‘He does nothing. But he doesn’t like me.’

‘He’s very hard to please!’ cried Miss Stackpole. ‘Why don’t you leave him?’

‘I can’t change that way,’ Isabel said.

‘Why not, I should like to know? You won’t confess that you’ve made a mistake. You’re too proud.’

‘I don’t know whether I’m too proud. But I can’t publish my mistake. I don’t think that’s decent. I’d much rather die.’

‘You won’t think so always,’ said Henrietta.

‘I don’t know what great unhappiness might bring me to; but it seems to me I shall always be ashamed. One must accept one’s deeds. I married him before all the world; I was perfectly free; it was impossible to do anything more deliberate. One can’t change that way,’ Isabel repeated.

‘You have changed, in spite of the impossibility. I hope you don’t mean to say you like him.’

Isabel debated. ‘No, I don’t like him. I can tell you, because I’m weary of my secret. But that’s enough; I can’t announce it on the housetops.’

Henrietta gave a laugh. ‘Don’t you think you’re rather too considerate?’

‘It’s not of him that I’m considerate—it’s of myself!’ Isabel answered.

It was not surprising Gilbert Osmond should not have taken comfort in Miss Stackpole; his instinct had naturally set him in opposition to a young lady capable of advising his wife to withdraw from the conjugal roof. When she arrived in Rome he had said to Isabel that he hoped she would leave her friend the interviewer alone; and Isabel had answered that he at least had nothing to fear from her. She said to Henrietta that as Osmond didn’t like her she couldn’t invite her to dine, but they could easily see each other in other ways. Isabel received Miss Stackpole freely in her own sitting-room, and took her repeatedly to drive, face to face with Pansy, who, bending a little forward, on the opposite seat of the carriage, gazed at the celebrated authoress with a respectful attention which Henrietta occasionally found irritating. She complained to Isabel that Miss Osmond had a little look as if she should remember everything one said. ‘I don’t want to be remembered that way,’ Miss Stackpole declared; ‘I consider that my conversation refers only to the moment, like the morning papers. Your stepdaughter, as she sits there, looks as if she kept all the back numbers and would bring them out some day against me.’ She could not teach herself to think favourably of Pansy, whose absence of initiative, of conversation, of personal claims, seemed to her, in a girl of twenty, unnatural and even uncanny. Isabel presently saw that Osmond would have liked her to urge a little the cause of her friend, insist a little upon his receiving her, so that he might appear to suffer for good manners’ sake. Her immediate acceptance of his objections put him too much in the wrong—it being in effect one of the disadvantages of expressing contempt that you cannot enjoy at the same time the credit of expressing sympathy. Osmond held to his credit, and yet he held to his objections—all of which were elements difficult to reconcile. The right thing would have been that Miss Stackpole should come to dine at Palazzo Roccanera once or twice, so that (in spite of his superficial civility, always so great) she might judge for herself how little pleasure it gave him. From the moment, however, that both the ladies were so unaccommodating, there was nothing for Osmond but to wish the lady from New York would take herself off. It was surprising how little satisfaction he got from his wife’s friends; he took occasion to call Isabel’s attention to it.

‘You’re certainly not fortunate in your intimates; I wish you might make a new collection,’ he said to her one morning in reference to nothing visible at the moment, but in a tone of ripe reflection which deprived the remark of all brutal abruptness. ‘It’s as if you had taken the trouble to pick out the people in the world that I have least in common with. Your cousin I have always thought a conceited ass—besides his