“I hope you’ve heard no harm. My life has been a remarkably complete blank.”
“Like the good reigns in history,” Osmond suggested. He appeared to think his duties as a host now terminated—he had performed them so conscientiously. Nothing could have been more adequate, more nicely measured, than his courtesy to his wife’s old friend. It was punctilious, it was explicit, it was everything but natural—a deficiency which Lord Warburton, who, himself, had on the whole a good deal of nature, may be supposed to have perceived. “I’ll leave you and Mrs. Osmond together,” he added. “You have reminiscences into which I don’t enter.”
“I’m afraid you lose a good deal!” Lord Warburton called after him, as he moved away, in a tone which perhaps betrayed overmuch an appreciation of his generosity. Then the visitor turned on Isabel the deeper, the deepest, consciousness of his look, which gradually became more serious. “I’m really very glad to see you.”
“It’s very pleasant. You’re very kind.”
“Do you know that you’re changed—a little?”
She just hesitated. “Yes—a good deal.”
“I don’t mean for the worse, of course; and yet how can I say for the better?”
“I think I shall have no scruple in saying that to you,” she bravely returned.
“Ah well, for me—it’s a long time. It would be a pity there shouldn’t be something to show for it.” They sat down and she asked him about his sisters, with other enquiries of a somewhat perfunctory kind. He answered her questions as if they interested him, and in a few moments she saw—or believed she saw—that he would press with less of his whole weight than of yore. Time had breathed upon his heart and, without chilling it, given it a relieved sense of having taken the air. Isabel felt her usual esteem for Time rise at a bound. Her friend’s manner was certainly that of a contented man, one who would rather like people, or like her at least, to know him for such. “There’s something I must tell you without more delay,” he resumed. “I’ve brought Ralph Touchett with me.”
“Brought him with you?” Isabel’s surprise was great.