Page:The Portrait of a Lady (London, Macmillan & Co., 1881) Volume 3.djvu/131

 indeed her ingenuity was unable to suggest what comfort he hoped to give her by coming to Rome and yet not calling on her. They met him twice in the street, but he had no appearance of seeing them; they were driving, and he had a habit of looking straight in front of him, as if he proposed to contemplate but one object at a time. Isabel could have fancied she had seen him the day before; it must have been with just that face and step that he walked out of Mrs. Touchett's door at the close of their last interview. He was dressed just as he had been dressed on that day; Isabel remembered the colour of his cravat; and yet in spite of this familiar look there was a strangeness in his figure too; something that made her feel afresh that it was rather terrible he should have come to Rome. He looked bigger and more over-topping than of old, and in those days he certainly was lofty enough. She noticed that the people whom he passed looked back after him; but he went straight forward, lifting above them a face like a February sky.

Miss Stackpole's other topic was very different; she gave Isabel the latest news about Mr. Bantling. He had been out in the United States the year before, and she was happy to say she had been able to show him considerable attention. She didn't know how much he had enjoyed it, but she would undertake to say it had done him good; he wasn't the same man when he left that he was when he came. It had opened his eyes and shown him that England was not everything. He was very much liked over there, and thought extremely simple—more simple than the English were commonly supposed to be. There were some people thought him affected; she didn't know whether they meant that his simplicity was an affectation. Some of his questions were too discouraging; he thought all the chambermaids were farmers' daughters—or all the farmers' daughters