He took a resolve after this not to misinterpret her words even when Miss Stackpole appeared to strike the personal note most strongly. He bethought himself that persons, in her view, were simple and homogeneous organisms, and that he, for his own part, was too perverted¹ a representative of the nature of man to have a right to deal with her in strict reciprocity. He carried out his resolve with a great deal of tact², and the young lady found in renewed contact with him no obstacle to the exercise of her genius for unshrinking enquiry, the general application of her confidence. Her situation at Gardencourt therefore, appreciated as we have seen her to be by Isabel and full of appreciation³ herself of that free play of intelligence which, to her sense, rendered Isabel’s character a sister-spirit, and of the easy venerableness of Mr. Touchett, whose noble tone, as she said, met with her full approval — her situation at Gardencourt would have been perfectly⁴ comfortable had she not conceived an irresistible⁵ mistrust of the little lady for whom she had at first supposed herself obliged to “allow” as mistress of the house. She presently discovered, in truth, that this obligation was of the lightest and that Mrs. Touchett cared very little how Miss Stackpole behaved. Mrs. Touchett had defined her to Isabel as both an adventuress and a bore — adventuresses usually giving one more of a thrill; she had expressed some surprise at her niece’s having selected such a friend, yet had immediately added that she knew Isabel’s friends were her own affair and that she had never undertaken to like them all or to restrict the girl to those she liked.

 

“If you could see none but the people I like, my dear, you’d have a very small society,” Mrs. Touchett frankly⁶ admitted; “and I don’t think I like any man or woman well enough to recommend them to you. When it comes to recommending it’s a serious affair. I don’t like Miss Stackpole — everything about her

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