The Portrait of a Lady: Chapters 36–55

Miss Osmond, indeed, in the bloom of her juvenility, had a hint of the rococo which Rosier, whose taste was predominantly for that manner, could not fail to appreciate.

It seemed to him of evil omen that the young lady he wished to marry, and whose fastidious father he doubted of his ability to conciliate, should be immured in a kind of domestic fortress, a pile which bore a stern old Roman name, which smelt of historic deeds, of crime and craft and violence...

For “advice” read “cash,” he said to himself; and the fact that Gilbert Osmond had landed his highest prizes during his impecunious season confirmed his most cherished doctrine—the doctrine that a collector may freely be poor if he be only patient.

He felt extremely bold after the dull girl in so vain a disguise of rose-colour had responded to the call of her mother, who came in to say, with a significant simper at Rosier, that she must carry her off to other triumphs.

She was severe, and in the manner in which she turned her back to him there was a degree of contempt which caused him to mutter a decent imprecation.

They sat down and she asked him about his sisters, with other enquiries of a somewhat perfunctory kind.

No reference was ever again made between them to Ralph’s opinion of Gilbert Osmond, and by surrounding this topic with a sacred silence they managed to preserve a semblance of reciprocal frankness.

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.

That was the work of—Isabel scarcely knew what: of nature, providence, fortune, of the eternal mystery of things.

“I liked her once better than I do to-day. I’m tired of her, and I’m rather ashamed of it. She’s so almost unnaturally good! I’m glad she’s not in Italy; it makes for relaxation—for a sort of moral detente. Don’t talk of her too much; it seems to bring her back. She’ll come back in plenty of time.”

“Ah, a moment ago I thought you seemed rather to disparage her.”

Isabel cared little more for him than for the tapestry that she held in her hand; but it was true that he was an old friend and that with her husband she felt a desire not to extenuate such ties.

They were not his misdeeds, his turpitudes; she accused him of nothing—that is but of one thing, which was not a crime.

That was all she accused him of, and the miserable part of it was precisely that it was not a crime, for against a crime she might have found redress.

Isabel’s cheek burned when she asked herself if she had really married on a factitious theory, in order to do something finely appreciable with her money.

The words had been nothing superficially; but when in the light of deepening experience she had looked into them they had then appeared portentous.

Pansy was as ready for a dance as ever; she was not of a generalising turn and had not extended to other pleasures the interdict she had seen placed on those of love.

If she was biding her time or hoping to circumvent her father she must have had a prevision of success.

Rosier lingered a moment till Pansy came in sight on the arm of her cavalier; he stood just long enough to look her in the face.

He stood there with his handsome, easy, important physiognomy; and as Isabel observed him it came over her, as it had done before, that it was strange a man of his mettle should take an interest in a little maid.

But Osmond had given her a sort of tableau of her position as his daughter’s duenna, which consisted of gracious alternations of concession and contraction; and there were directions of his which she liked to think she obeyed to the letter.

“She has promised to dance with me later,” he said.
“I’m glad of that. I suppose you’ve engaged her for the cotillion.”

She asked herself when it would begin, like fire-works, or Lent, or the opera season; not that she cared much, but she wondered what kept it in abeyance.

“I’m sorry to hear it; I hoped she would have her own way. Why doesn’t my brother like you?” the Countess ingenuously added.

And on Isabel’s making no rejoinder he went on to enquire whether it took his lordship five days to indite a letter.

When Pansy kissed him before going to bed he returned her embrace with even more than his usual munificence, and Isabel wondered if he meant it as a hint that his daughter had been injured by the machinations of her stepmother.

Neither, after the first allusions, did the two men expatiate upon Mrs. Osmond—a theme in which Goodwood perceived as many dangers as Ralph.

Then it came over her more poignantly that she should not see him again.

Excuse me if my little compliment seems in execrable taste; fortunately my wife doesn’t hear me.

“Oh God!” his companion murmured; and, sitting there in her ripe freshness, she had recourse to the same gesture she had provoked on Isabel’s part in the morning: she bent her face and covered it with her hands.

After he had left her she went, the first thing, and lifted from the mantel-shelf the attenuated coffee-cup in which he had mentioned the existence of a crack; but she looked at it rather abstractedly.

This bustling, pushing rabble that calls itself society—one should take her out of it occasionally. Convents are very quiet, very convenient, very salutary. I like to think of her there, in the old garden, under the arcade, among those tranquil virtuous women.

She will have her books and her drawing, she will have her piano. I’ve made the most liberal arrangements. There is to be nothing ascetic; there’s just to be a certain little sense of sequestration. She’ll have time to think, and there’s something I want her to think about.

To this, for some time, he made no rejoinder; he continued to give his chief attention to his work, which was of a sort that would brook no negligence.

So she may take her revenge as she chooses; I don’t think she’ll frighten you very much. Her great idea has been to be tremendously irreproachable—a kind of full-blown lily—the incarnation of propriety. She has always worshipped that god.

“Yes, yes, the mother has done so,” said Isabel, who had listened to all this with a face more and more wan.

She drove at five o’clock to a high floor in a narrow street in the quarter of the Piazza Navona, and was admitted by the portress of the convent, a genial and obsequious person.

Mother Catherine has a most coquettish little toilet-table, with something that looked uncommonly like a bottle of eau-de-Cologne.

While she looked about her for the proper egress, the door opened and admitted one of the ladies of the house, who advanced with a discreet smile, gently rubbing, under her long loose sleeves, a pair of plump white hands.

“Your sisters, in America, wished to know how you dress. That seemed to be their principal interest. I wasn’t able to tell them—but they seemed to have the right idea: that you never wear anything less than black brocade.”