s it was something good; I don't know.
You've not only dried up my tears; you've dried up my soul."

"It's not I then that am responsible for my wife's condition," Osmond
said. "It's pleasant to think that I shall get the benefit of your
influence upon her. Don't you know the soul is an immortal principle?
How can it suffer alteration?"

"I don't believe at all that it's an immortal principle. I believe it
can perfectly be destroyed. That's what has happened to mine, which
was a very good one to start with; and it's you I have to thank for it.
You're VERY bad," she added with gravity in her emphasis.

"Is this the way we're to end?" Osmond asked with the same studied
coldness.

"I don't know how we're to end. I wish I did--How do bad people
end?--especially as to their COMMON crimes. You have made me as bad as
yourself."

"I don't understand you. You seem to me quite good enough," said Osmond,
his conscious indifference giving an extreme effect to the words.

Madame Merle's self-possession tended on the contrary to diminish, and
she was nearer losing it than on any occasion on which we have had the
pleasure of meeting her. The glow of her eye turners sombre; her smile
betrayed a painful effort. "Good enough for anything that I've done with
myself? I suppose that's what you mean."

"Good enough to be always charming!" Osmond exclaimed, smiling too.

"Oh God!" his companion murmured; and, sitting there in her ripe
freshness, she had recourse to the same gesture she had provoked on
Isabel's part in the morning: she bent her face and covered it with her
hands.

"Are you going to weep after all?" Osmond asked; and on her remaining
motionless he went on: "Have I ever complained to you?"

She dropped her hands quickly. "No, you've taken your revenge
otherwise--you have taken it on HER."

Osmond threw back his head further; he looked a while at the ceiling
and might have been supposed to be appealing, in an informal way, to the
heavenly powers. "Oh, the imagination of women! It's always vulgar, at
bottom. You talk of revenge like a third-rate novelist."

"Of course you haven't complained. You've enjoyed your triumph too
much."

"I'm rather curious to know what you call my triumph."

"You've made your wife afraid of you."

Osmond changed his position; he leaned forward, resting his elbows on
his knees and looking a while at a beautiful old Persian rug, at
his feet. He had an air of refusing to accept any one's