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.