Page:The Portrait of a Lady (1882).djvu/130

122 122 THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY. The incident which had preceded Isabel's departure from Gardencourt left a painful trace in the girl's mind ; she took no pleasure in recalling Lord Warburton's magnanimous dis- appointment. She could .not have done less than what she did. ; this was certainly true. But her necessity, all the same, had been a distasteful one, and she felt no desire to take credit for her conduct. Nevertheless, mingled with this ab- sence of an intellectual relish of it, was a feeling of freedom which in itself was sweet, and which, as she wandered through the great city with her ill-matched companions, occasionally throbbed into joyous excitement. When she walked in Ken- sington Gardens, she stopped the children (mainly of the poorer sort) whom she saw playing on the grass ; she asked them their names and gave them sixpence, and when they were pretty she kissed them. Ralph noticed such incidents ; he noticed every- thing that Isabel did. One afternoon, by way of amusing his companions, he invited them to tea in Winchester Square, and he had the house set in order as much as possible, to do honour to their visit. There was another guest, also, to meet the ladies, an amiable bachelor, an old friend of Ralph's, who happened to be in town, and who got on uncommonly well with Miss Stackpole. Mr. Bantling, a stout, fair, smiling man of forty, who was extraordinarily well dressed, and whose contributions to the conversation were characterised by vivacity rather than continuity, laughed immo- derately at everything Henrietta said, gave her. several cups of tea, examined in her society the bric-a-brac, of which Ralph had a considerable collection, and afterwards, when th host proposed they should go out into the square and pretend it was a ftte- champetre, walked round the limited inclosure several times with her and listened with candid interest to her remarks upon the inner life, " Oh, I see," said Mr. Bantling ; " I dare say you found it very quiet at Gardencourt. Naturally there's not much going on there when there's such a lot of illness about. Touchett's very bad, you know ; the doctors have forbid his being in England at all, and he has only come back to take care of his father. The old man, I believe, has half-a-dozen things the matter with him. They call it gout, but to my certain knowledge he is dropsical as well, though he doesn't look it. You may depend upon it he has got a lot of water somewhere. Of course that sort of thing makes it awfully slow for people in the house ; 1 wonder they have them under such circumstances. Then I believe Mr Touchett is always squabbling with his wife ; she lives away