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280 280 THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY. combinations we are already acquainted. There would be, for instance, the conciliatory Lily, our heroine's sister and Edmund Ludlow's wife, who came out from New York to spend five months with Isabel. She left her husband behind her, but she brought her children, to whom Isabel now played with equal munificence and tenderness the part of maiden-aunt. Mr. Ludlow, towards the last, had been able to snatch a few weeks from his forensic triumphs, and, crossing the ocean with extreme rapidity, spent a month with the two ladies in Paris, before taking his wife home. The little Ludlows had not yet, even from the American point of view, reached the proper tourist-age ; so that while her sister was with her, Isabel confined her move- ments to a narrow circle. Lily and the babies had joined her in Switzerland in the month of July, and they had spent a summer of fine weather in an Alpine valley where the flowers were thick in the meadows, and the shade of great chestnuts made a resting-place in such upward wanderings as might be undertaken by ladies and children on warm afternoons. Afterwards they had come to Paris, a city beloved by Lily, but less appreciated by Isabel, who in those days was constantly thinking of Rome. Mrs. Ludlow enjoyed Paris, but she was nevertheless somewhat disappointed and puzzled ; and after her husband had joined her she was in addition a good deal depressed at not being able to induce him to enter into these somewhat subtle and complex emotions. They all had Isabel for their object ; but Edmund Ludlow, as he had always done before, declined to be surprised, or distressed, or mystified, or elated, at' anything his sister-in-law might have done or have failed to do. Mrs. Ludlow's feelings were various. At one moment she thought it would be so natural for Isabel to come home and take a house in New York the Rossiters', for instance, which had an elegant conservatory, and was just round the corner from her own ; at another she could not conceal her surprise at the girl's not marrying some gentleman 6f rank in one of the foreign countries. On the whole, as I have said, she was rather disappointed. She had taken more satisfaction in Isabel's accession of fortune than if the money had been left to herself ; it had seemed to her to offer just the proper setting for her sister's slender but eminent figure. Isabel had developed less, however, than Lily had thought likely development, to Lily's understanding, being somehow mysteriously connected with morning-calls and evening-parties. Intellectually, doubtless, she had made immense strides ; but she appeared to have achieved few of those social conquests of which Mrs. Ludlow had expected to admire the trophies. Lily's