It was a thing to believe in, not to see--a matter of faith, not of experience.

Experience, however, might supply us with very creditable imitations of it, and the part of wisdom was to make the best of these.

Certainly, on the whole, Isabel had never encountered a more agreeable and interesting figure than Madame Merle; she had never met a person having less of that fault which is the principal obstacle to friendship--the air of reproducing the more tiresome, the stale, the too-familiar parts of one's own character.
The gates of the girl's confidence were opened wider than they had ever been; she said things to this amiable auditress that she had not yet said to any one.

Sometimes she took alarm at her candour: it was as if she had given to a comparative stranger the key to her cabinet of jewels.

These spiritual gems were the only ones of any magnitude that Isabel possessed, but there was all the greater reason for their being carefully guarded.