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three times across the Atlantic, giving them on each occa-
sion, however, but a few months’ view of the subject
proposed: a course which had whetted our heroine’s curios-
ity 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 supe-
rior, his remarkable girl. Later, when the journeys to Europe
ceased, he still had shown his children all sorts of indul-
gence, and if he had been troubled about money-matters
nothing ever disturbed their irreflective consciousness of
many possessions. Isabel, though she danced very well, had
not the recollection of having been in New York a successful
member of the choregraphic circle; her sister Edith was, as
every one said, so very much more fetching. Edith was so
striking an example of success that Isabel could have no il-
lusions as to what constituted this advantage, or as to the
limits of her own power to frisk and jump and shriek—
above all with rightness of effect. Nineteen persons out of
twenty (including the younger sister herself pronounced
Edith infinitely the prettier of the two; but the twentieth,
besides reversing this judgement, had the entertainment of
thinking all the others aesthetic vulgarians. Isabel had in
the depths of her nature an even more unquenchable desire
to please than Edith; but the depths of this young lady’s na-
ture were a very out-of-the-way place, between which and

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