Page:The Portrait of a Lady (London, Macmillan & Co., 1881) Volume 1.djvu/266

 with bold, free touches of criticism, which, even when they had a restrictive effect, never struck Isabel as ill-natured. It never occurred 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 agreed with her; in the second Madame Merle implied that there was a great deal more to say; and in the third, to speak to one without ceremony of one's near relations was an agreeable sign of intimacy. These signs of intimacy 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 alluded frequently to the incidents of her own life, she never lingered upon them; she was as little of an egotist as she was of a gossip.

"I am old, and stale, and faded," she said more than once; "I am of no more interest than last week's newspaper. You are young and fresh, and of to-day; you have the great thing—you have 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 that I shall not care to hear. It is a sign that I am 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 of us, 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 that I adore. But I shall never be ill-natured with the young; they touch me too much. I give you carte blanche, then; you can even be impertinent if you like; I shall let it pass. I talk as if I were a hundred years old, you say? Well, I am, if you please; I was born before the French Revolution.