‘Come down, you say?’

‘Well, that renders my sense of what has happened to you. You seemed to me to be soaring far up in the blue—to be sailing in the bright light, over the heads of men. Suddenly some one tosses up a faded rosebud—a missile that should never have reached you—and straight you drop to the ground. It hurts me,’ said Ralph audaciously, ‘hurts me as if I had fallen myself!’

The look of pain and bewilderment deepened in his companion’s face. ‘I don’t understand you in the least,’ she repeated. ‘You say you amused yourself with a project for my career—I don’t understand that. Don’t amuse yourself too much, or I shall think you’re doing it at my expense.’

Ralph shook his head. ‘I’m not afraid of your not believing that I’ve had great ideas for you.’

‘What do you mean by my soaring and sailing?’ she pursued. ‘I’ve never moved on a higher plane than I’m moving on now. There’s nothing higher for a girl than to marry a—a person she likes,’ said poor Isabel, wandering into the didactic.

‘It’s your liking the person we speak of that I venture to criticize, my dear cousin. I should have said that the man for you would have been a more active, larger, freer sort of nature.’ Ralph hesitated, then added: ‘I can’t get over the sense that Osmond is somehow—well, small.’ He had uttered the last word with no great assurance; he was afraid she would flash out again. But to his surprise she was quiet; she had the air of considering.

‘Small?’ She made it sound immense.

‘I think he’s narrow, selfish. He takes himself so seriously!’

‘He has a great respect for himself; I don’t blame him for that,’ said Isabel. ‘It makes one more sure to respect others.’

Ralph for a moment felt almost reassured by her reasonable tone. ‘Yes, but everything is relative; one ought to feel one’s relation to things—to others. I don’t think Mr Osmond does that.’

‘I’ve chiefly to do with his relation to me. In that he’s excellent.’

‘He’s the incarnation of taste,’ Ralph went on, thinking hard how he could best express Gilbert Osmond’s sinister attributes without putting himself in the wrong by seeming to describe him coarsely. He wished to describe him impersonally, scientifically. ‘He judges and measures, approves and condemns, altogether by that.’

‘It’s a happy thing then that his taste should be exquisite.’

‘It’s exquisite, indeed, since it has led him to select you as his bride. But have you ever seen such a taste—a really exquisite one—ruffled?’

‘I hope it may never be my fortune to fail to gratify my husband’s.’

At these words a sudden passion leaped to Ralph’s lips. ‘Ah, that’s wilful, that’s unworthy of you! You were not meant to be measured in that way—you were meant for something better than to keep guard over the sensibilities of a sterile dilettante!’

Isabel rose quickly and he did the same, so that they stood for a moment looking at each other as if he had flung down a defiance or an insult. But ‘You go too far,’ she simply breathed.

‘I’ve said what I had on my mind—and I’ve said it because I love you!’