Isabel after this observed to their companion that she hoped she knew Mrs Touchett considered she hadn’t a speck on her perfection. On which ‘I’m obliged to you,’ Madame Merle replied, ‘but I’m afraid your aunt imagines, or at least alludes to, no aberrations that the clock-face doesn’t register.’

‘So that you mean you’ve a wild side that’s unknown to her?’

‘Ah no, I fear my darkest sides are my tamest. I mean that having no faults, for your aunt, means that one’s never late for dinner—that is for her dinner. I was not late, by the way, the other day, when you came back from London; the clock was just at eight when I came into the drawing-room: it was the rest of you that were before the time. It means that one answers a letter the day one gets it and that when one comes to stay with her one doesn’t bring too much luggage and is careful not to be taken ill. For Mrs Touchett those things constitute virtue; it’s a blessing to be able to reduce it to its elements.’

Madame Merle’s own conversation, it will be perceived, was enriched with bold, free touches of criticism, which, even when they had a restrictive effect, never struck Isabel as ill-natured. It couldn’t occur to the girl for instance that Mrs Touchett’s accomplished guest was abusing her; and this for very good reasons. In the first place Isabel rose eagerly to the sense of her shades; in the second Madame Merle implied that there was a great deal more to say; and it was clear in the third that for a person to speak to one without ceremony of one’s near relations was an agreeable sign of that person’s intimacy with one’s self. These signs of deep communion multiplied as the days elapsed, and there was none of which Isabel was more sensible than of her companion’s preference for making Miss Archer herself a topic. Though she referred frequently to the incidents of her own career she never lingered upon them; she was as little of a gross egotist as she was of a flat gossip.

‘I’m old and stale and faded,’ she said more than once; ‘I’m of no more interest than last week’s newspaper. You’re young and fresh and of to-day; you’ve the great thing—you’ve actuality. I once had it—we all have it for an hour. You, however, will have it for longer. Let us talk about you then; you can say nothing I shall not care to hear. It’s a sign that I’m growing old—that I like to talk with younger people. I think it’s a very pretty compensation. If we can’t have youth within us we can have it outside, and I really think we see it and feel it better that way. Of course we must be in sympathy with it—that I shall always be. I don’t know that I shall ever be ill-natured with old people—I hope not; there are certainly some old people I adore. But I shall never be anything but abject with the young; they touch me and appeal to me too much. I give you carte blanche¹ then; you can even be impertinent if you like; I shall let it pass and horribly spoil you. I speak as if I were a hundred years old, you say? Well, I am, if you please; I was born before the French Revolution.² Ah, my dear, je viens de loin;³ I belong to the old, old world.⁴ But it’s not of that I want to talk; I want to talk about the new. You must tell me more about America; you never tell me enough. Here I’ve been since I was brought here as a helpless child, and it’s ridiculous, or rather it’s scandalous, how little I know about that splendid, dreadful, funny country—surely the greatest and drollest of them all. There are a great many of us like that in these parts, and I must say I think we’re a wretched set of people. You should live in your own land; whatever it may be you have your natural place there. If we’re not good Americans we’re certainly poor Europeans; we’ve no natural place here. We’re mere parasites, crawling over the surface; we haven’t our feet in the soil. At least one can know it and not have illusions. A woman perhaps can get on; a woman, it seems to me, has no natural place anywhere; wherever she finds herself she has to remain on the surface and, more or less, to crawl. You protest, my dear? you’re horrified? you declare you’ll never crawl? It’s very true that I don’t see you crawling; you stand more upright than a good many poor creatures. Very good; on the whole, I don’t think you’ll crawl. But the men, the Americans; je vous demande un peu,⁵ what do they make of it over here? I don’t envy them trying to arrange themselves. Look at poor Ralph Touchett: what sort of a figure do you call that? Fortunately he has a consumption; I say fortunately, because it gives him something to do. His consumption’s his carrière;⁶ it’s a kind of position. You can say: “Oh, Mr Touchett, he takes care of his lungs, he knows a great deal about climates.” But without that who would he be, what would he represent? “Mr Ralph Touchett: an American who lives in Europe.” That signifies absolutely nothing—it’s impossible anything should signify less. “He’s very cultivated,” they say: “he has a very pretty collection of old snuff-boxes.” The collection is all that’s wanted to make it pitiful. I’m tired of the sound of the word; I