Her offered, her passive
extent, in other words, was about that of a knife-edge. Isabel had
reason to believe none the less that as she advanced in life she
made more of those concessions to the sense of something obscurely
distinct from convenience- more of them than she independently
exacted. She was learning to sacrifice consistency to considerations
of that inferior order for which the excuse must be found in the
particular case. It was not to the credit of her absolute rectitude
that she should have gone the longest way round to Florence in order
to spend a few weeks with her invalid son; since in former years it
had been one of her most definite convictions that when Ralph wished
to see her he was at liberty to remember that Palazzo Crescentini
contained a large apartment known as the quarter of the signorino.
"I want to ask you something," Isabel said to this young man the day
after her arrival at San Remo- "something I've thought more than
once of asking you by letter, but that I've hesitated on the whole
to write about. Face to face, nevertheless, my question seems easy
enough. Did you know your father intended to leave me so much money?"
Ralph stretched his legs a little further than usual and gazed a
little more fixedly at the Mediterranean.
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