Such were the narrow views of people hitherto supposed capable of
opening their hearts to all salutary novelties, but now put to a genuine
test, as Mrs. Tarrant felt. Her husband's tastes rubbed off on her soft,
moist moral surface, and the couple lived in an atmosphere of novelty,
in which, occasionally, the accommodating wife encountered the fresh
sensation of being in want of her dinner. Her father died, leaving,
after all, very little money; he had spent his modest fortune upon the
blacks. Selah Tarrant and his companion had strange adventures; she
found herself completely enrolled in the great irregular army of
nostrum-mongers, domiciled in humanitary Bohemia. It absorbed her like a
social swamp; she sank into it a little more every day, without
measuring the inches of her descent. Now she stood there up to her chin;
it may probably be said of her that she had touched bottom. When she
went to Miss Birdseye's it seemed to her that she re-entered society.
The door that admitted her was not the door that admitted some of the
others (she should never forget the tipped-up nose of Mrs. Farrinder),
and the superior portal remained ajar, disclosing possible vistas. She
had lived with long-haired men and short-haired women, she had
contributed a flexible faith and an irremediable want of funds to a
dozen social experiments, she had partaken of the comfort of a hundred
religions, had followed innumerable dietary reforms, chiefly of the
negative order, and had gone of an evening to a _seance_ or a lecture as
regularly as she had eaten her supper.
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