and coffee. She erred both from economy and from the haste which
makes waste. Miss Eliza Farrel often turned from the scanty, poorly
cooked food which was place before her with disgust, but she never
seemed to lose an ounce of her firm, fair flesh, nor a shade of her
sweet color.

Miss Eliza Farrel was an anomaly. She was so beautiful that her
beauty detracted from her charm for both sexes. It was so perfect as
to awaken suspicion in a world where nothing is perfect from the hand
of nature. Then, too, she was manifestly, in spite of her beauty, not
in the first flush of youth, and had, it seemed, no right to such
perfection of body. Also her beauty was of a type which people
invariably associate with things which are undesirable to the rigidly
particular, and East Westland was largely inhabited by the rigidly
particular.

East Westland was not ignorant. It read of the crimes and follies of
the times, but it read of them with a distinct and complacent sense
of superiority. It was as if East Westland said: "It is desirable to
read of these things, of these doings among the vicious and the
worldly, that we may understand what _we_ are." East Westland looked
upon itself in its day and generation as a lot among the cities of
the plain.

It seemed inconceivable that East Westland people should have
recognized the fact that Miss Farrel's beauty was of a suspicious
type, but they must have had an instinctive knowledge of it. From the
moment that Miss Farrel appeared in the village, although she had the
best of references, not a woman would admit her into her house as a
boarder, and the hotel, with its feather-beds and poor table, was her