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time it would be all very well; but without the encourage-
ment of his father’s society he should barely have patience to
await his own turn. He had not the incentive of feeling that
he was indispensable to his mother; it was a rule with his
mother to have no regrets. He bethought himself of course
that it had been a small kindness to his father to wish that,
of the two, the active rather than the passive party should
know the felt wound; he remembered that the old man had
always treated his own forecast of an early end as a clever
fallacy, which he should be delighted to discredit so far as he
might by dying first. But of the two triumphs, that of refut-
ing a sophistical son and that of holding on a while longer
to a state of being which, with all abatements, he enjoyed,
Ralph deemed it no sin to hope the latter might be vouch-
safed to Mr. Touchett.
These were nice questions, but Isabel’s arrival put a stop
to his puzzling over them. It even suggested there might be a
compensation for the intolerable ennui of surviving his ge-
nial sire. He wondered whether he were harbouring ‘love’ for
this spontaneous young woman from Albany; but he judged
that on the whole he was not. After he had known her for a
week he quite made up his mind to this, and every day he
felt a little more sure. Lord Warburton had been right about
her; she was a really interesting little figure. Ralph won-
dered how their neighbour had found it out so soon; and
then he said it was only another proof of his friend’s high
abilities, which he had always greatly admired. If his cous-
in were to be nothing more than an entertainment to him,
Ralph was conscious she was an entertainment of a high or-

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