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The Portrait of a Lady — Volume 1

by Henry James · English · Gutenberg #2833 · 676,477 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Portrait of a Lady — Volume 1

Author: Henry James


        
Release date: September 1, 2001 [eBook #2833]
                Most recently updated: September 20, 2016

Language: English

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THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY

VOLUME I


By Henry James




PREFACE

“_The Portrait of a Lady_” was, like “_Roderick Hudson_,” begun in Florence,
during three months spent there in the spring of 1879. Like “Roderick”
 and like “_The American_,” it had been designed for publication in “_The
Atlantic Monthly_,” where it began to appear in 1880. It differed from
its two predecessors, however, in finding a course also open to it, from
month to month, in “_Macmillan’s Magazine_”; which was to be for me one of
the last occasions of simultaneous “serialisation” in the two countries
that the changing conditions of literary intercourse between England and
the United States had up to then left unaltered. It is a long novel, and
I was long in writing it; I remember being again much occupied with it,
the following year, during a stay of several weeks made in Venice. I had
rooms on Riva Schiavoni, at the top of a house near the passage leading
off to San Zaccaria; the waterside life, the wondrous lagoon spread
before me, and the ceaseless human chatter of Venice came in at my
windows, to which I seem to myself to have been constantly driven, in
the fruitless fidget of composition, as if to see whether, out in the
blue channel, the ship of some right suggestion, of some better phrase,
of the next happy twist of my subject, the next true touch for my
canvas, mightn’t come into sight. But I recall vividly enough that the
response most elicited, in general, to these restless appeals was the
rather grim admonition that romantic and historic sites, such as
the land of Italy abounds in, offer the artist a questionable aid to
concentration when they themselves are not to be the subject of it. They
are too rich in their own life and too charged with their own meanings
merely to help him out with a lame phrase; they draw him away from his
small question to their own greater ones; so that, after a little, he
feels, while thus yearning toward them in his difficulty, as if he were
asking an army of glorious veterans to help him to arrest a peddler who
has given him the wrong change.

There are pages of the book which, in the reading over, have seemed
to make me see again the bristling curve of the wide Riva, the large
colour-spots of the balconied houses and the repeated undulation of the
little hunchbacked bridges, marked by the rise and drop again, with the
wave, of foreshortened clicking pedestrians. The Venetian footfall and
the Venetian cry--all talk there, wherever uttered, having the pitch of
a call across the water--come in once more at the window, renewing one’s
old impression of the delighted senses and the divided, frustrated mind.
How can places that speak <i>in general</i> so to the imagination not give
it, at the moment, the particular thing it wants? I recollect again
and again, in beautiful places, dropping into that wonderment. The
real truth is, I think, that they express, under this appeal, only too
much--more than, in the given case, one has use for; so that one
finds one’s self working less congruously, after all, so far as the
surrounding picture is concerned, than in presence of the moderate and
the neutral, to which we may lend something of the light of our vision.
Such a place as Venice is too proud for such charities; Venice doesn’t
borrow, she but all magnificently gives. We profit by that enormously,
but to do so we must either be quite off duty or be on it in her service
alone. Such, and so rueful, are these reminiscences; though on the
whole, no doubt, one’s book, and one’s “literary effort” at large, were
to be the better for them. Strangely fertilising, in the long run, does
a wasted effort of attention often prove. It all depends on _how_ the
attention has been cheated, has been squandered. There are high-handed
insolent frauds, and there are insidious sneaking ones. And there is,
I fear, even on the most designing artist’s part, always witless enough
good faith, always anxious enough desire, to fail to guard him against
their deceits.

Trying to recover here, for recognition, the germ of my idea, I see that
it must have consisted not at all in any conceit of a “plot,” nefarious
name, in any flash, upon the fancy, of a set of relations, or in any one
of those situations that, by a logic of their own, immediately fall, for
the fabulist, into movement, into a march or a rush, a patter of quick
steps; but altogether in the sense of a single character, the character
and aspect of a particular engaging young woman, to which all the usual
elements of a “subject,” certainly of a setting, were to need to be
super added. Quite as interesting as the young woman herself at her
best, do I find, I must again repeat, this projection of memory upon the
whole matter of the growth, in one’s imagination, of some such apology
for a motive. These are the fascinations of the fabulist’s art, these
lurking forces of expansion, these necessities of upspringing in
the seed, these beautiful determinations, on the part of the idea
entertained, to grow as tall as possible, to push into the light and
the air and thickly flower there; and, quite as much, these fine
possibilities of recovering, from some good standpoint on the ground
gained, the intimate history of the business--of retracing and
reconstructing its steps and stages. I have always fondly remembered a
remark that I heard fall years ago from the lips of Ivan Turgenieff in
regard to his own experience of the usual origin of the fictive picture.
It began for him almost always with the vision of some person or
persons, who hovered before him, soliciting him, as the active or
passive figure, interesting him and appealing to him just as they were
and by what they were. He saw them, in that fashion, as disponibles,
saw them subject to the chances, the complications of existence, and saw
them vividly, but then had to find for them the right relations, those
that would most bring them out; to imagine, to invent and select and
piece together the situations most useful and favourable to the sense of
the creatures themselves, the complications they would be most likely to
produce and to feel.

“To arrive at these things is to arrive at my story,” he said, “and
that’s the way I look for it. The result is that I’m often accused
of not having ‘story’ enough. I seem to myself to have as much as I
need--to show my people, to exhibit their relations with each other;
for that is all my measure. If I watch them long enough I see them come
together, I see them _placed_, I see them engaged in this or that act and
in this or that difficulty. How they look and move and speak and behave,
always in the setting I have found for them, is my account of them--of
which I dare say, alas, _que cela manque souvent d’architecture_. But I
would rather, I think, have too little architecture than too much--when
there’s danger of its interfering with my measure of the truth. The
French of course like more of it than I give--having by their own genius
such a hand for it; and indeed one must give all one can. As for the
origin of one’s wind-blown germs themselves, who shall say, as you ask,
where _they_ come from? We have to go too far back, too far behind,
to say. Isn’t it all we can say that they come from every quarter
of heaven, that they are _there_ at almost any turn of the road? They
accumulate, and we are always picking them over, selecting among them.
They are the breath of life--by which I mean that life, in its own
way, breathes them upon us. They are so, in a manner prescribed and
imposed--floated into our minds by the current of life. That reduces to
imbecility the vain critic’s quarrel, so often, with one’s subject, when
he hasn’t the wit to accept it. Will he point out then which other it
should properly have been?--his office being, essentially to point out.
_Il en serait bien embarrassé_. Ah, when he points out what I’ve done or
failed to do with it, that’s another matter: there he’s on his ground. I
give him up my ‘sarchitecture,’” my distinguished friend concluded, “as
much as he will.”

So this beautiful genius, and I recall with comfort the gratitude I drew
from his reference to the intensity of suggestion that may reside in the
stray figure, the unattached character, the image _en disponibilité_.
It gave me higher warrant than I seemed then to have met for just
that blest habit of one’s own imagination, the trick of investing some
conceived or encountered individual, some brace or group of individuals,
with the germinal property and authority. I was myself so much more
antecedently conscious of my figures than of their setting--a too
preliminary, a preferential interest in which struck me as in general
such a putting of the cart before the horse. I might envy, though I
couldn’t emulate, the imaginative writer so constituted as to see his
fable first and to make out its agents afterwards. I could think so
little of any fable that didn’t need its agents positively to launch
it; I could think so little of any situation that didn’t depend for its
interest on the nature of the persons situated, and thereby on their
way of taking it. There are methods of so-called presentation, I believe
among novelists who have appeared to flourish--that offer the situation
as indifferent to that support; but I have not lost the sense of the
value for me, at the time, of the admirable Russian’s testimony to my
not needing, all superstitiously, to try and perform any such gymnastic.
Other echoes from the same source linger with me, I confess, as
unfadingly--if it be not all indeed one much-embracing echo. It was
impossible after that not to read, for one’s uses, high lucidity into
the tormented and disfigured and bemuddled question of the objective
value, and even quite into that of the critical appreciation, of
“subject” in the novel.

One had had from an early time, for that matter, the instinct of the
right estimate of such values and of its reducing to the inane the
dull dispute over the “immoral” subject and the moral. Recognising so
promptly the one measure of the worth of a given subject, the question
about it that, rightly answered, disposes of all others--is it valid,
in a word, is it genuine, is it sincere, the result of some direct
impression or perception of life?--I had found small edification,
mostly, in a critical pretension that had neglected from the first
all delimitation of ground and all definition of terms. The air of
my earlier time shows, to memory, as darkened, all round, with that
vanity--unless the difference to-day be just in one’s own final
impatience, the lapse of one’s attention. There is, I think, no more
nutritive or suggestive truth in this connexion than that of the perfect
dependence of the “moral” sense of a work of art on the amount of felt
life concerned in producing it. The question comes back thus, obviously,
to the kind and the degree of the artist’s prime sensibility, which is
the soil out of which his subject springs. The quality and capacity of
that soil, its ability to “grow” with due freshness and straightness any
vision of life, represents, strongly or weakly, the projected morality.
That element is but another name for the more or less close connexion of
the subject with some mark made on the intelligence, with some sincere
experience. By which, at the same time, of course, one is far from
contending that this enveloping air of the artist’s humanity--which
gives the last touch to the worth of the work--is not a widely and
wondrously varying element; being on one occasion a rich and magnificent
medium and on another a comparatively poor and ungenerous one. Here we
get exactly the high price of the novel as a literary form--its power
not only, while preserving that form with closeness, to range
through all the differences of the individual relation to its general
subject-matter, all the varieties of outlook on life, of disposition to
reflect and project, created by conditions that are never the same from
man to man (or, so far as that goes, from man to woman), but positively
to appear more true to its character in proportion as it strains, or
tends to burst, with a latent extravagance, its mould.

The house of fiction has in short not one window, but a million--a
number of possible windows not to be reckoned, rather; every one of
which has been pierced, or is still pierceable, in its vast front, by
the need of the individual vision and by the pressure of the individual
will. These apertures, of dissimilar shape and size, hang so, all
together, over the human scene that we might have expected of them a
greater sameness of report than we find. They are but windows at the
best, mere holes in a dead wall, disconnected, perched aloft; they are
not hinged doors opening straight upon life. But they have this mark of
their own that at each of them stands a figure with a pair of eyes,
or at least with a field-glass, which forms, again and again, for
observation, a unique instrument, insuring to the person making use of
it an impression distinct from every other. He and his neighbours are
watching the same show, but one seeing more where the other sees less,
one seeing black where the other sees white, one seeing big where the
other sees small, one seeing coarse where the other sees fine. And
so on, and so on; there is fortunately no saying on what, for the
particular pair of eyes, the window may _not_ open; “fortunately” by
reason, precisely, of this incalculability of range. The spreading
field, the human scene, is the “choice of subject”; the pierced
aperture, either broad or balconied or slit-like and low-browed, is the
“literary form”; but they are, singly or together, as nothing without
the posted presence of the watcher--without, in other words, the
consciousness of the artist. Tell me what the artist is, and I will tell
you of what he has _been_ conscious. Thereby I shall express to you at
once his boundless freedom and his “moral” reference.

All this is a long way round, however, for my word about my dim first
move toward “The Portrait,” which was exactly my grasp of a single
character--an acquisition I had made, moreover, after a fashion not
here to be retraced. Enough that I was, as seemed to me, in complete
possession of it, that I had been so for a long time, that this had made
it familiar and yet had not blurred its charm, and that, all urgently,
all tormentingly, I saw it in motion and, so to speak, in transit. This
amounts to saying that I saw it as bent upon its fate--some fate or
other; which, among the possibilities, being precisely the question.
Thus I had my vivid individual--vivid, so strangely, in spite of being
still at large, not confined by the conditions, not engaged in the
tangle, to which we look for much of the impress that constitutes an
identity. If the apparition was still all to be placed how came it to
be vivid?--since we puzzle such quantities out, mostly, just by the
business of placing them. One could answer such a question beautifully,
doubtless, if one could do so subtle, if not so monstrous, a thing as to
write the history of the growth of one’s imagination. One would describe
then what, at a given time, had extraordinarily happened to it, and one
would so, for instance, be in a position to tell, with an approach to
clearness, how, under favour of occasion, it had been able to take over
(take over straight from life) such and such a constituted, animated
figure or form. The figure has to that extent, as you see, _been_
placed--placed in the imagination that detains it, preserves,
protects, enjoys it, conscious of its presence in the dusky, crowded,
heterogeneous back-shop of the mind very much as a wary dealer in
precious odds and ends, competent to make an “advance” on rare objects
confided to him, is conscious of the rare little “piece” left in deposit
by the reduced, mysterious lady of title or the speculative amateur,
and which is already there to disclose its merit afresh as soon as a key
shall have clicked in a cupboard-door.

That may he, I recognise, a somewhat superfine analogy for the
particular “value” I here speak of, the image of the young feminine
nature that I had had for so considerable a time all curiously at my
disposal; but it appears to fond memory quite to fit the fact--with the
recall, in addition, of my pious desire but to place my treasure right.
I quite remind myself thus of the dealer resigned not to “realise,”
 resigned to keeping the precious object locked up indefinitely rather
than commit it, at no matter what price, to vulgar hands. For there
_are_ dealers in these forms and figures and treasures capable of that
refinement. The point is, however, that this single small corner-stone,
the conception of a certain young woman affronting her destiny, had
begun with being all my outfit for the large building of “The Portrait
of a Lady.” It came to be a square and spacious house--or has at least
seemed so to me in this going over it again; but, such as it is, it
had to be put up round my young woman while she stood there in perfect
isolation. That is to me, artistically speaking, the circumstance of
interest; for I have lost myself once more, I confess, in the curiosity
of analysing the structure. By what process of logical accretion was
this slight “personality,” the mere slim shade of an intelligent but
presumptuous girl, to find itself endowed with the high attributes of a
Subject?--and indeed by what thinness, at the best, would such a subject
not be vitiated? Millions of presumptuous girls, intelligent or not
intelligent, daily affront their destiny, and what is it open to their
destiny to be, at the most, that we should make an ado about it? The
novel is of its very nature an “ado,” an ado about something, and the
larger the form it takes the greater of course the ado. Therefore,
consciously, that was what one was in for--for positively organising an
ado about Isabel Archer.

One looked it well in the face, I seem to remember, this extravagance;
and with the effect precisely of recognising the charm of the problem.
Challenge any such problem with any intelligence, and you immediately
see how full it is of substance; the wonder being, all the while, as we
look at the world, how absolutely, how inordinately, the Isabel Archers,
and even much smaller female fry, insist on mattering. George Eliot has
admirably noted it--“In these frail vessels is borne onward through the
ages the treasure of human affection.” In “Romeo and Juliet” Juliet has
to be important, just as, in “Adam Bede” and “The Mill on the Floss” and
“Middlemarch” and “Daniel Deronda,” Hetty Sorrel and Maggie Tulliver and
Rosamond Vincy and Gwendolen Harleth have to be; with that much of firm
ground, that much of bracing air, at the disposal all the while of
their feet and their lungs. They are typical, none the less, of a class
difficult, in the individual case, to make a centre of interest; so
difficult in fact that many an expert painter, as for instance Dickens
and Walter Scott, as for instance even, in the main, so subtle a hand
as that of R. L. Stevenson, has preferred to leave the task unattempted.
There are in fact writers as to whom we make out that their refuge
from this is to assume it to be not worth their attempting; by which
pusillanimity in truth their honour is scantly saved. It is never an
attestation of a value, or even of our imperfect sense of one, it is
never a tribute to any truth at all, that we shall represent that value
badly. It never makes up, artistically, for an artist’s dim feeling
about a thing that he shall “do” the thing as ill as possible. There are
better ways than that, the best of all of which is to begin with less
stupidity.

It may be answered meanwhile, in regard to Shakespeare’s and to George
Eliot’s testimony, that their concession to the “importance” of their
Juliets and Cleopatras and Portias (even with Portia as the very type
and model of the young person intelligent and presumptuous) and to that
of their Hettys and Maggies and Rosamonds and Gwendolens, suffers the
abatement that these slimnesses are, when figuring as the main props of
the theme, never suffered to be sole ministers of its appeal, but have
their inadequacy eked out with comic relief and underplots, as the
playwrights say, when not with murders and battles and the great
mutations of the world. If they are shown as “mattering” as much as
they could possibly pretend to, the proof of it is in a hundred other
persons, made of much stouter stuff; and each involved moreover in a
hundred relations which matter to _them_ concomitantly with that one.
Cleopatra matters, beyond bounds, to Antony, but his colleagues,
his antagonists, the state of Rome and the impending battle also
prodigiously matter; Portia matters to Antonio, and to Shylock, and
to the Prince of Morocco, to the fifty aspiring princes, but for these
gentry there are other lively concerns; for Antonio, notably, there
are Shylock and Bassanio and his lost ventures and the extremity of
his predicament. This extremity indeed, by the same token, matters to
Portia--though its doing so becomes of interest all by the fact that
Portia matters to _us_. That she does so, at any rate, and that almost
everything comes round to it again, supports my contention as to this
fine example of the value recognised in the mere young thing. (I say
“mere” young thing because I guess that even Shakespeare, preoccupied
mainly though he may have been with the passions of princes, would
scarce have pretended to found the best of his appeal for her on her
high social position.) It is an example exactly of the deep difficulty
braved--the difficulty of making George Eliot’s “frail vessel,” if not
the all-in-all for our attention, at least the clearest of the call.

Now to see deep difficulty braved is at any time, for the really
addicted artist, to feel almost even as a pang the beautiful incentive,
and to feel it verily in such sort as to wish the danger intensified.
The difficulty most worth tackling can only be for him, in these
conditions, the greatest the case permits of. So I remember feeling
here (in presence, always, that is, of the particular uncertainty of my
ground), that there would be one way better than another--oh, ever so
much better than any other!--of making it fight out its battle. The
frail vessel, that charged with George Eliot’s “treasure,” and thereby
of such importance to those who curiously approach it, has likewise
possibilities of importance to itself, possibilities which permit of
treatment and in fact peculiarly require it from the moment they are
considered at all. There is always the escape from any close account
of the weak agent of such spells by using as a bridge for evasion, for
retreat and flight, the view of her relation to those surrounding her.
Make it predominantly a view of _their_ relation and the trick is played:
you give the general sense of her effect, and you give it, so far as the
raising on it of a superstructure goes, with the maximum of ease. Well,
I recall perfectly how little, in my now quite established connexion,
the maximum of ease appealed to me, and how I seemed to get rid of it
by an honest transposition of the weights in the two scales. “Place the
centre of the subject in the young woman’s own consciousness,” I said to
myself, “and you get as interesting and as beautiful a difficulty as you
could wish. Stick to _that_--for the centre; put the heaviest weight
into _that_ scale, which will be so largely the scale of her relation
to herself. Make her only interested enough, at the same time, in the
things that are not herself, and this relation needn’t fear to be too
limited. Place meanwhile in the other scale the lighter weight (which is
usually the one that tips the balance of interest): press least hard, in
short, on the consciousness of your heroine’s satellites, especially the
male; make it an interest contributive only to the greater one. See, at
all events, what can be done in this way. What better field could there
be for a due ingenuity? The girl hovers, inextinguishable, as a charming
creature, and the job will be to translate her into the highest terms
of that formula, and as nearly as possible moreover into _all_ of them. To
depend upon her and her little concerns wholly to see you through will
necessitate, remember, your really ‘doing’ her.”

So far I reasoned, and it took nothing less than that technical rigour,
I now easily see, to inspire me with the right confidence for erecting
on such a plot of ground the neat and careful and proportioned pile of
bricks that arches over it and that was thus to form, constructionally
speaking, a literary monument. Such is the aspect that to-day “The
Portrait” wears for me: a structure reared with an “architectural”
 competence, as Turgenieff would have said, that makes it, to the
author’s own sense, the most proportioned of his productions after “The
Ambassadors” which was to follow it so many years later and which has,
no doubt, a superior roundness. On one thing I was determined; that,
though I should clearly have to pile brick upon brick for the creation
of an interest, I would leave no pretext for saying that anything is
out of line, scale or perspective. I would build large--in fine embossed
vaults and painted arches, as who should say, and yet never let it
appear that the chequered pavement, the ground under the reader’s
feet, fails to stretch at every point to the base of the walls. That
precautionary spirit, on re-perusal of the book, is the old note that
most touches me: it testifies so, for my own ear, to the anxiety of my
provision for the reader’s amusement. I felt, in view of the possible
limitations of my subject, that no such provision could be excessive,
and the development of the latter was simply the general form of that
earnest quest. And I find indeed that this is the only account I can
give myself of the evolution of the fable it is all under the head thus
named that I conceive the needful accretion as having taken place, the
right complications as having started. It was naturally of the essence
that the young woman should be herself complex; that was rudimentary--or
was at any rate the light in which Isabel Archer had originally dawned.
It went, however, but a certain way, and other lights, contending,
conflicting lights, and of as many different colours, if possible, as
the rockets, the Roman candles and Catherine-wheels of a “pyrotechnic
display,” would be employable to attest that she was. I had, no doubt, a
groping instinct for the right complications, since I am quite unable
to track the footsteps of those that constitute, as the case stands, the
general situation exhibited. They are there, for what they are worth,
and as numerous as might be; but my memory, I confess, is a blank as to
how and whence they came.

I seem to myself to have waked up one morning in possession of them--of
Ralph Touchett and his parents, of Madame Merle, of Gilbert Osmond and
his daughter and his sister, of Lord Warburton, Caspar Goodwood and
Miss Stackpole, the definite array of contributions to Isabel Archer’s
history. I recognised them, I knew them, they were the numbered pieces
of my puzzle, the concrete terms of my “plot.” It was as if they had
simply, by an impulse of their own, floated into my ken, and all in
response to my primary question: “Well, what will she _do_?” Their answer
seemed to be that if I would trust them they would show me; on which,
with an urgent appeal to them to make it at least as interesting as
they could, I trusted them. They were like the group of attendants and
entertainers who come down by train when people in the country give a
party; they represented the contract for carrying the party on. That was
an excellent relation with them--a possible one even with so broken a
reed (from her slightness of cohesion) as Henrietta Stackpole. It is a
familiar truth to the novelist, at the strenuous hour, that, as certain
elements in any work are of the essence, so others are only of the
form; that as this or that character, this or that disposition of the
material, belongs to the subject directly, so to speak, so this or that
other belongs to it but indirectly--belongs intimately to the treatment.
This is a truth, however, of which he rarely gets the benefit--since it
could be assured to him, really, but by criticism based upon perception,
criticism which is too little of this world. He must not think of
benefits, moreover, I freely recognise, for that way dishonour lies:
he has, that is, but one to think of--the benefit, whatever it may be,
involved in his having cast a spell upon the simpler, the very simplest,
forms of attention. This is all he is entitled to; he is entitled to
nothing, he is bound to admit, that can come to him, from the reader, as
a result on the latter’s part of any act of reflexion or discrimination.
He may _enjoy_ this finer tribute--that is another affair, but on
condition only of taking it as a gratuity “thrown in,” a mere miraculous
windfall, the fruit of a tree he may not pretend to have shaken. Against
reflexion, against discrimination, in his interest, all earth and air
conspire; wherefore it is that, as I say, he must in many a case have
schooled himself, from the first, to work but for a “living wage.” The
living wage is the reader’s grant of the least possible quantity of
attention required for consciousness of a “spell.” The occasional
charming “tip” is an act of his intelligence over and beyond this, a
golden apple, for the writer’s lap, straight from the wind-stirred tree.
The artist may of course, in wanton moods, dream of some Paradise (for
art) where the direct appeal to the intelligence might be legalised; for
to such extravagances as these his yearning mind can scarce hope ever
completely to close itself. The most he can do is to remember they _are_
extravagances.

All of which is perhaps but a gracefully devious way of saying that
Henrietta Stackpole was a good example, in “The Portrait,” of the truth
to which I just adverted--as good an example as I could name were it not
that Maria Gostrey, in “The Ambassadors,” then in the bosom of time,
may be mentioned as a better. Each of these persons is but wheels to the
coach; neither belongs to the body of that vehicle, or is for a moment
accommodated with a seat inside. There the subject alone is ensconced,
in the form of its “hero and heroine,” and of the privileged high
officials, say, who ride with the king and queen. There are reasons
why one would have liked this to be felt, as in general one would like
almost anything to be felt, in one’s work, that one has one’s self
contributively felt. We have seen, however, how idle is that pretension,
which I should be sorry to make too much of. Maria Gostrey and Miss
Stackpole then are cases, each, of the light _ficelle_, not of the true
agent; they may run beside the coach “for all they are worth,” they may
cling to it till they are out of breath (as poor Miss Stackpole all so
visibly does), but neither, all the while, so much as gets her foot on
the step, neither ceases for a moment to tread the dusty road. Put it
even that they are like the fishwives who helped to bring back to Paris
from Versailles, on that most ominous day of the first half of the
French Revolution, the carriage of the royal family. The only thing
is that I may well be asked, I acknowledge, why then, in the present
fiction, I have suffered Henrietta (of whom we have indubitably too
much) so officiously, so strangely, so almost inexplicably, to pervade.
I will presently say what I can for that anomaly--and in the most
conciliatory fashion.

A point I wish still more to make is that if my relation of confidence
with the actors in my drama who _were_, unlike Miss Stackpole, true
agents, was an excellent one to have arrived at, there still remained my
relation with the reader, which was another affair altogether and as to
which I felt no one to be trusted but myself. That solicitude was to be
accordingly expressed in the artful patience with which, as I have
said, I piled brick upon brick. The bricks, for the whole
counting-over--putting for bricks little touches and inventions and
enhancements by the way--affect me in truth as well-nigh innumerable and
as ever so scrupulously fitted together and packed-in. It is an effect
of detail, of the minutest; though, if one were in this connexion to say
all, one would express the hope that the general, the ampler air of the
modest monument still survives. I do at least seem to catch the key to
a part of this abundance of small anxious, ingenious illustration as I
recollect putting my finger, in my young woman’s interest, on the most
obvious of her predicates. “What will she ‘do’? Why, the first thing
she’ll do will be to come to Europe; which in fact will form, and all
inevitably, no small part of her principal adventure. Coming to
Europe is even for the ‘frail vessels,’ in this wonderful age, a mild
adventure; but what is truer than that on one side--the side of their
independence of flood and field, of the moving accident, of battle and
murder and sudden death--her adventures are to be mild? Without her
sense of them, her sense _for_ them, as one may say, they are next to
nothing at all; but isn’t the beauty and the difficulty just in showing
their mystic conversion by that sense, conversion into the stuff of
drama or, even more delightful word still, of ‘story’?” It was all
as clear, my contention, as a silver bell. Two very good instances, I
think, of this effect of conversion, two cases of the rare chemistry,
are the pages in which Isabel, coming into the drawing-room at
Gardencourt, coming in from a wet walk or whatever, that rainy
afternoon, finds Madame Merle in possession of the place, Madame
Merle seated, all absorbed but all serene, at the piano, and deeply
recognises, in the striking of such an hour, in the presence there,
among the gathering shades, of this personage, of whom a moment before
she had never so much as heard, a turning-point in her life. It is
dreadful to have too much, for any artistic demonstration, to dot one’s
i’s and insist on one’s intentions, and I am not eager to do it now; but
the question here was that of producing the maximum of intensity with
the minimum of strain.

The interest was to be raised to its pitch and yet the elements to be
kept in their key; so that, should the whole thing duly impress, I might
show what an “exciting” inward life may do for the person leading it
even while it remains perfectly normal. And I cannot think of a more
consistent application of that ideal unless it be in the long statement,
just beyond the middle of the book, of my young woman’s extraordinary
meditative vigil on the occasion that was to become for her such a
landmark. Reduced to its essence, it is but the vigil of searching
criticism; but it throws the action further forward that twenty
“incidents” might have done. It was designed to have all the vivacity
of incidents and all the economy of picture. She sits up, by her dying
fire, far into the night, under the spell of recognitions on which she
finds the last sharpness suddenly wait. It is a representation simply
of her motionlessly _seeing_, and an attempt withal to make the mere still
lucidity of her act as “interesting” as the surprise of a caravan or the
identification of a pirate. It represents, for that matter, one of the
identifications dear to the novelist, and even indispensable to him;
but it all goes on without her being approached by another person and
without her leaving her chair. It is obviously the best thing in the
book, but it is only a supreme illustration of the general plan. As to
Henrietta, my apology for whom I just left incomplete, she exemplifies,
I fear, in her superabundance, not an element of my plan, but only
an excess of my zeal. So early was to begin my tendency to _overtreat_,
rather than undertreat (when there was choice or danger) my subject.
(Many members of my craft, I gather, are far from agreeing with me, but
I have always held overtreating the minor disservice.) “Treating” that
of “The Portrait” amounted to never forgetting, by any lapse, that the
thing was under a special obligation to be amusing. There was the danger
of the noted “thinness”--which was to be averted, tooth and nail,
by cultivation of the lively. That is at least how I see it to-day.
Henrietta must have been at that time a part of my wonderful notion of
the lively. And then there was another matter. I had, within the few
preceding years, come to live in London, and the “international” light
lay, in those days, to my sense, thick and rich upon the scene. It was
the light in which so much of the picture hung. But that _is_ another
matter. There is really too much to say.

HENRY JAMES




THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY



CHAPTER I

Under certain circumstances there are few hours in life more agreeable
than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea. There
are circumstances in which, whether you partake of the tea or not--some
people of course never do,--the situation is in itself delightful. Those
that I have in mind in beginning to unfold this simple history offered
an admirable setting to an innocent pastime. The implements of
the little feast had been disposed upon the lawn of an old English
country-house, in what I should call the perfect middle of a splendid
summer afternoon. Part of the afternoon had waned, but much of it was
left, and what was left was of the finest and rarest quality. Real dusk
would not arrive for many hours; but the flood of summer light had begun
to ebb, the air had grown mellow, the shadows were long upon the smooth,
dense turf. They lengthened slowly, however, and the scene expressed
that sense of leisure still to come which is perhaps the chief source
of one’s enjoyment of such a scene at such an hour. From five o’clock to
eight is on certain occasions a little eternity; but on such an occasion
as this the interval could be only an eternity of pleasure. The persons
concerned in it were taking their pleasure quietly, and they were not
of the sex which is supposed to furnish the regular votaries of the
ceremony I have mentioned. The shadows on the perfect lawn were straight
and angular; they were the shadows of an old man sitting in a deep
wicker-chair near the low table on which the tea had been served, and
of two younger men strolling to and fro, in desultory talk, in front of
him. The old man had his cup in his hand; it was an unusually large cup,
of a different pattern from the rest of the set and painted in brilliant
colours. He disposed of its contents with much circumspection, holding
it for a long time close to his chin, with his face turned to the house.
His companions had either finished their tea or were indifferent to
their privilege; they smoked cigarettes as they continued to stroll.
One of them, from time to time, as he passed, looked with a certain
attention at the elder man, who, unconscious of observation, rested his
eyes upon the rich red front of his dwelling. The house that rose beyond
the lawn was a structure to repay such consideration and was the most
characteristic object in the peculiarly English picture I have attempted
to sketch.

It stood upon a low hill, above the river--the river being the Thames at
some forty miles from London. A long gabled front of red brick, with
the complexion of which time and the weather had played all sorts of
pictorial tricks, only, however, to improve and refine it, presented
to the lawn its patches of ivy, its clustered chimneys, its windows
smothered in creepers. The house had a name and a history; the old
gentleman taking his tea would have been delighted to tell you these
things: how it had been built under Edward the Sixth, had offered a
night’s hospitality to the great Elizabeth (whose august person had
extended itself upon a huge, magnificent and terribly angular bed which
still formed the principal honour of the sleeping apartments), had been
a good deal bruised and defaced in Cromwell’s wars, and then, under the
Restoration, repaired and much enlarged; and how, finally, after having
been remodelled and disfigured in the eighteenth century, it had passed
into the careful keeping of a shrewd American banker, who had bought it
originally because (owing to circumstances too complicated to set forth)
it was offered at a great bargain: bought it with much grumbling at its
ugliness, its antiquity, its incommodity, and who now, at the end of
twenty years, had become conscious of a real aesthetic passion for it,
so that he knew all its points and would tell you just where to stand
to see them in combination and just the hour when the shadows of
its various protuberances which fell so softly upon the warm, weary
brickwork--were of the right measure. Besides this, as I have said,
he could have counted off most of the successive owners and occupants,
several of whom were known to general fame; doing so, however, with an
undemonstrative conviction that the latest phase of its destiny was not
the least honourable. The front of the house overlooking that portion
of the lawn with which we are concerned was not the entrance-front; this
was in quite another quarter. Privacy here reigned supreme, and the wide
carpet of turf that covered the level hill-top seemed but the extension
of a luxurious interior. The great still oaks and beeches flung down a
shade as dense as that of velvet curtains; and the place was furnished,
like a room, with cushioned seats, with rich-coloured rugs, with
the books and papers that lay upon the grass. The river was at some
distance; where the ground began to slope the lawn, properly speaking,
ceased. But it was none the less a charming walk down to the water.

The old gentleman at the tea-table, who had come from America thirty
years before, had brought with him, at the top of his baggage, his
American physiognomy; and he had not only brought it with him, but he
had kept it in the best order, so that, if necessary, he might have
taken it back to his own country with perfect confidence. At present,
obviously, nevertheless, he was not likely to displace himself; his
journeys were over and he was taking the rest that precedes the
great rest. He had a narrow, clean-shaven face, with features evenly
distributed and an expression of placid acuteness. It was evidently a
face in which the range of representation was not large, so that the air
of contented shrewdness was all the more of a merit. It seemed to tell
that he had been successful in life, yet it seemed to tell also that his
success had not been exclusive and invidious, but had had much of the
inoffensiveness of failure. He had certainly had a great experience of
men, but there was an almost rustic simplicity in the faint smile that
played upon his lean, spacious cheek and lighted up his humorous eye
as he at last slowly and carefully deposited his big tea-cup upon the
table. He was neatly dressed, in well-brushed black; but a shawl was
folded upon his knees, and his feet were encased in thick, embroidered
slippers. A beautiful collie dog lay upon the grass near his chair,
watching the master’s face almost as tenderly as the master took in the
still more magisterial physiognomy of the house; and a little bristling,
bustling terrier bestowed a desultory attendance upon the other
gentlemen.

One of these was a remarkably well-made man of five-and-thirty, with a
face as English as that of the old gentleman I have just sketched was
something else; a noticeably handsome face, fresh-coloured, fair and
frank, with firm, straight features, a lively grey eye and the rich
adornment of a chestnut beard. This person had a certain fortunate,
brilliant exceptional look--the air of a happy temperament fertilised by
a high civilisation--which would have made almost any observer envy him
at a venture. He was booted and spurred, as if he had dismounted from a
long ride; he wore a white hat, which looked too large for him; he
held his two hands behind him, and in one of them--a large, white,
well-shaped fist--was crumpled a pair of soiled dog-skin gloves.

His companion, measuring the length of the lawn beside him, was a person
of quite a different pattern, who, although he might have excited
grave curiosity, would not, like the other, have provoked you to wish
yourself, almost blindly, in his place. Tall, lean, loosely and feebly
put together, he had an ugly, sickly, witty, charming face, furnished,
but by no means decorated, with a straggling moustache and whisker. He
looked clever and ill--a combination by no means felicitous; and he wore
a brown velvet jacket. He carried his hands in his pockets, and there
was something in the way he did it that showed the habit was inveterate.
His gait had a shambling, wandering quality; he was not very firm on
his legs. As I have said, whenever he passed the old man in the chair he
rested his eyes upon him; and at this moment, with their faces brought
into relation, you would easily have seen they were father and son.
The father caught his son’s eye at last and gave him a mild, responsive
smile.

“I’m getting on very well,” he said.

“Have you drunk your tea?” asked the son.

“Yes, and enjoyed it.”

“Shall I give you some more?”

The old man considered, placidly. “Well, I guess I’ll wait and see.” He
had, in speaking, the American tone.

“Are you cold?” the son enquired.

The father slowly rubbed his legs. “Well, I don’t know. I can’t tell
till I feel.”

“Perhaps some one might feel for you,” said the younger man, laughing.

“Oh, I hope some one will always feel for me! Don’t you feel for me,
Lord Warburton?”

“Oh yes, immensely,” said the gentleman addressed as Lord Warburton,
promptly. “I’m bound to say you look wonderfully comfortable.”

“Well, I suppose I am, in most respects.” And the old man looked down at
his green shawl and smoothed it over his knees. “The fact is I’ve been
comfortable so many years that I suppose I’ve got so used to it I don’t
know it.”

“Yes, that’s the bore of comfort,” said Lord Warburton. “We only know
when we’re uncomfortable.”

“It strikes me we’re rather particular,” his companion remarked.

“Oh yes, there’s no doubt we’re particular,” Lord Warburton murmured.
And then the three men remained silent a while; the two younger ones
standing looking down at the other, who presently asked for more tea. “I
should think you would be very unhappy with that shawl,” Lord Warburton
resumed while his companion filled the old man’s cup again.

“Oh no, he must have the shawl!” cried the gentleman in the velvet coat.
“Don’t put such ideas as that into his head.”

“It belongs to my wife,” said the old man simply.

“Oh, if it’s for sentimental reasons--” And Lord Warburton made a
gesture of apology.

“I suppose I must give it to her when she comes,” the old man went on.

“You’ll please to do nothing of the kind. You’ll keep it to cover your
poor old legs.”

“Well, you mustn’t abuse my legs,” said the old man. “I guess they are
as good as yours.”

“Oh, you’re perfectly free to abuse mine,” his son replied, giving him
his tea.

“Well, we’re two lame ducks; I don’t think there’s much difference.”

“I’m much obliged to you for calling me a duck. How’s your tea?”

“Well, it’s rather hot.”

“That’s intended to be a merit.”

“Ah, there’s a great deal of merit,” murmured the old man, kindly. “He’s
a very good nurse, Lord Warburton.”

“Isn’t he a bit clumsy?” asked his lordship.

“Oh no, he’s not clumsy--considering that he’s an invalid himself. He’s
a very good nurse--for a sick-nurse. I call him my sick-nurse because
he’s sick himself.”

“Oh, come, daddy!” the ugly young man exclaimed.

“Well, you are; I wish you weren’t. But I suppose you can’t help it.”

“I might try: that’s an idea,” said the young man.

“Were you ever sick, Lord Warburton?” his father asked.

Lord Warburton considered a moment. “Yes, sir, once, in the Persian
Gulf.”

“He’s making light of you, daddy,” said the other young man. “That’s a
sort of joke.”

“Well, there seem to be so many sorts now,” daddy replied, serenely.
“You don’t look as if you had been sick, anyway, Lord Warburton.”

“He’s sick of life; he was just telling me so; going on fearfully about
it,” said Lord Warburton’s friend.

“Is that true, sir?” asked the old man gravely.

“If it is, your son gave me no consolation. He’s a wretched fellow to
talk to--a regular cynic. He doesn’t seem to believe in anything.”

“That’s another sort of joke,” said the person accused of cynicism.

“It’s because his health is so poor,” his father explained to Lord
Warburton. “It affects his mind and colours his way of looking at
things; he seems to feel as if he had never had a chance. But it’s
almost entirely theoretical, you know; it doesn’t seem to affect his
spirits. I’ve hardly ever seen him when he wasn’t cheerful--about as he
is at present. He often cheers me up.”

The young man so described looked at Lord Warburton and laughed. “Is it
a glowing eulogy or an accusation of levity? Should you like me to carry
out my theories, daddy?”

“By Jove, we should see some queer things!” cried Lord Warburton.

“I hope you haven’t taken up that sort of tone,” said the old man.

“Warburton’s tone is worse than mine; he pretends to be bored. I’m not
in the least bored; I find life only too interesting.”

“Ah, too interesting; you shouldn’t allow it to be that, you know!”

“I’m never bored when I come here,” said Lord Warburton. “One gets such
uncommonly good talk.”

“Is that another sort of joke?” asked the old man. “You’ve no excuse for
being bored anywhere. When I was your age I had never heard of such a
thing.”

“You must have developed very late.”

“No, I developed very quick; that was just the reason. When I was twenty
years old I was very highly developed indeed. I was working tooth and
nail. You wouldn’t be bored if you had something to do; but all you
young men are too idle. You think too much of your pleasure. You’re too
fastidious, and too indolent, and too rich.”

“Oh, I say,” cried Lord Warburton, “you’re hardly the person to accuse a
fellow-creature of being too rich!”

“Do you mean because I’m a banker?” asked the old man.

“Because of that, if you like; and because you have--haven’t you?--such
unlimited means.”

“He isn’t very rich,” the other young man mercifully pleaded. “He has
given away an immense deal of money.”

“Well, I suppose it was his own,” said Lord Warburton; “and in that case
could there be a better proof of wealth? Let not a public benefactor
talk of one’s being too fond of pleasure.”

“Daddy’s very fond of pleasure--of other people’s.”

The old man shook his head. “I don’t pretend to have contributed
anything to the amusement of my contemporaries.”

“My dear father, you’re too modest!”

“That’s a kind of joke, sir,” said Lord Warburton.

“You young men have too many jokes. When there are no jokes you’ve
nothing left.”

“Fortunately there are always more jokes,” the ugly young man remarked.

“I don’t believe it--I believe things are getting more serious. You
young men will find that out.”

“The increasing seriousness of things, then that’s the great opportunity
of jokes.”

“They’ll have to be grim jokes,” said the old man. “I’m convinced there
will be great changes, and not all for the better.”

“I quite agree with you, sir,” Lord Warburton declared. “I’m very sure
there will be great changes, and that all sorts of queer things will
happen. That’s why I find so much difficulty in applying your advice;
you know you told me the other day that I ought to ‘take hold’ of
something. One hesitates to take hold of a thing that may the next
moment be knocked sky-high.”

“You ought to take hold of a pretty woman,” said his companion. “He’s
trying hard to fall in love,” he added, by way of explanation, to his
father.

“The pretty women themselves may be sent flying!” Lord Warburton
exclaimed.

“No, no, they’ll be firm,” the old man rejoined; “they’ll not be
affected by the social and political changes I just referred to.”

“You mean they won’t be abolished? Very well, then, I’ll lay hands on
one as soon as possible and tie her round my neck as a life-preserver.”

“The ladies will save us,” said the old man; “that is the best of them
will--for I make a difference between them. Make up to a good one and
marry her, and your life will become much more interesting.”

A momentary silence marked perhaps on the part of his auditors a sense
of the magnanimity of this speech, for it was a secret neither for his
son nor for his visitor that his own experiment in matrimony had not
been a happy one. As he said, however, he made a difference; and these
words may have been intended as a confession of personal error; though
of course it was not in place for either of his companions to remark
that apparently the lady of his choice had not been one of the best.

“If I marry an interesting woman I shall be interested: is that what you
say?” Lord Warburton asked. “I’m not at all keen about marrying--your
son misrepresented me; but there’s no knowing what an interesting woman
might do with me.”

“I should like to see your idea of an interesting woman,” said his
friend.

“My dear fellow, you can’t see ideas--especially such highly ethereal
ones as mine. If I could only see it myself--that would be a great step
in advance.”

“Well, you may fall in love with whomsoever you please; but you mustn’t
fall in love with my niece,” said the old man.

His son broke into a laugh. “He’ll think you mean that as a provocation!
My dear father, you’ve lived with the English for thirty years, and
you’ve picked up a good many of the things they say. But you’ve never
learned the things they don’t say!”

“I say what I please,” the old man returned with all his serenity.

“I haven’t the honour of knowing your niece,” Lord Warburton said. “I
think it’s the first time I’ve heard of her.”

“She’s a niece of my wife’s; Mrs. Touchett brings her to England.”

Then young Mr. Touchett explained. “My mother, you know, has been
spending the winter in America, and we’re expecting her back. She writes
that she has discovered a niece and that she has invited her to come out
with her.”

“I see,--very kind of her,” said Lord Warburton. Is the young lady
interesting?”

“We hardly know more about her than you; my mother has not gone into
details. She chiefly communicates with us by means of telegrams, and her
telegrams are rather inscrutable. They say women don’t know how to write
them, but my mother has thoroughly mastered the art of condensation.
‘Tired America, hot weather awful, return England with niece, first
steamer decent cabin.’ That’s the sort of message we get from her--that
was the last that came. But there had been another before, which I think
contained the first mention of the niece. ‘Changed hotel, very bad,
impudent clerk, address here. Taken sister’s girl, died last year, go to
Europe, two sisters, quite independent.’ Over that my father and I
have scarcely stopped puzzling; it seems to admit of so many
interpretations.”

“There’s one thing very clear in it,” said the old man; “she has given
the hotel-clerk a dressing.”

“I’m not sure even of that, since he has driven her from the field. We
thought at first that the sister mentioned might be the sister of the
clerk; but the subsequent mention of a niece seems to prove that the
allusion is to one of my aunts. Then there was a question as to whose
the two other sisters were; they are probably two of my late aunt’s
daughters. But who’s ‘quite independent,’ and in what sense is the term
used?--that point’s not yet settled. Does the expression apply more
particularly to the young lady my mother has adopted, or does it
characterise her sisters equally?--and is it used in a moral or in a
financial sense? Does it mean that they’ve been left well off, or
that they wish to be under no obligations? or does it simply mean that
they’re fond of their own way?”

“Whatever else it means, it’s pretty sure to mean that,” Mr. Touchett
remarked.

“You’ll see for yourself,” said Lord Warburton. “When does Mrs. Touchett
arrive?”

“We’re quite in the dark; as soon as she can find a decent cabin.
She may be waiting for it yet; on the other hand she may already have
disembarked in England.”

“In that case she would probably have telegraphed to you.”

“She never telegraphs when you would expect it--only when you don’t,”
 said the old man. “She likes to drop on me suddenly; she thinks she’ll
find me doing something wrong. She has never done so yet, but she’s not
discouraged.”

“It’s her share in the family trait, the independence she speaks of.”
 Her son’s appreciation of the matter was more favourable. “Whatever the
high spirit of those young ladies may be, her own is a match for it. She
likes to do everything for herself and has no belief in any one’s power
to help her. She thinks me of no more use than a postage-stamp without
gum, and she would never forgive me if I should presume to go to
Liverpool to meet her.”

“Will you at least let me know when your cousin arrives?” Lord Warburton
asked.

“Only on the condition I’ve mentioned--that you don’t fall in love with
her!” Mr. Touchett replied.

“That strikes me as hard, don’t you think me good enough?”

“I think you too good--because I shouldn’t like her to marry you. She
hasn’t come here to look for a husband, I hope; so many young ladies are
doing that, as if there were no good ones at home. Then she’s probably
engaged; American girls are usually engaged, I believe. Moreover I’m not
sure, after all, that you’d be a remarkable husband.”

“Very likely she’s engaged; I’ve known a good many American girls, and
they always were; but I could never see that it made any difference,
upon my word! As for my being a good husband,” Mr. Touchett’s visitor
pursued, “I’m not sure of that either. One can but try!”

“Try as much as you please, but don’t try on my niece,” smiled the old
man, whose opposition to the idea was broadly humorous.

“Ah, well,” said Lord Warburton with a humour broader still, “perhaps,
after all, she’s not worth trying on!”



CHAPTER II

While this exchange of pleasantries took place between the two Ralph
Touchett wandered away a little, with his usual slouching gait, his
hands in his pockets and his little rowdyish terrier at his heels. His
face was turned toward the house, but his eyes were bent musingly on the
lawn; so that he had been an object of observation to a person who had
just made her appearance in the ample doorway for some moments before
he perceived her. His attention was called to her by the conduct of
his dog, who had suddenly darted forward with a little volley of shrill
barks, in which the note of welcome, however, was more sensible than
that of defiance. The person in question was a young lady, who seemed
immediately to interpret the greeting of the small beast. He advanced
with great rapidity and stood at her feet, looking up and barking hard;
whereupon, without hesitation, she stooped and caught him in her hands,
holding him face to face while he continued his quick chatter. His
master now had had time to follow and to see that Bunchie’s new friend
was a tall girl in a black dress, who at first sight looked pretty.
She was bareheaded, as if she were staying in the house--a fact which
conveyed perplexity to the son of its master, conscious of that immunity
from visitors which had for some time been rendered necessary by the
latter’s ill-health. Meantime the two other gentlemen had also taken
note of the new-comer.

“Dear me, who’s that strange woman?” Mr. Touchett had asked.

“Perhaps it’s Mrs. Touchett’s niece--the independent young lady,” Lord
Warburton suggested. “I think she must be, from the way she handles the
dog.”

The collie, too, had now allowed his attention to be diverted, and he
trotted toward the young lady in the doorway, slowly setting his tail in
motion as he went.

“But where’s my wife then?” murmured the old man.

“I suppose the young lady has left her somewhere: that’s a part of the
independence.”

The girl spoke to Ralph, smiling, while she still held up the terrier.
“Is this your little dog, sir?”

“He was mine a moment ago; but you’ve suddenly acquired a remarkable air
of property in him.”

“Couldn’t we share him?” asked the girl. “He’s such a perfect little
darling.”

Ralph looked at her a moment; she was unexpectedly pretty. “You may have
him altogether,” he then replied.

The young lady seemed to have a great deal of confidence, both in
herself and in others; but this abrupt generosity made her blush. “I
ought to tell you that I’m probably your cousin,” she brought out,
putting down the dog. “And here’s another!” she added quickly, as the
collie came up.

“Probably?” the young man exclaimed, laughing. “I supposed it was quite
settled! Have you arrived with my mother?”

“Yes, half an hour ago.”

“And has she deposited you and departed again?”

“No, she went straight to her room, and she told me that, if I should
see you, I was to say to you that you must come to her there at a
quarter to seven.”

The young man looked at his watch. “Thank you very much; I shall be
punctual.” And then he looked at his cousin. “You’re very welcome here.
I’m delighted to see you.”

She was looking at everything, with an eye that denoted clear
perception--at her companion, at the two dogs, at the two gentlemen
under the trees, at the beautiful scene that surrounded her. “I’ve never
seen anything so lovely as this place. I’ve been all over the house;
it’s too enchanting.”

“I’m sorry you should have been here so long without our knowing it.”

“Your mother told me that in England people arrived very quietly; so I
thought it was all right. Is one of those gentlemen your father?”

“Yes, the elder one--the one sitting down,” said Ralph.

The girl gave a laugh. “I don’t suppose it’s the other. Who’s the
other?”

“He’s a friend of ours--Lord Warburton.”

“Oh, I hoped there would be a lord; it’s just like a novel!” And then,
“Oh you adorable creature!” she suddenly cried, stooping down and
picking up the small dog again.

She remained standing where they had met, making no offer to advance or
to speak to Mr. Touchett, and while she lingered so near the threshold,
slim and charming, her interlocutor wondered if she expected the old man
to come and pay her his respects. American girls were used to a great
deal of deference, and it had been intimated that this one had a high
spirit. Indeed Ralph could see that in her face.

“Won’t you come and make acquaintance with my father?” he nevertheless
ventured to ask. “He’s old and infirm--he doesn’t leave his chair.”

“Ah, poor man, I’m very sorry!” the girl exclaimed, immediately moving
forward. “I got the impression from your mother that he was rather
intensely active.”

Ralph Touchett was silent a moment. “She hasn’t seen him for a year.”

“Well, he has a lovely place to sit. Come along, little hound.”

“It’s a dear old place,” said the young man, looking sidewise at his
neighbour.

“What’s his name?” she asked, her attention having again reverted to the
terrier.

“My father’s name?”

“Yes,” said the young lady with amusement; “but don’t tell him I asked
you.”

They had come by this time to where old Mr. Touchett was sitting, and he
slowly got up from his chair to introduce himself.

“My mother has arrived,” said Ralph, “and this is Miss Archer.”

The old man placed his two hands on her shoulders, looked at her a
moment with extreme benevolence and then gallantly kissed her. “It’s
a great pleasure to me to see you here; but I wish you had given us a
chance to receive you.”

“Oh, we were received,” said the girl. “There were about a dozen
servants in the hall. And there was an old woman curtseying at the
gate.”

“We can do better than that--if we have notice!” And the old man stood
there smiling, rubbing his hands and slowly shaking his head at her.
“But Mrs. Touchett doesn’t like receptions.”

“She went straight to her room.”

“Yes--and locked herself in. She always does that. Well, I suppose I
shall see her next week.” And Mrs. Touchett’s husband slowly resumed his
former posture.

“Before that,” said Miss Archer. “She’s coming down to dinner--at eight
o’clock. Don’t you forget a quarter to seven,” she added, turning with a
smile to Ralph.

“What’s to happen at a quarter to seven?”

“I’m to see my mother,” said Ralph.

“Ah, happy boy!” the old man commented. “You must sit down--you must
have some tea,” he observed to his wife’s niece.

“They gave me some tea in my room the moment I got there,” this young
lady answered. “I’m sorry you’re out of health,” she added, resting her
eyes upon her venerable host.

“Oh, I’m an old man, my dear; it’s time for me to be old. But I shall be
the better for having you here.”

She had been looking all round her again--at the lawn, the great trees,
the reedy, silvery Thames, the beautiful old house; and while engaged
in this survey she had made room in it for her companions; a
comprehensiveness of observation easily conceivable on the part of a
young woman who was evidently both intelligent and excited. She had
seated herself and had put away the little dog; her white hands, in
her lap, were folded upon her black dress; her head was erect, her eye
lighted, her flexible figure turned itself easily this way and that, in
sympathy with the alertness with which she evidently caught impressions.
Her impressions were numerous, and they were all reflected in a clear,
still smile. “I’ve never seen anything so beautiful as this.”

“It’s looking very well,” said Mr. Touchett. “I know the way it strikes
you. I’ve been through all that. But you’re very beautiful yourself,” he
added with a politeness by no means crudely jocular and with the happy
consciousness that his advanced age gave him the privilege of saying
such things--even to young persons who might possibly take alarm at
them.

What degree of alarm this young person took need not be exactly
measured; she instantly rose, however, with a blush which was not a
refutation. “Oh yes, of course I’m lovely!” she returned with a quick
laugh. “How old is your house? Is it Elizabethan?”

“It’s early Tudor,” said Ralph Touchett.

She turned toward him, watching his face. “Early Tudor? How very
delightful! And I suppose there are a great many others.”

“There are many much better ones.”

“Don’t say that, my son!” the old man protested. “There’s nothing better
than this.”

“I’ve got a very good one; I think in some respects it’s rather better,”
 said Lord Warburton, who as yet had not spoken, but who had kept an
attentive eye upon Miss Archer. He slightly inclined himself, smiling;
he had an excellent manner with women. The girl appreciated it in an
instant; she had not forgotten that this was Lord Warburton. “I should
like very much to show it to you,” he added.

“Don’t believe him,” cried the old man; “don’t look at it! It’s a
wretched old barrack--not to be compared with this.”

“I don’t know--I can’t judge,” said the girl, smiling at Lord Warburton.

In this discussion Ralph Touchett took no interest whatever; he stood
with his hands in his pockets, looking greatly as if he should like to
renew his conversation with his new-found cousin.

“Are you very fond of dogs?” he enquired by way of beginning. He seemed
to recognise that it was an awkward beginning for a clever man.

“Very fond of them indeed.”

“You must keep the terrier, you know,” he went on, still awkwardly.

“I’ll keep him while I’m here, with pleasure.”

“That will be for a long time, I hope.”

“You’re very kind. I hardly know. My aunt must settle that.”

“I’ll settle it with her--at a quarter to seven.” And Ralph looked at
his watch again.

“I’m glad to be here at all,” said the girl.

“I don’t believe you allow things to be settled for you.”

“Oh yes; if they’re settled as I like them.”

“I shall settle this as I like it,” said Ralph. “It’s most unaccountable
that we should never have known you.”

“I was there--you had only to come and see me.”

“There? Where do you mean?”

“In the United States: in New York and Albany and other American
places.”

“I’ve been there--all over, but I never saw you. I can’t make it out.”

Miss Archer just hesitated. “It was because there had been some
disagreement between your mother and my father, after my mother’s death,
which took place when I was a child. In consequence of it we never
expected to see you.”

“Ah, but I don’t embrace all my mother’s quarrels--heaven forbid!”
 the young man cried. “You’ve lately lost your father?” he went on more
gravely.

“Yes; more than a year ago. After that my aunt was very kind to me; she
came to see me and proposed that I should come with her to Europe.”

“I see,” said Ralph. “She has adopted you.”

“Adopted me?” The girl stared, and her blush came back to her, together
with a momentary look of pain which gave her interlocutor some alarm. He
had underestimated the effect of his words. Lord Warburton, who appeared
constantly desirous of a nearer view of Miss Archer, strolled toward the
two cousins at the moment, and as he did so she rested her wider eyes on
him.

“Oh no; she has not adopted me. I’m not a candidate for adoption.”

“I beg a thousand pardons,” Ralph murmured. “I meant--I meant--” He
hardly knew what he meant.

“You meant she has taken me up. Yes; she likes to take people up.
She has been very kind to me; but,” she added with a certain visible
eagerness of desire to be explicit, “I’m very fond of my liberty.”

“Are you talking about Mrs. Touchett?” the old man called out from his
chair. “Come here, my dear, and tell me about her. I’m always thankful
for information.”

The girl hesitated again, smiling. “She’s really very benevolent,”
 she answered; after which she went over to her uncle, whose mirth was
excited by her words.

Lord Warburton was left standing with Ralph Touchett, to whom in a
moment he said: “You wished a while ago to see my idea of an interesting
woman. There it is!”



CHAPTER III

Mrs. Touchett was certainly a person of many oddities, of which her
behaviour on returning to her husband’s house after many months was a
noticeable specimen. She had her own way of doing all that she did, and
this is the simplest description of a character which, although by no
means without liberal motions, rarely succeeded in giving an impression
of suavity. Mrs. Touchett might do a great deal of good, but she
never pleased. This way of her own, of which she was so fond, was not
intrinsically offensive--it was just unmistakeably distinguished from
the ways of others. The edges of her conduct were so very clear-cut that
for susceptible persons it sometimes had a knife-like effect. That hard
fineness came out in her deportment during the first hours of her return
from America, under circumstances in which it might have seemed that
her first act would have been to exchange greetings with her husband
and son. Mrs. Touchett, for reasons which she deemed excellent, always
retired on such occasions into impenetrable seclusion, postponing the
more sentimental ceremony until she had repaired the disorder of dress
with a completeness which had the less reason to be of high importance
as neither beauty nor vanity were concerned in it. She was a plain-faced
old woman, without graces and without any great elegance, but with an
extreme respect for her own motives. She was usually prepared to explain
these--when the explanation was asked as a favour; and in such a case
they proved totally different from those that had been attributed to
her. She was virtually separated from her husband, but she appeared to
perceive nothing irregular in the situation. It had become clear, at an
early stage of their community, that they should never desire the same
thing at the same moment, and this appearance had prompted her to rescue
disagreement from the vulgar realm of accident. She did what she could
to erect it into a law--a much more edifying aspect of it--by going to
live in Florence, where she bought a house and established herself; and
by leaving her husband to take care of the English branch of his bank.
This arrangement greatly pleased her; it was so felicitously definite.
It struck her husband in the same light, in a foggy square in London,
where it was at times the most definite fact he discerned; but he
would have preferred that such unnatural things should have a greater
vagueness. To agree to disagree had cost him an effort; he was ready to
agree to almost anything but that, and saw no reason why either assent
or dissent should be so terribly consistent. Mrs. Touchett indulged in
no regrets nor speculations, and usually came once a year to spend a
month with her husband, a period during which she apparently took pains
to convince him that she had adopted the right system. She was not fond
of the English style of life, and had three or four reasons for it to
which she currently alluded; they bore upon minor points of that ancient
order, but for Mrs. Touchett they amply justified non-residence. She
detested bread-sauce, which, as she said, looked like a poultice
and tasted like soap; she objected to the consumption of beer by
her maid-servants; and she affirmed that the British laundress (Mrs.
Touchett was very particular about the appearance of her linen) was not
a mistress of her art. At fixed intervals she paid a visit to her own
country; but this last had been longer than any of its predecessors.

She had taken up her niece--there was little doubt of that. One wet
afternoon, some four months earlier than the occurrence lately narrated,
this young lady had been seated alone with a book. To say she was so
occupied is to say that her solitude did not press upon her; for her
love of knowledge had a fertilising quality and her imagination was
strong. There was at this time, however, a want of fresh taste in
her situation which the arrival of an unexpected visitor did much to
correct. The visitor had not been announced; the girl heard her at last
walking about the adjoining room. It was in an old house at Albany, a
large, square, double house, with a notice of sale in the windows of one
of the lower apartments. There were two entrances, one of which had
long been out of use but had never been removed. They were exactly
alike--large white doors, with an arched frame and wide side-lights,
perched upon little “stoops” of red stone, which descended sidewise
to the brick pavement of the street. The two houses together formed a
single dwelling, the party-wall having been removed and the rooms placed
in communication. These rooms, above-stairs, were extremely numerous,
and were painted all over exactly alike, in a yellowish white which had
grown sallow with time. On the third floor there was a sort of arched
passage, connecting the two sides of the house, which Isabel and her
sisters used in their childhood to call the tunnel and which, though it
was short and well lighted, always seemed to the girl to be strange and
lonely, especially on winter afternoons. She had been in the house,
at different periods, as a child; in those days her grandmother lived
there. Then there had been an absence of ten years, followed by a return
to Albany before her father’s death. Her grandmother, old Mrs. Archer,
had exercised, chiefly within the limits of the family, a large
hospitality in the early period, and the little girls often spent weeks
under her roof--weeks of which Isabel had the happiest memory. The
manner of life was different from that of her own home--larger, more
plentiful, practically more festal; the discipline of the nursery was
delightfully vague and the opportunity of listening to the conversation
of one’s elders (which with Isabel was a highly-valued pleasure) almost
unbounded. There was a constant coming and going; her grandmother’s
sons and daughters and their children appeared to be in the enjoyment of
standing invitations to arrive and remain, so that the house offered to
a certain extent the appearance of a bustling provincial inn kept by a
gentle old landlady who sighed a great deal and never presented a bill.
Isabel of course knew nothing about bills; but even as a child she
thought her grandmother’s home romantic. There was a covered piazza
behind it, furnished with a swing which was a source of tremulous
interest; and beyond this was a long garden, sloping down to the stable
and containing peach-trees of barely credible familiarity. Isabel had
stayed with her grandmother at various seasons, but somehow all her
visits had a flavour of peaches. On the other side, across the street,
was an old house that was called the Dutch House--a peculiar structure
dating from the earliest colonial time, composed of bricks that had been
painted yellow, crowned with a gable that was pointed out to strangers,
defended by a rickety wooden paling and standing sidewise to the street.
It was occupied by a primary school for children of both sexes, kept
or rather let go, by a demonstrative lady of whom Isabel’s chief
recollection was that her hair was fastened with strange bedroomy combs
at the temples and that she was the widow of some one of consequence.
The little girl had been offered the opportunity of laying a foundation
of knowledge in this establishment; but having spent a single day in it,
she had protested against its laws and had been allowed to stay at home,
where, in the September days, when the windows of the Dutch House
were open, she used to hear the hum of childish voices repeating the
multiplication table--an incident in which the elation of liberty and
the pain of exclusion were indistinguishably mingled. The foundation
of her knowledge was really laid in the idleness of her grandmother’s
house, where, as most of the other inmates were not reading people,
she had uncontrolled use of a library full of books with frontispieces,
which she used to climb upon a chair to take down. When she had found
one to her taste--she was guided in the selection chiefly by the
frontispiece--she carried it into a mysterious apartment which lay
beyond the library and which was called, traditionally, no one knew
why, the office. Whose office it had been and at what period it had
flourished, she never learned; it was enough for her that it contained
an echo and a pleasant musty smell and that it was a chamber of disgrace
for old pieces of furniture whose infirmities were not always apparent
(so that the disgrace seemed unmerited and rendered them victims
of injustice) and with which, in the manner of children, she had
established relations almost human, certainly dramatic. There was an old
haircloth sofa in especial, to which she had confided a hundred childish
sorrows. The place owed much of its mysterious melancholy to the fact
that it was properly entered from the second door of the house, the
door that had been condemned, and that it was secured by bolts which a
particularly slender little girl found it impossible to slide. She
knew that this silent, motionless portal opened into the street; if the
sidelights had not been filled with green paper she might have looked
out upon the little brown stoop and the well-worn brick pavement. But
she had no wish to look out, for this would have interfered with her
theory that there was a strange, unseen place on the other side--a place
which became to the child’s imagination, according to its different
moods, a region of delight or of terror.

It was in the “office” still that Isabel was sitting on that melancholy
afternoon of early spring which I have just mentioned. At this time
she might have had the whole house to choose from, and the room she had
selected was the most depressed of its scenes. She had never opened the
bolted door nor removed the green paper (renewed by other hands) from
its sidelights; she had never assured herself that the vulgar street lay
beyond. A crude, cold rain fell heavily; the spring-time was indeed an
appeal--and it seemed a cynical, insincere appeal--to patience. Isabel,
however, gave as little heed as possible to cosmic treacheries; she kept
her eyes on her book and tried to fix her mind. It had lately occurred
to her that her mind was a good deal of a vagabond, and she had spent
much ingenuity in training it to a military step and teaching it
to advance, to halt, to retreat, to perform even more complicated
manoeuvres, at the word of command. Just now she had given it marching
orders and it had been trudging over the sandy plains of a history of
German Thought. Suddenly she became aware of a step very different from
her own intellectual pace; she listened a little and perceived that some
one was moving in the library, which communicated with the office. It
struck her first as the step of a person from whom she was looking for a
visit, then almost immediately announced itself as the tread of a
woman and a stranger--her possible visitor being neither. It had an
inquisitive, experimental quality which suggested that it would not stop
short of the threshold of the office; and in fact the doorway of this
apartment was presently occupied by a lady who paused there and looked
very hard at our heroine. She was a plain, elderly woman, dressed in
a comprehensive waterproof mantle; she had a face with a good deal of
rather violent point.

“Oh,” she began, “is that where you usually sit?” She looked about at
the heterogeneous chairs and tables.

“Not when I have visitors,” said Isabel, getting up to receive the
intruder.

She directed their course back to the library while the visitor
continued to look about her. “You seem to have plenty of other rooms;
they’re in rather better condition. But everything’s immensely worn.”

“Have you come to look at the house?” Isabel asked. “The servant will
show it to you.”

“Send her away; I don’t want to buy it. She has probably gone to
look for you and is wandering about upstairs; she didn’t seem at all
intelligent. You had better tell her it’s no matter.” And then, since
the girl stood there hesitating and wondering, this unexpected critic
said to her abruptly: “I suppose you’re one of the daughters?”

Isabel thought she had very strange manners. “It depends upon whose
daughters you mean.”

“The late Mr. Archer’s--and my poor sister’s.”

“Ah,” said Isabel slowly, “you must be our crazy Aunt Lydia!”

“Is that what your father told you to call me? I’m your Aunt Lydia, but
I’m not at all crazy: I haven’t a delusion! And which of the daughters
are you?”

“I’m the youngest of the three, and my name’s Isabel.”

“Yes; the others are Lilian and Edith. And are you the prettiest?”

“I haven’t the least idea,” said the girl.

“I think you must be.” And in this way the aunt and the niece made
friends. The aunt had quarrelled years before with her brother-in-law,
after the death of her sister, taking him to task for the manner in
which he brought up his three girls. Being a high-tempered man he had
requested her to mind her own business, and she had taken him at his
word. For many years she held no communication with him and after his
death had addressed not a word to his daughters, who had been bred in
that disrespectful view of her which we have just seen Isabel betray.
Mrs. Touchett’s behaviour was, as usual, perfectly deliberate. She
intended to go to America to look after her investments (with which her
husband, in spite of his great financial position, had nothing to
do) and would take advantage of this opportunity to enquire into the
condition of her nieces. There was no need of writing, for she should
attach no importance to any account of them she should elicit by letter;
she believed, always, in seeing for one’s self. Isabel found, however,
that she knew a good deal about them, and knew about the marriage of the
two elder girls; knew that their poor father had left very little money,
but that the house in Albany, which had passed into his hands, was to
be sold for their benefit; knew, finally, that Edmund Ludlow,
Lilian’s husband, had taken upon himself to attend to this matter, in
consideration of which the young couple, who had come to Albany during
Mr. Archer’s illness, were remaining there for the present and, as well
as Isabel herself, occupying the old place.

“How much money do you expect for it?” Mrs. Touchett asked of her
companion, who had brought her to sit in the front parlour, which she
had inspected without enthusiasm.

“I haven’t the least idea,” said the girl.

“That’s the second time you have said that to me,” her aunt rejoined.
“And yet you don’t look at all stupid.”

“I’m not stupid; but I don’t know anything about money.”

“Yes, that’s the way you were brought up--as if you were to inherit a
million. What have you in point of fact inherited?”

“I really can’t tell you. You must ask Edmund and Lilian; they’ll be
back in half an hour.”

“In Florence we should call it a very bad house,” said Mrs. Touchett;
“but here, I dare say, it will bring a high price. It ought to make
a considerable sum for each of you. In addition to that you must have
something else; it’s most extraordinary your not knowing. The position’s
of value, and they’ll probably pull it down and make a row of shops.
I wonder you don’t do that yourself; you might let the shops to great
advantage.”

Isabel stared; the idea of letting shops was new to her. “I hope they
won’t pull it down,” she said; “I’m extremely fond of it.”

“I don’t see what makes you fond of it; your father died here.”

“Yes; but I don’t dislike it for that,” the girl rather strangely
returned. “I like places in which things have happened--even if they’re
sad things. A great many people have died here; the place has been full
of life.”

“Is that what you call being full of life?”

“I mean full of experience--of people’s feelings and sorrows. And not of
their sorrows only, for I’ve been very happy here as a child.”

“You should go to Florence if you like houses in which things have
happened--especially deaths. I live in an old palace in which three
people have been murdered; three that were known and I don’t know how
many more besides.”

“In an old palace?” Isabel repeated.

“Yes, my dear; a very different affair from this. This is very
bourgeois.”

Isabel felt some emotion, for she had always thought highly of her
grandmother’s house. But the emotion was of a kind which led her to say:
“I should like very much to go to Florence.”

“Well, if you’ll be very good, and do everything I tell you I’ll take
you there,” Mrs. Touchett declared.

Our young woman’s emotion deepened; she flushed a little and smiled at
her aunt in silence. “Do everything you tell me? I don’t think I can
promise that.”

“No, you don’t look like a person of that sort. You’re fond of your own
way; but it’s not for me to blame you.”

“And yet, to go to Florence,” the girl exclaimed in a moment, “I’d
promise almost anything!”

Edmund and Lilian were slow to return, and Mrs. Touchett had an
hour’s uninterrupted talk with her niece, who found her a strange and
interesting figure: a figure essentially--almost the first she had ever
met. She was as eccentric as Isabel had always supposed; and hitherto,
whenever the girl had heard people described as eccentric, she had
thought of them as offensive or alarming. The term had always suggested
to her something grotesque and even sinister. But her aunt made it a
matter of high but easy irony, or comedy, and led her to ask herself
if the common tone, which was all she had known, had ever been as
interesting. No one certainly had on any occasion so held her as this
little thin-lipped, bright-eyed, foreign-looking woman, who retrieved an
insignificant appearance by a distinguished manner and, sitting there in
a well-worn waterproof, talked with striking familiarity of the courts
of Europe. There was nothing flighty about Mrs. Touchett, but she
recognised no social superiors, and, judging the great ones of the earth
in a way that spoke of this, enjoyed the consciousness of making
an impression on a candid and susceptible mind. Isabel at first had
answered a good many questions, and it was from her answers apparently
that Mrs. Touchett derived a high opinion of her intelligence. But after
this she had asked a good many, and her aunt’s answers, whatever turn
they took, struck her as food for deep reflexion. Mrs. Touchett waited
for the return of her other niece as long as she thought reasonable, but
as at six o’clock Mrs. Ludlow had not come in she prepared to take her
departure.

“Your sister must be a great gossip. Is she accustomed to staying out so
many hours?”

“You’ve been out almost as long as she,” Isabel replied; “she can have
left the house but a short time before you came in.”

Mrs. Touchett looked at the girl without resentment; she appeared to
enjoy a bold retort and to be disposed to be gracious. “Perhaps she
hasn’t had so good an excuse as I. Tell her at any rate that she must
come and see me this evening at that horrid hotel. She may bring her
husband if she likes, but she needn’t bring you. I shall see plenty of
you later.”



CHAPTER IV

Mrs. Ludlow was the eldest of the three sisters, and was usually thought
the most sensible; the classification being in general that Lilian
was the practical one, Edith the beauty and Isabel the “intellectual”
 superior. Mrs. Keyes, the second of the group, was the wife of an
officer of the United States Engineers, and as our history is not
further concerned with her it will suffice that she was indeed very
pretty and that she formed the ornament of those various military
stations, chiefly in the unfashionable West, to which, to her deep
chagrin, her husband was successively relegated. Lilian had married a
New York lawyer, a young man with a loud voice and an enthusiasm for
his profession; the match was not brilliant, any more than Edith’s, but
Lilian had occasionally been spoken of as a young woman who might be
thankful to marry at all--she was so much plainer than her sisters.
She was, however, very happy, and now, as the mother of two peremptory
little boys and the mistress of a wedge of brown stone violently driven
into Fifty-third Street, seemed to exult in her condition as in a bold
escape. She was short and solid, and her claim to figure was questioned,
but she was conceded presence, though not majesty; she had moreover, as
people said, improved since her marriage, and the two things in life
of which she was most distinctly conscious were her husband’s force in
argument and her sister Isabel’s originality. “I’ve never kept up with
Isabel--it would have taken all my time,” she had often remarked;
in spite of which, however, she held her rather wistfully in sight;
watching her as a motherly spaniel might watch a free greyhound. “I want
to see her safely married--that’s what I want to see,” she frequently
noted to her husband.

“Well, I must say I should have no particular desire to marry her,”
 Edmund Ludlow was accustomed to answer in an extremely audible tone.

“I know you say that for argument; you always take the opposite ground.
I don’t see what you’ve against her except that she’s so original.”

“Well, I don’t like originals; I like translations,” Mr. Ludlow had more
than once replied. “Isabel’s written in a foreign tongue. I can’t make
her out. She ought to marry an Armenian or a Portuguese.”

“That’s just what I’m afraid she’ll do!” cried Lilian, who thought
Isabel capable of anything.

She listened with great interest to the girl’s account of Mrs.
Touchett’s appearance and in the evening prepared to comply with their
aunt’s commands. Of what Isabel then said no report has remained, but
her sister’s words had doubtless prompted a word spoken to her husband
as the two were making ready for their visit. “I do hope immensely
she’ll do something handsome for Isabel; she has evidently taken a great
fancy to her.”

“What is it you wish her to do?” Edmund Ludlow asked. “Make her a big
present?”

“No indeed; nothing of the sort. But take an interest in her--sympathise
with her. She’s evidently just the sort of person to appreciate her. She
has lived so much in foreign society; she told Isabel all about it. You
know you’ve always thought Isabel rather foreign.”

“You want her to give her a little foreign sympathy, eh? Don’t you think
she gets enough at home?”

“Well, she ought to go abroad,” said Mrs. Ludlow. “She’s just the person
to go abroad.”

“And you want the old lady to take her, is that it?”

“She has offered to take her--she’s dying to have Isabel go. But what
I want her to do when she gets her there is to give her all the
advantages. I’m sure all we’ve got to do,” said Mrs. Ludlow, “is to give
her a chance.”

“A chance for what?”

“A chance to develop.”

“Oh Moses!” Edmund Ludlow exclaimed. “I hope she isn’t going to develop
any more!”

“If I were not sure you only said that for argument I should feel very
badly,” his wife replied. “But you know you love her.”

“Do you know I love you?” the young man said, jocosely, to Isabel a
little later, while he brushed his hat.

“I’m sure I don’t care whether you do or not!” exclaimed the girl; whose
voice and smile, however, were less haughty than her words.

“Oh, she feels so grand since Mrs. Touchett’s visit,” said her sister.

But Isabel challenged this assertion with a good deal of seriousness.
“You must not say that, Lily. I don’t feel grand at all.”

“I’m sure there’s no harm,” said the conciliatory Lily.

“Ah, but there’s nothing in Mrs. Touchett’s visit to make one feel
grand.”

“Oh,” exclaimed Ludlow, “she’s grander than ever!”

“Whenever I feel grand,” said the girl, “it will be for a better
reason.”

Whether she felt grand or no, she at any rate felt different, as if
something had happened to her. Left to herself for the evening she sat
a while under the lamp, her hands empty, her usual avocations unheeded.
Then she rose and moved about the room, and from one room to another,
preferring the places where the vague lamplight expired. She was
restless and even agitated; at moments she trembled a little. The
importance of what had happened was out of proportion to its appearance;
there had really been a change in her life. What it would bring with it
was as yet extremely indefinite; but Isabel was in a situation that gave
a value to any change. She had a desire to leave the past behind her
and, as she said to herself, to begin afresh. This desire indeed was not
a birth of the present occasion; it was as familiar as the sound of the
rain upon the window and it had led to her beginning afresh a great many
times. She closed her eyes as she sat in one of the dusky corners of the
quiet parlour; but it was not with a desire for dozing forgetfulness. It
was on the contrary because she felt too wide-eyed and wished to check
the sense of seeing too many things at once. Her imagination was by
habit ridiculously active; when the door was not open it jumped out of
the window. She was not accustomed indeed to keep it behind bolts; and
at important moments, when she would have been thankful to make use
of her judgement alone, she paid the penalty of having given undue
encouragement to the faculty of seeing without judging. At present, with
her sense that the note of change had been struck, came gradually a host
of images of the things she was leaving behind her. The years and hours
of her life came back to her, and for a long time, in a stillness broken
only by the ticking of the big bronze clock, she passed them in
review. It had been a very happy life and she had been a very fortunate
person--this was the truth that seemed to emerge most vividly. She had
had the best of everything, and in a world in which the circumstances
of so many people made them unenviable it was an advantage never to have
known anything particularly unpleasant. It appeared to Isabel that the
unpleasant had been even too absent from her knowledge, for she had
gathered from her acquaintance with literature that it was often a
source of interest and even of instruction. Her father had kept it
away from her--her handsome, much loved father, who always had such
an aversion to it. It was a great felicity to have been his daughter;
Isabel rose even to pride in her parentage. Since his death she had
seemed to see him as turning his braver side to his children and as
not having managed to ignore the ugly quite so much in practice as in
aspiration. But this only made her tenderness for him greater; it
was scarcely even painful to have to suppose him too generous, too
good-natured, too indifferent to sordid considerations. Many persons
had held that he carried this indifference too far, especially the large
number of those to whom he owed money. Of their opinions Isabel was
never very definitely informed; but it may interest the reader to know
that, while they had recognised in the late Mr. Archer a remarkably
handsome head and a very taking manner (indeed, as one of them had said,
he was always taking something), they had declared that he was making a
very poor use of his life. He had squandered a substantial fortune, he
had been deplorably convivial, he was known to have gambled freely.
A few very harsh critics went so far as to say that he had not even
brought up his daughters. They had had no regular education and no
permanent home; they had been at once spoiled and neglected; they had
lived with nursemaids and governesses (usually very bad ones) or had
been sent to superficial schools, kept by the French, from which, at the
end of a month, they had been removed in tears. This view of the matter
would have excited Isabel’s indignation, for to her own sense her
opportunities had been large. Even when her father had left his
daughters for three months at Neufchatel with a French _bonne_ who had
eloped with a Russian nobleman staying at the same hotel--even in this
irregular situation (an incident of the girl’s eleventh year) she had
been neither frightened nor ashamed, but had thought it a romantic
episode in a liberal education. Her father had a large way of looking at
life, of which his restlessness and even his occasional incoherency
of conduct had been only a proof. He wished his daughters, even as
children, to see as much of the world as possible; and it was for this
purpose that, before Isabel was fourteen, he had transported them three
times across the Atlantic, giving them on each occasion, however, but a
few months’ view of the subject proposed: a course which had whetted
our heroine’s curiosity without enabling her to satisfy it. She ought to
have been a partisan of her father, for she was the member of his trio
who most “made up” to him for the disagreeables he didn’t mention. In
his last days his general willingness to take leave of a world in which
the difficulty of doing as one liked appeared to increase as one grew
older had been sensibly modified by the pain of separation from his
clever, his superior, his remarkable girl. Later, when the journeys to
Europe ceased, he still had shown his children all sorts of indulgence,
and if he had been troubled about money-matters nothing ever disturbed
their irreflective consciousness of many possessions. Isabel, though she
danced very well, had not the recollection of having been in New York a
successful member of the choreographic circle; her sister Edith was,
as every one said, so very much more fetching. Edith was so striking
an example of success that Isabel could have no illusions as to what
constituted this advantage, or as to the limits of her own power to
frisk and jump and shriek--above all with rightness of effect. Nineteen
persons out of twenty (including the younger sister herself) pronounced
Edith infinitely the prettier of the two; but the twentieth, besides
reversing this judgement, had the entertainment of thinking all the
others aesthetic vulgarians. Isabel had in the depths of her nature an
even more unquenchable desire to please than Edith; but the depths of
this young lady’s nature were a very out-of-the-way place, between which
and the surface communication was interrupted by a dozen capricious
forces. She saw the young men who came in large numbers to see her
sister; but as a general thing they were afraid of her; they had a
belief that some special preparation was required for talking with her.
Her reputation of reading a great deal hung about her like the cloudy
envelope of a goddess in an epic; it was supposed to engender difficult
questions and to keep the conversation at a low temperature. The poor
girl liked to be thought clever, but she hated to be thought bookish;
she used to read in secret and, though her memory was excellent, to
abstain from showy reference. She had a great desire for knowledge, but
she really preferred almost any source of information to the printed
page; she had an immense curiosity about life and was constantly staring
and wondering. She carried within herself a great fund of life, and her
deepest enjoyment was to feel the continuity between the movements of
her own soul and the agitations of the world. For this reason she was
fond of seeing great crowds and large stretches of country, of reading
about revolutions and wars, of looking at historical pictures--a class
of efforts as to which she had often committed the conscious solecism of
forgiving them much bad painting for the sake of the subject. While the
Civil War went on she was still a very young girl; but she passed months
of this long period in a state of almost passionate excitement, in which
she felt herself at times (to her extreme confusion) stirred
almost indiscriminately by the valour of either army. Of course the
circumspection of suspicious swains had never gone the length of making
her a social proscript; for the number of those whose hearts, as they
approached her, beat only just fast enough to remind them they had heads
as well, had kept her unacquainted with the supreme disciplines of
her sex and age. She had had everything a girl could have: kindness,
admiration, bonbons, bouquets, the sense of exclusion from none of the
privileges of the world she lived in, abundant opportunity for dancing,
plenty of new dresses, the London _Spectator_, the latest publications,
the music of Gounod, the poetry of Browning, the prose of George Eliot.

These things now, as memory played over them, resolved themselves into a
multitude of scenes and figures. Forgotten things came back to her; many
others, which she had lately thought of great moment, dropped out of
sight. The result was kaleidoscopic, but the movement of the instrument
was checked at last by the servant’s coming in with the name of a
gentleman. The name of the gentleman was Caspar Goodwood; he was a
straight young man from Boston, who had known Miss Archer for the last
twelvemonth and who, thinking her the most beautiful young woman of her
time, had pronounced the time, according to the rule I have hinted at,
a foolish period of history. He sometimes wrote to her and had within a
week or two written from New York. She had thought it very possible he
would come in--had indeed all the rainy day been vaguely expecting him.
Now that she learned he was there, nevertheless, she felt no eagerness
to receive him. He was the finest young man she had ever seen, was
indeed quite a splendid young man; he inspired her with a sentiment of
high, of rare respect. She had never felt equally moved to it by any
other person. He was supposed by the world in general to wish to marry
her, but this of course was between themselves. It at least may be
affirmed that he had travelled from New York to Albany expressly to see
her; having learned in the former city, where he was spending a few
days and where he had hoped to find her, that she was still at the State
capital. Isabel delayed for some minutes to go to him; she moved about
the room with a new sense of complications. But at last she presented
herself and found him standing near the lamp. He was tall, strong and
somewhat stiff; he was also lean and brown. He was not romantically, he
was much rather obscurely, handsome; but his physiognomy had an air of
requesting your attention, which it rewarded according to the charm you
found in blue eyes of remarkable fixedness, the eyes of a complexion
other than his own, and a jaw of the somewhat angular mould which is
supposed to bespeak resolution. Isabel said to herself that it bespoke
resolution to-night; in spite of which, in half an hour, Caspar
Goodwood, who had arrived hopeful as well as resolute, took his way back
to his lodging with the feeling of a man defeated. He was not, it may be
added, a man weakly to accept defeat.



CHAPTER V

Ralph Touchett was a philosopher, but nevertheless he knocked at his
mother’s door (at a quarter to seven) with a good deal of eagerness.
Even philosophers have their preferences, and it must be admitted
that of his progenitors his father ministered most to his sense of the
sweetness of filial dependence. His father, as he had often said to
himself, was the more motherly; his mother, on the other hand, was
paternal, and even, according to the slang of the day, gubernatorial.
She was nevertheless very fond of her only child and had always insisted
on his spending three months of the year with her. Ralph rendered
perfect justice to her affection and knew that in her thoughts and her
thoroughly arranged and servanted life his turn always came after the
other nearest subjects of her solicitude, the various punctualities of
performance of the workers of her will. He found her completely dressed
for dinner, but she embraced her boy with her gloved hands and made
him sit on the sofa beside her. She enquired scrupulously about her
husband’s health and about the young man’s own, and, receiving no
very brilliant account of either, remarked that she was more than ever
convinced of her wisdom in not exposing herself to the English climate.
In this case she also might have given way. Ralph smiled at the idea of
his mother’s giving way, but made no point of reminding her that his
own infirmity was not the result of the English climate, from which he
absented himself for a considerable part of each year.

He had been a very small boy when his father, Daniel Tracy Touchett,
a native of Rutland, in the State of Vermont, came to England as
subordinate partner in a banking-house where some ten years later he
gained preponderant control. Daniel Touchett saw before him a life-long
residence in his adopted country, of which, from the first, he took a
simple, sane and accommodating view. But, as he said to himself, he had
no intention of disamericanising, nor had he a desire to teach his
only son any such subtle art. It had been for himself so very soluble a
problem to live in England assimilated yet unconverted that it seemed to
him equally simple his lawful heir should after his death carry on the
grey old bank in the white American light. He was at pains to intensify
this light, however, by sending the boy home for his education. Ralph
spent several terms at an American school and took a degree at an
American university, after which, as he struck his father on his return
as even redundantly native, he was placed for some three years in
residence at Oxford. Oxford swallowed up Harvard, and Ralph became
at last English enough. His outward conformity to the manners that
surrounded him was none the less the mask of a mind that greatly enjoyed
its independence, on which nothing long imposed itself, and which,
naturally inclined to adventure and irony, indulged in a boundless
liberty of appreciation. He began with being a young man of promise; at
Oxford he distinguished himself, to his father’s ineffable satisfaction,
and the people about him said it was a thousand pities so clever a
fellow should be shut out from a career. He might have had a career
by returning to his own country (though this point is shrouded in
uncertainty) and even if Mr. Touchett had been willing to part with
him (which was not the case) it would have gone hard with him to put
a watery waste permanently between himself and the old man whom he
regarded as his best friend. Ralph was not only fond of his father,
he admired him--he enjoyed the opportunity of observing him. Daniel
Touchett, to his perception, was a man of genius, and though he himself
had no aptitude for the banking mystery he made a point of learning
enough of it to measure the great figure his father had played. It was
not this, however, he mainly relished; it was the fine ivory surface,
polished as by the English air, that the old man had opposed to
possibilities of penetration. Daniel Touchett had been neither at
Harvard nor at Oxford, and it was his own fault if he had placed in his
son’s hands the key to modern criticism. Ralph, whose head was full
of ideas which his father had never guessed, had a high esteem for the
latter’s originality. Americans, rightly or wrongly, are commended for
the ease with which they adapt themselves to foreign conditions; but Mr.
Touchett had made of the very limits of his pliancy half the ground
of his general success. He had retained in their freshness most of
his marks of primary pressure; his tone, as his son always noted with
pleasure, was that of the more luxuriant parts of New England. At the
end of his life he had become, on his own ground, as mellow as he
was rich; he combined consummate shrewdness with the disposition
superficially to fraternise, and his “social position,” on which he had
never wasted a care, had the firm perfection of an unthumbed fruit. It
was perhaps his want of imagination and of what is called the historic
consciousness; but to many of the impressions usually made by English
life upon the cultivated stranger his sense was completely closed. There
were certain differences he had never perceived, certain habits he had
never formed, certain obscurities he had never sounded. As regards these
latter, on the day he had sounded them his son would have thought less
well of him.

Ralph, on leaving Oxford, had spent a couple of years in travelling;
after which he had found himself perched on a high stool in his father’s
bank. The responsibility and honour of such positions is not, I
believe, measured by the height of the stool, which depends upon other
considerations: Ralph, indeed, who had very long legs, was fond of
standing, and even of walking about, at his work. To this exercise,
however, he was obliged to devote but a limited period, for at the end
of some eighteen months he had become aware of his being seriously out
of health. He had caught a violent cold, which fixed itself on his lungs
and threw them into dire confusion. He had to give up work and apply,
to the letter, the sorry injunction to take care of himself. At first he
slighted the task; it appeared to him it was not himself in the least
he was taking care of, but an uninteresting and uninterested person
with whom he had nothing in common. This person, however, improved
on acquaintance, and Ralph grew at last to have a certain grudging
tolerance, even an undemonstrative respect, for him. Misfortune makes
strange bedfellows, and our young man, feeling that he had something
at stake in the matter--it usually struck him as his reputation for
ordinary wit--devoted to his graceless charge an amount of attention of
which note was duly taken and which had at least the effect of keeping
the poor fellow alive. One of his lungs began to heal, the other
promised to follow its example, and he was assured he might outweather
a dozen winters if he would betake himself to those climates in which
consumptives chiefly congregate. As he had grown extremely fond of
London, he cursed the flatness of exile: but at the same time that he
cursed he conformed, and gradually, when he found his sensitive organ
grateful even for grim favours, he conferred them with a lighter hand.
He wintered abroad, as the phrase is; basked in the sun, stopped at home
when the wind blew, went to bed when it rained, and once or twice, when
it had snowed overnight, almost never got up again.

A secret hoard of indifference--like a thick cake a fond old nurse might
have slipped into his first school outfit--came to his aid and helped to
reconcile him to sacrifice; since at the best he was too ill for aught
but that arduous game. As he said to himself, there was really nothing
he had wanted very much to do, so that he had at least not renounced the
field of valour. At present, however, the fragrance of forbidden fruit
seemed occasionally to float past him and remind him that the finest of
pleasures is the rush of action. Living as he now lived was like reading
a good book in a poor translation--a meagre entertainment for a young
man who felt that he might have been an excellent linguist. He had good
winters and poor winters, and while the former lasted he was sometimes
the sport of a vision of virtual recovery. But this vision was dispelled
some three years before the occurrence of the incidents with which this
history opens: he had on that occasion remained later than usual in
England and had been overtaken by bad weather before reaching Algiers.
He arrived more dead than alive and lay there for several weeks between
life and death. His convalescence was a miracle, but the first use he
made of it was to assure himself that such miracles happen but once. He
said to himself that his hour was in sight and that it behoved him to
keep his eyes upon it, yet that it was also open to him to spend the
interval as agreeably as might be consistent with such a preoccupation.
With the prospect of losing them the simple use of his faculties became
an exquisite pleasure; it seemed to him the joys of contemplation had
never been sounded. He was far from the time when he had found it hard
that he should be obliged to give up the idea of distinguishing himself;
an idea none the less importunate for being vague and none the less
delightful for having had to struggle in the same breast with bursts
of inspiring self-criticism. His friends at present judged him more
cheerful, and attributed it to a theory, over which they shook their
heads knowingly, that he would recover his health. His serenity was but
the array of wild flowers niched in his ruin.

It was very probably this sweet-tasting property of the observed thing
in itself that was mainly concerned in Ralph’s quickly-stirred interest
in the advent of a young lady who was evidently not insipid. If he was
consideringly disposed, something told him, here was occupation enough
for a succession of days. It may be added, in summary fashion, that the
imagination of loving--as distinguished from that of being loved--had
still a place in his reduced sketch. He had only forbidden himself the
riot of expression. However, he shouldn’t inspire his cousin with a
passion, nor would she be able, even should she try, to help him to one.
“And now tell me about the young lady,” he said to his mother. “What do
you mean to do with her?”

Mrs. Touchett was prompt. “I mean to ask your father to invite her to
stay three or four weeks at Gardencourt.”

“You needn’t stand on any such ceremony as that,” said Ralph. “My father
will ask her as a matter of course.”

“I don’t know about that. She’s my niece; she’s not his.”

“Good Lord, dear mother; what a sense of property! That’s all the more
reason for his asking her. But after that--I mean after three months
(for its absurd asking the poor girl to remain but for three or four
paltry weeks)--what do you mean to do with her?”

“I mean to take her to Paris. I mean to get her clothing.”

“Ah yes, that’s of course. But independently of that?”

“I shall invite her to spend the autumn with me in Florence.”

“You don’t rise above detail, dear mother,” said Ralph. “I should like
to know what you mean to do with her in a general way.”

“My duty!” Mrs. Touchett declared. “I suppose you pity her very much,”
 she added.

“No, I don’t think I pity her. She doesn’t strike me as inviting
compassion. I think I envy her. Before being sure, however, give me a
hint of where you see your duty.”

“In showing her four European countries--I shall leave her the choice of
two of them--and in giving her the opportunity of perfecting herself in
French, which she already knows very well.”

Ralph frowned a little. “That sounds rather dry--even allowing her the
choice of two of the countries.”

“If it’s dry,” said his mother with a laugh, “you can leave Isabel alone
to water it! She is as good as a summer rain, any day.”

“Do you mean she’s a gifted being?”

“I don’t know whether she’s a gifted being, but she’s a clever
girl--with a strong will and a high temper. She has no idea of being
bored.”

“I can imagine that,” said Ralph; and then he added abruptly: “How do
you two get on?”

“Do you mean by that that I’m a bore? I don’t think she finds me one.
Some girls might, I know; but Isabel’s too clever for that. I think I
greatly amuse her. We get on because I understand her, I know the sort
of girl she is. She’s very frank, and I’m very frank: we know just what
to expect of each other.”

“Ah, dear mother,” Ralph exclaimed, “one always knows what to expect
of you! You’ve never surprised me but once, and that’s to-day--in
presenting me with a pretty cousin whose existence I had never
suspected.”

“Do you think her so very pretty?”

“Very pretty indeed; but I don’t insist upon that. It’s her general
air of being some one in particular that strikes me. Who is this rare
creature, and what is she? Where did you find her, and how did you make
her acquaintance?”

“I found her in an old house at Albany, sitting in a dreary room on a
rainy day, reading a heavy book and boring herself to death. She didn’t
know she was bored, but when I left her no doubt of it she seemed very
grateful for the service. You may say I shouldn’t have enlightened her--I
should have let her alone. There’s a good deal in that, but I acted
conscientiously; I thought she was meant for something better. It
occurred to me that it would be a kindness to take her about and
introduce her to the world. She thinks she knows a great deal of
it--like most American girls; but like most American girls she’s
ridiculously mistaken. If you want to know, I thought she would do me
credit. I like to be well thought of, and for a woman of my age there’s
no greater convenience, in some ways, than an attractive niece. You
know I had seen nothing of my sister’s children for years; I disapproved
entirely of the father. But I always meant to do something for them when
he should have gone to his reward. I ascertained where they were to be
found and, without any preliminaries, went and introduced myself. There
are two others of them, both of whom are married; but I saw only the
elder, who has, by the way, a very uncivil husband. The wife, whose name
is Lily, jumped at the idea of my taking an interest in Isabel; she
said it was just what her sister needed--that some one should take
an interest in her. She spoke of her as you might speak of some young
person of genius--in want of encouragement and patronage. It may be that
Isabel’s a genius; but in that case I’ve not yet learned her special
line. Mrs. Ludlow was especially keen about my taking her to Europe;
they all regard Europe over there as a land of emigration, of rescue, a
refuge for their superfluous population. Isabel herself seemed very
glad to come, and the thing was easily arranged. There was a little
difficulty about the money-question, as she seemed averse to being
under pecuniary obligations. But she has a small income and she supposes
herself to be travelling at her own expense.”

Ralph had listened attentively to this judicious report, by which his
interest in the subject of it was not impaired. “Ah, if she’s a genius,”
 he said, “we must find out her special line. Is it by chance for
flirting?”

“I don’t think so. You may suspect that at first, but you’ll be wrong.
You won’t, I think, in any way, be easily right about her.”

“Warburton’s wrong then!” Ralph rejoicingly exclaimed. “He flatters
himself he has made that discovery.”

His mother shook her head. “Lord Warburton won’t understand her. He
needn’t try.”

“He’s very intelligent,” said Ralph; “but it’s right he should be
puzzled once in a while.”

“Isabel will enjoy puzzling a lord,” Mrs. Touchett remarked.

Her son frowned a little. “What does she know about lords?”

“Nothing at all: that will puzzle him all the more.”

Ralph greeted these words with a laugh and looked out of the window.
Then, “Are you not going down to see my father?” he asked.

“At a quarter to eight,” said Mrs. Touchett.

Her son looked at his watch. “You’ve another quarter of an hour then.
Tell me some more about Isabel.” After which, as Mrs. Touchett declined
his invitation, declaring that he must find out for himself, “Well,” he
pursued, “she’ll certainly do you credit. But won’t she also give you
trouble?”

“I hope not; but if she does I shall not shrink from it. I never do
that.”

“She strikes me as very natural,” said Ralph.

“Natural people are not the most trouble.”

“No,” said Ralph; “you yourself are a proof of that. You’re extremely
natural, and I’m sure you have never troubled any one. It takes trouble
to do that. But tell me this; it just occurs to me. Is Isabel capable of
making herself disagreeable?”

“Ah,” cried his mother, “you ask too many questions! Find that out for
yourself.”

His questions, however, were not exhausted. “All this time,” he said,
“you’ve not told me what you intend to do with her.”

“Do with her? You talk as if she were a yard of calico. I shall do
absolutely nothing with her, and she herself will do everything she
chooses. She gave me notice of that.”

“What you meant then, in your telegram, was that her character’s
independent.”

“I never know what I mean in my telegrams--especially those I send from
America. Clearness is too expensive. Come down to your father.”

“It’s not yet a quarter to eight,” said Ralph.

“I must allow for his impatience,” Mrs. Touchett answered. Ralph knew
what to think of his father’s impatience; but, making no rejoinder, he
offered his mother his arm. This put it in his power, as they
descended together, to stop her a moment on the middle landing of the
staircase--the broad, low, wide-armed staircase of time-blackened oak
which was one of the most striking features of Gardencourt. “You’ve no
plan of marrying her?” he smiled.

“Marrying her? I should be sorry to play her such a trick! But apart
from that, she’s perfectly able to marry herself. She has every
facility.”

“Do you mean to say she has a husband picked out?”

“I don’t know about a husband, but there’s a young man in Boston--!”

Ralph went on; he had no desire to hear about the young man in Boston.
“As my father says, they’re always engaged!”

His mother had told him that he must satisfy his curiosity at the
source, and it soon became evident he should not want for occasion. He
had a good deal of talk with his young kinswoman when the two had been
left together in the drawing-room. Lord Warburton, who had ridden over
from his own house, some ten miles distant, remounted and took his
departure before dinner; and an hour after this meal was ended Mr. and
Mrs. Touchett, who appeared to have quite emptied the measure of their
forms, withdrew, under the valid pretext of fatigue, to their respective
apartments. The young man spent an hour with his cousin; though she had
been travelling half the day she appeared in no degree spent. She was
really tired; she knew it, and knew she should pay for it on the morrow;
but it was her habit at this period to carry exhaustion to the furthest
point and confess to it only when dissimulation broke down. A fine
hypocrisy was for the present possible; she was interested; she was, as
she said to herself, floated. She asked Ralph to show her the pictures;
there were a great many in the house, most of them of his own choosing.
The best were arranged in an oaken gallery, of charming proportions,
which had a sitting-room at either end of it and which in the evening
was usually lighted. The light was insufficient to show the pictures
to advantage, and the visit might have stood over to the morrow.
This suggestion Ralph had ventured to make; but Isabel looked
disappointed--smiling still, however--and said: “If you please I should
like to see them just a little.” She was eager, she knew she was eager
and now seemed so; she couldn’t help it. “She doesn’t take suggestions,”
 Ralph said to himself; but he said it without irritation; her pressure
amused and even pleased him. The lamps were on brackets, at intervals,
and if the light was imperfect it was genial. It fell upon the vague
squares of rich colour and on the faded gilding of heavy frames; it made
a sheen on the polished floor of the gallery. Ralph took a candlestick
and moved about, pointing out the things he liked; Isabel, inclining to
one picture after another, indulged in little exclamations and murmurs.
She was evidently a judge; she had a natural taste; he was struck with
that. She took a candlestick herself and held it slowly here and there;
she lifted it high, and as she did so he found himself pausing in the
middle of the place and bending his eyes much less upon the pictures
than on her presence. He lost nothing, in truth, by these wandering
glances, for she was better worth looking at than most works of art.
She was undeniably spare, and ponderably light, and proveably tall; when
people had wished to distinguish her from the other two Miss Archers
they had always called her the willowy one. Her hair, which was dark
even to blackness, had been an object of envy to many women; her light
grey eyes, a little too firm perhaps in her graver moments, had an
enchanting range of concession. They walked slowly up one side of the
gallery and down the other, and then she said: “Well, now I know more
than I did when I began!”

“You apparently have a great passion for knowledge,” her cousin
returned.

“I think I have; most girls are horridly ignorant.”

“You strike me as different from most girls.”

“Ah, some of them would--but the way they’re talked to!” murmured
Isabel, who preferred not to dilate just yet on herself. Then in a
moment, to change the subject, “Please tell me--isn’t there a ghost?”
 she went on.

“A ghost?”

“A castle-spectre, a thing that appears. We call them ghosts in
America.”

“So we do here, when we see them.”

“You do see them then? You ought to, in this romantic old house.”

“It’s not a romantic old house,” said Ralph. “You’ll be disappointed if
you count on that. It’s a dismally prosaic one; there’s no romance here
but what you may have brought with you.”

“I’ve brought a great deal; but it seems to me I’ve brought it to the
right place.”

“To keep it out of harm, certainly; nothing will ever happen to it here,
between my father and me.”

Isabel looked at him a moment. “Is there never any one here but your
father and you?”

“My mother, of course.”

“Oh, I know your mother; she’s not romantic. Haven’t you other people?”

“Very few.”

“I’m sorry for that; I like so much to see people.”

“Oh, we’ll invite all the county to amuse you,” said Ralph.

“Now you’re making fun of me,” the girl answered rather gravely. “Who
was the gentleman on the lawn when I arrived?”

“A county neighbour; he doesn’t come very often.”

“I’m sorry for that; I liked him,” said Isabel.

“Why, it seemed to me that you barely spoke to him,” Ralph objected.

“Never mind, I like him all the same. I like your father too,
immensely.”

“You can’t do better than that. He’s the dearest of the dear.”

“I’m so sorry he is ill,” said Isabel.

“You must help me to nurse him; you ought to be a good nurse.”

“I don’t think I am; I’ve been told I’m not; I’m said to have too many
theories. But you haven’t told me about the ghost,” she added.

Ralph, however, gave no heed to this observation. “You like my father
and you like Lord Warburton. I infer also that you like my mother.”

“I like your mother very much, because--because--” And Isabel found
herself attempting to assign a reason for her affection for Mrs.
Touchett.

“Ah, we never know why!” said her companion, laughing.

“I always know why,” the girl answered. “It’s because she doesn’t expect
one to like her. She doesn’t care whether one does or not.”

“So you adore her--out of perversity? Well, I take greatly after my
mother,” said Ralph.

“I don’t believe you do at all. You wish people to like you, and you try
to make them do it.”

“Good heavens, how you see through one!” he cried with a dismay that was
not altogether jocular.

“But I like you all the same,” his cousin went on. “The way to clinch
the matter will be to show me the ghost.”

Ralph shook his head sadly. “I might show it to you, but you’d never see
it. The privilege isn’t given to every one; it’s not enviable. It has
never been seen by a young, happy, innocent person like you. You must
have suffered first, have suffered greatly, have gained some miserable
knowledge. In that way your eyes are opened to it. I saw it long ago,”
 said Ralph.

“I told you just now I’m very fond of knowledge,” Isabel answered.

“Yes, of happy knowledge--of pleasant knowledge. But you haven’t
suffered, and you’re not made to suffer. I hope you’ll never see the
ghost!”

She had listened to him attentively, with a smile on her lips, but with
a certain gravity in her eyes. Charming as he found her, she had struck
him as rather presumptuous--indeed it was a part of her charm; and he
wondered what she would say. “I’m not afraid, you know,” she said: which
seemed quite presumptuous enough.

“You’re not afraid of suffering?”

“Yes, I’m afraid of suffering. But I’m not afraid of ghosts. And I think
people suffer too easily,” she added.

“I don’t believe you do,” said Ralph, looking at her with his hands in
his pockets.

“I don’t think that’s a fault,” she answered. “It’s not absolutely
necessary to suffer; we were not made for that.”

“You were not, certainly.”

“I’m not speaking of myself.” And she wandered off a little.

“No, it isn’t a fault,” said her cousin. “It’s a merit to be strong.”

“Only, if you don’t suffer they call you hard,” Isabel remarked.

They passed out of the smaller drawing-room, into which they had
returned from the gallery, and paused in the hall, at the foot of the
staircase. Here Ralph presented his companion with her bedroom candle,
which he had taken from a niche. “Never mind what they call you. When
you do suffer they call you an idiot. The great point’s to be as happy
as possible.”

She looked at him a little; she had taken her candle and placed her foot
on the oaken stair. “Well,” she said, “that’s what I came to Europe for,
to be as happy as possible. Good-night.”

“Good-night! I wish you all success, and shall be very glad to
contribute to it!”

She turned away, and he watched her as she slowly ascended. Then, with
his hands always in his pockets, he went back to the empty drawing-room.



CHAPTER VI

Isabel Archer was a young person of many theories; her imagination was
remarkably active. It had been her fortune to possess a finer mind
than most of the persons among whom her lot was cast; to have a larger
perception of surrounding facts and to care for knowledge that was
tinged with the unfamiliar. It is true that among her contemporaries
she passed for a young woman of extraordinary profundity; for these
excellent people never withheld their admiration from a reach of
intellect of which they themselves were not conscious, and spoke of
Isabel as a prodigy of learning, a creature reported to have read the
classic authors--in translations. Her paternal aunt, Mrs. Varian, once
spread the rumour that Isabel was writing a book--Mrs. Varian having a
reverence for books, and averred that the girl would distinguish herself
in print. Mrs. Varian thought highly of literature, for which she
entertained that esteem that is connected with a sense of privation.
Her own large house, remarkable for its assortment of mosaic tables and
decorated ceilings, was unfurnished with a library, and in the way of
printed volumes contained nothing but half a dozen novels in paper on
a shelf in the apartment of one of the Miss Varians. Practically, Mrs.
Varian’s acquaintance with literature was confined to The New York
_Interviewer_; as she very justly said, after you had read the _Interviewer_
you had lost all faith in culture. Her tendency, with this, was rather
to keep the _Interviewer_ out of the way of her daughters; she was
determined to bring them up properly, and they read nothing at all. Her
impression with regard to Isabel’s labours was quite illusory; the girl
had never attempted to write a book and had no desire for the laurels
of authorship. She had no talent for expression and too little of the
consciousness of genius; she only had a general idea that people were
right when they treated her as if she were rather superior. Whether or
no she were superior, people were right in admiring her if they thought
her so; for it seemed to her often that her mind moved more quickly
than theirs, and this encouraged an impatience that might easily be
confounded with superiority. It may be affirmed without delay that
Isabel was probably very liable to the sin of self-esteem; she often
surveyed with complacency the field of her own nature; she was in the
habit of taking for granted, on scanty evidence, that she was right;
she treated herself to occasions of homage. Meanwhile her errors and
delusions were frequently such as a biographer interested in preserving
the dignity of his subject must shrink from specifying. Her thoughts
were a tangle of vague outlines which had never been corrected by the
judgement of people speaking with authority. In matters of opinion
she had had her own way, and it had led her into a thousand ridiculous
zigzags. At moments she discovered she was grotesquely wrong, and then
she treated herself to a week of passionate humility. After this she
held her head higher than ever again; for it was of no use, she had an
unquenchable desire to think well of herself. She had a theory that it
was only under this provision life was worth living; that one should
be one of the best, should be conscious of a fine organisation (she
couldn’t help knowing her organisation was fine), should move in a realm
of light, of natural wisdom, of happy impulse, of inspiration gracefully
chronic. It was almost as unnecessary to cultivate doubt of one’s self
as to cultivate doubt of one’s best friend: one should try to be one’s
own best friend and to give one’s self, in this manner, distinguished
company. The girl had a certain nobleness of imagination which rendered
her a good many services and played her a great many tricks. She spent
half her time in thinking of beauty and bravery and magnanimity; she had
a fixed determination to regard the world as a place of brightness, of
free expansion, of irresistible action: she held it must be detestable
to be afraid or ashamed. She had an infinite hope that she should never
do anything wrong. She had resented so strongly, after discovering them,
her mere errors of feeling (the discovery always made her tremble as if
she had escaped from a trap which might have caught her and smothered
her) that the chance of inflicting a sensible injury upon another
person, presented only as a contingency, caused her at moments to hold
her breath. That always struck her as the worst thing that could happen
to her. On the whole, reflectively, she was in no uncertainty about
the things that were wrong. She had no love of their look, but when
she fixed them hard she recognised them. It was wrong to be mean, to be
jealous, to be false, to be cruel; she had seen very little of the evil
of the world, but she had seen women who lied and who tried to hurt
each other. Seeing such things had quickened her high spirit; it seemed
indecent not to scorn them. Of course the danger of a high spirit was
the danger of inconsistency--the danger of keeping up the flag after the
place has surrendered; a sort of behaviour so crooked as to be almost
a dishonour to the flag. But Isabel, who knew little of the sorts of
artillery to which young women are exposed, flattered herself that such
contradictions would never be noted in her own conduct. Her life should
always be in harmony with the most pleasing impression she should
produce; she would be what she appeared, and she would appear what she
was. Sometimes she went so far as to wish that she might find herself
some day in a difficult position, so that she should have the pleasure
of being as heroic as the occasion demanded. Altogether, with her meagre
knowledge, her inflated ideals, her confidence at once innocent and
dogmatic, her temper at once exacting and indulgent, her mixture of
curiosity and fastidiousness, of vivacity and indifference, her desire
to look very well and to be if possible even better, her determination
to see, to try, to know, her combination of the delicate, desultory,
flame-like spirit and the eager and personal creature of conditions: she
would be an easy victim of scientific criticism if she were not intended
to awaken on the reader’s part an impulse more tender and more purely
expectant.

It was one of her theories that Isabel Archer was very fortunate in
being independent, and that she ought to make some very enlightened use
of that state. She never called it the state of solitude, much less of
singleness; she thought such descriptions weak, and, besides, her sister
Lily constantly urged her to come and abide. She had a friend whose
acquaintance she had made shortly before her father’s death, who offered
so high an example of useful activity that Isabel always thought of her
as a model. Henrietta Stackpole had the advantage of an admired ability;
she was thoroughly launched in journalism, and her letters to the
_Interviewer_, from Washington, Newport, the White Mountains and other
places, were universally quoted. Isabel pronounced them with confidence
“ephemeral,” but she esteemed the courage, energy and good-humour of the
writer, who, without parents and without property, had adopted three
of the children of an infirm and widowed sister and was paying their
school-bills out of the proceeds of her literary labour. Henrietta was
in the van of progress and had clear-cut views on most subjects; her
cherished desire had long been to come to Europe and write a series of
letters to the _Interviewer_ from the radical point of view--an enterprise
the less difficult as she knew perfectly in advance what her opinions
would be and to how many objections most European institutions lay
open. When she heard that Isabel was coming she wished to start at once;
thinking, naturally, that it would be delightful the two should travel
together. She had been obliged, however, to postpone this enterprise.
She thought Isabel a glorious creature, and had spoken of her covertly
in some of her letters, though she never mentioned the fact to her
friend, who would not have taken pleasure in it and was not a regular
student of the _Interviewer_. Henrietta, for Isabel, was chiefly a proof
that a woman might suffice to herself and be happy. Her resources were
of the obvious kind; but even if one had not the journalistic talent and
a genius for guessing, as Henrietta said, what the public was going to
want, one was not therefore to conclude that one had no vocation,
no beneficent aptitude of any sort, and resign one’s self to being
frivolous and hollow. Isabel was stoutly determined not to be hollow. If
one should wait with the right patience one would find some happy work
to one’s hand. Of course, among her theories, this young lady was not
without a collection of views on the subject of marriage. The first on
the list was a conviction of the vulgarity of thinking too much of it.
From lapsing into eagerness on this point she earnestly prayed she might
be delivered; she held that a woman ought to be able to live to herself,
in the absence of exceptional flimsiness, and that it was perfectly
possible to be happy without the society of a more or less coarse-minded
person of another sex. The girl’s prayer was very sufficiently answered;
something pure and proud that there was in her--something cold and dry
an unappreciated suitor with a taste for analysis might have called
it--had hitherto kept her from any great vanity of conjecture on the
article of possible husbands. Few of the men she saw seemed worth a
ruinous expenditure, and it made her smile to think that one of them
should present himself as an incentive to hope and a reward of patience.
Deep in her soul--it was the deepest thing there--lay a belief that if
a certain light should dawn she could give herself completely; but
this image, on the whole, was too formidable to be attractive. Isabel’s
thoughts hovered about it, but they seldom rested on it long; after a
little it ended in alarms. It often seemed to her that she thought too
much about herself; you could have made her colour, any day in the
year, by calling her a rank egoist. She was always planning out her
development, desiring her perfection, observing her progress. Her nature
had, in her conceit, a certain garden-like quality, a suggestion of
perfume and murmuring boughs, of shady bowers and lengthening vistas,
which made her feel that introspection was, after all, an exercise
in the open air, and that a visit to the recesses of one’s spirit was
harmless when one returned from it with a lapful of roses. But she was
often reminded that there were other gardens in the world than those of
her remarkable soul, and that there were moreover a great many places
which were not gardens at all--only dusky pestiferous tracts, planted
thick with ugliness and misery. In the current of that repaid curiosity
on which she had lately been floating, which had conveyed her to this
beautiful old England and might carry her much further still, she often
checked herself with the thought of the thousands of people who were
less happy than herself--a thought which for the moment made her fine,
full consciousness appear a kind of immodesty. What should one do with
the misery of the world in a scheme of the agreeable for one’s self? It
must be confessed that this question never held her long. She was too
young, too impatient to live, too unacquainted with pain. She always
returned to her theory that a young woman whom after all every one
thought clever should begin by getting a general impression of life.
This impression was necessary to prevent mistakes, and after it should
be secured she might make the unfortunate condition of others a subject
of special attention.

England was a revelation to her, and she found herself as diverted as a
child at a pantomime. In her infantine excursions to Europe she had
seen only the Continent, and seen it from the nursery window; Paris, not
London, was her father’s Mecca, and into many of his interests there his
children had naturally not entered. The images of that time moreover had
grown faint and remote, and the old-world quality in everything that
she now saw had all the charm of strangeness. Her uncle’s house seemed a
picture made real; no refinement of the agreeable was lost upon
Isabel; the rich perfection of Gardencourt at once revealed a world and
gratified a need. The large, low rooms, with brown ceilings and dusky
corners, the deep embrasures and curious casements, the quiet light on
dark, polished panels, the deep greenness outside, that seemed always
peeping in, the sense of well-ordered privacy in the centre of a
“property”--a place where sounds were felicitously accidental, where
the tread was muffed by the earth itself and in the thick mild air all
friction dropped out of contact and all shrillness out of talk--these
things were much to the taste of our young lady, whose taste played a
considerable part in her emotions. She formed a fast friendship with her
uncle, and often sat by his chair when he had had it moved out to the
lawn. He passed hours in the open air, sitting with folded hands like
a placid, homely household god, a god of service, who had done his work
and received his wages and was trying to grow used to weeks and months
made up only of off-days. Isabel amused him more than she suspected--the
effect she produced upon people was often different from what she
supposed--and he frequently gave himself the pleasure of making her
chatter. It was by this term that he qualified her conversation, which
had much of the “point” observable in that of the young ladies of her
country, to whom the ear of the world is more directly presented than to
their sisters in other lands. Like the mass of American girls Isabel had
been encouraged to express herself; her remarks had been attended
to; she had been expected to have emotions and opinions. Many of her
opinions had doubtless but a slender value, many of her emotions passed
away in the utterance; but they had left a trace in giving her the habit
of seeming at least to feel and think, and in imparting moreover to
her words when she was really moved that prompt vividness which so many
people had regarded as a sign of superiority. Mr. Touchett used to think
that she reminded him of his wife when his wife was in her teens. It was
because she was fresh and natural and quick to understand, to speak--so
many characteristics of her niece--that he had fallen in love with Mrs.
Touchett. He never expressed this analogy to the girl herself, however;
for if Mrs. Touchett had once been like Isabel, Isabel was not at all
like Mrs. Touchett. The old man was full of kindness for her; it was a
long time, as he said, since they had had any young life in the house;
and our rustling, quickly-moving, clear-voiced heroine was as agreeable
to his sense as the sound of flowing water. He wanted to do something
for her and wished she would ask it of him. She would ask nothing but
questions; it is true that of these she asked a quantity. Her uncle had
a great fund of answers, though her pressure sometimes came in forms
that puzzled him. She questioned him immensely about England, about the
British constitution, the English character, the state of politics,
the manners and customs of the royal family, the peculiarities of the
aristocracy, the way of living and thinking of his neighbours; and in
begging to be enlightened on these points she usually enquired whether
they corresponded with the descriptions in the books. The old man always
looked at her a little with his fine dry smile while he smoothed down
the shawl spread across his legs.

“The books?” he once said; “well, I don’t know much about the books. You
must ask Ralph about that. I’ve always ascertained for myself--got my
information in the natural form. I never asked many questions even;
I just kept quiet and took notice. Of course I’ve had very good
opportunities--better than what a young lady would naturally have. I’m
of an inquisitive disposition, though you mightn’t think it if you were
to watch me: however much you might watch me I should be watching you
more. I’ve been watching these people for upwards of thirty-five years,
and I don’t hesitate to say that I’ve acquired considerable information.
It’s a very fine country on the whole--finer perhaps than what we give
it credit for on the other side. Several improvements I should like to
see introduced; but the necessity of them doesn’t seem to be generally
felt as yet. When the necessity of a thing is generally felt they
usually manage to accomplish it; but they seem to feel pretty
comfortable about waiting till then. I certainly feel more at home among
them than I expected to when I first came over; I suppose it’s because
I’ve had a considerable degree of success. When you’re successful you
naturally feel more at home.”

“Do you suppose that if I’m successful I shall feel at home?” Isabel
asked.

“I should think it very probable, and you certainly will be successful.
They like American young ladies very much over here; they show them
a great deal of kindness. But you mustn’t feel too much at home, you
know.”

“Oh, I’m by no means sure it will satisfy me,” Isabel judicially
emphasised. “I like the place very much, but I’m not sure I shall like
the people.”

“The people are very good people; especially if you like them.”

“I’ve no doubt they’re good,” Isabel rejoined; “but are they pleasant
in society? They won’t rob me nor beat me; but will they make themselves
agreeable to me? That’s what I like people to do. I don’t hesitate to
say so, because I always appreciate it. I don’t believe they’re very
nice to girls; they’re not nice to them in the novels.”

“I don’t know about the novels,” said Mr. Touchett. “I believe the
novels have a great deal but I don’t suppose they’re very accurate.
We once had a lady who wrote novels staying here; she was a friend
of Ralph’s and he asked her down. She was very positive, quite up to
everything; but she was not the sort of person you could depend on
for evidence. Too free a fancy--I suppose that was it. She afterwards
published a work of fiction in which she was understood to have given
a representation--something in the nature of a caricature, as you might
say--of my unworthy self. I didn’t read it, but Ralph just handed me
the book with the principal passages marked. It was understood to be
a description of my conversation; American peculiarities, nasal twang,
Yankee notions, stars and stripes. Well, it was not at all accurate;
she couldn’t have listened very attentively. I had no objection to her
giving a report of my conversation, if she liked but I didn’t like the
idea that she hadn’t taken the trouble to listen to it. Of course I talk
like an American--I can’t talk like a Hottentot. However I talk, I’ve
made them understand me pretty well over here. But I don’t talk like the
old gentleman in that lady’s novel. He wasn’t an American; we wouldn’t
have him over there at any price. I just mention that fact to show you
that they’re not always accurate. Of course, as I’ve no daughters,
and as Mrs. Touchett resides in Florence, I haven’t had much chance
to notice about the young ladies. It sometimes appears as if the young
women in the lower class were not very well treated; but I guess their
position is better in the upper and even to some extent in the middle.”

“Gracious,” Isabel exclaimed; “how many classes have they? About fifty,
I suppose.”

“Well, I don’t know that I ever counted them. I never took much notice
of the classes. That’s the advantage of being an American here; you
don’t belong to any class.”

“I hope so,” said Isabel. “Imagine one’s belonging to an English class!”

“Well, I guess some of them are pretty comfortable--especially towards
the top. But for me there are only two classes: the people I trust and
the people I don’t. Of those two, my dear Isabel, you belong to the
first.”

“I’m much obliged to you,” said the girl quickly. Her way of taking
compliments seemed sometimes rather dry; she got rid of them as rapidly
as possible. But as regards this she was sometimes misjudged; she was
thought insensible to them, whereas in fact she was simply unwilling to
show how infinitely they pleased her. To show that was to show too much.
“I’m sure the English are very conventional,” she added.

“They’ve got everything pretty well fixed,” Mr. Touchett admitted. “It’s
all settled beforehand--they don’t leave it to the last moment.”

“I don’t like to have everything settled beforehand,” said the girl. “I
like more unexpectedness.”

Her uncle seemed amused at her distinctness of preference. “Well, it’s
settled beforehand that you’ll have great success,” he rejoined. “I
suppose you’ll like that.”

“I shall not have success if they’re too stupidly conventional. I’m not
in the least stupidly conventional. I’m just the contrary. That’s what
they won’t like.”

“No, no, you’re all wrong,” said the old man. “You can’t tell what
they’ll like. They’re very inconsistent; that’s their principal
interest.”

“Ah well,” said Isabel, standing before her uncle with her hands
clasped about the belt of her black dress and looking up and down the
lawn--“that will suit me perfectly!”



CHAPTER VII

The two amused themselves, time and again, with talking of the attitude
of the British public as if the young lady had been in a position to
appeal to it; but in fact the British public remained for the present
profoundly indifferent to Miss Isabel Archer, whose fortune had dropped
her, as her cousin said, into the dullest house in England. Her gouty
uncle received very little company, and Mrs. Touchett, not having
cultivated relations with her husband’s neighbours, was not warranted
in expecting visits from them. She had, however, a peculiar taste; she
liked to receive cards. For what is usually called social intercourse
she had very little relish; but nothing pleased her more than to find
her hall-table whitened with oblong morsels of symbolic pasteboard. She
flattered herself that she was a very just woman, and had mastered the
sovereign truth that nothing in this world is got for nothing. She had
played no social part as mistress of Gardencourt, and it was not to be
supposed that, in the surrounding country, a minute account should be
kept of her comings and goings. But it is by no means certain that she
did not feel it to be wrong that so little notice was taken of them and
that her failure (really very gratuitous) to make herself important in
the neighbourhood had not much to do with the acrimony of her allusions
to her husband’s adopted country. Isabel presently found herself in the
singular situation of defending the British constitution against her
aunt; Mrs. Touchett having formed the habit of sticking pins into this
venerable instrument. Isabel always felt an impulse to pull out the
pins; not that she imagined they inflicted any damage on the tough old
parchment, but because it seemed to her her aunt might make better use
of her sharpness. She was very critical herself--it was incidental to
her age, her sex and her nationality; but she was very sentimental as
well, and there was something in Mrs. Touchett’s dryness that set her
own moral fountains flowing.

“Now what’s your point of view?” she asked of her aunt. “When you
criticise everything here you should have a point of view. Yours doesn’t
seem to be American--you thought everything over there so disagreeable.
When I criticise I have mine; it’s thoroughly American!”

“My dear young lady,” said Mrs. Touchett, “there are as many points of
view in the world as there are people of sense to take them. You may
say that doesn’t make them very numerous! American? Never in the world;
that’s shockingly narrow. My point of view, thank God, is personal!”

Isabel thought this a better answer than she admitted; it was a
tolerable description of her own manner of judging, but it would not
have sounded well for her to say so. On the lips of a person less
advanced in life and less enlightened by experience than Mrs. Touchett
such a declaration would savour of immodesty, even of arrogance. She
risked it nevertheless in talking with Ralph, with whom she talked a
great deal and with whom her conversation was of a sort that gave a
large licence to extravagance. Her cousin used, as the phrase is, to
chaff her; he very soon established with her a reputation for treating
everything as a joke, and he was not a man to neglect the privileges
such a reputation conferred. She accused him of an odious want of
seriousness, of laughing at all things, beginning with himself. Such
slender faculty of reverence as he possessed centred wholly upon his
father; for the rest, he exercised his wit indifferently upon his
father’s son, this gentleman’s weak lungs, his useless life, his
fantastic mother, his friends (Lord Warburton in especial), his adopted,
and his native country, his charming new-found cousin. “I keep a band
of music in my ante-room,” he said once to her. “It has orders to play
without stopping; it renders me two excellent services. It keeps the
sounds of the world from reaching the private apartments, and it makes
the world think that dancing’s going on within.” It was dance-music
indeed that you usually heard when you came within ear-shot of Ralph’s
band; the liveliest waltzes seemed to float upon the air. Isabel often
found herself irritated by this perpetual fiddling; she would have liked
to pass through the ante-room, as her cousin called it, and enter the
private apartments. It mattered little that he had assured her they were
a very dismal place; she would have been glad to undertake to sweep them
and set them in order. It was but half-hospitality to let her remain
outside; to punish him for which Isabel administered innumerable taps
with the ferule of her straight young wit. It must be said that her wit
was exercised to a large extent in self-defence, for her cousin amused
himself with calling her “Columbia” and accusing her of a patriotism so
heated that it scorched. He drew a caricature of her in which she was
represented as a very pretty young woman dressed, on the lines of the
prevailing fashion, in the folds of the national banner. Isabel’s chief
dread in life at this period of her development was that she should
appear narrow-minded; what she feared next afterwards was that she
should really be so. But she nevertheless made no scruple of abounding
in her cousin’s sense and pretending to sigh for the charms of her
native land. She would be as American as it pleased him to regard her,
and if he chose to laugh at her she would give him plenty of occupation.
She defended England against his mother, but when Ralph sang its praises
on purpose, as she said, to work her up, she found herself able to
differ from him on a variety of points. In fact, the quality of this
small ripe country seemed as sweet to her as the taste of an October
pear; and her satisfaction was at the root of the good spirits which
enabled her to take her cousin’s chaff and return it in kind. If her
good-humour flagged at moments it was not because she thought herself
ill-used, but because she suddenly felt sorry for Ralph. It seemed to
her he was talking as a blind and had little heart in what he said. “I
don’t know what’s the matter with you,” she observed to him once; “but I
suspect you’re a great humbug.”

“That’s your privilege,” Ralph answered, who had not been used to being
so crudely addressed.

“I don’t know what you care for; I don’t think you care for anything.
You don’t really care for England when you praise it; you don’t care for
America even when you pretend to abuse it.”

“I care for nothing but you, dear cousin,” said Ralph.

“If I could believe even that, I should be very glad.”

“Ah well, I should hope so!” the young man exclaimed.

Isabel might have believed it and not have been far from the truth. He
thought a great deal about her; she was constantly present to his mind.
At a time when his thoughts had been a good deal of a burden to him her
sudden arrival, which promised nothing and was an open-handed gift of
fate, had refreshed and quickened them, given them wings and something
to fly for. Poor Ralph had been for many weeks steeped in melancholy;
his outlook, habitually sombre, lay under the shadow of a deeper cloud.
He had grown anxious about his father, whose gout, hitherto confined to
his legs, had begun to ascend into regions more vital. The old man had
been gravely ill in the spring, and the doctors had whispered to
Ralph that another attack would be less easy to deal with. Just now
he appeared disburdened of pain, but Ralph could not rid himself of a
suspicion that this was a subterfuge of the enemy, who was waiting to
take him off his guard. If the manoeuvre should succeed there would be
little hope of any great resistance. Ralph had always taken for granted
that his father would survive him--that his own name would be the first
grimly called. The father and son had been close companions, and the
idea of being left alone with the remnant of a tasteless life on his
hands was not gratifying to the young man, who had always and tacitly
counted upon his elder’s help in making the best of a poor business.
At the prospect of losing his great motive Ralph lost indeed his one
inspiration. If they might die at the same time it would be all very
well; but without the encouragement of his father’s society he should
barely have patience to await his own turn. He had not the incentive of
feeling that he was indispensable to his mother; it was a rule with his
mother to have no regrets. He bethought himself of course that it had
been a small kindness to his father to wish that, of the two, the active
rather than the passive party should know the felt wound; he remembered
that the old man had always treated his own forecast of an early end as
a clever fallacy, which he should be delighted to discredit so far as
he might by dying first. But of the two triumphs, that of refuting a
sophistical son and that of holding on a while longer to a state of
being which, with all abatements, he enjoyed, Ralph deemed it no sin to
hope the latter might be vouchsafed to Mr. Touchett.

These were nice questions, but Isabel’s arrival put a stop to his
puzzling over them. It even suggested there might be a compensation for
the intolerable _ennui_ of surviving his genial sire. He wondered whether
he were harbouring “love” for this spontaneous young woman from Albany;
but he judged that on the whole he was not. After he had known her for
a week he quite made up his mind to this, and every day he felt a little
more sure. Lord Warburton had been right about her; she was a really
interesting little figure. Ralph wondered how their neighbour had
found it out so soon; and then he said it was only another proof of his
friend’s high abilities, which he had always greatly admired. If his
cousin were to be nothing more than an entertainment to him, Ralph was
conscious she was an entertainment of a high order. “A character like
that,” he said to himself--“a real little passionate force to see at
play is the finest thing in nature. It’s finer than the finest work
of art--than a Greek bas-relief, than a great Titian, than a Gothic
cathedral. It’s very pleasant to be so well treated where one had least
looked for it. I had never been more blue, more bored, than for a week
before she came; I had never expected less that anything pleasant would
happen. Suddenly I receive a Titian, by the post, to hang on my wall--a
Greek bas-relief to stick over my chimney-piece. The key of a beautiful
edifice is thrust into my hand, and I’m told to walk in and admire. My
poor boy, you’ve been sadly ungrateful, and now you had better keep very
quiet and never grumble again.” The sentiment of these reflexions was
very just; but it was not exactly true that Ralph Touchett had had a key
put into his hand. His cousin was a very brilliant girl, who would take,
as he said, a good deal of knowing; but she needed the knowing, and his
attitude with regard to her, though it was contemplative and critical,
was not judicial. He surveyed the edifice from the outside and admired
it greatly; he looked in at the windows and received an impression of
proportions equally fair. But he felt that he saw it only by glimpses
and that he had not yet stood under the roof. The door was fastened, and
though he had keys in his pocket he had a conviction that none of them
would fit. She was intelligent and generous; it was a fine free nature;
but what was she going to do with herself? This question was irregular,
for with most women one had no occasion to ask it. Most women did
with themselves nothing at all; they waited, in attitudes more or less
gracefully passive, for a man to come that way and furnish them with
a destiny. Isabel’s originality was that she gave one an impression of
having intentions of her own. “Whenever she executes them,” said Ralph,
“may I be there to see!”

It devolved upon him of course to do the honours of the place. Mr.
Touchett was confined to his chair, and his wife’s position was that of
rather a grim visitor; so that in the line of conduct that opened itself
to Ralph duty and inclination were harmoniously mixed. He was not a
great walker, but he strolled about the grounds with his cousin--a
pastime for which the weather remained favourable with a persistency not
allowed for in Isabel’s somewhat lugubrious prevision of the climate;
and in the long afternoons, of which the length was but the measure of
her gratified eagerness, they took a boat on the river, the dear little
river, as Isabel called it, where the opposite shore seemed still a
part of the foreground of the landscape; or drove over the country in a
phaeton--a low, capacious, thick-wheeled phaeton formerly much used by
Mr. Touchett, but which he had now ceased to enjoy. Isabel enjoyed it
largely and, handling the reins in a manner which approved itself to
the groom as “knowing,” was never weary of driving her uncle’s capital
horses through winding lanes and byways full of the rural incidents she
had confidently expected to find; past cottages thatched and timbered,
past ale-houses latticed and sanded, past patches of ancient common and
glimpses of empty parks, between hedgerows made thick by midsummer. When
they reached home they usually found tea had been served on the lawn
and that Mrs. Touchett had not shrunk from the extremity of handing her
husband his cup. But the two for the most part sat silent; the old
man with his head back and his eyes closed, his wife occupied with her
knitting and wearing that appearance of rare profundity with which some
ladies consider the movement of their needles.

One day, however, a visitor had arrived. The two young persons, after
spending an hour on the river, strolled back to the house and perceived
Lord Warburton sitting under the trees and engaged in conversation, of
which even at a distance the desultory character was appreciable, with
Mrs. Touchett. He had driven over from his own place with a portmanteau
and had asked, as the father and son often invited him to do, for a
dinner and a lodging. Isabel, seeing him for half an hour on the day of
her arrival, had discovered in this brief space that she liked him; he
had indeed rather sharply registered himself on her fine sense and
she had thought of him several times. She had hoped she should see him
again--hoped too that she should see a few others. Gardencourt was not
dull; the place itself was sovereign, her uncle was more and more a
sort of golden grandfather, and Ralph was unlike any cousin she had
ever encountered--her idea of cousins having tended to gloom. Then her
impressions were still so fresh and so quickly renewed that there was as
yet hardly a hint of vacancy in the view. But Isabel had need to remind
herself that she was interested in human nature and that her foremost
hope in coming abroad had been that she should see a great many people.
When Ralph said to her, as he had done several times, “I wonder you find
this endurable; you ought to see some of the neighbours and some of
our friends, because we have really got a few, though you would never
suppose it”--when he offered to invite what he called a “lot of people”
 and make her acquainted with English society, she encouraged the
hospitable impulse and promised in advance to hurl herself into the
fray. Little, however, for the present, had come of his offers, and it
may be confided to the reader that if the young man delayed to carry
them out it was because he found the labour of providing for his
companion by no means so severe as to require extraneous help. Isabel
had spoken to him very often about “specimens;” it was a word that
played a considerable part in her vocabulary; she had given him to
understand that she wished to see English society illustrated by eminent
cases.

“Well now, there’s a specimen,” he said to her as they walked up from
the riverside and he recognised Lord Warburton.

“A specimen of what?” asked the girl.

“A specimen of an English gentleman.”

“Do you mean they’re all like him?”

“Oh no; they’re not all like him.”

“He’s a favourable specimen then,” said Isabel; “because I’m sure he’s
nice.”

“Yes, he’s very nice. And he’s very fortunate.”

The fortunate Lord Warburton exchanged a handshake with our heroine
and hoped she was very well. “But I needn’t ask that,” he said, “since
you’ve been handling the oars.”

“I’ve been rowing a little,” Isabel answered; “but how should you know
it?”

“Oh, I know he doesn’t row; he’s too lazy,” said his lordship,
indicating Ralph Touchett with a laugh.

“He has a good excuse for his laziness,” Isabel rejoined, lowering her
voice a little.

“Ah, he has a good excuse for everything!” cried Lord Warburton, still
with his sonorous mirth.

“My excuse for not rowing is that my cousin rows so well,” said Ralph.
“She does everything well. She touches nothing that she doesn’t adorn!”

“It makes one want to be touched, Miss Archer,” Lord Warburton declared.

“Be touched in the right sense and you’ll never look the worse for
it,” said Isabel, who, if it pleased her to hear it said that her
accomplishments were numerous, was happily able to reflect that such
complacency was not the indication of a feeble mind, inasmuch as there
were several things in which she excelled. Her desire to think well of
herself had at least the element of humility that it always needed to be
supported by proof.

Lord Warburton not only spent the night at Gardencourt, but he was
persuaded to remain over the second day; and when the second day was
ended he determined to postpone his departure till the morrow. During
this period he addressed many of his remarks to Isabel, who accepted
this evidence of his esteem with a very good grace. She found herself
liking him extremely; the first impression he had made on her had had
weight, but at the end of an evening spent in his society she scarce
fell short of seeing him--though quite without luridity--as a hero
of romance. She retired to rest with a sense of good fortune, with a
quickened consciousness of possible felicities. “It’s very nice to know
two such charming people as those,” she said, meaning by “those” her
cousin and her cousin’s friend. It must be added moreover that an
incident had occurred which might have seemed to put her good-humour to
the test. Mr. Touchett went to bed at half-past nine o’clock, but his
wife remained in the drawing-room with the other members of the party.
She prolonged her vigil for something less than an hour, and then,
rising, observed to Isabel that it was time they should bid the
gentlemen good-night. Isabel had as yet no desire to go to bed; the
occasion wore, to her sense, a festive character, and feasts were not
in the habit of terminating so early. So, without further thought, she
replied, very simply--

“Need I go, dear aunt? I’ll come up in half an hour.”

“It’s impossible I should wait for you,” Mrs. Touchett answered.

“Ah, you needn’t wait! Ralph will light my candle,” Isabel gaily
engaged.

“I’ll light your candle; do let me light your candle, Miss Archer!” Lord
Warburton exclaimed. “Only I beg it shall not be before midnight.”

Mrs. Touchett fixed her bright little eyes upon him a moment and
transferred them coldly to her niece. “You can’t stay alone with the
gentlemen. You’re not--you’re not at your blest Albany, my dear.”

Isabel rose, blushing. “I wish I were,” she said.

“Oh, I say, mother!” Ralph broke out.

“My dear Mrs. Touchett!” Lord Warburton murmured.

“I didn’t make your country, my lord,” Mrs. Touchett said majestically.
“I must take it as I find it.”

“Can’t I stay with my own cousin?” Isabel enquired.

“I’m not aware that Lord Warburton is your cousin.”

“Perhaps I had better go to bed!” the visitor suggested. “That will
arrange it.”

Mrs. Touchett gave a little look of despair and sat down again. “Oh, if
it’s necessary I’ll stay up till midnight.”

Ralph meanwhile handed Isabel her candlestick. He had been watching her;
it had seemed to him her temper was involved--an accident that might
be interesting. But if he had expected anything of a flare he was
disappointed, for the girl simply laughed a little, nodded good-night
and withdrew accompanied by her aunt. For himself he was annoyed at his
mother, though he thought she was right. Above-stairs the two ladies
separated at Mrs. Touchett’s door. Isabel had said nothing on her way
up.

“Of course you’re vexed at my interfering with you,” said Mrs. Touchett.

Isabel considered. “I’m not vexed, but I’m surprised--and a good deal
mystified. Wasn’t it proper I should remain in the drawing-room?”

“Not in the least. Young girls here--in decent houses--don’t sit alone
with the gentlemen late at night.”

“You were very right to tell me then,” said Isabel. “I don’t understand
it, but I’m very glad to know it.

“I shall always tell you,” her aunt answered, “whenever I see you taking
what seems to me too much liberty.”

“Pray do; but I don’t say I shall always think your remonstrance just.”

“Very likely not. You’re too fond of your own ways.”

“Yes, I think I’m very fond of them. But I always want to know the
things one shouldn’t do.”

“So as to do them?” asked her aunt.

“So as to choose,” said Isabel.



CHAPTER VIII

As she was devoted to romantic effects Lord Warburton ventured to
express a hope that she would come some day and see his house, a very
curious old place. He extracted from Mrs. Touchett a promise that she
would bring her niece to Lockleigh, and Ralph signified his willingness
to attend the ladies if his father should be able to spare him. Lord
Warburton assured our heroine that in the mean time his sisters would
come and see her. She knew something about his sisters, having sounded
him, during the hours they spent together while he was at Gardencourt,
on many points connected with his family. When Isabel was interested she
asked a great many questions, and as her companion was a copious talker
she urged him on this occasion by no means in vain. He told her he
had four sisters and two brothers and had lost both his parents. The
brothers and sisters were very good people--“not particularly clever,
you know,” he said, “but very decent and pleasant;” and he was so good
as to hope Miss Archer might know them well. One of the brothers was in
the Church, settled in the family living, that of Lockleigh, which was
a heavy, sprawling parish, and was an excellent fellow in spite of his
thinking differently from himself on every conceivable topic. And then
Lord Warburton mentioned some of the opinions held by his brother, which
were opinions Isabel had often heard expressed and that she supposed to
be entertained by a considerable portion of the human family. Many of
them indeed she supposed she had held herself, till he assured her
she was quite mistaken, that it was really impossible, that she had
doubtless imagined she entertained them, but that she might depend that,
if she thought them over a little, she would find there was nothing
in them. When she answered that she had already thought several of the
questions involved over very attentively he declared that she was only
another example of what he had often been struck with--the fact that,
of all the people in the world, the Americans were the most grossly
superstitious. They were rank Tories and bigots, every one of them;
there were no conservatives like American conservatives. Her uncle and
her cousin were there to prove it; nothing could be more medieval than
many of their views; they had ideas that people in England nowadays were
ashamed to confess to; and they had the impudence moreover, said his
lordship, laughing, to pretend they knew more about the needs and
dangers of this poor dear stupid old England than he who was born in it
and owned a considerable slice of it--the more shame to him! From all of
which Isabel gathered that Lord Warburton was a nobleman of the newest
pattern, a reformer, a radical, a contemner of ancient ways. His other
brother, who was in the army in India, was rather wild and pig-headed
and had not been of much use as yet but to make debts for Warburton to
pay--one of the most precious privileges of an elder brother. “I don’t
think I shall pay any more,” said her friend; “he lives a monstrous deal
better than I do, enjoys unheard-of luxuries and thinks himself a much
finer gentleman than I. As I’m a consistent radical I go in only for
equality; I don’t go in for the superiority of the younger brothers.”
 Two of his four sisters, the second and fourth, were married, one of
them having done very well, as they said, the other only so-so.
The husband of the elder, Lord Haycock, was a very good fellow, but
unfortunately a horrid Tory; and his wife, like all good English wives,
was worse than her husband. The other had espoused a smallish squire
in Norfolk and, though married but the other day, had already five
children. This information and much more Lord Warburton imparted to his
young American listener, taking pains to make many things clear and to
lay bare to her apprehension the peculiarities of English life. Isabel
was often amused at his explicitness and at the small allowance he
seemed to make either for her own experience or for her imagination. “He
thinks I’m a barbarian,” she said, “and that I’ve never seen forks and
spoons;” and she used to ask him artless questions for the pleasure of
hearing him answer seriously. Then when he had fallen into the trap,
“It’s a pity you can’t see me in my war-paint and feathers,” she
remarked; “if I had known how kind you are to the poor savages I would
have brought over my native costume!” Lord Warburton had travelled
through the United States and knew much more about them than Isabel; he
was so good as to say that America was the most charming country in the
world, but his recollections of it appeared to encourage the idea that
Americans in England would need to have a great many things explained
to them. “If I had only had you to explain things to me in America!”
 he said. “I was rather puzzled in your country; in fact I was quite
bewildered, and the trouble was that the explanations only puzzled me
more. You know I think they often gave me the wrong ones on purpose;
they’re rather clever about that over there. But when I explain you
can trust me; about what I tell you there’s no mistake.” There was no
mistake at least about his being very intelligent and cultivated and
knowing almost everything in the world. Although he gave the most
interesting and thrilling glimpses Isabel felt he never did it to
exhibit himself, and though he had had rare chances and had tumbled in,
as she put it, for high prizes, he was as far as possible from making
a merit of it. He had enjoyed the best things of life, but they had not
spoiled his sense of proportion. His quality was a mixture of the effect
of rich experience--oh, so easily come by!--with a modesty at times
almost boyish; the sweet and wholesome savour of which--it was as
agreeable as something tasted--lost nothing from the addition of a tone
of responsible kindness.

“I like your specimen English gentleman very much,” Isabel said to Ralph
after Lord Warburton had gone.

“I like him too--I love him well,” Ralph returned. “But I pity him
more.”

Isabel looked at him askance. “Why, that seems to me his only
fault--that one can’t pity him a little. He appears to have everything,
to know everything, to be everything.”

“Oh, he’s in a bad way!” Ralph insisted.

“I suppose you don’t mean in health?”

“No, as to that he’s detestably sound. What I mean is that he’s a man
with a great position who’s playing all sorts of tricks with it. He
doesn’t take himself seriously.”

“Does he regard himself as a joke?”

“Much worse; he regards himself as an imposition--as an abuse.”

“Well, perhaps he is,” said Isabel.

“Perhaps he is--though on the whole I don’t think so. But in that case
what’s more pitiable than a sentient, self-conscious abuse planted by
other hands, deeply rooted but aching with a sense of its injustice?
For me, in his place, I could be as solemn as a statue of Buddha.
He occupies a position that appeals to my imagination. Great
responsibilities, great opportunities, great consideration, great
wealth, great power, a natural share in the public affairs of a great
country. But he’s all in a muddle about himself, his position, his
power, and indeed about everything in the world. He’s the victim of a
critical age; he has ceased to believe in himself and he doesn’t know
what to believe in. When I attempt to tell him (because if I were he I
know very well what I should believe in) he calls me a pampered bigot.
I believe he seriously thinks me an awful Philistine; he says I don’t
understand my time. I understand it certainly better than he, who
can neither abolish himself as a nuisance nor maintain himself as an
institution.”

“He doesn’t look very wretched,” Isabel observed.

“Possibly not; though, being a man of a good deal of charming taste, I
think he often has uncomfortable hours. But what is it to say of a being
of his opportunities that he’s not miserable? Besides, I believe he is.”

“I don’t,” said Isabel.

“Well,” her cousin rejoined, “if he isn’t he ought to be!”

In the afternoon she spent an hour with her uncle on the lawn, where the
old man sat, as usual, with his shawl over his legs and his large cup
of diluted tea in his hands. In the course of conversation he asked her
what she thought of their late visitor.

Isabel was prompt. “I think he’s charming.”

“He’s a nice person,” said Mr. Touchett, “but I don’t recommend you to
fall in love with him.”

“I shall not do it then; I shall never fall in love but on your
recommendation. Moreover,” Isabel added, “my cousin gives me rather a
sad account of Lord Warburton.”

“Oh, indeed? I don’t know what there may be to say, but you must
remember that Ralph must talk.”

“He thinks your friend’s too subversive--or not subversive enough! I
don’t quite understand which,” said Isabel.

The old man shook his head slowly, smiled and put down his cup. “I don’t
know which either. He goes very far, but it’s quite possible he doesn’t
go far enough. He seems to want to do away with a good many things, but
he seems to want to remain himself. I suppose that’s natural, but it’s
rather inconsistent.”

“Oh, I hope he’ll remain himself,” said Isabel. “If he were to be done
away with his friends would miss him sadly.”

“Well,” said the old man, “I guess he’ll stay and amuse his friends.
I should certainly miss him very much here at Gardencourt. He always
amuses me when he comes over, and I think he amuses himself as well.
There’s a considerable number like him, round in society; they’re very
fashionable just now. I don’t know what they’re trying to do--whether
they’re trying to get up a revolution. I hope at any rate they’ll put it
off till after I’m gone. You see they want to disestablish everything;
but I’m a pretty big landowner here, and I don’t want to be
disestablished. I wouldn’t have come over if I had thought they
were going to behave like that,” Mr. Touchett went on with expanding
hilarity. “I came over because I thought England was a safe country. I
call it a regular fraud if they are going to introduce any considerable
changes; there’ll be a large number disappointed in that case.”

“Oh, I do hope they’ll make a revolution!” Isabel exclaimed. “I should
delight in seeing a revolution.”

“Let me see,” said her uncle, with a humorous intention; “I forget
whether you’re on the side of the old or on the side of the new. I’ve
heard you take such opposite views.”

“I’m on the side of both. I guess I’m a little on the side of
everything. In a revolution--after it was well begun--I think I should
be a high, proud loyalist. One sympathises more with them, and they’ve a
chance to behave so exquisitely. I mean so picturesquely.”

“I don’t know that I understand what you mean by behaving picturesquely,
but it seems to me that you do that always, my dear.”

“Oh, you lovely man, if I could believe that!” the girl interrupted.

“I’m afraid, after all, you won’t have the pleasure of going gracefully
to the guillotine here just now,” Mr. Touchett went on. “If you want to
see a big outbreak you must pay us a long visit. You see, when you come
to the point it wouldn’t suit them to be taken at their word.”

“Of whom are you speaking?”

“Well, I mean Lord Warburton and his friends--the radicals of the upper
class. Of course I only know the way it strikes me. They talk about the
changes, but I don’t think they quite realise. You and I, you know, we
know what it is to have lived under democratic institutions: I always
thought them very comfortable, but I was used to them from the first.
And then I ain’t a lord; you’re a lady, my dear, but I ain’t a lord. Now
over here I don’t think it quite comes home to them. It’s a matter of
every day and every hour, and I don’t think many of them would find it
as pleasant as what they’ve got. Of course if they want to try, it’s
their own business; but I expect they won’t try very hard.”

“Don’t you think they’re sincere?” Isabel asked.

“Well, they want to _feel_ earnest,” Mr. Touchett allowed; “but it seems
as if they took it out in theories mostly. Their radical views are a
kind of amusement; they’ve got to have some amusement, and they might
have coarser tastes than that. You see they’re very luxurious, and these
progressive ideas are about their biggest luxury. They make them feel
moral and yet don’t damage their position. They think a great deal of
their position; don’t let one of them ever persuade you he doesn’t, for
if you were to proceed on that basis you’d be pulled up very short.”

Isabel followed her uncle’s argument, which he unfolded with his quaint
distinctness, most attentively, and though she was unacquainted with the
British aristocracy she found it in harmony with her general impressions
of human nature. But she felt moved to put in a protest on Lord
Warburton’s behalf. “I don’t believe Lord Warburton’s a humbug; I don’t
care what the others are. I should like to see Lord Warburton put to the
test.”

“Heaven deliver me from my friends!” Mr. Touchett answered. “Lord
Warburton’s a very amiable young man--a very fine young man. He has a
hundred thousand a year. He owns fifty thousand acres of the soil of
this little island and ever so many other things besides. He has half a
dozen houses to live in. He has a seat in Parliament as I have one at my
own dinner-table. He has elegant tastes--cares for literature, for art,
for science, for charming young ladies. The most elegant is his taste
for the new views. It affords him a great deal of pleasure--more
perhaps than anything else, except the young ladies. His old house over
there--what does he call it, Lockleigh?--is very attractive; but I don’t
think it’s as pleasant as this. That doesn’t matter, however--he has
so many others. His views don’t hurt any one as far as I can see; they
certainly don’t hurt himself. And if there were to be a revolution he
would come off very easily. They wouldn’t touch him, they’d leave him as
he is: he’s too much liked.”

“Ah, he couldn’t be a martyr even if he wished!” Isabel sighed. “That’s
a very poor position.”

“He’ll never be a martyr unless you make him one,” said the old man.

Isabel shook her head; there might have been something laughable in the
fact that she did it with a touch of melancholy. “I shall never make any
one a martyr.”

“You’ll never be one, I hope.”

“I hope not. But you don’t pity Lord Warburton then as Ralph does?”

Her uncle looked at her a while with genial acuteness. “Yes, I do, after
all!”



CHAPTER IX

The two Misses Molyneux, this nobleman’s sisters, came presently to call
upon her, and Isabel took a fancy to the young ladies, who appeared to
her to show a most original stamp. It is true that when she described
them to her cousin by that term he declared that no epithet could be
less applicable than this to the two Misses Molyneux, since there
were fifty thousand young women in England who exactly resembled them.
Deprived of this advantage, however, Isabel’s visitors retained that
of an extreme sweetness and shyness of demeanour, and of having, as
she thought, eyes like the balanced basins, the circles of “ornamental
water,” set, in parterres, among the geraniums.

“They’re not morbid, at any rate, whatever they are,” our heroine said
to herself; and she deemed this a great charm, for two or three of the
friends of her girlhood had been regrettably open to the charge (they
would have been so nice without it), to say nothing of Isabel’s having
occasionally suspected it as a tendency of her own. The Misses Molyneux
were not in their first youth, but they had bright, fresh complexions
and something of the smile of childhood. Yes, their eyes, which Isabel
admired, were round, quiet and contented, and their figures, also of a
generous roundness, were encased in sealskin jackets. Their friendliness
was great, so great that they were almost embarrassed to show it; they
seemed somewhat afraid of the young lady from the other side of the
world and rather looked than spoke their good wishes. But they made it
clear to her that they hoped she would come to luncheon at Lockleigh,
where they lived with their brother, and then they might see her very,
very often. They wondered if she wouldn’t come over some day, and sleep:
they were expecting some people on the twenty-ninth, so perhaps she
would come while the people were there.

“I’m afraid it isn’t any one very remarkable,” said the elder sister;
“but I dare say you’ll take us as you find us.”

“I shall find you delightful; I think you’re enchanting just as you
are,” replied Isabel, who often praised profusely.

Her visitors flushed, and her cousin told her, after they were gone,
that if she said such things to those poor girls they would think she
was in some wild, free manner practising on them: he was sure it was the
first time they had been called enchanting.

“I can’t help it,” Isabel answered. “I think it’s lovely to be so quiet
and reasonable and satisfied. I should like to be like that.”

“Heaven forbid!” cried Ralph with ardour.

“I mean to try and imitate them,” said Isabel. “I want very much to see
them at home.”

She had this pleasure a few days later, when, with Ralph and his mother,
she drove over to Lockleigh. She found the Misses Molyneux sitting in a
vast drawing-room (she perceived afterwards it was one of several) in a
wilderness of faded chintz; they were dressed on this occasion in black
velveteen. Isabel liked them even better at home than she had done at
Gardencourt, and was more than ever struck with the fact that they were
not morbid. It had seemed to her before that if they had a fault it was
a want of play of mind; but she presently saw they were capable of deep
emotion. Before luncheon she was alone with them for some time, on one
side of the room, while Lord Warburton, at a distance, talked to Mrs.
Touchett.

“Is it true your brother’s such a great radical?” Isabel asked. She
knew it was true, but we have seen that her interest in human nature was
keen, and she had a desire to draw the Misses Molyneux out.

“Oh dear, yes; he’s immensely advanced,” said Mildred, the younger
sister.

“At the same time Warburton’s very reasonable,” Miss Molyneux observed.

Isabel watched him a moment at the other side of the room; he was
clearly trying hard to make himself agreeable to Mrs. Touchett. Ralph
had met the frank advances of one of the dogs before the fire that the
temperature of an English August, in the ancient expanses, had not
made an impertinence. “Do you suppose your brother’s sincere?” Isabel
enquired with a smile.

“Oh, he must be, you know!” Mildred exclaimed quickly, while the elder
sister gazed at our heroine in silence.

“Do you think he would stand the test?”

“The test?”

“I mean for instance having to give up all this.”

“Having to give up Lockleigh?” said Miss Molyneux, finding her voice.

“Yes, and the other places; what are they called?”

The two sisters exchanged an almost frightened glance. “Do you mean--do
you mean on account of the expense?” the younger one asked.

“I dare say he might let one or two of his houses,” said the other.

“Let them for nothing?” Isabel demanded.

“I can’t fancy his giving up his property,” said Miss Molyneux.

“Ah, I’m afraid he is an impostor!” Isabel returned. “Don’t you think
it’s a false position?”

Her companions, evidently, had lost themselves. “My brother’s position?”
 Miss Molyneux enquired.

“It’s thought a very good position,” said the younger sister. “It’s the
first position in this part of the county.”

“I dare say you think me very irreverent,” Isabel took occasion to
remark. “I suppose you revere your brother and are rather afraid of
him.”

“Of course one looks up to one’s brother,” said Miss Molyneux simply.

“If you do that he must be very good--because you, evidently, are
beautifully good.”

“He’s most kind. It will never be known, the good he does.”

“His ability is known,” Mildred added; “every one thinks it’s immense.”

“Oh, I can see that,” said Isabel. “But if I were he I should wish to
fight to the death: I mean for the heritage of the past. I should hold
it tight.”

“I think one ought to be liberal,” Mildred argued gently. “We’ve always
been so, even from the earliest times.”

“Ah well,” said Isabel, “you’ve made a great success of it; I don’t
wonder you like it. I see you’re very fond of crewels.”

When Lord Warburton showed her the house, after luncheon, it seemed to
her a matter of course that it should be a noble picture. Within, it
had been a good deal modernised--some of its best points had lost their
purity; but as they saw it from the gardens, a stout grey pile, of the
softest, deepest, most weather-fretted hue, rising from a broad, still
moat, it affected the young visitor as a castle in a legend. The day was
cool and rather lustreless; the first note of autumn had been struck,
and the watery sunshine rested on the walls in blurred and desultory
gleams, washing them, as it were, in places tenderly chosen, where the
ache of antiquity was keenest. Her host’s brother, the Vicar, had come
to luncheon, and Isabel had had five minutes’ talk with him--time enough
to institute a search for a rich ecclesiasticism and give it up as
vain. The marks of the Vicar of Lockleigh were a big, athletic figure,
a candid, natural countenance, a capacious appetite and a tendency to
indiscriminate laughter. Isabel learned afterwards from her cousin
that before taking orders he had been a mighty wrestler and that he
was still, on occasion--in the privacy of the family circle as it
were--quite capable of flooring his man. Isabel liked him--she was in
the mood for liking everything; but her imagination was a good deal
taxed to think of him as a source of spiritual aid. The whole party, on
leaving lunch, went to walk in the grounds; but Lord Warburton exercised
some ingenuity in engaging his least familiar guest in a stroll apart
from the others.

“I wish you to see the place properly, seriously,” he said. “You can’t
do so if your attention is distracted by irrelevant gossip.” His own
conversation (though he told Isabel a good deal about the house, which
had a very curious history) was not purely archaeological; he reverted
at intervals to matters more personal--matters personal to the young
lady as well as to himself. But at last, after a pause of some duration,
returning for a moment to their ostensible theme, “Ah, well,” he said,
“I’m very glad indeed you like the old barrack. I wish you could see
more of it--that you could stay here a while. My sisters have taken an
immense fancy to you--if that would be any inducement.”

“There’s no want of inducements,” Isabel answered; “but I’m afraid I
can’t make engagements. I’m quite in my aunt’s hands.”

“Ah, pardon me if I say I don’t exactly believe that. I’m pretty sure
you can do whatever you want.”

“I’m sorry if I make that impression on you; I don’t think it’s a nice
impression to make.”

“It has the merit of permitting me to hope.” And Lord Warburton paused a
moment.

“To hope what?”

“That in future I may see you often.”

“Ah,” said Isabel, “to enjoy that pleasure I needn’t be so terribly
emancipated.”

“Doubtless not; and yet, at the same time, I don’t think your uncle
likes me.”

“You’re very much mistaken. I’ve heard him speak very highly of you.”

“I’m glad you have talked about me,” said Lord Warburton. “But, I
nevertheless don’t think he’d like me to keep coming to Gardencourt.”

“I can’t answer for my uncle’s tastes,” the girl rejoined, “though I
ought as far as possible to take them into account. But for myself I
shall be very glad to see you.”

“Now that’s what I like to hear you say. I’m charmed when you say that.”

“You’re easily charmed, my lord,” said Isabel.

“No, I’m not easily charmed!” And then he stopped a moment. “But you’ve
charmed me, Miss Archer.”

These words were uttered with an indefinable sound which startled the
girl; it struck her as the prelude to something grave: she had heard the
sound before and she recognised it. She had no wish, however, that for
the moment such a prelude should have a sequel, and she said as gaily
as possible and as quickly as an appreciable degree of agitation would
allow her: “I’m afraid there’s no prospect of my being able to come here
again.”

“Never?” said Lord Warburton.

“I won’t say ‘never’; I should feel very melodramatic.”

“May I come and see you then some day next week?”

“Most assuredly. What is there to prevent it?”

“Nothing tangible. But with you I never feel safe. I’ve a sort of sense
that you’re always summing people up.”

“You don’t of necessity lose by that.”

“It’s very kind of you to say so; but, even if I gain, stern justice is
not what I most love. Is Mrs. Touchett going to take you abroad?”

“I hope so.”

“Is England not good enough for you?”

“That’s a very Machiavellian speech; it doesn’t deserve an answer. I
want to see as many countries as I can.”

“Then you’ll go on judging, I suppose.”

“Enjoying, I hope, too.”

“Yes, that’s what you enjoy most; I can’t make out what you’re up to,”
 said Lord Warburton. “You strike me as having mysterious purposes--vast
designs.”

“You’re so good as to have a theory about me which I don’t at all fill
out. Is there anything mysterious in a purpose entertained and
executed every year, in the most public manner, by fifty thousand of
my fellow-countrymen--the purpose of improving one’s mind by foreign
travel?”

“You can’t improve your mind, Miss Archer,” her companion declared.
“It’s already a most formidable instrument. It looks down on us all; it
despises us.”

“Despises you? You’re making fun of me,” said Isabel seriously.

“Well, you think us ‘quaint’--that’s the same thing. I won’t be thought
‘quaint,’ to begin with; I’m not so in the least. I protest.”

“That protest is one of the quaintest things I’ve ever heard,” Isabel
answered with a smile.

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