Our young lady's courage, however, might have been taken as
reaching its height after her relations had gone home. She could
imagine braver things than spending the winter in Paris--Paris
had sides by which it so resembled New York, Paris was like
smart, neat prose--and her close correspondence with Madame
Merle did much to stimulate such flights. She had never had a
keener sense of freedom, of the absolute boldness and wantonness
of liberty, than when she turned away from the platform at the
Euston Station on one of the last days of November, after the
departure of the train that was to convey poor Lily, her husband
and her children to their ship at Liverpool. It had been good for
her to regale; she was very conscious of that; she was very
observant, as we know, of what was good for her, and her effort
was constantly to find something that was good enough. To profit
by the present advantage till the latest moment she had made the
journey from Paris with the unenvied travellers. She would have
accompanied them to Liverpool as well, only Edmund Ludlow had
asked her, as a favour, not to do so; it made Lily so fidgety and
she asked such impossible questions. Isabel watched the train
move away; she kissed her hand to the elder of her small nephews,
a demonstrative child who leaned dangerously far out of the
window of the carriage and made separation an occasion of violent
hilarity, and then she walked back into the foggy London street.
The world lay before her--she could do whatever she chose. There
was a deep thrill in it all, but for the present her choice was
tolerably discreet; she chose simply to walk back from Euston
Square to her hotel. The early dusk of a November afternoon had
already closed in; the street-lamps, in the thick, brown air,
looked weak and red; our heroine was unattended and Euston Square