Page:The Portrait of a Lady (London, Macmillan & Co., 1881) Volume 1.djvu/272

 "Yes; I would make an effort to keep you," Madame Merle rejoined, looking at her gravely. "When I say I should like to be your age," she went on, "I mean with your qualities—frank, generous, sincere, like you. In that case I should have made something better of my life."

"What should you have liked to do that you have not done?"

Madame Merle took a sheet of music—she was seated at the piano, and had abruptly wheeled about on the stool when she first spoke—and mechanically turned the leaves. At last she said—

"I am very ambitious!"

"And your ambitions have not been satisfied? They must have been great."

"They were great. I should make myself ridiculous by talking of them."

Isabel wondered what they could have been—whether Madame Merle had aspired to wear a crown. "I don't know what your idea of success may be, but you seem to me to have been successful. To me, indeed, you are an image of success."

Madame Merle tossed away the music with a smile.

"What is your idea of success?"

"You evidently think it must be very tame," said Isabel. "It is to see some dream of one's youth come true."

"Ah," Madame Merle exclaimed, "that I have never seen! But my dreams were so great—so preposterous. Heaven forgive me, I am dreaming now." And she turned back to the piano and began to play with energy.

On the morrow she said to Isabel that her definition of success had been very pretty, but frightfully sad. Measured in that way, who had succeeded? The dreams of one's youth, why