CHAPTER XIX.
As Mrs.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.