Portrait of a Lady

“You're very conceited. She had no interested views, and never supposed you would think she had.”

“One must be very modest then to talk with such women,” Ralph said humbly. “But it's a very strange type. She's too personal – considering that she expects other people not to be. She walks in without knocking at the door.”

“Yes,” Isabel admitted, “she doesn't sufficiently recognise the existence of knockers; and indeed I'm not sure that she doesn't think them rather a pretentious ornament. She thinks one's door should stand ajar. But I persist in liking her.”

“I persist in thinking her too familiar,” Ralph rejoined, naturally somewhat uncomfortable under the sense of having been doubly deceived in Miss Stackpole.

“Well,” said Isabel, smiling, “I'm afraid it's because she's rather vulgar that I like her.”

“She would be flattered by your reason!”

“If I should tell her I wouldn't express it in that way. I should say it's because there's something of the 'people' in her.”

“What do you know about the people? and what does she, for that matter?”

“She knows a great deal, and I know enough to feel that she's a kind of emanation of the great democracy – of the continent, the country, the nation. I don't say that she sums it all up, that would be too much to ask of her. But she suggests it; she vividly figures it.”

“You like her then for patriotic reasons. I'm afraid it is on those very grounds I object to her.”

“Ah,” said Isabel with a kind of joyous sigh, “I like so many things! If a thing strikes me with a certain intensity I accept it. I don't want to swagger, but I suppose I'm rather versatile. I like people to be totally different from Henrietta – in the style of Lord Warburton's sisters for instance. So long as I look at the Misses Molyneux they seem to me to answer a kind of ideal. Then Henrietta presents herself, and I'm straightway convinced by her; not so much in respect to herself as in respect to what masses behind her.”

“Ah, you mean the back view of her,” Ralph suggested.

“What she says is true,” his cousin answered; “you'll never be serious. I like the great country stretching away beyond the rivers and across the prairies, blooming and smiling and spreading till it stops at the green Pacific! A strong, sweet, fresh odour seems to rise from it, and Henrietta – pardon my simile – has something of that odour in her garments.”

Isabel blushed a little as she concluded this speech, and the blush, together with the momentary ardour she had thrown into it, was so becoming to her that Ralph stood smiling at her for a moment after she had ceased speaking. “I'm not sure the Pacific's so green as that,” he said; “but you're a young woman of imagination. Henrietta, however, does smell of the Future – it almost knocks one down!”

Chapter XI

He took a resolve after this not to misinterpret her words even when Miss Stackpole appeared to strike the personal note most strongly. He bethought himself that persons, in her view, were simple and homogeneous organisms, and that he, for his own part, was too perverted a representative of the nature of man to have a right to deal with her in strict reciprocity. He carried out his resolve with a great deal of tact, and the young lady found in renewed contact with him no obstacle to the exercise of her genius for unshrinking enquiry, the general application of her confidence. Her situation at Gardencourt therefore, appreciated as we have seen her to be by Isabel and full of appreciation herself of that free play of intelligence which, to her sense, rendered Isabel's character a sister-spirit, and of the easy venerableness of Mr. Touchett, whose noble tone, as she said, met with her full approval – her situation at Gardencourt would have been perfectly comfortable had she not conceived an irresistible mistrust of the little lady for whom she had at first supposed herself obliged to “allow” as mistress of the house. She presently discovered, in truth, that this obligation was of the lightest and that Mrs. Touchett cared very little how Miss Stackpole behaved. Mrs. Touchett had defined her to Isabel as both an adventuress and a bore – adventuresses usually giving one more of a thrill; she had expressed some surprise at her niece's having selected such a friend, yet had immediately added that she knew Isabel's friends were her own affair and that she had never undertaken to like them all or to restrict the girl to those she liked.

“If you could see none but the people I like, my dear, you'd have a very small society,” Mrs. Touchett frankly admitted; “and I don't think I like any man or woman well enough to recommend them to you. When it comes to recommending it's a serious affair. I don't like Miss Stackpole – everything about her displeases me; she talks so much too loud and looks at one as if one wanted to look at her – which one doesn't. I'm sure she has lived all her life in a boarding-house, and I detest the manners and the liberties of such places. If you ask me if I prefer my own manners, which you doubtless think very bad, I'll tell you that I prefer them immensely. Miss Stackpole knows I detest boarding-house civilisation, and she detests me for detesting it, because she thinks it the highest in the world. She'd like Gardencourt a great deal better if it were a boarding-house. For me, I find it almost too much of one! We shall never get on together therefore, and there's no use trying.”

Mrs. Touchett was right in guessing that Henrietta disapproved of her, but she had not quite put her finger on the reason. A day or two after Miss Stackpole's arrival she had made some invidious reflexions on American hotels, which excited a vein of counter-argument on the part of the correspondent of the Interviewer, who in the exercise of her profession had acquainted herself, in the western world, with every form of caravansary. Henrietta expressed the opinion that American hotels were the best in the world, and Mrs. Touchett, fresh from a renewed struggle with them, recorded a conviction that they were the worst. Ralph, with his experimental geniality, suggested, by way of healing the breach, that the truth lay between the two extremes and that the establishments in question ought to be described as fair middling. This contribution to the discussion, however, Miss Stackpole rejected with scorn. Middling indeed! If they were not the best in the world they were the worst, but there was nothing middling about an American hotel.

“We judge from different points of view, evidently,” said Mrs. Touchett. “I like to be treated as an individual; you like to be treated as a 'party.'”

“I don't know what you mean,” Henrietta replied. “I like to be treated as an American lady.”

“Poor American ladies!” cried Mrs. Touchett with a laugh. “They're the slaves of slaves.”

“They're the companions of freemen,” Henrietta retorted.

“They're the companions of their servants – the Irish chambermaid and the negro waiter. They share their work.”

“Do you call the domestics in an American household 'slaves'?” Miss Stackpole enquired. “If that's the way you desire to treat them, no wonder you don't like America.”

“If you've not good servants you're miserable,” Mrs. Touchett serenely said. “They're very bad in America, but I've five perfect ones in Florence.”

“I don't see what you want with five,” Henrietta couldn't help observing. “I don't think I should like to see five persons surrounding me in that menial position.”

“I like them in that position better than in some others,” proclaimed Mrs. Touchett with much meaning.

“Should you like me better if I were your butler, dear?” her husband asked.

“I don't think I should: you wouldn't at all have the tenue.”

“The companions of freemen – I like that, Miss Stackpole,” said Ralph. “It's a beautiful description.”

“When I said freemen I didn't mean you, sir!”

And this was the only reward that Ralph got for his compliment. Miss Stackpole was baffled; she evidently thought there was something treasonable in Mrs. Touchett's appreciation of a class which she privately judged to be a mysterious survival of feudalism. It was perhaps because her mind was oppressed with this image that she suffered some days to elapse before she took occasion to say to Isabel: “My dear friend, I wonder if you're growing faithless.”

“Faithless? Faithless to you, Henrietta?”

“No, that would be a great pain; but it's not that.”

“Faithless to my country then?”

“Ah, that I hope will never be. When I wrote to you from Liverpool I said I had something particular to tell you. You've never asked me what it is. Is it because you've suspected?”

“Suspected what? As a rule I don't think I suspect,” said Isabel.

“I remember now that phrase in your letter, but I confess I had forgotten it. What have you to tell me?”

Henrietta looked disappointed, and her steady gaze betrayed it. “You don't ask that right – as if you thought it important. You're changed – you're thinking of other things.”

“Tell me what you mean, and I'll think of that.”

“Will you really think of it? That's what I wish to be sure of.”

“I've not much control of my thoughts, but I'll do my best,” said Isabel. Henrietta gazed at her, in silence, for a period which tried Isabel's patience, so that our heroine added at last: “Do you mean that you're going to be married?”

“Not till I've seen Europe!” said Miss Stackpole. “What are you laughing at?” she went on. “What I mean is that Mr. Goodwood came out in the steamer with me.”

“Ah!” Isabel responded.

“You say that right. I had a good deal of talk with him; he has come after you.”

“Did he tell you so?”

“No, he told me nothing; that's how I knew it,” said Henrietta cleverly. “He said very little about you, but I spoke of you a good deal.”

Isabel waited. At the mention of Mr. Goodwood's name she had turned a little pale. “I'm very sorry you did that,” she observed at last.

“It was a pleasure to me, and I liked the way he listened. I could have talked a long time to such a listener; he was so quiet, so intense; he drank it all in.”

“What did you say about me?” Isabel asked.