I don’t know that it’s right to make everything so easy for a person.”
“It surely depends upon the person. When the person’s good, your making things easy is all to the credit of virtue. To facilitate the execution of good impulses, what can be a nobler act?”
This was a little difficult to follow, and Mr. Touchett considered it for a while. At last he said: “Isabel’s a sweet young thing; but do you think she’s so good as that?”
“She’s as good as her best opportunities,” Ralph returned.
“Well,” Mr. Touchett declared, “she ought to get a great many opportunities for sixty thousand pounds.”
“I’ve no doubt she will.”
“Of course I’ll do what you want,” said the old man. “I only want to understand it a little.”
“Well, dear daddy, don’t you understand it now?” his son caressingly asked. “If you don’t we won’t take any more trouble about it. We’ll leave it alone.”
Mr. Touchett lay a long time still. Ralph supposed he had given up the attempt to follow. But at last, quite lucidly, he began again. “Tell me this first. Doesn’t it occur to you that a young lady with sixty thousand pounds may fall a victim to the fortune-hunters?”
“She’ll hardly fall a victim to more than one.”
“Well, one’s too many.”
“Decidedly. That’s a risk, and it has entered into my calculation. I think it’s appreciable, but I think it’s small, and I’m prepared to take it.”
Poor Mr. Touchett’s acuteness had passed into perplexity, and his perplexity now passed into admiration. “Well, you have gone into it!” he repeated. “But I don’t see what good you’re to get of it.”
Ralph leaned over his father’s pillows and gently smoothed them; he was aware their talk had been unduly prolonged. “I shall get just the good I said a few moments ago I wished to put into Isabel’s reach — that of having met the requirements of my imagination. But it’s scandalous, the way I’ve taken advantage of you!”
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 couldn’t have spent a week with her without being sure of that. This was indeed Madame Merle’s great talent, her most perfect gift. Life had told upon her; she had felt it strongly, and it was part of the satisfaction to be taken in her society that when the girl talked of what she was pleased to call serious matters this lady understood her so easily and quickly. Emotion, it is true, had become with her rather historic; she made no secret of the fact that the fount of passion, thanks to having been rather violently tapped at one period, didn’t flow quite so freely as of yore. She proposed moreover, as well as expected, to cease feeling; she freely admitted that of old she had been a little mad, and now she pretended to be perfectly sane.
“I judge more than I used to,” she said to Isabel, “but it seems to me one has earned the right. One can’t judge till one’s forty; before that we’re too eager, too hard, too cruel, and in addition much too ignorant. I’m sorry for you; it will be a long time before you’re forty. But every gain’s a loss of some kind; I often think that after forty one can’t really feel. The freshness, the quickness have certainly gone. You’ll keep them longer than most people; it will be a great satisfaction to me to see you some years hence. I want to see what life makes of you. One thing’s certain — it can’t spoil you. It may pull you about horribly, but I defy it to break you up.”
Isabel received this assurance as a young soldier, still panting from a slight skirmish in which he has come off with honour, might receive a pat on the shoulder from his colonel. Like such a recognition of merit it seemed to come with authority. How could the lightest word do less on the part of a person who was prepared to say, of almost everything Isabel told her, “Oh, I’ve been in that, my dear; it passes, like everything else.” On many of her interlocutors Madame Merle might have produced an irritating effect; it was disconcertingly difficult to surprise her. But Isabel, though by no means incapable of desiring to be effective, had not at present this impulse. She was too sincere, too interested in her judicious companion. And then moreover Madame Merle never said such things in the tone of triumph or of boastfulness; they dropped from her like cold confessions.
A period of bad weather had settled upon Gardencourt; the days grew shorter and there was an end to the pretty tea-parties on the lawn. But our young woman had long indoor conversations with her fellow visitor, and in spite of the rain the two ladies often sallied forth for a walk, equipped with the defensive apparatus which the English climate and the English genius have between them brought to such perfection. Madame Merle liked almost everything, including the English rain. “There’s always a little of it and never too much at once,” she said; “and it never wets you and it always smells good.” She declared that in England the pleasures of smell were great — that in this inimitable island there was a certain mixture of fog and beer and soot which, however odd it might sound, was the national aroma, and was most agreeable to the nostril; and she used to lift the sleeve of her British overcoat and bury her nose in it, inhaling the clear, fine scent of the wool. Poor Ralph Touchett, as soon as the autumn had begun to define itself, became almost a prisoner; in bad weather he was unable to step out of the house, and he used sometimes to
