Osmond
talked of many things; Madame Merle had said he could be agreeable
when he chose, and to-day, after a little, he appeared not only to have
chosen but to have determined. Madame Merle and the Countess Gemini sat
a little apart, conversing in the effortless manner of persons who knew
each other well enough to take their ease; but every now and then Isabel
heard the Countess, at something said by her companion, plunge into the
latter's lucidity as a poodle splashes after a thrown stick. It was as
if Madame Merle were seeing how far she would go. Mr. Osmond talked of
Florence, of Italy, of the pleasure of living in that country and of the
abatements to the pleasure. There were both satisfactions and drawbacks;
the drawbacks were numerous; strangers were too apt to see such a world
as all romantic. It met the case soothingly for the human, for the
social failure--by which he meant the people who couldn't "realise," as
they said, on their sensibility: they could keep it about them there,
in their poverty, without ridicule, as you might keep an heirloom or an
inconvenient entailed place that brought you in nothing. Thus there were
advantages in living in the country which contained the greatest sum of
beauty. Certain impressions you could get only there. Others, favourable
to life, you never got, and you got some that were very bad. But from
time to time you got one of a quality that made up for everything.
Italy, all the same, had spoiled a great many people; he was even
fatuous enough to believe at times that he himself might have been a
better man if he had spent less of his life there. It made one idle and
dilettantish and second-rate; it had no discipline for the character,
didn't cultivate in you, otherwise expressed, the successful social
and other "cheek" that flourished in Paris and London. "We're sweetly
provincial," said Mr. Osmond, "and I'm perfectly aware that I myself am
as rusty as a key that has no lock to fit it. It polishes me up a little
to talk with you--not that I venture to pretend I can turn that very
complicated lock I suspect your intellect of being! But you'll be going
away before I've seen you three times, and I shall perhaps never see you
after that. That's what it is to live in a country that people come to.
When they're disagreeable here it's bad enough; when they're agreeable
it's still worse. As soon as you like them they're off again! I've been
deceived too often; I've ceased to form atta