vidence, fortune, of
the eternal mystery of things. It was true her aunt's complaint had
been not so much of Madame Merle's activity as of her duplicity: she had
brought about the strange event and then she had denied her guilt. Such
guilt would not have been great, to Isabel's mind; she couldn't make
a crime of Madame Merle's having been the producing cause of the most
important friendship she had ever formed. This had occurred to her just
before her marriage, after her little discussion with her aunt and at a
time when she was still capable of that large inward reference, the
tone almost of the philosophic historian, to her scant young annals. If
Madame Merle had desired her change of state she could only say it had
been a very happy thought. With her, moreover, she had been perfectly
straightforward; she had never concealed her high opinion of Gilbert
Osmond. After their union Isabel discovered that her husband took a less
convenient view of the matter; he seldom consented to finger, in talk,
this roundest and smoothest bead of their social rosary. "Don't you like
Madame Merle?" Isabel had once said to him. "She thinks a great deal of
you."

"I'll tell you once for all," Osmond had answered. "I liked her once
better than I do to-day. I'm tired of her, and I'm rather ashamed of it.
She's so almost unnaturally good! I'm glad she's not in Italy; it makes
for relaxation--for a sort of moral detente. Don't talk of her too much;
it seems to bring her back. She'll come back in plenty of time."

Madame Merle, in fact, had come back before it was too late--too late,
I mean, to recover whatever advantage she might have lost. But meantime,
if, as I have said, she was sensibly different, Isabel's feelings were
also not quite the same. Her consciousness of the situation was as
acute as of old, but it was much less satisfying. A dissatisfied mind,
whatever else it may miss, is rarely in want of reasons; they bloom as
thick as buttercups in June. The fact of Madame Merle's having had a
hand in Gilbert Osmond's marriage ceased to be one of her titles to
consideration; it might have been written, after all, that there was not
so much to thank her for. As time went on there was less and less, and
Isabel once said to herself that perhaps without her these things would
not have been. That reflection indeed was instantly stifled; she knew an
immediate horror at having made it. "Whatever happens to me let me not
be unjust," she said; "le