Mrs. Touchett had no purpose of awaiting in London the sale of her house. After selecting from
among its furniture the objects she wished to transport to her other abode, she left the rest of its
contents to be disposed of by the auctioneer and took her departure for the Continent. She was of
course accompanied on this journey by her niece, who now had plenty of leisure to measure and
weigh and otherwise handle the windfall on which Madame Merle had covertly congratulated her.
Isabel thought very often of the fact of her accession of means, looking at it in a dozen different
lights; but we shall not now attempt to follow her train of thought or to explain exactly why her
new consciousness was at first oppressive. This failure to rise to immediate joy was indeed but
brief; the girl presently made up her mind that to be rich was a virtue because it was to be able to
do, and that to do could only be sweet. It was the graceful contrary of the stupid side of weakness-especially
the feminine variety. To be weak was, for a delicate young person, rather graceful, but,
after all, as Isabel said to herself, there was a larger grace than that. Just now, it is true, there was
not much to do--once she had sent off a cheque to Lily and another to poor Edith; but she was
thankful for the quiet months which her mourning robes and her aunt's fresh widowhood
compelled them to spend together. The acquisition of power made her serious; she scrutinised her
power with a kind of tender ferocity, but was not eager to exercise it. She began to do so during a
stay of some weeks which she eventually made with her aunt in Paris, though in ways that will
inevitably present themselves as trivial. They were the ways most naturally imposed in a city in
which the shops are the admiration of the world, and that were prescribed unreservedly by the
guidance of Mrs. Touchett, who took a rigidly practical view of the transformation of her niece
from a poor girl to a rich one. "Now that you're a young woman of fortune you must know how to
play the part--I mean to play it well," she said to Isabel once for all; and she added that the girl's
first duty was to have everything handsome. "You don't know how to take care of your things, but
you must learn," she went on; this was Isabel's second duty. Isabel submitted, but for the present
her imagination was not kindled; she longed for opportunities, but these were not the opportunities
she meant.
Mrs. Touchett rarely changed her plans, and, having intended before her husband's death to spend
a part of the winter in Paris, saw no reason to deprive herself--still less to deprive her companion-of
this advantage. Though they would live in great retirement she might still present her niece,
informally, to the little circle of her fellow countrymen dwelling upon the skirts of the Champs
Elysees. With many of these amiable colonists Mrs. Touchett was intimate; she shared their
expatriation, their convictions, their pastimes, their ennui. Isabel saw them arrive with a good deal
of assiduity at her aunt's hotel, and pronounced on them with a trenchancy doubtless to be
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accounted for by the temporary exaltation of her sense of human duty. She made up her mind that
their lives were, though luxurious, inane, and incurred some disfavour by expressing this view on
bright Sunday afternoons, when the American absentees were engaged in calling on each other.
Though her listeners passed for people kept exemplarily genial by their cooks and dressmakers,
two or three of them thought her cleverness, which was generally admitted, inferior to that of the
new theatrical pieces. "You all live here this way, but what does it lead to?" she was pleased to ask.
"It doesn't seem to lead to anything, and I should think you'd get very tired of it."
Mrs. Touchett thought the question worthy of Henrietta Stackpole. The two ladies had found
Henrietta in Paris, and Isabel constantly saw her; so that Mrs. Touchett had some reason for saying
to herself that if her niece were not clever enough to originate almost anything, she might be
suspected of having borrowed that style of remark from her journalistic friend. The first occasion
on which Isabel had spoken was that of a visit paid by the two ladies to Mrs. Luce, an old friend of
Mrs. Touchett's and the only person in Paris she now went to see. Mrs. Luce had been living in
Paris since the days of Louis Philippe; she used to say jocosely that she was one of the generation
of 1830--a joke of which the point was not always taken. When it failed Mrs. Luce used to
explain--"Oh yes, I'm one of the romantics;" her French had never become quite perfect. She was
always at home on Sunday afternoons and surrounded by sympathetic compatriots, usually the
same. In fact she was at home at all times, and reproduced with wondrous truth in her well-
cushioned little corner of the brilliant city, the domestic tone of her native Baltimore. This reduced
Mr. Luce, her worthy husband, a tall, lean, grizzled, well-brushed gentleman who wore a gold eyeglass
and carried his hat a little too much on the back of his head, to mere platonic praise of the
"distractions" of Paris --they were his great word--since you would never have guessed from what
cares he escaped to them. One of them was that he went every day to the American banker's, where
he found a post-office that was almost as sociable and colloquial an institution as in an American
country town. He passed an hour (in fine weather) in a chair in the Champs Elysees, and he dined
uncommonly well at his own table, seated above a waxed floor which it was Mrs. Luce's happiness
to believe had a finer polish than any other in the French capital. Occasionally he dined with a
friend or two at the Cafe Anglais, where his talent for ordering a dinner was a source of felicity to
his companions and an object of admiration even to the headwaiter of the establishment. These
were his only known pastimes, but they had beguiled his hours for upwards of half a century, and
they doubtless justified his frequent declaration that there was no place like Paris. In no other
place, on these terms, could Mr. Luce flatter himself that he was enjoying life. There was nothing
like Paris, but it must be confessed that Mr. Luce thought less highly of this scene of his
dissipations than in earlier days. In the list of his resources his political reflections should not be
omitted, for they were doubtless the animating principle of many hours that superficially seemed
vacant. Like many of his fellow colonists Mr. Luce was a high--or rather a deep--conservative, and
gave no countenance to the government lately established in France. He had no faith in its duration
and would assure you from year to year that its end was close at hand. "They want to be kept
down, sir, to be kept down; nothing but the strong hand--the iron heel--will do for them," he would
frequently say of the French people; and his ideal of a fine showy clever rule was that of the
superseded Empire. "Paris is much less attractive than in the days of the Emperor; HE knew how
to make a city pleasant," Mr. Luce had often remarked to Mrs. Touchett, who was quite of his own
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way of thinking and wished to know what one had crossed that odious Atlantic for but to get away
from republics.
"Why, madam, sitting in the Champs Elysees, opposite to the Palace of Industry, I've seen the
court-carriages from the Tuileries pass up and down as many as seven times a day. I remember one
occasion when they went as high as nine. What do you see now? It's no use talking, the style's all
gone. Napoleon knew what the French people want, and there'll be a dark cloud over Paris, our
Paris, till they get the Empire back again."
Among Mrs. Luce's visitors on Sunday afternoons was a young man with whom Isabel had had a
good deal of conversation and whom she found full of valuable knowledge. Mr. Edward Rosier-Ned
Rosier as he was called--was native to New York and had been brought up in Paris, living
there under the eye of his father who, as it happened, had been an early and intimate friend of the
late Mr. Archer. Edward Rosier remembered Isabel as a little girl; it had been his father who came
to the rescue of the small Archers at the inn at Neufchatel (he was travelling that way with the boy
and had stopped at the hotel by chance), after their bonne had gone off with the Russian prince and
when Mr. Archer's whereabouts remained for some days a mystery. Isabel remembered perfectly
the neat little male child whose hair smelt of a delicious cosmetic and who had a bonne all his
own, warranted to lose sight of him under no provocation. Isabel took a walk with the pair beside
the lake and thought little Edward as pretty as an angel--a comparison by no means conventional in
her mind, for she had a very definite conception of a type of features which she supposed to be
angelic and which her new friend perfectly illustrated. A small pink face surmounted by a blue
velvet bonnet and set off by a stiff embroidered collar had become the countenance of her childish
dreams; and she had firmly believed for some time afterwards that the heavenly hosts conversed
among themselves in a queer little dialect of French-English, expressing the properest sentiments,
as when Edward told her that he was "defended" by his bonne to go near the edge of the lake, and
that one must always obey to one's bonne. Ned Rosier's English had improved; at least it exhibited
in a less degree the French variation. His father was dead and his bonne dismissed, but the young
man still conformed to the spirit of their teaching --he never went to the edge of the lake. There
was still something agreeable to the nostrils about him and something not offensive to nobler
organs. He was a very gentle and gracious youth, with what are called cultivated tastes--an
acquaintance with old china, with good wine, with the bindings of books, with the Almanach de
Gotha, with the best shops, the best hotels, the hours of railway-trains. He could order a dinner
almost as well as Mr. Luce, and it was probable that as his experience accumulated he would be a
worthy successor to that gentleman, whose rather grim politics he also advocated in a soft and
innocent voice. He had some charming rooms in Paris, decorated with old Spanish altar-lace, the
envy of his female friends, who declared that his chimney-piece was better draped than the high
shoulders of many a duchess. He usually, however, spent a part of every winter at Pau, and had
once passed a couple of months in the United States.
He took a great interest in Isabel and remembered perfectly the walk at Neufchatel, when she
would persist in going so near the edge. He seemed to recognise this same tendency in the
subversive enquiry that I quoted a moment ago, and set himself to answer our heroine's question
with greater urbanity than it perhaps deserved. "What does it lead to, Miss Archer? Why Paris
leads everywhere. You can't go anywhere unless you come here first. Every one that comes to
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Europe has got to pass through. You don't mean it in that sense so much? You mean what good it
does you? Well, how can you penetrate futurity? How can you tell what lies ahead? If it's a
pleasant road I don't care where it leads. I like the road, Miss Archer; I like the dear old asphalte.
You can't get tired of it--you can't if you try. You think you would, but you wouldn't; there's
always something new and fresh. Take the Hotel Drouot, now; they sometimes have three and four
sales a week. Where can you get such things as you can here? In spite of all they say I maintain
they're cheaper too, if you know the right places. I know plenty of places, but I keep them to
myself. I'll tell you, if you like, as a particular favour; only you mustn't tell any one else. Don't you
go anywhere without asking me first; I want you to promise me that. As a general thing avoid the
Boulevards; there's very little to be done on the Boulevards. Speaking conscientiously--sans
blague--I don't believe any one knows Paris better than I. You and Mrs. Touchett must come and
breakfast with me some day, and I'll show you my things; je ne vous dis que ca! There has been a
great deal of talk about London of late; it's the fashion to cry up London. But there's nothing in it-you
can't do anything in London. No Louis Quinze--nothing of the First Empire; nothing but their
eternal Queen Anne. It's good for one's bed-room, Queen Anne--for one's washing-room; but it
isn't proper for a salon. Do I spend my life at the auctioneer's?" Mr. Rosier pursued in answer to
another question of Isabel's. "Oh no; I haven't the means. I wish I had. You think I'm a mere trifler;
I can tell by the expression of your face--you've got a wonderfully expressive face. I hope you
don't mind my saying that; I mean it as a kind of warning. You think I ought to do something, and
so do I, so long as you leave it vague. But when you come to the point you see you have to stop. I
can't go home and be a shopkeeper. You think I'm very well fitted? Ah, Miss Archer, you overrate
me. I can buy very well, but I can't sell; you should see when I sometimes try to get rid of my
things. It takes much more ability to make other people buy than to buy yourself. When I think
how clever they must be, the people who make ME buy! Ah no; I couldn't be a shopkeeper. I can't
be a doctor; it's a repulsive business. I can't be a clergyman; I haven't got convictions. And then I
can't pronounce the names right in the Bible. They're very difficult, in the Old Testament
particularly. I can't be a lawyer; I don't understand--how do you call it?--the American procedure.
Is there anything else? There's nothing for a gentleman in America. I should like to be a
diplomatist; but American diplomacy--that's not for gentlemen either. I'm sure if you had seen the
last min--"
Henrietta Stackpole, who was often with her friend when Mr. Rosier, coming to pay his
compliments late in the afternoon, expressed himself after the fashion I have sketched, usually
interrupted the young man at this point and read him a lecture on the duties of the American
citizen. She thought him most unnatural; he was worse than poor Ralph Touchett. Henrietta,
however, was at this time more than ever addicted to fine criticism, for her conscience had been
freshly alarmed as regards Isabel. She had not congratulated this young lady on her augmentations
and begged to be excused from doing so.
"If Mr. Touchett had consulted me about leaving you the money," she frankly asserted, "I'd have
said to him 'Never!"
"I see," Isabel had answered. "You think it will prove a curse in disguise. Perhaps it will."
"Leave it to some one you care less for--that's what I should have said."
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"To yourself for instance?" Isabel suggested jocosely. And then, "Do you really believe it will ruin
me?" she asked in quite another tone.
"I hope it won't ruin you; but it will certainly confirm your dangerous tendencies."
"Do you mean the love of luxury--of extravagance?"
"No, no," said Henrietta; "I mean your exposure on the moral side. I approve of luxury; I think we
ought to be as elegant as possible. Look at the luxury of our western cities; I've seen nothing over
here to compare with it. I hope you'll never become grossly sensual; but I'm not afraid of that. The
peril for you is that you live too much in the world of your own dreams. You're not enough in
contact with reality--with the toiling, striving, suffering, I may even say sinning, world that
surrounds you. You're too fastidious; you've too many graceful illusions. Your newly-acquired
thousands will shut you up more and more to the society of a few selfish and heartless people who
will be interested in keeping them up."
Isabel's eyes expanded as she gazed at this lurid scene. "What are my illusions?" she asked. "I try
so hard not to have any."
"Well," said Henrietta, "you think you can lead a romantic life, that you can live by pleasing
yourself and pleasing others. You'll find you're mistaken. Whatever life you lead you must put
your soul in it--to make any sort of success of it; and from the moment you do that it ceases to be
romance, I assure you: it becomes grim reality! And you can't always please yourself; you must
sometimes please other people. That, I admit, you're very ready to do; but there's another thing
that's still more important--you must often displease others. You must always be ready for that-you
must never shrink from it. That doesn't suit you at all--you're too fond of admiration, you like
to be thought well of. You think we can escape disagreeable duties by taking romantic views-that's
your great illusion, my dear. But we can't. You must be prepared on many occasions in life to
please no one at all--not even yourself."
Isabel shook her head sadly; she looked troubled and frightened. "This, for you, Henrietta," she
said, "must be one of those occasions!"
It was certainly true that Miss Stackpole, during her visit to Paris, which had been professionally
more remunerative than her English sojourn, had not been living in the world of dreams. Mr.
Bantling, who had now returned to England, was her companion for the first four weeks of her
stay; and about Mr. Bantling there was nothing dreamy. Isabel learned from her friend that the two
had led a life of great personal intimacy and that this had been a peculiar advantage to Henrietta,
owing to the gentleman's remarkable knowledge of Paris. He had explained everything, shown her
everything, been her constant guide and interpreter. They had breakfasted together, dined together,
gone to the theatre together, supped together, really in a manner quite lived together. He was a true
friend, Henrietta more than once assured our heroine; and she had never supposed that she could
like any Englishman so well. Isabel could not have told you why, but she found something that
ministered to mirth in the alliance the correspondent of the Interviewer had struck with Lady
Pensil's brother; her amusement moreover subsisted in face of the fact that she thought it a credit to
each of them. Isabel couldn't rid herself of a suspicion that they were playing somehow at crosspurposes--
that the simplicity of each had been entrapped. But this simplicity was on either side
none the less honourable. It was as graceful on Henrietta's part to believe that Mr. Bantling took an
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interest in the diffusion of lively journalism and in consolidating the position of lady-
correspondents as it was on the part of his companion to suppose that the cause of the Interviewer-a
periodical of which he never formed a very definite conception--was, if subtly analysed (a task to
which Mr. Bantling felt himself quite equal), but the cause of Miss Stackpole's need of
demonstrative affection. Each of these groping celibates supplied at any rate a want of which the
other was impatiently conscious. Mr. Bantling, who was of rather a slow and a discursive habit,
relished a prompt, keen, positive woman, who charmed him by the influence of a shining,
challenging eye and a kind of bandbox freshness, and who kindled a perception of raciness in a
mind to which the usual fare of life seemed unsalted. Henrietta, on the other hand, enjoyed the
society of a gentleman who appeared somehow, in his way, made, by expensive, roundabout,
almost "quaint" processes, for her use, and whose leisured state, though generally indefensible,
was a decided boon to a breathless mate, and who was furnished with an easy, traditional, though
by no means exhaustive, answer to almost any social or practical question that could come up. She
often found Mr. Bantling's answers very convenient, and in the press of catching the American
post would largely and showily address them to publicity. It was to be feared that she was indeed
drifting toward those abysses of sophistication as to which Isabel, wishing for a good-humoured
retort, had warned her. There might be danger in store for Isabel; but it was scarcely to be hoped
that Miss Stackpole, on her side, would find permanent rest in any adoption of the views of a class
pledged to all the old abuses. Isabel continued to warn her good-humouredly; Lady Pensil's
obliging brother was sometimes, on our heroine's lips, an object of irreverent and facetious
allusion. Nothing, however, could exceed Henrietta's amiability on this point; she used to abound
in the sense of Isabel's irony and to enumerate with elation the hours she had spent with this
perfect man of the world--a term that had ceased to make with her, as previously, for opprobrium.
Then, a few moments later, she would forget that they had been talking jocosely and would
mention with impulsive earnestness some expedition she had enjoyed in his company. She would
say: "Oh, I know all about Versailles; I went there with Mr. Bantling. I was bound to see it
thoroughly--I warned him when we went out there that I was thorough: so we spent three days at
the hotel and wandered all over the place. It was lovely weather --a kind of Indian summer, only
not so good. We just lived in that park. Oh yes; you can't tell me anything about Versailles."
Henrietta appeared to have made arrangements to meet her gallant friend during the spring in Italy.
CHAPTER XXI
Mrs. Touchett, before arriving in Paris, had fixed the day for her departure and by the middle of
February had begun to travel southward. She interrupted her journey to pay a visit to her son, who
at San Remo, on the Italian shore of the Mediterranean, had been spending a dull, bright winter
beneath a slow-moving white umbrella. Isabel went with her aunt as a matter of course, though
Mrs. Touchett, with homely, customary logic, had laid before her a pair of alternatives.
"Now, of course, you're completely your own mistress and are as free as the bird on the bough. I
don't mean you were not so before, but you're at present on a different footing--property erects a
kind of barrier. You can do a great many things if you're rich which would be severely criticised if
you were poor. You can go and come, you can travel alone, you can have your own establishment:
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I mean of course if you'll take a companion--some decayed gentlewoman, with a darned cashmere
and dyed hair, who paints on velvet. You don't think you'd like that? Of course you can do as you
please; I only want you to understand how much you're at liberty. You might take Miss Stackpole
as your dame de compagnie; she'd keep people off very well. I think, however, that it's a great deal
better you should remain with me, in spite of there being no obligation. It's better for several
reasons, quite apart from your liking it. I shouldn't think you'd like it, but I recommend you to
make the sacrifice. Of course whatever novelty there may have been at first in my society has quite
passed away, and you see me as I am--a dull, obstinate, narrow-minded old woman."
"I don't think you're at all dull," Isabel had replied to this.
"But you do think I'm obstinate and narrow-minded? I told you so!" said Mrs. Touchett with much
elation at being justified.
Isabel remained for the present with her aunt, because, in spite of eccentric impulses, she had a
great regard for what was usually deemed decent, and a young gentlewoman without visible
relations had always struck her as a flower without foliage. It was true that Mrs. Touchett'
conversation had never again appeared so brilliant as that first afternoon in Albany, when s(s) he sat in
her damp waterproof and sketched the opportunities that Europe would offer to a young person of
taste. This, however, was in a great measure the girl's own fault; she had got a glimpse of her aunt's
experience, and her imagination constantly anticipated the judgements and emotions of a woman
who had very little of the same faculty. Apart from this, Mrs. Touchett had a great merit; she was
as honest as a pair of compasses. There was a comfort in her stiffness and firmness; you knew
exactly where to find her and were never liable to chance encounters and concussions. On her own
ground she was perfectly present, but was never over-inquisitive as regards the territory of her
neighbour. Isabel came at last to have a kind of undemonstrable pity for her; there seemed
something so dreary in the condition of a person whose nature had, as it were, so little surface-offered
so limited a face to the accretions of human contact. Nothing tender, nothing sympathetic,
had ever had a chance to fasten upon it--no wind-sown blossom, no familiar softening moss. Her
offered, her passive extent, in other words, was about that of a knife-edge. Isabel had reason to
believe none the less that as she advanced in life she made more of those concessions to the sense
of something obscurely distinct from convenience--more of them than she independently exacted.
She was learning to sacrifice consistency to considerations of that inferior order for which the
excuse must be found in the particular case. It was not to the credit of her absolute rectitude that
she should have gone the longest way round to Florence in order to spend a few weeks with her
invalid son; since in former years it had been one of her most definite convictions that when Ralph
wished to see her he was at liberty to remember that Palazzo Crescentini contained a large
apartment known as the quarter of the signorino.
"I want to ask you something," Isabel said to this young man the day after her arrival at San
Remo--"something I've thought more than once of asking you by letter, but that I've hesitated on
the whole to write about. Face to face, nevertheless, my question seems easy enough. Did you
know your father intended to leave me so much money?"
Ralph stretched his legs a little further than usual and gazed a little more fixedly at the
Mediterranean.
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"What does it matter, my dear Isabel, whether I knew? My father was very obstinate."
"So," said the girl, "you did know."
"Yes; he told me. We even talked it over a little." "What did he do it for?" asked Isabel abruptly.
"Why, as a kind of compliment."
"A compliment on what?"
"On your so beautifully existing."
"He liked me too much," she presently declared.
"That's a way we all have."
"If I believed that I should be very unhappy. Fortunately I don't believe it. I want to be treated with
justice; I want nothing but that."
"Very good. But you must remember that justice to a lovely being is after all a florid sort of
sentiment."
"I'm not a lovely being. How can you say that, at the very moment when I'm asking such odious
questions? I must seem to you delicate!"
"You seem to me troubled," said Ralph.
"I am troubled."
"About what?"
For a moment she answered nothing; then she broke out: "Do you think it good for me suddenly to
be made so rich? Henrietta doesn't."
"Oh, hang Henrietta!" said Ralph coarsely, "If you ask me I'm delighted at it."
"Is that why your father did it--for your amusement?"
"I differ with Miss Stackpole," Ralph went on more gravely. "I think it very good for you to have
means."
Isabel looked at him with serious eyes. "I wonder whether you know what's good for me--or
whether you care."
"If I know depend upon it I care. Shall I tell you what it is? Not to torment yourself."
"Not to torment you, I suppose you mean."
"You can't do that; I'm proof. Take things more easily. Don't ask yourself so much whether this or
that is good for you. Don't question your conscience so much--it will get out of tune like a
strummed piano. Keep it for great occasions. Don't try so much to form your character--it's like
trying to pull open a tight, tender young rose. Live as you like best, and your character will take
care of itself. Most things are good for you; the exceptions are very rare, and a comfortable
income's not one of them." Ralph paused, smiling; Isabel had listened quickly. "You've too much
power of thought--above all too much conscience," Ralph added. "It's out of all reason, the number
