She had heard of these things in detail only ten minutes
before, from the girl's parents, but her hospitable soul had needed but
a moment to swallow and assimilate them. If her account of them was not
very lucid, it should be said in excuse for her that it was impossible
to have any idea of Verena Tarrant unless one had heard her, and
therefore still more impossible to give an idea to others. Mrs.
Farrinder was perceptibly irritated; she appeared to have made up her
mind, after her first hesitation, that the Tarrant family were
fantastical and compromising. She had bent an eye of coldness on Selah
and his wife--she might have regarded them all as a company of
mountebanks.
"Stand up and tell us what you have to say," she remarked, with some
sternness, to Verena, who only raised her eyes to her, silently now,
with the same sweetness, and then rested them on her father. This
gentleman seemed to respond to an irresistible appeal; he looked round
at the company with all his teeth, and said that these flattering
allusions were not so embarrassing as they might otherwise be, inasmuch
as any success that he and his daughter might have had was so thoroughly
impersonal: he insisted on that word.
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