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customed 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 judg-
ing. 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 peo-
ple made them unenviable it was an advantage never to have
known anything particularly unpleasant. It appeared to Is-
abel 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 daugh-
ter; 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. But this only
made her tenderness for him greater; it was scarcely even
painful to have to suppose him too generous, too good-na-
tured, too indifferent to sordid considerations. Many
persons had held that he carried this indifference too far,

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