suit YOU?”
“You’ll suit me beautifully; but what I mean is that you and papa will suit each other. You’re both so quiet and so serious. You’re not so quiet as he — or even as Madame Merle; but you’re more quiet than many others. He should not for instance have a wife like my aunt. She’s always in motion, in agitation — to-day especially; you’ll see when she comes in. They told us at the convent it was wrong to judge our elders, but I suppose there’s no harm if we judge them favourably. You’ll be a delightful companion for papa.”
“For you too, I hope,” Isabel said.
“I speak first of him on purpose. I’ve told you already what I myself think of you; I liked you from the first. I admire you so much that I think it will be a good fortune to have you always before me. You’ll be my model; I shall try to imitate you though I’m afraid it will be very feeble. I’m very glad for papa — he needed something more than me. Without you I don’t see how he could have got it. You’ll be my stepmother, but we mustn’t use that word. They’re always said to be cruel; but I don’t think you’ll ever so much as pinch or even push me. I’m not afraid at all.”
“My good little Pansy,” said Isabel gently, “I shall be ever so kind to you.” A vague, inconsequent vision of her coming in some odd way to need it had intervened with the effect of a chill.
“Very well then, I’ve nothing to fear,” the child returned with her note of prepared promptitude. What teaching she had had, it seemed to suggest — or what penalties for non-performance she dreaded!
Her description of her aunt had not been incorrect; the Countess Gemini was further than ever from having folded her wings. She entered the room with a flutter through the air and kissed Isabel first on the forehead and then on each cheek as if according to some ancient prescribed rite. She drew the visitor to a sofa and, looking at her with a variety of turns of the head, began to talk very much as if, seated brush in hand before an easel, she were applying a series of considered touches to a composition of figures already sketched in. “If you expect me to congratulate you I must beg you to excuse me. I don’t suppose you care if I do or not; I believe you’re supposed not to care — through being so clever — for all sorts of ordinary things. But I care myself if I tell fibs; I never tell them unless there’s something rather good to be gained. I don’t see what’s to be gained with you — especially as you wouldn’t believe me. I don’t make professions any more than I make paper flowers or flouncey lampshades — I don’t know how. My lampshades would be sure to take fire, my roses and my fibs to be larger than life. I’m very glad for my own sake that you’re to marry Osmond; but I won’t pretend I’m glad for yours. You’re very brilliant — you know that’s the way you’re always spoken of; you’re an heiress and very good-looking and original, not banal; so it’s a good thing to have you in the family. Our family’s very good, you know; Osmond will have told you that; and my mother was rather distinguished — she was called the American Corinne. But we’re dreadfully fallen, I think, and perhaps you’ll pick us up. I’ve great confidence in you; there are ever so many things I want to talk to you about. I never congratulate any girl on marrying; I think they ought to make it somehow not quite so awful a steel trap. I suppose Pansy oughtn’t to hear all this; but that’s what she has come to me for — to acquire the tone of society. There’s no harm in her knowing what horrors she may be in for. When first I got an idea that my brother had designs on you I thought of writing to you, to recommend you, in the strongest terms, not to listen to him. Then I thought it would be disloyal, and I hate anything of that kind. Besides, as I say, I was enchanted for myself; and after all I’m very selfish. By the way, you won’t respect me, not one little mite, and we shall never be intimate. I should like it, but you won’t. Some day, all the same, we shall be better friends than you will believe at first. My husband will come and see you, though, as you probably know, he’s on no sort of terms with Osmond. He’s very fond of going to see pretty women, but I’m not afraid of you. In the first place I don’t care what he does. In the second, you won’t care a straw for him; he won’t be a bit, at any time, your affair, and, stupid as he is, he’ll see you’re not his. Some day, if you can stand it, I’ll tell you all about him. Do you think my niece ought to go out of the room? Pansy, go and practise a little in my boudoir.”
“Let her stay, please,” said Isabel. “I would rather hear nothing that Pansy may not!”
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 comparatively frivolous periods would have been apparent from the attention he bestowed upon Madame Merle’s drawing-room, which, although furnished with specimens of every style, was especially rich in articles of the last two centuries. He had immediately put a glass into one eye and looked round; and then “By Jove, she has some jolly good things!” he had yearningly murmured. The room was small and densely filled with furniture; it gave an impression of faded silk and little statuettes which might totter if one moved. Rosier got up and wandered about with his careful tread, bending over the tables charged with knick-knacks and the cushions embossed with princely arms. When Madame Merle came in she found him standing before the fireplace with his nose very close to the great lace flounce attached to the damask cover of the mantel. He had lifted it delicately, as if he were smelling it.
“It’s old Venetian,” she said; “it’s rather good.”
“It’s too good for this; you ought to wear it.”
“They tell me you have some better in Paris,
