ragically: she shows it comically instead. She has got a horrid
husband, though I'm not sure she makes the best of him. Of course,
however, a horrid husband's an awkward thing. Madame Merle gives her
excellent advice, but it's a good deal like giving a child a dictionary
to learn a language with. He can look out the words, but he can't put
them together. My sister needs a grammar, but unfortunately she's not
grammatical. Pardon my troubling you with these details; my sister was
very right in saying you've been taken into the family. Let me take down
that picture; you want more light."

He took down the picture, carried it toward the window, related some
curious facts about it. She looked at the other works of art, and he
gave her such further information as might appear most acceptable to
a young lady making a call on a summer afternoon. His pictures, his
medallions and tapestries were interesting; but after a while Isabel
felt the owner much more so, and independently of them, thickly as they
seemed to overhang him. He resembled no one she had ever seen; most
of the people she knew might be divided into groups of half a dozen
specimens. There were one or two exceptions to this; she could think for
instance of no group that would contain her aunt Lydia. There were other
people who were, relatively speaking, original--original, as one might
say, by courtesy such as Mr. Goodwood, as her cousin Ralph, as Henrietta
Stackpole, as Lord Warburton, as Madame Merle. But in essentials, when
one came to look at them, these individuals belonged to types already
present to her mind. Her mind contained no class offering a natural
place to Mr. Osmond--he was a specimen apart. It was not that she
recognised all these truths at the hour, but they were falling into
order before her. For the moment she only said to herself that this "new
relation" would perhaps prove her very most distinguished. Madame Merle
had had that note of rarity, but what quite other power it immediately
gained when sounded by a man! It was not so much what he said and did,
but rather what he withheld, that marked him for her as by one of those
signs of the highly curious that he was showing her on the underside of
old plates and in the corner of sixteenth-century drawings: he indulged
in no striking deflections from common usage, he was an original without
being an eccentric. She had never met a person of so fine a grain.
The peculiarity was physical, to begin with