Page:The Portrait of a Lady (1882).djvu/292

284 THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY. she had grown up under other stars. Isabel believed that at bottom she had a different morality. Of course the morality of civilised persons has always much in common ; but Isabel suspected that her friend had esoteric views. She believed, with the presumption of youth, that a morality which differed from her own must be inferior to it ; and this conviction was an aid to detecting an occasional flash of cruelty, an occasional lapse from candour, in the conversation of a woman who had raised delicate kindness to an art, and whose nature was too large for the narrow ways of deception. Her conception of human motives was different from Isabel's, and there were several in her list of which our heroine had not even heard. She had not heard of everything, that was very plain ; and there were evidently things in the world of which it was not advantageous to hear. Once or twice Isabel had a sort of fright, but the reader will be amused at the cause of it. Madame Merle, as we know, comprehended, responded, sympathised, with wonderful readiness ; yet it had nevertheless happened that her young friend mentally exclaimed " Heaven forgive her, she doesn't understand me ! " Absurd as it may seem, this discovery operated as a shock ; it left Isabel with a vague horror, in which there was even an element of foreboding. The horror of course sub- sided, in the light of some sudden proof of Madame Merle's remarkable intelligence ; but it left a" sort of high-water-mark in the development of this delightful intimacy. Madame Merle had once said that, in her belief, when a friendship ceased to grow, it immediately began to decline there was no point of equilibrium between liking a person more and liking him less. A stationary affection, in other words, was impossible it must move one way or the other. Without estimating the value of this doctrine, I may say that if Isabel's imagination, which had hitherto been so actively engaged on her friend's behalf, began at last to languish, she enjoyed her society not a particle less than before. If their friendship had declined, it had declined to a very comfortable level. The truth is that in these days the girl had other uses for her imagination, which was better occupied than it had ever been. I do not allude to the impulse it received as she gazed at the Pyramids in the course of an excursion from Cairo, or as she stood among the broken columns of the Acropolis and fixed her eyes upon the point designated to her as the Strait of Salamis ; deep and memorable as these emotions had been. She came back by the last of March from Egypt and Greece, and made another stay in Rome. A few days after her arrival Gilbert Osmond came down from Florence