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.