Chapter 19

CHAPTER XIX

As Mrs. Touchett had foretold, Isabel and Madame Merle were
thrown much together during the illness of their host, so that if
they had not become intimate it would have been almost a breach
of good manners. Their manners were of the best, but in addition
to this they happened to please each other. It is perhaps too
much to say that they swore an eternal friendship, but tacitly at
least they called the future to witness. Isabel did so with a
perfectly good conscience, though she would have hesitated to
admit she was intimate with her new friend in the high sense she
privately attached to this term. She often wondered indeed if she
ever had been, or ever could be, intimate with any one. She had
an ideal of friendship as well as of several other sentiments,
which it failed to seem to her in this case--it had not seemed to
her in other cases--that the actual completely expressed. But she
often reminded herself that there were essential reasons why
one's ideal could never become concrete. It was a thing to believe
in, not to see--a matter of faith, not of experience. Experience,
however, might supply us with very creditable imitations of it,
and the part of wisdom was to make the best of these. Certainly,
on the whole, Isabel had never encountered a more agreeable and
interesting figure than Madame Merle; she had never met a person
having less of that fault which is the principal obstacle to
friendship--the air of reproducing the more tiresome, the stale,
the too-familiar parts of one's own character. The gates of the
girl's confidence were opened wider than they had ever been; she
said things to this amiable auditress that she had not yet said
to any one. Sometimes she took alarm at her candour: it was as if
she had given to a comparative stranger the key to her cabinet of
jewels. These spiritual gems were the only ones of any magnitude
that Isabel possessed, but there was all the greater reason for
their being carefully guarded. Afterwards, however, she always
remembered that one should never regret a generous error and that
if Madame Merle had not the merits she attributed to her, so much
the worse for Madame Merle. There was no doubt she had great
merits--she was charming, sympathetic, intelligent, cultivated.
More than this (for it had not been Isabel's ill-fortune to go
through life without meeting in her own sex several persons of
whom no less could fairly be said), she was rare, superior and
preeminent. There are many amiable people in the world, and
Madame Merle was far from being vulgarly good-natured and
restlessly witty. She knew how to think--an accomplishment rare
in women; and she had thought to very good purpose. Of course,
too, she knew how to feel; Isabel