Page:The Portrait of a Lady (1882).djvu/440

432 432 THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY. promptly granted ; she would be at home at six o'clock that afternoon. She spent the day wondering what he was coming for what good he expected to get of it. He had presented him- self hitherto as a person destitute of the faculty of compromise, who would take what he had asked for or nothing. Isabel's hospitality, however, asked -no questions, and she found no great difficulty in appearing happy enough to deceive him. It was her conviction, at least, that she deceived him, and made him say to himself that he had been misinformed. But she also saw, so she believed, that he was not disappointed, as some other men, she was sure, would have been ; he had not come to Home to look for an opportunity. She never found out what he had come for ; he offered her no explanation ; there could be none but the very simple one that he wanted to see her. In other words, he had come for his amusement. Isabel followed up this induction with a good deal of eagerness, and was delighted to have found a formula that would lay the ghost of this gentle- , man's ancient grievance. If he had come to Eome for his amusement this was exactly what she wanted ; for if he cared for amusement he had got over his heartache. If he had got over his heartache everything was as it should be, and her responsibilities were at an end. It was true that he took his recreation a little stiffly, but he had never been demonstrative, and Isabel had every reason to believe that he was satisfied with what he saw. Henrietta was not in his confidence, though he was in hers, and Isabel consequently received no side-light upon his state of mind. He had little conversation upon general topics ; it came back to her that she had said of him once, years before " Mr. Goodwood speaks a good deal, but he doesn't talk." He spoke a good deal in Eome, but he talked, perhaps, as little as ever f considering, that is, how much there was to talk about. His arrival was not calculated to simplify her relations with her husband, for if Mr. Osmond didn't like her friends, Mr. Goodwood had no claim upon his attention save having been one of the first of them. There was nothing for her to say of him but that he was an old friend ; this rather meagre synthesis exhausted the facts. She had been obliged to introduce him to Osmond ; it was impossible she should not ask him to dinner, to her Thursday evenings, of which she had grown very weary, but to which her husband still held for the sake not so much of inviting people as of not inviting them. To the Thursdays Mr. Goodwood came regularly, solemnly, rather early ; he appeared to regard them with a good deal of gravity. Isabel