The Portrait of a Lady

by Henry James

He had a narrow, clean-shaven face, with features evenly distributed and an expression of placid acuteness. It was evidently a face in which the range of representation was not large, so that the air of contented shrewdness was all the more of a merit. It seemed to tell that he had been successful in life, yet it seemed to tell also that his success had not been exclusive and invidious, but had had much of the inoffensiveness of failure.

Lord Warburton was left standing with Ralph Touchett, to whom in a moment he said: ‘You wished a while ago to see my idea of an interesting woman. There it is!’

She had her own way of doing all that she did, and this is the simplest description of a character which, although by no means without liberal motions, rarely succeeded in giving an impression of suavity. Mrs Touchett might do a great deal of good, but she never pleased.

Nineteen persons out of twenty (including the younger sister herself, pronounced Edith infinitely the prettier of the two; but the twentieth, besides reversing this judgement, had the entertainment of thinking all the others æsthetic vulgarians. Isabel had in the depths of her nature an even more unquenchable desire to please than Edith; but the depths of this young lady’s nature were a very out-of-the-way place, between which and the surface communication was interrupted by a dozen capricious forces. She saw the young men who came in large numbers to see her sister; but as a general thing they were afraid of her; they had a belief that some special preparation was required for talking with her. Her reputation of reading a great deal hung about her like the cloudy envelope of a goddess in an epic;

Americans, rightly or wrongly, are commended for the ease with which they adapt themselves to foreign conditions;

Don't know how true this was in James's time, but now I should think it would have to be qualified as applying only to those Americans who allow themselves to be exposed to foreign conditions

Living as he now lived was like reading a good book in a poor translation—a meagre entertainment for a young man who felt that he might have been an excellent linguist.

Henrietta, for Isabel, was chiefly a proof that a woman might suffice to herself and be happy.

Her nature had, in her conceit, a certain garden-like quality, a suggestion of perfume and murmuring boughs, of shady bowers and lengthening vistas, which made her feel that introspection was, after all, an exercise in the open air, and that a visit to the recesses of one’s spirit was harmless when one returned from it with a lapful of roses.

But I always want to know the things one shouldn’t do.’ ‘So as to do them?’ asked her aunt. ‘So as to choose,’ said Isabel.

When she walked in Kensington Gardens she stopped the children (mainly of the poorer sort) whom she saw playing on the grass; she asked them their names and gave them sixpence and, when they were pretty, kissed them.

‘I’m not in my first youth—I can do what I choose—I belong quite to the independent class. I’ve neither father nor mother; I’m poor and of a serious disposition; I’m not pretty. I therefore am not bound to be timid and conventional; indeed I can’t afford such luxuries. Besides, I try to judge things for myself; to judge wrong, I think, is more honourable than not to judge at all. I don’t wish to be a mere sheep in the flock; I wish to choose my fate and know something of human affairs beyond what other people think it compatible with propriety to tell me.’

She stood still a little longer, and then, by an irresistible impulse, dropped on her knees before her bed and hid her face in her arms.

With all her love of knowledge she had a natural shrinking from raising curtains and looking into unlighted corners. The love of knowledge coexisted in her mind with the finest capacity for ignorance.

Mrs Touchett had a great merit; she was as honest as a pair of compasses.

Most things are good for you; the exceptions are very rare, and a comfortable income’s not one of them.’

‘You ought to see a great many men,’ Madame Merle remarked; ‘you ought to see as many as possible, so as to get used to them.’ ‘Used to them?’ Isabel repeated with that solemn stare which sometimes seemed to proclaim her deficient in the sense of comedy. ‘Why, I’m not afraid of them—I’m as used to them as the cook to the butcher-boys.’

The Countess was very good company and not really the featherhead she seemed; all one had to do with her was to observe the simple condition of not believing a word she said.

We know that he was fond of originals, of rarities, of the superior and the exquisite; and now that he had seen Lord Warburton, whom he thought a very fine example of his race and order, he perceived a new attraction in the idea of taking to himself a young lady who had qualified herself to figure in his collection of choice objects by declining so noble a hand.

‘I’m delighted to hear it!’ she answered passionately. Five minutes after he had gone out she burst into tears.

She could never rid herself of the sense that unhappiness was a state of disease—of suffering as opposed to doing.

She knew of no wrong he had done; he was not violent, he was not cruel: she simply believed he hated her.

In reality Isabel would as soon have thought of despising her as of passing a moral judgement on a grasshopper. She was not indifferent to her husband’s sister, however; she was rather a little afraid of her. She wondered at her; she thought her very extraordinary. The Countess seemed to her to have no soul; she was like a bright rare shell, with a polished surface and a remarkably pink lip, in which something would rattle when you shook it. This rattle was apparently the Countess’s spiritual principle, a little loose nut that tumbled about inside of her.

She worried him; she oppressed him; the idea of spending the day in a European railway-carriage with her offered a complication of irritations. Still, she was a lady travelling alone; it was his duty to put himself out for her. There could be no two questions about that; it was a perfectly clear necessity. He looked extremely grave for some moments and then said, wholly without the flourish of gallantry but in a tone of extreme distinctness, ‘Of course if you’re going tomorrow I’ll go too, as I may be of assistance to you.’

little mattered that Isabel would know much better; it was for his own satisfaction more than for hers that he longed to show her he was not deceived. He tried and tried again to make her betray Osmond; he felt cold-blooded, cruel, dishonourable almost, in doing so. But it scarcely mattered, for he only failed. What had she come for then, and why did she seem almost to offer him a chance to violate their tacit convention? Why did she ask him his advice if she gave him no liberty to answer her? How could they talk of her domestic embarrassments, as it pleased her humorously to designate them, if the principal factor was not to be mentioned? These contradictions were themselves but an indication of her trouble, and her cry for help, just before, was the only thing he was bound to consider.

he wanted to die at home; it was the only wish he had left—to extend himself in the large quiet room where he had last seen his father lie, and close his eyes upon the summer dawn.

It was true that Goodwood had at times grimly wished he were dead and would have liked to kill him; but Osmond had no means of knowing this, for practice had made the younger man perfect in the art of appearing inaccessible to-day to any violent emotion. He cultivated this art in order to deceive himself, but it was others that he deceived first. He cultivated it, moreover, with very limited success; of which there could be no better proof than the deep, dumb irritation that reigned in his soul when he heard Osmond speak of his wife’s feelings as if he were commissioned to answer for them.

She went to her aunt and put her arm around her; and Mrs Touchett, who as a general thing neither invited nor enjoyed caresses, submitted for a moment to this one, rising, as might be, to take it. But she was stiff and dry-eyed; her acute white face was terrible. ‘Dear Aunt Lydia,’ Isabel murmured. ‘Go and thank God you’ve no child,’ said Mrs Touchett, disengaging herself.

Walter Pater’s infamous conclusion to The Renaissance, which exhorts the reader: ‘To burn always with this hard, gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life. In a sense it might even be said that our failure is to form habits

‘Does she like him?’ ‘Yes, I think she does.’ ‘Is he a good fellow?’ Ralph hesitated a moment. ‘No, he’s not,’ he said, at last. ‘Why then does she like him?’ pursued Lord Warburton, with noble naiveté. ‘Because she’s a woman.’

there are few indications of selfishness more conclusive (on the part of a gentleman at least) than the preference for a single life.