Washington Square

E had slightly misrepresented the matter in saying that Catherine had
consented to take the great step. We left her just now declaring that
she would burn her ships behind her; but Morris, after having elicited
this declaration, had become conscious of good reasons for not taking it
up. He avoided, gracefully enough, fixing a day, though he left her
under the impression that he had his eye on one. Catherine may have had
her difficulties; but those of her circumspect suitor are also worthy of
consideration. The prize was certainly great; but it was only to be won
by striking the happy mean between precipitancy and caution. It would be
all very well to take one’s jump and trust to Providence; Providence was
more especially on the side of clever people, and clever people were
known by an indisposition to risk their bones. The ultimate reward of a
union with a young woman who was both unattractive and impoverished ought
to be connected with immediate disadvantages by some very palpable chain.
Between the fear of losing Catherine and her possible fortune altogether,
and the fear of taking her too soon and finding this possible fortune as
void of actuality as a collection of emptied bottles, it was not
comfortable for Morris Townsend to choose; a fact that should be
remembered by readers disposed to judge harshly of a young man who may
have struck them as making but an indifferently successful use of fine
natural parts. He had not forgotten that in any event Catherine had her
own ten thousand a year; he had devoted an abundance of meditation to
this circumstance. But with his fine parts he rated himself high, and he
had a perfectly definite appreciation of his value, which seemed to him
inadequately represented by the sum I have mentioned. At the same time
he reminded himself that this sum was considerable, that everything is
relative, and that if a modest income is less desirable than a large one,
the complete absence of revenue is nowhere accounted an advantage. These
reflexions gave him plenty of occupation, and made it necessary that he
should trim his sail. Dr. Sloper’s opposition was the unknown quantity
in the problem he had to work out. The natural way to work it out was by
marrying Catherine; but in mathematics there are many short cuts, and
Morris was not without a hope that he should yet discover one. When
Catherine took him at his word and consented to renounce the attempt to
mollify her father, he drew back skilfully enough, as I have said, and
kept the wedding-day still an open question. Her faith in his sincerity
was so complete that she was incapable of suspecting that he was playing
with her; her trouble just now was of another kind. The poor girl had an
admirable sense of honour; and from the moment she had brought herself to
the point of violating her father’s wish, it seemed to her that she had
no right to enjoy his protection. It was on her conscience that she
ought to live under his roof only so long as she conformed to his wisdom.
There was a great deal of glory in such a position, but poor Catherine
felt that she had forfeited her claim to it. She had cast her lot with a
young man against whom he had solemnly warned her, and broken the
contract under which he provided her with a happy home. She could not
give up the young man, so she must leave the home; and the sooner the
object of her preference offered her another the sooner her situation
would lose its awkward twist. This was close reasoning; but it was
commingled with an infinite amount of merely instinctive penitence.
Catherine’s days at this time were dismal, and the weight of some of her
hours was almost more than she could bear. Her father never looked at
her, never spoke to her. He knew perfectly what he was about, and this
was part of a plan. She looked at him as much as she dared (for she was
afraid of seeming to offer herself to his observation), and she pitied
him for the sorrow she had brought upon him. She held up her head and
busied her hands, and went about her daily occupations; and when the
state of things in Washington Square seemed intolerable, she closed her
eyes and indulged herself with an intellectual vision of the man for
whose sake she had broken a sacred law. Mrs. Penniman, of the three
persons in Washington Square, had much the most of the manner that
belongs to a great crisis. If Catherine was quiet, she was quietly
quiet, as I may say, and her pathetic effects, which there was no one to
notice, were entirely unstudied and unintended. If the Doctor was stiff
and dry and absolutely indifferent to the presence of his companions, it
was so lightly, neatly, easily done, that you would have had to know him
well to discover that, on the whole, he rather enjoyed having to be so
disagreeable. But Mrs. Penniman was elaborately reserved and
significantly silent; there was a richer rustle in the very deliberate
movements to which she confined herself, and when she occasionally spoke,
in connexion with some very trivial event, she had the air of meaning
something deeper than what she said. Between Catherine and her father
nothing had passed since the evening she went to speak to him in his
study. She had something to say to him—it seemed to her she ought to say
it; but she kept it back, for fear of irritating him. He also had
something to say to her; but he was determined not to speak first. He
was interested, as we know, in seeing how, if she were left to herself,
she would “stick.” At last she told him she had seen Morris Townsend
again, and that their relations remained quite the same.

“I think we shall marry—before very long. And probably, meanwhile, I
shall see him rather often; about once a week, not more.”

The Doctor looked at her coldly from head to foot, as if she had been a
stranger. It was the first time his eyes had rested on her for a week,
which was fortunate, if that was to be their expression. “Why not three
times a day?” he asked. “What prevents your meeting as often as you
choose?”

She turned away a moment; there were tears in her eyes. Then she said,
“It is better once a week.”

“I don’t see how it is better. It is as bad as it can be. If you
flatter yourself that I care for little modifications of that sort, you
are very much mistaken. It is as wrong of you to see him once a week as
it would be to see him all day long. Not that it matters to me,
however.”

Catherine tried to follow these words, but they seemed to lead towards a
vague horror from which she recoiled. “I think we shall marry pretty
soon,” she repeated at last.

Her father gave her his dreadful look again, as if she were some one
else. “Why do you tell me that? It’s no concern of mine.”

“Oh, father!” she broke out, “don’t you care, even if you do feel so?”

“Not a button. Once you marry, it’s quite the same to me when or where
or why you do it; and if you think to compound for your folly by hoisting
your flag in this way, you may spare yourself the trouble.”

With this he turned away. But the next day he spoke to her of his own
accord, and his manner was somewhat changed. “Shall you be married
within the next four or five months?” he asked.

“I don’t know, father,” said Catherine. “It is not very easy for us to
make up our minds.”

“Put it off, then, for six months, and in the meantime I will take you to
Europe. I should like you very much to go.”

It gave her such delight, after his words of the day before, to hear that
he should “like” her to do something, and that he still had in his heart
any of the tenderness of preference, that she gave a little exclamation
of joy. But then she became conscious that Morris was not included in
this proposal, and that—as regards really going—she would greatly prefer
to remain at home with him. But she blushed, none the less, more
comfortably than she had done of late. “It would be delightful to go to
Europe,” she remarked, with a sense that the idea was not original, and
that her tone was not all it might be.

“Very well, then, we will go. Pack up your clothes.”

“I had better tell Mr. Townsend,” said Catherine.

Her father fixed his cold eyes upon her. “If you mean that you had
better ask his leave, all that remains to me is to hope he will give it.”

The girl was sharply touched by the pathetic ring of the words; it was
the most calculated, the most dramatic little speech the Doctor had ever
uttered. She felt that it was a great thing for her, under the
circumstances, to have this fine opportunity of showing him her respect;
and yet there was something else that she felt as well, and that she
presently expressed. “I sometimes think that if I do what you dislike so
much, I ought not to stay with you.”

“To stay with me?”

“If I live with you, I ought to obey you.”

“If that’s your theory, it’s certainly mine,” said the Doctor, with a dry
laugh.

“But if I don’t obey you, I ought not to live with you—to enjoy your
kindness and protection.”

This striking argument gave the Doctor a sudden sense of having
underestimated his daughter; it seemed even more than worthy of a young
woman who had revealed the quality of unaggressive obstinacy. But it
displeased him—displeased him deeply, and he signified as much. “That
idea is in very bad taste,” he said. “Did you get it from Mr. Townsend?”

“Oh no; it’s my own!” said Catherine eagerly.

“Keep it to yourself, then,” her father answered, more than ever
determined she should go to Europe.