and was an open-handed gift of
fate, had refreshed and quickened them, given them wings and something
to fly for. Poor Ralph had been for many weeks steeped in melancholy;
his outlook, habitually sombre, lay under the shadow of a deeper cloud.
He had grown anxious about his father, whose gout, hitherto confined to
his legs, had begun to ascend into regions more vital. The old man had
been gravely ill in the spring, and the doctors had whispered to
Ralph that another attack would be less easy to deal with. Just now
he appeared disburdened of pain, but Ralph could not rid himself of a
suspicion that this was a subterfuge of the enemy, who was waiting to
take him off his guard. If the manoeuvre should succeed there would be
little hope of any great resistance. Ralph had always taken for granted
that his father would survive him--that his own name would be the first
grimly called. The father and son had been close companions, and the
idea of being left alone with the remnant of a tasteless life on his
hands was not gratifying to the young man, who had always and tacitly
counted upon his elder's help in making the best of a poor business.
At the prospect of losing his great motive Ralph lost indeed his one
inspiration. If they might die at the same time it would be all very
well; but without the encouragement of his father's society he should
barely have patience to await his own turn. He had not the incentive of
feeling that he was indispensable to his mother; it was a rule with his
mother to have no regrets. He bethought himself of course that it had
been a small kindness to his father to wish that, of the two, the active
rather than the passive party should know the felt wound; he remembered
that the old man had always treated his own forecast of an early end as
a clever fallacy, which he should be delighted to discredit so far as
he might by dying first. But of the two triumphs, that of refuting a
sophistical son and that of holding on a while longer to a state of
being which, with all abatements, he enjoyed, Ralph deemed it no sin to
hope the latter might be vouchsafed to Mr. Touchett.

These were nice questions, but Isabel's arrival put a stop to his
puzzling over them. It even suggested there might be a compensation for
the intolerable ennui of surviving his genial sire. He wondered whether
he were harbouring "love" for this spontaneous young woman from Albany;
but he judged that on the whole he was not. After he had