a companion--some decayed gentlewoman, with a darned cashmere and dyed
hair, who paints on velvet. You don't think you'd like that? Of course
you can do as you please; I only want you to understand how much you're
at liberty. You might take Miss Stackpole as your dame de compagnie;
she'd keep people off very well. I think, however, that it's a great
deal better you should remain with me, in spite of there being no
obligation. It's better for several reasons, quite apart from your
liking it. I shouldn't think you'd like it, but I recommend you to make
the sacrifice. Of course whatever novelty there may have been at first
in my society has quite passed away, and you see me as I am--a dull,
obstinate, narrow-minded old woman."

"I don't think you're at all dull," Isabel had replied to this.

"But you do think I'm obstinate and narrow-minded? I told you so!" said
Mrs. Touchett with much elation at being justified.

Isabel remained for the present with her aunt, because, in spite of
eccentric impulses, she had a great regard for what was usually deemed
decent, and a young gentlewoman without visible relations had always
struck her as a flower without foliage. It was true that Mrs. Touchett's
conversation had never again appeared so brilliant as that first
afternoon in Albany, when she sat in her damp waterproof and sketched
the opportunities that Europe would offer to a young person of taste.
This, however, was in a great measure the girl's own fault; she had
got a glimpse of her aunt's experience, and her imagination constantly
anticipated the judgements and emotions of a woman who had very little
of the same faculty. Apart from this, Mrs. Touchett had a great merit;
she was as honest as a pair of compasses. There was a comfort in her
stiffness and firmness; you knew exactly where to find her and were
never liable to chance encounters and concussions. On her own ground
she was perfectly present, but was never over-inquisitive as regards
the territory of her neighbour. Isabel came at last to have a kind of
undemonstrable pity for her; there seemed something so dreary in
the condition of a person whose nature had, as it were, so little
surface--offered so limited a face to the accretions of human contact.
Nothing tender, nothing sympathetic, had ever had a chance to fasten
upon it--no wind-sown blossom, no familiar softening moss. Her offered,
her passive extent, in other words, was about that of a knife-edge.
Isabel had