Page 196 - the-portrait-of-a-lady

‘Where are your public men, where are your men and
women of intellect?’ she enquired of Ralph, standing in the
middle of Trafalgar Square as if she had supposed this to be
a place where she would naturally meet a few. ‘That’s one of
them on the top of the column, you say—Lord Nelson? Was
he a lord too? Wasn’t he high enough, that they had to stick
him a hundred feet in the air? That’s the past—I don’t care
about the past; I want to see some of the leading minds of
the present. I won’t say of the future, because I don’t believe
much in your future.’ Poor Ralph had few leading minds
among his acquaintance and rarely enjoyed the pleasure of
button-holing a celebrity; a state of things which appeared
to Miss Stackpole to indicate a deplorable want of enter-
prise. ‘If I were on the other side I should call,’ she said, ‘and
tell the gentleman, whoever he might be, that I had heard a
great deal about him and had come to see for myself. But I
gather from what you say that this is not the custom here.
You seem to have plenty of meaningless customs, but none
of those that would help along. We are in advance, certainly.
I suppose I shall have to give up the social side altogether”;
and Henrietta, though she went about with her guidebook
and pencil and wrote a letter to the Interviewer about the
Tower (in which she described the execution of Lady Jane
Grey), had a sad sense of falling below her mission.
The incident that had preceded Isabel’s departure from
Gardencourt left a painful trace in our young woman’s
mind: when she felt again in her face, as from a recurrent
wave, the cold breath of her last suitor’s surprise, she could
only muffle her head till the air cleared. She could not have

196 The Portrait of a Lady