Chapter 36

CHAPTER XXXVI

One afternoon of the autumn of 1876, toward dusk, a young man of
pleasing appearance rang at the door of a small apartment on the
third floor of an old Roman house. On its being opened he
enquired for Madame Merle; whereupon the servant, a neat, plain
woman, with a French face and a lady's maid's manner, ushered him
into a diminutive drawing-room and requested the favour of his
name. "Mr. Edward Rosier," said the young man, who sat down to
wait till his hostess should appear.

The reader will perhaps not have forgotten that Mr. Rosier was an
ornament of the American circle in Paris, but it may also be
remembered that he sometimes vanished from its horizon. He had
spent a portion of several winters at Pau, and as he was a
gentleman of constituted habits he might have continued for years
to pay his annual visit to this charming resort. In the summer of
1876, however, an incident befell him which changed the current
not only of his thoughts, but of his customary sequences. He
passed a month in the Upper Engadine and encountered at Saint
Moritz a charming young girl. To this little person he began to
pay, on the spot, particular attention: she struck him as exactly
the household angel he had long been looking for. He was never
precipitate, he was nothing if not discreet, so he forbore for
the present to declare his passion; but it seemed to him when
they parted--the young lady to go down into Italy and her admirer
to proceed to Geneva, where he was under bonds to join other
friends--that he should be romantically wretched if he were not
to see her again. The simplest way to do so was to go in the
autumn to Rome, where Miss Osmond was domiciled with her family.
Mr. Rosier started on his pilgrimage to the Italian capital and
reached it on the first of November. It was a pleasant thing to
do, but for the young man there was a strain of the heroic in the
enterprise. He might expose himself, unseasoned, to the poison of
the Roman air, which in November lay, notoriously, much in wait.
Fortune, however, favours the brave; and this adventurer, who
took three grains of quinine a day, had at the end of a month no
cause to deplore his temerity. He had made to a certain extent
good use of his time; he had devoted it in vain to finding a flaw
in Pansy Osmond's composition. She was admirably finished; she
had had the last touch; she was really a consummate piece. He
thought of her in amorous meditation a good deal as he might have
thought of a Dresden-china shepherdess. Miss Osmond, indeed, in
the bloom of her juvenility, had a hint of the rococo which
Rosier, whose taste was predominantly for that manner, could not
fail to appreciate. That he esteemed the productions of