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She’s not the bright American girl she was. She’s taking dif-
ferent views, a different colour, and turning away from her
old ideals. I want to save those ideals, Mr. Touchett, and
that’s where you come in.’
‘Not surely as an ideal?’
‘Well, I hope not,’ Henrietta replied promptly. ‘I’ve got a
fear in my heart that she’s going to marry one of these fell
Europeans, and I want to prevent it.’
‘Ah, I see,’ cried Ralph; ‘and to prevent it you want me to
step in and marry her?’
‘Not quite; that remedy would be as bad as the disease,
for you’re the typical, the fell European from whom I wish
to rescue her. No; I wish you to take an interest in another
person—a young man to whom she once gave great en-
couragement and whom she now doesn’t seem to think
good enough. He’s a thoroughly grand man and a very dear
friend of mine, and I wish very much you would invite him
to pay a visit here.’
Ralph was puzzled by this appeal, and it is perhaps not to
the credit of his purity of mind that he failed to look at it at
first in the simplest light. It wore, to his eyes, a tortuous air,
and his fault was that he was not quite sure that anything in
the world could really be as candid as this request of Miss
Stackpole’s appeared. That a young woman should demand
that a gentleman whom she described as her very dear friend
should be furnished with an opportunity to make himself
agreeable to another young woman, a young woman whose
attention had wandered and whose charms were greater—
this was an anomaly which for the moment challenged all

168 The Portrait of a Lady