t the
moment when Osmond had declared to Isabel that he really must object to
that newspaper-woman, and Isabel had answered that it seemed to her he
took Henrietta too hard, the good Mr. Bantling had appeared upon
the scene and proposed that they should take a run down to Spain.
Henrietta's letters from Spain had proved the most acceptable she
had yet published, and there had been one in especial, dated from the
Alhambra and entitled 'Moors and Moonlight,' which generally passed for
her masterpiece. Isabel had been secretly disappointed at her husband's
not seeing his way simply to take the poor girl for funny. She even
wondered if his sense of fun, or of the funny--which would be his sense
of humour, wouldn't it?--were by chance defective. Of course she herself
looked at the matter as a person whose present happiness had nothing
to grudge to Henrietta's violated conscience. Osmond had thought their
alliance a kind of monstrosity; he couldn't imagine what they had in
common. For him, Mr. Bantling's fellow tourist was simply the most
vulgar of women, and he had also pronounced her the most abandoned.
Against this latter clause of the verdict Isabel had appealed with an
ardour that had made him wonder afresh at the oddity of some of his
wife's tastes. Isabel could explain it only by saying that she liked to
know people who were as different as possible from herself. "Why
then don't you make the acquaintance of your washerwoman?" Osmond
had enquired; to which Isabel had answered that she was afraid her
washerwoman wouldn't care for her. Now Henrietta cared so much.

Ralph had seen nothing of her for the greater part of the two years that
had followed her marriage; the winter that formed the beginning of her
residence in Rome he had spent again at San Remo, where he had been
joined in the spring by his mother, who afterwards had gone with him
to England, to see what they were doing at the bank--an operation she
couldn't induce him to perform. Ralph had taken a lease of his house at
San Remo, a small villa which he had occupied still another winter; but
late in the month of April of this second year he had come down to Rome.
It was the first time since her marriage that he had stood face to face
with Isabel; his desire to see her again was then of the keenest. She
had written to him from time to time, but her letters told him nothing
he wanted to know. He had asked his mother what she was making of her
life, and his mother h