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an apparition. So when his mother observed to him that it
was plain what Mr. Osmond was thinking of, Ralph replied
that he was quite of her opinion. Mrs. Touchett had from
far back found a place on her scant list for this gentleman,
though wondering dimly by what art and what process—
so negative and so wise as they were—he had everywhere
effectively imposed himself. As he had never been an im-
portunate visitor he had had no chance to be offensive, and
he was recommended to her by his appearance of being as
well able to do without her as she was to do without him—a
quality that always, oddly enough, affected her as providing
ground for a relation with her. It gave her no satisfaction,
however, to think that he had taken it into his head to mar-
ry her niece. Such an alliance, on Isabel’s part, would have
an air of almost morbid perversity. Mrs. Touchett easily re-
membered that the girl had refused an English peer; and
that a young lady with whom Lord Warburton had not suc-
cessfully wrestled should content herself with an obscure
American dilettante, a middle-aged widower with an un-
canny child and an ambiguous income, this answered to
nothing in Mrs. Touchett’s conception of success. She took,
it will be observed, not the sentimental, but the political,
view of matrimony—a view which has always had much to
recommend it. ‘I trust she won’t have the folly to listen to
him,’ she said to her son; to which Ralph replied that Isa-
bel’s listening was one thing and Isabel’s answering quite
another. He knew she had listened to several parties, as his
father would have said, but had made them listen in return;
and he found much entertainment in the idea that in these

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