Page:The Portrait of a Lady (1882).djvu/451

443 THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY. 443 might have been a what I was mentioning just now. The whole American world was in a conspiracy to make you so. But you resisted, you have something that saved you. And yet you are so modern, so modern ; the most modern man we know ! We shall always be delighted to see you again." I have said that Osmond was in good-humour, and these remarks will give ample evidence of the fact. They were infinitely more personal than he usually cared to be, and if Caspar Goodwood had attended to them more closely he might have thought that the defence of delicacy was in rather odd hands. We may believe, however, that Osmond knew very well what he was about, and that if he chose for once to be a little vulgar, he had an excellent reason for the escapade. Good- wood had only a vague sense that he was laying it on, somehow ; he scarcely knew where the mixture was applied. Indeed lie scarcely knew what Osmond was talking about ; he wanted to be alone with Isabel, and that idea spoke louder to him than her husband's perfectly modulated voice. He watched her talking with other people, and wondered when she would be at liberty, and whether he might ask her to go into one of the other rooms. His humour was not, like Osmond's, of the best ; there was an. element of dull rage in his consciousness of things. Up to this time he had not disliked Osmond -personally; he had only thought him very well-informed and obliging, and more than he had supposed like the person whom Isabel Archer would naturally marry. Osmond had won in the open field a great advantage over him, and Goodwood had too strong a sense of fair play to have been moved to underrate him on that account. He had not tried positively to like him ; this was a flight of sentimental benevolence of which, even in the days when he came nearest to reconciling himself to what had happened, Goodwood was quite incapable. He accepted him as a rather brilliant personage of the amateurish kind, afflicted with a redundancy of leisure which it amused him to work olf in little refinements of conversation. But he only half trusted him ; he could never make out why the deuce Osmond should lavish refinements of any sort upon him. It made him suspect that he found some private ent*T- tainmerit in it, and it ministered to a general impression that his successful rival had a fantastic streak in his composition. He knew indeed that Osmond could have no reason to wish him evil; he had nothing to fear from him. He had carried oil' a supreme advantage, and he could aiford to be kind to a man who had lost everything. It was true that Goodwood at times had wished Osmond were dead, and would have liked to kill