like vulgar, bragging, lying talk. Isabel had taken in hand a volume of Ampere, 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 pursue her study. 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.
"You say you'll come back; but who knows?" Gilbert Osmond said.
"I think you're much more likely to start on your voyage round the world. You're under no
obligation to come back; you can do exactly what you choose; you can roam through space."
"Well, Italy's a part of space," Isabel answered. "I can take it on the way."
"On the way round the world? No, don't do that. Don't put us in a parenthesis--give us a chapter to
ourselves. I don't want to see you on your travels. I'd rather see you when they're over. I should
like to see you when you're tired and satiated," Osmond added in a moment. "I shall prefer you in
that state."
Isabel, with her eyes bent, fingered the pages of M. Ampere. "You turn things into ridicule without
seeming to do it, though not, I think, without intending it. You've no respect for my travels-- you
think them ridiculous."
"Where do you find that?"
She went on in the same tone, fretting the edge of her book with the paper-knife. "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."
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"I think it beautiful," said Osmond. "You know my opinions--I've 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."
She looked up from her book. "What you despise most in the world is bad, is stupid art."
"Possibly. But yours seem to me very clear and very good."
"If I were to go to Japan next winter you would laugh at me," she went on.
Osmond gave a smile--a keen one, but not a laugh, for the tone of their conversation was not
jocose. Isabel had in fact her solemnity; he had seen it before. "You have one!"
"That's exactly what I say. You think such an idea absurd."
"I would give my little finger to go to Japan; it's one of the countries I want most to see. Can't you
believe that, with my taste for old lacquer?"
"I haven't a taste for old lacquer to excuse me," said Isabel.
"You've a better excuse--the means of going. You're quite wrong in your theory that I laugh at you.
I don't know what has put it into your head."
"It wouldn't be remarkable if you did think it ridiculous that I should have the means to travel
when you've not; for you know everything and I know nothing."
"The more reason why you should travel and learn," smiled Osmond. "Besides," he added as if it
were a point to be made, "I don't know everything."
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 these too few days in Rome, which she
might musingly have likened to the figure of some small princess of one of the ages of dress
overmuffled in a mantle of state and dragging a train that it took pages or historians to hold up-that
this felicity was coming to an end. That most of the interest of the time had been owing to Mr.
Osmond was a reflexion 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 they should never meet again,
perhaps after all it would be as well. Happy things don't repeat themselves, and her adventure wore
already the changed, the seaward face of some romantic island from which, after feasting on purple
grapes, she was putting off while the breeze rose. 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 the pity that the chapter was closed; she
felt for a moment a pang that touched the source of tears. The sensation kept her silent, and Gilbert
Osmond was silent too; he was looking at her. "Go everywhere," he said at last, in a low, kind
voice; "do everything; get everything out of life. Be happy,--be triumphant."
"What do you mean by being triumphant?"
"Well, doing what you like."
"To triumph, then, it seems to me, is to fail! Doing all the vain things one likes is often very
tiresome."
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"Exactly," said Osmond with his quiet quickness. "As I intimated just now, you'll 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 want to say to you."
"Ah, I can't advise you without knowing what it is. But I'm horrid when I'm tired," Isabel added
with due inconsequence.
"I don't believe that. You're angry, sometimes--that I can believe, though I've never seen it. But I'm
sure you're never 'cross.'"
"Not even when I lose my temper?"
"You don't lose it--you find it, and that must be beautiful." Osmond spoke with a noble
earnestness. "They must be great moments to see."
"If I could only find it now!" Isabel nervously cried.
"I'm not afraid; I should fold my arms and admire you. I'm speaking very seriously." He leaned
forward, 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'm in love with you."
She instantly rose. "Ah, keep that till I am tired!"
"Tired of hearing it from others?" He sat there raising his eyes to her. "No, you may heed it now or
never, as you please. But after all I must say it now." She had turned away, but in the movement
she had stopped herself and dropped her gaze upon him. The two remained a while 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. "I'm
absolutely in love with you."
He had repeated the announcement in a tone of almost impersonal discretion, like a man who
expected very little from it but who spoke for his own needed relief. The tears came into her eyes:
this time they obeyed the sharpness of the pang that suggested to her somehow the slipping of a
fine bolt--backward, forward, she couldn't have said which. The words he had uttered made him,
as he stood there, beautiful and generous, invested him as with the golden air of early autumn; but,
morally speaking, she retreated before them--facing him still--as she had retreated in the other
cases before a like encounter. "Oh don't say that, please," she answered with an intensity that
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 sense of
something within herself, deep down, that she supposed to be inspired and trustful passion. It was
there like a large sum stored in a bank--which there was a terror in having to begin to spend. If she
touched it, it would all come out.
"I haven't the idea that it will matter much to you," said Osmond. "I've too little to offer you. What
I have--it's enough for me; but it's not enough for you. I've 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, considerately inclined to her, 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
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oddity, and presenting to her his firm, refined, slightly ravaged face. "It gives me no pain, because
it's perfectly simple. For me you'll always be the most important woman in the world."
Isabel looked at herself in this character--looked intently, thinking she filled it with a certain grace.
But what she said was not an expression of any such 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 it struck her as a ridiculous word. But it was
what stupidly came to her.
"I remember perfectly. Of course you're surprised and startled. But if it's nothing but that, it will
pass away. And it will perhaps leave something that I may not be ashamed of."
"I don't know what it may leave. You see at all events that I'm not overwhelmed," said Isabel with
rather a pale smile. "I'm not too troubled to think. And I think that I'm glad I leave Rome tomorrow."
"Of course I don't agree with you there."
"I don't at all KNOW you," she added abruptly; and then she coloured as she heard herself saying
what she had said almost a year before to Lord Warburton.
"If you were not going away you'd know me better."
"I shall do that some other time."
"I hope so. I'm very easy to know."
"No, no," she emphatically answered--"there you're not sincere. You're not easy to know; no one
could be less so."
"Well," he laughed, "I said that because I know myself. It may be a boast, but I do."
"Very likely; but you're very wise."
"So are you, Miss Archer!" Osmond exclaimed.
"I don't feel so just now. Still, I'm wise enough to think you had better go. Good-night."
"God bless you!" said Gilbert Osmond, taking the hand which she failed to surrender. After which
he added: "If we meet again you'll find me as you leave me. If we don't I shall be so all the same."
"Thank you very much. Good-bye."
There was something quietly firm about Isabel's visitor; he might go of his own movement, but
wouldn't be dismissed. "There's one thing more. I haven't asked anything of you--not even a
thought in the future; you must do me that justice. But there's a little service I should like to ask. I
shall not return home for several days; Rome's delightful, and it's a good place for a man in my
state of mind. Oh, I know you're sorry to leave it; but you're right to do what your aunt wishes."
"She doesn't even wish it!" Isabel broke out strangely.
Osmond 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, very proper.
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'll discover what a worship I have for propriety."
"You're not conventional?" Isabel gravely asked.
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"I like the way you utter that word! No, I'm not conventional: I'm convention itself. You don't
understand that?" And he paused a moment, smiling. "I should like to explain it." Then with a
sudden, quick, bright naturalness, "Do come back again," he pleaded. "There are so many things
we might talk about."
She stood there with lowered eyes. "What service did you speak of just now?"
"Go and see my little daughter before you leave Florence. She's alone at the villa; I decided not to
send her to my sister, who hasn't at all my ideas. Tell her she must love her poor father very
much," said Gilbert Osmond gently.
"It will be a great pleasure to me to go," Isabel answered. "I'll tell her what you say. Once more
good-bye."
On this he took a rapid, respectful leave. When he had gone she stood a moment looking about her
and seated herself slowly and with an air of deliberation. She sat there till her companions came
back, with folded hands, gazing at the ugly carpet. Her agitation--for it had not diminished--was
very still, very deep. What had happened was something that for a week past her imagination had
been going forward to meet; but here, when it came, she stopped--that sublime principle somehow
broke down. 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, as I say, now hung back:
there was a last vague space it couldn't 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
She returned on the morrow to Florence, under her cousin's escort, and Ralph Touchett, though
usually restive under railway discipline, thought very well of the successive hours passed in the
train that hurried his companion away from the city now distinguished by Gilbert Osmond's
preference--hours that were to form the first stage in a larger scheme of travel. Miss Stackpole had
remained behind; she was planning a little trip to Naples, to be carried out with Mr. Bantling's aid.
Isabel was to have 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 call on Pansy Osmond.
Her plan, however, seemed for a moment likely to modify itself in deference to an idea 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, "forever") 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. She mentioned to this fortunate woman that Mr. Osmond had asked
her to take a look at his daughter, but didn't mention that he had also made her a declaration of
love.
"Ah, comme cela se trouve!" Madame Merle exclaimed. "I myself have been thinking it would be
a kindness to pay the child a little visit before I go off."
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"We can go together then," Isabel reasonably said: "reasonably" because the proposal was not
uttered in the spirit of enthusiasm. She had prefigured her small pilgrimage as made in solitude;
she should like it better so. She was nevertheless prepared to sacrifice this mystic sentiment to her
great consideration for her friend.
That personage finely meditated. "After all, why should we both go; having, each of us, so much to
do during these last hours?"
"Very good; I can easily go alone."
"I don't know about your going alone--to the house of a handsome bachelor. He has been married-but
so long ago!"
Isabel stared. "When Mr. Osmond's away what does it matter?"
"They don't know he's away, you see."
"They? Whom do you mean?"
"Every one. But perhaps it doesn't signify."
"If you were going why shouldn't I?" Isabel asked.
"Because I'm an old frump and you're a beautiful young woman."
"Granting all that, you've not promised."
"How much you think of your promises!" said the elder woman in mild mockery.
"I think a great deal of my promises. Does that surprise you?"
"You're right," Madame Merle audibly reflected. "I really think you wish to be kind to the child."
"I wish very much to be kind to her."
"Go and see her then; no one will be the wiser. And tell her I'd have come if you hadn't. Or rather,"
Madame Merle added, "DON'T tell her. She won't care."
As Isabel drove, in the publicity of an open vehicle, along the winding way which led to Mr.
Osmond's hill-top, she wondered what her friend had meant by no one's being the wiser. Once in a
while, at large intervals, this lady, whose voyaging discretion, as a general thing, was rather of the
open sea than of the risky channel, dropped a remark of ambiguous quality, struck a note that
sounded false. What cared Isabel Archer for the vulgar judgements of obscure people? and did
Madame Merle suppose that she was capable of doing a thing at all if it had to be sneakingly done?
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 sorts of things as to which she liked to be clear. She heard Pansy strumming at the piano in
another place as she herself was ushered into Mr. Osmond's drawing-room; the little girl was
"practising," and Isabel was pleased to think she performed this duty with rigour. She immediately
came in, smoothing down her frock, and did the honours of her father's house with a wide-eyed
earnestness of courtesy. Isabel sat there half an hour, and Pansy rose to the occasion as the small,
winged fairy in the pantomime soars by the aid of the dissimulated wire --not chattering, but
conversing, and showing the same respectful interest in Isabel's affairs that Isabel was so good as
to take in hers. Isabel wondered at her; she had never had so directly presented to her nose the
white flower of cultivated sweetness. How well the child had been taught, said our admiring young
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woman; how prettily she had been directed and fashioned; and yet how simple, how natural, how
innocent she had been kept! Isabel was fond, ever, of the question of character and quality, of
sounding, as who should say, the deep personal mystery, and it had pleased her, up to this time, to
be in doubt as to whether this tender slip were not really all-knowing. Was the extremity of her
candour but the perfection of self-consciousness? Was it put on to please her father's visitor, or
was it the direct expression of an unspotted nature? 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 gloom--her interview with the daughter of the house, I say,
effectually settled this question. Pansy was really a blank page, a pure white surface, successfully
kept so; she had neither art, nor guile, nor temper, nor talent--only two or three small exquisite
instincts: for knowing a friend, for avoiding a mistake, for taking care of an old toy or a new frock.
Yet to be so tender was to be touching withal, and she could be felt as an easy victim of fate. She
would have no will, no power to resist, no sense of her own importance; she would easily be
mystified, easily crushed: her force would be all in knowing when and where to cling. She moved
about the place with her visitor, who had asked leave to walk through the other rooms again, where
Pansy gave her judgement on several works of art. She spoke of her prospects, her occupations, her
father's intentions; she was not egotistical, but felt the propriety of supplying the information so
distinguished a guest would naturally expect.
"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's 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's not rich,
and I should be very sorry if he were to pay much money for me, because I don't think I'm worth it.
I don't learn quickly enough, and I have no memory. For what I'm told, yes--especially when it's
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'm 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've 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'm very sorry, and he'll be sorry too. Of everyone who comes here I like you the
best. That's 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'm really as yet only a child. Oh, yes, I've 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's right to ask. At the convent they told us that we must never
ask the age. I don't like to do anything that's not expected; it looks as if one had not been properly
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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 don't play
very well. You play yourself? I wish very much you'd play something for me; papa has the idea
that I should hear good music. Madame Merle has played for me several times; that's what I like
best about Madame Merle; she has great facility. I shall never have facility. And I've no voice--just
a small sound like the squeak of a slate-pencil making flourishes."
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, held her close, looked at her long. "Be very good," she said; "give
pleasure to your father."
"I think that's what I live for," Pansy answered. "He has not much pleasure; he's rather a sad man."
Isabel listened to this assertion with an interest which she felt it almost a torment to be obliged to
conceal. 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
