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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 questions, dazzled as she was
by the great immediate opening of her aunt’s offer of ‘Eu-
rope,’ he declared that this was no answer at all; and it was
now to obtain a better one that he was following her across
the sea. To say to herself that he was a kind of grim fate was
well enough for a fanciful young woman who was able to
take much for granted in him; but the reader has a right to a
nearer and a clearer view.
He was the son of a proprietor of well-known cotton-mills
in Massachusetts—a gentleman who had accumulated a
considerable fortune in the exercise of this industry. Caspar
at present managed the works, and with a judgement and
a temper which, in spite of keen competition and languid
years, had kept their prosperity from dwindling. He had re-
ceived the better part of his education at Harvard College,
where, however, he had gained renown rather as a gymnast
and an oarsman than as a gleaner of more dispersed knowl-
edge. Later on he had learned that the finer intelligence
too could vault and pull and strain—might even, breaking
the record, treat itself to rare exploits. He had thus discov-
ered in himself a sharp eye for the mystery of mechanics,
and had invented an improvement in the cotton-spinning

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