her history from her own point of view--a consummation the more
desirable as Isabel had already heard it related from the point
of view of others. This history was so sad a one (in so far as it
concerned the late M. Merle, a positive adventurer, she might
say, though originally so plausible, who had taken advantage,
years before, of her youth and of an inexperience in which
doubtless those who knew her only now would find it difficult to
believe); it abounded so in startling and lamentable incidents
that her companion wondered a person so eprouvee could have
kept so much of her freshness, her interest in life. Into this
freshness of Madame Merle's she obtained a considerable insight;
she seemed to see it as professional, as slightly mechanical,
carried about in its case like the fiddle of the virtuoso, or
blanketed and bridled like the "favourite" of the jockey. She
liked her as much as ever, but there was a corner of the curtain
that never was lifted; it was as if she had remained after all
something of a public performer, condemned to emerge only in
character and in costume. She had once said that she came from a
distance, that she belonged to the "old, old" world, and Isabel
never lost the impression that she was the product of a different
moral or social clime from her own, that she had grown up under
other stars.

She believed then that at bottom she had a different morality. Of
course the morality of civilised persons has always much in
common; but our young woman had a sense in her of values gone
wrong or, as they said at the shops, marked down. She considered,
with the presumption of youth, that a morality differing from her
own must be inferior to it; and this conviction was an aid to
detecting an occasional flash of cruelty, an occasional lapse