She was not accustomed indeed to
keep it behind bolts; and at important moments, when she would have
been thankful to make use of her judgement alone, she paid the penalty
of having given undue encouragement to the faculty of seeing without
judging. At present, with her sense that the note of change had been
struck, came gradually a host of images of the things she was
leaving behind her. The years and hours of her life came back to
her, and for a long time, in a stillness broken only by the ticking of
the big bronze clock, she passed them in review. It had been a very
happy life and she had been a very fortunate person- this was the
truth that seemed to emerge most vividly. 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.
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