Page 309 - the-portrait-of-a-lady

Chapter 21

Mrs. Touchett, before arriving in Paris, had fixed the
day for her departure and by the middle of February had
begun to travel southward. She interrupted her journey to
pay a visit to her son, who at San Remo, on the Italian shore
of the Mediterranean, had been spending a dull, bright win-
ter beneath a slow-moving white umbrella. Isabel went with
her aunt as a matter of course, though Mrs. Touchett, with
homely, customary logic, had laid before her a pair of alter-
natives.
‘Now, of course, you’re completely your own mistress and
are as free as the bird on the bough. I don’t mean you were
not so before, but you’re at present on a different footing—
property erects a kind of barrier. You can do a great many
things if you’re rich which would be severely criticized 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’ll take a companion—some decayed gentlewoman,
with a darned cashmere and dyed hair, who paints on vel-
vet. You don’t think you’d like that? Of course you can do as
you please; I only want you to understand how much you’re
at liberty. You might take Miss Stackpole as your dame de
compagnie; she’d keep people off very well. I think, how-
ever, that it’s a great deal better you should remain with me,
in spite of there being no obligation. It’s better for several

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