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Variants I: Substantive Variants up to Copy Text
- Henry James
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Acknowledgments
- Henry James
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- The Portrait of a Lady
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Chapter 15
- Henry James
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IT had been arranged that the two young ladies should proceed to London under Ralph's escort, though Mrs. Touchett looked with little favour upon the plan. It was just the sort of plan, she said, that Miss Stackpole would be sure to suggest, and she inquired if the correspondent of the Interviewer was to take the party to stay at a boarding-house.
“I don't care where she takes us to stay, so long as there is local colour,” said Isabel. “That is what we are going to London for.”
“I suppose that after a girl has refused an English lord she may do anything,” her aunt rejoined. “After that one needn't stand on trifles.”
“Should you have liked me to marry Lord Warburton?” Isabel inquired.
“Of course I should.”
“I thought you disliked the English so much.”
“So I do; but it's all the more reason for making use of them.”
“Is that your idea of marriage?” And Isabel ventured to add that her aunt appeared to her to have made very little use of Mr. Touchett.
“Your uncle is not an English nobleman,” said Mrs. Touchett, “though even if he had been, I should still probably have taken up my residence in Florence.”
“Do you think Lord Warburton could make me any better than I am?” the girl asked, with some animation. “I don't mean that I am too good to improve. I mean—I mean that I don't love Lord Warburton enough to marry him.”
“You did right to refuse him, then,” said Mrs. Touchett, in her little spare voice. “Only, the next great offer you get, I hope you will manage to come up to your standard.”
“We had better wait till the offer comes, before we talk about it. I hope very much that I may have no more offers for the present. They bother me fearfully.”
“You probably won't be troubled with them if you adopt permanently the Bohemian manner of life. However, I have promised Ralph not to criticise the affair.”
“I will do whatever Ralph says is right,” Isabel said. “I have unbounded confidence in Ralph.”
Chapter 39
- Henry James
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IT probably will not be surprising to the reflective reader that Ralph Touchett should have seen less of his cousin since her marriage than he had done before that event—an event of which he took such a view as could hardly prove a confirmation of intimacy. He had uttered his thought, as we know, and after this he had held his peace, Isabel not having invited him to resume a discussion which marked an era in their relations. That discussion had made a difference—the difference that he feared, rather than the one he hoped. It had not chilled the girl's zeal in carrying out her engagement, but it had come dangerously near to spoiling a friendship. No reference was ever again made between them to Ralph's opinion of Gilbert Osmond; and by surrounding this topic with a sacred silence, they managed to preserve a semblance of reciprocal frankness. But there was a difference, as Ralph often said to himself— there was a difference. She had not forgiven him, she never would forgive him; that was all he had gained. She thought she had forgiven him; she believed she didn't care; and as she was both very generous and very proud, these convictions represented a certain reality. But whether or no the event should justify him, he would virtually have done her a wrong, and the wrong was of the sort that women remember best. As Osmond's wife, she could never again be his friend. If in this character she should enjoy the felicity she expected, she would have nothing but contempt for the man who had attempted, in advance, to undermine a blessing so dear; and if on the other hand his warning should be justified, the vow she had taken that he should never know it, would lay upon her spirit a burden that would make her hate him. Such had been, during the year that followed his cousin's marriage, Ralph's rather dismal prevision of the future; and if his meditations appear morbid, we must remember that he was not in the bloom of health. He consoled himself as he might by behaving (as he deemed) beautifully, and was present at the ceremony by which Isabel was united to Mr. Osmond, and which was performed in Florence in the month of June.
Chapter 7
- Henry James
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THE two amused themselves, time and again, with talking of the attitude of the British public, as if the young lady had been in a position to appeal to it; but in fact the British public remained for the present profoundly indifferent to Miss Isabel Archer, whose fortune had dropped her, as her cousin said, into the dullest house in England. Her gouty uncle received very little company, and Mrs. Touchett, not having cultivated relations with her husband's neighbours, was not warranted in expecting visits from them. She had, however, a peculiar taste; she liked to receive cards. For what is usually called social intercourse she had very little relish; but nothing pleased her more than to find her hall-table whitened with oblong morsels of symbolic pasteboard. She flattered herself that she was a very just woman, and had mastered the sovereign truth that nothing in this world is got for nothing. She had played no social part as mistress of Gardencourt, and it was not to be supposed that, in the surrounding country, a minute account should be kept of her comings and goings. But it is by no means certain that she did not feel it to be wrong that so little notice was taken of them, and that her failure (really very gratuitous) to make herself important in the neighbourhood had not much to do with the acrimony of her allusions to her husband's adopted country. Isabel presently found herself in the singular situation of defending the British constitution against her aunt; Mrs. Touchett having formed the habit of sticking pins into this venerable instrument. Isabel always felt an impulse to pull out the pins; not that she imagined they inflicted any damage on the tough old parchment, but because it seemed to her that her aunt might make better use of her sharpness. She was very critical herself—it was incidental to her age, her sex, and her nationality; but she was very sentimental as well, and there was something in Mrs. Touchett's dryness that set her own moral fountains flowing.
“Now what is your point of view?” she asked of her aunt. “When you criticize everything here, you should have a point of view.
Chapter 20
- Henry James
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SOME fortnight after this incident Madame Merle drove up in a hansom cab to the house in Winchester Square. As she descended from her vehicle she observed, suspended between the dining-room windows, a large, neat, wooden tablet, on whose fresh black ground were inscribed in white paint the words—“This noble freehold mansion to be sold;” with the name of the agent to whom application should be made. “They certainly lose no time,” said the visitor, as, after sounding the big brass knocker, she waited to be admitted; “it's a practical country!” And within the house, as she ascended to the drawing-room, she perceived numerous signs of abdication; pictures removed from the walls and placed upon sofas, windows undraped and floors laid bare. Mrs. Touchett presently received her, and intimated in a few words that condolences might be taken for granted.
“I know what you are going to say—he was a very good man. But I know it better than any one, because I gave him more chance to show it. In that I think I was a good wife.” Mrs. Touchett added that at the end her husband apparently recognised this fact. “He has treated me liberally,” she said; “I won't say more liberally than I expected, because I didn't expect. You know that as a general thing I don't expect. But he chose, I presume, to recognise the fact that though I lived much abroad, and mingled—you may say freely—in foreign life, I never exhibited the smallest preference for any one else.”
“For any one but yourself,” Madame Merle mentally observed; but the reflection was perfectly inaudible.
“I never sacrificed my husband to another,” Mrs. Touchett continued, with her stout curtness.
“Oh no,” thought Madame Merle; “you never did anything for another!”
There was a certain cynicism in these mute comments which demands an explanation; the more so as they are not in accord either with the view— somewhat superficial perhaps—that we have hitherto enjoyed of Madame Merle's character, or with the literal facts of Mrs. Touchett's history; the more so, too, as Madame Merle had a well-founded conviction that her friend's last remark was not in the least to be construed as a side-thrust at herself.
Chapter 52
- Henry James
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THERE was a train for Turin and Paris that evening; and after the Countess had left her, Isabel had a rapid and decisive conference with her maid, who was discreet, devoted, and active. After this, she thought (except of her journey) of only one thing. She must go and see Pansy; from her she could not turn away. She had not seen her yet, as Osmond had given her to understand that it was too soon to begin. She drove at five o’clock to a high door in a narrow street in the quarter of the Piazza Navona, and was admitted by the portress of the convent, a genial and obsequious person. Isabel had been at this institution before; she had come with Pansy to see the sisters. She knew they were good women, and she saw that the large rooms were clean and cheerful, and that the wellused garden had sun for winter and shade for spring. But she disliked the place, and it made her horribly sad; not for the world would she have spent a night there. It produced to-day more than before the impression of a well-appointed prison; for it was not possible to pretend that Pansy was free to leave it. This innocent creature had been presented to her in a new and violent light, but the secondary effect of the revelation was to make Isabel reach out her hand to her.
The portress left her to wait in the parlour of the convent, while she went to make it known that there was a visitor for the dear young lady. The parlour was a vast, cold apartment, with new-looking furniture; a large clean stove of white porcelain, unlighted; a collection of wax-flowers under glass; and a series of engravings from religious pictures on the walls. On the other occasion Isabel had thought it less like Rome than like Philadelphia; but to-day she made no reflections; the apartment only seemed to her very empty and very soundless. The portress returned at the end of some five minutes, ushering in another person. Isabel got up, expecting to see one of the ladies of the sisterhood; but to her extreme surprise she found herself confronted with Madame Merle.
Chapter 33
- Henry James
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HER fit of weeping, however, was of brief duration, and the signs of it had vanished when, an hour later, she broke the news to her aunt. I use this expression because she had been sure Mrs. Touchett would not be pleased; Isabel had only waited to tell her till she had seen Mr. Goodwood. She had an odd impression that it would not be honourable to make the fact public before she should have heard what Mr. Goodwood would say about it. He had said rather less than she expected, and she now had a somewhat angry sense of having lost time. But she would lose no more; she waited till Mrs. Touchett came into the drawing-room before the mid-day breakfast, and then she said to her—
“Aunt Lydia, I have something to tell you.” Mrs. Touchett gave a little jump and looked at the girl almost fiercely.
“You needn't tell me; I know what it is.”
“I don't know how you know.”
“The same way that I know when the window is open—by feeling a draught. You are going to marry that man.”
“What man do you mean?” Isabel inquired, with great dignity.
“Madame Merle's friend—Mr. Osmond.”
“I don't know why you call him Madame Merle's friend. Is that the principal thing he is known by?”
“If he is not her friend he ought to be—after what she has done for him!” cried Mrs. Touchett. “I shouldn't have expected it of her; I am disappointed.”
“If you mean that Madame Merle has had anything to do with my engagement you are greatly mistaken,” Isabel declared, with a sort of ardent coldness.
“You mean that your attractions were sufficient, without the gentleman being urged? You are quite right. They are immense, your attractions, and he would never have presumed to think of you if she had not put him up to it. He has a very good opinion of himself, but he was not a man to take trouble. Madame Merle took the trouble for him.”
Chronology of Composition and Production
- Henry James
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Chapter 30
- Henry James
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UNDER her cousin's escort Isabel returned on the morrow to Florence, and Ralph Touchett, though usually he was not fond of railway journeys, thought very well of the successive hours passed in the train which hurried his companion away from the city now distinguished by Gilbert Osmond's preference—hours that were to form the first stage in a still larger scheme of travel. Miss Stackpole had remained behind; she was planning a little trip to Naples, to be executed with Mr. Bantling's assistance. Isabel was to have but three days in Florence before the 4th of June, the date of Mrs. Touchett's departure, and she determined to devote the last of these to her promise to go and see Pansy Osmond. Her plan, however, seemed for a moment likely to modify itself, in deference to a plan of Madame Merle’s. This lady was still at Casa Touchett; but she too was on the point of leaving Florence, her next station being an ancient castle in the mountains of Tuscany, the residence of a noble family of that country, whose acquaintance (she had known them, as she said, “for ever”) seemed to Isabel, in the light of certain photographs of their immense crenellated dwelling which her friend was able to show her, a precious privilege.
She mentioned to Madame Merle that Mr. Osmond had asked her to call upon his daughter; she did not mention to her that he had also made her a declaration of love.
“Ah, comme cela se trouve!” the elder lady exclaimed. “I myself have been thinking it would be a kindness to take a look at the child before I go into the country.”
“We can go together, then,” said Isabel, reasonably. I say “reasonably,” because the proposal was not uttered in the spirit of enthusiasm. She had prefigured her visit as made in solitude; she should like it better so. Nevertheless, to her great consideration for Madame Merle she was prepared to sacrifice this mystic sentiment.
Her friend meditated, with her usual suggestive smile. “After all,” she presently said, “why should we both go; having, each of us, so much to do during these last hours?”
Chapter 32
- Henry James
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IT was not of him, nevertheless, that she was thinking while she stood at the window, where we found her a while ago, and it was not of any of the matters that I have just rapidly sketched. She was not thinking of the past, but of the future; of the immediate, impending hour. She had reason to expect a scene, and she was not fond of scenes. She was not asking herself what she should say to her visitor; this question had already been answered. What he would say to her—that was the interesting speculation. It could be nothing agreeable; Isabel was convinced of this, and the conviction had something to do with her being rather paler than usual. For the rest, however, she wore her natural brightness of aspect; even deep grief, with this vivid young lady, would have had a certain soft effulgence. She had laid aside her mourning, but she was still very simply dressed, and as she felt a good deal older than she had done a year before, it is probable that to a certain extent she looked so. She was not left indefinitely to her apprehensions, for the servant at last came in and presented her a card.
“Let the gentleman come in,” said Isabel, who continued to gaze out of the window after the footman had retired. It was only when she had heard the door close behind the person who presently entered that she looked round.
Caspar Goodwood stood there—stood and received a moment, from head to foot, the bright, dry gaze with which she rather withheld than offered a greeting. Whether on his side Mr. Goodwood felt himself older than on the first occasion of our meeting him, is a point which we shall perhaps presently ascertain; let me say meanwhile that to Isabel's critical glance he showed nothing of the injury of time. Straight, strong, and fresh, there was nothing in his appearance that spoke positively either of youth or of age; he looked too deliberate, too serious to be young, and too eager, too active to be old. Old he would never be, and this would serve as a compensation for his never having known the age of chubbiness.
Chapter 46
- Henry James
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LORD WARBURTON was not seen in Mrs. Osmond's drawing-room for several days, and Isabel could not fail to observe that her husband said nothing to her about having received a letter from him. She could not fail to observe, either, that Osmond was in a state of expectancy, and that though it was not agreeable to him to betray it, he thought their distinguished friend kept him waiting quite too long. At the end of four days he alluded to his absence.
“What has become of Warburton? What does he mean by treating one like a tradesman with a bill?”
“I know nothing about him,” Isabel said. “I saw him last Friday, at the German ball. He told me then that he meant to write to you.”
“He has never written to me.”
“So I supposed, from your not having told me.”
“He's an odd fish,” said Osmond, comprehensively. And on Isabel's making no rejoinder, he went on to inquire whether it took his lordship five days to indite a letter. “Does he form his words with such difficulty?”
“I don't know,” said Isabel. “I have never had a letter from him.”
“Never had a letter? I had an idea that you were at one time in intimate correspondence.”
Isabel answered that this had not been the case, and let the conversation drop. On the morrow, however, coming into the drawing-room late in the afternoon, her husband took it up again.
“When Lord Warburton told you of his intention of writing, what did you say to him?” he asked.
Isabel hesitated a moment. “I think I told him not to forget it.”
“Did you believe there was a danger of that?”
“As you say, he's an odd fish.”
“Apparently he has forgotten it,” said Osmond. “Be so good as to remind him.”
“Should you like me to write to him?” Isabel asked.
“I have no objection whatever.”
“You expect too much of me.”
“Ah yes, I expect a great deal of you.”
“I am afraid I shall disappoint you,” said Isabel.
“My expectations have survived a good deal of disappointment.”
Chapter 50
- Henry James
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AS the Countess Gemini was not acquainted with the ancient monuments, Isabel occasionally offered to introduce her to these interesting relics and to give their afternoon drive an antiquarian aim. The Countess, who professed to think her sister-in-law a prodigy of learning, never made an objection, and gazed at masses of Roman brickwork as patiently as if they had been mounds of modern drapery. She was not an antiquarian; but she was so delighted to be in Rome that she only desired to float with the current. She would gladly have passed an hour every day in the damp darkness of the Baths of Titus, if it had been a condition of her remaining at the Palazzo Roccanera. Isabel, however, was not a severe cicerone; she used to visit the ruins chiefly because they offered an excuse for talking about other matters than the love-affairs of the ladies of Florence, as to which her companion was never weary of offering information. It must be added that during these visits the Countess was not very active; her preference was to sit in the carriage and exclaim that everything was most interesting. It was in this manner that she had hitherto examined the Coliseum, to the infinite regret of her niece, who—with all the respect that she owed her—could not see why she should not descend from the vehicle and enter the building. Pansy had so little chance to ramble that her view of the case was not wholly disinterested; it may be divined that she had a secret hope that, once inside, her aunt might be induced to climb to the upper tiers. There came a day when the Countess announced her willingness to undertake this feat—a mild afternoon in March, when the windy month expressed itself in occasional puffs of spring. The three ladies went into the Coliseum together, but Isabel left her companions to wander over the place. She had often ascended to those desolate ledges from which the Roman crowd used to bellow applause, and where now the wild flowers (when they are allowed), bloom in the deep crevices; and to-day she felt weary, and preferred to sit in the despoiled arena.
General Editors’ Preface
- Henry James
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The Cambridge Edition of the Complete Fiction of Henry James (hereafter CFHJ) has been undertaken in the belief that there is a need for a full scholarly, informative, historical edition of James's work, presenting the texts in carefully checked, accurate form, with detailed annotation and extensive introductions. James's texts exist in a number of forms, including manuscripts (though most are lost), serial texts, and volumes of various sorts, often incorporating significant amounts of revision, most conspicuously the New York Edition (hereafter NYE) published by Charles Scribner's Sons in New York and Macmillan & Co. in London (1907–9). Besides these there are also pirated editions, unfinished works published posthumously, and other questionable forms. The CFHJ takes account of these complexities, within the framework of a textual policy which aims to be clear, orderly and consistent.
This edition aims to represent James's fictional career as it evolves, with a fresh and expanded awareness of its changing contexts and an informed sense of his developing style, technique and concerns. Consequently, it does not attempt to base its choices on the principle of the ‘last lifetime edition’, which in the case of Henry James is monumentally embodied in the twenty-four volumes of the NYE, the author's selection of nine longer novels (six of them in two volumes) and fifty-eight shorter novels and tales, and including eighteen specially composed Prefaces. The CFHJ, as a general rule, adopts rather the text of the first published book edition of a work – unless the intrinsic particularities and the publishing history of that work require an alternative choice – on the ground that emphasis on the first context in which it was written and read will permit an unprecedented fullness of attention to the transformations in James's writing over five decades, as well as the rich literary and social contexts of their original publication.
There are inevitably cases where determining ‘the first published book edition’ requires some care. If, for instance, James expresses a preference for the text of one particular early book edition over another, or if the first edition to be published is demonstrably inferior to a later impression or edition, or if authorial supervision of a particular early edition or impression can be established, then a case can be made for choosing a text other than the first published book edition.
Appendix A - Extracts from James’s Notebooks
- Henry James
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Henry James’s Notebooks are collected in Volume XXXIV of The Complete Fiction of Henry James. The editor of that volume, Philip Horne, has excerpted and prepared the texts for this Appendix, and has supplied a few essential glosses and annotations; more extensive notes can be found in the volume devoted to The Notebooks.
The following passage is drawn from the first volume of James's notebooks in the Houghton Library, Harvard (MS Am 1094 (v. 1)). This volume of the notebooks runs from 7 November 1878 to 11 March 1888; the excerpt that follows probably dates from late December 1880 or early January 1881.
P. of an L.After Isabel’smarriage there are fivemore instalments, and the success of the whole story greatly depends upon this portion being well conducted or not. Let me then make the most of it—let me imagine the best. There has been a want of action in the earlier part, and it may be made up here. The elements that remain are, in themselves, I think, very interesting, and they only need to be strongly and happily combined. The weakness of the whole story is that it is too exclusively psychological—that it depends to[o] little on incident; but the complete unfolding of the situation that is established by Isabel's marriage may nonetheless be quite sufficiently dramatic. The idea of the whole thing is that the poor girl, who has dreamed of freedom and nobleness, who has done, as she believes, a generous, natural, clear-sighted thing, finds herself in reality ground in the very mill of the conventional. After a year or two of marriage the antagonism between her nature and Osmond's comes out—the open opposition of a noble character and a narrow one. There is a great deal to do here in a small compass; every word, therefore, must tell—every touch must count. If the last five parts of the story appear crowded, this will be rather a good defect in consideration of the perhaps too great diffuseness of the earlier portion. Isabel awakes from her sweet delusion—oh, the art required for making this delusion natural! and finds herself face to face with a husband who has ended by conceiving a hatred for her own larger qualities.
Chapter 27
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I SHALL not undertake to give an account of Isabel's impressions of Rome, to analyse her feelings as she trod the ancient pavement of the Forum, or to number her pulsations as she crossed the threshold of St. Peter’s. It is enough to say that her perception of the endless interest of the place was such as might have been expected in a young woman of her intelligence and culture. She had always been fond of history, and here was history in the stones of the street and the atoms of the sunshine. She had an imagination that kindled at the mention of great deeds, and wherever she turned some great deed had been acted. These things excited her, but she was quietly excited. It seemed to her companions that she spoke less than usual, and Ralph Touchett, when he appeared to be looking listlessly and awkwardly over her head, was really dropping an eye of observation upon her. To her own knowledge she was very happy; she would even have been willing to believe that these were to be on the whole the happiest hours of her life. The sense of the mighty human past was heavy upon her, but it was interfused in the strangest, suddenest, most capricious way, with the fresh, cool breath of the future. Her feelings were so mingled that she scarcely knew whither any of them would lead her, and she went about in a kind of repressed ecstasy of contemplation, seeing often in the things she looked at a great deal more than was there, and yet not seeing many of the items enumerated in “Murray.” Rome, as Ralph said, was in capital condition. The herd of re-echoing tourists had departed, and most of the solemn places had relapsed into solemnity. The sky was a blaze of blue, and the plash of the fountains, in their mossy niches, had lost its chill and doubled its music. On the corners of the warm, bright streets one stumbled upon bundles of flowers.
Our friends had gone one afternoon—it was the third of their stay—to look at the latest excavations in the Forum; these labours having been for some time previous largely extended.
Chapter 21
- Henry James
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MRS. TOUCHETT, before arriving in Paris, had fixed a day for her departure; and by the middle of February she had begun to travel southward. She did not go directly to Florence, but 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, under a white umbrella. Isabel went with her aunt, as a matter of course, though Mrs. Touchett, with her usual homely logic, had laid before her a pair of alternatives.
“Now, of course, you are completely your own mistress,” she said. “Excuse me; I don't mean that you were not so before. But you are on a different footing—property erects a kind of barrier. You can do a great many things if you are 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 will take a companion—some decayed gentlewoman with a darned cashmere and dyed hair, who paints on velvet. You don't think you would like that? Of course you can do as you please; I only want you to understand that you are at liberty. You might take Miss Stackpole as your dame de compagnie; she would keep people off very well. I think, however, that it is 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 would 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 are at all dull,” Isabel had replied to this.
“But you do think I am 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.
Chapter 16
- Henry James
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ISABEL had had no hidden motive in wishing her cousin not to take her home; it simply seemed to her that for some days past she had consumed an inordinate quantity of his time, and the independent spirit of the American girl who ends by regarding perpetual assistance as a sort of derogation to her sanity, had made her decide that for these few hours she must suffice to herself. She had moreover a great fondness for intervals of solitude, and since her arrival in England it had been but scantily gratified. It was a luxury she could always command at home, and she had missed it. That evening, however, an incident occurred which—had there been a critic to note it—would have taken all colour from the theory that the love of solitude had caused her to dispense with Ralph's attendance. She was sitting, towards nine o’clock, in the dim illumination of Pratt's Hotel, trying with the aid of two tall candles to lose herself in a volume she had brought from Gardencourt, but succeeding only to the extent of reading other words on the page than those that were printed there—words that Ralph had spoken to her in the afternoon.
Suddenly the well-muffled knuckle of the waiter was applied to the door, which presently admitted him, bearing the card of a visitor. This card, duly considered, offered to Isabel's startled vision the name of Mr. Caspar Goodwood. She let the servant stand before her inquiringly for some instants, without signifying her wishes.
“Shall I show the gentleman up, ma’am?” he asked at last, with a slightly encouraging inflection.
Isabel hesitated still, and while she hesitated she glanced at the mirror.
“He may come in,” she said at last; and waited for him with some emotion.
Caspar Goodwood came in and shook hands with her. He said nothing till the servant had left the room again, then he said—
“Why didn't you answer my letter?”
Chapter 49
- Henry James
- Edited by Michael Anesko, Pennsylvania State University
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- Book:
- The Portrait of a Lady
- Published online:
- 11 April 2021
- Print publication:
- 12 May 2016, pp 494-505
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MADAME MERLE had not made her appearance at the Palazzo Roccanera on the evening of that Thursday of which I have narrated some of the incidents, and Isabel, though she observed her absence, was not surprised by it. Things had passed between them which added no stimulus to sociability, and to appreciate which we must glance a little backward. It has been mentioned that Madame Merle returned from Naples shortly after Lord Warburton had left Rome, and that on her first meeting with Isabel (whom, to do her justice, she came immediately to see) her first utterance was an inquiry as to the whereabouts of this nobleman, for whom she appeared to hold her dear friend accountable.
“Please don't talk of him,” said Isabel, for answer; “we have heard so much of him of late.”
Madame Merle bent her head on one side a little, protestingly, and smiled in the left corner of her mouth.
“You have heard, yes. But you must remember that I have not, in Naples. I hoped to find him here, and to be able to congratulate Pansy.”
“You may congratulate Pansy still; but not on marrying Lord Warburton.”
“How you say that! Don't you know I had set my heart on it?” Madame Merle asked, with a great deal of spirit, but still with the intonation of good-humour.
Isabel was discomposed, but she was determined to be goodhumoured too.
“You shouldn't have gone to Naples, then. You should have stayed here to watch the affair.”
“I had too much confidence in you. But do you think it is too late?”
“You had better ask Pansy,” said Isabel.
“I shall ask her what you have said to her.”
These words seemed to justify the impulse of self-defence aroused on Isabel's part by her perceiving that her visitor's attitude was a critical one. Madame Merle, as we know, had been very discreet hitherto; she had never criticised; she had been excessively afraid of intermeddling. But apparently she had only reserved herself for this occasion; for she had a dangerous quickness in her eye, and an air of irritation which even her admirable smile was not able to transmute.
Chapter 3
- Henry James
- Edited by Michael Anesko, Pennsylvania State University
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- Book:
- The Portrait of a Lady
- Published online:
- 11 April 2021
- Print publication:
- 12 May 2016, pp 19-26
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MRS. TOUCHETT was certainly a person of many oddities, of which her behaviour on returning to her husband's house after many months was a noticeable specimen. She had her own way of doing all that she did, and this is the simplest description of a character which, although it was by no means without benevolence, rarely succeeded in giving an impression of softness. Mrs. Touchett might do a great deal of good, but she never pleased. This way of her own, of which she was so fond, was not intrinsically offensive—it was simply very sharply distinguished from the ways of others. The edges of her conduct were so very clear-cut that for susceptible persons it sometimes had a wounding effect. This purity of outline was visible in her deportment during the first hours of her return from America, under circumstances in which it might have seemed that her first act would have been to exchange greetings with her husband and son. Mrs. Touchett, for reasons which she deemed excellent, always retired on such occasions into impenetrable seclusion, postponing the more sentimental ceremony until she had achieved a toilet which had the less reason to be of high importance as neither beauty nor vanity were concerned in it. She was a plain-faced old woman, without coquetry and without any great elegance, but with an extreme respect for her own motives. She was usually prepared to explain these—when the explanation was asked as a favour; and in such a case they proved totally different from those that had been attributed to her. She was virtually separated from her husband, but she appeared to perceive nothing irregular in the situation. It had become apparent, at an early stage of their relations, that they should never desire the same thing at the same moment, and this fact had prompted her to rescue disagreement from the vulgar realm of accident. She did what she could to erect it into a law—a much more edifying aspect of it—by going to live in Florence, where she bought a house and established herself; leaving her husband in England to take care of his bank. This arrangement greatly pleased her; it was so extremely definite.