ve of their visitor's calls; he read the situation more clearly.
Isabel was the attraction, and in all conscience a sufficient one.
Osmond was a critic, a student of the exquisite, and it was natural he
should be curious of so rare an apparition. So when his mother observed
to him that it was plain what Mr. Osmond was thinking of, Ralph replied
that he was quite of her opinion. Mrs. Touchett had from far back found
a place on her scant list for this gentleman, though wondering dimly by
what art and what process--so negative and so wise as they were--he
had everywhere effectively imposed himself. As he had never been an
importunate visitor he had had no chance to be offensive, and he was
recommended to her by his appearance of being as well able to do without
her as she was to do without him--a quality that always, oddly enough,
affected her as providing ground for a relation with her. It gave her
no satisfaction, however, to think that he had taken it into his head to
marry her niece. Such an alliance, on Isabel's part, would have an air
of almost morbid perversity. Mrs. Touchett easily remembered that the
girl had refused an English peer; and that a young lady with whom Lord
Warburton had not successfully wrestled should content herself with an
obscure American dilettante, a middle-aged widower with an uncanny child
and an ambiguous income, this answered to nothing in Mrs. Touchett's
conception of success. She took, it will be observed, not the
sentimental, but the political, view of matrimony--a view which has
always had much to recommend it. "I trust she won't have the folly
to listen to him," she said to her son; to which Ralph replied that
Isabel's listening was one thing and Isabel's answering quite another.
He knew she had listened to several parties, as his father would
have said, but had made them listen in return; and he found much
entertainment in the idea that in these few months of his knowing her he
should observe a fresh suitor at her gate. She had wanted to see life,
and fortune was serving her to her taste; a succession of fine gentlemen
going down on their knees to her would do as well as anything else.
Ralph looked forward to a fourth, a fifth, a tenth besieger; he had no
conviction she would stop at a third. She would keep the gate ajar and
open a parley; she would certainly not allow number three to come in.
He expressed this view, somewhat after this fashion, to his mother, who
looked at him as if he