Washington Square
by Henry James
I
During a portion of the first half of the present century,
and more particularly during the latter part of it, there
flourished and practiced in the city of New York a
physician who enjoyed perhaps an exceptional share of
the consideration which, in the United States, has always
been bestowed upon distinguished members of the
medical profession. This profession in America has
constantly been held in honor, and more successfully than
elsewhere has put forward a claim to the epithet of
"liberal." In a country in which, to play a social part, you
must either earn your income or make believe that you
earn it, the healing art has appeared in a high degree to
combine two recognized sources of credit. It belongs to
the realm of the practical, which in the United States is a
great recommendation; and it is touched by the light of
science--a merit appreciated in a community in which the
love of knowledge has not always been accompanied by
leisure and opportunity.
It was an element in Doctor Sloper's reputation that his
learning and his skill were very evenly balanced; he was
what you might call a scholarly doctor, and yet there was
nothing abstract in his remedies--he always ordered you
to take something. Though he was felt to be extremely
thorough, he was not uncomfortably theoretic; and if he
sometimes explained matters rather more minutely than
might seem of use to the patient, he never went so far
(like some practitioners one had heard of) as to trust to
the explanation alone, but always left behind him an
inscrutable prescription. There were some doctors that
left the prescription without offering any explanation at all;
and he did not belong to that class either, which was after
all the most vulgar. It will be seen that I am describing a
clever man; and this is really the reason why Doctor
Sloper had become a local celebrity.
At the time at which we are chiefly concerned with him
he was some fifty years of age, and his popularity was at
its height. He was very witty, and he passed in the best
society of New York for a man of the world--which,
indeed, he was, in a very sufficient degree. I hasten to
add, to anticipate possible misconception, that he was
not the least of a charlatan. He was a thoroughly honest
man--honest in a degree of which he had perhaps lacked
the opportunity to give the complete measure; and,
putting aside the great good nature of the circle in which
he practiced, which was rather fond of boasting that it
possessed the "brightest" doctor in the country, he daily
justified his claim to the talents attributed to him by the
popular voice. He was an observer, even a philosopher,
and to be bright was so natural to him, and (as the
popular voice said) came so easily, that he never aimed
at mere effect, and had none of the little tricks and
pretensions of second-rate reputations. It must be
confessed that fortune had favored him, and that he had
found the path to prosperity very soft to his tread. He
had married, at the age of twenty-seven, for love, a very
charming girl, Miss Catherine Harrington, of New York,
who, in addition to her charms, had brought him a solid
dowry. Mrs. Sloper was amiable, graceful,
accomplished, elegant, and in 1820 she had been one of
the pretty girls of the small but promising capital which
clustered about the Battery and overlooked the Bay, and
of which the uppermost boundary was indicated by the
grassy waysides of Canal Street. Even at the age of
twenty-seven Austin Sloper had made his mark
sufficiently to mitigate the anomaly of his having been
chosen among a dozen suitors by a young woman of high
fashion, who had ten thousand dollars of income and the
most charming eyes in the island of Manhattan. These
eyes, and some of their accompaniments, were for about
five years a source of extreme satisfaction to the young
physician, who was both a devoted and a very happy
husband.
The fact of his having married a rich woman made no
difference in the line he had traced for himself, and he
cultivated his profession with as definite a purpose as if
he still had no other resources than his fraction of the
modest patrimony which, on his father's death, he had
shared with his brothers and sisters. This purpose had not
been preponderantly to make money--it had been rather
to learn something and to do something. To learn
something interesting, and to do something useful--this
was, roughly speaking, the program he had sketched,
and of which the accident of his wife having an income
appeared to him in no degree to modify the validity. He
was fond of his practice, and of exercising a skill of which
he was agreeably conscious, and it was so patent a truth
that if he were not a doctor there was nothing else he
could be, that a doctor he persisted in being, in the best
possible conditions. Of course his easy domestic situation
saved him a good deal of drudgery, and his wife's
affiliation to the "best people" brought him a good many
of those patients whose symptoms are, if not more
interesting in themselves than those of the lower orders,
at least more consistently displayed. He desired
experience, and in the course of twenty years he got a
great deal. It must be added that it came to him in some
forms which, whatever might have been their intrinsic
value, made it the reverse of welcome. His first child, a
little boy of extraordinary promise, as the doctor, who
was not addicted to easy enthusiasm, firmly believed,
died at three years of age, in spite of everything that the
mother's tenderness and the father's science could invent
to save him. Two years later Mrs. Sloper gave birth to a
second infant--an infant of a sex which rendered the poor
child, to the doctor's sense, an inadequate substitute for
his lamented firstborn, of whom he had promised himself
to make an admirable man. The little girl was a
disappointment; but this was not the worst. A week after
her birth the young mother, who, as the phrase is, had
been doing well, suddenly betrayed alarming symptoms,
and before another week had elapsed Austin Sloper was
a widower.
For a man whose trade was to keep people alive he had
certainly done poorly in his own family; and a bright
doctor who within three years loses his wife and his little
boy should perhaps be prepared to see either his skill or
his affection impugned. Our friend, however, escaped
criticism; that is, he escaped all criticism but his own,
which was much the most competent and most
formidable. He walked under the weight of this very
private censure for the rest of his days, and bore forever
the scars of a castigation to which the strongest hand he
knew had treated him on the night that followed his wife's
death. The world, which, as I have said, appreciated him,
pitied him too much to be ironical; his misfortune made
him more interesting, and even helped him to be the
fashion. It was observed that even medical families
cannot escape the more insidious forms of disease, and
that, after all, Doctor Sloper had lost other patients
besides the two I have mentioned; which constituted an
honorable precedent. His little girl remained to him; and
though she was not what he had desired, he proposed to
himself to make the best of her. He had on hand a stock
of unexpended authority, by which the child, in its early
years, profited largely. She had been named, as a matter
of course, after her poor mother, and even in her most
diminutive babyhood the doctor never called her anything
but Catherine. She grew up a very robust and healthy
child, and her father, as he looked at her, often said to
himself that, such as she was, he at least need have no
fear of losing her. I say "such as she was," because, to tell
the truth--But this is a truth of which I will defer the
telling.
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 favorite 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, ...
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