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.