Merle exclaimed, rising with a long
low sigh but having a glance at the same time for the contents of her
mantel-shelf.

"It appears that I'm to be severely taught the disadvantages of a false
position."

"You express yourself like a sentence in a copybook. We must look for
our comfort where we can find it. If my wife doesn't like me, at least
my child does. I shall look for compensations in Pansy. Fortunately I
haven't a fault to find with her."

"Ah," she said softly, "if I had a child--!"

Osmond waited, and then, with a little formal air, "The children of
others may be a great interest!" he announced.

"You're more like a copy-book than I. There's something after all that
holds us together."

"Is it the idea of the harm I may do you?" Osmond asked.

"No; it's the idea of the good I may do for you. It's that," Madame
Merle pursued, "that made me so jealous of Isabel. I want it to be
MY work," she added, with her face, which had grown hard and bitter,
relaxing to its habit of smoothness.

Her friend took up his hat and his umbrella, and after giving the
former article two or three strokes with his coat-cuff, "On the whole, I
think," he said, "you had better leave it to me."

After he had left her she went, the first thing, and lifted from the
mantel-shelf the attenuated coffee-cup in which he had mentioned the
existence of a crack; but she looked at it rather abstractedly. "Have I
been so vile all for nothing?" she vaguely wailed.

CHAPTER L

As the Countess Gemini was not acquainted with the ancient monuments
Isabel occasionally offered to introduce her to these interesting relics
and to give their afternoon drive an antiquarian aim. The Countess, who
professed to think her sister-in-law a prodigy of learning, never made
an objection, and gazed at masses of Roman brickwork as patiently as if
they had been mounds of modern drapery. She had not the historic sense,
though she had in some directions the anecdotic, and as regards herself
the apologetic, but she was so delighted to be in Rome that she only
desired to float with the current. She would gladly have passed an hour
every day in the damp darkness of the Baths of Titus if it had been a
condition of her remaining at Palazzo Roccanera. Isabel, however, was
not a severe cicerone; she used to visit the ruins chiefly because they
offered an excuse for talking about other matters than the love affairs
of the ladies of Florence, as to which her compani