d never had and a voice more audible reminded her she was in
danger of losing. To keep it, to recover it, to reconsecrate it, was the
ambition of her heart; this was one of the many reasons why Providence
had judged her worthy of having so wonderful a child. Verena was born
not only to lead their common sex out of bondage, but to remodel a
visiting-list which bulged and contracted in the wrong places, like a
country-made garment. As the daughter of Abraham Greenstreet, Mrs.
Tarrant had passed her youth in the first Abolitionist circles, and she
was aware how much such a prospect was clouded by her union with a young
man who had begun life as an itinerant vendor of lead-pencils (he had
called at Mr. Greenstreet's door in the exercise of this function), had
afterwards been for a while a member of the celebrated Cayuga community,
where there were no wives, or no husbands, or something of that sort
(Mrs. Tarrant could never remember), and had still later (though before
the development of the healing faculty) achieved distinction in the
spiritualistic world. (He was an extraordinarily favoured medium, only
he had had to stop for reasons of which Mrs. Tarrant possessed her
version.) Even in a society much occupied with the effacement of
prejudice there had been certain dim presumptions against this versatile
being, who naturally had not wanted arts to ingratiate himself with Miss
Greenstreet, her eyes, like his own, being fixed exclusively on the
future. The young couple (he was considerably her elder) had gazed on
the future together until they found that the past had completely
forsaken them and that the present offered but a slender foothold. Mrs.
Tarrant, in other words, incurred the displeasure of her family, who
gave her husband to understand that, much as they desired to remove the
shackles from the slave, there were kinds of behaviour which struck them
as too unfettered. These had prevailed, to their thinking, at Cayuga,
and they naturally felt it was no use for him to say that his residence
there had been (for him--the community still existed) but a momentary
episode, inasmuch as there was little more to be urged for the spiritual
picnics and vegetarian camp-meetings in which the discountenanced pair
now sought consolation.

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 o