It was true that Mrs.Touchett's conversation had never again appeared so brilliant as that first afternoon in Albany, when she sat in her damp waterproof and sketched the opportunities that Europe would offer to a young person of taste.
This, however, was in a great measure the girl's own fault; she had got a glimpse of her aunt's experience, and her imagination constantly anticipated the judgements and emotions of a woman who had very little of the same faculty.

Apart from this, Mrs.Touchett had a great merit; she was as honest as a pair of compasses.

There was a comfort in her stiffness and firmness; you knew exactly where to find her and were never liable to chance encounters and concussions.

On her own ground she was perfectly present, but was never over-inquisitive as regards the territory of her neighbour.

Isabel came at last to have a kind of undemonstrable pity for her; there seemed something so dreary in the condition of a person whose nature had, as it were, so little surface--offered so limited a face to the accretions of human contact.
Nothing tender, nothing sympathetic, had ever had a chance to fasten upon it--no wind-sown blossom, no familiar softening moss.