"My dear lady, I have no conscience!"
"Well, I advise you to cultivate one. You'll need it the next time you go to America."
"I shall probably never go again."
"Are you ashamed to show yourself?"
Ralph meditated with a mild smile. "I suppose that if one has no conscience one has no shame."
"Well, you've got plenty of assurance," Henrietta declared. "Do you consider it right to give up
your country?"
"Ah, one doesn't give up one's country any more than one gives UP one's grandmother. They're
both antecedent to choice--elements of one's composition that are not to be eliminated."
"I suppose that means that you've tried and been worsted. What do they think of you over here?"
"They delight in me."
"That's because you truckle to them."
"Ah, set it down a little to my natural charm!" Ralph sighed.
"I don't know anything about your natural charm. If you've got any charm it's quite unnatural. It's
wholly acquired--or at least you've tried hard to acquire it, living over here. I don't say you've
succeeded. It's a charm that I don't appreciate, anyway. Make yourself useful in some way, and
then we'll talk about it." "Well, now, tell me what I shall do," said Ralph.
"Go right home, to begin with."
"Yes, I see. And then?"
"Take right hold of something."
"Well, now, what sort of thing?"
"Anything you please, so long as you take hold. Some new idea, some big work."
"Is it very difficult to take hold?" Ralph enquired.
"Not if you put your heart into it."
"Ah, my heart," said Ralph. "If it depends upon my heart--!"
"Haven't you got a heart?"
"I had one a few days ago, but I've lost it since."
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"You're not serious," Miss Stackpole remarked; "that's what's the matter with you." But for all this,
in a day or two, she again permitted him to fix her attention and on the later occasion assigned a
different cause to her mysterious perversity. "I know what's the matter with you, Mr. Touchett,"
she said. "You think you're too good to get married."
"I thought so till I knew you, Miss Stackpole," Ralph answered; "and then I suddenly changed my
mind."
"Oh pshaw!" Henrietta groaned.
"Then it seemed to me," said Ralph, "that I was not good enough."
"It would improve you. Besides, it's your duty."
"Ah," cried the young man, "one has so many duties! Is that a duty too?"
"Of course it is--did you never know that before? It's every one's duty to get married."
Ralph meditated a moment; he was disappointed. There was something in Miss Stackpole he had
begun to like; it seemed to him that if she was not a charming woman she was at least a very good
"sort." She was wanting in distinction, but, as Isabel had said, she was brave: she went into cages,
she flourished lashes, like a spangled lion-tamer. He had not supposed her to be capable of vulgar
arts, but these last words struck him as a false note. When a marriageable young woman urges
matrimony on an unencumbered young man the most obvious explanation of her conduct is not the
altruistic impulse.
"Ah, well now, there's a good deal to be said about that," Ralph rejoined.
"There may be, but that's the principal thing. I must say I think it looks very exclusive, going round
all alone, as if you thought no woman was good enough for you. Do you think you're better than
any one else in the world? In America it's usual for people to marry."
"If it's my duty," Ralph asked, "is it not, by analogy, yours as well?"
Miss Stackpole's ocular surfaces unwinkingly caught the sun. "Have you the fond hope of finding a
flaw in my reasoning? Of course I've as good a right to marry as any one else."
"Well then," said Ralph, "I won't say it vexes me to see you single. It delights me rather."
"You're not serious yet. You never will be."
"Shall you not believe me to be so on the day I tell you I desire to give up the practice of going
round alone?"
Miss Stackpole looked at him for a moment in a manner which seemed to announce a reply that
might technically be called encouraging. But to his great surprise this expression suddenly
resolved itself into an appearance of alarm and even of resentment. "No, not even then," she
answered dryly. After which she walked away.
"I've not conceived a passion for your friend," Ralph said that evening to Isabel, "though we talked
some time this morning about it."
"And you said something she didn't like," the girl replied.
Ralph stared. "Has she complained of me?"
"She told me she thinks there's something very low in the tone of Europeans towards women."
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"Does she call me a European?"
"One of the worst. She told me you had said to her something that an American never would have
said. But she didn't repeat it."
Ralph treated himself to a luxury of laughter. "She's an extraordinary combination. Did she think I
was making love to her?"
"No; I believe even Americans do that. But she apparently thought you mistook the intention of
something she had said, and put an unkind construction on it."
"I thought she was proposing marriage to me and I accepted her. Was that unkind?"
Isabel smiled. "It was unkind to me. I don't want you to marry."
"My dear cousin, what's one to do among you all?" Ralph demanded. "Miss Stackpole tells me it's
my bounden duty, and that it's hers, in general, to see I do mine!"
"She has a great sense of duty," said Isabel gravely. "She has indeed, and it's the motive of
everything she says. That's what I like her for. She thinks it's unworthy of you to keep so many
things to yourself. That's what she wanted to express. If you thought she was trying to--to attract
you, you were very wrong."
"It's true it was an odd way, but I did think she was trying to attract me. Forgive my depravity."
"You're very conceited. She had no interested views, and never supposed you would think she
had."
"One must be very modest then to talk with such women," Ralph said humbly. "But it's a very
strange type. She's too personal-- considering that she expects other people not to be. She walks in
without knocking at the door."
"Yes," Isabel admitted, "she doesn't sufficiently recognise the existence of knockers; and indeed
I'm not sure that she doesn't think them rather a pretentious ornament. She thinks one's door should
stand ajar. But I persist in liking her."
"I persist in thinking her too familiar," Ralph rejoined, naturally somewhat uncomfortable under
the sense of having been doubly deceived in Miss Stackpole.
"Well," said Isabel, smiling, "I'm afraid it's because she's rather vulgar that I like her."
"She would be flattered by your reason!"
"If I should tell her I wouldn't express it in that way. I should say it's because there's something of
the 'people' in her."
"What do you know about the people? and what does she, for that matter?"
"She knows a great deal, and I know enough to feel that she's a kind of emanation of the great
democracy--of the continent, the country, the nation. I don't say that she sums it all up, that would
be too much to ask of her. But she suggests it; she vividly figures it."
"You like her then for patriotic reasons. I'm afraid it is on those very grounds I object to her."
"Ah," said Isabel with a kind of joyous sigh, "I like so many things! If a thing strikes me with a
certain intensity I accept it. I don't want to swagger, but I suppose I'm rather versatile. I like people
to be totally different from Henrietta--in the style of Lord Warburton's sisters for instance. So long
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as I look at the Misses Molyneux they seem to me to answer a kind of ideal. Then Henrietta
presents herself, and I'm straightway convinced by her; not so much in respect to herself as in
respect to what masses behind her."
"Ah, you mean the back view of her," Ralph suggested.
"What she says is true," his cousin answered; "you'll never be serious. I like the great country
stretching away beyond the rivers and across the prairies, blooming and smiling and spreading till
it stops at the green Pacific! A strong, sweet, fresh odour seems to rise from it, and Henrietta-pardon
my simile--has something of that odour in her garments."
Isabel blushed a little as she concluded this speech, and the blush, together with the momentary
ardour she had thrown into it, was so becoming to her that Ralph stood smiling at her for a moment
after she had ceased speaking. "I'm not sure the Pacific's so green as that," he said; "but you're a
young woman of imagination. Henrietta, however, does smell of the Future--it almost knocks one
down!"
CHAPTER XI
He took a resolve after this not to misinterpret her words even when Miss Stackpole appeared to
strike the personal note most strongly. He bethought himself that persons, in her view, were simple
and homogeneous organisms, and that he, for his own part, was too perverted a representative of
the nature of man to have a right to deal with her in strict reciprocity. He carried out his resolve
with a great deal of tact, and the young lady found in renewed contact with him no obstacle to the
exercise of her genius for unshrinking enquiry, the general application of her confidence. Her
situation at Gardencourt therefore, appreciated as we have seen her to be by Isabel and full of
appreciation herself of that free play of intelligence which, to her sense, rendered Isabel's character
a sister-spirit, and of the easy venerableness of Mr. Touchett, whose noble tone, as she said, met
with her full approval--her situation at Gardencourt would have been perfectly comfortable had she
not conceived an irresistible mistrust of the little lady for whom she had at first supposed herself
obliged to "allow" as mistress of the house. She presently discovered, in truth, that this obligation
was of the lightest and that Mrs. Touchett cared very little how Miss Stackpole behaved. Mrs.
Touchett had defined her to Isabel as both an adventuress and a bore--adventuresses usually giving
one more of a thrill; she had expressed some surprise at her niece's having selected such a friend,
yet had immediately added that she knew Isabel's friends were her own affair and that she had
never undertaken to like them all or to restrict the girl to those she liked.
"If you could see none but the people I like, my dear, you'd have a very small society," Mrs.
Touchett frankly admitted; "and I don't think I like any man or woman well enough to recommend
them to you. When it comes to recommending it's a serious affair. I don't like Miss Stackpole-everything
about her displeases me; she talks so much too loud and looks at one as if one wanted
to look at her--which one doesn't. I'm sure she has lived all her life in a boarding-house, and I
detest the manners and the liberties of such places. If you ask me if I prefer my own manners,
which you doubtless think very bad, I'll tell you that I prefer them immensely. Miss Stackpole
knows I detest boarding-house civilisation, and she detests me for detesting it, because she thinks it
the highest in the world. She'd like Gardencourt a great deal better if it were a boarding-house. For
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me, I find it almost too much of one! We shall never get on together therefore, and there's no use
trying."
Mrs. Touchett was right in guessing that Henrietta disapproved of her, but she had not quite put her
finger on the reason. A day or two after Miss Stackpole's arrival she had made some invidious
reflexions on American hotels, which excited a vein of counter-argument on the part of the
correspondent of the Interviewer, who in the exercise of her profession had acquainted herself, in
the western world, with every form of caravansary. Henrietta expressed the opinion that American
hotels were the best in the world, and Mrs. Touchett, fresh from a renewed struggle with them,
recorded a conviction that they were the worst. Ralph, with his experimental geniality, suggested,
by way of healing the breach, that the truth lay between the two extremes and that the
establishments in question ought to be described as fair middling. This contribution to the
discussion, however, Miss Stackpole rejected with scorn. Middling indeed! If they were not the
best in the world they were the worst, but there was nothing middling about an American hotel.
"We judge from different points of view, evidently," said Mrs. Touchett. "I like to be treated as an
individual; you like to be treated as a 'party.'"
"I don't know what you mean," Henrietta replied. "I like to be treated as an American lady."
"Poor American ladies!" cried Mrs. Touchett with a laugh. "They're the slaves of slaves."
"They're the companions of freemen," Henrietta retorted.
"They're the companions of their servants--the Irish chambermaid and the negro waiter. They share
their work."
"Do you call the domestics in an American household 'slaves'?" Miss Stackpole enquired. "If that's
the way you desire to treat them, no wonder you don't like America."
"If you've not good servants you're miserable," Mrs. Touchett serenely said. "They're very bad in
America, but I've five perfect ones in Florence."
"I don't see what you want with five," Henrietta couldn't help observing. "I don't think I should like
to see five persons surrounding me in that menial position."
"I like them in that position better than in some others," proclaimed Mrs. Touchett with much
meaning.
"Should you like me better if I were your butler, dear?" her husband asked.
"I don't think I should: you wouldn't at all have the tenue."
"The companions of freemen--I like that, Miss Stackpole," said Ralph. "It's a beautiful
description."
"When I said freemen I didn't mean you, sir!"
And this was the only reward that Ralph got for his compliment. Miss Stackpole was baffled; she
evidently thought there was something treasonable in Mrs. Touchett's appreciation of a class which
she privately judged to be a mysterious survival of feudalism. It was perhaps because her mind was
oppressed with this image that she suffered some days to elapse before she took occasion to say to
Isabel: "My dear friend, I wonder if you're growing faithless."
"Faithless? Faithless to you, Henrietta?"
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"No, that would be a great pain; but it's not that."
"Faithless to my country then?"
"Ah, that I hope will never be. When I wrote to you from Liverpool I said I had something
particular to tell you. You've never asked me what it is. Is it because you've suspected?"
"Suspected what? As a rule I don't think I suspect," said Isabel.
"I remember now that phrase in your letter, but I confess I had forgotten it. What have you to tell
me?"
Henrietta looked disappointed, and her steady gaze betrayed it. "You don't ask that right--as if you
thought it important. You're changed--you're thinking of other things."
"Tell me what you mean, and I'll think of that."
"Will you really think of it? That's what I wish to be sure of."
"I've not much control of my thoughts, but I'll do my best," said Isabel. Henrietta gazed at her, in
silence, for a period which tried Isabel's patience, so that our heroine added at last: "Do you mean
that you're going to be married?"
"Not till I've seen Europe!" said Miss Stackpole. "What are you laughing at?" she went on. "What I
mean is that Mr. Goodwood came out in the steamer with me."
"Ah!" Isabel responded.
"You say that right. I had a good deal of talk with him; he has come after you."
"Did he tell you so?"
"No, he told me nothing; that's how I knew it," said Henrietta cleverly. "He said very little about
you, but I spoke of you a good deal."
Isabel waited. At the mention of Mr. Goodwood's name she had turned a little pale. "I'm very sorry
you did that," she observed at last.
"It was a pleasure to me, and I liked the way he listened. I could have talked a long time to such a
listener; he was so quiet, so intense; he drank it all in."
"What did you say about me?" Isabel asked.
"I said you were on the whole the finest creature I know."
"I'm very sorry for that. He thinks too well of me already; he oughtn't to be encouraged."
"He's dying for a little encouragement. I see his face now, and his earnest absorbed look while I
talked. I never saw an ugly man look so handsome."
"He's very simple-minded," said Isabel. "And he's not so ugly."
"There's nothing so simplifying as a grand passion."
"It's not a grand passion; I'm very sure it's not that."
"You don't say that as if you were sure."
Isabel gave rather a cold smile. "I shall say it better to Mr. Goodwood himself."
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"He'll soon give you a chance," said Henrietta. Isabel offered no answer to this assertion, which her
companion made with an air of great confidence. "He'll find you changed," the latter pursued.
"You've been affected by your new surroundings."
"Very likely. I'm affected by everything."
"By everything but Mr. Goodwood!" Miss Stackpole exclaimed with a slightly harsh hilarity.
Isabel failed even to smile back and in a moment she said: "Did he ask you to speak to me?"
"Not in so many words. But his eyes asked it--and his handshake, when he bade me good-bye."
"Thank you for doing so." And Isabel turned away.
"Yes, you're changed; you've got new ideas over here," her friend continued.
"I hope so," said Isabel; "one should get as many new ideas as possible."
"Yes; but they shouldn't interfere with the old ones when the old ones have been the right ones."
Isabel turned about again. "If you mean that I had any idea with regard to Mr. Goodwood--!" But
she faltered before her friend's implacable glitter.
"My dear child, you certainly encouraged him."
Isabel made for the moment as if to deny this charge; instead of which, however, she presently
answered: "It's very true. I did encourage him." And then she asked if her companion had learned
from Mr. Goodwood what he intended to do. It was a concession to her curiosity, for she disliked
