Chapter 21 - Page 2

to find her and
were never liable to chance encounters and concussions. On her own
ground she was perfectly present, but was never over-inquisitive as
regards the territory of her neighbour. Isabel came at last to
have a kind of undemonstrable pity for her; there seemed
something so dreary in the condition of a person whose nature
had, as it were, so little surface--offered so limited a face to
the accretions of human contact. Nothing tender, nothing
sympathetic, had ever had a chance to fasten upon it--no
wind-sown blossom, no familiar softening moss. Her offered, her
passive extent, in other words, was about that of a knife-edge.
Isabel had reason to believe none the less that as she advanced in
life she made more of those concessions to the sense of something
obscurely distinct from convenience--more of them than she
independently exacted. She was learning to sacrifice consistency
to considerations of that inferior order for which the excuse must
be found in the particular case. It was not to the credit of her
absolute rectitude that she should have gone the longest way round
to Florence in order to spend a few weeks with her invalid son;
since in former years it had been one of her most definite
convictions that when Ralph wished to see her he was at liberty to
remember that Palazzo Crescentini contained a large apartment
known as the quarter of the signorino.

"I want to ask you something," Isabel said to this young man the
day after her arrival at San Remo--"something I've thought more
than once of asking you by letter, but that I've hesitated on the
whole to write about. Face to face, nevertheless, my question
seems easy enough. Did you know your father intended to leave me
so much money?"

Ralph stretched his legs a little further than usual and gazed a
little more fixedly at the Mediterranean.

"What does it matter, my dear Isabel, whether I knew? My father
was very obstinate."

"So," said the girl, "you did know."

"Yes; he told me. We even talked it over a little." "What did he
do it for?" asked Isabel abruptly. "Why, as a kind of compliment."

"A compliment on what?"

"On your so beautifully existing."

"He liked me too much," she presently declared.

"That's a way we all have."

"If I believed that I should be very unhappy. Fortunately I don't
believe it. I want to be treated with justice; I want nothing but
that."

"Very good. But you must remember that justice to a lovely being is
after all a florid sort of sentiment."

"I'm not a lovely being. How can you say that, at the very moment
when I'm asking such odious questions? I must seem to you
delicate!"

"You seem to me troubled," said Ralph.