eny him that. He admired her--he had told her
why: because she was the most imaginative woman he had known. It might
very well have been true; for during those months she had imagined
a world of things that had no substance. She had had a more wondrous
vision of him, fed through charmed senses and oh such a stirred
fancy!--she had not read him right. A certain combination of features
had touched her, and in them she had seen the most striking of figures.
That he was poor and lonely and yet that somehow he was noble--that was
what had interested her and seemed to give her her opportunity. There
had been an indefinable beauty about him--in his situation, in his mind,
in his face. She had felt at the same time that he was helpless and
ineffectual, but the feeling had taken the form of a tenderness
which was the very flower of respect. He was like a sceptical voyager
strolling on the beach while he waited for the tide, looking seaward yet
not putting to sea. It was in all this she had found her occasion. She
would launch his boat for him; she would be his providence; it would be
a good thing to love him. And she had loved him, she had so anxiously
and yet so ardently given herself--a good deal for what she found in
him, but a good deal also for what she brought him and what might enrich
the gift. As she looked back at the passion of those full weeks she
perceived in it a kind of maternal strain--the happiness of a woman who
felt that she was a contributor, that she came with charged hands. But
for her money, as she saw to-day, she would never have done it. And then
her mind wandered off to poor Mr. Touchett, sleeping under English turf,
the beneficent author of infinite woe! For this was the fantastic fact.
At bottom her money had been a burden, had been on her mind, which
was filled with the desire to transfer the weight of it to some other
conscience, to some more prepared receptacle. What would lighten her
own conscience more effectually than to make it over to the man with the
best taste in the world? Unless she should have given it to a hospital
there would have been nothing better she could do with it; and there was
no charitable institution in which she had been as much interested as
in Gilbert Osmond. He would use her fortune in a way that would make her
think better of it and rub off a certain grossness attaching to the good
luck of an unexpected inheritance. There had been nothing very delicate
in inheriting seventy