pt to follow. But at last, quite lucidly, he began again. "Tell
me this first. Doesn't it occur to you that a young lady with sixty
thousand pounds may fall a victim to the fortune-hunters?"

"She'll hardly fall a victim to more than one."

"Well, one's too many."

"Decidedly. That's a risk, and it has entered into my calculation. I
think it's appreciable, but I think it's small, and I'm prepared to take
it."

Poor Mr. Touchett's acuteness had passed into perplexity, and his
perplexity now passed into admiration. "Well, you have gone into it!" he
repeated. "But I don't see what good you're to get of it."

Ralph leaned over his father's pillows and gently smoothed them; he was
aware their talk had been unduly prolonged. "I shall get just the good
I said a few moments ago I wished to put into Isabel's reach--that of
having met the requirements of my imagination. But it's scandalous, the
way I've taken advantage of you!"

CHAPTER XIX

As Mrs. Touchett had foretold, Isabel and Madame Merle were thrown
much together during the illness of their host, so that if they had
not become intimate it would have been almost a breach of good manners.
Their manners were of the best, but in addition to this they happened
to please each other. It is perhaps too much to say that they swore
an eternal friendship, but tacitly at least they called the future to
witness. Isabel did so with a perfectly good conscience, though she
would have hesitated to admit she was intimate with her new friend in
the high sense she privately attached to this term. She often wondered
indeed if she ever had been, or ever could be, intimate with any one.
She had an ideal of friendship as well as of several other sentiments,
which it failed to seem to her in this case--it had not seemed to her
in other cases--that the actual completely expressed. But she often
reminded herself that there were essential reasons why one's ideal
could never become concrete. It was a thing to believe in, not to see--a
matter of faith, not of experience. Experience, however, might supply
us with very creditable imitations of it, and the part of wisdom was
to make the best of these. Certainly, on the whole, Isabel had never
encountered a more agreeable and interesting figure than Madame Merle;
she had never met a person having less of that fault which is the
principal obstacle to friendship--the air of reproducing the more
tiresome, the stale, the too-familiar parts of one'