Warburton's; unfortunately it was beyond question, and this aggressive,
uncompromising look of it was just what made it unattractive. She could
never say to herself that here was a sufferer who had compensations, as
she was able to say in the case of her English suitor. She had no faith
in Mr. Goodwood's compensations and no esteem for them. A cotton factory
was not a compensation for anything--least of all for having failed
to marry Isabel Archer. And yet, beyond that, she hardly knew what
he had--save of course his intrinsic qualities. Oh, he was intrinsic
enough; she never thought of his even looking for artificial aids. If
he extended his business--that, to the best of her belief, was the
only form exertion could take with him--it would be because it was an
enterprising thing, or good for the business; not in the least because
he might hope it would overlay the past. This gave his figure a kind of
bareness and bleakness which made the accident of meeting it in memory
or in apprehension a peculiar concussion; it was deficient in the social
drapery commonly muffling, in an overcivilized age, the sharpness of
human contacts. His perfect silence, moreover, the fact that she never
heard from him and very seldom heard any mention of him, deepened this
impression of his loneliness. She asked Lily for news of him, from
time to time; but Lily knew nothing of Boston--her imagination was
all bounded on the east by Madison Avenue. As time went on Isabel had
thought of him oftener, and with fewer restrictions; she had had more
than once the idea of writing to him. She had never told her husband
about him--never let Osmond know of his visits to her in Florence; a
reserve not dictated in the early period by a want of confidence
in Osmond, but simply by the consideration that the young man's
disappointment was not her secret but his own. It would be wrong of her,
she had believed, to convey it to another, and Mr. Goodwood's affairs
could have, after all, little interest for Gilbert. When it had come
to the point she had never written to him; it seemed to her that,
considering his grievance, the least she could do was to let him alone.
Nevertheless she would have been glad to be in some way nearer to him.
It was not that it ever occurred to her that she might have married him;
even after the consequences of her actual union had grown vivid to her
that particular reflection, though she indulged in so many, had not had
the assurance to