| IT had been arranged that the two young ladies should proceed to London under Ralph’s escort, though Mrs. Touchett looked with little favour upon the plan. It was just the sort of plan, she said, that Miss Stackpole would be sure to suggest, and she inquired if the correspondent of the Interviewer was to take the party to stay at a boarding-house. | 1 |
| “I don’t care where she takes us to stay, so long as there is local colour,” said Isabel. “That is what we are going to London for.” | 2 |
| “I suppose that after a girl has refused an English lord she may do anything,” her aunt rejoined. “After that one needn’t stand on trifles.” | 3 |
| “Should you have liked me to marry Lord Warburton?” Isabel inquired. | 4 |
| “Of course I should.” | 5 |
| “I thought you disliked the English so much.” | 6 |
| “So I do; but it’s all the more reason for making use of them.” | 7 |
| “Is that your idea of marriage?” And Isabel ventured to add that her aunt appeared to her to have made very little use of Mr. Touchett. | 8 |
| “Your uncle is not an English nobleman,” said Mrs. Touchett, “though even if he had been, I should still probably have taken up my residence in Florence.” | 9 |
| “Do you think Lord Warburton could make me any better than I am?” the girl asked, with some animation. “I don’t mean that I am too good to improve. I mean—I mean that I don’t love Lord Warburton enough to marry him.” | 10 |
| “You did right to refuse him, then,” said Mrs. Touchett, in her little spare voice. “Only, the next great offer you get, I hope you will manage to come up to your standard.” | 11 |
| “We had better wait till the offer comes, before we talk about it. I hope very much that I may have no more offers for the present. They bother me fearfully.” | 12 |
| “You probably won’t be troubled with them if you adopt permanently the Bohemian manner of life. However, I have promised Ralph not to criticise the affair.” | 13 |
| “I will do whatever Ralph says is right,” Isabel said. “I have unbounded confidence in Ralph.” | 14 |
| “His mother is much obliged to you!” cried this lady, with a laugh. | 15 |
| “It seems to me she ought to be,” Isabel rejoined, smiling. | 16 |
| Ralph had assured her that there would be no violation of decency in their paying a visit—the little party of three—to the sights of the metropolis; but Mrs. Touchett took a different view. Like many ladies of her country who have lived a long time in Europe, she had completely lost her native tact on such points, and in her reaction, not in itself deplorable, against the liberty allowed to young persons beyond the seas, had fallen into gratuitous and exaggerated scruples. Ralph accompanied the two young ladies to town and established them at a quiet inn in a street that ran at right angles to Piccadilly. His first idea had been to take them to his father’s house in Winchester Square, a large, dull mansion, which at this period of the year was shrouded in silence and brown holland; but he bethought himself that, the cook being at Gardencourt, there was no one in the house to get them their meals; and Pratt’s Hotel accordingly became their resting-place. Ralph, on his side, found quarters in Winchester Square, having a “den” there of which he was very fond, and not being dependent on the local cuisine. He availed himself largely indeed of that at Pratt’s Hotel, beginning his day with an early visit to his fellow-travellers, who had Mr. Pratt in person, in a large bulging white waistcoat, to remove their dish-covers. Ralph turned up, as he said, after breakfast, and the little party made out a scheme of entertainment for the day. As London does not wear in the month of September its most brilliant face, the young man, who occasionally took an apologetic tone, was obliged to remind his companion, to Miss Stackpole’s high irritation, that there was not a creature in town. | 17 |
| “I suppose you mean that the aristocracy are absent,” Henrietta answered; “but I don’t think you could have a better proof that if they were absent altogether they would not be missed. It seems to me the place is about as full as it can be. There is no one here, of course, except three or four millions of people. What is it you call them—the lower-middle class? They are only the population of London, and that is of no consequence.” | 18 |
| Ralph declared that for him the aristocracy left no void that Miss Stackpole herself did not fill, and that a more contented man was nowhere at that movement to be found. In this he spoke the truth, for the stale September days, in the huge half-empty town, borrowed a charm from his circumstances. When he went home at night to the empty house in Winchester Square, after a day spent with his inquisitive country-women, he wandered into the big dusky dining-room, where the candle he took from the hall-table, after letting himself in, constituted the only illumination. The square was still, the house was still; when he raised one of the windows of the dining-room to let in the air, he heard the slow creak of the boots of a solitary policeman. His own step, in the empty room, seemed loud and sonorous; some of the carpets had been raised, and whenever he moved he roused a melancholy echo. He sat down in one of the armchairs; the big, dark dining table twinkled here and there in the small candle-light; the pictures on the wall, all of them very brown, looked vague and incoherent. There was a ghostly presence in the room, as of dinners long since digested, of table-talk that had lost its actuality. This hint of the supernatural perhaps had something to do with the fact that Ralph’s imagination took a flight, and that he remained in his chair a long time beyond the hour at which he should have been in bed; doing nothing, not even reading the evening paper. I say he did nothing, and I maintain the phrase in the face of the fact that he thought at these moments of Isabel. To think of Isabel could only be for Ralph an idle pursuit, leading to nothing and profiting little to any one. His cousin had not yet seemed to him so charming as during these days spent in sounding, tourist-fashion, the deeps and shallows of the metropolitan element. Isabel was constantly interested and often excited; if she had come in search of local colour she found it everywhere. She asked more questions than he could answer, and launched little theories that he was equally unable to accept or to refute. | 19 |
| The party went more than once to the British Museum, and to that brighter palace of art which reclaims for antique variety so large an area of a monotonous suburb; they spent a morning in the Abbey and went on a penny-steamer to the Tower; they looked at pictures both in public and private collections, and sat on various occasions beneath the great trees in Kensington Gardens. Henrietta Stackpole proved to be an indefatigable sight-seer and a more good-natured critic than Ralph had ventured to hope. She had indeed many disappointments, and London at large suffered from her vivid remembrance of many of the cities of her native land; but she made the best of its dingy peculiarities and only heaved an occasional sigh, and uttered a desultory “Well!” which led no further and lost itself in retrospect. The truth was that, as she said herself, she was not in her element. “I have not a sympathy with inanimate objects,” she remarked to Isabel at the National Gallery; and she continued to suffer from the meagreness of the glimpse that had as yet been vouchsafed to her of the inner life. Landscapes by Turner and Assyrian bulls were a poor substitute for the literary dinner-parties at which she had hoped to meet the genius and renown of Great Britain. | 20 |
| “Where are your public men, where are your men and women of intellect?” she inquired of Ralph, standing in the middle of Trafalgar Square, as if she had supposed this to be a place where she would naturally meet a few. “That’s one of them on the top of the column, you say—Lord Nelson? Was he a lord too? Wasn’t he high enough, that they had to stick him a hundred feet in the air? That’s the past—I don’t care about the past; I want to see some of the leading minds of the present. I won’t say of the future, because I don’t believe much in your future.” Poor Ralph had few leading minds among his acquaintance, and rarely enjoyed the pleasure of button-holding a celebrity; a state of things which appeared to Miss Stackpole to indicate a deplorable want of enterprise. “If I were on the other side I should call,” she said, “and tell the gentleman, whoever he might be, that I had heard a great deal about him and had come to see for myself. But I gather from what you say that this is not the custom here. You seem to have plenty of meaningless customs, and none of those that one really wants. We are in advance, certainly. I suppose I shall have to give up the social side altogether;” and Henrietta, though she went about with her guide-book and pencil, and wrote a letter to the Interviewer about the Tower (in which she described the execution of Lady Jane Grey), had a depressing sense of falling below her own standard. | 21 |
| The incident which had preceded Isabel’s departure from Gardencourt left a painful trace in the girl’s mind; she took no pleasure in recalling Lord Warburton’s magnanimous disappointment. She could not have done less than what she did; this was certainly true. But her necessity, all the same, had been a distasteful one, and she felt no desire to take credit for her conduct. Nevertheless, mingled with this absence of an intellectual relish of it, was a feeling of freedom which in itself was sweet, and which, as she wandered through the great city with her ill-matched companions, occasionally throbbed into joyous excitement. When she walked in Kensington Gardens, she stopped the children (mainly of the poorer sort) whom she saw playing on the grass; she asked them their names and gave them sixpence, and when they were pretty she kissed them. Ralph noticed such incidents; he noticed everything that Isabel did. | 22 |
| One afternoon, by way of amusing his companions, he invited them to tea in Winchester Square, and he had the house set in order as much as possible, to do honour to their visit. There was another guest, also, to meet the ladies, an amiable bachelor, an old friend of Ralph’s, who happened to be in town, and who got on uncommonly well with Miss Stackpole. Mr. Bantling, a stout, fair, smiling man of forty, who was extraordinarily well dressed, and whose contributions to the conversation were characterised by vivacity rather than continuity, laughed immoderately at everything Henrietta said, gave her several cups of tea, examined in her society the bric-à-brac, of which Ralph had a considerable collection, and afterwards, when the host proposed they should go out into the square and pretend it was a fête-champêtre, walked round the limited inclosure several times with her and listened with candid interest to her remarks upon the inner life. | 23 |
| “Oh, I see,” said Mr. Bantling; “I dare say you found it very quiet at Gardencourt. Naturally there’s not much going on there when there’s such a lot of illness about. Touchett’s very bad, you know; the doctors have forbid his being in England at all, and he only come back to take care of his father. The old man, I believe, has half-a-dozen things the matter with him. They call it gout, but to my certain knowledge he is dropsical as well, though he doesn’t look it. You may depend upon it he has got a lot of water somewhere. Of course that sort of thing makes it awfully slow for people in the house; I wonder they have them under such circumstances. Then I believe Mr. Touchett is always squabbling with his wife; she lives away from her husband, you know, in that extraordinary American way of yours. If you want a house where there is always something going on, I recommend you to go down and stay with my sister, Lady Pensil, in Bedfordshire. I’ll write to her to-morrow, and I’m sure she’ll be delighted to ask you. I know just what you want—you want a house where they go in for theatricals and picnics and that sort of thing. My sister is just that sort of woman; she is always getting up something or other, and she is always glad to have the sort of people that help her. I am sure she’ll ask you down by return of post; she is tremendously fond of distinguished people and writers. She writes herself, you know; but I haven’t read everything she has written. It’s usually poetry, and I don’t go in much for poetry—unless it’s Byron. I suppose you think a great deal of Byron in America,” Mr. Bantling continued, expanding in the stimulating air of Miss Stackpole’s attention, bringing up his sequences promptly, and at last changing his topic, with a natural eagerness to provide suitable conversation for so remarkable a woman. He returned, however, ultimately to the idea of Henrietta’s going to stay with Lady Pensil in Bedfordshire. “I understand what you want,” he repeated; “you want to see some genuine English sport. The Touchetts are not English at all, you know; they live on a kind of foreign system; they have got some awfully queer ideas. The old man thinks it’s wicked to hunt, I am told. You must get down to my sister’s in time for the theatricals, and I am sure she will be glad to give you a part. I am sure you act well; I know you are very clever. My sister is forty years old, and she has seven children; but she is going to play the principal part. Of course you needn’t act if you don’t want to.” | 24 |
| In this manner Mr. Banting delivered himself, while they strolled over the grass in Winchester Square, which, although it had been peppered by the London soot, invited the tread to linger. Henrietta thought her blooming, easy-voiced bachelor, with his impressibility to feminine merit and his suggestiveness of allusion, a very agreeable man, and she valued the opportunity he offered her. | 25 |
| “I don’t know but I would go, if your sister should ask me,” she said. “I think it would be my duty. What do you call her name?” | 26 |
| “Pensil. It’s an odd name, but it isn’t a bad one.” | 27 |
| “I think one name is as good as another. But what is her rank?” | 28 |
| “Oh, she’s a baron’s wife; a convenient sort of rank. You are fine enough, and you are not too fine.” | 29 |
| “I don’t know but what she’d be too fine for me. What do you call the place she lives in—Bedfordshire?” | 30 |
| “She lives away in the northern corner of it. It’s a tire-some country, but I daresay you won’t mind it. I’ll try and run down while you are there.” | 31 |
| All this was very pleasant to Miss Stackpole, and she was sorry to be obliged to separate from Lady Pensil’s obliging brother. But it happened that she had met the day before, in Piccadilly, some friends whom she had not seen for a year; the Miss Climbers, two ladies from Wilmington, Delaware, who had been travelling on the continent and were now preparing to re-embark. Henrietta had a long interview with them on the Piccadilly pavement, and though the three ladies all talked at once, they had not exhausted their accumulated topics. It had been agreed therefore that Henrietta should come and dine with them in their lodgings in Jermyn Street at six o’clock on the morrow, and she now bethought herself of this engagement. She prepared to start for Jermyn Street, taking leave first of Ralph Touchett and Isabel, who, seated on garden chairs in another part of the inclosure, were occupied—if the term may be used—with an exchange of amenities less pointed than the practical colloquy of Miss Stackpole and Mr. Bantling. When it had been settled between Isabel and her friend that they should be re-united at some reputable hour at Pratt’s Hotel, Ralph remarked that the latter must have a cab. She could not walk all the way to Jermyn Street. | 32 |
| “I suppose you mean it’s improper for me to walk alone!” Henrietta exclaimed. “Merciful powers, have I come to this?” | 33 |
| “There is not the slightest need of your walking alone,” said Mr. Bantling, in an off-hand tone expressive of gallantry. “I should be greatly pleased to go with you.” | 34 |
| “I simply meant that you would be late for dinner,” Ralph answered. “Think of those poor ladies, in their impatience, waiting for you.” | 35 |
| “You had better have a hansom, Henrietta,” said Isabel. | 36 |
| “I will get you a hansom, if you will trust to me,” Mr. Bantling went on. “We might walk a little till we met one.” | 37 |
| “I don’t see why I shouldn’t trust to him, do you?” Henrietta inquired of Isabel. | 38 |
| “I don’t see what Mr. Bantling could do to you,” Isabel answered, smiling; “but if you like, we will walk with you till you find your cab.” | 39 |
| “Never mind; we will go alone. Come on, Mr. Bantling, and take care you get me a good one.” | 40 |
| Mr. Bantling promised to do his best, and the two took their departure, leaving Isabel and her cousin standing in the square, over which a clear September twilight had now begun to gather. It was perfectly still; the wide quadrangle of dusky houses showed lights in none of the windows, where the shutters and blinds were closed; the pavements were a vacant expanse, and putting aside two small children from a neighbouring slum, who, attracted by symptoms of abnormal animation in the interior, were squeezing their necks between the rusty railings of the inclosure, the most vivid object within sight was the big red pillar-post on the south-east corner. | 41 |
| “Henrietta will ask him to get into the cab and go with her to Jermyn Street,” Ralph observed. He always spoke of Miss Stackpole as Henrietta. | 42 |
| “Very possibly,” said his companion. | 43 |
| “Or rather, no, she won’t,” he went on. “But Bantling will ask leave to get in.” | 44 |
| “Very likely again. I am very glad they are such good friends.” | 45 |
| “She has made a conquest. He thinks her a brilliant woman. It may go far,” said Ralph. | 46 |
| Isabel was silent a moment. | 47 |
| “I call Henrietta a very brilliant woman; but I don’t think it will go far,” she rejoined at last. “They would never really know each other. He has not the least idea what she really is, and she has no just comprehension of Mr. Bantling.” | 48 |
| “There is no more usual basis of matrimony than a mutual misunderstanding. But it ought not to be so difficult to understand Bob Bantling,” Ralph added. “He is a very simple fellow.” | 49 |
| “Yes, but Henrietta is simpler still. And pray, what am I to do?” Isabel asked, looking about her through the fading light, in which the limited landscape-gardening of the square took on a large and effective appearance. “I don’t imagine that you will propose that you and I, for our amusement, should drive about London in a hansom.” | 50 |
| “There is no reason why we should not stay here—if you don’t dislike it. It is very warm; there will be half-an-hour yet before dark; and if you permit it, I will light a cigarette.” | 51 |
| “You may do what you please,” said Isabel, “if you will amuse me till seven o’clock. I propose at that hour to go back and partake of a simple and solitary repast—two poached eggs and a muffin—at Pratt’s Hotel. | 52 |
| “May I not dine with you?” Ralph asked. | 53 |
| “No, you will dine at your club.” | 54 |
| They had wandered back to their chairs in the centre of the square again, and Ralph had lighted his cigarette. It would have given him extreme pleasure to be present in person at the modest little feast she had sketched; but in default of this he liked even being forbidden. For the moment, however, he liked immensely being alone with her, in the thickening dusk, in the centre of the multitudinous town; it made her seem to depend upon him and to be in his power. This power he could exert but vaguely; the best exercise of it was to accept her decisions submissively. There was almost an emotion in doing so. | 55 |
| “Why won’t you let me dine with you?” he asked, after a pause. | 56 |
| “Because I don’t care for it.” | 57 |
| “I suppose you are tired of me.” | 58 |
| “I shall be an hour hence. You see I have the gift of fore-knowledge.” | 59 |
| “Oh, I shall be delightful meanwhile,” said Ralph. But he said nothing more, and as Isabel made no rejoinder, they sat some time in silence which seemed to contradict his promise of entertainment. It seemed to him that she was preoccupied, and he wondered what she was thinking about; there were two or three very possible subjects. At last he spoke again. “Is your objection to my society this evening caused by your expectation of another visitor?” | 60 |
| She turned her head with a glance of her clear, fair eyes. | 61 |
| “Another visitor? What visitor should I have?” | 62 |
| He had none to suggest; which made his question seem to himself silly as well as brutal. | 63 |
| “You have a great many friends that I don’t know,” he said, laughing a little awkwardly. “You have a whole past from which I was perversely excluded.” | 64 |
| “You were reserved for my future. You must remember that my past is over there across the water. There is none of it here in London.” | 65 |
| “Very good, then, since your future is seated beside you. Capital thing to have your future so handy.” And Ralph lighted another cigarette and reflected that Isabel probably meant that she had received news that Mr. Caspar Goodwood had crossed to Paris. After he had lighted his cigarette he puffed it a while, and then he went on. “I promised a while ago to be very amusing; but you see I don’t come up to the mark, and the fact is there is a good deal of temerity in my undertaking to amuse a person like you. What do you care for my feeble attempts? You have grand ideas—you have a high standard in such matters. I ought at least to bring in a band of music or a company of mountebanks.” | 66 |
| “One mountebank is enough, and you do very well. Pray go on, and in another ten minutes I shall begin to laugh.” | 67 |
| “I assure you that I am very serious,” said Ralph. “You do really ask a great deal.” | 68 |
| “I don’t know what you mean. I ask nothing!” | 69 |
| “You accept nothing,” said Ralph. She coloured, and now suddenly it seemed to her that she guessed his meaning. But why should he speak to her of such things? He hesitated a little, and then he continued. “There is something I should like very much to say to you. It’s a question I wish to ask. It seems to me I have a right to ask it, because I have a kind of interest in the answer.” | 70 |
| “Ask what you will,” Isabel answered gently, “and I will try and satisfy you.” | 71 |
| “Well, then, I hope you won’t mind my saying that Lord Warburton has told me of something that has passed between you.” | 72 |
| Isabel started a little; she sat looking at her open fan. “Very good; I suppose it was natural he should tell you.” | 73 |
| “I have his leave to let you know he has done so. He has some hope still,” said Ralph. | 74 |
| “Still?” | 75 |
| “He had it a few days ago.” | 76 |
| “I don’t believe he has any now,” said the girl. | 77 |
| “I am very sorry for him, then; he is such a fine fellow.” | 78 |
| “Pray, did he ask you to talk to me?” | 79 |
| “No, not that. But he told me because he couldn’t help it. We are old friends, and he was greatly disappointed. He sent me a line asking me to come and see him, and I rode over to Lockleigh the day before he and his sister lunched with us. He was very heavy-hearted; he had just got a letter from you.” | 80 |
| “Did he show you the letter?” asked Isabel, with momentary loftiness. | 81 |
| “By no means. But he told me it was a neat refusal. I was very sorry for him,” Ralph repeated. | 82 |
| For some moments Isabel said nothing; then at last, “Do you know how often he had seen me? Five or six times.” | 83 |
| “That’s to your glory.” | 84 |
| “It’s not for that I say it.” | 85 |
| “What then do you say it for? Not to prove that poor Warburton’s state of mind is superficial because I am pretty sure you don’t think that.” | 86 |
| Isabel certainly was unable to say that she thought it; but presently she said something else. “If you have not been requested by Lord Warburton to argue with me, then you are doing it disinterestedly—or for the love of argument.” | 87 |
| “I have no wish to argue with you at all. I only wish to leave you alone. I am simply greatly interested in your own sentiments.” | 88 |
| “I am greatly obliged to you!” cried Isabel, with a laugh. | 89 |
| “Of course you mean that I am meddling in what doesn’t concern me. But why shouldn’t I speak to you of this matter without annoying you or embarrassing myself? What’s the use of being your cousin, if I can’t have a few privileges? What is the use of adoring you without the hope of a reward, if I can’t have a few compensations? What is the use of being ill and disabled, and restricted to mere spectatorship at the game of life, if I really can’t see the show when I have paid so much for my ticket? Tell me this,” Ralph went on, while Isabel listened to him with quickened attention: “What had you in your mind when you refused Lord Warburton?” | 90 |
| “What had I in my mind?” | 91 |
| “What was the logic—the view of your situation—that dictated so remarkable an act?” | 92 |
| “I didn’t wish to marry him—if that is logic.” | 93 |
| “No, that is not logic—and I knew that before. What was it you said to yourself? You certainly said more than that.” | 94 |
| Isabel reflected a moment and then she answered this inquiry with a question of her own. “Why do you call it a remarkable act? That is what your mother thinks, too.” | 95 |
| “Warburton is such a fine fellow; as a man I think he has hardly a fault. And then, he is what they call here a swell. He has immense possessions, and his wife would be thought a superior being. He unites the intrinsic and the extrinsic advantages.” | 96 |
| Isabel watched her cousin while he spoke, as if to see how far he would go. “I refused him because he was too perfect then. I am not perfect myself, and he is too good for me. Besides, his perfection would irritate me.” | 97 |
| “That is ingenious rather than candid,” said Ralph. “As a fact, you think nothing in the world too perfect for you.” | 98 |
| “Do you think I am so good?” | 99 |
| “No, but you are exacting, all the same, without the excuse of thinking yourself good. Nineteen women out of twenty however, even of the most exacting sort, would have contented themselves with Warburton. Perhaps you don’t know he has been run after.” | 100 |
| “I don’t wish to know. But it seems to me,” said Isabel, “that you told me of several faults that he has, one day when I spoke of him to you.” | 101 |
| Ralph looked grave. “I hope that what I said then had no weight with you; for they were not faults, the things I spoke of; they were simply peculiarities of his position. If I had known he wished to marry you, I would never have alluded to them. I think I said that as regards that position he was rather a sceptic. It would have been in your power to make him a believer.” | 102 |
| “I think not. I don’t understand the matter, and I am not conscious of any mission of that sort.—You are evidently disappointed,” Isabel added, looking gently but earnestly at her cousin. “You would have liked me to marry Lord Warburton.” | 103 |
| “Not in the least. I am absolutely without a wish on the subject. I don’t pretend to advise you, and I content myself with watching you—with the deepest interest.” | 104 |
| Isabel gave a rather conscious sigh. “I wish I could be as interesting to myself as I am to you!” | 105 |
| “There you are not candid again; you are extremely interesting to yourself. Do you know, however,” said Ralph, “that if you have really given Lord Warburton his final answer, I am rather glad it has been what it was. I don’t mean I am glad for you, and still less, of course, for him. I am glad for myself.” | 106 |
| “Are you thinking of proposing to me?” | 107 |
| “By no means. From the point of view I speak of that would be fatal; I should kill the goose that supplies me with golden eggs. I use that animal as a symbol of my insane illusions. What I mean is, I shall have the entertainment of seeing what a young lady does who won’t marry Lord Warburton.” | 108 |
| “That is what your mother counts upon too,” said Isabel. | 109 |
| “Ah, there will be plenty of spectators! We shall contemplate the rest of your career. I shall not see all of it, but I shall probably see the most interesting years. Of course, if you were to marry our friend, you would still have a career—a very honourable and brilliant one. But relatively speaking, it would be a little prosaic. It would be definitely marked out in advance; it would be wanting in the unexpected. You know I am extremely fond of the unexpected, and now that you have kept the game in your hands I depend on your giving us some magnificent example of it.” | 110 |
| “I don’t understand you very well,” said Isabel, “but I do so well enough to be able to say that if you look for magnificent examples of anything I shall disappoint you.” | 111 |
| “You will do so only by disappointing yourself—and that will go hard with you!” | 112 |
| To this Isabel made no direct reply; there was an amount of truth in it which would bear consideration. At last she said abruptly— | 113 |
| “I don’t see what harm there is in my wishing not to tie myself. I don’t want to begin life by marrying. There are other things a woman can do.” | 114 |
| “There is nothing she can do so well. But you are manysided.” | 115 |
| “If one is two-sided, it is enough,” said Isabel. | 116 |
| “You are the most charming of polygons!” Ralph broke out, with a laugh. At a glance from his companion, however, he became grave, and to prove it he went on—“You want to see life, as the young men say.” | 117 |
| “I don’t think I want to see it as the young men want to see it; but I do want to look about me.” | 118 |
| “You want to drain the cup of experience.” | 119 |
| “No, I don’t wish to touch the cup of experience. It’s a poisoned drink! I only want to see for myself.” | 120 |
| “You want to see, but not to feel,” said Ralph. | 121 |
| “I don’t think that if one is a sentient being, one can make the distinction,” Isabel returned. “I am a good deal like Henrietta. The other day, when I asked her if she wished to marry, she said—‘not till I have seen Europe!’ I too don’t wish to marry until I have seen Europe.” | 122 |
| “You evidently expect that a crowned head will be struck with you.” | 123 |
| “No, that would be worse than marrying Lord Warburton. But it is getting very dark,” Isabel continued, “and I must go home.” She rose from her place, but Ralph sat still a moment, looking at her. As he did not follow her, she stopped, and they remained a while exchanging a gaze, full on either side, but especially on Ralph’s, of utterances too vague for words. | 124 |
| “You have answered my question,” said Ralph at last. “You have told me what I wanted. I am greatly obliged to you.” | 125 |
| “It seems to me I have told you very little.” | 126 |
| “You have told me the great thing; that the world interests you and that you want to throw yourself into it.” | 127 |
| Isabel’s silvery eyes shone for a moment in the darkness. “I never said that.” | 128 |
| “I think you meant it. Don’t repudiate it; it’s so fine!” | 129 |
| “I don’t know what you are trying to fasten upon me, for I am not in the least an adventurous spirit. Women are not like men.” | 130 |
| Ralph slowly rose from his seat, and they walked together to the gate of the square. “No,” he said; “women rarely boast of their courage; men do so with a certain frequency.” | 131 |
| “Men have it to boast of!” | 132 |
| “Women have it too; you have a great deal.” | 133 |
| “Enough to go home in a cab to Pratt’s Hotel; but not more.” | 134 |
| Ralph unlocked the gate, and after they had passed out he fastened it. | 135 |
| “We will find your cab,” he said; and as they turned towards a neighbouring street in which it seemed that this quest would be fruitful, he asked her again if he might not see her safely to the inn. | 136 |
| “By no means,” she answered; “you are very tired; you must go home and go to bed.” | 137 |
| The cab was found, and he helped her into it, standing a moment at the door. | 138 |
| “When people forget I am a sick man I am often annoyed” he said. “But it’s worse when they remember it!” | 139 |
