Page:The Portrait of a Lady (1882).djvu/34

26 26 THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY. to herself,*to begin afresh. This desire, indeed, was not a birth of the present occasion; it was as familiar as the sound of the rain upon the window, and it had led to her beginning afresh a great many times. She closed her eyes as she sat in one of the dusky corners of the quiet parlour ; but it was not with a desire to take a nap. On the contrary, it was because she felt too wide-awake, and wished to check the sense of seeing too many things at once. Her imagination was by habit ridiculously active ; if the door were not opened to it, it jumped out of the window. She was not accustomed, indeed, to keep it behind bolts ; and, at important moments, when she would have been thankful to make use of her judgment alone, she paid the penalty of having given undue encouragement to the faculty of seeing without judging. 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 girl 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 people made them unen- viable, it was an advantage never to have known anything particularly disagreeable. It appeared to Isabel that the disa- greeable 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 good fortune to have been his daughter ; Isabel was even proud of her parentage. Since his death she had gathered a vague impression that he turned his brighter side to his children, and that he had not eluded discomfort 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 think that he was too generous, too good-natured, too indifferent to sordid considerations. Many persons thought that he carried this indiiference too far; especially the large number of those to whom he owed money. Of their opinions, Isabel was never very definitely informed ; but it may interest the reader to know that, while they admitted that the late Mr. Archer had a remarkably handsome head and a very taking manner (indeed, as one of them had said, he was always taking something), they declared that he had made a