nt felt; for there were plenty of others that knew how to make as
little money as she would. To speak--that was the one thing that most
people were willing to do for nothing; it was not a line in which it was
easy to appear conspicuously disinterested. Disinterestedness, too, was
incompatible with receipts; and receipts were what Selah Tarrant was, in
his own parlance, after. He wished to bring about the day when they
would flow in freely; the reader perhaps sees the gesture with which, in
his colloquies with himself, he accompanied this mental image.

It seemed to him at present that the fruitful time was not far off; it
had been brought appreciably nearer by that fortunate evening at Miss
Birdseye's. If Mrs. Farrinder could be induced to write an "open letter"
about Verena, that would do more than anything else. Selah was not
remarkable for delicacy of perception, but he knew the world he lived in
well enough to be aware that Mrs. Farrinder was liable to rear up, as
they used to say down in Pennsylvania, where he lived before he began to
peddle lead-pencils. She wouldn't always take things as you might
expect, and if it didn't meet her views to pay a public tribute to
Verena, there wasn't any way known to Tarrant's ingenious mind of
getting round her. If it was a question of a favour from Mrs. Farrinder,
you just had to wait for it, as you would for a rise in the thermometer.
He had told Miss Birdseye what he would like, and she seemed to think,
from the way their celebrated friend had been affected, that the idea
might take her some day of just letting the public know all she had
felt. She was off somewhere now (since that evening), but Miss Birdseye
had an idea that when she was back in Roxbury she would send for Verena
and give her a few points. Meanwhile, at any rate, Selah was sure he had
a card; he felt there was money in the air. It might already be said
there were receipts from Charles Street; that rich, peculiar young woman
seemed to want to lavish herself. He pretended, as I have intimated, not
to notice this; but he never saw so much as when he had his eyes fixed
on the cornice. He had no doubt that if he should make up his mind to
take a hall some night, she would tell him where the bill might be sent.
That was what he was thinking of now, whether he had better take a hall
right away, so that Verena might leap at a bound into renown, or wait
till she had made a few more appearances in private, so that curios