Page:The Portrait of a Lady (1882).djvu/327

319 THE PORTE AIT OF A LADY. 319 head that he might offer her two or three of the gems of his col- lection 1 If she would only help him to marry Miss Osmond, he would present her with his whole museum. He could hardly say so to her outright ; it would seem too gross a bribe. But he should like her to believe it. It was with these thoughts that he went again to Mrs. Osmond's, Mrs. Osmond having an "evening" she had taken the Thursday of each week when his presence could be accounted for on general principles of civility. The object of Mr. Hosier's well-regulated affection dwelt in a high house in the very heart of Rome ; a dark and massive structure, overlooking a sunny piazzetta in the neighbourhood of the Farnese Palace. In a palace, too, little Pansy lived a palace in Roman parlance, but a dungeon to poor Rosier's apprehensive mind. It seemed to him of evil omen that the young lady he wished to marry, and whose fastidious father he doubted of his ability to conciliate, should be immured -in a kind of domestic fortress, which bore a stern old Roman name, which smelt of historic deeds, of crime and craft and violence, which was mentioned in " Murray " and visited by tourists who looked disappointed and depressed, and which had frescoes by Caravaggio in the piano nobile and a row of mutilated statues and dusty urns in the wide, nobly-arched loggia overlooking the damp court where a fountain gushed out of a mossy niche. In a less preoccupied frame of mind he could have done justice to the Palazzo Roccanera ; he could have entered into the sentiment of Mrs. Osmond, who had once told him that on settling themselves in Rome she and her husband chose this habitation for the love of local colour. It had local colour enough, and though he knew less about architecture than about Limoges enamel, he could see that the proportions of the windows, and even the details of the cornice, had quite the grand air. But Rosier was haunted by the conviction that at picturesque periods young girls had been shut up there to keep them from their true loves, and, under the threat of being thrown into convents, had been forced into unholy marriages. There was one point, however, to which he always did justice when once he found himself in Mrs. Osmond's warm, rich-look- ing reception-rooms, which were on the second floor. He acknowledged that these people were very stiong in bibelots. It was a taste of Osmond's own not at all of hers ; this she had told him the first time he came to the house, when, after asking himself for a quarter of an hour whether they had better tilings than he, he was obliged to admit that they had, very much, and vanquished his envy, as a gentleman should, to the point of