" It was
dance-music indeed that you usually heard when you came within
ear-shot of Ralph's band; the liveliest waltzes seemed to float upon
the air. Isabel often found herself irritated by this perpetual
fiddling; she would have liked to pass through the ante-room, as her
cousin called it, and enter the private apartments. It mattered little
that he had assured her they were a very dismal place; she would
have been glad to undertake to sweep them and set them in order. It
was but half-hospitality to let her remain outside; to punish him
for which Isabel administered innumerable taps with the ferule of
her straight young wit. It must be said that her wit was exercised
to a large extent in self-defence, for her cousin amused himself
with calling her "Columbia" and accusing her of a patriotism so heated
that it scorched. He drew a caricature of her in which she was
represented as a very pretty young woman dressed, on the lines of
the prevailing fashion, in the folds of the national banner.
Isabel's chief dread in life at this period of her development was
that she should appear narrow-minded; what she feared next
afterwards was that she should really be so.
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