suppose you mean that you proposed it and she assented.”
“Of course I gave her a chance. But she’s encouraging — she’s very encouraging.”
“I rejoice to hear it — but don’t cry victory too soon. Of course you’ll go to Rome.”
“Ah,” said Osmond, “it makes one work, this idea of yours!”
“Don’t pretend you don’t enjoy it — you’re very ungrateful. You’ve not been so well occupied these many years.”
“The way you take it’s beautiful,” said Osmond. “I ought to be grateful for that.”
“Not too much so, however,” Madame Merle answered. She talked with her usual smile, leaning back in her chair and looking round the room. “You’ve made a very good impression, and I’ve seen for myself that you’ve received one. You’ve not come to Mrs. Touchett’s seven times to oblige me.”
“The girl’s not disagreeable,” Osmond quietly conceded.
Madame Merle dropped her eye on him a moment, during which her lips closed with a certain firmness. “Is that all you can find to say about that fine creature?”
“All? Isn’t it enough? Of how many people have you heard me say more?”
She made no answer to this, but still presented her talkative grace to the room. “You’re unfathomable,” she murmured at last. “I’m frightened at the abyss into which I shall have cast her.”
He took it almost gaily. “You can’t draw back — you’ve gone too far.”
“Very good; but you must do the rest yourself.”
“I shall do it,” said Gilbert Osmond.
Madame Merle remained silent and he changed his place again; but when she rose to go he also took leave. Mrs. Touchett’s victoria was awaiting her guest in the court, and after he had helped his friend into it he stood there detaining her. “You’re very indiscreet,” she said rather wearily; “you shouldn’t have moved when I did.”
He had taken off his hat; he passed his hand over his forehead. “I always forget; I’m out of the habit.”
“You’re quite unfathomable,” she repeated, glancing up at the windows of the house, a modern structure in the new part of the town.
He paid no heed to this remark, but spoke in his own sense. “She’s really very charming. I’ve scarcely known any one more graceful.”
“It does me good to hear you say that. The better you like her the better for me.”
“I like her very much. She’s all you described her, and into the bargain capable, I feel, of great devotion. She has only one fault.”
“What’s that?”
“Too many ideas.”
“I warned you she was clever.”
“Fortunately they’re very bad ones,” said Osmond.
“Why is that fortunate?”
“Dame, if they must be sacrificed!”
Madame Merle leaned back, looking straight before her; then she spoke to the coachman. But her friend again detained her. “If I go to Rome what shall I do with Pansy?”
“I’ll go and see her,” said Madame Merle.
Chapter XXVII
I may not attempt to report in its fulness our young woman’s response to the deep appeal of Rome, to analyse her feelings as she trod the pavement of the Forum or to number her pulsations as she crossed the threshold of Saint Peter’s. It is enough to say that her impression was such as might have been expected of a person of her freshness and her eagerness. She had always been fond of history, and here was history in the stones of the street and the atoms of the sunshine. She had an imagination that kindled at the mention of great deeds, and wherever she turned some great deed had been acted. These things strongly moved her, but moved her all inwardly. It seemed to her companions that she talked less than usual, and Ralph Touchett, when he appeared to be looking listlessly and awkwardly over her head, was really dropping on her an intensity of observation. By her own measure she was very happy; she would even have been willing to take these hours for the happiest she was ever to know. The sense of the terrible human past was heavy to her, but that of something altogether contemporary would suddenly give it wings that it could wave in the blue. Her consciousness was so mixed that she scarcely knew where the different parts of it would lead her, and she went about in a repressed ecstasy of contemplation, seeing often in the things she looked at a great deal more than was there, and yet not seeing many of the items enumerated in her Murray. Rome, as Ralph said, confessed to the psychological moment. The herd of reechoing tourists had departed and most of the solemn places had relapsed into solemnity. The sky was a blaze of blue, and the plash of the fountains in their mossy niches had lost its chill and doubled its music. On the corners of the warm, bright streets one stumbled on bundles of flowers. Our friends had gone one afternoon — it was the third of their stay — to look at the latest excavations in the Forum, these labours having been for some time previous largely extended. They had descended from the modern street to the level of the Sacred Way, along which they wandered with a reverence of step which was not the same on the part of each. Henrietta Stackpole was struck with the fact that ancient Rome had been paved a good deal like New York, and even found an analogy between the deep chariot-ruts traceable in the antique street and the overjangled iron grooves which express the intensity of American life. The sun had begun to sink, the air was a golden haze, and the long shadows of broken column and vague pedestal leaned across the field of ruin. Henrietta wandered away with Mr. Bantling, whom it was apparently delightful to her to hear speak of Julius Caesar as a “cheeky old boy,” and Ralph addressed such elucidations as he was prepared to offer to the attentive ear of our heroine. One of the humble archeologists who hover about the place had put himself at the disposal of the two, and repeated his lesson with a fluency which the decline of the season had done nothing to impair. A process of digging was on view in a remote corner of the Forum, and he presently remarked that if it should please the signori to go and watch it a little they might see something of interest. The proposal commended itself more to Ralph than to Isabel, weary with much wandering; so that she admonished her companion to satisfy his curiosity while she patiently awaited his return. The hour and the place were much to her taste — she should enjoy being briefly alone. Ralph accordingly went off with the cicerone while Isabel sat down on a prostrate column near the foundations of the Capitol. She wanted a short solitude, but she was not long to enjoy it. Keen as was her interest in the rugged relics of the Roman past that lay scattered about her and in which the corrosion of centuries had still left so much of individual life, her thoughts, after resting a while on these things, had wandered, by a concatenation of stages it might require some subtlety to trace, to regions and objects charged with a more active appeal. From the Roman past to Isabel Archer’s future was a long stride, but her imagination had taken it in a single flight and now hovered in slow circles over the nearer and richer field. She was so absorbed in her thoughts, as she bent her eyes upon a row of cracked but not dislocated slabs covering the ground at her feet, that she had not heard the sound of approaching footsteps before a shadow was thrown across the line of her vision. She looked up and saw a gentleman
