that what I shall think about is some way of letting you know that what you ask is impossible-letting
you know it without making you miserable."
"There's no way to do that, Miss Archer. I won't say that if you refuse me you'll kill me; I shall not
die of it. But I shall do worse; I shall live to no purpose."
"You'll live to marry a better woman than I."
"Don't say that, please," said Lord Warburton very gravely. "That's fair to neither of us."
"To marry a worse one then."
"If there are better women than you I prefer the bad ones. That's all I can say," he went on with the
same earnestness. "There's no accounting for tastes."
His gravity made her feel equally grave, and she showed it by again requesting him to drop the
subject for the present. "I'll speak to you myself--very soon. Perhaps I shall write to you."
"At your convenience, yes," he replied. "Whatever time you take, it must seem to me long, and I
suppose I must make the best of that."
"I shall not keep you in suspense; I only want to collect my mind a little."
He gave a melancholy sigh and stood looking at her a moment, with his hands behind him, giving
short nervous shakes to his hunting-crop. "Do you know I'm very much afraid of it--of that
remarkable mind of yours?"
Our heroine's biographer can scarcely tell why, but the question made her start and brought a
conscious blush to her cheek. She returned his look a moment, and then with a note in her voice
that might almost have appealed to his compassion, "So am I, my lord!" she oddly exclaimed.
His compassion was not stirred, however; all he possessed of the faculty of pity was needed at
home. "Ah! be merciful, be merciful," he murmured.
"I think you had better go," said Isabel. "I'll write to you."
"Very good; but whatever you write I'll come and see you, you know." And then he stood
reflecting, his eyes fixed on the observant countenance of Bunchie, who had the air of having
understood all that had been said and of pretending to carry off the indiscretion by a simulated fit
of curiosity as to the roots of an ancient oak. "There's one thing more," he went on. "You know, if
you don't like Lockleigh--if you think it's damp or anything of that sort--you need never go within
fifty miles of it. It's not damp, by the way; I've had the house thoroughly examined; it's perfectly
safe and right. But if you shouldn't fancy it you needn't dream of living in it. There's no difficulty
whatever about that; there are plenty of houses. I thought I'd just mention it; some people don't like
a moat, you know. Good-bye."
"I adore a moat," said Isabel. "Good-bye."
He held out his hand, and she gave him hers a moment--a moment long enough for him to bend his
handsome bared head and kiss it. Then, still agitating, in his mastered emotion, his implement of
the chase, he walked rapidly away. He was evidently much upset.
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Isabel herself was upset, but she had not been affected as she would have imagined. What she felt
was not a great responsibility, a great difficulty of choice; it appeared to her there had been no
choice in the question. She couldn't marry Lord Warburton; the idea failed to support any
enlightened prejudice in favour of the free exploration of life that she had hitherto entertained or
was now capable of entertaining. She must write this to him, she must convince him, and that duty
was comparatively simple. But what disturbed her, in the sense that it struck her with wonderment,
was this very fact that it cost her so little to refuse a magnificent "chance." With whatever
qualifications one would, Lord Warburton had offered her a great opportunity; the situation might
have discomforts, might contain oppressive, might contain narrowing elements, might prove really
but a stupefying anodyne; but she did her sex no injustice in believing that nineteen women out of
twenty would have accommodated themselves to it without a pang. Why then upon her also should
it not irresistibly impose itself? Who was she, what was she, that she should hold herself superior?
What view of life, what design upon fate, what conception of happiness, had she that pretended to
be larger than these large these fabulous occasions? If she wouldn't do such a thing as that then she
must do great things, she must do something greater. Poor Isabel found ground to remind herself
from time to time that she must not be too proud, and nothing could be more sincere than her
prayer to be delivered from such a danger: the isolation and loneliness of pride had for her mind
the horror of a desert place. If it had been pride that interfered with her accepting Lord Warburton
such a betise was singularly misplaced; and she was so conscious of liking him that she ventured to
assure herself it was the very softness, and the fine intelligence, of sympathy. She liked him too
much to marry him, that was the truth; something assured her there was a fallacy somewhere in the
glowing logic of the proposition--as he saw it-- even though she mightn't put her very finest finger-
point on it; and to inflict upon a man who offered so much a wife with a tendency to criticise
would be a peculiarly discreditable act. She had promised him she would consider his question,
and when, after he had left her, she wandered back to the bench where he had found her and lost
herself in meditation, it might have seemed that she was keeping her vow. But this was not the
case; she was wondering if she were not a cold, hard, priggish person, and, on her at last getting up
and going rather quickly back to the house, felt, as she had said to her friend, really frightened at
herself.
CHAPTER XIII
It was this feeling and not the wish to ask advice--she had no desire whatever for that--that led her
to speak to her uncle of what had taken place. She wished to speak to some one; she should feel
more natural, more human, and her uncle, for this purpose, presented himself in a more attractive
light than either her aunt or her friend Henrietta. Her cousin of course was a possible confidant; but
she would have had to do herself violence to air this special secret to Ralph. So the next day, after
breakfast, she sought her occasion. Her uncle never left his apartment till the afternoon, but he
received his cronies, as he said, in his dressing-room. Isabel had quite taken her place in the class
so designated, which, for the rest, included the old man's son, his physician, his personal servant,
and even Miss Stackpole. Mrs. Touchett did not figure in the list, and this was an obstacle the less
to Isabel's finding her host alone. He sat in a complicated mechanical chair, at the open window of
his room, looking westward over the park and the river, with his newspapers and letters piled up
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beside him, his toilet freshly and minutely made, and his smooth, speculative face composed to
benevolent expectation.
She approached her point directly. "I think I ought to let you know that Lord Warburton has asked
me to marry him. I suppose I ought to tell my aunt; but it seems best to tell you first."
The old man expressed no surprise, but thanked her for the confidence she showed him. "Do you
mind telling me whether you accepted him?" he then enquired.
"I've not answered him definitely yet; I've taken a little time to think of it, because that seems more
respectful. But I shall not accept him."
Mr. Touchett made no comment upon this; he had the air of thinking that, whatever interest he
might take in the matter from the point of view of sociability, he had no active voice in it. "Well, I
told you you'd be a success over here. Americans are highly appreciated."
"Very highly indeed," said Isabel. "But at the cost of seeming both tasteless and ungrateful, I don't
think I can marry Lord Warburton."
"Well," her uncle went on, "of course an old man can't judge for a young lady. I'm glad you didn't
ask me before you made up your mind. I suppose I ought to tell you," he added slowly, but as if it
were not of much consequence, "that I've known all about it these three days."
"About Lord Warburton's state of mind?"
"About his intentions, as they say here. He wrote me a very pleasant letter, telling me all about
them. Should you like to see his letter?" the old man obligingly asked.
"Thank you; I don't think I care about that. But I'm glad he wrote to you; it was right that he
should, and he would be certain to do what was right."
"Ah well, I guess you do like him!" Mr. Touchett declared. "You needn't pretend you don't."
"I like him extremely; I'm very free to admit that. But I don't wish to marry any one just now."
"You think some one may come along whom you may like better. Well, that's very likely," said
Mr. Touchett, who appeared to wish to show his kindness to the girl by easing off her decision, as
it were, and finding cheerful reasons for it.
"I don't care if I don't meet any one else. I like Lord Warburton quite well enough." she fell into
that appearance of a sudden change of point of view with which she sometimes startled and even
displeased her interlocutors.
Her uncle, however, seemed proof against either of these impressions. "He's a very fine man," he
resumed in a tone which might have passed for that of encouragement. "His letter was one of the
pleasantest I've received for some weeks. I suppose one of the reasons I liked it was that it was all
about you; that is all except the part that was about himself. I suppose he told you all that."
"He would have told me everything I wished to ask him," Isabel said.
"But you didn't feel curious?"
"My curiosity would have been idle--once I had determined to decline his offer."
"You didn't find it sufficiently attractive?" Mr. Touchett enquired.
She was silent a little. "I suppose it was that," she presently admitted. "But I don't know why."
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"Fortunately ladies are not obliged to give reasons," said her uncle. "There's a great deal that's
attractive about such an idea; but I don't see why the English should want to entice us away from
our native land. I know that we try to attract them over there, but that's because our population is
insufficient. Here, you know, they're rather crowded. However, I presume there's room for
charming young ladies everywhere."
"There seems to have been room here for you," said Isabel, whose eyes had been wandering over
the large pleasure-spaces of the park.
Mr. Touchett gave a shrewd, conscious smile. "There's room everywhere, my dear, if you'll pay for
it. I sometimes think I've paid too much for this. Perhaps you also might have to pay too much."
"Perhaps I might," the girl replied.
That suggestion gave her something more definite to rest on than she had found in her own
thoughts, and the fact of this association of her uncle's mild acuteness with her dilemma seemed to
prove that she was concerned with the natural and reasonable emotions of life and not altogether a
victim to intellectual eagerness and vague ambitions--ambitions reaching beyond Lord
Warburton's beautiful appeal, reaching to something indefinable and possibly not commendable. In
so far as the indefinable had an influence upon Isabel's behaviour at this juncture, it was not the
conception, even unformulated, of a union with Caspar Goodwood; for however she might have
resisted conquest at her English suitor's large quiet hands she was at least as far removed from the
disposition to let the young man from Boston take positive possession of her. The sentiment in
which She sought refuge after reading his letter was a critical view of his having come abroad; for
it was part of the influence he had upon her that he seemed to deprive her of the sense of freedom.
There was a disagreeably strong push, a kind of hardness of presence, in his way of rising before
her. She had been haunted at moments by the image, by the danger, of his disapproval and had
wondered--a consideration she had never paid in equal degree to any one else--whether he would
like what she did. The difficulty was that more than any man she had ever known, more than poor
Lord Warburton (she had begun now to give his lordship the benefit of this epithet), Caspar
Goodwood expressed for her an energy--and she had already felt it as a power that was of his very
nature. It was in no degree a matter of his "advantages"--it was a matter of the spirit that sat in his
clear-burning eyes like some tireless watcher at a window. She might like it or not, but he insisted,
ever, with his whole weight and force: even in one's usual contact with him one had to reckon with
that. The idea of a diminished liberty was particularly disagreeable to her at present, since she had
just given a sort of personal accent to her independence by looking so straight at Lord Warburton's
big bribe and yet turning away from it. Sometimes Caspar Goodwood had seemed to range himself
on the side of her destiny, to be the stubbornest fact she knew; she said to herself at such moments
that she might evade him for a time, but that she must make terms with him at last--terms which
would be certain to be favourable to himself. Her impulse had been to avail herself of the things
that helped her to resist such an obligation; and this impulse had been much concerned in her eager
acceptance of her aunt's invitation, which had come to her at an hour when she expected from day
to day to see Mr. Goodwood and when she was glad to have an answer ready for something she
was sure he would say to her. When she had told him at Albany, on the evening of Mrs. Touchett's
visit, that she couldn't then discuss difficult questions, dazzled as she was by the great immediate
opening of her aunt's offer of "Europe," he declared that this was no answer at all; and it was now
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to obtain a better one that he was following her across the sea. To say to herself that he was a kind
of grim fate was well enough for a fanciful young woman who was able to take much for granted
in him; but the reader has a right to a nearer and a clearer view.
He was the son of a proprietor of well-known cotton-mills in Massachusetts--a gentleman who had
accumulated a considerable fortune in the exercise of this industry. Caspar at present managed the
works, and with a judgement and a temper which, in spite of keen competition and languid years,
had kept their prosperity from dwindling. He had received the better part of his education at
Harvard College, where, however, he had gained renown rather as a gymnast and an oarsman than
as a gleaner of more dispersed knowledge. Later on he had learned that the finer intelligence too
could vault and pull and strain--might even, breaking the record, treat itself to rare exploits. He had
thus discovered in himself a sharp eye for the mystery of mechanics, and had invented an
improvement in the cotton-spinning process which was now largely used and was known by his
name. You might have seen it in the newspapers in connection with this fruitful contrivance;
assurance of which he had given to Isabel by showing her in the columns of the New York
Interviewer an exhaustive article on the Goodwood patent--an article not prepared by Miss
Stackpole, friendly as she had proved herself to his more sentimental interests. There were
intricate, bristling things he rejoiced in; he liked to organise, to contend, to administer; he could
make people work his will, believe in him, march before him and justify him. This was the art, as
they said, of managing men --which rested, in him, further, on a bold though brooding ambition. It
struck those who knew him well that he might do greater things than carry on a cotton-factory;
there was nothing cottony about Caspar Goodwood, and his friends took for granted that he would
somehow and somewhere write himself in bigger letters. But it was as if something large and
confused, something dark and ugly, would have to call upon him: he was not after all in harmony
with mere smug peace and greed and gain, an order of things of which the vital breath was
ubiquitous advertisement. It pleased Isabel to believe that he might have ridden, on a plunging
steed, the whirlwind of a great war--a war like the Civil strife that had overdarkened her conscious
childhood and his ripening youth.
She liked at any rate this idea of his being by character and in fact a mover of men--liked it much
better than some other points in his nature and aspect. She cared nothing for his cotton-mill-- the
Goodwood patent left her imagination absolutely cold. She wished him no ounce less of his
manhood, but she sometimes thought he would be rather nicer if he looked, for instance, a little
differently. His jaw was too square and set and his figure too straight and stiff: these things
suggested a want of easy consonance with the deeper rhythms of life. Then she viewed with
reserve a habit he had of dressing always in the same manner; it was not apparently that he wore
the same clothes continually, for, on the contrary, his garments had a way of looking rather too
new. But they all seemed of the same piece; the figure, the stuff, was so drearily usual. She had
reminded herself more than once that this was a frivolous objection to a person of his importance;
and then she had amended the rebuke by saying that it would be a frivolous objection only if she
were in love with him. She was not in love with him and therefore might criticise his small defects
as well as his great--which latter consisted in the collective reproach of his being too serious, or,
rather, not of his being so, since one could never be, but certainly of his seeming so. He showed his
appetites and designs too simply and artlessly; when one was alone with him he talked too much
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about the same subject, and when other people were present he talked too little about anything.
And yet he was of supremely strong, clean make--which was so much she saw the different fitted
parts of him as she had seen, in museums and portraits, the different fitted parts of armoured
warriors--in plates of steel handsomely inlaid with gold. It was very strange: where, ever, was any
tangible link between her impression and her act? Caspar Goodwood had never corresponded to
her idea of a delightful person, and she supposed that this was why he left her so harshly critical.
When, however, Lord Warburton, who not only did correspond with it, but gave an extension to
the term, appealed to her approval, she found herself still unsatisfied. It was certainly strange.
The sense of her incoherence was not a help to answering Mr. Goodwood's letter, and Isabel
determined to leave it a while unhonoured. If he had determined to persecute her he must take the
consequences; foremost among which was his being left to perceive how little it charmed her that
he should come down to Gardencourt. She was already liable to the incursions of one suitor at this
place, and though it might be pleasant to be appreciated in opposite quarters there was a kind of
grossness in entertaining two such passionate pleaders at once, even in a case where the
entertainment should consist of dismissing them. She made no reply to Mr. Goodwood; but at the
end of three days she wrote to Lord Warburton, and the letter belongs to our history.
DEAR LORD WARBURTON--A great deal of earnest thought has not led me to change my mind
about the suggestion you were so kind as to make me the other day. I am not, I am really and truly
not, able to regard you in the light of a companion for life; or to think of your home--your various
homes--as the settled seat of my existence. These things cannot be reasoned about, and I very
earnestly entreat you not to return to the subject we discussed so exhaustively. We see our lives
from our own point of view; that is the privilege of the weakest and humblest of us; and I shall
never be able to see mine in the manner you proposed. Kindly let this suffice you, and do me the
justice to believe that I have given your proposal the deeply respectful consideration it deserves. It
is with this very great regard that I remain sincerely yours,
ISABEL ARCHER.
While the author of this missive was making up her mind to dispatch it Henrietta Stackpole formed
a resolve which was accompanied by no demur. She invited Ralph Touchett to take a walk with
her in the garden, and when he had assented with that alacrity which seemed constantly to testify
to his high expectations, she informed him that she had a favour to ask of him. It may be admitted
that at this information the young man flinched; for we know that Miss Stackpole had struck him
as apt to push an advantage. The alarm was unreasoned, however; for he was clear about the area
of her indiscretion as little as advised of its vertical depth, and he made a very civil profession of
the desire to serve her. He was afraid of her and presently told her so. "When you look at me in a
certain way my knees knock together, my faculties desert me; I'm filled with trepidation and I ask
only for strength to execute your commands. You've an address that I've never encountered in any
woman."
"Well," Henrietta replied good-humouredly, "if I had not known before that you were trying
somehow to abash me I should know it now. Of course I'm easy game--I was brought up with such
different customs and ideas. I'm not used to your arbitrary standards, and I've never been spoken to
in America as you have spoken to me. If a gentleman conversing with me over there were to speak
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to me like that I shouldn't know what to make of it. We take everything more naturally over there,
and, after all, we're a great deal more simple. I admit that; I'm very simple myself. Of course if you
choose to laugh at me for it you're very welcome; but I think on the whole I would rather be myself
than you. I'm quite content to be myself; I don't want to change. There are plenty of people that
appreciate me just as I am. It's true they're nice fresh free-born Americans!" Henrietta had lately
taken up the tone of helpless innocence and large concession. "I want you to assist me a little," she
went on. "I don't care in the least whether I amuse you while you do so; or, rather, I'm perfectly
willing your amusement should be your reward. I want you to help me about Isabel."
"Has she injured you?" Ralph asked.
"If she had I shouldn't mind, and I should never tell you. What I'm afraid of is that she'll injure
herself."
"I think that's very possible," said Ralph.
His companion stopped in the garden-walk, fixing on him perhaps the very gaze that unnerved
him. "That too would amuse you, I suppose. The way you do say things! I never heard any one so
indifferent."
"To Isabel? Ah, not that!"
"Well, you're not in love with her, I hope."
"How can that be, when I'm in love with Another?"
"You're in love with yourself, that's the Other!" Miss Stackpole declared. "Much good may it do
you! But if you wish to be serious once in your life here's a chance; and if you really care for your
cousin here's an opportunity to prove it. I don't expect you to understand her; that's too much to
ask. But you needn't do that to grant my favour. I'll supply the necessary intelligence."
"I shall enjoy that immensely!" Ralph exclaimed. "I'll be Caliban and you shall be Ariel."
"You're not at all like Caliban, because you're sophisticated, and Caliban was not. But I'm not
talking about imaginary characters; I'm talking about Isabel. Isabel's intensely real. What I wish to
tell you is that I find her fearfully changed."
"Since you came, do you mean?"
"Since I came and before I came. She's not the same as she once so beautifully was."
"As she was in America?"
"Yes, in America. I suppose you know she comes from there. She can't help it, but she does."
"Do you want to change her back again?"
"Of course I do, and I want you to help me."
"Ah," said Ralph, "I'm only Caliban; I'm not Prospero."
"You were Prospero enough to make her what she has become. You've acted on Isabel Archer
since she came here, Mr. Touchett."
"I, my dear Miss Stackpole? Never in the world. Isabel Archer has acted on me--yes; she acts on
every one. But I've been absolutely passive."
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"You're too passive then. You had better stir yourself and be careful. Isabel's changing every day;
she's drifting away-- right out to sea. I've watched her and I can see it. She's not the bright
American girl she was. She's taking different views, a different colour, and turning away from her
