Page 132 - the-portrait-of-a-lady

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 frankly 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 displeases me; she talks so much too loud and
looks at one as if one wanted to look at her—which one
doesn’t. I’m sure she has lived all her life in a boarding-
house, and I detest the manners and the liberties of such
places. If you ask me if I prefer my own manners, which
you doubtless think very bad, I’ll tell you that I prefer them
immensely. Miss Stackpole knows I detest boarding-house
civilization, and she detests me for detesting it, because she
thinks it the highest in the world. She’d like Gardencourt a
great deal better if it were a boarding-house. For me, I find
it almost too much of one! We shall never get on together
therefore, and there’s no use trying.’
Mrs. Touchett was right in guessing that Henrietta dis-
approved of her, but she had not quite put her finger on the
reason. A day or two after Miss Stackpole’s arrival she had
made some invidious reflexions on American hotels, which
excited a vein of counterargument on the part of the cor-
respondent of the Interviewer, who in the exercise of her
profession had acquainted herself, in the western world,
with every form of caravansary. Henrietta expressed the

132 The Portrait of a Lady