," Isabel solemnly pondered; "that's the supreme
good fortune: to be in a better position for appreciating people than
they are for appreciating you." And she added that such, when one
considered it, was simply the essence of the aristocratic situation.
In this light, if in none other, one should aim at the aristocratic
situation.

I may not count over all the links in the chain which led Isabel to
think of Madame Merle's situation as aristocratic--a view of it never
expressed in any reference made to it by that lady herself. She had
known great things and great people, but she had never played a great
part. She was one of the small ones of the earth; she had not been born
to honours; she knew the world too well to nourish fatuous illusions
on the article of her own place in it. She had encountered many of the
fortunate few and was perfectly aware of those points at which their
fortune differed from hers. But if by her informed measure she was no
figure for a high scene, she had yet to Isabel's imagination a sort of
greatness. To be so cultivated and civilised, so wise and so easy,
and still make so light of it--that was really to be a great lady,
especially when one so carried and presented one's self. It was as if
somehow she had all society under contribution, and all the arts and
graces it practised--or was the effect rather that of charming uses
found for her, even from a distance, subtle service rendered by her to
a clamorous world wherever she might be? After breakfast she wrote a
succession of letters, as those arriving for her appeared innumerable:
her correspondence was a source of surprise to Isabel when they
sometimes walked together to the village post-office to deposit Madame
Merle's offering to the mail. She knew more people, as she told Isabel,
than she knew what to do with, and something was always turning up to be
written about. Of painting she was devotedly fond, and made no more of
brushing in a sketch than of pulling off her gloves. At Gardencourt she
was perpetually taking advantage of an hour's sunshine to go out with a
camp-stool and a box of water-colours. That she was a brave musician we
have already perceived, and it was evidence of the fact that when she
seated herself at the piano, as she always did in the evening, her
listeners resigned themselves without a murmur to losing the grace
of her talk. Isabel, since she had known her, felt ashamed of her own
facility, which she now looked upon as