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.
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She had taken up her niece--there was little doubt of that. One wet afternoon, some four months
earlier than the occurrence lately narrated, this young lady had been seated alone with a book. To
say she was so occupied is to say that her solitude did not press upon her; for her love of
knowledge had a fertilising 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 single 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 sallow with time. On the third floor there was a sort of arched passage,
connecting the two sides of the house, which Isabel 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 Isabel 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 (which with Isabel 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. Isabel 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. Isabel
had stayed with her grandmother at various seasons, but somehow all her visits had a flavour 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 that had been painted
yellow, crowned with a gable that was pointed out to strangers, defended by a rickety wooden
paling 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 Isabel's chief recollection was that
her hair was fastened with strange bedroomy combs at the temples and that she was the widow of
some one of consequence. The little girl had been offered the opportunity of laying a foundation of
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
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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 infirmities
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 haircloth sofa in especial, 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 Isabel 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 had 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 spring-time
was indeed an appeal-- and it seemed a cynical, insincere appeal--to patience. Isabel, however,
gave as little heed as possible to cosmic treacheries; she kept her eyes on her book and tried to fix
her mind. 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 manoeuvres, at the word of command. Just now she had given
it marching orders and it had been trudging over the sandy plains 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 some one 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 usually sit?" She looked about at the heterogeneous chairs and
tables.
"Not when I have visitors," said Isabel, getting up to receive the intruder.
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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 servant 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 had better tell her it's no matter." And then,
since the girl stood there hesitating and wondering, this unexpected critic said to her abruptly: "I
suppose you're one of the daughters?"
Isabel thought she had very strange manners. "It depends upon 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 Lilian and Edith. And are you the prettiest?"
"I haven't the least idea," said the girl.
"I think you must be." And in this way the aunt and the niece made friends. The aunt had
quarrelled 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 enquire 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 one's self. 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, Lilian'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. Touchett asked of her companion, who had
brought her to sit in the front parlour, which she had inspected without enthusiasm.
"I haven't the least idea," said the girl.
"That's the second time you have 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."
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"Yes, that's the way you were brought up--as if you were to inherit a million. What have you in
point of fact inherited?"
"I really can't tell you. You must ask Edmund and Lilian; they'll be back in half an hour."
"In Florence we should call it a very bad house," said Mrs. Touchett; "but here, I dare say, 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 your not knowing. The position's 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."
Isabel 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 of 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?" Isabel repeated.
"Yes, my dear; a very different affair from this. This is very bourgeois."
Isabel 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'll take you there," Mrs. Touchett
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'd promise almost anything!"
Edmund and Lilian were slow to return, and Mrs. Touchett 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 Isabel 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, or comedy, 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
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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. Touchett, but she
recognised 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. Isabel at
first had answered a good many questions, and it was from her answers apparently that Mrs.
Touchett derived a high opinion of her intelligence. But after this she had asked a good many, and
her aunt's answers, whatever turn they took, struck her as food for deep reflexion. Mrs. Touchett
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," Isabel replied; "she can have left the house but a short
time before you came in."
Mrs. Touchett 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 IV
Mrs. Ludlow was the eldest of the three sisters, and was usually thought the most sensible; the
classification being in general that Lilian was the practical one, Edith the beauty and Isabel the
"intellectual" superior. Mrs. Keyes, the second of the group, was the wife of an officer of the
United States Engineers, and as our history is not further 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 unfashionable West, to which, to her deep chagrin, her husband was successively relegated.
Lilian had married 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's, but Lilian had occasionally been
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 Fifty-third Street, seemed to exult
in her condition as in a bold escape. She was short and solid, and her claim to figure was
questioned, but she was conceded presence, though not majesty; she had moreover, as people said,
improved since her marriage, and the two things in life of which she was most distinctly conscious
were her husband's force in argument and her sister Isabel's originality. "I've never kept up with
Isabel--it would have taken all my time," she had often remarked; in spite of which, however, she
held her rather wistfully in sight; watching her as a motherly spaniel might watch a free
greyhound. "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 particular desire to marry her," Edmund Ludlow 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've
against her except that she's so original."
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"Well, I don't like originals; I like translations," Mr. Ludlow had more than once replied. "Isabel's
written in a foreign tongue. I can't make her out. She ought to marry an Armenian or a
Portuguese."
"That's just what I'm afraid she'll do!" cried Lilian, who thought Isabel capable of anything.
She listened with great interest to the girl's account of Mrs. Touchett's appearance and in the
evening prepared to comply with their aunt's commands. Of what Isabel then said no report has
remained, but her sister's words had doubtless prompted a word spoken to her husband as the two
were making 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?" Edmund Ludlow asked. "Make her a big present?"
"No indeed; nothing of the sort. But take an interest in her-- sympathise 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've always thought Isabel rather foreign."
"You want her to give her a little foreign sympathy, eh? Don't you think she gets enough at home?"
"Well, she ought to go abroad," said Mrs. Ludlow. "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've got to do," said Mrs. Ludlow, "is
to give her a chance."
"A chance for what?"
"A chance to develop."
"Oh Moses!" Edmund Ludlow 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 hat.
"I'm sure I don't care whether you do or not!" exclaimed the girl; whose voice and smile, however,
were less haughty than her words.
"Oh, she feels so grand since Mrs. Touchett's visit," said her 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. Touchett's visit to make one feel grand."
"Oh," exclaimed Ludlow, "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
avocations unheeded. Then she rose and moved about the room, and from one room to another,
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preferring the places where the vague 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; there 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 as she sat in one of the dusky
corners of the quiet parlour; but it was not with a desire for dozing 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 judgement 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 change had been struck, came gradually a host of images of the things she
was leaving behind her. The years and 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 truth 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 instruction. 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 her tenderness for him greater; it was scarcely even
painful to have to suppose him too generous, too good-natured, too indifferent to sordid
considerations. 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 definitely
informed; but it may interest the reader to know that, while they had recognised 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
