Page:The Portrait of a Lady (1882).djvu/303

295 THE POETRAIT OF A LADY. 295 Gilbert Osmond, After an interval of silence, however, she asked her companion from whom she had received a visit an hour before. " Prom an old friend an American gentleman," Isabel said, with a colour in her cheek. " An American, of course. It is only an American that calls at ten o'clock in the morning." " It was half-past ten ; he was in a great hurry ; he goes away this evening." " Couldn't he have come yesterday, at the usual time 1 " " He only arrived last night." " He spends but twenty-four hours in Florence ? " Mrs. Touchett cried. " He's an American truly." " He is indeed," said Isabel, thinking with a perverse admir- ation of what Caspar Goodwood had done for her. Two days afterward Ralph arrived; but though Isabel was sure that Mrs. Touchett had lost no time in telling him the news, he betrayed at first no knowledge of the great fact. Their first talk was naturally about his health ; Isabel had many ques- tions to ask about Corfu. She had been shocked by his appear- ance when he came into the room ; she had forgotten how ill he looked. In spite of Corfu, he looked very ill to-day, and Isabel wondered whether he were really worse or whether she was simply disaccustomed to living with an invalid. Poor Ralph grew no handsomer as he advanced in life, and the now ap- parently complete loss of. his health had done little to mitigate the natural oddity of his person. His face wore its pleasant perpetual smile, which perhaps suggested wit rather than achieved it ; his thin whisker languished upon a lean cheek ; the exor- bitant curve of his nose defined itself more sharply. Lean he was altogether ; lean and long and loose-jointed ; an accidental cohesion of relaxed angles. His brown velvet jacket had become perennial ; his hands had fixed themselves in his pockets ; he shambled, and stumbled, and shuffled, in a manner that denoted great physical helplessness. It was perhaps this whimsical gait that helped to mark his character more than ever as that of the humorous invalid the invalid for whom even his own disabilities are part of the general joke. They might well indeed with Ralph have been the chief cause of the want of seriousness with which he appeared to regard a world in which the reason for his own presence was past finding out. Isabel had grown fond of his ugliness; his awkwardness had become dear to her. These things were endeared by association; they struck her as the conditions of