e
clung to. Lord Warburton would do as well as Mr. Rosier--especially as
she seemed quite to like him; she had expressed this sentiment to Isabel
without a single reservation; she had said she thought his conversation
most interesting--he had told her all about India. His manner to Pansy
had been of the rightest and easiest--Isabel noticed that for herself,
as she also observed that he talked to her not in the least in a
patronising way, reminding himself of her youth and simplicity, but
quite as if she understood his subjects with that sufficiency with which
she followed those of the fashionable operas. This went far enough
for attention to the music and the barytone. He was careful only to be
kind--he was as kind as he had been to another fluttered young chit at
Gardencourt. A girl might well be touched by that; she remembered how
she herself had been touched, and said to herself that if she had been
as simple as Pansy the impression would have been deeper still. She
had not been simple when she refused him; that operation had been
as complicated as, later, her acceptance of Osmond had been. Pansy,
however, in spite of HER simplicity, really did understand, and was
glad that Lord Warburton should talk to her, not about her partners and
bouquets, but about the state of Italy, the condition of the peasantry,
the famous grist-tax, the pellagra, his impressions of Roman society.
She looked at him, as she drew her needle through her tapestry, with
sweet submissive eyes, and when she lowered them she gave little quiet
oblique glances at his person, his hands, his feet, his clothes, as if
she were considering him. Even his person, Isabel might have reminded
her, was better than Mr. Rosier's. But Isabel contented herself at such
moments with wondering where this gentleman was; he came no more at all
to Palazzo Roccanera. It was surprising, as I say, the hold it had taken
of her--the idea of assisting her husband to be pleased.

It was surprising for a variety of reasons which I shall presently touch
upon. On the evening I speak of, while Lord Warburton sat there, she had
been on the point of taking the great step of going out of the room and
leaving her companions alone. I say the great step, because it was in
this light that Gilbert Osmond would have regarded it, and Isabel was
trying as much as possible to take her husband's view. She succeeded
after a fashion, but she fell short of the point I mention. After all
she couldn