sister was with her Isabel had confined her movements to
a narrow circle. Lily and the babies had joined her in Switzerland in
the month of July, and they had spent a summer of fine weather in an
Alpine valley where the flowers were thick in the meadows and the shade
of great chestnuts made a resting-place for such upward wanderings as
might be undertaken by ladies and children on warm afternoons. They had
afterwards reached the French capital, which was worshipped, and with
costly ceremonies, by Lily, but thought of as noisily vacant by Isabel,
who in these days made use of her memory of Rome as she might have done,
in a hot and crowded room, of a phial of something pungent hidden in her
handkerchief.

Mrs. Ludlow sacrificed, as I say, to Paris, yet had doubts and
wonderments not allayed at that altar; and after her husband had joined
her found further chagrin in his failure to throw himself into these
speculations. They all had Isabel for subject; but Edmund Ludlow, as
he had always done before, declined to be surprised, or distressed, or
mystified, or elated, at anything his sister-in-law might have done
or have failed to do. Mrs. Ludlow's mental motions were sufficiently
various. At one moment she thought it would be so natural for that young
woman to come home and take a house in New York--the Rossiters', for
instance, which had an elegant conservatory and was just round the
corner from her own; at another she couldn't conceal her surprise at the
girl's not marrying some member of one of the great aristocracies. On
the whole, as I have said, she had fallen from high communion with the
probabilities. She had taken more satisfaction in Isabel's accession of
fortune than if the money had been left to herself; it had seemed to her
to offer just the proper setting for her sister's slightly meagre, but
scarce the less eminent figure. Isabel had developed less, however, than
Lily had thought likely--development, to Lily's understanding, being
somehow mysteriously connected with morning-calls and evening-parties.
Intellectually, doubtless, she had made immense strides; but she
appeared to have achieved few of those social conquests of which Mrs.
Ludlow had expected to admire the trophies. Lily's conception of such
achievements was extremely vague; but this was exactly what she had
expected of Isabel--to give it form and body. Isabel could have done
as well as she had done in New York; and Mrs. Ludlow appealed to her
husban