o use the tone of patronage with a
grossness not in his habits he had an excellent reason for the escapade.
Goodwood had only a vague sense that he was laying it on somehow; he
scarcely knew where the mixture was applied. Indeed he scarcely knew
what Osmond was talking about; he wanted to be alone with Isabel, and
that idea spoke louder to him than her husband's perfectly-pitched
voice. He watched her talking with other people and wondered when she
would be at liberty and whether he might ask her to go into one of the
other rooms. His humour was not, like Osmond's, of the best; there was
an element of dull rage in his consciousness of things. Up to this time
he had not disliked Osmond personally; he had only thought him very
well-informed and obliging and more than he had supposed like the person
whom Isabel Archer would naturally marry. His host had won in the open
field a great advantage over him, and Goodwood had too strong a sense
of fair play to have been moved to underrate him on that account. He
had not tried positively to think well of him; this was a flight of
sentimental benevolence of which, even in the days when he came
nearest to reconciling himself to what had happened, Goodwood was
quite incapable. He accepted him as rather a brilliant personage of the
amateurish kind, afflicted with a redundancy of leisure which it amused
him to work off in little refinements of conversation. But he only half
trusted him; he could never make out why the deuce Osmond should lavish
refinements of any sort upon HIM. It made him suspect that he found some
private entertainment in it, and it ministered to a general impression
that his triumphant rival had in his composition a streak of perversity.
He knew indeed that Osmond could have no reason to wish him evil; he
had nothing to fear from him. He had carried off a supreme advantage and
could afford to be kind to a man who had lost everything. It was true
that Goodwood had at times grimly wished he were dead and would have
liked to kill him; but Osmond had no means of knowing this, for practice
had made the younger man perfect in the art of appearing inaccessible
to-day to any violent emotion. He cultivated this art in order to
deceive himself, but it was others that he deceived first. He cultivated
it, moreover, with very limited success; of which there could be no
better proof than the deep, dumb irritation that reigned in his
soul when he heard Osmond speak of his wife's fee