received for some weeks. I suppose one of the reasons I liked it was that it was all about you; that is all except the part that was about himself. I suppose he told you all that.’

‘He would have told me everything I wished to ask him,’ Isabel said.

‘But you didn’t feel curious?’

‘My curiosity would have been idle—once I had determined to decline his offer.’

‘You didn’t find it sufficiently attractive?’ Mr Touchett enquired.

She was silent a little. ‘I suppose it was that,’ she presently admitted. ‘But I don’t know why.’

‘Fortunately ladies are not obliged to give reasons,’ said her uncle. ‘There’s a great deal that’s attractive about such an idea; but I don’t see why the English should want to entice us away from our native land. I know that we try to attract them over there, but that’s because our population is insufficient. Here, you know, they’re rather crowded. However, I presume there’s room for charming young ladies everywhere.’

‘There seems to have been room here for you,’ said Isabel, whose eyes had been wandering over the large pleasure-spaces of the park.

Mr Touchett gave a shrewd, conscious smile. ‘There’s room everywhere, my dear, if you’ll pay for it. I sometimes think I’ve paid too much for this. Perhaps you also might have to pay too much.’

‘Perhaps I might,’ the girl replied.

That suggestion gave her something more definite to rest on than she had found in her own thoughts, and the fact of this association of her uncle’s mild acuteness with her dilemma seemed to prove that she was concerned with the natural and reasonable emotions of life and not altogether a victim to intellectual eagerness and vague ambitions—ambitions reaching beyond Lord Warburton’s beautiful appeal, reaching to something indefinable and possibly not commendable. In so far as the indefinable had an influence upon Isabel’s behaviour at this juncture, it was not the conception, even unformulated, of a union with Caspar Goodwood; for however she might have resisted conquest at her English suitor’s large quiet hands she was at least as far removed from the disposition to let the young man from Boston take positive possession of her. The sentiment in which she sought refuge after reading his letter was a critical view of his having come abroad; for it was part of the influence he had upon her that he seemed to deprive her of the sense of freedom. There was a disagreeably strong push, a kind of hardness of presence, in his way of rising before her. She had been haunted at moments by the image, by the danger, of his disapproval and had wondered—a consideration she had never paid in equal degree to any one else—whether he would like what she did. The difficulty was that more than any man she had ever known, more than poor Lord Warburton (she had begun now to give his lordship the benefit of this epithet), Caspar Goodwood expressed for her an energy—and she had already felt it as a power—that was of his very nature. It was in no degree a matter of his ‘advantages’—it was a matter of the spirit that sat in his clear-burning eyes like some tireless watcher at a window. She might like it or not, but he insisted, ever, with his whole weight and force: even in one’s usual contact with him one had to reckon with that. The idea of a diminished liberty was particularly disagreeable to her at present, since she had just given a sort of personal accent to her independence by looking so straight at Lord Warburton’s big bribe and yet turning away from it. Sometimes Caspar Goodwood had seemed to range himself on the side of her destiny, to be the stubbornest fact she knew; she said to herself at such moments that she might evade him for a time, but that she must make terms with him at least—terms which would be certain to be favourable to himself. Her impulse had been to avail herself of the things that helped her to resist such an obligation; and this impulse had been much concerned in her eager acceptance of her aunt’s invitation, which had come to her at an hour when she expected from day to day to see Mr Goodwood and when she was glad to have an answer ready for something she was sure he would say to her. When she had told him at Albany, on the evening of Mrs Touchett’s visit, that she couldn’t then discuss difficult