Archer since she came here, Mr. Touchett."

"I, my dear Miss Stackpole? Never in the world. Isabel Archer has acted
on me--yes; she acts on every one. But I've been absolutely passive."

"You're too passive then. You had better stir yourself and be careful.
Isabel's changing every day; she's drifting away--right out to sea. I've
watched her and I can see it. She's not the bright American girl she
was. She's taking different views, a different colour, and turning away
from her old ideals. I want to save those ideals, Mr. Touchett, and
that's where you come in."

"Not surely as an ideal?"

"Well, I hope not," Henrietta replied promptly. "I've got a fear in my
heart that she's going to marry one of these fell Europeans, and I want
to prevent it.

"Ah, I see," cried Ralph; "and to prevent it you want me to step in and
marry her?"

"Not quite; that remedy would be as bad as the disease, for you're the
typical, the fell European from whom I wish to rescue her. No; I wish
you to take an interest in another person--a young man to whom she once
gave great encouragement and whom she now doesn't seem to think good
enough. He's a thoroughly grand man and a very dear friend of mine, and
I wish very much you would invite him to pay a visit here."

Ralph was much puzzled by this appeal, and it is perhaps not to the
credit of his purity of mind that he failed to look at it at first in
the simplest light. It wore, to his eyes, a tortuous air, and his fault
was that he was not quite sure that anything in the world could really
be as candid as this request of Miss Stackpole's appeared. That a young
woman should demand that a gentleman whom she described as her very dear
friend should be furnished with an opportunity to make himself agreeable
to another young woman, a young woman whose attention had wandered and
whose charms were greater--this was an anomaly which for the moment
challenged all his ingenuity of interpretation. To read between the
lines was easier than to follow the text, and to suppose that Miss
Stackpole wished the gentleman invited to Gardencourt on her own account
was the sign not so much of a vulgar as of an embarrassed mind. Even
from this venial act of vulgarity, however, Ralph was saved, and saved
by a force that I can only speak of as inspiration. With no more outward
light on the subject than he already possessed he suddenly acquired the
conviction that it would be a sovereign injustice to the correspondent