Page:The Portrait of a Lady (1882).djvu/375

367 THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY. 367 " You were afraid that I would plead for Mr. Eosier ? Haven't you noticed that I have never spoken to you of him ? " " I have never given you a chance. We have so little con- versation in these days. I know he was an old friend of yours." " Yes ; he's an old friend of mine." Isabel cared little more for him than for the tapestry that she held in her hand ; but it was true that he was an old friend, and with her husband she felt a desire not to extenuate such ties. He had a way of expressing contempt for them which fortified her loyalty to them, even when, as in the present case, they were in themselves insignificant. She sometimes felt a sort of passion of tenderness for memories which had no other merit than that they belonged to her unmarried life. " But as regards Pansy," she added in a moment, " I have given him no encouragement." " That's fortunat^," Osmond observed. " Fortunate for me, I suppose you mean. For him it matters little." " There is no use talking of him," Osmond said. "As I tell you, I have turned him out." " Yes ; but a lover outside is always a lover. He is some- times even more of one. Mr. Eosier still has hope." " He's welcome to the comfort of it ! My daughter has only to sit still, to become Lady Warburton." "Should you like that?' 7 Isabel asked, with a simplicity which was not so affected as it may appear. She was resolved to assume nothing, for Osmond had a way of unexpectedly turn- ing her assumptions against her. The intensity with which he would like his daughter to become Lady Warburton had been the very basis of her own recent reflections. But that was for herself ; she would recognise nothing until Osmond should have put it into words ; she would not take for granted with him that he thought Lord Warburton a prize worth an amount of effort that was unusual among the Osmonds. It was Gilbert's con- stant intimation that, for him, nothing was a prize ; that he treated as from equal to equal with the most distinguished peo- ple in the world, and that his daughter had only to look about her to pick out a prince. It cost him therefore a lapse from consistency to say explicitly that he yearned for Lord Warbur- ton, that if this nobleman should escape, his equivalent might not be found ; and it was another of his customary implications that he was never inconsistent. He would have liked his wife to glide over the point. But strangely enough, now that she was face to face with him, though an hour before she had almost in- Vented a scheme for pleasing him, Isabel was not accommodating,