ing intended before her
husband's death to spend a part of the winter in Paris, saw no reason to
deprive herself--still less to deprive her companion--of this advantage.
Though they would live in great retirement she might still present
her niece, informally, to the little circle of her fellow countrymen
dwelling upon the skirts of the Champs Elysees. With many of these
amiable colonists Mrs. Touchett was intimate; she shared their
expatriation, their convictions, their pastimes, their ennui. Isabel
saw them arrive with a good deal of assiduity at her aunt's hotel, and
pronounced on them with a trenchancy doubtless to be accounted for by
the temporary exaltation of her sense of human duty. She made up her
mind that their lives were, though luxurious, inane, and incurred some
disfavour by expressing this view on bright Sunday afternoons, when the
American absentees were engaged in calling on each other. Though her
listeners passed for people kept exemplarily genial by their cooks and
dressmakers, two or three of them thought her cleverness, which was
generally admitted, inferior to that of the new theatrical pieces. "You
all live here this way, but what does it lead to?" she was pleased to
ask. "It doesn't seem to lead to anything, and I should think you'd get
very tired of it."

Mrs. Touchett thought the question worthy of Henrietta Stackpole. The
two ladies had found Henrietta in Paris, and Isabel constantly saw her;
so that Mrs. Touchett had some reason for saying to herself that if her
niece were not clever enough to originate almost anything, she might be
suspected of having borrowed that style of remark from her journalistic
friend. The first occasion on which Isabel had spoken was that of
a visit paid by the two ladies to Mrs. Luce, an old friend of Mrs.
Touchett's and the only person in Paris she now went to see. Mrs. Luce
had been living in Paris since the days of Louis Philippe; she used to
say jocosely that she was one of the generation of 1830--a joke of
which the point was not always taken. When it failed Mrs. Luce used to
explain--"Oh yes, I'm one of the romantics;" her French had never
become quite perfect. She was always at home on Sunday afternoons and
surrounded by sympathetic compatriots, usually the same. In fact she
was at home at all times, and reproduced with wondrous truth in her
well-cushioned little corner of the brilliant city, the domestic tone of
her native Baltimore. This reduced Mr. Luce, h