Touchett declared.
Our young woman'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 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 moment, "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, which was all she had known, had
ever been as interesting. No one certainly had on any occasion so held
her as this little thin-lipped, bright-eyed, foreign-looking woman,
who retrieved an insignificant appearance by a distinguished manner
and, sitting there in a well-worn waterproof, talked with striking
familiarity of the courts of Europe.
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