She
had once or twice had a positive scare; since it so affected her to
have to exclaim, of her friend, "Heaven forgive her, she doesn't
understand me!" Absurd as it may seem this discovery operated as a
shock, left her with a vague dismay in which there was even an element
of foreboding. The dismay of course subsided, in the light of some
sudden proof of Madame Merle's remarkable intelligence; but it stood
for a high-water-mark in the ebb and flow of confidence. Madame
Merle had once declared her belief that when a friendship ceases to
grow it immediately begins to decline-there being no point of
equilibrium between liking more and liking less. A stationary
affection, in other words, was impossible-it must move one way or
the other. However that might be, the girl had in these days a
thousand uses for her sense of the romantic, which was more active
than it had ever been. I do not allude to the impulse it received as
she gazed at the Pyramids in the course of an excursion from Cairo, or
as she stood among the broken columns of the Acropolis and fixed her
eyes upon the point designated to her as the Strait of Salamis; deep
and memorable as these emotions had remained.
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