Page 268 - the-portrait-of-a-lady

hers. But if by her informed measure she was no figure for
a high scene, she had yet to Isabel’s imagination a sort of
greatness. To be so cultivated and civilized, so wise and so
easy, and still make so light of it—that was really to be a
great lady, especially when one so carried and presented
one’s self. It was as if somehow she had all society under
contribution, and all the arts and graces it practised—or
was the effect rather that of charming uses found for her,
even from a distance, subtle service rendered by her to a
clamorous world wherever she might be? After breakfast
she wrote a succession of letters, as those arriving for her
appeared innumerable: her correspondence was a source of
surprise to Isabel when they sometimes walked together to
the village post-office to deposit Madame Merle’s offering to
the mail. She knew more people, as she told Isabel, than she
knew what to do with, and something was always turning
up to be written about. Of painting she was devotedly fond,
and made no more of brushing in a sketch than of pulling
off her gloves. At Gardencourt she was perpetually taking
advantage of an hour’s sunshine to go out with a camp-stool
and a box of water-colours. That she was a brave musician
we have already perceived, and it was evidence of the fact
that when she seated herself at the piano, as she always did
in the evening, her listeners resigned themselves without a
murmur to losing the grace of her talk. Isabel, since she had
known her, felt ashamed of her own facility, which she now
looked upon as basely inferior; and indeed, though she had
been thought rather a prodigy at home, the loss to society
when, in taking her place upon the music-stool, she turned

268 The Portrait of a Lady