him nothing he wanted to know. He had asked his mother what she was making of her life, and his
mother had simply answered that she supposed she was making the best of it. Mrs. Touchett had
not the imagination that communes with the unseen, and she now pretended to no intimacy with
her niece, whom she rarely encountered. This young woman appeared to be living in a sufficiently
honourable way, but Mrs. Touchett still remained of the opinion that her marriage had been a
shabby affair. It had given her no pleasure to think of Isabel's establishment, which she was sure
was a very lame business. From time to time, in Florence, she rubbed against the Countess Gemini,
doing her best always to minimise the contact; and the Countess reminded her of Osmond, who
made her think of Isabel. The Countess was less talked of in these days; but Mrs. Touchett augured
no good of that: it only proved how she had been talked of before. There was a more direct
suggestion of Isabel in the person of Madame Merle; but Madame Merle's relations with Mrs.
Touchett had undergone a perceptible change. Isabel's aunt had told her, without circumlocution,
that she had played too ingenious a part; and Madame Merle, who never quarrelled with any one,
who appeared to think no one worth it, and who had performed the miracle of living, more or less,
for several years with Mrs. Touchett and showing no symptom of irritation--Madame Merle now
took a very high tone and declared that this was an accusation from which she couldn't stoop to
defend herself. She added, however (without stooping), that her behaviour had been only too
simple, that she had believed only what she saw, that she saw Isabel was not eager to marry and
Osmond not eager to please (his repeated visits had been nothing; he was boring himself to death
on his hill-top and he came merely for amusement). Isabel had kept her sentiments to herself, and
her journey to Greece and Egypt had effectually thrown dust in her companion's eyes. Madame
Merle accepted the event--she was unprepared to think of it as a scandal; but that she had played
any part in it, double or single, was an imputation against which she proudly protested. It was
doubtless in consequence of Mrs. Touchett's attitude, and of the injury it offered to habits
consecrated by many charming seasons, that Madame Merle had, after this, chosen to pass many
months in England, where her credit was quite unimpaired. Mrs. Touchett had done her a wrong;
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there are some things that can't be forgiven. But Madame Merle suffered in silence; there was
always something exquisite in her dignity.
Ralph, as I say, had wished to see for himself; but while engaged in this pursuit he had yet felt
afresh what a fool he had been to put the girl on her guard. He had played the wrong card, and now
he had lost the game. He should see nothing, he should learn nothing; for him she would always
wear a mask. His true line would have been to profess delight in her union, so that later, when, as
Ralph phrased it, the bottom should fall out of it, she might have the pleasure of saying to him that
he had been a goose. He would gladly have consented to pass for a goose in order to know Isabel's
real situation. At present, however, she neither taunted him with his fallacies nor pretended that her
own confidence was justified; if she wore a mask it completely covered her face. There was
something fixed and mechanical in the serenity painted on it; this was not an expression, Ralph
said-- it was a representation, it was even an advertisement. She had lost her child; that was a
sorrow, but it was a sorrow she scarcely spoke of; there was more to say about it than she could
say to Ralph. It belonged to the past, moreover; it had occurred six months before and she had
already laid aside the tokens of mourning. She appeared to be leading the life of the world; Ralph
heard her spoken of as having a "charming position." He observed that she produced the
impression of being peculiarly enviable, that it was supposed, among many people, to be a
privilege even to know her. Her house was not open to every one, and she had an evening in the
week to which people were not invited as a matter of course. She lived with a certain
magnificence, but you needed to be a member of her circle to perceive it; for there was nothing to
gape at, nothing to criticise, nothing even to admire, in the daily proceedings of Mr. and Mrs.
Osmond. Ralph, in all this, recognised the hand of the master; for he knew that Isabel had no
faculty for producing studied impressions. She struck him as having a great love of movement, of
gaiety, of late hours, of long rides, of fatigue; an eagerness to be entertained, to be interested, even
to be bored, to make acquaintances, to see people who were talked about, to explore the
neighbourhood of Rome, to enter into relation with certain of the mustiest relics of its old society.
In all this there was much less discrimination than in that desire for comprehensiveness of
development on which he had been used to exercise his wit. There was a kind of violence in some
of her impulses, of crudity in some of her experiments, which took him by surprise: it seemed to
him that she even spoke faster, moved faster, breathed faster, than before her marriage. Certainly
she had fallen into exaggerations--she who used to care so much for the pure truth; and whereas of
old she had a great delight in good-humoured argument, in intellectual play (she never looked so
charming as when in the genial heat of discussion she received a crushing blow full in the face and
brushed it away as a feather), she appeared now to think there was nothing worth people's either
differing about or agreeing upon. Of old she had been curious, and now she was indifferent, and
yet in spite of her indifference her activity was greater than ever. Slender still, but lovelier than
before, she had gained no great maturity of aspect; yet there was an amplitude and a brilliancy in
her personal arrangements that gave a touch of insolence to her beauty. Poor human-hearted Isabel,
what perversity had bitten her? Her light step drew a mass of drapery behind it; her intelligent head
sustained a majesty of ornament. The free, keen girl had become quite another person; what he saw
was the fine lady who was supposed to represent something. What did Isabel represent? Ralph
asked himself; and he could only answer by saying that she represented Gilbert Osmond. "Good
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heavens, what a function!" he then woefully exclaimed. He was lost in wonder at the mystery of
things.
He recognised Osmond, as I say; he recognised him at every turn. He saw how he kept all things
within limits; how he adjusted, regulated, animated their manner of life. Osmond was in his
element; at last he had material to work with. He always had an eye to effect, and his effects were
deeply calculated. They were produced by no vulgar means, but the motive was as vulgar as the art
was great. To surround his interior with a sort of invidious sanctity, to tantalise society with a
sense of exclusion, to make people believe his house was different from every other, to impart to
the face that he presented to the world a cold originality--this was the ingenious effort of the
personage to whom Isabel had attributed a superior morality. "He works with superior material,"
Ralph said to himself; "it's rich abundance compared with his former resources." Ralph was a
clever man; but Ralph had never--to his own sense--been so clever as when he observed, in petto,
that under the guise of caring only for intrinsic values Osmond lived exclusively for the world. Far
from being its master as he pretended to be, he was its very humble servant, and the degree of its
attention was his only measure of success. He lived with his eye on it from morning till night, and
the world was so stupid it never suspected the trick. Everything he did was pose--pose so subtly
considered that if one were not on the lookout one mistook it for impulse. Ralph had never met a
man who lived so much in the land of consideration. His tastes, his studies, his accomplishments,
his collections, were all for a purpose. His life on his hill-top at Florence had been the conscious
attitude of years. His solitude, his ennui, his love for his daughter, his good manners, his bad
manners, were so many features of a mental image constantly present to him as a model of
impertinence and mystification. His ambition was not to please the world, but to please himself by
exciting the world's curiosity and then declining to satisfy it. It had made him feel great, ever, to
play the world a trick. The thing he had done in his life most directly to please himself was his
marrying Miss Archer; though in this case indeed the gullible world was in a manner embodied in
poor Isabel, who had been mystified to the top of her bent. Ralph of course found a fitness in being
consistent; he had embraced a creed, and as he had suffered for it he could not in honour forsake it.
I give this little sketch of its articles for what they may at the time have been worth. It was certain
that he was very skilful in fitting the facts to his theory--even the fact that during the month he
spent in Rome at this period the husband of the woman he loved appeared to regard him not in the
least as an enemy.
For Gilbert Osmond Ralph had not now that importance. It was not that he had the importance of a
friend; it was rather that he had none at all. He was Isabel's cousin and he was rather unpleasantly
ill--it was on this basis that Osmond treated with him. He made the proper enquiries, asked about
his health, about Mrs. Touchett, about his opinion of winter climates, whether he were comfortable
at his hotel. He addressed him, on the few occasions of their meeting, not a word that was not
necessary; but his manner had always the urbanity proper to conscious success in the presence of
conscious failure. For all this, Ralph had had, toward the end, a sharp inward vision of Osmond's
making it of small ease to his wife that she should continue to receive Mr. Touchett. He was not
jealous--he had not that excuse; no one could be jealous of Ralph. But he made Isabel pay for her
old-time kindness, of which so much was still left; and as Ralph had no idea of her paying too
much, so when his suspicion had become sharp, he had taken himself off. In doing so he had
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deprived Isabel of a very interesting occupation: she had been constantly wondering what fine
principle was keeping him alive. She had decided that it was his love of conversation; his
conversation had been better than ever. He had given up walking; be was no longer a humorous
stroller. He sat all day in a chair --almost any chair would serve, and was so dependent on what
you would do for him that, had not his talk been highly contemplative, you might have thought he
was blind. The reader already knows more about him than Isabel was ever to know, and the reader
may therefore be given the key to the mystery. What kept Ralph alive was simply the fact that he
had not yet seen enough of the person in the world in whom he was most interested: he was not yet
satisfied. There was more to come; he couldn't make up his mind to lose that. He wanted to see
what she would make of her husband--or what her husband would make of her. This was only the
first act of the drama, and he was determined to sit out the performance. His determination had
held good; it had kept him going some eighteen months more, till the time of his return to Rome
with Lord Warburton. It had given him indeed such an air of intending to live indefinitely that Mrs.
Touchett, though more accessible to confusions of thought in the matter of this strange,
unremunerative--and unremunerated--son of hers than she had ever been before, had, as we have
learned, not scrupled to embark for a distant land. If Ralph had been kept alive by suspense it was
with a good deal of the same emotion--the excitement of wondering in what state she should find
him--that Isabel mounted to his apartment the day after Lord Warburton had notified her of his
arrival in Rome.
She spent an hour with him; it was the first of several visits. Gilbert Osmond called on him
punctually, and on their sending their carriage for him Ralph came more than once to Palazzo
Roccanera. A fortnight elapsed, at the end of which Ralph announced to Lord Warburton that he
thought after all he wouldn't go to Sicily. The two men had been dining together after a day spent
by the latter in ranging about the Campagna. They had left the table, and Warburton, before the
chimney, was lighting a cigar, which he instantly removed from his lips.
"Won't go to Sicily? Where then will you go?"
"Well, I guess I won't go anywhere," said Ralph, from the sofa, all shamelessly.
"Do you mean you'll return to England?"
"Oh dear no; I'll stay in Rome."
"Rome won't do for you. Rome's not warm enough."
"It will have to do. I'll make it do. See how well I've been."
Lord Warburton looked at him a while, puffing a cigar and as if trying to see it. "You've been
better than you were on the journey, certainly. I wonder how you lived through that. But I don't
understand your condition. I recommend you to try Sicily."
"I can't try," said poor Ralph. "I've done trying. I can't move further. I can't face that journey.
Fancy me between Scylla and Charybdis! I don't want to die on the Sicilian plains--to be snatched
away, like Proserpine in the same locality, to the Plutonian shades."
"What the deuce then did you come for?" his lordship enquired.
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"Because the idea took me. I see it won't do. It really doesn't matter where I am now. I've
exhausted all remedies, I've swallowed all climates. As I'm here I'll stay. I haven't a single cousin
in Sicily--much less a married one."
"Your cousin's certainly an inducement. But what does the doctor say?"
"I haven't asked him, and I don't care a fig. If I die here Mrs. Osmond will bury me. But I shall not
die here."
"I hope not." Lord Warburton continued to smoke reflectively. "Well, I must say," he resumed,
"for myself I'm very glad you don't insist on Sicily. I had a horror of that journey."
"Ah, but for you it needn't have mattered. I had no idea of dragging you in my train."
"I certainly didn't mean to let you go alone."
"My dear Warburton, I never expected you to come further than this," Ralph cried.
"I should have gone with you and seen you settled," said Lord Warburton.
"You're a very good Christian. You're a very kind man."
"Then I should have come back here."
"And then you'd have gone to England."
"No, no; I should have stayed."
"Well," said Ralph, "if that's what we are both up to, I don't see where Sicily comes in!"
His companion was silent; he sat staring at the fire. At last, looking up, "I say, tell me this," he
broke out; "did you really mean to go to Sicily when we started?"
"Ah, vous m'en demandez trop! Let me put a question first. Did you come with me quite-platonically?"
"I don't know what you mean by that. I wanted to come abroad."
"I suspect we've each been playing our little game."
"Speak for yourself. I made no secret whatever of my desiring to be here a while."
"Yes, I remember you said you wished to see the Minister of Foreign Affairs."
"I've seen him three times. He's very amusing."
"I think you've forgotten what you came for," said Ralph.
"Perhaps I have," his companion answered rather gravely.
These two were gentlemen of a race which is not distinguished by the absence of reserve, and they
had travelled together from London to Rome without an allusion to matters that were uppermost in
the mind of each. There was an old subject they had once discussed, but it had lost its recognised
place in their attention, and even after their arrival in Rome, where many things led back to it, they
had kept the same half-diffident, half-confident silence.
"I recommend you to get the doctor's consent, all the same," Lord Warburton went on, abruptly,
after an interval.
"The doctor's consent will spoil it. I never have it when I can help it."
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"What then does Mrs. Osmond think?" Ralph's friend demanded. I've not told her. She'll probably
say that Rome's too cold and even offer to go with me to Catania. She's capable of that."
"In your place I should like it."
"Her husband won't like it."
"Ah well, I can fancy that; though it seems to me you're not bound to mind his likings. They're his
affair."
"I don't want to make any more trouble between them," said Ralph.
"Is there so much already?"
"There's complete preparation for it. Her going off with me would make the explosion. Osmond
isn't fond of his wife's cousin."
"Then of course he'd make a row. But won't he make a row if you stop here?"
"That's what I want to see. He made one the last time I was in Rome, and then I thought it my duty
to disappear. Now I think it's my duty to stop and defend her."
"My dear Touchett, your defensive powers--!" Lord Warburton began with a smile. But he saw
something in his companion's face that checked him. "Your duty, in these premises, seems to me
rather a nice question," he observed instead.
Ralph for a short time answered nothing. "It's true that my defensive powers are small," he
returned at last; "but as my aggressive ones are still smaller Osmond may after all not think me
worth his gunpowder. At any rate," he added, "there are things I'm curious to see."
"You're sacrificing your health to your curiosity then?"
"I'm not much interested in my health, and I'm deeply interested in Mrs. Osmond."
"So am I. But not as I once was," Lord Warburton added quickly. This was one of the allusions he
had not hitherto found occasion to make.
"Does she strike you as very happy?" Ralph enquired, emboldened by this confidence.
"Well, I don't know; I've hardly thought. She told me the other night she was happy."
"Ah, she told YOU, of course," Ralph exclaimed, smiling.
"I don't know that. It seems to me I was rather the sort of person she might have complained to."
"Complained? She'll never complain. She has done it--what she HAS done--and she knows it.
She'll complain to you least of all. She's very careful."
"She needn't be. I don't mean to make love to her again."
"I'm delighted to hear it. There can be no doubt at least of YOUR duty."
"Ah no," said Lord Warburton gravely; "none!"
"Permit me to ask," Ralph went on, "whether it's to bring out the fact that you don't mean to make
love to her that you're so very civil to the little girl?"
Lord Warburton gave a slight start; he got up and stood before the fire, looking at it hard. "Does
that strike you as very ridiculous?"
"Ridiculous? Not in the least, if you really like her."
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"I think her a delightful little person. I don't know when a girl of that age has pleased me more."
"She's a charming creature. Ah, she at least is genuine."
"Of course there's the difference in our ages--more than twenty years."
"My dear Warburton," said Ralph, "are you serious?"
"Perfectly serious--as far as I've got."
"I'm very glad. And, heaven help us," cried Ralph, "how cheered-up old Osmond will be!"
His companion frowned. "I say, don't spoil it. I shouldn't propose for his daughter to please HIM."
"He'll have the perversity to be pleased all the same."
"He's not so fond of me as that," said his lordship.
"As that? My dear Warburton, the drawback of your position is that people needn't be fond of you
at all to wish to be connected with you. Now, with me in such a case, I should have the happy
confidence that they loved me."
Lord Warburton seemed scarcely in the mood for doing justice to general axioms--he was thinking
of a special case. "Do you judge she'll be pleased?"
"The girl herself? Delighted, surely."
"No, no; I mean Mrs. Osmond."
Ralph looked at him a moment. "My dear fellow, what has she to do with it?"
"Whatever she chooses. She's very fond of Pansy."
"Very true--very true." And Ralph slowly got up. "It's an interesting question--how far her
fondness for Pansy will carry her." He stood there a moment with his hands in his pockets and
rather a clouded brow. "I hope, you know, that you're very--very sure. The deuce!" he broke off. "I
don't know how to say it."
"Yes, you do; you know how to say everything."
"Well, it's awkward. I hope you're sure that among Miss Osmond's merits her being--a--so near her
stepmother isn't a leading one?"
"Good heavens, Touchett!" cried Lord Warburton angrily, "for what do you take me?"
CHAPTER XL
Isabel had not seen much of Madame Merle since her marriage, this lady having indulged in
frequent absences from Rome. At one time she had spent six months in England; at another she
had passed a portion of a winter in Paris. She had made numerous visits to distant friends and gave
countenance to the idea that for the future she should be a less inveterate Roman than in the past.
As she had been inveterate in the past only in the sense of constantly having an apartment in one of
the sunniest niches of the Pincian--an apartment which often stood empty--this suggested a
prospect of almost constant absence; a danger which Isabel at one period had been much inclined
to deplore. Familiarity had modified in some degree her first impression of Madame Merle, but it
had not essentially altered it; there was still much wonder of admiration in it. That personage was
armed at all points; it was a pleasure to see a character so completely equipped for the social battle.
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She carried her flag discreetly, but her weapons were polished steel, and she used them with a skill
which struck Isabel as more and more that of a veteran. She was never weary, never overcome
with disgust; she never appeared to need rest or consolation. She had her own ideas; she had of old
exposed a great many of them to Isabel, who knew also that under an appearance of extreme self-
control her highly-cultivated friend concealed a rich sensibility. But her will was mistress of her
life; there was something gallant in the way she kept going. It was as if she had learned the secret
of it--as if the art of life were some clever trick she had guessed. Isabel, as she herself grew older,
became acquainted with revulsions, with disgusts; there were days when the world looked black
and she asked herself with some sharpness what it was that she was pretending to live for. Her old
habit had been to live by enthusiasm, to fall in love with suddenly-perceived possibilities, with the
idea of some new adventure. As a younger person she had been used to proceed from one little
exaltation to the other: there were scarcely any dull places between. But Madame Merle had
suppressed enthusiasm; she fell in love now-a-days with nothing; she lived entirely by reason and
by wisdom. There were hours when Isabel would have given anything for lessons in this art; if her
brilliant friend had been near she would have made an appeal to her. She had become aware more
than before of the advantage of being like that --of having made one's self a firm surface, a sort of
corselet of silver.
But, as I say, it was not till the winter during which we lately renewed acquaintance with our
heroine that the personage in question made again a continuous stay in Rome. Isabel now saw
more of her than she had done since her marriage; but by this time Isabel's needs and inclinations
had considerably changed. It was not at present to Madame Merle that she would have applied for
instruction; she had lost the desire to know this lady's clever trick. If she had troubles she must
keep them to herself, and if life was difficult it would not make it easier to confess herself beaten.
Madame Merle was doubtless of great use to herself and an ornament to any circle; but was she-would
she be --of use to others in periods of refined embarrassment? The best way to profit by her
friend--this indeed Isabel had always thought--was to imitate her, to be as firm and bright as she.
She recognised no embarrassments, and Isabel, considering this fact, determined for the fiftieth
time to brush aside her own. It seemed to her too, on the renewal of an intercourse which had
virtually been interrupted, that her old ally was different, was almost detached--pushing to the
extreme a certain rather artificial fear of being indiscreet. Ralph Touchett, we know, had been of
the opinion that she was prone to exaggeration, to forcing the note--was apt, in the vulgar phrase,
to overdo it. Isabel had never admitted this charge--had never indeed quite understood it; Madame
Merle's conduct, to her perception, always bore the stamp of good taste, was always "quiet." But in
this matter of not wishing to intrude upon the inner life of the Osmond family it at last occurred to
our young woman that she overdid a little. That of course was not the best taste; that was rather
violent. She remembered too much that Isabel was married; that she had now other interests; that
