Page 262 - the-portrait-of-a-lady

Chapter 19

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 en-
countered 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

262 The Portrait of a Lady