glance like the flash of a watchman's bull's-eye, and then quickly
passed out. Ransom could see that she was impatient of the general
question and bored with being reminded, even for the sake of her rights,
that she was a woman--a detail that she was in the habit of forgetting,
having as many rights as she had time for. It was certain that whatever
might become of the movement at large, Doctor Prance's own little
revolution was a success.

VII

She had no sooner left him than Olive Chancellor came towards him with
eyes that seemed to say, "I don't care whether you are here now or
not--I'm all right!" But what her lips said was much more gracious; she
asked him if she mightn't have the pleasure of introducing him to Mrs.
Farrinder. Ransom consented, with a little of his Southern flourish, and
in a moment the lady got up to receive him from the midst of the circle
that now surrounded her. It was an occasion for her to justify her
reputation of an elegant manner, and it must be impartially related that
she struck Ransom as having a dignity in conversation and a command of
the noble style which could not have been surpassed by a daughter--one
of the most accomplished, most far-descended daughters--of his own
latitude. It was as if she had known that he was not eager for the
changes she advocated, and wished to show him that, especially to a
Southerner who had bitten the dust, her sex could be magnanimous. This
knowledge of his secret heresy seemed to him to be also in the faces of
the other ladies, whose circumspect glances, however (for he had not
been introduced), treated it as a pity rather than as a shame. He was
conscious of all these middle-aged feminine eyes, conscious of curls,
rather limp, that depended from dusky bonnets, of heads poked forward,
as if with a waiting, listening, familiar habit, of no one being very
bright or gay--no one, at least, but that girl he had noticed before,
who had a brilliant head, and who now hovered on the edge of the
conclave. He met her eye again; she was watching him too. It had been in
his thought that Mrs. Farrinder, to whom his cousin might have betrayed
or misrepresented him, would perhaps defy him to combat, and he wondered
whether he could pull himself together (he was extremely embarrassed)
sufficiently to do honour to such a challenge. If she would fling down
the glove on the temperance question, it seemed to him that it would be
in him to pick it up; for the idea