She was
too young, too impatient to live, too unacquainted with pain. She
always returned to her theory that a young woman whom after all
every one thought clever should begin by getting a general
impression of life. This impression was necessary to prevent mistakes,
and after it should be secured she might make the unfortunate
condition of others a subject of special attention.
England was a revelation to her, and she found herself as diverted
as a child at a pantomime. In her infantine excursions to Europe she
had seen only the Continent, and seen it from the nursery window;
Paris, not London, was her father's Mecca, and into many of his
interests there his children had naturally not entered. The images
of that time moreover had grown faint and remote, and the old-world
quality in everything that she now saw had all the charm of
strangeness. Her uncle's house seemed a picture made real; no
refinement of the agreeable was lost upon Isabel; the rich
perfection of Gardencourt at once revealed a world and gratified a
need. The large, low rooms, with brown ceilings and dusky corners, the
deep embrasures and curious casements, the quiet light on dark,
polished panels, the deep greenness outside, that seemed always
peeping in, the sense of well-ordered privacy in the centre of a
"property"- a place where sounds were felicitously accidental, where
the tread was muffled by the earth itself and in the thick mild air
all friction dropped out of contact and all shrillness out of talk-
these things were much to the taste of our young lady, whose taste
played a considerable part in her emotions.
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