Washington Square quotes

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.

”

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;

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.

Dr. Sloper had usually a little smile, never a very big one, and with his little smile playing in his clear eyes and on his neatly-shaved lips, he looked at his daughter’s crimson gown.

“Is it possible that this magnificent person is my child?” he said.

You would have surprised him if you had told him so; but it is a literal fact that he almost never addressed his daughter save in the ironical form. Whenever he addressed her he gave her pleasure;

“I am not magnificent,” she said mildly, wishing that she had put on another dress.

“You are sumptuous, opulent, expensive,” her father rejoined. “You look as if you had eighty thousand a year.”

“Well, so long as I haven’t—” said Catherine illogically. Her conception of her prospective wealth was as yet very indefinite.

he had omitted, by accident, to say that he would sing to her if she would play to him. He thought of this after he got into the street; but he might have spared his compunction, for Catherine had not noticed the lapse.

She was thinking only that “some other time” had a delightful sound; it seemed to spread itself over the future.

This was all the more reason, however, though she was ashamed and uncomfortable, why she should tell her father that Mr. Morris Townsend had called again. She announced the fact abruptly, almost violently, as soon as the Doctor came into the house;

“Very possibly you are right. But the thing is for Catherine to see it.”

“I will present her with a pair of spectacles!” said the Doctor.

… would not have complained nor rebelled, but would have humbly accepted the decree, and sought for consolation in thinking over the times she had already seen him, the words he had spoken, the sound of his voice, of his tread, the expression of his face.

Love demands certain things as a right; but Catherine had no sense of her rights; she had only a consciousness of immense and unexpected favours.

Her very gratitude for these things had hushed itself; for it seemed to her that there would be something of impudence in making a festival of her secret. Her father suspected Morris Townsend’s visits, and noted her reserve. She seemed to beg pardon for it;

“I don’t say that. I am not obliged to say it; and to say it, save under stress of compulsion, would be very bad taste. I say simply that you belong to the wrong category.”

“But your daughter doesn’t marry a category,” Townsend urged, with his handsome smile.

“She marries an individual—an individual whom she is so good as to say she loves.”

“Is there nothing I can do to make you believe in me?”

“If there were I should be sorry to suggest it, for⁠—don’t you see?⁠—I don’t want to believe in you!” said the Doctor, smiling.

“I would go and dig in the fields.”

“Don’t you care a little to gratify your daughter? Do you enjoy the idea of making her miserable?”

“I am perfectly resigned to her thinking me a tyrant for a twelvemonth.”

“For a twelvemonth!” exclaimed Morris, with a laugh.

“She is past the age at which people are forbidden, and I am not a father in an old-fashioned novel. But I shall strongly urge her to break with you.”

“I don’t think she will,” said Morris Townsend.

“Perhaps not. But I shall have done what I could.”

“I suspect she will be careful; for she is at bottom very much afraid of you.”

“They are both afraid of me⁠—harmless as I am!” the Doctor answered. “And it is on that that I build⁠—on the salutary terror I inspire!”

Mrs. Montgomery brushed away her tears, and blushed at having shed them. “I should like to know your daughter,” she answered; and then, in an instant—

“Don’t let her marry him!”

Dr. Sloper went away with the words gently humming in his ears—“Don’t let her marry him!” They gave him the moral satisfaction of which he had just spoken, and their value was the greater that they had evidently cost a pang to poor little Mrs.

Morris hesitated a moment; and then, as if he spoke advisedly—

“I do like the money!”

“Ah, but not—but not as he means it. You don’t like it more than Catherine?”

Then he came back, and paused for a minute in front of Dr. Sloper’s dwelling. His eyes travelled over it; they even rested on the ruddy windows of Mrs. Penniman’s apartment.

He thought it a devilish comfortable house.

There was a simplicity in this, indeed, which fairly vexed Mrs. Penniman.

“If your father forbade you to go to sleep, I suppose you would keep awake!” she commented.

Catherine looked at her. “I don’t understand you. You seem to be very strange.”

The Doctor answered, however, quietly enough:

“Of course you can wait till I die, if you like.”

Catherine gave a cry of natural horror.

There was a dreadful ugliness in it, which seemed to glare at her through the interposing medium of her own feebler reason. Suddenly, however, she had an inspiration—she almost knew it to be an inspiration.

“If I don’t marry before your death, I will not after,” she said.

To her father, it must be admitted, this seemed only another epigram; and as obstinacy, in unaccomplished minds, does not usually select such a mode of expression, he was the more surprised at this wanton play of a fixed idea.

The Doctor took several turns round his study, with his hands in his pockets, and a thin sparkle, possibly of irritation, but partly also of something like humour, in his eye.

“By Jove,” he said to himself, “I believe she will stick⁠—I believe she will stick!”

And this idea of Catherine “sticking” appeared to have a comical side, and to offer a prospect of entertainment. He determined, as he said to himself, to see it out.

Catherine thought a little. “I don’t know how; but not in that way. I wish to be just as usual.” And she finished dressing, and, according to her aunt’s expression, went plumping down into the paternal presence.

She was really too modest for consistent pathos.

And yet it was perfectly true that she had had a dreadful night. Even after Mrs. Penniman left her she had had no sleep.

“And shall you not relent?”

“Shall a geometrical proposition relent? I am not so superficial.”

“Doesn’t geometry treat of surfaces?” asked Mrs. Almond, who, as we know, was clever, smiling.

“Say it amuses you outright! I don’t see why it should be such a joke that your daughter adores you.”

“It is the point where the adoration stops that I find it interesting to fix.”

“It stops where the other sentiment begins.”

“Cling is prettier. That’s what those very simple natures always do, and nothing could be simpler than Catherine. She doesn’t take many impressions; but when she takes one she keeps it.

She is like a copper kettle that receives a dent; you may polish up the kettle, but you can’t efface the mark.

”

“You seem to have a great many different ways of seeing the same object.”

“Their number is infinite!” said Mrs. Penniman, in a tone which seemed to suggest that this convenient faculty was one of her brightest attributes.

“I recommend you to take one way and stick to it,” Morris replied.

“That I shall object to even more. But the deuce will be that I can’t prevent anything.”

“If she is to have a fall,” said Mrs. Almond, with a gentle laugh, “we must spread as many carpets as we can.”

And she carried out this idea by showing a great deal of motherly kindness to the girl.

Mrs. Penniman felt disappointed and snubbed, and she relieved herself in a little vaguely-sarcastic cry. He was certainly perverse.

“I give her up, not for another woman, but for a wider career!” Morris announced.

This was very grand; but still Mrs. Penniman, who felt that she had exposed herself, was faintly rancorous.

From her own point of view the great facts of her career were that Morris Townsend had trifled with her affection, and that her father had broken its spring.

Nothing could ever alter these facts; they were always there, like her name, her age, her plain face.

Nothing could ever undo the wrong or cure the pain that Morris had inflicted on her, and nothing could ever make her feel towards her father as she felt in her younger years.

they were always there, like her name, her age, her plain face. Nothing could ever undo the wrong or cure the pain that Morris had inflicted on her, and nothing could ever make her feel towards her father as she felt in her younger years.

There was something dead in her life, and her duty was to try and fill the void.

Catherine recognised this duty to the utmost; she had a great disapproval of brooding and moping. She had, of course, no faculty for quenching memory in dissipation;

She had been so humble in her youth that she could now afford to have a little pride, and there was something in this request, and in her father’s thinking himself so free to make it, that seemed an injury to her dignity.

Poor Catherine’s dignity was not aggressive; it never sat in state; but if you pushed far enough you could find it.

Her father had pushed very far.

“Upon my word,” her father explained, “I had no idea how obstinate you are!”

She knew herself that she was obstinate, and it gave her a certain joy. She was now a middle-aged woman.

About a year after this, the accident that the Doctor had spoken of occurred; he took a violent cold.

To Mrs. Penniman it seemed monstrous that a man should play such tricks with other people’s money; for after his death, of course, as she said, it was other people’s. “Of course, you will dispute the will,” she remarked, fatuously, to Catherine.

“Oh no,” Catherine answered, “I like it very much. Only I wish it had been expressed a little differently!”