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winter in Paris, saw no reason to deprive herself—still less
to deprive her companionof this advantage. Though they
would live in great retirement she might still present her
niece, informally, to the little circle of her fellow country-
men dwelling upon the skirts of the Champs Elysees. With
many of these amiable colonists Mrs. Touchett was intimate;
she shared their expatriation, their convictions, their pas-
times, their ennui. Isabel saw them arrive with a good deal
of assiduity at her aunt’s hotel, and pronounced on them
with a trenchancy doubtless to be accounted for by the tem-
porary exaltation of her sense of human duty. She made up
her mind that their lives were, though luxurious, inane, and
incurred some disfavour by expressing this view on bright
Sunday afternoons, when the American absentees were en-
gaged in calling on each other. Though her listeners passed
for people kept exemplarily genial by their cooks and dress-
makers, two or three of them thought her cleverness, which
was generally admitted, inferior to that of the new theatri-
cal pieces. ‘You all live here this way, but what does it lead
to?’ she was pleased to ask. ‘It doesn’t seem to lead to any-
thing, and I should think you’d get very tired of it.’
Mrs. Touchett thought the question worthy of Henriet-
ta Stackpole. The two ladies had found Henrietta in Paris,
and Isabel constantly saw her; so that Mrs. Touchett had
some reason for saying to herself that if her niece were not
clever enough to originate almost anything, she might be
suspected of having borrowed that style of remark from
her journalistic friend. The first occasion on which Isabel
had spoken was that of a visit paid by the two ladies to Mrs.

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