The Portrait of a Lady: Chapters 14–21

Isabel told her uncle she had written to him, mentioning also his intention of coming; and the old man, in consequence, left his room earlier than usual and made his appearance at the two o’clock repast.

According to Isabel, if Miss Molyneux should ever learn what had passed between Miss Archer and Lord Warburton she would probably be shocked at such a girl’s failure to rise; or no, rather (this was our heroine’s last position) she would impute to the young American but a due consciousness of inequality.

“Do you know you’re the first lord I’ve ever seen?” she said very promptly to her neighbour. “I suppose you think I’m awfully benighted.”

“Would you make that remark to an English lady?” she enquired with soft asperity.

“Oh dear, no,” said Lord Warburton brazenly; “our talk had no such solemn character as that.”

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 enclosure, 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.

“I promised just now to be very amusing; but you see I don’t come up to the mark, and the fact is there’s a good deal of temerity in one’s undertaking to amuse a person like you. What do you care for my feeble attempts? You’ve grand ideas—you’ve a high standard in such matters. I ought at least to bring in a band of music or a company of mountebanks.”

“I promised just now to be very amusing; but you see I don’t come up to the mark, and the fact is there’s a good deal of temerity in one’s undertaking to amuse a person like you. What do you care for my feeble attempts? You’ve grand ideas—you’ve a high standard in such matters. I ought at least to bring in a band of music or a company of mountebanks.”

“Do you find it so? It seems to me there’s a great difference. I can imagine that at the end of ten years we might have a very pleasant correspondence. I shall have matured my epistolary style.”

The serenity of this announcement struck a chill to the young man’s heart; he seemed to see her whirled away into circles from which he was inexorably excluded.

“Who would wish less to curtail your liberty than I? What can give me greater pleasure than to see you perfectly independent—doing whatever you like? It’s to make you independent that I want to marry you.”
“That’s a beautiful sophism,” said the girl with a smile more beautiful still.

Then, adverting to topics more cheerful, he interrogated Miss Stackpole as to her own future.

And yet she had evidently nothing of the fluttered, flapping quality of a morsel of bunting in the wind; her manner expressed the repose and confidence which come from a large experience.

And yet she had evidently nothing of the fluttered, flapping quality of a morsel of bunting in the wind; her manner expressed the repose and confidence which come from a large experience.

The local doctor, a very sagacious man, in whom Ralph had secretly more confidence than in his distinguished colleague, was constantly in attendance, and Sir Matthew Hope came back several times.

“Why should we prevaricate just at the last? We never prevaricated before. I’ve got to die some time, and it’s better to die when one’s sick than when one’s well. I’m very sick—as sick as I shall ever be. I hope you don’t want to prove that I shall ever be worse than this? That would be too bad. You don’t? Well then.”

“Very likely she will; but that’s no reason—!” Mr. Touchett let his phrase die away in a helpless but not quite querulous sigh and remained silent again.

Ralph had foreseen what his father was coming to, and this suggestion was by no means fresh. It had long been Mr. Touchett’s most ingenious way of taking the cheerful view of his son’s possible duration. Ralph had usually treated it facetiously; but present circumstances proscribed the facetious.

Ralph had usually treated it facetiously; but present circumstances proscribed the facetious.Ralph had foreseen what his father was coming to, and this suggestion was by no means fresh. It had long been Mr. Touchett’s most ingenious way of taking the cheerful view of his son’s possible duration. Ralph had usually treated it facetiously; but present circumstances proscribed the facetious.

“You tell me I shall have money enough for two. What I want is that you should kindly relieve me of my superfluity and make it over to Isabel. Divide my inheritance into two equal halves and give her the second.”

She appeared to have in her experience a touchstone for everything, and somewhere in the capacious pocket of her genial memory she would find the key to Henrietta’s value.

She was one of the small ones of the earth; she had not been born to honours; she knew the world too well to nourish fatuous illusions on the article of her own place in it.

I don’t know that I shall ever be ill-natured with old people—I hope not; there are certainly some old people I adore. But I shall never be anything but abject with the young; they touch me and appeal to me too much.

I give you carte blanche then; you can even be impertinent if you like; I shall let it pass and horribly spoil you.

I give you carte blanche then; you can even be impertinent if you like; I shall let it pass and horribly spoil you.

Here I’ve been since I was brought here as a helpless child, and it’s ridiculous, or rather it’s scandalous, how little I know about that splendid, dreadful, funny country—surely the greatest and drollest of them all.

That’s very crude of you. When you’ve lived as long as I you’ll see that every human being has his shell and that you must take the shell into account. By the shell I mean the whole envelope of circumstances. There’s no such thing as an isolated man or woman; we’re each of us made up of some cluster of appurtenances. What shall we call our ‘self’?

Isabel was fond of metaphysics, but was unable to accompany her friend into this bold analysis of the human personality.

I am bound to confess, though it may cast some discredit on the sketch I have given of the youthful loyalty practised by our heroine toward this accomplished woman, that Isabel had said nothing whatever to her about Lord Warburton and had been equally reticent on the subject of Caspar Goodwood.

“You’ve plenty of time,” she had said to Isabel in return for the mutilated confidences which our young woman made her and which didn’t pretend to be perfect, though we have seen that at moments the girl had compunctions at having said so much.

A perfectly veracious speech; but, as Isabel thought, not as perfectly timed.

Henrietta’s career, however, was not so successful as might have been wished even in the interest of her private felicity; that view of the inner life of Great Britain which she was so eager to take appeared to dance before her like an ignis fatuus.

The invitation from Lady Pensil, for mysterious reasons, had never arrived; and poor Mr. Bantling himself, with all his friendly ingenuity, had been unable to explain so grave a dereliction on the part of a missive that had obviously been sent.

Madame Merle shook her head with a wise and now quite benignant smile.

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 accounted for by the temporary exaltation of her sense of human duty.

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 accounted for by the temporary exaltation of her sense of human duty.

This reduced Mr. Luce, her worthy husband, a tall, lean, grizzled, well-brushed gentleman who wore a gold eye-glass 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.

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.

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.

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.

You can go and come, you can travel alone, you can have your own establishment: I mean of course if you’ll take a companion—some decayed gentlewoman, with a darned cashmere and dyed hair, who paints on velvet.

Madame Merle had predicted to Mrs. Touchett that after their young friend had put her hand into her pocket half a dozen times she would be reconciled to the idea that it had been filled by a munificent uncle; and the event justified, as it had so often justified before, that lady’s perspicacity.

Madame Merle had predicted to Mrs. Touchett that after their young friend had put her hand into her pocket half a dozen times she would be reconciled to the idea that it had been filled by a munificent uncle; and the event justified, as it had so often justified before, that lady’s perspicacity.

It rested upon two figures which, in spite of increasing distance, were still sufficiently salient; they were recognisable without difficulty as those of Caspar Goodwood and Lord Warburton.