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. In his last days his
general willingness to take leave of a world in which the difficulty
of doing as one liked appeared to increase as one grew older had
been sensibly modified by the pain of separation from his clever,
his superior, his remarkable girl.
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