Page:The Portrait of a Lady (1882).djvu/247

239 THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY. 239 not for Madame Merle that he came ; these two were old friends, and he never put himself out for her. He was not fond of Ealph Ealph had told her so and it was not supposable that Mr. Osmond had suddenly taken a fancy to her son. Ealph was imperturbable Ealph had a kind of loose-fitting urbanity that wrapped him about like an ill-made overcoat, but of which he never divested himself ; he thought Mr. Osmond very good com- pany, and would have been willing at any time to take the hos- pitable view of his idiosyncracies. .But he did not flatter him- self that the desire to repair a past injustice was the motive of their visitor's calls ; he read the situation more clearly. Isabel was the attraction, and in all conscience a sufficient one. Osmond was a critic, a student of the exquisite, and it was natural he should admire an admirable person. So when his mother said to him that it was very plain what Mr. Osmond was thinking of, Ealph replied that he was quite of her opinion. Mrs. Touchett had always liked Mr. Osmond ; she thought him so much of a gentleman. As he had never been an importunate visitor he had had no chance to be offensive, and he was recommended to Mrs. Touchett by his appearance of being as well able to do without her as she was to do without him a quality that always excited her esteem. It gave her no satisfaction, however, to think that he had taken it into his head to marry her niece. Such an alliance, on Isabel's part, would have an air of almost morbid perversity. Mrs. Touchett easily remembered that the girl had refused an English peer ; and that a young lady for whom Lord "Warburton had not been up to the mark should content herself with an obscure American dilettante, a middle- aged widower with an overgrown daughter and an income of nothing this answered to nothing in Mrs. Touchett's conception of success. She took, it will be observed, not the sentimental, but the political, view of matrimony a view which has always had much to recommend it; " I trust she won't have the folly to listen to him/' she said to her son ; to which Ealph replied that Isabel's listening was one thing and her answering quite another. He knew that she had listened to others, but that she had made them listen to her in return ; and he found much entertainment in the idea that, in these few months that he had known her, he should see a third suitor at her gate. She had wanted to see life, and fortune was serving her to her taste ; a succession of gentlemen going down on their knees to her was by itself a respectable chapter of experience. Ealph looked forward to a fourth and a fifth, soupirant ; he had no conviction that she would stop at a third. She would keep the gate ajar