It was simply an
intensely personal exhibition, and the person making it happened to be
fascinating. She might have offended the taste of certain people--Ransom
could imagine that there were other Boston circles in which she would be
thought pert; but for himself all he could feel was that to _his_
starved senses she irresistibly appealed. He was the stiffest of
conservatives, and his mind was steeled against the inanities she
uttered--the rights and wrongs of women, the equality of the sexes, the
hysterics of conventions, the further stultification of the suffrage,
the prospect of conscript mothers in the national Senate. It made no
difference; she didn't mean it, she didn't know what she meant, she had
been stuffed with this trash by her father, and she was neither more nor
less willing to say it than to say anything else; for the necessity of
her nature was not to make converts to a ridiculous cause, but to emit
those charming notes of her voice, to stand in those free young
attitudes, to shake her braided locks like a naiad rising from the
waves, to please every one who came near her, and to be happy that she
pleased. I know not whether Ransom was aware of the bearings of this
interpretation, which attributed to Miss Tarrant a singular hollowness
of character; he contented himself with believing that she was as
innocent as she was lovely, and with regarding her as a vocalist of
exquisite faculty, condemned to sing bad music.
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