h woman; everything
in her person was round and replete, though without those accumulations
which suggest heaviness. Her features were thick but in perfect
proportion and harmony, and her complexion had a healthy clearness.
Her grey eyes were small but full of light and incapable of
stupidity--incapable, according to some people, even of tears; she had
a liberal, full-rimmed mouth which when she smiled drew itself upward to
the left side in a manner that most people thought very odd, some very
affected and a few very graceful. Isabel inclined to range herself in
the last category. Madame Merle had thick, fair hair, arranged somehow
"classically" and as if she were a Bust, Isabel judged--a Juno or a
Niobe; and large white hands, of a perfect shape, a shape so perfect
that their possessor, preferring to leave them unadorned, wore no
jewelled rings. Isabel had taken her at first, as we have seen, for
a Frenchwoman; but extended observation might have ranked her as a
German--a German of high degree, perhaps an Austrian, a baroness, a
countess, a princess. It would never have been supposed she had come
into the world in Brooklyn--though one could doubtless not have carried
through any argument that the air of distinction marking her in so
eminent a degree was inconsistent with such a birth. It was true that
the national banner had floated immediately over her cradle, and the
breezy freedom of the stars and stripes might have shed an influence
upon the attitude she there took towards life. And yet she had evidently
nothing of the fluttered, flapping quality of a morsel of bunting in the
wind; her manner expressed the repose and confidence which come from a
large experience. Experience, however, had not quenched her youth; it
had simply made her sympathetic and supple. She was in a word a woman of
strong impulses kept in admirable order. This commended itself to Isabel
as an ideal combination.

The girl made these reflexions while the three ladies sat at their tea,
but that ceremony was interrupted before long by the arrival of the
great doctor from London, who had been immediately ushered into the
drawing-room. Mrs. Touchett took him off to the library for a private
talk; and then Madame Merle and Isabel parted, to meet again at dinner.
The idea of seeing more of this interesting woman did much to mitigate
Isabel's sense of the sadness now settling on Gardencourt.

When she came into the drawing-room before dinner she found