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 pretensions 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 Osmond, Madame Merle held-
see 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
brought her children to Italy after her husband's death, and Mrs.
Touchett remembered her during the year that followed her arrival. She
thought her a horrible snob; but this was an irregularity of judgement
on Mrs. Touchett's part, for she, like Mrs. Osmond, approved of
political marriages. The Countess was very good company and not really
the featherhead she seemed; all one had to do with her was to
observe the simple condition of not believing a word she said.
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