by a process of conjecture, and to judge by the expression of her
face this attempt gave her plenty to do. Grave she found herself,
and positively more weighted, as by the experience of the lapse of
the year she had spent in seeing the world. She had ranged, she
would have said, through space and surveyed much of mankind, and
was therefore now, in her own eyes, a very different person from
the frivolous young woman from Albany who had begun to take the
measure of Europe on the lawn at Gardencourt a couple of years
before. She flattered herself she had harvested wisdom and
learned a great deal more of life than this light-minded creature
had even suspected. If her thoughts just now had inclined
themselves to retrospect, instead of fluttering their wings
nervously about the present, they would have evoked a multitude
of interesting pictures. These pictures would have been both
landscapes and figure-pieces; the latter, however, would have
been the more numerous. With several of the images that might
have been projected on such a field we are already acquainted.
There would be for instance the conciliatory Lily, our heroine's
sister and Edmund Ludlow's wife, who had come out from New York
to spend five months with her relative. She had left her husband
behind her, but had brought her children, to whom Isabel now
played with equal munificence and tenderness the part of
maiden-aunt. Mr. Ludlow, toward the last, had been able to snatch
a few weeks from his forensic triumphs and, crossing 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