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 her
opportunities had been large. Even when her father had left his
daughters for three months at Neufchatel with a French bonne who
had eloped with a Russian nobleman staying at the same hotel--
even in this irregular situation (an incident of the girl's
eleventh year) she had been neither frightened nor ashamed, but
had thought it a romantic episode in a liberal education. Her
father had a large way of looking at life, of which his
restlessness and even his occasional incoherency of conduct had
been only a proof. He wished his daughters, even as children, to
see as much of the world as possible; and it was for this purpose
that, before Isabel was fourteen, he had transported them three
times across the Atlantic, giving them on each occasion, however,
but a few months' view of the subject proposed: a course which
had whetted our heroine's curiosity without enabling her to
satisfy it. She ought to have been a partisan of her father, for
she was the member of his trio who most "made up" to him for the
disagreeables he didn't mention. In his last days his general
willingness to take leave of a world in which the difficulty of
doing as one liked appeared to increase as one grew older had
been sensibly modified by the pain of separation from his clever,
his superior, his remarkable girl. Later, when the journeys to
Europe ceased, he still had shown his children all sorts of
indulgence, and if he had been troubled about money-matters
nothing ever disturbed their irreflective consciousness of many