rs.

As regards the pecuniary transaction with Selah, it was strange how she
should have seen it through the conviction that Verena would never give
up her parents. Olive was sure that she would never turn her back upon
them, would always share with them. She would have despised her had she
thought her capable of another course; yet it baffled her to understand
why, when parents were so trashy, this natural law should not be
suspended. Such a question brought her back, however, to her perpetual
enigma, the mystery she had already turned over in her mind for hours
together--the wonder of such people being Verena's progenitors at all.
She had explained it, as we explain all exceptional things, by making
the part, as the French say, of the miraculous. She had come to consider
the girl as a wonder of wonders, to hold that no human origin, however
congruous it might superficially appear, would sufficiently account for
her; that her springing up between Selah and his wife was an exquisite
whim of the creative force; and that in such a case a few shades more or
less of the inexplicable didn't matter. It was notorious that great
beauties, great geniuses, great characters, take their own times and
places for coming into the world, leaving the gaping spectators to make
them "fit in," and holding from far-off ancestors, or even, perhaps,
straight from the divine generosity, much more than from their ugly or
stupid progenitors. They were incalculable phenomena, anyway, as Selah
would have said. Verena, for Olive, was the very type and model of the
"gifted being"; her qualities had not been bought and paid for; they
were like some brilliant birthday-present, left at the door by an
unknown messenger, to be delightful for ever as an inexhaustible legacy,
and amusing for ever from the obscurity of its source. They were
superabundantly crude as yet--happily for Olive, who promised herself,
as we know, to train and polish them--but they were as genuine as fruit
and flowers, as the glow of the fire or the plash of water. For her
scrutinising friend Verena had the disposition of the artist, the spirit
to which all charming forms come easily and naturally. It required an
effort at first to imagine an artist so untaught, so mistaught, so poor
in experience; but then it required an effort also to imagine people
like the old Tarrants, or a life so full as her life had been of ugly
things. Only an exquisite creature could have resisted such
ass