As Mrs. Touchett had foretold¹, 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 breach² 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 perfectly³ good conscience, though she would have hesitated to admit she was intimate with her new friend in the high sense she privately⁴ 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 tiresome⁵, 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 amiable⁶ 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 gems⁷ were the only ones of any magnitude that Isabel

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