You will have the same--or
rather, you will have better!" and Aunt Lavinia smiled. "Then you
will see what I mean. It's a wonderful character, full of passion
and energy, and just as true!"
Catherine listened with a mixture of interest and apprehension. Aunt
Lavinia was intensely sympathetic, and Catherine, for the past year,
while she wandered through foreign galleries and churches, and rolled
over the smoothness of posting roads, nursing the thoughts that never
passed her lips, had often longed for the company of some intelligent
person of her own sex. To tell her story to some kind woman--at
moments it seemed to her that this would give her comfort, and she
had more than once been on the point of taking the landlady, or the
nice young person from the dressmaker's, into her confidence. If a
woman had been near her she would on certain occasions have treated
such a companion to a fit of weeping; and she had an apprehension
that, on her return, this would form her response to Aunt Lavinia's
first embrace. In fact, however, the two ladies had met, in
Washington Square, without tears, and when they found themselves
alone together a certain dryness fell upon the girl's emotion. It
came over her with a greater force that Mrs. Penniman had enjoyed a
whole year of her lover's society, and it was not a pleasure to her
to hear her aunt explain and interpret the young man, speaking of him
as if her own knowledge of him were supreme.
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