Chapter IX   
     
THE TWO Misses Molyneux, this nobleman’s sisters, came presently to call upon her, and Isabel took a fancy to the young ladies, who appeared to her to have a very original stamp. It is true, that, when she spoke of them to her cousin as original, he declared that no epithet could be less applicable than this to the two Misses Molyneux, for that there were fifty thousand young women in England who exactly resembled them. Deprived of this advantage, however, Isabel’s visitors retained that of an extreme sweetness and shyness of demeanour, and of having, as she thought, the kindest eyes in the world.      1   
  “They are not morbid, at any rate, whatever they are,” our heroine said to herself; and she deemed this a great charm, for two or three of the friends of her girlhood had been regrettably open to the charge (they would have been so nice without it), to say nothing of Isabel’s having occasionally suspected that it might become a fault of her own. The Misses Molyneux were not in their first youth, but they had bright, fresh complexions, and something of the smile of childhood. Their eyes, which Isabel admired so much, were quiet and contented, and their figures, of a generous roundness, were encased in sealskin jackets. Their friendliness was great, so great that they were almost embarrassed to show it; they seemed somewhat afraid of the young lady from the other side of the world, and rather looked than spoke their good wishes. But they made it clear to her that they hoped she would come to lunch at Lockleigh, where they lived with their brother, and then might see her very, very often. They wondered whether she wouldn’t come over some day and sleep; they were expecting some people on the twenty-ninth, and perhaps she would come while the people were there.      2   
  “I’m afraid it isn’t any one very remarkable,” said the elder sister; “but I daresay you will take us as you find us.”      3   
  “I shall find you delightful; I think you are enchanting just as you are,” replied Isabel, who often praised profusely.      4   
  Her visitors blushed, and her cousin told her, after they were gone, that if she said such things to those poor girls, they would think she was quizzing them; he was sure it was the first time they had been called enchanting.      5   
  “I can’t help it,” Isabel answered. “I think it’s lovely to be so quiet, and reasonable, and satisfied. I should like to be like that.”      6   
  “Heaven forbid!” cried Ralph, with ardour.      7   
  “I mean to try and imitate them,” said Isabel. “I want very much to see them at home.”      8   
  She had this pleasure a few days later, when, with Ralph and his mother, she drove over to Lockleigh. She found the Misses Molyneux sitting in a vast drawing-room (she perceived afterwards it was one of several), in a wilderness of faded chintz; they were dressed on this occasion in black velveteen. Isabel liked them even better at home than she had done at Gardencourt, and was more than ever struck with the fact that they were not morbid. It had seemed to her before that, if they had a fault, it was a want of vivacity; but she presently saw that they were capable of deep emotion. Before lunch she was alone with them, for some time, on one side of the room, while Lord Warburton, at a distance, talked to Mrs. Touchett.      9   
  “Is it true that your brother is such a great radical?” Isabel asked. She knew it was true, but we have seen that her interest in human nature was keen, and she had a desire to draw the Misses Molyneux out.     10   
  “Oh dear, yes; he’s immensely advanced,” said Mildred, the younger sister.     11   
  “At the same time, Warburton is very reasonable,” Miss Molyneux observed.     12   
  Isabel watched him a moment, at the other side of the room; he was evidently trying hard to make himself agreeable to Mrs. Touchett. Ralph was playing with one of the dogs before the fire, which the temperature of an English August, in the ancient, spacious room, had not made an impertinence. “Do you suppose your brother is sincere?” Isabel inquired with a smile.     13   
  “Oh, he must be, you know!” Mildred exclaimed, quickly; while the elder sister gazed at our heroine in silence.     14   
  “Do you think he would stand the test?”     15   
  “The test?”     16   
  “I mean, for instance, having to give up all this!”     17   
  “Having to give up Lockleigh?” said Miss Molyneux, finding her voice.     18   
  “Yes, and the other places; what are they called?”     19   
  The two sisters exchanged an almost frightened glance. “Do you mean—do you mean on account of the expense?” the younger one asked.     20   
  “I daresay he might let one or two of his houses,” said the other.     21   
  “Let them for nothing?” Isabel inquired.     22   
  “I can’t fancy his giving up his property,” said Miss Molyneux.     23   
  “Ah, I am afraid he is an impostor!” Isabel exclaimed. “Don’t you think it’s a false position?”     24   
  Her companions, evidently, were rapidly getting bewildered. “My brother’s position?” Miss Molyneux inquired.     25   
  “It’s thought a very good position,” said the younger sister. “It’s the first position in the county.”     26   
  “I suspect you think me very irreverent,” Isabel took occasion to observe. “I suppose you revere your brother, and are rather afraid of him.”     27   
  “Of course one looks up to one’s brother,” said Miss Molyneux, simply.     28   
  “If you do that, he must be very good—because you, evidently, are very good.”     29   
  “He is most kind. It will never be known, the good he does.”     30   
  “His ability is known,” Mildred added; “every one thinks it’s immense.”     31   
  “Oh, I can see that,” said Isabel. “But if I were he, I should wish to be a conservative. I should wish to keep everything.”     32   
  “I think one ought to be liberal,” Mildred argued, gently. “We have always been so, even from the earliest times.”     33   
  “Ah well,” said Isabel, “you have made a great success of it; I don’t wonder you like it. I see you are very fond of crewels.”     34   
  When Lord Warburton showed her the house, after lunch, it seemed to her a matter of course that it should be a noble picture. Within, it had been a good deal modernised—some of its best points had lost their purity; but as they saw it from the gardens, a stout, grey pile, of the softest, deepest, most weather-fretted hue, rising from a broad, still moat, it seemed to Isabel a castle in a fairy-tale. The day was cool and rather lustreless; the first note of autumn had been struck; and the watery sunshine rested on the walls in blurred and desultory gleams, washing them, as it were, in places tenderly chosen, where the ache of antiquity was keenest. Her host’s brother, the Vicar, had come to lunch, and Isabel had had five minutes’ talk with him—time enough to institute a search for theological characteristics and give it up as vain. The characteristics of the Vicar of Lockleigh were a big, athletic figure, a candid, natural countenance, a capacious appetite, and a tendency to abundant laughter. Isabel learned afterwards from her cousin that, before taking orders, he had been a mighty wrestler, and that he was still, on occasion—in the privacy of the family circle as it were—quite capable of flooring his man. Isabel liked him—she was in the mood for liking everything; but her imagination was a good deal taxed to think of him as a source of spiritual aid. The whole party, on leaving lunch, went to walk in the grounds; but Lord Warburton exercised some ingenuity in engaging his youngest visitor in a stroll somewhat apart from the others.     35   
  “I wish you to see the place properly, seriously,” he said, “You can’t do so if your attention is distracted by irrelevant gossip.”     36   
  His own conversation (though he told Isabel a good deal about the house, which had a very curious history) was not purely archæological; he reverted at intervals to matters more personal—matters personal to the young lady as well as to himself. But at last, after a pause of some duration, returning for a moment to their ostensible theme, “Ah, well,” he said, “I am very glad indeed you like the old house. I wish you could see more of it—that you could stay here a while. My sisters have taken an immense fancy to you—if that would be any inducement.”     37   
  “There is no want of inducements,” Isabel answered; “but I am afraid I can’t make engagements. I am quite in my aunt’s hands.”     38   
  “Ah, excuse me if I say I don’t exactly believe that. I am pretty sure you can do whatever you want.”     39   
  “I am sorry if I make that impression on you; I don’t think it’s a nice impression to make.”     40   
  “It has the merit of permitting me to hope.” And Lord Warburton paused a moment.     41   
  “To hope what?”     42   
  “That in future I may see you often.”     43   
  “Ah,” said Isabel, “to enjoy that pleasure, I needn’t be so terribly emancipated.”     44   
  “Doubtless not; and yet, at the same time, I don’t think your uncle likes me.”     45   
  “You are very much mistaken. I have heard him speak very highly of you.”     46   
  “I am glad you have talked about me,” said Lord Warburton. “But, all the same, I don’t think he would like me to keep coming to Gardencourt.”     47   
  “I can’t answer for my uncle’s tastes,” the girl rejoined, “though I ought, as far as possible, to take them into account. But, for myself, I shall be very glad to see you.”     48   
  “Now that’s what I like to hear you say. I am charmed when you say that.”     49   
  “You are easily charmed, my lord,” said Isabel.     50   
  “No, I am not easily charmed!” And then he stopped a moment. “But you have charmed me, Miss Archer,” he added.     51   
  These words were uttered with an indefinable sound which startled the girl; it struck her as the prelude to something grave; she had heard the sound before, and she recognised it. She had no wish, however, that for the moment such a prelude should have a sequel, and she said, as gaily as possible and as quickly as an appreciable degree of agitation would allow her, “I am afraid there is no prospect of my being able to come here again.”     52   
  “Never?” said Lord Warburton.     53   
  “I won’t say ‘never’; I should feel very melodramatic.”     54   
  “May I come and see you then some day next week?”     55   
  “Most assuredly. What is there to prevent it?”     56   
  “Nothing tangible. But with you I never feel safe. I have a sort of sense that you are always judging people.”     57   
  “You don’t of necessity lose by that.”     58   
  “It is very kind of you to say so; but even if I gain, stern justice is not what I most love. Is Mrs. Touchett going to take you abroad?”     59   
  “I hope so.”     60   
  “Is England not good enough for you?”     61   
  “That’s a very Machiavellian speech; it doesn’t deserve an answer. I want very much to see foreign lands as well.”     62   
  “Then you will go on judging, I suppose.”     63   
  “Enjoying, I hope, too.”     64   
  “Yes, that’s what you enjoy most; I can’t make out what you are up to,” said Lord Warburton. “You strike me as having mysterious purposes—vast designs?”     65   
  “You are so good as to have a theory about me which I don’t at all fill out. Is there anything mysterious in a purpose entertained and executed every year, in the most public manner, by fifty thousand of my fellow-countrymen—the purpose of improving one’s mind by foreign travel?”     66   
  “You can’t improve your mind, Miss Archer,” her companion declared. “It’s already a most formidable instrument. It looks down on us all; it despises us.”     67   
  “Despises you? You are making fun of me,” said Isabel, seriously.     68   
  “Well, you think us picturesque—that’s the same thing, I won’t be thought picturesque, to begin with; I am not so in the least. I protest.”     69   
  “That protest is one of the most picturesque things I have ever heard,” Isabel answered with a smile.     70   
  Lord Warburton was silent a moment. “You judge only from the outside—you don’t care,” he said presently. “You only care to amuse yourself!” The note she had heard in his voice a moment before reappeared, and mixed with it now was an audible strain of bitterness—a bitterness so abrupt and inconsequent that the girl was afraid she had hurt him. She had often heard that the English were a highly eccentric people; and she had even read in some ingenious author that they were, at bottom, the most romantic of races. Was Lord Warburton suddenly turning romantic—was he going to make a scene, in his own house, only the third time they had met? She was reassured, quickly enough, by her sense of his great good manners, which was not impaired by the fact that he had already touched the furthest limit of good taste in expressing his admiration of a young lady who had confided in his hospitality. She was right in trusting to his good manners, for he presently went on, laughing a little, and without a trace of the accent that had discomposed her—“I don’t mean, of course, that you amuse yourself with trifles. You select great materials; the foibles, the afflictions of human nature, the peculiarities of nations!”     71   
  “As regards that,” said Isabel, “I should find in my own nation entertainment for a lifetime. But we have a long drive, and my aunt will soon wish to start.” She turned back toward the others, and Lord Warburton walked beside her in silence. But before they reached the others—“I shall come and see you next week,” he said.     72   
  She had received an appreciable shock, but as it died away she felt that she could not pretend to herself that it was altogether a painful one. Nevertheless, she made answer to this declaration, coldly enough, “Just as you please.” And her coldness was not coquetry—a quality that she possessed in a much smaller degree than would have seemed probable to many critics; it came from a certain fear.

Chapter X   
     
THE DAY after her visit to Lockleigh she received a note from her friend, Miss Stackpole—a note of which the envelope, exhibiting in conjunction the postmark of Liverpool and the neat calligraphy of the quick-fingered Henrietta, caused her some liveliness of emotion. “Here I am, my lovely friend,” Miss Stackpole wrote; “I managed to get off at last. I decided only the night before I left New York—the Interviewer having come round to my figure. I put a few things into a bag, like a veteran journalist, and came down to the steamer in a street-car. Where are you, and where can we meet? I suppose you are visiting at some castle or other, and have already acquired the correct accent. Perhaps, even, you have married a lord; I almost hope you have, for I want some introductions to the first people, and shall count on you for a few. The Interviewer wants some light on the nobility. My first impressions (of the people at large) are not rose-coloured; but I wish to talk them over with you, and you know that whatever I am, at least I am not superficial. I have also something very particular to tell you. Do appoint a meeting as quickly as you can; come to London (I should like so much to visit the sights with you), or else let me come to you, wherever you are. I will do so with pleasure; for you know everything interests me, and I wish to see as much as possible of the inner life.”      1   
  Isabel did not show this letter to her uncle; but she acquainted him with its purport, and, as she expected, he begged her instantly to assure Miss Stackpole, in his name, that he should be delighted to receive her at Gardencourt. “Though she is a literary lady,” he said, “I suppose that, being an American, she won’t reproduce me, as that other one did. She has seen others like me.”      2   
  “She has seen no other so delightful!” Isabel answered; but she was not altogether at ease about Henrietta’s reproductive instincts, which belonged to that side of her friend’s character which she regarded with least complacency. She wrote to Miss Stackpole, however, that she would be very welcome under Mr. Touchett’s roof; and this enterprising young woman lost no time in signifying her intention of arriving. She had gone up to London, and it was from the metropolis that she took the train for the station nearest to Gardencourt, where Isabel and Ralph were in waiting to receive the visitor.      3   
  “Shall I love her, or shall I hate her?” asked Ralph, while they stood on the platform, before the advent of the train.      4   
  “Whichever you do will matter very little to her,” said Isabel. “She doesn’t care a straw what men think of her.”      5   
  “As a man I am bound to dislike her, then. She must be a kind of monster. Is she very ugly?”      6   
  “No, she is decidedly pretty.”      7   
  “A female interviewer—a reporter in petticoats? I am very curious to see her,” Ralph declared.      8   
  “It is very easy to laugh at her, but it is not easy to be as brave as she.”      9   
  “I should think not; interviewing requires bravery. Do you suppose she will interview me?”     10   
  “Never in the world. She will not think you of enough importance.”     11   
  “You will see,” said Ralph. “She will send a description of us all, including Bunchie, to her newspaper.”     12   
  “I shall ask her not to,” Isabel answered.     13   
  “You think she is capable of it, then.”     14   
  “Perfectly.”     15   
  “And yet you have made her your bosom-friend?”     16   
  “I have not made her my bosom-friend; but I like her, in spite of her faults.”     17   
  “Ah, well,” said Ralph, “I am afraid I shall dislike her, in spite of her merits.”     18   
  “You will probably fall in love with her at the end of three days.”     19   
  “And have my love-letters published in the Interviewer? Never!” cried the young man.     20   
  The train presently arrived, and Miss Stackpole, promptly descending, proved to be, as Isabel had said, decidedly pretty. She was a fair, plump person, of medium stature, with a round face, a small mouth, a delicate complexion, a bunch of light brown ringlets at the back of her head, and a peculiarly open, surprised-looking eye. The most striking point in her appearance was the remarkable fixedness of this organ, which rested without impudence or defiance, but as if in conscientious exercise of a natural right, upon every object it happened to encounter. It rested in this manner upon Ralph himself, who was somewhat disconcerted by Miss Stackpole’s gracious and comfortable aspect, which seemed to indicate that it would not be so easy as he had assumed to disapprove of her. She was very well dressed, in fresh dove-coloured draperies, and Ralph saw at a glance that she was scrupulously, fastidiously neat. From top to toe she carried not an ink-stain. She spoke in a clear, high voice—a voice not rich, but loud, though after she had taken her place, with her companions, in Mr. Touchett’s carriage, she struck him, rather to his surprise, as not an abundant talker. She answered the inquiries made of her by Isabel, however, and in which the young man ventured to join, with a great deal of precision and distinctness; and later, in the library at Gardencourt, when she had made the acquaintance of Mr. Touchett (his wife not having thought it necessary to appear), did more to give the measure of her conversational powers.     21   
  “Well, I should like to know whether you consider yourselves American or English,” she said. “If once I knew, I could talk to you accordingly.”     22   
  “Talk to us anyhow, and we shall be thankful,” Ralph answered, liberally.     23   
  She fixed her eyes upon him, and there was something in their character that reminded him of large polished buttons; he seemed to see the reflection of surrounding objects upon the pupil. The expression of a button is not usually deemed human, but there was something in Miss Stackpole’s gaze that made him, as he was a very modest man, feel vaguely embarrassed and uncomfortable. This sensation, it must be added, after he had spent a day or two in her company, sensibly diminished, though it never wholly disappeared. “I don’t suppose that you are going to undertake to persuade me that you are an American,” she said.     24   
  “To please you, I will be an Englishman, I will be a Turk!”     25   
  “Well, if you can change about that way, you are very welcome,” Miss Stackpole rejoined.     26   
  “I am sure you understand everything, and that differences of nationality are no barrier to you,” Ralph went on.     27   
  Miss Stackpole gazed at him still. “Do you mean the foreign languages?”     28   
  “The languages are nothing. I mean the spirit—the genius.”     29   
  “I am not sure that I understand you,” said the correspondent of the Interviewer; “but I expect I shall before I leave.”     30   
  “He is what is called a cosmopolitan,” Isabel suggested.     31   
  “That means he’s a little of everything and not much of any. I must say I think patriotism is like charity—it begins at home.”     32   
  “Ah, but where does home begin, Miss Stackpole?” Ralph inquired.     33   
  “I don’t know where it begins, but I know where it ends. It ended a long time before I got here.”     34   
  “Don’t you like it over here?” asked Mr. Touchett, with his mild, wise, aged, innocent voice.     35   
  “Well, sir, I haven’t quite made up my mind what ground I shall take. I feel a good deal cramped. I felt it on the journey from Liverpool to London.”     36   
  “Perhaps you were in a crowded carriage,” Ralph suggested.     37   
  “Yes, but it was crowded with friends—a party of Americans whose acquaintance I had made upon the steamer; a most lovely group, from Little Rock, Arkansas. In spite of that I felt cramped—I felt something pressing upon me; I couldn’t tell what it was. I felt at the very commencement as if I were not going to sympathise with the atmosphere. But I suppose I shall make my own atmosphere. Your surroundings seem very attractive.”     38   
  “Ah, we too are a lovely group!” said Ralph. “Wait a little and you will see.”     39   
  Miss Stackpole showed every disposition to wait, and evidently was prepared to make a considerable stay at Garden-court. She occupied herself in the mornings with literary labour; but in spite of this Isabel spent many hours with her friend, who, once her daily task performed, was of an eminently social tendency. Isabel speedily found occasion to request her to desist from celebrating the charms of their common sojourn in print, having discovered, on the second morning of Miss Stackpole’s visit, that she was engaged upon a letter to the Interviewer, of which the title, in her exquisitely neat and legible hand (exactly that of the copy-books which our heroine remembered at school), was “Americans and Tudors—Glimpses of Gardencourt.” Miss Stackpole, with the best conscience in the world, offered to read her letter to Isabel, who immediately put in her protest.     40   
  “I don’t think you ought to do that. I don’t think you ought to describe the place.”     41   
  Henrietta gazed at her, as usual. “Why, it’s just what the people want, and it’s a lovely place.”     42   
  “It’s too lovely to be put in the newspapers, and it’s not what my uncle wants.”     43   
  “Don’t you believe that!” cried Henrietta. “They are always delighted, afterwards.”     44   
  “My uncle won’t be delighted—nor my cousin, either. They will consider it a breach of hospitality.”     45   
  Miss Stackpole showed no sense of confusion; she simply wiped her pen, very neatly, upon an elegant little implement which she kept for the purpose, and put away her manuscript. “Of course if you don’t approve, I won’t do it; but I sacrifice a beautiful subject.”     46   
  “There are plenty of other subjects, there are subjects all round you. We will take some drives, and I will show you some charming scenery.”     47   
  “Scenery is not my department; I always need a human interest. You know I am deeply human, Isabel; I always was,” Miss Stackpole rejoined. “I was going to bring in your cousin—the alienated American. There is a great demand just now for the alienated American, and your cousin is a beautiful specimen. I should have handled him severely.”     48   
  “He would have died of it!” Isabel exclaimed. “Not of the severity, but of the publicity.”     49   
  “Well, I should have liked to kill him a little. And I should have delighted to do your uncle, who seems to me a much nobler type—the American faithful still. He is a grand old man; I don’t see how he can object to my paying him honour.”     50   
  Isabel looked at her companion in much wonderment; it appeared to her so strange that a nature in which she found so much to esteem should exhibit such extraordinary disparities. “My poor Henrietta,” she said, “you have no sense of privacy.”     51   
  Henrietta coloured deeply, and for a moment her brilliant eyes were suffused; while Isabel marvelled more than ever at her inconsistency. “You do me great injustice,” said Miss Stackpole, with dignity. “I have never written a word about myself!”     52   
  “I am very sure of that; but it seems to me one should be modest for others also!”     53   
  “Ah, that is very good!” cried Henrietta, seizing her pen again. “Just let me make a note of it, and I will put it in a letter.” She was a thoroughly good-natured woman, and half an hour later she was in as cheerful a mood as should have been looked for in a newspaper-correspondent in want of material.     54   
  “I have promised to do the social side,” she said to Isabel; “and how can I do it unless I get ideas? If I can’t describe this place, don’t you know some place I can describe?” Isabel promised she would bethink herself, and the next day, in conversation with her friend, she happened to mention her visit to Lord Warburton’s ancient house. “Ah, you must take me there—that is just the place for me!” Miss Stackpole exclaimed. “I must get a glimpse of the nobility.”     55   
  “I can’t take you,” said Isabel; “but Lord Warburton is coming here, and you will have a chance to see him and observe him. Only if you intend to repeat his conversation, I shall certainly give him warning.”     56   
  “Don’t do that,” her companion begged; “I want him to be natural.”     57   
  “An Englishman is never so natural as when he is holding his tongue,” Isabel rejoined.     58   
  It was not apparent, at the end of three days, that his cousin had fallen in love with their visitor, though he had spent a good deal of time in her society. They strolled about the park together, and sat under the trees, and in the afternoon, when it was delightful to float along the Thames, Miss Stackpole occupied a place in the boat in which hitherto Ralph had had but a single companion. Her society had a less insoluble quality than Ralph had expected in the natural perturbation of his sense of the perfect adequacy of that of his cousin; for the correspondent of the Interviewer made him laugh a good deal, and he had long since decided that abundant laughter should be the embellishment of the remainder of his days. Henrietta, on her side, did not quite justify Isabel’s declaration with regard to her indifference to masculine opinion; for poor Ralph appeared to have presented himself to her as an irritating problem, which it would be superficial on her part not to solve.     59   
  “What does he do for a living?” she asked of Isabel, the evening of her arrival. “Does he go round all day with his hands in his pockets?”     60   
  “He does nothing,” said Isabel, smiling; “he’s a gentleman of leisure.”     61   
  “Well, I call that a shame—when I have to work like a cotton-mill,” Miss Stackpole replied. “I should like to show him up.”     62   
  “He is in wretched health; he is quite unfit for work,” Isabel urged.     63   
  “Pshaw! don’t you believe it. I work when I am sick,” cried her friend. Later, when she stepped into the boat, on joining the water-party, she remarked to Ralph that she supposed he hated her—he would like to drown her.     64   
  “Ah, no,” said Ralph, “I keep my victims for a slower torture. And you would be such an interesting one!”     65   
  “Well, you do torture me, I may say that. But I shock all your prejudices; that’s one comfort.”     66   
  “My prejudices? I haven’t a prejudice to bless myself with. There’s intellectual poverty for you.”     67   
  “The more shame to you; I have some delicious prejudices. Of course I spoil your flirtation, or whatever it is you call it, with your cousin; but I don’t care for that, for I render your cousin the service of drawing you out. She will see how thin you are.”     68   
  “Ah, do draw me out!” Ralph exclaimed. “So few people will take the trouble.”     69   
  Miss Stackpole, in this undertaking, appeared to shrink from no trouble; resorting largely, whenever the opportunity offered, to the natural expedient of interrogation. On the following day the weather was bad, and in the afternoon the young man, by way of providing in-door amusement, offered to show her the pictures. Henrietta strolled through the long gallery in his society, while he pointed out its principal ornaments and mentioned the painters and subjects. Miss Stackpole looked at the pictures in perfect silence, committing herself to no opinion, and Ralph was gratified by the fact that she delivered herself of none of the little ready-made ejaculations of delight of which the visitors to Gardencourt were so frequently lavish. This young lady, indeed, to do her justice, was but little addicted to the use of conventional phrases; there was something earnest and inventive in her tone, which at times, in its brilliant deliberation, suggested a person of high culture speaking a foreign language. Ralph Touchett subsequently learned that she had at one time officiated as art-critic to a Transatlantic journal; but she appeared, in spite of this fact, to carry in her pocket none of the small change of admiration. Suddenly, just after he had called her attention to a charming Constable, she turned and looked at him as if he himself had been a picture.     70   
  “Do you always spend your time like this?” she demanded.     71   
  “I seldom spend it so agreeably,” said Ralph.     72   
  “Well, you know what I mean—without any regular occupation.”     73   
  “Ah,” said Ralph, “I am the idlest man living.”     74   
  Miss Stackpole turned her gaze to the Constable again, and Ralph bespoke her attention for a small Watteau hanging near it, which represented a gentleman in a pink doublet and hose and a ruff, leaning against the pedestal of the statue of a nymph in a garden, and playing the guitar to two ladies seated on the grass.     75   
  “That’s my ideal of a regular occupation,” he said.     76   
  Miss Stackpole turned to him again and though her eyes had rested upon the picture, he saw that she had not apprehended the subject. She was thinking of something much more serious.     77   
  “I don’t see how you can reconcile it to your conscience,” she said.     78   
  “My dear lady, I have no conscience!”     79   
  “Well, I advise you to cultivate one. You will need it the next time you go to America.”     80   
  “I shall probably never go again.”     81   
  “Are you ashamed to show yourself?”     82   
  Ralph meditated, with a gentle smile.     83   
  “I suppose that, if one has no conscience, one has no shame.”     84   
  “Well, you have got plenty of assurance,” Henrietta declared. “Do you consider it right to give up your country?”     85   
  “Ah, one doesn’t give up one’s country any more than one gives up one’s grandmother. It’s antecedent to choice.”     86   
  “I suppose that means that you would give it up if you could? What do they think of you over here?”     87   
  “They delight in me.”     88   
  “That’s because you truckle to them.”     89   
  “Ah, set it down a little to my natural charm!” Ralph urged.     90   
  “I don’t know anything about your natural charm. If you have got any charm, it’s quite unnatural. It’s wholly acquired—or at least you have tried hard to acquire it, living over here. I don’t say you have succeeded. It’s a charm that I don’t appreciate, any way. Make yourself useful in some way, and then we will talk about it.”     91   
  “Well now, tell me what I shall do,” said Ralph.     92   
  “Go right home, to begin with.”     93   
  “Yes, I see. And then?”     94   
  “Take right hold of something.”     95   
  “Well, now, what sort of thing?”     96   
  “Anything you please, so long as you take hold. Some new idea, some big work.”     97   
  “Is it very difficult to take hold?” Ralph inquired.     98   
  “Not if you put your heart into it.”     99   
  “Ah, my heart,” said Ralph. “If it depends upon my heart——”    100   
  “Haven’t you got any?”    101   
  “I had one a few days ago, but I have lost it since.”    102   
  “You are not serious,” Miss Stackpole remarked; “that’s what’s the matter with you.” But for all this, in a day or two she again permitted him to fix her attention, and on this occasion assigned a different cause to her mysterious perversity. “I know what’s the matter with you, Mr. Touchett,” she said. “You think you are too good to get married.”    103   
  “I thought so till I knew you, Miss Stackpole,” Ralph answered; “and then I suddenly changed my mind.”    104   
  “Oh, pshaw!” Henrietta exclaimed impatiently.    105   
  “Then it seemed to me,” said Ralph, “that I was not good enough.”    106   
  “It would improve you. Besides, it’s your duty.”    107   
  “Ah,” cried the young man, “one has so many duties! Is that a duty too?”    108   
  “Of course it is—did you never know that before? It’s every one’s duty to get married.”    109   
  Ralph meditated a moment; he was disappointed. There was something in Miss Stackpole he had begun to like; it seemed to him that if she was not a charming woman she was at least a very good fellow. She was wanting in distinction, but, as Isabel had said, she was brave, and there is always something fine about that. He had not supposed her to be capable of vulgar arts; but these last words struck him as a false note. When a marriageable young woman urges matrimony upon an unencumbered young man, the most obvious explanation of her conduct is not the altruistic impulse.    110   
  “Ah, well now, there is a good deal to be said about that,” Ralph rejoined.    111   
  “There may be, but that is the principal thing. I must say I think it looks very exclusive, going round all alone, as if you thought no woman was good enough for you. Do you think you are better than any one else in the world? In America it’s usual for people to marry.”    112   
  “If it’s my duty,” Ralph asked, “is it not, by analogy, yours as well?”    113   
  Miss Stackpole’s brilliant eyes expanded still further.    114   
  “Have you the fond hope of finding a flaw in my reasoning? Of course I have got as good a right to marry as any one else.”    115   
  “Well then,” said Ralph, “I won’t say it vexes me to see you single. It delights me rather.”    116   
  “You are not serious yet. You never will be.”    117   
  “Shall you not believe me to be so on the day that I tell you I desire to give up the practice of going round alone?”    118   
  Miss Stackpole looked at him for a moment in a manner which seemed to announce a reply that might technically be called encouraging. But to his great surprise this expression suddenly resolved itself into an appearance of alarm, and even of resentment.    119   
  “No, not even then,” she answered, dryly. After which she walked away.    120   
  “I have not fallen in love with your friend,” Ralph said that evening to Isabel, “though we talked some time this morning about it.”    121   
  “And you said something she didn’t like,” the girl replied. Ralph stared. “Has she complained of me?”    122   
  “She told me she thinks there is something very low in the tone of Europeans towards women.”    123   
  “Does she call me a European?”    124   
  “One of the worst. She told me you had said to her something that an American never would have said. But she didn’t repeat it.”    125   
  Ralph treated himself to a burst of resounding laughter.    126   
  “She is an extraordinary combination. Did she think I was making love to her?”    127   
  “No; I believe even Americans do that. But she apparently thought you mistook the intention of something she had said, and put an unkind construction on it.”    128   
  “I thought she was proposing marriage to me, and I accepted her. Was that unkind?”    129   
  Isabel smiled. “It was unkind to me. I don’t want you to marry.”    130   
  “My dear cousin, what is one to do among you all?” Ralph demanded. “Miss Stackpole tells me it’s my bounden duty, and that it’s hers to see I do mine!”    131   
  “She has a great sense of duty,” said Isabel gravely. “She has, indeed, and it’s the motive of everything she says. That’s what I like her for. She thinks it’s very frivolous for you to be single; that’s what she meant to express to you. If you thought she was trying to—to attract you, you were very wrong.”    132   
  “It is true it was an odd way; but I did think she was trying to attract me. Excuse my superficiality.”    133   
  “You are very conceited. She had no interested views, and never supposed you would think she had.”    134   
  “One must be very modest, then, to talk with such women,” Ralph said, humbly. “But it’s is a very strange type. She is too personal—considering that she expects other people not to be. She walks in without knocking at the door.”    135   
  “Yes,” Isabel admitted, “she doesn’t sufficiently recognize the existence of knockers; and indeed I am not sure that she doesn’t think them a rather pretentious ornament. She thinks one’s door should stand ajar. But I persist in liking her.”    136   
  “I persist in thinking her too familiar,” Ralph rejoined, naturally somewhat uncomfortable under the sense of having been doubly deceived in Miss Stackpole.    137   
  “Well,” said Isabel, smiling, “I am afraid it is because she is rather vulgar that I like her.”    138   
  “She would be flattered by your reason!”    139   
  “If I should tell her, I would not express it in that way. I should say it is because there is something of the ‘people’ in her.”    140   
  “What do you know about the people? and what does she, for that matter?”    141   
  “She knows a great deal, and I know enough to feel that she is a kind of emanation of the great democracy—of the continent, the country, the nation. I don’t say that she sums it all up, that would be too much to ask of her. But she suggests it, she reminds me of it.”    142   
  “You like her then for patriotic reasons. I am afraid it is on those very grounds that I object to her.”    143   
  “Ah,” said Isabel, with a kind of joyous sigh, “I like so many things! If a thing strikes me in a certain way, I like it. I don’t want to boast, but I suppose I am rather versatile. I like people to be totally different from Henrietta—in the style of Lord Warburton’s sisters, for instance. So long as I look at the Misses Molyneux, they seem to me to answer a kind of ideal. Then Henrietta presents herself, and I am immensely struck with her; not so much for herself as what stands behind her.”    144   
  “Ah, you mean the back view of her,” Ralph suggested.    145   
  “What she says is true,” his cousin answered; “you will never be serious. I like the great country stretching away beyond the rivers and across the prairies, blooming and smiling and spreading, till it stops at the blue Pacific! A strong, sweet, fresh odour seems to rise from it, and Henrietta—excuse my simile—has something of that odour in her garments.”    146   
  Isabel blushed a little as she concluded this speech, and the blush, together with the momentary ardour she had thrown into it, was so becoming to her that Ralph stood smiling at her for a moment after she had ceased speaking.    147   
  “I am not sure the Pacific is blue,” he said; ”but you are a woman of imagination. Henrietta, however, is fragrant—Henrietta is decidedly fragrant!”

Chapter XI   
     
HE took a resolve after this not to misinterpret her words, even when Miss Stackpole appeared to strike the personal note most strongly. He bethought himself that persons, in her view, were simple and homogeneous organisms, and that he, for his own part, was too perverted a representative of human nature to have a right to deal with her in strict reciprocity. He carried out his resolve with a great deal of tact, and the young lady found in her relations with him no obstacle to the exercise of that somewhat aggressive frankness which was the social expression of her nature. Her situation at Gardencourt, therefore, appreciated as we have seen her to be by Isabel, and full of appreciation herself of that fine freedom of composition which, to her sense, rendered Isabel’s character a sister-spirit, and of the easy venerableness of Mr. Touchett, whose general tone, as she said, met with her full approval—her situation at Gardencourt would have been perfectly comfortable, had she not conceived an irresistible mistrust of the little lady to whom she had at first supposed herself obliged to pay a certain deference as mistress of the house. She presently discovered, however, that this obligation was of the lightest, and that Mrs. Touchett cared very little how Miss Stackpole behaved. Mrs. Touchett had spoken of her to Isabel as a “newspaper-woman,” and expressed some surprise at her niece’s having selected such a friend; but she had immediately added that she knew Isabel’s friends were her own affair, and that she never undertook to like them all, or to restrict the girl to those she liked.      1   
  “If you could see none but the people I like, my dear, you would have a very small society,” Mrs. Touchett frankly admitted; “and I don’t think I like any man or woman well enough to recommend them to you. When it comes to recommending, it is a serious affair. I don’t like Miss Stackpole—I don’t like her tone. She talks too loud, and she looks at me too hard. I am sure she has lived all her life in a boarding-house, and I detest the style of manners that such a way of living produces. If you ask me if I prefer my own manners, which you doubtless think very bad, I will tell you that I prefer them immensely. Miss Stackpole knows that I detest boarding-house civilisation, and she detests me for detesting it, because she thinks it is the highest in the world. She would like Gardencourt a great deal better if it were a boarding-house. For me, I find it almost too much of one! We shall never get on together, therefore, and there is no use of trying.”      2   
  Mrs. Touchett was right in guessing that Henrietta disapproved of her, but she had not quite put her finger on the reason. A day or two after Miss Stackpole’s arrival she had made some invidious reflections on American hotels, which excited a vein of counter-argument on the part of the correspondent of the Interviewer, who in the exercise of her profession had acquired a large familiarity with the technical hospitality of her country. Henrietta expressed the opinion that American hotels were the best in the world, and Mrs. Touchett recorded a conviction that they were the worst. Ralph, with his experimental geniality, suggested, by way of healing the breach, that the truth lay between the two extremes, and that the establishments in question ought to be described as fair middling. This contribution to the discussion, however, Miss Stackpole rejected with scorn. Middling, indeed! If they were not the best in the world, they were the worst, but there was nothing middling about an American hotel.      3   
  “We judge from different points of view, evidently,” said Mrs. Touchett. “I like to be treated as an individual; you like to be treated as a ‘party’.”      4   
  “I don’t know what you mean,” Henrietta replied. “I like to be treated as an American lady.”      5   
  “Poor American ladies!” cried Mrs. Touchett, with a laugh. “They are the slaves of slaves.”      6   
  “They are the companions of freemen,” Henrietta rejoined.      7   
  “They are the companions of their servants—the Irish chambermaid and the negro waiter. They share their work.”      8   
  “Do you call the domestics in an American household ‘slaves’?” Miss Stackpole inquired. “If that’s the way you desire to treat them, no wonder you don’t like America.”      9   
  “If you have not good servants, you are miserable,” Mrs. Touchett said, serenely. “They are very bad in America, but I have five perfect ones in Florence.”     10   
  “I don’t see what you want with five,” Henrietta could not help observing. “I don’t think I should like to see five persons surrounding me in that menial position.”     11   
  “I like them in that position better than in some others,” cried Mrs. Touchett, with a laugh.     12   
  “Should you like me better if I were your butler, dear?” her husband asked.     13   
  “I don’t think I should; you would make a very poor butler.”     14   
  “The companions of freemen—I like that, Miss Stackpole,” said Ralph. “It’s a beautiful description.”     15   
  “When I said freemen, I didn’t mean you, sir!”     16   
  And this was the only reward that Ralph got for his compliment. Miss Stackpole was baffled; she evidently thought there was something treasonable in Mrs. Touchett’s appreciation of a class which she privately suspected of being a mysterious survival of feudalism. It was perhaps because her mind was oppressed with this image that she suffered some days to elapse before she said to Isabel in the morning, while they were alone together,     17   
  “My dear friend, I wonder whether you are growing faithless?”     18   
  “Faithless? Faithless to you, Henrietta?”     19   
  “No, that would be a great pain; but it is not that.”     20   
  “Faithless to my country, then?”     21   
  “Ah, that I hope will never be. When I wrote to you from Liverpool, I said I had something particular to tell you. You have never asked me what it is. Is it because you have suspected?”     22   
  “Suspected what? As a rule, I don’t think I suspect,” said Isabel. “I remember now that phrase in your letter, but I confess I had forgotten it. What have you to tell me?”     23   
  Henrietta looked disappointed, and her steady gaze betrayed it.     24   
  “You don’t ask that right—as if you thought it important. You are changed—you are thinking of other things.”     25   
  “Tell me what you mean, and I think of that.”     26   
  “Will you really think of it? That is what I wish to be sure of.”     27   
  “I have not much control of my thoughts, but I will do my best,” said Isabel.     28   
  Henrietta gazed at her, in silence, for a period of time which tried Isabel’s patience, so that our heroine said at last—     29   
  “Do you mean that you are going to be married?”     30   
  “Not till I have seen Europe!” said Miss Stackpole. “What are you laughing at?” she went on. “What I mean is, that Mr. Goodwood came out in the steamer with me.”     31   
  “Ah!” Isabel exclaimed, quickly.     32   
  “You say that right. I had a good deal of talk with him; he has come after you.”     33   
  “Did he tell you so?”     34   
  “No, he told me nothing; that’s how I knew it,” said Henrietta, cleverly. “He said very little about you, but I spoke of you a good deal.”     35   
  Isabel was silent a moment. At the mention of Mr. Goodwood’s name she had coloured a little, and now her blush was slowly fading.     36   
  “I am very sorry you did that,” she observed at last.     37   
  “It was a pleasure to me, and I liked the way he listened. I could have talked a long time to such a listener; he was so quiet, so intense; he drank it all in.”     38   
  “What did you say about me?” Isabel asked.     39   
  “I said you were on the whole the finest creature I know.”     40   
  “I am very sorry for that. He thinks too well of me already; he ought not to be encouraged.”     41   
  “He is dying for a little encouragement. I see his face now, and his earnest, absorbed look, while I talked. I never saw an ugly man look so handsome!”     42   
  “He is very simple-minded,” said Isabel. “And he is not so ugly.”     43   
  “There is nothing so simple as a great passion.”     44   
  “It is not a great passion; I am very sure it is not that.”     45   
  “You don’t say that as if you were sure.”     46   
  Isabel gave rather a cold smile.     47   
  “I shall say it better to Mr. Goodwood himself!”     48   
  “He will soon give you a chance,” said Henrietta.     49   
  Isabel offered no answer to this assertion, which her companion made with an air of great confidence.     50   
  “He will find you changed,” the latter pursued. “You have been affected by your new surroundings.”     51   
  “Very likely. I am affected by everything.”     52   
  “By everything but Mr. Goodwood!” Miss Stackpole exclaimed, with a laugh.     53   
  Isabel failed even to smile in reply; and in a moment she said—     54   
  “Did he ask you to speak to me?”     55   
  “Not in so many words. But his eyes asked it—and his handshake, when he bade me good-bye.”     56   
  “Thank you for doing so.” And Isabel turned away.     57   
  “Yes, you are changed; you have got new ideas over here,” her friend continued.     58   
  “I hope so,” said Isabel; “one should get as many new ideas as possible.”     59   
  “Yes; but they shouldn’t interfere with the old ones.”     60   
  Isabel turned about again. “If you mean that I had any idea with regard to Mr. Goodwood——” And then she paused; Henrietta’s bright eyes seemed to her to grow enormous.     61   
  “My dear child, you certainly encouraged him,” said Miss Stackpole.     62   
  Isabel appeared for the moment to be on the point of denying this charge, but instead of this she presently answered—“It is very true; I did encourage him.” And then she inquired whether her companion had learned from Mr. Goodwood what he intended to do. This inquiry was a concession to curiosity, for she did not enjoy discussing the gentleman with Henrietta Stackpole, and she thought that in her treatment of the subject this faithful friend lacked delicacy.     63   
  “I asked him, and he said he meant to do nothing,” Miss Stackpole answered. “But I don’t believe that; he’s not a man to do nothing. He is a man of action. Whatever happens to him, he will always do something, and whatever he does will be right.”     64   
  “I quite believe that,” said Isabel. Henrietta might be wanting in delicacy; but it touched the girl, all the same, to hear this rich assertion made.     65   
  “Ah, you do care for him,” Henrietta murmured.     66   
  “Whatever he does will be right,” Isabel repeated. “When a man is of that supernatural mould, what does it matter to him whether one cares for him?”     67   
  “It may not matter to him, but it matters to one’s self.”     68   
  “Ah, what it matters to me, that is not what we are discussing,” said Isabel, smiling a little.     69   
  This time her companion was grave. “Well, I don’t care; you have changed,” she replied. “You are not the girl you were a few short weeks ago, and Mr. Goodwood will see it. I expect him here any day.”     70   
  “I hope he will hate me, then,” said Isabel.     71   
  “I believe that you hope it about as much as I believe that he is capable of it.”     72   
  To this observation our heroine made no rejoinder; she was absorbed in the feeling of alarm given her by Henrietta’s intimation that Caspar Goodwood would present himself at Gardencourt. Alarm is perhaps a violent term to apply to the uneasiness with which she regarded this contingency; but her uneasiness was keen, and there were various good reasons for it. She pretended to herself that she thought the event impossible, and, later, she communicated her disbelief to her friend; but for the next forty-eight hours, nevertheless, she stood prepared to hear the young man’s name announced. The feeling was oppressive; it made the air sultry, as if there were to be a change of weather; and the weather, socially speaking, had been so agreeable during Isabel’s stay at Gardencourt that any change would be for the worse. Her suspense, however, was dissipated on the second day. She had walked into the park, in company with the sociable Bunchie, and after strolling about for some time, in a manner at once listless and restless, had seated herself on a garden-bench, within sight of the house, beneath a spreading beech, where, in a white dress ornamented with black ribbons, she formed, among the flickering shadows, a very graceful and harmonious image. She entertained herself for some moments with talking to the little terrier, as to whom the proposal of an ownership divided with her cousin had been applied as impartially as possible—as impartially as Bunchie’s own somewhat fickle and inconstant sympathies would allow. But she was notified for the first time, on this occasion, of the finite character of Bunchie’s intellect; hitherto she had been mainly struck with its extent. It seemed to her at last that she would do well to take a book; formerly, when she felt heavy-hearted, she had been able, with the help of some well-chosen volume, to transfer the seat of consciousness to the organ of pure reason. Of late, however, it was not to be denied, literature had seemed a fading light, and even after she had reminded herself that her uncle’s library was provided with a complete set of those authors which no gentleman’s collection should be without, she sat motionless and empty-handed, with her eyes fixed upon the cool green turf of the lawn. Her meditations were presently interrupted by the arrival of a servant, who handed her a letter. The letter bore the London postmark, and was addressed in a hand that she knew—that she seemed to know all the better, indeed, as the writer had been present to her mind when the letter was delivered. This document proved to be short, and I may give it entire.
             “MY DEAR MISS ARCHER—I don’t know whether you will have heard of my coming to England, but even if you have not, it will scarcely be a surprise to you. You will remember that when you gave me my dismissal at Albany three months ago, I did not accept it. I protested against it. You in fact appeared to accept my protest, and to admit that I had the right on my side. I had come to see you with the hope that you would let me bring you over to my conviction; my reasons for entertaining this hope had been of the best. But you disappointed it; I found you changed, and you were able to give me no reason for the change. You admitted that you were unreasonable, and it was the only concession you would make; but it was a very cheap one, because you are not unreasonable. No, you are not, and you never will be. Therefore it is that I believe you will let me see you again. You told me that I am not disagreeable to you, and I believe it; for I don’t see why that should be. I shall always think of you; I shall never think of any one else. I came to England simply because you are here; I couldn’t stay at home after you had gone; I hated the country because you were not in it. If I like this country at present, it is only because you are here. I have been to England before, but I have never enjoyed it much. May I not come and see you for half-an-hour? This at present is the dearest wish of, yours faithfully,   
“CASPAR GOODWOOD.”
  73   
  Isabel read Mr. Goodwood’s letter with such profound attention that she had not perceived an approaching tread on the soft grass. Looking up, however, as she mechanically folded the paper, she saw Lord Warburton standing before her.

Chapter XII   
     
SHE put the letter into her pocket, and offered her visitor a smile of welcome, exhibiting no trace of discomposure, and half surprised at her self-possession.      1   
  “They told me you were out here,” said Lord Warburton; “and as there was no one in the drawing-room, and it is really you that I wish to see, I came out with no more ado.”      2   
  Isabel had got up; she felt a wish, for the moment, that he should not sit down beside her. “I was just going indoors,” she said.      3   
  “Please don’t do that; it is much pleasanter here; I have ridden over from Lockleigh; it’s a lovely day.” His smile was peculiarly friendly and pleasing, and his whole person seemed to emit that radiance of good-feeling and good fare which had formed the charm of the girl’s first impression of him. It surrounded him like a zone of fine June weather.      4   
  “We will walk about a little, then,” said Isabel, who could not divest herself of the sense of an intention on the part of her visitor, and who wished both to elude the intention and to satisfy her curiosity regarding it. It had flashed upon her vision once before, and it had given her on that occasion, as we know, a certain alarm. This alarm was composed of several elements, not all of which were disagreeable; she had indeed spent some days in analysing them, and had succeeded in separating the pleasant part of this idea of Lord Warburton’s making love to her from the painful. It may appear to some readers that the young lady was both precipitate and unduly fastidious; but the latter of these facts, if the charge be true, may serve to exonerate her from the discredit of the former. She was not eager to convince herself that a territorial magnate, as she had heard Lord Warburton called, was smitten with her charms; because a declaration from such a source would point to more questions than it would answer. She had received a strong impression of Lord Warburton’s being a personage, and she had occupied herself in examining the idea. At the risk of making the reader smile, it must be said that there had been moments when the intimation that she was admired by a “personage” struck her as an aggression which she would rather have been spared. She had never known a personage before; there were no personages in her native land. When she had thought of such matters as this, she had done so on the basis of character—of what one likes in a gentleman’s mind and in his talk. She herself was a character—she could not help being aware of that; and hitherto her visions of a completed life had concerned themselves largely with moral images—things as to which the question would be whether they pleased her soul. Lord Warburton loomed up before her, largely and brightly, as a collection of attributes and powers which were not to be measured by this simple rule, but which demanded a different sort of appreciation—an appreciation which the girl, with her habit of judging quickly and freely, felt that she lacked the patience to bestow. Of course, there would be a short cut to it, and as Lord Warburton was evidently a very fine fellow, it would probably also be a safe cut. Isabel was able to say all this to herself, but she was unable to feel the force of it. What she felt was that a territorial, a political, a social magnate had conceived the design of drawing her into the system in which he lived and moved. A certain instinct, not imperious, but persuasive, told her to resist—it murmured to her that virtually she had a system and an orbit of her own. It told her other things besides—things which both contradicted and confirmed each other; that a girl might do much worse than trust herself to such a man as Lord Warburton, and that it would be very interesting to see something of his system from his own point of view; that, on the other hand, however, there was evidently a great deal of it which she should regard only as an incumbrance, and that even in the whole there was something heavy and rigid which would make it unacceptable. Furthermore, there was a young man lately come from America who had no system at all; but who had a character of which it was useless for her to try to persuade herself that the impression on her mind had been light. The letter that she carried in her pocket sufficiently reminded her of the contrary. Smile not, however, I venture to repeat, at this simple young lady from Albany, who debated whether she should accept an English peer before he had offered himself, and who was disposed to believe that on the whole she could do better. She was a person of great good faith, and if there was a great deal of folly in her wisdom, those who judge her severely may have the satisfaction of finding that, later, she became consistently wise only at the cost of an amount of folly which will constitute almost a direct appeal to charity.      5   
  Lord Warburton seemed quite ready to walk, to sit, or to do anything that Isabel should propose, and he gave her this assurance with his usual air of being particularly pleased to exercise a social virtue. But he was, nevertheless, not in command of his emotions, and as he strolled beside her for a moment, in silence, looking at her without letting her know it, there was something embarrassed in his glance and his misdirected laughter. Yes, assuredly—as we have touched on the point, we may return to it for a moment again—the English are the most romantic people in the world, and Lord Warburton was about to give an example of it. He was about to take a step which would astonish all his friends and displease a great many of them, and which, superficially, had nothing to recommend it. The young lady who trod the turf beside him had come from a queer country across the sea, which he knew a good deal about; her antecedents, her associations, were very vague to his mind, except in so far as they were generic, and in this sense they revealed themselves with a certain vividness. Miss Archer had neither a fortune nor the sort of beauty that justifies a man to the multitude, and he calculated that he had spent about twenty-six hours in her company. He had summed up all this—the perversity of the impulse, which had declined to avail itself of the most liberal opportunities to subside, and the judgment of mankind, as exemplified particularly in the more quickly-judging half of it; he had looked these things well in the face, and then he had dismissed them from his thoughts. He cared no more for them than for the rosebud in his button-hole. It is the good fortune of a man who for the greater part of a lifetime has abstained without effort from making himself disagreeable to his friends, that when the need comes for such a course it is not discredited by irritating associations.      6   
  “I hope you had a pleasant ride,” said Isabel, who observed her companion’s hesitancy.      7   
  “It would have been pleasant if for nothing else than that it brought me here,” Lord Warburton answered.      8   
  “Are you so fond of Gardencourt?” the girl asked; more and more sure that he meant to make some demand of her; wishing not to challenge him if he hesitated, and yet to keep all the quietness of her reason if he proceeded. It suddenly came upon her that her situation was one which a few weeks ago she would have deemed deeply romantic; the park of an old English country-house, with the foreground embellished by a local nobleman in the act of making love to a young lady who, on careful inspection, should be found to present remarkable analogies with herself. But if she were now the heroine of the situation, she succeeded scarcely the less in looking at it from the outside.      9   
  “I care nothing for Gardencourt,” said Lord Warburton; “I care only for you.”     10   
  “You have known me too short a time to have a right to say that, and I cannot believe you are serious.”     11   
  These words of Isabel’s were not perfectly sincere, for she had no doubt whatever that he was serious. They were simply a tribute to the fact, of which she was perfectly aware, that those he himself had just uttered would have excited surprise on the part of the public at large. And, moreover, if anything beside the sense she had already acquired that Lord Warburton was not a frivolous person had been needed to convince her, the tone in which he replied to her would quite have served the purpose.     12   
  “One’s right in such a matter is not measured by the time, Miss Archer; it is measured by the feeling itself. If I were to wait three months, it would make no difference; I shall not be more sure of what I mean than I am to-day. Of course I have seen you very little; but my impression dates from the very first hour we met. I lost no time; I fell in love with you then. It was at first sight, as the novels say; I know now that is not a fancy-phrase, and I shall think better of novels for evermore. Those two days I spent here settled it; I don’t know whether you suspected I was doing so, but I paid—mentally speaking, I mean—the greatest possible attention to you. Nothing you said, nothing you did, was lost upon me. When you came to Gardencourt the other day—or rather, when you went away—I was perfectly sure. Nevertheless, I made up my mind to think it over, and to question myself narrowly. I have done so; all these days I have thought of nothing else. I don’t make mistakes about such things; I am a very judicious fellow. I don’t go off easily, but when I am touched, it’s for life. It’s for life, Miss Archer, it’s for life,” Lord Warburton repeated in the kindest, tenderest, pleasantest voice Isabel had ever heard, and looking at her with eyes that shone with the light of a passion that had sifted itself clear of the baser parts of emotion—the heat, the violence, the unreason—and which burned as steadily as a lamp in a windless place.     13   
  By tacit consent, as he talked, they had walked more and more slowly, and at last they stopped, and he took her hand.     14   
  “Ah, Lord Warburton, how little you know me!” Isabel said, very gently; gently, too, she drew her hand away.     15   
  “Don’t taunt me with that; that I don’t know you better makes me unhappy enough already; it’s all my loss. But that is what I want, and it seems to me I am taking the best way. If you will be my wife, then I shall know you, and when I tell you all the good I think of you, you will not be able to say it is from ignorance.”     16   
  “If you know me little, I know you even less,” said Isabel.     17   
  “You mean that, unlike yourself, I may not improve on acquaintance? Ah, of course, that is very possible. But think, to speak to you as I do, how determined I must be to try and give satisfaction! You do like me rather, don’t you?”     18   
  “I like you very much, Lord Warburton,” the girl answered; and at this moment she liked him immensely.     19   
  “I thank you for saying that; it shows you don’t regard me as a stranger. I really believe I have filled all the other relations of life very creditably, and I don’t see why I should not fill this one—in which I offer myself to you—seeing that I care so much more about it. Ask the people who know me well; I have friends who will speak for me.”     20   
  “I don’t need the recommendation of your friends,” said Isabel.     21   
  “Ah now, that is delightful of you. You believe in me yourself.”     22   
  “Completely,” Isabel declared; and it was the truth.     23   
  The light in her companion’s eyes turned into a smile, and he gave a long exhalation of joy.     24   
  “If you are mistaken, Miss Archer, let me lose all I possess!”     25   
  She wondered whether he meant this for a reminder that he was rich, and, on the instant, felt sure that he did not. He was thinking that, as he would have said himself; and indeed he might safely leave it to the memory of any interlocutor, especially of one to whom he was offering his hand. Isabel had prayed that she might not be agitated, and her mind was tranquil enough, even while she listened and asked herself what it was best she should say, to indulge in this incidental criticism. What she should say, had she asked herself? Her foremost wish was to say something as nearly as possible as kind as what he had said to her. His words had carried perfect conviction with them; she felt that he loved her.     26   
  “I thank you more than I can say for your offer,” she rejoined at last; “it does me great honour.”     27   
  “Ah, don’t say that!” Lord Warburton broke out. “I was afraid you would say something like that. I don’t see what you have to do with that sort of thing. I don’t see why you should thank me—it is I who ought to thank you, for listening to me; a man whom you know so little, coming down on you with such a thumper! Of course it’s a great question; I must tell you that I would rather ask it than have it to answer myself. But the way you have listened—or at least your having listened at all—gives me some hope.”     28   
  “Don’t hope too much,” Isabel said.     29   
  “Oh, Miss Archer!” her companion murmured, smiling again in his seriousness, as if such a warning might perhaps be taken but as the play of high spirits—the coquetry of elation.     30   
  “Should you be greatly surprised if I were to beg you not to hope at all?” Isabel asked.     31   
  “Surprised? I don’t know what you mean by surprise. It wouldn’t be that; it would be a feeling very much worse.”     32   
  Isabel walked on again; she was silent for some minutes.     33   
  “I am very sure that, highly as I already think of you, my opinion of you, if I should know you well, would only rise. But I am by no means sure that you would not be disappointed. And I say that not in the least out of conventional modesty; it is perfectly sincere.”     34   
  “I am willing to risk it, Miss Archer,” her companion answered.     35   
  “It’s a great question, as you say; it’s a very difficult question.”     36   
  “I don’t expect you, of course, to answer it outright. Think it over as long as may be necessary. If I can gain by waiting, I will gladly wait a long time. Only remember that in the end my dearest happiness depends upon your answer.”     37   
  “I should be very sorry to keep you in suspense,” said Isabel.     38   
  “Oh, don’t mind. I would much rather have a good answer six months hence than a bad one to-day.”     39   
  “But it is very probable that even six months hence I should not be able to give you one that you would think good.”     40   
  “Why not, since you really like me?”     41   
  “Ah, you must never doubt of that,” said Isabel.     42   
  “Well, then, I don’t see what more you ask.”     43   
  “It is not what I ask; it is what I can give. I don’t think I should suit you; I really don’t think I should.”     44   
  “You needn’t bother about that; that’s my affair. You needn’t be a better royalist than the king.”     45   
  “It’s not only that,” said Isabel; “but I am not sure I wish to marry any one.”     46   
  “Very likely you don’t. I have no doubt a great many women begin that way,” said his lordship, who, be it averred, did not in the least believe in the axiom he thus beguiled his anxiety by uttering. “But they are frequently persuaded.”     47   
  “Ah, that is because they want to be!”     48   
  And Isabel lightly laughed.     49   
  Her suitor’s countenance fell, and he looked at her for a while in silence.     50   
  “I’m afraid it’s my being an Englishman that makes you hesitate,” he said, presently. “I know your uncle thinks you ought to marry in your own country.”     51   
  Isabel listened to this assertion with some interest; it had never occurred to her that Mr. Touchett was likely to discuss her matrimonial prospects with Lord Warburton.     52   
  “Has he told you that?” she asked.     53   
  “I remember his making the remark; he spoke perhaps of Americans generally.”     54   
  “He appears himself to have found it very pleasant to live in England,” said Isabel, in a manner that might have seemed a little perverse, but which expressed both her constant perception of her uncle’s pictorial circumstances and her general disposition to elude any obligation to take a restricted view.     55   
  It gave her companion hope, and he immediately exclaimed warmly—     56   
  “Ah, my dear Miss Archer, old England is a very good sort of country, you know! And it will be still better when we have furbished it up a little.”     57   
  “Oh, don’t furbish it, Lord Warburton; leave it alone; I like it this way.”     58   
  “Well, then, if you like it, I am more and more unable to see your objection to what I propose.”     59   
  “I am afraid I can’t make you understand.”     60   
  “You ought at least to try; I have got a fair intelligence. Are you afraid—afraid of the climate? We can easily live elsewhere, you know. You can pick out your climate, the whole world over.”     61   
  These words were uttered with a tender eagerness which went to Isabel’s heart, and she would have given her little finger at that moment, to feel, strongly and simply, the impulse to answer, “Lord Warburton, it is impossible for a woman to do better in this world than to commit herself to your loyalty.”     62   
  But though she could conceive the impulse, she could not let it operate; her imagination was charmed, but it was not led captive. What she finally bethought herself of saying was something very different—something which altogether deferred the need of answering. “Don’t think me unkind if I ask you to say no more about this to-day.”     63   
  “Certainly, certainly!” cried Lord Warburton. “I wouldn’t bore you for the world.”     64   
  “You have given me a great deal to think about, and I promise you I will do it justice.”     65   
  “That’s all I ask of you, of course—and that you will remember that my happiness is in your hands.”     66   
  Isabel listened with extreme respect to this admonition, but she said after a minute—“I must tell you that what I shall think about is some way of letting you know that what you ask is impossible, without making you miserable.”     67   
  “There is no way to do that, Miss Archer. I won’t say that, if you refuse me, you will kill me; I shall not die of it. But I shall do worse; I shall live to no purpose.”     68   
  “You will live to marry a better woman than I.”     69   
  “Don’t say that, please,” said Lord Warburton, very gravely. “That is fair to neither of us.”     70   
  “To marry a worse one, then.”     71   
  “If there are better women than you, then I prefer the bad ones; that’s all I can say,” he went on, with the same gravity. “There is no accounting for tastes.”     72   
  His gravity made her feel equally grave, and she showed it by again requesting him to drop the subject for the present. “I will speak to you myself, very soon,” she said. “Perhaps I shall write to you.”     73   
  “At your convenience, yes,” he answered. “Whatever time you take, it must seem to me long, and I suppose I must make the best of that.”     74   
  “I shall not keep you in suspense; I only want to collect my mind a little.”     75   
  He gave a melancholy sigh and stood looking at her a moment, with his hands behind him, giving short nervous shakes to his hunting-whip. “Do you know I am very much afraid of it—of that mind of yours?”     76   
  Our heroine’s biographer can scarcely tell why, but the question made her start and brought a conscious blush to her cheek. She returned his look a moment, and then, with a note in her voice that might almost have appealed to his compassion—“So am I, my lord!” she exclaimed.     77   
  His compassion was not stirred, however; all that he possessed of the faculty of pity was needed at home. “Ah! be merciful, be merciful,” he murmured.     78   
  “I think you had better go,” said Isabel. “I will write to you.”     79   
  “Very good; but whatever you write, I will come and see you.” And then he stood reflecting, with his eyes fixed on the observant countenance of Bunchie, who had the air of having understood all that had been said, and of pretending to carry off the indiscretion by a simulated fit of curiosity as to the roots of an ancient beech. “There is one thing more,” said Lord Warburton. “You know, if you don’t like Lockleigh—if you think it’s damp, or anything of that sort—you need never go within fifty miles of it. It is not damp, by the way; I have had the house thoroughly examined; it is perfectly sanitary. But if you shouldn’t fancy it, you needn’t dream of living in it. There is no difficulty whatever about that; there are plenty of houses. I thought I would just mention it; some people don’t like a moat, you know. Good-bye.”     80   
  “I delight in a moat,” said Isabel. “Good-bye.”     81   
  He held out his hand, and she gave him hers a moment—a moment long enough for him to bend his head and kiss it. Then, shaking his hunting-whip with little quick strokes, he walked rapidly away. He was evidently very nervous.     82   
  Isabel herself was nervous, but she was not affected as she would have imagined. What she felt was not a great responsibility, a great difficulty of choice; for it appeared to her that there was no choice in the question. She could not marry Lord Warburton; the idea failed to correspond to any vision of happiness that she had hitherto entertained, or was now capable of entertaining. She must write this to him, she must convince him, and this duty was comparatively simple. But what disturbed her, in the sense that it struck her with wonderment, was this very fact that it cost her so little to refuse a great opportunity. With whatever qualifications one would, Lord Warburton had offered her a great opportunity; the situation might have discomforts, might contain elements that would displease her, but she did her sex no injustice in believing that nineteen women out of twenty would accommodate themselves to it with extreme zeal. Why then upon her also should it not impose itself? Who was she, what was she, that she should hold herself superior? What view of life, what design upon fate, what conception of happiness, had she that pretended to be larger than this large occasion? If she would not do this, then she must do great things, she must do something greater. Poor Isabel found occasion to remind herself from time to time that she must not be too proud, and nothing could be more sincere than her prayer to be delivered from such a danger; for the isolation and loneliness of pride had for her mind the horror of a desert place. If it were pride that interfered with her accepting Lord Warburton, it was singularly misplaced; and she was so conscious of liking him that she ventured to assure herself it was not. She liked him too much to marry him, that was the point; something told her that she should not be satisfied, and to inflict upon a man who offered so much a wife with a tendency to criticise would be a peculiarly discreditable act. She had promised him that she would consider his proposal, and when, after he had left her, she wandered back to the bench where he had found her, and lost herself in meditation, it might have seemed that she was keeping her word. But this was not the case; she was wondering whether she were not a cold, hard girl; and when at last she got up and rather quickly went back to the house, it was because, as she had said to Lord Warburton, she was really frightened at herself.

Chapter XIII   
     
IT was this feeling, and not the wish to ask advice—she had no desire whatever for that—that led her to speak to her uncle of what Lord Warburton had said to her. She wished to speak to some one; she should feel more natural, more human, and her uncle, for this purpose, presented himself in a more attractive light than either her aunt or her friend Henrietta. Her cousin, of course, was a possible confidant; but it would have been disagreeable to her to confide this particular matter to Ralph. So, the next day, after breakfast, she sought her occasion. Her uncle never left his apartment till the afternoon; but he received his cronies, as he said, in his dressing-room. Isabel had quite taken her place in the class so designated, which, for the rest, included the old man’s son, his physician, his personal servant, and even Miss Stackpole. Mrs. Touchett did not figure in the list, and this was an obstacle the less to Isabel’s finding her uncle alone. He sat in a complicated mechanical chair, at the open window of his room, looking westward over the park and the river, with his newspapers and letters piled up beside him, his toilet freshly and minutely made, and his smooth, speculative face composed to benevolent expectation.      1   
  Isabel approached her point very directly. “I think I ought to let you know that Lord Warburton has asked me to marry him. I suppose I ought to tell my aunt; but it seems best to tell you first.”      2   
  The old man expressed no surprise, but thanked her for the confidence she showed him. “Do you mind telling me whether you accepted him?” he added.      3   
  “I have not answered him definitely yet; I have taken a little time to think of it, because that seems more respectful. But I shall not accept him.”      4   
  Mr. Touchett made no comment upon this; he had the air of thinking that whatever interest he might take in the matter from the point of view of sociability, he had no active voice in it. “Well, I told you you would be a success over here. Americans are highly appreciated.”      5   
  “Very highly indeed,” said Isabel. “But at the cost of seeming ungrateful, I don’t think I can marry Lord Warburton.”      6   
  “Well,” her uncle went on, “of course an old man can’t judge for a young lady. I am glad you didn’t ask me before you made up your mind. I suppose I ought to tell you,” he added slowly, but as if it were not of much consequence, “that I have known all about it these three days.”      7   
  “About Lord Warburton’s state of mind?”      8   
  “About his intentions, as they say here. He wrote me a very pleasant letter, telling me all about them. Should you like to see it?” the old man asked, obligingly.      9   
  “Thank you; I don’t think I care about that. But I am glad he wrote to you; it was right that he should, and he would be certain to do what was right.”     10   
  “Ah, well, I guess you do like him!” Mr. Touchett declared. “You needn’t pretend you don’t.”     11   
  “I like him extremely; I am very free to admit that. But I don’t wish to marry any one just now.”     12   
  “You think some one may come along whom you may like better. Well, that’s very likely,” said Mr. Touchett, who appeared to wish to show his kindness to the girl by easing off her decision, as it were, and finding cheerful reasons for it.     13   
  “I don’t care if I don’t meet any one else; I like Lord Warburton quite well enough,” said Isabel, with that appearance of a sudden change of point of view with which she sometimes startled and even displeased her interlocutors.     14   
  Her uncle, however, seemed proof against either of these sensations.     15   
  “He’s a very fine man,” he resumed, in a tone which might have passed for that of encouragement. “His letter was one of the pleasantest letters I have received for some weeks. I suppose one of the reasons I liked it was that it was all about you; that is, all except the part which was about himself. I suppose he told you all that.”     16   
  “He would have told me everything I wished to ask him,” Isabel said.     17   
  “But you didn’t feel curious?”     18   
  “My curiosity would have been idle—once I had determined to decline his offer.”     19   
  “You didn’t find it sufficiently attractive?” Mr. Touchett inquired.     20   
  The girl was silent a moment.     21   
  “I suppose it was that,” she presently admitted. “But I don’t know why.”     22   
  “Fortunately, ladies are not obliged to give reasons,” said her uncle. “There’s a great deal that’s attractive about such an idea; but I don’t see why the English should want to entice us away from our native land. I know that we try to attract them over there; but that’s because our population is insufficient. Here, you know, they are rather crowded. However, I suppose there is room for charming young ladies everywhere.”     23   
  “There seems to have been room here for you,” said Isabel, whose eyes had been wandering over the large pleasure-spaces of the park.     24   
  Mr. Touchett gave a shrewd, conscious smile.     25   
  “There is room everywhere, my dear, if you will pay for it. I sometimes think I have paid too much for this. Perhaps you also might have to pay too much.”     26   
  “Perhaps I might,” the girl replied.     27   
  This suggestion gave her something more definite to rest upon than she had found in her own thoughts, and the fact of her uncle’s genial shrewdness being associated with her dilemma seemed to prove to her that she was concerned with the natural and reasonable emotions of life, and not altogether a victim to intellectual eagerness and vague ambitions—ambitions reaching beyond Lord Warburton’s handsome offer to something indefinable and possible not commendable. In so far as the indefinable had an influence upon Isabel’s behaviour at this juncture, it was not the conception, however unformulated, of a union with Caspar Goodwood; for however little she might have felt warranted in lending a receptive ear to her English suitor, she was at least as far removed from the disposition to let the young man from Boston take complete possession of her. The sentiment in which she ultimately took refuge, after reading his letter, was a critical view of his having come abroad; for it was part of the influence he had upon her that he seemed to take from her the sense of freedom. There was something too forcible, something oppressive and restrictive, in the manner in which he presented himself. She had been haunted at moments by the image of his disapproval, and she had wondered—a consideration she had never paid in one equal degree to any one else—whether he would like what she did. The difficulty was that more than any man she had ever known, more than poor Lord Warburton (she had begun now to give his lordship the benefit of this epithet), Caspar Goodwood gave her an impression of energy. She might like it or not, but at any rate there was something very strong about him; even in one’s usual contact with him one had to reckon with it. The idea of a diminished liberty was particularly disagreeable to Isabel at present, because it seemed to her that she had just given a sort of personal accent to her independence by making up her mind to refuse Lord Warburton. Sometimes Caspar Goodwood had seemed to range himself on the side of her destiny, to be the stubbornest fact she knew; she said to herself at such moments that she might evade him for a time, but that she must make terms with him at last—terms which would be certain to be favourable to himself.     28   
  Her impulse had been to avail herself of the things that helped her to resist such an obligation; and this impulse had been much concerned in her eager acceptance of her aunt’s invitation, which had come to her at a time when she expected from day to day to see Mr. Goodwood, and when she was glad to have an answer ready for something she was sure he would say to her. When she had told him at Albany, on the evening of Mrs. Touchett’s visit, that she could not now discuss difficult questions, because she was preoccupied with the idea of going to Europe with her aunt, he declared that this was no answer at all; and it was to obtain a better one that he followed her across the seas. To say to herself that he was a kind of fate was well enough for a fanciful young woman, who was able to take much for granted in him; but the reader has a right to demand a description less metaphysical.     29   
  He was the son of a proprietor of certain well-known cotton-mills in Massachusetts—a gentleman who had accumulated a considerable fortune in the exercise of this industry. Caspar now managed the establishment, with a judgment and a brilliancy which, in spite of keen competition and languid years, had kept its prosperity from dwindling. He had received the better part of his education at Harvard University, where, however, he had gained more renown as a gymnast and an oarsman than as a votary of culture. Later, he had become reconciled to culture, and though he was still fond of sport, he was capable of showing an excellent understanding of other matters. He had a remarkable aptitude for mechanics, and had invented an improvement in the cotton-spinning process, which was now largely used and was known by his name. You might have seen his name in the papers in connection with this fruitful contrivance; assurance of which he had given to Isabel by showing her in the columns of the New York Interviewer an exhaustive article on the Goodwood patent—an article not prepared by Miss Stackpole, friendly as she had proved herself to his more sentimental interests. He had great talent for business, for administration, and for making people execute his purpose and carry out his views—for managing men, as the phrase was; and to give its complete value to this faculty, he had an insatiable, an almost fierce, ambition. It always struck people who knew him that he might do greater things than carry on a cotton-factory; there was nothing cottony about Caspar Goodwood, and his friends took for granted that he would not always content himself with that. He had once said to Isabel that, if the United States were only not such a confoundedly peaceful nation, he would find his proper place in the army. He keenly regretted that the Civil War should have terminated just as he had grown old enough to wear shoulder-straps, and was sure that if something of the same kind would only occur again, he would make a display of striking military talent. It pleased Isabel to believe that he had the qualities of a famous captain, and she answered that, if it would help him on, she shouldn’t object to a war—a speech which ranked among the three or four most encouraging ones he had elicited from her, and of which the value was not diminished by her subsequent regret at having said anything so heartless, inasmuch as she never communicated this regret to him. She liked at any rate this idea of his being potentially a commander of men—liked it much better than some other points in his character and appearance. She cared nothing about his cotton-mill, and the Goodwood patent left her imagination absolutely cold. She wished him not an inch less a man than he was; but she sometimes thought he would be rather nicer if he looked, for instance, a little differently. His jaw was too square and grim, and his figure too straight and stiff; these things suggested a want of easy adaptability to some of the occasions of life. Then she regarded with disfavour a habit he had of dressing always in the same manner; it was not apparently that he wore the same clothes continually, for, on the contrary, his garments had a way of looking rather too new. But they all seemed to be made of the same piece; the pattern, the cut, was in every case identical. She had reminded herself more than once that this was a frivolous objection to a man of Mr. Goodwood’s importance; and then she had amended the rebuke by saying that it would be a frivolous objection if she were in love with him. She was not in love with him, and therefore she might criticise his small defects as well as his great ones—which latter consisted in the collective reproach of his being too serious, or, rather, not of his being too serious, for one could never be that, but of his seeming so. He showed his seriousness too simply, too artlessly; when one was alone with him he talked too much about the same subject, and when other people were present he talked too little about anything. And yet he was the strongest man she had ever known, and she believed that at bottom he was the cleverest. It was very strange; she was far from understanding the contradictions among her own impressions. Caspar Goodwood had never corresponded to her idea of a delightful person, and she supposed that this was why he was so unsatisfactory. When, however, Lord Warburton, who not only did correspond with it, but gave an extension to the term, appealed to her approval, she found herself still unsatisfied. It was certainly strange.     30   
  Such incongruities were not a help to answering Mr. Goodwood’s letter, and Isabel determined to leave it a while unanswered. If he had determined to persecute her, he must take the consequences; foremost among which was his being left to perceive that she did not approve of his coming to Gardencourt. She was already liable to the incursions of one suitor at this place, and though it might be pleasant to be appreciated in opposite quarters, Isabel had a personal shrinking from entertaining two lovers at once, even in a case where the entertainment should consist of dismissing them. She sent no answer to Mr. Goodwood; but at the end of three days she wrote to Lord Warburton, and the letter belongs to our history. It ran as follows.
             “DEAR LORD WARBURTON—A great deal of careful reflection has not led me to change my mind about the suggestion you were so kind as to make me the other day. I do not find myself able to regard you in the light of a husband, or to regard your home—your various homes—in the light of my own. These things cannot be reasoned about, and I very earnestly entreat you not to return to the subject we discussed so exhaustively. We see our lives from our own point of view; that is the privilege of the weakest and humblest of us; and I shall never be able to see mine in the manner you proposed. Kindly let this suffice you, and do me the justice to believe that I have given your proposal the deeply respectful consideration it deserves. It is with this feeling of respect that I remain very truly yours,   
“ISABEL ARCHER.”
  31   
  While the author of this missive was making up her mind to despatch it, Henrietta Stackpole formed a resolution which was accompanied by no hesitation. She invited Ralph Touchett to take a walk with her in the garden, and when he had assented with that alacrity which seemed constantly to testify to his high expectations, she informed him that she had a favour to ask of him. It may be confided to the reader that at this information the young man flinched; for we know that Miss Stackpole had struck him as indiscreet. The movement was unreasonable, however; for he had measured the limits of her discretion as little as he had explored its extent; and he made a very civil profession of the desire to serve her. He was afraid of her, and he presently told her so.     32   
  “When you look at me in a certain way,” he said, “my knees knock together, my faculties desert me; I am filled with trepidation, and I ask only for strength to execute your commands. You have a look which I have never encountered in any woman.”     33   
  “Well,” Henrietta replied, good-humouredly, “if I had not known before that you were trying to turn me into ridicule, I should know it now. Of course I am easy game—I was brought up with such different customs and ideas. I am not used to your arbitrary standards, and I have never been spoken to in America as you have spoken to me. If a gentleman conversing with me over there, were to speak to me like that, I shouldn’t know what to make of it. We take everything more naturally over there, and, after all, we are a great deal more simple. I admit that; I am very simple myself. Of course, if you choose to laugh at me for that, you are very welcome; but I think on the whole I would rather be myself than you. I am quite content to be myself; I don’t want to change. There are plenty of people that appreciate me just as I am; it is true they are only Americans!” Henrietta had lately taken up the tone of helpless innocence and large concession. “I want you to assist me a little,” she went on. “I don’t care in the least whether I amuse you while you do so; or, rather, I am perfectly willing that your amusement should be your reward. I want you to help me about Isabel.”     34   
  “Has she injured you?” Ralph asked.     35   
  “If she had I shouldn’t mind, and I should never tell you. What I am afraid of is that she will injure herself.”     36   
  “I think that is very possible,” said Ralph.     37   
  His companion stopped in the garden-walk, fixing on him a gaze which may perhaps have contained the quality that caused his knees to knock together. “That, too, would amuse you, I suppose. The way you do say things! I never heard any one so indifferent.”     38   
  “To Isabel? Never in the world.”     39   
  “Well, you are not in love with her, I hope.”     40   
  “How can that be, when I am in love with another?”     41   
  “You are in love with yourself, that’s the other!” Miss Stackpole declared. “Much good may it do you! But if you wish to be serious once in your life, here’s a chance; and if you really care for your cousin, here is an opportunity to prove it. I don’t expect you to understand her; that’s too much to ask. But you needn’t do that to grant my favour. I will supply the necessary intelligence.”     42   
  “I shall enjoy that immensely!” Ralph exclaimed. “I will be Caliban, and you shall be Ariel.”     43   
  “You are not at all like Caliban, because you are sophisticated, and Caliban was not. But I am not talking about imaginary characters; I am talking about Isabel. Isabel is intensely real. What I wish to tell you is that I find her fearfully changed.”     44   
  “Since you came, do you mean?”     45   
  “Since I came, and before I came. She is not the same as she was.”     46   
  “As she was in America?”     47   
  “Yes, in America. I suppose you know that she comes from there. She can’t help it, but she does.”     48   
  “Do you want to change her back again?”     49   
  “Of course I do; and I want you to help me.”     50   
  “Ah,” said Ralph, “I am only Caliban; I am not Prospero.”     51   
  “You were Prospero enough to make her what she has become. You have acted on Isabel Archer since she came here, Mr. Touchett.”     52   
  “I, my dear Miss Stackpole? Never in the world. Isabel Archer has acted on me—yes; she acts on every one. But I have been absolutely passive.”     53   
  “You are too passive, then. You had better stir yourself and be careful. Isabel is changing every day; she is drifting away—right out to sea. I have watched her and I can see it. She is not the bright American girl she was. She is taking different views, and turning away from her old ideals. I want to save those ideals, Mr. Touchett, and that is where you come in.”     54   
  “Not surely as an ideal?”     55   
  “Well, I hope not,” Henrietta replied, promptly. “I have got a fear in my heart that she is going to marry one of these Europeans, and I want to prevent it.”     56   
  “Ah, I see,” cried Ralph; “and to prevent it, you want me to step in and marry her?”     57   
  “Not quite; that remedy would be as bad as the disease, for you are the typical European from whom I wish to rescue her. No; I wish you to take an interest in another person—a young man to whom she once gave great encouragement, and whom she now doesn’t seem to think good enough. He’s a noble fellow, and a very dear friend of mine, and I wish very much you would invite him to pay a visit here.”     58   
  Ralph was much puzzled by this appeal, and it is perhaps not to the credit of his purity of mind that he failed to look at it at first in the simplest light. It wore, to his eyes, a tortuous air, and his fault was that he was not quite sure that anything in the world could really be as candid as this request of Miss Stackpole’s appeared. That a young woman should demand that a gentleman whom she described as her very dear friend should be furnished with an opportunity to make himself agreeable to another young woman, whose attention had wandered and whose charms were greater—this was an anomaly which for the moment challenged all his ingenuity of interpretation. To read between the lines was easier than to follow the text, and to suppose that Miss Stackpole wished the gentleman invited to Gardencourt on her own account was the sign not so much of a vulgar, as of an embarrassed, mind. Even from this venial act of vulgarity, however, Ralph was saved, and saved by a force that I can scarcely call anything less than inspiration. With no more outward light on the subject than he already possessed, he suddenly acquired the conviction that it would be a sovereign injustice to the correspondent of the Interviewer to assign a dishonourable motive to any act of hers. This conviction passed into his mind with extreme rapidity; it was perhaps kindled by the pure radiance of the young lady’s imperturbable gaze. He returned this gaze a moment, consciously, resisting an inclination to frown, as one frowns in the presence of larger luminaries. “Who is the gentleman you speak of?”     59   
  “Mr. Caspar Goodwood, from Boston. He has been extremely attentive to Isabel—just as devoted to her as he can live. He has followed her out here, and he is at present in London. I don’t know his address, but I guess I can obtain it.”     60   
  “I have never heard of him,” said Ralph.     61   
  “Well, I suppose you haven’t heard of every one. I don’t believe he has ever heard of you; but that is no reason why Isabel shouldn’t marry him.”     62   
  Ralph gave a small laugh. “What a rage you have for marrying people! Do you remember how you wanted to marry me the other day?”     63   
  “I have got over that. You don’t know how to take such ideas. Mr. Goodwood does, however; and that’s what I like about him. He’s a splendid man and a perfect gentleman; and Isabel knows it.”     64   
  “Is she very fond of him?”     65   
  “If she isn’t she ought to be. He is simply wrapped up in her.”     66   
  “And you wish me to ask him here,” said Ralph, reflectively.     67   
  “It would be an act of true hospitality.”     68   
  “Caspar Goodwood,” Ralph continued—“it’s rather a striking name.”     69   
  “I don’t care anything about his name. It might be Ezekiel Jenkins, and I should say the same. He is the only man I have ever seen whom I think worthy of Isabel.”     70   
  “You are a very devoted friend,” said Ralph.     71   
  “Of course I am. If you say that to laugh at me, I don’t care.”     72   
  “I don’t say it to laugh at you; I am very much struck with it.”     73   
  “You are laughing worse than ever; but I advise you not to laugh at Mr. Goodwood.”     74   
  “I assure you I am very serious; you ought to understand that,” said Ralph.     75   
  In a moment his companion understood it. “I believe you are; now you are too serious.”     76   
  “You are difficult to please.”     77   
  “Oh, you are very serious indeed. You won’t invite Mr. Goodwood.”     78   
  “I don’t know,” said Ralph. “I am capable of strange things. Tell me a little about Mr. Goodwood. What is he like?”     79   
  “He is just the opposite of you. He is at the head of a cotton factory; a very fine one.”     80   
  “Has he pleasant manners?” asked Ralph.     81   
  “Splendid manners—in the American style.”     82   
  “Would he be an agreeable member of our little circle?”     83   
  “I don’t think he would care much about our little circle. He would concentrate on Isabel.”     84   
  “And how would my cousin like that?”     85   
  “Very possibly not at all. But it will be good for her. It will call back her thoughts.”     86   
  “Call them back—from where?”     87   
  “From foreign parts and other unnatural places. Three months ago she gave Mr. Goodwood every reason to suppose that he was acceptable to her, and it is not worthy of Isabel to turn her back upon a real friend simply because she has changed the scene. I have changed the scene too, and the effect of it has been to make me care more for my old associations than ever. It’s my belief that the sooner Isabel changes it back again the better. I know her well enough to know that she would never be truly happy over here, and I wish her to form some strong American tie that will act as a preservative.”     88   
  “Are you not a little too much in a hurry?” Ralph inquired. “Don’t you think you ought to give her more of a chance in poor old England?”     89   
  “A chance to ruin her bright young life? One is never too much in a hurry to save a precious human creature from drowning.”     90   
  “As I understand it, then,” said Ralph, “you wish me to push Mr. Goodwood overboard after her. Do you know,” he added, “that I have never heard her mention his name?”     91   
  Henrietta Stackpole gave a brilliant smile. “I am delighted to hear that; it proves how much she thinks of him.”     92   
  Ralph appeared to admit that there was a good deal in this, and he surrendered himself to meditation, while his companion watched him askance. “If I should invite Mr. Goodwood,” he said, “it would be to quarrel with him.”     93   
  “Don’t do that; he would prove the better man.”     94   
  “You certainly are doing your best to make me hate him! I really don’t think I can ask him. I should be afraid of being rude to him.”     95   
  “It’s just as you please,” said Henrietta. “I had no idea you were in love with her yourself.”     96   
  “Do you really believe that?” the young man asked, with lifted eyebrows.     97   
  “That’s the most natural speech I have ever heard you make! Of course I believe it,” Miss Stackpole answered, ingeniously.     98   
  “Well,” said Ralph, “to prove to you that you are wrong, I will invite him. It must be, of course, as a friend of yours.”     99   
  “It will not be as a friend of mine that he will come; and it will not be to prove to me that I am wrong that you will ask him—but to prove it to yourself!”    100   
  These last words of Miss Stackpole’s (on which the two presently separated) contained an amount of truth which Ralph Touchett was obliged to recognise; but it so far took the edge from too sharp a recognition that, in spite of his suspecting that it would be rather more indiscreet to keep his promise than it would be to break it, he wrote Mr. Goodwood a note of six lines, expressing the pleasure it would give Mr. Touchett the elder that he should join a little party at Gardencourt, of which Miss Stackpole was a valued member. Having sent his letter (to the care of a banker whom Henrietta suggested) he waited in some suspense. He had heard of Mr. Casper Goodwood by name for the first time; for when his mother mentioned to him on her arrival that there was a story about the girl’s having an “admirer” at home, the idea seemed deficient in reality, and Ralph took no pains to ask questions, the answers to which would suggest only the vague or the disagreeable. Now, however, the native admiration of which his cousin was the object had become more concrete; it took the form of a young man who had followed her to London; who was interested in a cotton-mill, and had manners in the American style. Ralph had two theories about this young man. Either his passion was a sentimental fiction of Miss Stackpole’s (there was always a sort of tacit understanding among women, born of the solidarity of the sex, that they should discover or invent lovers for each other), in which case he was not to be feared, and would probably not accept the invitation; or else he would accept the invitation, and in this event would prove himself a creature too irrational to demand further consideration. The latter clause of Ralph’s argument might have seemed incoherent; but it embodied his conviction, that if Mr. Goodwood were interested in Isabel in the serious manner described by Miss Stackpole, he would not care to present himself at Gardencourt on a summons from the latter lady. “On this supposition,” said Ralph, “he must regard her as a thorn on the stem of his rose; as an intercessor he must find her wanting in tact.”    101   
  Two days after he had sent his invitation he received a very short note from Caspar Goodwood, thanking him for it, regretting that other engagements made a visit to Gardencourt impossible, and presenting many compliments to Miss Stackpole. Ralph handed the note to Henrietta, who, when she had read it, exclaimed—    102   
  “Well, I never have heard of anything so stiff!”    103   
  “I am afraid he doesn’t care so much about my cousin as you suppose,” Ralph observed.    104   
  “No, it’s not that; it’s some deeper motive. His nature is very deep. But I am determined to fathom it, and I will write to him to know what he means.”    105   
  His refusal of Ralph’s overtures made this young man vaguely uncomfortable; from the moment he declined to come to Gardencourt Ralph began to think him of importance. He asked himself what it signified to him whether Isabel’s admirers should be desperadoes or laggards; they were not rivals of his, and were perfectly welcome to act out their genius. Nevertheless he felt much curiosity as to the result of Miss Stackpole’s promised inquiry into the causes of Mr. Goodwood’s stiffness—a curiosity for the present ungratified, inasmuch as when he asked her three days later whether she had written to London, she was obliged to confess that she had written in vain. Mr. Goodwood had not answered her.    106   
  “I suppose he is thinking it over,” she said; “he thinks everything over; he is not at all impulsive. But I am accustomed to having my letters answered the same day.”    107   
  Whether it was to pursue her investigations, or whether it was in compliance with still larger interests, is a point which remains somewhat uncertain; at all events, she presently proposed to Isabel that they should make an excursion to London together.    108   
  “If I must tell the truth,” she said, “I am not seeing much at this place, and I shouldn’t think you were either. I have not even seen that aristocrat—what’s his name?—Lord Washburton. He seems to let you severely alone.”    109   
  “Lord Warburton is coming to-morrow, I happen to know,” replied Isabel, who had received a note from the master of Lockleigh in answer to her own letter. “You will have every opportunity of examining him.”    110   
  “Well, he may do for one letter, but what is one letter when you want to write fifty? I have described all the scenery in this vicinity, and raved about all the old women and donkeys. You may say what you please, scenery makes a thin letter. I must go back to London and get some impressions of real life. I was there but three days before I came away, and that is hardly time to get started.”    111   
  As Isabel, on her journey from New York to Gardencourt, had seen even less of the metropolis than this, it appeared a happy suggestion of Henrietta’s that the two should go thither on a visit of pleasure. The idea struck Isabel as charming; she had a great desire to see something of London, which had always been the city of her imagination. They turned over their scheme together and indulged in visions of æsthetic hours. They would stay at some picturesque old inn—one of the inns described by Dickens—and drive over the town in those delightful hansoms. Henrietta was a literary woman, and the great advantage of being a literary woman was that you could go everywhere and do everything. They would dine at a coffee-house, and go afterwards to the play; they would frequent the Abbey and the British Museum, and find out where Doctor Johnson had lived, and Goldsmith and Addison. Isabel grew eager, and presently mentioned these bright intentions to Ralph, who burst into a fit of laughter, which did not express the sympathy she had desired.    112   
  “It’s a delightful plan,” he said. “I advise you to go to the Tavistock Hotel in Covent Garden, an easy, informal, old-fashioned place, and I will have you put down at my club.”    113   
  “Do you mean it’s improper?” Isabel asked. “Dear me, isn’t anything proper here? With Henrietta, surely I may go anywhere; she isn’t hampered in that way. She has travelled over the whole American continent, and she can surely find her way about this simple little island.”    114   
  “Ah, then,” said Ralph, “let me take advantage of her protection to go up to town as well. I may never have a chance to travel so safely!”

Chapter XIV   
     
MISS STACKPOLE would have prepared to start for London immediately; but Isabel, as we have seen, had been notified that Lord Warburton would come again to Gardencourt, and she believed it to be her duty to remain there and see him. For four or five days he had made no answer to her letter; then he had written, very briefly, to say that he would come to lunch two days later. There was something in these delays and postponements that touched the girl, and renewed her sense of his desire to be considerate and patient, not to appear to urge her too grossly; a discretion the more striking that she was so sure he really liked her. Isabel told her uncle that she had written to him, and let Mr. Touchett know of Lord Warburton’s intention of coming; and the old man, in consequence, left his room earlier than usual, and made his appearance at the lunch-table. This was by no means an act of vigilance on his part, but the fruit of a benevolent belief that his being of the company might help to cover the visitor’s temporary absence, in case Isabel should find it needful to give Lord Warburton another hearing. This personage drove over from Lockleigh, and brought the elder of his sisters with him, a measure presumably dictated by considerations of the same order as Mr. Touchett’s. The two visitors were introduced to Miss Stackpole, who, at luncheon, occupied a seat adjoining Lord Warburton’s. Isabel, who was nervous, and had no relish of the prospect of again arguing the question he had so precipitately opened, could not help admiring his good-humoured self-possession, which quite disguised the symptoms of that admiration it was natural she should suppose him to feel. He neither looked at her nor spoke to her, and the only sign of his emotion was that he avoided meeting her eye. He had plenty of talk for the others, however, and he appeared to eat his luncheon with discrimination and appetite. Miss Molyneux, who had a smooth, nun-like forehead, and wore a large silver cross suspended from her neck, was evidently preoccupied with Henrietta Stackpole, upon whom her eyes constantly rested in a manner which seemed to denote a conflict between attention and alienation. Of the two ladies from Lockleigh, she was the one that Isabel had liked best; there was such a world of hereditary quiet in her. Isabel was sure, moreover, that her mild forehead and silver cross had a romantic meaning—that she was a member of a High Church sisterhood, had taken some picturesque vows. She wondered what Miss Molyneux would think of her if she knew Miss Archer had refused her brother; and then she felt sure that Miss Molyneux would never know—that Lord Warburton never told her such things. He was fond of her and kind to her, but on the whole he told her little. Such, at least, was Isabel’s theory; when, at table, she was not occupied in conversation, she was usually occupied in forming theories about her neighbours. According to Isabel, if Miss Molyneux should ever learn what had passed between Miss Archer and Lord Warburton, she would probably be shocked at the young lady’s indifference to such an opportunity; or no, rather (this was our heroine’s last impression) she would impute to the young American a high sense of general fitness.      1   
  Whatever Isabel might have made of her opportunities, Henrietta Stackpole was by no means disposed to neglect those in which she now found herself immersed.      2   
  “Do you know you are the first lord I have ever seen?” she said, very promptly, to her neighbour. “I suppose you think I am awfully benighted.”      3   
  “You have escaped seeing some very ugly men,” Lord Warburton answered, looking vaguely about the table and laughing a little.      4   
  “Are they very ugly? They try to make us believe in America that they are all handsome and magnificent, and that they wear wonderful robes and crowns.”      5   
  “Ah, the robes and crowns are gone out of fashion,” said Lord Warburton, “like your tomahawks and revolvers.”      6   
  “I am sorry for that; I think an aristocracy ought to be splendid,” Henrietta declared. “If it is not that, what is it?”      7   
  “Oh, you know, it isn’t much, at the best,” Lord Warburton answered. “Won’t you have a potato?”      8   
  “I don’t care much for these European potatoes. I shouldn’t know you from an ordinary American gentleman.”      9   
  “Do talk to me as if I were one,” said Lord Warburton. “I don’t see how you manage to get on without potatoes; you must find so few things to eat over here.”     10   
  Henrietta was silent a moment; there was a chance that he was not sincere.     11   
  “I have had hardly any appetite since I have been here,” she went on at last; “so it doesn’t much matter. I don’t approve of you, you know; I feel as if I ought to tell you that.”     12   
  “Don’t approve of me?”     13   
  “Yes, I don’t suppose any one ever said such a thing to you before, did they? I don’t approve of lords, as an institution. I think the world has got beyond that—far beyond.”     14   
  “Oh, so do I. I don’t approve of myself in the least. Sometimes it comes over me—how I should object to myself if I were not myself, don’t you know? But that’s rather good, by the way—not to be vain-glorious.”     15   
  “Why don’t you give it up, then?” Miss Stackpole inquired.     16   
  “Give up—a—?” asked Lord Warburton, meeting her harsh inflection with a very mellow one.     17   
  “Give up being a lord.”     18   
  “Oh, I am so little of one! One would really forget all about it, if you wretched Americans were not constantly reminding one. However, I do think of giving up—the little there is left of it—one of these days.”     19   
  “I should like to see you do it,” Henrietta exclaimed, rather grimly.     20   
  “I will invite you to the ceremony; we will have a supper and a dance.”     21   
  “Well,” said Miss Stackpole, “I like to see all sides. I don’t approve of a privileged class, but I like to hear what they have got to say for themselves.”     22   
  “Mighty little, as you see!”     23   
  “I should like to draw you out a little more,” Henrietta continued. “But you are always looking away. You are afraid of meeting my eye. I see you want to escape me.”     24   
  “No, I am only looking for those despised potatoes.”     25   
  “Please explain about that young lady—your sister—then. I don’t understand about her. Is she a Lady?”     26   
  “She’s a capital good girl.”     27   
  “I don’t like the way you say that—as if you wanted to change the subject. Is her position inferior to yours?”     28   
  “We neither of us have any position to speak of; but she is better off than I, because she has none of the bother.”     29   
  “Yes, she doesn’t look as if she had much bother. I wish I had as little bother as that. You do produce quiet people over here, whatever you may do.”     30   
  “Ah, you see one takes life easily, on the whole,” said Lord Warburton. “And then you know we are very dull. Ah, we can be dull when we try!”     31   
  “I should advise you to try something else. I shouldn’t know what to talk to your sister about; she looks so different. Is that silver cross a badge?”     32   
  “A badge?”     33   
  “A sign of rank.”     34   
  Lord Warburton’s glance had wandered a good deal, but at this it met the gaze of his neighbour.     35   
  “Oh, yes,” he answered, in a moment; “the women go in for those things. The silver cross is worn by the eldest daughters of Viscounts.”     36   
  This was his harmless revenge for having occasionally had his credulity too easily engaged in America.     37   
  After lunch he proposed to Isabel to come into the gallery and look at the pictures; and though she knew that he had seen the pictures twenty times, she complied without criticising this pretext. Her conscience now was very easy; ever since she sent him her letter she had felt particularly light of spirit. He walked slowly to the end of the gallery, staring at the paintings and saying nothing; and then he suddenly broke out—     38   
  “I hoped you wouldn’t write to me that way.”     39   
  “It was the only way, Lord Warburton,” said the girl. “Do try and believe that.”     40   
  “If I could believe it, of course I should let you alone. But we can’t believe by willing it; and I confess I don’t understand. I could understand your disliking me; that I could understand well. But that you should admit what you do——”     41   
  “What have I admitted?” Isabel interrupted, blushing a little.     42   
  “That you think me a good fellow; isn’t that it?” She said nothing, and he went on—“You don’t seem to have any reason, and that gives me a sense of injustice.”     43   
  “I have a reason, Lord Warburton,” said the girl; and she said it in a tone that made his heart contract.     44   
  “I should like very much to know it.”     45   
  “I will tell you some day when there is more to show for it.”     46   
  “Excuse my saying that in the meantime I must doubt of it.”     47   
  “You make me very unhappy,” said Isabel.     48   
  “I am not sorry for that; it may help you to know how I feel. Will you kindly answer me a question?” Isabel made no audible assent, but he apparently saw something in her eyes which gave him courage to go on. “Do you prefer some one else?”     49   
  “That’s a question I would rather not answer.”     50   
  “Ah, you do then!” her suitor murmured with bitterness.     51   
  The bitterness touched her, and she cried out—     52   
  “You are mistaken! I don’t.”     53   
  He sat down on a bench, unceremoniously, doggedly, like a man in trouble; leaning his elbows on his knees and staring at the floor.     54   
  “I can’t even be glad of that,” he said at last, throwing himself back against the wall, “for that would be an excuse.”     55   
  Isabel raised her eyebrows, with a certain eagerness.     56   
  “An excuse? Must I excuse myself?”     57   
  He paid, however, no answer to the question. Another idea had come into his head.     58   
  “Is it my political opinions? Do you think I go too far?”     59   
  “I can’t object to your political opinions, Lord Warburton,” said the girl, “because I don’t understand them.”     60   
  “You don’t care what I think,” he cried, getting up. “It’s all the same to you.”     61   
  Isabel walked away, to the other side of the gallery, and stood, there, showing him her charming back, her light slim figure, the length of her white neck as she bent her head, and the density of her dark braids. She stopped in front of a small picture, as if for the purpose of examining it; and there was something young and flexible in her movement, which her companion noticed. Isabel’s eyes, however, saw nothing; they had suddenly been suffused with tears. In a moment he followed her, and by this time she had brushed her tears away; but when she turned round, her face was pale, and the expression of her eyes was strange.     62   
  “That reason that I wouldn’t tell you,” she said, “I will tell it you, after all. It is that I can’t escape my fate.”     63   
  “Your fate?”     64   
  “I should try to escape it if I should marry you.”     65   
  “I don’t understand. Why should not that be your fate, as well as anything else?”     66   
  “Because it is not,” said Isabel, femininely. “I know it is not. It’s not my fate to give up—I know it can’t be.”     67   
  Poor Lord Warburton stared, with an interrogative point in either eye.     68   
  “Do you call marrying me giving up?”     69   
  “Not in the usual sense. It is getting—getting—getting a great deal. But it is giving up other chances.”     70   
  “Other chances?” Lord Warburton repeated, more and more puzzled.     71   
  “I don’t mean chances to marry,” said Isabel, her colour rapidly coming back to her. And then she stopped, looking down with a deep frown, as if it were hopeless to attempt to make her meaning clear.     72   
  “I don’t think it is presumptuous in me to say that I think you will gain more than you will lose,” Lord Warburton observed.     73   
  “I can’t escape unhappiness,” said Isabel. “In marrying you, I shall be trying to.”     74   
  “I don’t know whether you would try to, but you certainly would: that I must in candour admit!” Lord Warburton exclaimed, with an anxious laugh.     75   
  “I must not—I can’t!” cried the girl.     76   
  “Well, if you are bent on being miserable, I don’t see why you should make me so. Whatever charms unhappiness may have for you, it has none for me.”     77   
  “I am not bent on being miserable,” said Isabel. “I have always been intensely determined to be happy, and I have often believed I should be. I have told people that; you can ask them. But it comes over me every now and then that I can never be happy in any extraordinary way; not by turning away, by separating yourself.”     78   
  “By separating yourself from what?”     79   
  “From life. From the usual chances and dangers, from what most people know and suffer.”     80   
  Lord Warburton broke into a smile that almost denoted hope.     81   
  “Why, my dear Miss Archer,” he began to explain, with the most considerate eagerness, “I don’t offer you any exoneration from life, or from any chances or dangers whatever. I wish I could; depend upon it I would! For what do you take me, pray? Heaven help me, I am not the Emperor of China! All I offer you is the chance of taking the common lot in a comfortable sort of way. The common lot? Why, I am devoted to the common lot! Strike an alliance with me, and I promise you that you shall have plenty of it. You shall separate from nothing whatever—not even from your friend Miss Stackpole.”     82   
  “She would never approve of it,” said Isabel, trying to smile and take advantage of this side-issue; despising herself too, not a little, for doing so.     83   
  “Are we speaking of Miss Stackpole?” Lord Warburton asked, impatiently. “I never saw a person judge things on such theoretic grounds.”     84   
  “Now I suppose you are speaking of me,” said Isabel, with humility; and she turned away again, for she saw Miss Molyneux enter the gallery, accompanied by Henrietta and by Ralph.     85   
  Lord Warburton’s sister addressed him with a certain timidity, and reminded him that she ought to return home in time for tea, as she was expecting some company. He made no answer—apparently not having heard her; he was preoccupied—with good reason. Miss Molyneux looked lady-like and patient, and awaited his pleasure.     86   
  “Well, I never, Miss Molyneux!” said Henrietta Stackpole.     87   
  “If I wanted to go, he would have to go. If I wanted my brother to do a thing, he would have to do it.”     88   
  “Oh, Warburton does everything one wants,” Miss Molyneux answered, with a quick, shy laugh. “How very many pictures you have!” she went on, turning to Ralph.     89   
  “They look a good many, because they are all put together,” said Ralph. “But it’s really a bad way.”     90   
  “Oh, I think it’s so nice. I wish we had a gallery at Lockleigh. I am so very fond of pictures,” Miss Molyneux went on, persistently, to Ralph, as if she were afraid that Miss Stackpole would address her again. Henrietta appeared at once to fascinate and to frighten her.     91   
  “Oh yes, pictures are very indispensable,” said Ralph, who appeared to know better what style of reflection was acceptable to her.     92   
  “They are so very pleasant when it rains,” the young lady continued. “It rains so very often.”     93   
  “I am sorry you are going away, Lord Warburton,” said Henrietta. “I wanted to get a great deal more out of you.”     94   
  “I am not going away,” Lord Warburton answered.     95   
  “Your sister says you must. In America the gentlemen obey the ladies.”     96   
  “I am afraid we have got some people to tea,” said Miss Molyneux, looking at her brother.     97   
  “Very good, my dear. We’ll go.”     98   
  “I hoped you would resist!” Henrietta exclaimed. “I wanted to see what Miss Molyneux would do.”     99   
  “I never do anything,” said this young lady.    100   
  “I suppose in your position it’s sufficient for you to exist,” Miss Stackpole rejoined. “I should like very much to see you at home.”    101   
  “You must come to Lockleigh again,” said Miss Molyneux, very sweetly, to Isabel, ignoring this remark of Isabel’s friend.    102   
  Isabel looked into her quiet eyes a moment, and for that moment seemed to see in their grey depths the reflection of everything she had rejected in rejecting Lord Warburton—the peace, the kindness, the honour, the possessions, a deep security and a great exclusion. She kissed Miss Molyneux, and then she said—    103   
  “I am afraid I can never come again.”    104   
  “Never again?”    105   
  “I am afraid I am going away.”    106   
  “Oh, I am so very sorry,” said Miss Molyneux. “I think that’s so very wrong of you.”    107   
  Lord Warburton watched this little passage; then he turned away and stared at a picture. Ralph, leaning against the rail before the picture, with his hands in his pockets, had for the moment been watching him.    108   
  “I should like to see you at home,” said Henrietta, whom Lord Warburton found beside him. “I should like an hour’s talk with you; there are a great many questions I wish to ask you.”    109   
  “I shall be delighted to see you,” the proprietor of Lockleigh answered; “but I am certain not to be able to answer many of your questions. When will you come?”    110   
  “Whenever Miss Archer will take me. We are thinking of going to London, but we will go and see you first. I am determined to get some satisfaction out of you.”    111   
  “If it depends upon Miss Archer, I am afraid you won’t get much. She will not come to Lockleigh; she doesn’t like the place.”    112   
  “She told me it was lovely!” said Henrietta.    113   
  Lord Warburton hesitated a moment. “She won’t come, all the same. You had better come alone,” he added.    114   
  Henrietta straightened herself, and her large eyes expanded.    115   
  “Would you make that remark to an English lady?” she inquired, with soft asperity.    116   
  Lord Warburton stared.    117   
  “Yes, if I liked her enough.”    118   
  “You would be careful not to like her enough. If Miss Archer won’t visit your place again, it’s because she doesn’t want to take me. I know what she thinks of me, and I suppose you think the same—that I oughtn’t to bring in individuals.”    119   
  Lord Warburton was at a loss; he had not been made acquainted with Miss Stackpole’s professional character, and did not catch her allusion.    120   
  “Miss Archer has been warning you!” she went on.    121   
  “Warning me?”    122   
  “Isn’t that why she came off alone with you here—to put you on your guard?”    123   
  “Oh, dear no,” said Lord Warburton, blushing; “our talk had no such solemn character as that.”    124   
  “Well, you have been on your guard—intensely. I suppose it’s natural to you; that’s just what I wanted to observe. And so, too, Miss Molyneux—she wouldn’t commit herself. You have been warned, anyway,” Henrietta continued addressing this young lady, “but for you it wasn’t necessary.”    125   
  “I hope not,” said Miss Molyneux, vaguely.    126   
  “Miss Stackpole takes notes,” Ralph explained, humorously. “She is a great satirist; she goes through us all, and she works us up.”    127   
  “Well, I must say I never have had such a collection of bad material!” Henrietta declared, looking from Isabel to Lord Warburton, and from this nobleman to his sister and to Ralph. “There is something the matter with you all; you are as dismal as if you had got a bad telegram.”    128   
  “You do see through us, Miss Stackpole,” said Ralph in a low tone, giving her a little intelligent nod, as he led the party out of the gallery. “There is something the matter with us all.”    129   
  Isabel came behind these two; Miss Molyneux, who decidedly liked her immensely, had taken her arm, to walk beside her over the polished floor. Lord Warburton strolled on the other side, with his hands behind him, and his eyes lowered. For some moments he said nothing; and then—    130   
  “Is it true that you are going to London?” he asked.    131   
  “I believe it has been arranged.”    132   
  “And when shall you come back?”    133   
  “In a few days; but probably for a very short time. I am going to Paris with my aunt.”    134   
  “When, then, shall I see you again?”    135   
  “Not for a good while,” said Isabel; “but some day or other, I hope.”    136   
  “Do you really hope it?”    137   
  “Very much.”    138   
  He went a few steps in silence; then he stopped, and put out his hand.    139   
  “Good-bye.”    140   
  “Good-bye,” said Isabel.    141   
  Miss Molyneux kissed her again, and she let the two depart; after which, without rejoining Henrietta and Ralph, she retreated to her own room.    142   
  In this apartment, before dinner, she was found by Mrs. Touchett, who had stopped on her way to the drawing-room.    143   
  “I may as well tell you,” said her aunt, “that your uncle has informed me of your relations with Lord Warburton.”    144   
  Isabel hesitated an instant.    145   
  “Relations? They are hardly relations. That is the strange part of it; he has seen me but three or four times.”    146   
  “Why did you tell your uncle rather than me?” Mrs. Touchett inquired, dryly, but dispassionately.    147   
  Again Isabel hesitated.    148   
  “Because he knows Lord Warburton better.”    149   
  “Yes, but I know you better.”    150   
  “I am not sure of that,” said Isabel, smiling.    151   
  “Neither am I, after all; especially when you smile that way. One would think you had carried off a prize! I suppose that when you refuse an offer like Lord Warburton’s it’s because you expect to do something better.”    152   
  “Ah, my uncle didn’t say that!” cried Isabel, smiling still.

Chapter XV   
     
IT had been arranged that the two young ladies should proceed to London under Ralph’s escort, though Mrs. Touchett looked with little favour upon the plan. It was just the sort of plan, she said, that Miss Stackpole would be sure to suggest, and she inquired if the correspondent of the Interviewer was to take the party to stay at a boarding-house.      1   
  “I don’t care where she takes us to stay, so long as there is local colour,” said Isabel. “That is what we are going to London for.”      2   
  “I suppose that after a girl has refused an English lord she may do anything,” her aunt rejoined. “After that one needn’t stand on trifles.”      3   
  “Should you have liked me to marry Lord Warburton?” Isabel inquired.      4   
  “Of course I should.”      5   
  “I thought you disliked the English so much.”      6   
  “So I do; but it’s all the more reason for making use of them.”      7   
  “Is that your idea of marriage?” And Isabel ventured to add that her aunt appeared to her to have made very little use of Mr. Touchett.      8   
  “Your uncle is not an English nobleman,” said Mrs. Touchett, “though even if he had been, I should still probably have taken up my residence in Florence.”      9   
  “Do you think Lord Warburton could make me any better than I am?” the girl asked, with some animation. “I don’t mean that I am too good to improve. I mean—I mean that I don’t love Lord Warburton enough to marry him.”     10   
  “You did right to refuse him, then,” said Mrs. Touchett, in her little spare voice. “Only, the next great offer you get, I hope you will manage to come up to your standard.”     11   
  “We had better wait till the offer comes, before we talk about it. I hope very much that I may have no more offers for the present. They bother me fearfully.”     12   
  “You probably won’t be troubled with them if you adopt permanently the Bohemian manner of life. However, I have promised Ralph not to criticise the affair.”     13   
  “I will do whatever Ralph says is right,” Isabel said. “I have unbounded confidence in Ralph.”     14   
  “His mother is much obliged to you!” cried this lady, with a laugh.     15   
  “It seems to me she ought to be,” Isabel rejoined, smiling.     16   
  Ralph had assured her that there would be no violation of decency in their paying a visit—the little party of three—to the sights of the metropolis; but Mrs. Touchett took a different view. Like many ladies of her country who have lived a long time in Europe, she had completely lost her native tact on such points, and in her reaction, not in itself deplorable, against the liberty allowed to young persons beyond the seas, had fallen into gratuitous and exaggerated scruples. Ralph accompanied the two young ladies to town and established them at a quiet inn in a street that ran at right angles to Piccadilly. His first idea had been to take them to his father’s house in Winchester Square, a large, dull mansion, which at this period of the year was shrouded in silence and brown holland; but he bethought himself that, the cook being at Gardencourt, there was no one in the house to get them their meals; and Pratt’s Hotel accordingly became their resting-place. Ralph, on his side, found quarters in Winchester Square, having a “den” there of which he was very fond, and not being dependent on the local cuisine. He availed himself largely indeed of that at Pratt’s Hotel, beginning his day with an early visit to his fellow-travellers, who had Mr. Pratt in person, in a large bulging white waistcoat, to remove their dish-covers. Ralph turned up, as he said, after breakfast, and the little party made out a scheme of entertainment for the day. As London does not wear in the month of September its most brilliant face, the young man, who occasionally took an apologetic tone, was obliged to remind his companion, to Miss Stackpole’s high irritation, that there was not a creature in town.     17   
  “I suppose you mean that the aristocracy are absent,” Henrietta answered; “but I don’t think you could have a better proof that if they were absent altogether they would not be missed. It seems to me the place is about as full as it can be. There is no one here, of course, except three or four millions of people. What is it you call them—the lower-middle class? They are only the population of London, and that is of no consequence.”     18   
  Ralph declared that for him the aristocracy left no void that Miss Stackpole herself did not fill, and that a more contented man was nowhere at that movement to be found. In this he spoke the truth, for the stale September days, in the huge half-empty town, borrowed a charm from his circumstances. When he went home at night to the empty house in Winchester Square, after a day spent with his inquisitive country-women, he wandered into the big dusky dining-room, where the candle he took from the hall-table, after letting himself in, constituted the only illumination. The square was still, the house was still; when he raised one of the windows of the dining-room to let in the air, he heard the slow creak of the boots of a solitary policeman. His own step, in the empty room, seemed loud and sonorous; some of the carpets had been raised, and whenever he moved he roused a melancholy echo. He sat down in one of the armchairs; the big, dark dining table twinkled here and there in the small candle-light; the pictures on the wall, all of them very brown, looked vague and incoherent. There was a ghostly presence in the room, as of dinners long since digested, of table-talk that had lost its actuality. This hint of the supernatural perhaps had something to do with the fact that Ralph’s imagination took a flight, and that he remained in his chair a long time beyond the hour at which he should have been in bed; doing nothing, not even reading the evening paper. I say he did nothing, and I maintain the phrase in the face of the fact that he thought at these moments of Isabel. To think of Isabel could only be for Ralph an idle pursuit, leading to nothing and profiting little to any one. His cousin had not yet seemed to him so charming as during these days spent in sounding, tourist-fashion, the deeps and shallows of the metropolitan element. Isabel was constantly interested and often excited; if she had come in search of local colour she found it everywhere. She asked more questions than he could answer, and launched little theories that he was equally unable to accept or to refute.     19   
  The party went more than once to the British Museum, and to that brighter palace of art which reclaims for antique variety so large an area of a monotonous suburb; they spent a morning in the Abbey and went on a penny-steamer to the Tower; they looked at pictures both in public and private collections, and sat on various occasions beneath the great trees in Kensington Gardens. Henrietta Stackpole proved to be an indefatigable sight-seer and a more good-natured critic than Ralph had ventured to hope. She had indeed many disappointments, and London at large suffered from her vivid remembrance of many of the cities of her native land; but she made the best of its dingy peculiarities and only heaved an occasional sigh, and uttered a desultory “Well!” which led no further and lost itself in retrospect. The truth was that, as she said herself, she was not in her element. “I have not a sympathy with inanimate objects,” she remarked to Isabel at the National Gallery; and she continued to suffer from the meagreness of the glimpse that had as yet been vouchsafed to her of the inner life. Landscapes by Turner and Assyrian bulls were a poor substitute for the literary dinner-parties at which she had hoped to meet the genius and renown of Great Britain.     20   
  “Where are your public men, where are your men and women of intellect?” she inquired of Ralph, standing in the middle of Trafalgar Square, as if she had supposed this to be a place where she would naturally meet a few. “That’s one of them on the top of the column, you say—Lord Nelson? Was he a lord too? Wasn’t he high enough, that they had to stick him a hundred feet in the air? That’s the past—I don’t care about the past; I want to see some of the leading minds of the present. I won’t say of the future, because I don’t believe much in your future.” Poor Ralph had few leading minds among his acquaintance, and rarely enjoyed the pleasure of button-holding a celebrity; a state of things which appeared to Miss Stackpole to indicate a deplorable want of enterprise. “If I were on the other side I should call,” she said, “and tell the gentleman, whoever he might be, that I had heard a great deal about him and had come to see for myself. But I gather from what you say that this is not the custom here. You seem to have plenty of meaningless customs, and none of those that one really wants. We are in advance, certainly. I suppose I shall have to give up the social side altogether;” and Henrietta, though she went about with her guide-book and pencil, and wrote a letter to the Interviewer about the Tower (in which she described the execution of Lady Jane Grey), had a depressing sense of falling below her own standard.     21   
  The incident which had preceded Isabel’s departure from Gardencourt left a painful trace in the girl’s mind; she took no pleasure in recalling Lord Warburton’s magnanimous disappointment. She could not have done less than what she did; this was certainly true. But her necessity, all the same, had been a distasteful one, and she felt no desire to take credit for her conduct. Nevertheless, mingled with this absence of an intellectual relish of it, was a feeling of freedom which in itself was sweet, and which, as she wandered through the great city with her ill-matched companions, occasionally throbbed into joyous excitement. When she walked in Kensington Gardens, she stopped the children (mainly of the poorer sort) whom she saw playing on the grass; she asked them their names and gave them sixpence, and when they were pretty she kissed them. Ralph noticed such incidents; he noticed everything that Isabel did.     22   
  One afternoon, by way of amusing his companions, he invited them to tea in Winchester Square, and he had the house set in order as much as possible, to do honour to their visit. There was another guest, also, to meet the ladies, an amiable bachelor, an old friend of Ralph’s, who happened to be in town, and who got on uncommonly well with Miss Stackpole. Mr. Bantling, a stout, fair, smiling man of forty, who was extraordinarily well dressed, and whose contributions to the conversation were characterised by vivacity rather than continuity, laughed immoderately at everything Henrietta said, gave her several cups of tea, examined in her society the bric-à-brac, of which Ralph had a considerable collection, and afterwards, when the host proposed they should go out into the square and pretend it was a fête-champêtre, walked round the limited inclosure several times with her and listened with candid interest to her remarks upon the inner life.     23   
  “Oh, I see,” said Mr. Bantling; “I dare say you found it very quiet at Gardencourt. Naturally there’s not much going on there when there’s such a lot of illness about. Touchett’s very bad, you know; the doctors have forbid his being in England at all, and he only come back to take care of his father. The old man, I believe, has half-a-dozen things the matter with him. They call it gout, but to my certain knowledge he is dropsical as well, though he doesn’t look it. You may depend upon it he has got a lot of water somewhere. Of course that sort of thing makes it awfully slow for people in the house; I wonder they have them under such circumstances. Then I believe Mr. Touchett is always squabbling with his wife; she lives away from her husband, you know, in that extraordinary American way of yours. If you want a house where there is always something going on, I recommend you to go down and stay with my sister, Lady Pensil, in Bedfordshire. I’ll write to her to-morrow, and I’m sure she’ll be delighted to ask you. I know just what you want—you want a house where they go in for theatricals and picnics and that sort of thing. My sister is just that sort of woman; she is always getting up something or other, and she is always glad to have the sort of people that help her. I am sure she’ll ask you down by return of post; she is tremendously fond of distinguished people and writers. She writes herself, you know; but I haven’t read everything she has written. It’s usually poetry, and I don’t go in much for poetry—unless it’s Byron. I suppose you think a great deal of Byron in America,” Mr. Bantling continued, expanding in the stimulating air of Miss Stackpole’s attention, bringing up his sequences promptly, and at last changing his topic, with a natural eagerness to provide suitable conversation for so remarkable a woman. He returned, however, ultimately to the idea of Henrietta’s going to stay with Lady Pensil in Bedfordshire. “I understand what you want,” he repeated; “you want to see some genuine English sport. The Touchetts are not English at all, you know; they live on a kind of foreign system; they have got some awfully queer ideas. The old man thinks it’s wicked to hunt, I am told. You must get down to my sister’s in time for the theatricals, and I am sure she will be glad to give you a part. I am sure you act well; I know you are very clever. My sister is forty years old, and she has seven children; but she is going to play the principal part. Of course you needn’t act if you don’t want to.”     24   
  In this manner Mr. Banting delivered himself, while they strolled over the grass in Winchester Square, which, although it had been peppered by the London soot, invited the tread to linger. Henrietta thought her blooming, easy-voiced bachelor, with his impressibility to feminine merit and his suggestiveness of allusion, a very agreeable man, and she valued the opportunity he offered her.     25   
  “I don’t know but I would go, if your sister should ask me,” she said. “I think it would be my duty. What do you call her name?”     26   
  “Pensil. It’s an odd name, but it isn’t a bad one.”     27   
  “I think one name is as good as another. But what is her rank?”     28   
  “Oh, she’s a baron’s wife; a convenient sort of rank. You are fine enough, and you are not too fine.”     29   
  “I don’t know but what she’d be too fine for me. What do you call the place she lives in—Bedfordshire?”     30   
  “She lives away in the northern corner of it. It’s a tire-some country, but I daresay you won’t mind it. I’ll try and run down while you are there.”     31   
  All this was very pleasant to Miss Stackpole, and she was sorry to be obliged to separate from Lady Pensil’s obliging brother. But it happened that she had met the day before, in Piccadilly, some friends whom she had not seen for a year; the Miss Climbers, two ladies from Wilmington, Delaware, who had been travelling on the continent and were now preparing to re-embark. Henrietta had a long interview with them on the Piccadilly pavement, and though the three ladies all talked at once, they had not exhausted their accumulated topics. It had been agreed therefore that Henrietta should come and dine with them in their lodgings in Jermyn Street at six o’clock on the morrow, and she now bethought herself of this engagement. She prepared to start for Jermyn Street, taking leave first of Ralph Touchett and Isabel, who, seated on garden chairs in another part of the inclosure, were occupied—if the term may be used—with an exchange of amenities less pointed than the practical colloquy of Miss Stackpole and Mr. Bantling. When it had been settled between Isabel and her friend that they should be re-united at some reputable hour at Pratt’s Hotel, Ralph remarked that the latter must have a cab. She could not walk all the way to Jermyn Street.     32   
  “I suppose you mean it’s improper for me to walk alone!” Henrietta exclaimed. “Merciful powers, have I come to this?”     33   
  “There is not the slightest need of your walking alone,” said Mr. Bantling, in an off-hand tone expressive of gallantry. “I should be greatly pleased to go with you.”     34   
  “I simply meant that you would be late for dinner,” Ralph answered. “Think of those poor ladies, in their impatience, waiting for you.”     35   
  “You had better have a hansom, Henrietta,” said Isabel.     36   
  “I will get you a hansom, if you will trust to me,” Mr. Bantling went on. “We might walk a little till we met one.”     37   
  “I don’t see why I shouldn’t trust to him, do you?” Henrietta inquired of Isabel.     38   
  “I don’t see what Mr. Bantling could do to you,” Isabel answered, smiling; “but if you like, we will walk with you till you find your cab.”     39   
  “Never mind; we will go alone. Come on, Mr. Bantling, and take care you get me a good one.”     40   
  Mr. Bantling promised to do his best, and the two took their departure, leaving Isabel and her cousin standing in the square, over which a clear September twilight had now begun to gather. It was perfectly still; the wide quadrangle of dusky houses showed lights in none of the windows, where the shutters and blinds were closed; the pavements were a vacant expanse, and putting aside two small children from a neighbouring slum, who, attracted by symptoms of abnormal animation in the interior, were squeezing their necks between the rusty railings of the inclosure, the most vivid object within sight was the big red pillar-post on the south-east corner.     41   
  “Henrietta will ask him to get into the cab and go with her to Jermyn Street,” Ralph observed. He always spoke of Miss Stackpole as Henrietta.     42   
  “Very possibly,” said his companion.     43   
  “Or rather, no, she won’t,” he went on. “But Bantling will ask leave to get in.”     44   
  “Very likely again. I am very glad they are such good friends.”     45   
  “She has made a conquest. He thinks her a brilliant woman. It may go far,” said Ralph.     46   
  Isabel was silent a moment.     47   
  “I call Henrietta a very brilliant woman; but I don’t think it will go far,” she rejoined at last. “They would never really know each other. He has not the least idea what she really is, and she has no just comprehension of Mr. Bantling.”     48   
  “There is no more usual basis of matrimony than a mutual misunderstanding. But it ought not to be so difficult to understand Bob Bantling,” Ralph added. “He is a very simple fellow.”     49   
  “Yes, but Henrietta is simpler still. And pray, what am I to do?” Isabel asked, looking about her through the fading light, in which the limited landscape-gardening of the square took on a large and effective appearance. “I don’t imagine that you will propose that you and I, for our amusement, should drive about London in a hansom.”     50   
  “There is no reason why we should not stay here—if you don’t dislike it. It is very warm; there will be half-an-hour yet before dark; and if you permit it, I will light a cigarette.”     51   
  “You may do what you please,” said Isabel, “if you will amuse me till seven o’clock. I propose at that hour to go back and partake of a simple and solitary repast—two poached eggs and a muffin—at Pratt’s Hotel.     52   
  “May I not dine with you?” Ralph asked.     53   
  “No, you will dine at your club.”     54   
  They had wandered back to their chairs in the centre of the square again, and Ralph had lighted his cigarette. It would have given him extreme pleasure to be present in person at the modest little feast she had sketched; but in default of this he liked even being forbidden. For the moment, however, he liked immensely being alone with her, in the thickening dusk, in the centre of the multitudinous town; it made her seem to depend upon him and to be in his power. This power he could exert but vaguely; the best exercise of it was to accept her decisions submissively. There was almost an emotion in doing so.     55   
  “Why won’t you let me dine with you?” he asked, after a pause.     56   
  “Because I don’t care for it.”     57   
  “I suppose you are tired of me.”     58   
  “I shall be an hour hence. You see I have the gift of fore-knowledge.”     59   
  “Oh, I shall be delightful meanwhile,” said Ralph. But he said nothing more, and as Isabel made no rejoinder, they sat some time in silence which seemed to contradict his promise of entertainment. It seemed to him that she was preoccupied, and he wondered what she was thinking about; there were two or three very possible subjects. At last he spoke again. “Is your objection to my society this evening caused by your expectation of another visitor?”     60   
  She turned her head with a glance of her clear, fair eyes.     61   
  “Another visitor? What visitor should I have?”     62   
  He had none to suggest; which made his question seem to himself silly as well as brutal.     63   
  “You have a great many friends that I don’t know,” he said, laughing a little awkwardly. “You have a whole past from which I was perversely excluded.”     64   
  “You were reserved for my future. You must remember that my past is over there across the water. There is none of it here in London.”     65   
  “Very good, then, since your future is seated beside you. Capital thing to have your future so handy.” And Ralph lighted another cigarette and reflected that Isabel probably meant that she had received news that Mr. Caspar Goodwood had crossed to Paris. After he had lighted his cigarette he puffed it a while, and then he went on. “I promised a while ago to be very amusing; but you see I don’t come up to the mark, and the fact is there is a good deal of temerity in my undertaking to amuse a person like you. What do you care for my feeble attempts? You have grand ideas—you have a high standard in such matters. I ought at least to bring in a band of music or a company of mountebanks.”     66   
  “One mountebank is enough, and you do very well. Pray go on, and in another ten minutes I shall begin to laugh.”     67   
  “I assure you that I am very serious,” said Ralph. “You do really ask a great deal.”     68   
  “I don’t know what you mean. I ask nothing!”     69   
  “You accept nothing,” said Ralph. She coloured, and now suddenly it seemed to her that she guessed his meaning. But why should he speak to her of such things? He hesitated a little, and then he continued. “There is something I should like very much to say to you. It’s a question I wish to ask. It seems to me I have a right to ask it, because I have a kind of interest in the answer.”     70   
  “Ask what you will,” Isabel answered gently, “and I will try and satisfy you.”     71   
  “Well, then, I hope you won’t mind my saying that Lord Warburton has told me of something that has passed between you.”     72   
  Isabel started a little; she sat looking at her open fan. “Very good; I suppose it was natural he should tell you.”     73   
  “I have his leave to let you know he has done so. He has some hope still,” said Ralph.     74   
  “Still?”     75   
  “He had it a few days ago.”     76   
  “I don’t believe he has any now,” said the girl.     77   
  “I am very sorry for him, then; he is such a fine fellow.”     78   
  “Pray, did he ask you to talk to me?”     79   
  “No, not that. But he told me because he couldn’t help it. We are old friends, and he was greatly disappointed. He sent me a line asking me to come and see him, and I rode over to Lockleigh the day before he and his sister lunched with us. He was very heavy-hearted; he had just got a letter from you.”     80   
  “Did he show you the letter?” asked Isabel, with momentary loftiness.     81   
  “By no means. But he told me it was a neat refusal. I was very sorry for him,” Ralph repeated.     82   
  For some moments Isabel said nothing; then at last, “Do you know how often he had seen me? Five or six times.”     83   
  “That’s to your glory.”     84   
  “It’s not for that I say it.”     85   
  “What then do you say it for? Not to prove that poor Warburton’s state of mind is superficial because I am pretty sure you don’t think that.”     86   
  Isabel certainly was unable to say that she thought it; but presently she said something else. “If you have not been requested by Lord Warburton to argue with me, then you are doing it disinterestedly—or for the love of argument.”     87   
  “I have no wish to argue with you at all. I only wish to leave you alone. I am simply greatly interested in your own sentiments.”     88   
  “I am greatly obliged to you!” cried Isabel, with a laugh.     89   
  “Of course you mean that I am meddling in what doesn’t concern me. But why shouldn’t I speak to you of this matter without annoying you or embarrassing myself? What’s the use of being your cousin, if I can’t have a few privileges? What is the use of adoring you without the hope of a reward, if I can’t have a few compensations? What is the use of being ill and disabled, and restricted to mere spectatorship at the game of life, if I really can’t see the show when I have paid so much for my ticket? Tell me this,” Ralph went on, while Isabel listened to him with quickened attention: “What had you in your mind when you refused Lord Warburton?”     90   
  “What had I in my mind?”     91   
  “What was the logic—the view of your situation—that dictated so remarkable an act?”     92   
  “I didn’t wish to marry him—if that is logic.”     93   
  “No, that is not logic—and I knew that before. What was it you said to yourself? You certainly said more than that.”     94   
  Isabel reflected a moment and then she answered this inquiry with a question of her own. “Why do you call it a remarkable act? That is what your mother thinks, too.”     95   
  “Warburton is such a fine fellow; as a man I think he has hardly a fault. And then, he is what they call here a swell. He has immense possessions, and his wife would be thought a superior being. He unites the intrinsic and the extrinsic advantages.”     96   
  Isabel watched her cousin while he spoke, as if to see how far he would go. “I refused him because he was too perfect then. I am not perfect myself, and he is too good for me. Besides, his perfection would irritate me.”     97   
  “That is ingenious rather than candid,” said Ralph. “As a fact, you think nothing in the world too perfect for you.”     98   
  “Do you think I am so good?”     99   
  “No, but you are exacting, all the same, without the excuse of thinking yourself good. Nineteen women out of twenty however, even of the most exacting sort, would have contented themselves with Warburton. Perhaps you don’t know he has been run after.”    100   
  “I don’t wish to know. But it seems to me,” said Isabel, “that you told me of several faults that he has, one day when I spoke of him to you.”    101   
  Ralph looked grave. “I hope that what I said then had no weight with you; for they were not faults, the things I spoke of; they were simply peculiarities of his position. If I had known he wished to marry you, I would never have alluded to them. I think I said that as regards that position he was rather a sceptic. It would have been in your power to make him a believer.”    102   
  “I think not. I don’t understand the matter, and I am not conscious of any mission of that sort.—You are evidently disappointed,” Isabel added, looking gently but earnestly at her cousin. “You would have liked me to marry Lord Warburton.”    103   
  “Not in the least. I am absolutely without a wish on the subject. I don’t pretend to advise you, and I content myself with watching you—with the deepest interest.”    104   
  Isabel gave a rather conscious sigh. “I wish I could be as interesting to myself as I am to you!”    105   
  “There you are not candid again; you are extremely interesting to yourself. Do you know, however,” said Ralph, “that if you have really given Lord Warburton his final answer, I am rather glad it has been what it was. I don’t mean I am glad for you, and still less, of course, for him. I am glad for myself.”    106   
  “Are you thinking of proposing to me?”    107   
  “By no means. From the point of view I speak of that would be fatal; I should kill the goose that supplies me with golden eggs. I use that animal as a symbol of my insane illusions. What I mean is, I shall have the entertainment of seeing what a young lady does who won’t marry Lord Warburton.”    108   
  “That is what your mother counts upon too,” said Isabel.    109   
  “Ah, there will be plenty of spectators! We shall contemplate the rest of your career. I shall not see all of it, but I shall probably see the most interesting years. Of course, if you were to marry our friend, you would still have a career—a very honourable and brilliant one. But relatively speaking, it would be a little prosaic. It would be definitely marked out in advance; it would be wanting in the unexpected. You know I am extremely fond of the unexpected, and now that you have kept the game in your hands I depend on your giving us some magnificent example of it.”    110   
  “I don’t understand you very well,” said Isabel, “but I do so well enough to be able to say that if you look for magnificent examples of anything I shall disappoint you.”    111   
  “You will do so only by disappointing yourself—and that will go hard with you!”    112   
  To this Isabel made no direct reply; there was an amount of truth in it which would bear consideration. At last she said abruptly—    113   
  “I don’t see what harm there is in my wishing not to tie myself. I don’t want to begin life by marrying. There are other things a woman can do.”    114   
  “There is nothing she can do so well. But you are manysided.”    115   
  “If one is two-sided, it is enough,” said Isabel.    116   
  “You are the most charming of polygons!” Ralph broke out, with a laugh. At a glance from his companion, however, he became grave, and to prove it he went on—“You want to see life, as the young men say.”    117   
  “I don’t think I want to see it as the young men want to see it; but I do want to look about me.”    118   
  “You want to drain the cup of experience.”    119   
  “No, I don’t wish to touch the cup of experience. It’s a poisoned drink! I only want to see for myself.”    120   
  “You want to see, but not to feel,” said Ralph.    121   
  “I don’t think that if one is a sentient being, one can make the distinction,” Isabel returned. “I am a good deal like Henrietta. The other day, when I asked her if she wished to marry, she said—‘not till I have seen Europe!’ I too don’t wish to marry until I have seen Europe.”    122   
  “You evidently expect that a crowned head will be struck with you.”    123   
  “No, that would be worse than marrying Lord Warburton. But it is getting very dark,” Isabel continued, “and I must go home.” She rose from her place, but Ralph sat still a moment, looking at her. As he did not follow her, she stopped, and they remained a while exchanging a gaze, full on either side, but especially on Ralph’s, of utterances too vague for words.    124   
  “You have answered my question,” said Ralph at last. “You have told me what I wanted. I am greatly obliged to you.”    125   
  “It seems to me I have told you very little.”    126   
  “You have told me the great thing; that the world interests you and that you want to throw yourself into it.”    127   
  Isabel’s silvery eyes shone for a moment in the darkness. “I never said that.”    128   
  “I think you meant it. Don’t repudiate it; it’s so fine!”    129   
  “I don’t know what you are trying to fasten upon me, for I am not in the least an adventurous spirit. Women are not like men.”    130   
  Ralph slowly rose from his seat, and they walked together to the gate of the square. “No,” he said; “women rarely boast of their courage; men do so with a certain frequency.”    131   
  “Men have it to boast of!”    132   
  “Women have it too; you have a great deal.”    133   
  “Enough to go home in a cab to Pratt’s Hotel; but not more.”    134   
  Ralph unlocked the gate, and after they had passed out he fastened it.    135   
  “We will find your cab,” he said; and as they turned towards a neighbouring street in which it seemed that this quest would be fruitful, he asked her again if he might not see her safely to the inn.    136   
  “By no means,” she answered; “you are very tired; you must go home and go to bed.”    137   
  The cab was found, and he helped her into it, standing a moment at the door.    138   
  “When people forget I am a sick man I am often annoyed” he said. “But it’s worse when they remember it!”

Chapter XVI   
     
ISABEL had had no hidden motive in wishing her cousin not to take her home; it simply seemed to her that for some days past she had consumed an inordinate quantity of his time, and the independent spirit of the American girl who ends by regarding perpetual assistance as a sort of derogation to her sanity, had made her decide that for these few hours she must suffice to herself. She had moreover a great fondness for intervals of solitude, and since her arrival in England it had been but scantily gratified. It was a luxury she could always command at home, and she had missed it. That evening, however, an incident occurred which—had there been a critic to note it—would have taken all colour from the theory that the love of solitude had caused her to dispense with Ralph’s attendance. She was sitting, towards nine o’clock, in the dim illumination of Pratt’s Hotel, trying with the aid of two tall candles to lose herself in a volume she had brought from Gardencourt, but succeeding only to the extent of reading other words on the page than those that were printed there—words that Ralph had spoken to her in the afternoon.      1   
  Suddenly the well-muffled knuckle of the waiter was applied to the door, which presently admitted him, bearing the card of a visitor. This card, duly considered, offered to Isabel’s startled vision the name of Mr. Caspar Goodwood. She let the servant stand before her inquiringly for some instants, without signifying her wishes.      2   
  “Shall I show the gentleman up, ma’am?” he asked at last, with a slightly encouraging inflection.      3   
  Isabel hesitated still, and while she hesitated she glanced at the mirror.      4   
  “He may come in,” she said at last; and waited for him with some emotion.      5   
  Caspar Goodwood came in and shook hands with her. He said nothing till the servant had left the room again, then he said—      6   
  “Why didn’t you answer my letter?”      7   
  He spoke in a quick, full, slightly peremptory tone—the tone of a man whose questions were usually pointed, and who was capable of much insistence.      8   
  Isabel answered him by a question.      9   
  “How did you know I was here?”     10   
  “Miss Stackpole let me know,” said Caspar Goodwood. “She told me that you would probably be at home alone this evening, and would be willing to see me.”     11   
  “Where did she see you—to tell you that?”     12   
  “She didn’t see me; she wrote to me.”     13   
  Isabel was silent; neither of them had seated themselves; they stood there with a certain air of defiance, or at least of contention.     14   
  “Henrietta never told me that she was writing to you,” Isabel said at last. “This is not kind of her.”     15   
  “Is it so disagreeable to you to see me?” asked the young man.     16   
  “I didn’t expect it. I don’t like such surprises.”     17   
  “But you knew I was in town; it was natural we should meet.”     18   
  “Do you call this meeting? I hoped I should not see you. In so large a place as London it seemed to me very possible.”     19   
  “Apparently it was disagreeable to you even to write to me,” said Mr. Goodwood.     20   
  Isabel made no answer to this; the sense of Henrietta Stackpole’s treachery, as she momentarily qualified it, was strong within her.     21   
  “Henrietta is not delicate!” she exclaimed with a certain bitterness. “It was a great liberty to take.”     22   
  “I suppose I am not delicate either. The fault is mine as much as hers.”     23   
  As Isabel looked at him it seemed to her that his jaw had never been more square. This might have displeased her; nevertheless she rejoined inconsequently—     24   
  “No, it is not your fault so much as hers. What you have done is very natural.”     25   
  “It is indeed!” cried Caspar Goodwood, with a voluntary laugh. “And now that I have come, at any rate, may I not stay?”     26   
  “You may sit down, certainly.”     27   
  And Isabel went back to her chair again, while her visitor took the first place that offered, in the manner of a man accustomed to pay little thought to the sort of chair he sat in.     28   
  “I have been hoping every day for an answer to my letter,” he said. “You might have written me a few lines.”     29   
  “It was not the trouble of writing that prevented me; I could as easily have written you four pages as one. But my silence was deliberate; I thought it best.”     30   
  He sat with his eyes fixed on hers while she said this; then he lowered them and attached them to a spot in the carpet, as if he were making a strong effort to say nothing but what he ought to say. He was a strong man in the wrong, and he was acute enough to see that an uncompromising exhibition of his strength would only throw the falsity of his position into relief. Isabel was not incapable of finding it agreeable to have an advantage of position over a person of this quality, and though she was not a girl to flaunt her advantage in his face, she was woman enough to enjoy being able to say “You know you ought not to have written to me yourself!” and to say it with a certain air of triumph.     31   
  Caspar Goodwood raised his eyes to hers again; they wore an expression of ardent remonstrance. He had a strong sense of justice, and he was ready any day in the year—over and above this—to argue the question of his rights.     32   
  “You said you hoped never to hear from me again; I know that. But I never accepted the prohibition. I promised you that you should hear very soon.”     33   
  “I did not say that I hoped never to hear from you,” said Isabel.     34   
  “Not for five years, then; for ten years. It is the same thing.”     35   
  “Do you find it so? It seems to me there is a great difference. I can imagine that at the end of ten years we might have a very pleasant correspondence. I shall have matured my epistolary style.”     36   
  Isabel looked away while she spoke these words, for she knew they were of a much less earnest cast than the countenance of her listener. Her eyes, however, at last came back to him, just as he said, very irrelevantly—     37   
  “Are you enjoying your visit to your uncle?”     38   
  “Very much indeed.” She hesitated, and then she broke out with even greater irrelevance, “What good do you expect to get by insisting?”     39   
  “The good of not losing you.”     40   
  “You have no right to talk about losing what is not yours. And even from your own point of view,” Isabel added, “you ought to know when to let one alone.”     41   
  “I displease you very much,” said Caspar Goodwood gloomily; not as if to provoke her to compassion for a man conscious of this blighting fact, but as if to set it well before himself, so that he might endeavour to act with his eyes upon it.”     42   
  “Yes, you displease me very much, and the worst is that it is needless.”     43   
  Isabel knew that his was not a soft nature, from which pin-pricks would draw blood; and from the first of her acquaintance with him and of her having to defend herself against a certain air that he had of knowing better what was good for her than she knew herself, she had recognised the fact that perfect frankness was her best weapon. To attempt to spare his sensibility or to escape from him edgewise, as one might do from a man who had barred the way less sturdily—this, in dealing with Caspar Goodwood, who would take everything of every sort that one might give him, was wasted agility. It was not that he had not susceptibilities, but his passive surface, as well as his active, was large and firm, and he might always be trusted to dress his wounds himself. In measuring the effect of his suffering, one might always reflect that he had a sound constitution.     44   
  “I can’t reconcile myself to that,” he said.     45   
  There was a dangerous liberality about this; for Isabel felt that it was quite open to him to say that he had not always displeased her.     46   
  “I can’t reconcile myself to it, either, and it is not the state of things that ought to exist between us. If you would only try and banish me from your mind for a few months we should be on good terms again.”     47   
  “I see. If I should cease to think of you for a few months I should find I could keep it up indefinitely.”     48   
  “Indefinitely is more than I ask. It is more even than I should like.”     49   
  “you know that what you ask is impossible,” said the young man, taking his adjective for granted in a manner that Isabel found irritating.     50   
  “Are you not capable of making an effort?” she demanded. “You are strong for everything else; why shouldn’t you be strong for that?”     51   
  “Because I am in love with you,” said Caspar Goodwood simply. “If one is strong, one loves only the more strongly.”     52   
  “There is a good deal in that;” and indeed our young lady felt the force of it. “Think of me or not, as you find most possible; only leave me alone.”     53   
  “Until when?”     54   
  “Well, for a year or two.”     55   
  “Which do you mean? Between one year and two there is a great difference.”     56   
  “Call it two, then,” said Isabel, wondering whether a little cynicism might not be effective.     57   
  “And what shall I gain by that?” Mr. Goodwood asked, giving no sign of wincing.     58   
  “You will have obliged me greatly.”     59   
  “But what will be my reward?”     60   
  “Do you need a reward for an act of generosity?”     61   
  “Yes, when it involves a great sacrifice.”     62   
  “There is no generosity without sacrifice. Men don’t understand such things. If you make this sacrifice I shall admire you greatly.”     63   
  “I don’t care a straw for your admiration. Will you marry me? That is the question.”     64   
  “Assuredly not, if I feel as I feel at present.”     65   
  “Then I ask again, what I shall gain?”     66   
  “You will gain quite as much as by worrying me to death!”     67   
  Caspar Goodwood bent his eyes again and gazed for a while into the crown of his hat. A deep flush overspread his face, and Isabel could perceive that this dart at last had struck home. To see a strong man in pain had something terrible for her, and she immediately felt very sorry for her visitor.     68   
  “Why do you make me say such things to you?” she cried in a trembling voice. “I only want to be gentle—to be kind. It is not delightful to me to feel that people care for me, and yet to have to try and reason them out of it. I think others also ought to be considerate; we have each to judge for ourselves. I know you are considerate, as much as you can be; you have good reasons for what you do. But I don’t want to marry. I shall probably never marry. I have a perfect right to feel that way, and it is no kindness to a woman to urge her—to persuade her against her will. If I give you pain I can only say I am very sorry. It is not my fault; I can’t marry you simply to please you. I won’t say that I shall always remain your friend, because when women say that, in these circumstances, it is supposed, I believe, to be a sort of mockery. But try me some day.”     69   
  Caspar Goodwood, during this speech, had kept his eyes fixed upon the name of his hatter, and it was not until some time after she had ceased speaking that he raised them. When he did so, the sight of a certain rosy, lovely eagerness in Isabel’s face threw some confusion into his attempt to analyse what she had said. “I will go home—I will go to-morrow—I will leave you alone,” he murmured at last. “Only,” he added in a louder tone—“I hate to lose sight of you!”     70   
  “Never fear. I will do no harm.”     71   
  “You will marry some one else,” said Caspar Goodwood.     72   
  “Do you think that is a generous charge?”     73   
  “Why not? Plenty of men will ask you.”     74   
  “I told you just now that I don’t wish to marry, and that I shall probably never do so.”     75   
  “I know you did; but I don’t believe it.”     76   
  “Thank you very much. You appear to think I am attempting to deceive you; you say very delicate things.”     77   
  “Why should I not say that? You have given me no promise that you will not marry.”     78   
  “No, that is all that would be wanting!” cried Isabel, with a bitter laugh.     79   
  “You think you won’t, but you will,” her visitor went on, as if he were preparing himself for the worst.     80   
  “Very well, I will them. Have it as you please.”     81   
  “I don’t know, however,” said Caspar Goodwood, “that my keeping you in sight would prevent it.”     82   
  “Don’t you indeed? I am, after all, very much afraid of you. Do you think I am so very easily pleased?” she asked suddenly, changing her tone.     83   
  “No, I don’t; I shall try and console myself with that. But there are a certain number of very clever men in the world; if there were only one, it would be enough. You will be sure to take no one who is not.”     84   
  “I don’t need the aid of a clever man to teach me how to live,” said Isabel. “I can find it out for myself.”     85   
  “To live alone, do you mean? I wish that when you have found that out, you would teach me.”     86   
  Isabel glanced at him a moment; then, with a quick smile—“Oh, you ought to marry!” she said.     87   
  Poor Caspar may be pardoned if for an instant this exclamation seemed to him to have the infernal note, and I cannot take upon myself to say that Isabel uttered it in obedience to an impulse strictly celestial. It is a fact, however, that it had always seemed to her that Caspar Goodwood, of all men, ought to enjoy the whole devotion of some tender woman. “God forgive you!” he murmured between his teeth, turning away.     88   
  Her exclamation had put her slightly in the wrong, and after a moment she felt the need to right herself. The easiest way to do it was to put her suitor in the wrong. “You do me great injustice—you say what you don’t know!” she broke out. “I should not be an easy victim—I have proved it.”     89   
  “Oh, to me, perfectly.”     90   
  “I have proved it to others as well.” And she paused a moment. “I refused a proposal of marriage last week—what they call a brilliant one.”     91   
  “I am very glad to hear it,” said the young man, gravely.     92   
  “It was a proposal that many girls would have accepted; it had everything to recommend it.” Isabel had hesitated to tell this story, but now she had begun, the satisfaction of speaking it out and doing herself justice took possession of her. “I was offered a great position and a great fortune—by a person whom I like extremely.”     93   
  Caspar gazed at her with great interest. “Is he an Englishman?”     94   
  “He is an English nobleman,” said Isabel.     95   
  Mr. Goodwood received this announcement in silence; then, at last, he said.     96   
  “I am glad he is disappointed.”     97   
  “Well, then, as you have companions in misfortune, make the best of it.”     98   
  “I don’t call him a companion,” said Caspar, grimly.     99   
  “Why not—since I declined his offer absolutely?”    100   
  “That doesn’t make him my companion. Besides, he’s an Englishman.”    101   
  “And pray is not an Englishman a human being?” Isabel inquired.    102   
  “Oh, no; he’s superhuman.”    103   
  “You are angry,” said the girl. “We have discussed this matter quite enough.”    104   
  “Oh, yes, I am angry. I plead guilty to that!”    105   
  Isabel turned away from him, walked to the open window, and stood a moment looking into the dusky vacancy of the street, where a turbid gaslight alone represented social animation. For some time neither of these young persons spoke; Caspar lingered near the chimney-piece, with his eyes gloomily fixed upon our heroine. She had virtually requested him to withdraw—he knew that; but at the risk of making himself odious to her he kept his ground. She was far too dear to him to be easily forfeited, and he had sailed across the Atlantic to extract some pledge from her. Presently she left the window and stood before him again.    106   
  “You do me very little justice,” she said—“after my telling you what I told you just now. I am sorry I told you—since it matters so little to you.”    107   
  “Ah,” cried the young man, “if you were thinking of me when you did it!” And then he paused, with the fear that she might contradict so happy a thought.    108   
  “I was thinking of you a little,” said Isabel.    109   
  “A little? I don’t understand. If the knowledge that I love you had any weight with you at all, it must have had a good deal.”    110   
  Isabel shook her head impatiently, as if to carry off a blush. “I have refused a noble gentleman. Make the most of that.”    111   
  “I thank you, then,” said Caspar Goodwood, gravely. “I thank you immensely.”    112   
  “And now you had better go home.”    113   
  “May I not see you again?” he asked.    114   
  “I think it is better not. You will be sure to talk of this, and you see it leads to nothing.”    115   
  “I promise you not to say a word that will annoy you.”    116   
  Isabel reflected a little, and then she said—“I return in a day or two to my uncle’s, and I can’t propose to you to come there; it would be very inconsistent.”    117   
  Caspar Goodwood, on his side, debated within himself. “You must do me justice too. I received an invitation to your uncle’s more than a week ago, and I declined it.”    118   
  “From whom was your invitation?” Isabel asked, surprised.    119   
  “From Mr. Ralph Touchett, whom I suppose to be your cousin. I declined it because I had not your authorisation to accept it. The suggestion that Mr. Touchett should invite me appeared to have come from Miss Stackpole.”    120   
  “It certainly did not come from me. Henrietta certainly goes very far,” Isabel added.    121   
  “Don’t be too hard on her—that touches me.”    122   
  “No; if you declined, that was very proper of you, and I thank you for it.” And Isabel gave a little shudder of dismay at the thought that Lord Warburton and Mr. Goodwood might have met at Gardencourt: it would have been so awkward for Lord Warburton!    123   
  “When you leave your uncle, where are you going?” Caspar asked.    124   
  “I shall go abroad with my aunt—to Florence and other places.”    125   
  The serenity of this announcement struck a chill to the young man’s heart; he seemed to see her whirled away into circles from which he was inexorably excluded. Nevertheless he went on quickly with his questions. “And when shall you come back to America?”    126   
  “Perhaps not for a long time; I am very happy here.”    127   
  “Do you mean to give up your country?”    128   
  “Don’t be an infant.”    129   
  “Well, you will be out of my sight indeed!” said Caspar Goodwood.    130   
  “I don’t know,” she answered, rather grandly. “The world strikes me as small.”    131   
  “It is too large for me!” Caspar exclaimed, with a simplicity which our young lady might have found touching if her face had not been set against concessions.    132   
  This attitude was part of a system, a theory, that she had lately embraced, and to be thorough she said after a moment—“Don’t think me unkind if I say that it’s just that—being out of your sight—that I like. If you were in the same place as I, I should feel as if you were watching me, and I don’t like that. I like my liberty too much. If there is a thing in the world that I am fond of,” Isabel went on, with a slight recurrence of the grandeur that had shown itself a moment before—“it is my personal independence.”    133   
  But whatever there was of grandeur in this speech moved Caspar Goodwood’s admiration; there was nothing that displeased him in the sort of feeling it expressed. This feeling not only did no violence to his way of looking at the girl he wished to make his wife, but seemed a grace the more in so ardent a spirit. To his mind she had always had wings, and this was but the flutter of those stainless pinions. He was not afraid of having a wife with a certain largeness of movement; he was a man of long steps himself. Isabel’s words, if they had been meant to shock him, failed of the mark, and only made him smile with the sense that here was common ground. “Who would wish less to curtail your liberty than I?” he asked. “What can give me greater pleasure than to see you perfectly independent—doing whatever you like? It is to make you independent that I want to marry you.”    134   
  “That’s a beautiful sophism,” said the girl, with a smile more beautiful still.    135   
  “An unmarried woman—a girl of your age—is not independent. There are all sorts of things she can’t do. She is hampered at every step.”    136   
  “That’s as she looks at the question,” Isabel answered, with much spirit. “I am not in my first youth—I can do what I choose—I belong quite to the independent class. I have neither father nor mother; I am poor; I am of a serious disposition, and not pretty. I therefore am not bound to be timid and conventional; indeed I can’t afford such luxuries. Besides, I try to judge things for myself; to judge wrong, I think, is more honourable than not to judge at all. I don’t wish to be a mere sheep in the flock; I wish to choose my fate and know something of human affairs beyond what other people think it compatible with propriety to tell me.” She paused a moment, but not long enough for her companion to reply. He was apparently on the point of doing so, when she went on—“Let me say this to you, Mr. Goodwood. You are so kind as to speak of being afraid of my marrying. If you should hear a rumour that I am on the point of doing so—girls are liable to have such things said about them—remember what I have told you about my love of liberty, and venture to doubt it.”    137   
  There was something almost passionately positive in the tone in which Isabel gave him this advice, and he saw a shining candour in her eyes which helped him to believe her. On the whole he felt reassured, and you might have perceived it by the manner in which he said, quite eagerly—“ You want simply to travel for two years? I am quite willing to wait two years, and you may do what you like in the interval. If that is all you want, pray say so. I don’t want you to be conventional; do I strike you as conventional myself? Do you want to improve your mind? Your mind is quite good enough for me; but if it interests you to wander about a while and see different countries, I shall be delighted to help you, in any way in my power.”    138   
  “You are very generous; that is nothing new to me. The best way to help me will be to put as many hundred miles of sea between us as possible.”    139   
  “One would think you were going to commit a crime!” said Caspar Goodwood.    140   
  “Perhaps I am. I wish to be free even to do that, if the fancy takes me.”    141   
  “Well then,” he said, slowly, “I will go home.” And he put out his hand, trying to look contented and confident.    142   
  Isabel’s confidence in him, however, was greater than any he could feel in her. Not that he thought her capable of committing a crime; but, turn it over as he would, there was something ominous in the way she reserved her option. As Isabel took his hand, she felt a great respect for him; she knew how much he cared for her, and she thought him magnanimous. They stood so for a moment, looking at each other, united by a handclasp which was not merely passive on her side. “That’s right,” she said, very kindly, almost tenderly. “You will lose nothing by being a reasonable man.”    143   
  “But I will come back, wherever you are, two years hence,” he returned, with characteristic grimness.    144   
  We have seen that our young lady was inconsequent, and at this she suddenly changed her note. “Ah, remember, I promise nothing—absolutely nothing!” Then more softly, as if to help him to leave her, she added—“And remember, too, that I shall not be an easy victim!”    145   
  “You will get very sick of your independence.”    146   
  “Perhaps I shall; it is even very probable. When that day comes I shall be very glad to see you.”    147   
  She had laid her hand on the knob of the door that led into her room, and she waited a moment to see whether her visitor would not take his departure. But he appeared unable to move; there was still an immense unwillingness in his attitude—a deep remonstrance in his eyes.    148   
  “I must leave you now,” said Isabel; and she opened the door, and passed into the other room.    149   
  This apartment was dark, but the darkness was tempered by a vague radiance sent up through the window from the court of the hotel, and Isabel could make out the masses of the furniture, the dim shining of the mirror, and the looming of the big four-posted bed. She stood still a moment, listening, and at last she heard Caspar Goodwood walk out of the sitting-room and close the door behind him. She stood still a moment longer, and then, by an irresistible impulse, she dropped on her knees before her bed, and hid her face in her arms.

Chapter XVII   
     
SHE was not praying; she was trembling—trembling all over. She was an excitable creature, and now she was much excited; but she wished to resist her excitement, and the attitude of prayer, which she kept for some time, seemed to help her to be still. She was extremely glad Caspar Goodwood was gone; there was something exhilarating in having got rid of him. As Isabel became conscious of this feeling she bowed her head a little lower; the feeling was there, throbbing in her heart; it was a part of her emotion; but it was a thing to be ashamed of—it was profane and out of place. It was not for some ten minutes that she rose from her knees, and when she came back to the sitting-room she was still trembling a little. Her agitation had two causes; part of it was to be accounted for by her long discussion with Mr. Goodwood, but it might be feared that the rest was simply the enjoyment she found in the exercise of her power. She sat down in the same chair again, and took up her book, but without going through the form of opening the volume. She leaned back, with that low, soft, aspiring murmur with which she often expressed her gladness in accidents of which the brighter side was not superficially obvious, and gave herself up to the satisfaction of having refused two ardent suitors within a fortnight.      1   
  That love of liberty of which she had given Caspar Goodwood so bold a sketch was as yet almost exclusively theoretic; she had not been able to indulge it on a large scale. But it seemed to her that she had done something; she had tasted of the delight, if not of battle, at least of victory; she had done what she preferred. In the midst of this agreeable sensation the image of Mr. Goodwood taking his sad walk homeward through the dingy town presented itself with a certain reproachful force; so that, as at the same moment the door of the room was opened, she rose quickly with an apprehension that he had come back. But it was only Henrietta Stackpole returning from her dinner.      2   
  Miss Stackpole immediately saw that something had happened to Isabel, and indeed the discovery demanded no great penetration. Henrietta went straight up to her friend, who received her without a greeting. Isabel’s elation in having sent Caspar Goodwood back to America pre-supposed her being glad that he had come to see her; but at the same time she perfectly remembered that Henrietta had had no right to set a trap for her.      3   
  “Has he been here, dear?” Miss Stackpole inquired, softly.      4   
  Isabel turned away, and for some moments answered nothing.      5   
  “You acted very wrongly,” she said at last.      6   
  “I acted for the best, dear. I only hope you acted as well.”      7   
  “You are not the judge. I can’t trust you,” said Isabel.      8   
  This declaration was unflattering, but Henrietta was much too unselfish to heed the charge it conveyed; she cared only for what it intimated with regard to her friend.      9   
  “Isabel Archer,” she declared, with equal abruptness and solemnity, “if you marry one of these people, I will never speak to you again!”     10   
  “Before making so terrible a threat, you had better wait till I am asked,” Isabel replied. Never having said a word to Miss Stackpole about Lord Warburton’s overtures, she had now no impulse whatever to justify herself to Henrietta by telling her that she had refused that nobleman.     11   
  “Oh, you’ll be asked quick enough, once you get off on the continent. Annie Climber was asked three times in Italy—poor plain little Annie.”     12   
  “Well, if Annie Climber was not captured, why should I be?”     13   
  “I don’t believe Annie was pressed; but you’ll be.”     14   
  “That’s a flattering conviction,” said Isabel, with a laugh.     15   
  “I don’t flatter you, Isabel, I tell you the truth!” cried her friend. “I hope you don’t mean to tell me that you didn’t give Mr. Goodwood some hope.”     16   
  “I don’t see why I should tell you anything; as I said to you just now, I can’t trust you. But since you are so much interested in Mr. Goodwood, I won’t conceal from you that he returns immediately to America.”     17   
  “You don’t mean to say you have sent him off?” Henrietta broke out in dismay.     18   
  “I asked him to leave me alone; and I ask you the same, Henrietta.”     19   
  Miss Stackpole stood there with expanded eyes, and then she went to the mirror over the chimney-piece and took off her bonnet.     20   
  “I hope you have enjoyed your dinner,” Isabel remarked lightly, as she did so.     21   
  But Miss Stackpole was not to be diverted by frivolous propositions, nor bribed by the offer of autobiographic opportunities.     22   
  “Do you know where you are going, Isabel Archer?”     23   
  “Just now I am going to bed,” said Isabel, with persistent frivolity.     24   
  “Do you know where you are drifting?” Henrietta went on holding out her bonnet delicately.     25   
  “No, I haven’t the least idea, and I find it very pleasant not to know. A swift carriage, of a dark night, rattling with four horses over roads that one can’t see—that’s my idea of happiness.”     26   
  “Mr. Goodwood certainly didn’t teach you to say such things as that—like the heroine of an immoral novel,” said Miss Stackpole. “You are drifting to some great mistake.”     27   
  Isabel was irritated by her friend’s interference, but even in the midst of her irritation she tried to think what truth this declaration could represent. She could think of nothing that diverted her from saying—“You must be very fond of me, Henrietta, to be willing to be so disagreeable to me.”     28   
  “I love you, Isabel,” said Miss Stackpole, with feeling.     29   
  “Well, if you love me, let me alone. I asked that of Mr. Goodwood, and I must also ask it of you.”     30   
  “Take care you are not let alone too much.”     31   
  “That is what Mr. Goodwood said to me. I told him I must take the risks.”     32   
  “You are a creature of risks—you make me shudder!” cried Henrietta. “When does Mr. Goodwood return to America?”     33   
  “I don’t know—he didn’t tell me.”     34   
  “Perhaps you didn’t inquire,” said Henrietta, with the note of righteous irony.     35   
  “I gave him too little satisfaction to have the right to ask questions of him.”     36   
  This assertion seemed to Miss Stackpole for a moment to bid defiance to comment; but at last she exclaimed—“Well, Isabel, if I didn’t know you, I might think you were heartless!”     37   
  “Take care,” said Isabel; “you are spoiling me.”     38   
  “I am afraid I have done that already. I hope, at least,” Miss Stackpole added, “that he may cross with Annie Climber!”     39   
  Isabel learned from her the next morning that she had determined not to return to Gardencourt (where old Mr. Touchett had promised her a renewed welcome), but to await in London the arrival of the invitation that Mr. Bantling had promised her from his sister, Lady Pensil. Miss Stackpole related very freely her conversation with Ralph Touchett’s sociable friend, and declared to Isabel that she really believed she had now got hold of something that would lead to something. On the receipt of Lady Pensil’s letter—Mr. Bantling had virtually guaranteed the arrival of this document—she would immediately depart for Bedfordshire, and if Isabel cared to look out for her impressions in the Interviewer, she would certainly find them. Henrietta was evidently going to see something of the inner life this time.     40   
  “Do you know where you are drifting, Henrietta Stackpole?” Isabel asked, imitating the tone in which her friend had spoken the night before.     41   
  “I am drifting to a big position—that of queen of American journalism. If my next letter isn’t copied all over the West, I’ll swallow my pen-wiper!”     42   
  She had arranged with her friend Miss Annie Climber, the young lady of the continental offers, that they should go together to make those purchases which were to constitute Miss Climber’s farewell to a hemisphere in which she at least had been appreciated; and she presently repaired to Jermyn Street to pick up her companion. Shortly after her departure Ralph Touchett was announced, and as soon as he came in Isabel saw that he had something on his mind. He very soon took his cousin into his confidence. He had received a telegram from his mother, telling him that his father had had a sharp attack of his old malady, that she was much alarmed, and that she begged Ralph would instantly return to Gardencourt. On this occasion, at least, Mrs. Touchett’s devotion to the electric wire had nothing incongruous.     43   
  “I have judged it best to see the great doctor, Sir Matthew Hope, first,” Ralph said; “by great good luck he’s in town. He is to see me at half-past twelve, and I shall make sure of his coming down to Gardencourt—which he will do the more readily as he has already seen my father several times, both there and in London. There is an express at two-forty-five, which I shall take, and you will come back with me, or remain here a few days longer, exactly as you prefer.”     44   
  “I will go with you!” Isabel exclaimed. “I don’t suppose I can be of any use to my uncle, but if he is ill I should like to be near him.”     45   
  “I think you like him,” said Ralph, with a certain shy pleasure in his eye. “You appreciate him, which all the world hasn’t done. The quality is too fine.”     46   
  “I think I love him,” said Isabel, simply.     47   
  “That’s very well. After his son, he is your greatest admirer.”     48   
  Isabel welcomed this assurance, but she gave secretly a little sigh of relief at the thought that Mr. Touchett was one of those admirers who could not propose to marry her. This, however, was not what she said; she went on to inform Ralph that there were other reasons why she should not remain in London. She was tired of it and wished to leave it; and then Henrietta was going away—going to stay in Bedfordshire.”     49   
  “In Bedfordshire?” Ralph exclaimed, with surprise.     50   
  “With Lady Pensil, the sister of Mr. Bantling, who has answered for an invitation.”     51   
  Ralph was feeling anxious, but at this he broke into a laugh. Suddenly, however, he looked grave again. “Bantling is a man of courage. But if the invitation should get lost on the way?”     52   
  “I thought the British post-office was impeccable.”     53   
  “The good Homer sometimes nods,” said Ralph. “However,” he went on, more brightly, “the good Bantling never does, and, whatever happens, he will take care of Henrietta.”     54   
  Ralph went to keep his appointment with Sir Matthew Hope, and Isabel made her arrangements for quitting Pratt’s Hotel. Her uncle’s danger touched her nearly, and while she stood before her open trunk, looking about her vaguely for what she should put into it, the tears suddenly rushed into her eyes. It was perhaps for this reason that when Ralph came back at two o’clock to take her to the station she was not yet ready.     55   
  He found Miss Stackpole, however, in the sitting-room, where she had just risen from the lunch-table, and this lady immediately expressed her regret at his father’s illness.     56   
  “He is a grand old man,” she said; “he is faithful to the last. If it is really to be the last—excuse my alluding to it, but you must often have thought of the possibility—I am sorry that I shall not be at Gardencourt.”     57   
  “You will amuse yourself much more in Bedfordshire.”     58   
  “I shall be sorry to amuse myself at such a time,” said Henrietta, with much propriety. But she immediately added—“I should like so to commemorate the closing scene.”     59   
  “My father may live a long time,” said Ralph, simply. Then, adverting to topics more cheerful, he interrogated Miss Stackpole as to her own future.     60   
  Now that Ralph was in trouble, she addressed him in a tone of larger allowance, and told him that she was much indebted to him for having made her acquainted with Mr. Bantling. “He has told me just the things I want to know,” she said; “all the society-items and all about the royal family. I can’t make out that what he tells me about the royal family is much to their credit; but he says that’s only my peculiar way of looking at it. Well, all I want is that he should give me the facts; I can put them together quick enough, once I’ve got them.” And she added that Mr. Bantling had been so good as to promise to come and take her out in the afternoon.     61   
  “To take you where?” Ralph ventured to inquire.     62   
  “To Buckingham Palace. He is going to show me over it, so that I may get some idea how they live.”     63   
  “Ah,” said Ralph, “we leave you in good hands. The first thing we shall hear is that you are invited to Windsor Castle.”     64   
  “If they ask me, I shall certainly go. Once I get started I am not afraid. But for all that,” Henrietta added in a moment, “I am not satisfied; I am not satisfied about Isabel.”     65   
  “What is her last misdemeanour?”     66   
  “Well, I have told you before, and I suppose there is no harm in my going on, I always finish a subject that I take up. Mr. Goodwood was here last night.”     67   
  Ralph opened his eyes; he even blushed a little—his blush being the sign of an emotion somewhat acute. He remembered that Isabel, in separating from him in Winchester Square, had repudiated his suggestion that her motive in doing so was the expectation of a visitor at Pratt’s Hotel, and it was a novel sensation to him to have to suspect her of duplicity. On the other hand, he quickly said to himself, what concern was it of his that she should have made an appointment with a lover? Had it not been thought graceful in every age that young ladies should make a mystery of such appointments? Ralph made Miss Stackpole a diplomatic answer. “I should have thought that, with the views you expressed to me the other day, that would satisfy you perfectly.”     68   
  “That he should come to see her? That was very well, as far as it went. It was a little plot of mine; I let him know that we were in London, and when it had been arranged that I should spend the evening out, I just sent him a word—a word to the wise. I hoped he would find her alone; I won’t pretend I didn’t hope that you would be out of the way. He came to see her; but he might as well have stayed away.”     69   
  “Isabel was cruel?” Ralph inquired, smiling, and relieved at learning that his cousin had not deceived him.     70   
  “I don’t exactly know what passed between them. But she gave him no satisfaction—she sent him back to America.”     71   
  “Poor Mr. Goodwood!” Ralph exclaimed.     72   
  “Her only idea seems to be to get rid of him,” Henrietta went on.     73   
  “Poor Mr. Goodwood!” repeated Ralph. The exclamation, it must be confessed, was somewhat mechanical. It failed exactly to express his thoughts, which were taking another line.     74   
  “You don’t say that as if you felt it; I don’t believe you care.”     75   
  “Ah,” said Ralph, “you must remember that I don’t know this interesting young man—that I have never seen him.”     76   
  “Well, I shall see him, and I shall tell him not to give up. If I didn’t believe Isabel would come round,” said Miss Stackpole—“well, I’d give her up myself!”

Chapter XVIII   
     
IT had occurred to Ralph that under the circumstances Isabel’s parting with Miss Stackpole might be of a slightly embarrassed nature, and he went down to the door of the hotel in advance of his cousin, who after a slight delay followed, with the traces of an unaccepted remonstrance, as he thought, in her eye. The two made the journey to Gardencourt in almost unbroken silence, and the servant who met them at the station had no better news to give them of Mr. Touchett—a fact which caused Ralph to congratulate himself afresh on Sir Matthew Hope’s having promised to come down in the five o’clock train and spend the night. Mrs. Touchett, he learned, on reaching home, had been constantly with the old man, and was with him at that moment; and this fact made Ralph say to himself that, after all, what his mother wanted was simply opportunity. The finest natures were those that shone on large occasions. Isabel went to her own room, noting, throughout the house, that perceptible hush which precedes a crisis. At the end of an hour, however, she came down-stairs in search of her aunt, whom she wished to ask about Mr. Touchett. She went into the library, but Mrs. Touchett was not there, and as the weather, which had been damp and chill, was now altogether spoiled, it was not probable that she had gone for her usual walk in the grounds. Isabel was on the point of ringing to send an inquiry to her room, when her attention was taken by an unexpected sound—the sound of low music proceeding apparently from the drawing-room. She knew that her aunt never touched the piano, and the musician was therefore probably Ralph, who played for his own amusement. That he should have resorted to this recreation at the present time, indicated apparently that his anxiety about his father had been relieved; so that Isabel took her way to the drawing-room with much alertness. The drawing-room at Gardencourt was an apartment of great distances, and as the piano was placed at the end of it furthest removed from the door at which Isabel entered her arrival was not noticed by the person seated before the instrument. This person was neither Ralph nor his mother; it was a lady whom Isabel immediately saw to be a stranger to herself, although her back was presented to the door. This back—an ample and well-dressed one—Isabel contemplated for some moments in surprise. The lady was of course a visitor who had arrived during her absence, and who had not been mentioned by either of the servants—one of them her aunt’s maid—of whom she had had speech since her return. Isabel had already learned, however, that the British domestic is not effusive, and she was particularly conscious of having been treated with dryness by her aunt’s maid, whose offered assistance the young lady from Albany—versed, as young ladies are in Albany, in the very metaphysics of the toilet—had perhaps made too light of. The arrival of a visitor was far from disagreeable to Isabel; she had not yet diverted herself of a youthful impression that each new acquaintance would exert some momentous influence upon her life. By the time she had made these reflections she became aware that the lady at the piano played remarkably well. She was playing something of Beethoven’s—Isabel knew not what, but she recognised Beethoven—and she touched the piano softly and discreetly, but with evident skill. Her touch was that of an artist; Isabel sat down noiselessly on the nearest chair and waited till the end of the piece. When it was finished she felt a strong desire to thank the player, and rose from her seat to do so, while at the same time the lady at the piano turned quickly round, as if she had become aware of her presence.      1   
  “That is very beautiful, and your playing makes it more beautiful still,” said Isabel, with all the young radiance with which she usually uttered a truthful rapture.      2   
  “You don’t think I disturbed Mr. Touchett, then?” the musician answered, as sweetly as this compliment deserved. “The house is so large, and his room so far away, that I thought I might venture—especially as I played just—just du bout des doigts.”      3   
  “She is a Frenchwoman,” Isabel said to herself; “she says that as if she were French.” And this supposition made the stranger more interesting to our speculative heroine. “I hope my uncle is doing well,” Isabel added. “I should think that to hear such lovely music as that would really make him feel better.”      4   
  The lady gave a discriminating smile.      5   
  “I am afraid there are moments in life when even Beethoven has nothing to say to us. We must admit, however, that they are our worst moments.”      6   
  “I am not in that state now,” said Isabel. “On the contrary, I should be so glad if you would play something more.”      7   
  “If it will give you pleasure—most willingly.” And this obliging person took her place again, and struck a few chords, while Isabel sat down nearer the instrument. Suddenly the stranger stopped, with her hands on the keys, half-turning and looking over her shoulder at the girl. She was forty years old, and she was not pretty; but she had a delightful expression. “Excuse me,” she said; “but are you the niece—the young American?”      8   
  “I am my aunt’s niece,” said Isabel, with naïveté.      9   
  The lady at the piano sat still a moment longer, looking over her shoulder with her charming smile.     10   
  “That’s very well,” she said, “we are compatriots.”     11   
  And then she began to play.     12   
  “Ah, then she is not French,” Isabel murmured; and as the opposite supposition had made her interesting, it might have seemed that this revelation would have diminished her effectiveness. But such was not the fact; for Isabel, as she listened to the music, found much stimulus to conjecture in the fact that an American should so strongly resemble a foreign woman.     13   
  Her companion played in the same manner as before, softly and solemnly, and while she played the shadows deepened in the room. The autumn twilight gathered in, and from her place Isabel could see the rain, which had now begun in earnest, washing the cold-looking lawn, and the wind shaking the great trees. At last, when the music had ceased, the lady got up, and, coming to her auditor, smiling, before Isabel had time to thank her again, said—     14   
  “I am very glad you have come back; I have heard a great deal about you.”     15   
  Isabel thought her a very attractive person; but she nevertheless said, with a certain abruptness, in answer to this speech—     16   
  “From whom have you heard about me?”     17   
  The stranger hesitated a single moment, and then—     18   
  “From your uncle,” she answered. “I have been here three days, and the first day he let me come and pay him a visit in his room. Then he talked constantly of you.”     19   
  “As you didn’t know me, that must have bored you.”     20   
  “It made me want to know you. All the more that since then—your aunt being so much with Mr. Touchett—I have been quite alone, and have got rather tired of my own society. I have not chosen a good moment for my visit.”     21   
  A servant had come in with lamps, and was presently followed by another, bearing the tea-tray. On the appearance of this repast Mrs. Touchett had apparently been notified, for she now arrived and addressed herself to the tea-pot. Her greeting to her niece did not differ materially from her manner of raising the lid of this receptacle in order to glance at the contents: in neither act was it becoming to make a show of avidity. Questioned about her husband, she was unable to say that he was better; but the local doctor was with him, and much light was expected from this gentleman’s consultation with Sir Matthew Hope.     22   
  “I suppose you two ladies have made acquaintance?” she said. “If you have not, I recommend you to do so; for so long as we continue—Ralph and I—to cluster about Mr. Touchett’s bed, you are not likely to have much society but each other.”     23   
  “I know nothing about you but that you are a great musician,” Isabel said to the visitor.     24   
  “There is a good deal more than that to know,” Mrs. Touchett affirmed, in her little dry tone.     25   
  “A very little of it, I am sure, will content Miss Archer!” the lady exclaimed, with a light laugh. “I am an old friend of your aunt’s—I have lived much in Florence—I am Madame Merle.”     26   
  She made this last announcement as if she were referring to a person of tolerably distinct identity.     27   
  For Isabel, however, it represented but little; she could only continue to feel that Madame Merle had a charming manner.     28   
  “She is not a foreigner, in spite of her name,” said Mrs. Touchett. “She was born—I always forget where you were born.”     29   
  “It is hardly worth while I should tell you, then.”     30   
  “On the contrary,” said Mrs. Touchett who rarely missed a logical point; “if I remembered, your telling me would be quite superfluous.”     31   
  Madame Merle glanced at Isabel with a fine, frank smile.     32   
  “I was born under the shadow of the national banner.”     33   
  “She is too fond of mystery,” said Mrs. Touchett; “that is her great fault.”     34   
  “Ah,” exclaimed Madame Merle, “I have great faults, but I don’t think that is one of them; it certainly is not the greatest. I came into the world in the Brooklyn navy-yard. My father was a high officer in the United States navy, and had a post—a post of responsibility—in that establishment at the time. I suppose I ought to love the sea, but I hate it. That’s why I don’t return to America. I love the land; the great thing is to love something.”     35   
  Isabel, as a dispassionate witness, had not been struck with the force of Mrs. Touchett’s characterisation of her visitor, who had an expressive, communicative, responsive face, by no means of the sort which, to Isabel’s mind, suggested a secretive disposition. It was a face that told of a rich nature and of quick and liberal impulses, and though it had no regular beauty was in the highest degree agreeable to contemplate.     36   
  Madame Merle was a tall, fair, plump woman; everything in her person was round and replete, though without those accumulations which minister to indolence. Her features were thick, but there was a graceful harmony among them, and her complexion had a healthy clearness. She had a small grey eye, with a great deal of light in it—an eye incapable of dulness, and, according to some people, incapable of tears; and a wide, firm mouth, which, when she smiled, drew itself upward to the left side, in a manner that most people thought very odd, some very affected, and a few very graceful. Isabel inclined to range herself in the last category. Madame Merle had thick, fair hair, which was arranged with picturesque simplicity, and a large white hand, of a perfect shape—a shape so perfect that its owner, preferring to leave it unadorned, wore no rings. Isabel had taken her at first, as we have seen, for a Frenchwoman; but extended observation led her to say to herself that Madame Merle might be a German—a German of rank, a countess, a princess. Isabel would never have supposed that she had been born in Brooklyn—though she could doubtless not have justified her assumption that the air of distinction, possessed by Madame Merle in so eminent a degree, was inconsistent with such a birth. It was true that the national banner had floated immediately over the spot of the lady’s nativity, and the breezy freedom of the stars and stripes might have shed an influence upon the attitude which she then and there took towards life. And yet Madame Merle had evidently nothing of the fluttered, flapping quality of a morsel of bunting in the wind; her deportment expressed the repose and confidence which come from a large experience. Experience, however, had not quenched her youth; it had simply made her sympathetic and supple. She was in a word a woman of ardent impulses, kept in admirable order. What an ideal combination! thought Isabel.     37   
  She made these reflections while the three ladies sat at their tea, but this ceremony was interrupted before long by the arrival of the great doctor from London, who had been immediately ushered into the drawing-room. Mrs. Touchett took him off to the library, to confer with him in private; and then Madame Merle and Isabel parted, to meet again at dinner. The idea of seeing more of this interesting woman did much to mitigate Isabel’s perception of the melancholy that now hung over Gardencourt.     38   
  When she came into the drawing-room before dinner she found the place empty; but in the course of a moment Ralph arrived. His anxiety about his father had been lightened; Sir Matthew Hope’s view of his condition was less sombre than Ralph’s had been. The doctor recommended that the nurse alone should remain with the old man for the next three or four hours; so that Ralph, his mother, and the great physician himself, were free to dine at table. Mrs. Touchett and Sir Matthew came in; Madame Merle was the last to appear.     39   
  Before she came, Isabel spoke of her to Ralph, who was standing before the fireplace.     40   
  “Pray who is Madame Merle?”     41   
  “The cleverest woman I know, not excepting yourself,” said Ralph.     42   
  “I thought she seemed very pleasant.”     43   
  “I was sure you would think her pleasant,” said Ralph.     44   
  “Is that why you invited her?”     45   
  “I didn’t invite her, and when we came back from London I didn’t know she was here. No one invited her. She is a friend of my mother’s, and just after you and I went to town, my mother got a note from her. She had arrived in England (she usually lives abroad, though she has first and last spent a good deal of time here), and she asked leave to come down for a few days. Madame Merle is a woman who can make such proposals with perfect confidence; she is so welcome wherever she goes. And with my mother there could be no question of hesitating; she is the one person in the world whom my mother very much admires. If she were not herself (which she after all much prefers), she would like to be Madame Merle. It would, indeed, be a great change.”     46   
  “Well, she is very charming,” said Isabel. “And she plays beautifully.”     47   
  “She does everything beautifully. She is complete.”     48   
  Isabel looked at her cousin a moment. “You don’t like her.”     49   
  “On the contrary, I was once in love with her.”     50   
  “And she didn’t care for you, and that’s why you don’t like her.”     51   
  “How can we have discussed such things? M. Merle was then living.”     52   
  “Is he dead now?”     53   
  “So she says.”     54   
  “Don’t you believe her?”     55   
  “Yes, because the statement agrees with the probabilities. The husband of Madame Merle would be likely to pass away.”     56   
  Isabel gazed at her cousin again. “I don’t know what you mean. You mean something—that you don’t mean. What was M. Merle?”     57   
  “The husband of Madame.”     58   
  “You are very odious. Has she any children?”     59   
  “Not the least little child—fortunately.”     60   
  “Fortunately?”     61   
  “I mean fortunately for the child; she would be sure to spoil it.”     62   
  Isabel was apparently on the point of assuring her cousin for the third time that he was odious; but the discussion was interrupted by the arrival of the lady who was the topic of it. She came rustling in quickly, apologising for being late, fastening a bracelet, dressed in dark blue satin, which exposed a white bosom that was ineffectually covered by a curious silver necklace. Ralph offered her his arm with the exaggerated alertness of a man who was no longer a lover.     63   
  Even if this had still been his condition, however, Ralph had other things to think about. The great doctor spent the night at Gardencourt, and returning to London on the morrow, after another consultation with Mr. Touchett’s own medical adviser, concurred in Ralph’s desire that he should see the patient again on the day following. On the day following Sir Matthew Hope reappeared at Gardencourt, and on this occasion took a less encouraging view of the old man, who had grown worse in the twenty-four hours. His feebleness was extreme, and to his son, who constantly sat by his bedside, it often seemed that his end was a hand. The local doctor, who was a very sagacious man, and in whom Ralph had secretly more confidence than in his distinguished colleague, was constantly in attendance, and Sir Matthew Hope returned several times to Gardencourt. Mr. Touchett was much of the time unconscious; he slept a great deal; he rarely spoke. Isabel had a great desire to be useful to him, and was allowed to watch with him several times when his other attendants (of whom Mrs. Touchett was not the least regular) went to take rest. He never seemed to know her, and she always said to herself—“Suppose he should die while I am sitting here;” an idea which excited her and kept her awake. Once he opened his eyes for a while and fixed them upon her intelligently, but when she went to him, hoping he would recognise her, he closed them and relapsed into unconsciousness. The day after this, however, he revived for a longer time; but on this occasion Ralph was with him alone. The old man began to talk, much to his son’s satisfaction, who assured him that they should presently have him sitting up.     64   
  “No, my boy,” said Mr. Touchett, “not unless you bury me in a sitting posture, as some of the ancients—was it the ancients?—used to do.     65   
  “Ah, daddy, don’t talk about that,” Ralph murmured. “You must not deny that you are getting better.”     66   
  “There will be no need of my denying it if you don’t say so,” the old man answered. “Why should we prevaricate, just at the last? We never prevaricated before. I have got to die some time, and it’s better to die when one is sick than when one is well. I am very sick—as sick as I shall ever be. I hope you don’t want to prove that I shall ever be worse than this? That would be too bad. You don’t? Well then.”     67   
  Having made this excellent point he became quiet, but the next time that Ralph was with him he again addressed himself to conversation. The nurse had gone to her supper and Ralph was alone with him, having just relieved Mrs. Touchett, who had been on guard since dinner. The room was lighted only by the flickering fire, which of late had become necessary, and Ralph’s tall shadow was projected upon the wall and ceiling, with an outline constantly varying but always grotesque.     68   
  “Who is that with me—is it my son?” the old man asked.     69   
  “Yes, it’s your son, daddy.”     70   
  “And is there no one else?”     71   
  “No one else.”     72   
  Mr. Touchett said nothing for a while; and then, “I want to talk a little,” he went on.     73   
  “Won’t it tire you?” Ralph inquired.     74   
  “It won’t matter if it does. I shall have a long rest. I want to talk about you.”     75   
  Ralph had drawn nearer to the bed; he sat leaning forward, with his hand on his father’s. “You had better select a brighter topic,” he said.     76   
  “You were always bright; I used to be proud of your brightness. I should like so much to think that you would do something.”     77   
  “If you leave us,” said Ralph, “I shall do nothing but miss you.”     78   
  “That is just what I don’t want; it’s what I want to talk about. You must get a new interest.”     79   
  “I don’t want a new interest, daddy. I have more old ones than I know what to do with.”     80   
  The old man lay there looking at his son; his face was the face of the dying, but his eyes were the eyes of Daniel Touchett. He seemed to be reckoning over Ralph’s interests.     81   
  “Of course you have got your mother,” he said at last. “You will take care of her.”     82   
  “My mother will always take care of herself,” Ralph answered.     83   
  “Well,” said his father, “perhaps as she grows older she will need a little help.”     84   
  “I shall not see that. She will outlive me.”     85   
  “Very likely she will; but that’s no reason—” Mr. Touchett let his phrase die away in a helpless but not exactly querulous sigh, and remained silent again.     86   
  “Don’t trouble yourself about us,” said his son. “My mother and I get on very well together, you know.”     87   
  “You get on by always being apart; that’s not natural.”     88   
  “If you leave us, we shall probably see more of each other.”     89   
  “Well,” the old man observed, with wandering irrelevance, “it cannot be said that my death will make much difference in your mother’s life.”     90   
  “It will probably make more than you think.”     91   
  “Well, she’ll have more money,” said Mr. Touchett. “I have left her a good wife’s portion, just as if she had been a good wife.”     92   
  “She has been one, daddy, according to her own theory. She has never troubled you.”     93   
  “Ah, some troubles are pleasant,” Mr. Touchett murmured. “Those you have given me, for instance. But your mother has been less—less—what shall I call it? less out of the way since I have been ill. I presume she knows I have noticed it.”     94   
  “I shall certainly tell her so; I am so glad you mention it.”     95   
  “It won’t make any difference to her; she doesn’t do it to please me. She does it to please—to please—” And he lay a while, trying to think why she did it. “She does it to please herself. But that is not what I want to talk about,” he added. “It’s about you. You will be very well off.”     96   
  “Yes,” said Ralph, “I know that. But I hope you have not forgotten the talk we had a year ago—when I told you exactly what money I should need and begged you to make some good use of the rest.”     97   
  “Yes, yes, I remember. I made a new will—in a few days. I suppose it was the first time such a thing had happened—a young man trying to get a will made against him.”     98   
  “It is not against me,” said Ralph. “It would be against me to have a large property to take care of. It is impossible for a man in my state of health to spend much money, and enough is as good as a feast.”     99   
  “Well, you will have enough—and something over. There will be more than enough for one—there will be enough for two.”    100   
  “That’s too much,” said Ralph.    101   
  “Ah, don’t say that. The best thing you can do, when I am gone, will be to marry.”    102   
  Ralph had foreseen what his father was coming to, and this suggestion was by no means novel. It had long been Mr. Touchett’s most ingenious way of expressing the optimistic view of his son’s health. Ralph had usually treated it humorously; but present circumstances made the humorous tone impossible. He simply fell back in his chair and returned his father’s appealing gaze in silence.    103   
  “If I, with a wife who hasn’t been very fond of me, have had a very happy life,” said the old man, carrying his ingenuity further still, “what a life might you not have, if you should marry a person different from Mrs. Touchett. There are more different from her than there are like her.”    104   
  Ralph still said nothing; and after a pause his father asked softly—“What do you think of your cousin?”    105   
  At this Ralph started, meeting the question with a rather fixed smile. “Do I understand you to propose that I should marry Isabel?”    106   
  “Well, that’s what it comes to in the end. Don’t you like her?”    107   
  “Yes, very much.” And Ralph got up from his chair and wandered over to the fire. He stood before it an instant and then he stooped and stirred it, mechanically. “I like Isabel very much,” he repeated.    108   
  “Well,” said his father, “I know she likes you. She told me so.”    109   
  “Did she remark that she would like to marry me?”    110   
  “No, but she can’t have anything against you. And she is the most charming young lady I have ever seen. And she would be good to you. I have thought a great deal about it.”    111   
  “So have I,” said Ralph, coming back to the bedside again. “I don’t mind telling you that.”    112   
  “You are in love with her, then? I should think you would be. It’s as if she came over on purpose.”    113   
  “No, I am not in love with her; but I should be if—if certain things were different.”    114   
  “Ah, things are always different from what they might be,” said the old man. “If you wait for them to change, you will never do anything. I don’t know whether you know,” he went on; “but I suppose there is no harm in my alluding to it in such an hour as this: there was some one wanted to marry Isabel the other day, and she wouldn’t have him.”    115   
  “I know she refused Lord Warburton; he told me himself.”    116   
  “Well, that proves that there is a chance for somebody else.”    117   
  “Somebody else took his chance the other day in London—and got nothing by it.”    118   
  “Was it you?” Mr. Touchett asked, eagerly.    119   
  “No, it was an older friend; a poor gentleman who came over from America to see about it.”    120   
  “Well, I am sorry for him. But it only proves what I say—that the way is open to you.”    121   
  “If it is, dear father, it is all the greater pity that I am unable to tread it. I haven’t many convictions; but I have three or four that I hold strongly. One is that people, on the whole, had better not marry their cousins. Another is, that people in an advanced stage of pulmonary weakness had better not marry at all.”    122   
  The old man raised his feeble hand and moved it to and fro a little before his face.    123   
  “What do you mean by that? You look at things in a way that would make everything wrong. What sort of a cousin is a cousin that you have never seen for more than twenty years of her life? We are all each other’s cousins, and if we stopped at that the human race would die out. It is just the same with your weak lungs. You are a great deal better than you used to be. All you want is to lead a natural life. It’s a great deal more natural to marry a pretty young lady that you are in love with than it is to remain single on false principles.”    124   
  “I am not in love with Isabel,” said Ralph.    125   
  “You said just now that you would be if you didn’t think it was wrong. I want to prove to you that it isn’t wrong.”    126   
  “It will only tire you, dear daddy,” said Ralph, who marvelled at his father’s tenacity and at his finding strength to insist. “Then where shall we all be?”    127   
  “Where shall you be if I don’t provide for you? You won’t have anything to do with the bank, and you won’t have me to take care of. You say you have got so many interests; but I can’t make them out.”    128   
  Ralph leaned back in his chair, with folded arms; his eyes were fixed for some time in meditation. At last, with the air of a man fairly mustering courage—“I take a great interest in my cousin,” he said, “but not the sort of interest you desire. I shall not live many years; but I hope I shall live long enough to see what she does with herself. She is entirely independent of me; I can exercise very little influence upon her life. But I should like to do something for her.”    129   
  “What should you like to do?”    130   
  “I should like to put a little wind in her sails.”    131   
  “What do you mean by that?”    132   
  “I should like to put it into her power to do some of the things she wants. She wants to see the world, for instance. I should like to put money in her purse.”    133   
  “Ah, I am glad you have thought of that,” said the old man. “But I have thought of it too. I have left her a legacy—five thousand pounds.”    134   
  “That is capital; it is very kind of you. But I should like to do a little more.”    135   
  Something of that veiled acuteness with which it had been on Daniel Touchett’s part, the habit of a lifetime to listen to a financial proposition, still lingered in the face in which the invalid had not obliterated the man of business. “I shall be happy to consider it,” he said, softly.”    136   
  “Isabel is poor, then. My mother tells me that she has but a few hundred dollars a year. I should like to make her rich.”    137   
  “What do you mean by rich?”    138   
  “I call people rich when they are able to gratify their imagination. Isabel has a great deal of imagination.”    139   
  “So have you, my son,” said Mr. Touchett, listening very attentively, but a little confusedly.    140   
  “You tell me I shall have money enough for two. What I want is that you should kindly relieve me of my superfluity and give it to Isabel. Divide my inheritance into two equal halves, and give the second half to her.”    141   
  “To do what she likes with?”    142   
  “Absolutely what she likes”    143   
  “And without an equivalent?”    144   
  “What equivalent could there be?”    145   
  “The one I have already mentioned.”    146   
  “Her marrying—some one or other? It’s just to do away with anything of that sort that I make my suggestion. If she has an easy income she will never have to marry for a support. She wishes to be free, and your bequest will make her free.”    147   
  “Well, you seem to have thought it out,” said Mr. Touchett. “But I don’t see why you appeal to me. The money will be yours, and you can easily give it to her yourself.”    148   
  Ralph started a little. “Ah, dear father, I can’t offer Isabel money!”    149   
  The old man gave a groan. “Don’t tell me you are not in love with her! Do you want me to have the credit of it?”    150   
  “Entirely. I should like it simply to be a clause in your will, without the slightest reference to me.”    151   
  “Do you want me to make a new will, then?”    152   
  “A few words will do it; you can attend to it the next time you feel a little lively.”    153   
  “You must telegraph to Mr. Hilary then. I will do nothing without my solicitor.”    154   
  “You shall see Mr. Hilary to-morrow.”    155   
  “He will think we have quarrelled, you and I,” said the old man.    156   
  “Very probably; I shall like him to think it,” said Ralph, smiling; “and to carry out the idea, I give you notice that I shall be very sharp with you.”    157   
  The humour of this appeared to touch his father; he lay a little while taking it in.    158   
  “I will do anything you like,” he said at last; “but I’m not sure it’s right. You say you want to put wind in her sails; but aren’t you afraid of putting too much?”    159   
  “I should like to see her going before the breeze!” Ralph answered.    160   
  “You speak as if it were for your entertainment.”    161   
  “So it is, a good deal.”    162   
  “Well, I don’t think I understand,” said Mr. Touchett, with a sigh. “Young men are very different from what I was. When I cared for a girl—when I was young—I wanted to do more than look at her. You have scruples that I shouldn’t have had, and you have ideas that I shouldn’t have had either. You say that Isabel wants to be free, and that her being rich will keep her from marrying for money. Do you think that she is a girl to do that?”    163   
  “By no means. But she has less money than she has ever had before; but her father gave her everything, because he used to spend his capital. She has nothing but the crumbs of that feast to live on, and she doesn’t really know how meagre they are—she has yet to learn it. My mother has told me all about it. Isabel will learn it when she is really thrown upon the world, and it would be very painful to me to think of her coming to the consciousness of a lot of wants that she should be unable to satisfy.”    164   
  “I have left her five thousand pounds. She can satisfy a good many wants with that.”    165   
  “She can indeed. But she would probably spend it in two or three years.”    166   
  “You think she would be extravagant then?”    167   
  “Most certainly,” said Ralph, smiling serenely.    168   
  Poor Mr. Touchett’s acuteness was rapidly giving place to pure confusion. “It would merely be a question of time, then, her spending the larger sum!”    169   
  “No, at first I think she would plunge into that pretty freely; she would probably make over part of it to each of her sisters. But after that she would come to her senses, remember that she had still a lifetime before her, and live within her means.”    170   
  “Well, you have worked it out,” said the old man, with a sigh. “You do take an interest in her, certainly.”    171   
  “You can’t consistently say I go too far. You wished me to go further.”    172   
  “Well, I don’t know,” the old man answered. “I don’t think I enter into your spirit. It seems to me immoral.”    173   
  “Immoral, dear daddy?”    174   
  “Well, I don’t know that it’s right to make everything so easy for a person.”    175   
  “It surely depends upon the person. When the person is good, your making things easy is all to the credit of virtue. To facilitate the execution of good impulses, what can be a nobler act?”    176   
  This was a little difficult to follow, and Mr. Touchett considered it for a while. At last he said—    177   
  “Isabel is a sweet young girl; but do you think she is as good as that?”    178   
  “She is as good as her best opportunities,” said Ralph.    179   
  “Well,” Mr. Touchett declared, “she ought to get a great many opportunities for sixty thousand pounds.”    180   
  “I have no doubt she will.”    181   
  “Of course I will do what you want,” said the old man “I only want to understand it a little.”    182   
  “Well, dear daddy, don’t you understand it now?” his son asked, caressingly. “If you don’t, we won’t take any more trouble about it; we will leave it alone.”    183   
  Mr. Touchett lay silent a long time. Ralph supposed that he had given up the attempt to understand it. But at last he began again—    184   
  “Tell me this first. Doesn’t it occur to you that a young lady with sixty thousand pounds may fall a victim to the fortune-hunters?”    185   
  “She will hardly fall a victim to more than one.”    186   
  “Well, one is too many.”    187   
  “Decidedly. That’s a risk, and it has entered into my calculation. I think it’s appreciable, but I think it’s small, and I am prepared to take it.”    188   
  Poor Mr. Touchett’s acuteness had passed into perplexity, and his perplexity now passed into admiration.    189   
  “Well, you have gone into it!” he exclaimed. “But I don’t see what good you are to get of it.”    190   
  Ralph leaned over his father’s pillows and gently smoothed them; he was aware that their conversation had been prolonged to a dangerous point. “I shall get just the good that I said just now I wished to put into Isabel’s reach—that of having gratified my imagination. But it’s scandalous, the way I have taken advantage of you!”