had been used to exercise his wit. There was
a kind of violence in some of her impulses, of crudity in some of her
experiments, which took him by surprise: it seemed to him that she even
spoke faster, moved faster, breathed faster, than before her marriage.
Certainly she had fallen into exaggerations--she who used to care so
much for the pure truth; and whereas of old she had a great delight
in good-humoured argument, in intellectual play (she never looked
so charming as when in the genial heat of discussion she received a
crushing blow full in the face and brushed it away as a feather), she
appeared now to think there was nothing worth people's either differing
about or agreeing upon. Of old she had been curious, and now she was
indifferent, and yet in spite of her indifference her activity was
greater than ever. Slender still, but lovelier than before, she had
gained no great maturity of aspect; yet there was an amplitude and a
brilliancy in her personal arrangements that gave a touch of insolence
to her beauty. Poor human-hearted Isabel, what perversity had bitten
her? Her light step drew a mass of drapery behind it; her intelligent
head sustained a majesty of ornament. The free, keen girl had become
quite another person; what he saw was the fine lady who was supposed to
represent something. What did Isabel represent? Ralph asked himself;
and he could only answer by saying that she represented Gilbert Osmond.
"Good heavens, what a function!" he then woefully exclaimed. He was lost
in wonder at the mystery of things.

He recognised Osmond, as I say; he recognised him at every turn. He
saw how he kept all things within limits; how he adjusted, regulated,
animated their manner of life. Osmond was in his element; at last he had
material to work with. He always had an eye to effect, and his effects
were deeply calculated. They were produced by no vulgar means, but the
motive was as vulgar as the art was great. To surround his interior
with a sort of invidious sanctity, to tantalise society with a sense
of exclusion, to make people believe his house was different from every
other, to impart to the face that he presented to the world a cold
originality--this was the ingenious effort of the personage to whom
Isabel had attributed a superior morality. "He works with superior
material," Ralph said to himself; "it's rich abundance compared with his
former resources." Ralph was a clever man; but Ralph had never--to his
own sense