She could live it over again, the incredulous terror with which she had taken the measure of her dwelling.Between those four walls she had lived ever since; they were to surround her for the rest of her life.It was the house of darkness, the house of dumbness, the house of suffocation.Osmond's beautiful mind gave it neither light nor air; Osmond's beautiful mind indeed seemed to peep down from a small high window and mock at her.Of course it had not been physical suffering; for physical suffering there might have been a remedy.She could come and go; she had her liberty; her husband was perfectly polite.He took himself so seriously; it was something appalling.Under all his culture, his cleverness, his amenity, under his good-nature, his facility, his knowledge of life, his egotism lay hidden like a serpent in a bank of flowers.She had taken him seriously, but she had not taken him so seriously as that.How could she-especially when she had known him better? She was to think of him as he thought of himself as the first gentleman in Europe.So it was that she had thought of him at first, and that indeed was the reason she had married him.But when she began to see what it implied she drew back; there was more in the bond than she had meant to put her name to.It implied a sovereign contempt for every one but some three or four very exalted people whom he envied, and for everything in the world but half a dozen ideas of his own.That was very well; she would have gone with him even there a long distance;for he pointed out to her so much of the baseness and shabbiness of life, opened her eyes so wide to the stupidity, the depravity, the ignorance of mankind, that she had been properly impressed with the infinite vulgarity of things and of the virtue of keeping one's self unspotted by it.But this base, ignoble world, it appeared, was after all what one was to live for; one was to keep it for ever in one's eye, in order not to enlighten or convert or redeem it, but to extract from it some recognition of one's own superiority.On the one hand it was despicable, but on the other it afforded a standard.
Osmond had talked to Isabel about his renunciation, his indifference, the ease with which he dispensed with the usual aids to success; and all this had seemed to her admirable.She had thought it a grand indifference, an exquisite independence.But indifference was really the last of his qualities; she had never seen any one who thought so much of others.For herself, avowedly, the world had always interested her and the study of her fellow creatures been her constant passion.She would have been willing, however, to renounce all her curiosities and sympathies for the sake of a personal life, if the person concerned had only been able to make her believe it was a gain! This at least was her present conviction;and the thing certainly would have been easier than to care for society as Osmond cared for it.
He was unable to live without it, and she saw that he had never really done so; he had looked at it out of his window even when he appeared to be most detached from it.He had his ideal, just as she had tried to have hers; only it was strange that people should seek for justice in such different quarters.His ideal was a conception of high prosperity and propriety, of the aristocratic life, which she now saw that he deemed himself always, in essence at least, to have led.He had never lapsed from it for an hour; he would never have recovered from the shame of doing so.That again was very well; here too she would have agreed; but they attached such different ideas, such different associations and desires, to the same formulas.Her notion of the aristocratic life was simply the union of great knowledge with great liberty; the knowledge would give one a sense of duty and the liberty a sense of enjoyment.But for Osmond it was altogether a thing of forms, a conscious, calculated attitude.He was fond of the old, the consecrated, the transmitted; so was she, but she pretended to do what she chose with it.He had an immense esteem for tradition; he had told her once that the best thing in the world was to have it, but that if one was so unfortunate as not to have it one must immediately proceed to make it.She knew that he meant by this that she hadn't it, but that he was better off; though from what source he had derived his traditions she never learned.He had a very large collection of them, however; that was very certain, and after a little she began to see.The great thing was to act in accordance with them; the great thing not only for him but for her.
Isabel had an undefined conviction that to serve for another person than their proprietor traditions must be of a thoroughly superior kind; but she nevertheless assented to this intimation that she too must march to the stately music that floated down from unknown periods in her husband's past; she who of old had been so free of step, so desultory, so devious, so much the reverse of processional.There were certain things they must do, a certain posture they must take, certain people they must know and not know.When she saw this rigid system close about her, draped though it was in pictured tapestries, that sense of darkness and suffocation of which I have spoken took possession of her; she seemed shut up with an odour of mould and decay.She had resisted of course; at first very humorously, ironically, tenderly; then, as the situation grew more serious, eagerly, passionately, pleadingly.She had pleaded the cause of freedom, of doing as they chose, of not caring for the aspect and denomination of their life-the cause of other instincts and longings, of quite another ideal.
Then it was that her husband's personality, touched as it never had been, stepped forth and stood erect.The things she had said were answered only by his scorn, and she could see he was ineffably ashamed of her-did he think of her-that she was base, vulgar, ignoble?
