Henry James: The Portrait of a Lady, The Bostonians, The Tragic Muse & Daisy Miller (4 Books in One Edition). Henry Foss James
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 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.”
“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