Page:The Portrait of a Lady (1882).djvu/175

THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY. 167 remarkable as the agility of her needle. She was never idle, for when she was engaged in none of the ways I have mentioned, she was either reading (she appeared to Isabel to read everything important), or walking out, or playing patience with the cards, or talking with her fellow inmates. And with all this, she always had the social quality ; she never was preoccupied, she never pressed too hard. She laid down her pastimes as easily as she took them up ; she worked and talked at the same time, and she appeared to attach no importance to anything she did. She gave away her sketches and tapestries ; she rose from the piano, or remained there, according to the convenience of her auditors, which she always unerringly divined. She was, in short, a most _ comfortable, protitable, agreeable person to live with. If for Isabel she had a fault, it was that she was not natural ; by which the girl meant, not that she was affected or pretentious ; for from these vulgar vices no woman could have been more exempt ; but that her nature had been too much over- laid by custom and her angles too much smoothed. She had become too flexible, too supple ; she was too finished, too civilised. She was, in a word, too perfectly the social animal that man and woman are supposed to have been intended to be ; and she had rid herself of every remnant of that tonic wildness which we may assume to have belonged even to the most amiable persons in the ages before country-house life was the fashion. Isabel found it difficult to think of Madame Merle as an isolated figure ; she existed only in her relations with her fellow-mortals. Isabel often wondered what her relations might be with her own soul. She always ended, however, by feeling that having a charming surface does not necessarily prove that one is super- ficial ; this was an illusion in which, in her youth, she had only just sufficiently escaped being nourished. Madame Merle was not superficial not she. She was deep ; and her nature spoke none the less in her behaviour because it spoke a conventional language. " What is language at all but a convention 1 " said Isabel. " She has the good taste not to pretend, like some people I have met, to express herself by original signs." " I am afraid you have suffered much," Isabel once found occasion to say to her, in response to some allusion that she had dropped. " What makes you think that 1 " Madame Merle asked, with a picturesque smile. " I hope I have not the pose of a martyr. " " No ; but you sometimes say things that I think people who have always been happy would not have found out."