Page:The Portrait of a Lady (1882).djvu/438

430 THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY. and every inflection of the tone in which she says it. She says charming things about me, and they give yon great comfort. I don't like at all to think she talks about me I feel as I should feel if I knew the footman were wearing my hat ! " Henrietta talked about Gilbert Osmond, as his wife assured him, rather less than he suspected. She had plenty of other subjects, in two of which the reader may be supposed to be especially interested. She let Isabel know that Caspar Good- wood had discovered for himself that she was unhappy, though indeed her ingenuity was unable to suggest what comfort he hoped to give her by coming to Rome and yet not calling on her. They met him twice in the street, but he had no appear- ance of seeing them ; they were driving, and he had a habit of looking straight in front of him, as if he proposed to contemplate but one object at a time. Isabel could have fancied she had seen him the day before; it must have been with just that face and step that he walked out of Mrs. Touchett's door at the close of their last interview. He was dressed just as he had been dressed on that day ; Isabel remembered the colour of his cravat ; and yet in spite of this familiar look there was a strangeness in his figure too ; something that made her feel afresh that it was rather terrible he should have come to Rome. He looked bigger and more over-topping than of old, and in those days he certainly was lofty enough. She noticed that the people whom he passed looked back after him ; but he went straight forward, lifting above them a face like a February sky. Miss Stackpole's other topic was very different ; she gave Isabel the latest news about Mr. Bantling. He had been out in the United States the year before, and she was happy to say she had been able to show him considerable attention. She didn't know how much he had enjoyed it, but she would undertake to say it had done him good; he wasn't the same nran when he left that he was when he came. It had opened his eyes and shown him that England was not everything. He was very much liked over there, and thought extremely simple more simple than the English were commonly supposed to be. There were some people thought him affected ; she didn't know whether they meant that his simplicity was an affectation. Some of his questions were too discouraging ; he thought all the chamber- maids were farmers' daughters or all the farmers' daughters were chamber-maids she couldn't exactly remember which. He hadn't seemed able to grasp the school-system ; it seemed really too much for him. On the whole he had appeared as if there