should have
made something better of my life."

"What should you have liked to do that you've not done?"

Madame Merle took a sheet of music--she was seated at the piano and
had abruptly wheeled about on the stool when she first spoke--and
mechanically turned the leaves. "I'm very ambitious!" she at last
replied.

"And your ambitions have not been satisfied? They must have been great."

"They WERE great. I should make myself ridiculous by talking of them."

Isabel wondered what they could have been--whether Madame Merle had
aspired to wear a crown. "I don't know what your idea of success may be,
but you seem to me to have been successful. To me indeed you're a vivid
image of success."

Madame Merle tossed away the music with a smile. "What's YOUR idea of
success?"

"You evidently think it must be a very tame one. It's to see some dream
of one's youth come true."

"Ah," Madame Merle exclaimed, "that I've never seen! But my dreams were
so great--so preposterous. Heaven forgive me, I'm dreaming now!" And she
turned back to the piano and began grandly to play. On the morrow she
said to Isabel that her definition of success had been very pretty,
yet frightfully sad. Measured in that way, who had ever succeeded? The
dreams of one's youth, why they were enchanting, they were divine! Who
had ever seen such things come to pass?

"I myself--a few of them," Isabel ventured to answer.

"Already? They must have been dreams of yesterday."

"I began to dream very young," Isabel smiled.

"Ah, if you mean the aspirations of your childhood--that of having a
pink sash and a doll that could close her eyes."

"No, I don't mean that."

"Or a young man with a fine moustache going down on his knees to you."

"No, nor that either," Isabel declared with still more emphasis.

Madame Merle appeared to note this eagerness. "I suspect that's what
you do mean. We've all had the young man with the moustache. He's the
inevitable young man; he doesn't count."

Isabel was silent a little but then spoke with extreme and
characteristic inconsequence. "Why shouldn't he count? There are young
men and young men."

"And yours was a paragon--is that what you mean?" asked her friend with
a laugh. "If you've had the identical young man you dreamed of, then
that was success, and I congratulate you with all my heart. Only in that
case why didn't you fly with him to his castle in the Apennines?"

"He has no castle in the Apennines."

"What