Of course Fidelia did not know this but simply discerned that of the two sorts of women in the world—those whom her nose and skin and hair at once and unforgivably antagonized, and those who, upon sight, arrayed themselves as her defenders and friends—Mrs. Fansler was of the second. Mrs. Fansler talked to her for a few minutes in the parlor and then showed her to a room on the second floor.
Two of the girls in the upper hall had the delicacy to retreat when the stranger ascended; but the other pair took a full, frank scrutiny of Fidelia Netley from White Falls. Fidelia looked at them, and with the same open, pleasant gaze, but she made not the same effect upon both; and she knew it. One was to be a girl for her to fend and the other a girl to kiss, if Fidelia put into practice the advice of her charm; for one girl, like Mrs. Fansler, showed without cause a sudden warm impulse to be her friend, while the other, at the same instant and from the same sight of her, betrayed as plain a sensation of hostility.
So it was all to start again, the hot, violent liking and hating of her, the reckless and unreasonable deeds to be done for her, without her wish, and the amazing, reasonless abuse of her. Why, at sight of her and when she did nothing at all but exist, did some persons want to hate when others liked her?
She stood in the center of her room, slowly turning while Mrs. Fansler bustled about unnecessarily displaying wholly obvious closets, the dresser and the chest of drawers.
"It's a lovely room," Fidelia said. "And that window is east, isn't it? Really, isn't it east?"
