第56章

It had been arranged that the two young ladies should proceed to London under Ralph's escort, though Mrs.Touchett looked with little favour on the plan.It was just the sort of plan, she said, that Miss Stackpole would be sure to suggest, and she enquired 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's local colour," said Isabel."That's what we're 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 enquired.

"Of course I should."

"I thought you disliked the English so much.""So I do; but it's all the greater 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's 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 I'm 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 smallest, sparest voice."Only, the next great offer you get, I hope you'll manage to come up to your standard.""We had better wait till the offer comes before we talk about it.

I hope very much I may have no more offers for the present.They upset me completely.""You probably won't be troubled with them if you adopt permanently the Bohemian manner of life.However, I've promised Ralph not to criticize.""I'll do whatever Ralph says is right," Isabel returned."I've unbounded confidence in Ralph.""His mother's much obliged to you!" this lady dryly laughed.

"It seems to me indeed she ought to feel it!" Isabel irrepressibly answered.

Ralph had assured her that there would be no violation of decency in their paying a visit- the little party of three- to the sights of the metropolis; but Mrs.Touchett took a different view.Like many ladies of her country who had lived a long time in Europe, she had completely lost her native tact on such points, and in her reaction, not in itself deplorable, against the liberty allowed to young persons beyond the seas, had fallen into gratuitous and exaggerated scruples.Ralph accompanied their visitors to town and established them at a quiet inn in a street that ran at right angles to Piccadilly.His first idea had been to take them to his father's house in Winchester Square, a large, dull mansion which at this period of the year was shrouded in silence and brown holland; but he bethought himself that, the cook being at Gardencourt, there was no one in the house to get them their meals, and Pratt's Hotel accordingly became their resting-place.Ralph, on his side, found quarters in Winchester Square, having a "den" there of which he was very fond and being familiar with deeper fears than that of a cold kitchen.He availed himself largely indeed of the resources of Pratt's Hotel, beginning his day with an early visit to his fellow travellers, who had Mr.Pratt in person, in a large bulging white waistcoat, to remove their dishcovers.Ralph turned up, as he said, after breakfast, and the little party made out a scheme of entertainment for the day.As London wears in the month of September a face blank but for its smears of prior service, the young man, who occasionally took an apologetic tone, was obliged to remind his companion, to Miss Stackpole's high derision, that there wasn't a creature in town.

"I suppose you mean the aristocracy are absent," Henrietta answered;"but I don't think you could have a better proof that if they were absent altogether they wouldn't be missed.It seems to me the place is about as full as it can be.There's no one here, of course, but three or four millions of people.What is it you call them- the lower-middle class? They're only the population of London, and that's of no consequence."Ralph declared that for him the aristocracy left no void that Miss Stackpole herself didn't fill, and that a more contented man was nowhere at that moment to be found.In this he spoke the truth, for the stale September days, in the huge half-empty town, had a charm wrapped in them as a coloured gem might be wrapped in a dusty cloth.

When he went home at night to the empty house in Winchester Square, after a chain of hours with his comparatively ardent friends, he wandered into the big dusky dining-room, where the candle he took from the hall-table, after letting himself in, constituted the only illumination.The square was still, the house was still; when he raised one of the windows of the dining-room to let in the air he heard the slow creak of the boots of a lone constable.His own step, in the empty place, seemed loud and sonorous; some of the carpets had been raised, and whenever he moved he roused a melancholy echo.He sat down in one of the armchairs; the big dark dining table twinkled here and there in the small candle-light; the pictures on the wall, all of them very brown, looked vague and incoherent.There was a ghostly presence as of dinners long since digested, of table-talk that had lost its actuality.This hint of the supernatural perhaps had something to do with the fact that his imagination took a flight and that he remained in his chair a long time beyond the hour at which he should have been in bed; doing nothing, not even reading the evening paper.I say he did nothing, and I maintain the phrase in the face of the fact that he thought at these moments of Isabel.To think of Isabel could only be for him an idle pursuit, leading to nothing and profiting little to any one.His cousin had not yet seemed to him so charming as during these days spent in sounding, tourist-fashion, the deeps and shallows of the metropolitan element.