VIII

Verena Tarrant got up and went to her father in the middle of the room;
Olive Chancellor crossed and resumed her place beside Mrs. Farrinder on
the sofa the girl had quitted; and Miss Birdseye's visitors, for the
rest, settled themselves attentively in chairs or leaned against the
bare sides of the parlour. Verena took her father's hands, held them for
a moment, while she stood before him, not looking at him, with her eyes
towards the company; then, after an instant, her mother, rising, pushed
forward, with an interesting sigh, the chair on which she had been
sitting. Mrs. Tarrant was provided with another seat, and Verena,
relinquishing her father's grasp, placed herself in the chair, which
Tarrant put in position for her. She sat there with closed eyes, and her
father now rested his long, lean hands upon her head. Basil Ransom
watched these proceedings with much interest, for the girl amused and
pleased him. She had far more colour than any one there, for whatever
brightness was to be found in Miss Birdseye's rather faded and dingy
human collection had gathered itself into this attractive but ambiguous
young person. There was nothing ambiguous, by the way, about her
confederate; Ransom simply loathed him, from the moment he opened his
mouth; he was intensely familiar--that is, his type was; he was simply
the detested carpet-bagger. He was false, cunning, vulgar, ignoble; the
cheapest kind of human product. That he should be the father of a
delicate, pretty girl, who was apparently clever too, whether she had a
gift or no, this was an annoying, disconcerting fact. The white, puffy
mother, with the high forehead, in the corner there, looked more like a
lady; but if she were one, it was all the more shame to her to have
mated with such a varlet, Ransom said to himself, making use, as he did
generally, of terms of opprobrium extracted from the older English
literature. He had seen Tarrant, or his equivalent, often before; he had
"whipped" him, as he believed, controversially, again and again, at
political meetings in blighted Southern towns, during the horrible
period of reconstruction. If Mrs. Farrinder had looked at Verena Tarrant
as if she were a mountebank, there was some excuse for it, inasmuch as
the girl made much the same impression on Basil Ransom. He had never
seen such an odd mixture of elements; she had the sweetest, most
unworldly face, and yet, with it, an air of being on exhibition, of
belongi