← catalogue

Washington Square

by Henry James · English · Gutenberg #2870 · 376,865 chars · public domain (US)

The Project Gutenberg eBook of Washington Square
    
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States,
you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
before using this eBook.

Title: Washington Square

Author: Henry James


        
Release date: October 1, 2001 [eBook #2870]
                Most recently updated: September 26, 2015

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2870

Credits: Transcribed from the 1921 Macmillan and Co. edition by David Price. Proofed by Dimitri Papadopoulos, Lynn A. Weinberg, Stuart Bennett and Mary Willard


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WASHINGTON SQUARE ***


Transcribed from the 1921 Macmillan and Co. edition by David Price, email
ccx074@pglaf.org.  Proofed by Dimitri Papadopoulos, Lynn A. Weinberg,
Stuart Bennett and Mary Willard.

                          [Picture: Book cover]





                                WASHINGTON
                                  SQUARE


                                * * * * *

                                    BY
                               HENRY JAMES

                                * * * * *

                        MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED
                       ST. MARTIN’S STREET, LONDON
                                   1921

                                * * * * *

                                COPYRIGHT

                        _First published in_ 1881

                                * * * * *




I


DURING a portion of the first half of the present century, and more
particularly during the latter part of it, there flourished and practised
in the city of New York a physician who enjoyed perhaps an exceptional
share of the consideration which, in the United States, has always been
bestowed upon distinguished members of the medical profession.  This
profession in America has constantly been held in honour, and more
successfully than elsewhere has put forward a claim to the epithet of
“liberal.”  In a country in which, to play a social part, you must either
earn your income or make believe that you earn it, the healing art has
appeared in a high degree to combine two recognised sources of credit.
It belongs to the realm of the practical, which in the United States is a
great recommendation; and it is touched by the light of science—a merit
appreciated in a community in which the love of knowledge has not always
been accompanied by leisure and opportunity.  It was an element in Dr.
Sloper’s reputation that his learning and his skill were very evenly
balanced; he was what you might call a scholarly doctor, and yet there
was nothing abstract in his remedies—he always ordered you to take
something.  Though he was felt to be extremely thorough, he was not
uncomfortably theoretic, and if he sometimes explained matters rather
more minutely than might seem of use to the patient, he never went so far
(like some practitioners one has heard of) as to trust to the explanation
alone, but always left behind him an inscrutable prescription.  There
were some doctors that left the prescription without offering any
explanation at all; and he did not belong to that class either, which
was, after all, the most vulgar.  It will be seen that I am describing a
clever man; and this is really the reason why Dr. Sloper had become a
local celebrity.  At the time at which we are chiefly concerned with him,
he was some fifty years of age, and his popularity was at its height.  He
was very witty, and he passed in the best society of New York for a man
of the world—which, indeed, he was, in a very sufficient degree.  I
hasten to add, to anticipate possible misconception, that he was not the
least of a charlatan.  He was a thoroughly honest man—honest in a degree
of which he had perhaps lacked the opportunity to give the complete
measure; and, putting aside the great good-nature of the circle in which
he practised, which was rather fond of boasting that it possessed the
“brightest” doctor in the country, he daily justified his claim to the
talents attributed to him by the popular voice.  He was an observer, even
a philosopher, and to be bright was so natural to him, and (as the
popular voice said) came so easily, that he never aimed at mere effect,
and had none of the little tricks and pretensions of second-rate
reputations.  It must be confessed that fortune had favoured him, and
that he had found the path to prosperity very soft to his tread.  He had
married at the age of twenty-seven, for love, a very charming girl, Miss
Catherine Harrington, of New York, who, in addition to her charms, had
brought him a solid dowry.  Mrs. Sloper was amiable, graceful,
accomplished, elegant, and in 1820 she had been one of the pretty girls
of the small but promising capital which clustered about the Battery and
overlooked the Bay, and of which the uppermost boundary was indicated by
the grassy waysides of Canal Street.  Even at the age of twenty-seven
Austin Sloper had made his mark sufficiently to mitigate the anomaly of
his having been chosen among a dozen suitors by a young woman of high
fashion, who had ten thousand dollars of income and the most charming
eyes in the island of Manhattan.  These eyes, and some of their
accompaniments, were for about five years a source of extreme
satisfaction to the young physician, who was both a devoted and a very
happy husband.  The fact of his having married a rich woman made no
difference in the line he had traced for himself, and he cultivated his
profession with as definite a purpose as if he still had no other
resources than his fraction of the modest patrimony which on his father’s
death he had shared with his brothers and sisters.  This purpose had not
been preponderantly to make money—it had been rather to learn something
and to do something.  To learn something interesting, and to do something
useful—this was, roughly speaking, the programme he had sketched, and of
which the accident of his wife having an income appeared to him in no
degree to modify the validity.  He was fond of his practice, and of
exercising a skill of which he was agreeably conscious, and it was so
patent a truth that if he were not a doctor there was nothing else he
could be, that a doctor he persisted in being, in the best possible
conditions.  Of course his easy domestic situation saved him a good deal
of drudgery, and his wife’s affiliation to the “best people” brought him
a good many of those patients whose symptoms are, if not more interesting
in themselves than those of the lower orders, at least more consistently
displayed.  He desired experience, and in the course of twenty years he
got a great deal.  It must be added that it came to him in some forms
which, whatever might have been their intrinsic value, made it the
reverse of welcome.  His first child, a little boy of extraordinary
promise, as the Doctor, who was not addicted to easy enthusiasms, firmly
believed, died at three years of age, in spite of everything that the
mother’s tenderness and the father’s science could invent to save him.
Two years later Mrs. Sloper gave birth to a second infant—an infant of a
sex which rendered the poor child, to the Doctor’s sense, an inadequate
substitute for his lamented first-born, of whom he had promised himself
to make an admirable man.  The little girl was a disappointment; but this
was not the worst.  A week after her birth the young mother, who, as the
phrase is, had been doing well, suddenly betrayed alarming symptoms, and
before another week had elapsed Austin Sloper was a widower.

For a man whose trade was to keep people alive, he had certainly done
poorly in his own family; and a bright doctor who within three years
loses his wife and his little boy should perhaps be prepared to see
either his skill or his affection impugned.  Our friend, however, escaped
criticism: that is, he escaped all criticism but his own, which was much
the most competent and most formidable.  He walked under the weight of
this very private censure for the rest of his days, and bore for ever the
scars of a castigation to which the strongest hand he knew had treated
him on the night that followed his wife’s death.  The world, which, as I
have said, appreciated him, pitied him too much to be ironical; his
misfortune made him more interesting, and even helped him to be the
fashion.  It was observed that even medical families cannot escape the
more insidious forms of disease, and that, after all, Dr. Sloper had lost
other patients beside the two I have mentioned; which constituted an
honourable precedent.  His little girl remained to him, and though she
was not what he had desired, he proposed to himself to make the best of
her.  He had on hand a stock of unexpended authority, by which the child,
in its early years, profited largely.  She had been named, as a matter of
course, after her poor mother, and even in her most diminutive babyhood
the Doctor never called her anything but Catherine.  She grew up a very
robust and healthy child, and her father, as he looked at her, often said
to himself that, such as she was, he at least need have no fear of losing
her.  I say “such as she was,” because, to tell the truth—But this is a
truth of which I will defer the telling.




II


WHEN the child was about ten years old, he invited his sister, Mrs.
Penniman, to come and stay with him.  The Miss Slopers had been but two
in number, and both of them had married early in life.  The younger, Mrs.
Almond by name, was the wife of a prosperous merchant, and the mother of
a blooming family.  She bloomed herself, indeed, and was a comely,
comfortable, reasonable woman, and a favourite with her clever brother,
who, in the matter of women, even when they were nearly related to him,
was a man of distinct preferences.  He preferred Mrs. Almond to his
sister Lavinia, who had married a poor clergyman, of a sickly
constitution and a flowery style of eloquence, and then, at the age of
thirty-three, had been left a widow, without children, without
fortune—with nothing but the memory of Mr. Penniman’s flowers of speech,
a certain vague aroma of which hovered about her own conversation.
Nevertheless he had offered her a home under his own roof, which Lavinia
accepted with the alacrity of a woman who had spent the ten years of her
married life in the town of Poughkeepsie.  The Doctor had not proposed to
Mrs. Penniman to come and live with him indefinitely; he had suggested
that she should make an asylum of his house while she looked about for
unfurnished lodgings.  It is uncertain whether Mrs. Penniman ever
instituted a search for unfurnished lodgings, but it is beyond dispute
that she never found them.  She settled herself with her brother and
never went away, and when Catherine was twenty years old her Aunt Lavinia
was still one of the most striking features of her immediate _entourage_.
Mrs. Penniman’s own account of the matter was that she had remained to
take charge of her niece’s education.  She had given this account, at
least, to every one but the Doctor, who never asked for explanations
which he could entertain himself any day with inventing.  Mrs. Penniman,
moreover, though she had a good deal of a certain sort of artificial
assurance, shrank, for indefinable reasons, from presenting herself to
her brother as a fountain of instruction.  She had not a high sense of
humour, but she had enough to prevent her from making this mistake; and
her brother, on his side, had enough to excuse her, in her situation, for
laying him under contribution during a considerable part of a lifetime.
He therefore assented tacitly to the proposition which Mrs. Penniman had
tacitly laid down, that it was of importance that the poor motherless
girl should have a brilliant woman near her.  His assent could only be
tacit, for he had never been dazzled by his sister’s intellectual lustre.
Save when he fell in love with Catherine Harrington, he had never been
dazzled, indeed, by any feminine characteristics whatever; and though he
was to a certain extent what is called a ladies’ doctor, his private
opinion of the more complicated sex was not exalted.  He regarded its
complications as more curious than edifying, and he had an idea of the
beauty of _reason_, which was, on the whole, meagrely gratified by what
he observed in his female patients.  His wife had been a reasonable
woman, but she was a bright exception; among several things that he was
sure of, this was perhaps the principal.  Such a conviction, of course,
did little either to mitigate or to abbreviate his widowhood; and it set
a limit to his recognition, at the best, of Catherine’s possibilities and
of Mrs. Penniman’s ministrations.  He, nevertheless, at the end of six
months, accepted his sister’s permanent presence as an accomplished fact,
and as Catherine grew older perceived that there were in effect good
reasons why she should have a companion of her own imperfect sex.  He was
extremely polite to Lavinia, scrupulously, formally polite; and she had
never seen him in anger but once in her life, when he lost his temper in
a theological discussion with her late husband.  With her he never
discussed theology, nor, indeed, discussed anything; he contented himself
with making known, very distinctly, in the form of a lucid ultimatum, his
wishes with regard to Catherine.

Once, when the girl was about twelve years old, he had said to her:

“Try and make a clever woman of her, Lavinia; I should like her to be a
clever woman.”

Mrs. Penniman, at this, looked thoughtful a moment.  “My dear Austin,”
she then inquired, “do you think it is better to be clever than to be
good?”

“Good for what?” asked the Doctor.  “You are good for nothing unless you
are clever.”

From this assertion Mrs. Penniman saw no reason to dissent; she possibly
reflected that her own great use in the world was owing to her aptitude
for many things.

“Of course I wish Catherine to be good,” the Doctor said next day; “but
she won’t be any the less virtuous for not being a fool.  I am not afraid
of her being wicked; she will never have the salt of malice in her
character.  She is as good as good bread, as the French say; but six
years hence I don’t want to have to compare her to good bread and
butter.”

“Are you afraid she will turn insipid?  My dear brother, it is I who
supply the butter; so you needn’t fear!” said Mrs. Penniman, who had
taken in hand the child’s accomplishments, overlooking her at the piano,
where Catherine displayed a certain talent, and going with her to the
dancing-class, where it must be confessed that she made but a modest
figure.

Mrs. Penniman was a tall, thin, fair, rather faded woman, with a
perfectly amiable disposition, a high standard of gentility, a taste for
light literature, and a certain foolish indirectness and obliquity of
character.  She was romantic, she was sentimental, she had a passion for
little secrets and mysteries—a very innocent passion, for her secrets had
hitherto always been as unpractical as addled eggs.  She was not
absolutely veracious; but this defect was of no great consequence, for
she had never had anything to conceal.  She would have liked to have a
lover, and to correspond with him under an assumed name in letters left
at a shop; I am bound to say that her imagination never carried the
intimacy farther than this.  Mrs. Penniman had never had a lover, but her
brother, who was very shrewd, understood her turn of mind.  “When
Catherine is about seventeen,” he said to himself, “Lavinia will try and
persuade her that some young man with a moustache is in love with her.
It will be quite untrue; no young man, with a moustache or without, will
ever be in love with Catherine.  But Lavinia will take it up, and talk to
her about it; perhaps, even, if her taste for clandestine operations
doesn’t prevail with her, she will talk to me about it.  Catherine won’t
see it, and won’t believe it, fortunately for her peace of mind; poor
Catherine isn’t romantic.”

She was a healthy well-grown child, without a trace of her mother’s
beauty.  She was not ugly; she had simply a plain, dull, gentle
countenance.  The most that had ever been said for her was that she had a
“nice” face, and, though she was an heiress, no one had ever thought of
regarding her as a belle.  Her father’s opinion of her moral purity was
abundantly justified; she was excellently, imperturbably good;
affectionate, docile, obedient, and much addicted to speaking the truth.
In her younger years she was a good deal of a romp, and, though it is an
awkward confession to make about one’s heroine, I must add that she was
something of a glutton.  She never, that I know of, stole raisins out of
the pantry; but she devoted her pocket-money to the purchase of
cream-cakes.  As regards this, however, a critical attitude would be
inconsistent with a candid reference to the early annals of any
biographer.  Catherine was decidedly not clever; she was not quick with
her book, nor, indeed, with anything else.  She was not abnormally
deficient, and she mustered learning enough to acquit herself respectably
in conversation with her contemporaries, among whom it must be avowed,
however, that she occupied a secondary place.  It is well known that in
New York it is possible for a young girl to occupy a primary one.
Catherine, who was extremely modest, had no desire to shine, and on most
social occasions, as they are called, you would have found her lurking in
the background.  She was extremely fond of her father, and very much
afraid of him; she thought him the cleverest and handsomest and most
celebrated of men.  The poor girl found her account so completely in the
exercise of her affections that the little tremor of fear that mixed
itself with her filial passion gave the thing an extra relish rather than
blunted its edge.  Her deepest desire was to please him, and her
conception of happiness was to know that she had succeeded in pleasing
him.  She had never succeeded beyond a certain point.  Though, on the
whole, he was very kind to her, she was perfectly aware of this, and to
go beyond the point in question seemed to her really something to live
for.  What she could not know, of course, was that she disappointed him,
though on three or four occasions the Doctor had been almost frank about
it.  She grew up peacefully and prosperously, but at the age of eighteen
Mrs. Penniman had not made a clever woman of her.  Dr. Sloper would have
liked to be proud of his daughter; but there was nothing to be proud of
in poor Catherine.  There was nothing, of course, to be ashamed of; but
this was not enough for the Doctor, who was a proud man and would have
enjoyed being able to think of his daughter as an unusual girl.  There
would have been a fitness in her being pretty and graceful, intelligent
and distinguished; for her mother had been the most charming woman of her
little day, and as regards her father, of course he knew his own value.
He had moments of irritation at having produced a commonplace child, and
he even went so far at times as to take a certain satisfaction in the
thought that his wife had not lived to find her out.  He was naturally
slow in making this discovery himself, and it was not till Catherine had
become a young lady grown that he regarded the matter as settled.  He
gave her the benefit of a great many doubts; he was in no haste to
conclude.  Mrs. Penniman frequently assured him that his daughter had a
delightful nature; but he knew how to interpret this assurance.  It
meant, to his sense, that Catherine was not wise enough to discover that
her aunt was a goose—a limitation of mind that could not fail to be
agreeable to Mrs. Penniman.  Both she and her brother, however,
exaggerated the young girl’s limitations; for Catherine, though she was
very fond of her aunt, and conscious of the gratitude she owed her,
regarded her without a particle of that gentle dread which gave its stamp
to her admiration of her father.  To her mind there was nothing of the
infinite about Mrs. Penniman; Catherine saw her all at once, as it were,
and was not dazzled by the apparition; whereas her father’s great
faculties seemed, as they stretched away, to lose themselves in a sort of
luminous vagueness, which indicated, not that they stopped, but that
Catherine’s own mind ceased to follow them.

It must not be supposed that Dr. Sloper visited his disappointment upon
the poor girl, or ever let her suspect that she had played him a trick.
On the contrary, for fear of being unjust to her, he did his duty with
exemplary zeal, and recognised that she was a faithful and affectionate
child.  Besides, he was a philosopher; he smoked a good many cigars over
his disappointment, and in the fulness of time he got used to it.  He
satisfied himself that he had expected nothing, though, indeed, with a
certain oddity of reasoning.  “I expect nothing,” he said to himself, “so
that if she gives me a surprise, it will be all clear again.  If she
doesn’t, it will be no loss.”  This was about the time Catherine had
reached her eighteenth year, so that it will be seen her father had not
been precipitate.  At this time she seemed not only incapable of giving
surprises; it was almost a question whether she could have received
one—she was so quiet and irresponsive.  People who expressed themselves
roughly called her stolid.  But she was irresponsive because she was shy,
uncomfortably, painfully shy.  This was not always understood, and she
sometimes produced an impression of insensibility.  In reality she was
the softest creature in the world.




III


AS a child she had promised to be tall, but when she was sixteen she
ceased to grow, and her stature, like most other points in her
composition, was not unusual.  She was strong, however, and properly
made, and, fortunately, her health was excellent.  It has been noted that
the Doctor was a philosopher, but I would not have answered for his
philosophy if the poor girl had proved a sickly and suffering person.
Her appearance of health constituted her principal claim to beauty, and
her clear, fresh complexion, in which white and red were very equally
distributed, was, indeed, an excellent thing to see.  Her eye was small
and quiet, her features were rather thick, her tresses brown and smooth.
A dull, plain girl she was called by rigorous critics—a quiet, ladylike
girl by those of the more imaginative sort; but by neither class was she
very elaborately discussed.  When it had been duly impressed upon her
that she was a young lady—it was a good while before she could believe
it—she suddenly developed a lively taste for dress: a lively taste is
quite the expression to use.  I feel as if I ought to write it very
small, her judgement in this matter was by no means infallible; it was
liable to confusions and embarrassments.  Her great indulgence of it was
really the desire of a rather inarticulate nature to manifest itself; she
sought to be eloquent in her garments, and to make up for her diffidence
of speech by a fine frankness of costume.  But if she expressed herself
in her clothes it is certain that people were not to blame for not
thinking her a witty person.  It must be added that though she had the
expectation of a fortune—Dr. Sloper for a long time had been making
twenty thousand dollars a year by his profession, and laying aside the
half of it—the amount of money at her disposal was not greater than the
allowance made to many poorer girls.  In those days in New York there
were still a few altar-fires flickering in the temple of Republican
simplicity, and Dr. Sloper would have been glad to see his daughter
present herself, with a classic grace, as a priestess of this mild faith.
It made him fairly grimace, in private, to think that a child of his
should be both ugly and overdressed.  For himself, he was fond of the
good things of life, and he made a considerable use of them; but he had a
dread of vulgarity, and even a theory that it was increasing in the
society that surrounded him.  Moreover, the standard of luxury in the
United States thirty years ago was carried by no means so high as at
present, and Catherine’s clever father took the old-fashioned view of the
education of young persons.  He had no particular theory on the subject;
it had scarcely as yet become a necessity of self-defence to have a
collection of theories.  It simply appeared to him proper and reasonable
that a well-bred young woman should not carry half her fortune on her
back.  Catherine’s back was a broad one, and would have carried a good
deal; but to the weight of the paternal displeasure she never ventured to
expose it, and our heroine was twenty years old before she treated
herself, for evening wear, to a red satin gown trimmed with gold fringe;
though this was an article which, for many years, she had coveted in
secret.  It made her look, when she sported it, like a woman of thirty;
but oddly enough, in spite of her taste for fine clothes, she had not a
grain of coquetry, and her anxiety when she put them on was as to whether
they, and not she, would look well.  It is a point on which history has
not been explicit, but the assumption is warrantable; it was in the royal
raiment just mentioned that she presented herself at a little
entertainment given by her aunt, Mrs. Almond.  The girl was at this time
in her twenty-first year, and Mrs. Almond’s party was the beginning of
something very important.

Some three or four years before this Dr. Sloper had moved his household
gods up town, as they say in New York.  He had been living ever since his
marriage in an edifice of red brick, with granite copings and an enormous
fanlight over the door, standing in a street within five minutes’ walk of
the City Hall, which saw its best days (from the social point of view)
about 1820.  After this, the tide of fashion began to set steadily
northward, as, indeed, in New York, thanks to the narrow channel in which
it flows, it is obliged to do, and the great hum of traffic rolled
farther to the right and left of Broadway.  By the time the Doctor
changed his residence the murmur of trade had become a mighty uproar,
which was music in the ears of all good citizens interested in the
commercial development, as they delighted to call it, of their fortunate
isle.  Dr. Sloper’s interest in this phenomenon was only indirect—though,
seeing that, as the years went on, half his patients came to be
overworked men of business, it might have been more immediate—and when
most of his neighbours’ dwellings (also ornamented with granite copings
and large fanlights) had been converted into offices, warehouses, and
shipping agencies, and otherwise applied to the base uses of commerce, he
determined to look out for a quieter home.  The ideal of quiet and of
genteel retirement, in 1835, was found in Washington Square, where the
Doctor built himself a handsome, modern, wide-fronted house, with a big
balcony before the drawing-room windows, and a flight of marble steps
ascending to a portal which was also faced with white marble.  This
structure, and many of its neighbours, which it exactly resembled, were
supposed, forty years ago, to embody the last results of architectural
science, and they remain to this day very solid and honourable dwellings.
In front of them was the Square, containing a considerable quantity of
inexpensive vegetation, enclosed by a wooden paling, which increased its
rural and accessible appearance; and round the corner was the more august
precinct of the Fifth Avenue, taking its origin at this point with a
spacious and confident air which already marked it for high destinies.  I
know not whether it is owing to the tenderness of early associations, but
this portion of New York appears to many persons the most delectable.  It
has a kind of established repose which is not of frequent occurrence in
other quarters of the long, shrill city; it has a riper, richer, more
honourable look than any of the upper ramifications of the great
longitudinal thoroughfare—the look of having had something of a social
history.  It was here, as you might have been informed on good authority,
that you had come into a world which appeared to offer a variety of
sources of interest; it was here that your grandmother lived, in
venerable solitude, and dispensed a hospitality which commended itself
alike to the infant imagination and the infant palate; it was here that
you took your first walks abroad, following the nursery-maid with unequal
step and sniffing up the strange odour of the ailantus-trees which at
that time formed the principal umbrage of the Square, and diffused an
aroma that you were not yet critical enough to dislike as it deserved; it
was here, finally, that your first school, kept by a broad-bosomed,
broad-based old lady with a ferule, who was always having tea in a blue
cup, with a saucer that didn’t match, enlarged the circle both of your
observations and your sensations.  It was here, at any rate, that my
heroine spent many years of her life; which is my excuse for this
topographical parenthesis.

Mrs. Almond lived much farther up town, in an embryonic street with a
high number—a region where the extension of the city began to assume a
theoretic air, where poplars grew beside the pavement (when there was
one), and mingled their shade with the steep roofs of desultory Dutch
houses, and where pigs and chickens disported themselves in the gutter.
These elements of rural picturesqueness have now wholly departed from New
York street scenery; but they were to be found within the memory of
middle-aged persons, in quarters which now would blush to be reminded of
them.  Catherine had a great many cousins, and with her Aunt Almond’s
children, who ended by being nine in number, she lived on terms of
considerable intimacy.  When she was younger they had been rather afraid
of her; she was believed, as the phrase is, to be highly educated, and a
person who lived in the intimacy of their Aunt Penniman had something of
reflected grandeur.  Mrs. Penniman, among the little Almonds, was an
object of more admiration than sympathy.  Her manners were strange and
formidable, and her mourning robes—she dressed in black for twenty years
after her husband’s death, and then suddenly appeared one morning with
pink roses in her cap—were complicated in odd, unexpected places with
buckles, bugles, and pins, which discouraged familiarity.  She took
children too hard, both for good and for evil, and had an oppressive air
of expecting subtle things of them, so that going to see her was a good
deal like being taken to church and made to sit in a front pew.  It was
discovered after a while, however, that Aunt Penniman was but an accident
in Catherine’s existence, and not a part of its essence, and that when
the girl came to spend a Saturday with her cousins, she was available for
“follow-my-master,” and even for leapfrog.  On this basis an
understanding was easily arrived at, and for several years Catherine
fraternised with her young kinsmen.  I say young kinsmen, because seven
of the little Almonds were boys, and Catherine had a preference for those
games which are most conveniently played in trousers.  By degrees,
however, the little Almonds’ trousers began to lengthen, and the wearers
to disperse and settle themselves in life.  The elder children were older
than Catherine, and the boys were sent to college or placed in
counting-rooms.  Of the girls, one married very punctually, and the other
as punctually became engaged.  It was to celebrate this latter event that
Mrs. Almond gave the little party I have mentioned.  Her daughter was to
marry a stout young stockbroker, a boy of twenty; it was thought a very
good thing.




IV


MRS. PENNIMAN, with more buckles and bangles than ever, came, of course,
to the entertainment, accompanied by her niece; the Doctor, too, had
promised to look in later in the evening.  There was to be a good deal of
dancing, and before it had gone very far, Marian Almond came up to
Catherine, in company with a tall young man.  She introduced the young
man as a person who had a great desire to make our heroine’s
acquaintance, and as a cousin of Arthur Townsend, her own intended.

Marian Almond was a pretty little person of seventeen, with a very small
figure and a very big sash, to the elegance of whose manners matrimony
had nothing to add.  She already had all the airs of a hostess, receiving
the company, shaking her fan, saying that with so many people to attend
to she should have no time to dance.  She made a long speech about Mr.
Townsend’s cousin, to whom she administered a tap with her fan before
turning away to other cares.  Catherine had not understood all that she
said; her attention was given to enjoying Marian’s ease of manner and
flow of ideas, and to looking at the young man, who was remarkably
handsome.  She had succeeded, however, as she often failed to do when
people were presented to her, in catching his name, which appeared to be
the same as that of Marian’s little stockbroker.  Catherine was always
agitated by an introduction; it seemed a difficult moment, and she
wondered that some people—her new acquaintance at this moment, for
instance—should mind it so little.  She wondered what she ought to say,
and what would be the consequences of her saying nothing.  The
consequences at present were very agreeable.  Mr. Townsend, leaving her
no time for embarrassment, began to talk with an easy smile, as if he had
known her for a year.

“What a delightful party!  What a charming house!  What an interesting
family!  What a pretty girl your cousin is!”

These observations, in themselves of no great profundity, Mr. Townsend
seemed to offer for what they were worth, and as a contribution to an
acquaintance.  He looked straight into Catherine’s eyes.  She answered
nothing; she only listened, and looked at him; and he, as if he expected
no particular reply, went on to say many other things in the same
comfortable and natural manner.  Catherine, though she felt tongue-tied,
was conscious of no embarrassment; it seemed proper that he should talk,
and that she should simply look at him.  What made it natural was that he
was so handsome, or rather, as she phrased it to herself, so beautiful.
The music had been silent for a while, but it suddenly began again; and
then he asked her, with a deeper, intenser smile, if she would do him the
honour of dancing with him.  Even to this inquiry she gave no audible
assent; she simply let him put his arm round her waist—as she did so it
occurred to her more vividly than it had ever done before, that this was
a singular place for a gentleman’s arm to be—and in a moment he was
guiding her round the room in the harmonious rotation of the polka.  When
they paused she felt that she was red; and then, for some moments, she
stopped looking at him.  She fanned herself, and looked at the flowers
that were painted on her fan.  He asked her if she would begin again, and
she hesitated to answer, still looking at the flowers.

“Does it make you dizzy?” he asked, in a tone of great kindness.

Then Catherine looked up at him; he was certainly beautiful, and not at
all red.  “Yes,” she said; she hardly knew why, for dancing had never
made her dizzy.

“Ah, well, in that case,” said Mr. Townsend, “we will sit still and talk.
I will find a good place to sit.”

He found a good place—a charming place; a little sofa that seemed meant
only for two persons.  The rooms by this time were very full; the dancers
increased in number, and people stood close in front of them, turning
their backs, so that Catherine and her companion seemed secluded and
unobserved.  “_We_ will talk,” the young man had said; but he still did
all the talking.  Catherine leaned back in her place, with her eyes fixed
upon him, smiling and thinking him very clever.  He had features like
young men in pictures; Catherine had never seen such features—so
delicate, so chiselled and finished—among the young New Yorkers whom she
passed in the streets and met at parties.  He was tall and slim, but he
looked extremely strong.  Catherine thought he looked like a statue.  But
a statue would not talk like that, and, above all, would not have eyes of
so rare a colour.  He had never been at Mrs. Almond’s before; he felt
very much like a stranger; and it was very kind of Catherine to take pity
on him.  He was Arthur Townsend’s cousin—not very near; several times
removed—and Arthur had brought him to present him to the family.  In
fact, he was a great stranger in New York.  It was his native place; but
he had not been there for many years.  He had been knocking about the
world, and living in far-away lands; he had only come back a month or two
before.  New York was very pleasant, only he felt lonely.

“You see, people forget you,” he said, smiling at Catherine with his
delightful gaze, while he leaned forward obliquely, turning towards her,
with his elbows on his knees.

It seemed to Catherine that no one who had once seen him would ever
forget him; but though she made this reflexion she kept it to herself,
almost as you would keep something precious.

They sat there for some time.  He was very amusing.  He asked her about
the people that were near them; he tried to guess who some of them were,
and he made the most laughable mistakes.  He criticised them very freely,
in a positive, off-hand way.  Catherine had never heard any
one—especially any young man—talk just like that.  It was the way a young
man might talk in a novel; or better still, in a play, on the stage,
close before the footlights, looking at the audience, and with every one
looking at him, so that you wondered at his presence of mind.  And yet
Mr. Townsend was not like an actor; he seemed so sincere, so natural.
This was very interesting; but in the midst of it Marian Almond came
pushing through the crowd, with a little ironical cry, when she found
these young people still together, which made every one turn round, and
cost Catherine a conscious blush.  Marian broke up their talk, and told
Mr. Townsend—whom she treated as if she were already married, and he had
become her cousin—to run away to her mother, who had been wishing for the
last half-hour to introduce him to Mr. Almond.

“We shall meet again!” he said to Catherine as he left her, and Catherine
thought it a very original speech.

Her cousin took her by the arm, and made her walk about.  “I needn’t ask
you what you think of Morris!” the young girl exclaimed.

“Is that his name?”

“I don’t ask you what you think of his name, but what you think of
himself,” said Marian.

“Oh, nothing particular!” Catherine answered, dissembling for the first
time in her life.

“I have half a mind to tell him that!” cried Marian.  “It will do him
good.  He’s so terribly conceited.”

“Conceited?” said Catherine, staring.

“So Arthur says, and Arthur knows about him.”

“Oh, don’t tell him!” Catherine murmured imploringly.

“Don’t tell him he’s conceited?  I have told him so a dozen times.”

At this profession of audacity Catherine looked down at her little
companion in amazement.  She supposed it was because Marian was going to
be married that she took so much on herself; but she wondered too,
whether, when she herself should become engaged, such exploits would be
expected of her.

Half an hour later she saw her Aunt Penniman sitting in the embrasure of
a window, with her head a little on one side, and her gold eye-glass
raised to her eyes, which were wandering about the room.  In front of her
was a gentleman, bending forward a little, with his back turned to
Catherine.  She knew his back immediately, though she had never seen it;
for when he had left her, at Marian’s instigation, he had retreated in
the best order, without turning round.  Morris Townsend—the name had
already become very familiar to her, as if some one had been repeating it
in her ear for the last half-hour—Morris Townsend was giving his
impressions of the company to her aunt, as he had done to herself; he was
saying clever things, and Mrs. Penniman was smiling, as if she approved
of them.  As soon as Catherine had perceived this she moved away; she
would not have liked him to turn round and see her.  But it gave her
pleasure—the whole thing.  That he should talk with Mrs. Penniman, with
whom she lived and whom she saw and talked with every day—that seemed to
keep him near her, and to make him even easier to contemplate than if she
herself had been the object of his civilities; and that Aunt Lavinia
should like him, should not be shocked or startled by what he said, this
also appeared to the girl a personal gain; for Aunt Lavinia’s standard
was extremely high, planted as it was over the grave of her late husband,
in which, as she had convinced every one, the very genius of conversation
was buried.  One of the Almond boys, as Catherine called him, invited our
heroine to dance a quadrille, and for a quarter of an hour her feet at
least were occupied.  This time she was not dizzy; her head was very
clear.  Just when the dance was over, she found herself in the crowd face
to face with her father.  Dr. Sloper had usually a little smile, never a
very big one, and with his little smile playing in his clear eyes and on
his neatly-shaved lips, he looked at his daughter’s crimson gown.

“Is it possible that this magnificent person is my child?” he said.

You would have surprised him if you had told him so; but it is a literal
fact that he almost never addressed his daughter save in the ironical
form.  Whenever he addressed her he gave her pleasure; but she had to cut
her pleasure out of the piece, as it were.  There were portions left
over, light remnants and snippets of irony, which she never knew what to
do with, which seemed too delicate for her own use; and yet Catherine,
lamenting the limitations of her understanding, felt that they were too
valuable to waste and had a belief that if they passed over her head they
yet contributed to the general sum of human wisdom.

“I am not magnificent,” she said mildly, wishing that she had put on
another dress.

“You are sumptuous, opulent, expensive,” her father rejoined.  “You look
as if you had eighty thousand a year.”

“Well, so long as I haven’t—” said Catherine illogically.  Her conception
of her prospective wealth was as yet very indefinite.

“So long as you haven’t you shouldn’t look as if you had.  Have you
enjoyed your party?”

Catherine hesitated a moment; and then, looking away, “I am rather
tired,” she murmured.  I have said that this entertainment was the
beginning of something important for Catherine.  For the second time in
her life she made an indirect answer; and the beginning of a period of
dissimulation is certainly a significant date.  Catherine was not so
easily tired as that.

Nevertheless, in the carriage, as they drove home, she was as quiet as if
fatigue had been her portion.  Dr. Sloper’s manner of addressing his
sister Lavinia had a good deal of resemblance to the tone he had adopted
towards Catherine.

“Who was the young man that was making love to you?” he presently asked.

“Oh, my good brother!” murmured Mrs. Penniman, in deprecation.

“He seemed uncommonly tender.  Whenever I looked at you, for half an
hour, he had the most devoted air.”

“The devotion was not to me,” said Mrs. Penniman.  “It was to Catherine;
he talked to me of her.”

Catherine had been listening with all her ears.  “Oh, Aunt Penniman!” she
exclaimed faintly.

“He is very handsome; he is very clever; he expressed himself with a
great deal—a great deal of felicity,” her aunt went on.

“He is in love with this regal creature, then?” the Doctor inquired
humorously.

“Oh, father,” cried the girl, still more faintly, devoutly thankful the
carriage was dark.

“I don’t know that; but he admired her dress.”

Catherine did not say to herself in the dark, “My dress only?” Mrs.
Penniman’s announcement struck her by its richness, not by its
meagreness.

“You see,” said her father, “he thinks you have eighty thousand a year.”

“I don’t believe he thinks of that,” said Mrs. Penniman; “he is too
refined.”

“He must be tremendously refined not to think of that!”

“Well, he is!” Catherine exclaimed, before she knew it.

“I thought you had gone to sleep,” her father answered.  “The hour has
come!” he added to himself.  “Lavinia is going to get up a romance for
Catherine.  It’s a shame to play such tricks on the girl.  What is the
gentleman’s name?” he went on, aloud.

“I didn’t catch it, and I didn’t like to ask him.  He asked to be
introduced to me,” said Mrs. Penniman, with a certain grandeur; “but you
know how indistinctly Jefferson speaks.”  Jefferson was Mr. Almond.
“Catherine, dear, what was the gentleman’s name?”

For a minute, if it had not been for the rumbling of the carriage, you
might have heard a pin drop.

“I don’t know, Aunt Lavinia,” said Catherine, very softly.  And, with all
his irony, her father believed her.




V


HE learned what he had asked some three or four days later, after Morris
Townsend, with his cousin, had called in Washington Square.  Mrs.
Penniman did not tell her brother, on the drive home, that she had
intimated to this agreeable young man, whose name she did not know, that,
with her niece, she should be very glad to see him; but she was greatly
pleased, and even a little flattered, when, late on a Sunday afternoon,
the two gentlemen made their appearance.  His coming with Arthur Townsend
made it more natural and easy; the latter young man was on the point of
becoming connected with the family, and Mrs. Penniman had remarked to
Catherine that, as he was going to marry Marian, it would be polite in
him to call.  These events came to pass late in the autumn, and Catherine
and her aunt had been sitting together in the closing dusk, by the
firelight, in the high back parlour.

Arthur Townsend fell to Catherine’s portion, while his companion placed
himself on the sofa, beside Mrs. Penniman.  Catherine had hitherto not
been a harsh critic; she was easy to please—she liked to talk with young
men.  But Marian’s betrothed, this evening, made her feel vaguely
fastidious; he sat looking at the fire and rubbing his knees with his
hands.  As for Catherine, she scarcely even pretended to keep up the
conversation; her attention had fixed itself on the other side of the
room; she was listening to what went on between the other Mr. Townsend
and her aunt.  Every now and then he looked over at Catherine herself and
smiled, as if to show that what he said was for her benefit too.
Catherine would have liked to change her place, to go and sit near them,
where she might see and hear him better.  But she was afraid of seeming
bold—of looking eager; and, besides, it would not have been polite to
Marian’s little suitor.  She wondered why the other gentleman had picked
out her aunt—how he came to have so much to say to Mrs. Penniman, to
whom, usually, young men were not especially devoted.  She was not at all
jealous of Aunt Lavinia, but she was a little envious, and above all she
wondered; for Morris Townsend was an object on which she found that her
imagination could exercise itself indefinitely.  His cousin had been
describing a house that he had taken in view of his union with Marian,
and the domestic conveniences he meant to introduce into it; how Marian
wanted a larger one, and Mrs. Almond recommended a smaller one, and how
he himself was convinced that he had got the neatest house in New York.

“It doesn’t matter,” he said; “it’s only for three or four years.  At the
end of three or four years we’ll move.  That’s the way to live in New
York—to move every three or four years.  Then you always get the last
thing.  It’s because the city’s growing so quick—you’ve got to keep up
with it.  It’s going straight up town—that’s where New York’s going.  If
I wasn’t afraid Marian would be lonely, I’d go up there—right up to the
top—and wait for it.  Only have to wait ten years—they’d all come up
after you.  But Marian says she wants some neighbours—she doesn’t want to
be a pioneer.  She says that if she’s got to be the first settler she had
better go out to Minnesota.  I guess we’ll move up little by little; when
we get tired of one street we’ll go higher.  So you see we’ll always have
a new house; it’s a great advantage to have a new house; you get all the
latest improvements.  They invent everything all over again about every
five years, and it’s a great thing to keep up with the new things.  I
always try and keep up with the new things of every kind.  Don’t you
think that’s a good motto for a young couple—to keep ‘going higher’?
That’s the name of that piece of poetry—what do they call
it?—_Excelsior_!”

Catherine bestowed on her junior visitor only just enough attention to
feel that this was not the way Mr. Morris Townsend had talked the other
night, or that he was talking now to her fortunate aunt.  But suddenly
his aspiring kinsman became more interesting.  He seemed to have become
conscious that she was affected by his companion’s presence, and he
thought it proper to explain it.

“My cousin asked me to bring him, or I shouldn’t have taken the liberty.
He seemed to want very much to come; you know he’s awfully sociable.  I
told him I wanted to ask you first, but he said Mrs. Penniman had invited
him.  He isn’t particular what he says when he wants to come somewhere!
But Mrs. Penniman seems to think it’s all right.”

“We are very glad to see him,” said Catherine.  And she wished to talk
more about him; but she hardly knew what to say.  “I never saw him
before,” she went on presently.

Arthur Townsend stared.

“Why, he told me he talked with you for over half an hour the other
night.”

“I mean before the other night.  That was the first time.”

“Oh, he has been away from New York—he has been all round the world.  He
doesn’t know many people here, but he’s very sociable, and he wants to
know every one.”

“Every one?” said Catherine.

“Well, I mean all the good ones.  All the pretty young ladies—like Mrs.
Penniman!” and Arthur Townsend gave a private laugh.

“My aunt likes him very much,” said Catherine.

“Most people like him—he’s so brilliant.”

“He’s more like a foreigner,” Catherine suggested.

“Well, I never knew a foreigner!” said young Townsend, in a tone which
seemed to indicate that his ignorance had been optional.

“Neither have I,” Catherine confessed, with more humility.  “They say
they are generally brilliant,” she added vaguely.

“Well, the people of this city are clever enough for me.  I know some of
them that think they are too clever for me; but they ain’t!”

“I suppose you can’t be too clever,” said Catherine, still with humility.

“I don’t know.  I know some people that call my cousin too clever.”

Catherine listened to this statement with extreme interest, and a feeling
that if Morris Townsend had a fault it would naturally be that one.  But
she did not commit herself, and in a moment she asked: “Now that he has
come back, will he stay here always?”

“Ah,” said Arthur, “if he can get something to do.”

“Something to do?”

“Some place or other; some business.”

“Hasn’t he got any?” said Catherine, who had never heard of a young
man—of the upper class—in this situation.

“No; he’s looking round.  But he can’t find anything.”

“I am very sorry,” Catherine permitted herself to observe.

“Oh, he doesn’t mind,” said young Townsend.  “He takes it easy—he isn’t
in a hurry.  He is very particular.”

Catherine thought he naturally would be, and gave herself up for some
moments to the contemplation of this idea, in several of its bearings.

“Won’t his father take him into his business—his office?” she at last
inquired.

“He hasn’t got any father—he has only got a sister.  Your sister can’t
help you much.”

It seemed to Catherine that if she were his sister she would disprove
this axiom.  “Is she—is she pleasant?” she asked in a moment.

“I don’t know—I believe she’s very respectable,” said young Townsend.
And then he looked across to his cousin and began to laugh.  “Look here,
we are talking about you,” he added.

Morris Townsend paused in his conversation with Mrs. Penniman, and
stared, with a little smile.  Then he got up, as if he were going.

“As far as you are concerned, I can’t return the compliment,” he said to
Catherine’s companion.  “But as regards Miss Sloper, it’s another
affair.”

Catherine thought this little speech wonderfully well turned; but she was
embarrassed by it, and she also got up.  Morris Townsend stood looking at
her and smiling; he put out his hand for farewell.  He was going, without
having said anything to her; but even on these terms she was glad to have
seen him.

“I will tell her what you have said—when you go!” said Mrs. Penniman,
with an insinuating laugh.

Catherine blushed, for she felt almost as if they were making sport of
her.  What in the world could this beautiful young man have said?  He
looked at her still, in spite of her blush; but very kindly and
respectfully.

“I have had no talk with you,” he said, “and that was what I came for.
But it will be a good reason for coming another time; a little pretext—if
I am obliged to give one.  I am not afraid of what your aunt will say
when I go.”

With this the two young men took their departure; after which Catherine,
with her blush still lingering, directed a serious and interrogative eye
to Mrs. Penniman.  She was incapable of elaborate artifice, and she
resorted to no jocular device—to no affectation of the belief that she
had been maligned—to learn what she desired.

“What did you say you would tell me?” she asked.

Mrs. Penniman came up to her, smiling and nodding a little, looked at her
all over, and gave a twist to the knot of ribbon in her neck.  “It’s a
great secret, my dear child; but he is coming a-courting!”

Catherine was serious still.  “Is that what he told you!”

“He didn’t say so exactly.  But he left me to guess it.  I’m a good
guesser.”

“Do you mean a-courting me?”

“Not me, certainly, miss; though I must say he is a hundred times more
polite to a person who has no longer extreme youth to recommend her than
most of the young men.  He is thinking of some one else.”  And Mrs.
Penniman gave her niece a delicate little kiss.  “You must be very
gracious to him.”

Catherine stared—she was bewildered.  “I don’t understand you,” she said;
“he doesn’t know me.”

“Oh yes, he does; more than you think.  I have told him all about you.”

“Oh, Aunt Penniman!” murmured Catherine, as if this had been a breach of
trust.  “He is a perfect stranger—we don’t know him.”  There was
infinite, modesty in the poor girl’s “we.”

Aunt Penniman, however, took no account of it; she spoke even with a
touch of acrimony.  “My dear Catherine, you know very well that you
admire him!”

“Oh, Aunt Penniman!” Catherine could only murmur again.  It might very
well be that she admired him—though this did not seem to her a thing to
talk about.  But that this brilliant stranger—this sudden apparition, who
had barely heard the sound of her voice—took that sort of interest in her
that was expressed by the romantic phrase of which Mrs. Penniman had just
made use: this could only be a figment of the restless brain of Aunt
Lavinia, whom every one knew to be a woman of powerful imagination.




VI


MRS. PENNIMAN even took for granted at times that other people had as
much imagination as herself; so that when, half an hour later, her
brother came in, she addressed him quite on this principle.

“He has just been here, Austin; it’s such a pity you missed him.”

“Whom in the world have I missed?” asked the Doctor.

“Mr. Morris Townsend; he has made us such a delightful visit.”

“And who in the world is Mr. Morris Townsend?”

“Aunt Penniman means the gentleman—the gentleman whose name I couldn’t
remember,” said Catherine.

“The gentleman at Elizabeth’s party who was so struck with Catherine,”
Mrs. Penniman added.

“Oh, his name is Morris Townsend, is it?  And did he come here to propose
to you?”

“Oh, father,” murmured the girl for all answer, turning away to the
window, where the dusk had deepened to darkness.

“I hope he won’t do that without your permission,” said Mrs. Penniman,
very graciously.

“After all, my dear, he seems to have yours,” her brother answered.

Lavinia simpered, as if this might not be quite enough, and Catherine,
with her forehead touching the window-panes, listened to this exchange of
epigrams as reservedly as if they had not each been a pin-prick in her
own destiny.

“The next time he comes,” the Doctor added, “you had better call me.  He
might like to see me.”

Morris Townsend came again, some five days afterwards; but Dr. Sloper was
not called, as he was absent from home at the time.  Catherine was with
her aunt when the young man’s name was brought in, and Mrs. Penniman,
effacing herself and protesting, made a great point of her niece’s going
into the drawing-room alone.

“This time it’s for you—for you only,” she said.  “Before, when he talked
to me, it was only preliminary—it was to gain my confidence.  Literally,
my dear, I should not have the _courage_ to show myself to-day.”

And this was perfectly true.  Mrs. Penniman was not a brave woman, and
Morris Townsend had struck her as a young man of great force of
character, and of remarkable powers of satire; a keen, resolute,
brilliant nature, with which one must exercise a great deal of tact.  She
said to herself that he was “imperious,” and she liked the word and the
idea.  She was not the least jealous of her niece, and she had been
perfectly happy with Mr. Penniman, but in the bottom of her heart she
permitted herself the observation: “That’s the sort of husband I should
have had!”  He was certainly much more imperious—she ended by calling it
imperial—than Mr. Penniman.

So Catherine saw Mr. Townsend alone, and her aunt did not come in even at
the end of the visit.  The visit was a long one; he sat there—in the
front parlour, in the biggest armchair—for more than an hour.  He seemed
more at home this time—more familiar; lounging a little in the chair,
slapping a cushion that was near him with his stick, and looking round
the room a good deal, and at the objects it contained, as well as at
Catherine; whom, however, he also contemplated freely.  There was a smile
of respectful devotion in his handsome eyes which seemed to Catherine
almost solemnly beautiful; it made her think of a young knight in a poem.
His talk, however, was not particularly knightly; it was light and easy
and friendly; it took a practical turn, and he asked a number of
questions about herself—what were her tastes—if she liked this and
that—what were her habits.  He said to her, with his charming smile,
“Tell me about yourself; give me a little sketch.”  Catherine had very
little to tell, and she had no talent for sketching; but before he went
she had confided to him that she had a secret passion for the theatre,
which had been but scantily gratified, and a taste for operatic
music—that of Bellini and Donizetti, in especial (it must be remembered
in extenuation of this primitive young woman that she held these opinions
in an age of general darkness)—which she rarely had an occasion to hear,
except on the hand-organ.  She confessed that she was not particularly
fond of literature.  Morris Townsend agreed with her that books were
tiresome things; only, as he said, you had to read a good many before you
found it out.  He had been to places that people had written books about,
and they were not a bit like the descriptions.  To see for yourself—that
was the great thing; he always tried to see for himself.  He had seen all
the principal actors—he had been to all the best theatres in London and
Paris.  But the actors were always like the authors—they always
exaggerated.  He liked everything to be natural.  Suddenly he stopped,
looking at Catherine with his smile.

“That’s what I like you for; you are so natural!  Excuse me,” he added;
“you see I am natural myself!”

And before she had time to think whether she excused him or not—which
afterwards, at leisure, she became conscious that she did—he began to
talk about music, and to say that it was his greatest pleasure in life.
He had heard all the great singers in Paris and London—Pasta and Rubini
and Lablache—and when you had done that, you could say that you knew what
singing was.

“I sing a little myself,” he said; “some day I will show you.  Not
to-day, but some other time.”

And then he got up to go; he had omitted, by accident, to say that he
would sing to her if she would play to him.  He thought of this after he
got into the street; but he might have spared his compunction, for
Catherine had not noticed the lapse.  She was thinking only that “some
other time” had a delightful sound; it seemed to spread itself over the
future.

This was all the more reason, however, though she was ashamed and
uncomfortable, why she should tell her father that Mr. Morris Townsend
had called again.  She announced the fact abruptly, almost violently, as
soon as the Doctor came into the house; and having done so—it was her
duty—she took measures to leave the room.  But she could not leave it
fast enough; her father stopped her just as she reached the door.

“Well, my dear, did he propose to you to-day?” the Doctor asked.

This was just what she had been afraid he would say; and yet she had no
answer ready.  Of course she would have liked to take it as a joke—as her
father must have meant it; and yet she would have liked, also, in denying
it, to be a little positive, a little sharp; so that he would perhaps not
ask the question again.  She didn’t like it—it made her unhappy.  But
Catherine could never be sharp; and for a moment she only stood, with her
hand on the door-knob, looking at her satiric parent, and giving a little
laugh.

“Decidedly,” said the Doctor to himself, “my daughter is not brilliant.”

But he had no sooner made this reflexion than Catherine found something;
she had decided, on the whole, to take the thing as a joke.

“Perhaps he will do it the next time!” she exclaimed, with a repetition
of her laugh.  And she quickly got out of the room.

The Doctor stood staring; he wondered whether his daughter were serious.
Catherine went straight to her own room, and by the time she reached it
she bethought herself that there was something else—something better—she
might have said.  She almost wished, now, that her father would ask his
question again, so that she might reply: “Oh yes, Mr. Morris Townsend
proposed to me, and I refused him!”

The Doctor, however, began to put his questions elsewhere; it naturally
having occurred to him that he ought to inform himself properly about
this handsome young man who had formed the habit of running in and out of
his house.  He addressed himself to the younger of his sisters, Mrs.
Almond—not going to her for the purpose; there was no such hurry as
that—but having made a note of the matter for the first opportunity.  The
Doctor was never eager, never impatient nor nervous; but he made notes of
everything, and he regularly consulted his notes.  Among them the
information he obtained from Mrs. Almond about Morris Townsend took its
place.

“Lavinia has already been to ask me,” she said.  “Lavinia is most
excited; I don’t understand it.  It’s not, after all, Lavinia that the
young man is supposed to have designs upon.  She is very peculiar.”

“Ah, my dear,” the Doctor replied, “she has not lived with me these
twelve years without my finding it out!”

“She has got such an artificial mind,” said Mrs. Almond, who always
enjoyed an opportunity to discuss Lavinia’s peculiarities with her
brother.  “She didn’t want me to tell you that she had asked me about Mr.
Townsend; but I told her I would.  She always wants to conceal
everything.”

“And yet at moments no one blurts things out with such crudity.  She is
like a revolving lighthouse; pitch darkness alternating with a dazzling
brilliancy!  But what did you tell her?” the Doctor asked.

“What I tell you; that I know very little of him.”

“Lavinia must have been disappointed at that,” said the Doctor; “she
would prefer him to have been guilty of some romantic crime.  However, we
must make the best of people.  They tell me our gentleman is the cousin
of the little boy to whom you are about to entrust the future of your
little girl.”

“Arthur is not a little boy; he is a very old man; you and I will never
be so old.  He is a distant relation of Lavinia’s _protégé_.  The name is
the same, but I am given to understand that there are Townsends and
Townsends.  So Arthur’s mother tells me; she talked about
‘branches’—younger branches, elder branches, inferior branches—as if it
were a royal house.  Arthur, it appears, is of the reigning line, but
poor Lavinia’s young man is not.  Beyond this, Arthur’s mother knows very
little about him; she has only a vague story that he has been ‘wild.’
But I know his sister a little, and she is a very nice woman.  Her name
is Mrs. Montgomery; she is a widow, with a little property and five
children.  She lives in the Second Avenue.”

“What does Mrs. Montgomery say about him?”

“That he has talents by which he might distinguish himself.”

“Only he is lazy, eh?”

“She doesn’t say so.”

“That’s family pride,” said the Doctor.  “What is his profession?”

“He hasn’t got any; he is looking for something.  I believe he was once
in the Navy.”

“Once?  What is his age?”

“I suppose he is upwards of thirty.  He must have gone into the Navy very
young.  I think Arthur told me that he inherited a small property—which
was perhaps the cause of his leaving the Navy—and that he spent it all in
a few years.  He travelled all over the world, lived abroad, amused
himself.  I believe it was a kind of system, a theory he had.  He has
lately come back to America, with the intention, as he tells Arthur, of
beginning life in earnest.”

“Is he in earnest about Catherine, then?”

“I don’t see why you should be incredulous,” said Mrs. Almond.  “It seems
to me that you have never done Catherine justice.  You must remember that
she has the prospect of thirty thousand a year.”

The Doctor looked at his sister a moment, and then, with the slightest
touch of bitterness: “You at least appreciate her,” he said.

Mrs. Almond blushed.

“I don’t mean that is her only merit; I simply mean that it is a great
one.  A great many young men think so; and you appear to me never to have
been properly aware of that.  You have always had a little way of
alluding to her as an unmarriageable girl.”

“My allusions are as kind as yours, Elizabeth,” said the Doctor frankly.
“How many suitors has Catherine had, with all her expectations—how much
attention has she ever received?  Catherine is not unmarriageable, but
she is absolutely unattractive.  What other reason is there for Lavinia
being so charmed with the idea that there is a lover in the house?  There
has never been one before, and Lavinia, with her sensitive, sympathetic
nature, is not used to the idea.  It affects her imagination.  I must do
the young men of New York the justice to say that they strike me as very
disinterested.  They prefer pretty girls—lively girls—girls like your
own.  Catherine is neither pretty nor lively.”

“Catherine does very well; she has a style of her own—which is more than
my poor Marian has, who has no style at all,” said Mrs. Almond.  “The
reason Catherine has received so little attention is that she seems to
all the young men to be older than themselves.  She is so large, and she
dresses—so richly.  They are rather afraid of her, I think; she looks as
if she had been married already, and you know they don’t like married
women.  And if our young men appear disinterested,” the Doctor’s wiser
sister went on, “it is because they marry, as a general thing, so young;
before twenty-five, at the age of innocence and sincerity, before the age
of calculation.  If they only waited a little, Catherine would fare
better.”

“As a calculation?  Thank you very much,” said the Doctor.

“Wait till some intelligent man of forty comes along, and he will be
delighted with Catherine,” Mrs. Almond continued.

“Mr. Townsend is not old enough, then; his motives may be pure.”

“It is very possible that his motives are pure; I should be very sorry to
take the contrary for granted.  Lavinia is sure of it, and, as he is a
very prepossessing youth, you might give him the benefit of the doubt.”

Dr. Sloper reflected a moment.

“What are his present means of subsistence?”

“I have no idea.  He lives, as I say, with his sister.”

“A widow, with five children?  Do you mean he lives _upon_ her?”

Mrs. Almond got up, and with a certain impatience: “Had you not better
ask Mrs. Montgomery herself?” she inquired.

“Perhaps I may come to that,” said the Doctor.  “Did you say the Second
Avenue?”  He made a note of the Second Avenue.




VII


HE was, however, by no means so much in earnest as this might seem to
indicate; and, indeed, he was more than anything else amused with the
whole situation.  He was not in the least in a state of tension or of
vigilance with regard to Catherine’s prospects; he was even on his guard
against the ridicule that might attach itself to the spectacle of a house
thrown into agitation by its daughter and heiress receiving attentions
unprecedented in its annals.  More than this, he went so far as to
promise himself some entertainment from the little drama—if drama it
was—of which Mrs. Penniman desired to represent the ingenious Mr.
Townsend as the hero.  He had no intention, as yet, of regulating the
_dénouement_.  He was perfectly willing, as Elizabeth had suggested, to
give the young man the benefit of every doubt.  There was no great danger
in it; for Catherine, at the age of twenty-two, was, after all, a rather
mature blossom, such as could be plucked from the stem only by a vigorous
jerk.  The fact that Morris Townsend was poor—was not of necessity
against him; the Doctor had never made up his mind that his daughter
should marry a rich man.  The fortune she would inherit struck him as a
very sufficient provision for two reasonable persons, and if a penniless
swain who could give a good account of himself should enter the lists, he
should be judged quite upon his personal merits.  There were other things
besides.  The Doctor thought it very vulgar to be precipitate in accusing
people of mercenary motives, inasmuch as his door had as yet not been in
the least besieged by fortune-hunters; and, lastly, he was very curious
to see whether Catherine might really be loved for her moral worth.  He
smiled as he reflected that poor Mr. Townsend had been only twice to the
house, and he said to Mrs. Penniman that the next time he should come she
must ask him to dinner.

He came very soon again, and Mrs. Penniman had of course great pleasure
in executing this mission.  Morris Townsend accepted her invitation with
equal good grace, and the dinner took place a few days later.  The Doctor
had said to himself, justly enough, that they must not have the young man
alone; this would partake too much of the nature of encouragement.  So
two or three other persons were invited; but Morris Townsend, though he
was by no means the ostensible, was the real, occasion of the feast.
There is every reason to suppose that he desired to make a good
impression; and if he fell short of this result, it was not for want of a
good deal of intelligent effort.  The Doctor talked to him very little
during dinner; but he observed him attentively, and after the ladies had
gone out he pushed him the wine and asked him several questions.  Morris
was not a young man who needed to be pressed, and he found quite enough
encouragement in the superior quality of the claret.  The Doctor’s wine
was admirable, and it may be communicated to the reader that while he
sipped it Morris reflected that a cellar-full of good liquor—there was
evidently a cellar-full here—would be a most attractive idiosyncrasy in a
father-in-law.  The Doctor was struck with his appreciative guest; he saw
that he was not a commonplace young man.  “He has ability,” said
Catherine’s father, “decided ability; he has a very good head if he
chooses to use it.  And he is uncommonly well turned out; quite the sort
of figure that pleases the ladies.  But I don’t think I like him.”  The
Doctor, however, kept his reflexions to himself, and talked to his
visitors about foreign lands, concerning which Morris offered him more
information than he was ready, as he mentally phrased it, to swallow.
Dr. Sloper had travelled but little, and he took the liberty of not
believing everything this anecdotical idler narrated.  He prided himself
on being something of a physiognomist, and while the young man, chatting
with easy assurance, puffed his cigar and filled his glass again, the
Doctor sat with his eyes quietly fixed on his bright, expressive face.
“He has the assurance of the devil himself,” said Morris’s host; “I don’t
think I ever saw such assurance.  And his powers of invention are most
remarkable.  He is very knowing; they were not so knowing as that in my
time.  And a good head, did I say?  I should think so—after a bottle of
Madeira and a bottle and a half of claret!”

After dinner Morris Townsend went and stood before Catherine, who was
standing before the fire in her red satin gown.

“He doesn’t like me—he doesn’t like me at all!” said the young man.

“Who doesn’t like you?” asked Catherine.

“Your father; extraordinary man!”

“I don’t see how you know,” said Catherine, blushing.

“I feel; I am very quick to feel.”

“Perhaps you are mistaken.”

“Ah, well; you ask him and you will see.”

“I would rather not ask him, if there is any danger of his saying what
you think.”

Morris looked at her with an air of mock melancholy.

“It wouldn’t give you any pleasure to contradict him?”

“I never contradict him,” said Catherine.

“Will you hear me abused without opening your lips in my defence?”

“My father won’t abuse you.  He doesn’t know you enough.”

Morris Townsend gave a loud laugh, and Catherine began to blush again.

“I shall never mention you,” she said, to take refuge from her confusion.

“That is very well; but it is not quite what I should have liked you to
say.  I should have liked you to say: ‘If my father doesn’t think well of
you, what does it matter?’”

“Ah, but it would matter; I couldn’t say that!” the girl exclaimed.

He looked at her for a moment, smiling a little; and the Doctor, if he
had been watching him just then, would have seen a gleam of fine
impatience in the sociable softness of his eye.  But there was no
impatience in his rejoinder—none, at least, save what was expressed in a
little appealing sigh.  “Ah, well, then, I must not give up the hope of
bringing him round!”

He expressed it more frankly to Mrs. Penniman later in the evening.  But
before that he sang two or three songs at Catherine’s timid request; not
that he flattered himself that this would help to bring her father round.
He had a sweet, light tenor voice, and when he had finished every one
made some exclamation—every one, that is, save Catherine, who remained
intensely silent.  Mrs. Penniman declared that his manner of singing was
“most artistic,” and Dr. Sloper said it was “very taking—very taking
indeed”; speaking loudly and distinctly, but with a certain dryness.

“He doesn’t like me—he doesn’t like me at all,” said Morris Townsend,
addressing the aunt in the same manner as he had done the niece.  “He
thinks I’m all wrong.”

Unlike her niece, Mrs. Penniman asked for no explanation.  She only
smiled very sweetly, as if she understood everything; and, unlike
Catherine too, she made no attempt to contradict him.  “Pray, what does
it matter?” she murmured softly.

“Ah, you say the right thing!” said Morris, greatly to the gratification
of Mrs. Penniman, who prided herself on always saying the right thing.

The Doctor, the next time he saw his sister Elizabeth, let her know that
he had made the acquaintance of Lavinia’s _protégé_.

“Physically,” he said, “he’s uncommonly well set up.  As an anatomist, it
is really a pleasure to me to see such a beautiful structure; although,
if people were all like him, I suppose there would be very little need
for doctors.”

“Don’t you see anything in people but their bones?” Mrs. Almond rejoined.
“What do you think of him as a father?”

“As a father?  Thank Heaven I am not his father!”

“No; but you are Catherine’s.  Lavinia tells me she is in love.”

“She must get over it.  He is not a gentleman.”

“Ah, take care!  Remember that he is a branch of the Townsends.”

“He is not what I call a gentleman.  He has not the soul of one.  He is
extremely insinuating; but it’s a vulgar nature.  I saw through it in a
minute.  He is altogether too familiar—I hate familiarity.  He is a
plausible coxcomb.”

“Ah, well,” said Mrs. Almond; “if you make up your mind so easily, it’s a
great advantage.”

“I don’t make up my mind easily.  What I tell you is the result of thirty
years of observation; and in order to be able to form that judgement in a
single evening, I have had to spend a lifetime in study.”

“Very possibly you are right.  But the thing is for Catherine to see it.”

“I will present her with a pair of spectacles!” said the Doctor.




VIII


IF it were true that she was in love, she was certainly very quiet about
it; but the Doctor was of course prepared to admit that her quietness
might mean volumes.  She had told Morris Townsend that she would not
mention him to her father, and she saw no reason to retract this vow of
discretion.  It was no more than decently civil, of course, that after
having dined in Washington Square, Morris should call there again; and it
was no more than natural that, having been kindly received on this
occasion, he should continue to present himself.  He had had plenty of
leisure on his hands; and thirty years ago, in New York, a young man of
leisure had reason to be thankful for aids to self-oblivion.  Catherine
said nothing to her father about these visits, though they had rapidly
become the most important, the most absorbing thing in her life.  The
girl was very happy.  She knew not as yet what would come of it; but the
present had suddenly grown rich and solemn.  If she had been told she was
in love, she would have been a good deal surprised; for she had an idea
that love was an eager and exacting passion, and her own heart was filled
in these days with the impulse of self-effacement and sacrifice.
Whenever Morris Townsend had left the house, her imagination projected
itself, with all its strength, into the idea of his soon coming back; but
if she had been told at such a moment that he would not return for a
year, or even that he would never return, she would not have complained
nor rebelled, but would have humbly accepted the decree, and sought for
consolation in thinking over the times she had already seen him, the
words he had spoken, the sound of his voice, of his tread, the expression
of his face.  Love demands certain things as a right; but Catherine had
no sense of her rights; she had only a consciousness of immense and
unexpected favours.  Her very gratitude for these things had hushed
itself; for it seemed to her that there would be something of impudence
in making a festival of her secret.  Her father suspected Morris
Townsend’s visits, and noted her reserve.  She seemed to beg pardon for
it; she looked at him constantly in silence, as if she meant to say that
she said nothing because she was afraid of irritating him.  But the poor
girl’s dumb eloquence irritated him more than anything else would have
done, and he caught himself murmuring more than once that it was a
grievous pity his only child was a simpleton.  His murmurs, however, were
inaudible; and for a while he said nothing to any one.  He would have
liked to know exactly how often young Townsend came; but he had
determined to ask no questions of the girl herself—to say nothing more to
her that would show that he watched her.  The Doctor had a great idea of
being largely just: he wished to leave his daughter her liberty, and
interfere only when the danger should be proved.  It was not in his
manner to obtain information by indirect methods, and it never even
occurred to him to question the servants.  As for Lavinia, he hated to
talk to her about the matter; she annoyed him with her mock romanticism.
But he had to come to this.  Mrs. Penniman’s convictions as regards the
relations of her niece and the clever young visitor who saved appearances
by coming ostensibly for both the ladies—Mrs. Penniman’s convictions had
passed into a riper and richer phase.  There was to be no crudity in Mrs.
Penniman’s treatment of the situation; she had become as uncommunicative
as Catherine herself.  She was tasting of the sweets of concealment; she
had taken up the line of mystery.  “She would be enchanted to be able to
prove to herself that she is persecuted,” said the Doctor; and when at
last he questioned her, he was sure she would contrive to extract from
his words a pretext for this belief.

“Be so good as to let me know what is going on in the house,” he said to
her, in a tone which, under the circumstances, he himself deemed genial.

“Going on, Austin?” Mrs. Penniman exclaimed.  “Why, I am sure I don’t
know!  I believe that last night the old grey cat had kittens!”

“At her age?” said the Doctor.  “The idea is startling—almost shocking.
Be so good as to see that they are all drowned.  But what else has
happened?”

“Ah, the dear little kittens!” cried Mrs. Penniman.  “I wouldn’t have
them drowned for the world!”

Her brother puffed his cigar a few moments in silence.  “Your sympathy
with kittens, Lavinia,” he presently resumed, “arises from a feline
element in your own character.”

“Cats are very graceful, and very clean,” said Mrs. Penniman, smiling.

“And very stealthy.  You are the embodiment both of grace and of
neatness; but you are wanting in frankness.”

“You certainly are not, dear brother.”

“I don’t pretend to be graceful, though I try to be neat.  Why haven’t
you let me know that Mr. Morris Townsend is coming to the house four
times a week?”

Mrs. Penniman lifted her eyebrows.  “Four times a week?”

“Five times, if you prefer it.  I am away all day, and I see nothing.
But when such things happen, you should let me know.”

Mrs. Penniman, with her eyebrows still raised, reflected intently.  “Dear
Austin,” she said at last, “I am incapable of betraying a confidence.  I
would rather suffer anything.”

“Never fear; you shall not suffer.  To whose confidence is it you allude?
Has Catherine made you take a vow of eternal secrecy?”

“By no means.  Catherine has not told me as much as she might.  She has
not been very trustful.”

“It is the young man, then, who has made you his confidante?  Allow me to
say that it is extremely indiscreet of you to form secret alliances with
young men.  You don’t know where they may lead you.”

“I don’t know what you mean by an alliance,” said Mrs. Penniman.  “I take
a great interest in Mr. Townsend; I won’t conceal that.  But that’s all.”

“Under the circumstances, that is quite enough.  What is the source of
your interest in Mr. Townsend?”

“Why,” said Mrs. Penniman, musing, and then breaking into her smile,
“that he is so interesting!”

The Doctor felt that he had need of his patience.  “And what makes him
interesting?—his good looks?”

“His misfortunes, Austin.”

“Ah, he has had misfortunes?  That, of course, is always interesting.
Are you at liberty to mention a few of Mr. Townsend’s?”

“I don’t know that he would like it,” said Mrs. Penniman.  “He has told
me a great deal about himself—he has told me, in fact, his whole history.
But I don’t think I ought to repeat those things.  He would tell them to
you, I am sure, if he thought you would listen to him kindly.  With
kindness you may do anything with him.”

The Doctor gave a laugh.  “I shall request him very kindly, then, to
leave Catherine alone.”

“Ah!” said Mrs. Penniman, shaking her forefinger at her brother, with her
little finger turned out, “Catherine had probably said something to him
kinder than that.”

“Said that she loved him?  Do you mean that?”

Mrs. Penniman fixed her eyes on the floor.  “As I tell you, Austin, she
doesn’t confide in me.”

“You have an opinion, I suppose, all the same.  It is that I ask you for;
though I don’t conceal from you that I shall not regard it as
conclusive.”

Mrs. Penniman’s gaze continued to rest on the carpet; but at last she
lifted it, and then her brother thought it very expressive.  “I think
Catherine is very happy; that is all I can say.”

“Townsend is trying to marry her—is that what you mean?”

“He is greatly interested in her.”

“He finds her such an attractive girl?”

“Catherine has a lovely nature, Austin,” said Mrs. Penniman, “and Mr.
Townsend has had the intelligence to discover that.”

“With a little help from you, I suppose.  My dear Lavinia,” cried the
Doctor, “you are an admirable aunt!”

“So Mr. Townsend says,” observed Lavinia, smiling.

“Do you think he is sincere?” asked her brother.

“In saying that?”

“No; that’s of course.  But in his admiration for Catherine?”

“Deeply sincere.  He has said to me the most appreciative, the most
charming things about her.  He would say them to you, if he were sure you
would listen to him—gently.”

“I doubt whether I can undertake it.  He appears to require a great deal
of gentleness.”

“He is a sympathetic, sensitive nature,” said Mrs. Penniman.

Her brother puffed his cigar again in silence.  “These delicate qualities
have survived his vicissitudes, eh?  All this while you haven’t told me
about his misfortunes.”

“It is a long story,” said Mrs. Penniman, “and I regard it as a sacred
trust.  But I suppose there is no objection to my saying that he has been
wild—he frankly confesses that.  But he has paid for it.”

“That’s what has impoverished him, eh?”

“I don’t mean simply in money.  He is very much alone in the world.”

“Do you mean that he has behaved so badly that his friends have given him
up?”

“He has had false friends, who have deceived and betrayed him.”

“He seems to have some good ones too.  He has a devoted sister, and
half-a-dozen nephews and nieces.”

Mrs. Penniman was silent a minute.  “The nephews and nieces are children,
and the sister is not a very attractive person.”

“I hope he doesn’t abuse her to you,” said the Doctor; “for I am told he
lives upon her.”

“Lives upon her?”

“Lives with her, and does nothing for himself; it is about the same
thing.”

“He is looking for a position—most earnestly,” said Mrs. Penniman.  “He
hopes every day to find one.”

“Precisely.  He is looking for it here—over there in the front parlour.
The position of husband of a weak-minded woman with a large fortune would
suit him to perfection!”

Mrs. Penniman was truly amiable, but she now gave signs of temper.  She
rose with much animation, and stood for a moment looking at her brother.
“My dear Austin,” she remarked, “if you regard Catherine as a weak-minded
woman, you are particularly mistaken!”  And with this she moved
majestically away.




IX


IT was a regular custom with the family in Washington Square to go and
spend Sunday evening at Mrs. Almond’s.  On the Sunday after the
conversation I have just narrated, this custom was not intermitted and on
this occasion, towards the middle of the evening, Dr. Sloper found reason
to withdraw to the library, with his brother-in-law, to talk over a
matter of business.  He was absent some twenty minutes, and when he came
back into the circle, which was enlivened by the presence of several
friends of the family, he saw that Morris Townsend had come in and had
lost as little time as possible in seating himself on a small sofa,
beside Catherine.  In the large room, where several different groups had
been formed, and the hum of voices and of laughter was loud, these two
young persons might confabulate, as the Doctor phrased it to himself,
without attracting attention.  He saw in a moment, however, that his
daughter was painfully conscious of his own observation.  She sat
motionless, with her eyes bent down, staring at her open fan, deeply
flushed, shrinking together as if to minimise the indiscretion of which
she confessed herself guilty.

The Doctor almost pitied her.  Poor Catherine was not defiant; she had no
genius for bravado; and as she felt that her father viewed her
companion’s attentions with an unsympathising eye, there was nothing but
discomfort for her in the accident of seeming to challenge him.  The
Doctor felt, indeed, so sorry for her that he turned away, to spare her
the sense of being watched; and he was so intelligent a man that, in his
thoughts, he rendered a sort of poetic justice to her situation.

“It must be deucedly pleasant for a plain inanimate girl like that to
have a beautiful young fellow come and sit down beside her and whisper to
her that he is her slave—if that is what this one whispers.  No wonder
she likes it, and that she thinks me a cruel tyrant; which of course she
does, though she is afraid—she hasn’t the animation necessary—to admit it
to herself.  Poor old Catherine!” mused the Doctor; “I verily believe she
is capable of defending me when Townsend abuses me!”

And the force of this reflexion, for the moment, was such in making him
feel the natural opposition between his point of view and that of an
infatuated child, that he said to himself that he was perhaps, after all,
taking things too hard and crying out before he was hurt.  He must not
condemn Morris Townsend unheard.  He had a great aversion to taking
things too hard; he thought that half the discomfort and many of the
disappointments of life come from it; and for an instant he asked himself
whether, possibly, he did not appear ridiculous to this intelligent young
man, whose private perception of incongruities he suspected of being
keen.  At the end of a quarter of an hour Catherine had got rid of him,
and Townsend was now standing before the fireplace in conversation with
Mrs. Almond.

“We will try him again,” said the Doctor.  And he crossed the room and
joined his sister and her companion, making her a sign that she should
leave the young man to him.  She presently did so, while Morris looked at
him, smiling, without a sign of evasiveness in his affable eye.

“He’s amazingly conceited!” thought the Doctor; and then he said aloud:
“I am told you are looking out for a position.”

“Oh, a position is more than I should presume to call it,” Morris
Townsend answered.  “That sounds so fine.  I should like some quiet
work—something to turn an honest penny.”

“What sort of thing should you prefer?”

“Do you mean what am I fit for?  Very little, I am afraid.  I have
nothing but my good right arm, as they say in the melodramas.”

“You are too modest,” said the Doctor.  “In addition to your good right
arm, you have your subtle brain.  I know nothing of you but what I see;
but I see by your physiognomy that you are extremely intelligent.”

“Ah,” Townsend murmured, “I don’t know what to answer when you say that!
You advise me, then, not to despair?”

And he looked at his interlocutor as if the question might have a double
meaning.  The Doctor caught the look and weighed it a moment before he
replied.  “I should be very sorry to admit that a robust and
well-disposed young man need ever despair.  If he doesn’t succeed in one
thing, he can try another.  Only, I should add, he should choose his line
with discretion.”

“Ah, yes, with discretion,” Morris Townsend repeated sympathetically.
“Well, I have been indiscreet, formerly; but I think I have got over it.
I am very steady now.”  And he stood a moment, looking down at his
remarkably neat shoes.  Then at last, “Were you kindly intending to
propose something for my advantage?” he inquired, looking up and smiling.

“Damn his impudence!” the Doctor exclaimed privately.  But in a moment he
reflected that he himself had, after all, touched first upon this
delicate point, and that his words might have been construed as an offer
of assistance.  “I have no particular proposal to make,” he presently
said; “but it occurred to me to let you know that I have you in my mind.
Sometimes one hears of opportunities.  For instance—should you object to
leaving New York—to going to a distance?”

“I am afraid I shouldn’t be able to manage that.  I must seek my fortune
here or nowhere.  You see,” added Morris Townsend, “I have ties—I have
responsibilities here.  I have a sister, a widow, from whom I have been
separated for a long time, and to whom I am almost everything.  I
shouldn’t like to say to her that I must leave her.  She rather depends
upon me, you see.”

“Ah, that’s very proper; family feeling is very proper,” said Dr. Sloper.
“I often think there is not enough of it in our city.  I think I have
heard of your sister.”

“It is possible, but I rather doubt it; she lives so very quietly.”

“As quietly, you mean,” the Doctor went on, with a short laugh, “as a
lady may do who has several young children.”

“Ah, my little nephews and nieces—that’s the very point!  I am helping to
bring them up,” said Morris Townsend.  “I am a kind of amateur tutor; I
give them lessons.”

“That’s very proper, as I say; but it is hardly a career.”

“It won’t make my fortune!” the young man confessed.

“You must not be too much bent on a fortune,” said the Doctor.  “But I
assure you I will keep you in mind; I won’t lose sight of you!”

“If my situation becomes desperate I shall perhaps take the liberty of
reminding you!” Morris rejoined, raising his voice a little, with a
brighter smile, as his interlocutor turned away.

Before he left the house the Doctor had a few words with Mrs. Almond.

“I should like to see his sister,” he said.  “What do you call her?  Mrs.
Montgomery.  I should like to have a little talk with her.”

“I will try and manage it,” Mrs. Almond responded.  “I will take the
first opportunity of inviting her, and you shall come and meet her.
Unless, indeed,” Mrs. Almond added, “she first takes it into her head to
be sick and to send for you.”

“Ah no, not that; she must have trouble enough without that.  But it
would have its advantages, for then I should see the children.  I should
like very much to see the children.”

“You are very thorough.  Do you want to catechise them about their
uncle!”

“Precisely.  Their uncle tells me he has charge of their education, that
he saves their mother the expense of school-bills.  I should like to ask
them a few questions in the commoner branches.”

“He certainly has not the cut of a schoolmaster!” Mrs. Almond said to
herself a short time afterwards, as she saw Morris Townsend in a corner
bending over her niece, who was seated.

And there was, indeed, nothing in the young man’s discourse at this
moment that savoured of the pedagogue.

“Will you meet me somewhere to-morrow or next day?” he said, in a low
tone, to Catherine.

“Meet you?” she asked, lifting her frightened eyes.

“I have something particular to say to you—very particular.”

“Can’t you come to the house?  Can’t you say it there?”

Townsend shook his head gloomily.  “I can’t enter your doors again!”

“Oh, Mr. Townsend!” murmured Catherine.  She trembled as she wondered
what had happened, whether her father had forbidden it.

“I can’t in self-respect,” said the young man.  “Your father has insulted
me.”

“Insulted you!”

“He has taunted me with my poverty.”

“Oh, you are mistaken—you misunderstood him!”  Catherine spoke with
energy, getting up from her chair.

“Perhaps I am too proud—too sensitive.  But would you have me otherwise?”
he asked tenderly.

“Where my father is concerned, you must not be sure.  He is full of
goodness,” said Catherine.

“He laughed at me for having no position!  I took it quietly; but only
because he belongs to you.”

“I don’t know,” said Catherine; “I don’t know what he thinks.  I am sure
he means to be kind.  You must not be too proud.”

“I will be proud only of you,” Morris answered.  “Will you meet me in the
Square in the afternoon?”

A great blush on Catherine’s part had been the answer to the declaration
I have just quoted.  She turned away, heedless of his question.

“Will you meet me?” he repeated.  “It is very quiet there; no one need
see us—toward dusk?”

“It is you who are unkind, it is you who laugh, when you say such things
as that.”

“My dear girl!” the young man murmured.

“You know how little there is in me to be proud of.  I am ugly and
stupid.”

Morris greeted this remark with an ardent murmur, in which she recognised
nothing articulate but an assurance that she was his own dearest.

But she went on.  “I am not even—I am not even—”  And she paused a
moment.

“You are not what?”

“I am not even brave.”

“Ah, then, if you are afraid, what shall we do?”

She hesitated a while; then at last—“You must come to the house,” she
said; “I am not afraid of that.”

“I would rather it were in the Square,” the young man urged.  “You know
how empty it is, often.  No one will see us.”

“I don’t care who sees us!  But leave me now.”

He left her resignedly; he had got what he wanted.  Fortunately he was
ignorant that half an hour later, going home with her father and feeling
him near, the poor girl, in spite of her sudden declaration of courage,
began to tremble again.  Her father said nothing; but she had an idea his
eyes were fixed upon her in the darkness.  Mrs. Penniman also was silent;
Morris Townsend had told her that her niece preferred, unromantically, an
interview in a chintz-covered parlour to a sentimental tryst beside a
fountain sheeted with dead leaves, and she was lost in wonderment at the
oddity—almost the perversity—of the choice.




X


CATHERINE received the young man the next day on the ground she had
chosen—amid the chaste upholstery of a New York drawing-room furnished in
the fashion of fifty years ago.  Morris had swallowed his pride and made
the effort necessary to cross the threshold of her too derisive parent—an
act of magnanimity which could not fail to render him doubly interesting.

“We must settle something—we must take a line,” he declared, passing his
hand through his hair and giving a glance at the long narrow mirror which
adorned the space between the two windows, and which had at its base a
little gilded bracket covered by a thin slab of white marble, supporting
in its turn a backgammon board folded together in the shape of two
volumes, two shining folios inscribed in letters of greenish gilt,
_History of England_.  If Morris had been pleased to describe the master
of the house as a heartless scoffer, it is because he thought him too
much on his guard, and this was the easiest way to express his own
dissatisfaction—a dissatisfaction which he had made a point of concealing
from the Doctor.  It will probably seem to the reader, however, that the
Doctor’s vigilance was by no means excessive, and that these two young
people had an open field.  Their intimacy was now considerable, and it
may appear that for a shrinking and retiring person our heroine had been
liberal of her favours.  The young man, within a few days, had made her
listen to things for which she had not supposed that she was prepared;
having a lively foreboding of difficulties, he proceeded to gain as much
ground as possible in the present.  He remembered that fortune favours
the brave, and even if he had forgotten it, Mrs. Penniman would have
remembered it for him.  Mrs. Penniman delighted of all things in a drama,
and she flattered herself that a drama would now be enacted.  Combining
as she did the zeal of the prompter with the impatience of the spectator,
she had long since done her utmost to pull up the curtain.  She too
expected to figure in the performance—to be the confidante, the Chorus,
to speak the epilogue.  It may even be said that there were times when
she lost sight altogether of the modest heroine of the play, in the
contemplation of certain great passages which would naturally occur
between the hero and herself.

What Morris had told Catherine at last was simply that he loved her, or
rather adored her.  Virtually, he had made known as much already—his
visits had been a series of eloquent intimations of it.  But now he had
affirmed it in lover’s vows, and, as a memorable sign of it, he had
passed his arm round the girl’s waist and taken a kiss.  This happy
certitude had come sooner than Catherine expected, and she had regarded
it, very naturally, as a priceless treasure.  It may even be doubted
whether she had ever definitely expected to possess it; she had not been
waiting for it, and she had never said to herself that at a given moment
it must come.  As I have tried to explain, she was not eager and
exacting; she took what was given her from day to day; and if the
delightful custom of her lover’s visits, which yielded her a happiness in
which confidence and timidity were strangely blended, had suddenly come
to an end, she would not only not have spoken of herself as one of the
forsaken, but she would not have thought of herself as one of the
disappointed.  After Morris had kissed her, the last time he was with
her, as a ripe assurance of his devotion, she begged him to go away, to
leave her alone, to let her think.  Morris went away, taking another kiss
first.  But Catherine’s meditations had lacked a certain coherence.  She
felt his kisses on her lips and on her cheeks for a long time afterwards;
the sensation was rather an obstacle than an aid to reflexion.  She would
have liked to see her situation all clearly before her, to make up her
mind what she should do if, as she feared, her father should tell her
that he disapproved of Morris Townsend.  But all that she could see with
any vividness was that it was terribly strange that anyone should
disapprove of him; that there must in that case be some mistake, some
mystery, which in a little while would be set at rest.  She put off
deciding and choosing; before the vision of a conflict with her father
she dropped her eyes and sat motionless, holding her breath and waiting.
It made her heart beat, it was intensely painful.  When Morris kissed her
and said these things—that also made her heart beat; but this was worse,
and it frightened her.  Nevertheless, to-day, when the young man spoke of
settling something, taking a line, she felt that it was the truth, and
she answered very simply and without hesitating.

“We must do our duty,” she said; “we must speak to my father.  I will do
it to-night; you must do it to-morrow.”

“It is very good of you to do it first,” Morris answered.  “The young
man—the happy lover—generally does that.  But just as you please!”

It pleased Catherine to think that she should be brave for his sake, and
in her satisfaction she even gave a little smile.  “Women have more
tact,” she said “they ought to do it first.  They are more conciliating;
they can persuade better.”

“You will need all your powers of persuasion.  But, after all,” Morris
added, “you are irresistible.”

“Please don’t speak that way—and promise me this.  To-morrow, when you
talk with father, you will be very gentle and respectful.”

“As much so as possible,” Morris promised.  “It won’t be much use, but I
shall try.  I certainly would rather have you easily than have to fight
for you.”

“Don’t talk about fighting; we shall not fight.”

“Ah, we must be prepared,” Morris rejoined; “you especially, because for
you it must come hardest.  Do you know the first thing your father will
say to you?”

“No, Morris; please tell me.”

“He will tell you I am mercenary.”

“Mercenary?”

“It’s a big word; but it means a low thing.  It means that I am after
your money.”

“Oh!” murmured Catherine softly.

The exclamation was so deprecating and touching that Morris indulged in
another little demonstration of affection.  “But he will be sure to say
it,” he added.

“It will be easy to be prepared for that,” Catherine said.  “I shall
simply say that he is mistaken—that other men may be that way, but that
you are not.”

“You must make a great point of that, for it will be his own great
point.”

Catherine looked at her lover a minute, and then she said, “I shall
persuade him.  But I am glad we shall be rich,” she added.

Morris turned away, looking into the crown of his hat.  “No, it’s a
misfortune,” he said at last.  “It is from that our difficulty will
come.”

“Well, if it is the worst misfortune, we are not so unhappy.  Many people
would not think it so bad.  I will persuade him, and after that we shall
be very glad we have money.”

Morris Townsend listened to this robust logic in silence.  “I will leave
my defence to you; it’s a charge that a man has to stoop to defend
himself from.”

Catherine on her side was silent for a while; she was looking at him
while he looked, with a good deal of fixedness, out of the window.
“Morris,” she said abruptly, “are you very sure you love me?”

He turned round, and in a moment he was bending over her.  “My own
dearest, can you doubt it?”

“I have only known it five days,” she said; “but now it seems to me as if
I could never do without it.”

“You will never be called upon to try!”  And he gave a little tender,
reassuring laugh.  Then, in a moment, he added, “There is something you
must tell me, too.”  She had closed her eyes after the last word she
uttered, and kept them closed; and at this she nodded her head, without
opening them.  “You must tell me,” he went on, “that if your father is
dead against me, if he absolutely forbids our marriage, you will still be
faithful.”

Catherine opened her eyes, gazing at him, and she could give no better
promise than what he read there.

“You will cleave to me?” said Morris.  “You know you are your own
mistress—you are of age.”

“Ah, Morris!” she murmured, for all answer.  Or rather not for all; for
she put her hand into his own.  He kept it a while, and presently he
kissed her again.  This is all that need be recorded of their
conversation; but Mrs. Penniman, if she had been present, would probably
have admitted that it was as well it had not taken place beside the
fountain in Washington Square.




XI


CATHERINE listened for her father when he came in that evening, and she
heard him go to his study.  She sat quiet, though her heart was beating
fast, for nearly half an hour; then she went and knocked at his door—a
ceremony without which she never crossed the threshold of this apartment.
On entering it now she found him in his chair beside the fire,
entertaining himself with a cigar and the evening paper.

“I have something to say to you,” she began very gently; and she sat down
in the first place that offered.

“I shall be very happy to hear it, my dear,” said her father.  He
waited—waited, looking at her, while she stared, in a long silence, at
the fire.  He was curious and impatient, for he was sure she was going to
speak of Morris Townsend; but he let her take her own time, for he was
determined to be very mild.

“I am engaged to be married!” Catherine announced at last, still staring
at the fire.

The Doctor was startled; the accomplished fact was more than he had
expected.  But he betrayed no surprise.  “You do right to tell me,” he
simply said.  “And who is the happy mortal whom you have honoured with
your choice?”

“Mr. Morris Townsend.”  And as she pronounced her lover’s name, Catherine
looked at him.  What she saw was her father’s still grey eye and his
clear-cut, definite smile.  She contemplated these objects for a moment,
and then she looked back at the fire; it was much warmer.

“When was this arrangement made?” the Doctor asked.

“This afternoon—two hours ago.”

“Was Mr. Townsend here?”

“Yes, father; in the front parlour.”  She was very glad that she was not
obliged to tell him that the ceremony of their betrothal had taken place
out there under the bare ailantus-trees.

“Is it serious?” said the Doctor.

“Very serious, father.”

Her father was silent a moment.  “Mr. Townsend ought to have told me.”

“He means to tell you to-morrow.”

“After I know all about it from you?  He ought to have told me before.
Does he think I didn’t care—because I left you so much liberty?”

“Oh no,” said Catherine; “he knew you would care.  And we have been so
much obliged to you for—for the liberty.”

The Doctor gave a short laugh.  “You might have made a better use of it,
Catherine.”

“Please don’t say that, father,” the girl urged softly, fixing her dull
and gentle eyes upon him.

He puffed his cigar awhile, meditatively.  “You have gone very fast,” he
said at last.

“Yes,” Catherine answered simply; “I think we have.”

Her father glanced at her an instant, removing his eyes from the fire.
“I don’t wonder Mr. Townsend likes you.  You are so simple and so good.”

“I don’t know why it is—but he _does_ like me.  I am sure of that.”

“And are you very fond of Mr. Townsend?”

“I like him very much, of course—or I shouldn’t consent to marry him.”

“But you have known him a very short time, my dear.”

“Oh,” said Catherine, with some eagerness, “it doesn’t take long to like
a person—when once you begin.”

“You must have begun very quickly.  Was it the first time you saw
him—that night at your aunt’s party?”

“I don’t know, father,” the girl answered.  “I can’t tell you about
that.”

“Of course; that’s your own affair.  You will have observed that I have
acted on that principle.  I have not interfered, I have left you your
liberty, I have remembered that you are no longer a little girl—that you
have arrived at years of discretion.”

“I feel very old—and very wise,” said Catherine, smiling faintly.

“I am afraid that before long you will feel older and wiser yet.  I don’t
like your engagement.”

“Ah!” Catherine exclaimed softly, getting up from her chair.

“No, my dear.  I am sorry to give you pain; but I don’t like it.  You
should have consulted me before you settled it.  I have been too easy
with you, and I feel as if you had taken advantage of my indulgence.
Most decidedly, you should have spoken to me first.”

Catherine hesitated a moment, and then—“It was because I was afraid you
wouldn’t like it!” she confessed.

“Ah, there it is!  You had a bad conscience.”

“No, I have not a bad conscience, father!” the girl cried out, with
considerable energy.  “Please don’t accuse me of anything so dreadful.”
These words, in fact, represented to her imagination something very
terrible indeed, something base and cruel, which she associated with
malefactors and prisoners.  “It was because I was afraid—afraid—” she
went on.

“If you were afraid, it was because you had been foolish!”

“I was afraid you didn’t like Mr. Townsend.”

“You were quite right.  I don’t like him.”

“Dear father, you don’t know him,” said Catherine, in a voice so timidly
argumentative that it might have touched him.

“Very true; I don’t know him intimately.  But I know him enough.  I have
my impression of him.  You don’t know him either.”

She stood before the fire, with her hands lightly clasped in front of
her; and her father, leaning back in his chair and looking up at her,
made this remark with a placidity that might have been irritating.

I doubt, however, whether Catherine was irritated, though she broke into
a vehement protest.  “I don’t know him?” she cried.  “Why, I know
him—better than I have ever known any one!”

“You know a part of him—what he has chosen to show you.  But you don’t
know the rest.”

“The rest?  What is the rest?”

“Whatever it may be.  There is sure to be plenty of it.”

“I know what you mean,” said Catherine, remembering how Morris had
forewarned her.  “You mean that he is mercenary.”

Her father looked up at her still, with his cold, quiet reasonable eye.
“If I meant it, my dear, I should say it!  But there is an error I wish
particularly to avoid—that of rendering Mr. Townsend more interesting to
you by saying hard things about him.”

“I won’t think them hard if they are true,” said Catherine.

“If you don’t, you will be a remarkably sensible young woman!”

“They will be your reasons, at any rate, and you will want me to hear
your reasons.”

The Doctor smiled a little.  “Very true.  You have a perfect right to ask
for them.”  And he puffed his cigar a few moments.  “Very well, then,
without accusing Mr. Townsend of being in love only with your fortune—and
with the fortune that you justly expect—I will say that there is every
reason to suppose that these good things have entered into his
calculation more largely than a tender solicitude for your happiness
strictly requires.  There is, of course, nothing impossible in an
intelligent young man entertaining a disinterested affection for you.
You are an honest, amiable girl, and an intelligent young man might
easily find it out.  But the principal thing that we know about this
young man—who is, indeed, very intelligent—leads us to suppose that,
however much he may value your personal merits, he values your money
more.  The principal thing we know about him is that he has led a life of
dissipation, and has spent a fortune of his own in doing so.  That is
enough for me, my dear.  I wish you to marry a young man with other
antecedents—a young man who could give positive guarantees.  If Morris
Townsend has spent his own fortune in amusing himself, there is every
reason to believe that he would spend yours.”

The Doctor delivered himself of these remarks slowly, deliberately, with
occasional pauses and prolongations of accent, which made no great
allowance for poor Catherine’s suspense as to his conclusion.  She sat
down at last, with her head bent and her eyes still fixed upon him; and
strangely enough—I hardly know how to tell it—even while she felt that
what he said went so terribly against her, she admired his neatness and
nobleness of expression.  There was something hopeless and oppressive in
having to argue with her father; but she too, on her side, must try to be
clear.  He was so quiet; he was not at all angry; and she too must be
quiet.  But her very effort to be quiet made her tremble.

“That is not the principal thing we know about him,” she said; and there
was a touch of her tremor in her voice.  “There are other things—many
other things.  He has very high abilities—he wants so much to do
something.  He is kind, and generous, and true,” said poor Catherine, who
had not suspected hitherto the resources of her eloquence.  “And his
fortune—his fortune that he spent—was very small!”

“All the more reason he shouldn’t have spent it,” cried the Doctor,
getting up, with a laugh.  Then as Catherine, who had also risen to her
feet again, stood there in her rather angular earnestness, wishing so
much and expressing so little, he drew her towards him and kissed her.
“You won’t think me cruel?” he said, holding her a moment.

This question was not reassuring; it seemed to Catherine, on the
contrary, to suggest possibilities which made her feel sick.  But she
answered coherently enough—“No, dear father; because if you knew how I
feel—and you must know, you know everything—you would be so kind, so
gentle.”

“Yes, I think I know how you feel,” the Doctor said.  “I will be very
kind—be sure of that.  And I will see Mr. Townsend to-morrow.  Meanwhile,
and for the present, be so good as to mention to no one that you are
engaged.”




XII


ON the morrow, in the afternoon, he stayed at home, awaiting Mr.
Townsend’s call—a proceeding by which it appeared to him (justly perhaps,
for he was a very busy man) that he paid Catherine’s suitor great honour,
and gave both these young people so much the less to complain of.  Morris
presented himself with a countenance sufficiently serene—he appeared to
have forgotten the “insult” for which he had solicited Catherine’s
sympathy two evenings before, and Dr. Sloper lost no time in letting him
know that he had been prepared for his visit.

“Catherine told me yesterday what has been going on between you,” he
said.  “You must allow me to say that it would have been becoming of you
to give me notice of your intentions before they had gone so far.”

“I should have done so,” Morris answered, “if you had not had so much the
appearance of leaving your daughter at liberty.  She seems to me quite
her own mistress.”

“Literally, she is.  But she has not emancipated herself morally quite so
far, I trust, as to choose a husband without consulting me.  I have left
her at liberty, but I have not been in the least indifferent.  The truth
is that your little affair has come to a head with a rapidity that
surprises me.  It was only the other day that Catherine made your
acquaintance.”

“It was not long ago, certainly,” said Morris, with great gravity.  “I
admit that we have not been slow to—to arrive at an understanding.  But
that was very natural, from the moment we were sure of ourselves—and of
each other.  My interest in Miss Sloper began the first time I saw her.”

“Did it not by chance precede your first meeting?” the Doctor asked.

Morris looked at him an instant.  “I certainly had already heard that she
was a charming girl.”

“A charming girl—that’s what you think her?”

“Assuredly.  Otherwise I should not be sitting here.”

The Doctor meditated a moment.  “My dear young man,” he said at last,
“you must be very susceptible.  As Catherine’s father, I have, I trust, a
just and tender appreciation of her many good qualities; but I don’t mind
telling you that I have never thought of her as a charming girl, and
never expected any one else to do so.”

Morris Townsend received this statement with a smile that was not wholly
devoid of deference.  “I don’t know what I might think of her if I were
her father.  I can’t put myself in that place.  I speak from my own point
of view.”

“You speak very well,” said the Doctor; “but that is not all that is
necessary.  I told Catherine yesterday that I disapproved of her
engagement.”

“She let me know as much, and I was very sorry to hear it.  I am greatly
disappointed.”  And Morris sat in silence awhile, looking at the floor.

“Did you really expect I would say I was delighted, and throw my daughter
into your arms?”

“Oh no; I had an idea you didn’t like me.”

“What gave you the idea?”

“The fact that I am poor.”

“That has a harsh sound,” said the Doctor, “but it is about the
truth—speaking of you strictly as a son-in-law.  Your absence of means,
of a profession, of visible resources or prospects, places you in a
category from which it would be imprudent for me to select a husband for
my daughter, who is a weak young woman with a large fortune.  In any
other capacity I am perfectly prepared to like you.  As a son-in-law, I
abominate you!”

Morris Townsend listened respectfully.  “I don’t think Miss Sloper is a
weak woman,” he presently said.

“Of course you must defend her—it’s the least you can do.  But I have
known my child twenty years, and you have known her six weeks.  Even if
she were not weak, however, you would still be a penniless man.”

“Ah, yes; that is _my_ weakness!  And therefore, you mean, I am
mercenary—I only want your daughter’s money.”

“I don’t say that.  I am not obliged to say it; and to say it, save under
stress of compulsion, would be very bad taste.  I say simply that you
belong to the wrong category.”

“But your daughter doesn’t marry a category,” Townsend urged, with his
handsome smile.  “She marries an individual—an individual whom she is so
good as to say she loves.”

“An individual who offers so little in return!”

“Is it possible to offer more than the most tender affection and a
lifelong devotion?” the young man demanded.

“It depends how we take it.  It is possible to offer a few other things
besides; and not only is it possible, but it’s usual.  A lifelong
devotion is measured after the fact; and meanwhile it is customary in
these cases to give a few material securities.  What are yours?  A very
handsome face and figure, and a very good manner.  They are excellent as
far as they go, but they don’t go far enough.”

“There is one thing you should add to them,” said Morris; “the word of a
gentleman!”

“The word of a gentleman that you will always love Catherine?  You must
be a very fine gentleman to be sure of that.”

“The word of a gentleman that I am not mercenary; that my affection for
Miss Sloper is as pure and disinterested a sentiment as was ever lodged
in a human breast!  I care no more for her fortune than for the ashes in
that grate.”

“I take note—I take note,” said the Doctor.  “But having done so, I turn
to our category again.  Even with that solemn vow on your lips, you take
your place in it.  There is nothing against you but an accident, if you
will; but with my thirty years’ medical practice, I have seen that
accidents may have far-reaching consequences.”

Morris smoothed his hat—it was already remarkably glossy—and continued to
display a self-control which, as the Doctor was obliged to admit, was
extremely creditable to him.  But his disappointment was evidently keen.

“Is there nothing I can do to make you believe in me?”

“If there were I should be sorry to suggest it, for—don’t you see?—I
don’t want to believe in you!” said the Doctor, smiling.

“I would go and dig in the fields.”

“That would be foolish.”

“I will take the first work that offers, to-morrow.”

“Do so by all means—but for your own sake, not for mine.”

“I see; you think I am an idler!” Morris exclaimed, a little too much in
the tone of a man who has made a discovery.  But he saw his error
immediately, and blushed.

“It doesn’t matter what I think, when once I have told you I don’t think
of you as a son-in-law.”

But Morris persisted.  “You think I would squander her money.”

The Doctor smiled.  “It doesn’t matter, as I say; but I plead guilty to
that.”

“That’s because I spent my own, I suppose,” said Morris.  “I frankly
confess that.  I have been wild.  I have been foolish.  I will tell you
every crazy thing I ever did, if you like.  There were some great follies
among the number—I have never concealed that.  But I have sown my wild
oats.  Isn’t there some proverb about a reformed rake?  I was not a rake,
but I assure you I have reformed.  It is better to have amused oneself
for a while and have done with it.  Your daughter would never care for a
milksop; and I will take the liberty of saying that you would like one
quite as little.  Besides, between my money and hers there is a great
difference.  I spent my own; it was because it was my own that I spent
it.  And I made no debts; when it was gone I stopped.  I don’t owe a
penny in the world.”

“Allow me to inquire what you are living on now—though I admit,” the
Doctor added, “that the question, on my part, is inconsistent.”

“I am living on the remnants of my property,” said Morris Townsend.

“Thank you!” the Doctor gravely replied.

Yes, certainly, Morris’s self-control was laudable.  “Even admitting I
attach an undue importance to Miss Sloper’s fortune,” he went on, “would
not that be in itself an assurance that I should take much care of it?”

“That you should take too much care would be quite as bad as that you
should take too little.  Catherine might suffer as much by your economy
as by your extravagance.”

“I think you are very unjust!”  The young man made this declaration
decently, civilly, without violence.

“It is your privilege to think so, and I surrender my reputation to you!
I certainly don’t flatter myself I gratify you.”

“Don’t you care a little to gratify your daughter?  Do you enjoy the idea
of making her miserable?”

“I am perfectly resigned to her thinking me a tyrant for a twelvemonth.”

“For a twelvemonth!” exclaimed Morris, with a laugh.

“For a lifetime, then!  She may as well be miserable in that way as in
the other.”

Here at last Morris lost his temper.  “Ah, you are not polite, sir!” he
cried.

“You push me to it—you argue too much.”

“I have a great deal at stake.”

“Well, whatever it is,” said the Doctor, “you have lost it!”

“Are you sure of that?” asked Morris; “are you sure your daughter will
give me up?”

“I mean, of course, you have lost it as far as I am concerned.  As for
Catherine’s giving you up—no, I am not sure of it.  But as I shall
strongly recommend it, as I have a great fund of respect and affection in
my daughter’s mind to draw upon, and as she has the sentiment of duty
developed in a very high degree, I think it extremely possible.”

Morris Townsend began to smooth his hat again.  “I too have a fund of
affection to draw upon!” he observed at last.

The Doctor at this point showed his own first symptoms of irritation.
“Do you mean to defy me?”

“Call it what you please, sir!  I mean not to give your daughter up.”

The Doctor shook his head.  “I haven’t the least fear of your pining away
your life.  You are made to enjoy it.”

Morris gave a laugh.  “Your opposition to my marriage is all the more
cruel, then!  Do you intend to forbid your daughter to see me again?”

“She is past the age at which people are forbidden, and I am not a father
in an old-fashioned novel.  But I shall strongly urge her to break with
you.”

“I don’t think she will,” said Morris Townsend.

“Perhaps not.  But I shall have done what I could.”

“She has gone too far,” Morris went on.

“To retreat?  Then let her stop where she is.”

“Too far to stop, I mean.”

The Doctor looked at him a moment; Morris had his hand on the door.
“There is a great deal of impertinence in your saying it.”

“I will say no more, sir!” Morris answered; and, making his bow, he left
the room.




XIII


IT may be thought the Doctor was too positive, and Mrs. Almond intimated
as much.  But, as he said, he had his impression; it seemed to him
sufficient, and he had no wish to modify it.  He had passed his life in
estimating people (it was part of the medical trade), and in nineteen
cases out of twenty he was right.

“Perhaps Mr. Townsend is the twentieth case,” Mrs. Almond suggested.

“Perhaps he is, though he doesn’t look to me at all like a twentieth
case.  But I will give him the benefit of the doubt, and, to make sure, I
will go and talk with Mrs. Montgomery.  She will almost certainly tell me
I have done right; but it is just possible that she will prove to me that
I have made the greatest mistake of my life.  If she does, I will beg Mr.
Townsend’s pardon.  You needn’t invite her to meet me, as you kindly
proposed; I will write her a frank letter, telling her how matters stand,
and asking leave to come and see her.”

“I am afraid the frankness will be chiefly on your side.  The poor little
woman will stand up for her brother, whatever he may be.”

“Whatever he may be?  I doubt that.  People are not always so fond of
their brothers.”

“Ah,” said Mrs. Almond, “when it’s a question of thirty thousand a year
coming into a family—”

“If she stands up for him on account of the money, she will be a humbug.
If she is a humbug I shall see it.  If I see it, I won’t waste time with
her.”

“She is not a humbug—she is an exemplary woman.  She will not wish to
play her brother a trick simply because he is selfish.”

“If she is worth talking to, she will sooner play him a trick than that
he should play Catherine one.  Has she seen Catherine, by the way—does
she know her?”

“Not to my knowledge.  Mr. Townsend can have had no particular interest
in bringing them together.”

“If she is an exemplary woman, no.  But we shall see to what extent she
answers your description.”

“I shall be curious to hear her description of you!” said Mrs. Almond,
with a laugh.  “And, meanwhile, how is Catherine taking it?”

“As she takes everything—as a matter of course.”

“Doesn’t she make a noise?  Hasn’t she made a scene?”

“She is not scenic.”

“I thought a love-lorn maiden was always scenic.”

“A fantastic widow is more so.  Lavinia has made me a speech; she thinks
me very arbitrary.”

“She has a talent for being in the wrong,” said Mrs. Almond.  “But I am
very sorry for Catherine, all the same.”

“So am I.  But she will get over it.”

“You believe she will give him up?”

“I count upon it.  She has such an admiration for her father.”

“Oh, we know all about that!  But it only makes me pity her the more.  It
makes her dilemma the more painful, and the effort of choosing between
you and her lover almost impossible.”

“If she can’t choose, all the better.”

“Yes, but he will stand there entreating her to choose, and Lavinia will
pull on that side.”

“I am glad she is not on my side; she is capable of ruining an excellent
cause.  The day Lavinia gets into your boat it capsizes.  But she had
better be careful,” said the Doctor.  “I will have no treason in my
house!”

“I suspect she will be careful; for she is at bottom very much afraid of
you.”

“They are both afraid of me—harmless as I am!” the Doctor answered.  “And
it is on that that I build—on the salutary terror I inspire!”




XIV


HE wrote his frank letter to Mrs. Montgomery, who punctually answered it,
mentioning an hour at which he might present himself in the Second
Avenue.  She lived in a neat little house of red brick, which had been
freshly painted, with the edges of the bricks very sharply marked out in
white.  It has now disappeared, with its companions, to make room for a
row of structures more majestic.  There were green shutters upon the
windows, without slats, but pierced with little holes, arranged in
groups; and before the house was a diminutive yard, ornamented with a
bush of mysterious character, and surrounded by a low wooden paling,
painted in the same green as the shutters.  The place looked like a
magnified baby-house, and might have been taken down from a shelf in a
toy-shop.  Dr. Sloper, when he went to call, said to himself, as he
glanced at the objects I have enumerated, that Mrs. Montgomery was
evidently a thrifty and self-respecting little person—the modest
proportions of her dwelling seemed to indicate that she was of small
stature—who took a virtuous satisfaction in keeping herself tidy, and had
resolved that, since she might not be splendid, she would at least be
immaculate.  She received him in a little parlour, which was precisely
the parlour he had expected: a small unspeckled bower, ornamented with a
desultory foliage of tissue-paper, and with clusters of glass drops, amid
which—to carry out the analogy—the temperature of the leafy season was
maintained by means of a cast-iron stove, emitting a dry blue flame, and
smelling strongly of varnish.  The walls were embellished with engravings
swathed in pink gauze, and the tables ornamented with volumes of extracts
from the poets, usually bound in black cloth stamped with florid designs
in jaundiced gilt.  The Doctor had time to take cognisance of these
details, for Mrs. Montgomery, whose conduct he pronounced under the
circumstances inexcusable, kept him waiting some ten minutes before she
appeared.  At last, however, she rustled in, smoothing down a stiff
poplin dress, with a little frightened flush in a gracefully-rounded
cheek.

She was a small, plump, fair woman, with a bright, clear eye, and an
extraordinary air of neatness and briskness.  But these qualities were
evidently combined with an unaffected humility, and the Doctor gave her
his esteem as soon as he had looked at her.  A brave little person, with
lively perceptions, and yet a disbelief in her own talent for social, as
distinguished from practical, affairs—this was his rapid mental _résumé_
of Mrs. Montgomery, who, as he saw, was flattered by what she regarded as
the honour of his visit.  Mrs. Montgomery, in her little red house in the
Second Avenue, was a person for whom Dr. Sloper was one of the great men,
one of the fine gentlemen of New York; and while she fixed her agitated
eyes upon him, while she clasped her mittened hands together in her
glossy poplin lap, she had the appearance of saying to herself that he
quite answered her idea of what a distinguished guest would naturally be.
She apologised for being late; but he interrupted her.

“It doesn’t matter,” he said; “for while I sat here I had time to think
over what I wish to say to you, and to make up my mind how to begin.”

“Oh, do begin!” murmured Mrs. Montgomery.

“It is not so easy,” said the Doctor, smiling.  “You will have gathered
from my letter that I wish to ask you a few questions, and you may not
find it very comfortable to answer them.”

“Yes; I have thought what I should say.  It is not very easy.”

“But you must understand my situation—my state of mind.  Your brother
wishes to marry my daughter, and I wish to find out what sort of a young
man he is.  A good way to do so seemed to be to come and ask you; which I
have proceeded to do.”

Mrs. Montgomery evidently took the situation very seriously; she was in a
state of extreme moral concentration.  She kept her pretty eyes, which
were illumined by a sort of brilliant modesty, attached to his own
countenance, and evidently paid the most earnest attention to each of his
words.  Her expression indicated that she thought his idea of coming to
see her a very superior conception, but that she was really afraid to
have opinions on strange subjects.

“I am extremely glad to see you,” she said, in a tone which seemed to
admit, at the same time, that this had nothing to do with the question.

The Doctor took advantage of this admission.  “I didn’t come to see you
for your pleasure; I came to make you say disagreeable things—and you
can’t like that.  What sort of a gentleman is your brother?”

Mrs. Montgomery’s illuminated gaze grew vague, and began to wander.  She
smiled a little, and for some time made no answer, so that the Doctor at
last became impatient.  And her answer, when it came, was not
satisfactory.  “It is difficult to talk about one’s brother.”

“Not when one is fond of him, and when one has plenty of good to say.”

“Yes, even then, when a good deal depends on it,” said Mrs. Montgomery.

“Nothing depends on it, for you.”

“I mean for—for—” and she hesitated.

“For your brother himself.  I see!”

“I mean for Miss Sloper,” said Mrs. Montgomery.  The Doctor liked this;
it had the accent of sincerity.  “Exactly; that’s the point.  If my poor
girl should marry your brother, everything—as regards her happiness—would
depend on his being a good fellow.  She is the best creature in the
world, and she could never do him a grain of injury.  He, on the other
hand, if he should not be all that we desire, might make her very
miserable.  That is why I want you to throw some light upon his
character, you know.  Of course you are not bound to do it.  My daughter,
whom you have never seen, is nothing to you; and I, possibly, am only an
indiscreet and impertinent old man.  It is perfectly open to you to tell
me that my visit is in very bad taste and that I had better go about my
business.  But I don’t think you will do this; because I think we shall
interest you, my poor girl and I.  I am sure that if you were to see
Catherine, she would interest you very much.  I don’t mean because she is
interesting in the usual sense of the word, but because you would feel
sorry for her.  She is so soft, so simple-minded, she would be such an
easy victim!  A bad husband would have remarkable facilities for making
her miserable; for she would have neither the intelligence nor the
resolution to get the better of him, and yet she would have an
exaggerated power of suffering.  I see,” added the Doctor, with his most
insinuating, his most professional laugh, “you are already interested!”

“I have been interested from the moment he told me he was engaged,” said
Mrs. Montgomery.

“Ah! he says that—he calls it an engagement?”

“Oh, he has told me you didn’t like it.”

“Did he tell you that I don’t like _him_?”

“Yes, he told me that too.  I said I couldn’t help it!” added Mrs.
Montgomery.

“Of course you can’t.  But what you can do is to tell me I am right—to
give me an attestation, as it were.”  And the Doctor accompanied this
remark with another professional smile.

Mrs. Montgomery, however, smiled not at all; it was obvious that she
could not take the humorous view of his appeal.  “That is a good deal to
ask,” she said at last.

“There can be no doubt of that; and I must, in conscience, remind you of
the advantages a young man marrying my daughter would enjoy.  She has an
income of ten thousand dollars in her own right, left her by her mother;
if she marries a husband I approve, she will come into almost twice as
much more at my death.”

Mrs. Montgomery listened in great earnestness to this splendid financial
statement; she had never heard thousands of dollars so familiarly talked
about.  She flushed a little with excitement.  “Your daughter will be
immensely rich,” she said softly.

“Precisely—that’s the bother of it.”

“And if Morris should marry her, he—he—”  And she hesitated timidly.

“He would be master of all that money?  By no means.  He would be master
of the ten thousand a year that she has from her mother; but I should
leave every penny of my own fortune, earned in the laborious exercise of
my profession, to public institutions.”

Mrs. Montgomery dropped her eyes at this, and sat for some time gazing at
the straw matting which covered her floor.

“I suppose it seems to you,” said the Doctor, laughing, “that in so doing
I should play your brother a very shabby trick.”

“Not at all.  That is too much money to get possession of so easily, by
marrying.  I don’t think it would be right.”

“It’s right to get all one can.  But in this case your brother wouldn’t
be able.  If Catherine marries without my consent, she doesn’t get a
penny from my own pocket.”

“Is that certain?” asked Mrs. Montgomery, looking up.

“As certain as that I sit here!”

“Even if she should pine away?”

“Even if she should pine to a shadow, which isn’t probable.”

“Does Morris know this?”

“I shall be most happy to inform him!” the Doctor exclaimed.

Mrs. Montgomery resumed her meditations, and her visitor, who was
prepared to give time to the affair, asked himself whether, in spite of
her little conscientious air, she was not playing into her brother’s
hands.  At the same time he was half ashamed of the ordeal to which he
had subjected her, and was touched by the gentleness with which she bore
it.  “If she were a humbug,” he said, “she would get angry; unless she be
very deep indeed.  It is not probable that she is as deep as that.”

“What makes you dislike Morris so much?” she presently asked, emerging
from her reflexions.

“I don’t dislike him in the least as a friend, as a companion.  He seems
to me a charming fellow, and I should think he would be excellent
company.  I dislike him, exclusively, as a son-in-law.  If the only
office of a son-in-law were to dine at the paternal table, I should set a
high value upon your brother.  He dines capitally.  But that is a small
part of his function, which, in general, is to be a protector and
caretaker of my child, who is singularly ill-adapted to take care of
herself.  It is there that he doesn’t satisfy me.  I confess I have
nothing but my impression to go by; but I am in the habit of trusting my
impression.  Of course you are at liberty to contradict it flat.  He
strikes me as selfish and shallow.”

Mrs. Montgomery’s eyes expanded a little, and the Doctor fancied he saw
the light of admiration in them.  “I wonder you have discovered he is
selfish!” she exclaimed.

“Do you think he hides it so well?”

“Very well indeed,” said Mrs. Montgomery.  “And I think we are all rather
selfish,” she added quickly.

“I think so too; but I have seen people hide it better than he.  You see
I am helped by a habit I have of dividing people into classes, into
types.  I may easily be mistaken about your brother as an individual, but
his type is written on his whole person.”

“He is very good-looking,” said Mrs. Montgomery.

The Doctor eyed her a moment.  “You women are all the same!  But the type
to which your brother belongs was made to be the ruin of you, and you
were made to be its handmaids and victims.  The sign of the type in
question is the determination—sometimes terrible in its quiet
intensity—to accept nothing of life but its pleasures, and to secure
these pleasures chiefly by the aid of your complaisant sex.  Young men of
this class never do anything for themselves that they can get other
people to do for them, and it is the infatuation, the devotion, the
superstition of others that keeps them going.  These others in
ninety-nine cases out of a hundred are women.  What our young friends
chiefly insist upon is that some one else shall suffer for them; and
women do that sort of thing, as you must know, wonderfully well.”  The
Doctor paused a moment, and then he added abruptly, “You have suffered
immensely for your brother!”

This exclamation was abrupt, as I say, but it was also perfectly
calculated.  The Doctor had been rather disappointed at not finding his
compact and comfortable little hostess surrounded in a more visible
degree by the ravages of Morris Townsend’s immorality; but he had said to
himself that this was not because the young man had spared her, but
because she had contrived to plaster up her wounds.  They were aching
there, behind the varnished stove, the festooned engravings, beneath her
own neat little poplin bosom; and if he could only touch the tender spot,
she would make a movement that would betray her.  The words I have just
quoted were an attempt to put his finger suddenly upon the place; and
they had some of the success that he looked for.  The tears sprang for a
moment to Mrs. Montgomery’s eyes, and she indulged in a proud little jerk
of the head.

“I don’t know how you have found that out!” she exclaimed.

“By a philosophic trick—by what they call induction.  You know you have
always your option of contradicting me.  But kindly answer me a question.
Don’t you give your brother money?  I think you ought to answer that.”

“Yes, I have given him money,” said Mrs. Montgomery.

“And you have not had much to give him?”

She was silent a moment.  “If you ask me for a confession of poverty,
that is easily made.  I am very poor.”

“One would never suppose it from your—your charming house,” said the
Doctor.  “I learned from my sister that your income was moderate, and
your family numerous.”

“I have five children,” Mrs. Montgomery observed; “but I am happy to say
I can bring them up decently.”

“Of course you can—accomplished and devoted as you are!  But your brother
has counted them over, I suppose?”

“Counted them over?”

“He knows there are five, I mean.  He tells me it is he that brings them
up.”

Mrs. Montgomery stared a moment, and then quickly—“Oh yes; he teaches
them Spanish.”

The Doctor laughed out.  “That must take a great deal off your hands!
Your brother also knows, of course, that you have very little money.”

“I have often told him so!” Mrs. Montgomery exclaimed, more unreservedly
than she had yet spoken.  She was apparently taking some comfort in the
Doctor’s clairvoyancy.

“Which means that you have often occasion to, and that he often sponges
on you.  Excuse the crudity of my language; I simply express a fact.  I
don’t ask you how much of your money he has had, it is none of my
business.  I have ascertained what I suspected—what I wished.”  And the
Doctor got up, gently smoothing his hat.  “Your brother lives on you,” he
said as he stood there.

Mrs. Montgomery quickly rose from her chair, following her visitor’s
movements with a look of fascination.  But then, with a certain
inconsequence—“I have never complained of him!” she said.

“You needn’t protest—you have not betrayed him.  But I advise you not to
give him any more money.”

“Don’t you see it is in my interest that he should marry a rich person?”
she asked.  “If, as you say, he lives on me, I can only wish to get rid
of him, and to put obstacles in the way of his marrying is to increase my
own difficulties.”

“I wish very much you would come to me with your difficulties,” said the
Doctor.  “Certainly, if I throw him back on your hands, the least I can
do is to help you to bear the burden.  If you will allow me to say so,
then, I shall take the liberty of placing in your hands, for the present,
a certain fund for your brother’s support.”

Mrs. Montgomery stared; she evidently thought he was jesting; but she
presently saw that he was not, and the complication of her feelings
became painful.  “It seems to me that I ought to be very much offended
with you,” she murmured.

“Because I have offered you money?  That’s a superstition,” said the
Doctor.  “You must let me come and see you again, and we will talk about
these things.  I suppose that some of your children are girls.”

“I have two little girls,” said Mrs. Montgomery.

“Well, when they grow up, and begin to think of taking husbands, you will
see how anxious you will be about the moral character of these gentlemen.
Then you will understand this visit of mine!”

“Ah, you are not to believe that Morris’s moral character is bad!”

The Doctor looked at her a little, with folded arms.  “There is something
I should greatly like—as a moral satisfaction.  I should like to hear you
say—‘He is abominably selfish!’”

The words came out with the grave distinctness of his voice, and they
seemed for an instant to create, to poor Mrs. Montgomery’s troubled
vision, a material image.  She gazed at it an instant, and then she
turned away.  “You distress me, sir!” she exclaimed.  “He is, after all,
my brother, and his talents, his talents—”  On these last words her voice
quavered, and before he knew it she had burst into tears.

“His talents are first-rate!” said the Doctor.  “We must find a proper
field for them!”  And he assured her most respectfully of his regret at
having so greatly discomposed her.  “It’s all for my poor Catherine,” he
went on.  “You must know her, and you will see.”

Mrs. Montgomery brushed away her tears, and blushed at having shed them.
“I should like to know your daughter,” she answered; and then, in an
instant—“Don’t let her marry him!”

Dr. Sloper went away with the words gently humming in his ears—“Don’t let
her marry him!”  They gave him the moral satisfaction of which he had
just spoken, and their value was the greater that they had evidently cost
a pang to poor little Mrs. Montgomery’s family pride.




XV


HE had been puzzled by the way that Catherine carried herself; her
attitude at this sentimental crisis seemed to him unnaturally passive.
She had not spoken to him again after that scene in the library, the day
before his interview with Morris; and a week had elapsed without making
any change in her manner.  There was nothing in it that appealed for
pity, and he was even a little disappointed at her not giving him an
opportunity to make up for his harshness by some manifestation of
liberality which should operate as a compensation.  He thought a little
of offering to take her for a tour in Europe; but he was determined to do
this only in case she should seem mutely to reproach him.  He had an idea
that she would display a talent for mute reproaches, and he was surprised
at not finding himself exposed to these silent batteries.  She said
nothing, either tacitly or explicitly, and as she was never very
talkative, there was now no especial eloquence in her reserve.  And poor
Catherine was not sulky—a style of behaviour for which she had too little
histrionic talent; she was simply very patient.  Of course she was
thinking over her situation, and she was apparently doing so in a
deliberate and unimpassioned manner, with a view of making the best of
it.

“She will do as I have bidden her,” said the Doctor, and he made the
further reflexion that his daughter was not a woman of a great spirit.  I
know not whether he had hoped for a little more resistance for the sake
of a little more entertainment; but he said to himself, as he had said
before, that though it might have its momentary alarms, paternity was,
after all, not an exciting vocation.

Catherine, meanwhile, had made a discovery of a very different sort; it
had become vivid to her that there was a great excitement in trying to be
a good daughter.  She had an entirely new feeling, which may be described
as a state of expectant suspense about her own actions.  She watched
herself as she would have watched another person, and wondered what she
would do.  It was as if this other person, who was both herself and not
herself, had suddenly sprung into being, inspiring her with a natural
curiosity as to the performance of untested functions.

“I am glad I have such a good daughter,” said her father, kissing her,
after the lapse of several days.

“I am trying to be good,” she answered, turning away, with a conscience
not altogether clear.

“If there is anything you would like to say to me, you know you must not
hesitate.  You needn’t feel obliged to be so quiet.  I shouldn’t care
that Mr. Townsend should be a frequent topic of conversation, but
whenever you have anything particular to say about him I shall be very
glad to hear it.”

“Thank you,” said Catherine; “I have nothing particular at present.”

He never asked her whether she had seen Morris again, because he was sure
that if this had been the case she would tell him.  She had, in fact, not
seen him, she had only written him a long letter.  The letter at least
was long for her; and, it may be added, that it was long for Morris; it
consisted of five pages, in a remarkably neat and handsome hand.
Catherine’s handwriting was beautiful, and she was even a little proud of
it; she was extremely fond of copying, and possessed volumes of extracts
which testified to this accomplishment; volumes which she had exhibited
one day to her lover, when the bliss of feeling that she was important in
his eyes was exceptionally keen.  She told Morris in writing that her
father had expressed the wish that she should not see him again, and that
she begged he would not come to the house until she should have “made up
her mind.”  Morris replied with a passionate epistle, in which he asked
to what, in Heaven’s name, she wished to make up her mind.  Had not her
mind been made up two weeks before, and could it be possible that she
entertained the idea of throwing him off?  Did she mean to break down at
the very beginning of their ordeal, after all the promises of fidelity
she had both given and extracted?  And he gave an account of his own
interview with her father—an account not identical at all points with
that offered in these pages.  “He was terribly violent,” Morris wrote;
“but you know my self-control.  I have need of it all when I remember
that I have it in my power to break in upon your cruel captivity.”
Catherine sent him, in answer to this, a note of three lines.  “I am in
great trouble; do not doubt of my affection, but let me wait a little and
think.”  The idea of a struggle with her father, of setting up her will
against his own, was heavy on her soul, and it kept her formally
submissive, as a great physical weight keeps us motionless.  It never
entered into her mind to throw her lover off; but from the first she
tried to assure herself that there would be a peaceful way out of their
difficulty.  The assurance was vague, for it contained no element of
positive conviction that her father would change his mind.  She only had
an idea that if she should be very good, the situation would in some
mysterious manner improve.  To be good, she must be patient, respectful,
abstain from judging her father too harshly, and from committing any act
of open defiance.  He was perhaps right, after all, to think as he did;
by which Catherine meant not in the least that his judgement of Morris’s
motives in seeking to marry her was perhaps a just one, but that it was
probably natural and proper that conscientious parents should be
suspicious and even unjust.  There were probably people in the world as
bad as her father supposed Morris to be, and if there were the slightest
chance of Morris being one of these sinister persons, the Doctor was
right in taking it into account.  Of course he could not know what she
knew, how the purest love and truth were seated in the young man’s eyes;
but Heaven, in its time, might appoint a way of bringing him to such
knowledge.  Catherine expected a good deal of Heaven, and referred to the
skies the initiative, as the French say, in dealing with her dilemma.
She could not imagine herself imparting any kind of knowledge to her
father, there was something superior even in his injustice and absolute
in his mistakes.  But she could at least be good, and if she were only
good enough, Heaven would invent some way of reconciling all things—the
dignity of her father’s errors and the sweetness of her own confidence,
the strict performance of her filial duties and the enjoyment of Morris
Townsend’s affection.  Poor Catherine would have been glad to regard Mrs.
Penniman as an illuminating agent, a part which this lady herself indeed
was but imperfectly prepared to play.  Mrs. Penniman took too much
satisfaction in the sentimental shadows of this little drama to have, for
the moment, any great interest in dissipating them.  She wished the plot
to thicken, and the advice that she gave her niece tended, in her own
imagination, to produce this result.  It was rather incoherent counsel,
and from one day to another it contradicted itself; but it was pervaded
by an earnest desire that Catherine should do something striking.  “You
must _act_, my dear; in your situation the great thing is to act,” said
Mrs. Penniman, who found her niece altogether beneath her opportunities.
Mrs. Penniman’s real hope was that the girl would make a secret marriage,
at which she should officiate as brideswoman or duenna.  She had a vision
of this ceremony being performed in some subterranean chapel—subterranean
chapels in New York were not frequent, but Mrs. Penniman’s imagination
was not chilled by trifles—and of the guilty couple—she liked to think of
poor Catherine and her suitor as the guilty couple—being shuffled away in
a fast-whirling vehicle to some obscure lodging in the suburbs, where she
would pay them (in a thick veil) clandestine visits, where they would
endure a period of romantic privation, and where ultimately, after she
should have been their earthly providence, their intercessor, their
advocate, and their medium of communication with the world, they should
be reconciled to her brother in an artistic tableau, in which she herself
should be somehow the central figure.  She hesitated as yet to recommend
this course to Catherine, but she attempted to draw an attractive picture
of it to Morris Townsend.  She was in daily communication with the young
man, whom she kept informed by letters of the state of affairs in
Washington Square.  As he had been banished, as she said, from the house,
she no longer saw him; but she ended by writing to him that she longed
for an interview.  This interview could take place only on neutral
ground, and she bethought herself greatly before selecting a place of
meeting.  She had an inclination for Greenwood Cemetery, but she gave it
up as too distant; she could not absent herself for so long, as she said,
without exciting suspicion.  Then she thought of the Battery, but that
was rather cold and windy, besides one’s being exposed to intrusion from
the Irish emigrants who at this point alight, with large appetites, in
the New World and at last she fixed upon an oyster saloon in the Seventh
Avenue, kept by a negro—an establishment of which she knew nothing save
that she had noticed it in passing.  She made an appointment with Morris
Townsend to meet him there, and she went to the tryst at dusk, enveloped
in an impenetrable veil.  He kept her waiting for half an hour—he had
almost the whole width of the city to traverse—but she liked to wait, it
seemed to intensify the situation.  She ordered a cup of tea, which
proved excessively bad, and this gave her a sense that she was suffering
in a romantic cause.  When Morris at last arrived, they sat together for
half an hour in the duskiest corner of a back shop; and it is hardly too
much to say that this was the happiest half-hour that Mrs. Penniman had
known for years.  The situation was really thrilling, and it scarcely
seemed to her a false note when her companion asked for an oyster stew,
and proceeded to consume it before her eyes.  Morris, indeed, needed all
the satisfaction that stewed oysters could give him, for it may be
intimated to the reader that he regarded Mrs. Penniman in the light of a
fifth wheel to his coach.  He was in a state of irritation natural to a
gentleman of fine parts who had been snubbed in a benevolent attempt to
confer a distinction upon a young woman of inferior characteristics, and
the insinuating sympathy of this somewhat desiccated matron appeared to
offer him no practical relief.  He thought her a humbug, and he judged of
humbugs with a good deal of confidence.  He had listened and made himself
agreeable to her at first, in order to get a footing in Washington
Square; and at present he needed all his self-command to be decently
civil.  It would have gratified him to tell her that she was a fantastic
old woman, and that he should like to put her into an omnibus and send
her home.  We know, however, that Morris possessed the virtue of
self-control, and he had, moreover, the constant habit of seeking to be
agreeable; so that, although Mrs. Penniman’s demeanour only exasperated
his already unquiet nerves, he listened to her with a sombre deference in
which she found much to admire.




XVI


THEY had of course immediately spoken of Catherine.  “Did she send me a
message, or—or anything?” Morris asked.  He appeared to think that she
might have sent him a trinket or a lock of her hair.

Mrs. Penniman was slightly embarrassed, for she had not told her niece of
her intended expedition.  “Not exactly a message,” she said; “I didn’t
ask her for one, because I was afraid to—to excite her.”

“I am afraid she is not very excitable!”  And Morris gave a smile of some
bitterness.

“She is better than that.  She is steadfast—she is true!”

“Do you think she will hold fast, then?”

“To the death!”

“Oh, I hope it won’t come to that,” said Morris.

“We must be prepared for the worst, and that is what I wish to speak to
you about.”

“What do you call the worst?”

“Well,” said Mrs. Penniman, “my brother’s hard, intellectual nature.”

“Oh, the devil!”

“He is impervious to pity,” Mrs. Penniman added, by way of explanation.

“Do you mean that he won’t come round?”

“He will never be vanquished by argument.  I have studied him.  He will
be vanquished only by the accomplished fact.”

“The accomplished fact?”

“He will come round afterwards,” said Mrs. Penniman, with extreme
significance.  “He cares for nothing but facts; he must be met by facts!”

“Well,” rejoined Morris, “it is a fact that I wish to marry his daughter.
I met him with that the other day, but he was not at all vanquished.”

Mrs. Penniman was silent a little, and her smile beneath the shadow of
her capacious bonnet, on the edge of which her black veil was arranged
curtain-wise, fixed itself upon Morris’s face with a still more tender
brilliancy.  “Marry Catherine first and meet him afterwards!” she
exclaimed.

“Do you recommend that?” asked the young man, frowning heavily.

She was a little frightened, but she went on with considerable boldness.
“That is the way I see it: a private marriage—a private marriage.”  She
repeated the phrase because she liked it.

“Do you mean that I should carry Catherine off?  What do they call
it—elope with her?”

“It is not a crime when you are driven to it,” said Mrs. Penniman.  “My
husband, as I have told you, was a distinguished clergyman; one of the
most eloquent men of his day.  He once married a young couple that had
fled from the house of the young lady’s father.  He was so interested in
their story.  He had no hesitation, and everything came out beautifully.
The father was afterwards reconciled, and thought everything of the young
man.  Mr. Penniman married them in the evening, about seven o’clock.  The
church was so dark, you could scarcely see; and Mr. Penniman was
intensely agitated; he was so sympathetic.  I don’t believe he could have
done it again.”

“Unfortunately Catherine and I have not Mr. Penniman to marry us,” said
Morris.

“No, but you have me!” rejoined Mrs. Penniman expressively.  “I can’t
perform the ceremony, but I can help you.  I can watch.”

“The woman’s an idiot,” thought Morris; but he was obliged to say
something different.  It was not, however, materially more civil.  “Was
it in order to tell me this that you requested I would meet you here?”

Mrs. Penniman had been conscious of a certain vagueness in her errand,
and of not being able to offer him any very tangible reward for his long
walk.  “I thought perhaps you would like to see one who is so near to
Catherine,” she observed, with considerable majesty.  “And also,” she
added, “that you would value an opportunity of sending her something.”

Morris extended his empty hands with a melancholy smile.  “I am greatly
obliged to you, but I have nothing to send.”

“Haven’t you a _word_?” asked his companion, with her suggestive smile
coming back.

Morris frowned again.  “Tell her to hold fast,” he said rather curtly.

“That is a good word—a noble word.  It will make her happy for many days.
She is very touching, very brave,” Mrs. Penniman went on, arranging her
mantle and preparing to depart.  While she was so engaged she had an
inspiration.  She found the phrase that she could boldly offer as a
vindication of the step she had taken.  “If you marry Catherine at all
risks” she said, “you will give my brother a proof of your being what he
pretends to doubt.”

“What he pretends to doubt?”

“Don’t you know what that is?” Mrs. Penniman asked almost playfully.

“It does not concern me to know,” said Morris grandly.

“Of course it makes you angry.”

“I despise it,” Morris declared.

“Ah, you know what it is, then?” said Mrs. Penniman, shaking her finger
at him.  “He pretends that you like—you like the money.”

Morris hesitated a moment; and then, as if he spoke advisedly—“I _do_
like the money!”

“Ah, but not—but not as he means it.  You don’t like it more than
Catherine?”

He leaned his elbows on the table and buried his head in his hands.  “You
torture me!” he murmured.  And, indeed, this was almost the effect of the
poor lady’s too importunate interest in his situation.

But she insisted on making her point.  “If you marry her in spite of him,
he will take for granted that you expect nothing of him, and are prepared
to do without it.  And so he will see that you are disinterested.”

Morris raised his head a little, following this argument, “And what shall
I gain by that?”

“Why, that he will see that he has been wrong in thinking that you wished
to get his money.”

“And seeing that I wish he would go to the deuce with it, he will leave
it to a hospital.  Is that what you mean?” asked Morris.

“No, I don’t mean that; though that would be very grand!” Mrs. Penniman
quickly added.  “I mean that having done you such an injustice, he will
think it his duty, at the end, to make some amends.”

Morris shook his head, though it must be confessed he was a little struck
with this idea.  “Do you think he is so sentimental?”

“He is not sentimental,” said Mrs. Penniman; “but, to be perfectly fair
to him, I think he has, in his own narrow way, a certain sense of duty.”

There passed through Morris Townsend’s mind a rapid wonder as to what he
might, even under a remote contingency, be indebted to from the action of
this principle in Dr. Sloper’s breast, and the inquiry exhausted itself
in his sense of the ludicrous.  “Your brother has no duties to me,” he
said presently, “and I none to him.”

“Ah, but he has duties to Catherine.”

“Yes, but you see that on that principle Catherine has duties to him as
well.”

Mrs. Penniman got up, with a melancholy sigh, as if she thought him very
unimaginative.  “She has always performed them faithfully; and now, do
you think she has no duties to _you_?”  Mrs. Penniman always, even in
conversation, italicised her personal pronouns.

“It would sound harsh to say so!  I am so grateful for her love,” Morris
added.

“I will tell her you said that!  And now, remember that if you need me, I
am there.”  And Mrs. Penniman, who could think of nothing more to say,
nodded vaguely in the direction of Washington Square.

Morris looked some moments at the sanded floor of the shop; he seemed to
be disposed to linger a moment.  At last, looking up with a certain
abruptness, “It is your belief that if she marries me he will cut her
off?” he asked.

Mrs. Penniman stared a little, and smiled.  “Why, I have explained to you
what I think would happen—that in the end it would be the best thing to
do.”

“You mean that, whatever she does, in the long run she will get the
money?”

“It doesn’t depend upon her, but upon you.  Venture to appear as
disinterested as you are!” said Mrs. Penniman ingeniously.  Morris
dropped his eyes on the sanded floor again, pondering this; and she
pursued.  “Mr. Penniman and I had nothing, and we were very happy.
Catherine, moreover, has her mother’s fortune, which, at the time my
sister-in-law married, was considered a very handsome one.”

“Oh, don’t speak of that!” said Morris; and, indeed, it was quite
superfluous, for he had contemplated the fact in all its lights.

“Austin married a wife with money—why shouldn’t you?”

“Ah! but your brother was a doctor,” Morris objected.

“Well, all young men can’t be doctors!”

“I should think it an extremely loathsome profession,” said Morris, with
an air of intellectual independence.  Then in a moment, he went on rather
inconsequently, “Do you suppose there is a will already made in
Catherine’s favour?”

“I suppose so—even doctors must die; and perhaps a little in mine,” Mrs.
Penniman frankly added.

“And you believe he would certainly change it—as regards Catherine?”

“Yes; and then change it back again.”

“Ah, but one can’t depend on that!” said Morris.

“Do you want to _depend_ on it?” Mrs. Penniman asked.

Morris blushed a little.  “Well, I am certainly afraid of being the cause
of an injury to Catherine.”

“Ah! you must not be afraid.  Be afraid of nothing, and everything will
go well!”

And then Mrs. Penniman paid for her cup of tea, and Morris paid for his
oyster stew, and they went out together into the dimly-lighted wilderness
of the Seventh Avenue.  The dusk had closed in completely and the street
lamps were separated by wide intervals of a pavement in which cavities
and fissures played a disproportionate part.  An omnibus, emblazoned with
strange pictures, went tumbling over the dislocated cobble-stones.

“How will you go home?” Morris asked, following this vehicle with an
interested eye.  Mrs. Penniman had taken his arm.

She hesitated a moment.  “I think this manner would be pleasant,” she
said; and she continued to let him feel the value of his support.

So he walked with her through the devious ways of the west side of the
town, and through the bustle of gathering nightfall in populous streets,
to the quiet precinct of Washington Square.  They lingered a moment at
the foot of Dr. Sloper’s white marble steps, above which a spotless white
door, adorned with a glittering silver plate, seemed to figure, for
Morris, the closed portal of happiness; and then Mrs. Penniman’s
companion rested a melancholy eye upon a lighted window in the upper part
of the house.

“That is my room—my dear little room!” Mrs. Penniman remarked.

Morris started.  “Then I needn’t come walking round the Square to gaze at
it.”

“That’s as you please.  But Catherine’s is behind; two noble windows on
the second floor.  I think you can see them from the other street.”

“I don’t want to see them, ma’am!”  And Morris turned his back to the
house.

“I will tell her you have been _here_, at any rate,” said Mrs. Penniman,
pointing to the spot where they stood; “and I will give her your
message—that she is to hold fast!”

“Oh, yes! of course.  You know I write her all that.”

“It seems to say more when it is spoken!  And remember, if you need me,
that I am _there_”; and Mrs. Penniman glanced at the third floor.

On this they separated, and Morris, left to himself, stood looking at the
house a moment; after which he turned away, and took a gloomy walk round
the Square, on the opposite side, close to the wooden fence.  Then he
came back, and paused for a minute in front of Dr. Sloper’s dwelling.
His eyes travelled over it; they even rested on the ruddy windows of Mrs.
Penniman’s apartment.  He thought it a devilish comfortable house.




XVII


MRS. PENNIMAN told Catherine that evening—the two ladies were sitting in
the back parlour—that she had had an interview with Morris Townsend; and
on receiving this news the girl started with a sense of pain.  She felt
angry for the moment; it was almost the first time she had ever felt
angry.  It seemed to her that her aunt was meddlesome; and from this came
a vague apprehension that she would spoil something.

“I don’t see why you should have seen him.  I don’t think it was right,”
Catherine said.

“I was so sorry for him—it seemed to me some one ought to see him.”

“No one but I,” said Catherine, who felt as if she were making the most
presumptuous speech of her life, and yet at the same time had an instinct
that she was right in doing so.

“But you wouldn’t, my dear,” Aunt Lavinia rejoined; “and I didn’t know
what might have become of him.”

“I have not seen him, because my father has forbidden it,” Catherine said
very simply.

There was a simplicity in this, indeed, which fairly vexed Mrs. Penniman.
“If your father forbade you to go to sleep, I suppose you would keep
awake!” she commented.

Catherine looked at her.  “I don’t understand you.  You seem to be very
strange.”

“Well, my dear, you will understand me some day!”  And Mrs. Penniman, who
was reading the evening paper, which she perused daily from the first
line to the last, resumed her occupation.  She wrapped herself in
silence; she was determined Catherine should ask her for an account of
her interview with Morris.  But Catherine was silent for so long, that
she almost lost patience; and she was on the point of remarking to her
that she was very heartless, when the girl at last spoke.

“What did he say?” she asked.

“He said he is ready to marry you any day, in spite of everything.”

Catherine made no answer to this, and Mrs. Penniman almost lost patience
again; owing to which she at last volunteered the information that Morris
looked very handsome, but terribly haggard.

“Did he seem sad?” asked her niece.

“He was dark under the eyes,” said Mrs. Penniman.  “So different from
when I first saw him; though I am not sure that if I had seen him in this
condition the first time, I should not have been even more struck with
him.  There is something brilliant in his very misery.”

This was, to Catherine’s sense, a vivid picture, and though she
disapproved, she felt herself gazing at it.  “Where did you see him?” she
asked presently.

“In—in the Bowery; at a confectioner’s,” said Mrs. Penniman, who had a
general idea that she ought to dissemble a little.

“Whereabouts is the place?” Catherine inquired, after another pause.

“Do you wish to go there, my dear?” said her aunt.

“Oh no!”  And Catherine got up from her seat and went to the fire, where
she stood looking a while at the glowing coals.

“Why are you so dry, Catherine?” Mrs. Penniman said at last.

“So dry?”

“So cold—so irresponsive.”

The girl turned very quickly.  “Did _he_ say that?”

Mrs. Penniman hesitated a moment.  “I will tell you what he said.  He
said he feared only one thing—that you would be afraid.”

“Afraid of what?”

“Afraid of your father.”

Catherine turned back to the fire again, and then, after a pause, she
said—“I _am_ afraid of my father.”

Mrs. Penniman got quickly up from her chair and approached her niece.
“Do you mean to give him up, then?”

Catherine for some time never moved; she kept her eyes on the coals.  At
last she raised her head and looked at her aunt.  “Why do you push me
so?” she asked.

“I don’t push you.  When have I spoken to you before?”

“It seems to me that you have spoken to me several times.”

“I am afraid it is necessary, then, Catherine,” said Mrs. Penniman, with
a good deal of solemnity.  “I am afraid you don’t feel the importance—”
She paused a little; Catherine was looking at her.  “The importance of
not disappointing that gallant young heart!”  And Mrs. Penniman went back
to her chair, by the lamp, and, with a little jerk, picked up the evening
paper again.

Catherine stood there before the fire, with her hands behind her, looking
at her aunt, to whom it seemed that the girl had never had just this dark
fixedness in her gaze.  “I don’t think you understand—or that you know
me,” she said.

“If I don’t, it is not wonderful; you trust me so little.”

Catherine made no attempt to deny this charge, and for some time more
nothing was said.  But Mrs. Penniman’s imagination was restless, and the
evening paper failed on this occasion to enchain it.

“If you succumb to the dread of your father’s wrath,” she said, “I don’t
know what will become of us.”

“Did _he_ tell you to say these things to me?”

“He told me to use my influence.”

“You must be mistaken,” said Catherine.  “He trusts me.”

“I hope he may never repent of it!”  And Mrs. Penniman gave a little
sharp slap to her newspaper.  She knew not what to make of her niece, who
had suddenly become stern and contradictious.

This tendency on Catherine’s part was presently even more apparent.  “You
had much better not make any more appointments with Mr. Townsend,” she
said.  “I don’t think it is right.”

Mrs. Penniman rose with considerable majesty.  “My poor child, are you
jealous of me?” she inquired.

“Oh, Aunt Lavinia!” murmured Catherine, blushing.

“I don’t think it is your place to teach me what is right.”

On this point Catherine made no concession.  “It can’t be right to
deceive.”

“I certainly have not deceived _you_!”

“Yes; but I promised my father—”

“I have no doubt you promised your father.  But I have promised him
nothing!”

Catherine had to admit this, and she did so in silence.  “I don’t believe
Mr. Townsend himself likes it,” she said at last.

“Doesn’t like meeting me?”

“Not in secret.”

“It was not in secret; the place was full of people.”

“But it was a secret place—away off in the Bowery.”

Mrs. Penniman flinched a little.  “Gentlemen enjoy such things,” she
remarked presently.  “I know what gentlemen like.”

“My father wouldn’t like it, if he knew.”

“Pray, do you propose to inform him?” Mrs. Penniman inquired.

“No, Aunt Lavinia.  But please don’t do it again.”

“If I do it again, you will inform him: is that what you mean?  I do not
share your dread of my brother; I have always known how to defend my own
position.  But I shall certainly never again take any step on your
behalf; you are much too thankless.  I knew you were not a spontaneous
nature, but I believed you were firm, and I told your father that he
would find you so.  I am disappointed—but your father will not be!”  And
with this, Mrs. Penniman offered her niece a brief good-night, and
withdrew to her own apartment.




XVIII


CATHERINE sat alone by the parlour fire—sat there for more than an hour,
lost in her meditations.  Her aunt seemed to her aggressive and foolish,
and to see it so clearly—to judge Mrs. Penniman so positively—made her
feel old and grave.  She did not resent the imputation of weakness; it
made no impression on her, for she had not the sense of weakness, and she
was not hurt at not being appreciated.  She had an immense respect for
her father, and she felt that to displease him would be a misdemeanour
analogous to an act of profanity in a great temple; but her purpose had
slowly ripened, and she believed that her prayers had purified it of its
violence.  The evening advanced, and the lamp burned dim without her
noticing it; her eyes were fixed upon her terrible plan.  She knew her
father was in his study—that he had been there all the evening; from time
to time she expected to hear him move.  She thought he would perhaps
come, as he sometimes came, into the parlour.  At last the clock struck
eleven, and the house was wrapped in silence; the servants had gone to
bed.  Catherine got up and went slowly to the door of the library, where
she waited a moment, motionless.  Then she knocked, and then she waited
again.  Her father had answered her, but she had not the courage to turn
the latch.  What she had said to her aunt was true enough—she was afraid
of him; and in saying that she had no sense of weakness she meant that
she was not afraid of herself.  She heard him move within, and he came
and opened the door for her.

“What is the matter?” asked the Doctor.  “You are standing there like a
ghost.”

She went into the room, but it was some time before she contrived to say
what she had come to say.  Her father, who was in his dressing-gown and
slippers, had been busy at his writing-table, and after looking at her
for some moments, and waiting for her to speak, he went and seated
himself at his papers again.  His back was turned to her—she began to
hear the scratching of his pen.  She remained near the door, with her
heart thumping beneath her bodice; and she was very glad that his back
was turned, for it seemed to her that she could more easily address
herself to this portion of his person than to his face.  At last she
began, watching it while she spoke.

“You told me that if I should have anything more to say about Mr.
Townsend you would be glad to listen to it.”

“Exactly, my dear,” said the Doctor, not turning round, but stopping his
pen.

Catherine wished it would go on, but she herself continued.  “I thought I
would tell you that I have not seen him again, but that I should like to
do so.”

“To bid him good-bye?” asked the Doctor.

The girl hesitated a moment.  “He is not going away.”

The Doctor wheeled slowly round in his chair, with a smile that seemed to
accuse her of an epigram; but extremes meet, and Catherine had not
intended one.  “It is not to bid him good-bye, then?” her father said.

“No, father, not that; at least, not for ever.  I have not seen him
again, but I should like to see him,” Catherine repeated.

The Doctor slowly rubbed his under lip with the feather of his quill.

“Have you written to him?”

“Yes, four times.”

“You have not dismissed him, then.  Once would have done that.”

“No,” said Catherine; “I have asked him—asked him to wait.”

Her father sat looking at her, and she was afraid he was going to break
out into wrath; his eyes were so fine and cold.

“You are a dear, faithful child,” he said at last.  “Come here to your
father.”  And he got up, holding out his hands toward her.

The words were a surprise, and they gave her an exquisite joy.  She went
to him, and he put his arm round her tenderly, soothingly; and then he
kissed her.  After this he said:

“Do you wish to make me very happy?”

“I should like to—but I am afraid I can’t,” Catherine answered.

“You can if you will.  It all depends on your will.”

“Is it to give him up?” said Catherine.

“Yes, it is to give him up.”

And he held her still, with the same tenderness, looking into her face
and resting his eyes on her averted eyes.  There was a long silence; she
wished he would release her.

“You are happier than I, father,” she said, at last.

“I have no doubt you are unhappy just now.  But it is better to be
unhappy for three months and get over it, than for many years and never
get over it.”

“Yes, if that were so,” said Catherine.

“It would be so; I am sure of that.”  She answered nothing, and he went
on.  “Have you no faith in my wisdom, in my tenderness, in my solicitude
for your future?”

“Oh, father!” murmured the girl.

“Don’t you suppose that I know something of men: their vices, their
follies, their falsities?”

She detached herself, and turned upon him.  “He is not vicious—he is not
false!”

Her father kept looking at her with his sharp, pure eye.  “You make
nothing of my judgement, then?”

“I can’t believe that!”

“I don’t ask you to believe it, but to take it on trust.”

Catherine was far from saying to herself that this was an ingenious
sophism; but she met the appeal none the less squarely.  “What has he
done—what do you know?”

“He has never done anything—he is a selfish idler.”

“Oh, father, don’t abuse him!” she exclaimed pleadingly.

“I don’t mean to abuse him; it would be a great mistake.  You may do as
you choose,” he added, turning away.

“I may see him again?”

“Just as you choose.”

“Will you forgive me?”

“By no means.”

“It will only be for once.”

“I don’t know what you mean by once.  You must either give him up or
continue the acquaintance.”

“I wish to explain—to tell him to wait.”

“To wait for what?”

“Till you know him better—till you consent.”

“Don’t tell him any such nonsense as that.  I know him well enough, and I
shall never consent.”

“But we can wait a long time,” said poor Catherine, in a tone which was
meant to express the humblest conciliation, but which had upon her
father’s nerves the effect of an iteration not characterised by tact.

The Doctor answered, however, quietly enough: “Of course you can wait
till I die, if you like.”  Catherine gave a cry of natural horror.

“Your engagement will have one delightful effect upon you; it will make
you extremely impatient for that event.”

Catherine stood staring, and the Doctor enjoyed the point he had made.
It came to Catherine with the force—or rather with the vague
impressiveness—of a logical axiom which it was not in her province to
controvert; and yet, though it was a scientific truth, she felt wholly
unable to accept it.

“I would rather not marry, if that were true,” she said.

“Give me a proof of it, then; for it is beyond a question that by
engaging yourself to Morris Townsend you simply wait for my death.”

She turned away, feeling sick and faint; and the Doctor went on.  “And if
you wait for it with impatience, judge, if you please, what _his_
eagerness will be!”

Catherine turned it over—her father’s words had such an authority for her
that her very thoughts were capable of obeying him.  There was a dreadful
ugliness in it, which seemed to glare at her through the interposing
medium of her own feebler reason.  Suddenly, however, she had an
inspiration—she almost knew it to be an inspiration.

“If I don’t marry before your death, I will not after,” she said.

To her father, it must be admitted, this seemed only another epigram; and
as obstinacy, in unaccomplished minds, does not usually select such a
mode of expression, he was the more surprised at this wanton play of a
fixed idea.

“Do you mean that for an impertinence?” he inquired; an inquiry of which,
as he made it, he quite perceived the grossness.

“An impertinence?  Oh, father, what terrible things you say!”

“If you don’t wait for my death, you might as well marry immediately;
there is nothing else to wait for.”

For some time Catherine made no answer; but finally she said:

“I think Morris—little by little—might persuade you.”

“I shall never let him speak to me again.  I dislike him too much.”

Catherine gave a long, low sigh; she tried to stifle it, for she had made
up her mind that it was wrong to make a parade of her trouble, and to
endeavour to act upon her father by the meretricious aid of emotion.
Indeed, she even thought it wrong—in the sense of being inconsiderate—to
attempt to act upon his feelings at all; her part was to effect some
gentle, gradual change in his intellectual perception of poor Morris’s
character.  But the means of effecting such a change were at present
shrouded in mystery, and she felt miserably helpless and hopeless.  She
had exhausted all arguments, all replies.  Her father might have pitied
her, and in fact he did so; but he was sure he was right.

“There is one thing you can tell Mr. Townsend when you see him again,” he
said: “that if you marry without my consent, I don’t leave you a farthing
of money.  That will interest him more than anything else you can tell
him.”

“That would be very right,” Catherine answered.  “I ought not in that
case to have a farthing of your money.”

“My dear child,” the Doctor observed, laughing, “your simplicity is
touching.  Make that remark, in that tone, and with that expression of
countenance, to Mr. Townsend, and take a note of his answer.  It won’t be
polite—it will, express irritation; and I shall be glad of that, as it
will put me in the right; unless, indeed—which is perfectly possible—you
should like him the better for being rude to you.”

“He will never be rude to me,” said Catherine gently.

“Tell him what I say, all the same.”

She looked at her father, and her quiet eyes filled with tears.

“I think I will see him, then,” she murmured, in her timid voice.

“Exactly as you choose!”  And he went to the door and opened it for her
to go out.  The movement gave her a terrible sense of his turning her
off.

“It will be only once, for the present,” she added, lingering a moment.

“Exactly as you choose,” he repeated, standing there with his hand on the
door.  “I have told you what I think.  If you see him, you will be an
ungrateful, cruel child; you will have given your old father the greatest
pain of his life.”

This was more than the poor girl could bear; her tears overflowed, and
she moved towards her grimly consistent parent with a pitiful cry.  Her
hands were raised in supplication, but he sternly evaded this appeal.
Instead of letting her sob out her misery on his shoulder, he simply took
her by the arm and directed her course across the threshold, closing the
door gently but firmly behind her.  After he had done so, he remained
listening.  For a long time there was no sound; he knew that she was
standing outside.  He was sorry for her, as I have said; but he was so
sure he was right.  At last he heard her move away, and then her footstep
creaked faintly upon the stairs.

The Doctor took several turns round his study, with his hands in his
pockets, and a thin sparkle, possibly of irritation, but partly also of
something like humour, in his eye.  “By Jove,” he said to himself, “I
believe she will stick—I believe she will stick!”  And this idea of
Catherine “sticking” appeared to have a comical side, and to offer a
prospect of entertainment.  He determined, as he said to himself, to see
it out.




XIX


IT was for reasons connected with this determination that on the morrow
he sought a few words of private conversation with Mrs. Penniman.  He
sent for her to the library, and he there informed her that he hoped very
much that, as regarded this affair of Catherine’s, she would mind her
_p’s_ and _q’s_.

“I don’t know what you mean by such an expression,” said his sister.
“You speak as if I were learning the alphabet.”

“The alphabet of common sense is something you will never learn,” the
Doctor permitted himself to respond.

“Have you called me here to insult me?” Mrs. Penniman inquired.

“Not at all.  Simply to advise you.  You have taken up young Townsend;
that’s your own affair.  I have nothing to do with your sentiments, your
fancies, your affections, your delusions; but what I request of you is
that you will keep these things to yourself.  I have explained my views
to Catherine; she understands them perfectly, and anything that she does
further in the way of encouraging Mr. Townsend’s attentions will be in
deliberate opposition to my wishes.  Anything that you should do in the
way of giving her aid and comfort will be—permit me the
expression—distinctly treasonable.  You know high treason is a capital
offence; take care how you incur the penalty.”

Mrs. Penniman threw back her head, with a certain expansion of the eye
which she occasionally practised.  “It seems to me that you talk like a
great autocrat.”

“I talk like my daughter’s father.”

“Not like your sister’s brother!” cried Lavinia.  “My dear Lavinia,” said
the Doctor, “I sometimes wonder whether I am your brother.  We are so
extremely different.  In spite of differences, however, we can, at a
pinch, understand each other; and that is the essential thing just now.
Walk straight with regard to Mr. Townsend; that’s all I ask.  It is
highly probable you have been corresponding with him for the last three
weeks—perhaps even seeing him.  I don’t ask you—you needn’t tell me.”  He
had a moral conviction that she would contrive to tell a fib about the
matter, which it would disgust him to listen to.  “Whatever you have
done, stop doing it.  That’s all I wish.”

“Don’t you wish also by chance to murder our child?” Mrs. Penniman
inquired.

“On the contrary, I wish to make her live and be happy.”

“You will kill her; she passed a dreadful night.”

“She won’t die of one dreadful night, nor of a dozen.  Remember that I am
a distinguished physician.”

Mrs. Penniman hesitated a moment.  Then she risked her retort.  “Your
being a distinguished physician has not prevented you from already losing
_two members_ of your family!”

She had risked it, but her brother gave her such a terribly incisive
look—a look so like a surgeon’s lancet—that she was frightened at her
courage.  And he answered her in words that corresponded to the look: “It
may not prevent me, either, from losing the society of still another.”

Mrs. Penniman took herself off, with whatever air of depreciated merit
was at her command, and repaired to Catherine’s room, where the poor girl
was closeted.  She knew all about her dreadful night, for the two had met
again, the evening before, after Catherine left her father.  Mrs.
Penniman was on the landing of the second floor when her niece came
upstairs.  It was not remarkable that a person of so much subtlety should
have discovered that Catherine had been shut up with the Doctor.  It was
still less remarkable that she should have felt an extreme curiosity to
learn the result of this interview, and that this sentiment, combined
with her great amiability and generosity, should have prompted her to
regret the sharp words lately exchanged between her niece and herself.
As the unhappy girl came into sight, in the dusky corridor, she made a
lively demonstration of sympathy.  Catherine’s bursting heart was equally
oblivious.  She only knew that her aunt was taking her into her arms.
Mrs. Penniman drew her into Catherine’s own room, and the two women sat
there together, far into the small hours; the younger one with her head
on the other’s lap, sobbing and sobbing at first in a soundless, stifled
manner, and then at last perfectly still.  It gratified Mrs. Penniman to
be able to feel conscientiously that this scene virtually removed the
interdict which Catherine had placed upon her further communion with
Morris Townsend.  She was not gratified, however, when, in coming back to
her niece’s room before breakfast, she found that Catherine had risen and
was preparing herself for this meal.

“You should not go to breakfast,” she said; “you are not well enough,
after your fearful night.”

“Yes, I am very well, and I am only afraid of being late.”

“I can’t understand you!” Mrs. Penniman cried.  “You should stay in bed
for three days.”

“Oh, I could never do that!” said Catherine, to whom this idea presented
no attractions.

Mrs. Penniman was in despair, and she noted, with extreme annoyance, that
the trace of the night’s tears had completely vanished from Catherine’s
eyes.  She had a most impracticable _physique_.  “What effect do you
expect to have upon your father,” her aunt demanded, “if you come
plumping down, without a vestige of any sort of feeling, as if nothing in
the world had happened?”

“He would not like me to lie in bed,” said Catherine simply.

“All the more reason for your doing it.  How else do you expect to move
him?”

Catherine thought a little.  “I don’t know how; but not in that way.  I
wish to be just as usual.”  And she finished dressing, and, according to
her aunt’s expression, went plumping down into the paternal presence.
She was really too modest for consistent pathos.

And yet it was perfectly true that she had had a dreadful night.  Even
after Mrs. Penniman left her she had had no sleep.  She lay staring at
the uncomforting gloom, with her eyes and ears filled with the movement
with which her father had turned her out of his room, and of the words in
which he had told her that she was a heartless daughter.  Her heart was
breaking.  She had heart enough for that.  At moments it seemed to her
that she believed him, and that to do what she was doing, a girl must
indeed be bad.  She _was_ bad; but she couldn’t help it.  She would try
to appear good, even if her heart were perverted; and from time to time
she had a fancy that she might accomplish something by ingenious
concessions to form, though she should persist in caring for Morris.
Catherine’s ingenuities were indefinite, and we are not called upon to
expose their hollowness.  The best of them perhaps showed itself in that
freshness of aspect which was so discouraging to Mrs. Penniman, who was
amazed at the absence of haggardness in a young woman who for a whole
night had lain quivering beneath a father’s curse.  Poor Catherine was
conscious of her freshness; it gave her a feeling about the future which
rather added to the weight upon her mind.  It seemed a proof that she was
strong and solid and dense, and would live to a great age—longer than
might be generally convenient; and this idea was depressing, for it
appeared to saddle her with a pretension the more, just when the
cultivation of any pretension was inconsistent with her doing right.  She
wrote that day to Morris Townsend, requesting him to come and see her on
the morrow; using very few words, and explaining nothing.  She would
explain everything face to face.




XX


ON the morrow, in the afternoon, she heard his voice at the door, and his
step in the hall.  She received him in the big, bright front parlour, and
she instructed the servant that if any one should call she was
particularly engaged.  She was not afraid of her father’s coming in, for
at that hour he was always driving about town.  When Morris stood there
before her, the first thing that she was conscious of was that he was
even more beautiful to look at than fond recollection had painted him;
the next was that he had pressed her in his arms.  When she was free
again it appeared to her that she had now indeed thrown herself into the
gulf of defiance, and even, for an instant, that she had been married to
him.

He told her that she had been very cruel, and had made him very unhappy;
and Catherine felt acutely the difficulty of her destiny, which forced
her to give pain in such opposite quarters.  But she wished that, instead
of reproaches, however tender, he would give her help; he was certainly
wise enough, and clever enough, to invent some issue from their troubles.
She expressed this belief, and Morris received the assurance as if he
thought it natural; but he interrogated, at first—as was natural
too—rather than committed himself to marking out a course.

“You should not have made me wait so long,” he said.  “I don’t know how I
have been living; every hour seemed like years.  You should have decided
sooner.”

“Decided?” Catherine asked.

“Decided whether you would keep me or give me up.”

“Oh, Morris,” she cried, with a long tender murmur, “I never thought of
giving you up!”

“What, then, were you waiting for?”  The young man was ardently logical.

“I thought my father might—might—” and she hesitated.

“Might see how unhappy you were?”

“Oh no!  But that he might look at it differently.”

“And now you have sent for me to tell me that at last he does so.  Is
that it?”

This hypothetical optimism gave the poor girl a pang.  “No, Morris,” she
said solemnly, “he looks at it still in the same way.”

“Then why have you sent for me?”

“Because I wanted to see you!” cried Catherine piteously.

“That’s an excellent reason, surely.  But did you want to look at me
only?  Have you nothing to tell me?”

His beautiful persuasive eyes were fixed upon her face, and she wondered
what answer would be noble enough to make to such a gaze as that.  For a
moment her own eyes took it in, and then—“I _did_ want to look at you!”
she said gently.  But after this speech, most inconsistently, she hid her
face.

Morris watched her for a moment, attentively.  “Will you marry me
to-morrow?” he asked suddenly.

“To-morrow?”

“Next week, then.  Any time within a month.”

“Isn’t it better to wait?” said Catherine.

“To wait for what?”

She hardly knew for what; but this tremendous leap alarmed her.  “Till we
have thought about it a little more.”

He shook his head, sadly and reproachfully.  “I thought you had been
thinking about it these three weeks.  Do you want to turn it over in your
mind for five years?  You have given me more than time enough.  My poor
girl,” he added in a moment, “you are not sincere!”

Catherine coloured from brow to chin, and her eyes filled with tears.
“Oh, how can you say that?” she murmured.

“Why, you must take me or leave me,” said Morris, very reasonably.  “You
can’t please your father and me both; you must choose between us.”

“I have chosen you!” she said passionately.

“Then marry me next week.”

She stood gazing at him.  “Isn’t there any other way?”

“None that I know of for arriving at the same result.  If there is, I
should be happy to hear of it.”

Catherine could think of nothing of the kind, and Morris’s luminosity
seemed almost pitiless.  The only thing she could think of was that her
father might, after all, come round, and she articulated, with an awkward
sense of her helplessness in doing so, a wish that this miracle might
happen.

“Do you think it is in the least degree likely?” Morris asked.

“It would be, if he could only know you!”

“He can know me if he will.  What is to prevent it?”

“His ideas, his reasons,” said Catherine.  “They are so—so terribly
strong.”  She trembled with the recollection of them yet.

“Strong?” cried Morris.  “I would rather you should think them weak.”

“Oh, nothing about my father is weak!” said the girl.

Morris turned away, walking to the window, where he stood looking out.
“You are terribly afraid of him!” he remarked at last.

She felt no impulse to deny it, because she had no shame in it; for if it
was no honour to herself, at least it was an honour to him.  “I suppose I
must be,” she said simply.

“Then you don’t love me—not as I love you.  If you fear your father more
than you love me, then your love is not what I hoped it was.”

“Ah, my friend!” she said, going to him.

“Do _I_ fear anything?” he demanded, turning round on her.  “For your
sake what am I not ready to face?”

“You are noble—you are brave!” she answered, stopping short at a distance
that was almost respectful.

“Small good it does me, if you are so timid.”

“I don’t think that I am—_really_,” said Catherine.

“I don’t know what you mean by ‘really.’  It is really enough to make us
miserable.”

“I should be strong enough to wait—to wait a long time.”

“And suppose after a long time your father should hate me worse than
ever?”

“He wouldn’t—he couldn’t!”

“He would be touched by my fidelity?  Is that what you mean?  If he is so
easily touched, then why should you be afraid of him?”

This was much to the point, and Catherine was struck by it.  “I will try
not to be,” she said.  And she stood there submissively, the image, in
advance, of a dutiful and responsible wife.  This image could not fail to
recommend itself to Morris Townsend, and he continued to give proo

Showing first 200,000 characters. Full text: gutenberg.org/ebooks/2870