Domestic fiction; Fathers and daughters -- Fiction; Love stories; Washington Square (New York, N.Y.) -- Fiction; Young women -- Fiction
ought to live under his roof only so long as she conformed to his wisdom.
There was a great deal of glory in such a position, but poor Catherine
felt that she had forfeited her claim to it. She had cast her lot with a
young man against whom he had solemnly warned her, and broken the
contract under which he provided her with a happy home. She could not
give up the young man, so she must leave the home; and the sooner the
object of her preference offered her another the sooner her situation
would lose its awkward twist. This was close reasoning; but it was
commingled with an infinite amount of merely instinctive penitence.
Catherine’s days at this time were dismal, and the weight of some of her
hours was almost more than she could bear. Her father never looked at
her, never spoke to her. He knew perfectly what he was about, and this
was part of a plan. She looked at him as much as she dared (for she was
afraid of seeming to offer herself to his observation), and she pitied
him for the sorrow she had brought upon him. She held up her head and
busied her hands, and went about her daily occupations; and when the
state of things in Washington Square seemed intolerable, she closed her
eyes and indulged herself with an intellectual vision of the man for
whose sake she had broken a sacred law. Mrs. Penniman, of the three
persons in Washington Square, had much the most of the manner that
belongs to a great crisis. If Catherine was quiet, she was quietly
quiet, as I may say, and her pathetic effects, which there was no one to
notice, were entirely unstudied and unintended. If the Doctor was stiff
and dry and absolutely indifferent to the presence of his companions, it
was so lightly, neatly, easily done, that you would have had to know him
well to discover that, on the whole, he rather enjoyed having to be so
disagreeable. But Mrs. Penniman was elaborately reserved and
significantly silent; there was a richer rustle in the very deliberate
movements to which she confined herself, and when she occasionally spoke,
in connexion with some very trivial event, she had the air of meaning
something deeper than what she said. Between Catherine and her father
nothing had passed since the evening she went to speak to him in his
study. She had something to say to him—it seemed to her she ought to say
it; but she kept it back, for fear of irritating him. He also had
something to say to her; but he was determined not to speak first. He
was interested, as we know, in seeing how, if she were left to herself,
she would “stick.” At last she told him she had seen Morris Townsend
again, and that their relations remained quite the same.
“I think we shall marry—before very long. And probably, meanwhile, I
shall see him rather often; about once a week, not more.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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