Page 267 - the-portrait-of-a-lady

verted product of their common soil, and had a conviction
that it would be severely judged. Henrietta would not at all
subscribe to Madame Merle; for reasons she could not have
defined this truth came home to the girl. On the other hand
she was equally sure that, should the occasion offer, her new
friend would strike off some happy view of her old: Madame
Merle was too humorous, too observant, not to do justice
to Henrietta, and on becoming acquainted with her would
probably give the measure of a tact which Miss Stackpole
couldn’t hope to emulate. She appeared to have in her ex-
perience a touchstone for everything, and somewhere in
the capacious pocket of her genial memory she would find
the key to Henrietta’s value. ‘That’s the great thing,’ Isabel
solemnly pondered; ‘that’s the supreme good fortune: to be
in a better position for appreciating people than they are
for appreciating you.’ And she added that such, when one
considered it, was simply the essence of the aristocratic situ-
ation. In this light, if in none other, one should aim at the
aristocratic situation.
I may not count over all the links in the chain which
led Isabel to think of Madame Merle’s situation as aristo-
cratic—a view of it never expressed in any reference made
to it by that lady herself. She had known great things and
great people, but she had never played a great part. She was
one of the small ones of the earth; she had not been born
to honours; she knew the world too well to nourish fatu-
ous illusions on the article of her own place in it. She had
encountered many of the fortunate few and was perfectly
aware of those points at which their fortune differed from

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