 Chapter 5 of The Portrait of a Lady, Volume 1. Self-touch-it was a philosopher, but nevertheless he knocked at his mother's door, at a quarter to seven, with a good deal of eagerness. Even philosophers have their preferences, and it must be admitted that of his progenitors his father ministered most to his sense of the sweetness of filial dependence. His father, as he had often said to himself, was the more motherly, his mother, on the other hand, was paternal, and even, according to the slang of the day, gubinatorial. She was nevertheless very fond of her only child, and had always insisted on his spending three months of the year with her. Ralph rendered perfect justice to her affection, and knew that in her thoughts and her thoroughly arranged and servanted life, his turn always came after the other nearest subjects of her selectitude. The various punctualities of performance of the workers of her will. He found her completely dressed for dinner, but she embraced her boy with her gloved hands, and made him sit on the sofa beside her. She inquired scrupulously about her husband's health, and about the young man's own, and receiving no very brilliant account of either, remarked that she was more than ever convinced of her wisdom in not exposing herself to the English climate. In this case, she also might have given way. Ralph smiled at the idea of his mother's giving way, but made no point of reminding her that his own infirmity was not the result of the English climate, from which he absented himself for a considerable part of each year. He had been a very small boy when his father, Daniel Tracy Tudget, a native of Rutland, in the state of Vermont, came to England as a subordinate partner in a banking house where some ten years later he gained preponderant control. Daniel Tudget saw before him a lifelong residence in his adopted country, of which from the first he took a simple, sane, and accommodating view. But as he said to himself, he had no intention of dis-Americanizing, nor had he a desire to teach his only son any such subtle art. It had been for himself so very soluble a problem to live in England, assimilated, but unconverted, that it seemed to him equally simple his lawful heir should after his death carry on the gray old bank in the white American light. He was at pains to intensify this light, however by sending the boy home for his education. Ralph spent several terms at an American school and took a degree at an American university. After which, as he struck his father on his return as even redundantly native, he was placed for some three years in residence at Oxford. Oxford swallowed up Harvard and Ralph became at last English enough. His outward conformity to the manners that surrounded him was nonetheless the mask of a mind that greatly enjoyed its independence, on which nothing long imposed itself and which naturally inclined to adventure and irony, indulged in a boundless liberty of appreciation. He began with being a young man of promise. At Oxford he distinguished himself. To his father's ineffable satisfaction and the people about him said it was a thousand pitties so clever a fellow should be shut out from a career. He might have had a career by returning to his own country, though this point is shrouded in uncertainty, and even if Mr. Touchett had been willing to part with him, which was not the case, it would have been hard with him to put a watery waist permanently between himself and the old man whom he regarded as his best friend. Ralph not only fond of his father, he admired him. He enjoyed the opportunity of observing him. Daniel Touchett, to his perception, was a man of genius, and though he himself had no aptitude for the banking mystery, he made a point of learning enough of it to measure the great figure his father had played. It was not this, however, he mainly relished. It was the fine ivory surface, polished as by the English air, that the old man had opposed to possibilities of penetration. Daniel Touchett had been neither at Harvard nor at Oxford, and it was his own fault if he had placed in his son's hands the key to modern criticism. Ralph, whose head was full of ideas which his father had never guessed, had a high esteem for the latter's originality. Americans, rightly or wrongly, are commended for the ease with which they adapt themselves to foreign conditions. But Mr. Touchett had made of the very limits of his pliancy half the ground of his general success. He had retained in their freshness most of his marks of primary pressure. His tone, as his son always noted with pleasure, was that of the more exuberant parts of New England. At the end of his life he had become, on his own ground, as mellow as he was rich. He combined consummate shrewdness with the disposition superficially to fraternize, and his social position, on which he had never wasted a care, had the firm perfection of an unthumbed fruit. It was perhaps his want of imagination and of what is called the historic consciousness, but to many of the impressions usually made by English life upon the cultivated stranger his sense was completely closed. There were certain differences he had never perceived, certain habits he had never formed, certain obscurities he had never sounded. As regards these latter, on the day he had sounded them, his son would have thought less well of him. Ralph, on leaving Oxford, had spent a couple of years in travelling, after which he had found himself perched on a high stool in his father's bank. The responsibility and honour of such positions is not, I believe, measured by the height of the stool, which depends upon other considerations. Ralph, indeed, who had very long legs, was fond of standing and even of walking about at his work. To this exercise, however, he was obliged to devote but a limited period, for at the end of some eighteen months he had become aware of his being seriously out of health. He had caught a violent cold which fixed itself on his lungs and threw them into dire confusion. He had to give up work and apply to the letter, the sorry injunction, to take care of himself. At first he slighted the task, it appeared to him it was not himself in the least he was taking care of, but an uninteresting, an uninterested person which whom he had nothing in common. This person, however, improved an acquaintance and Ralph grew at last to have a certain grudging tolerance, even an undemonstrative respect for him. Misfortune makes strange bedfellows and our young man feeling that he had something at stake in the matter. It usually struck him as his reputation for ordinary wit. Devoted to his graceless charge, an amount of attention of which note was duly taken and which had at least the effect of keeping the poor fellow alive. One of his lungs began to heal, the other promised to follow its example, and he was assured that he might outweather a dozen winters if he would be take himself to those climates in which consumptives chiefly congregate. As he had grown extremely fond of London he cursed the flatness of exile, but at the same time that he cursed he conformed. And gradually, when he found his sensitive organ, grateful even for grim favours, he conferred them with a lighter hand. He wintered abroad, as the phrase is, bast in the sun, stopped at home when the wind blew, went to bed when it rained, and once or twice when it had snowed overnight, almost never got up again. A secret horde of indifference, like a thick cake a fond old nurse might have slipped into his first school outfit, came to his aid and helped to reconcile him to sacrifice. Since at the best he was too ill for ought, but that arduous game. As he said to himself there was really nothing he had wanted very much to do, so that he had at least not renounced the field of valor. At present, however, the fragrance of forbidden fruit seemed occasionally to float past him and remind him that the finest of pleasures is the rush of action. Living as he now lived was like reading a good book in a poor translation, a meager entertainment for a young man who felt that he might have been an excellent linguist. He had good winters and poor winters, and while the former lasted he was sometimes the sport of a vision of virtual recovery. But this vision was dispelled some three years before the occurrence of the incidents with which this history opens. He had on that occasion remained later than usual in England and had been overtaken by bad weather before reaching Algiers. He arrived more dead than alive and lay there for several weeks between life and death. His convalescence was a miracle, but the first use he made of it was to assure himself that such miracles happen but once. He said to himself that his hour was in sight and that it behoved him to keep his eyes upon it, yet that it was also open to him to spend the interval as agreeably as might be consistent with such a preoccupation. With the prospect of losing them, the simple use of his faculties became an exquisite pleasure. It seemed to him the joys of contemplation had never been He was far from the time when he had found it hard that he should be obliged to give up the idea of distinguishing himself, an idea none the less importunate for being vague and none the less delightful for having had to struggle in the same breast with bursts of inspiring self-criticism. His friends at present judged him more cheerful and attributed it to a theory over which they shook their heads knowingly, that he would recover his health, his serenity, was but the array of wild flowers niched in his ruin. It was very probably this sweet-tasting property of the observed thing in itself that was mainly concerned in Ralph's quickly stirred interest in the advent of a young lady who was evidently not insipid. If he was consideringly disposed, something told him, here was occupation enough for a secession of days. It may be added, in summary fashion, that the imagination of loving, as distinguished from that of being loved, had still a place in his reduced sketch. He had only forbidden himself the riot of expression, however he shouldn't inspire his cousin with a passion, nor would she be able, even should she try, to help him to one. You now tell me about the young lady, he said to his mother. What do you mean to do with her? Mrs. Tuchett was prompt. I mean to ask your father to invite her to stay three or four weeks at Garden Court. You needn't stand on such ceremony as that, said Ralph. My father will ask her as a matter of course. I don't know about that. She's my niece. She's not his. Good Lord, dear mother! What a sense of property! That's all the more reason for his asking her, but after that, I mean after three months, for it's absurd asking the poor girl to remain but for three or four paltry weeks. What do you mean to do with her? I mean to take her to Paris. I mean to get her clothing. Ah, yes, that's of course, but independently of that. I shall invite her to spend the autumn with me in Florence. You don't rise above detail, dear mother, said Ralph. I should like to know what you mean to do with her in a general way. My duty, Mrs. Tuchett declared, I suppose you pity her very much, she added. No, I don't think I pity her. She doesn't strike me as inviting compassion. I think I envy her. Before being sure, however, give me a hint of where you see your duty. In showing her four European countries, I shall leave her the choice of two of them, and in giving her the opportunity of perfecting herself in French, which she already knows very well. Ralph frowned a little, that sounds rather dry, even allowing her the choice of two of the countries. If it's dry, said his mother with a laugh, you can leave Isabelle alone to water it. She is as good as summer rain any day. Do you mean she's a gifted being? I don't know whether she's a gifted being, but she's a clever girl with a strong will and a high temper. She has no idea of being bored. I can imagine that, said Ralph, and then he added abruptly, how do you to get on? Do you mean by that that I'm a bore? I don't think she finds me one. Some girls might, I know, but Isabelle's too clever for that. I think I greatly amuse her. We get on because I understand her. I know the sort of girl she is. She's very frank, and I'm very frank. We know just what to expect of each other. Ah, dear mother Ralph exclaimed, one always knows what to expect of you. You've never surprised me but once, and that's today, in presenting me with a pretty cousin whose existence I had never suspected. Do you think her so pretty? Very pretty indeed, but I don't insist upon it. It's her general air of being someone in particular that strikes me. Who is this rare creature, and what is she? Where did you find her? And how did you make her acquaintance? I found her in an old house at Albany, sitting in a dreary room on a rainy day, reading a heavy book and boring herself to death. She didn't know she was bored, but when I left her no doubt of it, she seemed very grateful for the service. You may say I shouldn't have enlightened her. I should have let her alone. That's a good deal in that, but I acted conscientiously. I thought she was meant for something better. It occurred to me that it would be a kindness to take her about and introduce her to the world. She thinks she knows a great deal of it, like most American girls, but like most American girls she's ridiculously mistaken. If you want to know, I thought she would do me credit. I like to be well thought of, and for a woman of my age there's no greater convenience, in some ways, than an attractive niece. You know I had seen nothing of my sister's children for years. I disapproved entirely of the father. But I always meant to do something for them when he should have gone to his reward. I asserted where they were to be found, and, without any preliminaries, went and introduced myself. There are two others of them, both of whom are married, but I saw only the elder, who has, by the way, a very uncivil husband. The wife, whose name is Lily, jumped at the idea of taking an interest in Isabel. She said it was just what her sister needed, that someone should take an interest in her. She spoke of her, as you might speak of some young person of genius in want of encouragement and patronage. It may be that Isabel's a genius, but in that case I've not yet learned her special line. Mrs. Ledlow was especially keen about my taking her to Europe. They all regard Europe over there as a land of immigration, of rescue, a refuge for their superfluous population. Isabel herself seemed very glad to come, and the thing was easily arranged. There was a little difficulty about the money question, as she seemed adverse to being under pecuniary obligations. But she has a small income, and she supposes herself to be traveling at her own expense. Ralph listened attentively to this judicious report, by which his interest in the subject of it was not impaired. Ah, she's a genius, he said. We must find out her special line. Is it by chance for flirting? I don't think so. You may suspect that at first, but she'll be wrong. You won't, I think, in any way be easily right about her. Warburton's wrong, then? Ralph rejoicingly exclaimed. He flatters himself. He has made that discovery. Lord Warburton won't understand her. He'd needn't try. He's very intelligent, said Ralph, but it's right he should be puzzled once in a while. Isabel will enjoy puzzling a lord, Mrs. Touchett remark. Her son frowned a little. What does she know about lords? Nothing at all. That will puzzle him all the more. Ralph greeted these words with a laugh and looked out of the window. Then, are you going down to see my father, he asked? At a quarter to eight, said Mrs. Touchett. Her son looked at his watch. You've another quarter of an hour, then. Tell me some more about Isabel, after which, as Mrs. Touchett declined his invitation, declaring that he must find out for himself. Well, he pursued. She'll certainly do you credit. But won't she also give you trouble? I hope not, but if she does I shall not shrink from it. I never do that. She strikes me as very natural, said Ralph. Natural people are not the most trouble. No, said Ralph, you yourself are proof of that. You're extremely natural, and I'm sure you have never troubled any one. It takes trouble to do that, but tell me this. It just occurs to me, is Isabel capable of making herself disagreeable? Oh! cried his mother. You ask too many questions. Find that out for yourself. His questions, however, were not exhausted. All this time, he said, you've not told me what you intend to do with her. Do with her? You talk as if she were a yard of calico. I shall do absolutely nothing with her, and she herself will do everything she chooses. She gave me notice of that. What you meant then, in your telegram, was that her characters independent. I never know what I mean in my telegrams, especially those I send from America. Clearness is too expensive. Come down to your father. It's not yet a quarter to eight, said Ralph. I must allow for his impatience, Mrs. Touchett answered. Ralph knew what to think of his father's impatience. But making no rejoinder, he offered his mother his arm. This put it in his power, as they descended together, to stop her a moment on the middle landing of the staircase. The broad, low, wide-arm staircase of time blackened oak, which was one of the most striking features of Garden Court. You've no plan of marrying her, he smiled. Marrying her? I should be sorry to play her such a trick. But apart from that, she's perfectly able to marry herself. She has every facility. Do you mean to say she has a husband picked out? I don't know about a husband, but there's a young man in Boston. Ralph went on. He had no desire to hear about the young man in Boston. As my father says, they're always engaged. His mother had told him that he must satisfy his curiosity at the source, and it soon became evident he should not want for occasion. He had a good deal of talk with his young kinswoman when the two had been left together in the drawing-room. Lord Warburton, who had ridden over from his own house some ten miles distant, remounted and took his departure before dinner. And an hour after this meal was ended, Mr. and Mrs. Touchett, who appeared to have quite emptied the measure of their forms, withdrew under the valid pretext of fatigue to their respective apartments. The young man spent an hour with his cousin, though she had been traveling half the day, she appeared in no degree spent. She was really tired. She knew it, and knew she should pay for it on the morrow. But it was her habit at this period to carry exhaustion to the furthest point, and confess to it only when dissimulation broke down. A fine hypocrisy was for the present possible. She was interested. She was, as she said to herself, floated. She asked Ralph to show her the pictures. There were a great many in the house, most of them of his own choosing. The best were arranged in an oaken gallery of charming proportions, which had a sitting-room at either end of it, and which in the evening was usually lighted. The light was insufficient to show the pictures to advantage, and the visit might have stood over to the morrow. This suggestion Ralph had ventured to make, but Isabelle looked disappointed, smiling still, however, and said, if you please, I should like to see them just a little. She was eager. She knew she was eager, and now seems so she couldn't help it. She doesn't take suggestions, Ralph said to himself. But he said it without irritation. Her pressure amused and even pleased him. The lamps were on brackets, at intervals, and if the light was imperfect it was genial. It fell upon the vague squares of rich color and on the faded gilding of heavy frames. It made a sheen on the polished floor of the gallery. Ralph took a candlestick and moved about, pointing out the things he liked. Isabelle, inclining to one picture after another, indulged in little exclamations and murmurs. She was evidently a judge. She had a natural taste. He was struck with that. She took a candlestick herself and held it slowly here and there. She lifted it high, and as she did so he found himself pausing in the middle of the place and bending his eyes much less upon the pictures than on her presence. He lost nothing in truth by these wandering glances, for she was better worth looking at than most works of art. She was undeniably spare and ponderably light and provably tall. When people had wished to distinguish her from the other two misarchers they had always called her the willowy one. Her hair, which was dark even to blackness, had been an object of envy to many women. Her light gray eyes, a little too firm perhaps in her graver moments, had an enchanting range of concession. They walked slowly up one side of the gallery and down the other, and then she said, Well now I know more than I did when I began. You apparently have a great passion for knowledge, her cousin returned. I think I have. Most girls are horribly ignorant. You strike me as different from most girls. Some of them would, but the way they're talked to, murmured Isabel, who preferred not to dilate just yet on herself, then in a moment to change the subject, please tell me, isn't there a ghost she went on? A ghost. A castle spectra, a thing that appears. We call them ghosts in America. So we do hear when we see them. You do see them then. You ought to in this romantic old house. It's not a romantic old house, said Ralph. You'll be disappointed if you count on that. It's a dismal-y prosaic one. There's no romance here, but what you may have brought with you. I've brought a great deal, but it seems to me I've brought it to the right place. To keep it out of harm, certainly, nothing will ever happen to it here between my father and me. Isabel looked at him a moment. Is there never anyone here but your father and you? My mother, of course. Oh, I know your mother. She's not romantic. Haven't you other people? Very few. I'm sorry for that. I like so much to see people. Oh, we'll invite all the country to amuse you, said Ralph. Now you're making fun of me, the girl answered rather gravely. Who was the gentleman on the lawn when I arrived? A county neighbor. He doesn't come very often. I'm sorry for that. I liked him, said Isabel. Why, it seemed to me that you barely spoke to him, Ralph objected. Never mind. I like him all the same. I like your father, too, immensely. You can't do better than that. He's the dearest of the deer. I'm so sorry he is ill, said Isabel. You must help me to nurse him. You ought to be a good nurse. I don't think I am. I've been told I'm not. I'm said to have too many theories. But you haven't told me about the ghost, she added. Ralph, however, gave no heed to this observation. You like my father and you like Lord Warburton. I infer also that you like my mother. I like your mother very much because, and Isabel found herself attempting to assign a reason for her affection for Mrs. Tuchett. Ah, we never know why, said her companion, laughing. I always know why, the girl answered. It's because she doesn't expect one to like her. She doesn't care whether one does or not. So you adore her out of perversity. Well, I take greatly after my mother, said Ralph. I don't believe you do it all. You wish people to like you, and you try to make them do it. Good heavens, how you see through one, he cried with dismay. That was not altogether jocular. But I like you all the same, his cousin went on. The way to clinch the matter will be to show me the ghost. Ralph shook his head sadly. I might show it to you, but you'd never see it. The privilege isn't given to everyone. It's not enviable. It has never been seen by a young, happy, innocent person like you. You must have suffered first, have suffered greatly, have gained some miserable knowledge. In that way, your eyes are open to it. I saw it long ago, said Ralph. I told you just now I'm very fond of knowledge, Isabel answered. Yes, of happy knowledge, of pleasant knowledge, but you haven't suffered. You're not made to suffer. I know you'll never see the ghost. She had listened to him attentively, with a smile on her lips, but with a certain gravity in her eye. Charming, as he found her, she struck him as rather presumptuous. Indeed, it was not a part of her charm, and he wondered what she would say. I'm not afraid, you know, she said, which seemed quite presumptuous enough. You're not afraid of suffering? Yes, I'm afraid of suffering, but I'm not afraid of ghosts. And I think people suffer too easily, she added. I don't believe you do, said Ralph, looking at her with his hands in his pockets. I don't think that's a fault, she answered. It's not absolutely necessary to suffer. We were not made for that. You were not, certainly. I'm not speaking of myself, and she wandered off a little. No, it isn't a fault, said her cousin. It's a merit to be strong. Only if you don't suffer, they call you hard, Isabel remarked. They passed out of the smaller drawing room into which they had returned from the gallery and paused in the hall at the foot of the staircase. Here Ralph presented his companion with her bedroom candle, which he had taken from a niche. Never mind what they call you. When you do suffer, they call you an idiot. The great points to be as happy as possible. She looked at him a little. She had taken her candle and placed her foot on the oaken stair. Well, she said. That's what I came to Europe for, to be happy as possible. Good night. Good night. I wish you all success and shall be very glad to contribute to it. She turned away and he watched her as she slowly ascended. Then, with his hands always in his pockets, he went back to the empty drawing room. End of chapter five. Recording by Don Murphy in El Segundo, California. Chapter six of The Portrait of a Lady, volume one. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Don Murphy. The Portrait of a Lady, volume one by Henry James. Chapter six. Isabelle 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 Isabelle as a prodigy of learning, a creature reported to have read the classic authors in translation. Her paternal aunt, Mrs. Varian, once spread the rumor that Isabelle was writing a book, Mrs. Varian having a reverence for books and avaired 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 a 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 and 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 impressions with regard to Isabelle's labors was quite illusionary. 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 not she were superior people were right in admiring her if they thought her so. For it seemed to her often that her mind move more quickly than theirs. And this encouraged an impatience that might easily be confounded with superiority. It may be affirmed without delay that Isabelle 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 unscanty 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 a subject might shrink from specifying. Her thoughts were a tangle of vague outlines which had never been corrected by the judgment of people speaking with authority. In matters of opinion she had had her own way and it had led her into a thousand ridiculous zig-zags. 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 organization. She couldn't help knowing her organization 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 oneself as to cultivate doubt of one's best friend. One should try to be one's own best friend and to give oneself 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 resended 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 recognized 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 behavior so crooked as to be almost a dishonor to the flag. But Isabel, who knew little of the sorts of artillery to which young women were 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 someday in a difficult position so that she should have the pleasure of being as heroic as the occasion demanded. Altogether, with her meager 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 a vacity 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, disultery, 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 made shortly after 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 humor of the writer, who without parents and without property had adopted three of the children of an infirmed 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 of most subjects. Her cherished desire had long been to come to Europe and to 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 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 oneself 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 and 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 shadowy 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 lap full 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 to her 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 for which 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 everyone 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 garden court 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 center of a property, a place where sounds were felicitously accidental, where the tread was muffled 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 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 more over to her words when she was really moved, that prompt vividness which so many people had regarded as a sign of superiority. Mr. Touchit 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. Touchit. He never expressed this analogy to the girl herself, however, for if Mrs. Touchit had once been like Isabel, Isabel was not at all like Mrs. Touchit. 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-eyed heroine was as agreeable to his sense as the sound of flowing water. He wanted to do something for her and wish she wouldn't 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 neighbors, and in begging to be enlightened on these points she usually inquired 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 shaw 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. There are 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 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 judiciously emphasized. 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 or 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 novels. I don't know about novels, said Mr. Touchett. I believe the novels have a great deal of ability, but I don't suppose they're very accurate. We once had a lady who wrote novels staying here, as 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, yanky 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 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 the fact to show you that they're not always accurate. Of course, I've had 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 really well treated, but I guess their position is better in the upper and even to some extent in the middle. Gracious, Isabelle 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 Isabelle. 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 Isabelle, 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 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 Isabelle, 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. By Dawn Murphy in El Segundo, California. 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 Isabelle 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. Touche, not having cultivated the 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 whole table whitened with oblong morsels of symbolic paste-board. She flattered herself that she was a very just woman and had mastered the sovereign truth that nothing in this world is God for nothing. She had played no social part as mistress of garden court, 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. Isabelle presently found herself in the singular situation of defending the British constitution against her aunt. Mrs. Touchette having formed the habit of sticking pins into this venerable instrument. Isabelle 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. Touchette's dryness that set her own moral fountains flowing. Now what is 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, Mrs. Touchette said, 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. Isabelle 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. Touchette, such a declaration would savor of immodesty, even of arrogance. She risked it nonetheless in talking to 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 chafe 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 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 Warbarten, especially. His adopted and his native country, his charming newfound cousin. I keep a band of music in my anti-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 worlds from reaching the private apartments, and it makes the world think that dancing's going on within. It was dancing music, indeed, that you usually heard when you came into earshot of Ralph's band. The liveliest waltzes seemed to float upon the air. Isabelle often found herself irritated by this perpetual fiddling. She would have liked to pass through the anti-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 Isabelle administered innumerable taps with the feral of her straight young wit. It must be said that her wit was exercised to a large extent in self-defense, 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 young, pretty woman dressed on the lines of prevailing fashion in the folds of the national banner. Isabelle'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 defer 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 chafe and return it in kind. If her good humor 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. Oh, 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 somber, 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 to 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 maneuver 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 intacitly 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 all be 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. Touchette. 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 harboring 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 titan 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 reflections was very just, but it was not exactly true that Ralph Touchette had had a key to put into his hand. His cousin was a very brilliant girl, who would take, as he said, a great 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 the window and received an impression of proportions equally fair, but he felt that he saw it only by glimpses, and that he had yet not stood under the roof. The door was fastened, and though he had the 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. Isabelle'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. Touchette 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 Isabelle's somewhat lugubrious provision 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 Isabelle called it, where the opposite shore seemed still a part of the foreground of the landscape, or drove over the country in a faton, a low capacious, thick wheeled faton, formerly much used by Mr. Touchette, but which he had now ceased to enjoy. Isabelle enjoyed it largely, and handling the rains 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 laddest and sanded, past patches of ancient common and glimpses of empty parks, between hedgerows made thick by mid-summer. When they reached home they usually found tea had been served on the lawn, and that Mrs. Touchette 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 considered 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, was Mrs. Touchette. He had driven over from his own place with apportment too, 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. Garden court 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 neighbors and some of our friends, because we have really got quite 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 as he recognized 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 though, said Isabel, because I'm sure he's nice. Oh yes, he's very nice, and 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 Tuchette 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, in as much 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 Garden Court, 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 good sense of 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. Touchette 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 gentleman 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. Touchette answered. Oh, 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. Touchette fixed her bright little eyes upon him a moment, and transferred them coldly to her niece. You can't stay here alone with the gentleman. You're not at your blessed Albany, my dear. Isabel rose blushing. I wish I were, she said. Oh, I say, mother. Ralph broke out. My dear Mrs. Touchette, Lord Warburton murmured. I didn't make your country, my Lord, Mrs. Touchette said majestically. I must take it as I find it. Can't I stay with my own cousin? Isabel inquired. 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. Touchette gave a little look of despair and sat down again. Oh, if it's necessary, I'll stay up until 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 flair 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. Touchette's door. Isabel had said nothing on her way up. Of course you are vexed at my interfering with you, Mrs. Touchette said. 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 a gentleman 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 is to do them, asked her aunt. So is to choose, said Isabel. End of Chapter 7. Recording by Mary B. Chapter 1 of The Portrait of a Lady, Volume 1. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Read by Betsy Bush, Marquette Michigan, July 2007. The Portrait of a Lady, Volume 1. By Henry James. Chapter 8. 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 Lockley, 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 meantime 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 Garden Court, 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 Lockley, 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 to 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 shamed 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 shamed 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 am 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. Isabelle was often demused 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 traveled through the United States and knew much more about them than Isabelle. 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 give 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, Isabelle 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 savor 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, Isabelle said to Ralph after Lord Warburton had gone. I like him too. I love him well, Ralph returned, but I pity him more. Isabelle looked at him a sconce. Why, that seems to me his only fault, that one can't pity him a little. He appears to have everything, to know everything, and 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 always 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 Isabelle. 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 a 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. What 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 Orburton. Oh, indeed! I don't know what there may be to say, but you must remember that Ralph must talk. He thinks your friends 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 Garden Court. 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 forgot 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 sympathizes more with them, and they have 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 realize. 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 comes quite 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, Ernest. 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 taste 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 won at my own dinner table. He has elegant taste, 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, locally, 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 anyone 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 will never be one, I hope. I hope not. But you don't pity Lord Warburton, then, as Ralph does. Her uncle looked at her awhile, with genial acuteness. Yes, I do, after all. The Portrait of a Lady, Volume 1, by Henry James, Chapter 9 The two Mrs. Molinaux, these nobleman 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 these to the two Mrs. Molinaux, since there were fifty thousand young women in England who exactly resembled them. Depraved of disadvantage, however, Isabel's visitors retained that of an extreme sweetness and shyness of the minor and of having, as she thought, eyes like the balanced basin, the circle of ornamental water, setting parterres among the geranium. They are not morbid at any rate, whatever they are, our heroine say 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 Mrs. Molinaux 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, quite a contended, and their figures, also of a generous roundness, were encased in seaskin jacket. 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 Lancia not luckily, where they lived with their brother, and then they might see her very, very often. They wondered if she wouldn't come over someday in sleep, they were expecting some people on the 29th, so perhaps she would come while the people were there. I'm afraid it isn't any one of 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 are enchanting, just as you are, replied Isabel, who often praised profusely. Her visitors flashed, and their 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 practicing 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 ardor. 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 too luckily. She found the Mrs. Molina, sitting in a vast drawing room. She perceived afterward it was one of several, in a wilderness of faded chains, they were dressed on this occasion in black velveting. Isabel liked them even better at home, that she had done at garden court, and was more than ever struck with the fact that they were not morbid. It had seemed to her before, that if they had thought it was a want of play of mine, 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 Warbaton, at a distance, talked to Mrs. Techette. Is it true your brother is such a great radical? Isabel asked. She knew it was true, but we have seen that her interest in human nature was keen, and she had the desire to draw the Mrs. Molina out. Oh dear, yes, he is immensely advanced, said Mildred, the younger sister. At the same time Warbaton is very reasonable, Ms. Molina observed. Isabel watched him a moment at the other side of the room. He was clearly trying hard to make himself agreeable to Mrs. Techette. Ralph had met the frank advances of one of the dogs before the fire, that the temperature of an English august in the ancient expenses had now made an impertinence. Do you suppose your brother is sincere? Isabel inquired 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, luckily, said Ms. Molina, finding her voice. Yes, and the other places. What are they called? The two sisters exchanged an almost frightened glance. Do you mean on account of the expense? the younger one asked. I dare say it 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 Ms. Molina. Ha, I'm afraid he is an imposter, Isabel returned. Don't you think it's a false position? Her companions evidently had lost themselves. My brother's position, Ms. Molina inquired. 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 Ms. Molina simply. If you do that, it must be very good, because you evidently are beautifully good. His most kind, it will never be known the good he does. His ability is known, Mr. Daddit. Everyone 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, mildered argued gently. We have always been so, even from the earliest times. How well, said Isabel, you have made a great success of it. I don't wonder you like it, I see you are very fond of cruels. When Lord Orbaton 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 modernized. Some of its best points had lost their purity, but as they saw it from the gardens, a stout gray pile of the softest, deepest, most weather-threaded ewe, rising from a broad steel moat, it affected the young visitor as a castle in a legend. The day was cold and rather lossoless. The first note of autumn had been struck, and the watery sunshine rested on the walls in a blur and desartary glimpse, washing them as it were in places tenderly chosen, where the ache of antiquity was keenest. Her old brother, the vicar, had come to luncheon, and Isabel had had five minutes to talk with him. Time enough to institute a search for a rich ecclesiaticism and give it up as they. The marks of the vicar of Locley were a big, athletic figure, a candid natural countenance, a capacious appetite, in the tendency to indiscriminate laughter. Isabel learned, afterward, from her cousin, that before taking orders he had been a mighty resul, 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 Warbarton 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 the 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. How well, he said, I'm very glad indeed you liked the old barrack. I wish you could see more of it, that you could stay here a while. My sisters, I'd taken an immense fancy to you if that would be an inducement. There's no want of inducement, Isabel answered, but I'm afraid I can't make engagement. I'm quiet in my aunt's hands. Ha, 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. A Lord Warbarton paused a moment. To hope what? That in future I may see you often. Ha, 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 are very much mistaken. I have heard him speak very highly of you. I'm glad you have talked about me, said Lord Warbarton, but I nevertheless don't think he'd like me to keep coming to Garden Court. I can't answer for my uncle's taste is 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 are easily charmed, my Lord, said Isabel. No, I'm not easily charmed, and then he stopped a moment. But you have 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 recognized 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 me being able to come here again. Never, said Lord Warbaton. I won't say never, I should feel very melodramatic. May I come and see you then, Sunday next week? Most assuredly, what is there to prevent it? Nothing tangible, but with you I never feel safe. I have a sort of sense that you are 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. Tashat going to take you abroad? I hope so. Is England not good enough for you? That's a very Machiavellian speech. He 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 are up to, said Lord Warbaton. You strike me as having mysterious purposes, vast designs. You are so good as to have a theory about me, which I don't at all feel out. Is there anything mysterious in a purpose entertained and executed every year, in the most public manner by 50,000 of my fellow countrymen? The purpose of improving one's mind by foreign travel? You can't improve your mind, Ms. Archer, her companion declared. It's already a most formidable instrument. It looks down on us all. It despises us. Despises you? You are making fun of me. Sedicable, seriously. Well, you think as 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 have ever heard. Is a balancer with a smile. Lord Warbaton was briefly silent. You judge only from the outside. You don't care, he said presently. You only care to amuse yourself. The note that she had heard in his voice a moment before reappeared, he mixed with it now, was a notable 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 the bottom of the most romantic of races. Was Lord Warbaton 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 farthest limit of good taste in expressing his admiration of a young lady who had confided in his hospitality. She was right, interesting 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 amused yourself with trifle. You select great materials, the fables, the affliction of human nature, the peculiarities of nation. As regards that, said Isabel, I should find in my own nation entertainment for a lifetime, but we have a long drive and my aunt will soon wish to start. She turned back towards the others, and Lord Warbaton 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 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. End of chapter 9