Page:The Portrait of a Lady (1882).djvu/205

197 THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY. 197 this she believed, and she was still capable of deriving pleasure from the belief ; but it was absurd that a man so completely absolved from fidelity should stiffen himself in an attitude it would be more graceful to discontinue. Englishmen liked to be comfortable, said Isabel, and there could be little comfort for Lord Warburton, in the long run, in thinking of a self-sufficient American girl who had been but a casual acquaintance. Isabel flattered herself that should she hear, from one day to another, that he had married some young lady of his own country who had done more to deserve him, she should receive the news without an impulse of jealousy. It would have proved that he believed she was firm which was what she wished to seem to him; and this was grateful to her pride. XXII. ON one of the first days of May, some six months after old Mr. Touchett's death, a .picturesque little group was gathered in one of the many rooms of an ancient villa which stood on the summit of an olive-muffled hill, outside of the Roman gate of Florence. The villa was a long, rather blank-looking structure, with the far-projecting roof which Tuscany loves, and which, on the hills that encircle Florence, when looked at from a distance, makes so harmonious a rectangle with the straight, dark, definite cypresses that usually rise, in groups of three or four, beside it. The house had a front upon a little grassy, empty, rural piazza, which occupied a part of the hill-top ; and this front, pierced with a few windows in irregular relations and furnished with a stone bench which ran along the base of the structure and usually afforded a lounging-place to one or two persons wearing more or less of that air of under- valued merit which in Italy, for some reason or other, always gracefully invests any one who confi- dently assumes a perfectly passive attitude this ancient, solid, weather-worn, yet imposing front, had a somewhat incommuni- cative character. It was the mask of the house ; it was not its face. It had heavy lids, but no eyes ; the house in reality looked another way looked off behind, into splendid openness and the range of the afternoon light. In that quarter the villa overhung the slope of its hill and the long valley of the Arno, hazy with Italian colour. It had a narrow garden, in the man- ner of a terrace, productive chiefly of tangles of wild roses and old stone benches, mossy and sun- warmed. The parapet of the