th certain
elements in the feminine camp. This complicated the problem, and such a
complication, naturally, could not make Mrs. Farrinder appear more easy
to assimilate. If Olive's was a high nature and so was hers, the fault
was in neither; it was only an admonition that they were not needed as
landmarks in the same part of the field. If such perceptions are
delicate as between men, the reader need not be reminded of the
exquisite form they may assume in natures more refined. So it was that
Olive passed, in three months, from the stage of veneration to that of
competition; and the process had been accelerated by the introduction of
Verena into the fold. Mrs. Farrinder had behaved in the strangest way
about Verena. First she had been struck with her, and then she hadn't;
first she had seemed to want to take her in, then she had shied at her
unmistakably--intimating to Olive that there were enough of that kind
already. Of "that kind" indeed!--the phrase reverberated in Miss
Chancellor's resentful soul. Was it possible she didn't know the kind
Verena was of, and with what vulgar aspirants to notoriety did she
confound her? It had been Olive's original desire to obtain Mrs.
Farrinder's stamp for her _protegee_; she wished her to hold a
commission from the commander-in-chief. With this view the two young
women had made more than one pilgrimage to Roxbury, and on one of these
occasions the sibylline mood (in its most charming form) had descended
upon Verena. She had fallen into it, naturally and gracefully, in the
course of talk, and poured out a stream of eloquence even more touching
than her regular discourse at Miss Birdseye's. Mrs. Farrinder had taken
it rather dryly, and certainly it didn't resemble her own style of
oratory, remarkable and cogent as this was. There had been considerable
question of her writing a letter to the New York _Tribune_, the effect
of which should be to launch Miss Tarrant into renown; but this
beneficent epistle never appeared, and now Olive saw that there was no
favour to come from the prophetess of Roxbury. There had been
primnesses, pruderies, small reserves, which ended by staying her pen.
If Olive didn't say at once that she was jealous of Verena's more
attractive manner, it was only because such a declaration was destined
to produce more effect a little later. What she did say was that
evidently Mrs. Farrinder wanted to keep the movement in her own
hands--viewed with suspicion certain roma