date, and buy them myself, but it
is a bad example," she said, firmly. "Things that were good enough
for our fathers and mothers are good enough for us. Good land! people
ain't any different from what they used to be. We haven't any
different flesh nor any different bones."

Miss Hart had a theory that many of the modern diseases might be
traced directly to the eschewing of feather-beds. "Never heard of
appendicitis in my father's time, when folks slept on good, soft
feather-beds, and got their bones and in'ards rested," she said.

Miss Hart was as timid in her way as Albion Bennet. She never got
enough control of her nervous fears to secure many hours of sound
sleep. She never was able to wholly rid herself of the conviction
that her own wakefulness and watchfulness was essential to the right
running of all the wheels of the universe, although she would have
been shocked had she fairly known her own attitude. She patrolled the
house by night, moving about the low, uneven corridors with a
flickering candle--for she was afraid to carry a kerosene lamp--like
a wandering spirit.

She was suspicious, too. She never lodged a stranger overnight but
she had grave doubts of his moral status. She imagined him a murderer
escaped from justice, and compared his face with the pictures of
criminals in the newspapers, or she was reasonably sure that he was
dishonest, although she had little to tempt him. She employed one
chambermaid and a stable-boy, and did the cooking herself. Miss Hart
was not a good cook. She used her thin, tense hands too quickly. She
was prone to over-measures of saleratus, to under-measures of sugar
and coffee. She erred both from economy and from the haste which
makes waste. Miss Eliza Farrel often turned from the scanty, poorly
cooked food which was place before her with disgust, but she never
seemed to lose an ounce of her firm, fair flesh, nor a shade of her
sweet color.

Miss Eliza Farrel was an anomaly. She was so beautiful that her
beauty detracted from her charm for both sexes. It was so perfect as
to awaken suspicion in a world where nothing is perfect from the hand
of nature. Then, too, she was manifestly, in spite of her beauty, not
in the first flush of youth, and had, it seemed, no right to such
perfection of body. Also her beauty was of a type which people
invariably associate with things which are undesirable to the rigidly
particular, and East Westland was largely inhabited by the rigidly