at the idea of taking advantage of the little girl--it was of this she would have accused herself--and
of exhaling into that air where he might still have a subtle sense for it any breath of her charmed
state. 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 sweet slimness closer and looking down at her almost in envy. She was obliged
to confess it to herself--she would have taken a passionate pleasure in talking of Gilbert Osmond to
this innocent, diminutive creature who was so near him. But she said no other word; she only
kissed Pansy once again. They went together through the vestibule, to the door that opened on the
court; and there her young hostess stopped, looking rather wistfully beyond. "I may go no further.
I've promised papa not to pass this door."
"You're right to obey him; he'll never ask you anything unreasonable."
"I shall always obey him. But when will you come again?"
"Not for a long time, I'm afraid."
"As soon as you can, I hope. I'm only a little girl," said Pansy, "but I shall always expect you." 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 dazzle 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 spring-time, shortly after her return to
Palazzo Crescentini and a year from the date of the incidents just narrated. She was alone on this
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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 woman stood near it for some time, her hands clasped behind her; she
gazed abroad with the vagueness of unrest. Too troubled for attention she moved in a vain circle.
Yet it could not be in her thought to catch a glimpse of her visitor before he should pass into the
house, since the entrance to the palace was not through the garden, in which stillness and privacy
always reigned. She wished rather to forestall his arrival by a process of conjecture, and to judge
by the expression of her face this attempt gave her plenty to do. Grave she found herself, and
positively more weighted, as by the experience of the lapse of the year she had spent in seeing the
world. She had ranged, she would have said, through space and surveyed much of mankind, and
was therefore now, in her own eyes, a very different person from the frivolous young woman from
Albany who had begun to take the measure of Europe on the lawn at Gardencourt a couple of years
before. She flattered herself she had harvested wisdom and learned 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 images that
might have been projected on such a field we are already acquainted. There would be for instance
the conciliatory Lily, our heroine's sister and Edmund Ludlow's wife, who had come out from New
York to spend five months with her relative. She had left her husband behind her, but had brought
her children, to whom Isabel now played with equal munificence and tenderness the part of
maiden-aunt. Mr. Ludlow, toward the last, had been able to snatch a few weeks from his forensic
triumphs and, crossing the ocean with extreme rapidity, had 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 had 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 for such upward
wanderings as might be undertaken by ladies and children on warm afternoons. They had
afterwards reached the French capital, which was worshipped, and with costly ceremonies, by Lily,
but thought of as noisily vacant by Isabel, who in these days made use of her memory of Rome as
she might have done, in a hot and crowded room, of a phial of something pungent hidden in her
handkerchief.
Mrs. Ludlow sacrificed, as I say, to Paris, yet had doubts and wonderments not allayed at that altar;
and after her husband had joined her found further chagrin in his failure to throw himself into these
speculations. They all had Isabel for subject; 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 mental motions were sufficiently various. At one
moment she thought it would be so natural for that young woman to come home and take a house
in New York--the Rossiters', for instance, which had an elegant conservatory and was just round
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the corner from her own; at another she couldn't conceal her surprise at the girl's not marrying
some member of one of the great aristocracies. On the whole, as I have said, she had fallen from
high communion with the probabilities. 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 slightly meagre, but scarce the less eminent figure. Isabel had developed
less, however, than Lily had thought likely--development, to Lily's understanding, being somehow
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 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 rendered
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 had no better reason for her
silence than that she didn't wish to speak. It was more romantic to say nothing, and, drinking deep,
in secret, of romance, she was as little disposed to ask poor Lily's advice as she would have been to
close that rare volume forever. But Lily knew nothing of these discriminations, and could only
pronounce her sister's career a strange anti-climax--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 she had lost her courage. So uncanny 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.
Our young lady's courage, however, might have been taken as reaching its height after her
relations had gone home. She could imagine braver things than spending the winter in Paris--Paris
had sides by which it so resembled New York, Paris was like smart, neat prose--and her close
correspondence with Madame Merle did much to stimulate such flights. 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 last days of November, after the
departure of the train that was to convey poor Lily, her husband and her children to their ship at
Liverpool. It had been good for her to regale; 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.
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There was a deep thrill in it all, 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 heroine 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 genius 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 to see her. Isabel wrote to Mrs. Touchett to apologise for
not presenting herself just yet in Florence, and her aunt replied characteristically enough.
Apologies, Mrs. Touchett intimated, were of no more use to her than 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 of the origin of things. Her
letter was frank, but (a rare case with Mrs. Touchett) not so frank as it pretended. She easily
forgave her niece for not stopping at Florence, because she took it for a sign that Gilbert Osmond
was less in question there than formerly. She watched of course to see if he would now find a
pretext for going to Rome, and derived some comfort from learning that he had not been 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 the 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 reflexion, a certain incoherence prevailed in her.
Isabel travelled rapidly and recklessly; she was like a thirsty person draining cup after cup.
Madame Merle meanwhile, as lady-in-waiting to a princess circulating incognita, panted a little in
her rear. It was on Isabel's invitation she had come, and she imparted all due dignity to the girl's
uncountenanced state. She played her part with the tact that might have been expected of her,
effacing herself and accepting the position of a companion whose expenses were profusely paid.
The situation, however, had no hardships, and people who met this reserved though striking pair
on their travels would not have been able to tell you which was patroness and which client. To say
that Madame Merle improved on acquaintance states meagrely the impression she made on her
friend, who had found her from the first so ample and so easy. At the end of an intimacy of three
months Isabel felt she knew her better; her character had revealed itself, and the admirable woman
had also at last redeemed her promise of relating her history from her own point of view--a
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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, a positive
adventurer, she might say, though originally so plausible, who had taken advantage, years before,
of her youth and of an inexperience in which doubtless those who knew her only now would find it
difficult to believe); it abounded so in startling and lamentable incidents that her companion
wondered a person so eprouvee could have kept so much of her freshness, her interest in life. Into
this freshness of Madame Merle's she obtained a considerable insight; she seemed to see it as
professional, as slightly mechanical, carried about in its case like the fiddle of the virtuoso, or
blanketed and bridled like the "favourite" of the jockey. She liked her as much as ever, but there
was a corner of the curtain that never was lifted; it was as if she had remained after all something
of a public performer, condemned to emerge only in character and in costume. She had once said
that she came from a distance, that she belonged to the "old, old" world, and Isabel never lost the
impression that she was the product of a different moral or social clime from her own, that she had
grown up under other stars.
She believed then that at bottom she had a different morality. Of course the morality of civilised
persons has always much in common; but our young woman had a sense in her of values gone
wrong or, as they said at the shops, marked down. She considered, with the presumption of youth,
that a morality differing from her own must be inferior to it; and this conviction was an aid to
detecting an occasional flash of cruelty, an occasional lapse from candour, in the conversation of a
person who had raised delicate kindness to an art and whose pride was too high for the narrow
ways of deception. Her conception of human motives might, in certain lights, have been acquired
at the court of some kingdom in decadence, and there were several in her list of which our heroine
had not even heard. She had not heard of everything, that was very plain; and there were evidently
things in the world of which it was not advantageous to hear. She had once or twice had a positive
scare; since it so affected her to have to exclaim, of her friend, "Heaven forgive her, she doesn't
understand me!" Absurd as it may seem this discovery operated as a shock, left her with a vague
dismay in which there was even an element of foreboding. The dismay of course subsided, in the
light of some sudden proof of Madame Merle's remarkable intelligence; but it stood for a highwater-
mark in the ebb and flow of confidence. Madame Merle had once declared her belief that
when a friendship ceases to grow it immediately begins to decline--there being no point of
equilibrium between liking more and liking less. A stationary affection, in other words, was
impossible--it must move one way or the other. However that might be, the girl had in these days a
thousand uses for her sense of the romantic, which was more active 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
remained. 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 descended 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 rejoice to accept an invitation given
long before, and went to pay a visit at Palazzo Crescentini, Madame Merle on this occasion
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remaining in Rome. She 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 near which we
found her a while ago, and it was not of any of the matters I have rapidly sketched. She was not
turned to the past, but to 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 issue. It could be
nothing in the least soothing--she had warrant for this, and the conviction doubtless showed in the
cloud on her brow. For the rest, however, all clearness reigned in her; she had put away her
mourning and she walked in no small shimmering splendour. She only, felt older-- ever so much,
and as if she were "worth more" for it, like some curious piece in an antiquary's collection. She
was not at any rate left indefinitely to her apprehensions, for a servant at last stood before her with
a card on his tray. "Let the gentleman come in," she said, and 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.
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 his sense of maturity had
kept pace with Isabel's we shall perhaps presently ascertain; let me say meanwhile that to her
critical glance he showed nothing of the injury of time. Straight, strong and hard, there was nothing
in his appearance that spoke positively either of youth or of age; if he had neither innocence nor
weakness, so he had no practical philosophy. His jaw showed the same voluntary cast as in earlier
days; but a crisis like the present had in it of course something grim. 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 reflexion: "Poor fellow, what great things he's capable of, and what a pity he should waste
so dreadfully 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: "I can't tell you how I hoped you wouldn't come!"
"I've no doubt of that." And he looked about him for a seat. Not only had he come, but he meant to
settle.
"You must be very tired," said Isabel, seating herself, and generously, as she thought, to give him
his opportunity.
"No, I'm not at all tired. Did you ever know me to be tired?"
"Never; I wish I had! When did you arrive?"
"Last night, very late; in a kind of snail-train they call the express. These Italian trains go at about
the rate of an American funeral."
"That's in keeping--you must have felt as if you were coming to bury me!" And she forced a smile
of encouragement to an easy view of their situation. She had reasoned the matter well out, making
it perfectly clear that she broke no faith and falsified no contract; but for all this she was afraid of
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her visitor. She was ashamed of her fear; but she was devoutly thankful there was nothing else to
be ashamed of. He looked at her with his stiff insistence, an insistence in which there was such a
want of tact; especially when the dull dark beam in his eye rested on her as a physical weight.
"No, I didn't feel that; I couldn't think of you as dead. I wish I could!" he candidly declared.
"I thank you immensely."
"I'd rather think of you as dead than as married to another man."
"That's very selfish of you!" she returned with the ardour of a real conviction. "If you're not happy
yourself others have yet a right to be."
"Very likely it's 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've done I shall never feel anything-- I mean anything but that. That I shall feel all my
life."
Mr. Goodwood made these detached assertions with 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 became,
after a little, irrelevant. "When did you leave New York?"
He threw up his head as if calculating. "Seventeen days ago."
"You must have travelled fast in spite of your slow trains."
"I came as fast as I could. I'd have come five days ago if I had been able."
"It wouldn't have made any difference, Mr. Goodwood," she coldly smiled.
"Not to you--no. But to me."
"You gain nothing that I see."
"That's for me to judge!"
"Of course. To me it seems that you only torment yourself." And then, to change the subject, she
asked him if he had seen Henrietta Stackpole. He looked as if he had not come from Boston to
Florence to talk of Henrietta Stackpole; but he answered, distinctly enough, that this young lady
had been with him just before he left America. "She came to see you?" Isabel then demanded.
"Yes, she was in Boston, and she called at my office. It was the day I had got your letter."
"Did you tell her?" Isabel asked with a certain anxiety.
"Oh no," said Caspar Goodwood simply; "I didn't want to do that. She'll hear it quick enough; she
hears everything."
"I shall write to her, and then she'll write to me and scold me," Isabel declared, trying to smile
again.
Caspar, however, remained sternly grave. "I guess she'll come right out," he said.
"On purpose to scold me?"
"I don't know. She seemed to think she had not seen Europe thoroughly."
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"I'm glad you tell me that," Isabel said. "I must prepare for her."
Mr. Goodwood fixed his eyes for a moment on the floor; then at last, raising them, "Does she
know Mr. Osmond?" he enquired.
"A little. And she doesn't like him. But of course I don't marry to please Henrietta," she added. It
would have been better for poor Caspar if she had tried a little more to gratify Miss Stackpole; but
he didn't say so; he only asked, presently, when her marriage would take place. To which she made
answer that she didn't know yet. "I can only say it will be soon. I've told no one but yourself and
one other person--an old friend of Mr. Osmond's."
"Is it a marriage your friends won't like?" he demanded.
"I really haven't an idea. As I say, I don't marry for my friends."
He went on, making no exclamation, no comment, only asking questions, doing it quite without
delicacy. "Who and what then is Mr. Gilbert Osmond?"
"Who and what? Nobody and nothing but a very good and very honourable man. He's not in
business," said Isabel. "He's not rich; he's not known for anything in particular."
She disliked Mr. Goodwood's questions, but she said to herself that she owed it to him to satisfy
him as far as possible. The satisfaction poor Caspar exhibited was, however, small; he sat very
upright, gazing at her. "Where does he come from? Where does he belong?"
She had never been so little pleased with the way he said "belawng." "He comes from nowhere. He
has spent most of his life in Italy."
"You said in your letter he was American. Hasn't he a native place?"
"Yes, but he has forgotten it. He left it as a small boy."
"Has he never gone back?"
"Why should he go back?" Isabel asked, flushing all defensively. "He has no profession."
"He might have gone back for his pleasure. Doesn't he like the United States?"
"He doesn't know them. Then he's very quiet and very simple--he contents himself with Italy."
"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.
"That I should marry him? Nothing at all," Isabel replied while her patience helped itself by
turning a little to hardness. "If he had done great things would you forgive me any better? Give me
up, Mr. Goodwood; I'm marrying a perfect nonentity. Don't try to take an interest in him. You
can't."
"I can't appreciate him; that's what you mean. And you don't mean in the least that he's a perfect
