interest for Gilbert. When it had come to the point she had never written to him; it seemed to her
that, considering his grievance, the least she could do was to let him alone. Nevertheless she would
have been glad to be in some way nearer to him. It was not that it ever occurred to her that she
might have married him; even after the consequences of her actual union had grown vivid to her
that particular reflection, though she indulged in so many, had not had the assurance to present
itself. But on finding herself in trouble he had become a member of that circle of things with which
she wished to set herself right. I have mentioned how passionately she needed to feel that her
unhappiness should not have come to her through her own fault. She had no near prospect of
dying, and yet she wished to make her peace with the world-- to put her spiritual affairs in order. It
came back to her from time to time that there was an account still to be settled with Caspar, and
she saw herself disposed or able to settle it to-day on terms easier for him than ever before. Still,
when she learned he was coming to Rome she felt all afraid; it would be more disagreeable for him
than for any one else to make out--since he WOULD make it out, as over a falsified balance-sheet
or something of that sort--the intimate disarray of her affairs. Deep in her breast she believed that
he had invested his all in her happiness, while the others had invested only a part. He was one
more person from whom she should have to conceal her stress. She was reassured, however, after
he arrived in Rome, for he spent several days without coming to see her.
Henrietta Stackpole, it may well be imagined, was more punctual, and Isabel was largely favoured
with the society of her friend. She threw herself into it, for now that she had made such a point of
keeping her conscience clear, that was one way of proving she had not been superficial--the more
so as the years, in their flight, had rather enriched than blighted those peculiarities which had been
humorously criticised by persons less interested than Isabel, and which were still marked enough
to give loyalty a spice of heroism. Henrietta was as keen and quick and fresh as ever, and as neat
and bright and fair. Her remarkably open eyes, lighted like great glazed railway-stations, had put
up no shutters; her attire had lost none of its crispness, her opinions none of their national
reference. She was by no means quite unchanged, however it struck Isabel she had grown vague.
Of old she had never been vague; though undertaking many enquiries at once, she had managed to
be entire and pointed about each. She had a reason for everything she did; she fairly bristled with
motives. Formerly, when she came to Europe it was because she wished to see it, but now, having
already seen it, she had no such excuse. She didn't for a moment pretend that the desire to examine
decaying civilisations had anything to do with her present enterprise; her journey was rather an
expression of her independence of the old world than of a sense of further obligations to it. "It's
nothing to come to Europe," she said to Isabel; "it doesn't seem to me one needs so many reasons
for that. It is something to stay at home; this is much more important." It was not therefore with a
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sense of doing anything very important that she treated herself to another pilgrimage to Rome; she
had seen the place before and carefully inspected it; her present act was simply a sign of
familiarity, of her knowing all about it, of her having as good a right as any one else to be there.
This was all very well, and Henrietta was restless; she had a perfect right to be restless too, if one
came to that. But she had after all a better reason for coming to Rome than that she cared for it so
little. Her friend easily recognised it, and with it the worth of the other's fidelity. She had crossed
the stormy ocean in midwinter because she had guessed that Isabel was sad. Henrietta guessed a
great deal, but she had never guessed so happily as that. Isabel's satisfactions just now were few,
but even if they had been more numerous there would still have been something of individual joy
in her sense of being justified in having always thought highly of Henrietta. She had made large
concessions with regard to her, and had yet insisted that, with all abatements, she was very
valuable. It was not her own triumph, however, that she found good; it was simply the relief of
confessing to this confidant, the first person to whom she had owned it, that she was not in the
least at her ease. Henrietta had herself approached this point with the smallest possible delay, and
had accused her to her face of being wretched. She was a woman, she was a sister; she was not
Ralph, nor Lord Warburton, nor Caspar Goodwood, and Isabel could speak.
"Yes, I'm wretched," she said very mildly. She hated to hear herself say it; she tried to say it as
judicially as possible.
"What does he do to you?" Henrietta asked, frowning as if she were enquiring into the operations
of a quack doctor.
"He does nothing. But he doesn't like me."
"He's very hard to please!" cried Miss Stackpole. "Why don't you leave him?"
"I can't change that way," Isabel said.
"Why not, I should like to know? You won't confess that you've made a mistake. You're too
proud."
"I don't know whether I'm too proud. But I can't publish my mistake. I don't think that's decent. I'd
much rather die."
"You won't think so always," said Henrietta.
"I don't know what great unhappiness might bring me to; but it seems to me I shall always be
ashamed. One must accept one's deeds. I married him before all the world; I was perfectly free; it
was impossible to do anything more deliberate. One can't change that way," Isabel repeated.
"You HAVE changed, in spite of the impossibility. I hope you don't mean to say you like him."
Isabel debated. "No, I don't like him. I can tell you, because I'm weary of my secret. But that's
enough; I can't announce it on the housetops."
Henrietta gave a laugh. "Don't you think you're rather too considerate?"
"It's not of him that I'm considerate--it's of myself!" Isabel answered.
It was not surprising Gilbert Osmond should not have taken comfort in Miss Stackpole; his instinct
had naturally set him in opposition to a young lady capable of advising his wife to withdraw from
the conjugal roof. When she arrived in Rome he had said to Isabel that he hoped she would leave
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her friend the interviewer alone; and Isabel had answered that he at least had nothing to fear from
her. She said to Henrietta that as Osmond didn't like her she couldn't invite her to dine, but they
could easily see each other in other ways. Isabel received Miss Stackpole freely in her own sitting-
room, and took her repeatedly to drive, face to face with Pansy, who, bending a little forward, on
the opposite seat of the carriage, gazed at the celebrated authoress with a respectful attention which
Henrietta occasionally found irritating. She complained to Isabel that Miss Osmond had a little
look as if she should remember everything one said. "I don't want to be remembered that way,"
Miss Stackpole declared; "I consider that my conversation refers only to the moment, like the
morning papers. Your stepdaughter, as she sits there, looks as if she kept all the back numbers and
would bring them out some day against me." She could not teach herself to think favourably of
Pansy, whose absence of initiative, of conversation, of personal claims, seemed to her, in a girl of
twenty, unnatural and even uncanny. Isabel presently saw that Osmond would have liked her to
urge a little the cause of her friend, insist a little upon his receiving her, so that he might appear to
suffer for good manners' sake. Her immediate acceptance of his objections put him too much in the
wrong--it being in effect one of the disadvantages of expressing contempt that you cannot enjoy at
the same time the credit of expressing sympathy. Osmond held to his credit, and yet he held to his
objections-- all of which were elements difficult to reconcile. The right thing would have been that
Miss Stackpole should come to dine at Palazzo Roccanera once or twice, so that (in spite of his
superficial civility, always so great) she might judge for herself how little pleasure it gave him.
From the moment, however, that both the ladies were so unaccommodating, there was nothing for
Osmond but to wish the lady from New York would take herself off. It was surprising how little
satisfaction he got from his wife's friends; he took occasion to call Isabel's attention to it.
"You're certainly not fortunate in your intimates; I wish you might make a new collection," he said
to her one morning in reference to nothing visible at the moment, but in a tone of ripe reflection
which deprived the remark of all brutal abruptness. "It's as if you had taken the trouble to pick out
the people in the world that I have least in common with. Your cousin I have always thought a
conceited ass--besides his being the most ill-favoured animal I know. Then it's insufferably
tiresome that one can't tell him so; one must spare him on account of his health. His health seems
to me the best part of him; it gives him privileges enjoyed by no one else. If he's so desperately ill
there's only one way to prove it; but he seems to have no mind for that. I can't say much more for
the great Warburton. When one really thinks of it, the cool insolence of that performance was
something rare! He comes and looks at one's daughter as if she were a suite of apartments; he tries
the door-handles and looks out of the windows, raps on the walls and almost thinks he'll take the
place. Will you be so good as to draw up a lease? Then, on the whole, he decides that the rooms
are too small; he doesn't think he could live on a third floor; he must look out for a piano nobile.
And he goes away after having got a month's lodging in the poor little apartment for nothing. Miss
Stackpole, however, is your most wonderful invention. She strikes me as a kind of monster. One
hasn't a nerve in one's body that she doesn't set quivering. You know I never have admitted that
she's a woman. Do you know what she reminds me of? Of a new steel pen-- the most odious thing
in nature. She talks as a steel pen writes; aren't her letters, by the way, on ruled paper? She thinks
and moves and walks and looks exactly as she talks. You may say that she doesn't hurt me,
inasmuch as I don't see her. I don't see her, but I hear her; I hear her all day long. Her voice is in
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my ears; I can't get rid of it. I know exactly what she says, and every inflexion of the tone in which
she says it. She says charming things about me, and they give you great comfort. I don't like at all
to think she talks about me--I feel as I should feel if I knew the footman were wearing my hat."
Henrietta talked about Gilbert Osmond, as his wife assured him, rather less than he suspected. She
had plenty of other subjects, in two of which the reader may be supposed to be especially
interested. She let her friend know that Caspar Goodwood had discovered for himself that she was
unhappy, though indeed her ingenuity was unable to suggest what comfort he hoped to give her by
coming to Rome and yet not calling on her. They met him twice in the street, but he had no
appearance of seeing them; they were driving, and he had a habit of looking straight in front of
him, as if he proposed to take in but one object at a time. Isabel could have fancied she had seen
him the day before; it must have been with just that face and step that he had walked out of Mrs.
Touchett's door at the close of their last interview. He was dressed just as he had been dressed on
that day, Isabel remembered the colour of his cravat; and yet in spite of this familiar look there was
a strangeness in his figure too, something that made her feel it afresh to be rather terrible he should
have come to Rome. He looked bigger and more overtopping than of old, and in those days he
certainly reached high enough. She noticed that the people whom he passed looked back after him;
but he went straight forward, lifting above them a face like a February sky.
Miss Stackpole's other topic was very different; she gave Isabel the latest news about Mr. Bantling.
He had been out in the United States the year before, and she was happy to say she had been able
to show him considerable attention. She didn't know how much he had enjoyed it, but she would
undertake to say it had done him good; he wasn't the same man when he left as he had been when
be came. It had opened his eyes and shown him that England wasn't everything. He had been very
much liked in most places, and thought extremely simple--more simple than the English were
commonly supposed to be. There were people who had thought him affected; she didn't know
whether they meant that his simplicity was an affectation. Some of his questions were too
discouraging; he thought all the chambermaids were farmers' daughters--or all the farmers'
daughters were chambermaids--she couldn't exactly remember which. He hadn't seemed able to
grasp the great school system; it had been really too much for him. On the whole he had behaved
as if there were too much of everything--as if he could only take in a small part. The part he had
chosen was the hotel system and the river navigation. He had seemed really fascinated with the
hotels; he had a photograph of every one he had visited. But the river steamers were his principal
interest; he wanted to do nothing but sail on the big boats. They had travelled together from New
York to Milwaukee, stopping at the most interesting cities on the route; and whenever they started
afresh he had wanted to know if they could go by the steamer. He seemed to have no idea of
geography--had an impression that Baltimore was a Western city and was perpetually expecting to
arrive at the Mississippi. He appeared never to have heard of any river in America but the
Mississippi and was unprepared to recognise the existence of the Hudson, though obliged to
confess at last that it was fully equal to the Rhine. They had spent some pleasant hours in the
palace-cars; he was always ordering ice-cream from the coloured man. He could never get used to
that idea--that you could get ice-cream in the cars. Of course you couldn't, nor fans, nor candy, nor
anything in the English cars! He found the heat quite overwhelming, and she had told him she
indeed expected it was the biggest he had ever experienced. He was now in England,
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hunting--"hunting round" Henrietta called it. These amusements were those of the American red
men; we had left that behind long ago, the pleasures of the chase. It seemed to be generally
believed in England that we wore tomahawks and feathers; but such a costume was more in
keeping with English habits. Mr. Bantling would not have time to join her in Italy, but when she
should go to Paris again he expected to come over. He wanted very much to see Versailles again;
he was very fond of the ancient regime. They didn't agree about that, but that was what she liked
Versailles for, that you could see the ancient regime had been swept away. There were no dukes
and marquises there now; she remembered on the contrary one day when there were five American
families, walking all round. Mr. Bantling was very anxious that she should take up the subject of
England again, and he thought she might get on better with it now; England had changed a good
deal within two or three years. He was determined that if she went there he should go to see his
sister, Lady Pensil, and that this time the invitation should come to her straight. The mystery about
that other one had never been explained.
Caspar Goodwood came at last to Palazzo Roccanera; he had written Isabel a note beforehand, to
ask leave. This was promptly granted; she would be at home at six o'clock that afternoon. She
spent the day wondering what he was coming for--what good he expected to get of it. He had
presented himself hitherto as a person destitute of the faculty of compromise, who would take what
he had asked for or take nothing. Isabel's hospitality, however, raised no questions, and she found
no great difficulty in appearing happy enough to deceive him. It was her conviction at least that
she deceived him, made him say to himself that he had been misinformed. But she also saw, so she
believed, that he was not disappointed, as some other men, she was sure, would have been; he had
not come to Rome to look for an opportunity. She never found out what he had come for; he
offered her no explanation; there could be none but the very simple one that he wanted to see her.
In other words he had come for his amusement. Isabel followed up this induction with a good deal
of eagerness, and was delighted to have found a formula that would lay the ghost of this
gentleman's ancient grievance. If he had come to Rome for his amusement this was exactly what
she wanted; for if he cared for amusement he had got over his heartache. If he had got over his
heartache everything was as it should be and her responsibilities were at an end. It was true that he
took his recreation a little stiffly, but he had never been loose and easy and she had every reason to
believe he was satisfied with what he saw. Henrietta was not in his confidence, though he was in
hers, and Isabel consequently received no side-light upon his state of mind. He was open to little
conversation on general topics; it came back to her that she had said of him once, years before,
"Mr. Goodwood speaks a good deal, but he doesn't talk." He spoke a good deal now, but he talked
perhaps as little as ever; considering, that is, how much there was in Rome to talk about. His
arrival was not calculated to simplify her relations with her husband, for if Mr. Osmond didn't like
her friends Mr. Goodwood had no claim upon his attention save as having been one of the first of
them. There was nothing for her to say of him but that he was the very oldest; this rather meagre
synthesis exhausted the facts. She had been obliged to introduce him to Gilbert; it was impossible
she should not ask him to dinner, to her Thursday evenings, of which she had grown very weary,
but to which her husband still held for the sake not so much of inviting people as of not inviting
them.
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To the Thursdays Mr. Goodwood came regularly, solemnly, rather early; he appeared to regard
them with a good deal of gravity. Isabel every now and then had a moment of anger; there was
something so literal about him; she thought he might know that she didn't know what to do with
him. But she couldn't call him stupid; he was not that in the least; he was only extraordinarily
honest. To be as honest as that made a man very different from most people; one had to be almost
equally honest with HIM. She made this latter reflection at the very time she was flattering herself
she had persuaded him that she was the most light-hearted of women. He never threw any doubt on
this point, never asked her any personal questions. He got on much better with Osmond than had
seemed probable. Osmond had a great dislike to being counted on; in such a case be had an
irresistible need of disappointing you. It was in virtue of this principle that he gave himself the
entertainment of taking a fancy to a perpendicular Bostonian whom he bad been depended upon to
treat with coldness. He asked Isabel if Mr. Goodwood also had wanted to marry her, and expressed
surprise at her not having accepted him. It would have been an excellent thing, like living under
some tall belfry which would strike all the hours and make a queer vibration in the upper air. He
declared he liked to talk with the great Goodwood; it wasn't easy at first, you had to climb up an
interminable steep staircase up to the top of the tower; but when you got there you had a big view
and felt a little fresh breeze. Osmond, as we know, had delightful qualities, and he gave Caspar
Goodwood the benefit of them all. Isabel could see that Mr. Goodwood thought better of her
husband than he had ever wished to; he had given her the impression that morning in Florence of
being inaccessible to a good impression. Gilbert asked him repeatedly to dinner, and Mr.
Goodwood smoked a cigar with him afterwards and even desired to be shown his collections.
Gilbert said to Isabel that he was very original; he was as strong and of as good a style as an
English portmanteau,--he had plenty of straps and buckles which would never wear out, and a
capital patent lock. Caspar Goodwood took to riding on the Campagna and devoted much time to
this exercise; it was therefore mainly in the evening that Isabel saw him. She bethought herself of
saying to him one day that if he were willing he could render her a service. And then she added
smiling:
"I don't know, however, what right I have to ask a service of you."
"You're the person in the world who has most right," he answered. "I've given you assurances that
I've never given any one else."
The service was that he should go and see her cousin Ralph, who was ill at the Hotel de Paris,
alone, and be as kind to him as possible. Mr. Goodwood had never seen him, but he would know
who the poor fellow was; if she was not mistaken Ralph had once invited him to Gardencourt.
Caspar remembered the invitation perfectly, and, though he was not supposed to be a man of
imagination, had enough to put himself in the place of a poor gentleman who lay dying at a Roman
inn. He called at the Hotel de Paris and, on being shown into the presence of the master of
Gardencourt, found Miss Stackpole sitting beside his sofa. A singular change had in fact occurred
in this lady's relations with Ralph Touchett. She had not been asked by Isabel to go and see him,
but on hearing that he was too ill to come out had immediately gone of her own motion. After this
she had paid him a daily visit--always under the conviction that they were great enemies. "Oh yes,
we're intimate enemies," Ralph used to say; and he accused her freely--as freely as the humour of it
would allow --of coming to worry him to death. In reality they became excellent friends, Henrietta
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much wondering that she should never have liked him before. Ralph liked her exactly as much as
he had always done; he had never doubted for a moment that she was an excellent fellow. They
talked about everything and always differed; about everything, that is, but Isabel--a topic as to
which Ralph always had a thin forefinger on his lips. Mr. Bantling on the other hand proved a
great resource; Ralph was capable of discussing Mr. Bantling with Henrietta for hours. Discussion
was stimulated of course by their inevitable difference of view--Ralph having amused himself with
taking the ground that the genial ex-guardsman was a regular Machiavelli. Caspar Goodwood
could contribute nothing to such a debate; but after he had been left alone with his host he found
there were various other matters they could take up. It must be admitted that the lady who had just
gone out was not one of these; Caspar granted all Miss Stackpole's merits in advance, but had no
further remark to make about her. Neither, after the first allusions, did the two men expatiate upon
Mrs. Osmond--a theme in which Goodwood perceived as many dangers as Ralph. He felt very
sorry for that unclassable personage; he couldn't bear to see a pleasant man, so pleasant for all his
queerness, so beyond anything to be done. There was always something to be done, for
Goodwood, and he did it in this case by repeating several times his visit to the Hotel de Paris. It
seemed to Isabel that she had been very clever; she had artfully disposed of the superfluous
Caspar. She had given him an occupation; she had converted him into a caretaker of Ralph. She
had a plan of making him travel northward with her cousin as soon as the first mild weather should
allow it. Lord Warburton had brought Ralph to Rome and Mr. Goodwood should take him away.
There seemed a happy symmetry in this, and she was now intensely eager that Ralph should
depart. She had a constant fear he would die there before her eyes and a horror of the occurrence of
this event at an inn, by her door, which he had so rarely entered. Ralph must sink to his last rest in
his own dear house, in one of those deep, dim chambers of Gardencourt where the dark ivy would
cluster round the edges of the glimmering window. There seemed to Isabel in these days
something sacred in Gardencourt; no chapter of the past was more perfectly irrecoverable. When
she thought of the months she had spent there the tears rose to her eyes. She flattered herself, as I
say, upon her ingenuity, but she had need of all she could muster; for several events occurred
which seemed to confront and defy her. The Countess Gemini arrived from Florence--arrived with
her trunks, her dresses, her chatter, her falsehoods, her frivolity, the strange, the unholy legend of
the number of her lovers. Edward Rosier, who had been away somewhere,--no one, not even
Pansy, knew where,--reappeared in Rome and began to write her long letters, which she never
answered. Madame Merle returned from Naples and said to her with a strange smile: "What on
earth did you do with Lord Warburton?" As if it were any business of hers!
CHAPTER XLVIII
One day, toward the end of February, Ralph Touchett made up his mind to return to England. He
had his own reasons for this decision, which he was not bound to communicate; but Henrietta
Stackpole, to whom he mentioned his intention, flattered herself that she guessed them. She
forbore to express them, however; she only said, after a moment, as she sat by his sofa: "I suppose
you know you can't go alone?"
"I've no idea of doing that," Ralph answered. "I shall have people with me."
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"What do you mean by 'people'? Servants whom you pay?"
"Ah," said Ralph jocosely, "after all, they're human beings."
"Are there any women among them?" Miss Stackpole desired to know.
"You speak as if I had a dozen! No, I confess I haven't a soubrette in my employment."
"Well," said Henrietta calmly, "you can't go to England that way. You must have a woman's care."
"I've had so much of yours for the past fortnight that it will last me a good while."
"You've not had enough of it yet. I guess I'll go with you," said Henrietta.
"Go with me?" Ralph slowly raised himself from his sofa.
"Yes, I know you don't like me, but I'll go with you all the same. It would be better for your health
to lie down again."
Ralph looked at her a little; then he slowly relapsed. "I like you very much," he said in a moment.
Miss Stackpole gave one of her infrequent laughs. "You needn't think that by saying that you can
buy me off. I'll go with you, and what is more I'll take care of you."
"You're a very good woman," said Ralph.
"Wait till I get you safely home before you say that. It won't be easy. But you had better go, all the
same."
Before she left him, Ralph said to her: "Do you really mean to take care of me?"
"Well, I mean to try."
"I notify you then that I submit. Oh, I submit!" And it was perhaps a sign of submission that a few
minutes after she had left him alone he burst into a loud fit of laughter. It seemed to him so
inconsequent, such a conclusive proof of his having abdicated all functions and renounced all
exercise, that he should start on a journey across Europe under the supervision of Miss Stackpole.
And the great oddity was that the prospect pleased him; he was gratefully, luxuriously passive. He
felt even impatient to start; and indeed he had an immense longing to see his own house again. The
end of everything was at hand; it seemed to him he could stretch out his arm and touch the goal.
But he wanted to die at home; it was the only wish he had left--to extend himself in the large quiet
room where he had last seen his father lie, and close his eyes upon the summer dawn.
That same day Caspar Goodwood came to see him, and he informed his visitor that Miss Stackpole
had taken him up and was to conduct him back to England. "Ah then," said Caspar, "I'm afraid I
shall be a fifth wheel to the coach. Mrs. Osmond has made me promise to go with you."
"Good heavens--it's the golden age! You're all too kind."
"The kindness on my part is to her; it's hardly to you."
"Granting that, SHE'S kind," smiled Ralph.
"To get people to go with you? Yes, that's a sort of kindness," Goodwood answered without
