He took a resolve after this not to misinterpret her words even when Miss Stackpole appeared to strike the personal note most strongly.

He bethought himself that persons, in her view, were simple and homogeneous organisms, and that he, for his own part, was too perverted a representative of the nature of man to have a right to deal with her in strict reciprocity.

He carried out his resolve with a great deal of tact, and the young lady found in renewed contact with him no obstacle to the exercise of her genius for unshrinking enquiry, the general application of her confidence.

Her situation at Gardencourt therefore, appreciated as we have seen her to be by Isabel and full of appreciation herself of that free play of intelligence which, to her sense, rendered Isabel's character a sister-spirit, and of the easy venerableness of Mr.
Touchett, whose noble tone, as she said, met with her full approval--her situation at Gardencourt would have been perfectly comfortable had she not conceived an irresistible mistrust of the little lady for whom she had at first supposed herself obliged to "allow" as mistress of the house.

She presently discovered, in truth, that this obligation was of the lightest and that Mrs.Touchett cared very little how Miss Stackpole behaved.