Washington Square

“I would rather it were in the Square,” the young man urged.  “You know how empty it is, often.  No one will see us.”

“I don’t care who sees us!  But leave me now.”

He left her resignedly; he had got what he wanted.  Fortunately he was ignorant that half an hour later, going home with her father and feeling him near, the poor girl, in spite of her sudden declaration of courage, began to tremble again.  Her father said nothing; but she had an idea his eyes were fixed upon her in the darkness.  Mrs. Penniman also was silent; Morris Townsend had told her that her niece preferred, unromantically, an interview in a chintz-covered parlour to a sentimental tryst beside a fountain sheeted with dead leaves, and she was lost in wonderment at the oddity—almost the perversity—of the choice.

X

Catherine received the young man the next day on the ground she had chosen—amid the chaste upholstery of a New York drawing-room furnished in the fashion of fifty years ago.  Morris had swallowed his pride and made the effort necessary to cross the threshold of her too derisive parent—an act of magnanimity which could not fail to render him doubly interesting.

“We must settle something—we must take a line,” he declared, passing his hand through his hair and giving a glance at the long narrow mirror which adorned the space between the two windows, and which had at its base a little gilded bracket covered by a thin slab of white marble, supporting in its turn a backgammon board folded together in the shape of two volumes, two shining folios inscribed in letters of greenish gilt, History of England.  If Morris had been pleased to describe the master of the house as a heartless scoffer, it is because he thought him too much on his guard, and this was the easiest way to express his own dissatisfaction—a dissatisfaction which he had made a point of concealing from the Doctor.  It will probably seem to the reader, however, that the Doctor’s vigilance was by no means excessive, and that these two young people had an open field.  Their intimacy was now considerable, and it may appear that for a shrinking and retiring person our heroine had been liberal of her favours.  The young man, within a few days, had made her listen to things for which she had not supposed that she was prepared; having a lively foreboding of difficulties, he proceeded to gain as much ground as possible in the present.  He remembered that fortune favours the brave, and even if he had forgotten it, Mrs. Penniman would have remembered it for him.  Mrs. Penniman delighted of all things in a drama, and she flattered herself that a drama would now be enacted.  Combining as she did the zeal of the prompter with the impatience of the spectator, she had long since done her utmost to pull up the curtain.  She too expected to figure in the performance—to be the confidante, the Chorus, to speak the epilogue.  It may even be said that there were times when she lost sight altogether of the modest heroine of the play, in the contemplation of certain great passages which would naturally occur between the hero and herself.