lt this, but she was rather
helpless about it, and delivered herself, with her universal
familiarity, which embraced every one and everything, of a wandering,
amiable tale, in which Abraham Greenstreet kept reappearing, in which
Doctor Tarrant's miraculous cures were specified, with all the facts
wanting, and in which Verena's successes in the West were related, not
with emphasis or hyperbole, in which Miss Birdseye never indulged, but
as accepted and recognised wonders, natural in an age of new
revelations. 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. They had just heard her say, "It
is not _me_, mother," and he and Mrs. Tarrant and the girl herself were
all equally aware it was not she. It was some power outside--it seemed
to flow through her; he couldn't pretend to say why his daughter should
be called, more than any one else. But it seemed as if she _was_ called.
When he just calmed her down by laying his hand on her a few moments, it
seemed to come. It so happened that in the West it had taken the form of
a considerable eloquence. She had certainly spoken with great facility
to cultivated and high-minded audiences. She had long followed with
sympathy the movement for the liberation of her sex from every sort of
bondage; it had been her principal interest even as a child (he mi