mpness was liable suddenly to become rigid. This phenomenon
occurred when the vapours of social ambition mounted to her brain, when
she extended an arm from which a crumpled dressing-gown fluttered back
to seize the passing occasion. Then she surprised her daughter by a
volubility of exhortation as to the duty of making acquaintances, and by
the apparent wealth of her knowledge of the mysteries of good society.
She had, in particular, a way of explaining confidentially--and in her
desire to be graphic she often made up the oddest faces--the
interpretation that you must sometimes give to the manners of the best
people, and the delicate dignity with which you should meet them, which
made Verena wonder what secret sources of information she possessed.
Verena took life, as yet, very simply; she was not conscious of so many
differences of social complexion. She knew that some people were rich
and others poor, and that her father's house had never been visited by
such abundance as might make one ask one's self whether it were right,
in a world so full of the disinherited, to roll in luxury. But except
when her mother made her slightly dizzy by a resentment of some slight
that she herself had never perceived, or a flutter over some opportunity
that appeared already to have passed (while Mrs. Tarrant was looking for
something to "put on"), Verena had no vivid sense that she was not as
good as any one else, for no authority appealing really to her
imagination had fixed the place of mesmeric healers in the scale of
fashion. It was impossible to know in advance how Mrs. Tarrant would
take things. Sometimes she was abjectly indifferent; at others she
thought that every one who looked at her wished to insult her. At
moments she was full of suspicion of the ladies (they were mainly
ladies) whom Selah mesmerised; then again she appeared to have given up
everything but her slippers and the evening-paper (from this publication
she derived inscrutable solace), so that if Mrs. Foat in person had
returned from the summer-land (to which she had some time since taken
her flight), she would not have disturbed Mrs. Tarrant's almost cynical
equanimity.

It was, however, in her social subtleties that she was most beyond her
daughter; it was when she discovered extraordinary though latent
longings on the part of people they met to make their acquaintance, that
the girl became conscious of how much she herself had still to learn.
All her desire wa