ed inclined to do anything. Yes, she was pretty-appearing,
but there was a certain indication of anaemia, and Doctor Prance would be
surprised if she didn't eat too much candy. Basil thought she had an
engaging exterior; it was his private reflexion, coloured doubtless by
"sectional" prejudice, that she was the first pretty girl he had seen in
Boston. She was talking with some ladies at the other end of the room;
and she had a large red fan, which she kept constantly in movement. She
was not a quiet girl; she fidgeted, was restless, while she talked, and
had the air of a person who, whatever she might be doing, would wish to
be doing something else. If people watched her a good deal, she also
returned their contemplation, and her charming eyes had several times
encountered those of Basil Ransom. But they wandered mainly in the
direction of Mrs. Farrinder--they lingered upon the serene solidity of
the great oratress. It was easy to see that the girl admired this
beneficent woman, and felt it a privilege to be near her. It was
apparent, indeed, that she was excited by the company in which she found
herself; a fact to be explained by a reference to that recent period of
exile in the West, of which we have had a hint, and in consequence of
which the present occasion may have seemed to her a return to
intellectual life. Ransom secretly wished that his cousin--since fate
was to reserve for him a cousin in Boston--had been more like that.

By this time a certain agitation was perceptible; several ladies,
impatient of vain delay, had left their places, to appeal personally to
Mrs. Farrinder, who was presently surrounded with sympathetic
remonstrants. Miss Birdseye had given her up; it had been enough for
Miss Birdseye that she should have said, when pressed (so far as her
hostess, muffled in laxity, could press) on the subject of the general
expectation, that she could only deliver her message to an audience
which she felt to be partially hostile. There was no hostility there;
they were all only too much in sympathy. "I don't require sympathy," she
said, with a tranquil smile, to Olive Chancellor; "I am only myself, I
only rise to the occasion, when I see prejudice, when I see bigotry,
when I see injustice, when I see conservatism, massed before me like an
army. Then I feel--I feel as I imagine Napoleon Bonaparte to have felt
on the eve of one of his great victories. I _must_ have unfriendly
elements--I like to win them over."