CHAPTER II
When the child was about ten years old, he invited his sister, Mrs.
Penniman, to come and stay with him. The Miss Slopers had been but
two in number, and both of them had married early in life. The
younger, Mrs. Almond by name, was the wife of a prosperous merchant,
and the mother of a blooming family. She bloomed herself, indeed,
and was a comely, comfortable, reasonable woman, and a favourite with
her clever brother, who, in the matter of women, even when they were
nearly related to him, was a man of distinct preferences. He
preferred Mrs. Almond to his sister Lavinia, who had married a poor
clergyman, of a sickly constitution and a flowery style of eloquence,
and then, at the age of thirty-three, had been left a widow, without
children, without fortune--with nothing but the memory of Mr.
Penniman's flowers of speech, a certain vague aroma of which hovered
about her own conversation. Nevertheless he had offered her a home
under his own roof, which Lavinia accepted with the alacrity of a
woman who had spent the ten years of her married life in the town of
Poughkeepsie. The Doctor had not proposed to Mrs. Penniman to come
and live with him indefinitely; he had suggested that she should make
an asylum of his house while she looked about for unfurnished
lodgings. It is uncertain whether Mrs. Penniman ever instituted a
search for unfurnished lodgings, but it is beyond dispute that she
never found them. She settled herself with her brother and never
went away, and when Catherine was twenty years old her Aunt Lavinia
was still one of the most striking features of her immediate
entourage. Mrs. Penniman's own account of the matter was that she
had remained to take charge of her niece's education. She had given
this account, at least, to every one but the Doctor, who never asked
for explanations which he could entertain himself any day with
inventing. Mrs. Penniman, moreover, though she had a good deal of a
certain sort of artificial assurance, shrank, for indefinable
reasons, from presenting herself to her brother as a fountain of
instruction. She had not a high sense of humour, but she had enough
to prevent her from making this mistake; and her brother, on his
side, had enough to excuse her, in her situation, for laying him
under contribution during a considerable part of a lifetime. He
therefore assented tacitly to the proposition which Mrs. Penniman had
tacitly laid down, that it was of importance that the poor motherless
girl should have a brilliant woman near her. His assent could only
be tacit, for he had never been dazzled by his sister's intellectual
lustre. Save when he fell in love with Catherine Harrington, he had
never been dazzled, indeed, by any feminine characteristics whatever;
and though he was to a certain extent what is called a ladies'
doctor, his private opinion of the more complicated sex was not
exalted. He regarded its complications as more curious than
edifying, and he had an idea of the beauty of REASON, which was, on
the whole, meagrely gratified by what he observed in his female
patients. His wife had been a reasonable woman, but she was a bright
exception; among several things that he was sure of, this was perhaps
the principal. Such a conviction, of course, did little either to
mitigate or to abbreviate his widowhood; and it set a limit to his
recognition, at the best, of Catherine's possibilities and of Mrs.
Penniman's ministrations. He, nevertheless, at the end of six
months, accepted his sister's permanent presence as an accomplished
fact, and as Catherine grew older perceived that there were in effect
good reasons why she should have a companion of her own imperfect
sex. He was extremely polite to Lavinia, scrupulously, formally
polite; and she had never seen him in anger but once in her life,
when he lost his temper in a theological discussion with her late
husband. With her he never discussed theology, nor, indeed,
discussed anything; he contented himself with making known, very
distinctly, in the form of a lucid ultimatum, his wishes with regard
to Catherine.
Once, when the girl was about twelve years old, he had said to her:
"Try and make a clever woman of her, Lavinia; I should like her to be
a clever woman."
Mrs. Penniman, at this, looked thoughtful a moment. "My dear
Austin," she then inquired, "do you think it is better to be clever
than to be good?"
"Good for what?" asked the Doctor. "You are good for nothing unless
you are clever."
From this assertion Mrs. Penniman saw no reason to dissent; she
possibly reflected that her own great use in the world was owing to
her aptitude for many things.
"Of course I wish Catherine to be good," the Doctor said next day;
"but she won't be any the less virtuous for not being a fool. I am
not afraid of her being wicked; she will never have the salt of
malice in her character. She is as good as good bread, as the French
say; but six years hence I don't want to have to compare her to good
bread and butter."
"Are you afraid she will turn insipid? My dear brother, it is I who
supply the butter; so you needn't fear!" said Mrs. Penniman, who had
taken in hand the child's accomplishments, overlooking her at the
piano, where Catherine displayed a certain talent, and going with her
to the dancing-class, where it must be confessed that she made but a
modest figure.
Mrs. Penniman was a tall, thin, fair, rather faded woman, with a
perfectly amiable disposition, a high standard of gentility, a taste
for light literature, and a certain foolish indirectness and
obliquity of character. She was romantic, she was sentimental, she
had a passion for little secrets and mysteries--a very innocent
passion, for her secrets had hitherto always been as unpractical as
addled eggs. She was not absolutely veracious; but this defect was
of no great consequence, for she had never had anything to conceal.
She would have liked to have a lover, and to correspond with him
under an assumed name in letters left at a shop; I am bound to say
that her imagination never carried the intimacy farther than this.
Mrs. Penniman had never had a lover, but her brother, who was very
shrewd, understood her turn of mind. "When Catherine is about
seventeen," he said to himself, "Lavinia will try and persuade her
that some young man with a moustache is in love with her. It will be
quite untrue; no young man, with a moustache or without, will ever be
in love with Catherine. But Lavinia will take it up, and talk to her
about it; perhaps, even, if her taste for clandestine operations
doesn't prevail with her, she will talk to me about it. Catherine
won't see it, and won't believe it, fortunately for her peace of
mind; poor Catherine isn't romantic."
She was a healthy well-grown child, without a trace of her mother's
beauty. She was not ugly; she had simply a plain, dull, gentle
countenance. The most that had ever been said for her was that she
had a "nice" face, and, though she was an heiress, no one had ever
thought of regarding her as a belle. Her father's opinion of her
moral purity was abundantly justified; she was excellently,
imperturbably good; affectionate, docile, obedient, and much addicted
to speaking the truth. In her younger years she was a good deal of a
romp, and, though it is an awkward confession to make about one's
heroine, I must add that she was something of a glutton. She never,
that I know of, stole raisins out of the pantry; but she devoted her
pocket-money to the purchase of cream-cakes. As regards this,
however, a critical attitude would be inconsistent with a candid
reference to the early annals of any biographer. Catherine was
decidedly not clever; she was not quick with her book, nor, indeed,
with anything else. She was not abnormally deficient, and she
mustered learning enough to acquit herself respectably in
conversation with her contemporaries, among whom it must be avowed,
however, that she occupied a secondary place. It is well known that
in New York it is possible for a young girl to occupy a primary one.
Catherine, who was extremely modest, had no desire to shine, and on
most social occasions, as they are called, you would have found her
lurking in the background. She was extremely fond of her father, and
very much afraid of him; she thought him the cleverest and handsomest
and most celebrated of men. The poor girl found her account so
completely in the exercise of her affections that the little tremor
of fear that mixed itself with her filial passion gave the thing an
extra relish rather than blunted its edge. Her deepest desire was to
please him, and her conception of happiness was to know that she had
succeeded in pleasing him. She had never succeeded beyond a certain
point. Though, on the whole, he was very kind to her, she was
perfectly aware of this, and to go beyond the point in question
seemed to her really something to live for. What she could not know,
of course, was that she disappointed him, though on three or four
occasions the Doctor had been almost frank about it. She grew up
peacefully and prosperously, but at the age of eighteen Mrs. Penniman
had not made a clever woman of her. Dr. Sloper would have liked to
be proud of his daughter; but there was nothing to be proud of in
poor Catherine. There was nothing, of course, to be ashamed of; but
this was not enough for the Doctor, who was a proud man and would
have enjoyed being able to think of his daughter as an unusual girl.
There would have been a fitness in her being pretty and graceful,
intelligent and distinguished; for her mother had been the most
charming woman of her little day, and as regards her father, of
course he knew his own value. He had moments of irritation at having
produced a commonplace child, and he even went so far at times as to
take a certain satisfaction in the thought that his wife had not
lived to find her out. He was naturally slow in making this
discovery himself, and it was not till Catherine had become a young
lady grown that he regarded the matter as settled. He gave her the
benefit of a great many doubts; he was in no haste to conclude. Mrs.
Penniman frequently assured him that his daughter had a delightful
nature; but he knew how to interpret this assurance. It meant, to
his sense, that Catherine was not wise enough to discover that her
aunt was a goose--a limitation of mind that could not fail to be
agreeable to Mrs. Penniman. Both she and her brother, however,
exaggerated the young girl's limitations; for Catherine, though she
was very fond of her aunt, and conscious of the gratitude she owed
her, regarded her without a particle of that gentle dread which gave
its stamp to her admiration of her father. To her mind there was
nothing of the infinite about Mrs. Penniman; Catherine saw her all at
once, as it were, and was not dazzled by the apparition; whereas her
father's great faculties seemed, as they stretched away, to lose
themselves in a sort of luminous vagueness, which indicated, not that
they stopped, but that Catherine's own mind ceased to follow them.
It must not be supposed that Dr. Sloper visited his disappointment
upon the poor girl, or ever let her suspect that she had played him a
trick. On the contrary, for fear of being unjust to her, he did his
duty with exemplary zeal, and recognised that she was a faithful and
affectionate child. Besides, he was a philosopher; he smoked a good
many cigars over his disappointment, and in the fulness of time he
got used to it. He satisfied himself that he had expected nothing,
though, indeed, with a certain oddity of reasoning. "I expect
nothing," he said to himself, "so that if she gives me a surprise, it
will be all clear again. If she doesn't, it will be no loss." This
was about the time Catherine had reached her eighteenth year, so that
it will be seen her father had not been precipitate. At this time
she seemed not only incapable of giving surprises; it was almost a
question whether she could have received one--she was so quiet and
irresponsive. People who expressed themselves roughly called her
stolid. But she was irresponsive because she was shy, uncomfortably,
painfully shy. This was not always understood, and she sometimes
produced an impression of insensibility. In reality she was the
softest creature in the world.
