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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?’ 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 was of
a kind which led her to say: ‘I should like very much to go
to Florence.’
‘Well, if you’ll be very good, and do everything I tell you
I’ll take you there,’ Mrs. Touchett declared.
Our young woman’s emotion deepened; she flushed a lit-
tle 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 person of that sort. You’re 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 mo-
ment, ‘I’d 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 figure: a figure
essentially—almost the first she had ever met. 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 offensive or alarming. The term
had always suggested to her something grotesque and even
sinister. But her aunt made it a matter of high but easy irony,
or comedy, and led her to ask herself if the common tone,

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