As for the men, they admired her timidly, sheepishly, and also a trifle contemptuously.  They did not admit openly the same opinion as the women with regard to the legitimacy of her charms, but they did maintain it secretly.  It did not seem possible to many of them that a woman could look just as Eliza Farrel did and be altogether natural.  As for her character, they also agreed with the feminine element secretly, although they openly declared the women were jealous of such beauty.  It did not seem that such a type could be anything except a dangerous one.

Miss Eliza Farrel was a pure blonde, as blond as a baby.  There was not a line nor blemish in her pure, fine skin.  The flush on her rounded cheeks and her full lips was like a baby’s.  Her dimples were like a baby’s.  Her blond hair was thick and soft with a pristine softness and thickness which is always associated with the hair of a child.  Her eyebrows were pencilled by nature, as if nature had been art.  Her smile was as fixedly radiant as a painted cherub’s.  Her figure had that exuberance and slenderness at various portions which no woman really believes in.  She looked like a beautiful doll, with an unvarying loveliness of manner and disposition under all vicissitudes of life, but she was undoubtedly something more than a doll.

Even the women listened dubiously and incredulously when she talked.  They had never heard a woman talk about such things in the way she did.  She had a fine education, being a graduate of one of the women’s colleges.  She was an accomplished musician and a very successful teacher.  Her pupils undoubtedly progressed, although they did not have the blind love and admiration which pupils usually have for a beautiful teacher.  To this there was one exception.

Miss Farrel always smiled, never frowned or reprimanded.  It was said that Miss Farrel had better government than Miss Florence Dean, the other assistant.  Miss Dean was plain and saturnine, and had no difficulty in obtaining a good boarding-place, even with the mother of a marriageable daughter, who had taken her in with far-sighted alacrity.  She dreamed of business calls concerning school matters, which Mr. Horace Allen, the principal, might be obliged to make, and she planned to have her daughter, who was a very pretty girl, in evidence.  But poor Miss Farrel was thrown back upon the mercies of Miss Hart and the feather-beds and the hotel.

There were other considerations besides the feather-beds and the poor fare which conspired to render the hotel an undesirable boarding-place.  Miss Farrel might as well have been under the espionage of a private detective as with Miss Hart.  If Miss Hart was suspicious of dire mischief in the cases of her other boarders, she was certain in the case of Eliza Farrel.  She would not have admitted her under her roof at all had she not been forced thereto by the necessity for money.  Miss Hart herself took care of Miss Farrel’s room sometimes.  She had no hesitation