THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY. 27 very poor use of his life. He had squandered a substantial fortune, he had been deplorably convivial, he was known to have gambled freely. A few very harsh critics went so far as to say that he had not even brought up his daughters. They had had no regular education and no permanent home ; they had been at once spoiled and neglected ; they had lived with nurse- maids and governesses (usually very bad ones), or had been sent to strange schools kept by foreigners, from which, at the end of a month, they had been removed in tears. This view of the matter would have excited Isabel's indignation, for to her own sense her opportunities had been abundant. Even when her father had left his daughters for three months at Neufchatel with a French bonne, who 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 fright- ened nor ashamed, but had thought it a picturesque 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 trans- ported them three times across the Atlantic, giving them on each occasion, however, but a few months' view of foreign lands ; 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 among his three daughters she was quite his favourite, and 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 v was sensibly modified by the pain of separation from his clever, his superior, his remark- able girl. Later, when the journeys to Europe ceased, he still had shown his children all sorts of indulgence, 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 popular. Edith was so striking an example of success that Isabel could have no illusions as to what constituted this advantage, or as to the moderate character of her own triumphs. Nineteen persons out of twenty (including the younger sister herself) pronounced Edith infinitely the prettier of the two ; but the twentieth, besides reversing this judgment, had the entertainment of thinking
