In a flash Isobel knew who he was.

Of course he was much changed, for Godfrey, who had matured early, as those of his generation were apt to do, especially if they had led a varied life, was now a handsome and well-built young man with a fine, thoughtful face and a quite respectable moustache.
"How he has changed, oh! how he has changed," she thought to herself.
The raw boy had become a man, and as she knew at once by her woman's instinct, a man with a great deal in him.

Isobel was a sensible member of her sex; one, too, who had seen something of the world by now, and she did not expect or wish for a hero or a saint built upon the mid-Victorian pattern, as portrayed in the books of the lady novelists of that period.

She wanted a man to be a man, by preference with the faults pertaining to the male nature, since she had observed that those who lacked these, possessed others, which to her robust womanhood seemed far worse, such as meanness and avarice and backbiting, and all the other qualities of the Pharisee.
Well, in Godfrey, whether she were right or wrong, with that swift glance of hers, she seemed to recognise a man as she wished a man to be.

If that standard of hers meant that very possibly he had admired other women, the lady whom he had pulled up a precipice, for instance, she did not mind particularly, so long as he admired her, Isobel, most of all.