Chapter 26

CHAPTER XXVI

Gilbert Osmond came to see Isabel again; that is he came to
Palazzo Crescentini. He had other friends there as well, and to
Mrs. Touchett and Madame Merle he was always impartially civil;
but the former of these ladies noted the fact that in the course
of a fortnight he called five times, and compared it with another
fact that she found no difficulty in remembering. Two visits a
year had hitherto constituted his regular tribute to Mrs.
Touchett's worth, and she had never observed him select for such
visits those moments, of almost periodical recurrence, when
Madame Merle was under her roof. It was not for Madame Merle that
he came; these two were old friends and he never put himself out
for her. He was not fond of Ralph--Ralph had told her so--and it
was not supposable that Mr. Osmond had suddenly taken a fancy to
her son. Ralph was imperturbable--Ralph had a kind of
loose-fitting urbanity that wrapped him about like an ill-made
overcoat, but of which he never divested himself; he thought Mr.
Osmond very good company and was willing at any time to look at
him in the light of hospitality. But he didn't flatter himself
that the desire to repair a past injustice was the motive of
their visitor's calls; he read the situation more clearly. Isabel
was the attraction, and in all conscience a sufficient one.
Osmond was a critic, a student of the exquisite, and it was
natural he should be curious of so rare an apparition. So when
his mother observed to him that it was plain what Mr. Osmond was
thinking of, Ralph replied that he was quite of her opinion. Mrs.
Touchett had from far back found a place on her scant list for
this gentleman, though wondering dimly by what art and what
process--so negative and so wise as they were--he had everywhere
effectively imposed himself. As he had never been an importunate
visitor he had had no chance to be offensive, and he was
recommended to her by his appearance of being as well able to do
without her as she was to do without him--a quality that always,
oddly enough, affected her as providing ground for a relation
with her. It gave her no satisfaction, however, to think that he
had taken it into his head to marry her niece. Such an alliance,
on Isabel's part, would have an air of almost morbid perversity.
Mrs. Touchett easily remembered that the girl had refused an
English peer; and that a young lady with whom Lord Warburton had
not successfully wrestled should content herself with an obscure
American dilettante, a middle-aged widower with an uncanny child
and an ambiguous income, this answered to nothing in Mrs.
Touchett's conception of success. She took, it will be observed,
not the sentimental, but the political, view of matrimony--a view