Osmond.Ralph, in all this, recognized the hand of the master; for he knew that Isabel had no faculty for producing studied impressions.She struck him as having a great love of movement, of gaiety, of late hours, of long rides, of fatigue; an eagerness to be entertained, to be interested, even to be bored, to make acquaintances, to see people who were talked about, to explore the neighbourhood of Rome, to enter into relation with certain of the mustiest relics of its old society.In all this there was much less discrimination than in that desire for comprehensiveness of development on which he had been used to exercise his wit.There was a kind of violence in some of her impulses, of crudity in some of her experiments, which took him by surprise: it seemed to him that she even spoke faster, moved faster, breathed faster, than before her marriage.Certainly she had fallen into exaggerations-she who used to care so much for the pure truth; and whereas of old she had a great delight in good-humoured argument, in intellectual play (she never looked so charming as when in the genial heat of discussion she received a crushing blow full in the face and brushed it away as a feather), she appeared now to think there was nothing worth people's either differing about or agreeing upon.Of old she had been curious, and now she was indifferent, and yet in spite of her indifference her activity was greater than ever.Slender still, but lovelier than before, she had gained no great maturity of aspect;yet there was an amplitude and a brilliancy in her personal arrangements that gave a touch of insolence to her beauty.Poor human-hearted Isabel, what perversity had bitten her? Her light step drew a mas of drapery behind it; her intelligent head sustained a majesty of ornament.The free, keen girl had become quite another person; what he saw was the fine lady who was supposed to represent something.What did Isabel represent? Ralph asked himself; and he could only answer by saying that she represented Gilbert Osmond."Good heavens, what a function!" he then woefully exclaimed.He was lost in wonder at the mystery of things.
He recognized Osmond, as I say; he recognized him at every turn.
He saw how he kept all things within limits; how he adjusted, regulated, animated their manner of life.Osmond was in his element;at last he had material to work with.He always had an eye to effect, and his effects were deeply calculated.They were produced by no vulgar means, but the motive was as vulgar as the art was great.
To surround his interior with a sort of invidious sanctity, to tantalize society with a sense of exclusion, to make people believe his house was different from every other, to impart to the face that he presented to the world a cold originality-this was the ingenious effort of the personage to whom Isabel had attributed a superior morality."He works with superior material," Ralph said to himself;"it's rich abundance compared with his former resources." Ralph was a clever man; but Ralph had never-to his own sense-been so clever as when he observed, in petto, that under the guise of caring only for intrinsic values Osmond lived exclusively for the world.Far from being its master as he pretended to be, he was its very humble servant, and the degree of its attention was his only measure of success.He lived with his eye on it from morning till night, and the world was so stupid it never suspected the trick.Everything he did was pose-pose so subtly considered that if one were not on the lookout one mistook it for impulse.Ralph had never met a man who lived so much in the land of consideration.His tastes, his studies, his accomplishments, his collections, were all for a purpose.His life on his hilltop at Florence had been the conscious attitude of years.
His solitude, his ennui, his love for his daughter, his good manners, his bad manners, were so many features of a mental image constantly present to him as a model of impertinence and mystification.His ambition was not to please the world, but to please himself by exciting the world's curiosity and then declining to satisfy it.It had made him feel great, ever, to play the world a trick.The thing he had done in his life most directly to please himself was his marrying Miss Archer; though in this case indeed the gullible world was in a manner embodied in poor Isabel, who had been mystified to the top of her bent.Ralph of course found a fitness in being consistent; he had embraced a creed, and as he had suffered for it he could not in honour forsake it.I give this little sketch of its articles for what they may at the time have been worth.It was certain that he was very skilful in fitting the facts to his theory-even the fact that during the month he spent in Rome at this period the husband of the woman he loved appeared to regard him not in the least as an enemy.
