Page 281 - the-portrait-of-a-lady

‘What should you have liked to do that you’ve not
done?’
Madame Merle took a sheet of music—she was seated at
the piano and had abruptly wheeled about on the stool when
she first spokeand mechanically turned the leaves. ‘I’m very
ambitious!’ she at last replied.
‘And your ambitions have not been satisfied? They must
have been great.’
‘They were great. I should make myself ridiculous by
talking of them.’
Isabel wondered what they could have been—whether
Madame Merle had aspired to wear a crown. ‘I don’t know
what your idea of success may be, but you seem to me to
have been successful. To me indeed you’re a vivid image of
success.’
Madame Merle tossed away the music with a smile.
‘What’s your idea of success?’
‘You evidently think it must be a very tame one. It’s to see
some dream of one’s youth come true.’
‘Ah,’ Madame Merle exclaimed, ‘that I’ve never seen! But
my dreams were so great—so preposterous. Heaven forgive
me, I’m dreaming now!’ And she turned back to the piano
and began grandly to play. On the morrow she said to Isa-
bel that her definition of success had been very pretty, yet
frightfully sad. Measured in that way, who had succeeded?
The dreams of one’s youth, why they were enchanting, they
were divine! Who had ever seen such things come to pass?
‘I myself—a few of them,’ Isabel ventured to answer.
‘Already? They must have been dreams of yesterday.’

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