Madame Merle and the Countess Gemini sat a little apart, conversing in the effortless manner of persons who knew each other well enough to take their ease; but every now and then Isabel heard the Countess, at something said by her companion, plunge into the latter's lucidity as a poodle splashes after a thrown stick.

It was as if Madame Merle were seeing how far she would go.

Mr.Osmond talked of Florence, of Italy, of the pleasure of living in that country and of the abatements to the pleasure.

There were both satisfactions and drawbacks; the drawbacks were numerous; strangers were too apt to see such a world as all romantic.

It met the case soothingly for the human, for the social failure--by which he meant the people who couldn't "realise," as they said, on their sensibility: they could keep it about them there, in their poverty, without ridicule, as you might keep an heirloom or an inconvenient entailed place that brought you in nothing.