The Portrait of a Lady

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. Henrietta, on the other hand, enjoyed the society of a gentleman who appeared somehow, in his way, made, by expensive, roundabout, almost “quaint” processes, for her use, and whose leisured state, though generally indefensible, was a decided boon to a breathless mate, and who was furnished with an easy, traditional, though by no means exhaustive, answer to almost any social or practical question that could come up. She often found Mr. Bantling’s answers very convenient, and in the press of catching the American post would largely and showily address them to publicity. It was to be feared that she was indeed drifting toward those abysses of sophistication as to which Isabel, wishing for a good-humoured retort, had warned her. There might be danger in store for Isabel; but it was scarcely to be hoped that Miss Stackpole, on her side, would find permanent rest in any adoption of the views of a class pledged to all the old abuses. Isabel continued to warn her good-humouredly; Lady Pensil’s obliging brother was sometimes, on our heroine’s lips, an object of irreverent and facetious allusion. 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. Then, a few moments later, she would forget that they had been talking jocosely and would mention with impulsive earnestness some expedition she had enjoyed in his company. She would say: “Oh, I know all about Versailles; I went there with Mr. Bantling. I was bound to see it thoroughly⁠—I warned him when we went out there that I was thorough: so we spent three days at the hotel and wandered all over the place. It was lovely weather⁠—a kind of Indian summer, only not so good. We just lived in that park. Oh yes; you can’t tell me anything about Versailles.” Henrietta appeared to have made arrangements to meet her gallant friend during the spring in Italy.

XXI

Mrs. Touchett, before arriving in Paris, had fixed the day for her departure and by the middle of February had begun to travel southward. She interrupted her journey to pay a visit to her son, who at San Remo, on the Italian shore of the Mediterranean, had been spending a dull, bright winter beneath a slow-moving white umbrella. Isabel went with her aunt as a matter of course, though Mrs. Touchett, with homely, customary logic, had laid before her a pair of alternatives.

“Now, of course, you’re completely your own mistress and are as free as the bird on the bough. I don’t mean you were not so before, but you’re at present on a different footing⁠—property erects a kind of barrier. You can do a great many things if you’re rich which would be severely criticised if you were poor. 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. You don’t think you’d like that? Of course you can do as you please; I only want you to understand how much you’re at liberty. You might take Miss Stackpole as your dame de compagnie; she’d keep people off very well. I think, however, that it’s a great deal better you should remain with me, in spite of there being no obligation. It’s better for several reasons, quite apart from your liking it. I shouldn’t think you’d like it, but I recommend you to make the sacrifice. Of course whatever novelty there may have been at first in my society has quite passed away, and you see me as I am⁠—a dull, obstinate, narrow-minded old woman.”

“I don’t think you’re at all dull,” Isabel had replied to this.

“But you do think I’m obstinate and narrow-minded? I told you so!” said Mrs. Touchett with much elation at being justified.

Isabel remained for the present with her aunt, because, in spite of eccentric impulses, she had a great regard for what was usually deemed decent, and a young gentlewoman without visible relations had always struck her as a flower without foliage. It was true that Mrs. Touchett’s conversation had never again appeared so brilliant as that first afternoon in Albany, when she sat in her damp waterproof and sketched the opportunities that Europe would offer to a young person of taste. This, however, was in a great measure the girl’s own fault; she had got a glimpse of her aunt’s experience, and her imagination constantly anticipated the judgements and emotions of a woman who had very little of the same faculty. Apart from this, Mrs. Touchett had a great merit; she was as honest as a pair of compasses. There was a comfort in her stiffness and firmness; you knew exactly where to find her and were never liable to chance encounters and concussions. On her own ground she was perfectly present, but was never over-inquisitive as regards the territory of her neighbour. Isabel came at last to have a kind of undemonstrable pity for her; there seemed something so dreary in the condition of a person whose nature had, as it were, so little surface⁠—offered so limited a face to the accretions of human contact. Nothing tender, nothing sympathetic, had ever had a chance to fasten upon it⁠—no wind-sown blossom, no familiar softening moss. Her offered, her passive extent, in other words, was about that of a knife-edge. Isabel had reason to believe none the less that as she advanced in life she made more of those concessions to the sense of