Page 693 - the-portrait-of-a-lady

ly thinks of it, the cool insolence of that performance was
something rare! He comes and looks at one’s daughter as
if she were a suite of apartments; he tries the door-handles
and looks out of the windows, raps on the walls and almost
thinks he’ll take the place. Will you be so good as to draw
up a lease? Then, on the whole, he decides that the rooms
are too small; he doesn’t think he could live on a third floor;
he must look out for a piano nobile. And he goes away after
having got a month’s lodging in the poor little apartment
for nothing. Miss Stackpole, however, is your most won-
derful invention. She strikes me as a kind of monster. One
hasn’t a nerve in one’s body that she doesn’t set quivering.
You know I never have admitted that she’s a woman. Do
you know what she reminds me of? Of a new steel pen-the
most odious thing in nature. She talks as a steel pen writes;
aren’t her letters, by the way, on ruled paper? She thinks and
moves and walks and looks exactly as she talks. You may say
that she doesn’t hurt me, inasmuch as I don’t see her. I don’t
see her, but I hear her; I hear her all day long. Her voice is
in my ears; I can’t get rid of it. I know exactly what she says,
and every inflexion of the tone in which she says it. She says
charming things about me, and they give you great com-
fort. I don’t like at all to think she talks about me-I feel as I
should feel if I knew the footman were wearing my hat.’
Henrietta talked about Gilbert Osmond, as his wife as-
sured him, rather less than he suspected. She had plenty
of other subjects, in two of which the reader may be sup-
posed to be especially interested. She let her friend know
that Caspar Goodwood had discovered for himself that she

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