lending himself to the joke. "For myself, however," he added, "I'll go so far as to say that I would
much rather travel with you and Miss Stackpole than with Miss Stackpole alone."
"And you'd rather stay here than do either," said Ralph. "There's really no need of your coming.
Henrietta's extraordinarily efficient."
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"I'm sure of that. But I've promised Mrs. Osmond."
"You can easily get her to let you off."
"She wouldn't let me off for the world. She wants me to look after you, but that isn't the principal
thing. The principal thing is that she wants me to leave Rome."
"Ah, you see too much in it," Ralph suggested.
"I bore her," Goodwood went on; "she has nothing to say to me, so she invented that."
"Oh then, if it's a convenience to her I certainly will take you with me. Though I don't see why it
should be a convenience," Ralph added in a moment.
"Well," said Caspar Goodwood simply, "she thinks I'm watching her."
"Watching her?"
"Trying to make out if she's happy."
"That's easy to make out," said Ralph. "She's the most visibly happy woman I know."
"Exactly so; I'm satisfied," Goodwood answered dryly. For all his dryness, however, he had more
to say. "I've been watching her; I was an old friend and it seemed to me I had the right. She
pretends to be happy; that was what she undertook to be; and I thought I should like to see for
myself what it amounts to. I've seen," he continued with a harsh ring in his voice, "and I don't want
to see any more. I'm now quite ready to go."
"Do you know it strikes me as about time you should?" Ralph rejoined. And this was the only
conversation these gentlemen had about Isabel Osmond.
Henrietta made her preparations for departure, and among them she found it proper to say a few
words to the Countess Gemini, who returned at Miss Stackpole's pension the visit which this lady
had paid her in Florence.
"You were very wrong about Lord Warburton," she remarked to the Countess. "I think it right you
should know that."
"About his making love to Isabel? My poor lady, he was at her house three times a day. He has left
traces of his passage!" the Countess cried.
"He wished to marry your niece; that's why he came to the house."
The Countess stared, and then with an inconsiderate laugh: "Is that the story that Isabel tells? It
isn't bad, as such things go. If he wishes to marry my niece, pray why doesn't he do it? Perhaps he
has gone to buy the wedding-ring and will come back with it next month, after I'm gone."
"No, he'll not come back. Miss Osmond doesn't wish to marry him."
"She's very accommodating! I knew she was fond of Isabel, but I didn't know she carried it so far."
"I don't understand you," said Henrietta coldly, and reflecting that the Countess was unpleasantly
perverse. "I really must stick to my point--that Isabel never encouraged the attentions of Lord
Warburton."
"My dear friend, what do you and I know about it? All we know is that my brother's capable of
everything."
"I don't know what your brother's capable of," said Henrietta with dignity.
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"It's not her encouraging Warburton that I complain of; it's her sending him away. I want
particularly to see him. Do you suppose she thought I would make him faithless?" the Countess
continued with audacious insistence. "However, she's only keeping him, one can feel that. The
house is full of him there; he's quite in the air. Oh yes, he has left traces; I'm sure I shall see him
yet."
"Well," said Henrietta after a little, with one of those inspirations which had made the fortune of
her letters to the Interviewer, "perhaps he'll be more successful with you than with Isabel!"
When she told her friend of the offer she had made Ralph Isabel replied that she could have done
nothing that would have pleased her more. It had always been her faith that at bottom Ralph and
this young woman were made to understand each other. "I don't care whether he understands me or
not," Henrietta declared. "The great thing is that he shouldn't die in the cars."
"He won't do that," Isabel said, shaking her head with an extension of faith.
"He won't if I can help it. I see you want us all to go. I don't know what you want to do."
"I want to be alone," said Isabel.
"You won't be that so long as you've so much company at home."
"Ah, they're part of the comedy. You others are spectators."
"Do you call it a comedy, Isabel Archer?" Henrietta rather grimly asked.
"The tragedy then if you like. You're all looking at me; it makes me uncomfortable."
Henrietta engaged in this act for a while. "You're like the stricken deer, seeking the innermost
shade. Oh, you do give me such a sense of helplessness!" she broke out.
"I'm not at all helpless. There are many things I mean to do."
"It's not you I'm speaking of; it's myself. It's too much, having come on purpose, to leave you just
as I find you."
"You don't do that; you leave me much refreshed," Isabel said.
"Very mild refreshment--sour lemonade! I want you to promise me something."
"I can't do that. I shall never make another promise. I made such a solemn one four years ago, and
I've succeeded so ill in keeping it."
"You've had no encouragement. In this case I should give you the greatest. Leave your husband
before the worst comes; that's what I want you to promise."
"The worst? What do you call the worst?"
"Before your character gets spoiled."
"Do you mean my disposition? It won't get spoiled," Isabel answered, smiling. "I'm taking very
good care of it. I'm extremely struck," she added, turning away, "with the off-hand way in which
you speak of a woman's leaving her husband. It's easy to see you've never had one!"
"Well," said Henrietta as if she were beginning an argument, "nothing is more common in our
Western cities, and it's to them, after all, that we must look in the future." Her argument, however,
does not concern this history, which has too many other threads to unwind. She announced to
Ralph Touchett that she was ready to leave Rome by any train he might designate, and Ralph
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immediately pulled himself together for departure. Isabel went to see him at the last, and he made
the same remark that Henrietta had made. It struck him that Isabel was uncommonly glad to get rid
of them all.
For all answer to this she gently laid her hand on his, and said in a low tone, with a quick smile:
"My dear Ralph--!"
It was answer enough, and he was quite contented. But he went on in the same way, jocosely,
ingenuously: "I've seen less of you than I might, but it's better than nothing. And then I've heard a
great deal about you."
"I don't know from whom, leading the life you've done."
"From the voices of the air! Oh, from no one else; I never let other people speak of you. They
always say you're 'charming,' and that's so flat."
"I might have seen more of you certainly," Isabel said. "But when one's married one has so much
occupation."
"Fortunately I'm not married. When you come to see me in England I shall be able to entertain you
with all the freedom of a bachelor." He continued to talk as if they should certainly meet again, and
succeeded in making the assumption appear almost just. He made no allusion to his term being
near, to the probability that he should not outlast the summer. If he preferred it so, Isabel was
willing enough; the reality was sufficiently distinct without their erecting finger-posts in
conversation. That had been well enough for the earlier time, though about this, as about his other
affairs, Ralph had never been egotistic. Isabel spoke of his journey, of the stages into which he
should divide it, of the precautions he should take. "Henrietta's my greatest precaution," he went
on. "The conscience of that woman's sublime."
"Certainly she'll be very conscientious."
"Will be? She has been! It's only because she thinks it's her duty that she goes with me. There's a
conception of duty for you."
"Yes, it's a generous one," said Isabel, "and it makes me deeply ashamed. I ought to go with you,
you know."
"Your husband wouldn't like that."
"No, he wouldn't like it. But I might go, all the same."
"I'm startled by the boldness of your imagination. Fancy my being a cause of disagreement
between a lady and her husband!"
"That's why I don't go," said Isabel simply--yet not very lucidly.
Ralph understood well enough, however. "I should think so, with all those occupations you speak
of."
"It isn't that. I'm afraid," said Isabel. After a pause she repeated, as if to make herself, rather than
him, hear the words: "I'm afraid."
Ralph could hardly tell what her tone meant; it was so strangely deliberate--apparently so void of
emotion. Did she wish to do public penance for a fault of which she had not been convicted? or
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were her words simply an attempt at enlightened self-analysis? However this might be, Ralph
could not resist so easy an opportunity. "Afraid of your husband?"
"Afraid of myself!" she said, getting up. She stood there a moment and then added: "If I were
afraid of my husband that would be simply my duty. That's what women are expected to be."
"Ah yes," laughed Ralph; "but to make up for it there's always some man awfully afraid of some
woman!"
She gave no heed to this pleasantry, but suddenly took a different turn. "With Henrietta at the head
of your little band," she exclaimed abruptly, "there will be nothing left for Mr. Goodwood!"
"Ah, my dear Isabel," Ralph answered, "he's used to that. There is nothing left for Mr.
Goodwood."
She coloured and then observed, quickly, that she must leave him. They stood together a moment;
both her hands were in both of his. "You've been my best friend," she said.
"It was for you that I wanted--that I wanted to live. But I'm of no use to you."
Then it came over her more poignantly that she should not see him again. She could not accept
that; she could not part with him that way. "If you should send for me I'd come," she said at last.
"Your husband won't consent to that."
"Oh yes, I can arrange it."
"I shall keep that for my last pleasure!" said Ralph.
In answer to which she simply kissed him. It was a Thursday, and that evening Caspar Goodwood
came to Palazzo Roccanera. He was among the first to arrive, and he spent some time in
conversation with Gilbert Osmond, who almost always was present when his wife received. They
sat down together, and Osmond, talkative, communicative, expansive, seemed possessed with a
kind of intellectual gaiety. He leaned back with his legs crossed, lounging and chatting, while
Goodwood, more restless, but not at all lively, shifted his position, played with his hat, made the
little sofa creak beneath him. Osmond's face wore a sharp, aggressive smile; he was as a man
whose perceptions have been quickened by good news. He remarked to Goodwood that he was
sorry they were to lose him; he himself should particularly miss him. He saw so few intelligent
men--they were surprisingly scarce in Rome. He must be sure to come back; there was something
very refreshing, to an inveterate Italian like himself, in talking with a genuine outsider.
"I'm very fond of Rome, you know," Osmond said; "but there's nothing I like better than to meet
people who haven't that superstition. The modern world's after all very fine. Now you're
thoroughly modern and yet are not at all common. So many of the moderns we see are such very
poor stuff. If they're the children of the future we're willing to die young. Of course the ancients
too are often very tiresome. My wife and I like everything that's really new--not the mere pretence
of it. There's nothing new, unfortunately, in ignorance and stupidity. We see plenty of that in forms
that offer themselves as a revelation of progress, of light. A revelation of vulgarity! There's a
certain kind of vulgarity which I believe is really new; I don't think there ever was anything like it
before. Indeed I don't find vulgarity, at all, before the present century. You see a faint menace of it
here and there in the last, but to-day the air has grown so dense that delicate things are literally not
recognised. Now, we've liked you--!" With which he hesitated a moment, laying his hand gently on
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Goodwood's knee and smiling with a mixture of assurance and embarrassment. "I'm going to say
something extremely offensive and patronising, but you must let me have the satisfaction of it.
We've liked you because--because you've reconciled us a little to the future. If there are to be a
certain number of people like you--a la bonne heure! I'm talking for my wife as well as for myself,
you see. She speaks for me, my wife; why shouldn't I speak for her? We're as united, you know, as
the candlestick and the snuffers. Am I assuming too much when I say that I think I've understood
from you that your occupations have been--a-- commercial? There's a danger in that, you know;
but it's the way you have escaped that strikes us. Excuse me if my little compliment seems in
execrable taste; fortunately my wife doesn't hear me. What I mean is that you might have been--a-what
I was mentioning just now. The whole American world was in a conspiracy to make you so.
But you resisted, you've something about you that saved you. And yet you're so modern, so
modern; the most modern man we know! We shall always be delighted to see you again."
I have said that Osmond was in good humour, and these remarks will give ample evidence of the
fact. They were infinitely more personal than he usually cared to be, and if Caspar Goodwood had
attended to them more closely he might have thought that the defence of delicacy was in rather odd
hands. We may believe, however, that Osmond knew very well what he was about, and that if he
chose to use the tone of patronage with a grossness not in his habits he had an excellent reason for
the escapade. Goodwood had only a vague sense that he was laying it on somehow; he scarcely
knew where the mixture was applied. Indeed he scarcely knew what Osmond was talking about; he
wanted to be alone with Isabel, and that idea spoke louder to him than her husband's perfectly-
pitched voice. He watched her talking with other people and wondered when she would be at
liberty and whether he might ask her to go into one of the other rooms. His humour was not, like
Osmond's, of the best; there was an element of dull rage in his consciousness of things. Up to this
time he had not disliked Osmond personally; he had only thought him very well-informed and
obliging and more than he had supposed like the person whom Isabel Archer would naturally
marry. His host had won in the open field a great advantage over him, and Goodwood had too
strong a sense of fair play to have been moved to underrate him on that account. He had not tried
positively to think well of him; this was a flight of sentimental benevolence of which, even in the
days when he came nearest to reconciling himself to what had happened, Goodwood was quite
incapable. He accepted him as rather a brilliant personage of the amateurish kind, afflicted with a
redundancy of leisure which it amused him to work off in little refinements of conversation. But he
only half trusted him; he could never make out why the deuce Osmond should lavish refinements
of any sort upon HIM. It made him suspect that he found some private entertainment in it, and it
ministered to a general impression that his triumphant rival had in his composition a streak of
perversity. He knew indeed that Osmond could have no reason to wish him evil; he had nothing to
fear from him. He had carried off a supreme advantage and could afford to be kind to a man who
had lost everything. It was true that Goodwood had at times grimly wished he were dead and
would have liked to kill him; but Osmond had no means of knowing this, for practice had made the
younger man perfect in the art of appearing inaccessible to-day to any violent emotion. He
cultivated this art in order to deceive himself, but it was others that he deceived first. He cultivated
it, moreover, with very limited success; of which there could be no better proof than the deep,
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dumb irritation that reigned in his soul when he heard Osmond speak of his wife's feelings as if he
were commissioned to answer for them.
That was all he had had an ear for in what his host said to him this evening; he had been conscious
that Osmond made more of a point even than usual of referring to the conjugal harmony prevailing
at Palazzo Roccanera. He had been more careful than ever to speak as if he and his wife had all
things in sweet community and it were as natural to each of them to say "we" as to say "I". In all
this there was an air of intention that had puzzled and angered our poor Bostonian, who could only
reflect for his comfort that Mrs. Osmond's relations with her husband were none of his business.
He had no proof whatever that her husband misrepresented her, and if he judged her by the surface
of things was bound to believe that she liked her life. She had never given him the faintest sign of
discontent. Miss Stackpole had told him that she had lost her illusions, but writing for the papers
had made Miss Stackpole sensational. She was too fond of early news. Moreover, since her arrival
in Rome she had been much on her guard; she had pretty well ceased to flash her lantern at him.
This indeed, it may be said for her, would have been quite against her conscience. She had now
seen the reality of Isabel's situation, and it had inspired her with a just reserve. Whatever could be
done to improve it the most useful form of assistance would not be to inflame her former lovers
with a sense of her wrongs. Miss Stackpole continued to take a deep interest in the state of Mr.
Goodwood's feelings, but she showed it at present only by sending him choice extracts, humorous
and other, from the American journals, of which she received several by every post and which she
always perused with a pair of scissors in her hand. The articles she cut out she placed in an
envelope addressed to Mr. Goodwood, which she left with her own hand at his hotel. He never
asked her a question about Isabel: hadn't he come five thousand miles to see for himself? He was
thus not in the least authorised to think Mrs. Osmond unhappy; but the very absence of
authorisation operated as an irritant, ministered to the harsh- ness with which, in spite of his theory
that he had ceased to care, he now recognised that, so far as she was concerned, the future had
nothing more for him. He had not even the satisfaction of knowing the truth; apparently he could
not even be trusted to respect her if she WERE unhappy. He was hopeless, helpless, useless. To
this last character she had called his attention by her ingenious plan for making him leave Rome.
He had no objection whatever to doing what he could for her cousin, but it made him grind his
teeth to think that of all the services she might have asked of him this was the one she had been
eager to select. There had been no danger of her choosing one that would have kept him in Rome.
To-night what he was chiefly thinking of was that he was to leave her to-morrow and that he had
gained nothing by coming but the knowledge that he was as little wanted as ever. About herself he
had gained no knowledge; she was imperturbable, inscrutable, impenetrable. He felt the old
bitterness, which he had tried so hard to swallow, rise again in his throat, and he knew there are
disappointments that last as long as life. Osmond went on talking; Goodwood was vaguely aware
that he was touching again upon his perfect intimacy with his wife. It seemed to him for a moment
that the man had a kind of demonic imagination; it was impossible that without malice he should
have selected so unusual a topic. But what did it matter, after all, whether he were demonic or not,
and whether she loved him or hated him? She might hate him to the death without one's gaining a
straw one's self. "You travel, by the by, with Ralph Touchett," Osmond said. "I suppose that means
you'll move slowly?"
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"I don't know. I shall do just as he likes."
"You're very accommodating. We're immensely obliged to you; you must really let me say it. My
wife has probably expressed to you what we feel. Touchett has been on our minds all winter; it has
looked more than once as if he would never leave Rome. He ought never to have come; it's worse
than an imprudence for people in that state to travel; it's a kind of indelicacy. I wouldn't for the
world be under such an obligation to Touchett as he has been to--to my wife and me. Other people
inevitably have to look after him, and every one isn't so generous as you."
"I've nothing else to do," Caspar said dryly.
Osmond looked at him a moment askance. "You ought to marry, and then you'd have plenty to do!
It's true that in that case you wouldn't be quite so available for deeds of mercy."
"Do you find that as a married man you're so much occupied?" the young man mechanically asked.
"Ah, you see, being married's in itself an occupation. It isn't always active; it's often passive; but
that takes even more attention. Then my wife and I do so many things together. We read, we study,
we make music, we walk, we drive--we talk even, as when we first knew each other. I delight, to
this hour, in my wife's conversation. If you're ever bored take my advice and get married. Your
wife indeed may bore you, in that case; but you'll never bore yourself. You'll always have
something to say to yourself--always have a subject of reflection."
