The Portrait of a Lady — Volume 1

CHAPTER VI

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER VII

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“A specimen of what?” asked the girl.

“A specimen of an English gentleman.”

“Do you mean they’re all like him?”

“Oh no; they’re not all like him.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Oh, I say, mother!” Ralph broke out.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“So as to do them?” asked her aunt.

“So as to choose,” said Isabel.

CHAPTER VIII

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

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

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

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

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

“I suppose you don’t mean in health?”

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

“Does he regard himself as a joke?”

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

“Well, perhaps he is,” said Isabel.

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

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

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

“I don’t,” said Isabel.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Of whom are you speaking?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You’ll never be one, I hope.”

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

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

CHAPTER IX

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Heaven forbid!” cried Ralph with ardour.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Do you think he would stand the test?”

“The test?”

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

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

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

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

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

“Let them for nothing?” Isabel demanded.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“To hope what?”

“That in future I may see you often.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Never?” said Lord Warburton.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I hope so.”

“Is England not good enough for you?”

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

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

“Enjoying, I hope, too.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lord Warburton was briefly silent. “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 are a highly eccentric people, and she had even read in some ingenious author that they are at bottom the most romantic of races. Was Lord Warburton suddenly turning romantic—was he going to make her 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!”

“As regards that,” said Isabel, “I should find in my own nation entertainment for a lifetime. But we’ve 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.

She had received an appreciable shock, but as it died away she felt that she couldn’t pretend to herself that it was altogether a painful one. Nevertheless she made answer to his declaration, coldly enough, “Just as you please.” And her coldness was not the calculation of her effect—a game she played 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’re 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’m not superficial. I’ve 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.”

Isabel judged best not to 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’s a literary lady,” he said, “I suppose that, being an American, she won’t show me up, as that other one did. She has seen others like me.”

“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 alert young woman lost no time in announcing her prompt approach. She had gone up to London, and it was from that centre that she took the train for the station nearest to Gardencourt, where Isabel and Ralph were in waiting to receive her.

“Shall I love her or shall I hate her?” Ralph asked while they moved along the platform.

“Whichever you do will matter very little to her,” said Isabel. “She doesn’t care a straw what men think of her.”

“As a man I’m bound to dislike her then. She must be a kind of monster. Is she very ugly?”

“No, she’s decidedly pretty.”

“A female interviewer—a reporter in petticoats? I’m very curious to see her,” Ralph conceded.

“It’s very easy to laugh at her but it is not easy to be as brave as she.”

“I should think not; crimes of violence and attacks on the person require more or less pluck. Do you suppose she’ll interview me?”

“Never in the world. She’ll not think you of enough importance.”

“You’ll see,” said Ralph. “She’ll send a description of us all, including Bunchie, to her newspaper.”

“I shall ask her not to,” Isabel answered.

“You think she’s capable of it then?”

“Perfectly.”

“And yet you’ve made her your bosom-friend?”

“I’ve not made her my bosom-friend; but I like her in spite of her faults.”

“Ah well,” said Ralph, “I’m afraid I shall dislike her in spite of her merits.”

“You’ll probably fall in love with her at the end of three days.”

“And have my love-letters published in the Interviewer? Never!” cried the young man.

The train presently arrived, and Miss Stackpole, promptly descending, proved, as Isabel had promised, quite delicately, even though rather provincially, fair. She was a neat, 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, a little arrested by Miss Stackpole’s gracious and comfortable aspect, which hinted that it wouldn’t be so easy as he had assumed to disapprove of her. She rustled, she shimmered, in fresh, dove-coloured draperies, and Ralph saw at a glance that she was as crisp and new and comprehensive as a first issue before the folding. From top to toe she had probably no misprint. She spoke in a clear, high voice—a voice not rich but loud; yet after she had taken her place with her companions in Mr. Touchett’s carriage she struck him as not all in the large type, the type of horrid “headings,” that he had expected. She answered the enquiries made of her by Isabel, however, and in which the young man ventured to join, with copious lucidity; 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 confidence in her powers.

“Well, I should like to know whether you consider yourselves American or English,” she broke out. “If once I knew I could talk to you accordingly.”

“Talk to us anyhow and we shall be thankful,” Ralph liberally answered.

She fixed her eyes on him, and there was something in their character that reminded him of large polished buttons—buttons that might have fixed the elastic loops of some tense receptacle: he seemed to see the reflection of surrounding objects on 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 a very modest man, feel vaguely embarrassed—less inviolate, more dishonoured, than he liked. This sensation, it must be added, after he had spent a day or two in her company, sensibly diminished, though it never wholly lapsed. “I don’t suppose that you’re going to undertake to persuade me that you’re an American,” she said.

“To please you I’ll be an Englishman, I’ll be a Turk!”

“Well, if you can change about that way you’re very welcome,” Miss Stackpole returned.

“I’m sure you understand everything and that differences of nationality are no barrier to you,” Ralph went on.

Miss Stackpole gazed at him still. “Do you mean the foreign languages?”

“The languages are nothing. I mean the spirit—the genius.”

“I’m not sure that I understand you,” said the correspondent of the Interviewer; “but I expect I shall before I leave.”

“He’s what’s called a cosmopolite,” Isabel suggested.

“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.”

“Ah, but where does home begin, Miss Stackpole?” Ralph enquired.

“I don’t know where it begins, but I know where it ends. It ended a long time before I got here.”

“Don’t you like it over here?” asked Mr. Touchett with his aged, innocent voice.

“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.”

“Perhaps you were in a crowded carriage,” Ralph suggested.

“Yes, but it was crowded with friends—party of Americans whose acquaintance I had made upon the steamer; a 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 accord with the atmosphere. But I suppose I shall make my own atmosphere. That’s the true way—then you can breathe. Your surroundings seem very attractive.”

“Ah, we too are a lovely group!” said Ralph. “Wait a little and you’ll see.”

Miss Stackpole showed every disposition to wait and evidently was prepared to make a considerable stay at Gardencourt. 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, deprecated, in fact defied, isolation. Isabel speedily found occasion to desire 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 on a letter to the Interviewer, of which the title, in her exquisitely neat and legible hand (exactly that of the copybooks 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.

“I don’t think you ought to do that. I don’t think you ought to describe the place.”

Henrietta gazed at her as usual. “Why, it’s just what the people want, and it’s a lovely place.”

“It’s too lovely to be put in the newspapers, and it’s not what my uncle wants.”

“Don’t you believe that!” cried Henrietta. “They’re always delighted afterwards.”

“My uncle won’t be delighted—nor my cousin either. They’ll consider it a breach of hospitality.”

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.”

“There are plenty of other subjects, there are subjects all round you. We’ll take some drives; I’ll show you some charming scenery.”

“Scenery’s not my department; I always need a human interest. You know I’m deeply human, Isabel; I always was,” Miss Stackpole rejoined. “I was going to bring in your cousin—the alienated American. There’s a great demand just now for the alienated American, and your cousin’s a beautiful specimen. I should have handled him severely.”

“He would have died of it!” Isabel exclaimed. “Not of the severity, but of the publicity.”

“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’s a grand old man; I don’t see how he can object to my paying him honour.”

Isabel looked at her companion in much wonderment; it struck her as strange that a nature in which she found so much to esteem should break down so in spots. “My poor Henrietta,” she said, “you’ve no sense of privacy.”

Henrietta coloured deeply, and for a moment her brilliant eyes were suffused, while Isabel found her more than ever inconsequent. “You do me great injustice,” said Miss Stackpole with dignity. “I’ve never written a word about myself!”

“I’m very sure of that; but it seems to me one should be modest for others also!”

“Ah, that’s very good!” cried Henrietta, seizing her pen again. “Just let me make a note of it and I’ll put it in somewhere.” 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-lady in want of matter. “I’ve 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’s just the place for me!” Miss Stackpole cried. “I must get a glimpse of the nobility.”

“I can’t take you,” said Isabel; “but Lord Warburton’s coming here, and you’ll have a chance to see him and observe him. Only if you intend to repeat his conversation I shall certainly give him warning.”

“Don’t do that,” her companion pleaded; “I want him to be natural.”

“An Englishman’s never so natural as when he’s holding his tongue,” Isabel declared.

It was not apparent, at the end of three days, that her cousin had, according to her prophecy, lost his heart to 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 presence proved somehow less irreducible to soft particles than Ralph had expected in the natural perturbation of his sense of the perfect solubility of that of his cousin; for the correspondent of the Interviewer prompted mirth in him, and he had long since decided that the crescendo of mirth should be the flower of his declining days. Henrietta, on her side, failed a little to 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 almost immoral not to work out.

“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?”

“He does nothing,” smiled Isabel; “he’s a gentleman of large leisure.”

“Well, I call that a shame—when I have to work like a car-conductor,” Miss Stackpole replied. “I should like to show him up.”

“He’s in wretched health; he’s quite unfit for work,” Isabel urged.

“Pshaw! don’t you believe it. I work when I’m 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 and would like to drown her.

“Ah no,” said Ralph, “I keep my victims for a slower torture. And you’d be such an interesting one!”

“Well, you do torture me; I may say that. But I shock all your prejudices; that’s one comfort.”

“My prejudices? I haven’t a prejudice to bless myself with. There’s intellectual poverty for you.”

“The more shame to you; I’ve some delicious ones. Of course I spoil your flirtation, or whatever it is you call it, with your cousin; but I don’t care for that, as I render her the service of drawing you out. She’ll see how thin you are.”

“Ah, do draw me out!” Ralph exclaimed. “So few people will take the trouble.”

Miss Stackpole, in this undertaking, appeared to shrink from no effort; 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 indoor 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 terms; there was something earnest and inventive in her tone, which at times, in its strained 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 journal of the other world; 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.

“Do you always spend your time like this?” she demanded.

“I seldom spend it so agreeably.”

“Well, you know what I mean—without any regular occupation.”

“Ah,” said Ralph, “I’m the idlest man living.”

Miss Stackpole directed her gaze to the Constable again, and Ralph bespoke her attention for a small Lancret 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. “That’s my ideal of a regular occupation,” he said.

Miss Stackpole turned to him again, and, though her eyes had rested upon the picture, he saw she had missed the subject. She was thinking of something much more serious. “I don’t see how you can reconcile it to your conscience.”

“My dear lady, I have no conscience!”

“Well, I advise you to cultivate one. You’ll need it the next time you go to America.”

“I shall probably never go again.”

“Are you ashamed to show yourself?”

Ralph meditated with a mild smile. “I suppose that if one has no conscience one has no shame.”

“Well, you’ve got plenty of assurance,” Henrietta declared. “Do you consider it right to give up your country?”

“Ah, one doesn’t give up one’s country any more than one gives up one’s grandmother. They’re both antecedent to choice—elements of one’s composition that are not to be eliminated.”

“I suppose that means that you’ve tried and been worsted. What do they think of you over here?”

“They delight in me.”

“That’s because you truckle to them.”

“Ah, set it down a little to my natural charm!” Ralph sighed.

“I don’t know anything about your natural charm. If you’ve got any charm it’s quite unnatural. It’s wholly acquired—or at least you’ve tried hard to acquire it, living over here. I don’t say you’ve succeeded. It’s a charm that I don’t appreciate, anyway. Make yourself useful in some way, and then we’ll talk about it.” “Well, now, tell me what I shall do,” said Ralph.

“Go right home, to begin with.”

“Yes, I see. And then?”

“Take right hold of something.”

“Well, now, what sort of thing?”

“Anything you please, so long as you take hold. Some new idea, some big work.”

“Is it very difficult to take hold?” Ralph enquired.

“Not if you put your heart into it.”

“Ah, my heart,” said Ralph. “If it depends upon my heart—!”

“Haven’t you got a heart?”

“I had one a few days ago, but I’ve lost it since.”

“You’re 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 the later occasion assigned a different cause to her mysterious perversity. “I know what’s the matter with you, Mr. Touchett,” she said. “You think you’re too good to get married.”

“I thought so till I knew you, Miss Stackpole,” Ralph answered; “and then I suddenly changed my mind.”

“Oh pshaw!” Henrietta groaned.

“Then it seemed to me,” said Ralph, “that I was not good enough.”

“It would improve you. Besides, it’s your duty.”

“Ah,” cried the young man, “one has so many duties! Is that a duty too?”

“Of course it is—did you never know that before? It’s every one’s duty to get married.”

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 “sort.” She was wanting in distinction, but, as Isabel had said, she was brave: she went into cages, she flourished lashes, like a spangled lion-tamer. 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 on an unencumbered young man the most obvious explanation of her conduct is not the altruistic impulse.

“Ah, well now, there’s a good deal to be said about that,” Ralph rejoined.

“There may be, but that’s 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’re better than any one else in the world? In America it’s usual for people to marry.”

“If it’s my duty,” Ralph asked, “is it not, by analogy, yours as well?”

Miss Stackpole’s ocular surfaces unwinkingly caught the sun. “Have you the fond hope of finding a flaw in my reasoning? Of course I’ve as good a right to marry as any one else.”

“Well then,” said Ralph, “I won’t say it vexes me to see you single. It delights me rather.”

“You’re not serious yet. You never will be.”

“Shall you not believe me to be so on the day I tell you I desire to give up the practice of going round alone?”

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. “No, not even then,” she answered dryly. After which she walked away.

“I’ve not conceived a passion for your friend,” Ralph said that evening to Isabel, “though we talked some time this morning about it.”

“And you said something she didn’t like,” the girl replied.

Ralph stared. “Has she complained of me?”

“She told me she thinks there’s something very low in the tone of Europeans towards women.”

“Does she call me a European?”

“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.”

Ralph treated himself to a luxury of laughter. “She’s an extraordinary combination. Did she think I was making love to her?”

“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.”

“I thought she was proposing marriage to me and I accepted her. Was that unkind?”

Isabel smiled. “It was unkind to me. I don’t want you to marry.”

“My dear cousin, what’s one to do among you all?” Ralph demanded. “Miss Stackpole tells me it’s my bounden duty, and that it’s hers, in general, to see I do mine!”

“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 unworthy of you to keep so many things to yourself. That’s what she wanted to express. If you thought she was trying to—to attract you, you were very wrong.”

“It’s true it was an odd way, but I did think she was trying to attract me. Forgive my depravity.”

“You’re very conceited. She had no interested views, and never supposed you would think she had.”

“One must be very modest then to talk with such women,” Ralph said humbly. “But it’s a very strange type. She’s too personal—considering that she expects other people not to be. She walks in without knocking at the door.”

“Yes,” Isabel admitted, “she doesn’t sufficiently recognise the existence of knockers; and indeed I’m not sure that she doesn’t think them rather a pretentious ornament. She thinks one’s door should stand ajar. But I persist in liking her.”

“I persist in thinking her too familiar,” Ralph rejoined, naturally somewhat uncomfortable under the sense of having been doubly deceived in Miss Stackpole.

“Well,” said Isabel, smiling, “I’m afraid it’s because she’s rather vulgar that I like her.”

“She would be flattered by your reason!”

“If I should tell her I wouldn’t express it in that way. I should say it’s because there’s something of the ‘people’ in her.”

“What do you know about the people? and what does she, for that matter?”

“She knows a great deal, and I know enough to feel that she’s 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 vividly figures it.”

“You like her then for patriotic reasons. I’m afraid it is on those very grounds I object to her.”

“Ah,” said Isabel with a kind of joyous sigh, “I like so many things! If a thing strikes me with a certain intensity I accept it. I don’t want to swagger, but I suppose I’m 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’m straightway convinced by her; not so much in respect to herself as in respect to what masses behind her.”

“Ah, you mean the back view of her,” Ralph suggested.

“What she says is true,” his cousin answered; “you’ll 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 green Pacific! A strong, sweet, fresh odour seems to rise from it, and Henrietta—pardon my simile—has something of that odour in her garments.”

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. “I’m not sure the Pacific’s so green as that,” he said; “but you’re a young woman of imagination. Henrietta, however, does smell of the Future—it almost knocks one down!”

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 the nature of man 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 renewed contact with him no obstacle to the exercise of her genius for unshrinking enquiry, the general application of her confidence. Her situation at Gardencourt therefore, appreciated as we have seen her to be by Isabel and full of appreciation herself of that free play of intelligence which, to her sense, rendered Isabel’s character a sister-spirit, and of the easy venerableness of Mr. Touchett, whose noble 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 for whom she had at first supposed herself obliged to “allow” as mistress of the house. She presently discovered, in truth, that this obligation was of the lightest and that Mrs. Touchett cared very little how Miss Stackpole behaved. Mrs. Touchett had defined her to Isabel as both an adventuress and a bore—adventuresses usually giving one more of a thrill; she had expressed some surprise at her niece’s having selected such a friend, yet had immediately added that she knew Isabel’s friends were her own affair and that she had never undertaken to like them all or to restrict the girl to those she liked.

“If you could see none but the people I like, my dear, you’d 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’s a serious affair. I don’t like Miss Stackpole—everything about her displeases me; she talks so much too loud and looks at one as if one wanted to look at her—which one doesn’t. I’m sure she has lived all her life in a boarding-house, and I detest the manners and the liberties of such places. If you ask me if I prefer my own manners, which you doubtless think very bad, I’ll tell you that I prefer them immensely. Miss Stackpole knows I detest boarding-house civilisation, and she detests me for detesting it, because she thinks it the highest in the world. She’d 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’s no use trying.”

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 reflexions 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 acquainted herself, in the western world, with every form of caravansary. Henrietta expressed the opinion that American hotels were the best in the world, and Mrs. Touchett, fresh from a renewed struggle with them, 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.

“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.’ ”

“I don’t know what you mean,” Henrietta replied. “I like to be treated as an American lady.”

“Poor American ladies!” cried Mrs. Touchett with a laugh. “They’re the slaves of slaves.”

“They’re the companions of freemen,” Henrietta retorted.

“They’re the companions of their servants—the Irish chambermaid and the negro waiter. They share their work.”

“Do you call the domestics in an American household ‘slaves’?” Miss Stackpole enquired. “If that’s the way you desire to treat them, no wonder you don’t like America.”

“If you’ve not good servants you’re miserable,” Mrs. Touchett serenely said. “They’re very bad in America, but I’ve five perfect ones in Florence.”

“I don’t see what you want with five,” Henrietta couldn’t help observing. “I don’t think I should like to see five persons surrounding me in that menial position.”

“I like them in that position better than in some others,” proclaimed Mrs. Touchett with much meaning.

“Should you like me better if I were your butler, dear?” her husband asked.

“I don’t think I should: you wouldn’t at all have the tenue.”

“The companions of freemen—I like that, Miss Stackpole,” said Ralph. “It’s a beautiful description.”

“When I said freemen I didn’t mean you, sir!”

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 judged to be 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 took occasion to say to Isabel: “My dear friend, I wonder if you’re growing faithless.”

“Faithless? Faithless to you, Henrietta?”

“No, that would be a great pain; but it’s not that.”

“Faithless to my country then?”

“Ah, that I hope will never be. When I wrote to you from Liverpool I said I had something particular to tell you. You’ve never asked me what it is. Is it because you’ve suspected?”

“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?”

Henrietta looked disappointed, and her steady gaze betrayed it. “You don’t ask that right—as if you thought it important. You’re changed—you’re thinking of other things.”

“Tell me what you mean, and I’ll think of that.”

“Will you really think of it? That’s what I wish to be sure of.”

“I’ve not much control of my thoughts, but I’ll do my best,” said Isabel. Henrietta gazed at her, in silence, for a period which tried Isabel’s patience, so that our heroine added at last: “Do you mean that you’re going to be married?”

“Not till I’ve 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.”

“Ah!” Isabel responded.

“You say that right. I had a good deal of talk with him; he has come after you.”

“Did he tell you so?”

“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.”

Isabel waited. At the mention of Mr. Goodwood’s name she had turned a little pale. “I’m very sorry you did that,” she observed at last.

“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.”

“What did you say about me?” Isabel asked.

“I said you were on the whole the finest creature I know.”

“I’m very sorry for that. He thinks too well of me already; he oughtn’t to be encouraged.”

“He’s 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.”

“He’s very simple-minded,” said Isabel. “And he’s not so ugly.”

“There’s nothing so simplifying as a grand passion.”

“It’s not a grand passion; I’m very sure it’s not that.”

“You don’t say that as if you were sure.”

Isabel gave rather a cold smile. “I shall say it better to Mr. Goodwood himself.”

“He’ll soon give you a chance,” said Henrietta. Isabel offered no answer to this assertion, which her companion made with an air of great confidence. “He’ll find you changed,” the latter pursued. “You’ve been affected by your new surroundings.”

“Very likely. I’m affected by everything.”

“By everything but Mr. Goodwood!” Miss Stackpole exclaimed with a slightly harsh hilarity.

Isabel failed even to smile back and in a moment she said: “Did he ask you to speak to me?”

“Not in so many words. But his eyes asked it—and his handshake, when he bade me good-bye.”

“Thank you for doing so.” And Isabel turned away.

“Yes, you’re changed; you’ve got new ideas over here,” her friend continued.

“I hope so,” said Isabel; “one should get as many new ideas as possible.”

“Yes; but they shouldn’t interfere with the old ones when the old ones have been the right ones.”

Isabel turned about again. “If you mean that I had any idea with regard to Mr. Goodwood—!” But she faltered before her friend’s implacable glitter.

“My dear child, you certainly encouraged him.”

Isabel made for the moment as if to deny this charge; instead of which, however, she presently answered: “It’s very true. I did encourage him.” And then she asked if her companion had learned from Mr. Goodwood what he intended to do. It was a concession to her curiosity, for she disliked discussing the subject and found Henrietta wanting in delicacy.

“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 high, bold action. Whatever happens to him he’ll always do something, and whatever he does will always be right.”

“I quite believe that.” Henrietta might be wanting in delicacy, but it touched the girl, all the same, to hear this declaration.

“Ah, you do care for him!” her visitor rang out.

“Whatever he does will always be right,” Isabel repeated. “When a man’s of that infallible mould what does it matter to him what one feels?”

“It may not matter to him, but it matters to one’s self.”

“Ah, what it matters to me—that’s not what we’re discussing,” said Isabel with a cold smile.

This time her companion was grave. “Well, I don’t care; you have changed. You’re not the girl you were a few short weeks ago, and Mr. Goodwood will see it. I expect him here any day.”

“I hope he’ll hate me then,” said Isabel.

“I believe you hope it about as much as I believe him capable of it.”

To this observation our heroine made no return; she was absorbed in the alarm given her by Henrietta’s intimation that Caspar Goodwood would present himself at Gardencourt. She pretended to herself, however, that she thought the event impossible, and, later, she communicated her disbelief to her friend. For the next forty-eight hours, nevertheless, she stood prepared to hear the young man’s name announced. The feeling pressed upon her; 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 indeed was dissipated 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 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 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, 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, her eyes bent on 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 she knew—that came into her vision, already so held by him, with the vividness of the writer’s voice or his face. This document proved short and may be given entire.

My Dear Miss Archerspan—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 that’s not your character. No, you are not, and you never will be, arbitrary or capricious. Therefore it is that I believe you will let me see you again. You told me that I’m 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 it holds you. I have been to England before, but 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.

Isabel read this missive with such deep attention that she had not perceived an approaching tread on the soft grass. Looking up, however, as she mechanically folded it 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 coolness.

“They told me you were out here,” said Lord Warburton; “and as there was no one in the drawing-room and it’s really you that I wish to see, I came out with no more ado.”

Isabel had got up; she felt a wish, for the moment, that he should not sit down beside her. “I was just going indoors.”

“Please don’t do that; it’s much jollier here; I’ve 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.

“We’ll 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 about 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 the idea of Lord Warburton’s “making up” 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; the fact of a declaration from such a source carrying with it really more questions than it would answer. She had received a strong impression of his being a “personage,” and she had occupied herself in examining the image so conveyed. At the risk of adding to the evidence of her self-sufficiency it must be said that there had been moments when this possibility of admiration by a personage represented to her an aggression almost to the degree of an affront, quite to the degree of an inconvenience. She had never yet known a personage; there had been no personages, in this sense, in her life; there were probably none such at all in her native land. When she had thought of individual eminence she had thought of it on the basis of character and wit—of what one might like in a gentleman’s mind and in his talk. She herself was a character—she couldn’t help being aware of that; and hitherto her visions of a completed consciousness had concerned themselves largely with moral images—things as to which the question would be whether they pleased her sublime 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 that the girl, with her habit of judging quickly and freely, felt she lacked patience to bestow. He appeared to demand of her something that no one else, as it were, had presumed to do. 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 rather invidiously lived and moved. A certain instinct, not imperious, but persuasive, told her to resist—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 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 a complication of every hour, and that even in the whole there was something stiff and stupid which would make it a burden. 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 she carried in her pocket all sufficiently reminded her of the contrary. Smile not, however, I venture to repeat, at this simple young woman 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.

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 had superficially 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 showed as distinct and unimportant. 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 judgement of mankind, as exemplified particularly in the more quickly-judging half of it: he had looked these things well in the face and then had dismissed them from his thoughts. He cared no more for them than for the rosebud in his buttonhole. 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.

“I hope you had a pleasant ride,” said Isabel, who observed her companion’s hesitancy.

“It would have been pleasant if for nothing else than that it brought me here.”

“Are you so fond of Gardencourt?” the girl asked, more and more sure that he meant to make some appeal to 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 “great” (as she supposed) 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 was now the heroine of the situation she succeeded scarcely the less in looking at it from the outside.

“I care nothing for Gardencourt,” said her companion. “I care only for you.”

“You’ve known me too short a time to have a right to say that, and I can’t believe you’re serious.”

These words of Isabel’s were not perfectly sincere, for she had no doubt whatever that he himself was. They were simply a tribute to the fact, of which she was perfectly aware, that those he had just uttered would have excited surprise on the part of a vulgar world. And, moreover, if anything beside the sense she had already acquired that Lord Warburton was not a loose thinker had been needed to convince her, the tone in which he replied would quite have served the purpose.

“One’s right in such a matter is not measured by the time, Miss Archer; it’s 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’ve 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’s 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 Lockleigh 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’ve done so; all these days I’ve done nothing else. I don’t make mistakes about such things; I’m a very judicious animal. I don’t go off easily, but when I’m 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 charged with the light of a passion that had sifted itself clear of the baser parts of emotion—the heat, the violence, the unreason—and that burned as steadily as a lamp in a windless place.

By tacit consent, as he talked, they had walked more and more slowly, and at last they stopped and he took her hand. “Ah, Lord Warburton, how little you know me!” Isabel said very gently. Gently too she drew her hand away.

“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’s what I want, and it seems to me I’m taking the best way. If you’ll be my wife, then I shall know you, and when I tell you all the good I think of you you’ll not be able to say it’s from ignorance.”

“If you know me little I know you even less,” said Isabel.

“You mean that, unlike yourself, I may not improve on acquaintance? Ah, of course that’s 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?”

“I like you very much, Lord Warburton,” she answered; and at this moment she liked him immensely.

“I thank you for saying that; it shows you don’t regard me as a stranger. I really believe I’ve filled all the other relations of life very creditably, and I don’t see why I shouldn’t 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’ve friends who’ll speak for me.”

“I don’t need the recommendation of your friends,” said Isabel.

“Ah now, that’s delightful of you. You believe in me yourself.”

“Completely,” Isabel declared. She quite glowed there, inwardly, with the pleasure of feeling she did.

The light in her companion’s eyes turned into a smile, and he gave a long exhalation of joy. “If you’re mistaken, Miss Archer, let me lose all I possess!”

She wondered whether he meant this for a reminder that he was rich, and, on the instant, felt sure that he didn’t. 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 if possible not less kind than what he had said to her. His words had carried perfect conviction with them; she felt she did, all so mysteriously, matter to him. “I thank you more than I can say for your offer,” she returned at last. “It does me great honour.”

“Ah, don’t say that!” he broke out. “I was afraid you’d say something like that. I don’t see what you’ve to do with that sort of thing. I don’t see why you should thank me—it’s I who ought to thank you for listening to me: a man 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’d rather ask it than have it to answer myself. But the way you’ve listened—or at least your having listened at all—gives me some hope.”

“Don’t hope too much,” Isabel said.

“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 exuberance of elation.

“Should you be greatly surprised if I were to beg you not to hope at all?” Isabel asked.

“Surprised? I don’t know what you mean by surprise. It wouldn’t be that; it would be a feeling very much worse.”

Isabel walked on again; she was silent for some minutes. “I’m 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’m by no means sure that you wouldn’t be disappointed. And I say that not in the least out of conventional modesty; it’s perfectly sincere.”

“I’m willing to risk it, Miss Archer,” her companion replied.

“It’s a great question, as you say. It’s a very difficult question.”

“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’ll gladly wait a long time. Only remember that in the end my dearest happiness depends on your answer.”

“I should be very sorry to keep you in suspense,” said Isabel.

“Oh, don’t mind. I’d much rather have a good answer six months hence than a bad one to-day.”

“But it’s very probable that even six months hence I shouldn’t be able to give you one that you’d think good.”

“Why not, since you really like me?”

“Ah, you must never doubt that,” said Isabel.

“Well then, I don’t see what more you ask!”

“It’s not what I ask; it’s what I can give. I don’t think I should suit you; I really don’t think I should.”

“You needn’t worry about that. That’s my affair. You needn’t be a better royalist than the king.”

“It’s not only that,” said Isabel; “but I’m not sure I wish to marry any one.”

“Very likely you don’t. I’ve 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’re frequently persuaded.”

“Ah, that’s because they want to be!” And Isabel lightly laughed. Her suitor’s countenance fell, and he looked at her for a while in silence. “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.”

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. “Has he told you that?”

“I remember his making the remark. He spoke perhaps of Americans generally.”

“He appears himself to have found it very pleasant to live in England.” Isabel spoke in a manner that might have seemed a little perverse, but which expressed both her constant perception of her uncle’s outward felicity and her general disposition to elude any obligation to take a restricted view.

It gave her companion hope, and he immediately cried with warmth: “Ah, my dear Miss Archer, old England’s a very good sort of country, you know! And it will be still better when we’ve furbished it up a little.”

“Oh, don’t furbish it, Lord Warburton—, leave it alone. I like it this way.”

“Well then, if you like it, I’m more and more unable to see your objection to what I propose.”

“I’m afraid I can’t make you understand.”

“You ought at least to try. I’ve 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.”

These words were uttered with a breadth of candour that was like the embrace of strong arms—that was like the fragrance straight in her face, and by his clean, breathing lips, of she knew not what strange gardens, what charged airs. She would have given her little finger at that moment to feel strongly and simply the impulse to answer: “Lord Warburton, it’s impossible for me to do better in this wonderful world, I think, than commit myself, very gratefully, to your loyalty.” But though she was lost in admiration of her opportunity she managed to move back into the deepest shade of it, even as some wild, caught creature in a vast cage. The “splendid” security so offered her was not the greatest she could conceive. What she finally bethought herself of saying was something very different—something that deferred the need of really facing her crisis. “Don’t think me unkind if I ask you to say no more about this to-day.”

“Certainly, certainly!” her companion cried. “I wouldn’t bore you for the world.”

“You’ve given me a great deal to think about, and I promise you to do it justice.”

“That’s all I ask of you, of course—and that you’ll remember how absolutely my happiness is in your hands.”

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—letting you know it without making you miserable.”

“There’s no way to do that, Miss Archer. I won’t say that if you refuse me you’ll kill me; I shall not die of it. But I shall do worse; I shall live to no purpose.”

“You’ll live to marry a better woman than I.”

“Don’t say that, please,” said Lord Warburton very gravely. “That’s fair to neither of us.”

“To marry a worse one then.”

“If there are better women than you I prefer the bad ones. That’s all I can say,” he went on with the same earnestness. “There’s no accounting for tastes.”

His gravity made her feel equally grave, and she showed it by again requesting him to drop the subject for the present. “I’ll speak to you myself—very soon. Perhaps I shall write to you.”

“At your convenience, yes,” he replied. “Whatever time you take, it must seem to me long, and I suppose I must make the best of that.”

“I shall not keep you in suspense; I only want to collect my mind a little.”

He gave a melancholy sigh and stood looking at her a moment, with his hands behind him, giving short nervous shakes to his hunting-crop. “Do you know I’m very much afraid of it—of that remarkable mind of yours?”

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 oddly exclaimed.

His compassion was not stirred, however; all he possessed of the faculty of pity was needed at home. “Ah! be merciful, be merciful,” he murmured.

“I think you had better go,” said Isabel. “I’ll write to you.”

“Very good; but whatever you write I’ll come and see you, you know.” And then he stood reflecting, 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 oak. “There’s one thing more,” he went on. “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’s not damp, by the way; I’ve had the house thoroughly examined; it’s perfectly safe and right. But if you shouldn’t fancy it you needn’t dream of living in it. There’s no difficulty whatever about that; there are plenty of houses. I thought I’d just mention it; some people don’t like a moat, you know. Good-bye.”

“I adore a moat,” said Isabel. “Good-bye.”

He held out his hand, and she gave him hers a moment—a moment long enough for him to bend his handsome bared head and kiss it. Then, still agitating, in his mastered emotion, his implement of the chase, he walked rapidly away. He was evidently much upset.

Isabel herself was upset, but she had not been affected as she would have imagined. What she felt was not a great responsibility, a great difficulty of choice; it appeared to her there had been no choice in the question. She couldn’t marry Lord Warburton; the idea failed to support any enlightened prejudice in favour of the free exploration of life that she had hitherto entertained or was now capable of entertaining. She must write this to him, she must convince him, and that 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 magnificent “chance.” With whatever qualifications one would, Lord Warburton had offered her a great opportunity; the situation might have discomforts, might contain oppressive, might contain narrowing elements, might prove really but a stupefying anodyne; but she did her sex no injustice in believing that nineteen women out of twenty would have accommodated themselves to it without a pang. Why then upon her also should it not irresistibly 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 these large these fabulous occasions? If she wouldn’t do such a thing as that then she must do great things, she must do something greater. Poor Isabel found ground 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: the isolation and loneliness of pride had for her mind the horror of a desert place. If it had been pride that interfered with her accepting Lord Warburton such a bêtise was singularly misplaced; and she was so conscious of liking him that she ventured to assure herself it was the very softness, and the fine intelligence, of sympathy. She liked him too much to marry him, that was the truth; something assured her there was a fallacy somewhere in the glowing logic of the proposition—as he saw it—even though she mightn’t put her very finest finger-point on it; 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 she would consider his question, 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 vow. But this was not the case; she was wondering if she were not a cold, hard, priggish person, and, on her at last getting up and going rather quickly back to the house, felt, as she had said to her friend, really frightened at herself.