Mrs. Tarrant, with her soft corpulence, looked to her guest very
bleached and tumid; her complexion had a kind of withered glaze; her
hair, very scanty, was drawn off her forehead _a la Chinoise_; she had
no eyebrows, and her eyes seemed to stare, like those of a figure of
wax. When she talked and wished to insist, and she was always insisting,
she puckered and distorted her face, with an effort to express the
inexpressible, which turned out, after all, to be nothing. She had a
kind of doleful elegance, tried to be confidential, lowered her voice
and looked as if she wished to establish a secret understanding, in
order to ask her visitor if she would venture on an apple-fritter. She
wore a flowing mantle, which resembled her husband's waterproof--a
garment which, when she turned to her daughter or talked about her,
might have passed for the robe of a sort of priestess of maternity. She
endeavoured to keep the conversation in a channel which would enable her
to ask sudden incoherent questions of Olive, mainly as to whether she
knew the principal ladies (the expression was Mrs. Tarrant's), not only
in Boston, but in the other cities which, in her nomadic course, she
herself had visited. Olive knew some of them, and of some of them had
never heard; but she was irritated, and pretended a universal ignorance
(she was conscious that she had never told so many fibs), by which her
hostess was much disconcerted, although her questions had apparently
been questions pure and simple, leading nowhither and without bearings
on any new truth.

XV

Tarrant, however, kept an eye in that direction; he was solemnly civil
to Miss Chancellor, handed her the dishes at table over and over again,
and ventured to intimate that the apple-fritters were very fine; but,
save for this, alluded to nothing more trivial than the regeneration of
humanity and the strong hope he felt that Miss Birdseye would again have
one of her delightful gatherings. With regard to this latter point he
explained that it was not in order that he might again present his
daughter to the company, but simply because on such occasions there was
a valuable interchange of hopeful thought, a contact of mind with mind.
If Verena had anything suggestive to contribute to the social problem,
the opportunity would come--that was part of their faith. They couldn't
reach out for it and try and push their way; if they were wanted, their
hour would strike; if they were not,