Bantling that he would soon come over to see her. Isabel
wrote to Mrs. Touchett to apologize for not presenting herself just
yet in Florence, and her aunt replied characteristically enough.
Apologies, Mrs. Touchett intimated, were of no more use to her than
bubbles, and she herself never dealt in such articles. One either
did the thing or one didn't, and what one "would" have done belonged
to the sphere of the irrelevant, like the idea of a future life or
of the origin of things. Her letter was frank, but (a rare case with
Mrs. Touchett) not so frank as it pretended. She easily forgave her
niece for not stopping at Florence, because she took it for a sign
that Gilbert Osmond was less in question there than formerly. She
watched of course to see if he would now find a pretext for going to
Rome, and derived some comfort from learning that he had not been
guilty of an absence.
Isabel, on her side, had not been a fortnight in Rome before she
proposed to Madame Merle that they should make a little pilgrimage
to the East. Madame Merle remarked that her friend was restless, but
she added that she herself had always been consumed with the desire to
visit Athens and Constantinople.
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