th her
immense sympathy for reform, she found herself so often wishing that
reformers were a little different. There was something grand about Mrs.
Farrinder; it lifted one up to be with her: but there was a false note
when she spoke to her young friend about the ladies in Beacon Street.
Olive hated to hear that fine avenue talked about as if it were such a
remarkable place, and to live there were a proof of worldly glory. All
sorts of inferior people lived there, and so brilliant a woman as Mrs.
Farrinder, who lived at Roxbury, ought not to mix things up. It was, of
course, very wretched to be irritated by such mistakes; but this was not
the first time Miss Chancellor had observed that the possession of
nerves was not by itself a reason for embracing the new truths. She knew
her place in the Boston hierarchy, and it was not what Mrs. Farrinder
supposed; so that there was a want of perspective in talking to her as
if she had been a representative of the aristocracy. Nothing could be
weaker, she knew very well, than (in the United States) to apply that
term too literally; nevertheless, it would represent a reality if one
were to say that, by distinction, the Chancellors belonged to the
_bourgeoisie_--the oldest and best. They might care for such a position
or not (as it happened, they were very proud of it), but there they
were, and it made Mrs. Farrinder seem provincial (there was something
provincial, after all, in the way she did her hair too) not to
understand. When Miss Birdseye spoke as if one were a "leader of
society," Olive could forgive her even that odious expression, because,
of course, one never pretended that she, poor dear, had the smallest
sense of the real. She was heroic, she was sublime, the whole moral
history of Boston was reflected in her displaced spectacles; but it was
a part of her originality, as it were, that she was deliciously
provincial. Olive Chancellor seemed to herself to have privileges enough
without being affiliated to the exclusive set and having invitations to
the smaller parties, which were the real test; it was a mercy for her
that she had not that added immorality on her conscience. The ladies
Mrs. Farrinder meant (it was to be supposed she meant some particular
ones) might speak for themselves. She wished to work in another field;
she had long been preoccupied with the romance of the people. She had an
immense desire to know intimately some _very_ poor girl. This might seem
one of