She had once said that she came from a distance,
that she belonged to the "old, old" world, and Isabel never lost the
impression that she was the product of a different moral or social
clime from her own, that she had grown up under other stars.
She believed then that at bottom she had a different morality. Of
course the morality of civilized persons has always much in common;
but our young woman had a sense in her of values gone wrong or, as
they said at the shops, marked down. She considered, with the
presumption of youth, that a morality differing from her own must be
inferior to it; and this conviction was an aid to detecting an
occasional flash of cruelty, an occasional lapse from candour, in
the conversation of a person who had raised delicate kindness to an
art and whose pride was too high for the narrow ways of deception. Her
conception of human motives might, in certain lights, have been
acquired at the court of some kingdom in decadence, and there were
several in her list of which our heroine had not even heard. She had
not heard of everything, that was very plain; and there were evidently
things in the world of which it was not advantageous to hear.
Pages:
544
545
546
547
548
549
550
551
552
553
554
555
556
557
558
559
560
561
562
563
564
565
566
567
568