But I know
it better than any one, because I gave him more chance to show it.
In that I think I was a good wife." Mrs. Touchett added that at the
end her husband apparently recognized this fact. "He has treated me
most liberally," she said; "I won't say more liberally than I
expected, because I didn't expect. You know that as a general thing
I don't expect. But he chose, I presume, to recognize the fact that
though I lived much abroad and mingled- you may say freely- in foreign
life, I never exhibited the smallest preference for any one else."
"For any one but yourself," Madame Merle mentally observed; but
the reflexion was perfectly inaudible.
"I never sacrificed my husband to another," Mrs. Touchett
continued with her stout curtness.
"Oh no," thought Madame Merle; "you never did anything for another!"
There was a certain cynicism in these mute comments which demands an
explanation; the more so as they are not in accord either with the
view- somewhat superficial perhaps- that we have hitherto enjoyed of
Madame Merle's character or with the literal facts of Mrs.
Touchett's history; the more so, too, as Madame Merle had a
well-founded conviction that her friend's last remark was not in the
least to be construed as a side-thrust at herself.
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