Chapter Chapter 4 · 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 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,

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 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 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.

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.