Chapter 8

CHAPTER VIII

As she was devoted to romantic effects Lord Warburton ventured to
express a hope that she would come some day and see his house, a
very curious old place. He extracted from Mrs. Touchett a promise
that she would bring her niece to Lockleigh, and Ralph signified
his willingness to attend the ladies if his father should be able
to spare him. Lord Warburton assured our heroine that in the mean
time his sisters would come and see her. She knew something about
his sisters, having sounded him, during the hours they spent
together while he was at Gardencourt, on many points connected
with his family. When Isabel was interested she asked a great
many questions, and as her companion was a copious talker she
urged him on this occasion by no means in vain. He told her he
had four sisters and two brothers and had lost both his parents.
The brothers and sisters were very good people--"not particularly
clever, you know," he said, "but very decent and pleasant;" and
he was so good as to hope Miss Archer might know them well. One
of the brothers was in the Church, settled in the family living,
that of Lockleigh, which was a heavy, sprawling parish, and was
an excellent fellow in spite of his thinking differently from
himself on every conceivable topic. And then Lord Warburton
mentioned some of the opinions held by his brother, which were
opinions Isabel had often heard expressed and that she supposed
to be entertained by a considerable portion of the human family.
Many of them indeed she supposed she had held herself, till he
assured her she was quite mistaken, that it was really
impossible, that she had doubtless imagined she entertained them,
but that she might depend that, if she thought them over a
little, she would find there was nothing in them. When she
answered that she had already thought several of the questions
involved over very attentively he declared that she was only
another example of what he had often been struck with--the fact
that, of all the people in the world, the Americans were the most
grossly superstitious. They were rank Tories and bigots, every
one of them; there were no conservatives like American
conservatives. Her uncle and her cousin were there to prove it;
nothing could be more medieval than many of their views; they had
ideas that people in England nowadays were ashamed to confess to;
and they had the impudence moreover, said his lordship, laughing,
to pretend they knew more about the needs and dangers of this
poor dear stupid old England than he who was born in it and owned
a considerable slice of it--the more shame to him! From all of
which Isabel gathered that Lord Warburton was a nobleman of the
newest pattern, a reformer, a radical, a contemner of