basely inferior; and indeed,
though she had been thought rather a prodigy at home, the loss to
society when, in taking her place upon the music-stool, she turned her
back to the room, was usually deemed greater than the gain. When Madame
Merle was neither writing, nor painting, nor touching the piano, she
was usually employed upon wonderful tasks of rich embroidery, cushions,
curtains, decorations for the chimneypiece; an art in which her bold,
free invention was as noted as the agility of her needle. She was never
idle, for when engaged in none of the ways I have mentioned she was
either reading (she appeared to Isabel to read "everything important"),
or walking out, or playing patience with the cards, or talking with her
fellow inmates. And with all this she had always the social quality, was
never rudely absent and yet never too seated. She laid down her pastimes
as easily as she took them up; she worked and talked at the same time,
and appeared to impute scant worth to anything she did. She gave away
her sketches and tapestries; she rose from the piano or remained
there, according to the convenience of her auditors, which she always
unerringly divined. She was in short the most comfortable, profitable,
amenable person to live with. If for Isabel she had a fault it was that
she was not natural; by which the girl meant, not that she was either
affected or pretentious, since from these vulgar vices no woman could
have been more exempt, but that her nature had been too much overlaid by
custom and her angles too much rubbed away. She had become too flexible,
too useful, was too ripe and too final. She was in a word too perfectly
the social animal that man and woman are supposed to have been intended
to be; and she had rid herself of every remnant of that tonic wildness
which we may assume to have belonged even to the most amiable persons
in the ages before country-house life was the fashion. Isabel found it
difficult to think of her in any detachment or privacy, she existed only
in her relations, direct or indirect, with her fellow mortals. One might
wonder what commerce she could possibly hold with her own spirit.
One always ended, however, by feeling that a charming surface doesn't
necessarily prove one superficial; this was an illusion in which, in
one's youth, one had but just escaped being nourished. Madame Merle was
not superficial--not she. She was deep, and her nature spoke none the
less in her behaviour because i