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429 THE PORTKAIT OF A LADY. *29 the credit of expressing sympathy. Osmond held to his credit, and yet he held to his objections all of which were elements difficult to reconcile. The right thing would have been that Miss Stackpole should come to dine at the Palazzo Koccanera once or twice, so that (in spite of his superficial civility, always so great) she might judge for herself how little pleasure it gave him. From the moment, however, that both the ladies were so unaccommodating, there was nothing for Osmond but to wish that Henrietta would take herself off. It was surprising how little satisfaction he got from his wife's friends ; he took occasion to call Isabel's attention to it. " You are certainly not, fortunate in your intimates ; I wish you might make a new collection," he said to her one morning, in reference to nothing visible at the moment, hut in a tone of ripe reflection which deprived the remark of all brutal abrupt- ness. " It's as if you had taken 'the trouble to pick out the people in the world that I have least in common with. Your cousin I have always thought a conceited ass besides his being the most ill-favoured animal I know. Then it's insufferably tiresome that one can't tell him so ; one must spare him on account of his health. His health seems to me the best part of him ; it gives him privileges enjoyed by no one else. If he is so desperately ill there is only one way to prove it ; but he seems to have no mind for that. I can't say much more for the great War.burton. When one really thinks of it, the cool insolence of that performance was something rare ! He comes and looks at one's daughter as if she were a suite of apartments ; he tries the door-handles and looks out of the windows, raps on the walls and almost thinks he will take the place. Will you be so good as to draw up a lease 1 Then, on the whole, he decides that the rooms are too small ; he doesn't think he could live on a third floor ; he must look out for a piano nobile. And he goes away, after having got a month's lodging in the poor little apartment for nothing. Miss Stackpole, however, is your most wonderful invention. She strikes me as a kind of monster. One hasn't a nerve in one's body that she doesn't set quivering. You know I never have admitted that she is a woman. Do you know what she reminds me oil Of a new steel pen the most odious thing in nature. She talks as a steel pen writes ; aren't her letters, by the way, on ruled paper 1 ? She thinks and moves, and walks and looks, exactly as she talks. You may say that she doesn't hurt me, inasmuch as I don't see her. I don't see her, but I hear her ; I hear her all day long. Her voice is in my ears ; I can't get rid of it. I know exactly what she says,