was "going in"; he
would have liked to go in himself, bodily, and, failing in this, he
hoped to get advertisements inserted gratis. The wish of his soul was
that he might be interviewed; that made him hover at the editorial
elbow. Once he thought he had been, and the headings, five or six deep,
danced for days before his eyes; but the report never appeared. He
expected his revenge for this the day after Verena should have burst
forth; he saw the attitude in which he should receive the emissaries who
would come after his daughter.

XIV

"We ought to have some one to meet her," Mrs. Tarrant said; "I presume
she wouldn't care to come out just to see us." "She," between the mother
and the daughter, at this period, could refer only to Olive Chancellor,
who was discussed in the little house at Cambridge at all hours and from
every possible point of view. It was never Verena now who began, for she
had grown rather weary of the topic; she had her own ways of thinking of
it, which were not her mother's, and if she lent herself to this lady's
extensive considerations it was because that was the best way of keeping
her thoughts to herself.

Mrs. Tarrant had an idea that she (Mrs. Tarrant) liked to study people,
and that she was now engaged in an analysis of Miss Chancellor. It
carried her far, and she came out at unexpected times with her results.
It was still her purpose to interpret the world to the ingenious mind of
her daughter, and she translated Miss Chancellor with a confidence which
made little account of the fact that she had seen her but once, while
Verena had this advantage nearly every day. Verena felt that by this
time she knew Olive very well, and her mother's most complicated
versions of motive and temperament (Mrs. Tarrant, with the most
imperfect idea of the meaning of the term, was always talking about
people's temperament) rendered small justice to the phenomena it was now
her privilege to observe in Charles Street. Olive was much more
remarkable than Mrs. Tarrant suspected, remarkable as Mrs. Tarrant
believed her to be. She had opened Verena's eyes to extraordinary
pictures, made the girl believe that she had a heavenly mission, given
her, as we have seen, quite a new measure of the interest of life. These
were larger consequences than the possibility of meeting the leaders of
society at Olive's house. She had met no one, as yet, but Mrs. Luna; her
new friend seemed to wish to keep her quite for her