- Posted on: 13 September, 2023
- 20 Years Old
- Henry James
- #1881 #20 #Female #Isabel Archer #Novel #Pansy Osmond #The Portrait of a Lady
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Pansy Osmond 20
Isabel received Miss Stackpole freely in her own sitting-room, and took her repeatedly to drive, face to face with Pansy, who, bending a little forward, on the opposite seat of the carriage, gazed at the celebrated authoress with a respectful attention which Henrietta occasionally found irritating. She complained to Isabel that Miss Osmond had a little look as if she should remember everything one said. “I don’t want to be remembered that way,” Miss Stackpole declared; “I consider that my conversation refers only to the moment, like the morning papers. Your stepdaughter, as she sits there, looks as if she kept all the back numbers and would bring them out some day against me.” She could not teach herself to think favourably of Pansy, whose absence of initiative, of conversation, of personal claims, seemed to her, in a girl of twenty, unnatural and even uncanny.
