d asked her, as a favour, not to do so; it made Lily so fidgety and
she asked such impossible questions. Isabel watched the train move away;
she kissed her hand to the elder of her small nephews, a demonstrative
child who leaned dangerously far out of the window of the carriage and
made separation an occasion of violent hilarity, and then she walked
back into the foggy London street. The world lay before her--she could
do whatever she chose. There was a deep thrill in it all, but for the
present her choice was tolerably discreet; she chose simply to walk back
from Euston Square to her hotel. The early dusk of a November afternoon
had already closed in; the street-lamps, in the thick, brown air, looked
weak and red; our heroine was unattended and Euston Square was a long
way from Piccadilly. But Isabel performed the journey with a positive
enjoyment of its dangers and lost her way almost on purpose, in order
to get more sensations, so that she was disappointed when an obliging
policeman easily set her right again. She was so fond of the spectacle
of human life that she enjoyed even the aspect of gathering dusk in the
London streets--the moving crowds, the hurrying cabs, the lighted shops,
the flaring stalls, the dark, shining dampness of everything. That
evening, at her hotel, she wrote to Madame Merle that she should start
in a day or two for Rome. She made her way down to Rome without touching
at Florence--having gone first to Venice and then proceeded southward by
Ancona. She accomplished this journey without other assistance than that
of her servant, for her natural protectors were not now on the ground.
Ralph Touchett was spending the winter at Corfu, and Miss Stackpole, in
the September previous, had been recalled to America by a telegram from
the Interviewer. This journal offered its brilliant correspondent a
fresher field for her genius than the mouldering cities of Europe, and
Henrietta was cheered on her way by a promise from Mr. Bantling that
he would soon come over to see her. Isabel wrote to Mrs. Touchett to
apologise for not presenting herself just yet in Florence, and her aunt
replied characteristically enough. Apologies, Mrs. Touchett intimated,
were of no more use to her than bubbles, and she herself never dealt
in such articles. One either did the thing or one didn't, and what one
"would" have done belonged to the sphere of the irrelevant, like the
idea of a future life or of the origin of things. Her lett