Page 459 - the-portrait-of-a-lady

Madame Merle’s remarkable intelligence; but it stood for a
high-water-mark in the ebb and flow of confidence. Madame
Merle had once declared her belief that when a friendship
ceases to grow it immediately begins to decline-there be-
ing no point of equilibrium between liking more and liking
less. A stationary affection, in other words, was impossible-
it must move one way or the other. However that might be,
the girl had in these days a thousand uses for her sense of
the romantic, which was more active 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 re-
mained. 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 descended from Florence and re-
mained three weeks, during which the fact of her being with
his old friend Madame Merle, in whose house she had gone
to lodge, made it virtually inevitable that he should see her
every day. When the last of April came she wrote to Mrs.
Touchett that she should now rejoice to accept an invita-
tion given long before, and went to pay a visit at Palazzo
Crescentini, Madame Merle on this occasion remaining in
Rome. She found her aunt alone; her cousin was still at Cor-
fu. Ralph, however, was expected in Florence from day to
day, and Isabel, who had not seen him for upwards of a year,
was prepared to give him the most affectionate welcome.

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