"When I say I should like to be your age I mean with your qualities--frank, generous, sincere like you.

In that case I should have made something better of my life." "What should you have liked to do that you've not done ?" Madame Merle took a sheet of music--she was seated at the piano and had abruptly wheeled about on the stool when she first spoke--and mechanically turned the leaves.

"I'm very ambitious!" she at last replied.
"And your ambitions have not been satisfied?
They must have been great." "They WERE great.

I should make myself ridiculous by talking of them." Isabel wondered what they could have been--whether Madame Merle had aspired to wear a crown.

"I don't know what your idea of success may be, but you seem to me to have been successful.