Washington Square

HEN the child was about ten years old, he invited his sister, Mrs.
Penniman, to come and stay with him. The Miss Slopers had been but two
in number, and both of them had married early in life. The younger, Mrs.
Almond by name, was the wife of a prosperous merchant, and the mother of
a blooming family. She bloomed herself, indeed, and was a comely,
comfortable, reasonable woman, and a favourite with her clever brother,
who, in the matter of women, even when they were nearly related to him,
was a man of distinct preferences. He preferred Mrs. Almond to his
sister Lavinia, who had married a poor clergyman, of a sickly
constitution and a flowery style of eloquence, and then, at the age of
thirty-three, had been left a widow, without children, without
fortune—with nothing but the memory of Mr. Penniman’s flowers of speech,
a certain vague aroma of which hovered about her own conversation.
Nevertheless he had offered her a home under his own roof, which Lavinia
accepted with the alacrity of a woman who had spent the ten years of her
married life in the town of Poughkeepsie. The Doctor had not proposed to
Mrs. Penniman to come and live with him indefinitely; he had suggested
that she should make an asylum of his house while she looked about for
unfurnished lodgings. It is uncertain whether Mrs. Penniman ever
instituted a search for unfurnished lodgings, but it is beyond dispute
that she never found them. She settled herself with her brother and
never went away, and when Catherine was twenty years old her Aunt Lavinia
was still one of the most striking features of her immediate entourage.
Mrs. Penniman’s own account of the matter was that she had remained to
take charge of her niece’s education. She had given this account, at
least, to every one but the Doctor, who never asked for explanations
which he could entertain himself any day with inventing. Mrs. Penniman,
moreover, though she had a good deal of a certain sort of artificial
assurance, shrank, for indefinable reasons, from presenting herself to
her brother as a fountain of instruction. She had not a high sense of
humour, but she had enough to prevent her from making this mistake; and
her brother, on his side, had enough to excuse her, in her situation, for
laying him under contribution during a considerable part of a lifetime.
He therefore assented tacitly to the proposition which Mrs. Penniman had
tacitly laid down, that it was of importance that the poor motherless
girl should have a brilliant woman near her. His assent could only be
tacit, for he had never been dazzled by his sister’s intellectual lustre.
Save when he fell in love with Catherine Harrington, he had never been
dazzled, indeed, by any feminine characteristics whatever; and though he
was to a certain extent what is called a ladies’ doctor, his private
opinion of the more complicated sex was not exalted. He regarded its
complications as more curious than edifying, and he had an idea of the
beauty of reason, which was, on the whole, meagrely gratified by what
he observed in his female patients. His wife had been a reasonable
woman, but she was a bright exception; among several things that he was
sure of, this was perhaps the principal. Such a conviction, of course,
did little either to mitigate or to abbreviate his widowhood; and it set
a limit to his recognition, at the best, of Catherine’s possibilities and
of Mrs. Penniman’s ministrations. He, nevertheless, at the end of six
months, accepted his sister’s permanent presence as an accomplished fact,
and as Catherine grew older perceived that there were in effect good
reasons why she should have a companion of her own imperfect sex. He was
extremely polite to Lavinia, scrupulously, formally polite; and she had
never seen him in anger but once in her life, when he lost his temper in
a theological discussion with her late husband. With her he never
discussed theology, nor, indeed, discussed anything; he contented himself
with making known, very distinctly, in the form of a lucid ultimatum, his
wishes with regard to Catherine.

Once, when the girl was about twelve years old, he had said to her:

“Try and make a clever woman of her, Lavinia; I should like her to be a
clever woman.”

Mrs. Penniman, at this, looked thoughtful a moment. “My dear Austin,”
she then inquired, “do you think it is better to be clever than to be
good?”

“Good for what?” asked the Doctor. “You are good for nothing unless you
are clever.”

From this assertion Mrs. Penniman saw no reason to dissent; she possibly
reflected that her own great use in the world was owing to her aptitude
for many things.

“Of course I wish Catherine to be good,” the Doctor said next day; “but
she won’t be any the less virtuous for not being a fool. I am not afraid
of her being wicked; she will never have the salt of malice in her
character. She is as good as good bread, as the French say; but six
years hence I don’t want to have to compare her to good bread and
butter.”

“Are you afraid she will turn insipid? My dear brother, it is I who
supply the butter; so you needn’t fear!” said Mrs. Penniman, who had
taken in hand the child’s accomplishments, overlooking her at the piano,
where Catherine displayed a certain talent, and going with her to the
dancing-class, where it must be confessed that she made but a modest
figure.

Mrs. Penniman was a tall, thin, fair, rather faded woman, with a
perfectly amiable disposition, a high standard of gentility, a taste for
light literature, and a certain foolish indirectness and obliquity of
character. She was romantic, she was sentimental, she had a passion for
little secrets and mysteries—a very innocent passion, for her secrets had
hitherto always been as unpractical as addled eggs. She was not
absolutely veracious; but this defect was of no great consequence, for
she had never had anything to conceal. She would have liked to have a
lover, and to correspond with him under an assumed name in letters left
at a shop; I am bound to say that her imagination never carried the
intimacy farther than this. Mrs. Penniman had never had a lover, but her
brother, who was very shrewd, understood her turn of mind. “When
Catherine is about seventeen,” he said to himself, “Lavinia will try and
persuade her that some young man with a moustache is in love with her.
It will be quite untrue; no young man, with a moustache or without, will
ever be in love with Catherine. But Lavinia will take it up, and talk to
her about it; perhaps, even, if her taste for clandestine operations
doesn’t prevail with her, she will talk to me about it. Catherine won’t
see it, and won’t believe it, fortunately for her peace of mind; poor
Catherine isn’t romantic.”

She was a healthy well-grown child, without a trace of her mother’s
beauty. She was not ugly; she had simply a plain, dull, gentle
countenance. The most that had ever been said for her was that she had a
“nice” face, and, though she was an heiress, no one had ever thought of
regarding her as a belle. Her father’s opinion of her moral purity was
abundantly justified; she was excellently, imperturbably good;
affectionate, docile, obedient, and much addicted to speaking the truth.
In her younger years she was a good deal of a romp, and, though it is an
awkward confession to make about one’s heroine, I must add that she was
something of a glutton. She never, that I know of, stole raisins out of
the pantry; but she devoted her pocket-money to the purchase of
cream-cakes. As regards this, however, a critical attitude would be
inconsistent with a candid reference to the early annals of any
biographer. Catherine was decidedly not clever; she was not quick with
her book, nor, indeed, with anything else. She was not abnormally
deficient, and she mustered learning enough to acquit herself respectably
in conversation with her contemporaries, among whom it must be avowed,
however, that she occupied a secondary place. It is well known that in
New York it is possible for a young girl to occupy a primary one.
Catherine, who was extremely modest, had no desire to shine, and on most
social occasions, as they are called, you would have found her lurking in
the background. She was extremely fond of her father, and very much
afraid of him; she thought him the cleverest and handsomest and most
celebrated of men. The poor girl found her account so completely in the
exercise of her affections that the little tremor of fear that mixed
itself with her filial passion gave the thing an extra relish rather than
blunted its edge. Her deepest desire was to please him, and her
conception of happiness was to know that she had succeeded in pleasing
him. She had never succeeded beyond a certain point. Though, on the
whole, he was very kind to her, she was perfectly aware of this, and to
go beyond the point in question seemed to her really something to live
for. What she could not know, of course, was that she disappointed him,
though on three or four occasions the Doctor had been almost frank about
it. She grew up peacefully and prosperously, but at the age of eighteen
Mrs. Penniman had not made a clever woman of her. Dr. Sloper would have
liked to be proud of his daughter; but there was nothing to be proud of
in poor Catherine. There was nothing, of course, to be ashamed of; but
this was not enough for the Doctor, who was a proud man and would have
enjoyed being able to think of his daughter as an unusual girl. There
would have been a fitness in her being pretty and graceful, intelligent
and distinguished; for her mother had been the most charming woman of her
little day, and as regards her father, of course he knew his own value.
He had moments of irritation at having produced a commonplace child, and
he even went so far at times as to take a certain satisfaction in the
thought that his wife had not lived to find her out. He was naturally
slow in making this discovery himself, and it was not till Catherine had
become a young lady grown that he regarded the matter as settled. He
gave her the benefit of a great many doubts; he was in no haste to
conclude. Mrs. Penniman frequently assured him that his daughter had a
delightful nature; but he knew how to interpret this assurance. It
meant, to his sense, that Catherine was not wise enough to discover that
her aunt was a goose—a limitation of mind that could not fail to be
agreeable to Mrs. Penniman. Both she and her brother, however,
exaggerated the young girl’s limitations; for Catherine, though she was
very fond of her aunt, and conscious of the gratitude she owed her,
regarded her without a particle of that gentle dread which gave its stamp
to her admiration of her father. To her mind there was nothing of the
infinite about Mrs. Penniman; Catherine saw her all at once, as it were,
and was not dazzled by the apparition; whereas her father’s great
faculties seemed, as they stretched away, to lose themselves in a sort of
luminous vagueness, which indicated, not that they stopped, but that
Catherine’s own mind ceased to follow them.

It must not be supposed that Dr. Sloper visited his disappointment upon
the poor girl, or ever let her suspect that she had played him a trick.
On the contrary, for fear of being unjust to her, he did his duty with
exemplary zeal, and recognised that she was a faithful and affectionate
child. Besides, he was a philosopher; he smoked a good many cigars over
his disappointment, and in the fulness of time he got used to it. He
satisfied himself that he had expected nothing, though, indeed, with a
certain oddity of reasoning. “I expect nothing,” he said to himself, “so
that if she gives me a surprise, it will be all clear again. If she
doesn’t, it will be no loss.” This was about the time Catherine had
reached her eighteenth year, so that it will be seen her father had not
been precipitate. At this time she seemed not only incapable of giving
surprises; it was almost a question whether she could have received
one—she was so quiet and irresponsive. People who expressed themselves
roughly called her stolid. But she was irresponsive because she was shy,
uncomfortably, painfully shy. This was not always understood, and she
sometimes produced an impression of insensibility. In reality she was
the softest creature in the world.