Washington Square

HE voyage was indeed uncomfortable, and Catherine, on arriving in New
York, had not the compensation of “going off,” in her father’s phrase,
with Morris Townsend. She saw him, however, the day after she landed;
and, in the meantime, he formed a natural subject of conversation between
our heroine and her Aunt Lavinia, with whom, the night she disembarked,
the girl was closeted for a long time before either lady retired to rest.

“I have seen a great deal of him,” said Mrs. Penniman. “He is not very
easy to know. I suppose you think you know him; but you don’t, my dear.
You will some day; but it will only be after you have lived with him. I
may almost say I have lived with him,” Mrs. Penniman proceeded, while
Catherine stared. “I think I know him now; I have had such remarkable
opportunities. You will have the same—or rather, you will have better!”
and Aunt Lavinia smiled. “Then you will see what I mean. It’s a
wonderful character, full of passion and energy, and just as true!”

Catherine listened with a mixture of interest and apprehension. Aunt
Lavinia was intensely sympathetic, and Catherine, for the past year,
while she wandered through foreign galleries and churches, and rolled
over the smoothness of posting roads, nursing the thoughts that never
passed her lips, had often longed for the company of some intelligent
person of her own sex. To tell her story to some kind woman—at moments
it seemed to her that this would give her comfort, and she had more than
once been on the point of taking the landlady, or the nice young person
from the dressmaker’s, into her confidence. If a woman had been near her
she would on certain occasions have treated such a companion to a fit of
weeping; and she had an apprehension that, on her return, this would form
her response to Aunt Lavinia’s first embrace. In fact, however, the two
ladies had met, in Washington Square, without tears, and when they found
themselves alone together a certain dryness fell upon the girl’s emotion.
It came over her with a greater force that Mrs. Penniman had enjoyed a
whole year of her lover’s society, and it was not a pleasure to her to
hear her aunt explain and interpret the young man, speaking of him as if
her own knowledge of him were supreme. It was not that Catherine was
jealous; but her sense of Mrs. Penniman’s innocent falsity, which had
lain dormant, began to haunt her again, and she was glad that she was
safely at home. With this, however, it was a blessing to be able to talk
of Morris, to sound his name, to be with a person who was not unjust to
him.

“You have been very kind to him,” said Catherine. “He has written me
that, often. I shall never forget that, Aunt Lavinia.”

“I have done what I could; it has been very little. To let him come and
talk to me, and give him his cup of tea—that was all. Your Aunt Almond
thought it was too much, and used to scold me terribly; but she promised
me, at least, not to betray me.”

“To betray you?”

“Not to tell your father. He used to sit in your father’s study!” said
Mrs. Penniman, with a little laugh.

Catherine was silent a moment. This idea was disagreeable to her, and
she was reminded again, with pain, of her aunt’s secretive habits.
Morris, the reader may be informed, had had the tact not to tell her that
he sat in her father’s study. He had known her but for a few months, and
her aunt had known her for fifteen years; and yet he would not have made
the mistake of thinking that Catherine would see the joke of the thing.
“I am sorry you made him go into father’s room,” she said, after a while.

“I didn’t make him go; he went himself. He liked to look at the books,
and all those things in the glass cases. He knows all about them; he
knows all about everything.”

Catherine was silent again; then, “I wish he had found some employment,”
she said.

“He has found some employment! It’s beautiful news, and he told me to
tell you as soon as you arrived. He has gone into partnership with a
commission merchant. It was all settled, quite suddenly, a week ago.”

This seemed to Catherine indeed beautiful news; it had a fine prosperous
air. “Oh, I’m so glad!” she said; and now, for a moment, she was
disposed to throw herself on Aunt Lavinia’s neck.

“It’s much better than being under some one; and he has never been used
to that,” Mrs. Penniman went on. “He is just as good as his partner—they
are perfectly equal! You see how right he was to wait. I should like to
know what your father can say now! They have got an office in Duane
Street, and little printed cards; he brought me one to show me. I have
got it in my room, and you shall see it to-morrow. That’s what he said
to me the last time he was here—‘You see how right I was to wait!’ He
has got other people under him, instead of being a subordinate. He could
never be a subordinate; I have often told him I could never think of him
in that way.”

Catherine assented to this proposition, and was very happy to know that
Morris was his own master; but she was deprived of the satisfaction of
thinking that she might communicate this news in triumph to her father.
Her father would care equally little whether Morris were established in
business or transported for life. Her trunks had been brought into her
room, and further reference to her lover was for a short time suspended,
while she opened them and displayed to her aunt some of the spoils of
foreign travel. These were rich and abundant; and Catherine had brought
home a present to every one—to every one save Morris, to whom she had
brought simply her undiverted heart. To Mrs. Penniman she had been
lavishly generous, and Aunt Lavinia spent half an hour in unfolding and
folding again, with little ejaculations of gratitude and taste. She
marched about for some time in a splendid cashmere shawl, which Catherine
had begged her to accept, settling it on her shoulders, and twisting down
her head to see how low the point descended behind.

“I shall regard it only as a loan,” she said. “I will leave it to you
again when I die; or rather,” she added, kissing her niece again, “I will
leave it to your first-born little girl!” And draped in her shawl, she
stood there smiling.

“You had better wait till she comes,” said Catherine.

“I don’t like the way you say that,” Mrs. Penniman rejoined, in a moment.
“Catherine, are you changed?”

“No; I am the same.”

“You have not swerved a line?”

“I am exactly the same,” Catherine repeated, wishing her aunt were a
little less sympathetic.

“Well, I am glad!” and Mrs. Penniman surveyed her cashmere in the glass.
Then, “How is your father?” she asked in a moment, with her eyes on her
niece. “Your letters were so meagre—I could never tell!”

“Father is very well.”

“Ah, you know what I mean,” said Mrs. Penniman, with a dignity to which
the cashmere gave a richer effect. “Is he still implacable!”

“Oh yes!”

“Quite unchanged?”

“He is, if possible, more firm.”

Mrs. Penniman took off her great shawl, and slowly folded it up. “That
is very bad. You had no success with your little project?”

“What little project?”

“Morris told me all about it. The idea of turning the tables on him, in
Europe; of watching him, when he was agreeably impressed by some
celebrated sight—he pretends to be so artistic, you know—and then just
pleading with him and bringing him round.”

“I never tried it. It was Morris’s idea; but if he had been with us, in
Europe, he would have seen that father was never impressed in that way.
He is artistic—tremendously artistic; but the more celebrated places we
visited, and the more he admired them, the less use it would have been to
plead with him. They seemed only to make him more determined—more
terrible,” said poor Catherine. “I shall never bring him round, and I
expect nothing now.”

“Well, I must say,” Mrs. Penniman answered, “I never supposed you were
going to give it up.”

“I have given it up. I don’t care now.”

“You have grown very brave,” said Mrs. Penniman, with a short laugh. “I
didn’t advise you to sacrifice your property.”

“Yes, I am braver than I was. You asked me if I had changed; I have
changed in that way. Oh,” the girl went on, “I have changed very much.
And it isn’t my property. If he doesn’t care for it, why should I?”

Mrs. Penniman hesitated. “Perhaps he does care for it.”

“He cares for it for my sake, because he doesn’t want to injure me. But
he will know—he knows already—how little he need be afraid about that.
Besides,” said Catherine, “I have got plenty of money of my own. We
shall be very well off; and now hasn’t he got his business? I am
delighted about that business.” She went on talking, showing a good deal
of excitement as she proceeded. Her aunt had never seen her with just
this manner, and Mrs. Penniman, observing her, set it down to foreign
travel, which had made her more positive, more mature. She thought also
that Catherine had improved in appearance; she looked rather handsome.
Mrs. Penniman wondered whether Morris Townsend would be struck with that.
While she was engaged in this speculation, Catherine broke out, with a
certain sharpness, “Why are you so contradictory, Aunt Penniman? You
seem to think one thing at one time, and another at another. A year ago,
before I went away, you wished me not to mind about displeasing father;
and now you seem to recommend me to take another line. You change about
so.”

This attack was unexpected, for Mrs. Penniman was not used, in any
discussion, to seeing the war carried into her own country—possibly
because the enemy generally had doubts of finding subsistence there. To
her own consciousness, the flowery fields of her reason had rarely been
ravaged by a hostile force. It was perhaps on this account that in
defending them she was majestic rather than agile.

“I don’t know what you accuse me of, save of being too deeply interested
in your happiness. It is the first time I have been told I am
capricious. That fault is not what I am usually reproached with.”

“You were angry last year that I wouldn’t marry immediately, and now you
talk about my winning my father over. You told me it would serve him
right if he should take me to Europe for nothing. Well, he has taken me
for nothing, and you ought to be satisfied. Nothing is changed—nothing
but my feeling about father. I don’t mind nearly so much now. I have
been as good as I could, but he doesn’t care. Now I don’t care either.
I don’t know whether I have grown bad; perhaps I have. But I don’t care
for that. I have come home to be married—that’s all I know. That ought
to please you, unless you have taken up some new idea; you are so
strange. You may do as you please; but you must never speak to me again
about pleading with father. I shall never plead with him for anything;
that is all over. He has put me off. I am come home to be married.”

This was a more authoritative speech than she had ever heard on her
niece’s lips, and Mrs. Penniman was proportionately startled. She was
indeed a little awestruck, and the force of the girl’s emotion and
resolution left her nothing to reply. She was easily frightened, and she
always carried off her discomfiture by a concession; a concession which
was often accompanied, as in the present case, by a little nervous laugh.