You'd judge me too harshly; you're of the cruel age." She preferred for the present to talk to Isabel of Isabel, and exhibited the greatest interest in our heroine's history, sentiments, opinions, prospects.

She made her chatter and listened to her chatter with infinite good nature.

This flattered and quickened the girl, who was struck with all the distinguished people her friend had known and with her having lived, as Mrs.Touchett said, in the best company in Europe.
Isabel thought the better of herself for enjoying the favour of a person who had so large a field of comparison; and it was perhaps partly to gratify the sense of profiting by comparison that she often appealed to these stores of reminiscence.

Madame Merle had been a dweller in many lands and had social ties in a dozen different countries.

"I don't pretend to be educated," she would say, "but I think I know my Europe;" and she spoke one day of going to Sweden to stay with an old friend, and another of proceeding to Malta to follow up a new acquaintance.