Page 452 - the-portrait-of-a-lady

spent a summer of fine weather in an Alpine valley where
the flowers were thick in the meadows and the shade of great
chestnuts made a resting place for such upward wanderings
as might be undertaken by ladies and children on warm af-
ternoons. They had afterwards reached the French capital,
which was worshipped, and with costly ceremonies, by Lily,
but thought of as noisily vacant by Isabel, who in these days
made use of her memory of Rome as she might have done,
in a hot and crowded room, of a phial of something pungent
hidden in her handkerchief.
Mrs. Ludlow sacrificed, as I say, to Paris, yet had doubts
and wonderments not allayed at that altar; and after her hus-
band had joined her found further chagrin in his failure to
throw himself into these speculations. They all had Isabel
for subject; but Edmund Ludlow, as he had always done be-
fore, declined to be surprised, or distressed, or mystified, or
elated, at anything his sister-in-law might have done or have
failed to do. Mrs. Ludlow’s mental motions were sufficiently
various. At one moment she thought it would be so natural
for that young woman to come home and take a house in
New York—the Rossiters’, for instance, which had an elegant
conservatory and was just round the corner from her own;
at another she couldn’t conceal her surprise at the girl’s not
marrying some member of one of the great aristocracies. On
the whole, as I have said, she had fallen from high commu-
nion with the probabilities. She had taken more satisfaction
in Isabel’s accession of fortune than if the money had been
left to herself; it had seemed to her to offer just the proper
setting for her sister’s slightly meagre, but scarce the less em-

452 The Portrait of a Lady