Chapter 15

CHAPTER XV

It had been arranged that the two young ladies should proceed to
London under Ralph's escort, though Mrs. Touchett looked with
little favour on the plan. It was just the sort of plan, she
said, that Miss Stackpole would be sure to suggest, and she
enquired if the correspondent of the Interviewer was to take the
party to stay at her favourite boarding-house.

"I don't care where she takes us to stay, so long as there's
local colour," said Isabel. "That's what we're going to London
for."

"I suppose that after a girl has refused an English lord she may
do anything," her aunt rejoined. "After that one needn't stand on
trifles."

"Should you have liked me to marry Lord Warburton?" Isabel
enquired.

"Of course I should."

"I thought you disliked the English so much."

"So I do; but it's all the greater reason for making use of
them."

"Is that your idea of marriage?" And Isabel ventured to add that
her aunt appeared to her to have made very little use of Mr.
Touchett.

"Your uncle's not an English nobleman," said Mrs. Touchett,
"though even if he had been I should still probably have taken up
my residence in Florence."

"Do you think Lord Warburton could make me any better than I am?"
the girl asked with some animation. "I don't mean I'm too good to
improve. I mean that I don't love Lord Warburton enough to marry
him."

"You did right to refuse him then," said Mrs. Touchett in her
smallest, sparest voice. "Only, the next great offer you get, I
hope you'll manage to come up to your standard."

"We had better wait till the offer comes before we talk about it.
I hope very much I may have no more offers for the present. They
upset me completely."

"You probably won't be troubled with them if you adopt
permanently the Bohemian manner of life. However, I've promised
Ralph not to criticise."

"I'll do whatever Ralph says is right," Isabel returned. "I've
unbounded confidence in Ralph."

"His mother's much obliged to you!" this lady dryly laughed.

"It seems to me indeed she ought to feel it!" Isabel
irrepressibly answered.

Ralph had assured her that there would be no violation of decency
in their paying a visit--the little party of three--to the sights
of the metropolis; but Mrs. Touchett took a different view. Like
many ladies of her country who had lived a long time in Europe,
she had completely lost her native tact on such points, and in
her reaction, not in itself deplorable, against the liberty
allowed to young persons beyond the seas, had fallen into
gratuitous and exaggerated scruples. Ralph accompanied their
visitors to town and established them at a quiet inn in a