"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 hand 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 valuation of anything, even of time, and of preferring to abide by his own; a peculiarity which made him at moments an irritating person to converse with."Isabel's not afraid of me, and it's not what I wish," he said at last."To what do you want to provoke me when you say such things as that?""I've thought over all the harm you can do me," Madame Merle answered."Your wife was afraid of me this morning, but in me it was really you she feared.""You may have said things that were in very bad taste; I'm not responsible for that.I didn't see the use of your going to see her at all: you're capable of acting without her.I've not made you afraid of me that I can see," he went on; "how then should I have made her?
You're at least as brave.I can't think where you've picked up such rubbish; one might suppose you knew me by this time." He got up as he spoke and walked to the chimney, where he stood a moment bending his eye, as if he had seen them for the first time, on the delicate specimens of rare porcelain with which it was covered.He took up a small cup and held it in his hand; then, still holding it and leaning his arm on the mantel, he pursued: "You always see too much in everything; you overdo it; you lose sight of the real.I'm much simpler than you think.""I think you're very simple." And Madame Merle kept her eye on her cup."I've come to that with time.I judged you, as I say, of old; but it's only since your marriage that I've understood you.I've seen better what you have been to your wife than I ever saw what you were for me.Please be very careful of that precious object.""It already has a wee bit of a tiny crack," said Osmond dryly as he put it down."If you didn't understand me before I married it was cruelly rash of you to put me into such a box.However, I took a fancy to my box myself; I thought it would be a comfortable fit.I asked very little; I only asked that she should like me.""That she should like you so much!"
"So much, of course; in such a case one asks the maximum.That she should adore me, if you will.Oh yes, I wanted that.""I never adored you," said Madame Merle.
"Ah, but you pretended to!"
"It's true that you never accused me of being a comfortable fit,"Madame Merle went on.
"My wife has declined-declined to do anything of the sort," said Osmond."If you're determined to make a tragedy of that, the tragedy's hardly for her.""The tragedy's for me!" Madame Merle exclaimed, rising with a long low sigh but having a glance at the same time for the contents of her mantel-shelf."It appears that I'm to be severely taught the disadvantages of a false position.""You express yourself like a sentence in a copy-book.We must look for our comfort where we can find it.If my wife doesn't like me, at least my child does.I shall look for compensations in Pansy.
Fortunately I haven't a fault to find with her.""Ah," she said softly, "if I had a child-!"Osmond waited, and then, with a little formal air, "The children of others may be a great interest!" he announced.
"You're more like a copy-book than I.There's something after all that holds us together.""Is it the idea of the harm I may do you?" Osmond asked.
"No; it's the idea of the good I may do for you.It's that,"Madame Merle pursued, "that made me so jealous of Isabel.I want it to be my work," she added, with her face, which had grown hard and bitter, relaxing to its habit of smoothness.
Her friend took up his hat and his umbrella, and after giving the former article two or three strokes with his coat-cuff, "On the whole, I think," he said, "you had better leave it to me."After he had left her she went, the first thing, and lifted from the mantel-shelf the attenuated coffee-cup in which he had mentioned the existence of a crack; but she looked at it rather abstractedly.
"Have I been so vile all for nothing?" she vaguely wailed.
