a great resource; Ralph was capable of discussing Mr. Bantling with
Henrietta for hours. Discussion was stimulated of course by their
inevitable difference of view--Ralph having amused himself with taking
the ground that the genial ex-guardsman was a regular Machiavelli.
Caspar Goodwood could contribute nothing to such a debate; but after
he had been left alone with his host he found there were various other
matters they could take up. It must be admitted that the lady who had
just gone out was not one of these; Caspar granted all Miss Stackpole's
merits in advance, but had no further remark to make about her. Neither,
after the first allusions, did the two men expatiate upon Mrs. Osmond--a
theme in which Goodwood perceived as many dangers as Ralph. He felt very
sorry for that unclassable personage; he couldn't bear to see a pleasant
man, so pleasant for all his queerness, so beyond anything to be done.
There was always something to be done, for Goodwood, and he did it in
this case by repeating several times his visit to the Hotel de Paris.
It seemed to Isabel that she had been very clever; she had artfully
disposed of the superfluous Caspar. She had given him an occupation; she
had converted him into a caretaker of Ralph. She had a plan of making
him travel northward with her cousin as soon as the first mild weather
should allow it. Lord Warburton had brought Ralph to Rome and Mr.
Goodwood should take him away. There seemed a happy symmetry in this,
and she was now intensely eager that Ralph should depart. She had a
constant fear he would die there before her eyes and a horror of the
occurrence of this event at an inn, by her door, which he had so rarely
entered. Ralph must sink to his last rest in his own dear house, in
one of those deep, dim chambers of Gardencourt where the dark ivy would
cluster round the edges of the glimmering window. There seemed to Isabel
in these days something sacred in Gardencourt; no chapter of the past
was more perfectly irrecoverable. When she thought of the months she had
spent there the tears rose to her eyes. She flattered herself, as I
say, upon her ingenuity, but she had need of all she could muster;
for several events occurred which seemed to confront and defy her. The
Countess Gemini arrived from Florence--arrived with her trunks, her
dresses, her chatter, her falsehoods, her frivolity, the strange, the
unholy legend of the number of her lovers. Edward Rosier, who had been
away some