Miss Hart had a theory that many of the modern diseases might be traced directly to the eschewing of feather-beds.  “Never heard of appendicitis in my father’s time, when folks slept on good, soft feather-beds, and got their bones and in’ards rested,” she said.

Miss Hart was as timid in her way as Albion Bennet.  She never got enough control of her nervous fears to secure many hours of sound sleep.  She never was able to wholly rid herself of the conviction that her own wakefulness and watchfulness was essential to the right running of all the wheels of the universe, although she would have been shocked had she fairly known her own attitude.  She patrolled the house by night, moving about the low, uneven corridors with a flickering candle—­for she was afraid to carry a kerosene lamp—­like a wandering spirit.

She was suspicious, too.  She never lodged a stranger overnight but she had grave doubts of his moral status.  She imagined him a murderer escaped from justice, and compared his face with the pictures of criminals in the newspapers, or she was reasonably sure that he was dishonest, although she had little to tempt him.  She employed one chambermaid and a stable-boy, and did the cooking herself.  Miss Hart was not a good cook.  She used her thin, tense hands too quickly.  She was prone to over-measures of saleratus, to under-measures of sugar 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 only resource.  Women said of her that she was made up, that no woman of her age ever looked as she did and had a perfectly irreproachable moral character.