t it was only
after the vehicle had rolled off that he reflected upon her coolness,
and asked himself why the deuce she had brought him away. She _was_ a
very odd cousin, was this Boston cousin of his. He stood there a moment,
looking at the light in Miss Birdseye's windows and greatly minded to
re-enter the house, now he might speak to the girl. But he contented
himself with the memory of her smile, and turned away with a sense of
relief, after all, at having got out of such wild company, as well as
with (in a different order) a vulgar consciousness of being very
thirsty.

X

Verena Tarrant came in the very next day from Cambridge to Charles
Street; that quarter of Boston is in direct communication with the
academic suburb. It hardly seemed direct to poor Verena, perhaps, who,
in the crowded street-car which deposited her finally at Miss
Chancellor's door, had to stand up all the way, half suspended by a
leathern strap from the glazed roof of the stifling vehicle, like some
blooming cluster dangling in a hothouse. She was used, however, to these
perpendicular journeys, and though, as we have seen, she was not
inclined to accept without question the social arrangements of her time,
it never would have occurred to her to criticise the railways of her
native land. The promptness of her visit to Olive Chancellor had been an
idea of her mother's, and Verena listened open-eyed while this lady, in
the seclusion of the little house in Cambridge, while Selah Tarrant was
"off," as they said, with his patients, sketched out a line of conduct
for her. The girl was both submissive and unworldly, and she listened to
her mother's enumeration of the possible advantages of an intimacy with
Miss Chancellor as she would have listened to any other fairy-tale. It
was still a part of the fairy-tale when this zealous parent put on with
her own hands Verena's smart hat and feather, buttoned her little jacket
(the buttons were immense and gilt), and presented her with twenty cents
to pay her car-fare.

There was never any knowing in advance how Mrs. Tarrant would take a
thing, and even Verena, who, filially, was much less argumentative than
in her civic and, as it were, public capacity, had a perception that her
mother was queer. She was queer, indeed--a flaccid, relaxed, unhealthy,
whimsical woman, who still had a capacity to cling. What she clung to
was "society," and a position in the world which a secret whisper told
her she ha