One might wonder what commerce she could possibly hold with her own spirit.
One always ended, however, by feeling that a charming surface doesn't necessarily prove one superficial; this was an illusion in which, in one's youth, one had but just escaped being nourished.

Madame Merle was not superficial--not she.

She was deep, and her nature spoke none the less in her behaviour because it spoke a conventional tongue.

"What's language at all but a convention ?" said Isabel.

"She has the good taste not to pretend, like some people I've met, to express herself by original signs." "I'm afraid you've suffered much," she once found occasion to say to her friend in response to some allusion that had appeared to reach far.
"What makes you think that ?" Madame Merle asked with the amused smile of a person seated at a game of guesses.