s something exquisite
in her dignity.

Ralph, as I say, had wished to see for himself; but while engaged in
this pursuit he had yet felt afresh what a fool he had been to put the
girl on her guard. He had played the wrong card, and now he had lost the
game. He should see nothing, he should learn nothing; for him she would
always wear a mask. His true line would have been to profess delight in
her union, so that later, when, as Ralph phrased it, the bottom should
fall out of it, she might have the pleasure of saying to him that he
had been a goose. He would gladly have consented to pass for a goose in
order to know Isabel's real situation. At present, however, she neither
taunted him with his fallacies nor pretended that her own confidence was
justified; if she wore a mask it completely covered her face. There was
something fixed and mechanical in the serenity painted on it; this was
not an expression, Ralph said--it was a representation, it was even an
advertisement. She had lost her child; that was a sorrow, but it was a
sorrow she scarcely spoke of; there was more to say about it than she
could say to Ralph. It belonged to the past, moreover; it had occurred
six months before and she had already laid aside the tokens of mourning.
She appeared to be leading the life of the world; Ralph heard her spoken
of as having a "charming position." He observed that she produced the
impression of being peculiarly enviable, that it was supposed, among
many people, to be a privilege even to know her. Her house was not open
to every one, and she had an evening in the week to which people
were not invited as a matter of course. She lived with a certain
magnificence, but you needed to be a member of her circle to perceive
it; for there was nothing to gape at, nothing to criticise, nothing even
to admire, in the daily proceedings of Mr. and Mrs. Osmond. Ralph, in
all this, recognised the hand of the master; for he knew that Isabel had
no faculty for producing studied impressions. She struck him as having
a great love of movement, of gaiety, of late hours, of long rides, of
fatigue; an eagerness to be entertained, to be interested, even to be
bored, to make acquaintances, to see people who were talked about, to
explore the neighbourhood of Rome, to enter into relation with certain
of the mustiest relics of its old society. In all this there was
much less discrimination than in that desire for comprehensiveness of
development on which he