 Preface of the Portrait of a Lady, Volume 1. The portrait of a lady was, like Roderick Hudson, begun in Florence during three months spent there in the spring of 1879. Like Roderick and like the American it had been designed for publication in the Atlantic Monthly where it began to appear in 1880. It differed from its two predecessors, however, in finding a course also open to it from month to month in Macmillan's magazine, which was to be, for me, one of the last occasions of simultaneous serialization in the two countries, that the changing conditions of literary intercourse between England and the United States had up to then left unaltered. It is a long novel and I was long in writing it. I remember being again much occupied with it the following year during a stay of several weeks made in Venice. I had rooms on Riva Siavoni at the top of a house near the passage leading off to San Zacharia, the waterside life, the wondrous lagoon spread before me, and the ceaseless human chatter of Venice came in at my windows, to which I seemed to myself to have been constantly driven in the fruitless fidget of composition as if to see weather out in the blue channel, the ship of some right suggestion, of some better phrase, of the next happy twist of my subject, the next true touch for my canvas, mightn't come into sight. But I recall vividly enough that the response most elicited, in general, to these restless appeals was the rather grim admonition that romantic and historic sites, such as the land of Italy abounds in, offer the artist a questionable aid to concentration when they themselves are not to be the subject of it. They are too rich in their own life and too charged with their own meanings merely to help him out with a lame phrase. They draw him away from his small question to their own greater ones, so that after little time he feels, while thus yearning towards them in his difficulty, as if he were asking an army of glorious veterans to help him to arrest a peddler who has given him the wrong change. There are pages of the book which, in the reading over, have seemed to make me see again the bristling curve of the wide riva, the large color spots of the balcony houses, and the repeated undulation of the little hunched-back bridges, marked by the rise and drop again, with the wave, a foreshortened clicking pedestrians. The Venetian footfall and the Venetian cry, all talk there, wherever uttered having the pitch of a call across the water, come in once more at the window, renewing one's old impression of the delighted senses and the divided frustrated mind. How can places that speak in general so to the imagination not give it, at the moment the particular thing it wants? I recollect again and again, in beautiful places, dropping into that wonderment. The real truth is, I think, that they express, under this appeal, only too much, more than, in the given case, one has used for, so that one finds oneself working less congressly, after all, so far as the surrounding picture is concerned, then in presence of the moderate and the neutral, to which we may lend something of the light of our vision. Such a place as Venice is too proud for such charities. Venice doesn't borrow, she but all magnificently gives. We profit by that enormously, but to do so we must either be quite off duty or be on it in her service alone. Such and so rueful are these reminisces, though on the whole, no doubt, one's book and one's literary effort at large, were to be the better for them. Strangely fertilizing in the long run, does a wasted effort of attention often prove. It all depends on how the attention has been cheated, has been squandered. There are high-handed, insolent frauds, and there are insidious sneaking ones. And there is, I fear, even on the most designing artist's part, always witless enough good faith, always anxious enough desire, to fail to guard him against their deceits. Trying to recover here, for recognition, the germ of my idea, I see that it must have consisted not at all in any conceit of plot, nefarious name, in any flash, upon the fancy of a set of relations, or in any one of those situations that, by a logic of their own, immediately fall, for the fabulous, into movement, into a march or a rush, a patter of quick steps, but altogether in the sense of a single character, the character and aspect of a particular engaging young woman, to which the usual elements of a subject, certainly of a setting, were to need to be super-added. Quite as interesting as the young woman herself at her best, do I find, I must again repeat, this projection of memory upon the whole matter of the growth, in one's imagination, of some such apology for a motive. These are the fascinations of the fabulous's art, these lurking forces of expansion, these necessities of the up-springing in the seed, these beautiful determinations on the part of the idea entertained, to grow as tall as possible, to push into the light and the air and thickly flower there, and quite as much, these fine possibilities of recovering, from some good standpoint on the ground gained, the intimate history of the business, of retracing and reconstructing its steps and stages. I have always fondly remembered a remark that I heard fall years ago from the lips of Ivan Tergenev in regards to his own experience of the usual origin of the fictive picture. It began for him almost always with a vision of some person or persons, who hovered before him, soliciting him, as the active or passive figure, interesting him and appealing to him just as they were and by what they were. He saw them in that fashion as dispensables, saw them subject to the chances, the complications of existence, and saw them vividly, but then had to find for them the right relations, those that would most bring them out, to imagine, to invent and select and piece together the situations most useful and favorable to the sense of the creatures themselves, the complications they would be most likely to produce and to feel. To arrive at these things is to arrive at my story, he said, and that's the way I look for it. The result is that I'm often accused of not having story enough. I seem to myself to have as much as I need, to show my people to exhibit their relations with each other, for that is all my measure. If I watch them long enough I see them come together, I see them placed, I see them engaged in this or that act, and in this or that difficulty. How they look and move and speak and behave, always in the setting I have found for them, is my account of them, of which I dare say, alas, qu'est-ce la manque souvent d'architecture. But I would rather, I think, have too little architecture than too much, when there's danger of its interfering with my measure of the truth. The French, of course, like more of it than I can give, having by their own genius such a hand for it, and indeed one must give all one can. As for the origin of one's wind-blown germs themselves, who shall say, as you ask where they come from, we have to go too far back, too far behind, to say. Isn't it all we can say that they come from every quarter of heaven, that they are there, at almost any turn of the road? They accumulate, and we are always picking them over, selecting among them. They are the breath of life, by which I mean that life, in its own way, breathes them upon us. They are so, in a manner prescribed and imposed, floated into our minds by the current of life. That reduces to imbecility the vain critic's quarrel, so often, with one subject, when he hasn't the wit to accept it. Will he point out, then, which other it should properly have been, his office, being, essentially, to point out? Il ensore bien embrace. Ah, when he points out what I've done, or fail to do with it, that's another matter. There he's on his ground. I give him up my sarcotecure, my distinguished friend concluded, as much as he will. So this beautiful genius. And I recall with comfort the gratitude I drew from his reference to the intensity of suggestion, that may reside in the stray figure, the unattached character, the image on disponsibilité. It gave me higher warrant than I seemed, then, to have met, for just that blessed habit of one's own imagination, the trick of investing some conceived or encountered individual, some brace or group of individuals, with the germinal property and authority. I was myself so much more antecedently conscious of my figures than of their setting, a too preliminary, a preferential interest, in which struck me, as in general, such a pudding of the cart before the horse. I might envy, though I couldn't emulate, the imaginative writer so constituted as to see his fable first and to make out its agents afterwards. I could think so little of any fable that it didn't need its agents positively to launch it. I could think so little of any situation that didn't depend for its interest on the nature of the person situated, and thereby on their way of taking it. There are methods of so-called presentation, I believe, among novelists who have appeared to flourish, that offer the situation as indifferent to that support, but I have not lost the sense of the value for me, at the time, of the admirable Russian's testimony to my not needing, all superstitiously, to try and perform any such gymnastic. Other echoes from the same source linger with me, I confess, as unfadingly, if it be not all, indeed, one much-embracing echo. It was impossible after that not to read, for one's uses, high lucidity into the tormented and disfigured and bemuddled question of the objective value, and even quite into that of the critical appreciation of subject in the novel. One had, from an early time, for that matter, the instinct of the right estimate of such values, and of its reducing to the inane the dull dispute over the immoral subject and the moral. Recognizing so promptly the one measure of the worth of a given subject, the question about it that, rightly answered, disposes of all others, is it valid, in a word, is it genuine? Is it sincere, the result of some direct impression or perception of life? I had found small edification, mostly, in a critical pretension that had neglected from the first all delimitation of ground and all definition of terms. The air of my earlier time shows, to memory, as darkened all around, with that vanity, unless the difference today be just in one's own final impatience, the lapse of one's attention. There is, I think, no more nutritive or suggestive truth in this connection than that of the perfect dependence of the moral sense of a work of art on the amount of felt life concerned in producing it. The question comes back, thus, obviously, to the kind and the degree of the artist's prime sensibility, which is the soil out of which his subject springs. The quality and capacity of that soil, its ability to grow with due freshness and straightness any vision of life, represents strongly or weakly the projected morality. That element is but another name for the more or less close connection of the subject with some mark made on the intelligence with some sincere experience, by which, at the same time, of course, one is far from contending that this enveloping air of the artist's humanity, which gives the last touch to the worth of the work, is not a widely and wondrously varying element, being on one occasion a rich and magnificent medium, and on another a comparatively poor and ungenerous one. Here we get exactly the high price of the novel as a literary form, its power not only while preserving that form with closeness, to range through all differences of the individual relation to its general subject matter, all the varieties of outlook on life, of disposition to reflect and project, created by conditions that are never the same from man to man, or so far as that goes from man to woman, but positively to appear more true to its character in proportion as its strains, or tends to burst with a latent extravagance, its mold. The house of fiction has, in short, not one window, but a million, a number of possible windows not to be reckoned, rather, every one of which has been impierced, or is still piercable in its vast front by the need of the individual vision and by the pressure of the individual will. These apertures of dissimilar shape and size hang so, altogether, over the human scene, that we might have expected of them a greater sameness of report than we find. They are but windows at the best, mere holes in a dead wall, disconnected, perched aloft, they are not hinged doors opening straight upon life. But they have this mark of their own that each of them stands a figure with a pair of eyes, or at least with a field glass which forms again and again for observation a unique instrument, ensuring to the person making use of it an impression distinct from every other. He and his neighbors are watching the same show, but one seeing more where the other sees less, one seeing black where the other sees white, one seeing big where the other sees small, one seeing coarse where the other sees fine, and so on and so on. There is fortunately no saying on what for the particular pair of eyes the window may not open, fortunately by reason precisely of this incalculability of range. The spreading field, the human scene, is the choice of subject, the pierced aperture, either broad or balconyed or soot-like and low-browed, is the literary form. But they are singly or together as nothing without the posted presence of the watcher, without, in other words, the consciousness of the artist. Tell me what the artist is, and I will tell you of what he has been conscious. Thereby I shall express to you at once his boundless freedom and his moral reference. All this is a long way round, however, for my word about my dim first move towards the portrait, which was exactly my grasp of a single character, an acquisition I had made, more over, after a fashion not here to be retraced. Enough that I was, as seemed to me, in complete possession of it, that I had been so for a long time, that this had made it familiar and yet had not blurred its charm, and that, all urgently, all tormentingly, I saw it in motion, and so to speak, in transit. This amounts to saying that I saw it as bent upon its fate, some fate or other, which, among the possibilities, being precisely the question. Thus I had my vivid individual, vivid so strangely, in spite of being still at large, not confined by the conditions, not engaged in the tangle to which we look for much of the impress that constitutes an identity, if the apparition was still all to be placed, how came it to be vivid? Since we puzzle such quantities out mostly just by the business of placing them. One could answer such a question beautifully doubtless, if one could do so subtle, if not so monstrous a thing, as to write the history of the growth of one's imagination. One would describe then what, at a given time, had extraordinarily happened to it, and one would so, for instance, be in a position to tell, with an approach to clearness, how, under favour of occasion, it had been able to take over, take over straight from life, such and such a constituted, animated figure or form. The figure has to that extent, as you see Ben placed, placed in the imagination that detains it, preserves, protects, enjoys it, conscious of its presence in the dusky, crowded, heterogeneous back-shop of the mind, very much as a wary dealer in precious odds and ends, competent to make an advance on rare objects confided to him, is conscious of the rare little piece left in deposit by the reduced, mysterious lady of tidal, or the speculative amateur, and which is already there to disclose its merit afresh, as soon as a key shall have clicked open in a cupboard door. That may be, I recognize, a somewhat superfine analogy, for the particular value I hear speak of, the image of the young feminine nature that I had had for so considerable a time, all curiously at my disposal, but it appears to fond memory quite to fit the fact, with the recall, in addition, of my pious desire but to place my treasure right. I quite remind myself thus of the dealer resigned not to realize, resigned to keeping the precious object locked up indefinitely rather than committed, at no matter what price, to vulgar hands, for there are dealers in these forms and figures and treasures capable of that refinement. The point is, however, that the single small cornerstone, the conception of a certain young woman affronting her destiny, had begun with being all my outfit for the large building of the portrait of a lady. It came to be a square and spacious house, or has at least seemed so to me in this going over it again, but, such as it is, it had to be put up round my young woman while she stood there in perfect isolation. That is, to me, artistically speaking, the circumstance of interest, for I have lost myself once more, I confess, in the curiosity of analyzing the structure. By what process of logical accretion was this slight personality, the mere slim shade of an intelligent but presumptuous girl, to find itself endowed with the high attributes of a subject, and indeed by what thinness, at the best, would such a subject not be vitiated? Millions of presumptuous girls, intelligent or not intelligent, daily affront their destiny, and what is it open to their destiny to be at the most that we should make an adieu about it? The novel is of its very nature an adieu, an adieu about something, and the larger form it takes, the greater, of course, the adieu. Therefore, consciously, that was what one was in for, for positively organizing an adieu about Isabelle Archer. One looked at well in the face, I seem to remember, this extravagance, and with the effect precisely of recognizing the charm of the problem. Challenge any such problem with any intelligence, and you immediately see how full it is of substance. The wonder being, all the while, as we look at the world, how absolutely, how inordinately, the Isabelle Archer's, and even much smaller, female fry, insist on mattering. George Elliot has admirably noted it. In these frail vessels is born onward through the ages the treasure of human affection. In Romeo and Juliet, Juliet has to be important, just as in Adam Bede, and the Mill on the Floss, and Middlemarch, and Daniel de Ronda, Hedi Sorrell, and Maggie Tulliver, and Rosamond Vincy, and Gwendolyn Harloth have to be, with that much of firm ground, that much of bracing air, at the disposal, all the while, of their feet and their lungs. They are typical, none the less, of a class difficult in the individual case to make a center of interest, so difficult in fact that many an expert painter, as for instance Dickens and Walter Scott, as for instance even, in the main, so subtle a hand as that of R. L. Stevenson, has preferred to leave the task unattempted. There are in fact writers, as to whom we make out that their refuge from this is to assume it to be not worth their attempting, by which Pusilanimity, in truth, their honor is scantily saved. It is never in a testation of value, or even of our imperfect sense of one. It is never a tribute to any truth at all, that we shall respect that value badly. It never makes up artistically for an artist's dim feeling about a thing he shall do, the thing as ill as possible. There are better ways than that, the best of all which is to begin with less stupidity. It may be answered, meanwhile, in regards to Shakespeare's and George Eliot's testimony, that their concession to the importance of their Juliet's and Cleopatra's and Portia's, even with Portia as the very type and model of the young person intelligent and presumptuous, and to that of their headies and maggies and Rosamunds and Gwendolyn's, suffers the abatement that these slimnesses are when figuring as the main props of the theme, never suffered to be the sole ministers of its appeal, but have their inadequacy eaked out with comic relief and underplots, as the playwrights say, when not with murders and battles and the great mutations of the world. If they are shown as mattering as much as they could possibly pretend to, the proof of it is in a hundred other persons, made of much stouter stuff, and each involved more over in a hundred relations which matter to them, concomitantly with that one. Cleopatra matters beyond bounds to Antony, but his colleagues, his antagonists, the State of Rome, and the impending battle also prodigiously matter. Portia matters to Antonio, and to Shylock, and to the Prince of Morocco, to the fifty aspiring princes, but for these gentry there are other lively concerns. For Antonio, notably, there are Shylock and Bassiano, and his lost ventures, and the extremity of his predicament. This extremity, indeed, by the same token matters to Portia, though its doing so becomes of interest all by the fact that Portia matters to us. But she does so at any rate, in that almost everything comes round to it again, supports my contention as to this fine example of the value recognized in the mere young thing. I say mere young thing, because I guess that even Shakespeare, preoccupied mainly though he may have been with the passions of princes, would scarce have pretended to found the best of his appeal for her on her high social position. It is an example exactly of the deep difficulty braved, the difficulty of making George Eliot's frail vessel if not the all and all of our attention at least the clearest of the call. Now to see deep difficulty braved is at any time, for the really addicted artist, to feel almost even as a pang the beautiful incentive, and to feel it verily in such a sort as to wish the danger intensified. The difficulty most worth tackling can only be for him, in these conditions, the greatest the case permits of. So I remember feeling here, in presence, always, that is, of the particular uncertainty of my ground, that there would be one way better than another, oh, ever so much better than any other, of making it fight out its battle. The frail vessel that charged with George Eliot's treasure, and thereby of such importance to those who curiously approach it, has likewise possibilities and an importance to itself. Possibilities which permit of treatment, and in fact peculiarly require it from the moment they are considered at all. There is always the escape for many close account of the weak agent of such spells by using as a bridge for evasion, for retreat and flight, the view of her relation to those surrounding her. Make it predominantly a view of their relation and the trick is played. You give the general sense of her effect, and you give it, so far as the raising on it of a superstructure goes, with the maximum of ease. Well, I recall perfectly how little, in my now quite established connection, the maximum of ease appealed to me, and how I seemed to get rid of it by an honest transposition of the weights in the two scales. It's the center of the subject in the young woman's own consciousness, I said to myself, and you get as interesting and as beautiful a difficulty as you could wish. Stick to that for the center. Put the heaviest weight into that scale, which will be so largely the scale of her relation to herself. Make her only interested enough, at the same time in the things that are not herself, and this relation needn't fear to be too limited. Place meanwhile in the other scale the lighter weight, which is usually the one that tips the balance of interest. Press least hard, in short, on the consciousness of your heroine's satellites, especially the male. Make it an interest-contributive only to the greater one. See, at all events, what can be done in this way? What better field could there be for a due ingenuity? The girl hovers, inextinguishable, as a charming creature, and the job will be to translate her into the highest terms of that formula, and as nearly as possible, moreover, into all of them. To depend upon her in her little concerns wholly, to see you through will necessitate, remember, your really doing her. So far I reasoned, and it took nothing less than a technical rigor I now easily see, to inspire me with the right confidence of erecting on such a plot of ground, the neat and careful proportioned pile of bricks that arches over it, and that was thus to form, constructionally speaking a literary monument. Such is the aspect that, to-day, the portrait wears for me, a structure reared with an architectural competence, as Turgenev would have said, that makes it, to the author's own sense, the most proportioned of his productions after the ambassadors, which was to follow it so many years later, in which has, no doubt, a superior roundness. On one thing I was determined that, though I should clearly have to pile brick upon brick for the creation of an interest, I would leave no pretext for saying that anything is out of line, scale, or perspective. I would build large, in fine embossed vaults and painted arches, as who should say, and yet never let it appear that the checkered pavement, the ground under the reader's feet, fails to stretch at every point to the base of the walls. That precautionary spirit, on reparousal of the book, is the old note that most touches me. It testifies so, for my own ear, to the anxiety of my provision for the reader's amusement. I felt, in view of the possible limitations of my subject, that no such provision could be excessive, and the development of the latter was simply the general form of that earnest quest. And I find, indeed, that this is the only account I can give myself of the evolution of the fable, it is all under the head, thus named, that I conceive the needful accretion as having taken place, the right complications as having started. It was naturally of the essence that the young woman should be herself complex, that was rudimentary, or was it any rate the light in which Isabelle Archer had originally dawned. It went, however, but a certain way, and other lights contending conflicting lights, and of as many different colors, if possible, as the Rockets, the Roman Catharines, and Catherine-wheels of a pyrotechnical display, would be employable to a test that she was. I had, no doubt, a groping instinct for the right complications, since I am quite unable to track the footsteps of those that constitute, as the case stands, the general situation exhibited. They are there for what they are worth, and as numerous as they might be, but my memory, I confess, is a blank as to how and whence they came. I seem to myself to have waked up one morning in possession of them, of Ralph Touchett and his parents, of Madame Merle, of Gilbert Osmond, and his daughter and his sister, of Lord Warburton, Casper Goodwood, and Miss Stackpole, the definite array of contributions to Isabelle Archer's history. I recognized them, I knew them, they were the numbered pieces of my puzzle, the concrete terms of my plot. It was as if they had simply, by an impulse of their own, floated into my kin, and all in response to my primary question, well, what will she do? Their answer seemed to be that if I would trust them they would show me, on which, with an urgent appeal to them to make it at least as interesting as they could, I trusted them. They were like the group of attendants and entertainers who come down by train when people in the country give a party. They represented the contract for carrying the party on. That was an excellent relation with them, a possible one even with so broken a reed from her slightness of cohesion. As Henrietta Stackpole, it is a familiar truth to the novelist at the strenuous hour that as certain elements in any work are of the essence, so others are only of the form, that as this or that character, this or that disposition of the novel, belongs to the subject directly, so to speak, so this or that other belongs to it but indirectly, belongs intimately to the treatment. This is a truth, however, of which he rarely gets the benefit, since it could be assured to him, really, but by criticism based upon perception, criticism which is too little of this world. He must not think of benefits moreover, I freely recognize, for that way dishonor lies. He has, that is, but one to think of. The benefit, whatever it may be, involved in his having cast a spell upon the simpler, the very simplest forms of attention. This is all he is entitled to. He is entitled to nothing he is bound to admit that can come to him from the reader, as a result on the latter's part of any act of reflection or discrimination. He may enjoy this finer tribute, that is another affair, but on condition only of taking it as a gratuity thrown in, a mere miraculous windfall, the fruit of a tree he may not pretend to have shaken. Against reflection, against discrimination in his interest, all earth and air conspire. Wherefore it is that, as I say, he must in many a case have schooled himself, from the first, to work but for a living wage. The living wage is the reader's grant of the least possible quantity of attention required for consciousness of a spell. The occasional charming tip is an act of his intelligence over and beyond this, a golden apple for the writer's lap straight from the wind-stirred tree. The artist may, of course, in wanted moods, dream of some paradise for art, where the direct appeal to the intelligence might be legalized, for to such extravagances as these his yearning mind can scarce hope ever completely to close itself. The most he can do is to remember they are extravagances. All of which is perhaps but a gracefully devious way of saying that Henrietta Stackpole was a good example, in the portrait, of the truth to which I just adverted, as good an example as I could name were it not that Maria Gostry, in the Ambassadors, then in the bosom of time, may be mentioned as a better. Each of these persons is but wheels to the coach, neither belongs to the body of that vehicle, or is for a moment accommodated with a seat inside. Where the subject alone is ensconced, in the form of its hero and heroine, and of the privileged high officials, say, who ride with the King and Queen. There are reasons why one would have liked this to be felt, as in general one would like almost anything to be felt in one's work, that one has oneself contributively felt. We have seen, however, how idle is that pretension, which I should be sorry to make too much of. Maria Gostry and Miss Stackpole, then, are cases, each, of the light fissile, not of the true agent. They may run beside the coach for all they are worth. They may cling to it till they are out of breath, as poor Miss Stackpole also visibly does. But neither, all the while, so much as gets her foot on the step, neither ceases for a moment to tread the dusty road. Put it even, that they are like the fishwives, who help to bring back to Paris from Versailles on that most ominous day of the first half of the French Revolution, the carriage of the royal family. The only thing is that I may well be asked, I acknowledged, why then in the present fiction I have suffered Henrietta, of whom we have indubitably too much, so officiously, so strangely, so almost inexplicably to pervade. I presently will say what I can for that anomaly, and in the most conciliatory fashion. A point I wish still more to make, is that, if my relation of confidence with the actors in my drama who were, unlike Miss Stackpole, true agents, was an excellent one to have arrived at, there still remained my relationship with the reader, which was another affair altogether, and as to which I felt no one to be trusted but myself. That solicitude was to be accordingly expressed in the artful patience with which, as I have said, I piled brick upon brick. The bricks for the whole counting over, putting for bricks little touches and inventions and enhancements by the way, affect me in truth as well nigh enumerable, and as ever so scrupulously fitted together and packed in. It is an effect of detail, of the minutest though, if one were in this connection to say, as one would express the hope that the general, the ampler heir of the modest monument, still survives. I do at least seem to catch the key to a part of this abundance of small, anxious, ingenious illustration as I recollect putting my finger in my young woman's interest on the most obvious of her predicates. What will she do? Why the first thing she will do will be to come to Europe, which in fact will form, and all inevitably, no small part of her principal adventure. Coming to Europe is even for the frail vessels, in this wonderful age, a mild adventure, but what is truer than that on one side, the side of their independence of flood and field, of the moving accident, of battle and murder and sudden death, her adventures are to be mild. Without her sense of them, her sense for them, as one may say, they are next to nothing at all. But isn't the beauty in the difficulty just in showing their mystic conversion by that sense, conversion into the stuff of drama, or even more delightful word still, of story? It was all as clear my contention as a silver bell. Two very good instances, I think, of this effect of conversion. Two cases of the rare chemistry are the passages in which Isabel, coming into the drawing-room at Garden Court, coming in from a wet walk or whatever, that rainy afternoon, finds Madame Merle in possession of the place. Madame Merle seated, all absorbed but all serene, at the piano, and deeply recognizes, in the striking of such an hour, in the presence there among the gathering shades of this personage, of whom a moment before she had never so much as heard, a turning point in her life. It is dreadful to have too much, for any artistic demonstration, to dot one's eyes and insist on one's intentions, and I am not eager to do it now, but the question here was that of producing the maximum of intensity with the minimum of strain. The interest was to be raised to its pitch, and yet the elements to be kept in their key, so that, should the whole thing duly impress, I might show what an exciting inward life may do for the person leading it, even while it remains perfectly normal. I cannot think of a more consistent application of that ideal, unless it be in the long statement, just beyond the middle of the book, of my young woman's extraordinary meditative vigil on the occasion that was to become for her such a landmark. Reduced to its essence it is but the vigil of searching criticism, but it throws the action further forward than twenty incidents might have done. It was designed to have all the vivacity of incidents and all the economy of picture. She sits up by her dying fire, far into the night, under the spell of recognitions on which she finds the last sharpness suddenly wait. It is a representation simply of her motionlessly seeing, and an attempt withal to make the mere, still, lucidity of her act as interesting as the surprise of a caravan or the identification of a pirate. It represents, for that matter, one of the identifications dear to the novelist, and even indispensable to him, but it all goes on without her being approached by another person and without her leaving her chair. It is obviously the best thing in the book, but it is only a supreme illustration of the general plan. As to Henrietta, my apology for whom I just left incomplete. She exemplifies, I fear, in her superabundance, not an element of my plan, but only an excess of my zeal. So early was to begin my tendency to overtreat rather than undertreat, when there was choice or danger, my subject. Many members of my craft I gather are far from agreeing with me, but I have always held overtreating the minor disservice. Treating that of the portrait amounted to never forgetting, by any lapse, that the thing was under a special obligation to be amusing. There was the danger of the noted thinness, which was to be averted tooth and nail, by cultivation of the lively. That is, at least, how I see it to-day. Henrietta must have been, at that time, a part of my wonderful notion of the lively. And then there was another matter. I had, within the few preceding years, come to live in London, and the international light lay, in those days, to my sense, thick and rich upon the scene. It was the light in which so much of the picture hung. But that is another matter. There is really too much to say. CHAPTER I Under certain circumstances there are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea. There are circumstances in which, whether you partake of the tea or not, some people, of course, never do, the situation is, in itself, delightful. Those that I have in mind in beginning to unfold this simple history offered an admirable setting to an innocent pastime. The implements of the Little Feast had been disposed upon the lawn of an old English country-house, in what I should call the perfect middle of a splendid summer afternoon. Part of the afternoon had waned, but much of it was left, and what was left was of the finest and rarest quality. Real dusk would not arrive for many hours. But the flood of summer light had begun to ebb. The air had grown mellow. The shadows were long upon the smooth, dense turf. They lengthened slowly, however, and the scene expressed that sense of leisure still to come, which is perhaps the chief source of one's enjoyment of such a scene at such an hour. From five o'clock to eight is on certain occasions a little eternity, but on such an occasion as this the interval could only be an eternity of pleasure. The persons concerned in it were taking their pleasure quietly, and they were not of the sex which is supposed to furnish the regular votaries of the ceremony I had mentioned. The shadows on the perfect lawn were straight and angular. They were the shadows of an old man sitting in a deep wicker chair near the low table on which the tea had been served, and of two younger men, strolling to and fro, in desultory talk in front of him. The old man had his cup in his hand. It was an unusually large cup, of a different pattern from the rest of the set, and painted in brilliant colors. He disposed of its contents with much circumspection, holding it for a long time close to his chin, with his face turned to the house. His companions had either finished their tea, or were indifferent to their privilege. They smoked cigarettes as they continued to stroll. One of them, from time to time, as he passed, looked with a certain attention at the elder man, who unconscious of observation rested his eyes upon the rich red front of his dwelling. The house that rose beyond the lawn was a structure to repay such consideration, and was the most characteristic object in the peculiarly English picture I have attempted to sketch. It stood upon a low hill above the river, the river being the Thames at some forty miles from London, a long gabled front of red brick, with the complexion of which time and the weather had played all sorts of pictorial tricks, only, however, to improve and refine it, to the lawn, its patches of ivy, its clustered chimneys, its windows smothered in creepers. The house had a name and a history. The old gentleman taking his tea would have been delighted to tell you these things, how it had been built under Edward VI, had offered a night's hospitality to the great Elizabeth whose august person had extended itself upon a huge, magnificent, and terribly angular bed which still formed the principal honour of the sleeping apartments, had been a good deal bruised and defaced in Cromwell's wars and then, under the restoration, repaired and much enlarged. And how finally? After having been remodeled and disfigured in the eighteenth century, it had passed into the careful keeping of a shrewd American banker, who had bought it originally because, owing to circumstances too complicated to set forth, it was offered at a great bargain, bought it with much grumbling at its ugliness, its antiquity, its incomodity, and who now, at the end of twenty years, had begun conscious of a real aesthetic passion for it, so that he knew all its points and would tell you just where to stand to see them in combination and just the hour when the shadows of its various protuberances which fell so softly upon the warm, weary brickwork were of the right measure. Besides this, as I have said, he could have counted off most of the successive owners and occupants, several of whom were known to general fame. Doing so, however, with an undemonstrative conviction that the latest phase of its destiny was not the least honourable. The front of the house overlooking that portion of the lawn with which we are concerned was not the entrance front. This was in quite another quarter. Privacy here rained supreme, and the wide carpet of turf that covered the level hill-top seemed but the extension of a luxurious interior. The great still oaks and beaches flung down a shade as dense as that of velvet curtains, and the place was furnished like a room with papers that lay upon the grass. The river was at some distance, where the ground began to slope the lawn properly speaking ceased, but it was, nonetheless, a charming walk down to the water. The old gentleman at the tea-table, who had come from America thirty years before, had brought with him, at top of his baggage, his American physiognomy, and he had not only brought it with him, but he had kept it in the best order, so that, if necessary, he might have taken it back to his own country with perfect confidence. At present, obviously, nevertheless, he was not likely to displace himself. His journeys were over, and he was taking the rest that precedes the great rest. He had a narrow, clean-shaven face, with features evenly distributed and an expression of placid acuteness. It was evidently a face in which the range of representation was not large, so that the air of contented shrewdness was all the more of a merit. It seemed to tell that he had been successful in life, yet it seemed to tell also that his success had not been exclusive and invidious, but it had much of the inoffensiveness of failure. He had certainly had a great experience of men, but there was an almost rustic simplicity in the faint smile that played upon his lean, spacious cheek, and lighted up his humorous eye as he had last, slowly and carefully, deposited his big teacup upon the table. He was neatly dressed, in well-brushed black, but a shawl was folded upon his knees, and his feet were encased in thick, embroidered slippers. A beautiful collie-dog lay upon the grass near his chair, watching the master's face almost as tenderly as the master took in the still-more magisterial physiognomy of the house, and a little bristling, bustling terrier bestowed a desultory attendance upon the other gentleman. One of these was a remarkably well-made man of five and thirty. With a face as English as that of the old gentleman I have just sketched was something else, a notably handsome face, fresh-colored, fair and frank, with firm, straight features, a lively gray eye, and the rich adornment of a chestnut beard. This person had a certain fortunate, brilliant, exceptional look, the air of a happy temperament fertilized by high civilization, which would have made almost any observer envy him at a venture. He was booted and spurred as if he had dismounted from a long ride. He wore a white hat which looked too large for him. He held his two hands behind him, and in one of them, a large, white, well-shaped fist, was crumpled a pair of soiled dog-skin gloves. His companion, measuring the length of the lawn beside him, was a person of quite a different pattern, who, although he might have excited grave curiosity, would not, like the other, have provoked you to wish yourself almost blindly in his place. Tall, lean, loosely and feebly put together, he had an ugly, sickly, witty, charming face, furnished but by no means decorated, with a struggling moustache and whisker. He looked clever and ill, a combination by no means felicitous, and he wore a brown velvet jacket. He carried his hands in his pockets, and there was something in the way he did it that showed the habit was inveterate. His gait had a shambling, wandering quality. He was not very firm in the legs. As I have said, whenever he passed the old man in the chair, he rested his eyes upon him, and at this moment, with their faces brought into relation, you would easily have seen they were father and son. The father caught his son's eye at last, and gave him a mild, responsive smile. I'm getting on very well, said he. Have you drunk your tea as the son? Yes, and enjoyed it. Shall I give you some more? The old man considered placidly. Well, I guess I'll wait and see. He had, in speaking, the American tone. Are you cold? The son inquired. The father slowly rubbed his legs. Well, I don't know. I can't tell till I feel. Perhaps someone might feel for you, said the younger man, laughing. Oh, I hope someone will always feel for me. Don't you feel for me, Lord Warburton? Oh, yes, immensely, said the gentleman, addressed as Lord Warburton promptly. I'm bound to say you look wonderfully comfortable. Well, I suppose I am in most respects. And the old man looked down at his green shawl and smoothed it over his knees. The fact is, I've been comfortable so many years that I suppose I've got so used to it I don't know it. Yes, that's the bore of comforts, said Lord Warburton. We only know when we're uncomfortable. It strikes me we're rather particular, his companion remarked. Oh, yes, there's no doubt we're particular, Lord Warburton murmured. And then the three men remained silent a while, the two younger ones standing looking down at the other, who presently asked for more tea. I should think you would be very unhappy with that shawl, Lord Warburton resumed, while his companion filled the old man's cup again. Oh, no, he must have the shawl, cried the gentleman in the velvet coat. Don't put such ideas as that into his head. It belongs to my wife, said the old man, simply. Oh, if it's for sentimental reasons. And Lord Warburton made a gesture of apology. I suppose I must give it to her when she comes, the old man went on. You are pleased to do nothing of the kind. You'll keep it to cover your poor old legs. Well, you mustn't abuse my legs, said the old man. I guess they're as good as yours. Oh, you're perfectly free to abuse mine, his son replied, giving him his tea. Well, we're too lame, ducks. I don't think there's much difference. I'm much obliged to you for calling me a duck. How's your tea? Well, it's rather hot. That's intended to be a merit. Ah, there's a great deal of merit, remembered the old man kindly. He's a very good nurse, Lord Warburton. Isn't he a bit clumsy, asked his lordship? Oh, no, he's not clumsy, considering that he's an invalid himself. He's a very good nurse for a sick nurse. I call him my sick nurse because he's sick himself. Oh, come, Daddy, the ugly young man exclaimed. Well, you are. I wish you weren't, but I suppose you can't help it. I might try. That's an idea, said the young man. Were you ever sick, Lord Warburton? His father asked. Lord Warburton considered a moment. Yes, sir, once in the Persian Gulf. He's making light of you, Daddy, said the other young man. That's a sort of joke. Well, there seem to be so many sorts now, Daddy replied serenely. You don't look as if you had been sick any way, Lord Warburton. He's sick of life. He was just telling me so, going on fearfully about it, said Lord Warburton's friend. Is that true, sir, asked the old man gravely? If it is, your son gave me no consolation. He's a wretched fellow to talk to, a regular cynic. He doesn't seem to believe in anything. That's another sort of joke, said the person accused of cynicism. It's because his health is so poor, his father explained to Lord Warburton. It affects his mind and colours his way of looking at things. He seems to feel as if he had never had a chance. But it's almost entirely theoretical, you know. It doesn't seem to affect his spirits. I've hardly ever seen him when he wasn't cheerful, about as he is at present. He often cheers me up. The young man so described looked at Lord Warburton and laughed. Is it a glowing eulogy or an accusation of levity? Should you like me to carry out my theories, Daddy? By Jove we should see some queer things, cried Lord Warburton. I hope you haven't taken up that sort of tone, said the old man. Warburton's tone is worse than mine. He pretends to be bored. I'm not in the least bored. I find life only too interesting. Ah! Too interesting. You shouldn't allow it to be that, you know. I'm never bored when I come here, said Lord Warburton. One gets such uncommonly good talk. Is that another sort of joke, asked the old man? You've no excuse for being bored anywhere. When I was your age I never heard of such a thing. You must have developed very late. No, I developed very quick. That was just the reason. When I was twenty years old I was very highly developed indeed. I was working tooth and nail. You wouldn't be bored if you had something to do, but all you rich young men are too idle. You think too much of your pleasure. You're too fastidious, and too indolent, and too rich. Oh! I say, cried Lord Warburton, you are hardly the person to accuse a fellow creature of being too rich. Do you mean because I'm a banker, asked the old man? Because of that, if you like, and because you have, haven't you, such unlimited means? He isn't very rich, the other young man mercifully pleaded. He has given away an immense deal of money. Well, I suppose it was his own, said Lord Warburton, and in that case could there be a better proof of wealth. Let not a public benefactor talk of one's being too fond of pleasure. Daddy's very fond of pleasure. Of other peoples. The old man shook his head. I don't pretend to have contributed anything to the amusement of my contemporaries. My dear father, you're too modest. That's a kind of joke, sir, said Lord Warburton. You young men have too many jokes. When there are no jokes, you've nothing left. Fortunately, there are always more jokes, the ugly young man remarked. I don't believe it. I believe things are getting more serious. You young men will find that out. The increasing seriousness of things, then, that's the great opportunity of jokes. They'll have to be grim jokes, said the old man. I'm convinced there will be great changes and not at all for the better. I quite agree with you, sir, Lord Warburton declared. I'm very sure there will be great changes, and that all sorts of queer things will happen. That's why I find so much difficulty in applying your advice. You know you told me the other day that I ought to take hold of something. One hesitates to take hold of a thing that may the next moment be knocked sky high. You ought to take hold of a pretty woman, said his companion. He's trying hard to fall in love, he added, by way of explanation to his father. The pretty women themselves may be sent flying, Lord Warburton exclaimed. No, no, they'll be firm, the old man rejoined. They'll not be affected by the social and political changes I just referred to. You mean they won't be abolished? Very well, then. I'll lay hands on one as soon as possible, and tie her round my neck as a life preserver. The ladies will save us, said the old man. That is the best of them will, for I make a difference between them. Take up to a good one and marry her, and your life will become much more interesting. A momentary silence marked, perhaps, on the part of his auditors, a sense of the magnanimity of this speech, for it was a secret, neither for his son nor for his visitor, that his own experiment in matrimony had not been a happy one. As he said, however, he made a difference, and these words may have been intended as a confession of personal error, though of course it was not in place for either of his companions to remark that, apparently, the lady of his choice had not been one of the best. If I marry an interesting woman, I shall be interested. Is that what you say? Lord Warburton asked. I'm not at all keen about marrying. Your son misrepresented me, but there's no knowing what an interesting woman might do with me. I should like to see your idea of an interesting woman, said his friend. My dear fellow, you can't see ideas, especially such highly ethereal ones as mine. If I could only see it myself, that would be a great step in advance. Well, you may fall in love with whomesoever you please, but you mustn't fall in love with my niece, said the old man. His son broke into a laugh. He'll think you mean that as a provocation. My dear father, you've lived with the English for thirty years, and you've picked up a good many of the things they say, but you've never learned the things they don't say. I say what I please, the old man returned, with all his serenity. I haven't the honour of knowing our niece, Lord Warburton said. I think this is the first time I've heard of her. She's a niece of my wife's. Mrs. Touchett brings her to England. Then young Mr. Touchett explained, My mother, you know, has been spending the winter in America, and we're expecting her back. She writes that she has discovered a niece, and that she has invited her to come out with her. I see. Very kind of her, said Lord Warburton. Is the young lady interesting? We hardly know more about her than you. My mother has not gone into details. She chiefly communicates with us by means of telegrams, and her telegrams are rather inscrutable. They say women don't know how to write them, but my mother has thoroughly mastered the art of condensation. Tired America, hot weather awful, return England with niece, first steamer, decent cabin. That's the sort of message we get from her. That was the last one that came. But there'd been another before, which I think contained the first mention of the niece. Changed hotel, very bad, impudent clerk, address here, taken sister's girl, died last year, go to Europe, two sisters quite independent. Over that my father and I have scarcely stopped puzzling. It seems to admit of so many interpretations. There's one thing very clear in it, said the old man. She has given the hotel clerk a dressing. I'm not even sure of that, since he has driven her from the field. We thought at first that the sister mentioned might be the sister of the clerk, but the subsequent mention of a niece seems to prove that the illusion is to one of my aunts. Then there was a question as to who's the other two sisters were. They're probably two of my late aunts' daughters, but who is quite independent, and in what sense is the term used? That point's not yet settled. Does the expression apply more particularly to the young lady my mother has adopted? Or does it characterize her sisters equally? And is it used in a moral or a financial sense? Does it mean they've been left well off? Or they wish to be under no obligations? Or does it simply mean that they're fond of their own way? Whatever else it means, it's pretty sure to mean that, Mr. Touchit remarked. You'll see for yourself, said Lord Warburton. When does Mrs. Touchit arrive? We're quite in the dark, as soon as she can find a decent cabin. She may be waiting for it yet, and on the other hand she may already have disembarked in England. In that case she would probably have telegraphed to you. She never telegraphs when you'd expect it. Only when you don't, said the old man. She likes to drop in on me suddenly. She thinks she'll find me doing something wrong. She has never done so yet, but she's not discouraged. With her share in the family trait, the independence she speaks of. Her son's appreciation of the matter was more favourable. Whatever the high spirit of these young ladies may be, her own is a match for it. She likes to do everything for herself, and has no belief in anyone's power to help her. She thinks me of no more use than a postage stamp without gum, and she would never forgive me if I should presume to go to Liverpool to meet her. Will you at least let me know when your cousin arrives? Lord Warburton asked. Only on the condition I've mentioned, that you don't fall in love with her. Mr. Touchett replied. That strikes me as hard. Don't you think me good enough? I think you're too good, because I shouldn't like her to marry you. She hasn't come here to look for a husband, I hope. So many young ladies are doing that as if there were no good ones at home. Then she's probably engaged. American girls are usually engaged, I believe. Moreover, I'm not sure after all that you'd be a remarkable husband. Very likely she's engaged. I've known a good many American girls, and they always were. But I never could see that it made any difference upon my word. As for my being a good husband, Mr. Touchett's visitor pursued. I'm not sure of that, either. One can not try. Try as much as you please, but don't try on my niece," smiled the old man, whose opposition to the idea was broadly humorous. Ah, well, said Lord Warburton, with a humor broader still. Perhaps after all she's not worth trying on. CHAPTER II While this exchange of pleasantries took place between the two, Ralph Touchett wandered away a little, with his usual slouching gait, his hands in his pockets and his little rowdyish terrier at his heels. His face was turned toward the house, but his eyes were bent musingly on the lawn, so that he had been an object of observation to a person who had just made her appearance in the ample doorway for some moments before he perceived her. His attention was called to her by the conduct of his dog, who had suddenly darted forward with a little volley of shrill barks in which the note of welcome, however, was more sensible than that of defiance. The person in question was a young lady, who seemed immediately to interpret the greeting of the small beast. He advanced with great rapidity and stood at her feet, looking up and barking hard, whereupon without hesitation she stooped and caught him in her hands, holding him face to face while he continued his quick chatter. His master now had had time to follow, and to see that Bunchie's new friend was a tall girl in a black dress, who at first sight looked pretty. She was bare-headed as if she were staying in the house, a fact which conveyed perplexity to the son of its master, conscious of that immunity from visitors which had for some time been rendered necessary by the latter's ill health. Meantime, the two other gentlemen had also taken note of the newcomer. Dear me, who's that strange woman Mr. Tuchett had asked? Perhaps it's Mrs. Tuchett's niece, the independent young lady, Lord Warburton suggested. I think she must be from the way she handles the dog. The collie, too, had now allowed his attention to be diverted, and he trotted toward the young lady in the doorway, slowly setting his tail in motion as he went. But where's my wife, then, murmured the old man? I suppose the young lady has left her somewhere. That's part of the independence. The girl spoke to Ralph, smiling, while she still held up the terrier. Is this your little dog, sir? He was mine a moment ago, but you've suddenly acquired a remarkable air of property in him. Couldn't we share him? asked the girl. He's such a perfect little darling. Ralph looked at her a moment. She was unexpectedly pretty. You may have him altogether, he then replied. The young lady seemed to have a great deal of confidence, both in herself and in others, but this abrupt generosity made her blush. I ought to tell you that I'm probably your cousin, she brought out, putting down the dog. And here's another, she added quickly, as the collie came up. Suddenly the young man exclaimed, laughing, I'd supposed it was quite settled. Have you arrived with my mother? Yes, half an hour ago. And has she deposited you and departed again? No, she went straight to her room, and she told me that if I should see you I was to say to you that you must come to her there at a quarter to seven. The young man looked at his watch. Thank you very much. I shall be punctual. And then he looked at his cousin. You're very welcome here. I'm delighted to see you. She was looking at everything, with an eye that denoted clear perception, at her companion, at the two dogs, at the two gentlemen under the trees, at the beautiful scene that surrounded her. I've never seen anything so lovely as this place. I've been all over the house. It's too enchanting. I'm sorry you should have been here so long without our knowing of it. Your mother told me that in England people arrive very quietly, so I thought it would be all right. Is one of those gentlemen your father? Yes, the elder one, the one sitting down, said Ralph. The girl gave a laugh. I don't suppose it's the other. Who's the other? He's a friend of ours, Lord Warburton. Oh! I hoped there would be a lord. It's just like a novel. And then—oh! You adorable creature! She suddenly cried, stooping down and picking up the small dog again. She remained where they had met, making no offer to advance or to speak to Mr. Tuchett, and while she lingered near the threshold, slim and charming, her interlocutor wondered if she expected the old man to come and pay her his respects. American girls were used to a great deal of difference, and it had been intimated that this one had a high spirit. Indeed, Ralph could see that in her face. Won't you come and make acquaintance with my father, he nevertheless ventured to ask. He's old and infirm. He doesn't leave his chair. Ah! poor man! I'm very sorry, the girl exclaimed, immediately moving forward. I got the impression from your mother that he was rather intensely active. Ralph Tuchett was silent a moment. She hasn't seen him for a year. Well, he has a lovely place to sit. Come along, little hound. It's a dear old place, said the young man, looking sidewise at his neighbor. What's his name, she asked, her attention having again reverted to the terrier. My father's name? Yes, said the young lady, with amusement. But don't tell him, I asked you. They had come by this time to where old Mr. Tuchett was sitting, and he slowly got up from his chair to introduce himself. My mother has arrived, said Ralph, and this is Miss Archer. The old man placed his two hands on her shoulders, looked at her a moment with extreme benevolence, and then, gallantly, kissed her. It's a great pleasure to me to see you here, but I wish you had given us a chance to receive you. Oh! We were received, said the girl. There were about a dozen servants in the hall, and there was an old woman curtsying at the gate. We can do better than that, if we have notice. And the old man stood there smiling, rubbing his hands and slowly shaking his head at her. But Mrs. Tuchett doesn't like receptions. She went straight to her room. Yes, and locked herself in. She always does that. Well, I suppose I shall see her next week. And Mrs. Tuchett's husband slowly resumed his former posture. Before that's in Miss Archer. She's coming down to dinner at eight o'clock. Don't you forget a quarter to seven, she added, turning with a smile to Ralph. What's to happen at a quarter to seven? I'm to see my mother, said Ralph. Ah! Happy boy! The old man commented. You must sit down. You must have some tea. He observed to his wife's niece. They gave me some tea in my room the moment I got there. The young lady answered. I'm sorry you're out of health, she added, resting her eyes upon her venerable host. Oh! I'm an old man, my dear. It's time for me to be old. But I shall be the better for having you here. She had been looking all around her again. At the lawn, the great trees, the reedy silvery Thames, the beautiful old house. And while engaged in this survey, she had made room in it for her companions. A comprehensiveness of observation easily conceivable on the part of a young woman who was evidently both intelligent and excited. She had seated herself, and had put away the little dog. Her white hands in her lap were folded upon her black dress. Her head was erect, her eye lighted, her flexible figure turned itself easily this way and that, in sympathy with the alertness with which she was evidently caught impressions. Her impressions were numerous, and they were all reflected in a clear, still smile. I've never seen anything so beautiful as this. It's looking very well, said Mr. Tudjit. I know the way it strikes you, I've been through all that. But you're very beautiful yourself, he added, with a politeness by no means crudely jocular, and with the happy consciousness that his advanced age gave him the privilege of saying such things, even to young persons who might possibly take alarm at them. What degree of alarm this young person took need not be exactly measured. She instantly rose, however, with a blush which was not a refutation. Oh, yes, of course I'm lovely, she returned with a quick laugh. How old is your house? Is it Elizabethan? Its early tutor, said Ralph Tudjit. She turned toward him, watching his face. Early tutor? How very delightful! And I suppose there are a great many others. There are many much better ones. Don't say that, my son, the old man protested, there's nothing better than this. I've got a very good one. I think in some respects it's rather better, said Lord Warburton, who has yet had not spoken, but who had kept an attentive eye upon Miss Archer. He slightly inclined himself, smiling. He had an excellent manner with women. The girl appreciated it, in an instant. She had not forgotten that this was Lord Warburton. I should very much like to show it to you, he added. Don't believe him, cried the old man. Don't look at it, it's a wretched old barrack, not to be compared to this. I don't know. I can't judge, said the girl, smiling at Lord Warburton. In this discussion Ralph Tudjit took no interest whatever. He stood with his hands in his pockets, looking greatly as if he should like to renew his conversation with his new found cousin. Are you very fond of dogs, he inquired, by way of beginning? He seemed to recognize that it was an awkward beginning for a clever young man. We fond of them indeed. You must keep the terrier, you know, he went on, still awkwardly. I'll keep them while I'm here with pleasure. That will be for a long time, I hope. You're very kind. I hardly know. My aunt must settle that. I'll settle it with her at a quarter to seven. And Ralph looked at his watch again. I'm glad to be here at all, said the girl. I don't believe you allow things to be settled for you. Oh, yes, if they're settled as I like them. I shall settle this as I like it, said Ralph. You're most unaccountable that we should never have known you. I was there. You only had to come and see me. There, where do you mean? In the United States, in New York and Albany and other American places. I've been there all over, but I never saw you. I can't make it out." Miss Archer just hesitated. It was because there had been some disagreement between your mother and my father after my mother's death which took place when I was a child. In consequence of it we never expected to see you. Ah, but I don't embrace all my mother's quarrels, heaven forbid, the young man cried. You've lately lost your father, he went on, more gravely. Yes, more than a year ago. After that my aunt was very kind to me. She came to see me and propose that I should come with her to Europe. I see, said Ralph, she has adopted you. Adopted me. The girl stared, and her blush came back to her, together with a momentary look of pain which gave her interlocutor some alarm. He had underestimated the effect of his words. Lord Warburton, who appeared constantly desirous of a nearer view of Miss Archer, strolled toward the two cousins at the moment, and as he did so she rested her wider eyes on him. Oh no, she's not adopted me. I'm not a candidate for adoption. I beg a thousand pardons, Ralph Murrit. I meant—I meant—he hardly knew what he meant. You mean she's taken me up? Yes, she likes to take people up. She's been very kind to me, but—she added, with a certain visible eagerness of desire to be explicit—I'm very fond of my liberty. Are you talking about Mrs. Tuchett, the old man called out from his chair? Come here, my dear, and tell me about her. I'm always thankful for information. The girl hesitated again, smiling. She's really very benevolent, she answered, after which she went over to her uncle whose mirth was excited by her words. Mr. Warburton was left standing with Ralph Tuchett, to whom, in a moment, he said, You wished a while ago to see my idea of an interesting woman. There it is. Chapter 3 Mrs. Tuchett was certainly a person of many oddities, of which her behaviour on returning to her husband's house after many months was a noticeable specimen. She had her own way of doing all that she did, and this is the simplest description of a character which, although by no means without liberal motions, rarely succeeded in giving an impression of suavity. Mrs. Tuchett might do a great deal of good, but she never pleased. This way of her own, of which she was so fond, was not intrinsically offensive. It was just unmistakably distinguished from the ways of others. The edges of her conduct were so very clear-cut that for susceptible persons it sometimes had a knife-like effect. That hard findness came out in her deportment during the first hours of her return from America, under circumstances in which it might have seemed that her first act would have been to exchange greetings with her husband and son. Mrs. Tuchett, for reasons which she deemed excellent, always retired on such occasions into impenetrable seclusion, postponing the more sentimental ceremony until she had repaired the disorder of dress with a completeness which had the less reason to be of high importance, as neither beauty nor vanity were concerned in it. She was a plain-faced old woman, without graces and without any great elegance, but with an extreme respect for her own motives. She was usually prepared to explain these, when the explanation was asked as a favour, and in such a case they proved totally different from those that had been attributed to her. She was virtually separated from her husband, but she appeared to perceive nothing irregular in the situation. It became clear at an early stage of their community that they should never desire the same thing at the same moment, and this appearance had prompted her to rescue disagreement from the vulgar realm of accident. She did what she could to erect it into a law, a much more edifying aspect of it, by going to live in Florence, where she bought a house and established herself, and by leaving her husband to take great care of the English branch of his bank. This arrangement pleased her. It was so felicitously definite. It struck her husband in the same light, in a foggy square in London, where it was at times the most definite fact he discerned, but he would have preferred that such unnatural things should have a greater vagueness. To agree to disagree had cost him an effort. He was ready to agree to almost anything but that, and saw no reason why either assent or dissent should be so terribly consistent. Mrs. Touchett indulged in no regrets or speculations, and usually came once a year to spend a month with her husband, a period during which she apparently took pains to convince him that she had adopted the right system. She was not fond of the English style of life, and had three or four reasons for it, to which she currently alluded. They bore upon minor points of that ancient order, but for Mrs. Touchett they amply justified non-residence. She detested bread-sauce, which, as she said, looked like a poultice and tasted like soap. She objected to the consumption of beer by her maid-servants, and she affirmed that the British laundress—Mrs. Touchett was very particular about the appearance of her linen—was not a mistress of her art. At fixed intervals she paid a visit to her own country, but this last had been longer than any of its predecessors. She had taken up her niece. There was little doubt of that. When went afternoon some four months earlier than the occurrence lately narrated, this young lady had been seated alone with a book. To say she was occupied is to say that her solitude did not press upon her, for her love of knowledge had a fertilizing quality, and her imagination was strong. There was at this time, however, a want of fresh taste in her situation, which the arrival of an unexpected visitor did much to correct. The visitor had not been announced. The girl heard her at last walking about the adjoining room. It was in an old house at Albany, a large square double-house, with a notice of sale in the windows of one of the lower apartments. There were two entrances, one of which had long been out of use, but had never been removed. They were exactly alike. Large white doors, with an arched frame and wide side lights, perched upon little stoops of red stone, which descended sidewise to the brick pavement of the street. The two houses together formed a sink dwelling. The party wall having been removed, and the rooms placed in communication. These rooms above stairs were extremely numerous, and were painted all over exactly alike, in a yellowish white which had grown shallow with time. On the third floor there was a sort of arched passage, connecting the two sides of the house which Isabelle and her sisters used in their childhood to call the tunnel, and which, though it was short and well-lighted, always seemed to the girl to be strange and lonely, especially on winter afternoons. She had been in the house at different periods as a child. In those days her grandmother lived there. Then there had been an absence of ten years followed by a return to Albany before her father's death. Her grandmother, old Mrs. Archer, had exercised chiefly within the limits of the family a large hospitality in the early period, and the little girls often spent weeks under her roof, weeks of which Isabelle had the happiest memory. The manner of life was different from that of her own home—larger, more plentiful, practically more festal. The discipline of the nursery was delightfully vague and the opportunity of listening to the conversation of one's elders, with which Isabelle was a highly valued pleasure, almost unbounded. There was a constant coming and going. Her grandmother's sons and daughters and their children appeared to be in the enjoyment of standing invitations to arrive and remain, so that the house offered, to a certain extent, the appearance of a bustling provincial inn kept by a gentle old landlady, who sighed a great deal, and never presented a bill. Isabelle, of course, knew nothing about bills, but even as a child she thought her grandmother's home romantic. There was a covered piazza behind it, furnished with a swing which was a source of tremulous interest, and beyond this was a long garden sloping down to the stable and containing peach trees of barely credible familiarity. Isabelle had stayed with her grandmother at various seasons, but somehow all her visits had a flavor of peaches. On the other side across the street was an old house that was called the Dutch House, a peculiar structure dating from the earliest colonial time, composed of bricks had been painted yellow, crowned with a gible that was pointed out to strangers, defended by a rickety wooden pailing and standing sidewise to the street. It was occupied by a primary school for children of both sexes, kept or rather let go by a demonstrative lady of whom Isabelle's chief recollection was that her hair was fastened with strange, bed roomy combs at the temples, and that she was the widow of someone of consequence. The little girl had been offered the opportunity of laying a founded knowledge in this establishment, but having spent a single day in it she had protested against its laws and had been allowed to stay at home where, in the September days, when the windows of the Dutch House were open, she used to hear the hum of childish voices repeating the multiplication table, an incident in which the elation of liberty and the pain of exclusion were indistinguishably mingled. The foundation of her knowledge was really laid in the idleness of her grandmother's house, where, as most of the other inmates were not reading people, she had uncontrolled use of a library full of books with frontispieces, which she used to climb upon a chair to take down. When she had found one to her taste, she was guided in the selection chiefly by the frontispiece, she carried it into a mysterious apartment which lay beyond the library, and which was called traditionally, no one knew why, the office. Whose office it had been and at what period it had flourished she never learned. It was enough for her that it contained an echo and a pleasant musty smell, and that it was a chamber of disgrace for old pieces of furniture whose infaties were not always apparent, so that the disgrace seemed unmerited and rendered them victims of injustice, and with which, in the manner of children, she had established relations almost human, certainly dramatic. There was an old hair-cloth sofa in a special, to which she had confided a hundred childish sorrows. The place owed much of its mysterious melancholy to the fact that it was properly entered from the second door of the house, the door that had been condemned, and that it was secured by bolts which a particularly slender little girl found it impossible to slide. She knew that this silent motionless portal opened into the street. If the sidelights had not been filled with green paper she might have looked out upon the little brown stoop and the well-worn brick pavement, but she had no wish to look out, for this would have interfered with her theory that there was a strange, unseen place on the other side, a place which became to the child's imagination, according to its different moods, a region of delight or of terror. It was in the office still that Isabelle was sitting on that melancholy afternoon of early spring which I have just mentioned. At this time she might have had the whole house to choose from, and the room she selected was the most depressed of its scenes. She had never opened the bolted door nor removed the green paper, renewed by other hands from its sidelights. She had never assured herself that the vulgar street lay beyond. A crude cold rain fell heavily. The springtime was indeed an appeal, and it seemed a cynical insincere appeal to patients. Isabelle, however, gave as little heat as possible to cosmic treacheries. She kept her eyes on her book, and tried to fix her mod. It had lately occurred to her that her mind was a good deal of a vagabond, and she had spent much ingenuity in training it to a military step and teaching it to advance, to halt, to retreat, to perform even more complicated maneuvers at the word of command. Just now she had been at marching orders, and it had been trudging over the sandy veins of a history of German thought. Suddenly she became aware of a step very different from her own intellectual pace. She listened a little, and perceived that someone was moving in the library, which communicated with the office. It struck her first as the step of a person from whom she was looking for a visit, then almost immediately announced itself as the tread of a woman and a stranger, her possible visitor being neither. It had an inquisitive, experimental quality which suggested that it would not stop short of the threshold of the office, and in fact the doorway of this apartment was presently occupied by a lady who paused there and looked very hard at our heroine. She was a plain elderly woman, dressed in a comprehensive waterproof mantle. She had a face with a good deal of rather violent point. Oh! she began. Is that where you use it? She looked about at the heterogeneous tables and chairs. Not when I have visitors, said Isabel, getting up to receive the intruder. She directed their course back to the library while the visitor continued to look about her. You seem to have plenty of other rooms. They're in rather better condition, but everything's immensely worn. Have you come to look at the house? Isabel asked. The servants will show it to you. Send her away. I don't want to buy it. She has probably gone to look for you and is wandering about upstairs. She didn't seem at all intelligent. You'd better tell her it's no matter. And then, since the girls stood there hesitating and wondering, the unexpected critics said to her abruptly, I suppose you're one of the daughters. Isabel thought she had very strange manners. It depends on whose daughters you mean. The late Mr. Archer's and my poor sister's. Ah! said Isabel slowly. You must be our crazy Aunt Lydia. Is that what your father told you to call me? I'm your Aunt Lydia, but I'm not at all crazy. I haven't a delusion. And which of the daughters are you? I'm the youngest of the three. And my name's Isabel. Yes, the others are Lillian and Edith. And are you the prettiest? I haven't the least ideas, said the girl. I think you must be. And in this way, the aunt and niece made friends. The aunt had quarreled years before with her brother-in-law after the death of her sister, taking him to task for the manner in which he brought up his three girls. Being a high-tempered man, he had requested her to mind her own business, and she had taken him at his word. For many years she held no communication with him, and after his death had addressed not a word to his daughters, who had been bred in that disrespectful view of her which we have just seen Isabel betray. Mrs. Touchett's behaviour was, as usual, perfectly deliberate. She intended to go to America to look after her investments, with which her husband, in spite of his great financial position, had nothing to do, and would take advantage of this opportunity to inquire into the condition of her nieces. There was no need of writing, for she should attach no importance to any account of them she should elicit by letter. She believed always in seeing for oneself. Isabel found, however, that she knew a good deal about them, and knew about the marriage of the two elder girls, knew that their poor father had left very little money, but that the house in Albany, which had passed into his hands, was to be sold for their benefit. Knew finally that Edmund Ludlow, Lillian's husband, had taken upon himself to attend to this matter, in consideration of which the young couple, who had come to Albany during Mr. Archer's illness, were remaining there for the present, and, as well as Isabel herself, occupying the old place. "'How much money do you expect for it?' Mrs. Tudget asked of her companion, who had brought her to sit in the front parlor, which she inspected without enthusiasm. "'I haven't the least idea,' said the girl. "'That's the second time you've said that to me,' her aunt rejoined, and yet you don't look at all stupid.' "'I'm not stupid, but I don't know anything about money.' "'Yes, that's the way you were brought up, as if you were to inherit a million. What have you, in fact, inherited?' "'I really can't tell you. You must ask Edmund and Lillian. They'll be back in half an hour.' "'In Florence we should call it a very bad house,' said Mrs. Tudget. "'But here, I daresay, it will bring a high price. It ought to make a considerable sum for each of you. In addition to that, you must have something else. It's most extraordinary or not knowing. The position is of value, and they'll probably pull it down and make a row of shops. I wonder you don't do that yourself. You might let the shops to great advantage.' Isabelle stared. The idea of letting shops was new to her. I hope they won't pull it down, she said. I'm extremely fond of it. I don't see what makes you fond of it. Your father died here. "'Yes, but I don't dislike it for that.' The girl rather strangely returned. I like places in which things have happened, even if they're sad things. A great many people have died here. The place has been full of life.' "'Is that what you call being full of life?' I mean full of experience, of people's feelings and sorrows, and not their sorrows only, for I've been very happy here as a child. You should go to Florence if you like houses in which things have happened, especially deaths. I live in an old palace in which three people have been murdered, three that were known, and I don't know how many more besides. In an old palace, Isabelle repeated—'Yes, my dear, a very different affair from this. This is very bourgeois.' Isabelle felt some emotion, for she had always thought highly of her grandmother's house, but the emotion was of a kind which led her to say, "'I should like very much to go to Florence.' "'Well, if you'll be very good, and do everything I tell you, I will take you there,' Mrs. Tuckett declared. Our young woman's emotion deepened. She flushed a little, and smiled at her aunt in silence. Do everything you tell me? I don't think I can promise that.' "'No, you don't look like a person of that sort. You're fond of your own way, but it's not for me to blame you.' "'And yet, to go to Florence,' the girl exclaimed in a moment, I would promise almost anything.' Edmund and Lillian were slow to return, and Mrs. Tuckett had an hour's uninterrupted talk with her niece, who found her a strange and interesting figure—a figure, essentially, almost the first she had ever met. She was as eccentric as Isabelle had always supposed, and hitherto, whenever the girl had heard people described as eccentric, she had thought of them as offensive or alarming. The term had always suggested to her something grotesque and even sinister. But her aunt made it a matter of high but easy irony, and led her to ask herself if the common tone, which was all she had known, had ever been as interesting. No one certainly had on any occasion so held her as this little thin-lipped, bright-eyed, foreign-looking woman, who retrieved an insignificant appearance by a distinguished manner, and sitting there in a well-worn waterproof, talked with striking familiarity of the courts of Europe. There was nothing flighty about Mrs. Tuckett, but she recognized no social superiors, and, judging the great ones of the earth in a way that spoke of this, enjoyed the consciousness of making an impression on a candid and susceptible mind. Isabelle at first had answered a good many questions, and it was from her answers, apparently, that Mrs. Tuckett derived a high opinion of her intelligence. But after this she asked a good many, and her aunt's answers, whatever turn they took, struck her as food for deep reflection. Mrs. Tuckett waited for the return of her other niece as long as she thought reasonable. But as at six o'clock Mrs. Ludlow had not come in, she prepared to take her departure. Your sister must be a great gossip. Is she accustomed to staying out so many hours? You've been out almost as long as she, Isabelle replied. She can have left the house but a short time before you came in. Mrs. Tuckett looked at the girl without resentment. She appeared to enjoy a bold retort and to be disposed to be gracious. Perhaps she hasn't had so good an excuse as I. Tell her at any rate that she must come and see me this evening at that horrid hotel. She may bring her husband if she likes, but she needn't bring you. I shall see plenty of you later. Chapter 4 Mrs. Ludlow was the eldest of the three sisters and was usually thought the most sensible. The classification being in general that Lillian was the practical one, Edith, the beauty and Isabelle the intellectual superior. Mrs. Keys, the second of the group, was the wife of an officer of the United States engineers, and as our history is no father concerned with her, it will suffice that she was indeed very pretty and that she formed the ornament of those various military stations chiefly in the infesionable west, to which, to a deep chagrin, her husband was actively relegated. Lillian admired a New York lawyer, a young man with a loud voice and an enthusiasm for his profession. The match was not brilliant any more than Edith, but Lillian had occasionally be spoken of as a young woman who might be thankful to marry at all. She was so much plainer than her sisters. She was, however, very happy, and now as the mother of two peremptory little boys and the mistress of a wedge of brown stone violently driven into 53rd Street seemed to exalt in her condition as in a bold escape. She was short and solid, and her claim to figure was questioned, but she was considered presence, though no majesty. She had moreover, as people said, improved since her marriage, and the two things in life of which she was most distantly conscious were her husband, force in argument, and her sister, Isabel, originality. I have never kept up with Isabel. It would take an all of my time, she had often remarked, in spite of which, however, she had her rather wistfully in sight, watching her as a motherly spaniel might watch a free gray hound. I want to see her safely married. That's what I want to see, she frequently noted to her husband. Well, I must say I should have no practical desire to marry her, had Munludlu was accustomed to answer in an extremely audible tone. I know you say that for argument, you always take the opposite ground. I don't see what you have against her, except that she is so original. Well, I don't like originals, I like translation, Mr. Ludlu had more than one answer applied. Isabel is irritten in a foreign tongue, I can't make her out. I have to marry an Armenian or a Portuguese. That's just what I'm afraid she'll do, cried Lillian, who thought Isabel capable of anything. She listened with great interest to the girl's account of Mrs. Tashat's appearance, and in the evening prepared to comply with her aunt's command, of what Isabel then said no report as remained, but her sister Wals had doubtless prompt a word spoken to her husband, as the two were making a ready for their visit. I do hope immensely she'll do something handsome for Isabel. She has evidently taken a great fancy to her. What is it you wish her to do, had Munludlu asked? Make her a big present? No, indeed, nothing of the sort, but take an interest in her. Sympathize with her. She's evidently just the sort of person to appreciate her. She has lived so much in foreign society. She told Isabel all about it. You know you have always thought Isabel her other foreign. You want her to give her a little foreign sympathy, eh? Don't you think she gets enough at all? Well, she ought to go abroad, said Mrs. Ludlu. She's just the person to go abroad, and you want the old lady to take her, is that it? She has offered to take her, she's dying to have Isabel go, but what I want her to do, when she gets her there, is to give her all the advantages. I'm sure all we have got to do, said Mrs. Ludlu, is to give her a chance. A chance for what? A chance to develop. Oh, Moses, had Munludlu exclaimed. I hope she isn't going to develop any more. If I were not sure you only said that for argument, I should feel very badly, his wife replied, but you know you love her. Do you know I love you, the young man, said jocosely to Isabel a little later, while he brushed his head. I'm sure I don't care whatever you do or not, exclaimed the girl, whose voice and smile, however, were less hoity than her words. Oh, she feels so grand since Mrs. Tashat visit, said their sister, but Isabel challenged this assertion with a good deal of seriousness. You must not say that, Lily, I don't feel grand at all. I'm sure there's no harm, said the conciliatory Lily. Ah, but there's nothing in Mrs. Tashat visit to make one feel grand. Oh, exclaimed Ludlu, she's grander than ever. Whenever I feel grand, said the girl, it will be for a better reason. Whether she felt grand or no, she at any rate felt different, as if something had happened to her. Left to herself for the evening, she sat a while under the lamp. Her hands empty, her usual vocation unneeded. Then she rose and moved about the room, and from one room to another, preferring the places where the vaguely lamplight expired. She was restless and even agitated. At moments, she trembled a little. The importance of what had happened was out of proportion to its appearance. They had really been a change in her life. What it would bring with it was as yet extremely indefinite, but Isabel was in a situation that gave a value to any change. She had a desire to leave the past behind her, and, as she said to herself, to begin afresh. This desire, indeed, was not a birth of the present occasion. It was as familiar as the sound of the rain upon the window, and it had led to her beginning afresh a great many times. She closed her eyes, and she sat in one of the dusky corners of the quiet parlor, but it was not with a desire for dosing forgetfulness. It was, on the contrary, because she felt too wide-eyed and wished to check the sense of seeing too many things at once. Her imagination was by habit ridiculously active. When the door was not open, it jumped out of the window. She was not accustomed, indeed, to keep it behind bolts. And at important moments, when she would have been thankful to make use of her judgment alone, she paid the penalty of having given undue encouragement to the faculty of seeing without judging. At present, with her sense that the note of the change had been struck, came gradually a host of images of the things she was leaving behind her. The years and the hours of her life came back to her, and for a long time, in a stillness broken only by the ticking of the big bronze clock, she passed them in review. It had been a very happy life, and she had been a very fortunate person. This was the true that seemed to emerge most vividly. She had had the best of everything, and in a world in which the circumstances of so many people made them unenviable, it was an advantage never to have known anything particularly unpleasant. It appeared to Isabel that the unpleasant had been even too absent from her knowledge, for she had gathered from her acquaintance with literature that it was often a source of interest and even of extraction. Her father had kept it away from her, her handsome, much-loved father, who always had such an aversion to it. It was a great felicity to have been his daughter. Isabel rose even to pride in her parentage. Since his death, she had seemed to see him as turning his braver side to his children, and as not having managed to ignore the ugly, quite so much in practice as in aspiration. But this only made their tenderness for him greater. It was scarcely even painful to have to suppose him too generous, too good-natured, too indifferent to sordid consideration. Many persons had held that he carried this indifference too far, especially the large number of those to whom he owed money. Of their opinions, Isabel was never very definitively informed, but it may interest the reader to know that while they had recognized in the late Mr. Archer a remarkably handsome head and a very taking manner, indeed as one of them had said he was always taking something, they had declared that he was making a very poor use of his life. He had squandered a substantial fortune. He had been deplorably convivial. He was known to have gambled freely. A few very harsh critics went so far as to say that he had not even brought up his daughters. They had had no regular education and no permanent home. They had been at once spoiled and neglected. They had lived with noose-mate and governesses, usually very bad ones, or had been sent to superficial schools kept by the French, from which at the end of a month they had been removed in tears. This view of the matter would have excited Isabel indignation for to her own sense of her opportunities had been large. Even when her father had left his daughter for three months at Noix-Châtel with a French bone, who had eloped with a Russian nobleman staying at the same hotel, even in this irregular situation, an incident of the Curse 11th year, she had been never frightened nor ashamed, but had thought it a romantic episode in a liberal education. Her father had a large way of looking at life, for which his restlessness and even his occasionally incurrency of conduct had been only a proof. He wished his daughters, even as children, to see as much of the world as possible. And it was for this purpose that before Isabel was fourteen, he had transported them three times across the Atlantic, giving them on its occasion, however but a few months' view of the subject proposed, a course which had whetted our heroine's curiosity without enabling her to satisfy it. She ought to have been a partisan of her father, for she was the member of his trio, who most made up to him for the disagreables he didn't mention. In his last days, his general willingness to take leave of a ward in which the difficulty for doing as one liked appeared to increase as one grew older, had been sensibly modified by the pain of separation from his clever, his superior, his remarkable girl. Later, when the journey to Europe seized, he still had shown his children all sort of indulgence. And if he had been troubled about many months, nothing ever disturbed the reflective consciousness of many possessions. Isabel, though she danced very well, had known their collection of having been in New York a successful member of the Choreographic Circle. A sister headed was, as everyone said, so very much more fetching. Edit was so striking an example of success that Isabel could have no illusion as to what constituted his advantage, or as to the limit of her home power to frisk and jump and shriek, above all with rightness of effect. Nineteen persons out of twenty, including the younger sister herself, pronounced Edith infinitely the prettier of the two, but the twentieth, besides reversing this judgment, had the entertainment of thinking or the other aesthetic vulgarians. Isabel had in death of her nature an even more unquenchable desire to please than Edith, but the depth of this young lady's nature were a very out-of-the-way place between which of the surface communication was interrupted by a dozen capricious forces. She saw the young man who came in large number to see her sister, but as in general think they were afraid of her, they had a belief that some special preparation was required for talking with her. Her reputation of reading a great deal hung about her like the cloudy envelope of a goddess in an epic. It was supposed to engender difficult question and to keep the conversation at a low temperature. The poor girl liked to be thought clever, but she hated to be thought bookish. She used to read in a secret, and though her memory was excellent, to abstain from showy reference. She had a great desire for knowledge, but she really preferred almost any source of information to the printed page. She had a great desire for knowledge, but she really preferred almost any source of information to the printed page. She had an immense curiosity about life that was constantly staring and wandering. She carried within herself a great fund of life, and her deepest enjoyment was to feel the continuity between the movements of her own soul in the agitations of the world. For this reason she was fond of seeing great crowd, large stretches of country, of reading about revolution and wars, of looking at historical pictures. A class of effort as to which she had often committed the conscious solesism of forgiving them much bad painting for the sake of the subject. While the civil war went on she was still a very young girl, but she passed months of this long period in a state of almost passionate excitement, in which she felt herself at times, to her extreme confusion, steered almost indiscriminately by the value of either army. Of course the circumspection of suspicious ways had never gone the length of making her a social proscript, for the number of those whose health, as they approached her, but only just fast enough to remind them they had the heads, as well, had kept her unacquainted with the supreme discipline of her sex and age. She had had everything a girl could have—kindness, admiration, bonbons, bouquet, the sense of exclusion from no one of the privileges of the world she lived in, abundant opportunity for dancing, plenty of new dresses, the London spectator, the latest publication, the music of Gno, the poetry of Browning, the prose of George Eliot. These things, now as memory played over them, resolved themselves into a multitude of scenes and figures. Forgotten things came back to her, many others which she had lately thought of great moment, dropped off the site. The result was kaleidoscopic, but the movement of the instrument was checked at last by the servants coming in with the name of a gentleman. The name of the gentleman was Caspar Goodwood. He was a stride young man from Boston, who had known his archer for the last twelve months, and who, thinking her the most beautiful young woman of her time, had pronounced the time according to the rule I have hinted at, a foolish period of history. He sometimes brought to her, had within a week or two written from New York. She had thought it, very possible he would come in, had indeed all the rainy day been vaguely expected him. Now she had learned he was there, nevertheless she felt no ignorance to receive him. He was the finest young man she had ever seen, was indeed quite a splendid young man. He inspired her with a sentiment of high, of rare respect. She had never felt equally moved to it by any other person. He was supposed by the word in general to wish to marry her, but this of course was between themselves. It at least may be affirmed that he traveled from New York to Albany expressly to see her, having learned in the former city where he was spending a few days, and where he had hoped to find her, that she was still at the state capital. Isabel delayed for some minutes to go to him, she moved about the room with a new sense of complication. But at last she presented herself and found him standing near the lamp. He was tall, strong, and somewhat stiff. He was also lean and brown. He was not romantically, he was much rather obscurely handsome, but his physiognomy had an air of requesting your attention which he rewarded according to the charm you found in blue eyes of remarkable fixer, the eyes of a complexion other than his own, and a jaw of the somewhat angular mode which is supposed to be speaker resolution. Isabel said to herself that it bespoke resolution tonight, in spite of which in half an hour Caspar Godwood, who had arrived hopeful as well as resolute, took his way back to his lodging with the feeling of a man defeated. He was not, it may be added, a man weakly to accept defeat.