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192 192 THE POKTRAIT OF A LADY. said. " Excuse me ; I don't mean that you were not so before. But you are on a different footing property erects a kind of "barrier. You can do a great many things if you are rich, which would be severely criticised if you were poor. You can go and come, you can travel alone, you can have your own establishment : I mean of course if you will take a companion some decayed gentlewoman with a darned cashmere and dyed hair, who paints on velvet. You don't think you would like that 1 Of course you can do as you please ; I only want you to understand that you are at liberty. You might take Miss Stackpole as your dame de compagnie ; she would keep people off very well. I think, however, that it is 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 would 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 are at all dull," Isa-bel had replied to this. " But you do think I am obstinate and narrow-minded 1 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 visi- ble 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 judgments 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 with her. On her own ground she was always to be found ; but she was never over-inquisitive as regards the terri- tory 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