He always had an eye to effect, and his effects were deeply calculated.

They were produced by no vulgar means, but the motive was as vulgar as the art was great.

To surround his interior with a sort of invidious sanctity, to tantalise society with a sense of exclusion, to make people believe his house was different from every other, to impart to the face that he presented to the world a cold originality--this was the ingenious effort of the personage to whom Isabel had attributed a superior morality.

"He works with superior material," Ralph said to himself; "it's rich abundance compared with his former resources." Ralph was a clever man; but Ralph had never--to his own sense--been so clever as when he observed, in petto, that under the guise of caring only for intrinsic values Osmond lived exclusively for the world.

Far from being its master as he pretended to be, he was its very humble servant, and the degree of its attention was his only measure of success.