Page:The Portrait of a Lady (1882).djvu/60

52 52 THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY. father would survive him^-that his own name would be the first called. The father and son had been close companions, and the idea of being left alone with the remnant of a tasteless life on his hands was not gratifying to the young man, who had always and tacitly counted upon his elder's help in making the best of a poor business. At the prospect of losing his great motive, Ralph was indeed mightily disgusted. If they might die at the same time, it would be all very well ; but without the encouragement of his father's society he should barely have patience to await his own turn. He had not the incentive of feeling that he was indispensable to his mother; it was a rule with his mother to have no regrets. He bethought himself, of course, that it had been a small kindness to his father to wish that, of the two, the active rather than the passive party should know the pain of loss; he remembered that the old man had always treated his own forecast of an uncompleted career as a clever fallacy, which he should be delighted to discredit so far as he might by dying first. But of the two triumphs, that of refuting a sophistical son and that of holding on a while longer to a state of being which, with all abatements, he enjoyed, Ralph deemed it no sin to hope that the latter might be vouchsafed to Mr. Touchett. These were nice questions, but Isabel's arrival put a stop to his puzzling over them. It even suggested that there might be a compensation fpr the intolerable ennui of surviving his genial sire. He wondered whether he were falling in love with this spontaneous young woman from Albany ; but he decided that on the whole he was not. After he had known her for a week, he quite made up his mind to this, and every day he felt a little more sure. Lord Warburton had been right about her ; she was a thoroughly interesting woman. Ralph wondered how Lord Warburton had found it out so soon ; and then he said it was cnly another proof of his friend's high abilities, which he had always greatly admired. If his cousin were to be nothing more than an entertainment, to him, Ralph was conscious that she was an entertainment of a high order. " A character like that," he said to himself, " is the finest thing in nature. It is finer than the fii;est work of aft than a Greek bas-relief, than a great Titian, than a Gothic cathedral. It is very pleasant to be so well-trated where one least looked for it. I had never been more blue, more bored, than for a week before she came ; I had never expected less that something agreeable would happen. Suddenly I receive a Titian, by the post, to hang on my wall a Greek bas-relief to stick over my chimney-piece. Tho key of