Touchett had foretold, Isabel and Madame Merle were thrown
much together during the illness of their host, so that if they had
not become intimate it would have been almost a breach of good
manners. Their manners were of the best, but in addition to this
they happened to please each other. It is perhaps too much to say that
they swore an eternal friendship, but tacitly at least they called the
future to witness. Isabel did so with a perfectly good conscience,
though she would have hesitated to admit she was intimate with her new
friend in the high sense she privately attached to this term. She
often wondered indeed if she ever had been, or ever could be, intimate
with any one. She had an ideal of friendship as well as of several
other sentiments, which it failed to seem to her in this case- it
had not seemed to her in other cases- that the actual completely
expressed. But she often reminded herself that there were essential
reasons why one's ideal could never become concrete. It was a thing to
believe in, not to see- a matter of faith, not of experience.
Experience, however, might supply us with very creditable imitations
of it, and the part of wisdom was to make the best of these.
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