It was an occasion for her to justify her
reputation of an elegant manner, and it must be impartially related that
she struck Ransom as having a dignity in conversation and a command of
the noble style which could not have been surpassed by a daughter--one
of the most accomplished, most far-descended daughters--of his own
latitude. It was as if she had known that he was not eager for the
changes she advocated, and wished to show him that, especially to a
Southerner who had bitten the dust, her sex could be magnanimous. This
knowledge of his secret heresy seemed to him to be also in the faces of
the other ladies, whose circumspect glances, however (for he had not
been introduced), treated it as a pity rather than as a shame. He was
conscious of all these middle-aged feminine eyes, conscious of curls,
rather limp, that depended from dusky bonnets, of heads poked forward,
as if with a waiting, listening, familiar habit, of no one being very
bright or gay--no one, at least, but that girl he had noticed before,
who had a brilliant head, and who now hovered on the edge of the
conclave. He met her eye again; she was watching him too. It had been in
his thought that Mrs. Farrinder, to whom his cousin might have betrayed
or misrepresented him, would perhaps defy him to combat, and he wondered
whether he could pull himself together (he was extremely embarrassed)
sufficiently to do honour to such a challenge.
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