He should see nothing, he should learn nothing; for him she would always wear a mask.

His true line would have been to profess delight in her union, so that later, when, as Ralph phrased it, the bottom should fall out of it, she might have the pleasure of saying to him that he had been a goose.

He would gladly have consented to pass for a goose in order to know Isabel's real situation.

At present, however, she neither taunted him with his fallacies nor pretended that her own confidence was justified; if she wore a mask it completely covered her face.

There was something fixed and mechanical in the serenity painted on it; this was not an expression, Ralph said--it was a representation, it was even an advertisement.