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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 en-
tice 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. How-
ever, 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 di-
lemma 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 ambitionsambi-
tions reaching beyond Lord Warburton’s beautiful appeal,
reaching to something indefinable and possibly not com-
mendable. 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

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