eemed to deprive her
of the sense of freedom. There was a disagreeably strong push, a kind
of hardness of presence, in his way of rising before her. She had been
haunted at moments by the image, by the danger, of his disapproval and
had wondered--a consideration she had never paid in equal degree to any
one else--whether he would like what she did. The difficulty was that
more than any man she had ever known, more than poor Lord Warburton (she
had begun now to give his lordship the benefit of this epithet), Caspar
Goodwood expressed for her an energy--and she had already felt it as a
power that was of his very nature. It was in no degree a matter of
his "advantages"--it was a matter of the spirit that sat in his
clear-burning eyes like some tireless watcher at a window. She might
like it or not, but he insisted, ever, with his whole weight and force:
even in one's usual contact with him one had to reckon with that. The
idea of a diminished liberty was particularly disagreeable to her at
present, since she had just given a sort of personal accent to her
independence by looking so straight at Lord Warburton's big bribe and
yet turning away from it. Sometimes Caspar Goodwood had seemed to range
himself on the side of her destiny, to be the stubbornest fact she knew;
she said to herself at such moments that she might evade him for a time,
but that she must make terms with him at last--terms which would be
certain to be favourable to himself. Her impulse had been to avail
herself of the things that helped her to resist such an obligation;
and this impulse had been much concerned in her eager acceptance of her
aunt's invitation, which had come to her at an hour when she expected
from day to day to see Mr. Goodwood and when she was glad to have an
answer ready for something she was sure he would say to her. When she
had told him at Albany, on the evening of Mrs. Touchett's visit, that
she couldn't then discuss difficult questions, dazzled as she was by
the great immediate opening of her aunt's offer of "Europe," he declared
that this was no answer at all; and it was now to obtain a better one
that he was following her across the sea. To say to herself that he was
a kind of grim fate was well enough for a fanciful young woman who was
able to take much for granted in him; but the reader has a right to a
nearer and a clearer view.

He was the son of a proprietor of well-known cotton-mills in
Massachusetts--a gentleman who had acc