Miss Stackpole knows I detest boarding-house civilisation, and she detests me for detesting it, because she thinks it the highest in the world.

She'd like Gardencourt a great deal better if it were a boarding-house.

For me, I find it almost too much of one! We shall never get on together therefore, and there's no use trying." Mrs.Touchett was right in guessing that Henrietta disapproved of her, but she had not quite put her finger on the reason.

A day or two after Miss Stackpole's arrival she had made some invidious reflexions on American hotels, which excited a vein of counter-argument on the part of the correspondent of the Interviewer, who in the exercise of her profession had acquainted herself, in the western world, with every form of caravansary.

Henrietta expressed the opinion that American hotels were the best in the world, and Mrs.Touchett, fresh from a renewed struggle with them, recorded a conviction that they were the worst.
Ralph, with his experimental geniality, suggested, by way of healing the breach, that the truth lay between the two extremes and that the establishments in question ought to be described as fair middling.