The Portrait of a Lady [Volume 2]

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He had repeated the announcement in a tone of almost impersonal
discretion, like a man who expected very little from it but who
spoke for his own needed relief. The tears came into her eyes:
this time they obeyed the sharpness of the pang that suggested to
her somehow the slipping of a fine bolt--backward, forward, she
couldn't have said which. The words he had uttered made him, as
he stood there, beautiful and generous, invested him as with the
golden air of early autumn; but, morally speaking, she retreated
before them--facing him still--as she had retreated in the other
cases before a like encounter. "Oh don't say that, please," she
answered with an intensity that expressed the dread of having, in
this case too, to choose and decide. What made her dread great
was precisely the force which, as it would seem, ought to have
banished all dread--the sense of something within herself, deep
down, that she supposed to be inspired and trustful passion. It
was there like a large sum stored in a bank--which there was a
terror in having to begin to spend. If she touched it, it would
all come out.

"I haven't the idea that it will matter much to you," said
Osmond. "I've too little to offer you. What I have--it's enough
for me; but it's not enough for you. I've neither fortune, nor
fame, nor extrinsic advantages of any kind. So I offer nothing. I
only tell you because I think it can't offend you, and some day
or other it may give you pleasure. It gives me pleasure, I assure
you," he went on, standing there before her, considerately
inclined to her, turning his hat, which he had taken up, slowly
round with a movement which had all the decent tremor of
awkwardness and none of its oddity, and presenting to her his
firm, refined, slightly ravaged face. "It gives me no pain,
because it's perfectly simple. For me you'll always be the most
important woman in the world."

Isabel looked at herself in this character--looked intently,
thinking she filled it with a certain grace. But what she said
was not an expression of any such complacency. "You don't offend
me; but you ought to remember that, without being offended, one
may be incommoded, troubled." "Incommoded," she heard herself
saying that, and it struck her as a ridiculous word. But it was
what stupidly came to her.

"I remember perfectly. Of course you're surprised and startled.
But if it's nothing but that, it will pass away. And it will
perhaps leave something that I may not be ashamed of."

"I don't know what it may leave. You see at all events that I'm
not overwhelmed," said Isabel with rather a pale smile. "I'm not
too troubled to think. And I think that I'm glad I leave Rome
to-morrow."

"Of course I don't agree with you there."

"I don't at all KNOW you," she added abruptly; and then she
coloured as she heard herself saying what she had said almost a
year before to Lord Warburton.

"If you were not going away you'd know me better."

"I shall do that some other time."

"I hope so. I'm very easy to know."

"No, no," she emphatically answered--"there you're not sincere.
You're not easy to know; no one could be less so."

"Well," he laughed, "I said that because I know myself. It may be
a boast, but I do."

"Very likely; but you're very wise."

"So are you, Miss Archer!" Osmond exclaimed.

"I don't feel so just now. Still, I'm wise enough to think you
had better go. Good-night."

"God bless you!" said Gilbert Osmond, taking the hand which she
failed to surrender. After which he added: "If we meet again
you'll find me as you leave me. If we don't I shall be so all the
same."

"Thank you very much. Good-bye."

There was something quietly firm about Isabel's visitor; he might
go of his own movement, but wouldn't be dismissed. "There's one
thing more. I haven't asked anything of you--not even a thought
in the future; you must do me that justice. But there's a little
service I should like to ask. I shall not return home for several
days; Rome's delightful, and it's a good place for a man in my
state of mind. Oh, I know you're sorry to leave it; but you're
right to do what your aunt wishes."

"She doesn't even wish it!" Isabel broke out strangely.

Osmond was apparently on the point of saying something that would
match these words, but he changed his mind and rejoined simply:
"Ah well, it's proper you should go with her, very proper. Do
everything that's proper; I go in for that. Excuse my being so
patronising. You say you don't know me, but when you do you'll
discover what a worship I have for propriety."

"You're not conventional?" Isabel gravely asked.

"I like the way you utter that word! No, I'm not conventional:
I'm convention itself. You don't understand that?" And he paused
a moment, smiling. "I should like to explain it." Then with a
sudden, quick, bright naturalness, "Do come back again,"
he pleaded. "There are so many things we might talk about."

She stood there with lowered eyes. "What service did you speak of
just now?"

"Go and see my little daughter before you leave Florence. She's
alone at the villa; I decided not to send her to my sister, who
hasn't at all my ideas. Tell her she must love her poor father
very much," said Gilbert Osmond gently.

"It will be a great pleasure to me to go," Isabel answered. "I'll
tell her what you say. Once more good-bye."

On this he took a rapid, respectful leave. When he had gone she
stood a moment looking about her and seated herself slowly and
with an air of deliberation. She sat there till her companions
came back, with folded hands, gazing at the ugly carpet. Her
agitation--for it had not diminished--was very still, very deep.
What had happened was something that for a week past her
imagination had been going forward to meet; but here, when it
came, she stopped--that sublime principle somehow broke down. The
working of this young lady's spirit was strange, and I can only
give it to you as I see it, not hoping to make it seem altogether
natural. Her imagination, as I say, now hung back: there was a
last vague space it couldn't cross--a dusky, uncertain tract
which looked ambiguous and even slightly treacherous, like a
moorland seen in the winter twilight. But she was to cross it
yet.

CHAPTER XXX

She returned on the morrow to Florence, under her cousin's
escort, and Ralph Touchett, though usually restive under railway
discipline, thought very well of the successive hours passed in
the train that hurried his companion away from the city now
distinguished by Gilbert Osmond's preference--hours that were to
form the first stage in a larger scheme of travel. Miss Stackpole
had remained behind; she was planning a little trip to Naples, to
be carried out with Mr. Bantling's aid. Isabel was to have three
days in Florence before the 4th of June, the date of Mrs.
Touchett's departure, and she determined to devote the last of
these to her promise to call on Pansy Osmond. Her plan, however,
seemed for a moment likely to modify itself in deference to an
idea of Madame Merle's. This lady was still at Casa Touchett; but
she too was on the point of leaving Florence, her next station
being an ancient castle in the mountains of Tuscany, the
residence of a noble family of that country, whose acquaintance
(she had known them, as she said, "forever") seemed to Isabel, in
the light of certain photographs of their immense crenellated
dwelling which her friend was able to show her, a precious
privilege. She mentioned to this fortunate woman that Mr. Osmond
had asked her to take a look at his daughter, but didn't mention
that he had also made her a declaration of love.

"Ah, comme cela se trouve!" Madame Merle exclaimed. "I myself
have been thinking it would be a kindness to pay the child a
little visit before I go off."

"We can go together then," Isabel reasonably said: "reasonably"
because the proposal was not uttered in the spirit of enthusiasm.
She had prefigured her small pilgrimage as made in solitude; she
should like it better so. She was nevertheless prepared to
sacrifice this mystic sentiment to her great consideration for
her friend.

That personage finely meditated. "After all, why should we both
go; having, each of us, so much to do during these last hours?"

"Very good; I can easily go alone."

"I don't know about your going alone--to the house of a handsome
bachelor. He has been married--but so long ago!"

Isabel stared. "When Mr. Osmond's away what does it matter?"

"They don't know he's away, you see."

"They? Whom do you mean?"

"Every one. But perhaps it doesn't signify."

"If you were going why shouldn't I?" Isabel asked.

"Because I'm an old frump and you're a beautiful young woman."

"Granting all that, you've not promised."

"How much you think of your promises!" said the elder woman in
mild mockery.

"I think a great deal of my promises. Does that surprise you?"

"You're right," Madame Merle audibly reflected. "I really think
you wish to be kind to the child."

"I wish very much to be kind to her."

"Go and see her then; no one will be the wiser. And tell her I'd
have come if you hadn't. Or rather," Madame Merle added, "DON'T
tell her. She won't care."

As Isabel drove, in the publicity of an open vehicle, along the
winding way which led to Mr. Osmond's hill-top, she wondered what
her friend had meant by no one's being the wiser. Once in a
while, at large intervals, this lady, whose voyaging discretion,
as a general thing, was rather of the open sea than of the risky
channel, dropped a remark of ambiguous quality, struck a note
that sounded false. What cared Isabel Archer for the vulgar
judgements of obscure people? and did Madame Merle suppose that
she was capable of doing a thing at all if it had to be
sneakingly done? Of course not: she must have meant something
else--something which in the press of the hours that preceded her
departure she had not had time to explain. Isabel would return to
this some day; there were sorts of things as to which she liked
to be clear. She heard Pansy strumming at the piano in another
place as she herself was ushered into Mr. Osmond's drawing-room;
the little girl was "practising," and Isabel was pleased to think
she performed this duty with rigour. She immediately came in,
smoothing down her frock, and did the honours of her father's
house with a wide-eyed earnestness of courtesy. Isabel sat there
half an hour, and Pansy rose to the occasion as the small, winged
fairy in the pantomime soars by the aid of the dissimulated wire
--not chattering, but conversing, and showing the same respectful
interest in Isabel's affairs that Isabel was so good as to take
in hers. Isabel wondered at her; she had never had so directly
presented to her nose the white flower of cultivated sweetness.
How well the child had been taught, said our admiring young
woman; how prettily she had been directed and fashioned; and yet
how simple, how natural, how innocent she had been kept! Isabel
was fond, ever, of the question of character and quality, of
sounding, as who should say, the deep personal mystery, and it
had pleased her, up to this time, to be in doubt as to whether
this tender slip were not really all-knowing. Was the extremity
of her candour but the perfection of self-consciousness? Was it
put on to please her father's visitor, or was it the direct
expression of an unspotted nature? The hour that Isabel spent in
Mr. Osmond's beautiful empty, dusky rooms--the windows had been
half-darkened, to keep out the heat, and here and there, through
an easy crevice, the splendid summer day peeped in, lighting a
gleam of faded colour or tarnished gilt in the rich gloom--her
interview with the daughter of the house, I say, effectually
settled this question. Pansy was really a blank page, a pure
white surface, successfully kept so; she had neither art, nor
guile, nor temper, nor talent--only two or three small exquisite
instincts: for knowing a friend, for avoiding a mistake,
for taking care of an old toy or a new frock. Yet to be so tender
was to be touching withal, and she could be felt as an easy
victim of fate. She would have no will, no power to resist, no
sense of her own importance; she would easily be mystified,
easily crushed: her force would be all in knowing when and where
to cling. She moved about the place with her visitor, who had
asked leave to walk through the other rooms again, where Pansy
gave her judgement on several works of art. She spoke of her
prospects, her occupations, her father's intentions; she was not
egotistical, but felt the propriety of supplying the information
so distinguished a guest would naturally expect.

"Please tell me," she said, "did papa, in Rome, go to see Madame
Catherine? He told me he would if he had time. Perhaps he had not
time. Papa likes a great deal of time. He wished to speak about
my education; it isn't finished yet, you know. I don't know what
they can do with me more; but it appears it's far from finished.
Papa told me one day he thought he would finish it himself; for
the last year or two, at the convent, the masters that teach the
tall girls are so very dear. Papa's not rich, and I should be
very sorry if he were to pay much money for me, because I don't
think I'm worth it. I don't learn quickly enough, and I have no
memory. For what I'm told, yes--especially when it's pleasant;
but not for what I learn in a book. There was a young girl who
was my best friend, and they took her away from the convent, when
she was fourteen, to make--how do you say it in English?--to
make a dot. You don't say it in English? I hope it isn't wrong;
I only mean they wished to keep the money to marry her. I don't
know whether it is for that that papa wishes to keep the money--
to marry me. It costs so much to marry!" Pansy went on with a
sigh; "I think papa might make that economy. At any rate I'm too
young to think about it yet, and I don't care for any gentleman;
I mean for any but him. If he were not my papa I should like to
marry him; I would rather be his daughter than the wife of--of
some strange person. I miss him very much, but not so much as you
might think, for I've been so much away from him. Papa has always
been principally for holidays. I miss Madame Catherine almost
more; but you must not tell him that. You shall not see him
again? I'm very sorry, and he'll be sorry too. Of everyone who
comes here I like you the best. That's not a great compliment,
for there are not many people. It was very kind of you to come
to-day--so far from your house; for I'm really as yet only a
child. Oh, yes, I've only the occupations of a child. When did
YOU give them up, the occupations of a child? I should like to
know how old you are, but I don't know whether it's right to ask.
At the convent they told us that we must never ask the age. I
don't like to do anything that's not expected; it looks as if one
had not been properly taught. I myself--I should never like to be
taken by surprise. Papa left directions for everything. I go to
bed very early. When the sun goes off that side I go into the
garden. Papa left strict orders that I was not to get scorched. I
always enjoy the view; the mountains are so graceful. In Rome,
from the convent, we saw nothing but roofs and bell-towers. I
practise three hours. I don't play very well. You play yourself?
I wish very much you'd play something for me; papa has the idea
that I should hear good music. Madame Merle has played for me
several times; that's what I like best about Madame Merle; she
has great facility. I shall never have facility. And I've no
voice--just a small sound like the squeak of a slate-pencil
making flourishes."

Isabel gratified this respectful wish, drew off her gloves and
sat down to the piano, while Pansy, standing beside her, watched
her white hands move quickly over the keys. When she stopped she
kissed the child good-bye, held her close, looked at her long.
"Be very good," she said; "give pleasure to your father."

"I think that's what I live for," Pansy answered. "He has not
much pleasure; he's rather a sad man."

Isabel listened to this assertion with an interest which she felt
it almost a torment to be obliged to conceal. It was her pride
that obliged her, and a certain sense of decency; there were
still other things in her head which she felt a strong impulse,
instantly checked, to say to Pansy about her father; there were
things it would have given her pleasure to hear the child, to
make the child, say. But she no sooner became conscious of these
things than her imagination was hushed with horror at the idea of
taking advantage of the little girl--it was of this she would
have accused herself--and of exhaling into that air where he
might still have a subtle sense for it any breath of her charmed
state. She had come--she had come; but she had stayed only an
hour. She rose quickly from the music-stool; even then, however,
she lingered a moment, still holding her small companion, drawing
the child's sweet slimness closer and looking down at her almost
in envy. She was obliged to confess it to herself--she would have
taken a passionate pleasure in talking of Gilbert Osmond to this
innocent, diminutive creature who was so near him. But she said
no other word; she only kissed Pansy once again. They went
together through the vestibule, to the door that opened on the
court; and there her young hostess stopped, looking rather
wistfully beyond. "I may go no further. I've promised papa not to
pass this door."

"You're right to obey him; he'll never ask you anything
unreasonable."

"I shall always obey him. But when will you come again?"

"Not for a long time, I'm afraid."

"As soon as you can, I hope. I'm only a little girl," said Pansy,
"but I shall always expect you." And the small figure stood in
the high, dark doorway, watching Isabel cross the clear, grey
court and disappear into the brightness beyond the big portone,
which gave a wider dazzle as it opened.

CHAPTER XXXI

Isabel came back to Florence, but only after several months; an
interval sufficiently replete with incident. It is not, however,
during this interval that we are closely concerned with her; our
attention is engaged again on a certain day in the late
spring-time, shortly after her return to Palazzo Crescentini and
a year from the date of the incidents just narrated. She was
alone on this occasion, in one of the smaller of the numerous
rooms devoted by Mrs. Touchett to social uses, and there was that
in her expression and attitude which would have suggested that
she was expecting a visitor. The tall window was open, and though
its green shutters were partly drawn the bright air of the garden
had come in through a broad interstice and filled the room with
warmth and perfume. Our young woman stood near it for some time,
her hands clasped behind her; she gazed abroad with the vagueness
of unrest. Too troubled for attention she moved in a vain circle.
Yet it could not be in her thought to catch a glimpse of her
visitor before he should pass into the house, since the entrance
to the palace was not through the garden, in which stillness and
privacy always reigned. She wished rather to forestall his arrival
by a process of conjecture, and to judge by the expression of her
face this attempt gave her plenty to do. Grave she found herself,
and positively more weighted, as by the experience of the lapse of
the year she had spent in seeing the world. She had ranged, she
would have said, through space and surveyed much of mankind, and
was therefore now, in her own eyes, a very different person from
the frivolous young woman from Albany who had begun to take the
measure of Europe on the lawn at Gardencourt a couple of years
before. She flattered herself she had harvested wisdom and
learned a great deal more of life than this light-minded creature
had even suspected. If her thoughts just now had inclined
themselves to retrospect, instead of fluttering their wings
nervously about the present, they would have evoked a multitude
of interesting pictures. These pictures would have been both
landscapes and figure-pieces; the latter, however, would have
been the more numerous. With several of the images that might
have been projected on such a field we are already acquainted.
There would be for instance the conciliatory Lily, our heroine's
sister and Edmund Ludlow's wife, who had come out from New York
to spend five months with her relative. She had left her husband
behind her, but had brought her children, to whom Isabel now
played with equal munificence and tenderness the part of
maiden-aunt. Mr. Ludlow, toward the last, had been able to snatch
a few weeks from his forensic triumphs and, crossing the ocean
with extreme rapidity, had spent a month with the two ladies in
Paris before taking his wife home. The little Ludlows had not
yet, even from the American point of view, reached the proper
tourist-age; so that while her sister was with her Isabel had
confined her movements to a narrow circle. Lily and the babies
had joined her in Switzerland in the month of July, and they had
spent a summer of fine weather in an Alpine valley where the
flowers were thick in the meadows and the shade of great
chestnuts made a resting-place for such upward wanderings as
might be undertaken by ladies and children on warm afternoons.
They had afterwards reached the French capital, which was
worshipped, and with costly ceremonies, by Lily, but thought of
as noisily vacant by Isabel, who in these days made use of her
memory of Rome as she might have done, in a hot and crowded room,
of a phial of something pungent hidden in her handkerchief.

Mrs. Ludlow sacrificed, as I say, to Paris, yet had doubts and
wonderments not allayed at that altar; and after her husband had
joined her found further chagrin in his failure to throw himself
into these speculations. They all had Isabel for subject; but
Edmund Ludlow, as he had always done before, declined to be
surprised, or distressed, or mystified, or elated, at anything
his sister-in-law might have done or have failed to do. Mrs.
Ludlow's mental motions were sufficiently various. At one moment
she thought it would be so natural for that young woman to come
home and take a house in New York--the Rossiters', for instance,
which had an elegant conservatory and was just round the corner
from her own; at another she couldn't conceal her surprise at the
girl's not marrying some member of one of the great aristocracies.
On the whole, as I have said, she had fallen from high communion
with the probabilities. She had taken more satisfaction in
Isabel's accession of fortune than if the money had been left to
herself; it had seemed to her to offer just the proper setting
for her sister's slightly meagre, but scarce the less eminent
figure. Isabel had developed less, however, than Lily had thought
likely--development, to Lily's understanding, being somehow
mysteriously connected with morning-calls and evening-parties.
Intellectually, doubtless, she had made immense strides; but she
appeared to have achieved few of those social conquests of which
Mrs. Ludlow had expected to admire the trophies. Lily's
conception of such achievements was extremely vague; but this was
exactly what she had expected of Isabel--to give it form and
body. Isabel could have done as well as she had done in New York;
and Mrs. Ludlow appealed to her husband to know whether there was
any privilege she enjoyed in Europe which the society of that
city might not offer her. We know ourselves that Isabel had made
conquests--whether inferior or not to those she might have
effected in her native land it would be a delicate matter to
decide; and it is not altogether with a feeling of complacency
that I again mention that she had not rendered these honourable
victories public. She had not told her sister the history of Lord
Warburton, nor had she given her a hint of Mr. Osmond's state of
mind; and she had had no better reason for her silence than that
she didn't wish to speak. It was more romantic to say nothing,
and, drinking deep, in secret, of romance, she was as little
disposed to ask poor Lily's advice as she would have been to
close that rare volume forever. But Lily knew nothing of these
discriminations, and could only pronounce her sister's career a
strange anti-climax--an impression confirmed by the fact that
Isabel's silence about Mr. Osmond, for instance, was in direct
proportion to the frequency with which he occupied her thoughts.
As this happened very often it sometimes appeared to Mrs. Ludlow
that she had lost her courage. So uncanny a result of so
exhilarating an incident as inheriting a fortune was of course
perplexing to the cheerful Lily; it added to her general sense
that Isabel was not at all like other people.

Our young lady's courage, however, might have been taken as
reaching its height after her relations had gone home. She could
imagine braver things than spending the winter in Paris--Paris
had sides by which it so resembled New York, Paris was like
smart, neat prose--and her close correspondence with Madame
Merle did much to stimulate such flights. She had never had a
keener sense of freedom, of the absolute boldness and wantonness
of liberty, than when she turned away from the platform at the
Euston Station on one of the last days of November, after the
departure of the train that was to convey poor Lily, her husband
and her children to their ship at Liverpool. It had been good for
her to regale; she was very conscious of that; she was very
observant, as we know, of what was good for her, and her effort
was constantly to find something that was good enough. To profit
by the present advantage till the latest moment she had made the
journey from Paris with the unenvied travellers. She would have
accompanied them to Liverpool as well, only Edmund Ludlow had
asked her, as a favour, not to do so; it made Lily so fidgety and
she asked such impossible questions. Isabel watched the train
move away; she kissed her hand to the elder of her small nephews,
a demonstrative child who leaned dangerously far out of the
window of the carriage and made separation an occasion of violent
hilarity, and then she walked back into the foggy London street.
The world lay before her--she could do whatever she chose. There
was a deep thrill in it all, but for the present her choice was
tolerably discreet; she chose simply to walk back from Euston
Square to her hotel. The early dusk of a November afternoon had
already closed in; the street-lamps, in the thick, brown air,
looked weak and red; our heroine was unattended and Euston Square
was a long way from Piccadilly. But Isabel performed the journey
with a positive enjoyment of its dangers and lost her way almost
on purpose, in order to get more sensations, so that she was
disappointed when an obliging policeman easily set her right
again. She was so fond of the spectacle of human life that she
enjoyed even the aspect of gathering dusk in the London streets--
the moving crowds, the hurrying cabs, the lighted shops, the
flaring stalls, the dark, shining dampness of everything. That
evening, at her hotel, she wrote to Madame Merle that she should
start in a day or two for Rome. She made her way down to Rome
without touching at Florence--having gone first to Venice and
then proceeded southward by Ancona. She accomplished this journey
without other assistance than that of her servant, for her
natural protectors were not now on the ground. Ralph Touchett was
spending the winter at Corfu, and Miss Stackpole, in the
September previous, had been recalled to America by a telegram
from the Interviewer. This journal offered its brilliant
correspondent a fresher field for her genius than the mouldering
cities of Europe, and Henrietta was cheered on her way by a
promise from Mr. Bantling that he would soon come over to see
her. Isabel wrote to Mrs. Touchett to apologise for not
presenting herself just yet in Florence, and her aunt replied
characteristically enough. Apologies, Mrs. Touchett intimated,
were of no more use to her than bubbles, and she herself never
dealt in such articles. One either did the thing or one didn't,
and what one "would" have done belonged to the sphere of the
irrelevant, like the idea of a future life or of the origin of
things. Her letter was frank, but (a rare case with Mrs.
Touchett) not so frank as it pretended. She easily forgave her
niece for not stopping at Florence, because she took it for a
sign that Gilbert Osmond was less in question there than
formerly. She watched of course to see if he would now find a
pretext for going to Rome, and derived some comfort from learning
that he had not been guilty of an absence. Isabel, on her side,
had not been a fortnight in Rome before she proposed to Madame
Merle that they should make a little pilgrimage to the East.
Madame Merle remarked that her friend was restless, but she added
that she herself had always been consumed with the desire to
visit Athens and Constantinople. The two ladies accordingly
embarked on this expedition, and spent three months in Greece, in
Turkey, in Egypt. Isabel found much to interest her in these
countries, though Madame Merle continued to remark that even
among the most classic sites, the scenes most calculated to
suggest repose and reflexion, a certain incoherence prevailed in
her. Isabel travelled rapidly and recklessly; she was like a
thirsty person draining cup after cup. Madame Merle meanwhile, as
lady-in-waiting to a princess circulating incognita, panted a
little in her rear. It was on Isabel's invitation she had come,
and she imparted all due dignity to the girl's uncountenanced
state. She played her part with the tact that might have been
expected of her, effacing herself and accepting the position of a
companion whose expenses were profusely paid. The situation,
however, had no hardships, and people who met this reserved
though striking pair on their travels would not have been able to
tell you which was patroness and which client. To say that Madame
Merle improved on acquaintance states meagrely the impression she
made on her friend, who had found her from the first so ample and
so easy. At the end of an intimacy of three months Isabel felt
she knew her better; her character had revealed itself, and the
admirable woman had also at last redeemed her promise of relating
her history from her own point of view--a consummation the more
desirable as Isabel had already heard it related from the point
of view of others. This history was so sad a one (in so far as it
concerned the late M. Merle, a positive adventurer, she might
say, though originally so plausible, who had taken advantage,
years before, of her youth and of an inexperience in which
doubtless those who knew her only now would find it difficult to
believe); it abounded so in startling and lamentable incidents
that her companion wondered a person so eprouvee could have
kept so much of her freshness, her interest in life. Into this
freshness of Madame Merle's she obtained a considerable insight;
she seemed to see it as professional, as slightly mechanical,
carried about in its case like the fiddle of the virtuoso, or
blanketed and bridled like the "favourite" of the jockey. She
liked her as much as ever, but there was a corner of the curtain
that never was lifted; it was as if she had remained after all
something of a public performer, condemned to emerge only in
character and in costume. She had once said that she came from a
distance, that she belonged to the "old, old" world, and Isabel
never lost the impression that she was the product of a different
moral or social clime from her own, that she had grown up under
other stars.

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