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Osmond personally; he had only thought him very well-in-
formed and obliging and more than he had supposed like
the person whom Isabel Archer would naturally marry. His
host had won in the open field a great advantage over him,
and Goodwood had too strong a sense of fair play to have
been moved to underrate him on that account. He had not
tried positively to think well of him; this was a flight of sen-
timental benevolence of which, even in the days when he
came nearest to reconciling himself to what had happened,
Goodwood was quite incapable. He accepted him as rather
a brilliant personage of the amateurish kind, afflicted with
a redundancy of leisure which it amused him to work off
in little refinements of conversation. But he only half trust-
ed him; he could never make out why the deuce Osmond
should lavish refinements of any sort upon him. It made
him suspect that he found some private entertainment in
it, and it ministered to a general impression that his trium-
phant rival had in his composition a streak of perversity.
He knew indeed that Osmond could have no reason to wish
him evil; he had nothing to fear from him. He had carried
off a supreme advantage and could afford to be kind to a
man who had lost everything. It was true that Goodwood
had at times grimly wished he were dead and would have
liked to kill him; but Osmond had no means of knowing
this, for practice had made the younger man perfect in the
art of appearing inaccessible to-day to any violent emotion.
He cultivated this art in order to deceive himself, but it was
others that he deceived first. He cultivated it, moreover,
with very limited success; of which there could be no better

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