The Portrait of A Lady (16 page)

‘‘I thought so till I knew you, Miss Stackpole,'' Ralph answered; ‘‘and then I suddenly changed my mind.''

‘‘Oh, pshaw!'' Henrietta exclaimed impatiently.

‘‘Then it seemed to me,'' said Ralph, ‘‘that I was not good enough.''

‘‘It would improve you. Besides, it's your duty.''

‘‘Ah,'' cried the young man, ‘‘one has so many duties! Is that a duty too?''

‘‘Of course it is—did you never know that before? It's every one's duty to get married.''

Ralph meditated a moment; he was disappointed. There was something in Miss Stackpole he had begun to like; it seemed to him that if she was not a charming woman she was at least a very good fellow. She was wanting in distinction, but, as Isabel had said, she was brave, and there is always something fine about that. He had not supposed her to be capable of vulgar arts; but these last words struck him as a false note. When a marriageable young woman urges matrimony upon an unencumbered young man, the most obvious explanation of her conduct is not the altruistic impulse.

‘‘Ah, well now, there is a good deal to be said about that,'' Ralph rejoined.

‘‘There may be, but that is the principal thing. I must say I think it looks very exclusive, going round all alone, as if you thought no woman was good enough for you. Do you think you are better than any one else in the world? In America it's usual for people to marry.''

‘‘If it's my duty,'' Ralph asked, ‘‘is it not, by analogy, yours as well?''

Miss Stackpole's brilliant eyes expanded still further.

‘‘Have you the fond hope of finding a flaw in my reasoning? Of course I have got as good a right to marry as any one else.''

‘‘Well then,'' said Ralph, ‘‘I won't say it vexes me to see you single. It delights me rather.''

‘‘You are not serious yet. You never will be.''

‘‘Shall you not believe me to be so on the day that I tell you I desire to give up the practise of going round alone?''

Miss Stackpole looked at him for a moment in a manner which seemed to announce a reply that might technically be called encouraging. But to his great surprise this expression suddenly resolved itself into an appearance of alarm, and even of resentment.

‘‘No, not even then,'' she answered, dryly. After which she walked away.

‘‘I have not fallen in love with your friend,'' Ralph said that evening to Isabel, ‘‘though we talked some time this morning about it.''

‘‘And you said something she didn't like,'' the girl replied.

Ralph stared. ‘‘Has she complained of me?''

‘‘She told me she thinks there is something very low in the tone of Europeans towards women.''

‘‘Does she call me a European?''

‘‘One of the worst. She told me you had said to her something that an American never would have said. But she didn't repeat it.''

Ralph treated himself to a burst of resounding laughter.

‘‘She is an extraordinary combination. Did she think I was making love to her?''

‘‘No; I believe even Americans do that. But she apparently thought you mistook the intention of something she had said, and put an unkind construction on it.''

‘‘I thought she was proposing marriage to me, and I accepted her. Was that unkind?''

Isabel smiled. ‘‘It was unkind to me. I don't want you to marry.''

‘‘My dear cousin, what is one to do among you all?'' Ralph demanded. ‘‘Miss Stackpole tells me it's my bounden duty, and that it's hers to see I do mine!''

‘‘She has a great sense of duty,'' said Isabel, gravely. ‘‘She has, indeed, and it's the motive of everything she says. That's what I like her for. She thinks it's very frivolous for you to be single; that's what she meant to express to you. If you thought she was trying to—to attract you, you were very wrong.''

‘‘It is true it was an odd way; but I did think she was trying to attract me. Excuse my superficiality.''

‘‘You are 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 is 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 recognize the existence of knockers; and indeed I am not sure that she doesn't think them a rather 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 am afraid it is because she is rather vulgar that I like her.''

‘‘She would be flattered by your reason!''

‘‘If I should tell her, I would not express it in that way. I should say it is because there is 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 is 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 reminds me of it.''

‘‘You like her then for patriotic reasons. I am afraid it is on those very grounds that I object to her.''

‘‘Ah,'' said Isabel, with a kind of joyous sigh, ‘‘I like so many things! If a thing strikes me in a certain way, I like it. I don't want to boast, but I suppose I am 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 am immensely struck with her; not so much for herself as what stands behind her.''

‘‘Ah, you mean the back view of her,'' Ralph suggested.

‘‘What she says is true,'' his cousin answered; ‘‘you will 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 blue Pacific! A strong, sweet, fresh odour seems to rise from it, and Henrietta—excuse 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 am not sure the Pacific is blue,'' he said; ‘‘but you are a woman of imagination. Henrietta, however, is fragrant—Henrietta is decidedly fragrant!''

11

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 human nature 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 her relations with him no obstacle to the exercise of that somewhat aggressive frankness which was the social expression of her nature. Her situation at Gardencourt, therefore, appreciated as we have seen her to be by Isabel, and full of appreciation herself of that fine freedom of composition which, to her sense, rendered Isabel's character a sister-spirit, and of the easy venerableness of Mr. Touchett, whose general 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 to whom she had at first supposed herself obliged to pay a certain deference as mistress of the house. She presently discovered, however, that this obligation was of the lightest, and that Mrs. Touchett cared very little how Miss Stackpole behaved. Mrs. Touchett had spoken of her to Isabel as a ‘‘newspaper-woman,'' and expressed some surprise at her niece's having selected such a friend; but she had immediately added that she knew Isabel's friends were her own affair, and that she never undertook 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 would 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 is a serious affair. I don't like Miss Stackpole—I don't like her tone. She talks too loud, and she looks at me too hard. I am sure she has lived all her life in a boarding-house, and I detest the style of manners that such a way of living produces. If you ask me if I prefer my own manners, which you doubtless think very bad, I will tell you that I prefer them immensely. Miss Stackpole knows that I detest boarding-house civilization, and she detests me for detesting it, because she thinks it is the highest in the world. She would 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 is 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 reflections 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 acquired a large familiarity with the technical hospitality of her country. Henrietta expressed the opinion that American hotels were the best in the world, and Mrs. Touchett 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 are the slaves of slaves.''

‘‘They are the companions of freemen,'' Henrietta rejoined.

‘‘They are 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 inquired. ‘‘If that's the way you desire to treat them, no wonder you don't like America.''

‘‘If you have not good servants, you are miserable,'' Mrs. Touchett said, serenely. ‘‘They are very bad in America, but I have five perfect ones in Florence.''

‘‘I don't see what you want with five,'' Henrietta could not 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,'' cried Mrs. Touchett, with a laugh.

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

‘‘I don't think I should; you would make a very poor butler.''

‘‘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 suspected of being 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 said to Isabel in the morning, while they were alone together, ‘‘My dear friend, I wonder whether you are growing faithless?''

‘‘Faithless? Faithless to you, Henrietta?''

‘‘No, that would be a great pain; but it is 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 have never asked me what it is. Is it because you have 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 are changed—you are thinking of other things.''

‘‘Tell me what you mean, and I will think of that.''

‘‘Will you really think of it? That is what I wish to be sure of.''

‘‘I have not much control of my thoughts, but I will do my best,'' said Isabel.

Henrietta gazed at her, in silence, for a period of time which tried Isabel's patience, so that our heroine said at last: ‘‘Do you mean that you are going to be married?''