taken for
granted.

"I know what you're going to say--he was a very good man. But I know it
better than any one, because I gave him more chance to show it. In that
I think I was a good wife." Mrs. Touchett added that at the end her
husband apparently recognised this fact. "He has treated me most
liberally," she said; "I won't say more liberally than I expected,
because I didn't expect. You know that as a general thing I don't
expect. But he chose, I presume, to recognise the fact that though I
lived much abroad and mingled--you may say freely--in foreign life, I
never exhibited the smallest preference for any one else."

"For any one but yourself," Madame Merle mentally observed; but the
reflexion was perfectly inaudible.

"I never sacrificed my husband to another," Mrs. Touchett continued with
her stout curtness.

"Oh no," thought Madame Merle; "you never did anything for another!"

There was a certain cynicism in these mute comments which demands an
explanation; the more so as they are not in accord either with the
view--somewhat superficial perhaps--that we have hitherto enjoyed of
Madame Merle's character or with the literal facts of Mrs. Touchett's
history; the more so, too, as Madame Merle had a well-founded conviction
that her friend's last remark was not in the least to be construed as a
side-thrust at herself. The truth is that the moment she had crossed the
threshold she received an impression that Mr. Touchett's death had had
subtle consequences and that these consequences had been profitable to
a little circle of persons among whom she was not numbered. Of course
it was an event which would naturally have consequences; her imagination
had more than once rested upon this fact during her stay at Gardencourt.
But it had been one thing to foresee such a matter mentally and another
to stand among its massive records. The idea of a distribution of
property--she would almost have said of spoils--just now pressed upon
her senses and irritated her with a sense of exclusion. I am far from
wishing to picture her as one of the hungry mouths or envious hearts of
the general herd, but we have already learned of her having desires
that had never been satisfied. If she had been questioned, she would
of course have admitted--with a fine proud smile--that she had not the
faintest claim to a share in Mr. Touchett's relics. "There was never
anything in the world between us," she would have said. "There was never
that, po