Page 354 - the-portrait-of-a-lady

if it lurked in his words, failed on this occasion to peep from
his face. ‘Do you wish Madame Merle to be banished?’
‘By no means. She’s much too good company. I delight in
Madame Merle,’ said Ralph Touchett simply.
‘You’re very odious, sir!’ Isabel exclaimed. And then she
asked him if he knew anything that was not to the honour
of her brilliant friend.
‘Nothing whatever. Don’t you see that’s just what I mean?
On the character of every one else you may find some little
black speck; if I were to take half an hour to it, some day,
I’ve no doubt I should be able to find one on yours. For my
own, of course, I’m spotted like a leopard. But on Madame
Merle’s nothing, nothing, nothing!’
‘That’s just what I think!’ said Isabel with a toss of her
head. ‘That is why I like her so much.’
‘She’s a capital person for you to know. Since you wish to
see the world you couldn’t have a better guide.’
‘I suppose you mean by that that she’s worldly?’
‘Worldly? No,’ said Ralph, ‘she’s the great round world
itself!’
It had certainly not, as Isabel for the moment took it into
her head to believe, been a refinement of malice in him to
say that he delighted in Madame Merle. Ralph Touchett took
his refreshment wherever he could find it, and he would not
have forgotten himself if he had been left wholly unbeguiled
by such a mistress of the social art. There are deep-lying
sympathies and antipathies, and it may have been that, in
spite of the administered justice she enjoyed at his hands,
her absence from his mother’s house would not have made

354 The Portrait of a Lady