ociations, only a girl who had some natural light, some divine spark
of taste. There were people like that, fresh from the hand of
Omnipotence; they were far from common, but their existence was as
incontestable as it was beneficent.

Tarrant's talk about his daughter, her prospects, her enthusiasm, was
terribly painful to Olive; it brought back to her what she had suffered
already from the idea that he laid his hands upon her to make her speak.
That he should be mixed up in any way with this exercise of her genius
was a great injury to the cause, and Olive had already determined that
in future Verena should dispense with his co-operation. The girl had
virtually confessed that she lent herself to it only because it gave him
pleasure, and that anything else would do as well, anything that would
make her quiet a little before she began to "give out." Olive took upon
herself to believe that _she_ could make her quiet, though, certainly,
she had never had that effect upon any one; she would mount the platform
with Verena if necessary, and lay her hands upon her head. Why in the
world had a perverse fate decreed that Tarrant should take an interest
in the affairs of Woman--as if she wanted _his_ aid to arrive at her
goal; a charlatan of the poor, lean, shabby sort, without the humour,
brilliancy, prestige, which sometimes throw a drapery over shallowness?
Mr. Pardon evidently took an interest as well, and there was something
in his appearance that seemed to say that his sympathy would not be
dangerous. He was much at his ease, plainly, beneath the roof of the
Tarrants, and Olive reflected that though Verena had told her much about
him, she had not given her the idea that he was as intimate as that.
What she had mainly said was that he sometimes took her to the theatre.
Olive could enter, to a certain extent, into that; she herself had had a
phase (some time after her father's death--her mother's had preceded
his--when she bought the little house in Charles Street and began to
live alone), during which she accompanied gentlemen to respectable
places of amusement. She was accordingly not shocked at the idea of such
adventures on Verena's part; than which, indeed, judging from her own
experience, nothing could well have been less adventurous. Her
recollections of these expeditions were as of something solemn and
edifying--of the earnest interest in her welfare exhibited by her
companion (there were few occasions on which the you