‘The matter—the matter—!’ And here Madame Merle stopped. Then she went on with a sudden outbreak of passion, a burst of summer thunder in a clear sky: ‘The matter is that I would give my right hand to be able to weep, and that I can’t!’
‘What good would it do you to weep?’
‘It would make me feel as I felt before I knew you.’
‘If I’ve dried your tears, that’s something. But I’ve seen you shed them.’
‘Oh, I believe you’ll make me cry still. I mean make me howl like a wolf. I’ve a great hope, I’ve a great need, of that. I was vile this morning; I was horrid,’ she said.
‘If Isabel was in the stupid state of mind you mention she probably didn’t perceive it,’ Osmond answered.
‘It was precisely my deviltry that stupefied her. I couldn’t help it; I was full of something bad. Perhaps 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 turned 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.’