spoiled and neglected; they had lived with nursemaids and governesses (usually very bad ones) or
had been sent to superficial schools, kept by the French, from which, at the end of a month, they
had been removed in tears. This view of the matter would have excited Isabel's indignation, for to
her own sense her opportunities had been large. Even when her father had left his daughters for
three months at Neufchatel with a French bonne who had eloped with a Russian nobleman staying
at the same hotel-- even in this irregular situation (an incident of the girl's eleventh year) she had
been neither frightened nor ashamed, but had thought it a romantic episode in a liberal education.
Her father had a large way of looking at life, of which his restlessness and even his occasional
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incoherency of conduct had been only a proof. He wished his daughters, even as children, to see as
much of the world as possible; and it was for this purpose that, before Isabel was fourteen, he had
transported them three times across the Atlantic, giving them on each occasion, however, but a few
months' view of the subject proposed: a course which had whetted our heroine's curiosity without
enabling her to satisfy it. She ought to have been a partisan of her father, for she was the member
of his trio who most "made up" to him for the disagreeables he didn't mention. In his last days his
general willingness to take leave of a world in which the difficulty of doing as one liked appeared
to increase as one grew older had been sensibly modified by the pain of separation from his clever,
his superior, his remarkable girl. Later, when the journeys to Europe ceased, he still had shown his
children all sorts of indulgence, and if he had been troubled about money-matters nothing ever
disturbed their irreflective consciousness of many possessions. Isabel, though she danced very
well, had not the recollection of having been in New York a successful member of the
choreographic circle; her sister Edith was, as every one said, so very much more fetching. Edith
was so striking an example of success that Isabel could have no illusions as to what constituted this
advantage, or as to the limits of her own power to frisk and jump and shriek--above all with
rightness of effect. Nineteen persons out of twenty (including the younger sister herself)
pronounced Edith infinitely the prettier of the two; but the twentieth, besides reversing this
judgement, had the entertainment of thinking all the others aesthetic vulgarians. Isabel had in the
depths of her nature an even more unquenchable desire to please than Edith; but the depths of this
young lady's nature were a very out-of-the-way place, between which and the surface
communication was interrupted by a dozen capricious forces. She saw the young men who came in
large numbers to see her sister; but as a general thing they were afraid of her; they had a belief that
some special preparation was required for talking with her. Her reputation of reading a great deal
hung about her like the cloudy envelope of a goddess in an epic; it was supposed to engender
difficult questions and to keep the conversation at a low temperature. The poor girl liked to be
thought clever, but she hated to be thought bookish; she used to read in secret and, though her
memory was excellent, to abstain from showy reference. She had a great desire for knowledge, but
she really preferred almost any source of information to the printed page; she had an immense
curiosity about life and was constantly staring and wondering. She carried within herself a great
fund of life, and her deepest enjoyment was to feel the continuity between the movements of her
own soul and the agitations of the world. For this reason she was fond of seeing great crowds and
large stretches of country, of reading about revolutions and wars, of looking at historical pictures-a
class of efforts as to which she had often committed the conscious solecism of forgiving them
much bad painting for the sake of the subject. While the Civil War went on she was still a very
young girl; but she passed months of this long period in a state of almost passionate excitement, in
which she felt herself at times (to her extreme confusion) stirred almost indiscriminately by the
valour of either army. Of course the circumspection of suspicious swains had never gone the
length of making her a social proscript; for the number of those whose hearts, as they approached
her, beat only just fast enough to remind them they had heads as well, had kept her unacquainted
with the supreme disciplines of her sex and age. She had had everything a girl could have:
kindness, admiration, bonbons, bouquets, the sense of exclusion from none of the privileges of the
world she lived in, abundant opportunity for dancing, plenty of new dresses, the London Spectator,
the latest publications, the music of Gounod, the poetry of Browning, the prose of George Eliot.
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These things now, as memory played over them, resolved themselves into a multitude of scenes
and figures. Forgotten things came back to her; many others, which she had lately thought of great
moment, dropped out of sight. The result was kaleidoscopic, but the movement of the instrument
was checked at last by the servant's coming in with the name of a gentleman. The name of the
gentleman was Caspar Goodwood; he was a straight young man from Boston, who had known
Miss Archer for the last twelvemonth and who, thinking her the most beautiful young woman of
her time, had pronounced the time, according to the rule I have hinted at, a foolish period of
history. He sometimes wrote to her and had within a week or two written from New York. She had
thought it very possible he would come in--had indeed all the rainy day been vaguely expecting
him. Now that she learned he was there, nevertheless, she felt no eagerness to receive him. He was
the finest young man she had ever seen, was indeed quite a splendid young man; he inspired her
with a sentiment of high, of rare respect. She had never felt equally moved to it by any other
person. He was supposed by the world in general to wish to marry her, but this of course was
between themselves. It at least may be affirmed that he had travelled from New York to Albany
expressly to see her; having learned in the former city, where he was spending a few days and
where he had hoped to find her, that she was still at the State capital. Isabel delayed for some
minutes to go to him; she moved about the room with a new sense of complications. But at last she
presented herself and found him standing near the lamp. He was tall, strong and somewhat stiff; he
was also lean and brown. He was not romantically, he was much rather obscurely, handsome; but
his physiognomy had an air of requesting your attention, which it rewarded according to the charm
you found in blue eyes of remarkable fixedness, the eyes of a complexion other than his own, and
a jaw of the somewhat angular mould which is supposed to bespeak resolution. Isabel said to
herself that it bespoke resolution to-night; in spite of which, in half an hour, Caspar Goodwood,
who had arrived hopeful as well as resolute, took his way back to his lodging with the feeling of a
man defeated. He was not, it may be added, a man weakly to accept defeat.
CHAPTER V
Ralph Touchett was a philosopher, but nevertheless he knocked at his mother's door (at a quarter to
seven) with a good deal of eagerness. Even philosophers have their preferences, and it must be
admitted that of his progenitors his father ministered most to his sense of the sweetness of filial
dependence. His father, as he had often said to himself, was the more motherly; his mother, on the
other hand, was paternal, and even, according to the slang of the day, gubernatorial. She was
nevertheless very fond of her only child and had always insisted on his spending three months of
the year with her. Ralph rendered perfect justice to her affection and knew that in her thoughts and
her thoroughly arranged and servanted life his turn always came after the other nearest subjects of
her solicitude, the various punctualities of performance of the workers of her will. He found her
completely dressed for dinner, but she embraced her boy with her gloved hands and made him sit
on the sofa beside her. She enquired scrupulously about her husband's health and about the young
man's own, and, receiving no very brilliant account of either, remarked that she was more than
ever convinced of her wisdom in not exposing herself to the English climate. In this case she also
might have given way. Ralph smiled at the idea of his mother's giving way, but made no point of
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reminding her that his own infirmity was not the result of the English climate, from which he
absented himself for a considerable part of each year.
He had been a very small boy when his father, Daniel Tracy Touchett, a native of Rutland, in the
State of Vermont, came to England as subordinate partner in a banking-house where some ten
years later he gained preponderant control. Daniel Touchett saw before him a life-long residence in
his adopted country, of which, from the first, he took a simple, sane and accommodating view.
But, as he said to himself, he had no intention of disamericanising, nor had he a desire to teach his
only son any such subtle art. It had been for himself so very soluble a problem to live in England
assimilated yet unconverted that it seemed to him equally simple his lawful heir should after his
death carry on the grey old bank in the white American light. He was at pains to intensify this
light, however, by sending the boy home for his education. Ralph spent several terms at an
American school and took a degree at an American university, after which, as he struck his father
on his return as even redundantly native, he was placed for some three years in residence at
Oxford. Oxford swallowed up Harvard, and Ralph became at last English enough. His outward
conformity to the manners that surrounded him was none the less the mask of a mind that greatly
enjoyed its independence, on which nothing long imposed itself, and which, naturally inclined to
adventure and irony, indulged in a boundless liberty of appreciation. He began with being a young
man of promise; at Oxford he distinguished himself, to his father's ineffable satisfaction, and the
people about him said it was a thousand pities so clever a fellow should be shut out from a career.
He might have had a career by returning to his own country (though this point is shrouded in
uncertainty) and even if Mr. Touchett had been willing to part with him (which was not the case) it
would have gone hard with him to put a watery waste permanently between himself and the old
man whom he regarded as his best friend. Ralph was not only fond of his father, he admired him-he
enjoyed the opportunity of observing him. Daniel Touchett, to his perception, was a man of
genius, and though he himself had no aptitude for the banking mystery he made a point of learning
enough of it to measure the great figure his father had played. It was not this, however, he mainly
relished; it was the fine ivory surface, polished as by the English air, that the old man had opposed
to possibilities of penetration. Daniel Touchett had been neither at Harvard nor at Oxford, and it
was his own fault if he had placed in his son's hands the key to modern criticism. Ralph, whose
head was full of ideas which his father had never guessed, had a high esteem for the latter's
originality. Americans, rightly or wrongly, are commended for the ease with which they adapt
themselves to foreign conditions; but Mr. Touchett had made of the very limits of his pliancy half
the ground of his general success. He had retained in their freshness most of his marks of primary
pressure; his tone, as his son always noted with pleasure, was that of the more luxuriant parts of
New England. At the end of his life he had become, on his own ground, as mellow as he was rich;
he combined consummate shrewdness with the disposition superficially to fraternise, and his
"social position," on which he had never wasted a care, had the firm perfection of an unthumbed
fruit. It was perhaps his want of imagination and of what is called the historic consciousness; but to
many of the impressions usually made by English life upon the cultivated stranger his sense was
completely closed. There were certain differences he had never perceived, certain habits he had
never formed, certain obscurities he had never sounded. As regards these latter, on the day he had
sounded them his son would have thought less well of him.
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Ralph, on leaving Oxford, had spent a couple of years in travelling; after which he had found
himself perched on a high stool in his father's bank. The responsibility and honour of such
positions is not, I believe, measured by the height of the stool, which depends upon other
considerations: Ralph, indeed, who had very long legs, was fond of standing, and even of walking
about, at his work. To this exercise, however, he was obliged to devote but a limited period, for at
the end of some eighteen months he had become aware of his being seriously out of health. He had
caught a violent cold, which fixed itself on his lungs and threw them into dire confusion. He had to
give up work and apply, to the letter, the sorry injunction to take care of himself. At first he
slighted the task; it appeared to him it was not himself in the least he was taking care of, but an
uninteresting and uninterested person with whom he had nothing in common. This person,
however, improved on acquaintance, and Ralph grew at last to have a certain grudging tolerance,
even an undemonstrative respect, for him. Misfortune makes strange bedfellows, and our young
man, feeling that he had something at stake in the matter-- it usually struck him as his reputation
for ordinary wit-- devoted to his graceless charge an amount of attention of which note was duly
taken and which had at least the effect of keeping the poor fellow alive. One of his lungs began to
heal, the other promised to follow its example, and he was assured he might outweather a dozen
winters if he would betake himself to those climates in which consumptives chiefly congregate. As
he had grown extremely fond of London, he cursed the flatness of exile: but at the same time that
he cursed he conformed, and gradually, when he found his sensitive organ grateful even for grim
favours, he conferred them with a lighter hand. He wintered abroad, as the phrase is; basked in the
sun, stopped at home when the wind blew, went to bed when it rained, and once or twice, when it
had snowed overnight, almost never got up again.
A secret hoard of indifference--like a thick cake a fond old nurse might have slipped into his first
school outfit--came to his aid and helped to reconcile him to sacrifice; since at the best he was too
ill for aught but that arduous game. As he said to himself, there was really nothing he had wanted
very much to do, so that he had at least not renounced the field of valour. At present, however, the
fragrance of forbidden fruit seemed occasionally to float past him and remind him that the finest of
pleasures is the rush of action. Living as he now lived was like reading a good book in a poor
translation--a meagre entertainment for a young man who felt that he might have been an excellent
linguist. He had good winters and poor winters, and while the former lasted he was sometimes the
sport of a vision of virtual recovery. But this vision was dispelled some three years before the
occurrence of the incidents with which this history opens: he had on that occasion remained later
than usual in England and had been overtaken by bad weather before reaching Algiers. He arrived
more dead than alive and lay there for several weeks between life and death. His convalescence
was a miracle, but the first use he made of it was to assure himself that such miracles happen but
once. He said to himself that his hour was in sight and that it behoved him to keep his eyes upon it,
yet that it was also open to him to spend the interval as agreeably as might be consistent with such
a preoccupation. With the prospect of losing them the simple use of his faculties became an
exquisite pleasure; it seemed to him the joys of contemplation had never been sounded. He was far
from the time when he had found it hard that he should be obliged to give up the idea of
distinguishing himself; an idea none the less importunate for being vague and none the less
delightful for having had to struggle in the same breast with bursts of inspiring self-criticism. His
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friends at present judged him more cheerful, and attributed it to a theory, over which they shook
their heads knowingly, that he would recover his health. His serenity was but the array of wild
flowers niched in his ruin.
It was very probably this sweet-tasting property of the observed thing in itself that was mainly
concerned in Ralph's quickly-stirred interest in the advent of a young lady who was evidently not
insipid. If he was consideringly disposed, something told him, here was occupation enough for a
succession of days. It may be added, in summary fashion, that the imagination of loving--as
distinguished from that of being loved --had still a place in his reduced sketch. He had only
forbidden himself the riot of expression. However, he shouldn't inspire his cousin with a passion,
nor would she be able, even should she try, to help him to one. "And now tell me about the young
lady," he said to his mother. "What do you mean to do with her?"
Mrs. Touchett was prompt. "I mean to ask your father to invite her to stay three or four weeks at
Gardencourt."
"You needn't stand on any such ceremony as that," said Ralph. "My father will ask her as a matter
of course."
"I don't know about that. She's my niece; she's not his."
"Good Lord, dear mother; what a sense of property! That's all the more reason for his asking her.
But after that--I mean after three months (for its absurd asking the poor girl to remain but for three
or four paltry weeks)--what do you mean to do with her?"
"I mean to take her to Paris. I mean to get her clothing."
"Ah yes, that's of course. But independently of that?"
"I shall invite her to spend the autumn with me in Florence."
"You don't rise above detail, dear mother," said Ralph. "I should like to know what you mean to do
with her in a general way."
"My duty!" Mrs. Touchett declared. "I suppose you pity her very much," she added.
"No, I don't think I pity her. She doesn't strike me as inviting compassion. I think I envy her.
Before being sure, however, give me a hint of where you see your duty."
"In showing her four European countries--I shall leave her the choice of two of them--and in
giving her the opportunity of perfecting herself in French, which she already knows very well."
Ralph frowned a little. "That sounds rather dry--even allowing her the choice of two of the
countries."
"If it's dry," said his mother with a laugh, "you can leave Isabel alone to water it! She is as good as
a summer rain, any day."
"Do you mean she's a gifted being?"
"I don't know whether she's a gifted being, but she's a clever girl--with a strong will and a high
temper. She has no idea of being bored."
"I can imagine that," said Ralph; and then he added abruptly: "How do you two get on?"
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"Do you mean by that that I'm a bore? I don't think she finds me one. Some girls might, I know;
but Isabel's too clever for that. I think I greatly amuse her. We get on because I understand her, I
know the sort of girl she is. She's very frank, and I'm very frank: we know just what to expect of
each other."
"Ah, dear mother," Ralph exclaimed, "one always knows what to expect of you! You've never
surprised me but once, and that's to-day--in presenting me with a pretty cousin whose existence I
had never suspected."
"Do you think her so very pretty?"
"Very pretty indeed; but I don't insist upon that. It's her general air of being some one in particular
that strikes me. Who is this rare creature, and what is she? Where did you find her, and how did
you make her acquaintance?"
"I found her in an old house at Albany, sitting in a dreary room on a rainy day, reading a heavy
book and boring herself to death. She didn't know she was bored, but when I left her no doubt of it
she seemed very grateful for the service. You may say I shouldn't have enlightened he--I should
have let her alone. There's a good deal in that, but I acted conscientiously; I thought she was meant
for something better. It occurred to me that it would be a kindness to take her about and introduce
her to the world. She thinks she knows a great deal of it--like most American girls; but like most
American girls she's ridiculously mistaken. If you want to know, I thought she would do me credit.
I like to be well thought of, and for a woman of my age there's no greater convenience, in some
ways, than an attractive niece. You know I had seen nothing of my sister's children for years; I
disapproved entirely of the father. But I always meant to do something for them when he should
have gone to his reward. I ascertained where they were to be found and, without any preliminaries,
went and introduced myself. There are two others of them, both of whom are married; but I saw
only the elder, who has, by the way, a very uncivil husband. The wife, whose name is Lily, jumped
at the idea of my taking an interest in Isabel; she said it was just what her sister needed--that some
one should take an interest in her. She spoke of her as you might speak of some young person of
genius-- in want of encouragement and patronage. It may be that Isabel's a genius; but in that case
I've not yet learned her special line. Mrs. Ludlow was especially keen about my taking her to
Europe; they all regard Europe over there as a land of emigration, of rescue, a refuge for their
superfluous population. Isabel herself seemed very glad to come, and the thing was easily
arranged. There was a little difficulty about the money-question, as she seemed averse to being
under pecuniary obligations. But she has a small income and she supposes herself to be travelling
at her own expense."
Ralph had listened attentively to this judicious report, by which his interest in the subject of it was
not impaired. "Ah, if she's a genius," he said, "we must find out her special line. Is it by chance for
flirting?"
"I don't think so. You may suspect that at first, but you'll be wrong. You won't, I think, in anyway,
be easily right about her."
"Warburton's wrong then!" Ralph rejoicingly exclaimed. "He flatters himself he has made that
discovery."
His mother shook her head. "Lord Warburton won't understand her. He needn't try."
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"He's very intelligent," said Ralph; "but it's right he should be puzzled once in a while."
"Isabel will enjoy puzzling a lord," Mrs. Touchett remarked.
Her son frowned a little. What does she know about lords?"
"Nothing at all: that will puzzle him all the more."
Ralph greeted these words with a laugh and looked out of the window. Then, "Are you not going
down to see my father?" he asked.
"At a quarter to eight," said Mrs. Touchett.
Her son looked at his watch. "You've another quarter of an hour then. Tell me some more about
Isabel." After which, as Mrs. Touchett declined his invitation, declaring that he must find out for
himself, "Well," he pursued, "she'll certainly do you credit. But won't she also give you trouble?"
"I hope not; but if she does I shall not shrink from it. I never do that."
"She strikes me as very natural," said Ralph.
"Natural people are not the most trouble."
"No," said Ralph; "you yourself are a proof of that. You're extremely natural, and I'm sure you
have never troubled any one. It takes trouble to do that. But tell me this; it just occurs to me. Is
Isabel capable of making herself disagreeable?"
"Ah," cried his mother, "you ask too many questions! Find that out for yourself."
His questions, however, were not exhausted. "All this time," he said, "you've not told me what you
intend to do with her."
"Do with her? You talk as if she were a yard of calico. I shall do absolutely nothing with her, and
she herself will do everything she chooses. She gave me notice of that."
"What you meant then, in your telegram, was that her character's independent."
"I never know what I mean in my telegrams--especially those I send from America. Clearness is
too expensive. Come down to your father."
"It's not yet a quarter to eight," said Ralph.
"I must allow for his impatience," Mrs. Touchett answered. Ralph knew what to think of his
father's impatience; but, making no rejoinder, he offered his mother his arm. This put it in his
power, as they descended together, to stop her a moment on the middle landing of the staircase-the
broad, low, wide-armed staircase of time-blackened oak which was one of the most striking
features of Gardencourt. "You've no plan of marrying her?" he smiled.
"Marrying her? I should be sorry to play her such a trick! But apart from that, she's perfectly able
to marry herself. She has every facility."
"Do you mean to say she has a husband picked out?"
"I don't know about a husband, but there's a young man in Boston--!"
Ralph went on; he had no desire to hear about the young man in Boston. "As my father says,
they're always engaged!"
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