weather, that the two ladies always came back with a healthy glow
in their cheeks, looking at the soles of their neat, stout boots and
declaring that their walk had done them inexpressible good. Before
luncheon, always, Madame Merle was engaged; Isabel admired and envied
her rigid possession of her morning. Our heroine had always passed for a
person of resources and had taken a certain pride in being one; but she
wandered, as by the wrong side of the wall of a private garden, round
the enclosed talents, accomplishments, aptitudes of Madame Merle. She
found herself desiring to emulate them, and in twenty such ways this
lady presented herself as a model. "I should like awfully to be so!"
Isabel secretly exclaimed, more than once, as one after another of her
friend's fine aspects caught the light, and before long she knew that
she had learned a lesson from a high authority. It took no great time
indeed for her to feel herself, as the phrase is, under an influence.
"What's the harm," she wondered, "so long as it's a good one? The more
one's under a good influence the better. The only thing is to see our
steps as we take them--to understand them as we go. That, no doubt, I
shall always do. I needn't be afraid of becoming too pliable; isn't it
my fault that I'm not pliable enough?" It is said that imitation is the
sincerest flattery; and if Isabel was sometimes moved to gape at her
friend aspiringly and despairingly it was not so much because she
desired herself to shine as because she wished to hold up the lamp for
Madame Merle. She liked her extremely, but was even more dazzled than
attracted. She sometimes asked herself what Henrietta Stackpole would
say to her thinking so much of this perverted product of their common
soil, and had a conviction that it would be severely judged. Henrietta
would not at all subscribe to Madame Merle; for reasons she could not
have defined this truth came home to the girl. On the other hand she
was equally sure that, should the occasion offer, her new friend would
strike off some happy view of her old: Madame Merle was too humorous,
too observant, not to do justice to Henrietta, and on becoming
acquainted with her would probably give the measure of a tact which
Miss Stackpole couldn't hope to emulate. She appeared to have in her
experience a touchstone for everything, and somewhere in the capacious
pocket of her genial memory she would find the key to Henrietta's value.
"That's the great thing