Page:The Portrait of a Lady (1882).djvu/198

190 190 THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY. prepared on many occasions in life to please no one at all not even yourself." Isabel shook her head sadly ; she looked troubled and frightened. " This, for you, Henrietta," she said, " must be one of those occasions ! " It was certainly true that Miss Stackpole, during her visit to Paris, which had been professionally more remunerative than her English sojourn, had not been living in the world of dreams. Mr. Bantling, who had now returned to England, was her companion for the first four weeks of her stay ; and about Mr. Bantling there was nothing dreamy. Isabel learned from her friend that the two liad-led a life of great intimacy, and that this had been a peculiar advantage to Henrietta, owing to the gentleman's remarkable knowledge of Paris. He had explained everything, shown her everything, been her constant guide and interpreter. They had breakfasted together, dined together, gone to the theatre together, supped together, really in a manner quite lived together. He was a true friend, Henrietta more than once assured our heroine ; and she had never supposed that she could like any Englishman so well. Isabel could not have told you why, but she found something that ministered to mirth in the alliance the correspondent of the Interviewer had struck with Lady Pensil's brother ; and her amusement subsisted in the face of the fact that she thought it a credit to each of them. Isabel could not rid herself .of a suspicion that they were playing, somehow, at cross-purposes that the simplicity of each of them, had been entrapped. But this simplicity was none the less honourable on either side ; it was as graceful on Henrietta's part to believe that Mr. Bantling took an interest in the diffusion of lively journalism, and in consolidating the position of lady-correspondents, as it was on the part of her companion to suppose that the cause of the Interviewer a periodical of which he never formed a very definite conception was, if subtly analysed (a task to which Mr. Bantling felt himself quite equal), but the cause of Miss Stackpole's coquetry. Each of these harmless confederates supplied at any rate a want of which the other was somewhat eagerly conscious. Mr. Bantling, who was of a rather slow and discursive habit, relished a prompt, keen, positive woman, who charmed him with the spectacle of a brilliant eye and a kind of bandbox neatness, and who kindled a perception of raciness in a mind to which the usual fare of life seemed unsalted. Henrietta, on the other hand, enjoyed the society of a fresh-looking, professionless gentleman, whose leisured state, though generally