"It is only during the engagement that love is all. Marriage is the great public school of life; the passions fall meekly into their proper place--beside the prosaic appetites, the objective demands; somewhat below the faculties that distinguish the higher kingdom." "Indeed? Well, I am sanguine enough to believe that we would prove the exception. I hardly dare think of it!" he burst out. "For God's sake keep your epigrams for other people and be a woman pure and simple." She looked both as she permitted her full red mouth to tremble and his arms to take sudden possession of her. X In the large liberty of an English country-house Isabel might have found the long morning tedious had she been of a more sociable habit. Lady Victoria, Mrs. Throfton, and Lady Cecilia Spence went to church; all three, as great ladies, having a dutiful eye to the edification of humbler folk. Flora Thangue spent the greater part of the morning writing letters for her hostess, the men fled to the golf-links, and the rest of the women not engaged in vehement political discussion, or Bridge, were striding across country. Isabel, tempted by the charmingly fitted writing-table in her room, although an indolent correspondent, wrote a long and amply descriptive letter to her sister, which her brother-in-law, being more than usually hard up at the moment of its arrival, transposed into fiction and illustrated delightfully for a local newspaper. Then she roamed about looking at the pictures, testing her European education by discovering for herself the Lelys and Mores, the Hoppners, Ketels, Holbeins, Knellers, Dahls, and Romneys. She had a quick instinct for the best in all things, but cared less for pictures than for other treasures of the past: marbles, the architecture in old streets, hard brown schlosses on their lonely heights, the Gothic spaces of cathedrals, the high and fervent imaginations, immortal yet nameless, in the carvings on stone; the jewelled facades of Orvieto and Siena, the romantic grandeur of the Alhambra. She opened a door at the back of the central hall and found herself in a pillared corridor with a door at either end. Both rooms were open, and as a blue cloud hung about the entrance to the left, she turned to what proved to be the library of Capheaton. It was a square light apartment, with the orthodox number of books, but with so many desks and writing-tables that it looked more like the business corner of the mansion. Here, indeed, as Isabel was to learn, Lady Victoria held daily conference with her housekeeper and stewards, interviewed the women of the tenantry, and those active and philanthropic ladies of every district that aspire to carry the burdens of others. Here Gwynne kept his Blue Books and thought out his speeches, but it was not a favorite room with the guests.