Chapter 31 - Page 2

the ocean
with extreme rapidity, had spent a month with the two ladies in
Paris before taking his wife home. The little Ludlows had not
yet, even from the American point of view, reached the proper
tourist-age; so that while her sister was with her Isabel had
confined her movements to a narrow circle. Lily and the babies
had joined her in Switzerland in the month of July, and they had
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 afternoons.
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 husband 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 before, 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 communion
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 eminent
figure. Isabel had developed less, however, than Lily had thought
likely--development, to Lily's understanding, being somehow
mysteriously connected with morning-calls and evening-parties.
Intellectually, doubtless, she had made immense strides; but she
appeared to have achieved few of those social conquests of which
Mrs. Ludlow had expected to admire the trophies. Lily's
conception of such achievements was extremely vague; but this was
exactly what she had expected of Isabel--to give it form and
body. Isabel could have done as well as she had done in New York;
and Mrs. Ludlow appealed to her husband to know whether there was
any