Essential Novelists - Henry James. Генри Джеймс
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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