Page 396 - the-portrait-of-a-lady

ess on meeting her at the villa, but was thankful for an
opportunity to repair the accident. Had not Mr. Osmond
remarked that she was a respectable person? To have pro-
ceeded from Gilbert Osmond this was a crude proposition,
but Madame Merle bestowed upon it a certain improving
polish. She told Isabel more about the poor Countess than
Mr. Osmond had done, and related the history of her mar-
riage and its consequences. The Count was a member of an
ancient Tuscan family, but of such small estate that he had
been glad to accept Amy Osmond, in spite of the question-
able beauty which had yet not hampered her career, with the
modest dowry her mother was able to offer—a sum about
equivalent to that which had already formed her brother’s
share of their patrimony. Count Gemini since then, how-
ever, had inherited money, and now they were well enough
off, as Italians went, though Amy was horribly extravagant.
The Count was a low-lived brute; he had given his wife every
pretext. She had no children; she had lost three within a year
of their birth. Her mother, who had bristled with preten-
sions to elegant learning and published descriptive poems
and corresponded on Italian subjects with the English
weekly journals, her mother had died three years after the
Countess’s marriage, the father, lost in the grey American
dawn of the situation, but reputed originally rich and wild,
having died much earlier. One could see this in Gilbert Os-
mond, Madame Merle heldsee that he had been brought up
by a woman; though, to do him justice, one would suppose
it had been by a more sensible woman than the American
Corinne, as Mrs. Osmond had liked to be called. She had

396 The Portrait of a Lady