Page 422 - the-portrait-of-a-lady

you. I feel lonely and want company,’ was Ralph’s greeting.
‘You’ve some that’s very good which you’ve yet desert-
ed.’
‘Do you mean my cousin? Oh, she has a visitor and
doesn’t want me. Then Miss Stackpole and Bantling have
gone out to a cafe to eat an ice—Miss Stackpole delights in
an ice. I didn’t think they wanted me either. The opera’s very
bad; the women look like laundresses and sing like pea-
cocks. I feel very low.’
‘You had better go home,’ Lord Warburton said without
affectation.
‘And leave my young lady in this sad place? Ah no, I must
watch over her.’
‘She seems to have plenty of friends.’
‘Yes, that’s why I must watch,’ said Ralph with the same
large mock-melancholy.
‘If she doesn’t want you it’s probable she doesn’t want
me.’
‘No, you’re different. Go to the box and stay there while
I walk about.’
Lord Warburton went to the box, where Isabel’s welcome
was as to a friend so honourably old that he vaguely asked
himself what queer temporal province she was annexing.
He exchanged greetings with Mr. Osmond, to whom he had
been introduced the day before and who, after he came in,
sat blandly apart and silent, as if repudiating competence
in the subjects of allusion now probable. It struck her sec-
ond visitor that Miss Archer had, in operatic conditions, a
radiance, even a slight exaltation; as she was, however, at all

422 The Portrait of a Lady