She had not heard of everything, that was very plain; and there were evidently things in the world of which it was not advantageous to hear.

She had once or twice had a positive scare; since it so affected her to have to exclaim, of her friend, "Heaven forgive her, she doesn't understand me!" Absurd as it may seem this discovery operated as a shock, left her with a vague dismay in which there was even an element of foreboding.

The dismay of course subsided, in the light of some sudden proof of Madame Merle's remarkable intelligence; but it stood for a high-water-mark in the ebb and flow of confidence.
Madame Merle had once declared her belief that when a friendship ceases to grow it immediately begins to decline--there being no point of equilibrium between liking more and liking less.

A stationary affection, in other words, was impossible--it must move one way or the other.
However that might be, the girl had in these days a thousand uses for her sense of the romantic, which was more active than it had ever been.
I do not allude to the impulse it received as she gazed at the Pyramids in the course of an excursion from Cairo, or as she stood among the broken columns of the Acropolis and fixed her eyes upon the point designated to her as the Strait of Salamis; deep and memorable as these emotions had remained.

She came back by the last of March from Egypt and Greece and made another stay in Rome.