from candour, in the conversation of a person who had raised
delicate kindness to an art and whose pride was too high for the
narrow ways of deception. Her conception of human motives might,
in certain lights, have been acquired at the court of some
kingdom in decadence, and there were several in her list of which
our heroine had not even heard. She had not heard of everything,
that was very plain; and there were evidently things in the world
of which it was not advantageous to hear. She had once or twice
had a positive scare; since it so affected her to have to
exclaim, of her friend, "Heaven forgive her, she doesn't
understand me!" Absurd as it may seem this discovery operated as
a shock, left her with a vague dismay in which there was even an
element of foreboding. The dismay of course subsided, in the
light of some sudden proof of Madame Merle's remarkable
intelligence; but it stood for a high-water-mark in the ebb and
flow of confidence. Madame Merle had once declared her belief
that when a friendship ceases to grow it immediately begins to
decline--there being no point of equilibrium between liking more
and liking less. A stationary affection, in other words, was
impossible--it must move one way or the other. However that might
be, the girl had in these days a thousand uses for her sense of
the romantic, which was more active than it had ever been. I do
not allude to the impulse it received as she gazed at the
Pyramids in the course of an excursion from Cairo, or as she
stood among the broken columns of the Acropolis and fixed her
eyes upon the point designated to her as the Strait of Salamis;
deep and memorable as these emotions had remained. She came back
by the last of March from Egypt and Greece and made another stay
in Rome. A few days after her arrival Gilbert Osmond descended
from Florence and remained three weeks, during which the fact of