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 peacocks. 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 second visitor
that Miss Archer had, in operatic conditions, a radiance, even a
slight exaltation; as she was, however, at all times a
keenly-glancing, quickly-moving, completely animated young woman, he
may have been mistaken on this point.
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