rpretations with as much ingenuity as good-humour. Isabel listened
to the discussions taking place between the two with a sense that
she might derive much benefit from them and that they were among the
advantages she couldn't have enjoyed for instance in Albany. In the
clear May mornings before the formal breakfast--this repast at Mrs.
Touchett's was served at twelve o'clock--she wandered with her cousin
through the narrow and sombre Florentine streets, resting a while in
the thicker dusk of some historic church or the vaulted chambers of some
dispeopled convent. She went to the galleries and palaces; she looked at
the pictures and statues that had hitherto been great names to her,
and exchanged for a knowledge which was sometimes a limitation a
presentiment which proved usually to have been a blank. She performed
all those acts of mental prostration in which, on a first visit to
Italy, youth and enthusiasm so freely indulge; she felt her heart beat
in the presence of immortal genius and knew the sweetness of rising
tears in eyes to which faded fresco and darkened marble grew dim. But
the return, every day, was even pleasanter than the going forth; the
return into the wide, monumental court of the great house in which Mrs.
Touchett, many years before, had established herself, and into the
high, cool rooms where the carven rafters and pompous frescoes of the
sixteenth century looked down on the familiar commodities of the age of
advertisement. Mrs. Touchett inhabited an historic building in a narrow
street whose very name recalled the strife of medieval factions; and
found compensation for the darkness of her frontage in the modicity of
her rent and the brightness of a garden where nature itself looked as
archaic as the rugged architecture of the palace and which cleared
and scented the rooms in regular use. To live in such a place was, for
Isabel, to hold to her ear all day a shell of the sea of the past. This
vague eternal rumour kept her imagination awake.

Gilbert Osmond came to see Madame Merle, who presented him to the young
lady lurking at the other side of the room. Isabel took on this occasion
little part in the talk; she scarcely even smiled when the others turned
to her invitingly; she sat there as if she had been at the play and had
paid even a large sum for her place. Mrs. Touchett was not present, and
these two had it, for the effect of brilliancy, all their own way. They
talked of the Florentine, the Roman,