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22 22 THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY. you don't do that yourself ; you might let the shops to great advantage." Isabel stared ; the idea of letting shops was new to her. " I hope they won't pull it down," she said ; " I am 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," said the girl, rather strangely. "I like places in which things have happened even if they are 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 have 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 1 " 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 wag of a kind which led her to say " I should like very much to go to Florence." " Well, if you will be very good, and do everything I tell you, I will take you there," Mrs. Touchett rejoined. The girl'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 young lady of that sort. You are 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 would 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 person. 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 dis- agreeable. To her imagination the term had always suggested something grotesque and inharmonious. But her aunt infused a