to see you some years hence. I want to see what life makes of you. One
thing's certain--it can't spoil you. It may pull you about horribly, but
I defy it to break you up."

Isabel received this assurance as a young soldier, still panting from
a slight skirmish in which he has come off with honour, might receive a
pat on the shoulder from his colonel. Like such a recognition of merit
it seemed to come with authority. How could the lightest word do less
on the part of a person who was prepared to say, of almost everything
Isabel told her, "Oh, I've been in that, my dear; it passes, like
everything else." On many of her interlocutors Madame Merle might have
produced an irritating effect; it was disconcertingly difficult to
surprise her. But Isabel, though by no means incapable of desiring to
be effective, had not at present this impulse. She was too sincere, too
interested in her judicious companion. And then moreover Madame Merle
never said such things in the tone of triumph or of boastfulness; they
dropped from her like cold confessions.

A period of bad weather had settled upon Gardencourt; the days grew
shorter and there was an end to the pretty tea-parties on the lawn. But
our young woman had long indoor conversations with her fellow visitor,
and in spite of the rain the two ladies often sallied forth for a walk,
equipped with the defensive apparatus which the English climate and
the English genius have between them brought to such perfection. Madame
Merle liked almost everything, including the English rain. "There's
always a little of it and never too much at once," she said; "and it
never wets you and it always smells good." She declared that in England
the pleasures of smell were great--that in this inimitable island there
was a certain mixture of fog and beer and soot which, however odd it
might sound, was the national aroma, and was most agreeable to the
nostril; and she used to lift the sleeve of her British overcoat and
bury her nose in it, inhaling the clear, fine scent of the wool. Poor
Ralph Touchett, as soon as the autumn had begun to define itself, became
almost a prisoner; in bad weather he was unable to step out of the
house, and he used sometimes to stand at one of the windows with his
hands in his pockets and, from a countenance half-rueful, half-critical,
watch Isabel and Madame Merle as they walked down the avenue under a
pair of umbrellas. The roads about Gardencourt were so firm, even in the
worst