particular.

East Westland was not ignorant. It read of the crimes and follies of
the times, but it read of them with a distinct and complacent sense
of superiority. It was as if East Westland said: "It is desirable to
read of these things, of these doings among the vicious and the
worldly, that we may understand what _we_ are." East Westland looked
upon itself in its day and generation as a lot among the cities of
the plain.

It seemed inconceivable that East Westland people should have
recognized the fact that Miss Farrel's beauty was of a suspicious
type, but they must have had an instinctive knowledge of it. From the
moment that Miss Farrel appeared in the village, although she had the
best of references, not a woman would admit her into her house as a
boarder, and the hotel, with its feather-beds and poor table, was her
only resource. Women said of her that she was made up, that no woman
of her age ever looked as she did and had a perfectly irreproachable
moral character.

As for the men, they admired her timidly, sheepishly, and also a
trifle contemptuously. They did not admit openly the same opinion as
the women with regard to the legitimacy of her charms, but they did
maintain it secretly. It did not seem possible to many of them that a
woman could look just as Eliza Farrel did and be altogether natural.
As for her character, they also agreed with the feminine element
secretly, although they openly declared the women were jealous of
such beauty. It did not seem that such a type could be anything
except a dangerous one.

Miss Eliza Farrel was a pure blonde, as blond as a baby. There was
not a line nor blemish in her pure, fine skin. The flush on her
rounded cheeks and her full lips was like a baby's. Her dimples were
like a baby's. Her blond hair was thick and soft with a pristine
softness and thickness which is always associated with the hair of a
child. Her eyebrows were pencilled by nature, as if nature had been
art. Her smile was as fixedly radiant as a painted cherub's. Her
figure had that exuberance and slenderness at various portions which
no woman really believes in. She looked like a beautiful doll, with
an unvarying loveliness of manner and disposition under all
vicissitudes of life, but she was undoubtedly something more than a
doll.

Even the women listened dubiously and incredulously when she talked.
They had never heard a woman talk about such things in the way she
did. She had a fine educat