Chapter 7

CHAPTER VII

The two amused themselves, time and again, with talking of the
attitude of the British public as if the young lady had been in a
position to appeal to it; but in fact the British public remained
for the present profoundly indifferent to Miss Isabel Archer,
whose fortune had dropped her, as her cousin said, into the
dullest house in England. Her gouty uncle received very little
company, and Mrs. Touchett, not having cultivated relations with
her husband's neighbours, was not warranted in expecting visits
from them. She had, however, a peculiar taste; she liked to
receive cards. For what is usually called social intercourse she
had very little relish; but nothing pleased her more than to find
her hall-table whitened with oblong morsels of symbolic
pasteboard. She flattered herself that she was a very just woman,
and had mastered the sovereign truth that nothing in this world
is got for nothing. She had played no social part as mistress of
Gardencourt, and it was not to be supposed that, in the
surrounding country, a minute account should be kept of her
comings and goings. But it is by no means certain that she did
not feel it to be wrong that so little notice was taken of them
and that her failure (really very gratuitous) to make herself
important in the neighbourhood had not much to do with the
acrimony of her allusions to her husband's adopted country.
Isabel presently found herself in the singular situation of
defending the British constitution against her aunt; Mrs.
Touchett having formed the habit of sticking pins into this
venerable instrument. Isabel always felt an impulse to pull out
the pins; not that she imagined they inflicted any damage on the
tough old parchment, but because it seemed to her her aunt might
make better use of her sharpness. She was very critical herself--
it was incidental to her age, her sex and her nationality; but
she was very sentimental as well, and there was something in Mrs.
Touchett's dryness that set her own moral fountains flowing.

"Now what's your point of view?" she asked of her aunt. "When you
criticise everything here you should have a point of view. Yours
doesn't seem to be American--you thought everything over there so
disagreeable. When I criticise I have mine; it's thoroughly
American!"

"My dear young lady," said Mrs. Touchett, "there are as many
points of view in the world as there are people of sense to take
them. You may say that doesn't make them very numerous! American?
Never in the world; that's shockingly narrow. My point of view,
thank God, is personal!"

Isabel thought this a better answer than she admitted; it was a
tolerable description of her own manner of judging, but it would
not have sounded