great things, she must
do something greater. Poor Isabel found ground to remind herself from
time to time that she must not be too proud, and nothing could be
more sincere than her prayer to be delivered from such a danger: the
isolation and loneliness of pride had for her mind the horror of a
desert place. If it had been pride that interfered with her accepting
Lord Warburton such a betise was singularly misplaced; and she was so
conscious of liking him that she ventured to assure herself it was the
very softness, and the fine intelligence, of sympathy. She liked him too
much to marry him, that was the truth; something assured her there was
a fallacy somewhere in the glowing logic of the proposition--as he saw
it--even though she mightn't put her very finest finger-point on it;
and to inflict upon a man who offered so much a wife with a tendency to
criticise would be a peculiarly discreditable act. She had promised him
she would consider his question, and when, after he had left her, she
wandered back to the bench where he had found her and lost herself in
meditation, it might have seemed that she was keeping her vow. But
this was not the case; she was wondering if she were not a cold, hard,
priggish person, and, on her at last getting up and going rather
quickly back to the house, felt, as she had said to her friend, really
frightened at herself.

CHAPTER XIII

It was this feeling and not the wish to ask advice--she had no desire
whatever for that--that led her to speak to her uncle of what had taken
place. She wished to speak to some one; she should feel more natural,
more human, and her uncle, for this purpose, presented himself in a
more attractive light than either her aunt or her friend Henrietta. Her
cousin of course was a possible confidant; but she would have had to do
herself violence to air this special secret to Ralph. So the next day,
after breakfast, she sought her occasion. Her uncle never left his
apartment till the afternoon, but he received his cronies, as he said,
in his dressing-room. Isabel had quite taken her place in the class
so designated, which, for the rest, included the old man's son, his
physician, his personal servant, and even Miss Stackpole. Mrs. Touchett
did not figure in the list, and this was an obstacle the less to
Isabel's finding her host alone. He sat in a complicated mechanical
chair, at the open window of his room, looking westward over the park
and the river, with his new