Chapter XXIX   
     
RALPH TOUCHETT, for reasons best known to himself, had seen fit to say that Gilbert Osmond was not a good fellow; but this assertion was not borne out by the gentleman’s conduct during the rest of the visit to Rome. He spent a portion of each day with Isabel and her companions, and gave every indication of being an easy man to live with. It was impossible not to feel that he had excellent points, and indeed this is perhaps why Ralph Touchett made his want of good fellowship a reproach to him. Even Ralph was obliged to admit that just now he was a delightful companion. His good humour was imperturbable, his knowledge universal, his manners were the gentlest in the world. His spirits were not visibly high; it was difficult to think of Gilbert Osmond as boisterous; he had a mortal dislike to loudness or eagerness. He thought Miss Archer sometimes too eager, too pronounced. It was a pity she had that fault; because if she had not had it she would really have had none; she would have been as bright and soft as an April cloud. If Osmond was not loud, however, he was deep, and during these closing days of the Roman May he had a gaiety that matched with slow irregular walks under the pines of the Villa Borghese, among the small sweet meadow flowers and the mossy marbles. He was pleased with everything; he had never before been pleased with so many things at once. Old impressions, old enjoyments, renewed themselves; one evening, going home to his room at the inn, he wrote down a little sonnet to which he prefixed the title of “Rome Revisited.” A day or two later he showed this piece of correct and ingenious verse to Isabel, explaining to her that it was an Italian fashion to commemorate the pleasant occasions of life by a tribute to the muse. In general Osmond took his pleasure singly; he was usually disgusted with something that seemed to him ugly or offensive; his mind was rarely visited with moods of comprehensive satisfaction. But at present he was happy—happier than he had perhaps ever been in his life; and the feeling had a large foundation. This was simply the sense of success—the most agreeable emotion of the human heart. Osmond had never had too much of it; in this respect he had never been spoiled; as he knew perfectly well and often reminded himself. “Ah no, I have not been spoiled; certainly I have not been spoiled,” he used to repeat to himself. “It I do succeed before I die, I shall have earned it well.” Absolutely void of success his career had not been; a very moderate amount of reflection would have assured him of this. But his triumphs were, some of them, now, too old; others had been too easy. The present one had been less difficult than might have been expected; but it had been easy—that is, it had been rapid—only because he had made an altogether exceptional effort, a greater effort than he had believed it was in him to make. The desire to succeed greatly—in something or other—had been the dream of his youth; but as the years went on, the conditions attached to success became so various and repulsive that the idea of making an effort gradually lost its charm. It was not dead, however; it only slept; it revived after he had made the acquaintance of Isabel Archer. Osmond had felt that any enterprise in which the chance of failure was at all considerable would never have an attraction for him; to fail would have been unspeakably odious, would have left an ineffaceable stain upon his life. Success was to seem in advance definitely certain—certain, that is, on this one condition, that the effort should be an agreeable one to make. That of exciting an interest on the part of Isabel Archer corresponded to this description, for the girl had pleased him from the first of his seeing her. We have seen that she thought him “fine”; and Gilbert Osmond returned the compliment. We have also seen (or heard) that he had a great dread of vulgarity, and on this score his mind was at rest with regard to our young lady. He was not afraid that she would disgust him or irritate him; he had no fear that she would even, in the more special sense of the word, displease him. If she was too eager, she could be taught to be less so; that was a fault which diminished with growing knowledge. She might defy him, she might anger him; this was another matter from displeasing him, and on the whole a less serious one. If a woman were ungraceful and common, her whole quality was vitiated, and one could take no precautions against that; one’s own delicacy would avail little. If, however, she were only wilful and high-tempered, the defect might be managed with comparative ease; for had one not a will of one’s own that one had been keeping for years in the best condition—as pure and keen as a sword protected by its sheath?      1   
  Though I have tried to speak with extreme discretion, the reader may have gathered a suspicion that Gilbert Osmond was not untainted by selfishness. This is rather a coarse imputation to put upon a man of his refinement; and it behoves us at all times to remember the familiar proverb about those who live in glass houses. If Mr. Osmond was more selfish than most of his fellows, the fact will still establish itself. Lest it should fail to do so, I must decline to commit myself to an accusation so gross; the more especially as several of the items of our story would seem to point the other way. It is well known that there are few indications of selfishness more conclusive (on the part of a gentleman at least) than the preference for a single life. Gilbert Osmond, after having tasted of matrimony, had spent a succession of years in the full enjoyment of recovered singleness. He was familiar with the simplicity of purpose, the lonely liberties, of bachelorhood. He had reached that period of life when it is supposed to be doubly difficult to renounce these liberties, endeared as they are by long association; and yet he was prepared to make the generous sacrifice. It would seem that this might fairly be set down to the credit of the noblest of our qualities—the faculty of self-devotion. Certain it is that Osmond’s desire to marry had been deep and distinct. It had not been notorious; he had not gone about asking people whether they knew a nice girl with a little money. Money was an object; but this was not his manner of proceeding, and no one knew—or even greatly cared—whether he wished to marry or not. Madame Merle knew—that we have already perceived. It was not that he had told her; on the whole he would not have cared to tell her. But there were things of which she had no need to be told—things as to which she had a sort of creative intuition. She had recognised a truth that was none the less pertinent for being very subtle: the truth that there was something very imperfect in Osmond’s situation as it stood. He was a failure, of course; that was an old story; to Madame Merle’s perception he would always be a failure. But there were degrees of ineffectiveness, and there was no need of taking one of the highest. Success, for Gilbert Osmond, would be to make himself felt; that was the only success to which he could now pretend. It is not a kind of distinction that is officially recognised—unless indeed the operation be performed upon multitudes of men. Osmond’s line would be to impress himself not largely but deeply; a distinction of the most private sort. A single character might offer the whole measure of it; the clear and sensitive nature of a generous girl would make space for the record. The record of course would be complete if the young lady should have a fortune, and Madame Merle would have taken no pains to make Mr. Osmond acquainted with Mrs. Touchett’s niece if Isabel had been as scantily dowered as when first she met her. He had waited all these years because he wanted only the best, and a portionless bride naturally would not have been the best. He had waited so long in vain that he finally almost lost his interest in the subject—not having kept it up by venturesome experiments. It had become improbable that the best was now to be had, and if he wished to make himself felt, there was soft and supple little Pansy, who would evidently respond to the slightest pressure. When at last the best did present itself Osmond recognised it like a gentleman. There was therefore no incongruity in his wishing to marry—it was his own idea of success, as well as that which Madame Merle, with her old-time interest in his affairs, entertained for him. Let it not, however, be supposed that he was guilty of the error of believing that Isabel’s character was of that passive sort which offers a free field for domination. He was sure that she would constantly act—act in the sense of enthusiastic concession.      2   
  Shortly before the time which had been fixed in advance for her return to Florence, this young lady received from Mrs. Touchett a telegram which ran as follows:—“Leave Florence 4th June, Bellaggio, and take you if you have not other views. But can’t wait if you dawdle in Rome.” The dawdling in Rome was very pleasant, but Isabel had no other views, and she wrote to her aunt that she would immediately join her. She told Gilbert Osmond that she had done so, and he replied that, spending many of his summers as well as his winters in Italy, he himself would loiter a little longer among the Seven Hills. He should not return to Florence for ten days more, and in that time she would have started for Bellaggio. It might be long, in this case, before he should see her again. This conversation took place in the large decorated sitting-room which our friends occupied at the hotel; it was late in the evening, and Ralph Touchett was to take his cousin back to Florence on the morrow. Osmond had found the girl alone; Miss Stackpole had contracted a friendship with a delightful American family on the fourth floor, and had mounted the interminable staircase to pay them a visit. Miss Stackpole contracted friendships, in travelling, with great freedom, and had formed several in railway-carriages, which were among her most valued ties. Ralph was making arrangements for the morrow’s journey, and Isabel sat alone in a wilderness of yellow upholstery. The chairs and sofas were orange; the walls and windows were draped in purple and gilt. The mirrors, the pictures, had great flamboyant frames; the ceiling was deeply vaulted and painted over with naked muses and cherubs. To Osmond the place was painfully ugly; the false colours, the sham splendour, made him suffer. Isabel had taken in hand a volume of Ampère, presented, on their arrival in Rome, by Ralph; but though she held it in her lap with her finger vaguely kept in the place, she was not impatient to go on with her reading. A lamp covered with a drooping veil of pink tissue-paper burned on the table beside her, and diffused a strange pale rosiness over the scene.      3   
  “You say you will come back; but who knows?” Gilbert Osmond said. “I think you are much more likely to start on your voyage round the world. You are under no obligation to come back; you can do exactly what you choose; you can roam through space.”      4   
  “Well, Italy is a part of space,” Isabel answered; “I can take it on the way.”      5   
  “On the way round the world? No, don’t do that. Don’t put us into a parenthesis—give us a chapter to ourselves. I don’t want to see you on your travels. I would rather see you when they are over. I should like to see you when you are tired and satiated,” Osmond added, in a moment. “I shall prefer you in that state.”      6   
  Isabel, with her eyes bent down, fingered the pages of M. Ampère a little.      7   
  “You turn things into ridicule without seeming to do it, though not, I think, without intending it,” she said at last. “You have no respect for my travels—you think them ridiculous.”      8   
  “Where do you find that?”      9   
  Isabel went on in the same tone, fretting the edge of her book with the paper-knife.     10   
  “You see my ignorance, my blunders, the way I wander about as if the world belonged to me, simply because—because it has been put into my power to do so. You don’t think a woman ought to do that. You think it bold and ungraceful.”     11   
  “I think it beautiful,” said Osmond. “You know my opinions—I have treated you to enough of them. Don’t you remember my telling you that one ought to make one’s life a work of art? You looked rather shocked at first; but then I told you that it was exactly what you seemed to me to be trying to do with your own life.”     12   
  Isabel looked up from her book.     13   
  “What you despise most in the world is bad art.”     14   
  “Possibly. But yours seem to me very good.”     15   
  “If I were to go to Japan next winter, you would laugh at me,” Isabel continued.     16   
  Osmond gave a smile—a keen one, but not a laugh, for the tone of their conversation was not jocular. Isabel was almost tremulously serious; he had seen her so before.     17   
  “You have an imagination that startles one!”     18   
  “That is exactly what I say. You think such an idea absurd.”     19   
  “I would give my little finger to go to Japan; it is one of the countries I want most to see. Can’t you believe that, with my taste for old lacquer?”     20   
  “I haven’t a taste for old lacquer to excuse me,” said Isabel.     21   
  “You have a better excuse—the means of going. You are quite wrong in your theory that I laugh at you. I don’t know what put it into your head.”     22   
  “It wouldn’t be remarkable if you did think it ridiculous that I should have the means to travel, when you have not; for you know everything, and I know nothing.”     23   
  “The more reason why you should travel and learn,” said Osmond, smiling. “Besides,” he added, more gravely, “I don’t know everything.”     24   
  Isabel was not struck with the oddity of his saying this gravely; she was thinking that the pleasantest incident of her life—so it pleased her to qualify her little visit to Rome—was coming to an end. That most of the interest of this episode had been owing to Mr. Osmond—this reflection she was not just now at pains to make; she had already done the point abundant justice. But she said to herself that if there were a danger that they should not meet again, perhaps after all it would be as well. Happy things do not repeat themselves, and these few days had been interfused with the element of success.     25   
  She might come back to Italy and find him different—this strange man who pleased her just as he was; and it would be better not to come than run the risk of that. But if she was not to come, the greater was the pity that this happy week was over; for a moment she felt her heart throb with a kind of delicious pain. The sensation kept her silent, and Gilbert Osmond was silent too; he was looking at her.     26   
  “Go everywhere,” he said at last, in a low, kind voice; “do everything; get everything out of life. Be happy—be triumphant.”     27   
  “What do you mean by being triumphant?”     28   
  “Doing what you like.”     29   
  “To triumph, then, it seems to me, is to fail! Doing what we like is often very tiresome.”     30   
  “Exactly,” said Osmond, with his quick responsiveness. “As I intimated just now, you will be tired some day.” He paused a moment, and then he went on: “I don’t know whether I had better not wait till then for something I wish to say to you.”     31   
  “Ah, I can’t advise you without knowing what it is. But I am horrid when I am tired,” Isabel added, with due inconsequence.     32   
  “I don’t believe that. You are angry, sometimes—that I can believe, though I have never seen it. But I am sure you are never disagreeable.”     33   
  “Not even when I lose my temper?”     34   
  “You don’t lose it—you find it, and that must be beautiful.” Osmond spoke very simply—almost solemnly. “There must be something very noble about that.”     35   
  “If I could only find it now!” the girl exclaimed, laughing, yet frowning.     36   
  “I am not afraid; I should fold my arms and admire you, I am speaking very seriously.” He was leaning forward, with a hand on each knee; for some moments he bent his eyes on the floor. “What I wish to say to you,” he went on at last, looking up, “is that I find I am in love with you.”     37   
  Isabel instantly rose from her chair.     38   
  “Ah, keep that till I am tired!” she murmured.     39   
  “Tired of hearing it from others?” And Osmond sat there, looking up at her. “No, you may heed it now, or never, as you please. But, after all, I must say it now.”     40   
  She had turned away, but in the movement she had stopped herself and dropped her gaze upon him. The two remained a moment in this situation, exchanging a long look—the large, conscious look of the critical hours of life. Then he got up and came near her, deeply respectful, as if he were afraid he had been too familiar.     41   
  “I am thoroughly in love with you.”     42   
  He repeated the announcement in a tone of almost impersonal discretion; like a man who expected very little from it, but spoke for his own relief.     43   
  The tears came into Isabel’s eyes—they were caused by an intenser throb of that pleasant pain I spoke of a moment ago. There was an immense sweetness in the words he had uttered; but, morally speaking, she retreated before them—facing him still—as she had retreated in two or three cases that we know of in which the same words had been spoken.     44   
  “Oh, don’t say that, please,” she answered at last, in a tone of entreaty which had nothing of conventional modesty, but which expressed the dread of having, in this case too, to choose and decide. What made her dread great was precisely the force which, as it would seem, ought to have banished all dread—the consciousness of what was in her own heart. It was terrible to have to surrender herself to that.     45   
  “I haven’t the idea that it will matter much to you,” said Osmond. “I have too little to offer you. What I have—it’s enough for me; but it’s not enough for you. I have neither fortune, nor fame, nor extrinsic advantages of any kind. So I offer nothing. I only tell you because I think it can’t offend you, and some day or other it may give you pleasure. It gives me pleasure, I assure you,” he went on, standing there before her, bending forward a little, turning his hat, which he had taken up, slowly round, with a movement which had all the decent tremor of awkwardness and none of its oddity, and presenting to her his keen, expressive, emphatic face. “It gives me no pain, because it is perfectly simple. For me you will always be the most important woman in the world.”     46   
  Isabel looked at herself in this character—looked intently, and thought that she filled it with a certain grace. But what she said was not an expression of this complacency. “You don’t offend me; but you ought to remember that, without being offended, one may be incommoded, troubled.” “Incommoded”: she heard herself saying that, and thought it a ridiculous word. But it was the word that came to her.     47   
  “I remember, perfectly. Of course you are surprised and startled. But if it is nothing but that, it will pass away. And it will perhaps leave something that I may not be ashamed of.”     48   
  “I don’t know what it may leave. You see at all events that I am not overwhelmed,” said Isabel, with rather a pale smile. “I am not too troubled to think. And I think that I am glad we are separating—that I leave Rome to-morrow.”     49   
  “Of course I don’t agree with you there.”     50   
  “I don’t know you,” said Isabel, abruptly; and then she coloured, as she heard herself saying what she had said almost a year before to Lord Warburton.     51   
  “If you were not going away you would know me better.”     52   
  “I shall do that some other time.”     53   
  “I hope so. I am very easy to know.”     54   
  “No, no,” said the girl, with a flash of bright eagerness; “there you are not sincere. You are not easy to know; no one could be less so.”     55   
  “Well,” Osmond answered, with a laugh, “I said that because I know myself. That may be a boast, but I do.”     56   
  “Very likely; but you are very wise.”     57   
  “So are you, Miss Archer!” Osmond exclaimed.     58   
  “I don’t feel so just now. Still, I am wise enough to think you had better go. Good night.”     59   
  “God bless you!” said Gilbert Osmond, taking the hand which she failed to surrender to him. And then in a moment he added, “If we meet again, you will find me as you leave me. If we don’t, I shall be so, all the same.”     60   
  “Thank you very much. Good-bye.”     61   
  There was something quietly firm about Isabel’s visitor; he might go of his own movement, but he would not be dismissed. “There is one thing more,” he said. “I haven’t asked anything of you—not even a thought in the future; you must do me that justice. But there is a little service I should like to ask. I shall not return home for several days; Rome is delightful, and it is a good place for a man in my state of mind. Oh, I know you are sorry to leave it; but you are right to do what your aunt wishes.”     62   
  “She doesn’t even wish it!” Isabel broke out, strangely.     63   
  Osmond for a moment was apparently on the point of saying something that would match these words. But he changed his mind, and rejoined, simply—“Ah well, it’s proper you should go with her, all the same. Do everything that’s proper; I go in for that. Excuse my being so patronising. You say you don’t know me; but when you do you will discover what a worship I have for propriety.”     64   
  “You are not conventional?” said Isabel, very gravely.     65   
  “I like the way you utter that word! No, I am not conventional: I am convention itself. You don’t understand that?” And Osmond paused a moment, smiling. “I should like to explain it.” Then, with a sudden, quick, bright naturalness—“Do come back again!” he cried. “There are so many things we might talk about.”     66   
  Isabel stood there with lowered eyes. “What service did you speak of just now?”     67   
  “Go and see my little daughter before you leave Florence. She is alone at the villa; I decided not to send her to my sister, who hasn’t my ideas. Tell her she must love her poor father very much,” said Gilbert Osmond, gently.     68   
  “It will be a great pleasure to me to go,” Isabel answered. “I will tell her what you say. Once more good-bye.”     69   
  On this he took a rapid, respectful leave. When he had gone, she stood a moment, looking about her, and then she seated herself, slowly, with an air of deliberation. She sat thus until her companions came back, with folded hands, gazing at the ugly carpet. Her agitation—for it had not diminished—was very still, very deep. That which had happened was something that for a week past her imagination had been going forward to meet; but here, when it came, she stopped—here imagination halted. The working of this young lady’s spirit was strange, and I can only give it to you as I see it, not hoping to make it seem altogether natural. Her imagination stopped, as I say; there was a last vague space it could not cross—a dusky, uncertain tract which looked ambiguous, and even slightly treacherous, like a moorland seen in the winter twilight. But she was to cross it yet.

Chapter XXX   
     
UNDER her cousin’s escort Isabel returned on the morrow to Florence, and Ralph Touchett, though usually he was not fond of railway journeys, thought very well of the successive hours passed in the train which hurried his companion away from the city now distinguished by Gilbert Osmond’s preference—hours that were to form the first stage in a still larger scheme of travel. Miss Stackpole had remained behind; she was planning a little trip to Naples, to be executed with Mr. Bantling’s assistance. Isabel was to have but three days in Florence before the 4th of June, the date of Mrs. Touchett’s departure, and she determined to devote the last of these to her promise to go and see Pansy Osmond. Her plan, however, seemed for a moment likely to modify itself, in deference to a plan of Madame Merle’s. This lady was still at Casa Touchett; but she too was on the point of leaving Florence, her next station being an ancient castle in the mountains of Tuscany, the residence of a noble family of that country, whose acquaintance (she had known them, as she said, “for ever”) seemed to Isabel, in the light of certain photographs of their immense crenellated dwelling which her friend was able to show her, a precious privilege.      1   
  She mentioned to Madame Merle that Mr. Osmond had asked her to call upon his daughter; she did not mention to her that he had also made her a declaration of love.      2   
  “Ah, comme cela se trouve!” the elder lady exclaimed. “I myself have been thinking it would be a kindness to take a look at the child before I go into the country.”      3   
  “We can go together, then,” said Isabel, reasonably. I say “reasonably,” because the proposal was not uttered in the spirit of enthusiasm. She had prefigured her visit as made in solitude; she should like it better so. Nevertheless, to her great consideration for Madame Merle she was prepared to sacrifice this mystic sentiment.      4   
  Her friend meditated, with her usual suggestive smile. “After all,” she presently said, “why should we both go; having, each of us, so much to do during these last hours?”      5   
  “Very good; I can easily go alone.”      6   
  “I don’t know about your going alone—to the house of a handsome bachelor. He has been married—but so long ago!”      7   
  Isabel stared. “When Mr. Osmond is away, what does it matter?”      8   
  “They don’t know he is away, you see.”      9   
  “They? Whom do you mean?”     10   
  “Every one. But perhaps it doesn’t matter.”     11   
  “If you were going, why shouldn’t I?” Isabel asked.     12   
  “Because I am an old frump, and you are a beautiful young woman.”     13   
  “Granting all that, you have not promised.”     14   
  “How much you think of your promises!” said Madame Merle, with a smile of genial mockery.     15   
  “I think a great deal of my promises. Does that surprise you?”     16   
  “You are right,” Madame Merle reflected audibly. “I really think you wish to be kind to the child.”     17   
  “I wish very much to be kind to her.”     18   
  “Go and see her, then; no one will be the wiser. And tell her I would have come if you had not.—Or rather,” Madame Merle added—“don’t tell her; she won’t care.”     19   
  As Isabel drove, in the publicity of an open vehicle, along the charming winding way which led to Mr. Osmond’s hilltop, she wondered what Madame Merle had meant by no one being the wiser. Once in a while, at large intervals, this lady, in whose discretion, as a general thing, there was something almost brilliant, dropped a remark of ambiguous quality, struck a note that sounded false. What cared Isabel Archer for the vulgar judgments of obscure people? and did Madame Merle suppose that she was capable of doing a deed in secret? Of course not—she must have meant something else—something which in the press of the hours that preceded her departure she had not had time to explain. Isabel would return to this some day; there were certain things as to which she liked to be clear. She heard Pansy strumming at the piano in another apartment, as she herself was ushered into Mr. Osmond’s drawing-room; the little girl was “practising,” and Isabel was pleased to think that she performed this duty faithfully. Presently Pansy came in, smoothing down her frock, and did the honours of her father’s house with the wide-eyed conscientiousness of a sensitive child. Isabel sat there for half-an-hour, and Pansy entertained her like a little lady—not chattering, but conversing, and showing the same courteous interest in Isabel’s affairs that Isabel was so good as to take in hers. Isabel wondered at her; as I have said before, she had never seen a child like that. How well she had been taught, said our keen young lady, how prettily she had been directed and fashioned; and yet how simple, how natural, how innocent she has been kept! Isabel was fond of psychological problems, and it had pleased her, up to this time, to be in doubt as to whether Miss Pansy were not all-knowing. Was her infantine serenity but the perfection of self-consciousness? Was it put on to please her father’s visitor, or was it the direct expression of a little neat, orderly character? The hour that Isabel spent in Mr. Osmond’s beautiful empty, dusky rooms—the windows had been half-darkened, to keep out the heat, and here and there, through an easy crevice, the splendid summer day peeped in, lighting a gleam of faded colour or tarnished gilt in the rich-looking gloom—Isabel’s interview with the daughter of the house, I say, effectually settled this question. Pansy was really a blank page, a pure white surface; she was not clever enough for precocious coquetries. She was not clever; Isabel could see that; she only had nice feelings. There was something touching about her; Isabel had felt it before; she would be an easy victim of fate. She would have no will, no power to resist, no sense of her own importance; only an exquisite taste, and an appreciation, equally exquisite, of such affection as might be bestowed upon her. She would easily be mystified, easily crushed; her force would be solely in her power to cling. She moved about the place with Isabel, who had asked leave to walk through the other rooms again, where Pansy gave her judgment on several works of art. She talked about her prospects, her occupations, her father’s intention; she was not egotistical, but she felt the propriety of giving Isabel the information that so observant a visitor would naturally expect.     20   
  “Please tell me,” she said, “did papa, in Rome, go to see Madame Catherine? He told me he would if he had time. Perhaps he had not time. Papa likes a great deal of time. He wished to speak about my education; it isn’t finished yet, you know. I don’t know what they can do with me more; but it appears it is far from finished. Papa told me one day he thought he would finish it himself; for the last year or two, at the convent, the masters that teach the tall girls are so very dear. Papa is not rich, and I should be very sorry if he were to pay much money for me, because I don’t think I am worth it. I don’t learn quickly enough, and I have got no memory. For what I am told, yes—especially when it is pleasant; but not for what I learn in a book. There was a young girl, who was my best friend, and they took her away from the convent when she was fourteen, to make—how do you say it in English?—to make a dot. You don’t say it in English? I hope it isn’t wrong; I only mean they wished to keep the money, to marry her. I don’t know whether it is for that that papa wishes to keep the money, to marry me. It costs so much to marry!” Pansy went on, with a sigh; “I think papa might make that economy. At any rate I am too young to think about it yet, and I don’t care for any gentleman; I mean for any but him. If he were not my papa I should like to marry him; I would rather be his daughter than the wife of—of some strange person. I miss him very much, but not so much as you might think, for I have been so much away from him. Papa has always been principally for holidays. I miss Madame Catherine almost more; but you must not tell him that. You shall not see him again? I am very sorry for that. Of every one who comes here I like you the best. That is not a great compliment, for there are not many people. It was very kind of you to come to-day—so far from your house; for I am as yet only a child. Oh, yes, I have only the occupations of a child. When did you give them up, the occupations of a child? I should like to know how old you are, but I don’t know whether it is right to ask. At the convent they told us that we must never ask the age. I don’t like to do anything that is not expected; it looks at if one had not been properly taught. I myself—I should never like to be taken by surprise. Papa left directions for everything. I go to bed very early. When the sun goes off that side I go into the garden. Papa left strict orders that I was not to get scorched. I always enjoy the view; the mountains are so graceful. In Rome, from the convent, we saw nothing but roofs and bell-towers. I practise three hours. I do not play very well. You play yourself? I wish very much that you would play something for me; papa wishes very much that I should hear good music. Madame Merle has played for me several times; that is what I like best about Madame Merle; she has great facility. I shall never have facility. And I have no voice—just a little thread.”     21   
  Isabel gratified this respectful wish, drew off her gloves, and sat down to the piano, while Pansy, standing beside her, watched her white hands move quickly over the keys. When she stopped, she kissed the child good-bye, and held her a moment, looking at her.     22   
  “Be a good child,” she said; “give pleasure to your father.”     23   
  “I think that is what I live for,” Pansy answered. “He has not much pleasure; he is rather a sad man.”     24   
  Isabel listened to this assertion with an interest which she felt it to be almost a torment that she was obliged to conceal from the child. It was her pride that obliged her, and a certain sense of decency; there were still other things in her head which she felt a strong impulse, instantly checked, to say to Pansy about her father; there were things it would have given her pleasure to hear the child, to make the child, say. But she no sooner became conscious of these things than her imagination was hushed with horror at the idea of taking advantage of the little girl—it was of this she would have accused herself—and of leaving an audible trace of her emotion behind. She had come—she had come; but she had stayed only an hour! She rose quickly from the music-stool; even then, however, she lingered a moment, still holding her small companion, drawing the child’s little tender person closer, and looking down at her. She was obliged to confess it to herself—she would have taken a passionate pleasure in talking about Gilbert Osmond to this innocent, diminutive creature who was near to him. But she said not another word; she only kissed Pansy once more. They went together through the vestibule, to the door which opened into the court; and there Pansy stopped, looking rather wistfully beyond.     25   
  “I may go no further,” she said. “I have promised papa not to go out of this door.”     26   
  “You are right to obey him; he will never ask you anything unreasonable.”     27   
  “I shall always obey him. But when will you come again?”     28   
  “Not for a long time, I am afraid.”     29   
  “As soon as you can, I hope. I am only a little girl,” said Pansy, “but I shall always expect you.”     30   
  And the small figure stood in the high, dark doorway, watching Isabel cross the clear, grey court, and disappear into the brightness beyond the big portone, which gave a wider gleam as it opened.

Chapter XXXI   
     
ISABEL came back to Florence, but only after several months; an interval sufficiently replete with incident. It is not, however, during this interval that we are closely concerned with her; our attention is engaged again on a certain day in the late springtime, shortly after her return to the Palazzo Crescentini, and a year from the date of the incidents I have just narrated. She was alone on this occasion, in one of the smaller of the numerous rooms devoted by Mrs. Touchett to social uses, and there was that in her expression and attitude which would have suggested that she was expecting a visitor. The tall window was open, and though its green shutters were partly drawn, the bright air of the garden had come in through a broad interstice and filled the room with warmth and perfume. Our young lady stood for some time at the window, with her hands clasped behind her, gazing into the brilliant aperture in the manner of a person relapsing into reverie. She was preoccupied; she was too restless to sit down, to work, to read. It was evidently not her design, however, to catch a glimpse of her visitor before he should pass into the house; for the entrance to the palace was not through the garden, in which stillness and privacy always reigned. She was endeavouring rather to anticipate his arrival by a process of conjecture, and to judge by the expression of her face this attempt gave her plenty to do. She was extremely grave; not sad exactly, but deeply serious. The lapse of a year may doubtless account for a considerable increase of gravity; though this will depend a good deal upon the manner in which the year has been spent. Isabel had spent hers in seeing the world; she had moved about; she had travelled; she had exerted herself with an almost passionate activity. She was now, to her own sense, a very different person from the frivolous young woman from Albany who had begun to see Europe upon the lawn at Gardencourt a couple of years before. She flattered herself that she had gathered a rich experience, that she knew a great deal more of life than this light-minded creature had even suspected. If her thoughts just now had inclined themselves to retrospect, instead of fluttering their wings nervously about the present, they would have evoked a multitude of interesting pictures. These pictures would have been both landscapes and figure-pieces; the latter, however, would have been the more numerous. With several of the figures concerned in these combinations we are already acquainted. There would be, for instance, the conciliatory Lily, our heroine’s sister and Edmund Ludlow’s wife, who came out from New York to spend five months with Isabel. She left her husband behind her, but she brought her children, to whom Isabel now played with equal munificence and tenderness the part of maiden-aunt. Mr. Ludlow, towards the last, had been able to snatch a few weeks from his forensic triumphs, and, crossing the ocean with extreme rapidity, spent a month with the two ladies in Paris, before taking his wife home. The little Ludlows had not yet, even from the American point of view, reached the proper tourist-age; so that while her sister was with her, Isabel confined her movements to a narrow circle. Lily and the babies had joined her in Switzerland in the month of July, and they had spent a summer of fine weather in an Alpine valley where the flowers were thick in the meadows, and the shade of great chestnuts made a resting-place in such upward wanderings as might be undertaken by ladies and children on warm afternoons. Afterwards they had come to Paris, a city beloved by Lily, but less appreciated by Isabel, who in those days was constantly thinking of Rome. Mrs. Ludlow enjoyed Paris, but she was nevertheless somewhat disappointed and puzzled; and after her husband had joined her she was in addition a good deal depressed at not being able to induce him to enter into these somewhat subtle and complex emotions. They all had Isabel for their object; but Edmund Ludlow, as he had always done before, declined to be surprised, or distressed, or mystified, or elated, at anything his sister-in-law might have done or have failed to do. Mrs. Ludlow’s feelings were various. At one moment she thought it would be so natural for Isabel to come home and take a house in New York—the Rossiters’, for instance, which had an elegant conservatory, and was just around the corner from her own; at another she could not conceal her surprise at the girl’s not marrying some gentleman of rank in one of the foreign countries. On the whole, as I have said, she was rather disappointed. She had taken more satisfaction in Isabel’s accession of fortune than if the money had been left to herself! it had seemed to her to offer just the proper setting for her sister’s slender but eminent figure. Isabel had developed less, however, than Lily had thought likely—development, to Lily’s understanding, being some-how mysteriously connected with morning-calls and evening-parties. Intellectually, doubtless, she had made immense strides; but she appeared to have achieved few of those social conquests of which Mrs. Ludlow had expected to admire the trophies. Lily’s conception of such achievements was extremely vague; but this was exactly what she had expected of Isabel—to give it form and body. Isabel could have done as well as she had done in New York; and Mrs. Ludlow appealed to her husband to know whether there was any privilege that she enjoyed in Europe which the society of that city might not offer her. We know, ourselves, that Isabel had made conquests—whether inferior or not to those she might have effected in her native land, it would be a delicate matter to decide, and it is not altogether with a feeling of complacency that I again mention that she had not made these honourable victories public. She had not told her sister the history of Lord Warburton, nor had she given her a hint of Mr. Osmond’s state of mind; and she had no better reason for her silence than that she didn’t wish to speak. It entertained her more to say nothing, and she had no idea of asking poor Lily’s advice. But Lily knew nothing of these rich mysteries, and it is no wonder, therefore, that she pronounced her sister’s career in Europe rather dull—an impression confirmed by the fact that Isabel’s silence about Mr. Osmond, for instance was in direct proportion to the frequency with which he occupied her thoughts. As this happened very often, it sometimes appeared to Mrs. Ludlow that her sister was really losing her gaiety. So very strange a result of so exhilarating an incident as inheriting a fortune was of course perplexing to the cheerful Lily; it added to her general sense that Isabel was not at all like other people.      1   
  Isabel’s gaiety, however—superficially speaking, at least—exhibited itself rather more after her sister had gone home. She could imagine something more poetic than spending the winter in Paris—Paris was like smart, neat prose—and her frequent correspondence with Madame Merle did much to stimulate such fancies. She had never had a keener sense of freedom, of the absolute boldness and wantonness of liberty, than when she turned away from the platform at the Euston station, on one of the latter days of November, after the departure of the train which was to convey poor Lily, her husband, and her children, to their ship at Liverpool. It had been good for her to have them with her; she was very conscious of that; she was very observant, as we know, of what was good for her, and her effort was constantly to find something that was good enough. To profit by the present advantage till the latest moment, she had made the journey from Paris with the unenvied travellers. She would have accompanied them to Liverpool as well, only Edmund Ludlow had asked her, as a favour, not to do so; it made Lily so fidgety, and she asked such impossible questions. Isabel watched the train move away; she kissed her hand to the elder of her small nephews, a demonstrative child who leaned dangerously far out of the window of the carriage and made separation an occasion of violent hilarity, and then she walked back into the foggy London street. The world lay before her—she could do whatever she chose. There was something exciting in the feeling, but for the present her choice was tolerably discreet; she chose simply to walk back from Euston Square to her hotel. The early dusk of a November afternoon had already closed in; the street-lamps, in the thick, brown air, looked weak and red; our young lady was unattended, and Euston Square was a long way from Piccadilly. But Isabel performed the journey with a positive enjoyment of its dangers, and lost her way almost on purpose, in order to get more sensations, so that she was disappointed when an obliging policeman easily set her right again. She was so fond of the spectacle of human life that she enjoyed even the aspect of gathering dusk in the London streets—the moving crowds, the hurrying cabs, the lighted shops, the flaring stalls, the dark, shining dampness of everything. That evening, at her hotel, she wrote to Madame Merle that she should start in a day or two for Rome. She made her way down to Rome without touching at Florence—having gone first to Venice and then proceeded southward by Ancona. She accomplished this journey without other assistance than that of her servant, for her natural protectors were not now on the ground. Ralph Touchett was spending the winter at Corfu, and Miss Stackpole, in the September previous, had been recalled to America by a telegram from the Interviewer. This journal offered its brilliant correspondent a fresher field for her talents than the mouldering cities of Europe, and Henrietta was cheered on her way by a promise from Mr. Bantling that he would soon come over and see her. Isabel wrote to Mrs. Touchett to apologise for not coming just then to Florence, and her aunt replied characteristically enough. Apologies, Mrs. Touchett intimated, were of no more use than soap-bubbles, and she herself never dealt in such articles. One either did the thing or one didn’t, and what one would have done belonged to the sphere of the irrelevant, like the idea of a future life or the origin of things. Her letter was frank, but (a rare case with Mrs. Touchett) it was not so frank as it seemed. She easily for-gave her niece for not stopping at Florence, because she thought it was a sign that there was nothing going on with Gilbert Osmond. She watched, of course, to see whether Mr. Osmond would now go to Rome, and took some comfort in learning that he was not guilty of an absence. Isabel, on her side, had not been a fortnight in Rome before she proposed to Madame Merle that they should make a little pilgrimage to the East. Madame Merle remarked that her friend was restless, but she added that she herself had always been consumed with a desire to visit Athens and Constantinople. The two ladies accordingly embarked on this expedition, and spent three months in Greece, in Turkey, in Egypt. Isabel found much to interest her in these countries, though Madame Merle continued to remark that even among the most classic sites, the scenes most calculated to suggest repose and reflection, her restlessness prevailed. Isabel travelled rapidly, eagerly, audaciously; she was like a thirsty person draining cup after cup. Madame Merle, for the present, was a most efficient duenna. It was on Isabel’s invitation she had come, and she imparted all necessary dignity to the girl’s uncountenanced condition. She played her part with the sagacity that might have been expected of her; she effaced herself, she accepted the position of a companion whose expenses were profusely paid. The situation, however, had no hardships, and people who met this graceful pair on their travels would not have been able to tell you which was the patroness and which the client. To say that Madame Merle improved on acquaintance would misrepresent the impression she made upon Isabel, who had thought her from the first a perfectly enlightened woman. At the end of an intimacy of three months Isabel felt that she knew her better; her character had revealed itself, and Madame Merle had also at last redeemed her promise of relating her history from her own point of view—a consummation the more desirable as Isabel had already heard it related from the point of view of others. This history was so sad a one (in so far as it concerned the late M. Merle, an adventurer of the lowest class, who had taken advantage, years before, of her youth, and of an inexperience in which those who knew her only now would find it difficult to believe); it abounded so in startling and lamentable incidents, that Isabel wondered the poor lady had kept so much of her freshness, her interest in life. Into this freshness of Madame Merle she obtained a considerable insight; she saw that it was, after all, a tolerably artificial bloom. Isabel liked her as much as ever, but there was a certain corner of the curtain t never was lifted; it was as if Madame Merle had remained after all a foreigner.      2   
  She had once said that she came from a distance, that she belonged to the old world, and Isabel never lost the impression that she was the product of a different clime from her own; that she had grown up under other stars. Isabel believed that at bottom she had a different morality. Of course the morality of civilised persons has always much in common; but Isabel suspected that her friend had esoteric views. She believed, with the presumption of youth, that a morality which differed from her own must be inferior to it; and this conviction was an aid to detecting an occasional flash of cruelty, an occasional lapse from candour, in the conversation of a woman who had raised delicate kindness to an art, and whose nature was too large for the narrow ways of deception. Her conception of human motives was different from Isabel’s, and there were several in her list of which our heroine had not even heard. She had not heard of everything, that was very plain; and there were evidently things in the world of which it was not advantageous to hear. Once or twice Isabel had a sort of fright, but the reader will be amused at the cause of it. Madame Merle, as we know, comprehended, responded sympathised, with wonderful readiness; yet it had nevertheless happened that her young friend mentally exclaimed—“Heaven forgive her, she doesn’t understand me!” Absurd as it may seem, this discovery operated as a shock; it left Isabel with a vague horror, in which there was even an element of foreboding. The horror of course subsided, in the light of some sudden proof of Madame Merle’s remarkable intelligence; but it left a sort of high-water-mark in the development of this delightful intimacy. Madame Merle had once said that, in her belief, when a friendship ceased to grow, it immediately began to decline—there was no point of equilibrium between liking a person more and liking him less. A stationary affection, in other words, was impossible—it must move one way or the other. Without estimating the value of this doctrine, I may say that if Isabel’s imagination, which had hitherto been so actively engaged on her friend’s behalf, began at last to languish, she enjoyed her society not a particle less than before. If their friendship had declined, it had declined to a very comfortable level. The truth is that in these days the girl had other uses for her imagination, which was better occupied than it had ever been. I do not allude to the impulse it received as she gazed at the Pyramids in the course of an excursion from Cairo, or as she stood among the broken columns of the Acropolis and fixed her eyes upon the point designated to her as the Strait of Salamis; deep and memorable as these emotions had been. She came back by the last of March from Egypt and Greece, and made another stay in Rome. A few days after her arrival Gilbert Osmond came down from Florence and remained three weeks, during which the fact of her being with his old friend, Madame Merle, in whose house she had gone to lodge, made it virtually inevitable that he should see her every day. When the last of April came she wrote to Mrs. Touchett that she should now be very happy to accept an invitation given long before, and went to pay a visit to the Palazzo Crescentini, Madame Merle on this occasion remaining in Rome. Isabel found her aunt alone; her cousin was still at Corfu. Ralph, however, was expected in Florence from day to day, and Isabel, who had not seen him for upwards of a year, was prepared to give him the most affectionate welcome.

Chapter XXXII   
     
IT was not of him, nevertheless, that she was thinking while she stood at the window, where we found her a while ago, and it was not of any of the matters that I have just rapidly sketched. She was not thinking of the past, but of the future; of the immediate, impending hour. She had reason to expect a scene, and she was not fond of scenes. She was not asking herself what she should say to her visitor; this question had already been answered. What he would say to her—that was the interesting speculation. It could be nothing agreeable; Isabel was convinced of this, and the conviction had something to do with her being rather paler than usual. For the rest, however, she wore her natural brightness of aspect; even deep grief, with this vivid young lady, would have had a certain soft effulgence. She had laid aside her mourning, but she was still very simply dressed, and as she felt a good deal older than she had done a year before, it is probable that to a certain extent she looked so. She was not left indefinitely to her apprehensions, for the servant at last came in and presented her a card.      1   
  “Let the gentleman come in,” said Isabel, who continued to gaze out of the window after the footman had retired. It was only when she had heard the door close behind the person who presently entered that she looked round.      2   
  Caspar Goodwood stood there—stood and received a moment, from head to foot, the bright, dry gaze with which she rather withheld than offered a greeting. Whether on his side Mr. Goodwood felt himself older than on the first occasion of our meeting him, is a point which we shall perhaps presently ascertain; let me say meanwhile that to Isabel’s critical glance he showed nothing of the injury of time. Straight, strong, and fresh, there was nothing in his appearance that spoke positively either of youth or of age; he looked too deliberate, too serious to be young, and too eager, too active to be old. Old he would never be, and this would serve as a compensation for his never having known the age of chubbiness. Isabel perceived that his jaw had quite the same voluntary look that it had worn in earlier days; but she was prepared to admit that such a moment as the present was not a time for relaxation. He had the air of a man who had travelled hard; he said nothing at first, as if he had been out of breath. This gave Isabel time to make a reflection. “Poor fellow,” she mentally murmured, “what great things he is capable of, and what a pity that he should waste his splendid force! What a pity, too, that one can’t satisfy everybody!” It gave her time to do more—to say at the end of a minute,      3   
  “I can’t tell you how I hoped that you wouldn’t come.”      4   
  “I have no doubt of that.” And Caspar Goodwood looked about him for a seat. Not only had he come, but he meant to stay a little.      5   
  “You must be very tired,” said Isabel, seating herself, generously, as she thought, to give him his opportunity.      6   
  “No, I am not at all tired. Did you ever knew me to be tired?”      7   
  “Never; I wish I had. When did you arrive here?”      8   
  “Last night, very late; in a kind of a snail-train they call the express. These Italian trains go at about the rate of an American funeral.”      9   
  “That is in keeping—you must have felt as if you were coming to a funeral,” Isabel said, forcing a smile, in order to offer such encouragement as she might to an easy treatment of their situation. She had reasoned out the matter elaborately; she had made it perfectly clear that she broke no faith, that she falsified no contract; but for all this she was afraid of him. She was ashamed of her fear; but she was devoutly thankful there was nothing else to be ashamed of.     10   
  He looked at her with his stiff persistency—a persistency in which there was almost a want of tact; especially as there was a dull dark beam in his eye which rested on her almost like a physical weight.     11   
  “No, I didn’t feel that; because I couldn’t think of you as dead. I wish I could!” said Caspar Goodwood, plainly.     12   
  “I thank you immensely.”     13   
  “I would rather think of you as dead than as married to another man.”     14   
  “That is very selfish of you!” Isabel cried, with the ardour of a real conviction. “If you are not happy yourself, others have a right to be.”     15   
  “Very likely it is selfish; but I don’t in the least mind your saying so. I don’t mind anything you can say now—I don’t feel it. The cruellest things you could think of would be mere pin-pricks. After what you have done I shall never feel anything. I mean anything but that. That I shall feel all my life.”     16   
  Mr. Goodwood made these detached assertions with a sort of dry deliberateness, in his hard, slow American tone, which flung no atmospheric colour over propositions intrinsically crude. The tone made Isabel angry rather than touched her; but her anger perhaps was fortunate, inasmuch as it gave her a further reason for controlling herself. It was under the pressure of this control that she said, after a little, irrelevantly, by way of answer to Mr. Goodwood’s speech—“When did you leave New York?”     17   
  He threw up his head a moment, as if he were calculating. “Seventeen days ago.”     18   
  “You must have travelled fast in spite of your slow trains.”     19   
  “I came as fast as I could. I would have come five days ago if I had been able.”     20   
  “It wouldn’t have made any difference, Mr. Goodwood,” said Isabel, smiling.     21   
  “Not to you—no. But to me.”     22   
  “You gain nothing that I see.”     23   
  “That is for me to judge!”     24   
  “Of course. To me it seems that you only torment yourself.” And then, to change the subject, Isabel asked him if he had seen Henrietta Stackpole.     25   
  He looked as if he had not come from Boston to Florence to talk about Henrietta Stackpole; but he answered distinctly enough, that this young lady had come to see him just before he left America.     26   
  “She came to see you?”     27   
  “Yes, she was in Boston, and she called at my office. It was the day I got your letter.”     28   
  “Did you tell her?” Isabel asked, with a certain anxiety.     29   
  “Oh no,” said Caspar Goodwood, simply; “I didn’t want to. She will hear it soon enough; she hears everything.”     30   
  “I shall write to her; and then she will write to me and scold me,” Isabel declared, trying to smile again.     31   
  Caspar, however, remained sternly grave. “I guess she’ll come out,” he said.     32   
  “On purpose to scold me?”     33   
  “I don’t know. She seemed to think she had not seen Europe thoroughly.”     34   
  “I am glad you tell me that,” Isabel said. “I must prepare for her.”     35   
  Mr. Goodwood fixed his eyes for a moment on the floor; then at last, raising them—“Does she know Mr. Osmond?” he asked.     36   
  “A little. And she doesn’t like him. But of course I don’t marry to please Henrietta,” Isabel added.     37   
  It would have been better for poor Caspar if she had tried a little more to gratify Miss Stackpole; but he did not say so; he only asked, presently, when her marriage would take place.     38   
  “I don’t know yet. I can only say it will be soon. I have told no one but yourself and one other person—an old friend of Mr. Osmond’s.”     39   
  “Is it a marriage your friends won’t like?” Caspar Goodwood asked.     40   
  “I really haven’t an idea. As I say, I don’t marry for my friends.”     41   
  He went on, making no exclamation, no comment, only asking questions.     42   
  “What is Mr. Osmond?”     43   
  “What is he? Nothing at all but a very good man. He is not in business,” said Isabel. “He is not rich; he is not known for anything in particular.”     44   
  She disliked Mr. Goodwood’s questions, but she said to herself that she owed it to him to satisfy him as far as possible.     45   
  The satisfaction poor Caspar exhibited was certainly small; he sat very upright, gazing at her.     46   
  “Where does he come from?” he went on.     47   
  “From nowhere. He has spent most of his life in Italy.”     48   
  “You said in your letter that he was an American. Hasn’t he a native place?”     49   
  “Yes, but he has forgotten it. He left it as a small boy.”     50   
  “Has he never gone back?”     51   
  “Why should he go back?” Isabel asked, flushing a little, and defensively. “He has no profession.”     52   
  “He might have gone back for his pleasure. Doesn’t he like the United States?”     53   
  “He doesn’t know them. Then he is very simple—he contents himself with Italy.”     54   
  “With Italy and with you,” said Mr. Goodwood, with gloomy plainness, and no appearance of trying to make an epigram. “What has he ever done?” he added, abruptly.     55   
  “That I should marry him? Nothing at all,” Isabel replied, with a smile that had gradually become a trifle defiant. “ If he had done great things would you forgive me any better? Give me up, Mr. Goodwood; I am marrying a nonentity. Don’t try to take an interest in him; you can’t.”     56   
  “I can’t appreciate him; that’s what you mean. And you don’t mean in the least that he is a nonentity. You think he is a great man, though no one else thinks so.”     57   
  Isabel’s colour deepened; she thought this very clever of her companion, and it was certainly a proof of the clairvoyance of such a feeling as his.     58   
  “Why do you always come back to what others think? I can’t discuss Mr. Osmond with you.”     59   
  “Of course not,” said Caspar, reasonably.     60   
  And he sat there with his air of stiff helplessness, as if not only this were true, but there were nothing else that they might discuss.     61   
  “You see how little you gain,” Isabel broke out—“how little comfort or satisfaction I can give you.”     62   
  “I didn’t expect you to give me much.”     63   
  “I don’t understand, then, why you came.”     64   
  “I came because I wanted to see you once more—as you are.”     65   
  “I appreciate that; but if you had waited a while, sooner or later we should have been sure to meet, and our meeting would have been pleasanter for each of us than this.”     66   
  “Waited till after you are married? That is just what I didn’t want to do. You will be different then.”     67   
  “Not very. I shall still be a great friend of yours. You will see.”     68   
  “That will make it all the worse,” said Mr. Goodwood, grimly.     69   
  “Ah, you are unaccommodating! I can’t promise to dislike you, in order to help you to resign yourself.”     70   
  “I shouldn’t care if you did!”     71   
  Isabel got up, with a movement of repressed impatience, and walked to the window, where she remained a moment, looking out. When she turned round, her visitor was still motionless in his place. She came towards him again and stopped, resting her hand on the back of the chair she had just quitted.     72   
  “Do you mean you came simply to look at me? That’s better for you, perhaps, than for me.”     73   
  “I wished to hear the sound of your voice,” said Caspar.     74   
  “You have heard it, and you see it says nothing very sweet.”     75   
  “It gives me pleasure, all the same.”     76   
  And with this he got up.     77   
  She had felt pain and displeasure when she received that morning the note in which he told her that he was in Florence, and, with her permission, would come within an hour to see her. She had been vexed and distressed, though she had sent back word by his messenger that he might come when he would. She had not been better pleased when she saw him; his being there at all was so full of implication. It implied things she could never assent to—rights, reproaches, remonstrance, rebuke, the expectation of making her change her purpose. These things, however, if implied, had not been expressed; and now our young lady, strangely enough, began to resent her visitor’s remarkable self-control.     78   
  There was a dumb misery about him which irritated her; there was a manly staying of his hand which made her heart beat faster. She felt her agitation rising, and she said to herself that she was as angry as a woman who had been in the wrong. She was not in the wrong; she had fortunately not that bitterness to swallow; but, all the same, she wished he would denounce her a little. She had wished his visit would be short; it had no purpose, no propriety; yet now that he seemed to be turning away, she felt a sudden horror of his leaving her without uttering a word that would give her an opportunity to defend herself more than she had done in writing to him a month before, in a few carefully chosen words, to announce her engagement. If she were not in the wrong, however, why should she desire to defend herself? It was an excess of generosity on Isabel’s part to desire that Mr. Goodwood should be angry.     79   
  If he had not held himself hard it might have made him so to hear the tone in which she suddenly exclaimed, as if she were accusing him of having accused her,     80   
  “I have not deceived you! I was perfectly free!”     81   
  “Yes, I know that,” said Caspar.     82   
  “I gave you full warning that I would do as I chose.”     83   
  “You said you would probably never marry, and you said it so positively that I pretty well believed it.”     84   
  Isabel was silent an instant.     85   
  “No one can be more surprised than myself at my present intention.”     86   
  “You told me that if I heard you were engaged, I was not to believe it,” Caspar went on. “I heard it twenty days ago from yourself, but I remembered what you had said. I thought there might be some mistake, and that is partly why I came.”     87   
  “If you wish me to repeat it by word of mouth, that is soon done. There is no mistake at all.”     88   
  “I saw that as soon as I came into the room.”     89   
  “What good would it do you that I shouldn’t marry?” Isabel asked, with a certain fierceness.     90   
  “I should like it better than this.”     91   
  “You are very selfish, as I said before.”     92   
  “I know that. I am selfish as iron.”     93   
  “Even iron sometimes melts. If you will be reasonable I will see you again.”     94   
  “Don’t you call me reasonable now?”     95   
  “I don’t know what to say to you,” she answered, with sudden humility.     96   
  “I sha’n’t trouble you for a long time,” the young man went on. He made a step towards the door, but he stopped. “ Another reason why I came was that I wanted to hear what you would say in explanation of your having changed your mind.”     97   
  Isabel’s humbleness as suddenly deserted her.     98   
  “In explanation? Do you think I am bound to explain?”     99   
  Caspar gave her one of his long dumb looks.    100   
  “You were very positive. I did believe it.”    101   
  “So did I. Do you think I could explain if I would?”    102   
  “No, I suppose not. Well,” he added, “I have done what I wished. I have seen you.”    103   
  “How little you make of these terrible journeys,” Isabel murmured.    104   
  “If you are afraid I am tired, you may be at your ease about that.” He turned away, this time in earnest, and no handshake, no sign of parting, was exchanged between them. At the door he stopped, with his hand on the knob. “ I shall leave Florence to-morrow,” he said.    105   
  “I am delighted to hear it!” she answered, passionately. And he went out. Five minutes after he had gone she burst into tears.

Chapter XXXIII   
     
HER fit of weeping, however, was of brief duration, and the signs of it had vanished when, an hour later, she broke the news to her aunt. I use this expression because she had been sure Mrs. Touchett would not be pleased; Isabel had only waited to tell her till she had seen Mr. Goodwood. She had an odd impression that it would not be honourable to make the fact public before she should have heard what Mr. Goodwood would say about it. He had said rather less than she expected, and she now had a somewhat angry sense of having lost time. But she would lose no more; she waited till Mrs. Touchett came into the drawing-room before the mid-day breakfast, and then she said to her—      1   
  “Aunt Lydia, I have something to tell you.”      2   
  Mrs. Touchett gave a little jump and looked at the girl almost fiercely.      3   
  “You needn’t tell me; I know what it is.”      4   
  “I don’t know how you know.”      5   
  “The same way that I know when the window is open—by feeling a draught. You are going to marry that man.”      6   
  “What man do you mean?” Isabel inquired, with great dignity.      7   
  “Madame Merle’s friend—Mr. Osmond.”      8   
  “I don’t know why you call him Madame Merle’s friend. Is that the principal thing he is known by?”      9   
  “If he is not her friend he ought to be—after what she has done for him!” cried Mrs. Touchett. “I shouldn’t have expected it of her; I am disappointed.”     10   
  “If you mean that Madame Merle has had anything to do with my engagement you are greatly mistaken,” Isabel declared, with a sort of ardent coldness.     11   
  “You mean that your attractions were sufficient, without the gentleman being urged? You are quite right. They are immense, your attractions, and he would never have presumed to think of you if she had not put him up to it. He has a very good opinion of himself, but he was not a man to take trouble. Madame Merle took the trouble for him.”     12   
  “He has taken a great deal for himself!” cried Isabel, with a voluntary laugh.     13   
  Mrs. Touchett gave a sharp nod.     14   
  “I think he must, after all, to have made you like him.”     15   
  “I thought you liked him yourself.”     16   
  “I did, and that is why I am angry with him.”     17   
  “Be angry with me, not with him,” said the girl.     18   
  “Oh, I am always angry with you; that’s no satisfaction! Was it for this that you refused Lord Warburton?”     19   
  “Please don’t go back to that. Why shouldn’t I like Mr. Osmond, since you did?”     20   
  “I never wanted to marry him; there is nothing of him.”     21   
  “Then he can’t hurt me,” said Isabel.     22   
  “Do you think you are going to be happy? No one is happy.”     23   
  “I shall set the fashion then. What does one marry for?”     24   
  “What you will marry for, heaven only knows. People usually marry as they go into partnership—to set up a house. But in your partnership you will bring everything.”     25   
  “Is it that Mr. Osmond is not rich? Is that what you are talking about?” Isabel asked.     26   
  “He has no money; he has no name; he has no importance. I value such things and I have the courage to say it; I think they are very precious. Many other people think the same, and they show it. But they give some other reason!”     27   
  Isabel hesitated a little.     28   
  “I think I value everything that is valuable. I care very much for money, and that is why I wish Mr. Osmond to have some.”     29   
  “Give it to him, then; but marry some one else.”     30   
  “His name is good enough for me,” the girl went on. “It’s a very pretty name. Have I such a fine one myself?”     31   
  “All the more reason you should improve on it. There are only a dozen American names. Do you marry him out of charity?”     32   
  “It was my duty to tell you, Aunt Lydia, but I don’t think it is my duty to explain to you. Even if it were, I shouldn’t be able. So please don’t remonstrate; in talking about it you have me at a disadvantage. I can’t talk about it.”     33   
  “I don’t remonstrate, I simply answer you; I must give some sign of intelligence. I saw it coming, and I said nothing. I never meddle.”     34   
  “You never do, and I am greatly obliged to you. You have been very considerate.”     35   
  “It was not considerate—it was convenient,” said Mrs. Touchett. “But I shall talk to Madame Merle.”     36   
  “I don’t see why you keep bringing her in. She has been a very good friend to me.”     37   
  “Possibly; but she has been a poor one to me.”     38   
  “What has she done to you?”     39   
  “She has deceived me. She had as good as promised me to prevent your engagement.”     40   
  “She couldn’t have prevented it.”     41   
  “She can do anything; that is what I have always liked her for. I knew she could play any part; but I understood that she played them one by one. I didn’t understand that she would play two at the same time.”     42   
  “I don’t know what part she may have played to you,” Isabel said; “that is between yourselves. To me she has been honest, and kind, and devoted.”     43   
  “Devoted, of course; she wished you to marry her candidate. She told me that she was watching you only in order to interpose.”     44   
  “She said that to please you,” the girl answered; conscious, however, of the inadequacy of the explanation.     45   
  “To please me by deceiving me? She knows me better. Am I pleased to-day?”     46   
  “I don’t think you are ever much pleased,” Isabel was obliged to reply. “If Madame Merle knew you would learn the truth, what had she to gain by insincerity?”     47   
  “She gained time, as you see. While I waited for her to interfere you were marching away, and she was really beating the drum.”     48   
  “That is very well. But by your own admission you saw I was marching, and even if she had given the alarm you would not have tried to stop me.”     49   
  “No, but some one else would.”     50   
  “Whom do you mean?” Isabel asked, looking very hard at her aunt.     51   
  Mrs. Touchett’s little bright eyes, active as they usually were, sustained her gaze rather than returned it.     52   
  “Would you have listened to Ralph?”     53   
  “Not if he had abused Mr. Osmond.”     54   
  “Ralph doesn’t abuse people; you know that perfectly. He cares very much for you.”     55   
  “I know he does,” said Isabel; “and I shall feel the value of it now, for he knows that whatever I do I do with reason.”     56   
  “He never believed you would do this. I told him you were capable of it, and he argued the other way.”     57   
  “He did it for the sake of argument,” said Isabel, smiling. “You don’t accuse him of having deceived you; why should you accuse Madame Merle?”     58   
  “He never pretended he would prevent it.”     59   
  “I am glad of that!” cried the girl, gaily. “I wish very much,” she presently added, “that when he comes you would tell him first of my engagement.”     60   
  “Of course I will mention it,” said Mrs. Touchett. “I will say nothing more to you about it, but I give you notice I will talk to others.”     61   
  “That’s as you please. I only meant that it is rather better the announcement should come from you than from me.”     62   
  “I quite agree with you; it is much more proper!”     63   
  And on this the two ladies went to breakfast, where Mrs. Touchett was as good as her word, and made no allusion to Gilbert Osmond. After an interval of silence, however, she asked her companion from whom she had received a visit an hour before.     64   
  “From an old friend—an American gentleman,” Isabel said, with a colour in her cheek.     65   
  “An American, of course. It is only an American that calls at ten o’clock in the morning.”     66   
  “It was half-past ten; he was in a great hurry; he goes away this evening.”     67   
  “Couldn’t he have come yesterday, at the usual time?”     68   
  “He only arrived last night.”     69   
  “He spends but twenty-four hours in Florence?” Mrs. Touchett cried. “He’s an American truly.”     70   
  “He is indeed,” said Isabel, thinking with a perverse admiration of what Caspar Goodwood had done for her.     71   
  Two days afterward Ralph arrived; but though Isabel was sure that Mrs. Touchett had lost no time in telling him the news, he betrayed at first no knowledge of the great fact. Their first talk was naturally about his health; Isabel had many questions to ask about Corfu. She had been shocked by his appearance when he came into the room; she had forgotten how ill he looked. In spite of Corfu, he looked very ill to-day, and Isabel wondered whether he were really worse or whether she was simply disaccustomed to living with an invalid. Poor Ralph grew no handsomer as he advanced in life, and the now apparently complete loss of his health had done little to mitigate the natural oddity of his person. His face wore its pleasant perpetual smile, which perhaps suggested wit rather than achieved it; his thin whisker languished upon a lean cheek; the exorbitant curve of his nose defined itself more sharply. Lean he was altogether; lean and long and loose-jointed; an accidental cohesion of relaxed angles. His brown velvet jacket had become perennial; his hands had fixed themselves in his pockets; he shambled, and stumbled, and shuffled, in a manner that denoted great physical helplessness. It was perhaps this whimsical gait that helped to mark his character more than ever as that of the humorous invalid—the invalid for whom even his own disabilities are part of the general joke. They might well indeed with Ralph have been the chief cause of the want of seriousness with which he appeared to regard a world in which the reason for his own presence was past finding out. Isabel had grown fond of his ugliness; his awkwardness had become dear to her. These things were endeared by association; they struck her as the conditions of his being so charming. Ralph was so charming that her sense of his being ill had hitherto had a sort of comfort in it; the state of his health had seemed not a limitation, but a kind of intellectual advantage; it absolved him from all professional and official emotions and left him the luxury of being simply personal. This personality of Ralph’s was delightful; it had none of the staleness of disease; it was always easy and fresh and genial. Such had been the girl’s impression of her cousin; and when she had pitied him it was only on reflection. As she reflected a good deal she had given him a certain amount of compassion; but Isabel always had a dread of wasting compassion—a precious article, worth more to the giver than to any one else.     72   
  Now, however, it took no great ingenuity to discover that poor Ralph’s tenure of life was less elastic than it should be. He was a dear, bright, generous fellow; he had all the illumination of wisdom and none of its pedantry, and yet he was dying. Isabel said to herself that life was certainly hard for some people, and she felt a delicate glow of shame as she thought how easy it now promised to become for herself. She was prepared to learn that Ralph was not pleased with her engagement; but she was not prepared, in spite of her affection for her cousin, to let this fact spoil the situation. She was not even prepared—or so she thought—to resent his want of sympathy; for it would be his privilege—it would be indeed his natural line—to find fault with any step she might take toward marriage. One’s cousin always pretended to hate one’s husband; that was traditional, classical; it was a part of one’s cousin’s always pretending to adore one. Ralph was nothing if not critical; and though she would certainly, other things being equal, have been as glad to marry to please Ralph as to please any one, it would be absurd to think it important that her choice should square with his views. What were his views, after all? He had pretended to think she had better marry Lord Warburton; but this was only because she had refused that excellent man. If she had accepted him Ralph would certainly have taken another tone; he always took the opposite one. You could criticise any marriage; it was the essence of a marriage to be open to criticism. How well she herself, if she would only give her mind to it, might criticise this union of her own! She had other employment, however, and Ralph was welcome to relieve her of the care. Isabel was prepared to be wonderfully good-humoured.     73   
  He must have seen that, and this made it the more odd that he should say nothing. After three days had elapsed without his speaking, Isabel become impatient; dislike it as he would he might at least go through the form. We who know more about poor Ralph than his cousin, may easily believe that during the hours that followed his arrival at the Palazzo Crescentini, he had privately gone through many forms. His mother had literally greeted him with the great news, which was even more sensibly chilling than Mrs. Touchett’s maternal kiss. Ralph was shocked and humiliated; his calculations had been false, and his cousin was lost. He drifted about the house like a rudderless vessel in a rocky stream, or sat in the garden of the palace in a great cane chair, with his long legs extended, his head thrown back, and his hat pulled over his eyes. He felt cold about the heart; he had never liked anything less. What could he do, what could he say? If Isabel were irreclaimable, could he pretend to like it? To attempt to reclaim her was permissible only if the attempt should succeed. To try to persuade her that the man to whom she had pledged her faith was a humbug would be decently discreet only in the event of her being persuaded. Otherwise he should simply have damned himself. It cost him an equal effort to speak his thought and to dissemble; he could neither assent with sincerity nor protest with hope. Meanwhile he knew—or rather he supposed—that the affianced pair were daily renewing their mutual vows. Osmond, at this moment, showed himself little at the Palazzo Crescentini; but Isabel met him every day elsewhere, as she was free to do after their engagement had been made public. She had taken a carriage by the month, so as not to be indebted to her aunt for the means of pursuing a course of which Mrs. Touchett disapproved, and she drove in the morning to the Cascine. This suburban wilderness, during the early hours, was void of all intruders, and our young lady, joined by her lover in its quietest part, strolled with him a while in the grey Italian shade and listened to the nightingales.

Chapter XXXIV   
     
ONE morning, on her return from her drive, some half-hour before luncheon, she quitted her vehicle in the court of the palace, and instead of ascending the great staircase, crossed the court, passed beneath another archway, and entered the garden. A sweeter spot, at this moment, could not have been imagined. The stillness of noontide hung over it; the warm shade was motionless, and the hot light made it pleasant. Ralph was sitting there in the clear gloom, at the base of a statue of Terpsichore—a dancing nymph with taper fingers and inflated draperies, in the manner of Bernini; the extreme relaxation of his attitude suggested at first to Isabel that he was asleep. Her light footstep on the grass had not roused him, and before turning away she stood for a moment looking at him. During this instant he opened his eyes; upon which she sat down on a rustic chair that matched with his own. Though in her irritation she had accused him of indifference, she was not blind to the fact that he was visibly preoccupied. But she had attributed his long reveries partly to the languor of his increased weakness, partly to his being troubled about certain arrangements he had made as to the property inherited from his father—arrangements of which Mrs. Touchett disapproved, and which, as she had told Isabel, now encountered opposition from the other partners in the bank. He ought to have gone to England, his mother said, instead of coming to Florence; he had not been there for months, and he took no more interest in the bank than in the state of Patagonia.      1   
  “I am sorry I waked you,” Isabel said; “you look tired.”      2   
  “I feel tired. But I was not asleep. I was thinking of you.”      3   
  “Are you tired of that?”      4   
  “Very much so. It leads to nothing. The road is long and I never arrive.”      5   
  “What do you wish to arrive at?” Isabel said, closing her parasol.      6   
  “At the point of expressing to myself properly what I think of your engagement.”      7   
  “Don’t think too much of it,” said Isabel, lightly.      8   
  “Do you mean that it’s none of my business?”      9   
  “Beyond a certain point, yes.”     10   
  “That’s the point I was to fix. I had an idea that you have found me wanting in good manners; I have never congratulated you.”     11   
  “Of course I have noticed that; I wondered why you were silent.”     12   
  “There have been a good many reasons; I will tell you now,” said Ralph.     13   
  He pulled off his hat and laid it on the ground; then he sat looking at her. He leaned back, with his head against the marble pedestal of Terpsichore, his arms dropped on either side of him, his hands laid upon the sides of his wide chair. He looked awkward, uncomfortable; he hesitated for a long time. Isabel said nothing; when people were embarrassed she was usually sorry for them; but she was determined not to help Ralph to utter a word that should not be to the honour of her ingenious purpose.     14   
  “I think I have hardly got over my surprise,” he said at last. “You were the last person I expected to see caught.”     15   
  “I don’t know why you call it caught.”     16   
  “Because you are going to be put into a cage.”     17   
  “If I like my cage, that needn’t trouble you,” said Isabel.     18   
  “That’s what I wonder at; that’s what I have been thinking of.”     19   
  “If you have been thinking, you may imagine how I have thought! I am satisfied that I am doing well.”     20   
  “You must have changed immensely. A year ago you valued your liberty beyond everything. You wanted only to see life.”     21   
  “I have seen it,” said Isabel. “It doesn’t seem to me so charming.”     22   
  “I don’t pretend it is; only I had an idea that you took a genial view of it and wanted to survey the whole field.”     23   
  “I have seen that one can’t do that. One must choose a corner and cultivate that.”     24   
  “That’s what I think. And one must choose a good corner. I had no idea, all winter, while I read your delightful letters, that you were choosing. You said nothing about it, and your silence put me off my guard.”     25   
  “It was not a matter I was likely to write to you about. Besides, I knew nothing of the future. It has all come lately. If you had been on your guard, however,” Isabel asked, “what would you have done?”     26   
  “I should have said—‘Wait a little longer.’”     27   
  “Wait for what?”     28   
  “Well, for a little more light,” said Ralph, with a rather absurd smile, while his hands found their way into his pockets.     29   
  “Where should my light have come from? From you?”     30   
  “I might have struck a spark or two!”     31   
  Isabel had drawn off her gloves; she smoothed them out as they lay upon her knee. The gentleness of this movement was accidental, for her expression was not conciliatory.     32   
  “You are beating about the bush, Ralph. You wish to say that you don’t like Mr. Osmond, and yet you are afraid.”     33   
  “I am afraid of you, not of him. If you marry him it won’t be a nice thing to have said.”     34   
  “If I marry him! Have you had any expectation of dissuading me?”     35   
  “Of course that seems to you too fatuous.”     36   
  “No,” said Isabel, after a little; “it seems to me touching.”     37   
  “That’s the same thing. It makes me so ridiculous that you pity me.”     38   
  Isabel stroked out her long gloves again.     39   
  “I know you have a great affection for me. I can’t get rid of that.”     40   
  “For heaven’s sake don’t try. Keep that well in sight. It will convince you how intensely I want you to do well.”     41   
  “And how little you trust me!”     42   
  There was a moment’s silence; the warm noon-tide seemed to listen.     43   
  “I trust you, but I don’t trust him,” said Ralph.     44   
  Isabel raised her eyes and gave him a wide, deep look.     45   
  “You have said it now; you will suffer for it.”     46   
  “Not if you are just.”     47   
  “I am very just,” said Isabel. “What better proof of it can there be than that I am not angry with you? I don’t know what is the matter with me, but I am not. I was when you began, but it has passed away. Perhaps I ought to be angry, but Mr. Osmond wouldn’t think so. He wants me to know everything; that’s what I like him for. You have nothing to gain, I know that. I have never been so nice to you, as a girl, that you should have much reason for wishing me to remain one. You give very good advice; you have often done so. No, I am very quiet; I have always believed in your wisdom,” Isabel went on, boasting of her quietness, yet speaking with a kind of contained exaltation. It was her passionate desire to be just; it touched Ralph to the heart, affected him like a caress from a creature he had injured. He wished to interrupt, to reassure, her; for a moment he was absurdly inconsistent; he would have retracted what he had said. But she gave him no chance; she went on, having caught a glimpse, as she thought, of the heroic line, and desiring to advance in that direction. “ I see you have got some idea; I should like very much to hear it. I am sure it’s disinterested; I feel that. It seems a strange thing to argue about, and of course I ought to tell you definitely that if you expect to dissuade me you may give it up. You will not move me at all; it is too late. As you say, I am caught. Certainly it won’t be pleasant for you to remember this, but your pain will be in your own thoughts. I shall never reproach you.”     48   
  “I don’t think you ever will,” said Ralph. “It is not in the least the sort of marriage I thought you would make.”     49   
  “What sort of marriage was that, pray?”     50   
  “Well, I can hardly say. I hadn’t exactly a positive view of it, but I had a negative. I didn’t think you would marry a man like Mr. Osmond.”     51   
  “What do you know against him? You know him scarcely at all.”     52   
  “Yes,” Ralph said, “I know him very little, and I know nothing against him. But all the same I can’t help feeling that you are running a risk.”     53   
  “Marriage is always a risk, and his risk is as great as mine.”     54   
  “That’s his affair! If he is afraid, let him recede; I wish he would.”     55   
  Isabel leaned back in her chair, folded her arms, and gazed a while at her cousin.     56   
  “I don’t think I understand you,” she said at last, coldly. “I don’t know what you are talking about.”     57   
  “I thought you would marry a man of more importance.”     58   
  Cold, I say, her tone had been, but at this a colour like a flame leaped into her face.     59   
  “Of more importance to whom? It seems to me enough that one’s husband should be important to one’s self!”     60   
  Ralph blushed as well; his attitude embarrassed him. Physically speaking, he proceeded to change it; he straightened himself, then leaned forward, resting a hand on each knee. He fixed his eyes on the ground; he had an air of the most respectful deliberation.     61   
  “I will tell you in a moment what I mean,” he presently said. He felt agitated, intensely eager; now that he had opened the discussion he wished to discharge his mind. But he wished also to be superlatively gentle.     62   
  Isabel waited a little, and then she went on, with majesty.     63   
  “In everything that makes one care for people, Mr. Osmond is pre-eminent. There may be nobler natures, but I have never had the pleasure of meeting one. Mr. Osmond is the best I know; he is important enough for me.”     64   
  “I had a sort of vision of your future,” Ralph said, without answering this; “I amused myself with planning out a kind of destiny for you. There was to be nothing of this sort in it. You were not to come down so easily, so soon.”     65   
  “To come down? What strange expressions you use! Is that your description of my marriage?”     66   
  “It expresses my idea of it. You seemed to me to be soaring far up in the blue—to be sailing in the bright light, over the heads of men. Suddenly some one tosses up a faded rosebud—a missile that should never have reached you—and down you drop to the ground. It hurts me,” said Ralph, audaciously, “as if I had fallen myself!”     67   
  The look of pain and bewilderment deepened in his companion’s face.     68   
  “I don’t understand you in the least,” she repeated. “You say you amused yourself with planning out my future—I don’t understand that. Don’t amuse yourself too much, or I shall think you are doing it at my expense.”     69   
  Ralph shook his head.     70   
  “I am not afraid of your not believing that I have had great ideas for you.”     71   
  “What do you mean by my soaring and sailing?” the girl asked. “I have never moved on a higher line than I am moving on now. There is nothing higher for a girl than to marry a—a person she likes,” said poor Isabel, wandering into the didactic.     72   
  “It’s your liking the person we speak of that I venture to criticise, my dear Isabel! I should have said that the man for you would have been a more active, larger, freer sort of nature.” Ralph hesitated a moment, then he added, “I can’t get over the belief that there’s something small in Osmond.”     73   
  He had uttered these last words with a tremor of the voice; he was afraid that she would flash out again. But to his surprise she was quiet; she had the air of considering.     74   
  “Something small?” she said reflectively.     75   
  “I think he’s narrow, selfish. He takes himself so seriously!”     76   
  “He has a great respect for himself; I don’t blame him for that,” said Isabel. “It’s the proper way to respect others.”     77   
  Ralph for a moment felt almost reassured by her reasonable tone.     78   
  “Yes, but everything is relative; one ought to feel one’s relations. I don’t think Mr. Osmond does that.”     79   
  “I have chiefly to do with the relation in which he stands to me. In that he is excellent.”     80   
  “He is the incarnation of taste,” Ralph went on, thinking hard how he could best express Gilbert Osmond’s sinister attributes without putting himself in the wrong by seeming to describe him coarsely. He wished to describe him impersonally, scientifically. “He judges and measures, approves and condemns, altogether by that.”     81   
  “It is a happy thing then that his tastes should be exquisite.”     82   
  “It is exquisite, indeed, since it has led him to select you as his wife. But have you ever seen an exquisite taste ruffled?”     83   
  “I hope it may never be my fortune to fail to gratify my husband’s.”     84   
  At these words a sudden passion leaped to Ralph’s lips. “Ah, that’s wilful, that’s unworthy of you!” he cried. “You were not meant to be measured in that way—you were meant for something better than to keep guard over the sensibilities of a sterile dilettante!”     85   
  Isabel rose quickly and Ralph did the same, so that they stood for a moment looking at each other as if he had flung down a defiance or an insult.     86   
  “You go too far,” she murmured.     87   
  “I have said what I had on my mind—and I have said it because I love you!”     88   
  Isabel turned pale: was he too on that tiresome list? She had a sudden wish to strike him off. “Ah then, you are not disinterested!”     89   
  “I love you, but I love without hope,” said Ralph quickly, forcing a smile, and feeling that in that last declaration he had expressed more than he intended.     90   
  Isabel moved away and stood looking into the sunny stillness of the garden; but after a little she turned back to him. “ I am afraid your talk, then, is the wildness of despair. I don’t understand it—but it doesn’t matter. I am not arguing with you; it is impossible that I should; I have only tried to listen to you. I am much obliged to you for attempting to explain,” she said gently, as if the anger with which she had just sprung up had already subsided. “It is very good of you to try to warn me, if you are really alarmed. But I won’t promise to think of what you have said; I shall forget it as soon as possible. Try and forget it yourself; you have done your duty, and no man can do more. I can’t explain to you what I feel, what I believe, and I wouldn’t if I could.” She paused a moment, and then she went on, with an inconsequence that Ralph observed even in the midst of his eagerness to discover some symptom of concession. “I can’t enter into your idea of Mr. Osmond; I can’t do it justice, because I see him in quite another way. He is not important—no, he is not important; he is a man to whom importance is supremely indifferent. If that is what you mean when you call him ‘small,’ then he is as small as you please. I call that large—it’s the largest thing I know. I won’t pretend to argue with you about a person I am going to marry,” Isabel repeated. “I am not in the least concerned to defend Mr. Osmond; he is not so weak as to need my defence. I should think it would seem strange, even to yourself, that I should talk of him so quietly and coldly, as if he were any one else. I would not talk of him at all, to any one but you; and you, after what you have said—I may just answer you once for all. Pray, would you wish me to make a mercenary marriage—what they call a marriage of ambition? I have only one ambition—to be free to follow out a good feeling. I had others once; but they have passed away. Do you complain of Mr. Osmond because he is not rich? That is just what I like him for. I have fortunately money enough; I have never felt so thankful for it as to-day. There have been moments when I should like to go and kneel down by your father’s grave; he did perhaps a better thing than he knew when he put it into my power to marry a poor man—a man who has borne his poverty with such dignity, with such indifference. Mr. Osmond has never scrambled nor struggled—he has cared for no worldly prize. If that is to be narrow, if that is to be selfish, then it’s very well. I am not frightened by such words, I am not even displeased; I am only sorry that you should make a mistake. Others might have done so, but I am surprised that you should. You might know a gentleman when you see one—you might know a fine mind. Mr. Osmond makes no mistakes! He knows everything, he understands everything, he has the kindest, gentlest, highest spirit. You have got hold of some false idea; it’s a pity, but I can’t help it; it regards you more than me.” Isabel paused a moment, looking at her cousin with an eye illuminated by a sentiment which contradicted the careful calmness of her manner—a mingled sentiment, to which the angry pain excited by his words and the wounded pride of having needed to justify a choice of which she felt only the nobleness and purity, equally contributed. Though she paused, Ralph said nothing; he saw she had more to say. She was superb, but she was eager; she was indifferent, but she was secretly trembling. “What sort of a person should you have liked me to marry?” she asked suddenly. “You talk about one’s soaring and sailing, but if one marries at all one touches the earth. One has human feelings and needs, one has a heart in one’s bosom, and one must marry a particular individual. Your mother has never forgiven me for not having come to a better understanding with Lord Warburton, and she is horrified at my contenting myself with a person who has none of Lord Warburton’s great advantages—no property, no title, no honours, no houses, nor lands, nor position, nor reputation, nor brilliant belongings of any sort. It is the total absence of all these things that pleases me. Mr. Osmond is simply a man—he is not a proprietor!”     91   
  Ralph had listened with great attention, as if everything she said merited deep consideration; but in reality he was only half thinking of the things she said, he was for the rest simply accommodating himself to the weight of his total impression—the impression of her passionate good faith. She was wrong, but she believed; she was deluded, but she was consistent. It was wonderfully characteristic of her that she had invented a fine theory about Gilbert Osmond, and loved him, not for what he really possessed, but for his very poverties dressed out as honours. Ralph remembered what he had said to his father about wishing to put it into Isabel’s power to gratify her imagination. He had done so, and the girl had taken full advantage of the privilege.     92   
  Poor Ralph felt sick; he felt ashamed. Isabel had uttered her last words with a low solemnity of conviction which virtually terminated the discussion, and she closed it formally by turning away and walking back to the house. Ralph walked beside her, and they passed into the court together and reached the big staircase. Here Ralph stopped, and Isabel paused, turning on him a face full of a deep elation at his opposition having made her own conception of her conduct more clear to her.     93   
  “Shall you not come up to breakfast?” she asked.     94   
  “No; I want no breakfast, I am not hungry.”     95   
  “You ought to eat,” said the girl; “you live on air.”     96   
  “I do, very much, and I shall go back into the garden and take another mouthful of it. I came thus far simply to say this. I said to you last year that if you were to get into trouble I should feel terribly sold. That’s how I feel to-day.”     97   
  “Do you think I am in trouble?”     98   
  “One is in trouble when one is in error.”     99   
  “Very well,” said Isabel; “I shall never complain of my trouble to you!” And she moved up the staircase.    100   
  Ralph, standing there with his hands in his pockets, followed her with his eyes; then the lurking chill of the high-walled court struck him and made him shiver, so that he returned to the garden, to breakfast on the Florentine sunshine.

Chapter XXXV   
     
ISABEL, when she strolled in the Cascine with her lover, felt no impulse to tell him that he was not thought well of at the Palazzo Crecentini. The discreet opposition offered to her marriage by her aunt and her cousin made on the whole little impression upon her; the moral of it was simply that they disliked Gilbert Osmond. This dislike was not alarming to Isabel; she scarcely even regretted it; for it served mainly to throw into higher relief the fact, in every way so honourable, that she married to please herself. One did other things to please other people; one did this for a more personal satisfaction; and Isabel’s satisfaction was confirmed by her lover’s admirable good conduct. Gilbert Osmond was in love, and he had never deserved less than during these still, bright days, each of them numbered, which preceded the fulfilment of his hopes, the harsh criticism passed upon him by Ralph Touchett. The chief impression produced upon Isabel’s mind by this criticism was that the passion of love separated its victim terribly from every one but the loved object. She felt herself disjoined from every one she had ever known before—from her two sisters, who wrote to express a dutiful hope that she would be happy, and a surprise, somewhat more vague, at her not having chosen a consort who was the hero of a richer accumulation of anecdote; from Henrietta, who, she was sure, would come out, too late, on purpose to remonstrate; from Lord Warburton, who would certainly console himself, and from Caspar Goodwood, who perhaps would not; from her aunt, who had cold, shallow ideas about marriage, for which she was not sorry to manifest her contempt; and from Ralph, whose talk about having great views for her was surely but a whimsical cover for a personal disappointment. Ralph apparently wished her not to marry at all—that was what it really meant—because he was amused with the spectacle of her adventures as a single woman. His disappointment made him say angry things about the man she had preferred even to him: Isabel flattered herself that she believed Ralph had been angry. It was the more easy for her to believe this, because, as I say, she thought on the whole but little about it, and accepted as an incident of her lot the idea that to prefer Gilbert Osmond as she preferred him was perforce to break all other ties. She tasted of the sweets of this preference, and they made her feel that there was after all something very invidious in being in love; much as the sentiment was theoretically approved of. It was the tragical side of happiness; one’s right was always made of the wrong of some one else. Gilbert Osmond was not demonstrative; the consciousness of success, which must now have flamed high within him, emitted very little smoke for so brilliant a blaze. Contentment, on his part, never took a vulgar form; excitement, in the most self-conscious of men, as a kind of ecstasy of self-control. This disposition, however, made him an admirable lover; it gave him a constant view of the amorous character. He never forgot himself, as I say; and so he never forgot to be graceful and tender, to wear the appearance of devoted intention. He was immensely pleased with his young lady; Madame Merle had made him a present of incalculable value. What could be a finer thing to live with than a high spirit attuned to softness? For would not the softness be all for one’s self, and the strenuousness for society, which admired the air of superiority? What could be a happier gift in a companion than a quick, fanciful mind, which saved one repetitions, and reflected one’s thought upon a scintillating surface. Osmond disliked to see his thought reproduced literally—that made it look stale and stupid; he preferred it to be brightened in the reproduction. His egotism, if egotism it was, had never taken the crude form of wishing for a dull wife; this lady’s intelligence was to be a silver plate, not an earthen one—a plate that he might heap up with ripe fruits, to which it would give a decorative value, so that conversation might become a sort of perpetual dessert. He found the silvery quality in perfection in Isabel; he could tap her imagination with his knuckle and make it ring. He knew perfectly, though he had not been told, that the union found little favour among the girl’s relations; but he had always treated her so completely as an independent person that it hardly seemed necessary to express regret for the attitude of her family. Nevertheless, one morning, he made an abrupt allusion to it.      1   
  “It’s the difference in our fortune they don’t like,” he said. “They think I am in love with your money.”      2   
  “Are you speaking of my aunt—of my cousin?” Isabel asked. “How do you know what they think?”      3   
  “You have not told me that they are pleased, and when I wrote to Mrs. Touchett the other day she never answered my note. If they had been delighted I should have learnt it, and the fact of my being poor and you rich is the most obvious explanation of their want of delight. But, of course, when a poor man marries a rich girl he must be prepared for imputations. I don’t mind them; I only care for one thing—your thinking it’s all right. I don’t care what others think. I have never cared much, and why should I begin to-day, when I have taken to myself a compensation for everything? I won’t pretend that I am sorry you are rich; I am delighted. I delight in everything that is yours—whether it be money or virtue. Money is a great advantage. It seems to me, however, that I have sufficiently proved that I can get on without it; I never in my life tried to earn a penny, and I ought to be less subject to suspicion than most people. I suppose it is their business to suspect—that of your own family; it’s proper on the whole they should. They will like me better some day; so will you, for that matter. Meanwhile my business is not to bother, but simply to be thankful for life and love. It has made me better, loving you,” he said on another occasion; “it has made me wiser, and easier, and brighter. I used to want a great many things before, and to be angry that I didn’t have them. Theoretically, I was satisfied, as I once told you. I flattered myself that I had limited my wants. But I was subject to irritation; I used to have morbid, sterile, hateful fits of hunger, of desire. Now I am really satisfied, because I can’t think of anything better. It is just as when one has been trying to spell out a book in the twilight, and suddenly the lamp comes in. I had been putting out my eyes over the book of life, and finding nothing to reward me for my pains; but now that I can read it properly I see that it’s a delightful story. My dear girl, I can’t tell you how life seems to stretch there before us—what a long summer afternoon awaits us. It’s the latter half of an Italian day—with a golden haze, and the shadows just lengthening, and that divine delicacy in the light, the air, the landscape, which I have loved all my life, and which you love to-day. Upon my word, I don’t see why we shouldn’t get on. We have got what we like—to say nothing of having each other. We have the faculty of admiration, and several excellent beliefs. We are not stupid, we are not heavy, we are not under bonds to any dull limitations. You are very fresh, and I am well-seasoned. We have got my poor child to amuse us; we will try and make up some little life for her. It is all soft and mellow—it has the Italian colouring.”      4   
  They made a good many plans, but they left themselves also a good deal of latitude; it was a matter of course, however, that they should live for the present in Italy. It was in Italy that they had met, Italy had been a party to their first impressions of each other, and Italy should be a party to their happiness. Osmond had the attachment of old acquaintance, and Isabel the stimulus of new, which seemed to assure her a future of beautiful hours. The desire for unlimited expansion had been succeeded in her mind by the sense that life was vacant without some private duty which gathered one’s energies to a point. She told Ralph that she had “seen life” in a year or two, and that she was already tired, not of life, but of observation. What had become of all her ardours, her aspirations, her theories, her high estimate of her independence, and her incipient conviction that she should never marry? These things had been absorbed in a more primitive sentiment—a sentiment which answered all questions, satisfied all needs, solved all difficulties. It simplified the future at a stroke, it came down from above, like the light of the stars, and it needed no explanation. There was explanation enough in the fact that he was her lover, her own, and that she was able to be of use to him. She could marry him with a kind of pride; she was not only taking but giving.      5   
  He brought Pansy with him two or three times to the Cascine—Pansy who was very little taller than a year before, and not much older. That she would always be a child was the conviction expressed by her father, who held her by the hand when she was in her sixteenth year, and told her to go and play while he sat down a while with the pretty lady. Pansy wore a short dress and a long coat; her hat always seemed too big for her. She amused herself with walking off, with quick, short steps, to the end of the alley, and then walking back with a smile that seemed an appeal for approbation. Isabel gave her approbation in abundance, and it was of that demonstrated personal kind which the child’s affectionate nature craved. She watched her development with a kind of amused suspense. Pansy had already become a little daughter. She was treated so completely as a child that Osmond had not yet explained to her the new relation in which he stood to the elegant Miss Archer. “She doesn’t know,” he said to Isabel; “she doesn’t suspect; she thinks it perfectly natural that you and I should come and walk here together, simply as good friends. There seems to me something enchantingly innocent in that; it’s the way I like her to be. No, I am not a failure, as I used to think; I have succeeded in two things. I am to marry the woman I adore, and I have brought up my child as I wished, in the old way.”      6   
  He was very fond, in all things, of the “old way;” that had struck Isabel as an element in the refinement of his character.      7   
  “It seems to me you will not know whether you have succeeded until you have told her,” she said. “You must see how she takes your news. She may be horrified—she may be jealous.”      8   
  “I am not afraid of that; she is too fond of you on her own account. I should like to leave her in the dark a little longer—to see if it will come into her head that if we are not engaged we ought to be.”      9   
  Isabel was impressed by Osmond’s æsthetic relish of Pansy’s innocence—her own appreciation of it being more moral. She was perhaps not the less pleased when he told her a few days later that he had broken the news to his daughter, who made such a pretty little speech. “Oh, then I shall have a sister!” She was neither surprised nor alarmed; she had not cried, as he expected.     10   
  “Perhaps she had guessed it,” said Isabel.     11   
  “Don’t say that; I should be disgusted if I believed that. I thought it would be just a little shock; but the way she took it proves that her good manners are paramount. That is also what I wished. You shall see for yourself; to-morrow she shall make you her congratulations in person.”     12   
  The meeting, on the morrow, took place at the Countess Gemini’s, whither Pansy had been conducted by her father, who knew that Isabel was to come in the afternoon to return a visit made her by the Countess on learning that they were to become sister-in-law. Calling at Casa Touchett, the visitor had not found Isabel at home; but after our young lady had been ushered into the Countess’s drawing-room, Pansy came in to say that her aunt would presently appear. Pansy was spending the day with her aunt, who thought she was of an age when she should begin to learn how to carry herself in company. It was Isabel’s view that the little girl might have given lessons in deportment to the elder lady, and nothing could have justified this conviction more than the manner in which Pansy acquitted herself while they waited together for the Countess. Her father’s decision, the year before, had finally been to send her back to the convent to receive the last graces, and Madame Catherine had evidently carried out her theory that Pansy was to be fitted for the great world.     13   
  “Papa has told me that you have kindly consented to marry him,” said the good woman’s pupil. “It is very delightful; I think you will suit very well.”     14   
  “You think I shall suit you?”     15   
  “You will suit me beautifully; but what I mean is that you and papa will suit each other. You are both so quiet and so serious. You are not so quiet as he—or even as Madame Merle; but you are more quiet than many others. He should not, for instance, have a wife like my aunt. She is always moving; to-day especially; you will see when she comes in. They told us at the convent it was wrong to judge our elders, but I suppose there is no harm if we judge them favourably. You will be a delightful companion for papa.”     16   
  “For you too, I hope,” Isabel said.     17   
  “I speak first of him on purpose. I have told you already what I myself think of you; I liked you from the first. I admire you so much that I think it will be a great good fortune to have you always before me. You will be my model; I shall try to imitate you—though I am afraid it will be very feeble. I am very glad for papa—he needed something more than me. Without you, I don’t see how he could have got it. You will be my stepmother; but we must not use that word. You don’t look at all like the word; it is somehow so ugly. They are always said to be cruel; but I think you will never be cruel. I am not afraid.”     18   
  “My good little Pansy,” said Isabel, gently, “I shall be very kind to you.”     19   
  “Very well then; I have nothing to fear,” the child declared, lightly.     20   
  Her description of her aunt had not been incorrect; the Countess Gemini was less than ever in a state of repose. She entered the room with a great deal of expression, and kissed Isabel, first on the lips, and then on each cheek, in the short, quick manner of a bird drinking. She made Isabel sit down on the sofa beside her, and looking at our heroine with a variety of turns of the head, delivered herself of a hundred remarks, from which I offer the reader but a brief selection.     21   
  “If you expect me to congratulate you, I must beg you to excuse me. I don’t suppose you care whether I do or not; I believe you are very proud. But I care myself whether I tell fibs or not; I never tell them unless there is something to be gained. I don’t see what there is to be gained with you—especially as you would not believe me. I don’t make phrases—I never made a phrase in my life. My fibs are always very crude. I am very glad, for my own sake, that you are going to marry Osmond; but I won’t pretend I am glad for yours. You are very remarkable—you know that’s what people call you; you are an heiress, and very good-looking and clever, very original; so it’s a good thing to have you in the family. Our family is very good, you know; Osmond will have told you that; and my mother was rather distinguished—she was called the American Corinne. But we are rather fallen, I think, and perhaps you will pick us up. I have great confidence in you; there are ever so many things I want to talk to you about. I never congratulate any girl on marrying; I think it’s the worst thing she can do. I suppose Pansy oughtn’t to hear all this; but that’s what she has come to me for—to acquire the tone of society. There is no harm in her knowing that it isn’t such a blessing to get married. When first I got an idea that my brother had designs upon you, I thought of writing to you, to recommend you, in the strongest terms, not to listen to him. Then I thought it would be disloyal, and I hate anything of that kind. Besides, as I say, I was enchanted, for myself; and after all, I am very selfish. By the way, you won’t respect me, and we shall never be intimate. I should like it, but you won’t. Some day, all the same, we shall be better friends than you will believe at first. My husband will come and see you, though, as you probably know, he is on no sort of terms with Osmond. He is very fond of going to see pretty women, but I am not afraid of you. In the first place, I don’t care what he does. In the second, you won’t care a straw for him; you will take his measure at a glance. Some day I will tell you all about him. Do you think my niece ought to go out of the room? Pansy, go and practise a little in my boudoir.”     22   
  “Let her stay, please,” said Isabel. “I would rather hear nothing that Pansy may not!”     23

Chapter XXXVI   
     
ONE afternoon, towards dusk, in the autumn of 1876, a young man of pleasing appearance rang at the door of a small apartment on the third floor of an old Roman house. On its being opened he inquired for Madame Merle, whereupon the servant, a neat, plain woman, with a French face and a lady’s maid’s manner, ushered him into a diminutive drawing-room and requested the favour of his name.      1   
  “Mr. Edward Rosier,” said the young man, who sat down to wait till his hostess should appear.      2   
  The reader will perhaps not have forgotten that Mr. Rosier was an ornament of the American circle in Paris, but it may also be remembered that he sometimes vanished from its horizon. He had spent a portion of several winters at Pau, and as he was a gentleman of tolerable inveterate habits he might have continued for years to pay his annual visit to this charming resort. In the summer of 1876, however, an incident befell him which changed the current, not only of his thoughts, but of his proceedings. He passed a month in the Upper Engadine, and encountered at St. Moritz a charming young girl. For this young lady he conceived a peculiar admiration; she was exactly the household angel he had long been looking for. He was never precipitate; he was nothing if not discreet; so he forebore for the present to declare his passion; but it seemed to him when they parted—the young lady to go down into Italy, and her admirer to proceed to Geneva, where he was under bonds to join some friends—that he should be very unhappy if he were not to see her again. The simplest way to do so was to go in the autumn to Rome, where Miss Osmond was domiciled with her family. Rosier started on his pilgrimage to the Italian capital and reached it on the first of November. It was a pleasant thing to do; but for the young man there was a strain of the heroic in the enterprise. He was nervous about the fever, and November, after all, was rather early in the season. Fortune, however, favours the brave; and Mr. Rosier, who took three grains of quinine every day, had at the end of a month no cause to deplore his temerity. He had made to a certain extent good use of his time; that is, he had perceived that Miss Pansy Osmond had not a flaw in her composition. She was admirably finished—she was in excellent style. He thought of her in amorous meditation a good deal as he might have thought of a Dresden-china shepherdess. Miss Osmond, indeed, in the bloom of her juvenility, had a touch of the rococo, which Rosier, whose taste was predominantly for that manner, could not fail to appreciate. That he esteemed the productions of comparatively frivolous periods would have been apparent from the attention he bestowed upon Madame Merle’s drawing-room, which, although furnished with specimens of every style, was especially rich in articles of the last two centuries. He had immediately put a glass into one eye and looked round; and then—“By Jove! she has some jolly good things!” he had murmured to himself. The room was small, and densely filled with furniture; it gave an impression of faded silk and little statuettes which might totter if one moved. Rosier got up and wandered about with his careful tread, bending over the tables charged with knick-knacks and the cushions embossed with princely arms. When Madame Merle came in she found him standing before the fireplace, with his nose very close to the great lace flounce attached to the damask cover of the mantel. He had lifted it delicately, as if he were smelling it.      3   
  “It’s old Venetian,” she said; “it’s rather good.”      4   
  “It’s too good for this; you ought to wear it.”      5   
  “They tell me you have some better in Paris, in the same situation.”      6   
  “Ah, but I can’t wear mine,” said Rosier, smiling.      7   
  “I don’t see why you shouldn’t! I have better lace than that to wear.”      8   
  Rosier’s eyes wandered, lingeringly, round the room again      9   
  “You have some very good things.”     10   
  “Yes, but I hate them.”     11   
  “Do you want to get rid of them?” the young man asked quickly.     12   
  “No, it’s good to have something to hate; one works it off.”     13   
  “I love my things,” said Rosier, as he sat there smiling. “But it’s not about them—nor about yours, that I came to talk to you.” He paused a moment, and then, with greater softness—“I care more for Miss Osmond than for all the bibelots in Europe!”     14   
  Madame Merle started a little.     15   
  “Did you come to tell me that?”     16   
  “I came to ask your advice.”     17   
  She looked at him with a little frown, stroking her chin.     18   
  “A man in love, you know, doesn’t ask advice.”     19   
  “Why not, if he is in a difficult position? That’s often the case with a man in love. I have been in love before, and I know. But never so much as this time—really, never so much. I should like particularly to know what you think of my prospects. I’m afraid Mr. Osmond doesn’t think me a phœnix.”     20   
  “Do you wish me to intercede?” Madame Merle asked, with her fine arms folded, and her mouth drawn up to the left.     21   
  “If you could say a good word for me, I should be greatly obliged. There will be no use in my troubling Miss Osmond unless I have good reason to believe her father will consent.”     22   
  “You are very considerate; that’s in your favour. But you assume, in rather an off-hand way, that I think you a prize.”     23   
  “You have been very kind to me,” said the young man. “ That’s why I came.”     24   
  “I am always kind to people who have good bibelots; there is no telling what one may get by it.”     25   
  And the left-hand corner of Madame Merle’s mouth gave expression to the joke.     26   
  Edward Rosier stared and blushed; his correct features were suffused with disappointment.     27   
  “Ah, I thought you liked me for myself!”     28   
  “I like you very much; but, if you please, we won’t analyse. Excuse me if I seem patronising; but I think you a perfect little gentleman. I must tell you, however, that I have not the marrying of Pansy Osmond.”     29   
  “I didn’t suppose that. But you have seemed to me intimate with her family, and I thought you might have influence.”     30   
  Madame Merle was silent a moment.     31   
  “Whom do you call her family?”     32   
  “Why, her father; and—how do you say it in English?—her belle-mère.”     33   
  “Mr. Osmond is her father, certainly; but his wife can scarcely be termed a member of her family. Mrs. Osmond has nothing to do with marrying her.”     34   
  “I am sorry for that,” said Rosier, with an amiable sigh. “I think Mrs. Osmond would favour me.”     35   
  “Very likely—if her husband does not.”     36   
  Edward Rosier raised his eyebrows.     37   
  “Does she take the opposite line from him?”     38   
  “In everything. They think very differently.”     39   
  “Well,” said Rosier, “I am sorry for that; but it’s none of my business. She is very fond of Pansy.”     40   
  “Yes, she is very fond of Pansy.”     41   
  “And Pansy has a great affection for her. She has told me that she loves her as if she were her own mother.”     42   
  “You must, after all, have had some very intimate talk with the poor child,” said Madame Merle. “Have you declared your sentiments?”     43   
  “Never!” cried Rosier, lifting his neatly-gloved hand. “Never, until I have assured myself of those of the parents.”     44   
  “You always wait for that? You have excellent principles; your conduct is most estimable.”     45   
  “I think you are laughing at me,” poor Rosier murmured, dropping back in his chair, and feeling his small moustache. “ I didn’t expect that of you, Madame Merle.”     46   
  She shook her head calmly, like a person who saw things clearly.     47   
  “You don’t do me justice. I think your conduct is in excellent taste and the best you could adopt. Yes, that’s what I think.”     48   
  “I wouldn’t agitate her—only to agitate her; I love her too much for that,” said Ned Rosier.     49   
  “I am glad, after all, that you have told me,” Madame Merle went on. “Leave it to me a little; I think I can help you.”     50   
  “I said you were the person to come to!” cried the young man, with an ingenuous radiance in his face.     51   
  “You were very clever,” Madame Merle returned, more drily. “When I say I can help you, I mean once assuming that your cause is good. Let us think a little whether it is.”     52   
  “I’m a dear little fellow,” said Rosier, earnestly. “I won’t say I have no faults, but I will say I have no vices.”     53   
  “All that is negative. What is the positive side? What have you got besides your Spanish lace and your Dresden tea-cups?”     54   
  “I have got a comfortable little fortune—about forty thousand francs a year. With the talent that I have for arranging, we can live beautifully on such an income.”     55   
  “Beautifully, no. Sufficiently, yes. Even that depends on where you live.”     56   
  “Well, in Paris. I would undertake it in Paris.”     57   
  Madame Merle’s mouth rose to the left.     58   
  “It wouldn’t be splendid; you would have to make use of the tea-cups, and they would get broken.”     59   
  “We don’t want to be splendid. If Miss Osmond should have everything pretty, it would be enough. When one is as pretty as she, one can afford to be simple. She ought never to wear anything but muslin,” said Rosier, reflectively.     60   
  “She would be much obliged to you for that theory.”     61   
  “It’s the correct one, I assure you; and I am sure she would enter into it. She understands all that; that’s why I love her.”     62   
  “She is a very good little girl, and extremely graceful. But her father, to the best of my belief, can give her nothing.”     63   
  Rosier hesitated a moment.     64   
  “I don’t in the least desire that he should. But I may remark, all the same, that he lives like a rich man.”     65   
  “The money is his wife’s; she brought him a fortune.”     66   
  “Mrs. Osmond, then, is very fond of her step-daughter; she may do something.”     67   
  “For a love-sick swain you have your eyes about you!” Madame Merle exclaimed, with a laugh.     68   
  “I esteem a dot very much. I can do without it, but I esteem it.”     69   
  “Mrs. Osmond,” Madame Merle went on, “will probably prefer to keep her money for her own children.”     70   
  “Her own children? Surely she has none.”     71   
  “She may have yet. She had a poor little boy, who died two years ago, six months after his birth. Others, therefore, may come.”     72   
  “I hope they will, if it will make her happy. She is a splendid woman.”     73   
  Madame Merle was silent a moment.     74   
  “Ah, about her there is much to be said. Splendid as you like! We have not exactly made out that you are a parti. The absence of vices is hardly a source of income.”     75   
  “Excuse me, I think it may be,” said Rosier, with his persuasive smile.     76   
  “You’ll be a touching couple, living on your innocence!”     77   
  “I think you underrate me.”     78   
  “You are not so innocent as that? Seriously,” said Madame Merle, “of course forty thousand francs a year and a nice character are a combination to be considered. I don’t say it’s to be jumped at; but there might be a worse offer. Mr. Osmond will probably incline to believe he can do better.”     79   
  “He can do so perhaps; but what can his daughter do? She can’t do better than marry the man she loves. For she does, you know,” Rosier added, eagerly.     80   
  “She does—I know it.”     81   
  “Ah,” cried the young man, “I said you were the person to come to.”     82   
  “But I don’t know how you know it, if you haven’t asked her,” Madame Merle went on.     83   
  “In such a case there is no need of asking and telling; as you say, we are an innocent couple. How did you know it?”     84   
  “I who am not innocent? By being very crafty. Leave it to me; I will find out for you.”     85   
  Rosier got up, and stood smoothing his hat.     86   
  “You say that rather coldly. Don’t simply find out how it is, but try to make it as it should be.”     87   
  “I will do my best. I will try to make the most of your advantages.”     88   
  “Thank you so very much. Meanwhile, I will say a word to Mrs. Osmond.”     89   
  “Gardez-vous en bien!” And Madame Merle rose, rapidly. “Don’t set her going, or you’ll spoil everything.”     90   
  Rosier gazed into his hat; he wondered whether his hostess had been after all the right person to come to.     91   
  “I don’t think I understand you. I am an old friend of Mrs. Osmond, and I think she would like me to succeed.”     92   
  “Be an old friend as much as you like; the more old friends she has the better, for she doesn’t get on very well with some of her new. But don’t for the present try to make her take up the cudgels for you. Her husband may have other views, and, as a person who wishes her well, I advise you not to multiply points of difference between them.”     93   
  Poor Rosier’s face assumed an expression of alarm; a suit for the hand of Pansy Osmond was even a more complicated business than his taste for proper transitions had allowed. But the extreme good sense which he concealed under a surface suggesting sprigged porcelain, came to his assistance.     94   
  “I don’t see that I am bound to consider Mr. Osmond so much!” he exclaimed.     95   
  “No, but you should consider her. You say you are an old friend. Would you make her suffer?”     96   
  “Not for the world.”     97   
  “Then be very careful, and let the matter alone until I have taken a few soundings.”     98   
  “Let the matter alone, dear Madame Merle? Remember that I am in love.”     99   
  “Oh, you won’t burn up. Why did you come to me, if you are not to heed what I say?”    100   
  “You are very kind; I will be very good,” the young man promised. “But I am afraid Mr. Osmond is rather difficult,” he added, in his mild voice, as he went to the door.    101   
  Madame Merle gave a light laugh.    102   
  “It has been said before. But his wife is not easy either.”    103   
  “Ah, she’s a splendid woman!” Ned Rosier repeated, passing out.    104   
  He resolved that his conduct should be worthy of a young man who was already a model of discretion; but he saw nothing in any pledge he had given Madame Merle that made it improper he should keep himself in spirits by an occasional visit to Miss Osmond’s home. He reflected constantly on what Madame Merle had said to him, and turned over in his mind the impression of her somewhat peculiar manner. He had gone to her de confiance, as they said in Paris; but it was possible that he had been precipitate. He found difficulty in thinking of himself as rash—he had incurred this reproach so rarely; but it certainly was true that he had known Madame Merle only for the last month, and that his thinking her a delightful woman was not, when one came to look into it, a reason for assuming that she would be eager to push Pansy Osmond into his arms—gracefully arranged as these members might be to receive her. Beyond this, Madame Merle had been very gracious to him, and she was a person of consideration among the girl’s people, where she had a rather striking appearance (Rosier had more than once wondered how she managed it), of being intimate without being familiar. But possibly he had exaggerated these advantages. There was no particular reason why she should take trouble for him; a charming woman was charming to every one, and Rosier felt rather like a fool when he thought of his appealing to Madame Merle on the ground that she had distinguished him. Very likely—though she had appeared to say it in joke—she was really only thinking of his bibelots. Had it come into her heat that he might offer her two or three of the gems of his collection? If she would only help him to marry Miss Osmond, he would present her with his whole museum. He could hardly say so to her outright; it would seem too gross a bribe. But he should like her to believe it.    105   
  It was with these thoughts that he went again to Mrs. Osmond’s, Mrs. Osmond having an “evening”—she had taken the Thursday of each week—when his presence could be accounted for on general principles of civility. The object of Mr. Rosier’s well-regulated affection dwelt in a high house in the very heart of Rome; a dark and massive structure, overlooking a sunny piazzetta in the neighbourhood of the Farnese Palace. In a palace, too, little pansy lived—a palace in Roman parlance, but a dungeon to poor Rosier’s apprehensive mind. It seemed to him of evil omen that the young lady he wished to marry, and whose fastidious father he doubted of his ability to conciliate, should be immured in a kind of domestic fortress, which bore a stern old Roman name, which smelt of historic deeds, of crime and craft and violence, which was mentioned in “Murray” and visited by tourists who looked disappointed and depressed, and which had frescoes by Caravaggio in the piano nobile and a row of mutilated statues and dusty urns in the wide, nobly-arched loggia overlooking the damp court where a fountain gushed out of a mossy niche. In a less preoccupied frame of mind he could have done justice to the Palazzo Roccanera; he could have entered into the sentiment of Mrs. Osmond, who had once told him that on settling themselves in Rome she and her husband chose this habitation for the love of local colour. It had local colour enough, and though he knew less about architecture than about Limoges enamel, he could see that the proportions of the windows, and even the details of the cornice, had quite the grand air. But Rosier was haunted by the conviction that at picturesque periods young girls had been shut up there to keep them from their true loves, and, under the threat of being thrown into convents, had been forced into unholy marriages. There was one point, however, to which he always did justice when once he found himself in Mrs. Osmond’s warm rich-looking reception-rooms, which were on the second floor. He acknowledged that these people were very strong in bibelots. It was a taste of Osmond’s own—not at all of hers; this she had told him the first time he came to the house, when, after asking himself for a quarter of an hour whether they had better things than he, he was obliged to admit that they had, very much, and vanquished his envy, as a gentleman should, to the point of expressing to his hostess his pure admiration of her treasures. He learned from Mrs. Osmond that her husband had made a large collection before their marriage, and that, though he had obtained a number of fine pieces within the last three years, he had got his best things at a time when he had not the advantage of her advice. Rosier interpreted this information according to principles of his own. For “advice” read “money,” he said to himself; and the fact that Gilbert Osmond had landed his great prizes during his impecunious season, confirmed his most cherished doctrine—the doctrine that a collector may freely be poor if he be only patient. In general, when Rosier presented himself on a Thursday evening, his first glance was bestowed upon the walls of the room; there were three or four objects that his eyes really yearned for. But after his talk with Madame Merle he felt the extreme seriousness of his position; and now, when he came in, he looked about for the daughter of the house with such eagerness as might be permitted to a gentleman who always crossed a threshold with an optimistic smile.

   
Chapter XXXVII   
     
PANSY was not in the first of the rooms, a large apartment with a concave ceiling and walls covered with old red damask; it was here that Mrs. Osmond usually sat—though she was not in her usually customary place tonight—and that a circle of more especial intimates gathered about the fire. The room, was warm, with a sort of subdued brightness; it contained the larger things, and—almost always—an odour of flowers. Pansy on this occasion was presumably in the chamber beyond, the resort of younger visitors, where tea was served. Osmond stood before the chimney, leaning back, with his hands behind him; he had one foot up and was warming the sole. Half-a-dozen people, scattered near him, were talking together; but he was not in the conversation; his eyes were fixed, abstractedly. Rosier, coming in unannounced, failed to attract his attention; but the young man, who was very punctilious, though he was even exceptionally conscious that it was the wife, not the husband, he had come to see, went up to shake hands with him. Osmond put out his left hand, without changing his attitude.      1   
  “How d’ye do? My wife’s somewhere about.”      2   
  “Never fear; I shall find her,” said Rosier, cheerfully.      3   
  Osmond stood looking at him; he had never before felt the keenness of this gentleman’s eyes. “Madame Merle has told him, and he doesn’t like it,” Rosier said to himself. He had hoped Madame Merle would be there; but she was not within sight; perhaps she was in one of the other rooms, or would come later. He had never especially delighted in Gilbert Osmond; he had a fancy that he gave himself airs. But Rosier was not quickly resentful, and where politeness was concerned he had an inveterate wish to be in the right. He looked round him, smiling, and then, in a moment, he said—      4   
  “I saw a jolly good piece of Capo di Monte to-day.”      5   
  Osmond answered nothing at first; but presently, while he warmed his boot-sole, “I don’t care a fig for Capo di Monte!” he returned.      6   
  “I hope you are not losing your interest?”      7   
  “In old pots and plates? Yes, I am losing my interest.”      8   
  Rosier for a moment forgot the delicacy of his position.      9   
  “You are not thinking of parting with a—a piece or two?”     10   
  “No, I am not thinking of parting with anything at all, Mr. Rosier,” said Osmond, with his eyes still on the eyes of his visitor.     11   
  “Ah, you want to keep, but not to add,” Rosier remarked, brightly.     12   
  “Exactly. I have nothing that I wish to match.”     13   
  Poor Rosier was aware that he had blushed, and he was distressed at his want of assurance. “Ah, well, I have!” was all that he could murmur; and he knew that his murmur was partly lost as he turned away. He took his course to the adjoining room, and met Mrs. Osmond coming out of the deep doorway. She was dressed in black velvet; she looked brilliant and noble. We know what Mr. Rosier thought of her, and the terms in which, to Madame Merle, he had expressed his admiration. Like his appreciation of her dear little stepdaughter, it was based partly on his fine sense of the plastic; but also on a relish for a more impalpable sort of merit—that merit of a bright spirit, which Rosier’s devotion to brittle wares had not made him cease to regard as a quality. Mrs. Osmond, at present, might well have gratified such tastes. The years had touched her only to enrich her; the flower of her youth had not faded, it only hung more quietly on its stem. She had lost something of that quick eagerness to which her husband had privately taken exception—she had more the air of being able to wait. Now, at all events, framed in the gilded doorway she struck our young man as the picture of a gracious lady.     14   
  “You see I am very regular,” he said. “But who should be if I am not?”     15   
  “Yes, I have known you longer than any one here. But we must not indulge in tender reminiscences. I want to introduce you to a young lady.”     16   
  “Ah, please, what young lady?” Rosier was immensely obliging; but this was not what he had come for.     17   
  “She sits there by the fire in pink, and has no one to speak to.”     18   
  Rosier hesitated a moment.     19   
  “Can’t Mr. Osmond speak to her? He is within six feet of her.”     20   
  Mrs. Osmond also hesitated.     21   
  “She is not very lively, and he doesn’t like dull people.”     22   
  “But she is good enough for me? Ah now, that is hard.”     23   
  “I only mean that you have ideas for two. And then you are so obliging.”     24   
  “So is your husband.”     25   
  “No, he is not—to me.” And Mrs. Osmond smiled vaguely.     26   
  “That’s a sign he should be doubly so to other women.”     27   
  “So I tell him,” said Mrs. Osmond, still smiling.     28   
  “You see I want some tea,” Rosier went on, looking wistfully beyond.     29   
  “That’s perfect. Go and give some to my young lady.”     30   
  “Very good; but after that I will abandon her to her fate. The simple truth is that I am dying to have a little talk with Miss Osmond.”     31   
  “Ah,” said Isabel, turning away, “I can’t help you there!”     32   
  Five minutes later, while he handed a tea-cup to the young lady in pink, whom he had conducted into the other room, he wondered whether, in making to Mrs. Osmond the profession I have just quoted, he had broken the spirit of his promise to Madame Merle. Such a question was capable of occupying this young man’s mind for a considerable time. At last, however, he became—comparatively speaking—reckless, and cared little what promises he might break. The fate to which he had threatened to abandon the young lady in pink proved to be none so terrible; for Pansy Osmond, who had given him the tea for his companion—Pansy was as fond as ever of making tea—presently came and talked to her. Into this mild colloquy Edward Rosier entered little; he sat by moodily, watching his small sweetheart. If we look at her now through his eyes, we shall at first not see much to remind us of the obedient little girl who, at Florence, three years before, was sent to walk short distances in the Cascine while her father and Miss Archer talked together of matters sacred to elder people. But after a moment we shall perceive that if at nineteen Pansy has become a young lady, she does not really fill out the part; that if she has grown very pretty, she lacks in a deplorable degree the quality known and esteemed in the appearance of females as style; and that if she is dressed with great freshness, she wears her smart attire with an undisguised appearance of saving it—very much as if it were lent her for the occasion. Edward Rosier, it would seem, would have been just the man to note these defects; and in point of fact there was not a quality of this young lady, of any sort, that he had not noted. Only he called her qualities by names of his own—some of which indeed were happy enough. “No, she is unique—she is absolutely unique,” he used to say to himself; and you may be sure that not for an instant would he have admitted to you that she was wanting in style. Style? Why, she had the style of a little princess; if you couldn’t see it you had no eye. It was not modern, it was not conscious, it would produce no impression in Broadway; the small, serious damsel, in her stiff little dress, only looked like an Infanta of Velasquez. This was enough for Edward Rosier, who thought her delightfully old-fashioned. Her anxious eyes, her charming lips, her slip of a figure, were as touching as a childish prayer. He had now an acute desire to know just to what point she liked him—a desire which made him fidget as he sat in his chair. It made him feel hot, so that he had to pat his forehead with his handkerchief; he had never been so uncomfortable. She was such a perfect jeune fille; and one couldn’t make of a jeune fille the inquiry necessary for throwing light on such a point. A jeune fille was what Rosier had always dreamed of—a jeune fille who should yet not be French, for he had felt that this nationality would complicate the question. He was sure that Pansy had never looked at a newspaper, and that, in the way of novels, if she had read Sir Walter Scott it was the very most. An American jeune fille; what would be better than that? She would be frank and gay, and yet would not have walked alone, nor have received letters from men, nor have been taken to the theatre to see the comedy of manners. Rosier could not deny that, as the matter stood, it would be a breach of hospitality to appeal directly to this unsophisticated creature; but he was now in imminent danger of asking himself whether hospitality were the most sacred thing in the world. Was not the sentiment that he entertained for Miss Osmond of infinitely greater importance? Of greater importance to him—yes; but not probably to the master of the house. There was one comfort; even if this gentleman had been placed on his guard by Madame Merle, he would not have extended the warning to Pansy; it would not have been part of his policy to let her know that a prepossessing young man was in love with her. But he was in love with her, the prepossessing young man; and all these restrictions of circumstance had ended by irritating him. What had Gilbert Osmond meant by giving him two fingers of his left hand? If Osmond was rude, surely he himself might be bold. He felt extremely bold after the dull girl in pink had responded to the call of her mother, who came in to say, with a significant simper at Rosier, that she must carry her off to other triumphs. The mother and daughter departed together, and now it depended only upon him that he should be virtually alone with Pansy. He had never been alone with her before; he had never been alone with a jeune fille. It was a great moment; poor Rosier began to pat his forehead again. There was another room, beyond the one in which they stood—a small room which had been thrown open and lighted, but, the company not being numerous, had remained empty all the evening. It was empty yet; it was upholstered in pale yellow; there were several lamps; through the open door it looked very pretty. Rosier stood a moment, gazing through this aperture; he was afraid that Pansy would run away, and felt almost capable of stretching out a hand to detain her. But she lingered where the young lady in pink had left them, making no motion to join a knot of visitors on the other side of the room. For a moment it occurred to him that she was frightened—too frightened perhaps to move; but a glance assured him that she was not, and then he reflected that she was too innocent, indeed, for that. After a moment’s supreme hesitation he asked her whether he might go and look at the yellow room, which seemed so attractive yet so virginal. He had been there already with Osmond, to inspect the furniture, which was of the First French Empire, and especially to admire the clock (which he did not really admire), an immense classic structure of that period. He therefore felt that he had now begun to manœuvre.     33   
  “Certainly, you may go,” said Pansy; “and if you like, I will show you.” She was not in the least frightened.     34   
  “That’s just what I hoped you would say; you are so very kind,” Rosier murmured.     35   
  They went in together; Rosier really thought the room very ugly, and it seemed cold. The same idea appeared to have struck Pansy.     36   
  “It’s not for winter evenings; it’s more for summer,” she said. “It’s papa’s taste; he has so much.”     37   
  He had a good deal, Rosier thought; but some of it was bad. He looked about him; he hardly knew what to say in such a situation. “Doesn’t Mrs. Osmond care how her rooms are done? Has she no taste?” he asked.     38   
  “Oh yes, a great deal; but it’s more for literature,” said Pansy—“and for conversation. But papa cares also for those things: I think he knows everything.”     39   
  Rosier was silent a moment. “There is one thing I am sure he knows!” he broke out presently. “He knows that when I come here it is, with all respect to him, with all respect to Mrs. Osmond, who is so charming—it is really,” said the young man, “to see you!”     40   
  “To see me?” asked Pansy, raising her vaguely-troubled eyes.     41   
  “To see you; that’s what I come for,” Rosier repeated, feeling the intoxication of rupture with authority. Pansy stood looking at him, simply, intently, openly; a blush was not needed to make her face more modest.     42   
  “I thought it was for that,” she said.     43   
  “And it was not disagreeable to you?”     44   
  “I couldn’t tell; I didn’t know. You never told me,” said Pansy.     45   
  “I was afraid of offending you.”     46   
  “You don’t offend me,” the young girl murmured, smiling as if an angel had kissed her.     47   
  “You like me then, Pansy?” Rosier asked, very gently, feeling very happy.     48   
  “Yes—I like you.”     49   
  They had walked to the chimney-piece, where the big cold Empire clock was perched; they were well within the room, and beyond observation from without. The tone in which she had said these four words seemed to him the very breath of nature, and his only answer could be to take her hand and hold it a moment. Then he raised it to his lips. She submitted, still with her pure, trusting smile, in which there was something ineffably passive. She liked him—she had liked him all the while; now anything might happen! She was ready—she had been ready always, waiting for him to speak. If he had not spoken she would have waited for ever; but when the word came she dropped like the peach from the shaken tree. Rosier felt that if he should draw her towards him and hold her to his heart, she would submit without a murmur, she would rest there without a question. It was true that this would be a rash experiment in a yellow Empire salottino. She had known it was for her he came; and yet like what a perfect little lady she had carried it off!     50   
  “You are very dear to me,” he murmured, trying to believe that there was after all such a thing as hospitality.     51   
  She looked a moment at her hand, where he had kissed it.     52   
  “Did you say that papa knows?”     53   
  “You told me just now he knows everything.”     54   
  “I think you must make sure,” said Pansy.     55   
  “Ah, my dear, when once I am sure of you!” Rosier murmured in her ear, while she turned back to the other rooms with a little air of consistency which seemed to imply that their appeal should be immediate.     56   
  The other rooms meanwhile had become conscious of the arrival of Madame Merle, who, wherever she went, produced an impression when she entered. How she did it the most attentive spectator could not have told you; for she neither spoke loud, nor laughed profusely, nor moved rapidly, nor dressed with splendour, nor appealed in any appreciable manner to the audience. Large, fair, smiling, serene, there was something in her very tranquillity that diffused itself, and when people looked round it was because of a sudden quiet. On this occasion she had done the quietest thing she could do; after embracing Mrs. Osmond, which was more striking, she had sat down on a small sofa to commune with the master of the house. There was a brief exchange of commonplaces between these two—they always paid, in public, a certain formal tribute to the commonplace—and then Madame Merle, whose eyes had been wandering, asked if little Mr. Rosier had come this evening.     57   
  “He came nearly an hour ago—but he has disappeared,” Osmond said.     58   
  “And where is Pansy?”     59   
  “In the other room. There are several people there.”     60   
  “He is probably among them,” said Madame Merle.     61   
  “Do you wish to see him?” Osmond asked, in a provokingly pointless tone.     62   
  Madame Merle looked at him a moment; she knew his tones, to the eighth of a note. “Yes, I should like to say to him that I have told you what he wants, and that it interests you but feebly.”     63   
  “Don’t tell him that, he will try to interest me more—which is exactly what I don’t want. Tell him I hate his proposal.”     64   
  “But you don’t hate it.”     65   
  “It doesn’t signify: I don’t love it. I let him see that, myself, this evening; I was rude to him on purpose. That sort of thing is a great bore. There is no hurry.”     66   
  “I will tell him that you will take time and think it over.”     67   
  “No, don’t do that. He will hang on.”     68   
  “If I discourage him he will do the same.”     69   
  “Yes, but in the one case he will try and talk and explain; which would be exceedingly tiresome. In the other he will probably hold his tongue and go in for some deeper game. That will leave me quiet. I hate talking with a donkey.”     70   
  “Is that what you call poor Mr. Rosier?”     71   
  “Oh, he’s enervating, with his eternal majolica.”     72   
  Madame Merle dropped her eyes, with a faint smile. “He’s a gentleman, he has a charming temper; and, after all, an income of forty thousand francs——”     73   
  “It’s misery—genteel misery,” Osmond broke in. “It’s not what I have dreamed of for Pansy.”     74   
  “Very good, then. He has promised me not to speak to her.”     75   
  “Do you believe him?” Osmond asked, absent-mindedly.     76   
  “Perfectly. Pansy has thought a great deal about him; but I don’t suppose you think that matters.”     77   
  “I don’t think it matters at all; but neither do I believe she has thought about him.”     78   
  “That opinion is more convenient,” said Madame Merle, quietly.     79   
  “Has she told you that she is in love with him?”     80   
  “For what do you take her? And for what do you take me?” Madame Merle added in a moment.     81   
  Osmond had raised his foot and was resting his slim ankle on the other knee; he clasped his ankle in his hand, familiarly, and gazed a while before him. “This kind of thing doesn’t find me unprepared. It’s what I educated her for. It was all for this—that when such a case should come up she should do what I prefer.”     82   
  “I am not afraid that she will not do it.”     83   
  “Well then, where is the hitch?”     84   
  “I don’t see any. But all the same, I recommend you not to get rid of Mr. Rosier. Keep him on hand, he may be useful.”     85   
  “I can’t keep him. Do it yourself.”     86   
  “Very good; I will put him into a corner and allow him so much a day.” Madame Merle had, for the most part, while they talked, been glancing about her; it was her habit, in this situation, just as it was her habit to interpose a good many blank-looking pauses. A long pause followed the last words I have quoted; and before it was broken again, she saw Pansy come out of the adjoining room, followed by Edward Rosier. Pansy advanced a few steps and then stopped and stood looking at Madame Merle and at her father.     87   
  “He has spoken to her,” Madame Merle said, simply, to Osmond.     88   
  Her companion never turned his head. “So much for your belief in his promises. He ought to be horsewhipped.”     89   
  “He intends to confess, poor little man!”     90   
  Osmond got up; he had now taken a sharp look at his daughter. “It doesn’t matter,” he murmured, turning away.     91   
  Pansy after a moment came up to Madame Merle with her little manner of unfamiliar politeness. This lady’s reception of her was not more intimate; she simply, as she rose from the sofa, gave her a friendly smile.     92   
  “You are very late,” said the young girl, gently.     93   
  “My dear child, I am never later than I intend to be.”     94   
  Madame Merle had not got up to be gracious to Pansy; she moved towards Edward Rosier. He came to meet her, and, very quickly, as if to get it off his mind—“I have spoken to her!” he whispered.     95   
  “I know it, Mr. Rosier.”     96   
  “Did she tell you?”     97   
  “Yes, she told me. Behave properly for the rest of the evening, and come and see me to-morrow at a quarter past five.”     98   
  She was severe, and in the manner in which she turned her back to him there was a degree of contempt which caused him to mutter a decent imprecation.     99   
  He had no intention of speaking to Osmond; it was neither the time nor the place. But he instinctively wandered towards Isabel, who sat talking with an old lady. He sat down on the other side of her; the old lady was an Italian, and Rosier took for granted that she understood no English.    100   
  “You said just now you wouldn’t help me,” he began, to Mrs. Osmond. “Perhaps you will feel differently when you know—when you know——”    101   
  He hesitated a little.    102   
  “When I know what?” Isabel asked, gently.    103   
  “That she is all right.”    104   
  “What do you mean by that?”    105   
  “Well, that we have come to an understanding.”    106   
  “She is all wrong,” said Isabel. “It won’t do.”    107   
  Poor Rosier gazed at her half-pleadingly, half-angrily; a sudden flush testified to his sense of injury.    108   
  “I have never been treated so,” he said. “What is there against me, after all? That is not the way I am usually considered. I could have married twenty times.”    109   
  “It’s a pity you didn’t. I don’t mean twenty times, but once, comfortably,” Isabel added, smiling kindly. “You are not rich enough for Pansy.”    110   
  “She doesn’t care a straw for one’s money.”    111   
  “No, but her father does.”    112   
  “Ah yes, he has proved that!” cried the young man.    113   
  Isabel got up, turning away from him, leaving her old lady, without saying anything; and he occupied himself for the next ten minutes in pretending to look at Gilbert Osmond’s collection of miniatures, which were neatly arranged on a series of small velvet screens. But he looked without seeing; his cheek burned; he was too full of his sense of injury. It was certain that he had never been treated that way before; he was not used to being thought not good enough. He knew how good he was, and if such a fallacy had not been so pernicious, he could have laughed at it. He looked about again for Pansy, but she had disappeared, and his main desire was now to get out of the house. Before doing so he spoke to Isabel again; it was not agreeable to him to reflect that he had just said a rude thing to her—the only point that would now justify a low view of him.    114   
  “I spoke of Mr. Osmond as I shouldn’t have done, a while ago,” he said. “But you must remember my situation.”    115   
  “I don’t remember what you said,” she answered, coldly.    116   
  “Ah, you are offended, and now you will never help me.”    117   
  She was silent an instant, and then, with a change of tone—    118   
  “It’s not that I won’t; I simply can’t!” Her manner was almost passionate.    119   
  “If you could—just a little,” said Rosier, “I would never again speak of your husband save as an angel.”    120   
  “The inducement is great,” said Isabel gravely—inscrutably, as he afterwards, to himself, called it; and she gave him, straight in the eyes, a look which was also inscrutable. It made him remember, somehow, that he had known her as a child; and yet it was keener than he liked, and he took himself off.

Chapter XXXVIII   
     
HE went to see Madame Merle on the morrow, and to his surprise she let him off rather easily. But she made him promise that he would stop there until something should have been decided. Mr. Osmond had had higher expectations; it was very true that as he had no intention of giving his daughter a portion, such expectations were open to criticism, or even, if one would, to ridicule. But she would advise Mr. Rosier not to take that tone; if he would possess his soul in patience he might arrive at his felicity.      1   
  Mr. Osmond was not favourable to his suit, but it would not be a miracle if he should gradually come round. Pansy would never defy her father, he might depend upon that, so nothing was to be gained by precipitation. Mr. Osmond needed to accustom his mind to an offer of a sort that he had not hitherto entertained, and this result must come of itself—it was useless to try to force it. Rosier remarked that his own situation would be in the mean while the most uncomfortable in the world, and Madame Merle assured him that she felt for him. But, as she justly declared, one couldn’t have everything one wanted; she had learned that lesson for herself. There would be no use in his writing to Gilbert Osmond, who had charged her to tell him as much. He wished the matter dropped for a few weeks, and would himself write when he should have anything to communicate which it would please Mr. Rosier to hear.      2   
  “He doesn’t like your having spoken to Pansy. Ah, he doesn’t like it at all,” said Madame Merle.      3   
  “I am perfectly willing to give him a chance to tell me so!”      4   
  “If you do that he will tell you more than you care to hear. Go to the house, for the next month, as little as possible, and leave the rest to me.”      5   
  “As little as possible? Who is to measure that?”      6   
  “Let me measure it. Go on Thursday evenings with the rest of the world; but don’t go at all at odd times, and don’t fret about Pansy. I will see that she understands everything. She’s a calm little nature; she will take it quietly.”      7   
  Edward Rosier fretted about Pansy a good deal, but he did as he was advised, and waited for another Thursday evening before returning to the Palazzo Roccanera. There had been a party at dinner, so that although he went early the company was already tolerably numerous. Osmond, as usual, was in the first room, near the fire, staring straight at the door, so that, not to be distinctly uncivil, Rosier had to go and speak to him.      8   
  “I am glad that you can take a hint,” Pansy’s father said, slightly closing his keen, conscious eye.      9   
  “I take no hints. But I took a message, as I supposed it to be.”     10   
  “You took it? Where did you take it?”     11   
  It seemed to poor Rosier that he was being insulted and he waited a moment, asking himself how much a true lover ought to submit to.     12   
  “Madame Merle gave me, as I understood it, a message from you—to the effect that you declined to give me the opportunity I desire—the opportunity to explain my wishes to you.”     13   
  Rosier flattered himself that he spoke rather sternly.     14   
  “I don’t see what Madame Merle has to do with it. Why did you apply to Madame Merle?”     15   
  “I asked her for an opinion—for nothing more. I did so because she had seemed to me to know you very well.”     16   
  “She doesn’t know me so well as she thinks,” said Osmond.     17   
  “I am sorry for that, because she has given me some little ground for hope.”     18   
  Osmond stared into the fire for a moment.     19   
  “I set a great price on my daughter.”     20   
  “You can’t set a higher one than I do. Don’t I prove it by wishing to marry her?”     21   
  “I wish to marry her very well,” Osmond went on, with a dry impertinence which, in another mood, poor Rosier would have admired.     22   
  “Of course I pretend that she would marry well in marrying me. She couldn’t marry a man who loves her more; or whom, I may venture to add, she loves more.”     23   
  “I am not bound to accept your theories as to whom my daughter loves,” Osmond said, looking up with a quick, cold smile.     24   
  “I am not theorising. Your daughter has spoken.”     25   
  “Not to me,” Osmond continued, bending forward a little and dropping his eyes to his boot-toes.     26   
  “I have her promise, sir!” cried Rosier, with the sharpness of exasperation.     27   
  As their voices had been pitched very low before, such a note attracted some attention from the company. Osmond waited till this little movement had subsided, then he said very quickly—     28   
  “I think she has no recollection of having given it.”     29   
  They had been standing with their faces to the fire and after he had uttered these last words Osmond turned round again to the room. Before Rosier had time to rejoin he perceived that a gentleman—a stranger—had just come in, unannounced, according to the Roman custom, and was about to present himself to the master of the house. The latter smiled blandly, but somewhat blankly; the visitor was a handsome man, with a large, fair beard—evidently an Englishman.     30   
  “You apparently don’t recognise me,” he said, with a smile that expressed more than Osmond’s.     31   
  “Ah yes, now I do; I expected so little to see you.”     32   
  Rosier departed, and went in direct pursuit of Pansy. He sought her, as usual, in the neighbouring room, but he again encountered Mrs. Osmond in his path. He gave this gracious lady no greeting—he was too righteously indignant; but said to her crudely—     33   
  “Your husband is awfully cold-blooded.”     34   
  She gave the same mystical smile that he had noticed before.     35   
  “You can’t expect every one to be as hot as yourself.”     36   
  “I don’t pretend to be cold, but I am cool. What has he been doing to his daughter?”     37   
  “I have no idea.”     38   
  “Don’t you take any interest?” Rosier demanded, feeling that she too was irritating.     39   
  For a moment she answered nothing. Then—     40   
  “No!” she said abruptly, and with a quickened light in her eye which directly contradicted the word.     41   
  “Excuse me if I don’t believe that. Where is Miss Osmond?”     42   
  “In the corner, making tea. Please leave her there.”     43   
  Rosier instantly discovered the young girl, who had been hidden by intervening groups. He watched her, but her own attention was entirely given to her occupation.     44   
  “What on earth has he done to her?” he asked again imploringly. “He declares to me that she has given me up.”     45   
  “She has not given you up,” Isabel said, in a low tone, without looking at him.     46   
  “Ah, thank you for that! Now I will leave her alone as long as you think proper!”     47   
  He had hardly spoken when he saw her change colour, and became aware that Osmond was coming towards her, accompanied by the gentleman who had just entered. He thought the latter, in spite of the advantage of good looks and evident social experience, was a little embarrassed.     48   
  “Isabel,” said Osmond, “I bring you an old friend.”     49   
  Mrs. Osmond’s face, though it wore a smile, was, like her old friend’s not perfectly confident. “I am very happy to see Lord Warburton,” she said. Rosier turned away, and now that his talk with her had been interrupted, felt absolved from the little pledge he had just taken. He had a quick impression that Mrs. Osmond would not notice what he did.     50   
  To do him justice, Isabel for some time quite ceased to observe him. She had been startled; she hardly knew whether she were glad or not. Lord Warburton, however, now that he was face to face with her, was plainly very well pleased; his frank grey eye expressed a deep, if still somewhat shy, satisfaction. He was larger, stouter than of yore, and he looked older; he stood there very solidly and sensibly.     51   
  “I suppose you didn’t expect to see me,” he said; “I have only just arrived. Literally, I only got here this evening. You see I have lost no time in coming to pay you my respects; I knew you were at home on Thursdays.”     52   
  “You see the fame of your Thursday has spread to England,” Osmond remarked, smiling, to his wife.     53   
  “It is very kind of Lord Warburton to come so soon; we are greatly flattered,” Isabel said.     54   
  “Ah well, it’s better than stopping in one of those horrible inns,” Osmond went on.     55   
  “The hotel seems very good; I think it is the same one where I saw you four years ago. You know it was here in Rome that we first met; it is a long time ago. Do you remember where I bade you good-bye? It was in the Capitol, in the first room.”     56   
  “I remember that myself,” said Osmond; “I was there at the time.”     57   
  “Yes, I remember that you were there. I was very sorry to leave Rome—so sorry that, somehow or other, it became a melancholy sort of memory, and I have never cared to come back till to-day. But I knew you were living here, and I assure you I have often thought of you. It must be a charming place to live in,” said Lord Warburton, brightly, looking about him.     58   
  “We should have been glad to see you at any time,” remarked with propriety.     59   
  “Thank you very much. I haven’t been out of England since then. Till a month ago, I really supposed my travels were over.”     60   
  “I have heard of you from time to time,” said Isabel, who had now completely recovered her self-possession.     61   
  “I hope you have heard no harm. My life has been a blank.”     62   
  “Like the good reigns in history,” Osmond suggested. He appeared to think his duties as a host had now terminated, he had performed them very conscientiously. Nothing could have been more adequate, more nicely measured, than his courtesy to his wife’s old friend. It was punctilious, it was explicit, it was everything but natural—a deficiency which Lord Warburton, who, himself, had on the whole a good deal of nature, may be supposed to have perceived. “I will leave you and Mrs. Osmond together,” he added. “You have reminiscences into which I don’t enter.”     63   
  “I am afraid you lose a good deal!” said Lord Warburton, in a tone which perhaps betrayed overmuch his appreciation of Osmond’s generosity. He stood a moment, looking at Isabel with an eye that gradually became more serious. “I am really very glad to see you.”     64   
  “It is very pleasant. You are very kind.”     65   
  “Do you know that you are changed—a little?”     66   
  Isabel hesitated a moment.     67   
  “Yes—a good deal.”     68   
  “I don’t mean for the worse, of course; and yet how can I say for the better?”     69   
  “I think I shall have no scruple in saying that to you,” said Isabel, smiling.     70   
  “Ah well, for me—it’s a long time. It would be a pity that there shouldn’t be something to show for it.”     71   
  They sat down, and Isabel asked him about his sisters, with other inquiries of a somewhat perfunctory kind. He answered her questions as if they interested him, and in a few moments she saw—or believed she saw—that he would prove a more comfortable companion than of yore. Time had breathed upon his heart, and without chilling this organ, had freely ventilated it. Isabel felt her usual esteem for Time rise at a bound. Lord Warburton’s manner was certainly that of a contented man who would rather like one to know it.     72   
  “There is something I must tell you without more delay,” he said. “I have brought Ralph Touchett with me.”     73   
  “Brought him with you?” Isabel’s surprise was great.     74   
  “He is at the hotel; he was too tired to come out, and has gone to bed.”     75   
  “I will go and see him,” said Isabel, quickly.     76   
  “That is exactly what I hoped you would do. I had an idea that you hadn’t seen much of him since your marriage—that in fact your relations were a—a little more formal. That’s why I hesitated—like an awkward Englishman.”     77   
  “I am as fond of Ralph as ever,” Isabel answered. “But why has he come to Rome?”     78   
  The declaration was very gentle; the question a little sharp.     79   
  “Because he is very far gone, Mrs. Osmond.”     80   
  “Rome, then, is no place for him. I heard from him that he had determined to give up his custom of wintering abroad, and remain in England, indoors, in what he called an artificial climate.”     81   
  “Poor fellow, he doesn’t succeed with the artificial! I went to see him three weeks ago, at Gardencourt, and found him extremely ill. He has been getting worse every year, and now he has no strength left. He smokes no more cigarettes! He had got up an artificial climate indeed; the house was as hot as Calcutta. Nevertheless, he had suddenly taken it into his head to start for Sicily. I didn’t believe in it—neither did the doctors, nor any of his friends. His mother, as I suppose you know, is in America, so there was no one to prevent him. He stuck to his idea that it would be the saving of him to spend the winter at Catania. He said he could take servants and furniture, and make himself comfortable; but in point of fact he hasn’t brought anything. I wanted him at least to go by sea, to save fatigue; but he said he hated the sea, and wished to stop at Rome. After that, though I thought it all rubbish, I made up my mind to come with him. I am acting as—what do you call it in America?—as a kind of moderator. Poor Touchett’s very moderate now. We left England a fortnight ago, and he has been very bad on the way. He can’t keep warm, and the further south we come the more he feels the cold. He has got a rather good man, but I’m afraid he’s beyond human help. If you don’t mind my saying so, I think it was a most extraordinary time for Mrs. Touchett to choose for going to America.”     82   
  Isabel had listened eagerly; her face was full of pain and wonder.     83   
  “My aunt does that at fixed periods, and she lets nothing turn her aside. When the date comes round she starts; I think she would have started if Ralph had been dying.”     84   
  “I sometimes think he is dying,” Lord Warburton said.     85   
  Isabel started up.     86   
  “I will go to him now!”     87   
  He checked her; he was a little disconcerted at the quick effect of his words.     88   
  “I don’t mean that I thought so to-night. On the contrary, to-day, in the train, he seemed particularly well; the idea of our reaching Rome—he is very fond of Rome, you know—gave him strength. An hour ago, when I bade him goodnight, he told me that he was very tired, but very happy. Go to him in the morning; that’s all I mean. I didn’t tell him I was coming here; I didn’t think of it till after we separated. Then I remembered that he had told me that you had an evening, and that it was this very Thursday. It occurred to me to come in and tell you that he was here, and let you know that you had perhaps better not wait for him to call. I think he said he had not written to you.” There was no need of Isabel’s declaring that she would act upon Lord Warburton’s information; she looked, as she sat there, like a winged creature held back. “Let alone that I wanted to see you for myself,” her visitor added, gallantly.     89   
  “I don’t understand Ralph’s plan; it seems to me very wild,” she said. “I was glad to think of him between those thick walls at Gardencourt.”     90   
  “He was completely alone there; the thick walls were his only company.”     91   
  “You went to see him; you have been extremely kind.”     92   
  “Oh dear, I had nothing to do,” said Lord Warburton.     93   
  “We hear, on the contrary, that you are doing great things. Every one speaks of you as a great statesman, and I am perpetually seeing your name in the Times, which, by the way, doesn’t appear to hold it in reverence. You are apparently as bold a radical as ever.”     94   
  “I don’t feel nearly so bold; you know the world has come round to me. Touchett and I have kept up a sort of Parliamentary debate, all the way from London. I tell him he is the last of the Tories, and he calls me the head of the Communists. So you see there is life in him yet.”     95   
  Isabel had many questions to ask about Ralph, but she abstained from asking them all. She would see for herself on the morrow. She perceived that after a little Lord Warburton would tire of that subject—that he had a consciousness of other possible topics. She was more and more able to say to herself that he had recovered, and, what is more to the point, she was able to say it without bitterness. He had been for her, of old, such an image of urgency, of insistence, of something to be resisted and reasoned with, that his reappearance at first menaced her with a new trouble. But she was now reassured; she could see that he only wished to live with her on good terms, that she was to understand that he had forgiven her and was incapable of the bad taste of making pointed allusions. This was not a form of revenge, of course; she had no suspicion that he wished to punish her by an exhibition of disillusionment; she did him the justice to believe that it had simply occurred to him that she would now take a good-natured interest in knowing that he was resigned. It was the resignation of a healthy, manly nature, in which sentimental wounds could never fester. British politics had cured him; she had known they would. She gave an envious thought to the happier lot of men, who are always free to plunge into the healing waters of action. Lord Warburton of course spoke of the past, but he spoke of it without implication; he even went so far as to allude to their former meeting in Rome as a very jolly time. And he told her that he had been immensely interested in hearing of her marriage—that it was a great pleasure to him to make Mr. Osmond’s acquaintance—since he could hardly be said to have made it on the other occasion. He had not written to her when she married, but he did not apologise to her for that. The only thing he implied was that they were old friends, intimate friends. It was very much as an intimate friend that he said to her, suddenly, after a short pause which he had occupied in smiling, as he looked about him, like a man to whom everything suggested a cheerful interpretation—     96   
  “Well now, I suppose you are very happy, and all that sort of thing?”     97   
  Isabel answered with a quick laugh; the tone of his remark struck her almost as the accent of comedy.     98   
  “Do you suppose if I were not I would tell you?”     99   
  “Well, I don’t know. I don’t see why not.”    100   
  “I do, then. Fortunately, however, I am very happy.”    101   
  “You have got a very good house.”    102   
  “Yes, it’s very pleasant. But that’s not my merit—it’s my husband’s.”    103   
  “You mean that he has arranged it?”    104   
  “Yes, it was nothing when we came.”    105   
  “He must be very clever.”    106   
  “He has a genius for upholstery,” said Isabel.    107   
  “There is a great rage for that sort of thing now. But you must have a taste of your own.”    108   
  “I enjoy things when they are done; but I have no ideas. I can never propose anything.”    109   
  “Do you mean that you accept what others propose?”    110   
  “Very willingly, for the most part.”    111   
  “That’s a good thing to know. I shall propose you something.”    112   
  “It will be very kind. I must say, however, that I have in a few small ways a certain initiative. I should like, for instance to introduce you to some of these people.”    113   
  “Oh, please don’t; I like sitting here. Unless it be to that young lady in the blue dress. She has a charming face.”    114   
  “The one talking to the rosy young man? That’s my husband’s daughter.”    115   
  “Lucky man, your husband. What a dear little maid!”    116   
  “You must make her acquaintance.”    117   
  “In a moment, with pleasure. I like looking at her from here.” He ceased to look at her, however, very soon; his eyes constantly reverted to Mrs. Osmond. “Do you know I was wrong just now in saying that you had changed?” he presently went on. “You seem to me, after all, very much the same.”    118   
  “And yet I find it’s a great change to be married,” said Isabel, with gaiety.    119   
  “It affects most people more than it has affected you. You see I haven’t gone in for that.”    120   
  “It rather surprises me.”    121   
  “You ought to understand it, Mrs. Osmond. But I want to marry,” he added, more simply.    122   
  “It ought to be very easy,” Isabel said, rising, and then blushing a little at the thought that she was hardly the person to say this. It was perhaps because Lord Warburton noticed her blush that he generously forebore to call her attention to the incongruity.    123   
  Edward Rosier meanwhile had seated himself on an ottoman beside Pansy’s tea-table. He pretended at first to talk to her about trifles, and she asked him who was the new gentleman conversing with her stepmother.    124   
  “He’s an English lord,” said Rosier. “I don’t know more.”    125   
  “I wonder if he will have some tea. The English are so fond of tea.”    126   
  “Never mind that; I have something particular to say to you.”    127   
  “Don’t speak so loud, or every one will hear us,” said Pansy.    128   
  “They won’t hear us if you continue to look that way: as if your only thought in life was the wish that the kettle would boil.”    129   
  “It has just been filled; the servants never know!” the young girl exclaimed, with a little sigh.    130   
  “Do you know what your father said to me just now? That you didn’t mean what you said a week ago.”    131   
  “I don’t mean everything I say. How can a young girl do that? But I mean what I say to you.”    132   
  “He told me that you had forgotten me.”    133   
  “Ah no, I don’t forget,” said Pansy, showing her pretty teeth in a fixed smile.    134   
  “Then everything is just the same?”    135   
  “Ah no, it’s not just the same. Papa has been very severe.”    136   
  “What has he done to you?    137   
  “He asked me what you had done to me, and I told him everything. Then he forbade me to marry you.”    138   
  “You needn’t mind that.”    139   
  “Oh yes, I must indeed. I can’t disobey papa.”    140   
  “Not for one who loves you as I do, and whom you pretend to love?”    141   
  Pansy raised the lid of the tea-pot, gazing into this vessel for a moment; then she dropped six words into its aromatic depths. “I love you just as much.”    142   
  “What good will that do me?”    143   
  “Ah,” said Pansy, raising her sweet, vague eyes, “I don’t know that.”    144   
  “You disappoint me,” groaned poor Rosier.    145   
  Pansy was silent a moment; she handed a tea-cup to a servant.    146   
  “Please don’t talk any more.”    147   
  “Is this to be all my satisfaction?”    148   
  “Papa said I was not to talk with you.”    149   
  “Do you sacrifice me like that? Ah, it’s too much!”    150   
  “I wish you would wait a little,” said the young girl, in a voice just distinct enough to betray a quaver.    151   
  “Of course I will wait if you will give me hope. But you take my life away.”    152   
  “I will not give you up—oh, no!” Pansy went on.    153   
  “He will try and make you marry some one else.”    154   
  “I will never do that.”    155   
  “What then are we to wait for?”    156   
  She hesitated a moment.    157   
  “I will speak to Mrs. Osmond, and she will help us.” It was in this manner that she for the most part designated her stepmother.    158   
  “She won’t help us much. She is afraid.”    159   
  “Afraid of what?”    160   
  “Of your father, I suppose.”    161   
  Pansy shook her little head.    162   
  “She is not afraid of any one! We must have patience.”    163   
  “Ah, that’s an awful word,” Rosier groaned; he was deeply disconcerted. Oblivious of the customs of good society, he dropped his head into his hands, and, supporting it with a melancholy grace, sat starting at the carpet. Presently he became aware of a good deal of movement about him, and when he looked up saw Pansy making a curtsey—it was still her little curtsey of the convent—to the English lord whom Mrs. Osmond had presented.