Daisy Miller

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Title: Daisy Miller
Author: Henry James
Release Date: July 3, 2008 [EBook #208]
Last Updated: September 18, 2016
Language: English
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*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK DAISY MILLER ***
Produced by Judith Boss
DAISY MILLER: A STUDY
IN TWO PARTS
The text is that of the first American appearance in book form, 1879.
PART I
At the little town of Vevey, in Switzerland, there is a particularly
comfortable hotel. There are, indeed, many hotels, for the entertainment
of tourists is the business of the place, which, as many travelers will
remember, is seated upon the edge of a remarkably blue lake--a lake that
it behooves every tourist to visit. The shore of the lake presents an
unbroken array of establishments of this order, of every category, from
the “grand hotel” of the newest fashion, with a chalk-white front, a
hundred balconies, and a dozen flags flying from its roof, to the little
Swiss pension of an elder day, with its name inscribed in German-looking
lettering upon a pink or yellow wall and an awkward summerhouse in the
angle of the garden. One of the hotels at Vevey, however, is famous,
even classical, being distinguished from many of its upstart neighbors
by an air both of luxury and of maturity. In this region, in the month
of June, American travelers are extremely numerous; it may be said,
indeed, that Vevey assumes at this period some of the characteristics
of an American watering place. There are sights and sounds which evoke a
vision, an echo, of Newport and Saratoga. There is a flitting hither
and thither of “stylish” young girls, a rustling of muslin flounces,
a rattle of dance music in the morning hours, a sound of high-pitched
voices at all times. You receive an impression of these things at the
excellent inn of the “Trois Couronnes” and are transported in fancy to
the Ocean House or to Congress Hall. But at the “Trois Couronnes,” it
must be added, there are other features that are much at variance with
these suggestions: neat German waiters, who look like secretaries of
legation; Russian princesses sitting in the garden; little Polish boys
walking about held by the hand, with their governors; a view of the
sunny crest of the Dent du Midi and the picturesque towers of the Castle
of Chillon.
I hardly know whether it was the analogies or the differences that were
uppermost in the mind of a young American, who, two or three years ago,
sat in the garden of the “Trois Couronnes,” looking about him, rather
idly, at some of the graceful objects I have mentioned. It was a
beautiful summer morning, and in whatever fashion the young American
looked at things, they must have seemed to him charming. He had come
from Geneva the day before by the little steamer, to see his aunt, who
was staying at the hotel--Geneva having been for a long time his place
of residence. But his aunt had a headache--his aunt had almost always a
headache--and now she was shut up in her room, smelling camphor, so that
he was at liberty to wander about. He was some seven-and-twenty years
of age; when his friends spoke of him, they usually said that he was at
Geneva “studying.” When his enemies spoke of him, they said--but,
after all, he had no enemies; he was an extremely amiable fellow, and
universally liked. What I should say is, simply, that when certain
persons spoke of him they affirmed that the reason of his spending so
much time at Geneva was that he was extremely devoted to a lady who
lived there--a foreign lady--a person older than himself. Very few
Americans--indeed, I think none--had ever seen this lady, about whom
there were some singular stories. But Winterbourne had an old attachment
for the little metropolis of Calvinism; he had been put to school there
as a boy, and he had afterward gone to college there--circumstances
which had led to his forming a great many youthful friendships. Many of
these he had kept, and they were a source of great satisfaction to him.
After knocking at his aunt’s door and learning that she was indisposed,
he had taken a walk about the town, and then he had come in to his
breakfast. He had now finished his breakfast; but he was drinking a
small cup of coffee, which had been served to him on a little table in
the garden by one of the waiters who looked like an attache. At last
he finished his coffee and lit a cigarette. Presently a small boy came
walking along the path--an urchin of nine or ten. The child, who was
diminutive for his years, had an aged expression of countenance, a pale
complexion, and sharp little features. He was dressed in knickerbockers,
with red stockings, which displayed his poor little spindle-shanks;
he also wore a brilliant red cravat. He carried in his hand a long
alpenstock, the sharp point of which he thrust into everything that
he approached--the flowerbeds, the garden benches, the trains of the
ladies’ dresses. In front of Winterbourne he paused, looking at him with
a pair of bright, penetrating little eyes.
“Will you give me a lump of sugar?” he asked in a sharp, hard little
voice--a voice immature and yet, somehow, not young.
Winterbourne glanced at the small table near him, on which his coffee
service rested, and saw that several morsels of sugar remained. “Yes,
you may take one,” he answered; “but I don’t think sugar is good for
little boys.”
This little boy stepped forward and carefully selected three of
the coveted fragments, two of which he buried in the pocket of his
knickerbockers, depositing the other as promptly in another place. He
poked his alpenstock, lance-fashion, into Winterbourne’s bench and tried
to crack the lump of sugar with his teeth.
“Oh, blazes; it’s har-r-d!” he exclaimed, pronouncing the adjective in a
peculiar manner.
Winterbourne had immediately perceived that he might have the honor
of claiming him as a fellow countryman. “Take care you don’t hurt your
teeth,” he said, paternally.
“I haven’t got any teeth to hurt. They have all come out. I have only
got seven teeth. My mother counted them last night, and one came out
right afterward. She said she’d slap me if any more came out. I can’t
help it. It’s this old Europe. It’s the climate that makes them come
out. In America they didn’t come out. It’s these hotels.”
Winterbourne was much amused. “If you eat three lumps of sugar, your
mother will certainly slap you,” he said.
“She’s got to give me some candy, then,” rejoined his young
interlocutor. “I can’t get any candy here--any American candy. American
candy’s the best candy.”
“And are American little boys the best little boys?” asked Winterbourne.
“I don’t know. I’m an American boy,” said the child.
“I see you are one of the best!” laughed Winterbourne.
“Are you an American man?” pursued this vivacious infant. And then,
on Winterbourne’s affirmative reply--“American men are the best,” he
declared.
His companion thanked him for the compliment, and the child, who had
now got astride of his alpenstock, stood looking about him, while he
attacked a second lump of sugar. Winterbourne wondered if he himself
had been like this in his infancy, for he had been brought to Europe at
about this age.
“Here comes my sister!” cried the child in a moment. “She’s an American
girl.”
Winterbourne looked along the path and saw a beautiful young lady
advancing. “American girls are the best girls,” he said cheerfully to
his young companion.
“My sister ain’t the best!” the child declared. “She’s always blowing at
me.”
“I imagine that is your fault, not hers,” said Winterbourne. The young
lady meanwhile had drawn near. She was dressed in white muslin, with a
hundred frills and flounces, and knots of pale-colored ribbon. She was
bareheaded, but she balanced in her hand a large parasol, with a deep
border of embroidery; and she was strikingly, admirably pretty. “How
pretty they are!” thought Winterbourne, straightening himself in his
seat, as if he were prepared to rise.
The young lady paused in front of his bench, near the parapet of the
garden, which overlooked the lake. The little boy had now converted his
alpenstock into a vaulting pole, by the aid of which he was springing
about in the gravel and kicking it up not a little.
“Randolph,” said the young lady, “what ARE you doing?”
“I’m going up the Alps,” replied Randolph. “This is the way!” And he
gave another little jump, scattering the pebbles about Winterbourne’s
ears.
“That’s the way they come down,” said Winterbourne.
“He’s an American man!” cried Randolph, in his little hard voice.
The young lady gave no heed to this announcement, but looked straight
at her brother. “Well, I guess you had better be quiet,” she simply
observed.
It seemed to Winterbourne that he had been in a manner presented. He
got up and stepped slowly toward the young girl, throwing away his
cigarette. “This little boy and I have made acquaintance,” he said, with
great civility. In Geneva, as he had been perfectly aware, a young
man was not at liberty to speak to a young unmarried lady except under
certain rarely occurring conditions; but here at Vevey, what conditions
could be better than these?--a pretty American girl coming and standing
in front of you in a garden. This pretty American girl, however, on
hearing Winterbourne’s observation, simply glanced at him; she then
turned her head and looked over the parapet, at the lake and the
opposite mountains. He wondered whether he had gone too far, but he
decided that he must advance farther, rather than retreat. While he was
thinking of something else to say, the young lady turned to the little
boy again.
“I should like to know where you got that pole,” she said.
“I bought it,” responded Randolph.
“You don’t mean to say you’re going to take it to Italy?”
“Yes, I am going to take it to Italy,” the child declared.
The young girl glanced over the front of her dress and smoothed out a
knot or two of ribbon. Then she rested her eyes upon the prospect again.
“Well, I guess you had better leave it somewhere,” she said after a
moment.
“Are you going to Italy?” Winterbourne inquired in a tone of great
respect.
The young lady glanced at him again. “Yes, sir,” she replied. And she
said nothing more.
“Are you--a--going over the Simplon?” Winterbourne pursued, a little
embarrassed.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I suppose it’s some mountain. Randolph, what
mountain are we going over?”
“Going where?” the child demanded.
“To Italy,” Winterbourne explained.
“I don’t know,” said Randolph. “I don’t want to go to Italy. I want to
go to America.”
“Oh, Italy is a beautiful place!” rejoined the young man.
“Can you get candy there?” Randolph loudly inquired.
“I hope not,” said his sister. “I guess you have had enough candy, and
mother thinks so too.”
“I haven’t had any for ever so long--for a hundred weeks!” cried the
boy, still jumping about.
The young lady inspected her flounces and smoothed her ribbons again;
and Winterbourne presently risked an observation upon the beauty of the
view. He was ceasing to be embarrassed, for he had begun to perceive
that she was not in the least embarrassed herself. There had not been
the slightest alteration in her charming complexion; she was evidently
neither offended nor flattered. If she looked another way when he spoke
to her, and seemed not particularly to hear him, this was simply her
habit, her manner. Yet, as he talked a little more and pointed out some
of the objects of interest in the view, with which she appeared quite
unacquainted, she gradually gave him more of the benefit of her glance;
and then he saw that this glance was perfectly direct and unshrinking.
It was not, however, what would have been called an immodest glance,
for the young girl’s eyes were singularly honest and fresh. They were
wonderfully pretty eyes; and, indeed, Winterbourne had not seen for
a long time anything prettier than his fair countrywoman’s various
features--her complexion, her nose, her ears, her teeth. He had a great
relish for feminine beauty; he was addicted to observing and analyzing
it; and as regards this young lady’s face he made several observations.
It was not at all insipid, but it was not exactly expressive; and
though it was eminently delicate, Winterbourne mentally accused it--very
forgivingly--of a want of finish. He thought it very possible that
Master Randolph’s sister was a coquette; he was sure she had a spirit of
her own; but in her bright, sweet, superficial little visage there was
no mockery, no irony. Before long it became obvious that she was much
disposed toward conversation. She told him that they were going to Rome
for the winter--she and her mother and Randolph. She asked him if he was
a “real American”; she shouldn’t have taken him for one; he seemed more
like a German--this was said after a little hesitation--especially when
he spoke. Winterbourne, laughing, answered that he had met Germans who
spoke like Americans, but that he had not, so far as he remembered, met
an American who spoke like a German. Then he asked her if she should not
be more comfortable in sitting upon the bench which he had just quitted.
She answered that she liked standing up and walking about; but she
presently sat down. She told him she was from New York State--“if you
know where that is.” Winterbourne learned more about her by catching
hold of her small, slippery brother and making him stand a few minutes
by his side.
“Tell me your name, my boy,” he said.
“Randolph C. Miller,” said the boy sharply. “And I’ll tell you her
name;” and he leveled his alpenstock at his sister.
“You had better wait till you are asked!” said this young lady calmly.
“I should like very much to know your name,” said Winterbourne.
“Her name is Daisy Miller!” cried the child. “But that isn’t her real
name; that isn’t her name on her cards.”
“It’s a pity you haven’t got one of my cards!” said Miss Miller.
“Her real name is Annie P. Miller,” the boy went on.
“Ask him HIS name,” said his sister, indicating Winterbourne.
But on this point Randolph seemed perfectly indifferent; he continued to
supply information with regard to his own family. “My father’s name is
Ezra B. Miller,” he announced. “My father ain’t in Europe; my father’s
in a better place than Europe.”
Winterbourne imagined for a moment that this was the manner in which the
child had been taught to intimate that Mr. Miller had been removed to
the sphere of celestial reward. But Randolph immediately added, “My
father’s in Schenectady. He’s got a big business. My father’s rich, you
bet!”
“Well!” ejaculated Miss Miller, lowering her parasol and looking at
the embroidered border. Winterbourne presently released the child,
who departed, dragging his alpenstock along the path. “He doesn’t like
Europe,” said the young girl. “He wants to go back.”
“To Schenectady, you mean?”
“Yes; he wants to go right home. He hasn’t got any boys here. There is
one boy here, but he always goes round with a teacher; they won’t let
him play.”
“And your brother hasn’t any teacher?” Winterbourne inquired.
“Mother thought of getting him one, to travel round with us. There was a
lady told her of a very good teacher; an American lady--perhaps you know
her--Mrs. Sanders. I think she came from Boston. She told her of this
teacher, and we thought of getting him to travel round with us. But
Randolph said he didn’t want a teacher traveling round with us. He said
he wouldn’t have lessons when he was in the cars. And we ARE in the cars
about half the time. There was an English lady we met in the cars--I
think her name was Miss Featherstone; perhaps you know her. She wanted
to know why I didn’t give Randolph lessons--give him ‘instruction,’ she
called it. I guess he could give me more instruction than I could give
him. He’s very smart.”
“Yes,” said Winterbourne; “he seems very smart.”
“Mother’s going to get a teacher for him as soon as we get to Italy. Can
you get good teachers in Italy?”
“Very good, I should think,” said Winterbourne.
“Or else she’s going to find some school. He ought to learn some more.
He’s only nine. He’s going to college.” And in this way Miss Miller
continued to converse upon the affairs of her family and upon other
topics. She sat there with her extremely pretty hands, ornamented with
very brilliant rings, folded in her lap, and with her pretty eyes now
resting upon those of Winterbourne, now wandering over the garden, the
people who passed by, and the beautiful view. She talked to Winterbourne
as if she had known him a long time. He found it very pleasant. It was
many years since he had heard a young girl talk so much. It might have
been said of this unknown young lady, who had come and sat down beside
him upon a bench, that she chattered. She was very quiet; she sat in a
charming, tranquil attitude; but her lips and her eyes were constantly
moving. She had a soft, slender, agreeable voice, and her tone was
decidedly sociable. She gave Winterbourne a history of her movements
and intentions and those of her mother and brother, in Europe, and
enumerated, in particular, the various hotels at which they had stopped.
“That English lady in the cars,” she said--“Miss Featherstone--asked me
if we didn’t all live in hotels in America. I told her I had never been
in so many hotels in my life as since I came to Europe. I have never
seen so many--it’s nothing but hotels.” But Miss Miller did not make
this remark with a querulous accent; she appeared to be in the best
humor with everything. She declared that the hotels were very good, when
once you got used to their ways, and that Europe was perfectly sweet.
She was not disappointed--not a bit. Perhaps it was because she had
heard so much about it before. She had ever so many intimate friends
that had been there ever so many times. And then she had had ever so
many dresses and things from Paris. Whenever she put on a Paris dress
she felt as if she were in Europe.
“It was a kind of a wishing cap,” said Winterbourne.
“Yes,” said Miss Miller without examining this analogy; “it always made
me wish I was here. But I needn’t have done that for dresses. I am sure
they send all the pretty ones to America; you see the most frightful
things here. The only thing I don’t like,” she proceeded, “is the
society. There isn’t any society; or, if there is, I don’t know where it
keeps itself. Do you? I suppose there is some society somewhere, but I
haven’t seen anything of it. I’m very fond of society, and I have always
had a great deal of it. I don’t mean only in Schenectady, but in New
York. I used to go to New York every winter. In New York I had lots of
society. Last winter I had seventeen dinners given me; and three of them
were by gentlemen,” added Daisy Miller. “I have more friends in New York
than in Schenectady--more gentleman friends; and more young lady friends
too,” she resumed in a moment. She paused again for an instant; she was
looking at Winterbourne with all her prettiness in her lively eyes and
in her light, slightly monotonous smile. “I have always had,” she said,
“a great deal of gentlemen’s society.”
Poor Winterbourne was amused, perplexed, and decidedly charmed. He
had never yet heard a young girl express herself in just this fashion;
never, at least, save in cases where to say such things seemed a kind of
demonstrative evidence of a certain laxity of deportment. And yet was he
to accuse Miss Daisy Miller of actual or potential inconduite, as they
said at Geneva? He felt that he had lived at Geneva so long that he
had lost a good deal; he had become dishabituated to the American tone.
Never, indeed, since he had grown old enough to appreciate things, had
he encountered a young American girl of so pronounced a type as this.
Certainly she was very charming, but how deucedly sociable! Was she
simply a pretty girl from New York State? Were they all like that, the
pretty girls who had a good deal of gentlemen’s society? Or was she also
a designing, an audacious, an unscrupulous young person? Winterbourne
had lost his instinct in this matter, and his reason could not help him.
Miss Daisy Miller looked extremely innocent. Some people had told him
that, after all, American girls were exceedingly innocent; and others
had told him that, after all, they were not. He was inclined to think
Miss Daisy Miller was a flirt--a pretty American flirt. He had never, as
yet, had any relations with young ladies of this category. He had
known, here in Europe, two or three women--persons older than Miss Daisy
Miller, and provided, for respectability’s sake, with husbands--who were
great coquettes--dangerous, terrible women, with whom one’s relations
were liable to take a serious turn. But this young girl was not a
coquette in that sense; she was very unsophisticated; she was only a
pretty American flirt. Winterbourne was almost grateful for having found
the formula that applied to Miss Daisy Miller. He leaned back in his
seat; he remarked to himself that she had the most charming nose he had
ever seen; he wondered what were the regular conditions and limitations
of one’s intercourse with a pretty American flirt. It presently became
apparent that he was on the way to learn.
“Have you been to that old castle?” asked the young girl, pointing with
her parasol to the far-gleaming walls of the Chateau de Chillon.
“Yes, formerly, more than once,” said Winterbourne. “You too, I suppose,
have seen it?”
“No; we haven’t been there. I want to go there dreadfully. Of course I
mean to go there. I wouldn’t go away from here without having seen that
old castle.”
“It’s a very pretty excursion,” said Winterbourne, “and very easy to
make. You can drive, you know, or you can go by the little steamer.”
“You can go in the cars,” said Miss Miller.
“Yes; you can go in the cars,” Winterbourne assented.
“Our courier says they take you right up to the castle,” the young girl
continued. “We were going last week, but my mother gave out. She suffers
dreadfully from dyspepsia. She said she couldn’t go. Randolph wouldn’t
go either; he says he doesn’t think much of old castles. But I guess
we’ll go this week, if we can get Randolph.”
“Your brother is not interested in ancient monuments?” Winterbourne
inquired, smiling.
“He says he don’t care much about old castles. He’s only nine. He
wants to stay at the hotel. Mother’s afraid to leave him alone, and the
courier won’t stay with him; so we haven’t been to many places. But it
will be too bad if we don’t go up there.” And Miss Miller pointed again
at the Chateau de Chillon.
“I should think it might be arranged,” said Winterbourne. “Couldn’t you
get some one to stay for the afternoon with Randolph?”
Miss Miller looked at him a moment, and then, very placidly, “I wish YOU
would stay with him!” she said.
Winterbourne hesitated a moment. “I should much rather go to Chillon
with you.”
“With me?” asked the young girl with the same placidity.
She didn’t rise, blushing, as a young girl at Geneva would have done;
and yet Winterbourne, conscious that he had been very bold, thought
it possible she was offended. “With your mother,” he answered very
respectfully.
But it seemed that both his audacity and his respect were lost upon Miss
Daisy Miller. “I guess my mother won’t go, after all,” she said. “She
don’t like to ride round in the afternoon. But did you really mean what
you said just now--that you would like to go up there?”
“Most earnestly,” Winterbourne declared.
“Then we may arrange it. If mother will stay with Randolph, I guess
Eugenio will.”
“Eugenio?” the young man inquired.
“Eugenio’s our courier. He doesn’t like to stay with Randolph; he’s the
most fastidious man I ever saw. But he’s a splendid courier. I guess
he’ll stay at home with Randolph if mother does, and then we can go to
the castle.”
Winterbourne reflected for an instant as lucidly as possible--“we” could
only mean Miss Daisy Miller and himself. This program seemed almost too
agreeable for credence; he felt as if he ought to kiss the young lady’s
hand. Possibly he would have done so and quite spoiled the project, but
at this moment another person, presumably Eugenio, appeared. A tall,
handsome man, with superb whiskers, wearing a velvet morning coat and
a brilliant watch chain, approached Miss Miller, looking sharply at her
companion. “Oh, Eugenio!” said Miss Miller with the friendliest accent.
Eugenio had looked at Winterbourne from head to foot; he now bowed
gravely to the young lady. “I have the honor to inform mademoiselle that
luncheon is upon the table.”
Miss Miller slowly rose. “See here, Eugenio!” she said; “I’m going to
that old castle, anyway.”
“To the Chateau de Chillon, mademoiselle?” the courier inquired.
“Mademoiselle has made arrangements?” he added in a tone which struck
Winterbourne as very impertinent.
Eugenio’s tone apparently threw, even to Miss Miller’s own apprehension,
a slightly ironical light upon the young girl’s situation. She turned
to Winterbourne, blushing a little--a very little. “You won’t back out?”
she said.
“I shall not be happy till we go!” he protested.
“And you are staying in this hotel?” she went on. “And you are really an
American?”
The courier stood looking at Winterbourne offensively. The young man,
at least, thought his manner of looking an offense to Miss Miller; it
conveyed an imputation that she “picked up” acquaintances. “I shall have
the honor of presenting to you a person who will tell you all about me,”
he said, smiling and referring to his aunt.
“Oh, well, we’ll go some day,” said Miss Miller. And she gave him a
smile and turned away. She put up her parasol and walked back to the inn
beside Eugenio. Winterbourne stood looking after her; and as she moved
away, drawing her muslin furbelows over the gravel, said to himself that
she had the tournure of a princess.
He had, however, engaged to do more than proved feasible, in promising
to present his aunt, Mrs. Costello, to Miss Daisy Miller. As soon as the
former lady had got better of her headache, he waited upon her in her
apartment; and, after the proper inquiries in regard to her health, he
asked her if she had observed in the hotel an American family--a mamma,
a daughter, and a little boy.
“And a courier?” said Mrs. Costello. “Oh yes, I have observed them. Seen
them--heard them--and kept out of their way.” Mrs. Costello was a widow
with a fortune; a person of much distinction, who frequently intimated
that, if she were not so dreadfully liable to sick headaches, she would
probably have left a deeper impress upon her time. She had a long, pale
face, a high nose, and a great deal of very striking white hair, which
she wore in large puffs and rouleaux over the top of her head. She had
two sons married in New York and another who was now in Europe. This
young man was amusing himself at Hamburg, and, though he was on his
travels, was rarely perceived to visit any particular city at the moment
selected by his mother for her own appearance there. Her nephew, who had
come up to Vevey expressly to see her, was therefore more attentive than
those who, as she said, were nearer to her. He had imbibed at Geneva the
idea that one must always be attentive to one’s aunt. Mrs. Costello
had not seen him for many years, and she was greatly pleased with him,
manifesting her approbation by initiating him into many of the secrets
of that social sway which, as she gave him to understand, she exerted in
the American capital. She admitted that she was very exclusive; but, if
he were acquainted with New York, he would see that one had to be. And
her picture of the minutely hierarchical constitution of the society of
that city, which she presented to him in many different lights, was, to
Winterbourne’s imagination, almost oppressively striking.
He immediately perceived, from her tone, that Miss Daisy Miller’s place
in the social scale was low. “I am afraid you don’t approve of them,” he
said.
“They are very common,” Mrs. Costello declared. “They are the sort of
Americans that one does one’s duty by not--not accepting.”
“Ah, you don’t accept them?” said the young man.
“I can’t, my dear Frederick. I would if I could, but I can’t.”
“The young girl is very pretty,” said Winterbourne in a moment.
“Of course she’s pretty. But she is very common.”
“I see what you mean, of course,” said Winterbourne after another pause.
“She has that charming look that they all have,” his aunt resumed. “I
can’t think where they pick it up; and she dresses in perfection--no,
you don’t know how well she dresses. I can’t think where they get their
taste.”
“But, my dear aunt, she is not, after all, a Comanche savage.”
“She is a young lady,” said Mrs. Costello, “who has an intimacy with her
mamma’s courier.”
“An intimacy with the courier?” the young man demanded.
“Oh, the mother is just as bad! They treat the courier like a familiar
friend--like a gentleman. I shouldn’t wonder if he dines with them.
Very likely they have never seen a man with such good manners, such
fine clothes, so like a gentleman. He probably corresponds to the young
lady’s idea of a count. He sits with them in the garden in the evening.
I think he smokes.”
Winterbourne listened with interest to these disclosures; they helped
him to make up his mind about Miss Daisy. Evidently she was rather wild.
“Well,” he said, “I am not a courier, and yet she was very charming to
me.”
“You had better have said at first,” said Mrs. Costello with dignity,
“that you had made her acquaintance.”
“We simply met in the garden, and we talked a bit.”
“Tout bonnement! And pray what did you say?”
“I said I should take the liberty of introducing her to my admirable
aunt.”
“I am much obliged to you.”
“It was to guarantee my respectability,” said Winterbourne.
“And pray who is to guarantee hers?”
“Ah, you are cruel!” said the young man. “She’s a very nice young girl.”
“You don’t say that as if you believed it,” Mrs. Costello observed.
“She is completely uncultivated,” Winterbourne went on. “But she is
wonderfully pretty, and, in short, she is very nice. To prove that I
believe it, I am going to take her to the Chateau de Chillon.”
“You two are going off there together? I should say it proved just the
contrary. How long had you known her, may I ask, when this interesting
project was formed? You haven’t been twenty-four hours in the house.”
“I have known her half an hour!” said Winterbourne, smiling.
“Dear me!” cried Mrs. Costello. “What a dreadful girl!”
Her nephew was silent for some moments. “You really think, then,” he
began earnestly, and with a desire for trustworthy information--“you
really think that--” But he paused again.
“Think what, sir?” said his aunt.
“That she is the sort of young lady who expects a man, sooner or later,
to carry her off?”
“I haven’t the least idea what such young ladies expect a man to do. But
I really think that you had better not meddle with little American girls
that are uncultivated, as you call them. You have lived too long out of
the country. You will be sure to make some great mistake. You are too
innocent.”
“My dear aunt, I am not so innocent,” said Winterbourne, smiling and
curling his mustache.
“You are guilty too, then!”
Winterbourne continued to curl his mustache meditatively. “You won’t let
the poor girl know you then?” he asked at last.
“Is it literally true that she is going to the Chateau de Chillon with
you?”
“I think that she fully intends it.”
“Then, my dear Frederick,” said Mrs. Costello, “I must decline the honor
of her acquaintance. I am an old woman, but I am not too old, thank
Heaven, to be shocked!”
“But don’t they all do these things--the young girls in America?”
Winterbourne inquired.
Mrs. Costello stared a moment. “I should like to see my granddaughters
do them!” she declared grimly.
This seemed to throw some light upon the matter, for Winterbourne
remembered to have heard that his pretty cousins in New York were
“tremendous flirts.” If, therefore, Miss Daisy Miller exceeded the
liberal margin allowed to these young ladies, it was probable that
anything might be expected of her. Winterbourne was impatient to see her
again, and he was vexed with himself that, by instinct, he should not
appreciate her justly.
Though he was impatient to see her, he hardly knew what he should say
to her about his aunt’s refusal to become acquainted with her; but he
discovered, promptly enough, that with Miss Daisy Miller there was
no great need of walking on tiptoe. He found her that evening in the
garden, wandering about in the warm starlight like an indolent sylph,
and swinging to and fro the largest fan he had ever beheld. It was ten
o’clock. He had dined with his aunt, had been sitting with her since
dinner, and had just taken leave of her till the morrow. Miss Daisy
Miller seemed very glad to see him; she declared it was the longest
evening she had ever passed.
“Have you been all alone?” he asked.
“I have been walking round with mother. But mother gets tired walking
round,” she answered.
“Has she gone to bed?”
“No; she doesn’t like to go to bed,” said the young girl. “She doesn’t
sleep--not three hours. She says she doesn’t know how she lives. She’s
dreadfully nervous. I guess she sleeps more than she thinks. She’s gone
somewhere after Randolph; she wants to try to get him to go to bed. He
doesn’t like to go to bed.”
“Let us hope she will persuade him,” observed Winterbourne.
“She will talk to him all she can; but he doesn’t like her to talk
to him,” said Miss Daisy, opening her fan. “She’s going to try to get
Eugenio to talk to him. But he isn’t afraid of Eugenio. Eugenio’s a
splendid courier, but he can’t make much impression on Randolph! I don’t
believe he’ll go to bed before eleven.” It appeared that Randolph’s
vigil was in fact triumphantly prolonged, for Winterbourne strolled
about with the young girl for some time without meeting her mother. “I
have been looking round for that lady you want to introduce me to,” his
companion resumed. “She’s your aunt.” Then, on Winterbourne’s admitting
the fact and expressing some curiosity as to how she had learned it, she
said she had heard all about Mrs. Costello from the chambermaid. She was
very quiet and very comme il faut; she wore white puffs; she spoke to no
one, and she never dined at the table d’hote. Every two days she had a
headache. “I think that’s a lovely description, headache and all!” said
Miss Daisy, chattering along in her thin, gay voice. “I want to know her
ever so much. I know just what YOUR aunt would be; I know I should like
her. She would be very exclusive. I like a lady to be exclusive; I’m
dying to be exclusive myself. Well, we ARE exclusive, mother and I. We
don’t speak to everyone--or they don’t speak to us. I suppose it’s about
the same thing. Anyway, I shall be ever so glad to know your aunt.”
Winterbourne was embarrassed. “She would be most happy,” he said; “but I
am afraid those headaches will interfere.”
The young girl looked at him through the dusk. “But I suppose she
doesn’t have a headache every day,” she said sympathetically.
Winterbourne was silent a moment. “She tells me she does,” he answered
at last, not knowing what to say.
Miss Daisy Miller stopped and stood looking at him. Her prettiness was
still visible in the darkness; she was opening and closing her enormous
fan. “She doesn’t want to know me!” she said suddenly. “Why don’t you
say so? You needn’t be afraid. I’m not afraid!” And she gave a little
laugh.
Winterbourne fancied there was a tremor in her voice; he was touched,
shocked, mortified by it. “My dear young lady,” he protested, “she knows
no one. It’s her wretched health.”
The young girl walked on a few steps, laughing still. “You needn’t be
afraid,” she repeated. “Why should she want to know me?” Then she paused
again; she was close to the parapet of the garden, and in front of her
was the starlit lake. There was a vague sheen upon its surface, and in
the distance were dimly seen mountain forms. Daisy Miller looked out
upon the mysterious prospect and then she gave another little laugh.
“Gracious! she IS exclusive!” she said. Winterbourne wondered whether
she was seriously wounded, and for a moment almost wished that her sense
of injury might be such as to make it becoming in him to attempt to
reassure and comfort her. He had a pleasant sense that she would be very
approachable for consolatory purposes. He felt then, for the instant,
quite ready to sacrifice his aunt, conversationally; to admit that she
was a proud, rude woman, and to declare that they needn’t mind her.
But before he had time to commit himself to this perilous mixture
of gallantry and impiety, the young lady, resuming her walk, gave an
exclamation in quite another tone. “Well, here’s Mother! I guess she
hasn’t got Randolph to go to bed.” The figure of a lady appeared at a
distance, very indistinct in the darkness, and advancing with a slow and
wavering movement. Suddenly it seemed to pause.
“Are you sure it is your mother? Can you distinguish her in this thick
dusk?” Winterbourne asked.
“Well!” cried Miss Daisy Miller with a laugh; “I guess I know my own
mother. And when she has got on my shawl, too! She is always wearing my
things.”
The lady in question, ceasing to advance, hovered vaguely about the spot
at which she had checked her steps.
“I am afraid your mother doesn’t see you,” said Winterbourne.
“Or perhaps,” he added, thinking, with Miss Miller, the joke
permissible--“perhaps she feels guilty about your shawl.”
“Oh, it’s a fearful old thing!” the young girl replied serenely. “I told
her she could wear it. She won’t come here because she sees you.”
“Ah, then,” said Winterbourne, “I had better leave you.”
“Oh, no; come on!” urged Miss Daisy Miller.
“I’m afraid your mother doesn’t approve of my walking with you.”
Miss Miller gave him a serious glance. “It isn’t for me; it’s for
you--that is, it’s for HER. Well, I don’t know who it’s for! But mother
doesn’t like any of my gentlemen friends. She’s right down timid. She
always makes a fuss if I introduce a gentleman. But I DO introduce
them--almost always. If I didn’t introduce my gentlemen friends to
Mother,” the young girl added in her little soft, flat monotone, “I
shouldn’t think I was natural.”
“To introduce me,” said Winterbourne, “you must know my name.” And he
proceeded to pronounce it.
“Oh, dear, I can’t say all that!” said his companion with a laugh. But
by this time they had come up to Mrs. Miller, who, as they drew near,
walked to the parapet of the garden and leaned upon it, looking intently
at the lake and turning her back to them. “Mother!” said the young
girl in a tone of decision. Upon this the elder lady turned round. “Mr.
Winterbourne,” said Miss Daisy Miller, introducing the young man very
frankly and prettily. “Common,” she was, as Mrs. Costello had pronounced
her; yet it was a wonder to Winterbourne that, with her commonness, she
had a singularly delicate grace.
Her mother was a small, spare, light person, with a wandering eye,
a very exiguous nose, and a large forehead, decorated with a certain
amount of thin, much frizzled hair. Like her daughter, Mrs. Miller was
dressed with extreme elegance; she had enormous diamonds in her ears.
So far as Winterbourne could observe, she gave him no greeting--she
certainly was not looking at him. Daisy was near her, pulling her shawl
straight. “What are you doing, poking round here?” this young lady
inquired, but by no means with that harshness of accent which her choice
of words may imply.
“I don’t know,” said her mother, turning toward the lake again.
“I shouldn’t think you’d want that shawl!” Daisy exclaimed.
“Well I do!” her mother answered with a little laugh.
“Did you get Randolph to go to bed?” asked the young girl.
“No; I couldn’t induce him,” said Mrs. Miller very gently. “He wants to
talk to the waiter. He likes to talk to that waiter.”
“I was telling Mr. Winterbourne,” the young girl went on; and to the
young man’s ear her tone might have indicated that she had been uttering
his name all her life.
“Oh, yes!” said Winterbourne; “I have the pleasure of knowing your son.”
Randolph’s mamma was silent; she turned her attention to the lake. But
at last she spoke. “Well, I don’t see how he lives!”
“Anyhow, it isn’t so bad as it was at Dover,” said Daisy Miller.
“And what occurred at Dover?” Winterbourne asked.
“He wouldn’t go to bed at all. I guess he sat up all night in the public
parlor. He wasn’t in bed at twelve o’clock: I know that.”
“It was half-past twelve,” declared Mrs. Miller with mild emphasis.
“Does he sleep much during the day?” Winterbourne demanded.
“I guess he doesn’t sleep much,” Daisy rejoined.
“I wish he would!” said her mother. “It seems as if he couldn’t.”
“I think he’s real tiresome,” Daisy pursued.
Then, for some moments, there was silence. “Well, Daisy Miller,” said
the elder lady, presently, “I shouldn’t think you’d want to talk against
your own brother!”
“Well, he IS tiresome, Mother,” said Daisy, quite without the asperity
of a retort.
“He’s only nine,” urged Mrs. Miller.
“Well, he wouldn’t go to that castle,” said the young girl. “I’m going
there with Mr. Winterbourne.”
To this announcement, very placidly made, Daisy’s mamma offered no
response. Winterbourne took for granted that she deeply disapproved of
the projected excursion; but he said to himself that she was a simple,
easily managed person, and that a few deferential protestations would
take the edge from her displeasure. “Yes,” he began; “your daughter has
kindly allowed me the honor of being her guide.”
Mrs. Miller’s wandering eyes attached themselves, with a sort of
appealing air, to Daisy, who, however, strolled a few steps farther,
gently humming to herself. “I presume you will go in the cars,” said her
mother.
“Yes, or in the boat,” said Winterbourne.
“Well, of course, I don’t know,” Mrs. Miller rejoined. “I have never
been to that castle.”
“It is a pity you shouldn’t go,” said Winterbourne, beginning to feel
reassured as to her opposition. And yet he was quite prepared to find
that, as a matter of course, she meant to accompany her daughter.
“We’ve been thinking ever so much about going,” she pursued; “but it
seems as if we couldn’t. Of course Daisy--she wants to go round. But
there’s a lady here--I don’t know her name--she says she shouldn’t think
we’d want to go to see castles HERE; she should think we’d want to wait
till we got to Italy. It seems as if there would be so many there,”
continued Mrs. Miller with an air of increasing confidence. “Of course
we only want to see the principal ones. We visited several in England,”
she presently added.
“Ah yes! in England there are beautiful castles,” said Winterbourne.
“But Chillon here, is very well worth seeing.”
“Well, if Daisy feels up to it--” said Mrs. Miller, in a tone
impregnated with a sense of the magnitude of the enterprise. “It seems
as if there was nothing she wouldn’t undertake.”
“Oh, I think she’ll enjoy it!” Winterbourne declared. And he desired
more and more to make it a certainty that he was to have the privilege
of a tete-a-tete with the young lady, who was still strolling along
in front of them, softly vocalizing. “You are not disposed, madam,” he
inquired, “to undertake it yourself?”
Daisy’s mother looked at him an instant askance, and then walked forward
in silence. Then--“I guess she had better go alone,” she said simply.
Winterbourne observed to himself that this was a very different type of
maternity from that of the vigilant matrons who massed themselves in the
forefront of social intercourse in the dark old city at the other end of
the lake. But his meditations were interrupted by hearing his name very
distinctly pronounced by Mrs. Miller’s unprotected daughter.
“Mr. Winterbourne!” murmured Daisy.
“Mademoiselle!” said the young man.
“Don’t you want to take me out in a boat?”
“At present?” he asked.
“Of course!” said Daisy.
“Well, Annie Miller!” exclaimed her mother.
“I beg you, madam, to let her go,” said Winterbourne ardently; for
he had never yet enjoyed the sensation of guiding through the summer
starlight a skiff freighted with a fresh and beautiful young girl.
“I shouldn’t think she’d want to,” said her mother. “I should think
she’d rather go indoors.”
“I’m sure Mr. Winterbourne wants to take me,” Daisy declared. “He’s so
awfully devoted!”
“I will row you over to Chillon in the starlight.”
“I don’t believe it!” said Daisy.
“Well!” ejaculated the elder lady again.
“You haven’t spoken to me for half an hour,” her daughter went on.
“I have been having some very pleasant conversation with your mother,”
said Winterbourne.
“Well, I want you to take me out in a boat!” Daisy repeated. They had
all stopped, and she had turned round and was looking at Winterbourne.
Her face wore a charming smile, her pretty eyes were gleaming, she was
swinging her great fan about. No; it’s impossible to be prettier than
that, thought Winterbourne.
“There are half a dozen boats moored at that landing place,” he said,
pointing to certain steps which descended from the garden to the lake.
“If you will do me the honor to accept my arm, we will go and select one
of them.”
Daisy stood there smiling; she threw back her head and gave a little,
light laugh. “I like a gentleman to be formal!” she declared.
“I assure you it’s a formal offer.”
“I was bound I would make you say something,” Daisy went on.
“You see, it’s not very difficult,” said Winterbourne. “But I am afraid
you are chaffing me.”
“I think not, sir,” remarked Mrs. Miller very gently.
“Do, then, let me give you a row,” he said to the young girl.
“It’s quite lovely, the way you say that!” cried Daisy.
“It will be still more lovely to do it.”
“Yes, it would be lovely!” said Daisy. But she made no movement to
accompany him; she only stood there laughing.
“I should think you had better find out what time it is,” interposed her
mother.
“It is eleven o’clock, madam,” said a voice, with a foreign accent, out
of the neighboring darkness; and Winterbourne, turning, perceived the
florid personage who was in attendance upon the two ladies. He had
apparently just approached.
“Oh, Eugenio,” said Daisy, “I am going out in a boat!”
Eugenio bowed. “At eleven o’clock, mademoiselle?”
“I am going with Mr. Winterbourne--this very minute.”
“Do tell her she can’t,” said Mrs. Miller to the courier.
“I think you had better not go out in a boat, mademoiselle,” Eugenio
declared.
Winterbourne wished to Heaven this pretty girl were not so familiar with
her courier; but he said nothing.
“I suppose you don’t think it’s proper!” Daisy exclaimed. “Eugenio
doesn’t think anything’s proper.”
“I am at your service,” said Winterbourne.
“Does mademoiselle propose to go alone?” asked Eugenio of Mrs. Miller.
“Oh, no; with this gentleman!” answered Daisy’s mamma.
The courier looked for a moment at Winterbourne--the latter thought he
was smiling--and then, solemnly, with a bow, “As mademoiselle pleases!”
he said.
“Oh, I hoped you would make a fuss!” said Daisy. “I don’t care to go
now.”
“I myself shall make a fuss if you don’t go,” said Winterbourne.
“That’s all I want--a little fuss!” And the young girl began to laugh
again.
“Mr. Randolph has gone to bed!” the courier announced frigidly.
“Oh, Daisy; now we can go!” said Mrs. Miller.
Daisy turned away from Winterbourne, looking at him, smiling and fanning
herself. “Good night,” she said; “I hope you are disappointed, or
disgusted, or something!”
He looked at her, taking the hand she offered him. “I am puzzled,” he
answered.
“Well, I hope it won’t keep you awake!” she said very smartly; and,
under the escort of the privileged Eugenio, the two ladies passed toward
the house.
Winterbourne stood looking after them; he was indeed puzzled. He
lingered beside the lake for a quarter of an hour, turning over the
mystery of the young girl’s sudden familiarities and caprices. But
the only very definite conclusion he came to was that he should enjoy
deucedly “going off” with her somewhere.
Two days afterward he went off with her to the Castle of Chillon. He
waited for her in the large hall of the hotel, where the couriers, the
servants, the foreign tourists, were lounging about and staring. It was
not the place he should have chosen, but she had appointed it. She came
tripping downstairs, buttoning her long gloves, squeezing her folded
parasol against her pretty figure, dressed in the perfection of a
soberly elegant traveling costume. Winterbourne was a man of imagination
and, as our ancestors used to say, sensibility; as he looked at her
dress and, on the great staircase, her little rapid, confiding step, he
felt as if there were something romantic going forward. He could have
believed he was going to elope with her. He passed out with her among
all the idle people that were assembled there; they were all looking
at her very hard; she had begun to chatter as soon as she joined him.
Winterbourne’s preference had been that they should be conveyed to
Chillon in a carriage; but she expressed a lively wish to go in the
little steamer; she declared that she had a passion for steamboats.
There was always such a lovely breeze upon the water, and you saw such
lots of people. The sail was not long, but Winterbourne’s companion
found time to say a great many things. To the young man himself their
little excursion was so much of an escapade--an adventure--that, even
allowing for her habitual sense of freedom, he had some expectation of
seeing her regard it in the same way. But it must be confessed that,
in this particular, he was disappointed. Daisy Miller was extremely
animated, she was in charming spirits; but she was apparently not at all
excited; she was not fluttered; she avoided neither his eyes nor those
of anyone else; she blushed neither when she looked at him nor when she
felt that people were looking at her. People continued to look at her
a great deal, and Winterbourne took much satisfaction in his pretty
companion’s distinguished air. He had been a little afraid that she
would talk loud, laugh overmuch, and even, perhaps, desire to move about
the boat a good deal. But he quite forgot his fears; he sat smiling,
with his eyes upon her face, while, without moving from her place, she
delivered herself of a great number of original reflections. It was the
most charming garrulity he had ever heard. He had assented to the idea
that she was “common”; but was she so, after all, or was he simply
getting used to her commonness? Her conversation was chiefly of what
metaphysicians term the objective cast, but every now and then it took a
subjective turn.
“What on EARTH are you so grave about?” she suddenly demanded, fixing
her agreeable eyes upon Winterbourne’s.
“Am I grave?” he asked. “I had an idea I was grinning from ear to ear.”
“You look as if you were taking me to a funeral. If that’s a grin, your
ears are very near together.”
“Should you like me to dance a hornpipe on the deck?”
“Pray do, and I’ll carry round your hat. It will pay the expenses of our
journey.”
“I never was better pleased in my life,” murmured Winterbourne.
She looked at him a moment and then burst into a little laugh. “I like
to make you say those things! You’re a queer mixture!”
In the castle, after they had landed, the subjective element decidedly
prevailed. Daisy tripped about the vaulted chambers, rustled her skirts
in the corkscrew staircases, flirted back with a pretty little cry and
a shudder from the edge of the oubliettes, and turned a singularly
well-shaped ear to everything that Winterbourne told her about the
place. But he saw that she cared very little for feudal antiquities and
that the dusky traditions of Chillon made but a slight impression upon
her. They had the good fortune to have been able to walk about without
other companionship than that of the custodian; and Winterbourne
arranged with this functionary that they should not be hurried--that
they should linger and pause wherever they chose. The custodian
interpreted the bargain generously--Winterbourne, on his side, had been
generous--and ended by leaving them quite to themselves. Miss Miller’s
observations were not remarkable for logical consistency; for anything
she wanted to say she was sure to find a pretext. She found a great many
pretexts in the rugged embrasures of Chillon for asking Winterbourne
sudden questions about himself--his family, his previous history, his
tastes, his habits, his intentions--and for supplying information upon
corresponding points in her own personality. Of her own tastes, habits,
and intentions Miss Miller was prepared to give the most definite, and
indeed the most favorable account.
“Well, I hope you know enough!” she said to her companion, after he had
told her the history of the unhappy Bonivard. “I never saw a man that
knew so much!” The history of Bonivard had evidently, as they say, gone
into one ear and out of the other. But Daisy went on to say that she
wished Winterbourne would travel with them and “go round” with them;
they might know something, in that case. “Don’t you want to come
and teach Randolph?” she asked. Winterbourne said that nothing
could possibly please him so much, but that he had unfortunately other
occupations. “Other occupations? I don’t believe it!” said Miss Daisy.
“What do you mean? You are not in business.” The young man admitted that
he was not in business; but he had engagements which, even within a day
or two, would force him to go back to Geneva. “Oh, bother!” she said; “I
don’t believe it!” and she began to talk about something else. But a few
moments later, when he was pointing out to her the pretty design of an
antique fireplace, she broke out irrelevantly, “You don’t mean to say
you are going back to Geneva?”
“It is a melancholy fact that I shall have to return to Geneva
tomorrow.”
“Well, Mr. Winterbourne,” said Daisy, “I think you’re horrid!”
“Oh, don’t say such dreadful things!” said Winterbourne--“just at the
last!”
“The last!” cried the young girl; “I call it the first. I have half a
mind to leave you here and go straight back to the hotel alone.” And
for the next ten minutes she did nothing but call him horrid. Poor
Winterbourne was fairly bewildered; no young lady had as yet done him
the honor to be so agitated by the announcement of his movements. His
companion, after this, ceased to pay any attention to the curiosities of
Chillon or the beauties of the lake; she opened fire upon the mysterious
charmer in Geneva whom she appeared to have instantly taken it for
granted that he was hurrying back to see. How did Miss Daisy Miller
know that there was a charmer in Geneva? Winterbourne, who denied the
existence of such a person, was quite unable to discover, and he was
divided between amazement at the rapidity of her induction and amusement
at the frankness of her persiflage. She seemed to him, in all this, an
extraordinary mixture of innocence and crudity. “Does she never allow
you more than three days at a time?” asked Daisy ironically. “Doesn’t
she give you a vacation in summer? There’s no one so hard worked but
they can get leave to go off somewhere at this season. I suppose, if you
stay another day, she’ll come after you in the boat. Do wait over
till Friday, and I will go down to the landing to see her arrive!”
Winterbourne began to think he had been wrong to feel disappointed in
the temper in which the young lady had embarked. If he had missed the
personal accent, the personal accent was now making its appearance.
It sounded very distinctly, at last, in her telling him she would stop
“teasing” him if he would promise her solemnly to come down to Rome in
the winter.
“That’s not a difficult promise to make,” said Winterbourne. “My aunt
has taken an apartment in Rome for the winter and has already asked me
to come and see her.”
“I don’t want you to come for your aunt,” said Daisy; “I want you to
come for me.” And this was the only allusion that the young man was ever
to hear her make to his invidious kinswoman. He declared that, at
any rate, he would certainly come. After this Daisy stopped teasing.
Winterbourne took a carriage, and they drove back to Vevey in the dusk;
the young girl was very quiet.
In the evening Winterbourne mentioned to Mrs. Costello that he had spent
the afternoon at Chillon with Miss Daisy Miller.
“The Americans--of the courier?” asked this lady.
“Ah, happily,” said Winterbourne, “the courier stayed at home.”
“She went with you all alone?”
“All alone.”
Mrs. Costello sniffed a little at her smelling bottle. “And that,” she
exclaimed, “is the young person whom you wanted me to know!”
PART II
Winterbourne, who had returned to Geneva the day after his excursion
to Chillon, went to Rome toward the end of January. His aunt had been
established there for several weeks, and he had received a couple of
letters from her. “Those people you were so devoted to last summer at
Vevey have turned up here, courier and all,” she wrote. “They seem to
have made several acquaintances, but the courier continues to be the
most intime. The young lady, however, is also very intimate with some
third-rate Italians, with whom she rackets about in a way that makes
much talk. Bring me that pretty novel of Cherbuliez’s--Paule Mere--and
don’t come later than the 23rd.”
In the natural course of events, Winterbourne, on arriving in Rome,
would presently have ascertained Mrs. Miller’s address at the American
banker’s and have gone to pay his compliments to Miss Daisy. “After what
happened at Vevey, I think I may certainly call upon them,” he said to
Mrs. Costello.
“If, after what happens--at Vevey and everywhere--you desire to keep
up the acquaintance, you are very welcome. Of course a man may know
everyone. Men are welcome to the privilege!”
“Pray what is it that happens--here, for instance?” Winterbourne
demanded.
“The girl goes about alone with her foreigners. As to what happens
further, you must apply elsewhere for information. She has picked up
half a dozen of the regular Roman fortune hunters, and she takes them
about to people’s houses. When she comes to a party she brings with her
a gentleman with a good deal of manner and a wonderful mustache.”
“And where is the mother?”
“I haven’t the least idea. They are very dreadful people.”
Winterbourne meditated a moment. “They are very ignorant--very innocent
only. Depend upon it they are not bad.”
“They are hopelessly vulgar,” said Mrs. Costello. “Whether or no being
hopelessly vulgar is being ‘bad’ is a question for the metaphysicians.
They are bad enough to dislike, at any rate; and for this short life
that is quite enough.”
The news that Daisy Miller was surrounded by half a dozen wonderful
mustaches checked Winterbourne’s impulse to go straightway to see her.
He had, perhaps, not definitely flattered himself that he had made an
ineffaceable impression upon her heart, but he was annoyed at hearing
of a state of affairs so little in harmony with an image that had lately
flitted in and out of his own meditations; the image of a very pretty
girl looking out of an old Roman window and asking herself urgently
when Mr. Winterbourne would arrive. If, however, he determined to wait a
little before reminding Miss Miller of his claims to her consideration,
he went very soon to call upon two or three other friends. One of these
friends was an American lady who had spent several winters at Geneva,
where she had placed her children at school. She was a very accomplished
woman, and she lived in the Via Gregoriana. Winterbourne found her in a
little crimson drawing room on a third floor; the room was filled with
southern sunshine. He had not been there ten minutes when the servant
came in, announcing “Madame Mila!” This announcement was presently
followed by the entrance of little Randolph Miller, who stopped in the
middle of the room and stood staring at Winterbourne. An instant later
his pretty sister crossed the threshold; and then, after a considerable
interval, Mrs. Miller slowly advanced.
“I know you!” said Randolph.
“I’m sure you know a great many things,” exclaimed Winterbourne, taking
him by the hand. “How is your education coming on?”
Daisy was exchanging greetings very prettily with her hostess, but when
she heard Winterbourne’s voice she quickly turned her head. “Well, I
declare!” she said.
“I told you I should come, you know,” Winterbourne rejoined, smiling.
“Well, I didn’t believe it,” said Miss Daisy.
“I am much obliged to you,” laughed the young man.
“You might have come to see me!” said Daisy.
“I arrived only yesterday.”
“I don’t believe that!” the young girl declared.
Winterbourne turned with a protesting smile to her mother, but this lady
evaded his glance, and, seating herself, fixed her eyes upon her son.
“We’ve got a bigger place than this,” said Randolph. “It’s all gold on
the walls.”
Mrs. Miller turned uneasily in her chair. “I told you if I were to bring
you, you would say something!” she murmured.
“I told YOU!” Randolph exclaimed. “I tell YOU, sir!” he added jocosely,
giving Winterbourne a thump on the knee. “It IS bigger, too!”
Daisy had entered upon a lively conversation with her hostess;
Winterbourne judged it becoming to address a few words to her mother. “I
hope you have been well since we parted at Vevey,” he said.
Mrs. Miller now certainly looked at him--at his chin. “Not very well,
sir,” she answered.
“She’s got the dyspepsia,” said Randolph. “I’ve got it too. Father’s got
it. I’ve got it most!”
This announcement, instead of embarrassing Mrs. Miller, seemed to
relieve her. “I suffer from the liver,” she said. “I think it’s this
climate; it’s less bracing than Schenectady, especially in the winter
season. I don’t know whether you know we reside at Schenectady. I was
saying to Daisy that I certainly hadn’t found any one like Dr. Davis,
and I didn’t believe I should. Oh, at Schenectady he stands first; they
think everything of him. He has so much to do, and yet there was nothing
he wouldn’t do for me. He said he never saw anything like my dyspepsia,
but he was bound to cure it. I’m sure there was nothing he wouldn’t
try. He was just going to try something new when we came off. Mr. Miller
wanted Daisy to see Europe for herself. But I wrote to Mr. Miller that
it seems as if I couldn’t get on without Dr. Davis. At Schenectady he
stands at the very top; and there’s a great deal of sickness there, too.
It affects my sleep.”
Winterbourne had a good deal of pathological gossip with Dr. Davis’s
patient, during which Daisy chattered unremittingly to her own
companion. The young man asked Mrs. Miller how she was pleased with
Rome. “Well, I must say I am disappointed,” she answered. “We had heard
so much about it; I suppose we had heard too much. But we couldn’t help
that. We had been led to expect something different.”
“Ah, wait a little, and you will become very fond of it,” said
Winterbourne.
“I hate it worse and worse every day!” cried Randolph.
“You are like the infant Hannibal,” said Winterbourne.
“No, I ain’t!” Randolph declared at a venture.
“You are not much like an infant,” said his mother. “But we have seen
places,” she resumed, “that I should put a long way before Rome.” And in
reply to Winterbourne’s interrogation, “There’s Zurich,” she concluded,
“I think Zurich is lovely; and we hadn’t heard half so much about it.”
“The best place we’ve seen is the City of Richmond!” said Randolph.
“He means the ship,” his mother explained. “We crossed in that ship.
Randolph had a good time on the City of Richmond.”
“It’s the best place I’ve seen,” the child repeated. “Only it was turned
the wrong way.”
“Well, we’ve got to turn the right way some time,” said Mrs. Miller with
a little laugh. Winterbourne expressed the hope that her daughter at
least found some gratification in Rome, and she declared that Daisy
was quite carried away. “It’s on account of the society--the society’s
splendid. She goes round everywhere; she has made a great number of
acquaintances. Of course she goes round more than I do. I must say they
have been very sociable; they have taken her right in. And then she
knows a great many gentlemen. Oh, she thinks there’s nothing like Rome.
Of course, it’s a great deal pleasanter for a young lady if she knows
plenty of gentlemen.”
By this time Daisy had turned her attention again to Winterbourne. “I’ve
been telling Mrs. Walker how mean you were!” the young girl announced.
“And what is the evidence you have offered?” asked Winterbourne, rather
annoyed at Miss Miller’s want of appreciation of the zeal of an admirer
who on his way down to Rome had stopped neither at Bologna nor at
Florence, simply because of a certain sentimental impatience. He
remembered that a cynical compatriot had once told him that American
women--the pretty ones, and this gave a largeness to the axiom--were at
once the most exacting in the world and the least endowed with a sense
of indebtedness.
“Why, you were awfully mean at Vevey,” said Daisy. “You wouldn’t do
anything. You wouldn’t stay there when I asked you.”
“My dearest young lady,” cried Winterbourne, with eloquence, “have I
come all the way to Rome to encounter your reproaches?”
“Just hear him say that!” said Daisy to her hostess, giving a twist to a
bow on this lady’s dress. “Did you ever hear anything so quaint?”
“So quaint, my dear?” murmured Mrs. Walker in the tone of a partisan of
Winterbourne.
“Well, I don’t know,” said Daisy, fingering Mrs. Walker’s ribbons. “Mrs.
Walker, I want to tell you something.”
“Mother-r,” interposed Randolph, with his rough ends to his words, “I
tell you you’ve got to go. Eugenio’ll raise--something!”
“I’m not afraid of Eugenio,” said Daisy with a toss of her head. “Look
here, Mrs. Walker,” she went on, “you know I’m coming to your party.”
“I am delighted to hear it.”
“I’ve got a lovely dress!”
“I am very sure of that.”
“But I want to ask a favor--permission to bring a friend.”
“I shall be happy to see any of your friends,” said Mrs. Walker, turning
with a smile to Mrs. Miller.
“Oh, they are not my friends,” answered Daisy’s mamma, smiling shyly in
her own fashion. “I never spoke to them.”
“It’s an intimate friend of mine--Mr. Giovanelli,” said Daisy without
a tremor in her clear little voice or a shadow on her brilliant little
face.
Mrs. Walker was silent a moment; she gave a rapid glance at
Winterbourne. “I shall be glad to see Mr. Giovanelli,” she then said.
“He’s an Italian,” Daisy pursued with the prettiest serenity. “He’s a
great friend of mine; he’s the handsomest man in the world--except Mr.
Winterbourne! He knows plenty of Italians, but he wants to know some
Americans. He thinks ever so much of Americans. He’s tremendously
clever. He’s perfectly lovely!”
It was settled that this brilliant personage should be brought to Mrs.
Walker’s party, and then Mrs. Miller prepared to take her leave. “I
guess we’ll go back to the hotel,” she said.
“You may go back to the hotel, Mother, but I’m going to take a walk,”
said Daisy.
“She’s going to walk with Mr. Giovanelli,” Randolph proclaimed.
“I am going to the Pincio,” said Daisy, smiling.
“Alone, my dear--at this hour?” Mrs. Walker asked. The afternoon was
drawing to a close--it was the hour for the throng of carriages and of
contemplative pedestrians. “I don’t think it’s safe, my dear,” said Mrs.
Walker.
“Neither do I,” subjoined Mrs. Miller. “You’ll get the fever, as sure as
you live. Remember what Dr. Davis told you!”
“Give her some medicine before she goes,” said Randolph.
The company had risen to its feet; Daisy, still showing her pretty
teeth, bent over and kissed her hostess. “Mrs. Walker, you are too
perfect,” she said. “I’m not going alone; I am going to meet a friend.”
“Your friend won’t keep you from getting the fever,” Mrs. Miller
observed.
“Is it Mr. Giovanelli?” asked the hostess.
Winterbourne was watching the young girl; at this question his attention
quickened. She stood there, smiling and smoothing her bonnet ribbons;
she glanced at Winterbourne. Then, while she glanced and smiled, she
answered, without a shade of hesitation, “Mr. Giovanelli--the beautiful
Giovanelli.”
“My dear young friend,” said Mrs. Walker, taking her hand pleadingly,
“don’t walk off to the Pincio at this hour to meet a beautiful Italian.”
“Well, he speaks English,” said Mrs. Miller.
“Gracious me!” Daisy exclaimed, “I don’t to do anything improper.
There’s an easy way to settle it.” She continued to glance at
Winterbourne. “The Pincio is only a hundred yards distant; and if Mr.
Winterbourne were as polite as he pretends, he would offer to walk with
me!”
Winterbourne’s politeness hastened to affirm itself, and the young girl
gave him gracious leave to accompany her. They passed downstairs
before her mother, and at the door Winterbourne perceived Mrs. Miller’s
carriage drawn up, with the ornamental courier whose acquaintance he had
made at Vevey seated within. “Goodbye, Eugenio!” cried Daisy; “I’m going
to take a walk.” The distance from the Via Gregoriana to the beautiful
garden at the other end of the Pincian Hill is, in fact, rapidly
traversed. As the day was splendid, however, and the concourse of
vehicles, walkers, and loungers numerous, the young Americans found
their progress much delayed. This fact was highly agreeable to
Winterbourne, in spite of his consciousness of his singular situation.
The slow-moving, idly gazing Roman crowd bestowed much attention upon
the extremely pretty young foreign lady who was passing through it upon
his arm; and he wondered what on earth had been in Daisy’s mind when
she proposed to expose herself, unattended, to its appreciation. His own
mission, to her sense, apparently, was to consign her to the hands
of Mr. Giovanelli; but Winterbourne, at once annoyed and gratified,
resolved that he would do no such thing.
“Why haven’t you been to see me?” asked Daisy. “You can’t get out of
that.”
“I have had the honor of telling you that I have only just stepped out
of the train.”
“You must have stayed in the train a good while after it stopped!” cried
the young girl with her little laugh. “I suppose you were asleep. You
have had time to go to see Mrs. Walker.”
“I knew Mrs. Walker--” Winterbourne began to explain.
“I know where you knew her. You knew her at Geneva. She told me so.
Well, you knew me at Vevey. That’s just as good. So you ought to have
come.” She asked him no other question than this; she began to prattle
about her own affairs. “We’ve got splendid rooms at the hotel; Eugenio
says they’re the best rooms in Rome. We are going to stay all winter,
if we don’t die of the fever; and I guess we’ll stay then. It’s a great
deal nicer than I thought; I thought it would be fearfully quiet; I was
sure it would be awfully poky. I was sure we should be going round
all the time with one of those dreadful old men that explain about the
pictures and things. But we only had about a week of that, and now
I’m enjoying myself. I know ever so many people, and they are all so
charming. The society’s extremely select. There are all kinds--English,
and Germans, and Italians. I think I like the English best. I like their
style of conversation. But there are some lovely Americans. I never saw
anything so hospitable. There’s something or other every day. There’s
not much dancing; but I must say I never thought dancing was everything.
I was always fond of conversation. I guess I shall have plenty at Mrs.
Walker’s, her rooms are so small.” When they had passed the gate of the
Pincian Gardens, Miss Miller began to wonder where Mr. Giovanelli might
be. “We had better go straight to that place in front,” she said, “where
you look at the view.”
“I certainly shall not help you to find him,” Winterbourne declared.
“Then I shall find him without you,” cried Miss Daisy.
“You certainly won’t leave me!” cried Winterbourne.
She burst into her little laugh. “Are you afraid you’ll get lost--or run
over? But there’s Giovanelli, leaning against that tree. He’s staring at
the women in the carriages: did you ever see anything so cool?”
Winterbourne perceived at some distance a little man standing with
folded arms nursing his cane. He had a handsome face, an artfully poised
hat, a glass in one eye, and a nosegay in his buttonhole. Winterbourne
looked at him a moment and then said, “Do you mean to speak to that
man?”
“Do I mean to speak to him? Why, you don’t suppose I mean to communicate
by signs?”
“Pray understand, then,” said Winterbourne, “that I intend to remain
with you.”
Daisy stopped and looked at him, without a sign of troubled
consciousness in her face, with nothing but the presence of her charming
eyes and her happy dimples. “Well, she’s a cool one!” thought the young
man.
“I don’t like the way you say that,” said Daisy. “It’s too imperious.”
“I beg your pardon if I say it wrong. The main point is to give you an
idea of my meaning.”
The young girl looked at him more gravely, but with eyes that were
prettier than ever. “I have never allowed a gentleman to dictate to me,
or to interfere with anything I do.”
“I think you have made a mistake,” said Winterbourne. “You should
sometimes listen to a gentleman--the right one.”
Daisy began to laugh again. “I do nothing but listen to gentlemen!” she
exclaimed. “Tell me if Mr. Giovanelli is the right one?”
The gentleman with the nosegay in his bosom had now perceived our two
friends, and was approaching the young girl with obsequious rapidity.
He bowed to Winterbourne as well as to the latter’s companion; he had
a brilliant smile, an intelligent eye; Winterbourne thought him not a
bad-looking fellow. But he nevertheless said to Daisy, “No, he’s not the
right one.”
Daisy evidently had a natural talent for performing introductions; she
mentioned the name of each of her companions to the other. She strolled
alone with one of them on each side of her; Mr. Giovanelli, who spoke
English very cleverly--Winterbourne afterward learned that he had
practiced the idiom upon a great many American heiresses--addressed her
a great deal of very polite nonsense; he was extremely urbane, and the
young American, who said nothing, reflected upon that profundity of
Italian cleverness which enables people to appear more gracious in
proportion as they are more acutely disappointed. Giovanelli, of course,
had counted upon something more intimate; he had not bargained for
a party of three. But he kept his temper in a manner which suggested
far-stretching intentions. Winterbourne flattered himself that he had
taken his measure. “He is not a gentleman,” said the young American;
“he is only a clever imitation of one. He is a music master, or a
penny-a-liner, or a third-rate artist. D__n his good looks!” Mr.
Giovanelli had certainly a very pretty face; but Winterbourne felt a
superior indignation at his own lovely fellow countrywoman’s not knowing
the difference between a spurious gentleman and a real one. Giovanelli
chattered and jested and made himself wonderfully agreeable. It was
true that, if he was an imitation, the imitation was brilliant.
“Nevertheless,” Winterbourne said to himself, “a nice girl ought to
know!” And then he came back to the question whether this was, in fact,
a nice girl. Would a nice girl, even allowing for her being a little
American flirt, make a rendezvous with a presumably low-lived foreigner?
The rendezvous in this case, indeed, had been in broad daylight and in
the most crowded corner of Rome, but was it not impossible to regard the
choice of these circumstances as a proof of extreme cynicism? Singular
though it may seem, Winterbourne was vexed that the young girl, in
joining her amoroso, should not appear more impatient of his own
company, and he was vexed because of his inclination. It was impossible
to regard her as a perfectly well-conducted young lady; she was wanting
in a certain indispensable delicacy. It would therefore simplify matters
greatly to be able to treat her as the object of one of those sentiments
which are called by romancers “lawless passions.” That she should seem
to wish to get rid of him would help him to think more lightly of her,
and to be able to think more lightly of her would make her much less
perplexing. But Daisy, on this occasion, continued to present herself as
an inscrutable combination of audacity and innocence.
She had been walking some quarter of an hour, attended by her two
cavaliers, and responding in a tone of very childish gaiety, as it
seemed to Winterbourne, to the pretty speeches of Mr. Giovanelli, when
a carriage that had detached itself from the revolving train drew up
beside the path. At the same moment Winterbourne perceived that his
friend Mrs. Walker--the lady whose house he had lately left--was seated
in the vehicle and was beckoning to him. Leaving Miss Miller’s side,
he hastened to obey her summons. Mrs. Walker was flushed; she wore an
excited air. “It is really too dreadful,” she said. “That girl must not
do this sort of thing. She must not walk here with you two men. Fifty
people have noticed her.”
Winterbourne raised his eyebrows. “I think it’s a pity to make too much
fuss about it.”
“It’s a pity to let the girl ruin herself!”
“She is very innocent,” said Winterbourne.
“She’s very crazy!” cried Mrs. Walker. “Did you ever see anything so
imbecile as her mother? After you had all left me just now, I could not
sit still for thinking of it. It seemed too pitiful, not even to attempt
to save her. I ordered the carriage and put on my bonnet, and came here
as quickly as possible. Thank Heaven I have found you!”
“What do you propose to do with us?” asked Winterbourne, smiling.
“To ask her to get in, to drive her about here for half an hour, so that
the world may see she is not running absolutely wild, and then to take
her safely home.”
“I don’t think it’s a very happy thought,” said Winterbourne; “but you
can try.”
Mrs. Walker tried. The young man went in pursuit of Miss Miller, who
had simply nodded and smiled at his interlocutor in the carriage and
had gone her way with her companion. Daisy, on learning that Mrs. Walker
wished to speak to her, retraced her steps with a perfect good grace and
with Mr. Giovanelli at her side. She declared that she was delighted to
have a chance to present this gentleman to Mrs. Walker. She immediately
achieved the introduction, and declared that she had never in her life
seen anything so lovely as Mrs. Walker’s carriage rug.
“I am glad you admire it,” said this lady, smiling sweetly. “Will you
get in and let me put it over you?”
“Oh, no, thank you,” said Daisy. “I shall admire it much more as I see
you driving round with it.”
“Do get in and drive with me!” said Mrs. Walker.
“That would be charming, but it’s so enchanting just as I am!” and Daisy
gave a brilliant glance at the gentlemen on either side of her.
“It may be enchanting, dear child, but it is not the custom here,” urged
Mrs. Walker, leaning forward in her victoria, with her hands devoutly
clasped.
“Well, it ought to be, then!” said Daisy. “If I didn’t walk I should
expire.”
“You should walk with your mother, dear,” cried the lady from Geneva,
losing patience.
“With my mother dear!” exclaimed the young girl. Winterbourne saw that
she scented interference. “My mother never walked ten steps in her life.
And then, you know,” she added with a laugh, “I am more than five years
old.”
“You are old enough to be more reasonable. You are old enough, dear Miss
Miller, to be talked about.”
Daisy looked at Mrs. Walker, smiling intensely. “Talked about? What do
you mean?”
“Come into my carriage, and I will tell you.”
Daisy turned her quickened glance again from one of the gentlemen beside
her to the other. Mr. Giovanelli was bowing to and fro, rubbing down
his gloves and laughing very agreeably; Winterbourne thought it a most
unpleasant scene. “I don’t think I want to know what you mean,” said
Daisy presently. “I don’t think I should like it.”
Winterbourne wished that Mrs. Walker would tuck in her carriage rug and
drive away, but this lady did not enjoy being defied, as she afterward
told him. “Should you prefer being thought a very reckless girl?” she
demanded.
“Gracious!” exclaimed Daisy. She looked again at Mr. Giovanelli, then
she turned to Winterbourne. There was a little pink flush in her cheek;
she was tremendously pretty. “Does Mr. Winterbourne think,” she asked
slowly, smiling, throwing back her head, and glancing at him from
head to foot, “that, to save my reputation, I ought to get into the
carriage?”
Winterbourne colored; for an instant he hesitated greatly. It seemed so
strange to hear her speak that way of her “reputation.” But he himself,
in fact, must speak in accordance with gallantry. The finest gallantry,
here, was simply to tell her the truth; and the truth, for Winterbourne,
as the few indications I have been able to give have made him known to
the reader, was that Daisy Miller should take Mrs. Walker’s advice. He
looked at her exquisite prettiness, and then he said, very gently, “I
think you should get into the carriage.”
Daisy gave a violent laugh. “I never heard anything so stiff! If this
is improper, Mrs. Walker,” she pursued, “then I am all improper, and you
must give me up. Goodbye; I hope you’ll have a lovely ride!” and, with
Mr. Giovanelli, who made a triumphantly obsequious salute, she turned
away.
Mrs. Walker sat looking after her, and there were tears in Mrs. Walker’s
eyes. “Get in here, sir,” she said to Winterbourne, indicating the place
beside her. The young man answered that he felt bound to accompany Miss
Miller, whereupon Mrs. Walker declared that if he refused her this
favor she would never speak to him again. She was evidently in earnest.
Winterbourne overtook Daisy and her companion, and, offering the young
girl his hand, told her that Mrs. Walker had made an imperious claim
upon his society. He expected that in answer she would say something
rather free, something to commit herself still further to that
“recklessness” from which Mrs. Walker had so charitably endeavored to
dissuade her. But she only shook his hand, hardly looking at him, while
Mr. Giovanelli bade him farewell with a too emphatic flourish of the
hat.
Winterbourne was not in the best possible humor as he took his seat in
Mrs. Walker’s victoria. “That was not clever of you,” he said candidly,
while the vehicle mingled again with the throng of carriages.
“In such a case,” his companion answered, “I don’t wish to be clever; I
wish to be EARNEST!”
“Well, your earnestness has only offended her and put her off.”
“It has happened very well,” said Mrs. Walker. “If she is so perfectly
determined to compromise herself, the sooner one knows it the better;
one can act accordingly.”
“I suspect she meant no harm,” Winterbourne rejoined.
“So I thought a month ago. But she has been going too far.”
“What has she been doing?”
“Everything that is not done here. Flirting with any man she could pick
up; sitting in corners with mysterious Italians; dancing all the evening
with the same partners; receiving visits at eleven o’clock at night. Her
mother goes away when visitors come.”
“But her brother,” said Winterbourne, laughing, “sits up till midnight.”
“He must be edified by what he sees. I’m told that at their hotel
everyone is talking about her, and that a smile goes round among all the
servants when a gentleman comes and asks for Miss Miller.”
“The servants be hanged!” said Winterbourne angrily. “The poor girl’s
only fault,” he presently added, “is that she is very uncultivated.”
“She is naturally indelicate,” Mrs. Walker declared.
“Take that example this morning. How long had you known her at Vevey?”
“A couple of days.”
“Fancy, then, her making it a personal matter that you should have left
the place!”
Winterbourne was silent for some moments; then he said, “I suspect, Mrs.
Walker, that you and I have lived too long at Geneva!” And he added a
request that she should inform him with what particular design she had
made him enter her carriage.
“I wished to beg you to cease your relations with Miss Miller--not to
flirt with her--to give her no further opportunity to expose herself--to
let her alone, in short.”
“I’m afraid I can’t do that,” said Winterbourne. “I like her extremely.”
“All the more reason that you shouldn’t help her to make a scandal.”
“There shall be nothing scandalous in my attentions to her.”
“There certainly will be in the way she takes them. But I have said what
I had on my conscience,” Mrs. Walker pursued. “If you wish to rejoin the
young lady I will put you down. Here, by the way, you have a chance.”
The carriage was traversing that part of the Pincian Garden that
overhangs the wall of Rome and overlooks the beautiful Villa Borghese.
It is bordered by a large parapet, near which there are several seats.
One of the seats at a distance was occupied by a gentleman and a lady,
toward whom Mrs. Walker gave a toss of her head. At the same moment
these persons rose and walked toward the parapet. Winterbourne had asked
the coachman to stop; he now descended from the carriage. His companion
looked at him a moment in silence; then, while he raised his hat, she
drove majestically away. Winterbourne stood there; he had turned his
eyes toward Daisy and her cavalier. They evidently saw no one; they were
too deeply occupied with each other. When they reached the low garden
wall, they stood a moment looking off at the great flat-topped pine
clusters of the Villa Borghese; then Giovanelli seated himself,
familiarly, upon the broad ledge of the wall. The western sun in the
opposite sky sent out a brilliant shaft through a couple of cloud bars,
whereupon Daisy’s companion took her parasol out of her hands and opened
it. She came a little nearer, and he held the parasol over her; then,
still holding it, he let it rest upon her shoulder, so that both of
their heads were hidden from Winterbourne. This young man lingered a
moment, then he began to walk. But he walked--not toward the couple with
the parasol; toward the residence of his aunt, Mrs. Costello.
He flattered himself on the following day that there was no smiling
among the servants when he, at least, asked for Mrs. Miller at her
hotel. This lady and her daughter, however, were not at home; and on
the next day after, repeating his visit, Winterbourne again had the
misfortune not to find them. Mrs. Walker’s party took place on the
evening of the third day, and, in spite of the frigidity of his last
interview with the hostess, Winterbourne was among the guests. Mrs.
Walker was one of those American ladies who, while residing abroad, make
a point, in their own phrase, of studying European society, and she
had on this occasion collected several specimens of her diversely born
fellow mortals to serve, as it were, as textbooks. When Winterbourne
arrived, Daisy Miller was not there, but in a few moments he saw her
mother come in alone, very shyly and ruefully. Mrs. Miller’s hair
above her exposed-looking temples was more frizzled than ever. As she
approached Mrs. Walker, Winterbourne also drew near.
“You see, I’ve come all alone,” said poor Mrs. Miller. “I’m so
frightened; I don’t know what to do. It’s the first time I’ve ever been
to a party alone, especially in this country. I wanted to bring Randolph
or Eugenio, or someone, but Daisy just pushed me off by myself. I ain’t
used to going round alone.”
“And does not your daughter intend to favor us with her society?”
demanded Mrs. Walker impressively.
“Well, Daisy’s all dressed,” said Mrs. Miller with that accent of the
dispassionate, if not of the philosophic, historian with which she
always recorded the current incidents of her daughter’s career. “She got
dressed on purpose before dinner. But she’s got a friend of hers there;
that gentleman--the Italian--that she wanted to bring. They’ve got going
at the piano; it seems as if they couldn’t leave off. Mr. Giovanelli
sings splendidly. But I guess they’ll come before very long,” concluded
Mrs. Miller hopefully.
“I’m sorry she should come in that way,” said Mrs. Walker.
“Well, I told her that there was no use in her getting dressed before
dinner if she was going to wait three hours,” responded Daisy’s mamma.
“I didn’t see the use of her putting on such a dress as that to sit
round with Mr. Giovanelli.”
“This is most horrible!” said Mrs. Walker, turning away and addressing
herself to Winterbourne. “Elle s’affiche. It’s her revenge for my having
ventured to remonstrate with her. When she comes, I shall not speak to
her.”
Daisy came after eleven o’clock; but she was not, on such an occasion,
a young lady to wait to be spoken to. She rustled forward in radiant
loveliness, smiling and chattering, carrying a large bouquet, and
attended by Mr. Giovanelli. Everyone stopped talking and turned and
looked at her. She came straight to Mrs. Walker. “I’m afraid you thought
I never was coming, so I sent mother off to tell you. I wanted to make
Mr. Giovanelli practice some things before he came; you know he sings
beautifully, and I want you to ask him to sing. This is Mr. Giovanelli;
you know I introduced him to you; he’s got the most lovely voice, and
he knows the most charming set of songs. I made him go over them this
evening on purpose; we had the greatest time at the hotel.” Of all
this Daisy delivered herself with the sweetest, brightest audibleness,
looking now at her hostess and now round the room, while she gave a
series of little pats, round her shoulders, to the edges of her dress.
“Is there anyone I know?” she asked.
“I think every one knows you!” said Mrs. Walker pregnantly, and she gave
a very cursory greeting to Mr. Giovanelli. This gentleman bore himself
gallantly. He smiled and bowed and showed his white teeth; he curled his
mustaches and rolled his eyes and performed all the proper functions
of a handsome Italian at an evening party. He sang very prettily half
a dozen songs, though Mrs. Walker afterward declared that she had been
quite unable to find out who asked him. It was apparently not Daisy who
had given him his orders. Daisy sat at a distance from the piano, and
though she had publicly, as it were, professed a high admiration for his
singing, talked, not inaudibly, while it was going on.
“It’s a pity these rooms are so small; we can’t dance,” she said to
Winterbourne, as if she had seen him five minutes before.
“I am not sorry we can’t dance,” Winterbourne answered; “I don’t dance.”
“Of course you don’t dance; you’re too stiff,” said Miss Daisy. “I hope
you enjoyed your drive with Mrs. Walker!”
“No. I didn’t enjoy it; I preferred walking with you.”
“We paired off: that was much better,” said Daisy. “But did you ever
hear anything so cool as Mrs. Walker’s wanting me to get into her
carriage and drop poor Mr. Giovanelli, and under the pretext that it was
proper? People have different ideas! It would have been most unkind; he
had been talking about that walk for ten days.”
“He should not have talked about it at all,” said Winterbourne; “he
would never have proposed to a young lady of this country to walk about
the streets with him.”
“About the streets?” cried Daisy with her pretty stare. “Where, then,
would he have proposed to her to walk? The Pincio is not the streets,
either; and I, thank goodness, am not a young lady of this country. The
young ladies of this country have a dreadfully poky time of it, so far
as I can learn; I don’t see why I should change my habits for THEM.”
“I am afraid your habits are those of a flirt,” said Winterbourne
gravely.
“Of course they are,” she cried, giving him her little smiling stare
again. “I’m a fearful, frightful flirt! Did you ever hear of a nice girl
that was not? But I suppose you will tell me now that I am not a nice
girl.”
“You’re a very nice girl; but I wish you would flirt with me, and me
only,” said Winterbourne.
“Ah! thank you--thank you very much; you are the last man I should think
of flirting with. As I have had the pleasure of informing you, you are
too stiff.”
“You say that too often,” said Winterbourne.
Daisy gave a delighted laugh. “If I could have the sweet hope of making
you angry, I should say it again.”
“Don’t do that; when I am angry I’m stiffer than ever. But if you won’t
flirt with me, do cease, at least, to flirt with your friend at the
piano; they don’t understand that sort of thing here.”
“I thought they understood nothing else!” exclaimed Daisy.
“Not in young unmarried women.”
“It seems to me much more proper in young unmarried women than in old
married ones,” Daisy declared.
“Well,” said Winterbourne, “when you deal with natives you must go
by the custom of the place. Flirting is a purely American custom;
it doesn’t exist here. So when you show yourself in public with Mr.
Giovanelli, and without your mother--”
“Gracious! poor Mother!” interposed Daisy.
“Though you may be flirting, Mr. Giovanelli is not; he means something
else.”
“He isn’t preaching, at any rate,” said Daisy with vivacity. “And if you
want very much to know, we are neither of us flirting; we are too good
friends for that: we are very intimate friends.”
“Ah!” rejoined Winterbourne, “if you are in love with each other, it is
another affair.”
She had allowed him up to this point to talk so frankly that he had no
expectation of shocking her by this ejaculation; but she immediately got
up, blushing visibly, and leaving him to exclaim mentally that
little American flirts were the queerest creatures in the world. “Mr.
Giovanelli, at least,” she said, giving her interlocutor a single
glance, “never says such very disagreeable things to me.”
Winterbourne was bewildered; he stood, staring. Mr. Giovanelli had
finished singing. He left the piano and came over to Daisy. “Won’t you
come into the other room and have some tea?” he asked, bending before
her with his ornamental smile.
Daisy turned to Winterbourne, beginning to smile again. He was still
more perplexed, for this inconsequent smile made nothing clear, though
it seemed to prove, indeed, that she had a sweetness and softness that
reverted instinctively to the pardon of offenses. “It has never occurred
to Mr. Winterbourne to offer me any tea,” she said with her little
tormenting manner.
“I have offered you advice,” Winterbourne rejoined.
“I prefer weak tea!” cried Daisy, and she went off with the brilliant
Giovanelli. She sat with him in the adjoining room, in the embrasure
of the window, for the rest of the evening. There was an interesting
performance at the piano, but neither of these young people gave heed
to it. When Daisy came to take leave of Mrs. Walker, this lady
conscientiously repaired the weakness of which she had been guilty at
the moment of the young girl’s arrival. She turned her back straight
upon Miss Miller and left her to depart with what grace she might.
Winterbourne was standing near the door; he saw it all. Daisy turned
very pale and looked at her mother, but Mrs. Miller was humbly
unconscious of any violation of the usual social forms. She appeared,
indeed, to have felt an incongruous impulse to draw attention to her own
striking observance of them. “Good night, Mrs. Walker,” she said; “we’ve
had a beautiful evening. You see, if I let Daisy come to parties without
me, I don’t want her to go away without me.” Daisy turned away, looking
with a pale, grave face at the circle near the door; Winterbourne saw
that, for the first moment, she was too much shocked and puzzled even
for indignation. He on his side was greatly touched.
“That was very cruel,” he said to Mrs. Walker.
“She never enters my drawing room again!” replied his hostess.
Since Winterbourne was not to meet her in Mrs. Walker’s drawing room, he
went as often as possible to Mrs. Miller’s hotel. The ladies were rarely
at home, but when he found them, the devoted Giovanelli was always
present. Very often the brilliant little Roman was in the drawing room
with Daisy alone, Mrs. Miller being apparently constantly of the opinion
that discretion is the better part of surveillance. Winterbourne
noted, at first with surprise, that Daisy on these occasions was never
embarrassed or annoyed by his own entrance; but he very presently began
to feel that she had no more surprises for him; the unexpected in her
behavior was the only thing to expect. She showed no displeasure at
her tete-a-tete with Giovanelli being interrupted; she could chatter as
freshly and freely with two gentlemen as with one; there was always,
in her conversation, the same odd mixture of audacity and puerility.
Winterbourne remarked to himself that if she was seriously interested in
Giovanelli, it was very singular that she should not take more trouble
to preserve the sanctity of their interviews; and he liked her the more
for her innocent-looking indifference and her apparently inexhaustible
good humor. He could hardly have said why, but she seemed to him a girl
who would never be jealous. At the risk of exciting a somewhat derisive
smile on the reader’s part, I may affirm that with regard to the women
who had hitherto interested him, it very often seemed to Winterbourne
among the possibilities that, given certain contingencies, he should be
afraid--literally afraid--of these ladies; he had a pleasant sense that
he should never be afraid of Daisy Miller. It must be added that this
sentiment was not altogether flattering to Daisy; it was part of his
conviction, or rather of his apprehension, that she would prove a very
light young person.
But she was evidently very much interested in Giovanelli. She looked at
him whenever he spoke; she was perpetually telling him to do this and
to do that; she was constantly “chaffing” and abusing him. She appeared
completely to have forgotten that Winterbourne had said anything to
displease her at Mrs. Walker’s little party. One Sunday afternoon,
having gone to St. Peter’s with his aunt, Winterbourne perceived
Daisy strolling about the great church in company with the inevitable
Giovanelli. Presently he pointed out the young girl and her cavalier to
Mrs. Costello. This lady looked at them a moment through her eyeglass,
and then she said:
“That’s what makes you so pensive in these days, eh?”
“I had not the least idea I was pensive,” said the young man.
“You are very much preoccupied; you are thinking of something.”
“And what is it,” he asked, “that you accuse me of thinking of?”
“Of that young lady’s--Miss Baker’s, Miss Chandler’s--what’s her
name?--Miss Miller’s intrigue with that little barber’s block.”
“Do you call it an intrigue,” Winterbourne asked--“an affair that goes
on with such peculiar publicity?”
“That’s their folly,” said Mrs. Costello; “it’s not their merit.”
“No,” rejoined Winterbourne, with something of that pensiveness to which
his aunt had alluded. “I don’t believe that there is anything to be
called an intrigue.”
“I have heard a dozen people speak of it; they say she is quite carried
away by him.”
“They are certainly very intimate,” said Winterbourne.
Mrs. Costello inspected the young couple again with her optical
instrument. “He is very handsome. One easily sees how it is. She thinks
him the most elegant man in the world, the finest gentleman. She has
never seen anything like him; he is better, even, than the courier.
It was the courier probably who introduced him; and if he succeeds in
marrying the young lady, the courier will come in for a magnificent
commission.”
“I don’t believe she thinks of marrying him,” said Winterbourne, “and I
don’t believe he hopes to marry her.”
“You may be very sure she thinks of nothing. She goes on from day to
day, from hour to hour, as they did in the Golden Age. I can imagine
nothing more vulgar. And at the same time,” added Mrs. Costello, “depend
upon it that she may tell you any moment that she is ‘engaged.’”
“I think that is more than Giovanelli expects,” said Winterbourne.
“Who is Giovanelli?”
“The little Italian. I have asked questions about him and learned
something. He is apparently a perfectly respectable little man. I
believe he is, in a small way, a cavaliere avvocato. But he doesn’t
move in what are called the first circles. I think it is really not
absolutely impossible that the courier introduced him. He is evidently
immensely charmed with Miss Miller. If she thinks him the finest
gentleman in the world, he, on his side, has never found himself in
personal contact with such splendor, such opulence, such expensiveness
as this young lady’s. And then she must seem to him wonderfully pretty
and interesting. I rather doubt that he dreams of marrying her. That
must appear to him too impossible a piece of luck. He has nothing but
his handsome face to offer, and there is a substantial Mr. Miller in
that mysterious land of dollars. Giovanelli knows that he hasn’t a title
to offer. If he were only a count or a marchese! He must wonder at his
luck, at the way they have taken him up.”
“He accounts for it by his handsome face and thinks Miss Miller a young
lady qui se passe ses fantaisies!” said Mrs. Costello.
“It is very true,” Winterbourne pursued, “that Daisy and her mamma have
not yet risen to that stage of--what shall I call it?--of culture at
which the idea of catching a count or a marchese begins. I believe that
they are intellectually incapable of that conception.”
“Ah! but the avvocato can’t believe it,” said Mrs. Costello.
Of the observation excited by Daisy’s “intrigue,” Winterbourne gathered
that day at St. Peter’s sufficient evidence. A dozen of the American
colonists in Rome came to talk with Mrs. Costello, who sat on a little
portable stool at the base of one of the great pilasters. The vesper
service was going forward in splendid chants and organ tones in the
adjacent choir, and meanwhile, between Mrs. Costello and her friends,
there was a great deal said about poor little Miss Miller’s going really
“too far.” Winterbourne was not pleased with what he heard, but when,
coming out upon the great steps of the church, he saw Daisy, who had
emerged before him, get into an open cab with her accomplice and roll
away through the cynical streets of Rome, he could not deny to himself
that she was going very far indeed. He felt very sorry for her--not
exactly that he believed that she had completely lost her head, but
because it was painful to hear so much that was pretty, and undefended,
and natural assigned to a vulgar place among the categories of disorder.
He made an attempt after this to give a hint to Mrs. Miller. He met one
day in the Corso a friend, a tourist like himself, who had just come
out of the Doria Palace, where he had been walking through the beautiful
gallery. His friend talked for a moment about the superb portrait
of Innocent X by Velasquez which hangs in one of the cabinets of the
palace, and then said, “And in the same cabinet, by the way, I had the
pleasure of contemplating a picture of a different kind--that pretty
American girl whom you pointed out to me last week.” In answer to
Winterbourne’s inquiries, his friend narrated that the pretty American
girl--prettier than ever--was seated with a companion in the secluded
nook in which the great papal portrait was enshrined.
“Who was her companion?” asked Winterbourne.
“A little Italian with a bouquet in his buttonhole. The girl is
delightfully pretty, but I thought I understood from you the other day
that she was a young lady du meilleur monde.”
“So she is!” answered Winterbourne; and having assured himself that his
informant had seen Daisy and her companion but five minutes before, he
jumped into a cab and went to call on Mrs. Miller. She was at home; but
she apologized to him for receiving him in Daisy’s absence.
“She’s gone out somewhere with Mr. Giovanelli,” said Mrs. Miller. “She’s
always going round with Mr. Giovanelli.”
“I have noticed that they are very intimate,” Winterbourne observed.
“Oh, it seems as if they couldn’t live without each other!” said Mrs.
Miller. “Well, he’s a real gentleman, anyhow. I keep telling Daisy she’s
engaged!”
“And what does Daisy say?”
“Oh, she says she isn’t engaged. But she might as well be!” this
impartial parent resumed; “she goes on as if she was. But I’ve made Mr.
Giovanelli promise to tell me, if SHE doesn’t. I should want to write to
Mr. Miller about it--shouldn’t you?”
Winterbourne replied that he certainly should; and the state of mind of
Daisy’s mamma struck him as so unprecedented in the annals of parental
vigilance that he gave up as utterly irrelevant the attempt to place her
upon her guard.
After this Daisy was never at home, and Winterbourne ceased to meet her
at the houses of their common acquaintances, because, as he perceived,
these shrewd people had quite made up their minds that she was going too
far. They ceased to invite her; and they intimated that they desired to
express to observant Europeans the great truth that, though Miss
Daisy Miller was a young American lady, her behavior was not
representative--was regarded by her compatriots as abnormal.
Winterbourne wondered how she felt about all the cold shoulders that
were turned toward her, and sometimes it annoyed him to suspect that
she did not feel at all. He said to himself that she was too light and
childish, too uncultivated and unreasoning, too provincial, to have
reflected upon her ostracism, or even to have perceived it. Then at
other moments he believed that she carried about in her elegant and
irresponsible little organism a defiant, passionate, perfectly observant
consciousness of the impression she produced. He asked himself whether
Daisy’s defiance came from the consciousness of innocence, or from her
being, essentially, a young person of the reckless class. It must be
admitted that holding one’s self to a belief in Daisy’s “innocence” came
to seem to Winterbourne more and more a matter of fine-spun gallantry.
As I have already had occasion to relate, he was angry at finding
himself reduced to chopping logic about this young lady; he was vexed at
his want of instinctive certitude as to how far her eccentricities were
generic, national, and how far they were personal. From either view
of them he had somehow missed her, and now it was too late. She was
“carried away” by Mr. Giovanelli.
A few days after his brief interview with her mother, he encountered her
in that beautiful abode of flowering desolation known as the Palace of
the Caesars. The early Roman spring had filled the air with bloom and
perfume, and the rugged surface of the Palatine was muffled with tender
verdure. Daisy was strolling along the top of one of those great mounds
of ruin that are embanked with mossy marble and paved with monumental
inscriptions. It seemed to him that Rome had never been so lovely as
just then. He stood, looking off at the enchanting harmony of line and
color that remotely encircles the city, inhaling the softly humid odors,
and feeling the freshness of the year and the antiquity of the place
reaffirm themselves in mysterious interfusion. It seemed to him also
that Daisy had never looked so pretty, but this had been an observation
of his whenever he met her. Giovanelli was at her side, and Giovanelli,
too, wore an aspect of even unwonted brilliancy.
“Well,” said Daisy, “I should think you would be lonesome!”
“Lonesome?” asked Winterbourne.
“You are always going round by yourself. Can’t you get anyone to walk
with you?”
“I am not so fortunate,” said Winterbourne, “as your companion.”
Giovanelli, from the first, had treated Winterbourne with distinguished
politeness. He listened with a deferential air to his remarks; he
laughed punctiliously at his pleasantries; he seemed disposed to testify
to his belief that Winterbourne was a superior young man. He carried
himself in no degree like a jealous wooer; he had obviously a great deal
of tact; he had no objection to your expecting a little humility of him.
It even seemed to Winterbourne at times that Giovanelli would find a
certain mental relief in being able to have a private understanding with
him--to say to him, as an intelligent man, that, bless you, HE knew
how extraordinary was this young lady, and didn’t flatter himself with
delusive--or at least TOO delusive--hopes of matrimony and dollars. On
this occasion he strolled away from his companion to pluck a sprig of
almond blossom, which he carefully arranged in his buttonhole.
“I know why you say that,” said Daisy, watching Giovanelli. “Because you
think I go round too much with HIM.” And she nodded at her attendant.
“Every one thinks so--if you care to know,” said Winterbourne.
“Of course I care to know!” Daisy exclaimed seriously. “But I don’t
believe it. They are only pretending to be shocked. They don’t really
care a straw what I do. Besides, I don’t go round so much.”
“I think you will find they do care. They will show it disagreeably.”
Daisy looked at him a moment. “How disagreeably?”
“Haven’t you noticed anything?” Winterbourne asked.
“I have noticed you. But I noticed you were as stiff as an umbrella the
first time I saw you.”
“You will find I am not so stiff as several others,” said Winterbourne,
smiling.
“How shall I find it?”
“By going to see the others.”
“What will they do to me?”
“They will give you the cold shoulder. Do you know what that means?”
Daisy was looking at him intently; she began to color. “Do you mean as
Mrs. Walker did the other night?”
“Exactly!” said Winterbourne.
She looked away at Giovanelli, who was decorating himself with his
almond blossom. Then looking back at Winterbourne, “I shouldn’t think
you would let people be so unkind!” she said.
“How can I help it?” he asked.
“I should think you would say something.”
“I do say something;” and he paused a moment. “I say that your mother
tells me that she believes you are engaged.”
“Well, she does,” said Daisy very simply.
Winterbourne began to laugh. “And does Randolph believe it?” he asked.
“I guess Randolph doesn’t believe anything,” said Daisy. Randolph’s
skepticism excited Winterbourne to further hilarity, and he observed
that Giovanelli was coming back to them. Daisy, observing it too,
addressed herself again to her countryman. “Since you have mentioned
it,” she said, “I AM engaged.” * * * Winterbourne looked at her; he had
stopped laughing. “You don’t believe!” she added.
He was silent a moment; and then, “Yes, I believe it,” he said.
“Oh, no, you don’t!” she answered. “Well, then--I am not!”
The young girl and her cicerone were on their way to the gate of the
enclosure, so that Winterbourne, who had but lately entered, presently
took leave of them. A week afterward he went to dine at a beautiful
villa on the Caelian Hill, and, on arriving, dismissed his hired
vehicle. The evening was charming, and he promised himself the
satisfaction of walking home beneath the Arch of Constantine and past
the vaguely lighted monuments of the Forum. There was a waning moon in
the sky, and her radiance was not brilliant, but she was veiled in a
thin cloud curtain which seemed to diffuse and equalize it. When, on his
return from the villa (it was eleven o’clock), Winterbourne approached
the dusky circle of the Colosseum, it recurred to him, as a lover of
the picturesque, that the interior, in the pale moonshine, would be well
worth a glance. He turned aside and walked to one of the empty arches,
near which, as he observed, an open carriage--one of the little Roman
streetcabs--was stationed. Then he passed in, among the cavernous
shadows of the great structure, and emerged upon the clear and silent
arena. The place had never seemed to him more impressive. One-half of
the gigantic circus was in deep shade, the other was sleeping in the
luminous dusk. As he stood there he began to murmur Byron’s famous
lines, out of “Manfred,” but before he had finished his quotation
he remembered that if nocturnal meditations in the Colosseum are
recommended by the poets, they are deprecated by the doctors. The
historic atmosphere was there, certainly; but the historic atmosphere,
scientifically considered, was no better than a villainous miasma.
Winterbourne walked to the middle of the arena, to take a more general
glance, intending thereafter to make a hasty retreat. The great cross in
the center was covered with shadow; it was only as he drew near it that
he made it out distinctly. Then he saw that two persons were stationed
upon the low steps which formed its base. One of these was a woman,
seated; her companion was standing in front of her.
Presently the sound of the woman’s voice came to him distinctly in the
warm night air. “Well, he looks at us as one of the old lions or tigers
may have looked at the Christian martyrs!” These were the words he
heard, in the familiar accent of Miss Daisy Miller.
“Let us hope he is not very hungry,” responded the ingenious Giovanelli.
“He will have to take me first; you will serve for dessert!”
Winterbourne stopped, with a sort of horror, and, it must be added, with
a sort of relief. It was as if a sudden illumination had been flashed
upon the ambiguity of Daisy’s behavior, and the riddle had become easy
to read. She was a young lady whom a gentleman need no longer be
at pains to respect. He stood there, looking at her--looking at her
companion and not reflecting that though he saw them vaguely, he himself
must have been more brightly visible. He felt angry with himself that he
had bothered so much about the right way of regarding Miss Daisy Miller.
Then, as he was going to advance again, he checked himself, not from the
fear that he was doing her injustice, but from a sense of the danger
of appearing unbecomingly exhilarated by this sudden revulsion from
cautious criticism. He turned away toward the entrance of the place,
but, as he did so, he heard Daisy speak again.
“Why, it was Mr. Winterbourne! He saw me, and he cuts me!”
What a clever little reprobate she was, and how smartly she played at
injured innocence! But he wouldn’t cut her. Winterbourne came forward
again and went toward the great cross. Daisy had got up; Giovanelli
lifted his hat. Winterbourne had now begun to think simply of the
craziness, from a sanitary point of view, of a delicate young girl
lounging away the evening in this nest of malaria. What if she WERE
a clever little reprobate? that was no reason for her dying of the
perniciosa. “How long have you been here?” he asked almost brutally.
Daisy, lovely in the flattering moonlight, looked at him a moment.
Then--“All the evening,” she answered, gently. * * * “I never saw
anything so pretty.”
“I am afraid,” said Winterbourne, “that you will not think Roman fever
very pretty. This is the way people catch it. I wonder,” he added,
turning to Giovanelli, “that you, a native Roman, should countenance
such a terrible indiscretion.”
“Ah,” said the handsome native, “for myself I am not afraid.”
“Neither am I--for you! I am speaking for this young lady.”
Giovanelli lifted his well-shaped eyebrows and showed his brilliant
teeth. But he took Winterbourne’s rebuke with docility. “I told the
signorina it was a grave indiscretion, but when was the signorina ever
prudent?”
“I never was sick, and I don’t mean to be!” the signorina declared. “I
don’t look like much, but I’m healthy! I was bound to see the Colosseum
by moonlight; I shouldn’t have wanted to go home without that; and we
have had the most beautiful time, haven’t we, Mr. Giovanelli? If there
has been any danger, Eugenio can give me some pills. He has got some
splendid pills.”
“I should advise you,” said Winterbourne, “to drive home as fast as
possible and take one!”
“What you say is very wise,” Giovanelli rejoined. “I will go and make
sure the carriage is at hand.” And he went forward rapidly.
Daisy followed with Winterbourne. He kept looking at her; she seemed
not in the least embarrassed. Winterbourne said nothing; Daisy chattered
about the beauty of the place. “Well, I HAVE seen the Colosseum by
moonlight!” she exclaimed. “That’s one good thing.” Then, noticing
Winterbourne’s silence, she asked him why he didn’t speak. He made
no answer; he only began to laugh. They passed under one of the dark
archways; Giovanelli was in front with the carriage. Here Daisy stopped
a moment, looking at the young American. “DID you believe I was engaged,
the other day?” she asked.
“It doesn’t matter what I believed the other day,” said Winterbourne,
still laughing.
“Well, what do you believe now?”
“I believe that it makes very little difference whether you are engaged
or not!”
He felt the young girl’s pretty eyes fixed upon him through the thick
gloom of the archway; she was apparently going to answer. But Giovanelli
hurried her forward. “Quick! quick!” he said; “if we get in by midnight
we are quite safe.”
Daisy took her seat in the carriage, and the fortunate Italian placed
himself beside her. “Don’t forget Eugenio’s pills!” said Winterbourne as
he lifted his hat.
“I don’t care,” said Daisy in a little strange tone, “whether I have
Roman fever or not!” Upon this the cab driver cracked his whip, and they
rolled away over the desultory patches of the antique pavement.
Winterbourne, to do him justice, as it were, mentioned to no one that
he had encountered Miss Miller, at midnight, in the Colosseum with a
gentleman; but nevertheless, a couple of days later, the fact of her
having been there under these circumstances was known to every member
of the little American circle, and commented accordingly. Winterbourne
reflected that they had of course known it at the hotel, and that, after
Daisy’s return, there had been an exchange of remarks between the porter
and the cab driver. But the young man was conscious, at the same moment,
that it had ceased to be a matter of serious regret to him that the
little American flirt should be “talked about” by low-minded menials.
These people, a day or two later, had serious information to give: the
little American flirt was alarmingly ill. Winterbourne, when the rumor
came to him, immediately went to the hotel for more news. He found that
two or three charitable friends had preceded him, and that they were
being entertained in Mrs. Miller’s salon by Randolph.
“It’s going round at night,” said Randolph--“that’s what made her sick.
She’s always going round at night. I shouldn’t think she’d want to,
it’s so plaguy dark. You can’t see anything here at night, except when
there’s a moon. In America there’s always a moon!” Mrs. Miller was
invisible; she was now, at least, giving her daughter the advantage of
her society. It was evident that Daisy was dangerously ill.
Winterbourne went often to ask for news of her, and once he saw Mrs.
Miller, who, though deeply alarmed, was, rather to his surprise,
perfectly composed, and, as it appeared, a most efficient and judicious
nurse. She talked a good deal about Dr. Davis, but Winterbourne paid her
the compliment of saying to himself that she was not, after all, such
a monstrous goose. “Daisy spoke of you the other day,” she said to him.
“Half the time she doesn’t know what she’s saying, but that time I think
she did. She gave me a message she told me to tell you. She told me to
tell you that she never was engaged to that handsome Italian. I am sure
I am very glad; Mr. Giovanelli hasn’t been near us since she was taken
ill. I thought he was so much of a gentleman; but I don’t call that
very polite! A lady told me that he was afraid I was angry with him for
taking Daisy round at night. Well, so I am, but I suppose he knows I’m a
lady. I would scorn to scold him. Anyway, she says she’s not engaged. I
don’t know why she wanted you to know, but she said to me three times,
‘Mind you tell Mr. Winterbourne.’ And then she told me to ask if you
remembered the time you went to that castle in Switzerland. But I said
I wouldn’t give any such messages as that. Only, if she is not engaged,
I’m sure I’m glad to know it.”
But, as Winterbourne had said, it mattered very little. A week after
this, the poor girl died; it had been a terrible case of the fever.
Daisy’s grave was in the little Protestant cemetery, in an angle of
the wall of imperial Rome, beneath the cypresses and the thick spring
flowers. Winterbourne stood there beside it, with a number of other
mourners, a number larger than the scandal excited by the young lady’s
career would have led you to expect. Near him stood Giovanelli, who came
nearer still before Winterbourne turned away. Giovanelli was very pale:
on this occasion he had no flower in his buttonhole; he seemed to wish
to say something. At last he said, “She was the most beautiful young
lady I ever saw, and the most amiable;” and then he added in a moment,
“and she was the most innocent.”
Winterbourne looked at him and presently repeated his words, “And the
most innocent?”
“The most innocent!”
Winterbourne felt sore and angry. “Why the devil,” he asked, “did you
take her to that fatal place?”
Mr. Giovanelli’s urbanity was apparently imperturbable. He looked on the
ground a moment, and then he said, “For myself I had no fear; and she
wanted to go.”
“That was no reason!” Winterbourne declared.
The subtle Roman again dropped his eyes. “If she had lived, I should
have got nothing. She would never have married me, I am sure.”
“She would never have married you?”
“For a moment I hoped so. But no. I am sure.”
Winterbourne listened to him: he stood staring at the raw protuberance
among the April daisies. When he turned away again, Mr. Giovanelli, with
his light, slow step, had retired.
Winterbourne almost immediately left Rome; but the following summer he
again met his aunt, Mrs. Costello at Vevey. Mrs. Costello was fond of
Vevey. In the interval Winterbourne had often thought of Daisy Miller
and her mystifying manners. One day he spoke of her to his aunt--said it
was on his conscience that he had done her injustice.
“I am sure I don’t know,” said Mrs. Costello. “How did your injustice
affect her?”
“She sent me a message before her death which I didn’t understand at the
time; but I have understood it since. She would have appreciated one’s
esteem.”
“Is that a modest way,” asked Mrs. Costello, “of saying that she would
have reciprocated one’s affection?”
Winterbourne offered no answer to this question; but he presently said,
“You were right in that remark that you made last summer. I was booked
to make a mistake. I have lived too long in foreign parts.”
Nevertheless, he went back to live at Geneva, whence there continue to
come the most contradictory accounts of his motives of sojourn: a report
that he is “studying” hard--an intimation that he is much interested in
a very clever foreign lady.
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