d so definitely
undertaken to preserve no record of what had passed between them that a
corresponding effort on his own part would be eminently just. This
was not, as it may seem, merely a theory tinged with sarcasm. Isabel
candidly believed that his lordship would, in the usual phrase, get over
his disappointment. He had been deeply affected--this she believed, and
she was still capable of deriving pleasure from the belief; but it
was absurd that a man both so intelligent and so honourably dealt with
should cultivate a scar out of proportion to any wound. Englishmen
liked moreover to be comfortable, said Isabel, and there could be
little comfort for Lord Warburton, in the long run, in brooding over a
self-sufficient American girl who had been but a casual acquaintance.
She flattered herself that, should she hear from one day to another that
he had married some young woman of his own country who had done more
to deserve him, she should receive the news without a pang even of
surprise. It would have proved that he believed she was firm--which was
what she wished to seem to him. That alone was grateful to her pride.

CHAPTER XXII

On one of the first days of May, some six months after old Mr.
Touchett's death, a small group that might have been described by a
painter as composing well was gathered in one of the many rooms of an
ancient villa crowning an olive-muffled hill outside of the Roman gate
of Florence. The villa was a long, rather blank-looking structure, with
the far-projecting roof which Tuscany loves and which, on the hills that
encircle Florence, when considered from a distance, makes so harmonious
a rectangle with the straight, dark, definite cypresses that usually
rise in groups of three or four beside it. The house had a front upon
a little grassy, empty, rural piazza which occupied a part of the
hill-top; and this front, pierced with a few windows in irregular
relations and furnished with a stone bench lengthily adjusted to the
base of the structure and useful as a lounging-place to one or two
persons wearing more or less of that air of undervalued merit which in
Italy, for some reason or other, always gracefully invests any one who
confidently assumes a perfectly passive attitude--this antique,
solid, weather-worn, yet imposing front had a somewhat incommunicative
character. It was the mask, not the face of the house. It had heavy
lids, but no eyes; the house in reality looked another way--looked off