Instinctively, too, she understood that, though her father might almost be called a young man, and had abounding vitality, no second wife would ever obscure to him that sacred memory.

It was one of the many grounds she had for admiring as much as she loved him.

His loyalty stirred her heart, coloured her view of life.
The ladies had some little apprehension that their young relative, fresh from contact with a many-sided world, might feel a dulness in their life and their interests; but nothing of the sort entered Irene's mind.

She was intelligent enough to appreciate the superiority of these quiet sisters to all but the very best of the acquaintances she had made in London or abroad, and modest enough to see in their entire refinement a correction of the excessive _sans-gene_ to which society tempted her.

They were behind the times only in the sense of escaping, by seclusion, those modern tendencies which vulgarise.