ithout judging. At present, with
her sense that the note of change had been struck, came gradually a host
of images of the things she was leaving behind her. The years and hours
of her life came back to her, and for a long time, in a stillness broken
only by the ticking of the big bronze clock, she passed them in
review. It had been a very happy life and she had been a very fortunate
person--this was the truth that seemed to emerge most vividly. She had
had the best of everything, and in a world in which the circumstances
of so many people made them unenviable it was an advantage never to have
known anything particularly unpleasant. It appeared to Isabel that the
unpleasant had been even too absent from her knowledge, for she had
gathered from her acquaintance with literature that it was often a
source of interest and even of instruction. Her father had kept it
away from her--her handsome, much loved father, who always had such
an aversion to it. It was a great felicity to have been his daughter;
Isabel rose even to pride in her parentage. Since his death she had
seemed to see him as turning his braver side to his children and as
not having managed to ignore the ugly quite so much in practice as in
aspiration. But this only made her tenderness for him greater; it
was scarcely even painful to have to suppose him too generous, too
good-natured, too indifferent to sordid considerations. Many persons
had held that he carried this indifference too far, especially the large
number of those to whom he owed money. Of their opinions Isabel was
never very definitely informed; but it may interest the reader to know
that, while they had recognised in the late Mr. Archer a remarkably
handsome head and a very taking manner (indeed, as one of them had said,
he was always taking something), they had declared that he was making a
very poor use of his life. He had squandered a substantial fortune, he
had been deplorably convivial, he was known to have gambled freely.
A few very harsh critics went so far as to say that he had not even
brought up his daughters. They had had no regular education and no
permanent home; they had been at once spoiled and neglected; they had
lived with nursemaids and governesses (usually very bad ones) or had
been sent to superficial schools, kept by the French, from which, at the
end of a month, they had been removed in tears. This view of the matter
would have excited Isabel's indignation, for to her own sense