It was as if somehow she had all society under
contribution, and all the arts and graces it practised- or was the
effect rather that of charming uses found for her, even from a
distance, subtle service rendered by her to a clamorous world wherever
she might be? After breakfast she wrote a succession of letters, as
those arriving for her appeared innumerable: her correspondence was
a source of surprise to Isabel when they sometimes walked together
to the village post-office to deposit Madame Merle's offering to the
mail. She knew more people, as she told Isabel, than she knew what
to do with, and something was always turning up to be written about.
Of painting she was devotedly fond, and made no more of brushing in
a sketch than of pulling off her gloves. At Gardencourt she was
perpetually taking advantage of an hour's sunshine to go out with a
camp-stool and a box of water-colours. That she was a brave musician
we have already perceived, and it was evidence of the fact that when
she seated herself at the piano, as she always did in the evening, her
listeners resigned themselves without a murmur to losing the grace
of her talk. Isabel, since she had known her, felt ashamed of her
own facility, which she now looked upon as basely inferior; and
indeed, though she had been thought rather a prodigy at home, the loss
to society when, in taking her place upon the music-stool, she
turned her back to the room, was usually deemed greater than the gain.
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