Chapter XIX   
     
AS Mrs. Touchett had foretold, Isabel and Madame Merle were thrown much together during the illness of their host, and if they had not become intimate it would have been almost a breach of good manners. Their manners were of the best; but in addition to this they happened to please each other. It is perhaps too much to say that they swore an eternal friendship; but tacitly, at least, they called the future to witness. Isabel did so with a perfectly good conscience, although she would have hesitated to admit that she was intimate with her new friend in the sense which she privately attached to this term. She often wondered, indeed, whether she ever had been, or ever could be, intimate with any one. She had an ideal of friendship, as well as of several other sentiments, and it did not seem to her in this case—it had not seemed to her in other cases—that the actual completely expressed it. But she often reminded herself that there were essential reasons why one’s ideal could not become concrete. It was a thing to believe in, not to see—a matter of faith, not of experience. Experience, however might supply us with very creditable imitations of it, and the part of wisdom was to make the best of these. Certainly, on the whole, Isabel had never encountered a more agreeable and interesting woman than Madame Merle; she had never met a woman who had less of that fault which is the principal obstacle to friendship—the air of reproducing the more tiresome parts of one’s own personality. The gates of the girl’s confidence were opened wider than they had ever been; she said things to Madame Merle that she had not yet said to any one. Sometimes she took alarm at her candour; it was as if she had given to a comparative stranger the key to her cabinet of jewels. These spiritual gems were the only ones of any magnitude that Isabel possessed; but that was all the greater reason why they should be carefully guarded. Afterwards, however, the girl always said to herself that one should never regret a generous error, and that if Madame Merle had not the merits she attributed to her, so much the worse for Madame Merle. There was no doubt she had great merits—she was a charming, sympathetic, intelligent, cultivated woman. More than this (for it had not been Isabel’s ill-fortune to go through life without meeting several persons of her own sex, of whom no less could fairly be said), she was rare, she was superior, she was pre-eminent. There are a great many amiable people in the world, and Madame Merle was far from being vulgarly good-natured and restlessly witty. She knew how to think—an accomplishment rare in women; and she had thought to very good purpose. Of course, too, she knew how to feel; Isabel could not have spent a week with her without being sure of that. This was, indeed, Madame Merle’s great talent, her most perfect gift. Life had told upon her; she had felt it strongly, and it was part of the satisfaction that Isabel found in her society that when the girl talked of what she was pleased to call serious matters, her companion understood her so easily and quickly. Emotion, it is true, had become with her rather historic; she made no secret of the fact that the fountain of sentiment, thanks to having been rather violently tapped at one period, did not flow quite so freely as of yore. Her pleasure was now to judge rather than to feel; she freely admitted that of old she had been rather foolish, and now she pretended to be wise.      1   
  “I judge more than I used to,” she said to Isabel; “but it seems to me that I have earned the right. One can’t judge till one is forty; before that we are too eager, too hard, too cruel, and in addition too ignorant. I am sorry for you; it will be a long time before you are forty. But every gain is a loss of some kind; I often think that after forty one can’t really feel. The freshness, the quickness have certainly gone. You will keep them longer than most people; it will be a great satisfaction to me to see you some years hence. I want to see what life makes of you. One thing is certain—it can’t spoil you. It may pull you about horribly; but I defy it to break you up.”      2   
  Isabel received this assurance as a young soldier, still panting from a slight skirmish in which he has come off with honour, might receive a pat on the shoulder from his colonel. Like such a recognition of merit, it seemed to come with authority. How could the lightest word do less, of a person who was prepared to say, of almost everything Isabel told her—“Oh, I have been in that, my dear; it passes, like everything else.” Upon many of her interlocutors, Madame Merle might have produced an irritating effect; it was so difficult to surprise her. But Isabel, though by no means incapable of desiring to be effective, had not at present this motive. She was too sincere, too interested in her judicious companion. And then, moreover, Madame Merle never said such things in the tone of triumph or of boastfulness; they dropped from her like grave confessions.      3   
  A period of bad weather had settled down upon Gardencourt; the days grew shorter, and there was an end to the pretty tea-parties on the lawn. But Isabel had long in-door conversations with her fellow-visitor, and in spite of the rain the two ladies often sallied forth for a walk, equipped with the defensive apparatus which the English climate and the English genius have between them brought to such perfection. Madame Merle was very appreciative; she liked almost everything, including the English rain. “There is always a little of it and never too much at once,” she said; “and it never wets you, and it always smells good. She declared that in England the pleasures of smell were great—that in this inimitable island there was a certain mixture of fog and beer and soot which, however odd it might sound, was the national aroma, and was most agreeable to the nostril; and she used to lift the sleeve of her British overcoat and bury her nose in it, to inhale the clear, fine odour of the wool. Poor Ralph Touchett, as soon as the autumn had begun to define itself, became almost a prisoner; in bad weather he was unable to step out of the house, and he used sometimes to stand at one of the windows, with his hands in his pockets, and, with a countenance half rueful, half critical, watch Isabel and Madame Merle as they walked down the avenue under a pair of umbrellas. The roads about Gardencourt were so firm, even in the worst weather, that the two ladies always came back with a healthy glow in their cheeks, looking at the soles of their neat, stout boots, and declaring that their walk had done them inexpressible good. Before lunch Madame Merle was always engaged; Isabel admired the inveteracy with which she occupied herself. Our heroine had always passed for a person of resources and had taken a certain pride in being one; but she envied the talents, the accomplishments, the aptitudes, of Madame Merle. She found herself desiring to emulate them, and in this and other ways Madame Merle presented herself as a model. “I should like to be like that!” Isabel secretly exclaimed, more than once, as one of her friend’s numerous facets suddenly caught the light, and before long she knew that she had learned a lesson from this exemplary woman. It took no very long time, indeed, for Isabel to feel that she was, as the phrase is, under an influence. “What is the harm,” she asked herself, “so long as it is a good one? The more one is under a good influence the better. The only thing is to see our steps as we take them—to understand them as we go. That I think I shall always do. I needn’t be afraid of becoming too pliable; it is my fault that I am not pliable enough.” It is said that imitation is the sincerest flattery; and if Isabel was tempted to reproduce in her deportment some of the most graceful features of that of her friend, it was not so much because she desired herself to shine as because she wished to hold up the lamp for Madame Merle. She liked her extremely; but she admired her even more than she liked her. She sometimes wondered what Henrietta Stackpole would say to her thinking so much of this brilliant fugitive from Brooklyn; and had a conviction that Henrietta would not approve of it. Henrietta would not like Madame Merle; for reasons that she could not have defined, this truth came home to Isabel. On the other hand she was equally sure that should the occasion offer, her new friend would accommodate herself perfectly to her old; Madame Merle was too humorous, too observant, not to do justice to Henrietta, and on becoming acquainted with her would probably give the measure of a tact which Miss Stackpole could not hope to emulate. She appeared to have, in her experience, a touchstone for everything, and somewhere in the capacious pocket of her genial memory she would find the key to Henrietta’s virtues. “That is the great thing,” Isabel reflected; “that is the supreme good fortune: to be in a better position for appreciating people than they are for appreciating you.” And she added that this, when one considered it, was simply the essence of the aristocratic situation. In this light, if in none other, one should aim at the aristocratic situation.      4   
  I cannot enumerate all the links in the chain which led Isabel to think of Madame Merle’s situation as aristocratic—a view of it never expressed in any reference made to it by that lady herself. She had known great things and great people, but she had never played a great part. She was one of the small ones of the earth; she had not been born to honours; she knew the world too well to be guilty of any fatuous illusions on the subject of her own place in it. She had known a good many of the fortunate few, and was perfectly aware of those points at which their fortune differed from hers. But if by her own measure she was nothing of a personage, she had yet, to Isabel’s imagination, a sort of greatness. To be so graceful, so gracious, so wise, so good, and to make so light of it all—that was really to be a great lady; especially when one looked so much like one. If Madame Merle, however, made light of her advantages as regards the world, it was not because she had not, for her own entertainment, taken them, as I have intimated, as seriously as possible. Her natural talents, for instance; these she had zealously cultivated. After breakfast she wrote a succession of letters; her correspondence was a source of surprise to Isabel when they sometimes walked together to the village post-office, to deposit Madame Merle’s contribution to the mail. She knew a multitude of people, and, as she told Isabel, something was always turning up to be written about. Of painting she was devotedly fond, and made no more of taking a sketch than of pulling off her gloves. At Gardencourt she was perpetually taking advantage of an hour’s sunshine to go out with a camp-stool and a box of water-colours. That she was a brilliant musician we have already perceived, and it was evidence of the fact that when she seated herself at the piano, as she always did in the evening, her listeners resigned themselves without a murmur to losing the entertainment of her talk. Isabel, since she had known Madame Merle, felt ashamed of her own playing, which she now looked upon as meagre and artless; and indeed, though she had been thought to play very well, the loss to society when, in taking her place upon the music-stool, she turned her back to the room, was usually deemed greater than the gain. When Madame Merle was neither writing, nor painting, nor touching the piano, she was usually employed upon wonderful morsels of picturesque embroidery, cushions, curtains, decorations for the chimney-piece; a sort of work in which her bold, free invention was as remarkable as the agility of her needle. She was never idle, for when she was engaged in none of the ways I have mentioned, she was either reading (she appeared to Isabel to read everything important), or walking out, or playing patience with the cards, or talking with her fellow inmates. And with all this, she always had the social quality; she never was preoccupied, she never pressed too hard. She laid down her pastimes as easily as she took them up; she worked and talked at the same time, and she appeared to attach no importance to anything she did. She gave away her sketches and tapestries; she rose from the piano, or remained there, according to the convenience of her auditors, which she always unerringly divined. She was, in short, a most comfortable, profitable, agreeable person to live with. If for Isabel she had a fault, it was that she was not natural; by which the girl meant, not that she was affected or pretentious; for from these vulgar vices no woman could have been more exempt; but that her nature had been too much over-laid by custom and her angles too much smoothed. She had become too flexible, too supple; she was too finished, too civilised. She was, in a word, too perfectly the social animal that man and woman are supposed to have been intended to be; and she had rid herself of every remnant of that tonic wildness which we may assume to have belonged even to the most amiable persons in the ages before country-house life was the fashion. Isabel found it difficult to think of Madame Merle as an isolated figure; she existed only in her relations with her fellow-mortals. Isabel often wondered what her relations might be with her own soul. She always ended, however, by feeling that having a charming surface does not necessarily prove that one is superficial; this was an illusion in which, in her youth, she had only just sufficiently escaped being nourished. Madame Merle was not superficial—not she. She was deep; and her nature spoke none the less in her behaviour because it spoke a conventional language. “What is language at all but a convention?” said Isabel. “She has the good taste not to pretend, like some people I have met, to express herself by original signs.”      5   
  “I am afraid you have suffered much,” Isabel once found occasion to say to her, in response to some allusion that she had dropped.      6   
  “What makes you think that?” Madame Merle asked, with a picturesque smile. “I hope I have not the pose of a martyr.”      7   
  “No; but you sometimes say things that I think people who have always been happy would not have found out.”      8   
  “I have not always been happy,” said Madame Merle, smiling still, but with a mock gravity, as if she were telling a child a secret. “What a wonderful thing!”      9   
  “A great many people give me the impression of never having felt anything very much,” Isabel answered.     10   
  “It’s very true; there are more iron pots, I think, than porcelain ones. But you may depend upon it that every one has something; even the hardest iron pots have a little bruise, a little hole, somewhere. I flatter myself that I am rather stout porcelain; but if I must tell you the truth I have been chipped and cracked! I do very well for service yet, because I have been cleverly mended; and I try to remain in the cupboard—the quiet, dusky cupboard, where there is an odour of stale spices—as much as I can. But when I have to come out, and into a strong light, then, my dear, I am a horror!”     11   
  I know not whether it was on this occasion or some other, that when the conversation had taken the turn I have just indicated, she said to Isabel that some day she would relate her history. Isabel assured her that she should delight to listen to it, and reminded her more than once of this engagement. Madame Merle, however, appeared to desire a postponement, and at last frankly told the young girl that she must wait till they knew each other better. This would certainly happen; a long friendship lay before them. Isabel assented, but at the same time asked Madame Merle if she could not trust her—if she feared a betrayal of confidence.     12   
  “It is not that I am afraid of your repeating what I say,” the elder lady answered; “I am afraid, on the contrary, of your taking it too much to yourself. You would judge me too harshly; you are of the cruel age.” She preferred for the present to talk to Isabel about Isabel, and exhibited the greatest interest in our heroine’s history, her sentiments, opinions, prospects. She made her chatter, and listened to her chatter with inexhaustible sympathy and good nature. In all this there was something flattering to the girl, who knew that Madame Merle knew a great many distinguished people, and had lived, as Mrs. Touchett said, in the best company in Europe. Isabel thought the better of herself for enjoying the favour of a person who had so large a field of comparison; and it was perhaps partly to gratify this sense of profiting by comparison that she often begged her friend to tell her about the people she knew. Madame Merle had been a dweller in many lands, and had social ties in a dozen different countries. “I don’t pretend to be learned,” she would say, “but I think I know my Europe;” and she spoke one day of going to Sweden to stay with an old friend, and another of going to Wallachia to follow up a new acquaintance. With England, where she had often stayed, she was thoroughly familiar; and for Isabel’s benefit threw a great deal of light upon the customs of the country and the character of the people, who “after all,” as she was fond of saying, were the finest people in the world.     13   
  “You must not think it strange, her staying in the house at such a time as this, when Mr. Touchett is passing away,” Mrs. Touchett remarked to Isabel. “She is incapable of doing anything indiscreet; she is the best-bred woman I know. It’s a favour to me that she stays; she is putting off a lot of visits at great houses,” said Mrs. Touchett, who never forgot that when she herself was in England her social value sank two or three degrees in the scale. “She has her pick of places; she is not in want of a shelter. But I have asked her to stay because I wish you to know her. I think it will be a good thing for you. Serena Merle has no faults.”     14   
  “If I didn’t already like her very much that description might alarm me,” Isabel said.     15   
  “She never does anything wrong. I have brought you out here, and I wish to do the best for you. Your sister Lily told me that she hoped I would give you plenty of opportunities. I give you one in securing Madame Merle. She is one of the most brilliant women in Europe.”     16   
  “I like her better than I like your description of her,” Isabel persisted in saying.     17   
  “Do you flatter yourself that you will find a fault in her? I hope you will let me know when you do.”     18   
  “That will be cruel—to you,” said Isabel.     19   
  “You needn’t mind me. You never will find one.”     20   
  “Perhaps not; but I think I shall not miss it.”     21   
  “She is always up to the mark!” said Mrs. Touchett.     22   
  Isabel after this said to Madame Merle that she hoped she knew Mrs. Touchett believed she had not a fault.     23   
  “I am obliged to you, but I am afraid your aunt has no perception of spiritual things,” Madame Merle answered.     24   
  “Do you mean by that that you have spiritual faults?”     25   
  “Ah no; I mean nothing so flat? I mean that having no faults, for your aunt, means that one is never late for dinner—that is, for her dinner. I was not late, by the way, the other day, when you came back from London; the clock was just at eight when I came into the drawing-room; it was the rest of you that were before the time. It means that one answers a letter the day one gets it, and that when one comes to stay with her one doesn’t bring too much luggage, and is careful not to be taken ill. For Mrs. Touchett those things constitute virtue; it’s a blessing to be able to reduce it to its elements.”     26   
  Madame Merle’s conversation, it will be perceived, was enriched with bold, free touches of criticism, which, even when they had a restrictive effect, never struck Isabel as ill-natured. It never occurred to the girl, for instance, that Mrs. Touchett’s accomplished guest was abusing her; and this for very good reasons. In the first place Isabel agreed with her; in the second Madame Merle implied that there was a great deal more to say; and in the third, to speak to one without ceremony of one’s near relations was an agreeable sign of intimacy. These signs of intimacy multiplied as the days elapsed, and there was none of which Isabel was more sensible than of her companion’s preference for making Miss Archer herself a topic. Though she alluded frequently to the incidents of her own life, she never lingered upon them; she was as little of an egotist as she was of a gossip.     27   
  “I am old, and stale, and faded,” she said more than once; “I am of no more interest than last week’s newspaper. You are young and fresh, and of to-day; you have the great thing—you have actuality. I once had it—we all have it for an hour. You, however, will have it for longer. Let us talk about you, then, you can say nothing that I shall not care to hear. It is a sign that I am growing old—that I like to talk with younger people. I think it’s a very pretty compensation. If we can’t have youth within us we can have it outside of us, and I really think we see it and feel it better that way. Of course we must be in sympathy with it—that I shall always be. I don’t know that I shall ever be ill-natured with old people—I hope not; there are certainly some old people that I adore. But I shall never be ill-natured with the young; they touch me too much. I give you carte blanche, then; you can even be impertinent if you like; I shall let it pass. I talk as if I were a hundred years old, you say? Well, I am, if you please; I was born before the French Revolution. Ah, my dear je viens de loin; I belong to the old world. But it is not of that I wish to talk; I wish to talk about the new. You must tell me more about America; you never tell me enough. Here I have been since I was brought here as a helpless child, and it is ridiculous, or rather it’s scandalous, how little I know about the land of my birth. There are a great many of us like that, over here; and I must say I think we are a wretched set of people. You should live in your own country; whatever it may be you have your natural place there. If we are not good Americans we are certainly poor Europeans; we have no natural place here. We are mere parasites, crawling over the surface; we haven’t our feet in the soil. At least one can know it, and not have illusions. A woman, perhaps, can get on; a woman, it seems to me, has no natural place anywhere; wherever she finds herself she has to remain on the surface and, more or less, to crawl. You protest, my dear? you are horrified? you declare you will never crawl? It is very true that I don’t see you crawling; you stand more upright than a good many poor creatures. Very good; on the whole, I don’t think you will crawl. But the men, the Americans; je vous demande un peu, what do they make of it over here? I don’t envy them, trying to arrange themselves. Look at poor Ralph Touchett; what sort of a figure do you call that? Fortunately he has got a consumption; I say fortunately, because it gives him something to do. His consumption is his career; it’s a kind of position. You can say, ‘Oh, Mr. Touchett, he takes care of his lungs, he knows a great deal about climates.’ But without that, who would he be, what would he represent? ‘Mr. Ralph Touchett, an American who lives in Europe.’ That signifies absolutely nothing—it’s impossible that anything should signify less. ‘He is very cultivated,’ they say; ‘he has got a very pretty collection of old snuff-boxes.’ The collection is all that is wanted to make it pitiful. I am tired of the sound of the word; I think it’s grotesque. With the poor old father it’s different; he has his identity, and it is rather a massive one. He represents a great financial house, and that, in our day, is as good as anything else. For an American, at any rate, that will do very well. But I persist in thinking your cousin is very lucky to have a chronic malady; so long as he doesn’t die of it. It’s much better than the snuff-boxes. If he were not ill, you say, he would do something?—he would take his father’s place in the house. My poor child, I doubt it; I don’t think he is at all fond of the house. However, you know him better than I, though I used to know him rather well, and he may have the benefit of the doubt. The worst case, I think, is a friend of mine, a countryman of ours, who lives in Italy (where he also was brought before he knew better), and who is one of the most delightful men I know. Some day you must know him. I will bring you together, and then you will see what I mean. He is Gilbert Osmond—he lives in Italy; that is all one can say about him. He is exceedingly clever, a man made to be distinguished; but, as I say, you exhaust the description when you say that he is Mr. Osmond, who lives in Italy. No career, no name, no position, no fortune, no past, no future, no anything. Oh yes, he paints, if you please—paints in water-colours, like me, only better than I. His painting is pretty bad; on the whole I am rather glad of that. Fortunately he is very indolent, so indolent that it amounts to a sort of position. He can say, ‘Oh, I do nothing; I am too deadly lazy. You can do nothing to-day unless you get up at five o’clock in the morning.’ In that way he becomes a sort of exception; you feel that he might do something if he would only rise early. He never speaks of his painting—to people at large; he is too clever for that. But he has a little girl—a dear little girl; he does speak of her. He is devoted to her, and if it were a career to be an excellent father he would be very distinguished. But I am afraid that is no better than the snuff-boxes; perhaps not even so good. Tell me what they do in America,” pursued Madame Merle, who, it must be observed, parenthetically, did not deliver herself all at once of these reflections, which are presented in a cluster for the convenience of the reader. She talked of Florence, where Mr. Osmond lived, and where Mrs. Touchett occupied a mediæval palace; she talked of Rome, where she herself had a little pied-à-terre, with some rather good old damask. She talked of places, of people, and even, as the phrase is, of “subjects”; and from time to time she talked of their kind old host and of the prospect of his recovery. From the first she had thought this prospect small, and Isabel had been struck with the positive, discriminating, competent way which she took of the measure of his remainder of life. One evening she announced definitely that he would not live.     28   
  “Sir Matthew Hope told me so, as plainly as was proper,” she said; “standing there, near the fire, before dinner. He makes himself very agreeable, the great doctor. I don’t mean that his saying that has anything to do with it. But he says such things with great tact. I had said to him that I felt ill at my ease, staying here at such a time; it seemed to me so indiscreet—it was not as if I could nurse. ‘You must remain, you must remain,’ he answered; ‘your office will come later.’ Was not that a very delicate way both of saying that poor Mr. Touchett would go, and that I might be of some use as a consoler? In fact, however, I shall not be of the slightest use. Your aunt will console herself; she, and she alone, knows just how much consolation she will require. It would be a very delicate matter for another person to undertake to administer the dose. With your cousin it will be different; he will miss his father sadly. But I should never presume to condole with Mr. Ralph; we are not on those terms.”     29   
  Madame Merle had alluded more than once to some undefined incongruity in her relations with Ralph Touchett; so Isabel took this occasion of asking her if they were not good friends.     30   
  “Perfectly, but he doesn’t like me.”     31   
  “What have you done to him?”     32   
  “Nothing whatever. But one has no need of a reason for that.”     33   
  “For not liking you? I think one has need of a very good reason.”     34   
  “You are very kind. Be sure you have one ready for the day when you begin.”     35   
  “Begin to dislike you? I shall never begin.”     36   
  “I hope not; because if you do, you will never end. That is the way with your cousin; he doesn’t get over it. It’s an antipathy of nature—if I can call it that when it is all on his side. I have nothing whatever against him, and don’t bear him the least little grudge for not doing me justice. Justice is all I want. However, one feels that he is a gentleman, and would never say anything underhand about one. Cartes sur table,” Madame Merle subjoined in a moment, “I am not afraid of him.”     37   
  “I hope not, indeed,” said Isabel, who added something about his being the kindest fellow living. She remembered, however, that on her first asking him about Madame Merle he had answered her in a manner which this lady might have thought injurious without being explicit. There was something between them, Isabel said to herself, but she said nothing more than this. If it were something of importance, it should inspire respect; if it were not, it was not worth her curiosity. With all her love of knowledge, Isabel had a natural shrinking from raising curtains and looking into unlighted corners. The love of knowledge coexisted in her mind with a still tender love of ignorance.     38   
  But Madame Merle sometimes said things that startled her, made her raise her clear eyebrows at the time, and think of the words afterwards.     39   
  “I would give a great deal to be your age again,” she broke out once, with a bitterness which, though diluted in her customary smile, was by no means disguised by it. “If I could only begin again—if I could have my life before me!”     40   
  “Your life is before you yet,” Isabel answered gently, for she was vaguely awe-struck.     41   
  “No; the best part is gone, and gone for nothing.”     42   
  “Surely, not for nothing,” said Isabel.     43   
  “Why not—what have I got? Neither husband, nor child, nor fortune, nor position, nor the traces of a beauty which I never had.”     44   
  “You have friends, dear lady.”     45   
  “I am not so sure!” cried Madame Merle.     46   
  “Ah, you are wrong. You have memories, talents——”     47   
  Madame Merle interrupted her.     48   
  “What have my talents brought me? Nothing but the need of using them still, to get through the hours, the years, to cheat myself with some pretence of action. As for my memories, the less said about them the better. You will be my friend till you find a better use for your friendship.”     49   
  “It will be for you to see that I don’t then,” said Isabel.     50   
  “Yes; I would make an effort to keep you,” Madame Merle rejoined, looking at her gravely. “When I say I should like to be your age,” she went on, “I mean with your qualities—frank, generous, sincere, like you. In that case I should have made something better of my life.”     51   
  “What should you have liked to do that you have not done?”     52   
  Madame Merle took a sheet of music—she was seated at the piano, and had abruptly wheeled about on the stool when she first spoke—and mechanically turned the leaves. At last she said—     53   
  “I am very ambitious!”     54   
  “And your ambitions have not been satisfied? They must have been great.”     55   
  “They were great. I should make myself ridiculous by talking of them.”     56   
  Isabel wondered what they could have been—whether Madame Merle had aspired to wear a crown. “I don’t know what your idea of success may be, but you seem to me to have been successful. To me, indeed, you are an image of success.”     57   
  Madame Merle tossed away the music with a smile.     58   
  “What is your idea of success?”     59   
  “You evidently think it must be very tame,” said Isabel. “It is to see some dream of one’s youth come true.”     60   
  “Ah,” Madame Merle exclaimed, “that I have never seen! But my dreams were so great—so preposterous. Heaven forgive me, I am dreaming now.” And she turned back to the piano and began to play with energy.     61   
  On the morrow she said to Isabel that her definition of success had been very pretty, but frightfully sad. Measured in that way, who had succeeded? The dreams of one’s youth, why they were enchanting, they were divine! Who had ever seen such things come to pass?     62   
  “I myself—a few of them,” Isabel ventured to answer.     63   
  “Already? They must have been dreams of yesterday.”     64   
  “I began to dream very young,” said Isabel, smiling.     65   
  “Ah, if you mean the aspirations of your childhood—that of having a pink sash and a doll that could close her eyes.”     66   
  “No, I don’t mean that.”     67   
  “Or a young man with a moustache going down on his knees to you.”     68   
  “No, nor that either,” Isabel declared, blushing.     69   
  Madame Merle gave a glance at her blush which caused it to deepen.     70   
  “I suspect that is what you do mean. We have all had the young man with the moustache. He is the inevitable young man; he doesn’t count.”     71   
  Isabel was silent for a moment, and then, with extreme and characteristic inconsequence—     72   
  “Why shouldn’t he count? There are young men and young men.”     73   
  “And yours was a paragon—is that what you mean?” cried her friend with a laugh. “If you have had the identical young man you dreamed of, then that was success, and I congratulate you. Only, in that case, why didn’t you fly with him to his castle in the Apennines?”     74   
  “He has no castle in the Apennines.”     75   
  “What has he? An ugly brick house in Fortieth Street? Don’t tell me that; I refuse to recognise that as an ideal.”     76   
  “I don’t care anything about his house,” said Isabel.     77   
  “That is very crude of you. When you have lived as long as I, you will see that every human being has his shell, and that you must take the shell into account. By the shell I mean the whole envelope of circumstances. There is no such thing as an isolated man or woman; we are each of us made up of a cluster of appurtenances. What do you call one’s self? Where does it begin? where does it end? It overflows into everything that belongs to us—and then it flows back again. I know that a large part of myself is in the dresses I choose to wear. I have a great respect for things! One’s self—for other people—is one’s expression of one’s self; and one’s house, one’s clothes, the book one reads, the company one keeps—these things are all expressive.”     78   
  This was very metaphysical; not more so, however, than several observations Madame Merle had already made. Isabel was found of metaphysics, but she was unable to accompany her friend into this bold analysis of the human personality.     79   
  “I don’t agree with you,” she said. “I think just the other way. I don’t know whether I succeed in expressing myself, but I know that nothing else expresses me. Nothing that belongs to me is any measure of me; on the contrary, it’s a limit, a barrier, and a perfectly arbitrary one. Certainly, the clothes which, as you say, I choose to wear, don’t express me; and heaven forbid they should!”     80   
  “You dress very well,” interposed Madame Merle, skilfully.     81   
  “Possibly; but I don’t care to be judged by that. My clothes may express the dressmaker, but they don’t express me. To begin with, it’s not my own choice that I wear them; they are imposed upon me by society.”     82   
  “Should you prefer to go without them?” Madame Merle inquired, in a tone which virtually terminated the discussion.     83   
  I am bound to confess, though it may cast some discredit upon the sketch I have given of the youthful loyalty which our heroine practised towards this accomplished woman, that Isabel had said nothing whatever to her about Lord Warburton, and had been equally reticent on the subject of Caspar Goodwood. Isabel had not concealed from her, however, that she had had opportunities of marrying, and had even let her know that they were of a highly advantageous kind. Lord Warburton had left Lockleigh, and was gone to Scotland, taking his sisters with him; and though he had written to Ralph more than once, to ask about Mr. Touchett’s health, the girl was not liable to the embarrassment of such inquiries as, had he still been in the neighbourhood, he would probably have felt bound to make in person. He had admirable self-control, but she felt sure that if he had come to Gardencourt he would have seen Madame Merle, and that if he had seen her he would have liked her, and betrayed to her that he was in love with her young friend.     84   
  It so happened that during Madame Merle’s previous visits to Gardencourt—each of them much shorter than the present one—he had either not been at Lockleigh or had not called at Mr. Touchett’s. Therefore, though she knew him by name as the great man of that county, she had no cause to suspect him of being a suitor of Mrs. Touchett’s freshly-imported niece.     85   
  “You have plenty of time,” she had said to Isabel, in return for the mutilated confidences which Isabel made her, and which did not pretend to be perfect, though we have seen that at moments the girl had compunctions at having said so much. “I am glad you have done nothing yet—that you have it still to do. It is a very good thing for a girl to have refused a few good offers—so long, of course, as they are not the best she is likely to have. Excuse me if my tone seems horribly worldly; one must take that view sometimes. Only don’t keep on refusing for the sake of refusing. It’s a pleasant exercise of power; but accepting is after all an exercise of power as well. There is always the danger of refusing once too often. It was not the one I fell into—I didn’t refuse often enough. You are an exquisite creature, and I should like to see you married to a prime minister. But speaking strictly, you know you are not what is technically called a parti. You are extremely good looking, and extremely clever; in yourself you are quite exceptional. You appear to have the vaguest ideas about your earthly possessions; but from what I can make out, you are not embarrassed with an income. I wish you had a little money.”     86   
  “I wish I had!” said Isabel, simply, apparently forgetting for the moment that her poverty had been a venial fault for two gallant gentlemen.     87   
  In spite of Sir Matthew Hope’s benevolent recommendation, Madame Merle did not remain to the end, as the issue of poor Mr. Touchett’s malady had now come frankly to be designated. She was under pledges to other people which had at last to be redeemed, and she left Gardencourt with the understanding that she should in any event see Mrs. Touchett there again, or in town, before quitting England. Her parting with Isabel was even more like the beginning of a friendship than their meeting had been.     88   
  “I am going to six places in succession,” she said, “but I shall see no one I like so well as you. They will all be old friends, however; one doesn’t make new friends at my age. I have made a great exception for you. You must remember that, and you must think well of me. You must reward me by believing in me.”     89   
  By way of answer, Isabel kissed her, and though some women kiss with facility, there are kisses and kisses, and this embrace was satisfactory to Madame Merle.     90   
  Isabel, after this, was much alone; she saw her aunt and cousin only at meals, and discovered that of the hours that Mrs. Touchett was invisible, only a minor portion was now devoted to nursing her husband. She spent the rest in her own apartments, to which access was not allowed even to her niece, in mysterious and inscrutable exercises. At table she was grave and silent; but her solemnity was not an attitude—Isabel could see that it was a conviction. She wondered whether her aunt repented of having taken her own way so much; but there was no visible evidence of this—no tears, no sighs, no exaggeration of a zeal which had always deemed itself sufficient. Mrs. Touchett seemed simply to feel the need of thinking things over and summing them up; she had a little moral account-book—with columns unerringly ruled, and a sharp steel clasp—which she kept with exemplary neatness.     91   
  “If I had foreseen this I would not have proposed your coming abroad now,” she said to Isabel after Madame Merle had left the house. “I would have waited and sent for you next year.”     92   
  Her remarks had usually a practical ring.     93   
  “So that perhaps I should never have known my uncle? It’s a great happiness to me to have come now.”     94   
  “That’s very well. But it was not that you might know your uncle that I brought you to Europe.” A perfectly veracious speech; but, as Isabel thought, not as perfectly timed.     95   
  She had leisure to think of this and other matters. She took a solitary walk every day, and spent much time in turning over the books in the library. Among the subjects that engaged her attention were the adventures of her friend Miss Stackpole, with whom she was in regular correspondence. Isabel liked her friend’s private epistolary style better than her public; that is, she thought her public letters would have been excellent if they had not been printed. Henrietta’s career, however, was not so successful as might have been wished even in the interest of her private felicity; that view of the inner life of Great Britain which she was so eager to take appeared to dance before her like an ignis fatuus. The invitation from Lady Pensil, for mysterious reasons, had never arrived; and poor Mr. Bantling himself, with all his friendly ingenuity, had been unable to explain so grave a dereliction on the part of a missive that had obviously been sent. Mr. Bantling, however, had evidently taken Henrietta’s affairs much to heart, and believed that he owed her a set-off to this illusory visit to Bedfordshire. “He says he should think I would go to the Continent,” Henrietta wrote; “and as he thinks of going there himself, I suppose his advice is sincere. He wants to know why I don’t take a view of French life; and it is a fact that I want very much to see the new Republic. Mr. Bantling doesn’t care much about the Republic, but he thinks of going over to Paris any way. I must say he is quite as attentive as I could wish, and at any rate I shall have seen one polite Englishman. I keep telling Mr. Bantling that he ought to have been an American; and you ought to see how it pleases him. Whenever I say so, he always breaks out with the same exclamation—‘Ah, but really, come now!’” A few days later she wrote that she had decided to go to Paris at the end of the week, and that Mr. Bantling had promised to see her off—perhaps even he would go as far as Dover with her. She would wait in Paris till Isabel should arrive, Henrietta added; speaking quite as if Isabel were to start on her Continental journey alone, and making no allusion to Mrs. Touchett. Bearing in mind his interest in their late companion, our heroine communicated several passages from Miss Stackpole’s letters to Ralph, who followed with an emotion akin to suspense the career of the correspondent of the Interviewer.     96   
  “It seems to me that she is doing very well,” he said, “going over to Paris with an ex-guardsman! If she wants something to write about, she has only to describe that episode.”     97   
  “It is not conventional, certainly,” Isabel answered; “but if you mean that—as far as Henrietta is concerned—it is not perfectly innocent, you are very much mistaken. You will never understand Henrietta.”     98   
  “Excuse me; I understand her perfectly. I didn’t at all at first; but now I have got the point of view. I am afraid, however, that Bantling has not; he may have some surprises. Oh, I understand Henrietta as well as if I had made her!”     99   
  Isabel was by no means sure of this; but she abstained from expressing further doubt, for she was disposed in these days to extend a great charity to her cousin. One afternoon, less than a week after Madame Merle’s departure, she was seated in the library with a volume to which her attention was not fastened. She had placed herself in a deep window-bench, from which she looked out into the dull, damp park; and as the library stood at right angles to the entrance-front of the house, she could see the doctor’s dog-cart, which had been waiting for the last two hours before the door. She was struck with the doctor’s remaining so long; but at last she saw him appear in the portico, stand a moment, slowly drawing on his gloves and looking at the knees of his horse, and then get into the vehicle and drive away. Isabel kept her place for half-an-hour; there was a great stillness in the house. It was so great that when she at last heard a soft, slow step on the deep carpet of the room, she was almost startled by the sound. She turned quickly away from the window, and saw Ralph Touchett standing there, with his hands still in his pockets, but with a face absolutely void of its usual latent smile. She got up, and her movement and glance were a question.    100   
  “It’s all over,” said Ralph.    101   
  “Do you mean that my uncle——?” And Isabel stopped.    102   
  “My father died an hour ago.”    103   
  “Ah, my poor Ralph!” the girl murmured, putting out her hand to him.    104

Chapter XX   
     
SOME fortnight after this incident Madame Merle drove up in a hansom cab to the house in Winchester Square. As she descended from her vehicle she observed, suspended between the dining-room windows, a large, neat, wooden tablet, on whose fresh black ground were inscribed in white paint the words—“This noble freehold mansion to be sold;” with the name of the agent to whom application should be made. “They certainly lose no time,” said the visitor, as, after sounding the big brass knocker, she waited to be admitted; “it’s a practical country!” And within the house, as she ascended to the drawing room, she perceived numerous signs of abdication; pictures removed from the walls and placed upon sofas, windows undraped and floors laid bare. Mrs. Touchett presently received her, and intimated in a few words that condolences might be taken for granted.      1   
  “I know what you are going to say—he was a very good man. But I know it better than any one, because I gave him more chance to show it. In that I think I was a good wife.” Mrs. Touchett added that at the end her husband apparently recognised this fact. “He has treated me liberally,” she said; “I won’t say more liberally than I expected, because I didn’t expect. You know that as a general thing I don’t expect. But he chose, I presume, to recognise the fact that though I lived much abroad, and mingled—you may say freely—in foreign life, I never exhibited the smallest preference for any one else.”      2   
  “For any one but yourself,” Madame Merle mentally observed; but the reflection was perfectly inaudible.      3   
  “I never sacrificed my husband to another,” Mrs. Touchett continued, with her stout curtness.      4   
  “Oh no,” thought Madame Merle; “you never did anything for another!”      5   
  There was a certain cynicism in these mute comments which demands an explanation; the more so as they are not in accord either with the view—somewhat superficial perhaps—that we have hitherto enjoyed of Madame Merle’s character, or with the literal facts of Mrs. Touchett’s history; the more so, too, as Madame Merle had a well-founded conviction that her friend’s last remark was not in the least to be construed as a side-thrust at herself. The truth is, that the moment she had crossed the threshold she received a subtle impression that Mr. Touchett’s death had had consequences, and that these consequences had been profitable to a little circle of persons among whom she was not numbered. Of course it was an event which would naturally have consequences; her imagination had more than once rested upon this fact during her stay at Gardencourt. But it had been one thing to foresee it mentally, and it was another to behold it actually. The idea of a distribution of property—she would almost have said of spoils—just now pressed upon her senses and irritated her with a sense of exclusion. I am far from wishing to say that Madame Merle was one of the hungry ones of the world; but we have already perceived that she had desires which had never been satisfied. If she had been questioned, she would of course have admitted—with a most becoming smile—that she had not the faintest claim to a share in Mr. Touchett’s relics. “There was never anything in the world between us,” she would have said. “There was never that, poor man!”—with a fillip of her thumb and her third finger. I hasten to add, moreover, that if her private attitude at the present moment was somewhat incongruously invidious, she was very careful not to betray herself. She had, after all, as much sympathy for Mrs. Touchett’s gains as for her losses.      6   
  “He has left me this house,” the newly-made widow said; “but of course I shall not live in it; I have a much better house in Florence. The will was opened only three days since, but I have already offered the house for sale. I have also a share in the bank; but I don’t yet understand whether I am obliged to leave it there. If not; I shall certainly take it out. Ralph, of course, has Gardencourt; but I am not sure that he will have means to keep up the place. He is of course left very well off, but his father has given away an immense deal of money; there are bequests to a string of third cousins in Vermont. Ralph, however, is very fond of Gardencourt, and would be quite capable of living there—in summer—with a maid-of-all-work and a gardener’s boy. There is one remarkable clause in my husband’s will,” Mrs. Touchett added. “He has left my niece a fortune.”      7   
  “A fortune!” Madame Merle repeated softly.      8   
  “Isabel steps into something like seventy thousand pounds.”      9   
  Madame Merle’s hands were clasped in her lap; at this she raised them, still clasped, and held them a moment against her bosom, while her eyes, a little dilated, fixed themselves on those of her friend. “Ah,” she cried, “the clever creature!”     10   
  Mrs. Touchett gave her a quick look. “What do you mean by that?”     11   
  For an instant Madame Merle’s colour rose, and she dropped her eyes. “It certainly is clever to achieve such results—without an effort!”     12   
  “There certainly was no effort; don’t call it an achievement.”     13   
  Madame Merle was rarely guilty of the awkwardness of retracting what she had said; her wisdom was shown rather in maintaining it and placing it in a favourable light. “My dear friend, Isabel would certainly not have had seventy thousand pounds left her if she had not been the most charming girl in the world. Her charm includes great cleverness.”     14   
  “She never dreamed, I am sure, of my husband’s doing anything for her; and I never dreamed of it either, for he never spoke to me of his intention,” Mrs. Touchett said. “She had no claim upon him whatever; it was no great recommendation to him that she was my niece. Whatever she achieved she achieved unconsciously.”     15   
  “Ah,” rejoined Madame Merle, “those are the greatest strokes!”     16   
  Mrs. Touchett gave a shrug. “The girl is fortunate; I don’t deny that. But for the present she is simply stupefied.”     17   
  “Do you mean that she doesn’t know what to do with the money?”     18   
  “That, I think she has hardly considered. She doesn’t know what to think about the matter at all. It has been as if a big gun were suddenly fired off behind her; she is feeling herself, to see if she be hurt. It is but three days since she received a visit from the principal executor who came in person, very gallantly, to notify her. He told me afterwards that when he had made his little speech she suddenly burst into tears. The money is to remain in the bank, and she is to draw the interest.”     19   
  Madame Merle shook her head, with a wise, and now quite benignant smile. “After she has done that two or three times she will get used to it.” Then after a silence—“What does your son think of it?” she abruptly asked.     20   
  “He left England just before it came out—used up by his fatigue and anxiety, and hurrying off to the south. He is on his way to the Riviera, and I have not yet heard from him. But it is not likely he will ever object to anything done by his father.”     21   
  “Didn’t you say his own share had been cut down?”     22   
  “Only at his wish. I know that he urged his father to do something for the people in America. He is not in the least addicted to looking after number one.”     23   
  “It depends upon whom he regards as number one!” said Madame Merle. And she remained thoughtful a moment, with her eyes bent upon the floor. “Am I not to see your happy niece?” she asked at last, looking up.     24   
  “You may see her; but you will not be struck with her being happy. She has looked as solemn, these three days, as a Cimabue Madonna!” And Mrs. Touchett rang for a servant.     25   
  Isabel came in shortly after the footman had been sent to call her; and Madame Merle thought, as she appeared, that Mrs. Touchett’s comparison had its force. The girl was pale and grave—an effect not mitigated by her deeper mourning; but the smile of her brightest moments came into her face as she saw Madame Merle, who went forward, laid her hand on our heroine’s shoulder, and after looking at her a moment, kissed her as if she were returning the kiss that she had received from Isabel at Gardencourt. This was the only allusion that Madame Merle, in her great good taste, made for the present to her young friend’s inheritance.     26   
  Mrs. Touchett did not remain in London until she had sold her house. After selecting from among its furniture those objects which she wished to transport to her Florentine residence, she left the rest of its contents to be disposed of by the auctioneer, and took her departure for the Continent. She was, of course, accompanied on this journey by her niece, who now had plenty of leisure to contemplate the windfall on which Madame Merle had covertly congratulated her. Isabel thought of it very often and looked at it in a dozen different lights; but we shall not at present attempt to enter into her meditations or to explain why it was that some of them were of a rather pessimistic cast. The pessimism of this young lady was transient; she ultimately made up her mind that to be rich was a virtue, because it was to be able to do, and to do was sweet. It was the contrary of weakness. To be weak was, for a young lady, rather graceful, but, after all, as Isabel said to herself, there was a larger grace than that. Just now, it is true, there was not much to do—once she had sent off a cheque to Lily and another to poor Edith; but she was thankful for the quiet months which her mourning robes and her aunt’s fresh widowhood compelled the two ladies to spend. The acquisition of power made her serious; she scrutinised her power with a kind of tender ferocity, but she was not eager to exercise it. She began to do so indeed during a stay of some weeks which she presently made with her aunt in Paris, but in ways that will probably be thought rather vulgar. They were the ways that most naturally presented themselves in a city in which the shops are the admiration of the world, especially under the guidance of Mrs. Touchett, who took a rigidly practical view of the transformation of her niece from a poor girl to a rich one. “Now that you are a young woman of fortune you must know how to play the part—I mean to play it well,” she said to Isabel, once for all; and she added that the girl’s first duty was to have everything handsome. “You don’t know how to take care of your things, but you must learn,” she went on; this was Isabel’s second duty. Isabel submitted, but for the present her imagination was not kindled; she longed for opportunities, but these were not the opportunities she meant.     27   
  Mrs. Touchett rarely changed her plans, and having intended before her husband’s death to spend a part of the winter in Paris she saw no reason to deprive herself—still less to deprive her companion—of this advantage. Though they would live in great retirement, she might still present her niece, informally, to the little circle of her fellow-countrymen dwelling upon the skirts of the Champs Elysées. With many of these amiable colonists Mrs. Touchett was intimate; she shared their expatriation, their convictions, their pastimes, their ennui. Isabel saw them come with a good deal of assiduity to her aunt’s hotel, and judged them with a trenchancy which is doubtless to be accounted for by the temporary exaltation of her sense of human duty. She made up her mind that their manner of life was superficial, and incurred some disfavour by expressing this view on bright Sunday afternoons, when the American absentees were engaged in calling upon each other. Though her listeners were the most good-natured people in the world, two or three of them thought her cleverness, which was generally admitted, only a dangerous variation of impertinence.     28   
  “You all live here this way, but what does it all lead to?” she was pleased to ask. “It doesn’t seem to lead to anything, and I should think you would get very tired of it.”     29   
  Mrs. Touchett thought the question worthy of Henrietta Stackpole. The two ladies had found Henrietta in Paris, and Isabel constantly saw her; so that Mrs. Touchett had some reason for saying to herself that if her niece were not clever enough to originate almost anything, she might be suspected of having borrowed that style of remark from her journalistic friend. The first occasion on which Isabel had spoken was that of a visit paid by the two ladies to Mrs. Luce, an old friend of Mrs. Touchett’s, and the only person in Paris she now went to see. Mrs. Luce had been living in Paris since the days of Louis Philippe; she used to say jocosely that she was one of the generation of 1830—a joke of which the point was not always taken. When it failed Mrs. Luce used always to explain—“Oh yes, I am one of the romantics;” her French had never become very perfect. She was always at home on Sunday afternoons, and surrounded by sympathetic compatriots, usually the same. In fact she was at home at all times, and led in her well-cushioned little corner of the brilliant city as quiet and domestic a life as she might have led in her native Baltimore. The existence of Mr. Luce, her worthy husband, was some-what more inscrutable. Superficially indeed, there was no mystery about it; the mystery lay deeper, and resided in the wonder of his supporting existence at all. He was the most unoccupied man in Europe, for he not only had no duties, but he had no pleasures. Habits certainly he had, but they were few in number, and had been worn threadbare by forty years of use. Mr. Luce was a tall, lean, grizzled, well-brushed gentleman, who wore a gold eyeglass and carried his hat a little too much on the back of his head. He went every day to the American banker’s, where there was a post-office which was almost as sociable and colloquial an institution as that of an American country town. He passed an hour (in fine weather) in a chair in the Champs Elysées, and he dined uncommonly well at his own table, seated above a waxed floor, which it was Mrs. Luce’s happiness to believe had a finer polish than any other in Paris. Occasionally he dined with a friend or two at the Café Anglais, where his talent for ordering a dinner was a source of felicity to his companions and an object of admiration even to the head-waiter of the establishment. These were his only known avocations, but they had beguiled his hours for upwards of half a century, and they doubtless justified his frequent declaration that there was no place like Paris. In no other place, on these terms, could Mr. Luce flatter himself that he was enjoying life. There was nothing like Paris, but it must be confessed that Mr. Luce thought less highly of the French capital than in earlier days. In the list of his occupations his political reveries should not be omitted, for they were doubtless the animating principle of many hours that superficially seemed vacant. Like many of his fellow colonists, Mr. Luce was a high—or rather a deep—conservative, and gave no countenance to the government recently established in France. He had no faith in its duration, and would assure you from year to year that its end was close at hand. “They want to be kept down, sir, to be kept down; nothing but the strong hand—the iron heel—will do for them,” he would frequently say of the French people; and his ideal of a fine government was that of the lately-abolished Empire. “Paris is much less attractive than in the days of the Emperor; he knew how to make a city pleasant,” Mr. Luce had often remarked to Mrs. Touchett, who was quite of his own way of thinking, and wished to know what one had crossed that odious Atlantic for but to get away from republics.     30   
  “Why, madam, sitting in the Champs Elysées, opposite to the Palace of Industry, I have seen the court-carriages from the Tuileries pass up and down as many as seven times a day. I remember one occasion when they went as high as nine times. What do you see now? It’s no use talking, the style’s all gone. Napoleon knew what the French people want, and there’ll be a cloud over Paris till they get the Empire back again.”     31   
  Among Mrs. Luce’s visitors on Sunday afternoons was a young man with whom Isabel had had a good deal of conversation, and whom she found full of valuable knowledge. Mr. Edward Rosier—Ned Rosier, as he was called—was a native of New York, and had been brought up in Paris, living there under the eye of his father, who, as it happened, had been an old and intimate friend of the late Mr. Archer. Edward Rosier remembered Isabel as a little girl; it had been his father who came to the rescue of the little Archers at the inn at Neufchâtel (he was travelling that way with the boy, and stopped at the hotel by chance), after their bonne had gone off with the Russian prince and when Mr. Archer’s whereabouts remained for some days a mystery. Isabel remembered perfectly the neat little male child, whose hair smelt of a delicious cosmetic, and who had a bonne of his own, warranted to lose sight of him under no provocation. Isabel took a walk with the pair beside the lake, and thought little Edward as pretty as an angel—a comparison by no means conventional in her mind, for she had a very definite conception of a type of features which she supposed to be angelic, and which her new friend perfectly illustrated. A small pink face, surmounted by a blue velvet bonnet and set off by a stiff embroidered collar, became the countenance of her childish dreams; and she firmly believed for some time afterwards that the heavenly hosts conversed among themselves in a queer little dialect of French-English, expressing the properest sentiments, as when Edward told her that he was “defended” by his bonne to go near the edge of the lake, and that one must always obey to one’s bonne. Ned Rosier’s English had improved; at least it exhibited in a less degree the French variation. His father was dead and his bonne was dismissed, but the young man still conformed to the spirit of their teaching—he never went to the edge of the lake. There was still something agreeable to the nostril about him, and something not offensive to nobler organs. He was a very gentle and gracious youth, with what are called cultivated tastes—an acquaintance with old china, with good wine, with the bindings of books, with the Almanach de Gotha, with the best shops, the best hotels, the hours of railway-trains. He could order a dinner almost as well as Mr. Luce, and it was probable that as his experience accumulated he would be a worthy successor to that gentleman, whose rather grim politics he also advocated, in a soft and innocent voice. He had some charming rooms in Paris, decorated with old Spanish altar-lace, the envy of his female friends, who declared that his chimney-piece was better draped than many a duchess. He usually, however, spent a part of every winter at Pau, and had once passed a couple of months in the United States.     32   
  He took a great interest in Isabel, and remembered perfectly the walk at Neufchâtel, when she would persist in going so near the edge. He seemed to recognise this same tendency in the subversive inquiry that I quoted a moment ago, and set himself to answer our heroine’s question with greater urbanity than it perhaps deserved. “What does it lead to, Miss Archer? Why Paris leads everywhere. You can’t go anywhere unless you come here first. Every one that comes to Europe has got to pass through. You don’t mean it in that sense so much? You mean what good it does you? Well, how can you penetrate futurity? How can you tell what lies ahead? If it’s a pleasant road I don’t care where it leads. I like the road, Miss Archer; I like the dear old asphalte. You can’t get tired of it—you can’t if you try. You think you would, but you wouldn’t; there’s always something new and fresh. Take the Hôtel Drouot, now; they sometimes have three and four sales a week. Where can you get such things as you can here? In spite of all they say, I maintain they are cheaper too, if you know the right places. I know plenty of places, but I keep them to myself. I’ll tell you, if you like, as a particular favour; only you must not tell any one else. Don’t you go anywhere without asking me first; I want you to promise me that. As a general thing avoid the Boulevards; there is very little to be done on the Boulevards. Speaking conscientiously—sans blague—I don’t believe any one knows Paris better than I. You and Mrs. Touchett must come and breakfast with me some day, and I’ll show you my things; je ne vous dis que ca! There has been a great deal of talk about London of late; it’s the fashion to cry up London. But there is nothing in it—you can’t do anything in London. No Louis Quinze—nothing of the First Empire; nothing but their eternal Queen Anne. It’s good for one’s bed-room, Queen Anne—for one’s washing-room; but it isn’t proper for a salon. Do I spend my life at the auctioneer’s?” Mr. Rosier pursued, in answer to another question of Isabel’s. “Oh, no; I haven’t the means. I wish I had. You think I’m a mere trifler; I can tell by the expression of your face—you have got a wonderfully expressive face. I hope you don’t mind my saying that; I mean it as a kind of warning. You think I ought to do something, and so do I, so long as you leave it vague. But when you come to the point, you see you have to stop. I can’t go home and be a shopkeeper. You think I am very well fitted? Ah, Miss Archer, you overrate me. I can buy very well, but I can’t sell; you should see when I sometimes try to get rid of my things. It takes much more ability to make other people buy than to buy yourself. When I think how clever they must be, the people who make me buy! Ah, no; I couldn’t be a shopkeeper. I can’t be a doctor, it’s a repulsive business. I can’t be a clergyman, I haven’t got convictions. And then I can’t pronounce the names right in the Bible. They are very difficult, in the Old Testament particularly. I can’t be a lawyer; I don’t understand—how do you call it?—the American procédure. Is there anything else? There is nothing for a gentleman to do in America. I should like to be a diplomatist; but American diplomacy—that is not for gentlemen either. I am sure if you had seen the last min——”     33   
  Henrietta Stackpole, who was often with her friend when Mr. Rosier, coming to pay his compliments, late in the afternoon, expressed himself after the fashion I have sketched, usually interrupted the young man at this point and read him a lecture on the duties of the American citizen. She thought him most unnatural; he was worse than Mr. Ralph Touchett. Henrietta, however, was at this time more than ever addicted to fine criticism, for her conscience had been freshly alarmed as regards Isabel. She had not congratulated this young lady on her accession of fortune, and begged to be excused from doing so.     34   
  “If Mr. Touchett had consulted me about leaving you the money,” she frankly said, “I would have said to him, ’Never.’”     35   
  “I see,” Isabel had answered. “You think it will prove a curse in disguise. Perhaps it will.”     36   
  “Leave it to some one you care less for—that’s what I should have said.”     37   
  “To yourself, for instance?” Isabel suggested, jocosely, And then—“Do you really believe it will ruin me?” she asked, in quite another tone.     38   
  “I hope it won’t ruin you; but it will certainly confirm your dangerous tendencies.”     39   
  “Do you mean the love of luxury—of extravagance?”     40   
  “No, no,” said Henrietta; “I mean your moral tendencies. I approve of luxury; I think we ought to be as elegant as possible. Look at the luxury of our western cities; I have seen nothing over here to compare with it. I hope you will never become sensual; but I am not afraid of that. The peril for you is that you live too much in the world of your own dreams—you are not enough in contact with reality—with the toiling, striving, suffering, I may even say sinning, world that surrounds you. You are too fastidious; you have too many graceful illusions. Your newly-acquired thousands will shut you up more and more to the society of a few selfish and heartless people, who will be interested in keeping up those illusions.”     41   
  Isabel’s eyes expanded as she gazed upon this vivid but dusky picture of her future. “What are my illusions?” she asked. “I try so hard not to have any.”     42   
  “Well,” said Henrietta, “you think that you can lead a romantic life, that you can live by pleasing yourself and pleasing others. You will find you are mistaken. Whatever life you lead, you must put your soul into it—to make any sort of success of it; and from the moment you do that it ceases to be romance, I assure you; it becomes reality! And you can’t always please yourself; you must sometimes please other people. That, I admit, you are very ready to do; but there is another thing that is still more important—you must often displease others. You must always be ready for that—you must never shrink from it. That doesn’t suit you at all—you are too fond of admiration, you like to be thought well of. You think we can escape disagreeable duties by taking romantic views—that is your great illusion, my dear. But we can’t. You must be prepared on many occasions in life to please no one at all—not even yourself.”     43   
  Isabel shook her head sadly; she looked troubled and frightened. “This, for you, Henrietta,” she said, “must be one of those occasions!”     44   
  It was certainly true that Miss Stackpole, during her visit to Paris, which had been professionally more remunerative than her English sojourn, had not been living in the world of dreams. Mr. Bantling, who had now returned to England, was her companion for the first four weeks of her stay; and about Mr. Bantling there was nothing dreamy. Isabel learned from her friend that the two had led a life of great intimacy, and that this had been a peculiar advantage to Henrietta, owing to the gentleman’s remarkable knowledge of Paris. He had explained everything, shown her everything, been her constant guide and interpreter. They had breakfasted together, dined together, gone to the theatre together, supped together, really in a manner quite lived together. He was a true friend, Henrietta more than once assured our heroine; and she had never supposed that she could like any Englishman so well. Isabel could not have told you why, but she found something that ministered to mirth in the alliance the correspondent of the Interviewer had struck with Lady Pensil’s brother; and her amusement subsisted in the face of the fact that she thought it a credit to each of them. Isabel could not rid herself of a suspicion that they were playing, somehow, at cross-purposes—that the simplicity of each of them had been entrapped. But this simplicity was none the less honourable on either side; it was as graceful on Henrietta’s part to believe that Mr. Bantling took an interest in the diffusion of lively journalism, and in consolidating the position of lady-correspondents, as it was on the part of her companion to suppose that the cause of the Interviewer—a periodical of which he never formed a very definite conception—was, if subtly analysed (a task to which Mr. Bantling felt himself quite equal), but the cause of Miss Stackpole’s coquetry. Each of these harmless confederates supplied at any rate a want of which the other was somewhat eagerly conscious. Mr. Bantling, who was of a rather slow and discursive habit, relished a prompt, keen, positive woman, who charmed him with the spectacle of a brilliant eye and a kind of bandbox neatness, and who kindled a perception of raciness in a mind to which the usual fare of life seemed unsalted. Henrietta, on the other hand, enjoyed the society of a fresh-looking, professionless gentleman, whose leisured state, though generally indefensible, was a decided advantage to Miss Stackpole, and who was furnished with an easy, traditional, though by no means exhaustive, answer to almost any social or practical question that could come up. She often found Mr. Bantling’s answers very convenient, and in the press of catching the American post would make use of them in her correspondence. It was to be feared that she was indeed drifting toward those mysterious shallows as to which Isabel, wishing for a good-humoured retort, had warned her. There might be danger in store for Isabel; but it was scarcely to be hoped that Miss Stackpole, on her side, would find permanent safety in the adoption of second-hand views. Isabel continued to warn her, good-humouredly; Lady Pensil’s obliging brother was sometimes, on our heroine’s lips, an object of irreverent and facetious allusion. Nothing, however, could exceed Henrietta’s amiability on this point; she used to abound in the sense of Isabel’s irony, and to enumerate with elation the hours she had spent with the good Mr. Bantling. Then, a few moments later, she would forget that they had been talking jocosely, and would mention with impulsive earnestness some expedition she had made in the company of the gallant ex-guardsman. She would say—“Oh, I know all about Versailles; I went there with Mr. Bantling. I was bound to see it thoroughly—I warned him when we went out there that I was thorough; so we spent three days at the hotel and wandered all over the place. It was lovely weather—a kind of Indian summer, only not so good. We just lived in that park. Oh yes; you can’t tell me anything about Versailles.” Henrietta appeared to have made arrangements to meet Mr. Bantling in the spring, in Italy.

   
Chapter XXI   
     
MRS. TOUCHETT, before arriving in Paris, had fixed the day for her departure; and by the middle of February she had begun to travel southward. She did not go directly to Florence, but interrupted her journey to pay a visit to her son, who at San Remo, on the Italian shore of the Mediterranean, had been spending a dull, bright winter, under a while umbrella. Isabel went with her aunt, as a matter of course, though Mrs. Touchett, with her usual homely logic, had laid before her a pair of alternatives.      1   
  “Now, of course, you are completely your own mistress,” she said. “Excuse me; I don’t mean that you were not so before. But you are on a different footing—property erects a kind of barrier. You can do a great many things if you are rich, which would be severely criticised if you were poor. You can go and come, you can travel alone, you can have your own establishment: I mean of course if you will take a companion—some decayed gentlewoman with a darned cashmere and dyed hair, who paints on velvet. You don’t think you would like that? Of course you can do as you please; I only want you to understand that you are at liberty. You might take Miss Stackpole as your dame de compagnie; she would keep people off very well. I think, however, that it is a great deal better you should remain with me, in spite of there being no obligation. It’s better for several reasons, quite apart from your liking it. I shouldn’t think you would like it, but I recommend you to make the sacrifice. Of course whatever novelty there may have been at first in my society has quite passed away, and you see me as I am—a dull, obstinate, narrow-minded old woman.”      2   
  “I don’t think you are at all dull,” Isabel had replied to this.      3   
  “But you do think I am obstinate and narrow-minded? I told you so!” said Mrs. Touchett, with much elation at being justified.      4   
  Isabel remained for the present with her aunt, because, in spite of eccentric impulses, she had a great regard for what was usually deemed decent, and a young gentlewoman without visible relations had always struck her as a flower without foliage. It was true that Mrs. Touchett’s conversation had never again appeared so brilliant as that first afternoon in Albany, when she sat in her damp waterproof and sketched the opportunities that Europe would offer to a young person of taste. This, however, was in a great measure the girl’s own fault; she had got a glimpse of her aunt’s experience, and her imagination constantly anticipated the judgments and emotions of a woman who had very little of the same faculty. Apart from this, Mrs. Touchett had a great merit; she was as honest as a pair of compasses. There was a comfort in her stiffness and firmness; you knew exactly where to find her, and were never liable to chance encounters with her. On her own ground she was always to be found; but she was never over-inquisitive as regards the territory of her neighbour. Isabel came at last to have a kind of undemonstrable pity for her; there seemed something so dreary in the condition of a person whose nature had, as it were, so little surface—offered so limited a face to the accretions of human contact. Nothing tender, nothing sympathetic, had ever had a chance to fasten upon it—no wind-sown blossom, no familiar moss. Her passive extent, in other words, was about that of a knife-edge. Isabel had reason to believe, however, that as she advanced in life she grew more disposed to confer those sentimental favours which she was still unable to accept—to sacrifice consistency to considerations of that inferior order for which the excuse must be found in the particular case. It was not to the credit of her absolute rectitude that she should have gone the longest way round to Florence, in order to spend a few weeks with her invalid son; for in former years it had been one of her most definite convictions that when Ralph wished to see her he was at liberty to remember that the Palazzo Crescentini contained a spacious apartment which was known as the room of the signorina.      5   
  “I want to ask you something,” Isabel said to this young man, the day after her arrival at San Remo—“something that I have thought more than once of asking you by letter, but that I have hesitated on the whole to write about. Face to face, nevertheless, my question seems easy enough. Did you know that your father intended to leave me so much money?”      6   
  Ralph stretched his legs a little further than usual, and gazed a little more fixedly at the Mediterranean. “What does it matter, my dear Isabel, whether I knew? My father was very obstinate.”      7   
  “So,” said the girl, “you did know.”      8   
  “Yes; he told me. We even talked it over a little.”      9   
  “What did he do it for?” asked Isabel abruptly.     10   
  “Why, as a kind of souvenir.”     11   
  “He liked me too much,” said Isabel.     12   
  “That’s a way we all have.”     13   
  “If I believed that, I should be very unhappy. Fortunately I don’t believe it. I want to be treated with justice; I want nothing but that.”     14   
  “Very good. But you must remember that justice to a lovely being is after all a florid sort of sentiment.”     15   
  “I am not a lovely being. How can you say that, at the very moment when I am asking such odious questions? I must seem to you delicate.”     16   
  “You seem to me troubled,” said Ralph.     17   
  “I am troubled.”     18   
  “About what?”     19   
  For a moment she answered nothing; then she broke out—     20   
  “Do you think it good for me suddenly to be made so rich? Henrietta doesn’t.”     21   
  “Oh, hang Henrietta!” said Ralph, coarsely. “If you ask me, I am delighted at it.”     22   
  “Is that why your father did it—for your amusement?”     23   
  “I differ with Miss Stackpole,” Ralph said, more gravely. “I think it’s very good for you to have means.”     24   
  Isabel looked at him a moment with serious eyes. “I wonder whether you know what is good for me—or whether you care.”     25   
  “If I know, depend upon it I care. Shall I tell you what it is? Not to torment yourself.”     26   
  “Not to torment you, I suppose you mean.”     27   
  “You can’t do that; I am proof. Take things more easily. Don’t ask yourself so much whether this or that is good for you. Don’t question your conscience so much—it will get out of tune, like a strummed piano. Keep it for great occasions. Don’t try so much to form your character—it’s like trying to pull open a rosebud. Live as you like best, and your character will form itself. Most things are good for you; the exceptions are very rare, and a comfortable income is not one of them.” Ralph paused, smiling; Isabel had listened quickly. “You have too much conscience,” Ralph added. “It’s out of all reason, the number of things you think wrong. Spread your wings; rise above the ground. It’s never wrong to do that.”     28   
  She had listened eagerly, as I say; and it was her nature to understand quickly.     29   
  “I wonder if you appreciate what you say. If you do, you take a great responsibility.”     30   
  “You frighten me a little, but I think I am right,” said Ralph, continuing to smile.     31   
  “All the same, what you say is very true,” Isabel went on. “You could say nothing more true. I am absorbed in myself—I look at life too much as a doctor’s prescription. Why, indeed, should we perpetually be thinking whether things are good for us, as if we were patients lying in a hospital? Why should I be so afraid of not doing right? As if it mattered to the world whether I do right or wrong!”     32   
  “You are a capital person to advise,” said Ralph; “you take the wind out of my sails!”     33   
  She looked at him as if she had not heard him—though she was following out the train of reflection which he himself had kindled. “I try to care more about the world than about myself—but I always come back to myself. It’s because I am afraid.” She stopped; her voice had trembled a little. “Yes, I am afraid; I can’t tell you. A large fortune means freedom, and I am afraid of that. It’s such a fine thing, and one should make such a good use of it. If one shouldn’t, one would be ashamed. And one must always be thinking—it’s a constant effort. I am not sure that it’s not a greater happiness to be powerless.”     34   
  “For weak people I have no doubt it’s a greater happiness. For weak people the effort not to be contemptible must be great.”     35   
  “And how do you know I am not weak?” Isabel asked.     36   
  “Ah,” Ralph answered, with a blush which the girl noticed, “if you are, I am awfully sold!”     37   
  The charm of the Mediterranean coast only deepened for our heroine on acquaintance; for it was the threshold of Italy—the gate of admirations. Italy, as yet imperfectly seen and felt, stretched before her as a land of promise, a land in which a love of the beautiful might be comforted by endless knowledge. Whenever she strolled upon the shore with her cousin—and she was the companion of his daily walk—she looked a while across the sea, with longing eyes, to where she knew that Genoa lay. She was glad to pause, however, on the edge of this larger knowledge; the stillness of these soft weeks seemed good to her. They were a peaceful interlude in a career which she had little warrant as yet for regarding as agitated, but which nevertheless she was constantly picturing to herself by the light of her hopes, her fears, her fancies, her ambitions, her predilections, and which reflected these subjective accidents in a manner sufficiently dramatic. Madame Merle had predicted to Mrs. Touchett that after Isabel had put her hand into her pocket half-a-dozen times she would be reconciled to the idea that it had been filled by a munificent uncle; and the event justified, as it had so often justified before, Madame Merle’s perspicacity. Ralph Touchett had praised his cousin for being morally inflammable; that is, for being quick to take a hint that was meant as good advice. His advice had perhaps helped the matter; at any rate before she left San Remo she had grown used to feeling rich. The consciousness found a place in rather a dense little group of ideas that she had about her herself, and often it was by no means the least agreeable. It was a perpetual implication of good intentions. She lost herself in a maze of visions; the fine things a rich, independent, generous girl, who took a large, human view of her opportunities and obligations, might do, were really innumerable. Her fortune therefore became to her mind a part of her better self; it gave her importance, gave her even, to her own imagination, a certain ideal beauty. What it did for her in the imagination of others is another affair, and on this point we must also touch in time. The visions I have just spoken of were intermingled with other reveries. Isabel liked better to think of the future than of the past; but at times, as she listened to the murmur of the Mediterranean waves, her glance took a backward flight. It rested upon two figures which, in spite of increasing distance, were still sufficiently salient; they were recognisable without difficulty as those of Caspar Goodwood and Lord Warburton. It was strange how quickly these gentlemen had fallen into the background of our young lady’s life. It was in her disposition at all times to lose faith in the reality of absent things; she could summon back her faith, in case of need, with an effort, but the effort was often painful, even when the reality had been pleasant. The past was apt to look dead, and its revival to wear the supernatural aspect of a resurrection. Isabel moreover was not prone to take for granted that she herself lived in the mind of others—she had not the fatuity to believe that she left indelible traces. She was capable of being wounded by the discovery that she had been forgotten; and yet, of all liberties, the one she herself found sweetest was the liberty to forget. She had not given her last shilling, sentimentally speaking, either to Caspar Goodwood or to Lord Warburton, and yet she did not regard them as appreciably in her debt. She had, of course, reminded herself that she was to hear from Mr. Goodwood again; but this was not to be for another year and a half, and in that time a great many things might happen. Isabel did not ay to herself that her American suitor might find some other girl more comfortable to woo; because, though it was certain that many other girls would prove so, she had not the smallest belief that this merit would attract him. But she reflected that she herself might change her humour—might weary of those things that were not Caspar (and there were so many things that were not Caspar!), and might find satisfaction in the very qualities which struck her to-day as his limitations. It was conceivable that his limitations should some day prove a sort of blessing in disguise—a clear and quiet harbour, inclosed by a fine granite breakwater. But that day could only come in its order, and she could not wait for it with folded hands. That Lord Warburton should continue to cherish her image seemed to her more than modesty should not only expect, but even desire. She had so definitely undertaken to forget him, as a lover, that a corresponding effort on his part would be eminently proper. This was not, as it may seem, merely a theory tinged with sarcasm. Isabel really believed that his lordship would, in the usual phrase, get over it. He had been deeply smitten—this she believed, and she was still capable of deriving pleasure from the belief; but it was absurd that a man so completely absolved from fidelity should stiffen himself in an attitude it would be more graceful to discontinue. Englishmen liked to be comfortable, said Isabel, and there could be little comfort for Lord Warburton, in the long run, in thinking of a self-sufficient American girl who had been but a casual acquaintance. Isabel flattered herself that should she hear, from one day to another, that he had married some young lady of his own country who had done more to deserve him, she should receive the news without an impulse of jealousy. It would have proved that he believed she was firm—which was what she wished to seem to him; and this was grateful to her pride.

Chapter XXII   
     
ON one of the first days of May, some six months after old Mr. Touchett’s death, a picturesque little group was gathered in one of the many rooms of an ancient villa which stood on the summit of an olive-muffled hill, outside of the Roman gate of Florence. The villa was a long, rather blank-looking structure, with the far-projecting roof which Tuscany loves, and which, on the hills that encircle Florence, when looked at from a distance, makes so harmonious a rectangle with the straight, dark, definite cypresses that usually rise, in groups of three or four, beside it. The house had a front upon a little grassy, empty, rural piazza which occupied a part of the hill-top; and this front, pierced with a few windows in irregular relations and furnished with a stone bench which ran along the base of the structure and usually afforded a lounging-place to one or two persons wearing more or less of that air of under-valued merit which in Italy, for some reason or other, always gracefully invests any one who confidently assumes a perfectly passive attitude—this ancient, solid, weather-worn, yet imposing front, had a somewhat incommunicative character. It was the mask of the house; it was not its face. It had heavy lids, but no eyes; the house in reality looked another way—looked off behind, into splendid openness and the range of the afternoon light. In that quarter the villa overhung the slope of its hill and the long valley of the Arno, hazy with Italian colour. It had a narrow garden, in the manner of a terrace, productive chiefly of tangles of wild roses and old stone benches, mossy and sun-warmed. The parapet of the terrace was just the height to lean upon, and beneath it the ground declined into the vagueness of olive-crops and vineyards. It is not, however, with the outside of the place that we are concerned; on this bright morning of ripened spring its tenants had reason to prefer the shady side of the wall. The windows of the ground-floor, as you saw them from the piazza, were, in their noble proportions, extremely architectural; but their function seemed to be less to offer communication with the world than to defy the world to look in. They were massively cross-barred and placed at such a height that curiosity, even on tiptoe, expired before it reached them. In an apartment lighted by a row of three of these obstructive apertures—one of the several distinct apartments into which the villa was divided, and which were mainly occupied by foreigners of conflicting nationality long resident in Florence—a gentleman was seated, in company with a young girl and two good sisters from a religious house. The room was, however, much less gloomy than my indications may have represented, for it had a wide, high door, which now stood open into the tangled garden behind; and the tall iron lattices admitted on occasion more than enough of the Italian sunshine. The place, moreover, was almost luxuriously comfortable; it told of habitation being practised as a fine art. It contained a variety of those faded hangings of damask and tapestry, those chests and cabinets of carved and time-polished oak, those primitive specimens of pictorial art in frames pedantically rusty, those perverse-looking relics of mediæval brass and pottery, of which Italy has long been the not quite exhausted storehouse. These things were intermingled with articles of modern furniture, in which liberal concession had been made to cultivated sensibilities; it was to be noticed that all the chairs were deep and well padded, and that much space was occupied by a writing-table of which the ingenious perfection bore the stamp of London and the nineteenth century. There were books in profusion, and magazines and newspapers, and a few small modern pictures, chiefly in water-colour. One of these productions stood on a drawing-room easel, before which, at the moment when we begin to be concerned with her, the young girl I have mentioned had placed herself. She was looking at the picture in silence.      1   
  Silence—absolute silence—had not fallen upon her companions; but their conversation had an appearance of embarrassed continuity. The two good sisters had not settled themselves in their respective chairs; their attitude was noticeably provisional, and they evidently wished to emphasise the transitory character of their presence. They were plain, comfortable mild-faced women, with a kind of business-like modesty, to which the impersonal aspect of their stiffened linen and inexpressive serge gave an advantage. One of them, a person of a certain age, in spectacles, with a fresh complexion and a full cheek, had a more discriminating manner than her colleague, and had evidently the responsibility of their errand, which apparently related to the young girl.      2   
  This young lady wore her hat—a coiffure of extreme simplicity, which was not at variance with a plain muslin gown, too short for the wearer, though it must already have been “let out.” The gentleman who might have been supposed to be entertaining the two nuns was perhaps conscious of the difficulties of his function; to entertain a nun is, in fact, a sufficiently delicate operation. At the same time he was plainly much interested in his youthful companion, and while she turned her back to him his eyes rested gravely upon her slim, small figure. He was a man of forty, with a well-shaped head, upon which the hair, still dense, but prematurely grizzled, had been cropped close. He had a thin, delicate, sharply-cut face, of which the only fault was that it looked too pointed; an appearance to which the shape of his beard contributed not a little. This beard, cut in the manner of the portraits of the sixteenth century and surmounted by a fair moustache, of which the ends had a picturesque upward flourish, gave its wearer a somewhat foreign, traditionary look, and suggested that he was a gentleman who studied effect. His luminous intelligent eye, an eye which expressed both softness and keenness—the nature of the observer as well as of the dreamer—would have assured you, however, that he studied it only within well-chosen limits, and that in so far as he sought it he found it. You would have been much at a loss to determine his nationality; he had none of the superficial signs that usually render the answer to this question an insipidly easy one. If he had English blood in his veins, it had probably received some French or Italian commixture; he was one of those persons who, in the matter of race, may, as the phrase is, pass for anything. He had a light, lean, lazy-looking figure, and was apparently neither tall nor short. He was dressed as a man dresses who takes little trouble about it.      3   
  “Well, my dear, what do you think of it?” he asked of the young girl. He used the Italian tongue, and used it with perfect ease; but this would not have convinced you that he was an Italian.      4   
  The girl turned her head a little to one side and the other.      5   
  “It is very pretty, papa. Did you make it yourself?”      6   
  “Yes, my child; I made it. Don’t you think I am clever?”      7   
  “Yes, papa, very clever; I also have learned to make pictures.” And she turned round and showed a small, fair face, of which the natural and usual expression seemed to be a smile of perfect sweetness.      8   
  “You should have brought me a specimen of your powers.”      9   
  “I have brought a great many; they are in my trunk,” said the child.     10   
  “She draws very—very carefully,” the elder of the nuns remarked, speaking in French.     11   
  “I am glad to hear it. Is it you who have instructed her?”     12   
  “Happily, no,” said the good sister, blushing a little. “Ce n’est pas ma partie. I teach nothing; I leave that to those who are wiser. We have an excellent drawing-master, Mr.—Mr.—what is his name?” she asked of her companion.     13   
  Her companion looked about at the carpet.     14   
  “It’s a German name,” she said in Italian, as if it needed to be translated.     15   
  “Yes,” the other went on, “he is a German, and we have had him for many years.”     16   
  The young girl, who was not heeding the conversation, had wandered away to the open door of the large room, and stood looking into the garden.     17   
  “And you, my sister, are French,” said the gentleman.     18   
  “Yes, sir,” the woman replied, gently. “I speak to the pupils in my own language. I know no other. But we have sisters of other countries—English, German, Irish. They all speak their own tongue.”     19   
  The gentleman gave a smile.     20   
  “Has my daughter been under the care of one of the Irish ladies?” And then, as he saw that his visitors suspected a joke, but failed to understand it—“You are very complete,” he said, instantly.     21   
  “Oh, yes, we are complete. We have everything, and everything is of the best.”     22   
  “We have gymnastics,” the Italian sister ventured to remark. “But not dangerous.”     23   
  “I hope not. Is that your branch?” A question which provoked much candid hilarity on the part of the two ladies; on the subsidence of which their entertainer, glancing at his daughter, remarked that she had grown.     24   
  “Yes, but I think she has finished. She will remain little,” said the French sister.     25   
  “I am not sorry. I like little women,” the gentleman declared, frankly. “But I know no particular reason why my child should be short.”     26   
  The nun gave a temperate shrug, as if to intimate that such things might be beyond our knowledge.     27   
  “She is in very good health; that is the best thing.”     28   
  “Yes, she looks well.” And the young girl’s father watched her for a moment. “What do you see in the garden?” he asked, in French.     29   
  “I see many flowers,” she replied, in a sweet, small voice, and with a French accent as good as his own.     30   
  “Yes, but not many good ones. However, such as they are, go out and gather some for ces dames.”     31   
  The child turned to him, with her smile brightened by pleasure. “May I, truly?” she asked.     32   
  “Ah, when I tell you,” said her father.     33   
  The girl glanced at the elder of the nuns.     34   
  “May I, truly, ma mère?”     35   
  “Obey monsieur your father, my child,” said the sister, blushing again.     36   
  The child, satisfied with this authorisation, descended from the threshold, and was presently lost to sight.     37   
  “You don’t spoil them,” said her father, smiling.     38   
  “For everything they must ask leave. That is our system. Leave is freely granted, but they must ask it.”     39   
  “Oh, I don’t quarrel with your system; I have no doubt it is a very good one. I sent you my daughter to see what you would make of her. I had faith.”     40   
  “One must have faith,” the sister blandly rejoined, gazing through her spectacles.     41   
  “Well, has my faith been rewarded? What have you made of her?”     42   
  The sister dropped her eyes a moment.     43   
  “A good Christian, monsieur.”     44   
  Her host dropped his eyes as well; but it was probable that the movement had in each case a different spring.     45   
  “Yes,” he said in a moment, “and what else?”     46   
  He watched the lady from the convent, probably thinking that she would say that a good Christian was everything.     47   
  But for all her simplicity, she was not so crude as that. “A charming young lady—a real little woman—a daughter in whom you will have nothing but contentment.”     48   
  “She seems to me very nice,” said the father. “She is very pretty.”     49   
  “She is perfect. She has no faults.”     50   
  “She never had any as a child, and I am glad you have given her none.”     51   
  “We love her too much,” said the spectacled sister, with dignity. “And as for faults, how can we give what we have not? Le couvent n’est pas comme le monde, monsieur. She is our child, as you may say. We have had her since she was so small.”     52   
  “Of all those we shall lose this year she is the one we shall miss most,” the younger woman murmured, deferentially.     53   
  “Ah, yes, we shall talk long of her,” said the other. “We shall hold her up to the new ones.”     54   
  And at this the good sister appeared to find her spectacles dim; while her companion, after fumbling a moment, presently drew forth a pocket-handkerchief of durable texture.     55   
  “It is not certain that you will lose her; nothing is settled yet,” the host rejoined, quickly; not as if to anticipate their tears, but in the tone of a man saying what was most agreeable to himself.     56   
  “We should be very happy to believe that. Fifteen is very young to leave us.”     57   
  “Oh,” exclaimed the gentleman, with more vivacity than he had yet used, “it is not I who wish to take her away. I wish you could keep her always!”     58   
  “Ah, monsieur,” said the elder sister, smiling and getting up, “good as she is, she is made for the world. Le monde y gagnera.”     59   
  “If all the good people were hidden away in convents, how would the world get on?” her companion softly inquired, rising also.     60   
  This was a question of a wider bearing than the good woman apparently supposed; and the lady in spectacles took a harmonising view by saying comfortably—     61   
  “Fortunately there are good people everywhere.”     62   
  “If you are going there will be two less here,” her host remarked, gallantly.     63   
  For this extravagant sally his simple visitors had no answer, and they simply looked at each other in decent deprecation; but their confusion was speedily covered by the return of the young girl, with two large bunches of roses—one of them all white, the other red.     64   
  “I give you your choice, mamman Catherine,” said the child. “It is only the colour that is different, mamman Justine; there are just as many roses in one bunch as another.”     65   
  The two sisters turned to each other, smiling and hesitating, with—“Which will you take?” and “No, it’s for you to choose.”     66   
  “I will take the red,” said mother Catherine, in the spectacles. “I am so red myself. They will comfort us on our way back to Rome.”     67   
  “Ah, they won’t last,” cried the young girl. “I wish I could give you something that would last!”     68   
  “You have given us a good memory of yourself, my daughter. That will last!”     69   
  “I wish nuns could wear pretty things. I would give you my blue beads,” the child went on.     70   
  “And do you go back to Rome to-night?” her father asked.     71   
  “Yes, we take the train again. We have so much to do là-bas.”     72   
  “Are you not tired?”     73   
  “We are never tired.”     74   
  “Ah, my sister, sometimes,” murmured the junior votaress.     75   
  “Not to-day, at any rate. We have rested too well here. Que Dieu vous garde, ma fille.”     76   
  Their host, while they exchanged kisses with his daughter, went forward to open the door through which they were to pass; but as he did so he gave a slight exclamation, and stood looking beyond. The door opened into a vaulted ante-chamber, as high as a chapel, and paved with red tiles; and into this ante-chamber a lady had just been admitted by a servant, a lad in shabby livery, who was now ushering her toward the apartment in which our friends were grouped. The gentleman at the door, after dropping his exclamation, remained silent; in silence, too, the lady advanced. He gave her no further audible greeting, and offered her no hand, but stood aside to let her pass into the drawing-room. At the threshold she hesitated.     77   
  “Is there any one?” she asked.     78   
  “Some one you may see.”     79   
  She went in, and found herself confronted with the two nuns and their pupil, who was coming forward between them, with a hand in the arm of each. At the sight of the new visitor they all paused, and the lady, who had stopped too, stood looking at them. The young girl gave a little soft cry—     80   
  “Ah, Madame Merle!”     81   
  The visitor had been slightly startled; but her manner the next instant was none the less gracious.     82   
  “Yes, it’s Madame Merle, come to welcome you home.”     83   
  And she held out two hands to the girl, who immediately came up to her, presenting her forehead to be kissed. Madame Merle saluted this portion of her charming little person, and then stood smiling at the two nuns. They acknowledged her smile with a decent obeisance, but permitted themselves no direct scrutiny of this imposing, brilliant woman, who seemed to bring in with her something of the radiance of the outer world.     84   
  “These ladies have brought my daughter home, and now they return to the convent,” the gentleman explained.     85   
  “Ah, you go back to Rome? I have lately come from there. It is very lovely now,” said Madame Merle.     86   
  The good sisters, standing with their hands folded into their sleeves, accepted this statement uncritically; and the master of the house asked Madame Merle how long it was since she had left Rome.     87   
  “She came to see me at the convent,” said the young girl, before her father’s visitors had time to reply.     88   
  “I have been more than once, Pansy,” Madame Merle answered. “Am I not your great friend in Rome?”     89   
  “I remember the last time best,” said Pansy, “because you told me I should leave the place.”     90   
  “Did you tell her that?” the child’s father asked.     91   
  “I hardly remember. I told her what I thought would please her. I have been in Florence a week. I hoped you would come and see me.”     92   
  “I should have done so if I had known you were here. One doesn’t know such things by inspiration—though I suppose one ought. You had better sit down.”     93   
  These two speeches were made in a peculiar tone of voice—a tone half-lowered, and carefully quiet, but as from habit rather than from any definite need.     94   
  Madame Merle looked about her, choosing her seat.     95   
  “You are going to the door with these women? Let me of course not interrupt the ceremony. Je vous salue, mesdames,” she added, in French, to the nuns, as if to dismiss them.     96   
  “This lady is a great friend of ours; you will have seen her at the convent,” said the host. “We have much faith in her judgment, and she will help me to decide whether my daughter shall return to you at the end of the holidays.”     97   
  “I hope you will decide in our favour, madam,” the sister in spectacles ventured to remark.     98   
  “That is Mr. Osmond’s pleasantry; I decide nothing,” said Madame Merle, smiling still. “I believe you have a very good school, but Miss Osmond’s friends must remember that she is meant for the world.”     99   
  “That is what I have told monsieur,” sister Catherine answered. “It is precisely to fit her for the world,” she murmured, glancing at Pansy, who stood at a little distance looking at Madame Merle’s elegant apparel.    100   
  “Do you hear that, Pansy? You are meant for the world,” said Pansy’s father.    101   
  The child gazed at him an instant with her pure young eyes.    102   
  “Am I not meant for you, papa?” she asked.    103   
  Papa gave a quick, light laugh.    104   
  “That doesn’t prevent it! I am of the world, Pansy.”    105   
  “Kindly permit us to retire,” said sister Catherine. “Be good, in any case, my daughter.”    106   
  “I shall certainly come back and see you,” Pansy declared, recommencing her embraces, which were presently interrupted by Madame Merle.    107   
  “Stay with me, my child,” she said, “while your father takes the good ladies to the door.”    108   
  Pansy stared, disappointed, but not protesting. She was evidently impregnated with the idea of submission, which was due to any one who took the tone of authority; and she was a passive spectator of the operation of her fate.    109   
  “May I not see mamman Catherine get into the carriage?” she asked very gently.    110   
  “It would please me better if you would remain with me,” said Madame Merle, while Mr. Osmond and his companions, who had bowed low again to the other visitor, passed into the ante-chamber.    111   
  “Oh yes, I will stay,” Pansy answered; and she stood near Madame Merle, surrendering her little hand, which this lady took. She stared out of the window; her eyes had filled with tears.    112   
  “I am glad they have taught you to obey,” said Madame Merle. “That is what little girls should do.”    113   
  “Oh yes, I obey very well,” said Pansy, with soft eagerness, almost with boastfulness, as if she had been speaking of her piano-playing. And then she gave a faint, just audible sigh.    114   
  Madame Merle, holding her hand, drew it across her own fine palm and looked at it. The gaze was critical, but it found nothing to deprecate; the child’s small hand was delicate and fair.    115   
  “I hope they always see that you wear gloves,” she said in a moment. “Little girls usually dislike them.”    116   
  “I used to dislike them, but I like them now,” the child answered.    117   
  “Very good, I will make you a present of a dozen.”    118   
  “I thank you very much. What colours will they be?” Pansy demanded, with interest.    119   
  Madame Merle meditated a moment.    120   
  “Useful colours.”    121   
  “But will they be pretty?”    122   
  “Are you fond of pretty things?”    123   
  “Yes; but—not too fond,” said Pansy, with a trace of asceticism.    124   
  “Well, they will not be too pretty,” Madame Merle answered, with a laugh. She took the child’s other hand, and drew her nearer; and then, looking at her a moment—“Shall you miss mother Catherine?”    125   
  “Yes—when I think of her.”    126   
  “Try, then, not to think of her. Perhaps some day,” added Madame Merle, “you will have another mother.”    127   
  “I don’t think that is necessary,” Pansy said, repeating her little soft, conciliatory sigh. “I had more than thirty mothers at the convent.”    128   
  Her father’s step sounded again in the ante-chamber, and Madame Merle got up, releasing the child. Mr. Osmond came in and closed the door; then, without looking at Madame Merle, he pushed one or two chairs back into their places.    129   
  His visitor waited a moment for him to speak, watching him as he moved about. Then at last she said—“I hoped you would have come to Rome. I thought it possible you would have come to fetch Pansy away.”    130   
  “That was a natural supposition; but I am afraid it is not the first time I have acted in defiance of your calculations.”    131   
  “Yes,” said Madame Merle, “I think you are very perverse.”    132   
  Mr. Osmond busied himself for a moment in the room—there was plenty of space in it to move about—in the fashion of a man mechanically seeking pretexts for not giving an attention which may be embarrassing. Presently, however, he had exhausted his pretexts; there was nothing left for him—unless he took up a book—but to stand with his hands behind him, looking at Pansy. “Why didn’t you come and see the last of mamman Catherine?” he asked of her abruptly, in French.    133   
  Pansy hesitated a moment, glancing at Madame Merle. “I asked her to stay with me,” said this lady, who had seated herself again in another place.    134   
  “Ah, that was better,” said Osmond. Then, at last, he dropped into a chair, and sat looking at Madame Merle; leaning forward a little, with his elbows on the edge of the arms and his hands interlocked.    135   
  “She is going to give me some gloves,” said Pansy.    136   
  “You needn’t tell that to every one, my dear,” Madame Merle observed.    137   
  “You are very kind to her,” said Osmond. “She is supposed to have everything she needs.”    138   
  “I should think she had had enough of the nuns.”    139   
  “If we are going to discuss that matter, she had better go out of the room.”    140   
  “Let her stay,” said Madame Merle. “We will talk of something else.”    141   
  “If you like, I won’t listen,” Pansy suggested, with an appearance of candour which imposed conviction.    142   
  “You may listen, charming child, because you won’t understand,” her father replied. The child sat down deferentially, near the open door, within sight of the garden, into which she directed her innocent, wistful eyes; and Mr. Osmond went on, irrelevantly, addressing himself to his other companion. “You are looking particularly well.”    143   
  “I think I always look the same,” said Madame Merle.    144   
  “You always are the same. You don’t vary. You are a wonderful woman.”    145   
  “Yes, I think I am.”    146   
  “You sometimes change your mind, however. You told me on your return from England that you would not leave Rome again for the present.”    147   
  “I am pleased that you remember so well what I say. That was my intention. But I have come to Florence to meet some friends who have lately arrived, and as to whose movements I was at that time uncertain.”    148   
  “That reason is characteristic. You are always doing something for your friends.”    149   
  Madame Merle looked straight at her interlocutor, smiling. “It is less characteristic than your comment upon it—which is perfectly insincere. I don’t, however, make a crime of that,” she added, “because if you don’t believe what you say there is no reason why you should. I don’t ruin myself for my friends: I don’t deserve your praise. I care greatly for myself.”    150   
  “Exactly; but yourself includes so many other selves—so much of everything. I never knew a person whose life touched so many other lives.”    151   
  “What do you call one’s life?” asked Madame Merle. “One’s appearance, one’s movements, one’s engagements, one’s society?”    152   
  “I call your life—your ambitions,” said Osmond.    153   
  Madame Merle looked a moment at Pansy. “I wonder whether she understands that,” she murmured.    154   
  “You see she can’t stay with us!” And Pansy’s father gave a rather joyless smile. “Go into the garden, ma bonne, and pluck a flower or two for Madame Merle,” he went on, in French.    155   
  “That’s just what I wanted to do,” Pansy exclaimed, rising with promptness and noiselessly departing. Her father followed her to the open door, stood a moment watching her, and then came back, but remained standing, or rather strolling to and fro, as if to cultivate a sense of freedom which in another attitude might be wanting.    156   
  “My ambitions are principally for you,” said Madame Merle, looking up at him with a certain nobleness of expression.    157   
  “That comes back to what I say. I am part of your life—I and a thousand others. You are not selfish—I can’t admit that. If you were selfish, what should I be? What epithet would properly describe me?”    158   
  “You are indolent. For me that is your worst fault.”    159   
  “I am afraid it is really my best.”    160   
  “You don’t care,” said Madame Merle, gravely.    161   
  “No; I don’t think I care much. What sort of a fault do you call that? My indolence, at any rate, was one of the reasons I didn’t go to Rome. But it was only one of them.”    162   
  “It is not of importance—to me at least—that you didn’t go; though I should have been glad to see you. I am glad that you are not in Rome now—which you might be, would probably be, if you had gone there a month ago. There is something I should like you to do at present in Florence.”    163   
  “Please remember my indolence,” said Osmond.    164   
  “I will remember it; but I beg you to forget it. In that way you will have both the virtue and the reward. This is not a great labour, and it may prove a great pleasure. How long is it since you made a new acquaintance?”    165   
  “I don’t think I have made any since I made yours.”    166   
  “It is time you should make another, then. There is a friend of mine I want you to know.”    167   
  Mr. Osmond, in his walk, had gone back to the open door again, and was looking at his daughter, as she moved about in the intense sunshine. “What good will it do me?” he asked, with a sort of genial crudity.    168   
  Madame Merle reflected a moment. “It will amuse you.” There was nothing crude in this rejoinder; it had been thoroughly well considered.    169   
  “If you say that, I believe it,” said Osmond, coming toward her. “There are some points in which my confidence in you is complete. I am perfectly aware, for instance, that you know good society from bad.”    170   
  “Society is all bad.”    171   
  “Excuse me. That isn’t a common sort of wisdom. You have gained it in the right way—experimentally; you have compared an immense number of people with each other.”    172   
  “Well, I invite you to profit by my knowledge.”    173   
  “To profit? Are you very sure that I shall?”    174   
  “It’s what I hope. It will depend upon yourself. If I could only induce you to make an effort!”    175   
  “Ah, there you are! I knew something tiresome was coming. What in the world—that is likely to turn up here—is worth an effort?”    176   
  Madame Merle flushed a little, and her eye betrayed vexation. “Don’t be foolish, Osmond. There is no one knows better than you that there are many things worth an effort.”    177   
  “Many things, I admit. But they are none of them probable things.”    178   
  “It is the effort that makes them probable,” said Madame Merle.    179   
  “There’s something in that. Who is your friend?”    180   
  “The person I came to Florence to see. She is a niece of Mrs. Touchett, whom you will not have forgotten.”    181   
  “A niece? The word niece suggests youth. I see what you are coming to.”    182   
  “Yes, she is young—twenty-two years old. She is a great friend of mine. I met her for the first time in England, several months ago, and we took a great fancy to each other. I like her immensely, and I do what I don’t do every day—I admire her. You will do the same.”    183   
  “Not if I can help it.”    184   
  “Precisely. But you won’t be able to help it.”    185   
  “Is she beautiful, clever, rich, splendid, universally intelligent and unprecedentedly virtuous? It is only on those conditions that I care to make her acquaintance. You know I asked you some time ago never to speak to me of any one who should not correspond to that description. I know plenty of dingy people; I don’t want to know any more.”    186   
  “Miss Archer is not dingy; she’s as bright as the morning. She corresponds to your description; it is for that I wish you to know her. She fills all your requirements.”    187   
  “More or less, of course.”    188   
  “No; quite literally. She is beautiful, accomplished, generous, and for an American, well-born. She is also very clever and very amiable, and she has a handsome fortune.”    189   
  Mr. Osmond listened to this in silence, appearing to turn it over in his mind, with his eyes on his informant. “What do you want to do with her?” he asked, at last.    190   
  “What you see. Put her in your way.”    191   
  “Isn’t she meant for something better than that?”    192   
  “I don’t pretend to know what people are meant for,” said Madame Merle. “I only know what I can do with them.”    193   
  “I am sorry for Miss Archer!” Osmond declared.    194   
  Madame Merle got up. “If that is a beginning of interest in her, I take note of it.”    195   
  The two stood there, face to face; she settled her mantilla, looking down at it as she did so.    196   
  “You are looking very well,” Osmond repeated, still more irrelevantly than before. “You have got some idea. You are never as well as when you have got an idea; they are always becoming to you.”    197   
  In the manner of these two persons, on first meeting on any occasion, and especially when they met in the presence of others, there was something indirect and circumspect, which showed itself in glance and tone. They approached each other obliquely, as it were, and they addressed each other by implication. The effect of each appeared to be to intensify to an embarrassing degree the self-consciousness of the other. Madame Merle of course carried off such embarrassments better than her friend; but even Madame Merle had not on this occasion the manner she would have liked to have—the perfect self-possession she would have wished to exhibit to her host. The point I wish to make is, however, that at a certain moment the obstruction, whatever it was, always levelled itself, and left them more closely face to face than either of them ever was with any one else. That was what had happened now. They stood there, knowing each other well, and each of them on the whole willing to accept the satisfaction of knowing, as a compensation for the inconvenience—whatever it might be—of being known.    198   
  “I wish very much you were not so heartless,” said Madame Merle, quietly. “It has always been against you, and it will be against you now.”    199   
  “I am not so heartless as you think. Every now and then something touches me—as for instance your saying just now that your ambitions are for me. I don’t understand it; I don’t see how or why they should be. But it touches me, all the same.”    200   
  “You will probably understand it ever less as time goes on. There are some things you will never understand. There is no particular need that you should.”    201   
  “You, after all, are the most remarkable woman,” said Osmond. “You have more in you than almost any one. I don’t see why you think Mrs. Touchett’s niece should matter very much to me, when—when——” and he paused a moment.    202   
  “When I myself have mattered so little?”    203   
  “That of course is not what I meant to say. When I have known and appreciated such a woman as you.”    204   
  “Isabel Archer is better than I,” said Madame Merle.    205   
  Her companion gave a laugh. “How little you must think of her to say that!”    206   
  “Do you suppose I am capable of jealousy? Please answer me that.”    207   
  “With regard to me? No; on the whole I don’t.”    208   
  “Come and see me, then, two days hence. I am staying at Mrs. Touchett’s—the Palazzo Crescentini—and the girl will be there.”    209   
  “Why didn’t you ask me that at first, simply, without speaking of the girl?” said Osmond. “You could have had her there at any rate.”    210   
  Madame Merle looked at him in the manner of a woman whom no question that he could ask would find unprepared. “Do you wish to know why? Because I have spoken of you to her.”    211   
  Osmond frowned and turned away. “I would rather not know that.” Then, in a moment, he pointed out the easel supporting the little water-colour drawing. “Have you seen that—my last?”    212   
  Madame Merle drew near and looked at it a moment. “Is it the Venetian Alps—one of your last year’s sketches?”    213   
  “Yes—but how you guess everything!”    214   
  Madame Merle looked for a moment longer; then she turned away. “You know I don’t care for your drawings.”    215   
  “I know it, yet I am always surprised at it. They are really so much better than most people’s.”    216   
  “That may very well be. But as the only thing you do, it’s so little. I should have liked you to do so many other things: those were my ambitions.”    217   
  “Yes; you have told me many times—things that were impossible.”    218   
  “Things that were impossible,” said Madame Merle. And then, in quite a different tone—“In itself your little picture is very good.” She looked about the room—at the old cabinets, the pictures, the tapestries, the surfaces of faded silk. “Your rooms, at least, are perfect,” she went on. “I am struck with that afresh, whenever I come back; I know none better anywhere. You understand this sort of thing as no one else does.”    219   
  “I am very sick of it,” said Osmond.    220   
  “You must let Miss Archer come and see all this. I have told her about it.”    221   
  “I don’t object to showing my things—when people are not idiots.”    222   
  “You do it delightfully. As a cicerone in your own museum you appear to particular advantage.”    223   
  Mr. Osmond, in return for this compliment, simply turned upon his companion an eye expressive of perfect clairvoyance.    224   
  “Did you say she was rich?” he asked in a moment.    225   
  “She has seventy thousand pounds.”    226   
  “En écus bien comptés?”    227   
  “There is no doubt whatever about her fortune. I have seen it, as I may say.”    228   
  “Satisfactory woman!—I mean you. And if I go to see her, shall I see the mother?”    229   
  “The mother? She has none—nor father either.”    230   
  “The aunt then; whom did you say?—Mrs. Touchett.”    231   
  “I can easily keep her out of the way.”    232   
  “I don’t object to her,” said Osmond; “I rather like Mrs. Touchett. She has a sort of old-fashioned character that is passing away—a vivid identity. But that long jackanapes, the son—is he about the place?”    233   
  “He is there, but he won’t trouble you.”    234   
  “He’s an awful ass.”    235   
  “I think you are mistaken. He is a very clever man. But he is not fond of being about when I am there, because he doesn’t like me.”    236   
  “What could be more asinine than that? Did you say that she was pretty?” Osmond went on.    237   
  “Yes; but I won’t say it again, lest you should be disappointed. Come and make a beginning; that is all I ask of you.”    238   
  “A beginning of what?”    239   
  Madame Merle was silent a moment. “I want you of course to marry her.”    240   
  “The beginning of the end! Well, I will see for myself. Have you told her that?”    241   
  “For what do you take me? She is a very delicate piece of machinery.”    242   
  “Really,” said Osmond, after some meditation, “I don’t understand your ambitions.”    243   
  “I think you will understand this one after you have seen Miss Archer. Suspend your judgment till then.” Madame Merle, as she spoke, had drawn near the open door of the garden, where she stood a moment, looking out. “Pansy has grown pretty,” she presently added.    244   
  “So it seemed to me.”    245   
  “But she has had enough of the convent.”    246   
  “I don’t know,” said Osmond. “I like what they have made of her. It’s very charming.”    247   
  “That’s not the convent. It’s the child’s nature.”    248   
  “It’s the combination, I think. She’s as pure as a pearl.”    249   
  “Why doesn’t she come back with my flowers, then?” Madame Merle asked. “She is not in a hurry.”    250   
  “We will go and get them,” said her companion.    251   
  “She doesn’t like me,” murmured Madame Merle, as she raised her parasol, and they passed into the garden.

Chapter XXIII   
     
MADAME MERLE, who had come to Florence on Mrs. Touchett’s arrival at the invitation of this lady—Mrs. Touchett offering her for a month the hospitality of the Palazzo Crescentini—the judicious Madame Merle spoke to Isabel afresh about Gilbert Osmond, and expressed the wish that she should know him; but made no such point of the matter as we have seen her do in recommending the girl herself to Mr. Osmond’s attention. The reason of this was perhaps that Isabel offered no resistance whatever to Madame Merle’s proposal. In Italy, as in England, the lady had a multitude of friends, both among the natives of the country and its heterogeneous visitors. She had mentioned to Isabel most of the people the girl would find it well to know—of course, she said, Isabel could know whomever she would—and she had placed Mr. Osmond near the top of the list. He was an old friend of her own; she had known him these ten years; he was one of the cleverest and most agreeable men it was possible to meet. He was altogether above the respectable average; quite another affair. He was not perfect—far from it; the effect he produced depended a good deal on the state of his nerves and his spirits. If he were not in the right mood he could be very unsatisfactory—like most people, after all; but when he chose to exert himself no man could do it to better purpose. He had his peculiarities—which indeed Isabel would find to be the case with all the men really worth knowing—and he did not cause his light to shine equally for all persons. Madame Merle, however, thought she could undertake that for Isabel he would be brilliant. He was easily bored—too easily, and dull people always put him out; but a quick and cultivated girl like Isabel would give him a stimulus which was too absent from his life. At any rate, he was a person to know. One should not attempt to live in Italy without making a friend of Gilbert Osmond, who knew more about the country than any one except two or three German professors. And if they had more knowledge than he, he had infinitely more taste; he had a taste which was quite by itself. Isabel remembered that her friend had spoken of him during their multifarious colloquies at Gardencourt, and wondered a little what was the nature of the tie that united them. She was inclined to imagine that Madame Merle’s ties were peculiar, and such a possibility was a part of the interest created by this suggestive woman. As regards her relations with Mr. Osmond, however, Madame Merle hinted at nothing but a long-established and tranquil friendship. Isabel said that she should be happy to know a person who had enjoyed her friend’s confidence for so many years. “You ought to see a great many men,” Madame Merle remarked; “you ought to see as many as possible, so as to get used to them.”      1   
  “Used to them?” Isabel repeated, with that exceedingly serious gaze which sometimes seemed to proclaim that she was deficient in a sense of humour—an intimation which at other moments she effectively refuted. “I am not afraid of them.”      2   
  “Used to them. I mean, so as to despise them. That’s what one comes to with most of them. You will pick out, for your society, the few whom you don’t despise.”      3   
  This remark had a bitterness which Madame Merle did not often allow herself to betray; but Isabel was not alarmed by it, for she had never supposed that, as one saw more of the world, the sentiment of respect became the most active of one’s emotions. This sentiment was excited, however, by the beautiful city of Florence, which pleased her not less than Madame Merle had promised; and if her unassisted perception had not been able to gauge its charms, she had clever companions to call attention to latent merits. She was in no want, indeed, of æsthetic illumination, for Ralph found it a pleasure which renewed his own earlier sensations, to act as cicerone to his eager young kinswoman. Madame Merle remained at home; she had seen the treasures of Florence so often, and she had always something to do. But she talked of all things with remarkable vividness of memory—she remembered the right-hand angel in the large Perugino, and the position of the hands of the Saint Elizabeth in the picture next to it; and had her own opinions as to the character of many famous works of art, differing often from Ralph with great sharpness, and defending her interpretations with as much ingenuity as good-humour. Isabel listened to the discussions which took place between the two, with a sense that she might derive much benefit from them and that they were among the advantages which—for instance—she could not have enjoyed in Albany. In the clear May mornings, before the formal breakfast—this repast at Mrs. Touchett’s was served at twelve o’clock—Isabel wandered about with her cousin through the narrow and sombre Florentine streets, resting a while in the thicker dusk of some historic church, or the vaulted chambers of some dispeopled convent. She went to the galleries and palaces; she looked at the pictures and statues which had hitherto been great names to her, and exchanged for a knowledge which was sometimes a limitation a presentiment which proved usually to have been a blank. She performed all those acts of mental prostration in which, on a first visit to Italy, youth and enthusiasm so freely indulge; she felt her heart beat in the presence of immortal genius, and knew the sweetness of rising tears in eyes to which faded fresco and darkened marble grew dim. But the return, every day, was even pleasanter than the going forth; the return into the wide, monumental court of the great house in which Mrs. Touchett, many years before, had established herself, and into the high, cool rooms where carven rafters and pompous frescoes of the sixteenth century looked down upon the familiar commodities of the nineteenth. Mrs. Touchett inhabited an historic building in a narrow street whose very name recalled the strife of Mediæval factions; and found compensation for the darkness of her frontage in the modicity of her rent and the brightness of a garden in which nature itself looked as archaic as the rugged architecture of the palace and which illumined the rooms that were in regular use. Isabel found that to live in such a place might be a source of happiness—almost of excitement. At first it had struck her as a sort of prison; but very soon its prison-like quality became a merit, for she discovered that it contained other prisoners than the members of her aunt’s household. The spirit of the past was shut up there, like a refugee from the outer world; it lurked in lonely corners, and, at night, haunted even the rooms in which Mrs. Touchett diffused her matter-of-fact influence. Isabel used to hear vague echoes and strange reverberations; she had a sense of the hovering of unseen figures, of the flitting of ghosts. Often she paused, listening, half-startled, half-disappointed, on the great cold stone staircase.      4   
  Gilbert Osmond came to see Madame Merle, who presented him to the young lady seated almost out of sight at the other end of the room. Isabel, on this occasion, took little share in the conversation; she scarcely even smiled when the others turned to her appealingly; but sat there as an impartial auditor of their brilliant discourse. Mrs. Touchett was not present, and these two had it their own way. They talked extremely well; it struck Isabel almost as a dramatic entertainment, rehearsed in advance. Madame Merle referred everything to her, but the girl answered nothing, though she knew that this attitude would make Mr. Osmond think she was one of those dull people who bored him. It was the worse, too, that Madame Merle would have told him she was almost as much above the merely respectable average as he himself, and that she was putting her friend dreadfully in the wrong. But this was no matter, for once; even if more had depended on it, Isabel could not have made an attempt to shine. There was something in Mr. Osmond that arrested her and held her in suspense—made it seem more important that she should get an impression of him than that she should produce one herself. Besides, Isabel had little skill in producing an impression which she knew to be expected; nothing could be more charming, in general, than to seem dazzling; but she had a perverse unwillingness to perform by arrangement. Mr. Osmond, to do him justice, had a well-bred air of expecting nothing; he was a quiet gentleman, with a colourless manner, who said elaborate things with a great deal of simplicity. Isabel, however, privately perceived that if he did not expect he observed; she was very sure he was sensitive. His face, his head was sensitive; he was not handsome, but he was fine, as fine as one of the drawings in the long gallery above the bridge, at the Uffizi. Mr. Osmond was very delicate; the tone of his voice alone would have proved it. It was the visitor’s delicacy that made her abstain from interference. His talk was like the tinking of glass, and if she had put out her finger she might have changed the pitch and spoiled the concert. Before he went he made an appeal to her.      5   
  “Madame Merle says she will come up to my hill-top some day next week and drink tea in my garden. It would give me much pleasure if you would come with her. It’s thought rather pretty—there’s what they call a general view. My daughter, too, would be so glad—or rather, for she is too young to have strong emotions, I should be so glad—so very glad.” And Mr. Osmond paused a moment, with a slight air of embarrassment leaving his sentence unfinished. “I should be so happy if you could know my daughter,” he went on, a moment afterwards.      6   
  Isabel answered that she should be delighted to see Miss Osmond, and that if Madame Merle would show her the way to the hill-top she should be very grateful. Upon this assurance the visitor took his leave; after which Isabel fully expected that her friend would scold her for having been so stupid. But to her surprise, Madame Merle, who indeed never fell into the matter-of-course, said to her in a few moments—      7   
  “You were charming, my dear; you were just as one would have wished you. You are never disappointing.”      8   
  A rebuke might possibly have been irritating, though it is much more probable that Isabel would have taken it in good part; but, strange to say, the words that Madame Merle actually used caused her the first feeling of displeasure she had known this lady to excite. “That is more than I intended,” she answered, coldly. “I am under no obligation that I know of to charm Mr. Osmond.”      9   
  Madame Merle coloured a moment; but we know it was not her habit to retract. “My dear child, I didn’t speak for him, poor man; I spoke for yourself. It is not of course a question as to his liking you; it matters little whether he likes you or not! But I thought you liked him.”     10   
  “I did,” said Isabel, honestly. “But I don’t see what that matters, either.”     11   
  “Everything that concerns you matters to me,” Madame Merle returned, with a sort of noble gentleness, “especially when at the same time another old friend is concerned.”     12   
  Whatever Isabel’s obligations may have been to Mr. Osmond, it must be admitted that she found them sufficient to lead her to ask Ralph sundry questions about him. She thought Ralph’s judgments cynical, but she flattered herself that she had learned to make allowance for that.     13   
  “Do I know him?” said her cousin. “Oh, yes, I know him; not well, but on the whole enough. I have never cultivated his society, and he apparently has never found mine indispensable to his happiness. Who is he—what is he? He is a mysterious American, who has been living these twenty years, or more, in Italy. Why do I call him mysterious? Only as a cover for my ignorance; I don’t know his antecedents, his family, his origin. For all I know, he may be a prince in disguise; he rather looks like one, by the way—like a prince who has abdicated in a fit of magnanimity, and has been in a state of disgust ever since. He used to live in Rome; but of late years he has taken up his abode in Florence; I remember hearing him say once that Rome has grown vulgar. He has a great dread of vulgarity; that’s his special line; he hasn’t any other that I know of. He lives on his income, which I suspect of not being vulgarly large. He’s a poor gentleman—that’s what he calls himself. He married young and lost his wife, and I believe he has a daughter. He also has a sister, who is married to some little Count or other, of these parts; I remember meeting her of old. She is nicer than he, I should think, but rather wicked. I remember there used to be some stories about her. I don’t think I recommend you to know her. But why don’t you ask Madame Merle about these people? She knows them all much better than I.”     14   
  “I ask you because I want your opinion as well as hers,” said Isabel.     15   
  “A fig for my opinion! If you fall in love with Mr. Osmond, what will you care for that?”     16   
  “Not much, probably. But meanwhile it has a certain importance. The more information one has about a person the better.”     17   
  “I don’t agree to that. We know too much about people in these days; we hear too much. Our ears, our minds, our mouths, are stuffed with personalities. Don’t mind anything that any one tells you about any one else. Judge every one and everything for yourself.”     18   
  “That’s what I try to do,” said Isabel; “but when you do that people call you conceited.”     19   
  “You are not to mind them—that’s precisely my argument; not to mind what they say about yourself any more than what they say about your friend or your enemy.”     20   
  Isabel was silent a moment. “I think you are right; but there are some things I can’t help minding: for instance, when my friend is attacked, or when I myself am praised.”     21   
  “Of course you are always at liberty to judge the critic. Judge people as critics, however,” Ralph added, “and you will condemn them all!”     22   
  “I shall see Mr. Osmond for myself,” said Isabel. “I have promised to pay him a visit.”     23   
  “To pay him a visit?”     24   
  “To go and see his view, his pictures, his daughter—I don’t know exactly what. Madame Merle is to take me; she tells me a great many ladies call upon him.”     25   
  “Ah, with Madame Merle you may go anywhere, de confiance,” said Ralph. “She knows none but the best people.”     26   
  Isabel said no more about Mr. Osmond, but she presently remarked to her cousin that she was not satisfied with his tone about Madame Merle. “It seems to me that you insinuate things about her. I don’t know what you mean, but if you have any grounds for disliking her, I think you should either mention them frankly or else say nothing at all.”     27   
  Ralph, however, resented this charge with more apparent earnestness than he commonly used. “I speak of Madame Merle exactly as I speak to her: with an even exaggerated respect.”     28   
  “Exaggerated, precisely. That is what I complain of.”     29   
  “I do so because Madame Merle’s merits are exaggerated.”     30   
  “By whom, pray? By me? If so, I do her a poor service.”     31   
  “No, no; by herself.”     32   
  “Ah, I protest!” Isabel cried with fervour. “If ever there was a woman who made small claims——”     33   
  “You put your finger on it,” Ralph interrupted. “Her modesty is exaggerated. She has no business with small claims—she has a perfect right to make large ones.”     34   
  “Her merits are large, then. You contradict yourself.”     35   
  “Her merits are immense,” said Ralph. “She is perfect; she is the only woman I know who has but that one little fault.”     36   
  Isabel turned away with impatience. “I don’t understand you; you are too paradoxical for my plain mind.”     37   
  “Let me explain. When I say she exaggerates, I don’t mean it in the vulgar sense—that she boasts, overstates, gives too fine an account of herself. I mean literally that she pushes the search for perfection too far—that her merits are in themselves overstrained. She is too good, too kind, too clever, too learned, too accomplished, too everything. She is too complete, in a word. I confess to you that she acts a little on my nerves, and that I feel about her a good deal as that intensely human Athenian felt about Aristides the just.”     38   
  Isabel looked hard at her cousin; but the mocking spirit, if it lurked in his words, failed on this occasion to peep from his eyes.     39   
  “Do you wish Madame Merle to be banished?” she inquired.     40   
  “By no means. She is much too good company. I delight in Madame Merle,” said Ralph Touchett, simply.     41   
  “You are very odious, sir!” Isabel exclaimed. And then she asked him if he knew anything that was not to the honour of her brilliant friend.     42   
  “Nothing whatever. Don’t you see that is just what I mean? Upon the character of every one else you may find some little black speck; if I were to take half-an-hour to it, some day, I have no doubt I should be able to find one on yours. For my own, of course, I am spotted like a leopard. But on Madame Merle’s nothing, nothing, nothing!”     43   
  “That is just what I think!” said Isabel, with a toss of her head. “That is why I like her so much.”     44   
  “She is a capital person for you to know. Since you wish to see the world you couldn’t have a better guide.”     45   
  “I suppose you mean by that that she is worldly?”     46   
  “Worldly? No,” said Ralph, “she is the world itself!”     47   
  It had certainly not, as Isabel for the moment took it into her head to believe, been a refinement of malice in him to say that he delighted in Madame Merle. Ralph Touchett took his entertainment wherever he could find it, and he would not have forgiven himself if he had not been able to find a great deal in the society of a woman in whom the social virtues existed in polished perfection. There are deep-lying sympathies and antipathies; and it may have been that in spite of the intellectual justice he rendered her, her absence from his mother’s house would not have made life seem barren. But Ralph Touchett had learned to appreciate, and there could be no better field for such a talent than the table-talk of Madame Merle. He talked with her largely, treated her with conspicuous civility, occupied himself with her and let her alone, with an opportuneness which she herself could not have surpassed. There were moments when he felt almost sorry for her; and these, oddly enough, were the moments when his kindness was least demonstrative. He was sure that she had been richly ambitious, and that what she had visibly accomplished was far below her ambition. She had got herself into perfect training, but she had won none of the prizes. She was always plain Madame Merle, the widow of a Swiss négociant, with a small income and a large acquaintance, who stayed with people a great deal, and was universally liked. The contrast between this position and any one of some half-dozen others which he vividly imagined her to have had her eyes upon at various moments, had an element of the tragical. His mother thought he got on beautifully with their pliable guest; to Mrs. Touchett’s sense two people who dealt so largely in factitious theories of conduct would have much in common. He had given a great deal of consideration to Isabel’s intimacy with Madame Merle—having long since made up his mind that he could not, without opposition, keep his cousin to himself; and he regarded it on the whole with philosophic tolerance. He believed it would take care of itself; it would not last for ever. Neither of these two superior persons knew the other as well as she supposed, and when each of them had made certain discoveries, there would be, if not a rupture, at least a relaxation. Meanwhile he was quite willing to admit that the conversation of the elder lady was an advantage to the younger, who had a great deal to learn, and would doubtless learn it better from Madame Merle than from some other instructors of the young. It was not probable that Isabel would be injured.

Chapter XXIV   
     
IT would certainly have been hard to see what injury could arise to her from the visit she presently paid to Mr. Osmond’s hill-top. Nothing could have been more charming than this occasion—a soft afternoon in May, in the full maturity of the Italian spring. The two ladies drove out of the Roman Gate, beneath the enormous black superstructure which crowns the fine clear arch of that portal and makes it nakedly impressive, and wound between high-walled lanes, into which the wealth of blossoming orchards over-drooped and flung a perfume, until they reached the small superurban piazza, of crooked shape, of which the long brown wall of the villa occupied in part by Mr. Osmond, formed the principal, or at least the most imposing, side. Isabel went with her friend through a wide, high court, where a clear shadow rested below, and a pair of light-arched galleries, facing each other above, caught the upper sunshine upon their slim columns and the flowering plants in which they were dressed. There was something rather severe about the place; it looked somehow as if, once you were in it, it would not be easy to get out. For Isabel, however, there was of course as yet no thought of getting out, but only of advancing. Mr. Osmond met her in the cold ante-chamber—it was cold even in the month of May—and ushered her, with her companion, into the apartment to which we have already been introduced. Madame Merle was in front, and while Isabel lingered a little, talking with Mr. Osmond, she went forward, familiarly, and greeted two persons who were seated in the drawing-room. One of these was little Pansy, on whom she bestowed a kiss; the other was a lady whom Mr. Osmond presented to Isabel as his sister, the Countess Gemini. “And that is my little girl,” he said, “who has just come out of a convent.”      1   
  Pansy had on a scanty white dress, and her fair hair was neatly arranged in a net; she wore a pair of slippers, tied sandal-fashion, about her ankles. She made Isabel a little conventual curtsey, and then came to be kissed. The Countess Gemini simply nodded, without getting up; Isabel could see that she was a woman of fashion. She was thin and dark, and not at all pretty, having features that suggested some tropical bird—a long beak-like nose, a small, quickly-moving eye, and a mouth and chin that receded extremely. Her face, however, thanks to a very human and feminine expression, was by no means disagreeable, and, as regards her appearance, it was evident that she understood herself and made the most of her points. The soft brilliancy of her toilet had the look of shimmering plumage, and her attitudes were light and sudden, like those of a creature that perched upon twigs. She had a great deal of manner; Isabel, who had never known any one with so much manner, immediately classified the Countess Gemini as the most affected of women. She remembered that Ralph had not recommended her as an acquaintance; but she was ready to acknowledge that on a casual view the Countess presented no appearance of wickedness. Nothing could have been kinder or more innocent than her greeting to Isabel.      2   
  “You will believe that I am glad to see you when I tell you that it is only because I knew you were to be here that I came myself. I don’t come and see my brother—I make him come and see me. This hill of his is impossible—I don’t see what possesses him. Really, Osmond, you will be the ruin of my horses some day; and if they receive an injury you will have to give me another pair. I heard them panting to-day; I assure you I did. It is very disagreeable to hear one’s horses panting when one is sitting in the carriage; it sounds, too, as if they were not what they should be. But I have always had good horses; whatever else I may have lacked, I have always managed that. My husband doesn’t know much, but I think he does know a horse. In general the Italians don’t, but my husband goes in, according to his poor light, for everything English. My horses are English—so it is all the greater pity they should be ruined. I must tell you,” she went on, directly addressing Isabel, “that Osmond doesn’t often invite me; I don’t think he likes to have me. It was quite my own idea, coming to-day. I like to see new people, and I am sure you are very new. But don’t sit there; that chair is not what it looks. There are some very good seats here, but there are also some horrors.”      3   
  These remarks were delivered with a variety of little jerks and glances, in a tone which, although it expressed a high degree of good-nature, was rather shrill than sweet.      4   
  “I don’t like to have you, my dear?” said her brother. “I am sure you are invaluable.”      5   
  “I don’t see any horrors anywhere,” Isabel declared, looking about her. “Everything here seems to me very beautiful.”      6   
  “I have got a few good things,” Mr. Osmond murmured; “indeed I have nothing very bad. But I have not what I should have liked.”      7   
  He stood there a little awkwardly, smiling and glancing about; his manner was an odd mixture of the indifferent and the expressive. He seemed to intimate that nothing was of much consequence. Isabel made a rapid induction: perfect simplicity was not the badge of his family. Even the little girl from the convent, who, in her prim white dress, with her small submissive face and her hands locked before her, stood there as if she were about to partake of her first communion—even Mr. Osmond’s diminutive daughter had a kind of finish which was not entirely artless.      8   
  “You would have liked a few things from the Uffizi and the Pitti—that’s what you would have liked,” said Madame Merle.      9   
  “Poor Osmond, with his old curtains and crucifixes!” the Countess Gemini exclaimed; she appeared to call her brother only by his family-name. Her ejaculation had no particular object; she smiled at Isabel as she made it, and looked at her from head to foot.     10   
  Her brother had not heard her; he seemed to be thinking what he could say to Isabel. “Won’t you have some tea?—you must be very tired,” he at last bethought himself of remarking.     11   
  “No, indeed, I am not tired; what have I done to tire me?” Isabel felt a certain need of being very direct, of pretending to nothing; there was something in the air, in her general impression of things—she could hardly have said what it was—that deprived her of all disposition to put herself forward. The place, the occasion, the combination of people, signified more than lay on the surface; she would try to understand—she would not simply utter graceful platitudes. Poor Isabel was perhaps not aware that many women would have uttered graceful platitudes to cover the working of their observation. It must be confessed that her pride was a trifle alarmed. A man whom she had heard spoken of in terms that excited interest, and who was evidently capable of distinguishing himself, had invited her, a young lady not lavish of her favours, to come to his house. Now that she had done so, the burden of the entertainment rested naturally upon himself: Isabel was not rendered less observant, and for the moment, I am afraid she was not rendered more indulgent by perceiving that Mr. Osmond carried his burden less complacently than might have been expected. “What a fool I was to have invited these women here!” she could fancy his exclaiming to himself.     12   
  “You will be tired when you go home, if he shows you all his bibelots and gives you a lecture on each,” said the Countess Gemini.     13   
  “I am not afraid of that; but if I am tired, I shall at least have learned something.”     14   
  “Very little, I suspect. But my sister is dreadfully afraid of learning anything,” said Mr. Osmond.     15   
  “Oh, I confess to that; I don’t want to know anything more—I know too much already. The more you know, the more unhappy you are.”     16   
  “You should not undervalue knowledge before Pansy, who has not finished her education,” Madame Merle interposed, with a smile.     17   
  “Pansy will never know any harm,” said the child’s father. “Pansy is a little convent-flower.”     18   
  “Oh, the convents, the convents!” cried the Countess, with a sharp laugh. “Speak to me of the convents. You may learn anything there; I am a convent-flower myself. I don’t pretend to be good, but the nuns do. Don’t you see what I mean?” she went on, appealing to Isabel.     19   
  Isabel was not sure that she saw, and she answered that she was very bad at following arguments. The Countess then declared that she herself detested arguments, but that this was her brother’s taste—he would always discuss. “For me,” she said, “one should like a thing or one shouldn’t; one can’t like everything, of course. But one shouldn’t attempt to reason it out—you never know where it may lead you. There are some very good feelings that may have bad reasons; don’t you know? And then there are very bad feelings, sometimes, that have good reasons. Don’t you see what I mean? I don’t care anything about reasons, but I know what I like.”     20   
  “Ah, that’s the great thing,” said Isabel, smiling, but suspecting that her acquaintance with this lightly-flitting personage would not lead to intellectual repose. If the Countess objected to argument, Isabel at this moment had as little taste for it, and she put out her hand to Pansy with a pleasant sense that such a gesture committed her to nothing that would admit of a divergence of views. Gilbert Osmond apparently took a rather hopeless view of his sister’s tone, and he turned the conversation to another topic. He presently sat down on the other side of his daughter, who had taken Isabel’s hand for a moment; but he ended by drawing her out of her chair, and making her stand between his knees, leaning against him while he passed his arm round her little waist. The child fixed her eyes on Isabel with a still, disinterested gaze, which seemed void of an intention, but conscious of an attraction. Mr. Osmond talked of many things; Madame Merle had said he could be agreeable when he chose, and to-day, after a little, he appeared not only to have chosen, but to have determined. Madame Merle and Countess Gemini sat a little apart, conversing in the effortless manner of persons who knew each other well enough to take their ease; every now and then Isabel heard the Countess say something extravagant. Mr. Osmond talked of Florence, of Italy, of the pleasure of living in that country, and of the abatements to such pleasure. There were both satisfactions and drawbacks; the drawbacks were pretty numerous; strangers were too apt to see Italy in rose-colour. On the whole it was better than other countries, if one was content to lead a quiet life and take things as they came. It was very dull sometimes, but there were advantages in living in the country which contained the most beauty. There were certain impressions that one could get only in Italy. There were others that one never got there, and one got some that were very bad. But from time to time one got a delightful one, which made up for everything. He was inclined to think that Italy had spoiled a great many people; he was even fatuous enough to believe at times that he himself might have been a better man if he had spent less of his life there. It made people idle and dilettantish, and second-rate; there was nothing tonic in an Italian life. One was out of the current; one was not dans le mouvement, as the French said; one was too far from Paris and London. “We are gloriously provincial, I assure you,” said Mr. Osmond, “and I am perfectly aware that I myself am as rusty as a key that has no lock to fit it. It polishes me up a little to talk with you—not that I venture to pretend I can turn that very complicated lock I suspect your intellect of being! But you will be going away before I have seen you three times, and I shall perhaps never see you after that. That’s what it is to live in a country that people come to. When they are disagreeable it is bad enough; when they are agreeable it is still worse. As soon as you find you like them they are off again! I have been deceived too often; I have ceased to form attachments; to permit myself to feel attractions. You mean to stay—to settle? That would be really comfortable. Ah yes, your aunt is a sort of guarantee; I believe she may be depended upon. Oh, she’s an old Florentine; I mean literally an old one; not a modern outsider. She is a contemporary of the Medici; she must have been present at the burning of Savonarola, and I am not sure she didn’t throw a handful of chips into the flame. Her face is very much like some faces in the early pictures; little, dry, definite faces, that must have had a good deal of expression, but almost always the same one. Indeed, I can show you her portrait in a fresco of Ghirlandaio’s. I hope you don’t object to my speaking that way of your aunt, eh? I have an idea you don’t. Perhaps you think that’s even worse. I assure you there is no want of respect in it, to either of you. You know I’m a particular admirer of Mrs. Touchett.”     21   
  While Isabel’s host exerted himself to entertain her in this somewhat confidential fashion, she looked occasionally at Madame Merle, who met her eyes with an inattentive smile in which, on this occasion, there was no infelicitous intimation that our heroine appeared to advantage. Madame Merle eventually proposed to the Countess Gemini that they should go into the garden, and the Countess, rising and shaking out her soft plumage, began to rustle toward the door.     22   
  “Poor Miss Archer!” she exclaimed, surveying the other group with expressive compassion. “She has been brought quite into the family.”     23   
  “Miss Archer can certainly have nothing but sympathy for a family to which you belong,” Mr. Osmond answered, with a laugh which, though it had something of a mocking ring, was not ill-natured.     24   
  “I don’t know what you mean by that! I am sure she will see no harm in me but what you tell her. I am better than he says, Miss Archer,” the Countess went on. “I am only rather light. Is that all he has said? Ah then, you keep him in good humour. Has he opened on one of his favourite subjects? I give you notice that there are two or three that he treats à fond. In that case you had better take off your bonnet.”     25   
  “I don’t think I know what Mr. Osmond’s favourite subjects are,” said Isabel, who had risen to her feet.     26   
  The Countess assumed, for an instant, an attitude of intense meditation; pressing one of her hands, with the fingertips gathered together, to her forehead.     27   
  “I’ll tell you in a moment,” she answered. “One is Machiavelli, the other is Vittoria Colonna, the next is Metastasio.”     28   
  “Ah, with me,” said Madame Merle, passing her arm into the Countess Gemini’s, as if to guide her course to the garden, “Mr. Osmond is never so historical.”     29   
  “Oh you,” the Countess answered as they moved away, “you yourself are Machiavelli—you yourself are Vittoria Colonna!”     30   
  “We shall hear next that poor Madame Merle is Metastasio!” Gilbert Osmond murmured, with a little melancholy smile.     31   
  Isabel had got up, on the assumption that they too were to go into the garden; but Mr. Osmond stood there, with no apparent inclination to leave the room, with his hands in the pockets of his jacket, and his daughter, who had now locked her arm into one of his own, clinging to him and looking up, while her eyes moved from his own face to Isabel’s. Isabel waited, with a certain unuttered contentedness, to have her movements directed; she liked Mr. Osmond’s talk, his company; she felt that she was being entertained. Through the open doors of the great room she saw Madame Merle and the Countess stroll across the deep grass of the garden; then she turned, and her eyes wandered over the things that were scattered about her. The understanding had been that her host should show her his treasures; his pictures and cabinets all looked like treasures. Isabel, after a moment, went toward one of the pictures to see it better; but just as she had done so Mr. Osmond said to her abruptly—     32   
  “Miss Archer, what do you think of my sister?”     33   
  Isabel turned, with a good deal of surprise.     34   
  “Ah, don’t ask me that—I have seen your sister too little.”     35   
  “Yes, you have seen her very little; but you must have observed that there is not a great deal of her to see. What do you think of our family tone?” Osmond went on, smiling. “I should like to know how it strikes a fresh, unprejudiced mind. I know what you are going to say—you have had too little observation of it. Of course this is only a glimpse. But just take notice, in future, if you have a chance. I sometimes think we have got into a rather bad way, living off here among things and people not our own, without responsibilities or attachments, with nothing to hold us together or keep us up; marrying foreigners, forming artificial tastes, playing tricks with our natural mission. Let me add, though, that I say that much more for myself than for my sister. She’s a very good woman—better than she seems. She is rather unhappy, and as she is not of a very serious disposition, she doesn’t tend to show it tragically; she shows it comically instead. She has got a nasty husband, though I am not sure she makes the best of him. Of course, however, a nasty husband is an awkward thing. Madame Merle gives her excellent advice, but it’s a good deal like giving a child a dictionary to learn a language with. He can look out the words, but he can’t put them together. My sister needs a grammar, but unfortunately she is not grammatical. Excuse my troubling you with these details; my sister was very right in saying that you have been taken into the family. Let me take down that picture; you want more light.”     36   
  He took down the picture, carried it toward the window, related some curious facts about it. She looked at the other works of art, and he gave her such further information as might appear to be most acceptable to a young lady making a call on a summer afternoon. His pictures, his carvings and tapestries were interesting; but after a while Isabel became conscious that the owner was more interesting still. He resembled no one she had ever seen; most of the people she knew might be divided into groups of half-a-dozen specimens. There were one or two exceptions to this; she could think, for instance, of no group that would contain her aunt Lydia. There were other people who were, relatively speaking, original—original, as one might say, by courtesy—such as Mr. Goodwood, as her cousin Ralph, as Henrietta Stackpole, as Lord Warburton, as Madame Merle. But in essentials, when one came to look at them, these individuals belonged to types which were already present to her mind. Her mind contained no class which offered a natural place to Mr. Osmond—he was a specimen apart. Isabel did not say all these things to herself at the time; but she felt them, and afterwards they became distinct. For the moment she only said to herself that Mr. Osmond had the interest of rareness. It was not so much what he said and did, but rather what he withheld, that distinguished him; he indulged in no striking deflections from common usage; he was an original without being an eccentric. Isabel had never met a person of so fine a grain. The peculiarity was physical, to begin with, and it extended to his immaterial part. His dense, delicate hair, his overdrawn, retouched features, his clear complexion, ripe without being coarse, the very evenness of the growth of his beard, and that light, smooth, slenderness of structure which made the movement of a single one of his fingers produce the effect of an expressive gesture—these personal points struck our observant young lady as the signs of an unusual sensibility. He was certainly fastidious and critical; he was probably irritable. His sensibility had governed him—possibly governed him too much; it had made him impatient of vulgar troubles and had led him to live by himself, in a serene, impersonal way, thinking about art and beauty and history. He had consulted his taste in everything—his taste alone, perhaps; that was what made him so different from every one else. Ralph had something of this same quality, this appearance of thinking that life was a matter of connoisseurship; but in Ralph it was an anomaly, a kind of humorous excrescence, whereas in Mr. Osmond it was the key-note, and everything was in harmony with it. Isabel was certainly far from understanding him completely; his meaning was not at all times obvious. It was hard to see what he meant, for instance, by saying that he was gloriously provincial—which was so exactly the opposite of what she had supposed. Was it a harmless paradox, intended to puzzle her? or was it the last refinement of high culture? Isabel trusted that she should learn in time; it would be very interesting to learn. If Mr. Osmond were provincial, pray what were the characteristics of the capital? Isabel could ask herself this question, in spite of having perceived that her host was a shy personage; for such shyness as his—the shyness of ticklish nerves and fine perceptions—was perfectly consistent with the best breeding. Indeed, it was almost a proof of superior qualities. Mr. Osmond was not a man of easy assurance, who chatted and gossiped with the fluency of a superficial nature; he was critical of himself as well as of others, and exacting a good deal of others (to think them agreeable), he probably took a rather ironical view of what he himself offered: a proof, into the bargain, that he was not grossly conceited. If he had not been shy, he would not have made that gradual, subtle, successful effort to overcome his shyness, to which Isabel felt that she owed both what pleased and what puzzled her in his conversation to-day. He suddenly asked her what she thought of the Countess of Gemini—that was doubtless a proof that he was interested in her feelings; it could scarcely be as a help to knowledge of his own sister. That he should be so interested showed an inquiring mind; but it was a little singular that he should sacrifice his fraternal feeling to his curiosity. This was the most eccentric thing he had done.     37   
  There were two other rooms, beyond the one in which she had been received, equally full of picturesque objects, and in these apartments Isabel spent a quarter of an hour. Every thing was very curious and valuable, and Mr. Osmond continued to be the kindest of ciceroni, as he led her from one fine piece to another, still holding his little girl by the hand. His kindness almost surprised our young lady, who wondered why he should take so much trouble for her; and she was oppressed at last with the accumulation of beauty and knowledge to which she found herself introduced. There was enough for the present; she had ceased to attend to what he said; she listened to him with attentive eyes, but she was not thinking of what he told her. He probably thought she was cleverer than she was; Madame Merle would have told him so; which was a pity, because in the end he would be sure to find out, and then perhaps even her real cleverness would not reconcile him to his mistake. A part of Isabel’s fatigue came from the effort to appear as intelligent as she believed Madame Merle had described her, and from the fear (very unusual with her) of exposing—not her ignorance; for that she cared comparatively little—but her possible grossness of perception. It would have annoyed her to express a liking for something which her host, in his superior enlightenment, would think she ought not to like; or to pass by something at which the truly initiated mind would arrest itself. She was very careful, therefore, as to what she said, as to what she noticed or failed to notice—more careful than she had ever been before.     38   
  They came back into the first of the rooms, where the tea had been served; but as the two other ladies were still on the terrace, and as Isabel had not yet been made acquainted with the view, which constituted the paramount distinction of the place, Mr. Osmond directed her steps into the garden without more delay. Madame Merle and the Countess had had chairs brought out, and as the afternoon was lovely, the Countess proposed they should take their tea in the open air. Pansy, therefore, was sent to bid the servant bring out the tray. The sun had got low, the golden light took a deeper tone, and on the mountains and the plain that stretched beneath them, the masses of purple shadow seemed to glow as richly as the places that were still exposed. The scene had an extraordinary charm. The air was almost solemnly still, and the large expanse of the landscape, with its gardenlike culture and nobleness of outline, its teeming valley and delicately-fretted hills, its peculiarly human-looking touches of habitation, lay there in splendid harmony and classic grace.     39   
  “You seem so well pleased that I think you can be trusted to come back,” Mr. Osmond said, as he led his companion to one of the angles of the terrace.     40   
  “I shall certainly come back,” Isabel answered, “in spite of what you say about its being bad to live in Italy. What was that you said about one’s natural mission? I wonder if I should forsake my natural mission if I were to settle in Florence.”     41   
  “A woman’s natural mission is to be where she is most appreciated.”     42   
  “The point is to find out where that is.”     43   
  “Very true—a woman often wastes a great deal of time in the inquiry. People ought to make it very plain to her.”     44   
  “Such a matter would have to be made very plain to me,” said Isabel, smiling.     45   
  “I am glad, at any rate, to hear you talk of settling. Madame Merle had given me an idea that you were of a rather roving disposition. I thought she spoke of your having some plan of going round the world.”     46   
  “I am rather ashamed of my plans; I make a new one every day.”     47   
  “I don’t see why you should be ashamed; it’s the greatest of pleasures.”     48   
  “It seems frivolous, I think,” said Isabel. “One ought to choose something very deliberately, and be faithful to that.”     49   
  “By that rule, then, I have not been frivolous.”     50   
  “Have you never made plans?”     51   
  “Yes, I made one years ago, and I am acting on it to-day.”     52   
  “It must have been a very pleasant one,” said Isabel.     53   
  “It was very simple. It was to be as quiet as possible.”     54   
  “As quiet?” the girl repeated.     55   
  “Not to worry—not to strive nor struggle. To resign myself. To be content with a little.” He uttered these sentences slowly, with little pauses between, and his intelligent eyes were fixed upon Isabel’s with the conscious look of a man who has brought himself to confess something.     56   
  “Do you call that simple?” Isabel asked, with a gentle laugh.     57   
  “Yes, because it’s negative.”     58   
  “Has your life been negative?”     59   
  “Call it affirmative if you like. Only it has affirmed my indifference. Mind you, not my natural indifference—I had none. But my studied, my wilful renunciation.”     60   
  Isabel scarcely understood him; it seemed a question whether he were joking or not. Why should a man who struck her as having a great fund of reserve suddenly bring himself to be so confidential? This was his affair, however, and his confidences were interesting. “I don’t see why you should have renounced,” she said in a moment.     61   
  “Because I could do nothing. I had no prospects, I was poor, and I was not a man of genius. I had no talents even; I took my measure early in life. I was simply the most fastidious young gentleman living. There were two or three people in the world I envied—the Emperor of Russia, for instance, and the Sultan of Turkey! There were even moments when I envied the Pope of Rome—for the consideration he enjoys. I should have been delighted to be considered to that extent; but since that couldn’t be, I didn’t care for anything, less, and I made up my mind not to go in for honours. A gentleman can always consider himself, and fortunately, I was a gentleman. I could do nothing in Italy—I couldn’t even be an Italian patriot. To do that, I should have had to go out of the country; and I was too fond of it to leave it. So I have passed a great many years here, on that quiet plan I spoke of. I have not been at all unhappy. I don’t mean to say I have cared for nothing; but the things I have cared for have been definite—limited. The events of my life have been absolutely unperceived by any one save myself; getting an old silver crucifix at a bargain (I have never bought anything dear, of course), or discovering, as I once did, a sketch by Correggio on a panel daubed over by some inspired idiot!”     62   
  This would have been rather a dry account of Mr. Osmond’s career if Isabel had fully believed it; but her imagination supplied the human element which she was sure had not been wanting. His life had been mingled with other lives more than he admitted; of course she could not expect him to enter into this. For the present she abstained from provoking further revelations; to intimate that he had not told her everything would be more familiar and less considerate than she now desired to be. He had certainly told her quite enough. It was her present inclination, however, to express considerable sympathy for the success with which he had preserved his independence. “That’s a very pleasant life,” she said, “to renounce everything but Correggio!”     63   
  “Oh, I have been very happy; don’t imagine me to suggest for a moment that I have not. It’s one’s own fault if one is not happy.”     64   
  “Have you lived here always?”     65   
  “No, not always. I lived a long time at Naples, and many years in Rome. But I have been here a good while. Perhaps I shall have to change, however; to do something else. I have no longer myself to think of. My daughter is growing up, and it is very possible she may not care so much for the Correggios and crucifixes as I. I shall have to do what is best for her.”     66   
  “Yes, do that,” said Isabel. “She is such a dear little girl.”     67   
  “Ah,” cried Gilbert Osmond, with feeling, “she is a little saint of heaven! She is my great happiness!”

   
Chapter XXV   
     
WHILE this sufficiently intimate colloquy (prolonged for some time after we cease to follow it) was going on, Madame Merle and her companion, breaking a silence of some duration, had begun to exchange remarks. They were sitting in an attitude of unexpressed expectancy; an attitude especially marked on the part of the Countess Gemini, who, being of a more nervous temperament than Madame Merle practised with less success the art of disguising impatience. What these ladies were waiting for would not have been apparent, and was perhaps not very definite to their own minds. Madame Merle waited for Osmond to release their young friend from her tête-à-tête, and the Countess waited because Madame Merle did. The Countess, moreover, by waiting, found the time ripe for saying something discordant; a necessity of which she had been conscious for the last twenty minutes. Her brother wandered with Isabel to the end of the garden, and she followed the pair for a while with her eyes.      1   
  “My dear,” she then observed to Madame Merle, “you will excuse me if I don’t congratulate you!”      2   
  “Very willingly; for I don’t in the least know why you should.”      3   
  “Haven’t you a little plan that you think rather well of?” And the Countess nodded towards the retreating couple.      4   
  Madame Merle’s eyes took the same direction; then she looked serenely at her neighbour. “You know I never understand you very well,” she answered, smiling.      5   
  “No one can understand better than you when you wish. I see that, just now, you don’t wish to.”      6   
  “You say things to me that no one else does,” said Madame Merle, gravely, but without bitterness.      7   
  “You mean things you don’t like? Doesn’t Osmond sometimes say such things?”      8   
  “What your brother says has a point.”      9   
  “Yes, a very sharp one sometimes. If you mean that I am not so clever as he, you must not think I shall suffer from your saying it. But it will be much better that you should understand me.”     10   
  “Why so?” asked Madame Merle; “what difference will it make?”     11   
  “If I don’t approve of your plan, you ought to know it in order to appreciate the danger of my interfering with it.”     12   
  Madame Merle looked as if she were ready to admit that there might be something in this; but in a moment she said quietly—“You think me more calculating than I am.”     13   
  “It’s not your calculating that I think ill of; it’s your calculating wrong. You have done so in this case.”     14   
  “You must have made extensive calculations yourself to discover it.”     15   
  “No, I have not had time for that. I have seen the girl but this once,” said the Countess, “and the conviction has suddenly come to me. I like her very much.”     16   
  “So do I,” Madame Merle declared.     17   
  “You have a strange way of showing it.”     18   
  “Surely—I have given her the advantage of making your acquaintance.”     19   
  “That, indeed,” cried the Countess, with a laugh, “is perhaps the best thing that could happen to her!”     20   
  Madame Merle said nothing for some time. The Countess’s manner was impertinent, but she did not suffer this to discompose her; and with her eyes upon the violet slope of Monte Morello she gave herself up to reflection.     21   
  “My dear lady,” she said at last, “I advise you not to agitate yourself. The matter you allude to concerns three persons much stronger of purpose than yourself.”     22   
  “Three persons? You and Osmond, of course. But is Miss Archer also very strong of purpose?”     23   
  “Quite as much so as we.”     24   
  “Ah then,” said the Countess radiantly, “if I convince her it’s her interest to resist you, she will do so successfully!”     25   
  “Resist us? Why do you express yourself so coarsely? She is not to be subjected to force.”     26   
  “I am not sure of that. You are capable of anything, you and Osmond. I don’t mean Osmond by himself, and I don’t mean you by yourself. But together you are dangerous—like some chemical combination.”     27   
  “You had better leave us alone, then,” said Madame Merle, smiling.     28   
  “I don’t mean to touch you—but I shall talk to that girl.”     29   
  “My poor Amy,” Madame Merle murmured, “I don’t see what has got into your head.”     30   
  “I take an interest in her—that is what has got into my head. I like her.”     31   
  Madame Merle hesitated a moment. “I don’t think she likes you.”     32   
  The Countess’s bright little eyes expanded, and her face was set in a grimace. “Ah, you are dangerous,” she cried, “even by yourself!”     33   
  “If you want her to like you, don’t abuse your brother to her,” said Madame Merle.     34   
  “I don’t suppose you pretend she has fallen in love with him—in two interviews.”     35   
  Madame Merle looked a moment at Isabel and at the master of the house. He was leaning against the parapet, facing her, with his arms folded; and she, at present, though she had her face turned to the opposite prospect, was evidently not scrutinising it. As Madame Merle watched her she lowered her eyes; she was listening, possibly with a certain embarrassment, while she pressed the point of her parasol into the path. Madame Merle rose from her chair. “Yes, I think so!” she said.     36   
  The shabby footboy, summoned by Pansy, had come out with a small table, which he placed upon the grass, and then had gone back and fetched the tea-tray; after which he again disappeared, to return with a couple of chairs. Pansy had watched these proceedings with the deepest interest, standing with her small hands folded together upon the front of her scanty frock; but she had not presumed to offer assistance to the servant. When the tea-table had been arranged, however, she gently approached her aunt.     37   
  “Do you think papa would object to my making the tea?”     38   
  The Countess looked at her with a deliberately critical gaze, and without answering her question. “My poor niece,” she said, “is that your best frock?”     39   
  “Ah no,” Pansy answered, “it’s just a little toilet for common occasions.”     40   
  “Do you call it a common occasion when I come to see you?—to say nothing of Madame Merle and the pretty lady yonder.”     41   
  Pansy reflected a moment, looking gravely from one of the persons mentioned to the other. Then her face broke into its perfect smile. “I have a pretty dress, but even that one is very simple. Why should I expose it beside your beautiful things?”     42   
  “Because it’s the prettiest you have; for me you must always wear the prettiest. Please put it on the next time. It seems to me they don’t dress you so well as they might.”     43   
  The child stroked down her antiquated skirt, sparingly. “It’s a good little dress to make tea—don’t you think? Do you not believe papa would allow me?”     44   
  “Impossible for me to say, my child,” said the Countess. “For me, your father’s ideas are unfathomable. Madame Merle understands them better; ask her.”     45   
  Madame Merle smiled with her usual geniality. “It’s a weighty question—let me think. It seems to me it would please your father to see a careful little daughter making his tea. It’s the proper duty of the daughter of the house—when she grows up.”     46   
  “So it seems to me, Madame Merle!” Pansy cried. “You shall see how well I will make it. A spoonful for each.” And she began to busy herself at the table.     47   
  “Two spoonfuls for me,” said the Countess, who with Madame Merle, remained for some moments watching her. “Listen to me, Pansy,” the Countess resumed at last. “I should like to know what you think of your visitor.”     48   
  “Ah, she is not mine—she is papa’s,” said Pansy.     49   
  “Miss Archer came to see you as well,” Madame Merle remarked.     50   
  “I am very happy to hear that. She has been very polite to me.”     51   
  “Do you like her, then?” the Countess asked.     52   
  “She is charming—charming,” said Pansy, in her little neat, conversational tone. “She pleases me exceedingly.”     53   
  “And you think she pleases your father?”     54   
  “Ah, really, Countess,” murmured Madame Merle, dissuasively. “Go and call them to tea,” she went on, to the child.     55   
  “You will see if they don’t like it!” Pansy declared; and went off to summon the others, who were still lingering at the end of the terrace.     56   
  “If Miss Archer is to become her mother it is surely interesting to know whether the child likes her,” said the Countess.     57   
  “If your brother marries again it won’t be for Pansy’s sake,” Madame Merle replied. “She will soon be sixteen, and after that she will begin to need a husband rather than a stepmother.”     58   
  “And will you provide the husband as well?”     59   
  “I shall certainly take an interest in her marrying well. I imagine you will do the same.”     60   
  “Indeed I shan’t!” cried the Countess. “Why should I of all women, set such a price on a husband?”     61   
  “You didn’t marry well; that’s what I am speaking of. When I say a husband, I mean a good one.”     62   
  “There are no good ones. Osmond won’t be a good one.”     63   
  Madame Merle closed her eyes a moment. “You are irritated just now; I don’t know why,” she said, presently. “I don’t think you will really object either to your brother, or to your niece’s, marrying, when the time comes for them to do so; and as regards Pansy, I am confident that we shall some day have the pleasure of looking for a husband for her together. Your large acquaintance will be a great help.”     64   
  “Yes, I am irritated,” the Countess answered. “You often irritate me. Your own coolness is fabulous; you are a strange woman.”     65   
  “It is much better that we should always act together,” Madame Merle went on.     66   
  “Do you mean that as a threat?” asked the Countess, rising.     67   
  Madame Merle shook her head, with a smile of sadness. “No indeed, you have not my coolness!”     68   
  Isabel and Mr. Osmond were now coming toward them, and Isabel had taken Pansy by the hand.     69   
  “Do you pretend to believe he would make her happy?” the Countess demanded.     70   
  “If he should marry Miss Archer I suppose he would behave like a gentleman.”     71   
  The Countess jerked herself into a succession of attitudes. “Do you mean as most gentlemen behave? That would be much to be thankful for! Of course Osmond’s a gentleman; his own sister needn’t be reminded of that. But does he think he can marry any girl he happens to pick out? Osmond’s a gentleman, of course; but I must say I have never, no never, seen any one of Osmond’s pretensions! What they are all based upon is more than I can say. I am his own sister; I might be supposed to know. Who is he, if you please? What has he ever done? If there had been anything particularly grand in his origin—if he were made of some superior clay—I suppose I should have got some inkling of it. If there had been any great honours or splendours in the family, I should certainly have made the most of them; they would have been quite in my line. But there is nothing, nothing, nothing. One’s parents were charming people of course; but so were yours, I have no doubt. Every one is a charming person, now-a-days. Even I am a charming person; don’t laugh, it has literally been said. As for Osmond, he has always appeared to believe that he is descended from the gods.”     72   
  “You may say what you please,” said Madame Merle, who had listened to this quick outbreak none the less attentively, we may believe, because her eye wandered away from the speaker, and her hands busied themselves with adjusting the knots of ribbon on her dress. “You Osmonds are a fine race—your blood must flow from some very pure source. Your brother, like an intelligent man, has had the conviction of it, if he has not had the proofs. You are modest about it, but you yourself are extremely distinguished. What do you say about your niece? The child’s a little duchess. Nevertheless,” Madame Merle added, “it will not be an easy matter for Osmond to marry Miss Archer. But he can try.”     73   
  “I hope she will refuse him. It will take him down a little.”     74   
  “We must not forget that he is one of the cleverest of men.”     75   
  “I have heard you say that before; but I haven’t yet discovered what he has done.”     76   
  “What he has done? He has done nothing that has had to be undone. And he has known how to wait.”     77   
  “To wait for Miss Archer’s money? How much of it is there?”     78   
  “That’s not what I mean,” said Madame Merle. “Miss Archer has seventy thousand pounds.”     79   
  “Well, it is a pity she is so nice,” the Countess declared. “To be sacrificed, any girl would do. She needn’t be superior.”     80   
  “If she were not superior, your brother would never look at her. He must have the best.”     81   
  “Yes,” rejoined the Countess, as they went forward a little to meet the others, “he is very hard to please. That makes me fear for her happiness!”

Chapter XXVI   
     
GILBERT OSMOND came to see Isabel again; that is, he came to the Palazzo Crescentini. He had other friends there as well; and to Mrs. Touchett and Madame Merle he was always impartially civil; but the former of these ladies noted the fact that in the course of a fortnight he called five times, and compared it with another fact that she found no difficulty in remembering. Two visits a year had hitherto constituted his regular tribute to Mrs. Touchett’s charms, and she had never observed that he selected for such visits those moments, of almost periodical recurrence, when Madame Merle was under her roof. It was not for Madame Merle that he came; these two were old friends, and he never put himself out for her. He was not fond of Ralph—Ralph had told her so—and it was not supposable that Mr. Osmond had suddenly taken a fancy to her son. Ralph was imperturbable—Ralph had a kind of loose-fitting urbanity that wrapped him about like an ill-made overcoat, but of which he never divested himself; he thought Mr. Osmond very good company, and would have been willing at any time to take the hospitable view of his idiosyncrasies. But he did not flatter himself that the desire to repair a past injustice was the motive of their visitor’s calls; he read the situation more clearly. Isabel was the attraction, and in all conscience a sufficient one. Osmond was a critic, a student of the exquisite, and it was natural he should admire an admirable person. So when his mother said to him that it was very plain what Mr. Osmond was thinking of, Ralph replied that he was quite of her opinion. Mrs. Touchett had always liked Mr. Osmond; she thought him so much of a gentleman. As he had never been an importunate visitor he had had no chance to be offensive, and he was recommended to Mrs. Touchett by his appearance of being as well able to do without her as she was to do without him—a quality that always excited her esteem. It gave her no satisfaction, however, to think that he had taken it into his head to marry her niece. Such an alliance, on Isabel’s part, would have an air of almost morbid perversity. Mrs. Touchett easily remembered that the girl had refused an English peer; and that a young lady for whom Lord Warburton had not been up to the mark should content herself with an obscure American dilettante, a middle-aged widower with an overgrown daughter and an income of nothing—this answered to nothing in Mrs. Touchett’s conception of success. She took, it will be observed, not the sentimental, but the political, view of matrimony—a view which has always had much to recommend it. “I trust she won’t have the folly to listen to him,” she said to her son; to which Ralph replied that Isabel’s listening was one thing and her answering quite another. He knew that she had listened to others, but that she had made them listen to her in return; and he found much entertainment in the idea that, in these few months that he had known her, he should see a third suitor at her gate. She had wanted to see life, and fortune was serving her to her taste; a succession of gentlemen going down on their knees to her was by itself a respectable chapter of experience. Ralph looked forward to a fourth and a fifth soupirant; he had no conviction that she would stop at a third. She would keep the gate ajar and open a parley; she would certainly not allow number three to come in. He expressed this view, somewhat after this fashion, to his mother, who looked at him as if he had been dancing a jig. He had such a fanciful, pictorial way of saying things that he might as well address her in the deaf-mute’s alphabet.      1   
  “I don’t think I know what you mean,” she said; “you use too many metaphors; I could never understand allegories. The two words in the language I most respect are Yes and No. If Isabel wants to marry Mr. Osmond, she will do so in spite of all your similes. Let her alone to find a favourable comparison for anything she undertakes. I know very little about the young man in America; I don’t think she spends much of her time in thinking of him, and I suspect he has got tired of waiting for her. There is nothing in life to prevent her marrying Mr. Osmond, if she only looks at him in a certain way. That is all very well; no one approves more than I of one’s pleasing one’s self. But she takes her pleasure in such odd things; she is capable of marrying Mr. Osmond for his opinions. She wants to be disinterested: as if she were the only person who is in danger of not being so! Will he be so disinterested when he has the spending of her money? That was her idea before your father’s death, and it has acquired new charms for her since. She ought to marry some one of whose disinterestedness she should be sure, herself; and there would be no such proof of that as his having a fortune of his own.”      2   
  “My dear mother, I am not afraid,” Ralph answered. “She is making fools of us all. She will please herself, of course; but she will do so by studying human nature and retaining her liberty. She has started on an exploring expedition, and I don’t think she will change her course, at the outset, at a signal from Gilbert Osmond. She may have slackened speed for an hour, but before we know it she will be steaming away again. Excuse another metaphor.”      3   
  Mrs. Touchett excused it perhaps, but she was not so much reassured as to withhold from Madame Merle the expression of her fears. “You who know everything,” she said, “you must know this: whether that man is making love to my niece.”      4   
  Madame Merle opened her expressive eyes, and with a brilliant smile—“Heaven help us,” she exclaimed, “that’s an idea!”      5   
  “Has it never occurred to you?”      6   
  “You make me feel like a fool—but I confess it hasn’t. I wonder,” added Madame Merle, “whether it has occurred to her.”      7   
  “I think I will ask her,” said Mrs. Touchett.      8   
  Madame Merle reflected a moment. “Don’t put it into her head. The thing would be to ask Mr. Osmond.”      9   
  “I can’t do that,” said Mrs. Touchett; “it’s none of my business.”     10   
  “I will ask him myself,” Madame Merle declared, bravely.     11   
  “It’s none of yours, either.”     12   
  “That’s precisely why I can afford to ask him; it is so much less my business than any one’s else, that in me the question will not seem to him embarrassing.”     13   
  “Pray let me know on the first day, then,” said Mrs. Touchett. “If I can’t speak to him, at least I can speak to her.”     14   
  “Don’t be too quick with her; don’t inflame her imagination.”     15   
  “I never did anything to any one’s imagination. But I am always sure she will do something I don’t like.”     16   
  “You wouldn’t like this,” Madame Merle observed, without the point of interrogation.     17   
  “Why should I, pray? Mr. Osmond has nothing to offer.”     18   
  Again Madame Merle was silent, while her thoughtful smile drew up her mouth more than usual toward the left corner. “Let us distinguish. Gilbert Osmond is certainly not the first comer. He is a man who under favourable circumstances might very well make an impression. He has made an impression, to my knowledge, more than once.”     19   
  “Don’t tell me about his love-affairs; they are nothing to me!” Mrs. Touchett cried. “What you say is precisely why I wish he would cease his visits. He has nothing in the world that I know of but a dozen or two of early masters and a grown up daughter.”     20   
  “The early masters are worth a good deal of money,” said Madame Merle, “and the daughter is a very young and very harmless person.”     21   
  “In other words, she is an insipid school-girl. Is that what you mean? Having no fortune, she can’t hope to marry, as they marry here; so that Isabel will have to furnish her either with a maintenance or with a dowry.”     22   
  “Isabel probably would not object to being kind to her. I think she likes the child.”     23   
  “Another reason for Mr. Osmond stopping at home! Otherwise, a week hence, we shall have Isabel arriving at the conviction that her mission in life is to prove that a stepmother may sacrifice herself—and that, to prove it, she must first become one.”     24   
  “She would make a charming stepmother,” said Madame Merle, smiling; “but I quite agree with you that she had better not decide upon her mission too hastily. Changing one’s mission is often awkward! I will investigate and report to you.”     25   
  All this went on quite over Isabel’s head; she had no suspicion that her relations with Mr. Osmond were being discussed. Madame Merle had said nothing to put her on her guard; she alluded no more pointedly to Mr. Osmond than to the other gentlemen of Florence, native and foreign, who came in considerable numbers to pay their respects to Miss Archer’s aunt. Isabel thought him very pleasant; she liked to think of him. She had carried away an image from her visit to his hill-top which her subsequent knowledge of him did nothing to efface and which happened to take her fancy particularly—the image of a quiet, clever, sensitive, distinguished man, strolling on a moss-grown terrace above the sweet Val d’Arno, and holding by the hand a little girl whose sympathetic docility gave a new aspect to childhood. The picture was not brilliant, but she liked its lowness of tone, and the atmosphere of summer twilight that pervaded it. It seemed to tell a story—a story of the sort that touched her most easily; to speak of a serious choice, a choice between things of a shallow, and things of a deep, interest; of a lonely, studious life in a lovely land; of an old sorrow that sometimes ached to-day; a feeling of pride that was perhaps exaggerated, but that had an element of nobleness; a care for beauty and perfection so natural and so cultivated together, that it had been the main occupation of a lifetime of which the arid places were watered with the sweet sense of a quaint, half-anxious, half-helpless fatherhood. At the Palazzo Crescentini Mr. Osmond’s manner remained the same; shy at first, and full of the effort (visible only to a sympathetic eye) to overcome this disadvantage; an effort which usually resulted in a great deal of easy, lively, very positive, rather aggressive, and always effective, talk. Mr. Osmond’s talk was not injured by the indication of an eagerness to shine; Isabel found no difficulty in believing that a person was sincere who had so many of the signs of strong conviction—as, for instance, an explicit and graceful appreciation of anything that might be said on his own side, said perhaps by Miss Archer in particular. What continued to please this young lady was his extraordinary subtlety. There was such a fine intellectual intention in what he said, and the movement of his wit was like that of a quick-flashing blade. One day he brought his little daughter with him, and Isabel was delighted to renew acquaintance with the child, who, as she presented her forehead to be kissed by every member of the circle, reminded her vividly of an ingénue in a French play. Isabel had never seen a young girl of this pattern; American girls were very different—different too were the daughters of England. This young lady was so neat, so complete in her manner; and yet in character, as one could see, so innocent and infantine. She sat on the sofa, by Isabel; she wore a small grenadine mantle and a pair of the useful gloves that Madame Merle had given her—little grey gloves, with a single button. She was like a sheet of blank paper—the ideal jeune fille of foreign fiction. Isabel hoped that so fair and smooth a page would be covered with an edifying text.     26   
  The Countess Gemini also came to call upon her, but the Countess was quite another affair. She was by no means a blank sheet; she had been written over in a variety of hands, and Mrs. Touchett, who felt by no means honoured by her visit, declared that a number of unmistakable blots were to be seen upon her surface. The Countess Gemini was indeed the occasion of a slight discussion between the mistress of the house and the visitor from Rome, in which Madame Merle (who was not such a fool as to irritate people by always agreeing with them) availed herself humourously of that large license of dissent which her hostess permitted as freely as she practised it. Mrs. Touchett had pronounced it a piece of audacity that the Countess Gemini should have presented herself at this time of day at the door of a house in which she was esteemed so little as she must long have known herself to be at the Palazzo Crescentini. Isabel had been made acquainted with the estimate which prevailed under this roof; it represented Mr. Osmond’s sister as a kind of flighty reprobate. She had been married by her mother—a heartless featherhead like herself, with an appreciation of foreign titles which the daughter, to do her justice, had probably by this time thrown off—to an Italian nobleman who had perhaps given her some excuse for attempting to quench the consciousness of neglect. The Countess, however, had consoled herself too well, and it was notorious in Florence that she had consoled others also. Mrs. Touchett had never consented to receive her, though the Countess had made overtures of old. Florence was not an austere city; but, as Mrs. Touchett said, she had to draw the line somewhere.     27   
  Madame Merle defended the unhappy lady with a great deal of zeal and wit. She could not see why Mrs. Touchett should make a scapegoat of that poor Countess, who had really done no harm, who had only done good in the wrong way. One must certainly draw the line, but while one was about it one should draw it straight; it was a very crooked chalkmark that would exclude the Countess Gemini. In that case Mrs. Touchett had better shut up her house; this perhaps would be the best course so long as she remained in Florence. One must be fair and not make arbitrary differences; the Countess had doubtless been imprudent; she had not been so clever as other women. She was a good creature, not clever at all; but since when had that been a ground of exclusion from the best society? It was a long time since one had heard anything about her, and there could be no better proof of her having renounced the error of her ways than her desire to become a member of Mrs. Touchett’s circle. Isabel could contribute nothing to this interesting dispute, not even a patient attention; she contented herself with having given a friendly welcome to the Countess Gemini, who, whatever her defects, had at least the merit of being Mr. Osmond’s sister. As she liked the brother, Isabel thought it proper to try and like the sister; in spite of the growing perplexity of things she was still perfectly capable of these rather primitive sequences of feeling. She had not received the happiest impression of the Countess on meeting her at the villa, but she was thankful for an opportunity to repair this accident. Had not Mr. Osmond declared that she was a good woman? To have proceeded from Gilbert Osmond, this was rather a rough statement; but Madame Merle bestowed upon it a certain improving polish. She told Isabel more about the poor Countess than Mr. Osmond had done, and related the history of her marriage and its consequences. The Count was a member of an ancient Tuscan family, but so poor that he had been glad to accept Amy Osmond, in spite of her being no beauty, with the modest dowry her mother was able to offer—a sum about equivalent to that which had already formed her brother’s share of their patrimony. Count Gemini, since then, however, had inherited money, and now they were well enough off, as Italians went, though Amy was horribly extravagant. The Count was a low-lived brute; he had given his wife every excuse. She had no children; she had lost three within a year of their birth. Her mother, who had pretensions to “culture,” wrote descriptive poems, and corresponded on Italian subjects with the English weekly journals—her mother had died three years after the Countess’s marriage, the father having died long before. One could see this in Gilbert Osmond, Madame Merle Thought—see that he had been brought up by a woman; though to do him justice, one would suppose it had been by a more sensible woman than the American Corinne, as Mrs. Osmond liked to be called. She had brought her children to Italy after her husband’s death, and Mrs. Touchett remembered her during the years that followed her arrival. She thought her a horrible snob; but this was an irregularity of judgment on Mrs. Touchett’s part, for she, like Mrs. Osmond, approved of political marriages. The Countess was very good company, and not such a fool as she seemed; one got on with her perfectly if one observed a single simple condition—that of not believing a word she said. Madame Merle had always made the best of her for her brother’s sake; he always appreciated any kindness shown to Amy, because (if it had to be confessed for him) he was rather ashamed of her. Naturally, he couldn’t like her style, her loudness, her want of repose. She displeased him; she acted on his nerves; she was not his sort of woman. What was his sort of woman? Oh, the opposite of the Countess, a woman who should always speak the truth. Isabel was unable to estimate the number of fibs her visitor had told her; the Countess indeed had given her an impression of rather silly sincerity. She had talked almost exclusively about herself; how much she should like to know Miss Archer; how thankful she should be for a real friend; how nasty the people in Florence were; how tired she was of the place; how much she should like to live somewhere else—in Paris, or London, or St. Petersburg; how impossible it was to get anything nice to wear in Italy, except a little old lace; how dear the world was growing everywhere; what a life of suffering and privation she had led. Madame Merle listened with interest to Isabel’s account of her conversation with this plaintive butterfly; but she had not needed it to feel exempt from anxiety. On the whole, she was not afraid of the Countess, and she could afford to do what was altogether best—not to appear so.     28   
  Isabel had another visitor, whom it was not, even behind her back, so easy a matter to patronise. Henrietta Stackpole, who had left Paris after Mrs. Touchett’s departure for San Remo and had worked her way down, as she said, through the cities of North Italy, arrived in Florence about the middle of May. Madame Merle surveyed her with a single glance, comprehended her, and, after a moment’s concentrated reflection, determined to like her. She determined, indeed, to delight in her. To like her was impossible; but the intenser sentiment might be managed. Madame Merle managed it beautifully, and Isabel felt that in foreseeing this event she had done justice to her friend’s breadth of mind. Henrietta’s arrival had been announced by Mr. Bantling, who, coming down from Nice while she was at Venice, and expecting to find her in Florence, which she had not yet reached, came to the Palazzo Crescentini to express his disappointment. Henrietta’s own advent occurred two days later, and produced in Mr. Bantling an emotion amply accounted for by the fact that he had not seen her since the termination of the episodes at Versailles. The humorous view of his situation was generally taken, but it was openly expressed only by Ralph Touchett, who, in the privacy of his own apartment, when Bantling smoked a cigar there, indulged in Heaven knows what genial pleasantries on the subject of the incisive Miss Stackpole and her British ally. This gentleman took the joke in perfectly good part, and artlessly confessed that he regarded the affair as an intellectual flirtation. He liked Miss Stackpole extremely; he thought she had a wonderful head on her shoulders, and found great comfort in the society of a woman who was not perpetually thinking about what would be said and how it would look. Miss Stackpole never cared how it looked, and if she didn’t care, pray why should he? But his curiosity had been roused; he wanted awfully to see whether she ever would care. He was prepared to go as far as she—he did not see why he should stop first.     29   
  Henrietta showed no signs of stopping at all. Her prospects, as we know, had brightened upon her leaving England, and she was now in the full enjoyment of her copious resources. She had indeed been obliged to sacrifice her hopes with regard to the inner life; the social question, on the continent, bristled with difficulties even more numerous than those she had encountered in England. But on the continent there was the outer life, which was palpable and visible at every turn, and more easily convertible to literary uses than the customs of those opaque islanders. Out of doors, in foreign lands, as Miss Stackpole ingeniously remarked, one seemed to see the right side of the tapestry; out of doors, in England, one seemed to see the wrong side, which gave one no notion of the figure. It is mortifying to be obliged to confess it, but Henrietta, despairing of more occult things, was now paying much attention to the outer life. She had been studying it for two months at Venice, from which city she sent to the Interviewer a conscientious account of the gondolas, the Piazza, the Bridge of Sighs, the pigeons and the young boatman who chanted Tasso. The Interviewer was perhaps disappointed, but Henrietta was at least seeing Europe. Her present purpose was to get down to Rome before the malaria should come on—she apparently supposed that it began on a fixed day; and with this design she was to spend at present but few days in Florence. Mr. Bantling was to go with her to Rome, and she pointed out to Isabel that as he had been there before, as he was a military man, and as he had a classical education—he was brought up at Eton, where they study nothing but Latin, said Miss Stackpole—he would be a most useful companion in the city of the Cæsars. At this juncture Ralph had the happy idea of proposing to Isabel that she also, under his own escort, should make a pilgrimage to Rome. She expected to pass a portion of the next winter there—that was very well; but meantime there was no harm in surveying the field. There were ten days left of the beautiful month of May—the most precious month of all to the true Rome-lover. Isabel would become a Rome-lover; that was a foregone conclusion. She was provided with a well-tested companion of her own sex, whose society, thanks to the fact that she had other calls upon her sympathy, would probably not be oppressive. Madame Merle would remain with Mrs. Touchett; she had left Rome for the summer and would not care to return. This lady professed herself delighted to be left at peace in Florence; she had locked up her apartment and sent her cook home to Palestrina. She urged Isabel, however, to assent to Ralph’s proposal, and assured her that a good introduction to Rome was not a thing to be despised. Isabel, in truth, needed no urging, and the party of four arranged its little journey. Mrs. Touchett, on this occasion, had resigned herself to the absence of a duenna; we have seen that she now inclined to the belief that her niece should stand alone.     30   
  Isabel saw Gilbert Osmond before she started, and mentioned her intention to him.     31   
  “I should like to be in Rome with you,” he said; “I should like to see you there.”     32   
  She hesitated a moment.     33   
  “You might come, then.”     34   
  “But you’ll have a lot of people with you.”     35   
  “Ah,” Isabel admitted, “of course I shall not be alone.”     36   
  For a moment he said nothing more.     37   
  “You’ll like it,” he went on, at last. “They have spoiled it, but you’ll like it.”     38   
  “Ought I to dislike it, because it’s spoiled?” she asked.     39   
  “No, I think not. It has been spoiled so often. If I were to go, what should I do with my little girl?”     40   
  “Can’t you leave her at the villa?”     41   
  “I don’t know that I like that—though there is a very good old woman who looks after her. I can’t afford a governess.”     42   
  “Bring her with you, then,” said Isabel, smiling.     43   
  Mr. Osmond looked grave.     44   
  “She has been in Rome all winter, at her convent; and she is too young to make journeys of pleasure.”     45   
  “You don’t like bringing her forward?” Isabel suggested.     46   
  “No, I think young girls should be kept out of the world.”     47   
  “I was brought up on a different system.”     48   
  “You? Oh, with you it succeeded, because you—you were exceptional.”     49   
  “I don’t see why,” said Isabel, who, however, was not sure there was not some truth in the speech.     50   
  Mr. Osmond did not explain; he simply went on. “If I thought it would make her resemble you to join a social group in Rome, I would take her there to-morrow.”     51   
  “Don’t make her resemble me,” said Isabel; “keep her like herself.”     52   
  “I might send her to my sister,” Mr. Osmond suggested. He had almost the air of asking advice; he seemed to like to talk over his domestic matters with Isabel.     53   
  “Yes,” said the girl; “I think that would not do much towards making her resemble me!”     54   
  After she had left Florence, Gilbert Osmond met Madame Merle at the Countess Gemini’s. There were other people present; the Countess’s drawing-room was usually well filled, and the talk had been general; but after a while Osmond left his place and came and sat on an ottoman half-behind, half-beside, Madame Merle’s chair.     55   
  “She wants me to go to Rome with her,” he announced, in a low voice.     56   
  “To go with her?”     57   
  “To be there while she is there. She proposed it.”     58   
  “I suppose you mean that you proposed it, and that she assented.”     59   
  “Of course I gave her a chance. But she is encouraging—she is very encouraging.”     60   
  “I am glad to hear it—but don’t cry victory too soon. Of course you will go to Rome.”     61   
  “Ah,” said Osmond, “It makes one work, this idea of yours!”     62   
  “Don’t pretend you don’t enjoy it—you are very ungrateful. You have not been so well occupied these many years.”     63   
  “The way you take it is beautiful,” said Osmond. “I ought to be grateful for that.”     64   
  “Not too much so, however,” Madame Merle answered. She talked with her usual smile, leaning back in her chair, and looking round the room. “You have made a very good impression, and I have seen for myself that you have received one. You have not come to Mrs. Touchett’s seven times to oblige me.”     65   
  “The girl is not disagreeable,” Osmond quietly remarked.     66   
  Madame Merle dropped her eye on him a moment, during which her lips closed with a certain firmness.     67   
  “Is that all you can find to say about that fine creature?”     68   
  “All? Isn’t it enough? Of how many people have you heard me say more?”     69   
  She made no answer to this, but still presented her conversational smile to the room.     70   
  “You’re unfathomable,” she murmured at last. “I am frightened at the abyss into which I shall have dropped her!”     71   
  Osmond gave a laugh.     72   
  “You can’t draw back—you have gone too far.”     73   
  “Very good; but you must do the rest yourself.”     74   
  “I shall do it,” said Osmond.     75   
  Madame Merle remained silent, and he changed his place again; but when she rose to go he also took leave. Mrs. Touchett’s victoria was awaiting her in the court, and after he had helped Madame Merle into it he stood there detaining her.     76   
  “You are very indiscreet,” she said, rather wearily; “you should not have moved when I did.”     77   
  He had taken off his hat; he passed his hand over his forehead.     78   
  “I always forget; I am out of the habit.”     79   
  “You are quite unfathomable,” she repeated, glancing up at the windows of the house; a modern structure in the new part of the town.     80   
  He paid no heed to this remark, but said to Madame Merle, with a considerable appearance of earnestness—     81   
  “She is really very charming; I have scarcely known any one more graceful.”     82   
  “I like to hear you say that. The better you like her, the better for me.”     83   
  “I like her very much. She is all you said, and into the bargain she is capable of great devotion. She has only one fault.”     84   
  “What is that?”     85   
  “She has too many ideas.”     86   
  “I warned you she was clever.”     87   
  “Fortunately they are very bad ones,” said Osmond.     88   
  “Why is that fortunate?”     89   
  “Dame, if they must be sacrificed!”     90   
  Madame Merle leaned back, looking straight before her; then she spoke to the coachman. But Osmond again detained her.     91   
  “If I go to Rome, what shall I do with Pansy?”     92   
  “I will go and see her,” said Madame Merle.

Chapter XXVII   
     
I SHALL not undertake to give an account of Isabel’s impressions of Rome, to analyse her feelings as she trod the ancient pavement of the Forum, or to number her pulsations as she crossed the threshold of St. Peter’s. It is enough to say that her perception of the endless interest of the place was such as might have been expected in a young woman of her intelligence and culture. She had always been fond of history, and here was history in the stones of the street and the atoms of the sunshine. She had an imagination that kindled at the mention of great deeds, and wherever she turned some great deed had been acted. These things excited her, but she was quietly excited. It seemed to her companions that she spoke less than usual, and Ralph Touchett, when he appeared to be looking listlessly and awkwardly over her head, was really dropping an eye of observation upon her. To her own knowledge she was very happy; she would even have been willing to believe that these were to be on the whole the happiest hours of her life. The sense of the mighty human past was heavy upon her, but it was interfused in the strangest, suddenest, most capricious way, with the fresh, cool breath of the future. Her feelings were so mingled that she scarcely knew whither any of them would lead her, and she went about in a kind of repressed ecstasy of contemplation, seeing often in the things she looked at a great deal more than was there, and yet not seeing many of the items enumerated in “Murray.” Rome as Ralph said, was in capital condition. The herd of reechoing tourists had departed, and most of the solemn places had relapsed into solemnity. The sky was a blaze of blue, and the plash of the fountains, in their mossy niches, had lost its chill and doubled its music. On the corners of the warm, bright streets one stumbled upon bundles of flowers.      1   
  Our friends had gone one afternoon—it was the third of their stay—to look at the latest excavations in the Forum; these labours having been for some time previous largely extended. They had gone down from the modern street to the level of the Sacred Way, along which they wandered with a reverence of step which was not the same on the part of each. Henrietta Stackpole was struck with the fact that ancient Rome had been paved a good deal like New York, and even found an analogy between the deep chariot-ruts which are traceable in the antique street, and the iron grooves which mark the course of the American horse-car. The sun had begun to sink, the air was filled with a golden haze, and the long shadows of broken column and formless pedestal were thrown across the field of ruin. Henrietta wandered away with Mr. Bantling, in whose Latin reminiscences she was apparently much engrossed, and Ralph addressed such elucidations as he was prepared to offer, to the attentive ear of our heroine. One of the humble archæologists who hover about the place had put himself at the disposal of the two, and repeated his lesson with a fluency which the decline of the season had done nothing to impair. A process of digging was going on in a remote corner of the Forum, and he presently remarked that if it should please the signori to go and watch it a little, they might see something interesting. The proposal commended itself more to Ralph than to Isabel, who was weary with much wandering; so that she charged her companion to satisfy his curiosity while she patiently awaited his return. The hour and the place were much to her taste, and she should enjoy being alone. Ralph accordingly went off with the cicerone, while Isabel sat down on a prostrate column, near the foundations of the Capitol. She desired a quarter of an hour’s solitude, but she was not long to enjoy it. Keen as was her interest in the rugged relics of the Roman past that lay scattered around her, and in which the corrosion of centuries had still left so much of individual life, her thoughts, after resting a while on these things, had wandered, by a concatenation of stages it might require some subtlety to trace, to regions and objects more contemporaneous. From the Roman past to Isabel Archer’s future was a long stride, but her imagination had taken it in a single flight, and now hovered in slow circles over the nearer and richer field. She was so absorbed in her thoughts, as she bent her eyes upon a row of cracked but not dislocated slabs covering the ground at her feet, that she had not heard the sound of approaching footsteps before a shadow was thrown across the line of her vision. She looked up and saw a gentleman—a gentleman who was not Ralph come back to say that the excavations were a bore. This personage was startled as she was startled; he stood there, smiling a little, blushing a good deal, and raising his hat.      2   
  “Lord Warburton!” Isabel exclaimed, getting up.      3   
  “I had no idea it was you,” he said. “I turned that corner and came upon you.”      4   
  Isabel looked about her.      5   
  “I am alone, but my companions have just left me. My cousin is gone to look at the digging over there.”      6   
  “Ah yes; I see.” And Lord Warburton’s eyes wandered vaguely in the direction Isabel had indicated. He stood firmly before her; he had stopped smiling; he folded his arms with a kind of deliberation. “Don’t let me disturb you,” he went on, looking at her dejected pillar. “I am afraid you are tired.”      7   
  “Yes, I am rather tired.” She hesitated a moment, and then she sat down. “But don’t let me interrupt you,” she added.      8   
  “Oh dear, I am quite alone, I have nothing on earth to do. I had no idea you were in Rome. I have just come from the East. I am only passing through.”      9   
  “You have been making a long journey,” said Isabel, who had learned from Ralph that Lord Warburton was absent from England.     10   
  “Yes, I came abroad for six months—soon after I saw you last. I have been in Turkey and Asia Minor; I came the other day from Athens.” He spoke with visible embarrassment; this unexpected meeting caused him an emotion he was unable to conceal. He looked at Isabel a moment, and then he said, abruptly—“Do you wish me to leave you, or will you let me stay a little?”     11   
  She looked up at him, gently. “I don’t wish you to leave me, Lord Warburton; I am very glad to see you.”     12   
  “Thank you for saying that. May I sit down?”     13   
  The fluted shaft on which Isabel had taken her seat would have afforded a resting-place to several persons, and there was plenty of room even for a highly-developed Englishman. This fine specimen of that great class seated himself near our young lady, and in the course of five minutes he had asked her several questions, taken rather at random, and of which, as he asked some of them twice over, he apparently did not always heed the answer; had given her, too, some information about himself which was not wasted upon her calmer feminine sense. Lord Warburton, though he tried hard to seem easy, was agitated; he repeated more than once that he had not expected to meet her, and it was evident that the encounter touched him in a way that would have made preparation advisable. He had abrupt alternations of gaiety and gravity; he appeared at one moment to seek his neighbour’s eye and at the next to avoid it. He was splendidly sunburnt; even his multitudinous beard seemed to have been burnished by the fire of Asia. He was dressed in the loose-fitting, heterogeneous garments in which the English traveller in foreign lands is wont to consult his comfort and affirm his nationality; and with his clear grey eye, his bronzed complexion, fresh beneath its brownness, his manly figure, his modest manner, and his general air of being a gentleman and an explorer, he was such a representative of the British race as need not in any clime have been disavowed by those who have a kindness for it. Isabel noted these things, and was glad she had always liked Lord Warburton. He was evidently as likeable as before, and the tone of his voice, which she had formerly thought delightful, was as good as an assurance that he would never change for the worse. They talked about the matters that were naturally in order; her uncle’s death, Ralph’s state of health, the way she had passed her winter, her visit to Rome, her return to Florence, her plans for the summer, the hotel she was staying at; and then Lord Warburton’s own adventures, movements, intentions, impressions and present domicile. At last there was a silence, and she knew what he was thinking of. His eyes were fixed on the ground; but at last he raised them and said gravely—“I have written to you several times.”     14   
  “Written to me? I have never got your letters.”     15   
  “I never sent them. I burned them up.”     16   
  “Ah,” said Isabel with a laugh, “it was better that you should do that than I!”     17   
  “I thought you wouldn’t care about them,” he went on, with a simplicity that might have touched her. “It seemed to me that after all I had no right to trouble you with letters.”     18   
  “I should have been very glad to have news of you. You know that I hoped that—that—” Isabel stopped; it seemed to her there would be a certain flatness in the utterance of her thought.     19   
  “I know what you are going to say. You hoped we should always remain good friends.” This formula, as Lord Warburton uttered it, was certainly flat enough; but then he was interested in making it appear so.     20   
  Isabel found herself reduced simply to saying—“Please don’t talk of all that;” a speech which hardly seemed to her an improvement on the other.     21   
  “It’s a small consolation to allow me!” Lord Warburton exclaimed, with force.     22   
  “I can’t pretend to console you,” said the girl, who, as she sat there, found it good to think that she had given him the answer that had satisfied him so little six months before. He was pleasant, he was powerful, he was gallant, there was no better man than he. But her answer remained.     23   
  “It’s very well you don’t try to console me; it would not be in your power,” she heard him say, through the medium of her quickened reflections.     24   
  “I hoped we should meet again, because I had no fear you would attempt to make me feel I had wronged you. But when you do that—the pain is greater than the pleasure.” And Isabel got up, looking for her companions.     25   
  “I don’t want to make you feel that; of course I can’t say that. I only just want you to know one or two things, in fairness to myself as it were. I won’t return to the subject again. I felt very strongly what I expressed to you last year; I couldn’t think of anything else. I tried to forget—energetically, systematically. I tried to take an interest in some one else. I tell you this because I want you to know I did my duty. I didn’t succeed. It was for the same purpose I went abroad—as far away as possible. They say travelling distracts the mind; but it didn’t distract mine. I have thought of you perpetually, ever since I last saw you. I am exactly the same. I love you just as much, and everything I said to you then is just as true. However, I don’t mean to trouble you now; it’s only for a moment. I may add that when I came upon you a moment since, without the smallest idea of seeing you, I was in the very act of wishing I knew where you were.”     26   
  He had recovered his self-control, as I say, and while he spoke it became complete. He spoke plainly and simply, in a low tone of voice, in a matter-of-fact way. There might have been something impressive, even to a woman of less imagination than the one he addressed, in hearing this brilliant, brave-looking gentleman express himself so modestly and reasonably.     27   
  “I have often thought of you, Lord Warburton,” Isabel answered. “You may be sure I shall always do that.” And then she added, with a smile—“There is no harm in that, on either side.”     28   
  They walked along together, and she asked kindly about his sisters and requested him to let them know she had done so. He said nothing more about his own feelings, but returned to those more objective topics they had already touched upon. Presently he asked her when she was to leave Rome, and on her mentioning the limit of her stay, declared he was glad it was still so distant.     29   
  “Why do you say that, if you yourself are only passing through?” she inquired, with some anxiety.     30   
  “Ah, when I said I was passing through, I didn’t mean that one would treat Rome as if it were Clapham Junction. To pass through Rome is to stop a week or two.”     31   
  “Say frankly that you mean to stay as long as I do!”     32   
  Lord Warburton looked at her a moment, with an uncomfortable smile. “You won’t like that. You are afraid you will see too much of me.”     33   
  “It doesn’t matter what I like. I certainly can’t expect you to leave this delightful place on my account. But I confess I am afraid of you.”     34   
  “Afraid I will begin again? I promise to be very careful.”     35   
  They had gradually stopped, and they stood a moment face to face. “Poor Lord Warburton!” said Isabel, with a melancholy smile.     36   
  “Poor Lord Warburton, indeed! But I will be careful.”     37   
  “You may be unhappy, but you shall not make me so. That I can’t allow.”     38   
  “If I believed I could make you unhappy, I think I should try it.” At this she walked in advance, and he also proceeded. “I will never say a word to displease you,” he promised, very gently.     39   
  “Very good. If you do, our friendship’s at an end.”     40   
  “Perhaps some day—after a while—you will give me leave,” he suggested.     41   
  “Give you leave—to make me unhappy?”     42   
  He hesitated. “To tell you again—” But he checked himself. “I will be silent,” he said; “silent always.”     43   
  Ralph Touchett had been joined, in his visit to the excavation, by Miss Stackpole and her attendant, and these three, now emerged from among the mounds of earth and stone collected round the aperture, and came into sight of Isabel and her companion. Ralph Touchett gave signs of greeting to Lord Warburton, and Henrietta exclaimed in a high voice, “Gracious, there’s that lord!” Ralph and his friend met each other with undemonstrative cordiality, and Miss Stackpole rested her large intellectual gaze upon the sunburnt traveller.     44   
  “I don’t suppose you remember me, sir,” she soon remarked.     45   
  “Indeed I do remember you,” said Lord Warburton. “I asked you to come and see me, and you never came.”     46   
  “I don’t go everywhere I am asked,” Miss Stackpole answered, coldly.     47   
  “Ah well, I won’t ask you again,” said the master of Lockleigh, good-humouredly.     48   
  “If you do I will go; so be sure!”     49   
  Lord Warburton, for all his good-humour, seemed sure enough. Mr. Bantling had stood by, without claiming a recognition, but he now took occasion to nod to his lordship, who answered him with a friendly “Oh, you here, Bantling?” and a hand-shake.     50   
  “Well,” said Henrietta, “I didn’t know you knew him!”     51   
  “I guess you don’t know every one I know,” Mr. Bantling rejoined, facetiously.     52   
  “I thought that when an Englishman knew a lord he always told you.”     53   
  “Ah, I am afraid Bantling was ashamed of me,” said Lord Warburton, laughing. Isabel was glad to hear him laugh; she gave a little sigh of relief as they took their way homeward.     54   
  The next day was Sunday; she spent her morning writing two long letters—one to her sister Lily, the other to Madame Merle; but in neither of these epistles did she mention the fact that a rejected suitor had threatened her with another appeal. Of a Sunday afternoon all good Romans (and the best Romans are often the northern barbarians) follow the custom of going to hear vespers at St. Peter’s; and it had been agreed among our friends that they would drive together to the great church. After lunch, an hour before the carriage came, Lord Warburton presented himself at the Hôtel de Paris and paid a visit to the two ladies, Ralph Touchett and Mr. Bantling having gone out together. The visitor seemed to have wished to give Isabel an example of his intention to keep the promise he had made her the evening before; he was both discreet and frank; he made not even a tacit appeal, but left it for her to judge what a mere good friend he could be. He talked about his travels, about Persia, about Turkey, and when Miss Stackpole asked him whether it would “pay” for her to visit those countries, assured her that they offered a great field to female enterprise. Isabel did him justice, but she wondered what his purpose was, and what he expected to gain even by behaving heroically. If he expected to melt her by showing what a good fellow he was, he might spare himself the trouble. She knew already he was a good fellow, and nothing he could do would add to this conviction. Moreover, his being in Rome at all made her vaguely uneasy. Nevertheless, when on bringing his call to a close, he said that he too should be at St. Peter’s and should look out for Isabel and her friends, she was obliged to reply that it would be a pleasure to see him again.     55   
  In the church, as she strolled over its tesselated acres, he was the first person she encountered. She had not been one of the superior tourists who are “disappointed” in St. Peter’s and find it smaller than its fame; the first time she passed beneath the huge leathern curtain that strains and bangs at the entrance—the first time she found herself beneath the far-arching dome and saw the light drizzle down through the air thickened with incense and with the reflections of marble and gilt, of mosaic and bronze, her conception of greatness received an extension. After this it never lacked space to soar. She gazed and wondered, like a child or a peasant, and paid her silent tribute to visible grandeur. Lord Warburton walked beside her and talked of Saint Sophia of Constantinople; she was afraid that he would end by calling attention to his exemplary conduct. The service had not yet begun, but at St. Peter’s there is much to observe, and as there is something almost profane in the vastness of the place, which seems meant as much for physical as for spiritual exercise, the different figures and groups, the mingled worshippers and spectators, may follow their various intentions without mutual scandal. In that splendid immensity individual indiscretion carries but a short distance. Isabel and her companions, however, were guilty of none; for though Henrietta was obliged to declare that Michael Angelo’s dome suffered by comparison with that of the Capitol at Washington, she addressed her protest chiefly to Mr. Bantling’s ear, and reserved it, in its more accentuated form, for the columns of the Interviewer. Isabel made the circuit of the church with Lord Warburton, and as they drew near the choir on the left of the entrance the voices of the Pope’s singers were borne towards them over the heads of the large number of persons clustered outside the doors. They paused a while on the skirts of this crowd, composed in equal measure of Roman cockneys and inquisitive strangers, and while they stood there the sacred concert went forward. Ralph, with Henrietta and Mr. Bantling, was apparently within, where Isabel, above the heads of the dense group in front of her, saw the afternoon light, silvered by clouds of incense that seemed to mingle with the splendid chant, sloping through the embossed recesses of high windows. After a while the singing stopped, and then Lord Warburton seemed disposed to turn away again. Isabel for a moment did the same; whereupon she found herself confronted with Gilbert Osmond, who appeared to have been standing at a short distance behind her. He now approached with a formal salutation.     56   
  “So you decided to come?” she said, putting out her hand.     57   
  “Yes, I came last night, and called this afternoon at your hotel. They told me you had come here, and I looked about for you.”     58   
  “The others are inside,” said Isabel.     59   
  “I didn’t come for the others.” Gilbert Osmond murmured, smiling.     60   
  She turned away; Lord Warburton was looking at them; perhaps he had heard this. Suddenly she remembered that it was just what he had said to her the morning he came to Gardencourt to ask her to marry him. Mr. Osmond’s words had brought the colour to her cheek, and this reminiscence had not the effect of dispelling it. Isabel sought refuge from her slight agitation in mentioning to each gentleman the name of the other, and fortunately at this moment Mr. Bantling made his way out of the choir, cleaving the crowd with British valour, and followed by Miss Stackpole and Ralph Touchett. I say fortunately, but this is perhaps a superficial view of the matter; for on perceiving the gentleman from Florence, Ralph Touchett exhibited symptoms of surprise which might not perhaps have seemed flattering to Mr. Osmond. It must be added, however, that these manifestations were momentary, and Ralph was presently able to say to his cousin, with due jocularity, that she would soon have all her friends about her. His greeting to Mr. Osmond was apparently frank; that is, the two men shook hands and looked at each other. Miss Stackpole had met the newcomer in Florence, but she had already found occasion to say to Isabel that she liked him no better than her other admirers—than Mr. Touchett, Lord Warburton, and little Mr. Rosier in Paris. “I don’t know what it is in you,” she had been pleased to remark, “but for a nice girl you do attract the most unpleasant people. Mr. Goodwood is the only one I have any respect for, and he’s just the one you don’t appreciate.”     61   
  “What’s your opinion of St. Peter’s?” Mr. Osmond asked of Isabel.     62   
  “It’s very large and very bright,” said the girl.     63   
  “It’s too large; it makes one feel like an atom.”     64   
  “Is not that the right way to feel—in a church?” Isabel asked, with a faint but interested smile.     65   
  “I suppose it’s the right way to feel everywhere, when one is nobody. But I like it in a church as little as anywhere else.”     66   
  “You ought indeed to be a Pope!” Isabel exclaimed, remembering something he had said to her in Florence.     67   
  “Ah, I should have enjoyed that!” said Gilbert Osmond.     68   
  Lord Warburton meanwhile had joined Ralph Touchett, and the two strolled away together.     69   
  “Who is the gentleman speaking to Miss Archer?” his lordship inquired.     70   
  “His name is Gilbert Osmond—he lives in Florence,” Ralph said.     71   
  “What is he besides?”     72   
  “Nothing at all. Oh yes, he is an American; but one forgets that; he is so little of one.”     73   
  “Has he known Miss Archer long?”     74   
  “No, about a fortnight.”     75   
  “Does she like him?”     76   
  “Yes, I think she does.”     77   
  “Is he a good fellow?”     78   
  Ralph hesitated a moment. “No, he’s not,” he said, at last.     79   
  “Why then does she like him?” pursued Lord Warburton, with noble naïveté.     80   
  “Because she’s a woman.”     81   
  Lord Warburton was silent a moment. “There are other men who are good fellows,” he presently said, “and them—them——”     82   
  “And them she likes also!” Ralph interrupted, smiling.     83   
  “Oh, if you mean she likes him in that way!” And Lord Warburton turned round again. As far as he was concerned, however, the party was broken up. Isabel remained in conversation with the gentleman from Florence till they left the church, and her English lover consoled himself by lending such attention as he might to the strains which continued to proceed from the choir.

Chapter XXVIII   
     
ON the morrow, in the evening, Lord Warburton went again to see his friends at their hotel, and at this establishment he learned that they had gone to the opera. He drove to the opera, with the idea of paying them a visit in their box, in accordance with the time-honoured Italian custom; and after he had obtained his admittance—it was one of the secondary theatres—looked about the large, bare, ill-lighted house. An act had just terminated, and he was at liberty to pursue his quest. After scanning two or three tiers of boxes, he perceived in one of the largest of these receptacles a lady whom he easily recognised. Miss Archer was seated facing the stage, and partly screened by the curtain of the box; and beside her, leaning back in his chair, was Mr. Gilbert Osmond. They appeared to have the place to themselves, and Warburton supposed that their companions had taken advantage of the entr’acte to enjoy the relative coolness of the lobby. He stood a while watching the interesting pair in the box, and asking himself whether he should go up and interrupt their harmonious colloquy. At last it became apparent that Isabel had seen him, and this accident determined him. He took his way to the upper regions, and on the staircase he met Ralph Touchett, slowly descending, with his hat in the attitude of ennui and his hands where they usually were.      1   
  “I saw you below a moment since, and was going down to you. I feel lonely and want company,” Ralph remarked.      2   
  “You have some that is very good that you have deserted.”      3   
  “Do you mean my cousin? Oh, she has got a visitor and doesn’t want me. Then Miss Stackpole and Bantling have gone out to a café to eat an ice—Miss Stackpole delights in an ice. I didn’t think they wanted me either. The opera is very bad; the women look like laundresses and sing like peacocks. I feel very low.”      4   
  “You had better go home,” Lord Warburton said, without affectation.      5   
  “And leave my young lady in this sad place? Ah no, I must watch over her.”      6   
  “She seems to have plenty of friends.”      7   
  “Yes, that’s why I must watch,” said Ralph, with the same low-voiced mock-melancholy.      8   
  “If she doesn’t want you, it’s probable she doesn’t want me.”      9   
  “No, you are different. Go to the box and stay there while I walk about.”     10   
  Lord Warburton went to the box, where he received a very gracious welcome from the more attractive of its occupants. He exchanged greetings with Mr. Osmond, to whom he had been introduced the day before, and who, after he came in, sat very quietly, scarcely mingling in the somewhat disjointed talk in which Lord Warburton engaged with Isabel. It seemed to the latter gentleman that Miss Archer looked very pretty; he even thought she looked excited; as she was, however, at all times a keenly-glancing, quickly-moving, completely animated young woman, he may have been mistaken on this point. Her talk with him betrayed little agitation; it expressed a kindness so ingenious and deliberate as to indicate that she was in undisturbed possession of her faculties. Poor Lord Warburton had moments of bewilderment. She had discouraged him, formally, as much as a woman could; what business had she then to have such soft, reassuring tones in her voice? The others came back; the bare, familiar, trivial opera began again. The box was large, and there was room for Lord Warburton to remain if he would sit a little behind, in the dark. He did so for half-an-hour, while Mr. Osmond sat in front, leaning forward, with his elbows on his knees, just behind Isabel. Lord Warburton heard nothing, and from his gloomy corner saw nothing but the clear profile of this young lady, defined against the dim illumination of the house. When there was another interval no one moved. Mr. Osmond talked to Isabel, and Lord Warburton remained in his corner. He did so but for a short time, however; after which he got up and bade good-night to the ladies. Isabel said nothing to detain him, and then he was puzzled again. Why had she so sweet a voice—such a friendly accent? He was angry with himself for being puzzled, and then angry for being angry. Verdi’s music did little to comfort him, and he left the theatre and walked homeward, without knowing his way, through the tortuous, tragical streets of Rome, where heavier sorrows than his had been carried under the stars.     11   
  “What is the character of that gentleman?” Osmond asked of Isabel, after the visitor had gone.     12   
  “Irreproachable—don’t you see it?”     13   
  “He owns about half England; that’s his character,” Henrietta remarked. “That’s what they call a free country!”     14   
  “Ah, he is a great proprietor? Happy man!” said Gilbert Osmond.     15   
  “Do you call that happiness—the ownership of human beings?” cried Miss Stackpole. “He owns his tenants, and he has thousands of them. It is pleasant to own something, but inanimate objects are enough for me. I don’t insist on flesh and blood, and minds and consciences.”     16   
  “It seems to me you own a human being or two,” Mr. Bantling suggested jocosely. “I wonder if Warburton orders his tenants about as you do me.”     17   
  “Lord Warburton is a great radical,” Isabel said. “He has very advanced opinions.”     18   
  “He has very advanced stone walls. His park is inclosed by a gigantic iron fence, some thirty miles round,” Henrietta announced, for the information of Mr. Osmond. “I should like him to converse with a few of our Boston radicals.”     19   
  “Don’t they approve of iron fences?” asked Mr. Bantling.     20   
  “Only to shut up wicked conservatives. I always feel as if I were talking to you over a fence!”     21   
  “Do you know him well, this unreformed reformer?” Osmond went on, questioning Isabel.     22   
  “Well enough.”     23   
  “Do you like him?”     24   
  “Very much.”     25   
  “Is he a man of ability?”     26   
  “Of excellent ability, and as good as he looks.”     27   
  “As good as he is good-looking do you mean? He is very good-looking. How detestably fortunate! to be a great English magnate, to be clever and handsome into the bargain, and, by way of finishing off, to enjoy your favour! That’s a man I could envy.”     28   
  Isabel gave a serious smile.     29   
  “You seem to me to be always envying some one. Yesterday it was the Pope; to-day it’s poor Lord Warburton.”     30   
  “My envy is not dangerous; it is very platonic. Why do you call him poor?”     31   
  “Women usually pity men after they have hurt them; that is their way of showing kindness,” said Ralph, joining in the conversation for the first time, with cynicism so transparently ingenuous as to be virtually innocent.     32   
  “Pray, have I hurt Lord Warburton?” Isabel asked, raising her eyebrows, as if the idea were perfectly novel.     33   
  “It serves him right if you have,” said Henrietta, while the curtain rose for the ballet.     34   
  Isabel saw no more of her attributive victim for the next twenty-four hours, but on the second day after the visit to the opera she encountered him in the gallery of the Capitol, where he was standing before the lion of the collection, the statue of the Dying Gladiator. She had come in with her companions, among whom, on this occasion again, Gilbert Osmond was numbered, and the party, having ascended the staircase, entered the first and finest of the rooms. Lord Warburton spoke to her with all his usual geniality, but said in a moment that he was leaving the gallery.     35   
  “And I am leaving Rome,” he added. “I should bid you good-bye.”     36   
  I shall not undertake to explain why, but Isabel was sorry to hear it. It was, perhaps, because she had ceased to be afraid of his renewing his suit; she was thinking of something else. She was on the point of saying she was sorry, but she checked herself and simply wished him a happy journey.     37   
  He looked at her with a somewhat heavy eye.     38   
  “I am afraid you think me rather inconsistent,” he said. “I told you the other day that I wanted so much to stay a while.”     39   
  “Oh no; you could easily change your mind.”     40   
  “That’s what I have done.”     41   
  “Bon voyage, then.”     42   
  “You’re in a great hurry to get rid of me,” said his lordship, rather dismally.     43   
  “Not in the least. But I hate partings.”     44   
  “You don’t care what I do,” he went on pitifully.     45   
  Isabel looked at him for a moment.     46   
  “Ah,” she said, “you are not keeping your promise!”     47   
  He coloured like a boy of fifteen.     48   
  “If I am not, then it’s because I can’t; and that’s why I am going.”     49   
  “Good-bye, then.”     50   
  “Good-bye.” He lingered still, however. “When shall I see you again?”     51   
  Isabel hesitated, and then, as if she had had a happy inspiration—“Some day after you are married.”     52   
  “That will never be. It will be after you are.”     53   
  “That will do as well,” said Isabel, smiling.     54   
  “Yes, quite as well. Good-bye.”     55   
  They shook hands, and he left her alone in the beautiful room, among the shining antique marbles. She sat down in the middle of the circle of statues, looking at them vaguely, resting her eyes on their beautiful blank faces; listening, as it were, to their eternal silence. It is impossible, in Rome at least, to look long at a great company of Greek sculptures without feeling the effect of their noble quietude. It soothes and moderates the spirit, it purifies the imagination. I say in Rome especially, because the Roman air is an exquisite medium for such impressions. The golden sunshine mingles with them, the great stillness of the past, so vivid yet, though it is nothing but a void full of names, seems to throw a solemn spell upon them. The blinds were partly closed in the windows of the Capitol, and a clear, warm shadow rested on the figures and made them more perfectly human. Isabel sat there a long time, under the charm of their motionless grace, seeing life between their gazing eyelids and purpose in their marble lips. The dark red walls of the room threw them into relief; the polished marble floor reflected their beauty. She had seen them all before, but her enjoyment repeated itself, and it was all the greater because she was glad, for the time, to be alone. At the last her thoughts wandered away from them, solicited by images of a vitality more complete. An occasional tourist came into the room, stopped and stared a moment at the Dying Gladiator, and then passed out of the other door, creaking over the smooth pavement. At the end of half-an-hour Gilbert Osmond reappeared, apparently in advance of his companions. He strolled towards her slowly, with his hands behind him, and with his usual bright, inquiring, yet not appealing smile.     56   
  “I am surprised to find you alone,” he said. “I thought you had company.”     57   
  “So I have—the best.” And Isabel glanced at the circle of sculpture.     58   
  “Do you call this better company than an English peer?”     59   
  “Ah, my English peer left me some time ago,” said Isabel, getting up. She spoke, with intention, a little dryly.     60   
  Mr. Osmond noted her dryness, but it did not prevent him from giving a laugh.     61   
  “I am afraid that what I heard the other evening is true; you are rather cruel to that nobleman.”     62   
  Isabel looked a moment at the vanquished Gladiator.     63   
  “It is not true. I am scrupulously kind.”     64   
  “That’s exactly what I mean!” Gilbert Osmond exclaimed, so humorously that his joke needs to be explained.     65   
  We knew that he was fond of originals, of rarities, of the superior, the exquisite; and now that he had seen Lord Warburton, whom he thought a very fine example of his race and order, he perceived a new attraction in the idea of taking to himself a young lady who had qualified herself to figure in his collection of choice objects by rejecting the splendid offer of a British aristocrat. Gilbert Osmond had a high appreciation of the British aristocracy—he had never forgiven Providence for not making him an English duke—and could measure the unexpectedness of this conduct. It would be proper that the woman he should marry should have done something of that sort.