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her journey was rather an expression of her independence
of the old world than of a sense of further obligations to it.
‘It’s nothing to come to Europe,’ she said to Isabel; ‘it doesn’t
seem to me one needs so many reasons for that. It is some-
thing to stay at home; this is much more important.’ It was
not therefore with a sense of doing anything very impor-
tant that she treated herself to another pilgrimage to Rome;
she had seen the place before and carefully inspected it; her
present act was simply a sign of familiarity, of her knowing
all about it, of her having as good a right as any one else to be
there. This was all very well, and Henrietta was restless; she
had a perfect right to be restless too, if one came to that. But
she had after all a better reason for coming to Rome than
that she cared for it so little. Her friend easily recognized it,
and with it the worth of the other’s fidelity. She had crossed
the stormy ocean in midwinter because she had guessed
that Isabel was sad. Henrietta guessed a great deal, but she
had never guessed so happily as that. Isabel’s satisfactions
just now were few, but even if they had been more numerous
there would still have been something of individual joy in
her sense of being justified in having always thought highly
of Henrietta. She had made large concessions with regard to
her, and had yet insisted that, with all abatements, she was
very valuable. It was not her own triumph, however, that
she found good; it was simply the relief of confessing to this
confidant, the first person to whom she had owned it, that
she was not in the least at her ease. Henrietta had herself
approached this point with the smallest possible delay, and
had accused her to her face of being wretched. She was a

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