on't pull it down," she said; "I'm extremely fond of it."

"I don't see what makes you fond of it; your father died here."

"Yes; but I don't dislike it for that," the girl rather strangely
returned. "I like places in which things have happened--even if they're
sad things. A great many people have died here; the place has been full
of life."

"Is that what you call being full of life?"

"I mean full of experience--of people's feelings and sorrows. And not of
their sorrows only, for I've been very happy here as a child."

"You should go to Florence if you like houses in which things have
happened--especially deaths. I live in an old palace in which three
people have been murdered; three that were known and I don't know how
many more besides."

"In an old palace?" Isabel repeated.

"Yes, my dear; a very different affair from this. This is very
bourgeois."

Isabel felt some emotion, for she had always thought highly of her
grandmother's house. But the emotion was of a kind which led her to say:
"I should like very much to go to Florence."

"Well, if you'll be very good, and do everything I tell you I'll take
you there," Mrs. Touchett declared.

Our young woman's emotion deepened; she flushed a little and smiled at
her aunt in silence. "Do everything you tell me? I don't think I can
promise that."

"No, you don't look like a person of that sort. You're fond of your own
way; but it's not for me to blame you."

"And yet, to go to Florence," the girl exclaimed in a moment, "I'd
promise almost anything!"

Edmund and Lilian were slow to return, and Mrs. Touchett had an
hour's uninterrupted talk with her niece, who found her a strange and
interesting figure: a figure essentially--almost the first she had ever
met. She was as eccentric as Isabel had always supposed; and hitherto,
whenever the girl had heard people described as eccentric, she had
thought of them as offensive or alarming. The term had always suggested
to her something grotesque and even sinister. But her aunt made it a
matter of high but easy irony, or comedy, and led her to ask herself
if the common tone, which was all she had known, had ever been as
interesting. No one certainly had on any occasion so held her as this
little thin-lipped, bright-eyed, foreign-looking woman, who retrieved an
insignificant appearance by a distinguished manner and, sitting there in
a well-worn waterproof, talked with striking familiarity of the courts
of Europe. There