you, I've
turned him out."

"Yes; but a lover outside's always a lover. He's sometimes even more of
one. Mr. Rosier still has hope."

"He's welcome to the comfort of it! My daughter has only to sit
perfectly quiet to become Lady Warburton."

"Should you like that?" Isabel asked with a simplicity which was not
so affected as it may appear. She was resolved to assume nothing, for
Osmond had a way of unexpectedly turning her assumptions against her.
The intensity with which he would like his daughter to become Lady
Warburton had been the very basis of her own recent reflections. But
that was for herself; she would recognise nothing until Osmond should
have put it into words; she would not take for granted with him that
he thought Lord Warburton a prize worth an amount of effort that was
unusual among the Osmonds. It was Gilbert's constant intimation that for
him nothing in life was a prize; that he treated as from equal to equal
with the most distinguished people in the world, and that his daughter
had only to look about her to pick out a prince. It cost him therefore
a lapse from consistency to say explicitly that he yearned for Lord
Warburton and that if this nobleman should escape his equivalent might
not be found; with which moreover it was another of his customary
implications that he was never inconsistent. He would have liked his
wife to glide over the point. But strangely enough, now that she
was face to face with him and although an hour before she had almost
invented a scheme for pleasing him, Isabel was not accommodating,
would not glide. And yet she knew exactly the effect on his mind of
her question: it would operate as an humiliation. Never mind; he was
terribly capable of humiliating her--all the more so that he was also
capable of waiting for great opportunities and of showing sometimes an
almost unaccountable indifference to small ones. Isabel perhaps took a
small opportunity because she would not have availed herself of a great
one.

Osmond at present acquitted himself very honourably. "I should like it
extremely; it would be a great marriage. And then Lord Warburton has
another advantage: he's an old friend of yours. It would be pleasant for
him to come into the family. It's very odd Pansy's admirers should all
be your old friends."

"It's natural that they should come to see me. In coming to see me they
see Pansy. Seeing her it's natural they should fall in love with her."

"So I think. But you'