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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Bostonians, Vol. I (of II), by Henry James
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Bostonians, Vol. I (of II)
+
+Author: Henry James
+
+Release Date: November 5, 2006 [EBook #19717]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE BOSTONIANS, VOL. I (OF II) ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by R. Cedron, Mary Meehan and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+                            THE BOSTONIANS
+
+                               A NOVEL
+
+                            BY HENRY JAMES
+
+                            IN TWO VOLUMES
+
+                               VOL. I
+
+
+
+MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED
+ST. MARTIN'S STREET, LONDON
+1921
+
+_First Published in_ 1886
+
+
+
+
+BOOK FIRST
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+
+"Olive will come down in about ten minutes; she told me to tell you
+that. About ten; that is exactly like Olive. Neither five nor fifteen,
+and yet not ten exactly, but either nine or eleven. She didn't tell me
+to say she was glad to see you, because she doesn't know whether she is
+or not, and she wouldn't for the world expose herself to telling a fib.
+She is very honest, is Olive Chancellor; she is full of rectitude.
+Nobody tells fibs in Boston; I don't know what to make of them all.
+Well, I am very glad to see you, at any rate."
+
+These words were spoken with much volubility by a fair, plump, smiling
+woman who entered a narrow drawing-room in which a visitor, kept waiting
+for a few moments, was already absorbed in a book. The gentleman had not
+even needed to sit down to become interested: apparently he had taken up
+the volume from a table as soon as he came in, and, standing there,
+after a single glance round the apartment, had lost himself in its
+pages. He threw it down at the approach of Mrs. Luna, laughed, shook
+hands with her, and said in answer to her last remark, "You imply that
+you do tell fibs. Perhaps that is one."
+
+"Oh no; there is nothing wonderful in my being glad to see you," Mrs.
+Luna rejoined, "when I tell you that I have been three long weeks in
+this unprevaricating city."
+
+"That has an unflattering sound for me," said the young man. "I pretend
+not to prevaricate."
+
+"Dear me, what's the good of being a Southerner?" the lady asked. "Olive
+told me to tell you she hoped you will stay to dinner. And if she said
+it, she does really hope it. She is willing to risk that."
+
+"Just as I am?" the visitor inquired, presenting himself with rather a
+work-a-day aspect.
+
+Mrs. Luna glanced at him from head to foot, and gave a little smiling
+sigh, as if he had been a long sum in addition. And, indeed, he was very
+long, Basil Ransom, and he even looked a little hard and discouraging,
+like a column of figures, in spite of the friendly face which he bent
+upon his hostess's deputy, and which, in its thinness, had a deep dry
+line, a sort of premature wrinkle, on either side of the mouth. He was
+tall and lean, and dressed throughout in black; his shirt-collar was low
+and wide, and the triangle of linen, a little crumpled, exhibited by the
+opening of his waistcoat, was adorned by a pin containing a small red
+stone. In spite of this decoration the young man looked poor--as poor as
+a young man could look who had such a fine head and such magnificent
+eyes. Those of Basil Ransom were dark, deep, and glowing; his head had a
+character of elevation which fairly added to his stature; it was a head
+to be seen above the level of a crowd, on some judicial bench or
+political platform, or even on a bronze medal. His forehead was high and
+broad, and his thick black hair, perfectly straight and glossy, and
+without any division, rolled back from it in a leonine manner. These
+things, the eyes especially, with their smouldering fire, might have
+indicated that he was to be a great American statesman; or, on the other
+hand, they might simply have proved that he came from Carolina or
+Alabama. He came, in fact, from Mississippi, and he spoke very
+perceptibly with the accent of that country. It is not in my power to
+reproduce by any combination of characters this charming dialect; but
+the initiated reader will have no difficulty in evoking the sound, which
+is to be associated in the present instance with nothing vulgar or vain.
+This lean, pale, sallow, shabby, striking young man, with his superior
+head, his sedentary shoulders, his expression of bright grimness and
+hard enthusiasm, his provincial, distinguished appearance, is, as a
+representative of his sex, the most important personage in my narrative;
+he played a very active part in the events I have undertaken in some
+degree to set forth. And yet the reader who likes a complete image, who
+desires to read with the senses as well as with the reason, is entreated
+not to forget that he prolonged his consonants and swallowed his vowels,
+that he was guilty of elisions and interpolations which were equally
+unexpected, and that his discourse was pervaded by something sultry and
+vast, something almost African in its rich, basking tone, something that
+suggested the teeming expanse of the cotton-field. Mrs. Luna looked up
+at all this, but saw only a part of it; otherwise she would not have
+replied in a bantering manner, in answer to his inquiry: "Are you ever
+different from this?" Mrs. Luna was familiar--intolerably familiar.
+
+Basil Ransom coloured a little. Then he said: "Oh yes; when I dine out I
+usually carry a six-shooter and a bowie-knife." And he took up his hat
+vaguely--a soft black hat with a low crown and an immense straight brim.
+Mrs. Luna wanted to know what he was doing. She made him sit down; she
+assured him that her sister quite expected him, would feel as sorry as
+she could ever feel for anything--for she was a kind of fatalist,
+anyhow--if he didn't stay to dinner. It was an immense pity--she herself
+was going out; in Boston you must jump at invitations. Olive, too, was
+going somewhere after dinner, but he mustn't mind that; perhaps he would
+like to go with her. It wasn't a party--Olive didn't go to parties; it
+was one of those weird meetings she was so fond of.
+
+"What kind of meetings do you refer to? You speak as if it were a
+rendezvous of witches on the Brocken."
+
+"Well, so it is; they are all witches and wizards, mediums, and
+spirit-rappers, and roaring radicals."
+
+Basil Ransom stared; the yellow light in his brown eyes deepened. "Do
+you mean to say your sister's a roaring radical?"
+
+"A radical? She's a female Jacobin--she's a nihilist. Whatever is, is
+wrong, and all that sort of thing. If you are going to dine with her,
+you had better know it."
+
+"Oh, murder!" murmured the young man vaguely, sinking back in his chair
+with his arms folded. He looked at Mrs. Luna with intelligent
+incredulity. She was sufficiently pretty; her hair was in clusters of
+curls, like bunches of grapes; her tight bodice seemed to crack with her
+vivacity; and from beneath the stiff little plaits of her petticoat a
+small fat foot protruded, resting upon a stilted heel. She was
+attractive and impertinent, especially the latter. He seemed to think it
+was a great pity, what she had told him; but he lost himself in this
+consideration, or, at any rate, said nothing for some time, while his
+eyes wandered over Mrs. Luna, and he probably wondered what body of
+doctrine _she_ represented, little as she might partake of the nature of
+her sister. Many things were strange to Basil Ransom; Boston especially
+was strewn with surprises, and he was a man who liked to understand.
+Mrs. Luna was drawing on her gloves; Ransom had never seen any that were
+so long; they reminded him of stockings, and he wondered how she managed
+without garters above the elbow. "Well, I suppose I might have known
+that," he continued, at last.
+
+"You might have known what?"
+
+"Well, that Miss Chancellor would be all that you say. She was brought
+up in the city of reform."
+
+"Oh, it isn't the city; it's just Olive Chancellor. She would reform the
+solar system if she could get hold of it. She'll reform you, if you
+don't look out. That's the way I found her when I returned from Europe."
+
+"Have you been in Europe?" Ransom asked.
+
+"Mercy, yes! Haven't you?"
+
+"No, I haven't been anywhere. Has your sister?"
+
+"Yes; but she stayed only an hour or two. She hates it; she would like
+to abolish it. Didn't you know I had been to Europe?" Mrs. Luna went on,
+in the slightly aggrieved tone of a woman who discovers the limits of
+her reputation.
+
+Ransom reflected he might answer her that until five minutes ago he
+didn't know she existed; but he remembered that this was not the way in
+which a Southern gentleman spoke to ladies, and he contented himself
+with saying that he must condone his Boeotian ignorance (he was fond
+of an elegant phrase); that he lived in a part of the country where they
+didn't think much about Europe, and that he had always supposed she was
+domiciled in New York. This last remark he made at a venture, for he
+had, naturally, not devoted any supposition whatever to Mrs. Luna. His
+dishonesty, however, only exposed him the more.
+
+"If you thought I lived in New York, why in the world didn't you come
+and see me?" the lady inquired.
+
+"Well, you see, I don't go out much, except to the courts."
+
+"Do you mean the law-courts? Every one has got some profession over
+here! Are you very ambitious? You look as if you were."
+
+"Yes, very," Basil Ransom replied, with a smile, and the curious
+feminine softness with which Southern gentlemen enunciate that adverb.
+
+Mrs. Luna explained that she had been living in Europe for several
+years--ever since her husband died--but had come home a month before,
+come home with her little boy, the only thing she had in the world, and
+was paying a visit to her sister, who, of course, was the nearest thing
+after the child. "But it isn't the same," she said. "Olive and I
+disagree so much."
+
+"While you and your little boy don't," the young man remarked.
+
+"Oh no, I never differ from Newton!" And Mrs. Luna added that now she
+was back she didn't know what she should do. That was the worst of
+coming back; it was like being born again, at one's age--one had to
+begin life afresh. One didn't even know what one had come back for.
+There were people who wanted one to spend the winter in Boston; but she
+couldn't stand that--she knew, at least, what she had not come back for.
+Perhaps she should take a house in Washington; did he ever hear of that
+little place? They had invented it while she was away. Besides, Olive
+didn't want her in Boston, and didn't go through the form of saying so.
+That was one comfort with Olive; she never went through any forms.
+
+Basil Ransom had got up just as Mrs. Luna made this last declaration;
+for a young lady had glided into the room, who stopped short as it fell
+upon her ears. She stood there looking, consciously and rather
+seriously, at Mr. Ransom; a smile of exceeding faintness played about
+her lips--it was just perceptible enough to light up the native gravity
+of her face. It might have been likened to a thin ray of moonlight
+resting upon the wall of a prison.
+
+"If that were true," she said, "I shouldn't tell you that I am very
+sorry to have kept you waiting."
+
+Her voice was low and agreeable--a cultivated voice--and she extended a
+slender white hand to her visitor, who remarked with some solemnity (he
+felt a certain guilt of participation in Mrs. Luna's indiscretion) that
+he was intensely happy to make her acquaintance. He observed that Miss
+Chancellor's hand was at once cold and limp; she merely placed it in
+his, without exerting the smallest pressure. Mrs. Luna explained to her
+sister that her freedom of speech was caused by his being a
+relation--though, indeed, he didn't seem to know much about them. She
+didn't believe he had ever heard of her, Mrs. Luna, though he pretended,
+with his Southern chivalry, that he had. She must be off to her dinner
+now, she saw the carriage was there, and in her absence Olive might give
+any version of her she chose.
+
+"I have told him you are a radical, and you may tell him, if you like,
+that I am a painted Jezebel. Try to reform him; a person from
+Mississippi is sure to be all wrong. I shall be back very late; we are
+going to a theatre-party; that's why we dine so early. Good-bye, Mr.
+Ransom," Mrs. Luna continued, gathering up the feathery white shawl
+which added to the volume of her fairness. "I hope you are going to stay
+a little, so that you may judge us for yourself. I should like you to
+see Newton, too; he is a noble little nature, and I want some advice
+about him. You only stay to-morrow? Why, what's the use of that? Well,
+mind you come and see me in New York; I shall be sure to be part of the
+winter there. I shall send you a card; I won't let you off. Don't come
+out; my sister has the first claim. Olive, why don't you take him to
+your female convention?" Mrs. Luna's familiarity extended even to her
+sister; she remarked to Miss Chancellor that she looked as if she were
+got up for a sea-voyage. "I am glad I haven't opinions that prevent my
+dressing in the evening!" she declared from the doorway. "The amount of
+thought they give to their clothing, the people who are afraid of
+looking frivolous!"
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+
+Whether much or little consideration had been directed to the result,
+Miss Chancellor certainly would not have incurred this reproach. She was
+habited in a plain dark dress, without any ornaments, and her smooth,
+colourless hair was confined as carefully as that of her sister was
+encouraged to stray. She had instantly seated herself, and while Mrs.
+Luna talked she kept her eyes on the ground, glancing even less toward
+Basil Ransom than toward that woman of many words. The young man was
+therefore free to look at her; a contemplation which showed him that she
+was agitated and trying to conceal it. He wondered why she was agitated,
+not foreseeing that he was destined to discover, later, that her nature
+was like a skiff in a stormy sea. Even after her sister had passed out
+of the room she sat there with her eyes turned away, as if there had
+been a spell upon her which forbade her to raise them. Miss Olive
+Chancellor, it may be confided to the reader, to whom in the course of
+our history I shall be under the necessity of imparting much occult
+information, was subject to fits of tragic shyness, during which she was
+unable to meet even her own eyes in the mirror. One of these fits had
+suddenly seized her now, without any obvious cause, though, indeed, Mrs.
+Luna had made it worse by becoming instantly so personal. There was
+nothing in the world so personal as Mrs. Luna; her sister could have
+hated her for it if she had not forbidden herself this emotion as
+directed to individuals. Basil Ransom was a young man of first-rate
+intelligence, but conscious of the narrow range, as yet, of his
+experience. He was on his guard against generalisations which might be
+hasty; but he had arrived at two or three that were of value to a
+gentleman lately admitted to the New York bar and looking out for
+clients. One of them was to the effect that the simplest division it is
+possible to make of the human race is into the people who take things
+hard and the people who take them easy. He perceived very quickly that
+Miss Chancellor belonged to the former class. This was written so
+intensely in her delicate face that he felt an unformulated pity for her
+before they had exchanged twenty words. He himself, by nature, took
+things easy; if he had put on the screw of late, it was after reflexion,
+and because circumstances pressed him close. But this pale girl, with
+her light-green eyes, her pointed features and nervous manner, was
+visibly morbid; it was as plain as day that she was morbid. Poor Ransom
+announced this fact to himself as if he had made a great discovery; but
+in reality he had never been so "Boeotian" as at that moment. It proved
+nothing of any importance, with regard to Miss Chancellor, to say that
+she was morbid; any sufficient account of her would lie very much to the
+rear of that. Why was she morbid, and why was her morbidness typical?
+Ransom might have exulted if he had gone back far enough to explain that
+mystery. The women he had hitherto known had been mainly of his own soft
+clime, and it was not often they exhibited the tendency he detected (and
+cursorily deplored) in Mrs. Luna's sister. That was the way he liked
+them--not to think too much, not to feel any responsibility for the
+government of the world, such as he was sure Miss Chancellor felt. If
+they would only be private and passive, and have no feeling but for
+that, and leave publicity to the sex of tougher hide! Ransom was pleased
+with the vision of that remedy; it must be repeated that he was very
+provincial.
+
+These considerations were not present to him as definitely as I have
+written them here; they were summed up in the vague compassion which his
+cousin's figure excited in his mind, and which was yet accompanied with
+a sensible reluctance to know her better, obvious as it was that with
+such a face as that she must be remarkable. He was sorry for her, but he
+saw in a flash that no one could help her: that was what made her
+tragic. He had not, seeking his fortune, come away from the blighted
+South, which weighed upon his heart, to look out for tragedies; at least
+he didn't want them outside of his office in Pine Street. He broke the
+silence ensuing upon Mrs. Luna's departure by one of the courteous
+speeches to which blighted regions may still encourage a tendency, and
+presently found himself talking comfortably enough with his hostess.
+Though he had said to himself that no one could help her, the effect of
+his tone was to dispel her shyness; it was her great advantage (for the
+career she had proposed to herself) that in certain conditions she was
+liable suddenly to become bold. She was reassured at finding that her
+visitor was peculiar; the way he spoke told her that it was no wonder he
+had fought on the Southern side. She had never yet encountered a
+personage so exotic, and she always felt more at her ease in the
+presence of anything strange. It was the usual things of life that
+filled her with silent rage; which was natural enough, inasmuch as, to
+her vision, almost everything that was usual was iniquitous. She had no
+difficulty in asking him now whether he would not stay to dinner--she
+hoped Adeline had given him her message. It had been when she was
+upstairs with Adeline, as his card was brought up, a sudden and very
+abnormal inspiration to offer him this (for her) really ultimate favour;
+nothing could be further from her common habit than to entertain alone,
+at any repast, a gentleman she had never seen.
+
+It was the same sort of impulse that had moved her to write to Basil
+Ransom, in the spring, after hearing accidentally that he had come to
+the North and intended, in New York, to practise his profession. It was
+her nature to look out for duties, to appeal to her conscience for
+tasks. This attentive organ, earnestly consulted, had represented to her
+that he was an offshoot of the old slave-holding oligarchy which, within
+her own vivid remembrance, had plunged the country into blood and tears,
+and that, as associated with such abominations, he was not a worthy
+object of patronage for a person whose two brothers--her only ones--had
+given up life for the Northern cause. It reminded her, however, on the
+other hand, that he too had been much bereaved, and, moreover, that he
+had fought and offered his own life, even if it had not been taken. She
+could not defend herself against a rich admiration--a kind of tenderness
+of envy--of any one who had been so happy as to have that opportunity.
+The most secret, the most sacred hope of her nature was that she might
+some day have such a chance, that she might be a martyr and die for
+something. Basil Ransom had lived, but she knew he had lived to see
+bitter hours. His family was ruined; they had lost their slaves, their
+property, their friends and relations, their home; had tasted of all the
+cruelty of defeat. He had tried for a while to carry on the plantation
+himself, but he had a millstone of debt round his neck, and he longed
+for some work which would transport him to the haunts of men. The State
+of Mississippi seemed to him the state of despair; so he surrendered the
+remnants of his patrimony to his mother and sisters, and, at nearly
+thirty years of age, alighted for the first time in New York, in the
+costume of his province, with fifty dollars in his pocket and a gnawing
+hunger in his heart.
+
+That this incident had revealed to the young man his ignorance of many
+things--only, however, to make him say to himself, after the first angry
+blush, that here he would enter the game and here he would win it--so
+much Olive Chancellor could not know; what was sufficient for her was
+that he had rallied, as the French say, had accepted the accomplished
+fact, had admitted that North and South were a single, indivisible
+political organism. Their cousinship--that of Chancellors and
+Ransoms--was not very close; it was the kind of thing that one might
+take up or leave alone, as one pleased. It was "in the female line," as
+Basil Ransom had written, in answering her letter with a good deal of
+form and flourish; he spoke as if they had been royal houses. Her mother
+had wished to take it up; it was only the fear of seeming patronising to
+people in misfortune that had prevented her from writing to Mississippi.
+If it had been possible to send Mrs. Ransom money, or even clothes, she
+would have liked that; but she had no means of ascertaining how such an
+offering would be taken. By the time Basil came to the North--making
+advances, as it were--Mrs. Chancellor had passed away; so it was for
+Olive, left alone in the little house in Charles Street (Adeline being
+in Europe), to decide.
+
+She knew what her mother would have done, and that helped her decision;
+for her mother always chose the positive course. Olive had a fear of
+everything, but her greatest fear was of being afraid. She wished
+immensely to be generous, and how could one be generous unless one ran a
+risk? She had erected it into a sort of rule of conduct that whenever
+she saw a risk she was to take it; and she had frequent humiliations at
+finding herself safe after all. She was perfectly safe after writing to
+Basil Ransom; and, indeed, it was difficult to see what he could have
+done to her except thank her (he was only exceptionally superlative) for
+her letter, and assure her that he would come and see her the first time
+his business (he was beginning to get a little) should take him to
+Boston. He had now come, in redemption of his grateful vow, and even
+this did not make Miss Chancellor feel that she had courted danger. She
+saw (when once she had looked at him) that he would not put those
+worldly interpretations on things which, with her, it was both an
+impulse and a principle to defy. He was too simple--too
+Mississippian--for that; she was almost disappointed. She certainly had
+not hoped that she might have struck him as making unwomanly overtures
+(Miss Chancellor hated this epithet almost as much as she hated its
+opposite); but she had a presentiment that he would be too good-natured,
+primitive to that degree. Of all things in the world, contention was
+most sweet to her (though why it is hard to imagine, for it always cost
+her tears, headaches, a day or two in bed, acute emotion), and it was
+very possible Basil Ransom would not care to contend. Nothing could be
+more displeasing than this indifference when people didn't agree with
+you. That he should agree she did not in the least expect of him; how
+could a Mississippian agree? If she had supposed he would agree, she
+would not have written to him.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+
+When he had told her that if she would take him as he was he should be
+very happy to dine with her, she excused herself a moment and went to
+give an order in the dining-room. The young man, left alone, looked
+about the parlour--the two parlours which, in their prolonged, adjacent
+narrowness, formed evidently one apartment--and wandered to the windows
+at the back, where there was a view of the water; Miss Chancellor having
+the good fortune to dwell on that side of Charles Street toward which,
+in the rear, the afternoon sun slants redly, from an horizon indented at
+empty intervals with wooden spires, the masts of lonely boats, the
+chimneys of dirty "works," over a brackish expanse of anomalous
+character, which is too big for a river and too small for a bay. The
+view seemed to him very picturesque, though in the gathered dusk little
+was left of it save a cold yellow streak in the west, a gleam of brown
+water, and the reflexion of the lights that had begun to show themselves
+in a row of houses, impressive to Ransom in their extreme modernness,
+which overlooked the same lagoon from a long embankment on the left,
+constructed of stones roughly piled. He thought this prospect, from a
+city-house, almost romantic; and he turned from it back to the interior
+illuminated now by a lamp which the parlour-maid had placed on a table
+while he stood at the window as to something still more genial and
+interesting. The artistic sense in Basil Ransom had not been highly
+cultivated; neither (though he had passed his early years as the son of
+a rich man) was his conception of material comfort very definite; it
+consisted mainly of the vision of plenty of cigars and brandy and water
+and newspapers, and a cane-bottomed arm-chair of the right inclination,
+from which he could stretch his legs. Nevertheless it seemed to him he
+had never seen an interior that was so much an interior as this queer
+corridor-shaped drawing-room of his new-found kinswoman; he had never
+felt himself in the presence of so much organised privacy or of so many
+objects that spoke of habits and tastes. Most of the people he had
+hitherto known had no tastes; they had a few habits, but these were not
+of a sort that required much upholstery. He had not as yet been in many
+houses in New York, and he had never before seen so many accessories.
+The general character of the place struck him as Bostonian; this was, in
+fact, very much what he had supposed Boston to be. He had always heard
+Boston was a city of culture, and now there was culture in Miss
+Chancellor's tables and sofas, in the books that were everywhere, on
+little shelves like brackets (as if a book were a statuette), in the
+photographs and watercolours that covered the walls, in the curtains
+that were festooned rather stiffly in the doorways. He looked at some of
+the books and saw that his cousin read German; and his impression of the
+importance of this (as a symptom of superiority) was not diminished by
+the fact that he himself had mastered the tongue (knowing it contained a
+large literature of jurisprudence) during a long, empty, deadly summer
+on the plantation. It is a curious proof of a certain crude modesty
+inherent in Basil Ransom that the main effect of his observing his
+cousin's German books was to give him an idea of the natural energy of
+Northerners. He had noticed it often before; he had already told himself
+that he must count with it. It was only after much experience he made
+the discovery that few Northerners were, in their secret soul, so
+energetic as he. Many other persons had made it before that. He knew
+very little about Miss Chancellor; he had come to see her only because
+she wrote to him; he would never have thought of looking her up, and
+since then there had been no one in New York he might ask about her.
+Therefore he could only guess that she was a rich young woman; such a
+house, inhabited in such a way by a quiet spinster, implied a
+considerable income. How much? he asked himself; five thousand, ten
+thousand, fifteen thousand a year? There was richness to our panting
+young man in the smallest of these figures. He was not of a mercenary
+spirit, but he had an immense desire for success, and he had more than
+once reflected that a moderate capital was an aid to achievement. He had
+seen in his younger years one of the biggest failures that history
+commemorates, an immense national _fiasco_, and it had implanted in his
+mind a deep aversion to the ineffectual. It came over him, while he
+waited for his hostess to reappear, that she was unmarried as well as
+rich, that she was sociable (her letter answered for that) as well as
+single; and he had for a moment a whimsical vision of becoming a partner
+in so flourishing a firm. He ground his teeth a little as he thought of
+the contrasts of the human lot; this cushioned feminine nest made him
+feel unhoused and underfed. Such a mood, however, could only be
+momentary, for he was conscious at bottom of a bigger stomach than all
+the culture of Charles Street could fill.
+
+Afterwards, when his cousin had come back and they had gone down to
+dinner together, where he sat facing her at a little table decorated in
+the middle with flowers, a position from which he had another view,
+through a window where the curtain remained undrawn by her direction
+(she called his attention to this--it was for his benefit), of the
+dusky, empty river, spotted with points of light--at this period, I say,
+it was very easy for him to remark to himself that nothing would induce
+him to make love to such a type as that. Several months later, in New
+York, in conversation with Mrs. Luna, of whom he was destined to see a
+good deal, he alluded by chance to this repast, to the way her sister
+had placed him at table, and to the remark with which she had pointed
+out the advantage of his seat.
+
+"That's what they call in Boston being very 'thoughtful,'" Mrs. Luna
+said, "giving you the Back Bay (don't you hate the name?) to look at,
+and then taking credit for it."
+
+This, however, was in the future; what Basil Ransom actually perceived
+was that Miss Chancellor was a signal old maid. That was her quality,
+her destiny; nothing could be more distinctly written. There are women
+who are unmarried by accident, and others who are unmarried by option;
+but Olive Chancellor was unmarried by every implication of her being.
+She was a spinster as Shelley was a lyric poet, or as the month of
+August is sultry. She was so essentially a celibate that Ransom found
+himself thinking of her as old, though when he came to look at her (as
+he said to himself) it was apparent that her years were fewer than his
+own. He did not dislike her, she had been so friendly; but, little by
+little, she gave him an uneasy feeling--the sense that you could never
+be safe with a person who took things so hard. It came over him that it
+was because she took things hard she had sought his acquaintance; it had
+been because she was strenuous, not because she was genial; she had had
+in her eye--and what an extraordinary eye it was!--not a pleasure, but a
+duty. She would expect him to be strenuous in return; but he
+couldn't--in private life, he couldn't; privacy for Basil Ransom
+consisted entirely in what he called "laying off." She was not so plain
+on further acquaintance as she had seemed to him at first; even the
+young Mississippian had culture enough to see that she was refined. Her
+white skin had a singular look of being drawn tightly across her face;
+but her features, though sharp and irregular, were delicate in a fashion
+that suggested good breeding. Their line was perverse, but it was not
+poor. The curious tint of her eyes was a living colour; when she turned
+it upon you, you thought vaguely of the glitter of green ice. She had
+absolutely no figure, and presented a certain appearance of feeling
+cold. With all this, there was something very modern and highly
+developed in her aspect; she had the advantages as well as the drawbacks
+of a nervous organisation. She smiled constantly at her guest, but from
+the beginning to the end of dinner, though he made several remarks that
+he thought might prove amusing, she never once laughed. Later, he saw
+that she was a woman without laughter; exhilaration, if it ever visited
+her, was dumb. Once only, in the course of his subsequent acquaintance
+with her, did it find a voice; and then the sound remained in Ransom's
+ear as one of the strangest he had heard.
+
+She asked him a great many questions, and made no comment on his
+answers, which only served to suggest to her fresh inquiries. Her
+shyness had quite left her, it did not come back; she had confidence
+enough to wish him to see that she took a great interest in him. Why
+should she? he wondered, He couldn't believe he was one of _her_ kind;
+he was conscious of much Bohemianism--he drank beer, in New York, in
+cellars, knew no ladies, and was familiar with a "variety" actress.
+Certainly, as she knew him better, she would disapprove of him, though,
+of course, he would never mention the actress, nor even, if necessary,
+the beer. Ransom's conception of vice was purely as a series of special
+cases, of explicable accidents. Not that he cared; if it were a part of
+the Boston character to be inquiring, he would be to the last a
+courteous Mississippian. He would tell her about Mississippi as much as
+she liked; he didn't care how much he told her that the old ideas in the
+South were played out. She would not understand him any the better for
+that; she would not know how little his own views could be gathered from
+such a limited admission. What her sister imparted to him about her
+mania for "reform" had left in his mouth a kind of unpleasant
+aftertaste; he felt, at any rate, that if she had the religion of
+humanity--Basil Ransom had read Comte, he had read everything--she would
+never understand him. He, too, had a private vision of reform, but the
+first principle of it was to reform the reformers. As they drew to the
+close of a meal which, in spite of all latent incompatibilities, had
+gone off brilliantly, she said to him that she should have to leave him
+after dinner, unless perhaps he should be inclined to accompany her. She
+was going to a small gathering at the house of a friend who had asked a
+few people, "interested in new ideas," to meet Mrs. Farrinder.
+
+"Oh, thank you," said Basil Ransom. "Is it a party? I haven't been to a
+party since Mississippi seceded."
+
+"No; Miss Birdseye doesn't give parties. She's an ascetic."
+
+"Oh, well, we have had our dinner," Ransom rejoined, laughing.
+
+His hostess sat silent a moment, with her eyes on the ground; she looked
+at such times as if she were hesitating greatly between several things
+she might say, all so important that it was difficult to choose.
+
+"I think it might interest you," she remarked presently. "You will hear
+some discussion, if you are fond of that. Perhaps you wouldn't agree,"
+she added, resting her strange eyes on him.
+
+"Perhaps I shouldn't--I don't agree with everything," he said, smiling
+and stroking his leg.
+
+"Don't you care for human progress?" Miss Chancellor went on.
+
+"I don't know--I never saw any. Are you going to show me some?"
+
+"I can show you an earnest effort towards it. That's the most one can be
+sure of. But I am not sure you are worthy."
+
+"Is it something very Bostonian? I should like to see that," said Basil
+Ransom.
+
+"There are movements in other cities. Mrs. Farrinder goes everywhere;
+she may speak to-night."
+
+"Mrs. Farrinder, the celebrated----?"
+
+"Yes, the celebrated; the great apostle of the emancipation of women.
+She is a great friend of Miss Birdseye."
+
+"And who is Miss Birdseye?"
+
+"She is one of our celebrities. She is the woman in the world, I
+suppose, who has laboured most for every wise reform. I think I ought to
+tell you," Miss Chancellor went on in a moment, "she was one of the
+earliest, one of the most passionate, of the old Abolitionists."
+
+She had thought, indeed, she ought to tell him that, and it threw her
+into a little tremor of excitement to do so. Yet, if she had been afraid
+he would show some irritation at this news, she was disappointed at the
+geniality with which he exclaimed:
+
+"Why, poor old lady--she must be quite mature!"
+
+It was therefore with some severity that she rejoined:
+
+"She will never be old. She is the youngest spirit I know. But if you
+are not in sympathy, perhaps you had better not come," she went on.
+
+"In sympathy with what, dear madam?" Basil Ransom asked, failing still,
+to her perception, to catch the tone of real seriousness. "If, as you
+say, there is to be a discussion, there will be different sides, and of
+course one can't sympathise with both."
+
+"Yes, but every one will, in his way--or in her way--plead the cause of
+the new truths. If you don't care for them, you won't go with us."
+
+"I tell you I haven't the least idea what they are! I have never yet
+encountered in the world any but old truths--as old as the sun and moon.
+How can I know? But _do_ take me; it's such a chance to see Boston."
+
+"It isn't Boston--it's humanity!" Miss Chancellor, as she made this
+remark, rose from her chair, and her movement seemed to say that she
+consented. But before she quitted her kinsman to get ready, she observed
+to him that she was sure he knew what she meant; he was only pretending
+he didn't.
+
+"Well, perhaps, after all, I have a general idea," he confessed; "but
+don't you see how this little reunion will give me a chance to fix it?"
+
+She lingered an instant, with her anxious face. "Mrs. Farrinder will fix
+it!" she said; and she went to prepare herself.
+
+It was in this poor young lady's nature to be anxious, to have scruple
+within scruple and to forecast the consequences of things. She returned
+in ten minutes, in her bonnet, which she had apparently assumed in
+recognition of Miss Birdseye's asceticism. As she stood there drawing on
+her gloves--her visitor had fortified himself against Mrs. Farrinder by
+another glass of wine--she declared to him that she quite repented of
+having proposed to him to go; something told her that he would be an
+unfavourable element.
+
+"Why, is it going to be a spiritual _séance_?" Basil Ransom asked.
+
+"Well, I have heard at Miss Birdseye's some inspirational speaking."
+Olive Chancellor was determined to look him straight in the face as she
+said this; her sense of the way it might strike him operated as a
+cogent, not as a deterrent, reason.
+
+"Why, Miss Olive, it's just got up on purpose for me!" cried the young
+Mississippian, radiant, and clasping his hands. She thought him very
+handsome as he said this, but reflected that unfortunately men didn't
+care for the truth, especially the new kinds, in proportion as they were
+good-looking. She had, however, a moral resource that she could always
+fall back upon; it had already been a comfort to her, on occasions of
+acute feeling, that she hated men, as a class, anyway. "And I want so
+much to see an old Abolitionist; I have never laid eyes on one," Basil
+Ransom added.
+
+"Of course you couldn't see one in the South; you were too afraid of
+them to let them come there!" She was now trying to think of something
+she might say that would be sufficiently disagreeable to make him cease
+to insist on accompanying her; for, strange to record--if anything, in a
+person of that intense sensibility, be stranger than any other--her
+second thought with regard to having asked him had deepened with the
+elapsing moments into an unreasoned terror of the effect of his
+presence. "Perhaps Miss Birdseye won't like you," she went on, as they
+waited for the carriage.
+
+"I don't know; I reckon she will," said Basil Ransom good-humouredly. He
+evidently had no intention of giving up his opportunity.
+
+From the window of the dining-room, at that moment, they heard the
+carriage drive up. Miss Birdseye lived at the South End; the distance
+was considerable, and Miss Chancellor had ordered a hackney-coach, it
+being one of the advantages of living in Charles Street that stables
+were near. The logic of her conduct was none of the clearest; for if she
+had been alone she would have proceeded to her destination by the aid of
+the street-car; not from economy (for she had the good fortune not to be
+obliged to consult it to that degree), and not from any love of
+wandering about Boston at night (a kind of exposure she greatly
+disliked), but by reason of a theory she devotedly nursed, a theory
+which bade her put off invidious differences and mingle in the common
+life. She would have gone on foot to Boylston Street, and there she
+would have taken the public conveyance (in her heart she loathed it) to
+the South End. Boston was full of poor girls who had to walk about at
+night and to squeeze into horse-cars in which every sense was
+displeased; and why should she hold herself superior to these? Olive
+Chancellor regulated her conduct on lofty principles, and this is why,
+having to-night the advantage of a gentleman's protection, she sent for
+a carriage to obliterate that patronage. If they had gone together in
+the common way she would have seemed to owe it to him that she should be
+so daring, and he belonged to a sex to which she wished to be under no
+obligations. Months before, when she wrote to him, it had been with the
+sense, rather, of putting _him_ in debt. As they rolled toward the South
+End, side by side, in a good deal of silence, bouncing and bumping over
+the railway-tracks very little less, after all, than if their wheels had
+been fitted to them, and looking out on either side at rows of red
+houses, dusky in the lamp-light, with protuberant fronts, approached by
+ladders of stone; as they proceeded, with these contemplative
+undulations, Miss Chancellor said to her companion, with a concentrated
+desire to defy him, as a punishment for having thrown her (she couldn't
+tell why) into such a tremor:
+
+"Don't you believe, then, in the coming of a better day--in its being
+possible to do something for the human race?"
+
+Poor Ransom perceived the defiance, and he felt rather bewildered; he
+wondered what type, after all, he _had_ got hold of, and what game was
+being played with him. Why had she made advances, if she wanted to pinch
+him this way? However, he was good for any game--that one as well as
+another--and he saw that he was "in" for something of which he had long
+desired to have a nearer view. "Well, Miss Olive," he answered, putting
+on again his big hat, which he had been holding in his lap, "what
+strikes me most is that the human race has got to bear its troubles."
+
+"That's what men say to women, to make them patient in the position they
+have made for them."
+
+"Oh, the position of women!" Basil Ransom exclaimed. "The position of
+women is to make fools of men. I would change my position for yours any
+day," he went on. "That's what I said to myself as I sat there in your
+elegant home."
+
+He could not see, in the dimness of the carriage, that she had flushed
+quickly, and he did not know that she disliked to be reminded of certain
+things which, for her, were mitigations of the hard feminine lot. But
+the passionate quaver with which, a moment later, she answered him
+sufficiently assured him that he had touched her at a tender point.
+
+"Do you make it a reproach to me that I happen to have a little money?
+The dearest wish of my heart is to do something with it for others--for
+the miserable."
+
+Basil Ransom might have greeted this last declaration with the sympathy
+it deserved, might have commended the noble aspirations of his
+kinswoman. But what struck him, rather, was the oddity of so sudden a
+sharpness of pitch in an intercourse which, an hour or two before, had
+begun in perfect amity, and he burst once more into an irrepressible
+laugh. This made his companion feel, with intensity, how little she was
+joking. "I don't know why I should care what you think," she said.
+
+"Don't care--don't care. What does it matter? It is not of the slightest
+importance."
+
+He might say that, but it was not true; she felt that there were reasons
+why she should care. She had brought him into her life, and she should
+have to pay for it. But she wished to know the worst at once. "Are you
+against our emancipation?" she asked, turning a white face on him in the
+momentary radiance of a street-lamp.
+
+"Do you mean your voting and preaching and all that sort of thing?" He
+made this inquiry, but seeing how seriously she would take his answer,
+he was almost frightened, and hung fire. "I will tell you when I have
+heard Mrs. Farrinder."
+
+They had arrived at the address given by Miss Chancellor to the
+coachman, and their vehicle stopped with a lurch. Basil Ransom got out;
+he stood at the door with an extended hand, to assist the young lady.
+But she seemed to hesitate; she sat there with her spectral face. "You
+hate it!" she exclaimed, in a low tone.
+
+"Miss Birdseye will convert me," said Ransom, with intention; for he had
+grown very curious, and he was afraid that now, at the last, Miss
+Chancellor would prevent his entering the house. She alighted without
+his help, and behind her he ascended the high steps of Miss Birdseye's
+residence. He had grown very curious, and among the things he wanted to
+know was why in the world this ticklish spinster had written to him.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+
+She had told him before they started that they should be early; she
+wished to see Miss Birdseye alone, before the arrival of any one else.
+This was just for the pleasure of seeing her--it was an opportunity; she
+was always so taken up with others. She received Miss Chancellor in the
+hall of the mansion, which had a salient front, an enormous and very
+high number--756--painted in gilt on the glass light above the door, a
+tin sign bearing the name of a doctress (Mary J. Prance) suspended from
+one of the windows of the basement, and a peculiar look of being both
+new and faded--a kind of modern fatigue--like certain articles of
+commerce which are sold at a reduction as shop-worn. The hall was very
+narrow; a considerable part of it was occupied by a large hat-tree, from
+which several coats and shawls already depended; the rest offered space
+for certain lateral demonstrations on Miss Birdseye's part. She sidled
+about her visitors, and at last went round to open for them a door of
+further admission, which happened to be locked inside. She was a little
+old lady, with an enormous head; that was the first thing Ransom
+noticed--the vast, fair, protuberant, candid, ungarnished brow,
+surmounting a pair of weak, kind, tired-looking eyes, and ineffectually
+balanced in the rear by a cap which had the air of falling backward, and
+which Miss Birdseye suddenly felt for while she talked, with
+unsuccessful irrelevant movements. She had a sad, soft, pale face, which
+(and it was the effect of her whole head) looked as if it had been
+soaked, blurred, and made vague by exposure to some slow dissolvent. The
+long practice of philanthropy had not given accent to her features; it
+had rubbed out their transitions, their meanings. The waves of sympathy,
+of enthusiasm, had wrought upon them in the same way in which the waves
+of time finally modify the surface of old marble busts, gradually
+washing away their sharpness, their details. In her large countenance
+her dim little smile scarcely showed. It was a mere sketch of a smile, a
+kind of instalment, or payment on account; it seemed to say that she
+would smile more if she had time, but that you could see, without this,
+that she was gentle and easy to beguile.
+
+She always dressed in the same way: she wore a loose black jacket, with
+deep pockets, which were stuffed with papers, memoranda of a voluminous
+correspondence; and from beneath her jacket depended a short stuff
+dress. The brevity of this simple garment was the one device by which
+Miss Birdseye managed to suggest that she was a woman of business, that
+she wished to be free for action. She belonged to the Short-Skirts
+League, as a matter of course; for she belonged to any and every league
+that had been founded for almost any purpose whatever. This did not
+prevent her being a confused, entangled, inconsequent, discursive old
+woman, whose charity began at home and ended nowhere, whose credulity
+kept pace with it, and who knew less about her fellow-creatures, if
+possible, after fifty years of humanitary zeal, than on the day she had
+gone into the field to testify against the iniquity of most
+arrangements. Basil Ransom knew very little about such a life as hers,
+but she seemed to him a revelation of a class, and a multitude of
+socialistic figures, of names and episodes that he had heard of, grouped
+themselves behind her. She looked as if she had spent her life on
+platforms, in audiences, in conventions, in phalansteries, in _séances_;
+in her faded face there was a kind of reflexion of ugly lecture-lamps;
+with its habit of an upward angle, it seemed turned toward a public
+speaker, with an effort of respiration in the thick air in which social
+reforms are usually discussed. She talked continually, in a voice of
+which the spring seemed broken, like that of an over-worked bell-wire;
+and when Miss Chancellor explained that she had brought Mr. Ransom
+because he was so anxious to meet Mrs. Farrinder, she gave the young man
+a delicate, dirty, democratic little hand, looking at him kindly, as she
+could not help doing, but without the smallest discrimination as against
+others who might not have the good fortune (which involved, possibly, an
+injustice) to be present on such an interesting occasion. She struck him
+as very poor, but it was only afterward that he learned she had never
+had a penny in her life. No one had an idea how she lived; whenever
+money was given her she gave it away to a negro or a refugee. No woman
+could be less invidious, but on the whole she preferred these two
+classes of the human race. Since the Civil War much of her occupation
+was gone; for before that her best hours had been spent in fancying that
+she was helping some Southern slave to escape. It would have been a nice
+question whether, in her heart of hearts, for the sake of this
+excitement, she did not sometimes wish the blacks back in bondage. She
+had suffered in the same way by the relaxation of many European
+despotisms, for in former years much of the romance of her life had been
+in smoothing the pillow of exile for banished conspirators. Her refugees
+had been very precious to her; she was always trying to raise money for
+some cadaverous Pole, to obtain lessons for some shirtless Italian.
+There was a legend that an Hungarian had once possessed himself of her
+affections, and had disappeared after robbing her of everything she
+possessed. This, however, was very apocryphal, for she had never
+possessed anything, and it was open to grave doubt that she could have
+entertained a sentiment so personal. She was in love, even in those
+days, only with causes, and she languished only for emancipations. But
+they had been the happiest days, for when causes were embodied in
+foreigners (what else were the Africans?), they were certainly more
+appealing.
+
+She had just come down to see Doctor Prance--to see whether she wouldn't
+like to come up. But she wasn't in her room, and Miss Birdseye guessed
+she had gone out to her supper; she got her supper at a boarding-table
+about two blocks off. Miss Birdseye expressed the hope that Miss
+Chancellor had had hers; she would have had plenty of time to take it,
+for no one had come in yet; she didn't know what made them all so late.
+Ransom perceived that the garments suspended to the hat-rack were not a
+sign that Miss Birdseye's friends had assembled; if he had gone a little
+further still he would have recognised the house as one of those in
+which mysterious articles of clothing are always hooked to something in
+the hall. Miss Birdseye's visitors, those of Doctor Prance, and of other
+tenants--for Number 756 was the common residence of several persons,
+among whom there prevailed much vagueness of boundary--used to leave
+things to be called for; many of them went about with satchels and
+reticules, for which they were always looking for places of deposit.
+What completed the character of this interior was Miss Birdseye's own
+apartment, into which her guests presently made their way, and where
+they were joined by various other members of the good lady's circle.
+Indeed, it completed Miss Birdseye herself, if anything could be said to
+render that office to this essentially formless old woman, who had no
+more outline than a bundle of hay. But the bareness of her long, loose,
+empty parlour (it was shaped exactly like Miss Chancellor's) told that
+she had never had any needs but moral needs, and that all her history
+had been that of her sympathies. The place was lighted by a small hot
+glare of gas, which made it look white and featureless. It struck even
+Basil Ransom with its flatness, and he said to himself that his cousin
+must have a very big bee in her bonnet to make her like such a house. He
+did not know then, and he never knew, that she mortally disliked it, and
+that in a career in which she was constantly exposing herself to offence
+and laceration, her most poignant suffering came from the injury of her
+taste. She had tried to kill that nerve, to persuade herself that taste
+was only frivolity in the disguise of knowledge; but her susceptibility
+was constantly blooming afresh and making her wonder whether an absence
+of nice arrangements were a necessary part of the enthusiasm of
+humanity. Miss Birdseye was always trying to obtain employment, lessons
+in drawing, orders for portraits, for poor foreign artists, as to the
+greatness of whose talent she pledged herself without reserve; but in
+point of fact she had not the faintest sense of the scenic or plastic
+side of life.
+
+Toward nine o'clock the light of her hissing burners smote the majestic
+person of Mrs. Farrinder, who might have contributed to answer that
+question of Miss Chancellor's in the negative. She was a copious,
+handsome woman, in whom angularity had been corrected by the air of
+success; she had a rustling dress (it was evident what _she_ thought
+about taste), abundant hair of a glossy blackness, a pair of folded
+arms, the expression of which seemed to say that rest, in such a career
+as hers, was as sweet as it was brief, and a terrible regularity of
+feature. I apply that adjective to her fine placid mask because she
+seemed to face you with a question of which the answer was preordained,
+to ask you how a countenance could fail to be noble of which the
+measurements were so correct. You could contest neither the measurements
+nor the nobleness, and had to feel that Mrs. Farrinder imposed herself.
+There was a lithographic smoothness about her, and a mixture of the
+American matron and the public character. There was something public in
+her eye, which was large, cold, and quiet; it had acquired a sort of
+exposed reticence from the habit of looking down from a lecture-desk,
+over a sea of heads, while its distinguished owner was eulogised by a
+leading citizen. Mrs. Farrinder, at almost any time, had the air of
+being introduced by a few remarks. She talked with great slowness and
+distinctness, and evidently a high sense of responsibility; she
+pronounced every syllable of every word and insisted on being explicit.
+If, in conversation with her, you attempted to take anything for
+granted, or to jump two or three steps at a time, she paused, looking at
+you with a cold patience, as if she knew that trick, and then went on at
+her own measured pace. She lectured on temperance and the rights of
+women; the ends she laboured for were to give the ballot to every woman
+in the country and to take the flowing bowl from every man. She was held
+to have a very fine manner, and to embody the domestic virtues and the
+graces of the drawing-room; to be a shining proof, in short, that the
+forum, for ladies, is not necessarily hostile to the fireside. She had a
+husband, and his name was Amariah.
+
+Doctor Prance had come back from supper and made her appearance in
+response to an invitation that Miss Birdseye's relaxed voice had tinkled
+down to her from the hall over the banisters, with much repetition, to
+secure attention. She was a plain, spare young woman, with short hair
+and an eye-glass; she looked about her with a kind of near-sighted
+deprecation, and seemed to hope that she should not be expected to
+generalise in any way, or supposed to have come up for any purpose more
+social than to see what Miss Birdseye wanted this time. By nine o'clock
+twenty other persons had arrived, and had placed themselves in the
+chairs that were ranged along the sides of the long, bald room, in which
+they ended by producing the similitude of an enormous street-car. The
+apartment contained little else but these chairs, many of which had a
+borrowed aspect, an implication of bare bedrooms in the upper regions; a
+table or two with a discoloured marble top, a few books, and a
+collection of newspapers piled up in corners. Ransom could see for
+himself that the occasion was not crudely festive; there was a want of
+convivial movement, and, among most of the visitors, even of mutual
+recognition. They sat there as if they were waiting for something; they
+looked obliquely and silently at Mrs. Farrinder, and were plainly under
+the impression that, fortunately, they were not there to amuse
+themselves. The ladies, who were much the more numerous, wore their
+bonnets, like Miss Chancellor; the men were in the garb of toil, many of
+them in weary-looking overcoats. Two or three had retained their
+overshoes, and as you approached them the odour of the india-rubber was
+perceptible. It was not, however, that Miss Birdseye ever noticed
+anything of that sort; she neither knew what she smelled nor tasted what
+she ate. Most of her friends had an anxious, haggard look, though there
+were sundry exceptions--half-a-dozen placid, florid faces. Basil Ransom
+wondered who they all were; he had a general idea they were mediums,
+communists, vegetarians. It was not, either, that Miss Birdseye failed
+to wander about among them with repetitions of inquiry and friendly
+absences of attention; she sat down near most of them in turn, saying
+"Yes, yes," vaguely and kindly, to remarks they made to her, feeling for
+the papers in the pockets of her loosened bodice, recovering her cap and
+sacrificing her spectacles, wondering most of all what had been her idea
+in convoking these people. Then she remembered that it had been
+connected in some way with Mrs. Farrinder; that this eloquent woman had
+promised to favour the company with a few reminiscences of her last
+campaign; to sketch even, perhaps, the lines on which she intended to
+operate during the coming winter. This was what Olive Chancellor had
+come to hear; this would be the attraction for the dark-eyed young man
+(he looked like a genius) she had brought with her. Miss Birdseye made
+her way back to the great lecturess, who was bending an indulgent
+attention on Miss Chancellor; the latter compressed into a small space,
+to be near her, and sitting with clasped hands and a concentration of
+inquiry which by contrast made Mrs. Farrinder's manner seem large and
+free. In her transit, however, the hostess was checked by the arrival of
+fresh pilgrims; she had no idea she had mentioned the occasion to so
+many people--she only remembered, as it were, those she had
+forgotten--and it was certainly a proof of the interest felt in Mrs.
+Farrinder's work. The people who had just come in were Doctor and Mrs.
+Tarrant and their daughter Verena; he was a mesmeric healer and she was
+of old Abolitionist stock. Miss Birdseye rested her dim, dry smile upon
+the daughter, who was new to her, and it floated before her that she
+would probably be remarkable as a genius; her parentage was an
+implication of that. There was a genius for Miss Birdseye in every bush.
+Selah Tarrant had effected wonderful cures; she knew so many people--if
+they would only try him. His wife was a daughter of Abraham Greenstreet;
+she had kept a runaway slave in her house for thirty days. That was
+years before, when this girl must have been a child; but hadn't it
+thrown a kind of rainbow over her cradle, and wouldn't she naturally
+have some gift? The girl was very pretty, though she had red hair.
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+
+Mrs. Farrinder, meanwhile, was not eager to address the assembly. She
+confessed as much to Olive Chancellor, with a smile which asked that a
+temporary lapse of promptness might not be too harshly judged. She had
+addressed so many assemblies, and she wanted to hear what other people
+had to say. Miss Chancellor herself had thought so much on the vital
+subject; would not she make a few remarks and give them some of her
+experiences? How did the ladies on Beacon Street feel about the ballot?
+Perhaps she could speak for _them_ more than for some others. That was a
+branch of the question on which, it might be, the leaders had not
+information enough; but they wanted to take in everything, and why
+shouldn't Miss Chancellor just make that field her own? Mrs. Farrinder
+spoke in the tone of one who took views so wide that they might easily,
+at first, before you could see how she worked round, look almost
+meretricious; she was conscious of a scope that exceeded the first
+flight of your imagination. She urged upon her companion the idea of
+labouring in the world of fashion, appeared to attribute to her familiar
+relations with that mysterious realm, and wanted to know why she
+shouldn't stir up some of her friends down there on the Mill-dam?
+
+Olive Chancellor received this appeal with peculiar feelings. With her
+immense sympathy for reform, she found herself so often wishing that
+reformers were a little different. There was something grand about Mrs.
+Farrinder; it lifted one up to be with her: but there was a false note
+when she spoke to her young friend about the ladies in Beacon Street.
+Olive hated to hear that fine avenue talked about as if it were such a
+remarkable place, and to live there were a proof of worldly glory. All
+sorts of inferior people lived there, and so brilliant a woman as Mrs.
+Farrinder, who lived at Roxbury, ought not to mix things up. It was, of
+course, very wretched to be irritated by such mistakes; but this was not
+the first time Miss Chancellor had observed that the possession of
+nerves was not by itself a reason for embracing the new truths. She knew
+her place in the Boston hierarchy, and it was not what Mrs. Farrinder
+supposed; so that there was a want of perspective in talking to her as
+if she had been a representative of the aristocracy. Nothing could be
+weaker, she knew very well, than (in the United States) to apply that
+term too literally; nevertheless, it would represent a reality if one
+were to say that, by distinction, the Chancellors belonged to the
+_bourgeoisie_--the oldest and best. They might care for such a position
+or not (as it happened, they were very proud of it), but there they
+were, and it made Mrs. Farrinder seem provincial (there was something
+provincial, after all, in the way she did her hair too) not to
+understand. When Miss Birdseye spoke as if one were a "leader of
+society," Olive could forgive her even that odious expression, because,
+of course, one never pretended that she, poor dear, had the smallest
+sense of the real. She was heroic, she was sublime, the whole moral
+history of Boston was reflected in her displaced spectacles; but it was
+a part of her originality, as it were, that she was deliciously
+provincial. Olive Chancellor seemed to herself to have privileges enough
+without being affiliated to the exclusive set and having invitations to
+the smaller parties, which were the real test; it was a mercy for her
+that she had not that added immorality on her conscience. The ladies
+Mrs. Farrinder meant (it was to be supposed she meant some particular
+ones) might speak for themselves. She wished to work in another field;
+she had long been preoccupied with the romance of the people. She had an
+immense desire to know intimately some _very_ poor girl. This might seem
+one of the most accessible of pleasures; but, in point of fact, she had
+not found it so. There were two or three pale shop-maidens whose
+acquaintance she had sought; but they had seemed afraid of her, and the
+attempt had come to nothing. She took them more tragically then they
+took themselves; they couldn't make out what she wanted them to do, and
+they always ended by being odiously mixed up with Charlie. Charlie was a
+young man in a white overcoat and a paper collar; it was for him, in the
+last analysis, that they cared much the most. They cared far more about
+Charlie than about the ballot. Olive Chancellor wondered how Mrs.
+Farrinder would treat that branch of the question. In her researches
+among her young townswomen she had always found this obtrusive swain
+planted in her path, and she grew at last to dislike him extremely. It
+filled her with exasperation to think that he should be necessary to the
+happiness of his victims (she had learned that whatever they might talk
+about with her, it was of him and him only that they discoursed among
+themselves), and one of the main recommendations of the evening club for
+her fatigued, underpaid sisters, which it had long been her dream to
+establish, was that it would in some degree undermine his
+position--distinct as her prevision might be that he would be in waiting
+at the door. She hardly knew what to say to Mrs. Farrinder when this
+momentarily misdirected woman, still preoccupied with the Mill-dam,
+returned to the charge.
+
+"We want labourers in that field, though I know two or three lovely
+women--sweet _home-women_--moving in circles that are for the most part
+closed to every new voice, who are doing their best to help on the
+fight. I have several names that might surprise you, names well known on
+State Street. But we can't have too many recruits, especially among
+those whose refinement is generally acknowledged. If it be necessary, we
+are prepared to take certain steps to conciliate the shrinking. Our
+movement is for all--it appeals to the most delicate ladies. Raise the
+standard among them, and bring me a thousand names. I know several that
+I should like to have. I look after the details as well as the big
+currents," Mrs. Farrinder added, in a tone as explanatory as could be
+expected of such a woman, and with a smile of which the sweetness was
+thrilling to her listener.
+
+"I can't talk to those people, I can't!" said Olive Chancellor, with a
+face which seemed to plead for a remission of responsibility. "I want to
+give myself up to others; I want to know everything that lies beneath
+and out of sight, don't you know? I want to enter into the lives of
+women who are lonely, who are piteous. I want to be near to them--to
+help them. I want to do something--oh, I should like so to speak!"
+
+"We should be glad to have you make a few remarks at present," Mrs.
+Farrinder declared, with a punctuality which revealed the faculty of
+presiding.
+
+"Oh dear, no, I can't speak; I have none of that sort of talent. I have
+no self-possession, no eloquence; I can't put three words together. But
+I do want to contribute."
+
+"What _have_ you got?" Mrs. Farrinder inquired, looking at her
+interlocutress, up and down, with the eye of business, in which there
+was a certain chill. "Have you got money?"
+
+Olive was so agitated for the moment with the hope that this great woman
+would approve of her on the financial side that she took no time to
+reflect that some other quality might, in courtesy, have been suggested.
+But she confessed to possessing a certain capital, and the tone seemed
+rich and deep in which Mrs. Farrinder said to her, "Then contribute
+that!" She was so good as to develop this idea, and her picture of the
+part Miss Chancellor might play by making liberal donations to a fund
+for the diffusion among the women of America of a more adequate
+conception of their public and private rights--a fund her adviser had
+herself lately inaugurated--this bold, rapid sketch had the vividness
+which characterised the speaker's most successful public efforts. It
+placed Olive under the spell; it made her feel almost inspired. If her
+life struck others in that way--especially a woman like Mrs. Farrinder,
+whose horizon was so full--then there must be something for her to do.
+It was one thing to choose for herself, but now the great representative
+of the enfranchisement of their sex (from every form of bondage) had
+chosen for her.
+
+The barren, gas-lighted room grew richer and richer to her earnest eyes;
+it seemed to expand, to open itself to the great life of humanity. The
+serious, tired people, in their bonnets and overcoats, began to glow
+like a company of heroes. Yes, she would do something, Olive Chancellor
+said to herself; she would do something to brighten the darkness of that
+dreadful image that was always before her, and against which it seemed
+to her at times that she had been born to lead a crusade--the image of
+the unhappiness of women. The unhappiness of women! The voice of their
+silent suffering was always in her ears, the ocean of tears that they
+had shed from the beginning of time seemed to pour through her own eyes.
+Ages of oppression had rolled over them; uncounted millions had lived
+only to be tortured, to be crucified. They were her sisters, they were
+her own, and the day of their delivery had dawned. This was the only
+sacred cause; this was the great, the just revolution. It must triumph,
+it must sweep everything before it; it must exact from the other, the
+brutal, blood-stained, ravening race, the last particle of expiation! It
+would be the greatest change the world had seen; it would be a new era
+for the human family, and the names of those who had helped to show the
+way and lead the squadrons would be the brightest in the tables of fame.
+They would be names of women weak, insulted, persecuted, but devoted in
+every pulse of their being to the cause, and asking no better fate than
+to die for it. It was not clear to this interesting girl in what manner
+such a sacrifice (as this last) would be required of her, but she saw
+the matter through a kind of sunrise-mist of emotion which made danger
+as rosy as success. When Miss Birdseye approached, it transfigured her
+familiar, her comical shape, and made the poor little humanitary hack
+seem already a martyr. Olive Chancellor looked at her with love,
+remembered that she had never, in her long, unrewarded, weary life, had
+a thought or an impulse for herself. She had been consumed by the
+passion of sympathy; it had crumpled her into as many creases as an old
+glazed, distended glove. She had been laughed at, but she never knew it;
+she was treated as a bore, but she never cared. She had nothing in the
+world but the clothes on her back, and when she should go down into the
+grave she would leave nothing behind her but her grotesque,
+undistinguished, pathetic little name. And yet people said that women
+were vain, that they were personal, that they were interested! While
+Miss Birdseye stood there, asking Mrs. Farrinder if she wouldn't say
+something, Olive Chancellor tenderly fastened a small battered brooch
+which confined her collar and which had half detached itself.
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+
+"Oh, thank you," said Miss Birdseye, "I shouldn't like to lose it; it
+was given me by Mirandola!" He had been one of her refugees in the old
+time, when two or three of her friends, acquainted with the limits of
+his resources, wondered how he had come into possession of the trinket.
+She had been diverted again, after her greeting with Doctor and Mrs.
+Tarrant, by stopping to introduce the tall, dark young man whom Miss
+Chancellor had brought with her to Doctor Prance. She had become
+conscious of his somewhat sombre figure, uplifted against the wall, near
+the door; he was leaning there in solitude, unacquainted with
+opportunities which Miss Birdseye felt to be, collectively, of value,
+and which were really, of course, what strangers came to Boston for. It
+did not occur to her to ask herself why Miss Chancellor didn't talk to
+him, since she had brought him; Miss Birdseye was incapable of a
+speculation of this kind. Olive, in fact, had remained vividly conscious
+of her kinsman's isolation until the moment when Mrs. Farrinder lifted
+her, with a word, to a higher plane. She watched him across the room;
+she saw that he might be bored. But she proposed to herself not to mind
+that; she had asked him, after all, not to come. Then he was no worse
+off than others; he was only waiting, like the rest; and before they
+left she would introduce him to Mrs. Farrinder. She might tell that lady
+who he was first; it was not every one that would care to know a person
+who had borne such a part in the Southern disloyalty. It came over our
+young lady that when she sought the acquaintance of her distant kinsman
+she had indeed done a more complicated thing than she suspected. The
+sudden uneasiness that he flung over her in the carriage had not left
+her, though she felt it less now she was with others, and especially
+that she was close to Mrs. Farrinder, who was such a fountain of
+strength. At any rate, if he was bored, he could speak to some one;
+there were excellent people near him, even if they _were_ ardent
+reformers. He could speak to that pretty girl who had just come in--the
+one with red hair--if he liked; Southerners were supposed to be so
+chivalrous!
+
+Miss Birdseye reasoned much less, and did not offer to introduce him to
+Verena Tarrant, who was apparently being presented by her parents to a
+group of friends at the other end of the room. It came back to Miss
+Birdseye, in this connexion, that, sure enough, Verena had been away for
+a long time--for nearly a year; had been on a visit to friends in the
+West, and would therefore naturally be a stranger to most of the Boston
+circle. Doctor Prance was looking at her--at Miss Birdseye--with little,
+sharp, fixed pupils; and the good lady wondered whether she were angry
+at having been induced to come up. She had a general impression that
+when genius was original its temper was high, and all this would be the
+case with Doctor Prance. She wanted to say to her that she could go down
+again if she liked; but even to Miss Birdseye's unsophisticated mind
+this scarcely appeared, as regards a guest, an adequate formula of
+dismissal. She tried to bring the young Southerner out; she said to him
+that she presumed they would have some entertainment soon--Mrs.
+Farrinder could be interesting when she tried! And then she bethought
+herself to introduce him to Doctor Prance; it might serve as a reason
+for having brought her up. Moreover, it would do her good to break up
+her work now and then; she pursued her medical studies far into the
+night, and Miss Birdseye, who was nothing of a sleeper (Mary Prance,
+precisely, had wanted to treat her for it), had heard her, in the
+stillness of the small hours, with her open windows (she had fresh air
+on the brain), sharpening instruments (it was Miss Birdseye's mild
+belief that she dissected), in a little physiological laboratory which
+she had set up in her back room, the room which, if she hadn't been a
+doctor, might have been her "chamber," and perhaps was, even with the
+dissecting, Miss Birdseye didn't know! She explained her young friends
+to each other, a trifle incoherently, perhaps, and then went to stir up
+Mrs. Farrinder.
+
+Basil Ransom had already noticed Doctor Prance; he had not been at all
+bored, and had observed every one in the room, arriving at all sorts of
+ingenious inductions. The little medical lady struck him as a perfect
+example of the "Yankee female"--the figure which, in the unregenerate
+imagination of the children of the cotton-States, was produced by the
+New England school-system, the Puritan code, the ungenial climate, the
+absence of chivalry. Spare, dry, hard, without a curve, an inflexion or
+a grace, she seemed to ask no odds in the battle of life and to be
+prepared to give none. But Ransom could see that she was not an
+enthusiast, and after his contact with his cousin's enthusiasm this was
+rather a relief to him. She looked like a boy, and not even like a good
+boy. It was evident that if she had been a boy, she would have "cut"
+school, to try private experiments in mechanics or to make researches in
+natural history. It was true that if she had been a boy she would have
+borne some relation to a girl, whereas Doctor Prance appeared to bear
+none whatever. Except her intelligent eye, she had no features to speak
+of. Ransom asked her if she were acquainted with the lioness, and on her
+staring at him, without response, explained that he meant the renowned
+Mrs. Farrinder.
+
+"Well, I don't know as I ought to say that I'm acquainted with her; but
+I've heard her on the platform. I have paid my half-dollar," the doctor
+added, with a certain grimness.
+
+"Well, did she convince you?" Ransom inquired.
+
+"Convince me of what, sir?"
+
+"That women are so superior to men."
+
+"Oh, deary me!" said Doctor Prance, with a little impatient sigh; "I
+guess I know more about women than she does."
+
+"And that isn't your opinion, I hope," said Ransom, laughing.
+
+"Men and women are all the same to me," Doctor Prance remarked. "I don't
+see any difference. There is room for improvement in both sexes. Neither
+of them is up to the standard." And on Ransom's asking her what the
+standard appeared to her to be, she said, "Well, they ought to live
+better; that's what they ought to do." And she went on to declare,
+further, that she thought they all talked too much. This had so long
+been Ransom's conviction that his heart quite warmed to Doctor Prance,
+and he paid homage to her wisdom in the manner of Mississippi--with a
+richness of compliment that made her turn her acute, suspicious eye upon
+him. This checked him; she was capable of thinking that _he_ talked too
+much--she herself having, apparently, no general conversation. It was
+german to the matter, at any rate, for him to observe that he believed
+they were to have a lecture from Mrs. Farrinder--he didn't know why she
+didn't begin. "Yes," said Doctor Prance, rather dryly, "I suppose that's
+what Miss Birdseye called me up for. She seemed to think I wouldn't want
+to miss that."
+
+"Whereas, I infer, you could console yourself for the loss of the
+oration," Ransom suggested.
+
+"Well, I've got some work. I don't want any one to teach me what a woman
+can do!" Doctor Prance declared. "She can find out some things, if she
+tries. Besides, I am familiar with Mrs. Farrinder's system; I know all
+she has got to say."
+
+"Well, what is it, then, since she continues to remain silent?"
+
+"Well, what it amounts to is just that women want to have a better time.
+That's what it comes to in the end. I am aware of that, without her
+telling me."
+
+"And don't you sympathise with such an aspiration?"
+
+"Well, I don't know as I cultivate the sentimental side," said Doctor
+Prance. "There's plenty of sympathy without mine. If they want to have a
+better time, I suppose it's natural; so do men too, I suppose. But I
+don't know as it appeals to me--to make sacrifices for it; it ain't such
+a wonderful time--the best you _can_ have!"
+
+This little lady was tough and technical; she evidently didn't care for
+great movements; she became more and more interesting to Basil Ransom,
+who, it is to be feared, had a fund of cynicism. He asked her if she
+knew his cousin, Miss Chancellor, whom he indicated, beside Mrs.
+Farrinder; _she_ believed, on the contrary, in wonderful times (she
+thought they were coming); she had plenty of sympathy, and he was sure
+she was willing to make sacrifices.
+
+Doctor Prance looked at her across the room for a moment; then she said
+she didn't know her, but she guessed she knew others like her--she went
+to see them when they were sick. "She's having a private lecture to
+herself," Ransom remarked; whereupon Doctor Prance rejoined, "Well, I
+guess she'll have to pay for it!" She appeared to regret her own
+half-dollar, and to be vaguely impatient of the behaviour of her sex.
+Ransom became so sensible of this that he felt it was indelicate to
+allude further to the cause of woman, and, for a change, endeavoured to
+elicit from his companion some information about the gentlemen present.
+He had given her a chance, vainly, to start some topic herself; but he
+could see that she had no interests beyond the researches from which,
+this evening, she had been torn, and was incapable of asking him a
+personal question. She knew two or three of the gentlemen; she had seen
+them before at Miss Birdseye's. Of course she knew principally ladies;
+the time hadn't come when a lady-doctor was sent for by a gentleman, and
+she hoped it never would, though some people seemed to think that this
+was what lady-doctors were working for. She knew Mr. Pardon; that was
+the young man with the "side-whiskers" and the white hair; he was a kind
+of editor, and he wrote, too, "over his signature"--perhaps Basil had
+read some of his works; he was under thirty, in spite of his white hair.
+He was a great deal thought of in magazine circles. She believed he was
+very bright--but she hadn't read anything. She didn't read much--not for
+amusement; only the _Transcript_. She believed Mr. Pardon sometimes
+wrote in the _Transcript_; well, she supposed he _was_ very bright. The
+other that she knew--only she didn't know him (she supposed Basil would
+think that queer)--was the tall, pale gentleman, with the black
+moustache and the eye-glass. She knew him because she had met him in
+society; but she didn't know him--well, because she didn't want to. If
+he should come and speak to her--and he looked as if he were going to
+work round that way--she should just say to him, "Yes, sir," or "No,
+sir," very coldly. She couldn't help it if he did think her dry; if _he_
+were a little more dry, it might be better for him. What was the matter
+with him? Oh, she thought she had mentioned that; he was a mesmeric
+healer, he made miraculous cures. She didn't believe in his system or
+disbelieve in it, one way or the other; she only knew that she had been
+called to see ladies he had worked on, and she found that he had made
+them lose a lot of valuable time. He talked to them--well, as if he
+didn't know what he was saying. She guessed he was quite ignorant of
+physiology, and she didn't think he ought to go round taking
+responsibilities. She didn't want to be narrow, but she thought a person
+ought to know something. She supposed Basil would think her very
+uplifted; but he had put the question to her, as she might say. All she
+could say was she didn't want him to be laying his hands on any of _her_
+folks; it was all done with the hands--what wasn't done with the tongue!
+Basil could see that Doctor Prance was irritated; that this extreme
+candour of allusion to her neighbour was probably not habitual to her,
+as a member of a society in which the casual expression of strong
+opinion generally produced waves of silence. But he blessed her
+irritation, for him it was so illuminating; and to draw further profit
+from it he asked her who the young lady was with the red hair--the
+pretty one, whom he had only noticed during the last ten minutes. She
+was Miss Tarrant, the daughter of the healer; hadn't she mentioned his
+name? Selah Tarrant; if he wanted to send for him. Doctor Prance wasn't
+acquainted with her, beyond knowing that she was the mesmerist's only
+child, and having heard something about her having some gift--she
+couldn't remember which it was. Oh, if she was his child, she would be
+sure to have some gift--if it was only the gift of the g----well, she
+didn't mean to say that; but a talent for conversation. Perhaps she
+could die and come to life again; perhaps she would show them her gift,
+as no one seemed inclined to do anything. Yes, she was pretty-appearing,
+but there was a certain indication of anæmia, and Doctor Prance would be
+surprised if she didn't eat too much candy. Basil thought she had an
+engaging exterior; it was his private reflexion, coloured doubtless by
+"sectional" prejudice, that she was the first pretty girl he had seen in
+Boston. She was talking with some ladies at the other end of the room;
+and she had a large red fan, which she kept constantly in movement. She
+was not a quiet girl; she fidgeted, was restless, while she talked, and
+had the air of a person who, whatever she might be doing, would wish to
+be doing something else. If people watched her a good deal, she also
+returned their contemplation, and her charming eyes had several times
+encountered those of Basil Ransom. But they wandered mainly in the
+direction of Mrs. Farrinder--they lingered upon the serene solidity of
+the great oratress. It was easy to see that the girl admired this
+beneficent woman, and felt it a privilege to be near her. It was
+apparent, indeed, that she was excited by the company in which she found
+herself; a fact to be explained by a reference to that recent period of
+exile in the West, of which we have had a hint, and in consequence of
+which the present occasion may have seemed to her a return to
+intellectual life. Ransom secretly wished that his cousin--since fate
+was to reserve for him a cousin in Boston--had been more like that.
+
+By this time a certain agitation was perceptible; several ladies,
+impatient of vain delay, had left their places, to appeal personally to
+Mrs. Farrinder, who was presently surrounded with sympathetic
+remonstrants. Miss Birdseye had given her up; it had been enough for
+Miss Birdseye that she should have said, when pressed (so far as her
+hostess, muffled in laxity, could press) on the subject of the general
+expectation, that she could only deliver her message to an audience
+which she felt to be partially hostile. There was no hostility there;
+they were all only too much in sympathy. "I don't require sympathy," she
+said, with a tranquil smile, to Olive Chancellor; "I am only myself, I
+only rise to the occasion, when I see prejudice, when I see bigotry,
+when I see injustice, when I see conservatism, massed before me like an
+army. Then I feel--I feel as I imagine Napoleon Bonaparte to have felt
+on the eve of one of his great victories. I _must_ have unfriendly
+elements--I like to win them over."
+
+Olive thought of Basil Ransom, and wondered whether he would do for an
+unfriendly element. She mentioned him to Mrs. Farrinder, who expressed
+an earnest hope that if he were opposed to the principles which were so
+dear to the rest of them, he might be induced to take the floor and
+testify on his own account. "I should be so happy to answer him," said
+Mrs. Farrinder, with supreme softness. "I should be so glad, at any
+rate, to exchange ideas with him." Olive felt a deep alarm at the idea
+of a public dispute between these two vigorous people (she had a
+perception that Ransom would be vigorous), not because she doubted of
+the happy issue, but because she herself would be in a false position,
+as having brought the offensive young man, and she had a horror of false
+positions. Miss Birdseye was incapable of resentment; she had invited
+forty people to hear Mrs. Farrinder speak, and now Mrs. Farrinder
+wouldn't speak. But she had such a beautiful reason for it! There was
+something martial and heroic in her pretext, and, besides, it was so
+characteristic, so free, that Miss Birdseye was quite consoled, and
+wandered away, looking at her other guests vaguely, as if she didn't
+know them from each other, while she mentioned to them, at a venture,
+the excuse for their disappointment, confident, evidently, that they
+would agree with her it was very fine. "But we can't pretend to be on
+the other side, just to start her up, can we?" she asked of Mr. Tarrant,
+who sat there beside his wife with a rather conscious but by no means
+complacent air of isolation from the rest of the company.
+
+"Well, I don't know--I guess we are all solid here," this gentleman
+replied, looking round him with a slow, deliberate smile, which made his
+mouth enormous, developed two wrinkles, as long as the wings of a bat,
+on either side of it, and showed a set of big, even, carnivorous teeth.
+
+"Selah," said his wife, laying her hand on the sleeve of his waterproof,
+"I wonder whether Miss Birdseye would be interested to hear Verena."
+
+"Well, if you mean she sings, it's a shame I haven't got a piano," Miss
+Birdseye took upon herself to respond. It came back to her that the girl
+had a gift.
+
+"She doesn't want a piano--she doesn't want anything," Selah remarked,
+giving no apparent attention to his wife. It was a part of his attitude
+in life never to appear to be indebted to another person for a
+suggestion, never to be surprised or unprepared.
+
+"Well, I don't know that the interest in singing is so general," said
+Miss Birdseye, quite unconscious of any slackness in preparing a
+substitute for the entertainment that had failed her.
+
+"It isn't singing, you'll see," Mrs. Tarrant declared.
+
+"What is it, then?"
+
+Mr. Tarrant unfurled his wrinkles, showed his back teeth. "It's
+inspirational."
+
+Miss Birdseye gave a small, vague, unsceptical laugh. "Well, if you can
+guarantee that----"
+
+"I think it would be acceptable," said Mrs. Tarrant; and putting up a
+half-gloved, familiar hand, she drew Miss Birdseye down to her, and the
+pair explained in alternation what it was their child could do.
+
+Meanwhile, Basil Ransom confessed to Doctor Prance that he was, after
+all, rather disappointed. He had expected more of a programme; he wanted
+to hear some of the new truths. Mrs. Farrinder, as he said, remained
+within her tent, and he had hoped not only to see these distinguished
+people but also to listen to them.
+
+"Well, _I_ ain't disappointed," the sturdy little doctress replied. "If
+any question had been opened, I suppose I should have had to stay."
+
+"But I presume you don't propose to retire."
+
+"Well, I've got to pursue my studies some time. I don't want the
+gentlemen-doctors to get ahead of me."
+
+"Oh, no one will ever get ahead of you, I'm very sure. And there is that
+pretty young lady going over to speak to Mrs. Farrinder. She's going to
+beg her for a speech--Mrs. Farrinder can't resist that."
+
+"Well, then, I'll just trickle out before she begins. Good-night, sir,"
+said Doctor Prance, who by this time had begun to appear to Ransom more
+susceptible of domestication, as if she had been a small
+forest-creature, a catamount or a ruffled doe, that had learned to stand
+still while you stroked it, or even to extend a paw. She ministered to
+health, and she was healthy herself; if his cousin could have been even
+of this type Basil would have felt himself more fortunate.
+
+"Good-night, Doctor," he replied. "You haven't told me, after all, your
+opinion of the capacity of the ladies."
+
+"Capacity for what?" said Doctor Prance. "They've got a capacity for
+making people waste time. All I know is that I don't want any one to
+tell _me_ what a lady can do!" And she edged away from him softly, as if
+she had been traversing a hospital-ward, and presently he saw her reach
+the door, which, with the arrival of the later comers, had remained
+open. She stood there an instant, turning over the whole assembly a
+glance like the flash of a watchman's bull's-eye, and then quickly
+passed out. Ransom could see that she was impatient of the general
+question and bored with being reminded, even for the sake of her rights,
+that she was a woman--a detail that she was in the habit of forgetting,
+having as many rights as she had time for. It was certain that whatever
+might become of the movement at large, Doctor Prance's own little
+revolution was a success.
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+
+She had no sooner left him than Olive Chancellor came towards him with
+eyes that seemed to say, "I don't care whether you are here now or
+not--I'm all right!" But what her lips said was much more gracious; she
+asked him if she mightn't have the pleasure of introducing him to Mrs.
+Farrinder. Ransom consented, with a little of his Southern flourish, and
+in a moment the lady got up to receive him from the midst of the circle
+that now surrounded her. It was an occasion for her to justify her
+reputation of an elegant manner, and it must be impartially related that
+she struck Ransom as having a dignity in conversation and a command of
+the noble style which could not have been surpassed by a daughter--one
+of the most accomplished, most far-descended daughters--of his own
+latitude. It was as if she had known that he was not eager for the
+changes she advocated, and wished to show him that, especially to a
+Southerner who had bitten the dust, her sex could be magnanimous. This
+knowledge of his secret heresy seemed to him to be also in the faces of
+the other ladies, whose circumspect glances, however (for he had not
+been introduced), treated it as a pity rather than as a shame. He was
+conscious of all these middle-aged feminine eyes, conscious of curls,
+rather limp, that depended from dusky bonnets, of heads poked forward,
+as if with a waiting, listening, familiar habit, of no one being very
+bright or gay--no one, at least, but that girl he had noticed before,
+who had a brilliant head, and who now hovered on the edge of the
+conclave. He met her eye again; she was watching him too. It had been in
+his thought that Mrs. Farrinder, to whom his cousin might have betrayed
+or misrepresented him, would perhaps defy him to combat, and he wondered
+whether he could pull himself together (he was extremely embarrassed)
+sufficiently to do honour to such a challenge. If she would fling down
+the glove on the temperance question, it seemed to him that it would be
+in him to pick it up; for the idea of a meddling legislation on this
+subject filled him with rage; the taste of liquor being good to him, and
+his conviction strong that civilisation itself would be in danger if it
+should fall into the power of a herd of vociferating women (I am but the
+reporter of his angry _formulae_) to prevent a gentleman from taking his
+glass. Mrs. Farrinder proved to him that she had not the eagerness of
+insecurity; she asked him if he wouldn't like to give the company some
+account of the social and political condition of the South. He begged to
+be excused, expressing at the same time a high sense of the honour done
+him by such a request, while he smiled to himself at the idea of his
+extemporising a lecture. He smiled even while he suspected the meaning
+of the look Miss Chancellor gave him: "Well, you are not of much account
+after all!" To talk to those people about the South--if they could have
+guessed how little he cared to do it! He had a passionate tenderness for
+his own country, and a sense of intimate connexion with it which would
+have made it as impossible for him to take a roomful of Northern
+fanatics into his confidence as to read aloud his mother's or his
+mistress's letters. To be quiet about the Southern land, not to touch
+her with vulgar hands, to leave her alone with her wounds and her
+memories, not prating in the market-place either of her troubles or her
+hopes, but waiting as a man should wait, for the slow process, the
+sensible beneficence, of time--this was the desire of Ransom's heart,
+and he was aware of how little it could minister to the entertainment of
+Miss Birdseye's guests.
+
+"We know so little about the women of the South; they are very
+voiceless," Mrs. Farrinder remarked. "How much can we count upon them?
+in what numbers would they flock to our standard? I have been
+recommended not to lecture in the Southern cities."
+
+"Ah, madam, that was very cruel advice--for us!" Basil Ransom exclaimed,
+with gallantry.
+
+"_I_ had a magnificent audience last spring in St. Louis," a fresh young
+voice announced, over the heads of the gathered group--a voice which, on
+Basil's turning, like every one else, for an explanation, appeared to
+have proceeded from the pretty girl with red hair. She had coloured a
+little with the effort of making this declaration, and she stood there
+smiling at her listeners.
+
+Mrs. Farrinder bent a benignant brow upon her, in spite of her being,
+evidently, rather a surprise. "Oh, indeed; and your subject, my dear
+young lady?"
+
+"The past history, the present condition, and the future prospects of
+our sex."
+
+"Oh, well, St. Louis--that's scarcely the South," said one of the
+ladies.
+
+"I'm sure the young lady would have had equal success at Charleston or
+New Orleans," Basil Ransom interposed.
+
+"Well, I wanted to go farther," the girl continued, "but I had no
+friends. I have friends in St. Louis."
+
+"You oughtn't to want for them anywhere," said Mrs. Farrinder, in a
+manner which, by this time, had quite explained her reputation. "I am
+acquainted with the loyalty of St. Louis."
+
+"Well, after that, you must let me introduce Miss Tarrant; she's
+perfectly dying to know you, Mrs. Farrinder." These words emanated from
+one of the gentlemen, the young man with white hair, who had been
+mentioned to Ransom by Doctor Prance as a celebrated magazinist. He,
+too, up to this moment, had hovered in the background, but he now gently
+clove the assembly (several of the ladies made way for him), leading in
+the daughter of the mesmerist.
+
+She laughed and continued to blush--her blush was the faintest pink; she
+looked very young and slim and fair as Mrs. Farrinder made way for her
+on the sofa which Olive Chancellor had quitted. "I _have_ wanted to know
+you; I admire you so much; I hoped so you would speak to-night. It's too
+lovely to see you, Mrs. Farrinder." So she expressed herself, while the
+company watched the encounter with a look of refreshed inanition. "You
+don't know who I am, of course; I'm just a girl who wants to thank you
+for all you have done for us. For you have spoken for us girls, just as
+much as--just as much as----" She hesitated now, looking about with
+enthusiastic eyes at the rest of the group, and meeting once more the
+gaze of Basil Ransom.
+
+"Just as much as for the old women," said Mrs. Farrinder genially. "You
+seem very well able to speak for yourself."
+
+"She speaks so beautifully--if she would only make a little address,"
+the young man who had introduced her remarked. "It's a new style, quite
+original," he added. He stood there with folded arms, looking down at
+his work, the conjunction of the two ladies, with a smile; and Basil
+Ransom, remembering what Miss Prance had told him, and enlightened by
+his observation in New York of some of the sources from which newspapers
+are fed, was immediately touched by the conviction that he perceived in
+it the material of a paragraph.
+
+"My dear child, if you'll take the floor, I'll call the meeting to
+order," said Mrs. Farrinder.
+
+The girl looked at her with extraordinary candour and confidence. "If I
+could only hear you first--just to give me an atmosphere."
+
+"I've got no atmosphere; there's very little of the Indian summer about
+_me_! I deal with facts--hard facts," Mrs. Farrinder replied. "Have you
+ever heard me? If so, you know how crisp I am."
+
+"Heard you? I've lived on you! It's so much to me to see you. Ask mother
+if it ain't!" She had expressed herself, from the first word she
+uttered, with a promptness and assurance which gave almost the
+impression of a lesson rehearsed in advance. And yet there was a strange
+spontaneity in her manner, and an air of artless enthusiasm, of personal
+purity. If she was theatrical, she was naturally theatrical. She looked
+up at Mrs. Farrinder with all her emotion in her smiling eyes. This lady
+had been the object of many ovations; it was familiar to her that the
+collective heart of her sex had gone forth to her; but, visibly, she was
+puzzled by this unforeseen embodiment of gratitude and fluency, and her
+eyes wandered over the girl with a certain reserve, while, within the
+depth of her eminently public manner, she asked herself whether Miss
+Tarrant were a remarkable young woman or only a forward minx. She found
+a response which committed her to neither view; she only said, "We want
+the young--of course we want the young!"
+
+"Who is that charming creature?" Basil Ransom heard his cousin ask, in a
+grave, lowered tone, of Matthias Pardon, the young man who had brought
+Miss Tarrant forward. He didn't know whether Miss Chancellor knew him,
+or whether her curiosity had pushed her to boldness. Ransom was near the
+pair, and had the benefit of Mr. Pardon's answer.
+
+"The daughter of Doctor Tarrant, the mesmeric healer--Miss Verena. She's
+a high-class speaker."
+
+"What do you mean?" Olive asked. "Does she give public addresses?"
+
+"Oh yes, she has had quite a career in the West. I heard her last spring
+at Topeka. They call it inspirational. I don't know what it is--only
+it's exquisite; so fresh and poetical. She has to have her father to
+start her up. It seems to pass into her." And Mr. Pardon indulged in a
+gesture intended to signify the passage.
+
+Olive Chancellor made no rejoinder save a low, impatient sigh; she
+transferred her attention to the girl, who now held Mrs. Farrinder's
+hand in both her own, and was pleading with her just to prelude a
+little. "I want a starting-point--I want to know where I am," she said.
+"Just two or three of your grand old thoughts."
+
+Basil stepped nearer to his cousin; he remarked to her that Miss Verena
+was very pretty. She turned an instant, glanced at him, and then said,
+"Do you think so?" An instant later she added, "How you must hate this
+place!"
+
+"Oh, not now, we are going to have some fun," Ransom replied
+good-humouredly, if a trifle coarsely; and the declaration had a point,
+for Miss Birdseye at this moment reappeared, followed by the mesmeric
+healer and his wife.
+
+"Ah, well, I see you are drawing her out," said Miss Birdseye to Mrs.
+Farrinder; and at the idea that this process had been necessary Basil
+Ransom broke into a smothered hilarity, a spasm which indicated that,
+for him, the fun had already begun, and procured him another grave
+glance from Miss Chancellor. Miss Verena seemed to him as far "out" as a
+young woman could be. "Here's her father, Doctor Tarrant--he has a
+wonderful gift--and her mother--she was a daughter of Abraham
+Greenstreet." Miss Birdseye presented her companion; she was sure Mrs.
+Farrinder would be interested; she wouldn't want to lose an opportunity,
+even if for herself the conditions were not favourable. And then Miss
+Birdseye addressed herself to the company more at large, widening the
+circle so as to take in the most scattered guests, and evidently feeling
+that after all it was a relief that one happened to have an obscurely
+inspired maiden on the premises when greater celebrities had betrayed
+the whimsicality of genius. It was a part of this whimsicality that Mrs.
+Farrinder--the reader may find it difficult to keep pace with her
+variations--appeared now to have decided to utter a few of her thoughts,
+so that her hostess could elicit a general response to the remark that
+it would be delightful to have both the old school and the new.
+
+"Well, perhaps you'll be disappointed in Verena," said Mrs. Tarrant,
+with an air of dolorous resignation to any event, and seating herself,
+with her gathered mantle, on the edge of a chair, as if she, at least,
+were ready, whoever else might keep on talking.
+
+"It isn't _me_, mother," Verena rejoined, with soft gravity, rather
+detached now from Mrs. Farrinder, and sitting with her eyes fixed
+thoughtfully on the ground. With deference to Mrs. Tarrant, a little
+more talk was necessary, for the young lady had as yet been
+insufficiently explained. Miss Birdseye felt this, but she was rather
+helpless about it, and delivered herself, with her universal
+familiarity, which embraced every one and everything, of a wandering,
+amiable tale, in which Abraham Greenstreet kept reappearing, in which
+Doctor Tarrant's miraculous cures were specified, with all the facts
+wanting, and in which Verena's successes in the West were related, not
+with emphasis or hyperbole, in which Miss Birdseye never indulged, but
+as accepted and recognised wonders, natural in an age of new
+revelations. She had heard of these things in detail only ten minutes
+before, from the girl's parents, but her hospitable soul had needed but
+a moment to swallow and assimilate them. If her account of them was not
+very lucid, it should be said in excuse for her that it was impossible
+to have any idea of Verena Tarrant unless one had heard her, and
+therefore still more impossible to give an idea to others. Mrs.
+Farrinder was perceptibly irritated; she appeared to have made up her
+mind, after her first hesitation, that the Tarrant family were
+fantastical and compromising. She had bent an eye of coldness on Selah
+and his wife--she might have regarded them all as a company of
+mountebanks.
+
+"Stand up and tell us what you have to say," she remarked, with some
+sternness, to Verena, who only raised her eyes to her, silently now,
+with the same sweetness, and then rested them on her father. This
+gentleman seemed to respond to an irresistible appeal; he looked round
+at the company with all his teeth, and said that these flattering
+allusions were not so embarrassing as they might otherwise be, inasmuch
+as any success that he and his daughter might have had was so thoroughly
+impersonal: he insisted on that word. They had just heard her say, "It
+is not _me_, mother," and he and Mrs. Tarrant and the girl herself were
+all equally aware it was not she. It was some power outside--it seemed
+to flow through her; he couldn't pretend to say why his daughter should
+be called, more than any one else. But it seemed as if she _was_ called.
+When he just calmed her down by laying his hand on her a few moments, it
+seemed to come. It so happened that in the West it had taken the form of
+a considerable eloquence. She had certainly spoken with great facility
+to cultivated and high-minded audiences. She had long followed with
+sympathy the movement for the liberation of her sex from every sort of
+bondage; it had been her principal interest even as a child (he might
+mention that at the age of nine she had christened her favourite doll
+Eliza P. Moseley, in memory of a great precursor whom they all
+reverenced), and now the inspiration, if he might call it so, seemed
+just to flow in that channel. The voice that spoke from her lips seemed
+to want to take that form. It didn't seem as if it _could_ take any
+other. She let it come out just as it would--she didn't pretend to have
+any control. They could judge for themselves whether the whole thing was
+not quite unique. That was why he was willing to talk about his own
+child that way, before a gathering of ladies and gentlemen; it was
+because they took no credit--they felt it was a power outside. If Verena
+felt she was going to be stimulated that evening, he was pretty sure
+they would be interested. Only he should have to request a few moments'
+silence, while she listened for the voice.
+
+Several of the ladies declared that they should be delighted--they hoped
+that Miss Tarrant was in good trim; whereupon they were corrected by
+others, who reminded them that it wasn't _her_--she had nothing to do
+with it--so her trim didn't matter; and a gentleman added that he
+guessed there were many present who had conversed with Eliza P. Moseley.
+Meanwhile Verena, more and more withdrawn into herself, but perfectly
+undisturbed by the public discussion of her mystic faculty, turned yet
+again, very prettily, to Mrs. Farrinder, and asked her if she wouldn't
+strike out--just to give her courage. By this time Mrs. Farrinder was in
+a condition of overhanging gloom; she greeted the charming suppliant
+with the frown of Juno. She disapproved completely of Doctor Tarrant's
+little speech, and she had less and less disposition to be associated
+with a miracle-monger. Abraham Greenstreet was very well, but Abraham
+Greenstreet was in his grave; and Eliza P. Moseley, after all, had been
+very tepid. Basil Ransom wondered whether it were effrontery or
+innocence that enabled Miss Tarrant to meet with such complacency the
+aloofness of the elder lady. At this moment he heard Olive Chancellor,
+at his elbow, with the tremor of excitement in her tone, suddenly
+exclaim: "Please begin, please begin! A voice, a human voice, is what we
+want."
+
+"I'll speak after you, and if you're a humbug, I'll expose you!" Mrs.
+Farrinder said. She was more majestic than facetious.
+
+"I'm sure we are all solid, as Doctor Tarrant says. I suppose we want to
+be quiet," Miss Birdseye remarked.
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+
+Verena Tarrant got up and went to her father in the middle of the room;
+Olive Chancellor crossed and resumed her place beside Mrs. Farrinder on
+the sofa the girl had quitted; and Miss Birdseye's visitors, for the
+rest, settled themselves attentively in chairs or leaned against the
+bare sides of the parlour. Verena took her father's hands, held them for
+a moment, while she stood before him, not looking at him, with her eyes
+towards the company; then, after an instant, her mother, rising, pushed
+forward, with an interesting sigh, the chair on which she had been
+sitting. Mrs. Tarrant was provided with another seat, and Verena,
+relinquishing her father's grasp, placed herself in the chair, which
+Tarrant put in position for her. She sat there with closed eyes, and her
+father now rested his long, lean hands upon her head. Basil Ransom
+watched these proceedings with much interest, for the girl amused and
+pleased him. She had far more colour than any one there, for whatever
+brightness was to be found in Miss Birdseye's rather faded and dingy
+human collection had gathered itself into this attractive but ambiguous
+young person. There was nothing ambiguous, by the way, about her
+confederate; Ransom simply loathed him, from the moment he opened his
+mouth; he was intensely familiar--that is, his type was; he was simply
+the detested carpet-bagger. He was false, cunning, vulgar, ignoble; the
+cheapest kind of human product. That he should be the father of a
+delicate, pretty girl, who was apparently clever too, whether she had a
+gift or no, this was an annoying, disconcerting fact. The white, puffy
+mother, with the high forehead, in the corner there, looked more like a
+lady; but if she were one, it was all the more shame to her to have
+mated with such a varlet, Ransom said to himself, making use, as he did
+generally, of terms of opprobrium extracted from the older English
+literature. He had seen Tarrant, or his equivalent, often before; he had
+"whipped" him, as he believed, controversially, again and again, at
+political meetings in blighted Southern towns, during the horrible
+period of reconstruction. If Mrs. Farrinder had looked at Verena Tarrant
+as if she were a mountebank, there was some excuse for it, inasmuch as
+the girl made much the same impression on Basil Ransom. He had never
+seen such an odd mixture of elements; she had the sweetest, most
+unworldly face, and yet, with it, an air of being on exhibition, of
+belonging to a troupe, of living in the gaslight, which pervaded even
+the details of her dress, fashioned evidently with an attempt at the
+histrionic. If she had produced a pair of castanets or a tambourine, he
+felt that such accessories would have been quite in keeping.
+
+Little Doctor Prance, with her hard good sense, had noted that she was
+anæmic, and had intimated that she was a deceiver. The value of her
+performance was yet to be proved, but she was certainly very pale, white
+as women are who have that shade of red hair; they look as if their
+blood had gone into it. There was, however, something rich in the
+fairness of this young lady; she was strong and supple, there was colour
+in her lips and eyes, and her tresses, gathered into a complicated coil,
+seemed to glow with the brightness of her nature. She had curious,
+radiant, liquid eyes (their smile was a sort of reflexion, like the
+glisten of a gem), and though she was not tall, she appeared to spring
+up, and carried her head as if it reached rather high. Ransom would have
+thought she looked like an Oriental, if it were not that Orientals are
+dark; and if she had only had a goat she would have resembled Esmeralda,
+though he had but a vague recollection of who Esmeralda had been. She
+wore a light-brown dress, of a shape that struck him as fantastic, a
+yellow petticoat, and a large crimson sash fastened at the side; while
+round her neck, and falling low upon her flat young chest, she had a
+double chain of amber beads. It must be added that, in spite of her
+melodramatic appearance, there was no symptom that her performance,
+whatever it was, would be of a melodramatic character. She was very
+quiet now, at least (she had folded her big fan), and her father
+continued the mysterious process of calming her down. Ransom wondered
+whether he wouldn't put her to sleep; for some minutes her eyes had
+remained closed; he heard a lady near him, apparently familiar with
+phenomena of this class, remark that she was going off. As yet the
+exhibition was not exciting, though it was certainly pleasant to have
+such a pretty girl placed there before one, like a moving statue. Doctor
+Tarrant looked at no one as he stroked and soothed his daughter; his
+eyes wandered round the cornice of the room, and he grinned upward, as
+if at an imaginary gallery. "Quietly--quietly," he murmured from time to
+time. "It will come, my good child, it will come. Just let it work--just
+let it gather. The spirit, you know; you've got to let the spirit come
+out when it will." He threw up his arms at moments, to rid himself of
+the wings of his long waterproof, which fell forward over his hands.
+Basil Ransom noticed all these things, and noticed also, opposite, the
+waiting face of his cousin, fixed, from her sofa, upon the closed eyes
+of the young prophetess. He grew more impatient at last, not of the
+delay of the edifying voice (though some time had elapsed), but of
+Tarrant's grotesque manipulations, which he resented as much as if he
+himself had felt their touch, and which seemed a dishonour to the
+passive maiden. They made him nervous, they made him angry, and it was
+only afterwards that he asked himself wherein they concerned him, and
+whether even a carpet-bagger hadn't a right to do what he pleased with
+his daughter. It was a relief to him when Verena got up from her chair,
+with a movement which made Tarrant drop into the background as if his
+part were now over. She stood there with a quiet face, serious and
+sightless; then, after a short further delay, she began to speak.
+
+She began incoherently, almost inaudibly, as if she were talking in a
+dream. Ransom could not understand her; he thought it very queer, and
+wondered what Doctor Prance would have said. "She's just arranging her
+ideas, and trying to get in report; she'll come out all right." This
+remark he heard dropped in a low tone by the mesmeric healer; "in
+report" was apparently Tarrant's version of _en rapport_. His prophecy
+was verified, and Verena did come out, after a little; she came out with
+a great deal of sweetness--with a very quaint and peculiar effect. She
+proceeded slowly, cautiously, as if she were listening for the prompter,
+catching, one by one, certain phrases that were whispered to her a great
+distance off, behind the scenes of the world. Then memory, or
+inspiration, returned to her, and presently she was in possession of her
+part. She played it with extraordinary simplicity and grace; at the end
+of ten minutes Ransom became aware that the whole audience--Mrs.
+Farrinder, Miss Chancellor, and the tough subject from Mississippi--were
+under the charm. I speak of ten minutes, but to tell the truth the young
+man lost all sense of time. He wondered afterwards how long she had
+spoken; then he counted that her strange, sweet, crude, absurd,
+enchanting improvisation must have lasted half an hour. It was not what
+she said; he didn't care for that, he scarcely understood it; he could
+only see that it was all about the gentleness and goodness of women, and
+how, during the long ages of history, they had been trampled under the
+iron heel of man. It was about their equality--perhaps even (he was not
+definitely conscious) about their superiority. It was about their day
+having come at last, about the universal sisterhood, about their duty to
+themselves and to each other. It was about such matters as these, and
+Basil Ransom was delighted to observe that such matters as these didn't
+spoil it. The effect was not in what she said, though she said some such
+pretty things, but in the picture and figure of the half-bedizened
+damsel (playing, now again, with her red fan), the visible freshness and
+purity of the little effort. When she had gained confidence she opened
+her eyes, and their shining softness was half the effect of her
+discourse. It was full of school-girl phrases, of patches of remembered
+eloquence, of childish lapses of logic, of flights of fancy which might
+indeed have had success at Topeka; but Ransom thought that if it had
+been much worse it would have been quite as good, for the argument, the
+doctrine, had absolutely nothing to do with it. It was simply an
+intensely personal exhibition, and the person making it happened to be
+fascinating. She might have offended the taste of certain people--Ransom
+could imagine that there were other Boston circles in which she would be
+thought pert; but for himself all he could feel was that to _his_
+starved senses she irresistibly appealed. He was the stiffest of
+conservatives, and his mind was steeled against the inanities she
+uttered--the rights and wrongs of women, the equality of the sexes, the
+hysterics of conventions, the further stultification of the suffrage,
+the prospect of conscript mothers in the national Senate. It made no
+difference; she didn't mean it, she didn't know what she meant, she had
+been stuffed with this trash by her father, and she was neither more nor
+less willing to say it than to say anything else; for the necessity of
+her nature was not to make converts to a ridiculous cause, but to emit
+those charming notes of her voice, to stand in those free young
+attitudes, to shake her braided locks like a naiad rising from the
+waves, to please every one who came near her, and to be happy that she
+pleased. I know not whether Ransom was aware of the bearings of this
+interpretation, which attributed to Miss Tarrant a singular hollowness
+of character; he contented himself with believing that she was as
+innocent as she was lovely, and with regarding her as a vocalist of
+exquisite faculty, condemned to sing bad music. How prettily, indeed,
+she made some of it sound!
+
+"Of course I only speak to women--to my own dear sisters; I don't speak
+to men, for I don't expect them to like what I say. They pretend to
+admire us very much, but I should like them to admire us a little less
+and to trust us a little more. I don't know what we have ever done to
+them that they should keep us out of everything. We have trusted _them_
+too much, and I think the time has come now for us to judge them, and
+say that by keeping us out we don't think they have done so well. When I
+look around me at the world, and at the state that men have brought it
+to, I confess I say to myself, "Well, if women had fixed it this way I
+should like to know what they would think of it!" When I see the
+dreadful misery of mankind and think of the suffering of which at any
+hour, at any moment, the world is full, I say that if this is the best
+they can do by themselves, they had better let us come in a little and
+see what _we_ can do. We couldn't possibly make it worse, could we? If
+we had done only this, we shouldn't boast of it. Poverty, and ignorance,
+and crime; disease, and wickedness, and wars! Wars, always more wars,
+and always more and more. Blood, blood--the world is drenched with
+blood! To kill each other, with all sorts of expensive and perfected
+instruments, that is the most brilliant thing they have been able to
+invent. It seems to me that we might stop it, we might invent something
+better. The cruelty--the cruelty; there is so much, so much! Why
+shouldn't tenderness come in? Why should our woman's hearts be so full
+of it, and all so wasted and withered, while armies and prisons and
+helpless miseries grow greater all the while? I am only a girl, a simple
+American girl, and of course I haven't seen much, and there is a great
+deal of life that I don't know anything about. But there are some things
+I feel--it seems to me as if I had been born to feel them; they are in
+my ears in the stillness of the night and before my face in the visions
+of the darkness. It is what the great sisterhood of women might do if
+they should all join hands, and lift up their voices above the brutal
+uproar of the world, in which it is so hard for the plea of mercy or of
+justice, the moan of weakness and suffering, to be heard. We should
+quench it, we should make it still, and the sound of our lips would
+become the voice of universal peace! For this we must trust one another,
+we must be true and gentle and kind. We must remember that the world is
+ours too, ours--little as we have ever had to say about anything!--and
+that the question is _not_ yet definitely settled whether it shall be a
+place of injustice or a place of love!"
+
+It was with this that the young lady finished her harangue, which was
+not followed by her sinking exhausted into her chair or by any of the
+traces of a laboured climax. She only turned away slowly towards her
+mother, smiling over her shoulder at the whole room, as if it had been a
+single person, without a flush in her whiteness, or the need of drawing
+a longer breath. The performance had evidently been very easy to her,
+and there might have been a kind of impertinence in her air of not
+having suffered from an exertion which had wrought so powerfully on
+every one else. Ransom broke into a genial laugh, which he instantly
+swallowed again, at the sweet grotesqueness of this virginal creature's
+standing up before a company of middle-aged people to talk to them about
+"love," the note on which she had closed her harangue. It was the most
+charming touch in the whole thing, and the most vivid proof of her
+innocence. She had had immense success, and Mrs. Tarrant, as she took
+her into her arms and kissed her, was certainly able to feel that the
+audience was not disappointed. They were exceedingly affected; they
+broke into exclamations and murmurs. Selah Tarrant went on conversing
+ostentatiously with his neighbours, slowly twirling his long thumbs and
+looking up at the cornice again, as if there could be nothing in the
+brilliant manner in which his daughter had acquitted herself to surprise
+_him_, who had heard her when she was still more remarkable, and who,
+moreover, remembered that the affair was so impersonal. Miss Birdseye
+looked round at the company with dim exultation; her large mild cheeks
+were shining with unwiped tears. Young Mr. Pardon remarked, in Ransom's
+hearing, that he knew parties who, if they had been present, would want
+to engage Miss Verena at a high figure for the winter campaign. And
+Ransom heard him add in a lower tone: "There's money for some one in
+that girl; you see if she don't have quite a run!" As for our
+Mississippian he kept his agreeable sensation for himself, only
+wondering whether he might not ask Miss Birdseye to present him to the
+heroine of the evening. Not immediately, of course, for the young man
+mingled with his Southern pride a shyness which often served all the
+purpose of humility. He was aware how much he was an outsider in such a
+house as that, and he was ready to wait for his coveted satisfaction
+till the others, who all hung together, should have given her the
+assurance of an approval which she would value, naturally, more than
+anything he could say to her. This episode had imparted animation to the
+assembly; a certain gaiety, even, expressed in a higher pitch of
+conversation, seemed to float in the heated air. People circulated more
+freely, and Verena Tarrant was presently hidden from Ransom's sight by
+the close-pressed ranks of the new friends she had made. "Well, I never
+heard it put _that_ way!" Ransom heard one of the ladies exclaim; to
+which another replied that she wondered one of their bright women hadn't
+thought of it before. "Well, it _is_ a gift, and no mistake," and "Well,
+they may call it what they please, it's a pleasure to listen to
+it"--these genial tributes fell from the lips of a pair of ruminating
+gentlemen. It was affirmed within Ransom's hearing that if they had a
+few more like that the matter would soon be fixed; and it was rejoined
+that they couldn't expect to have a great many--the style was so
+peculiar. It was generally admitted that the style was peculiar, but
+Miss Tarrant's peculiarity was the explanation of her success.
+
+
+
+
+IX
+
+
+Ransom approached Mrs. Farrinder again, who had remained on her sofa
+with Olive Chancellor; and as she turned her face to him he saw that she
+had felt the universal contagion. Her keen eye sparkled, there was a
+flush on her matronly cheek, and she had evidently made up her mind what
+line to take. Olive Chancellor sat motionless; her eyes were fixed on
+the floor with the rigid, alarmed expression of her moments of nervous
+diffidence; she gave no sign of observing her kinsman's approach. He
+said something to Mrs. Farrinder, something that imperfectly represented
+his admiration of Verena; and this lady replied with dignity that it was
+no wonder the girl spoke so well--she spoke in such a good cause. "She
+is very graceful, has a fine command of language; her father says it's a
+natural gift." Ransom saw that he should not in the least discover Mrs.
+Farrinder's real opinion, and her dissimulation added to his impression
+that she was a woman with a policy. It was none of his business whether
+in her heart she thought Verena a parrot or a genius; it was perceptible
+to him that she saw she would be effective, would help the cause. He
+stood almost appalled for a moment, as he said to himself that she would
+take her up and the girl would be ruined, would force her note and
+become a screamer. But he quickly dodged this vision, taking refuge in a
+mechanical appeal to his cousin, of whom he inquired how she liked Miss
+Verena. Olive made no answer; her head remained averted, she bored the
+carpet with her conscious eyes. Mrs. Farrinder glanced at her askance,
+and then said to Ransom serenely:
+
+"You praise the grace of your Southern ladies, but you have had to come
+North to see a human gazelle. Miss Tarrant is of the best New England
+stock--what _I_ call the best!"
+
+"I'm sure from what I have seen of the Boston ladies, no manifestation
+of grace can excite my surprise," Ransom rejoined, looking, with his
+smile, at his cousin.
+
+"She has been powerfully affected," Mrs. Farrinder explained, very
+slightly dropping her voice, as Olive, apparently, still remained deaf.
+
+Miss Birdseye drew near at this moment; she wanted to know if Mrs.
+Farrinder didn't want to express some acknowledgment, on the part of the
+company at large, for the real stimulus Miss Tarrant had given them.
+Mrs. Farrinder said: Oh yes, she would speak now with pleasure; only she
+must have a glass of water first. Miss Birdseye replied that there was
+some coming in a moment; one of the ladies had asked for it, and Mr.
+Pardon had just stepped down to draw some. Basil took advantage of this
+intermission to ask Miss Birdseye if she would give him the great
+privilege of an introduction to Miss Verena. "Mrs. Farrinder will thank
+her for the company," he said, laughing, "but she won't thank her for
+me."
+
+Miss Birdseye manifested the greatest disposition to oblige him; she was
+so glad he had been impressed. She was proceeding to lead him toward
+Miss Tarrant when Olive Chancellor rose abruptly from her chair and laid
+her hand, with an arresting movement, on the arm of her hostess. She
+explained to her that she must go, that she was not very well, that her
+carriage was there; also that she hoped Miss Birdseye, if it was not
+asking too much, would accompany her to the door.
+
+"Well, you are impressed too," said Miss Birdseye, looking at her
+philosophically. "It seems as if no one had escaped."
+
+Ransom was disappointed; he saw he was going to be taken away, and,
+before he could suppress it, an exclamation burst from his lips--the
+first exclamation he could think of that would perhaps check his
+cousin's retreat: "Ah, Miss Olive, are you going to give up Mrs.
+Farrinder?"
+
+At this Miss Olive looked at him, showed him an extraordinary face, a
+face he scarcely understood or even recognised. It was portentously
+grave, the eyes were enlarged, there was a red spot in each of the
+cheeks, and as directed to him, a quick, piercing question, a kind of
+leaping challenge, in the whole expression. He could only answer this
+sudden gleam with a stare, and wonder afresh what trick his Northern
+kinswoman was destined to play him. Impressed too? He should think he
+had been! Mrs. Farrinder, who was decidedly a woman of the world, came
+to his assistance, or to Miss Chancellor's, and said she hoped very much
+Olive wouldn't stay--she felt these things too much. "If you stay, I
+won't speak," she added; "I should upset you altogether." And then she
+continued, tenderly, for so preponderantly intellectual a nature: "When
+women feel as you do, how can I doubt that we shall come out all right?"
+
+"Oh, we shall come out all right, I guess," murmured Miss Birdseye.
+
+"But you must remember Beacon Street," Mrs. Farrinder subjoined. "You
+must take advantage of your position--you must wake up the Back Bay!"
+
+"I'm sick of the Back Bay!" said Olive fiercely; and she passed to the
+door with Miss Birdseye, bidding good-bye to no one. She was so agitated
+that, evidently, she could not trust herself, and there was nothing for
+Ransom but to follow. At the door of the room, however, he was checked
+by a sudden pause on the part of the two ladies: Olive stopped and stood
+there hesitating. She looked round the room and spied out Verena, where
+she sat with her mother, the centre of a gratified group; then, throwing
+back her head with an air of decision, she crossed over to her. Ransom
+said to himself that now, perhaps, was his chance, and he quickly
+accompanied Miss Chancellor. The little knot of reformers watched her as
+she arrived; their faces expressed a suspicion of her social importance,
+mingled with conscientious scruples as to whether it were right to
+recognise it. Verena Tarrant saw that she was the object of this
+manifestation, and she got up to meet the lady whose approach was so
+full of point. Ransom perceived, however, or thought he perceived, that
+she recognised nothing; she had no suspicions of social importance. Yet
+she smiled with all her radiance, as she looked from Miss Chancellor to
+him; smiled because she liked to smile, to please, to feel her
+success--or was it because she was a perfect little actress, and this
+was part of her training? She took the hand that Olive put out to her;
+the others, rather solemnly, sat looking up from their chairs.
+
+"You don't know me, but I want to know you," Olive said. "I can thank
+you now. Will you come and see me?"
+
+"Oh yes; where do you live?" Verena answered, in the tone of a girl for
+whom an invitation (she hadn't so many) was always an invitation.
+
+Miss Chancellor syllabled her address, and Mrs. Tarrant came forward,
+smiling. "I know about you, Miss Chancellor. I guess your father knew my
+father--Mr. Greenstreet. Verena will be very glad to visit you. We shall
+be very happy to see you in _our_ home."
+
+Basil Ransom, while the mother spoke, wanted to say something to the
+daughter, who stood there so near him, but he could think of nothing
+that would do; certain words that came to him, his Mississippi phrases,
+seemed patronising and ponderous. Besides, he didn't wish to assent to
+what she had said; he wished simply to tell her she was delightful, and
+it was difficult to mark that difference. So he only smiled at her in
+silence, and she smiled back at him--a smile that seemed to him quite
+for himself.
+
+"Where do you live?" Olive asked; and Mrs. Tarrant replied that they
+lived at Cambridge, and that the horse-cars passed just near their door.
+Whereupon Olive insisted "Will you come very soon?" and Verena said, Oh
+yes, she would come very soon, and repeated the number in Charles
+Street, to show that she had taken heed of it. This was done with
+childlike good faith. Ransom saw that she would come and see any one who
+would ask her like that, and he regretted for a minute that he was not a
+Boston lady, so that he might extend to her such an invitation. Olive
+Chancellor held her hand a moment longer, looked at her in farewell, and
+then, saying, "Come, Mr. Ransom," drew him out of the room. In the hall
+they met Mr. Pardon, coming up from the lower regions with a jug of
+water and a tumbler. Miss Chancellor's hackney-coach was there, and when
+Basil had put her into it she said to him that she wouldn't trouble him
+to drive with her--his hotel was not near Charles Street. He had so
+little desire to sit by her side--he wanted to smoke--that it was only
+after the vehicle had rolled off that he reflected upon her coolness,
+and asked himself why the deuce she had brought him away. She _was_ a
+very odd cousin, was this Boston cousin of his. He stood there a moment,
+looking at the light in Miss Birdseye's windows and greatly minded to
+re-enter the house, now he might speak to the girl. But he contented
+himself with the memory of her smile, and turned away with a sense of
+relief, after all, at having got out of such wild company, as well as
+with (in a different order) a vulgar consciousness of being very
+thirsty.
+
+
+
+
+X
+
+
+Verena Tarrant came in the very next day from Cambridge to Charles
+Street; that quarter of Boston is in direct communication with the
+academic suburb. It hardly seemed direct to poor Verena, perhaps, who,
+in the crowded street-car which deposited her finally at Miss
+Chancellor's door, had to stand up all the way, half suspended by a
+leathern strap from the glazed roof of the stifling vehicle, like some
+blooming cluster dangling in a hothouse. She was used, however, to these
+perpendicular journeys, and though, as we have seen, she was not
+inclined to accept without question the social arrangements of her time,
+it never would have occurred to her to criticise the railways of her
+native land. The promptness of her visit to Olive Chancellor had been an
+idea of her mother's, and Verena listened open-eyed while this lady, in
+the seclusion of the little house in Cambridge, while Selah Tarrant was
+"off," as they said, with his patients, sketched out a line of conduct
+for her. The girl was both submissive and unworldly, and she listened to
+her mother's enumeration of the possible advantages of an intimacy with
+Miss Chancellor as she would have listened to any other fairy-tale. It
+was still a part of the fairy-tale when this zealous parent put on with
+her own hands Verena's smart hat and feather, buttoned her little jacket
+(the buttons were immense and gilt), and presented her with twenty cents
+to pay her car-fare.
+
+There was never any knowing in advance how Mrs. Tarrant would take a
+thing, and even Verena, who, filially, was much less argumentative than
+in her civic and, as it were, public capacity, had a perception that her
+mother was queer. She was queer, indeed--a flaccid, relaxed, unhealthy,
+whimsical woman, who still had a capacity to cling. What she clung to
+was "society," and a position in the world which a secret whisper told
+her she had never had and a voice more audible reminded her she was in
+danger of losing. To keep it, to recover it, to reconsecrate it, was the
+ambition of her heart; this was one of the many reasons why Providence
+had judged her worthy of having so wonderful a child. Verena was born
+not only to lead their common sex out of bondage, but to remodel a
+visiting-list which bulged and contracted in the wrong places, like a
+country-made garment. As the daughter of Abraham Greenstreet, Mrs.
+Tarrant had passed her youth in the first Abolitionist circles, and she
+was aware how much such a prospect was clouded by her union with a young
+man who had begun life as an itinerant vendor of lead-pencils (he had
+called at Mr. Greenstreet's door in the exercise of this function), had
+afterwards been for a while a member of the celebrated Cayuga community,
+where there were no wives, or no husbands, or something of that sort
+(Mrs. Tarrant could never remember), and had still later (though before
+the development of the healing faculty) achieved distinction in the
+spiritualistic world. (He was an extraordinarily favoured medium, only
+he had had to stop for reasons of which Mrs. Tarrant possessed her
+version.) Even in a society much occupied with the effacement of
+prejudice there had been certain dim presumptions against this versatile
+being, who naturally had not wanted arts to ingratiate himself with Miss
+Greenstreet, her eyes, like his own, being fixed exclusively on the
+future. The young couple (he was considerably her elder) had gazed on
+the future together until they found that the past had completely
+forsaken them and that the present offered but a slender foothold. Mrs.
+Tarrant, in other words, incurred the displeasure of her family, who
+gave her husband to understand that, much as they desired to remove the
+shackles from the slave, there were kinds of behaviour which struck them
+as too unfettered. These had prevailed, to their thinking, at Cayuga,
+and they naturally felt it was no use for him to say that his residence
+there had been (for him--the community still existed) but a momentary
+episode, inasmuch as there was little more to be urged for the spiritual
+picnics and vegetarian camp-meetings in which the discountenanced pair
+now sought consolation.
+
+Such were the narrow views of people hitherto supposed capable of
+opening their hearts to all salutary novelties, but now put to a genuine
+test, as Mrs. Tarrant felt. Her husband's tastes rubbed off on her soft,
+moist moral surface, and the couple lived in an atmosphere of novelty,
+in which, occasionally, the accommodating wife encountered the fresh
+sensation of being in want of her dinner. Her father died, leaving,
+after all, very little money; he had spent his modest fortune upon the
+blacks. Selah Tarrant and his companion had strange adventures; she
+found herself completely enrolled in the great irregular army of
+nostrum-mongers, domiciled in humanitary Bohemia. It absorbed her like a
+social swamp; she sank into it a little more every day, without
+measuring the inches of her descent. Now she stood there up to her chin;
+it may probably be said of her that she had touched bottom. When she
+went to Miss Birdseye's it seemed to her that she re-entered society.
+The door that admitted her was not the door that admitted some of the
+others (she should never forget the tipped-up nose of Mrs. Farrinder),
+and the superior portal remained ajar, disclosing possible vistas. She
+had lived with long-haired men and short-haired women, she had
+contributed a flexible faith and an irremediable want of funds to a
+dozen social experiments, she had partaken of the comfort of a hundred
+religions, had followed innumerable dietary reforms, chiefly of the
+negative order, and had gone of an evening to a _séance_ or a lecture as
+regularly as she had eaten her supper. Her husband always had tickets
+for lectures; in moments of irritation at the want of a certain sequence
+in their career, she had remarked to him that it was the only thing he
+did have. The memory of all the winter nights they had tramped through
+the slush (the tickets, alas! were not car-tickets) to hear Mrs. Ada T.
+P. Foat discourse on the "Summer-land," came back to her with
+bitterness. Selah was quite enthusiastic at one time about Mrs. Foat,
+and it was his wife's belief that he had been "associated" with her
+(that was Selah's expression in referring to such episodes) at Cayuga.
+The poor woman, matrimonially, had a great deal to put up with; it took,
+at moments, all her belief in his genius to sustain her. She knew that
+he was very magnetic (that, in fact, was his genius), and she felt that
+it was his magnetism that held her to him. He had carried her through
+things where she really didn't know what to think; there were moments
+when she suspected that she had lost the strong moral sense for which
+the Greenstreets were always so celebrated.
+
+Of course a woman who had had the bad taste to marry Selah Tarrant would
+not have been likely under any circumstances to possess a very straight
+judgement; but there is no doubt that this poor lady had grown
+dreadfully limp. She had blinked and compromised and shuffled; she asked
+herself whether, after all, it was any more than natural that she should
+have wanted to help her husband, in those exciting days of his
+mediumship, when the table, sometimes, wouldn't rise from the ground,
+the sofa wouldn't float through the air, and the soft hand of a lost
+loved one was not so alert as it might have been to visit the circle.
+Mrs. Tarrant's hand was soft enough for the most supernatural effect,
+and she consoled her conscience on such occasions by reflecting
+that she ministered to a belief in immortality. She was glad,
+somehow, for Verena's sake, that they had emerged from the phase of
+spirit-intercourse; her ambition for her daughter took another form than
+desiring that she, too, should minister to a belief in immortality. Yet
+among Mrs. Tarrant's multifarious memories these reminiscences of the
+darkened room, the waiting circle, the little taps on table and wall,
+the little touches on cheek and foot, the music in the air, the rain of
+flowers, the sense of something mysteriously flitting, were most
+tenderly cherished. She hated her husband for having magnetised her so
+that she consented to certain things, and even did them, the thought of
+which to-day would suddenly make her face burn; hated him for the manner
+in which, somehow, as she felt, he had lowered her social tone; yet at
+the same time she admired him for an impudence so consummate that it had
+ended (in the face of mortifications, exposures, failures, all the
+misery of a hand-to-mouth existence) by imposing itself on her as a kind
+of infallibility. She knew he was an awful humbug, and yet her knowledge
+had this imperfection, that he had never confessed it--a fact that was
+really grand when one thought of his opportunities for doing so. He had
+never allowed that he wasn't straight; the pair had so often been in the
+position of the two augurs behind the altar, and yet he had never given
+her a glance that the whole circle mightn't have observed. Even in the
+privacy of domestic intercourse he had phrases, excuses, explanations,
+ways of putting things, which, as she felt, were too sublime for just
+herself; they were pitched, as Selah's nature was pitched, altogether in
+the key of public life.
+
+So it had come to pass, in her distended and demoralised conscience,
+that with all the things she despised in her life and all the things she
+rather liked, between being worn out with her husband's inability to
+earn a living and a kind of terror of his consistency (he had a theory
+that they lived delightfully), it happened, I say, that the only very
+definite criticism she made of him to-day was that he didn't know how to
+speak. That was where the shoe pinched--that was where Selah was slim.
+He couldn't hold the attention of an audience, he was not acceptable as
+a lecturer. He had plenty of thoughts, but it seemed as if he couldn't
+fit them into each other. Public speaking had been a Greenstreet
+tradition, and if Mrs. Tarrant had been asked whether in her younger
+years she had ever supposed she should marry a mesmeric healer, she
+would have replied: "Well, I never thought I should marry a gentleman
+who would be silent on the platform!" This was her most general
+humiliation; it included and exceeded every other, and it was a poor
+consolation that Selah possessed as a substitute--his career as a
+healer, to speak of none other, was there to prove it--the eloquence of
+the hand. The Greenstreets had never set much store on manual activity;
+they believed in the influence of the lips. It may be imagined,
+therefore, with what exultation, as time went on, Mrs. Tarrant found
+herself the mother of an inspired maiden, a young lady from whose lips
+eloquence flowed in streams. The Greenstreet tradition would not perish,
+and the dry places of her life would, perhaps, be plentifully watered.
+It must be added that, of late, this sandy surface had been irrigated,
+in moderation, from another source. Since Selah had addicted himself to
+the mesmeric mystery, their home had been a little more what the home of
+a Greenstreet should be. He had "considerable many" patients, he got
+about two dollars a sitting, and he had effected some most gratifying
+cures. A lady in Cambridge had been so much indebted to him that she had
+recently persuaded them to take a house near her, in order that Doctor
+Tarrant might drop in at any time. He availed himself of this
+convenience--they had taken so many houses that another, more or less,
+didn't matter--and Mrs. Tarrant began to feel as if they really had
+"struck" something.
+
+Even to Verena, as we know, she was confused and confusing; the girl had
+not yet had an opportunity to ascertain the principles on which her
+mother's limpness was liable suddenly to become rigid. This phenomenon
+occurred when the vapours of social ambition mounted to her brain, when
+she extended an arm from which a crumpled dressing-gown fluttered back
+to seize the passing occasion. Then she surprised her daughter by a
+volubility of exhortation as to the duty of making acquaintances, and by
+the apparent wealth of her knowledge of the mysteries of good society.
+She had, in particular, a way of explaining confidentially--and in her
+desire to be graphic she often made up the oddest faces--the
+interpretation that you must sometimes give to the manners of the best
+people, and the delicate dignity with which you should meet them, which
+made Verena wonder what secret sources of information she possessed.
+Verena took life, as yet, very simply; she was not conscious of so many
+differences of social complexion. She knew that some people were rich
+and others poor, and that her father's house had never been visited by
+such abundance as might make one ask one's self whether it were right,
+in a world so full of the disinherited, to roll in luxury. But except
+when her mother made her slightly dizzy by a resentment of some slight
+that she herself had never perceived, or a flutter over some opportunity
+that appeared already to have passed (while Mrs. Tarrant was looking for
+something to "put on"), Verena had no vivid sense that she was not as
+good as any one else, for no authority appealing really to her
+imagination had fixed the place of mesmeric healers in the scale of
+fashion. It was impossible to know in advance how Mrs. Tarrant would
+take things. Sometimes she was abjectly indifferent; at others she
+thought that every one who looked at her wished to insult her. At
+moments she was full of suspicion of the ladies (they were mainly
+ladies) whom Selah mesmerised; then again she appeared to have given up
+everything but her slippers and the evening-paper (from this publication
+she derived inscrutable solace), so that if Mrs. Foat in person had
+returned from the summer-land (to which she had some time since taken
+her flight), she would not have disturbed Mrs. Tarrant's almost cynical
+equanimity.
+
+It was, however, in her social subtleties that she was most beyond her
+daughter; it was when she discovered extraordinary though latent
+longings on the part of people they met to make their acquaintance, that
+the girl became conscious of how much she herself had still to learn.
+All her desire was to learn, and it must be added that she regarded her
+mother, in perfect good faith, as a wonderful teacher. She was perplexed
+sometimes by her worldliness; that, somehow, was not a part of the
+higher life which every one in such a house as theirs must wish above
+all things to lead; and it was not involved in the reign of justice,
+which they were all trying to bring about, that such a strict account
+should be kept of every little snub. Her father seemed to Verena to move
+more consecutively on the high plane; though his indifference to
+old-fashioned standards, his perpetual invocation of the brighter day,
+had not yet led her to ask herself whether, after all, men are more
+disinterested than women. Was it interest that prompted her mother to
+respond so warmly to Miss Chancellor, to say to Verena, with an air of
+knowingness, that the thing to do was to go in and see her
+_immediately_? No italics can represent the earnestness of Mrs.
+Tarrant's emphasis. Why hadn't she said, as she had done in former
+cases, that if people wanted to see them they could come out to their
+home; that she was not so low down in the world as not to know there was
+such a ceremony as leaving cards? When Mrs. Tarrant began on the
+question of ceremonies she was apt to go far; but she had waived it in
+this case; it suited her more to hold that Miss Chancellor had been very
+gracious, that she was a most desirable friend, that she had been more
+affected than any one by Verena's beautiful outpouring; that she would
+open to her the best saloons in Boston; that when she said "Come soon"
+she meant the very next day, that this was the way to take it, anyhow
+(one must know when to go forward gracefully); and that in short she,
+Mrs. Tarrant, knew what she was talking about.
+
+Verena accepted all this, for she was young enough to enjoy any journey
+in a horse-car, and she was ever-curious about the world; she only
+wondered a little how her mother knew so much about Miss Chancellor just
+from looking at her once. What Verena had mainly observed in the young
+lady who came up to her that way the night before was that she was
+rather dolefully dressed, that she looked as if she had been crying
+(Verena recognised that look quickly, she had seen it so much), and that
+she was in a hurry to get away. However, if she was as remarkable as her
+mother said, one would very soon see it; and meanwhile there was nothing
+in the girl's feeling about herself, in her sense of her importance, to
+make it a painful effort for her to run the risk of a mistake. She had
+no particular feeling about herself; she only cared, as yet, for outside
+things. Even the development of her "gift" had not made her think
+herself too precious for mere experiments; she had neither a particle of
+diffidence nor a particle of vanity. Though it would have seemed to you
+eminently natural that a daughter of Selah Tarrant and his wife should
+be an inspirational speaker, yet, as you knew Verena better, you would
+have wondered immensely how she came to issue from such a pair. Her
+ideas of enjoyment were very simple; she enjoyed putting on her new hat,
+with its redundancy of feather, and twenty cents appeared to her a very
+large sum.
+
+
+
+
+XI
+
+
+"I was certain you would come--I have felt it all day--something told
+me!" It was with these words that Olive Chancellor greeted her young
+visitor, coming to her quickly from the window, where she might have
+been waiting for her arrival. Some weeks later she explained to Verena
+how definite this prevision had been, how it had filled her all day with
+a nervous agitation so violent as to be painful. She told her that such
+forebodings were a peculiarity of her organisation, that she didn't know
+what to make of them, that she had to accept them; and she mentioned, as
+another example, the sudden dread that had come to her the evening
+before in the carriage, after proposing to Mr. Ransom to go with her to
+Miss Birdseye's. This had been as strange as it had been instinctive,
+and the strangeness, of course, was what must have struck Mr. Ransom;
+for the idea that he might come had been hers, and yet she suddenly
+veered round. She couldn't help it; her heart had begun to throb with
+the conviction that if he crossed that threshold some harm would come of
+of it for her. She hadn't prevented him, and now she didn't care, for
+now, as she intimated, she had the interest of Verena, and that made her
+indifferent to every danger, to every ordinary pleasure. By this time
+Verena had learned how peculiarly her friend was constituted, how
+nervous and serious she was, how personal, how exclusive, what a force
+of will she had, what a concentration of purpose. Olive had taken her
+up, in the literal sense of the phrase, like a bird of the air, had
+spread an extraordinary pair of wings, and carried her through the
+dizzying void of space. Verena liked it, for the most part; liked to
+shoot upward without an effort of her own and look down upon all
+creation, upon all history, from such a height. From this first
+interview she felt that she was seized, and she gave herself up, only
+shutting her eyes a little, as we do whenever a person in whom we have
+perfect confidence proposes, with our assent, to subject us to some
+sensation.
+
+"I want to know you," Olive said, on this occasion; "I felt that I must
+last night, as soon as I heard you speak. You seem to me very wonderful.
+I don't know what to make of you. I think we ought to be friends; so I
+just asked you to come to me straight off, without preliminaries, and I
+believed you would come. It is so _right_ that you have come, and it
+proves how right I was." These remarks fell from Miss Chancellor's lips
+one by one, as she caught her breath, with the tremor that was always in
+her voice, even when she was the least excited, while she made Verena
+sit down near her on the sofa, and looked at her all over in a manner
+that caused the girl to rejoice at having put on the jacket with the
+gilt buttons. It was this glance that was the beginning; it was with
+this quick survey, omitting nothing, that Olive took possession of her.
+"You are very remarkable; I wonder if you know how remarkable!" she went
+on, murmuring the words as if she were losing herself, becoming
+inadvertent in admiration.
+
+Verena sat there smiling, without a blush, but with a pure, bright look
+which, for her, would always make protests unnecessary. "Oh, it isn't
+me, you know; it's something outside!" She tossed this off lightly, as
+if she were in the habit of saying it, and Olive wondered whether it
+were a sincere disclaimer or only a phrase of the lips. The question was
+not a criticism, for she might have been satisfied that the girl was a
+mass of fluent catch-words and yet scarcely have liked her the less. It
+was just as she was that she liked her; she was so strange, so different
+from the girls one usually met, seemed to belong to some queer
+gipsy-land or transcendental Bohemia. With her bright, vulgar clothes,
+her salient appearance, she might have been a rope-dancer or a
+fortune-teller; and this had the immense merit, for Olive, that it
+appeared to make her belong to the "people," threw her into the social
+dusk of that mysterious democracy which Miss Chancellor held that the
+fortunate classes know so little about, and with which (in a future
+possibly very near) they will have to count. Moreover, the girl had
+moved her as she had never been moved, and the power to do that, from
+whatever source it came, was a force that one must admire. Her emotion
+was still acute, however much she might speak to her visitor as if
+everything that had happened seemed to her natural; and what kept it,
+above all, from subsiding was her sense that she found here what she had
+been looking for so long--a friend of her own sex with whom she might
+have a union of soul. It took a double consent to make a friendship, but
+it was not possible that this intensely sympathetic girl would refuse.
+Olive had the penetration to discover in a moment that she was a
+creature of unlimited generosity. I know not what may have been the
+reality of Miss Chancellor's other premonitions, but there is no doubt
+that in this respect she took Verena's measure on the spot. This was
+what she wanted; after that the rest didn't matter; Miss Tarrant might
+wear gilt buttons from head to foot, her soul could not be vulgar.
+
+"Mother told me I had better come right in," said Verena, looking now
+about the room, very glad to find herself in so pleasant a place, and
+noticing a great many things that she should like to see in detail.
+
+"Your mother saw that I meant what I said; it isn't everybody that does
+me the honour to perceive that. She saw that I was shaken from head to
+foot. I could only say three words--I couldn't have spoken more! What a
+power--what a power, Miss Tarrant!"
+
+"Yes, I suppose it is a power. If it wasn't a power, it couldn't do much
+with me!"
+
+"You are so simple--so much like a child," Olive Chancellor said. That
+was the truth, and she wanted to say it because, quickly, without forms
+or circumlocutions, it made them familiar. She wished to arrive at this;
+her impatience was such that before the girl had been five minutes in
+the room she jumped to her point--inquired of her, interrupting herself,
+interrupting everything: "Will you be my friend, my friend of friends,
+beyond every one, everything, for ever and for ever?" Her face was full
+of eagerness and tenderness.
+
+Verena gave a laugh of clear amusement, without a shade of embarrassment
+or confusion. "Perhaps you like me too much."
+
+"Of course I like you too much! When I like, I like too much. But of
+course it's another thing, your liking me," Olive Chancellor added. "We
+must wait--we must wait. When I care for anything, I can be patient."
+She put out her hand to Verena, and the movement was at once so
+appealing and so confident that the girl instinctively placed her own in
+it. So, hand in hand, for some moments, these two young women sat
+looking at each other. "There is so much I want to ask you," said Olive.
+
+"Well, I can't say much except when father has worked on me," Verena
+answered with an ingenuousness beside which humility would have seemed
+pretentious.
+
+"I don't care anything about your father," Olive Chancellor rejoined
+very gravely, with a great air of security.
+
+"He is very good," Verena said simply. "And he's wonderfully magnetic."
+
+"It isn't your father, and it isn't your mother; I don't think of them,
+and it's not them I want. It's only you--just as you are."
+
+Verena dropped her eyes over the front of her dress. "Just as she was"
+seemed to her indeed very well.
+
+"Do you want me to give up----?" she demanded, smiling.
+
+Olive Chancellor drew in her breath for an instant, like a creature in
+pain; then, with her quavering voice, touched with a vibration of
+anguish, she said; "Oh, how can I ask you to give up? _I_ will give
+up--I will give up everything!"
+
+Filled with the impression of her hostess's agreeable interior, and of
+what her mother had told her about Miss Chancellor's wealth, her
+position in Boston society, Verena, in her fresh, diverted scrutiny of
+the surrounding objects, wondered what could be the need of this scheme
+of renunciation. Oh no, indeed, she hoped she wouldn't give up--at least
+not before she, Verena, had had a chance to see. She felt, however, that
+for the present there would be no answer for her save in the mere
+pressure of Miss Chancellor's eager nature, that intensity of emotion
+which made her suddenly exclaim, as if in a nervous ecstasy of
+anticipation, "But we must wait! Why do we talk of this? We must wait!
+All will be right," she added more calmly, with great sweetness.
+
+Verena wondered afterward why she had not been more afraid of her--why,
+indeed, she had not turned and saved herself by darting out of the room.
+But it was not in this young woman's nature to be either timid or
+cautious; she had as yet to make acquaintance with the sentiment of
+fear. She knew too little of the world to have learned to mistrust
+sudden enthusiasms, and if she had had a suspicion it would have been
+(in accordance with common worldly knowledge) the wrong one--the
+suspicion that such a whimsical liking would burn itself out. She could
+not have that one, for there was a light in Miss Chancellor's magnified
+face which seemed to say that a sentiment, with her, might consume its
+object, might consume Miss Chancellor, but would never consume itself.
+Verena, as yet, had no sense of being scorched; she was only agreeably
+warmed. She also had dreamed of a friendship, though it was not what she
+had dreamed of most, and it came over her that this was the one which
+fortune might have been keeping. She never held back.
+
+"Do you live here all alone?" she asked of Olive.
+
+"I shouldn't if you would come and live with me!"
+
+Even this really passionate rejoinder failed to make Verena shrink; she
+thought it so possible that in the wealthy class people made each other
+such easy proposals. It was a part of the romance, the luxury, of
+wealth; it belonged to the world of invitations, in which she had had so
+little share. But it seemed almost a mockery when she thought of the
+little house in Cambridge, where the boards were loose in the steps of
+the porch.
+
+"I must stay with my father and mother," she said. "And then I have my
+work, you know. That's the way I must live now."
+
+"Your work?" Olive repeated, not quite understanding.
+
+"My gift," said Verena, smiling.
+
+"Oh yes, you must use it. That's what I mean; you must move the world
+with it; it's divine."
+
+It was so much what she meant that she had lain awake all night thinking
+of it, and the substance of her thought was that if she could only
+rescue the girl from the danger of vulgar exploitation, could only
+constitute herself her protectress and devotee, the two, between them,
+might achieve the great result. Verena's genius was a mystery, and it
+might remain a mystery; it was impossible to see how this charming,
+blooming, simple creature, all youth and grace and innocence, got her
+extraordinary powers of reflexion. When her gift was not in exercise she
+appeared anything but reflective, and as she sat there now, for
+instance, you would never have dreamed that she had had a vivid
+revelation. Olive had to content herself, provisionally, with saying
+that her precious faculty had come to her just as her beauty and
+distinction (to Olive she was full of that quality) had come; it had
+dropped straight from heaven, without filtering through her parents,
+whom Miss Chancellor decidedly did not fancy. Even among reformers she
+discriminated; she thought all wise people wanted great changes, but the
+votaries of change were not necessarily wise. She remained silent a
+little, after her last remark, and then she repeated again, as if it
+were the solution of everything, as if it represented with absolute
+certainty some immense happiness in the future--"We must wait, we must
+wait!" Verena was perfectly willing to wait, though she did not exactly
+know what they were to wait for, and the aspiring frankness of her
+assent shone out of her face, and seemed to pacify their mutual gaze.
+Olive asked her innumerable questions; she wanted to enter into her
+life. It was one of those talks which people remember afterwards, in
+which every word has been given and taken, and in which they see the
+signs of a beginning that was to be justified. The more Olive learnt of
+her visitor's life the more she wanted to enter into it, the more it
+took her out of herself. Such strange lives are led in America, she
+always knew that; but this was queerer than anything she had dreamed of,
+and the queerest part was that the girl herself didn't appear to think
+it queer. She had been nursed in darkened rooms, and suckled in the
+midst of manifestations; she had begun to "attend lectures," as she
+said, when she was quite an infant, because her mother had no one to
+leave her with at home. She had sat on the knees of somnambulists, and
+had been passed from hand to hand by trance-speakers; she was familiar
+with every kind of "cure," and had grown up among lady-editors of
+newspapers advocating new religions, and people who disapproved of the
+marriage-tie. Verena talked of the marriage-tie as she would have talked
+of the last novel--as if she had heard it as frequently discussed; and
+at certain times, listening to the answers she made to her questions,
+Olive Chancellor closed her eyes in the manner of a person waiting till
+giddiness passed. Her young friend's revelations actually gave her a
+vertigo; they made her perceive everything from which she should have
+rescued her. Verena was perfectly uncontaminated, and she would never be
+touched by evil; but though Olive had no views about the marriage-tie
+except that she should hate it for herself--that particular reform she
+did not propose to consider--she didn't like the "atmosphere" of circles
+in which such institutions were called into question. She had no wish
+now to enter into an examination of that particular one; nevertheless,
+to make sure, she would just ask Verena whether she disapproved of it.
+
+"Well, I must say," said Miss Tarrant, "I prefer free unions."
+
+Olive held her breath an instant; such an idea was so disagreeable to
+her. Then, for all answer, she murmured, irresolutely, "I wish you would
+let me help you!" Yet it seemed, at the same time, that Verena needed
+little help, for it was more and more clear that her eloquence, when she
+stood up that way before a roomful of people, was literally inspiration.
+She answered all her friend's questions with a good-nature which
+evidently took no pains to make things plausible, an effort to oblige,
+not to please; but, after all, she could give very little account of
+herself. This was very visible when Olive asked her where she had got
+her "intense realisation" of the suffering of women; for her address at
+Miss Birdseye's showed that she, too (like Olive herself), had had that
+vision in the watches of the night. Verena thought a moment, as if to
+understand what her companion referred to, and then she inquired, always
+smiling, where Joan of Arc had got her idea of the suffering of France.
+This was so prettily said that Olive could scarcely keep from kissing
+her; she looked at the moment as if, like Joan, she might have had
+visits from the saints. Olive, of course, remembered afterwards that it
+had not literally answered the question; and she also reflected on
+something that made an answer seem more difficult--the fact that the
+girl had grown up among lady-doctors, lady-mediums, lady-editors,
+lady-preachers, lady-healers, women who, having rescued themselves from
+a passive existence, could illustrate only partially the misery of the
+sex at large. It was true that they might have illustrated it by their
+talk, by all they had "been through" and all they could tell a younger
+sister; but Olive was sure that Verena's prophetic impulse had not been
+stirred by the chatter of women (Miss Chancellor knew that sound as well
+as any one); it had proceeded rather out of their silence. She said to
+her visitor that whether or no the angels came down to her in glittering
+armour, she struck her as the only person she had yet encountered who
+had exactly the same tenderness, the same pity, for women that she
+herself had. Miss Birdseye had something of it, but Miss Birdseye wanted
+passion, wanted keenness, was capable of the weakest concessions. Mrs.
+Farrinder was not weak, of course, and she brought a great intellect to
+the matter; but she was not personal enough--she was too abstract.
+Verena was not abstract; she seemed to have lived in imagination through
+all the ages. Verena said she _did_ think she had a certain amount of
+imagination; she supposed she couldn't be so effective on the platform
+if she hadn't a rich fancy. Then Olive said to her, taking her hand
+again, that she wanted her to assure her of this--that it was the only
+thing in all the world she cared for, the redemption of women, the thing
+she hoped under Providence to give her life to. Verena flushed a little
+at this appeal, and the deeper glow of her eyes was the first sign of
+exaltation she had offered. "Oh yes--I want to give my life!" she
+exclaimed, with a vibrating voice; and then she added gravely, "I want
+to do something great!"
+
+"You will, you will, we both will!" Olive Chancellor cried, in rapture.
+But after a little she went on: "I wonder if you know what it means,
+young and lovely as you are--giving your life!"
+
+Verena looked down for a moment in meditation.
+
+"Well," she replied, "I guess I have thought more than I appear."
+
+"Do you understand German? Do you know 'Faust'?" said Olive. "'_Entsagen
+sollst du, sollst entsagen!_'"
+
+"I don't know German; I should like so to study it; I want to know
+everything."
+
+"We will work at it together--we will study everything." Olive almost
+panted; and while she spoke the peaceful picture hung before her of
+still winter evenings under the lamp, with falling snow outside, and tea
+on a little table, and successful renderings, with a chosen companion,
+of Goethe, almost the only foreign author she cared about; for she hated
+the writing of the French, in spite of the importance they have given to
+women. Such a vision as this was the highest indulgence she could offer
+herself; she had it only at considerable intervals. It seemed as if
+Verena caught a glimpse of it too, for her face kindled still more, and
+she said she should like that ever so much. At the same time she asked
+the meaning of the German words.
+
+"'Thou shalt renounce, refrain, abstain!' That's the way Bayard Taylor
+has translated them," Olive answered.
+
+"Oh, well, I guess I can abstain!" Verena exclaimed, with a laugh. And
+she got up rather quickly, as if by taking leave she might give a proof
+of what she meant. Olive put out her hands to hold her, and at this
+moment one of the _portières_ of the room was pushed aside, while a
+gentleman was ushered in by Miss Chancellor's little parlour-maid.
+
+
+
+
+XII
+
+
+Verena recognised him; she had seen him the night before at Miss
+Birdseye's, and she said to her hostess, "Now I must go--you have got
+another caller!" It was Verena's belief that in the fashionable world
+(like Mrs. Farrinder, she thought Miss Chancellor belonged to
+it--thought that, in standing there, she herself was in it)--in the
+highest social walks it was the custom of a prior guest to depart when
+another friend arrived. She had been told at people's doors that she
+could not be received because the lady of the house had a visitor, and
+she had retired on these occasions with a feeling of awe much more than
+a sense of injury. They had not been the portals of fashion, but in this
+respect, she deemed, they had emulated such bulwarks. Olive Chancellor
+offered Basil Ransom a greeting which she believed to be consummately
+lady-like, and which the young man, narrating the scene several months
+later to Mrs. Luna, whose susceptibilities he did not feel himself
+obliged to consider (she considered his so little), described by saying
+that she glared at him. Olive had thought it very possible he would come
+that day if he was to leave Boston; though she was perfectly mindful
+that she had given him no encouragement at the moment they separated. If
+he should not come she should be annoyed, and if he should come she
+should be furious; she was also sufficiently mindful of that. But she
+had a foreboding that, of the two grievances, fortune would confer upon
+her only the less; the only one she had as yet was that he had responded
+to her letter--a complaint rather wanting in richness. If he came, at
+any rate, he would be likely to come shortly before dinner, at the same
+hour as yesterday. He had now anticipated this period considerably, and
+it seemed to Miss Chancellor that he had taken a base advantage of her,
+stolen a march upon her privacy. She was startled, disconcerted, but as
+I have said, she was rigorously lady-like. She was determined not again
+to be fantastic, as she had been about his coming to Miss Birdseye's.
+The strange dread associating itself with that was something which, she
+devoutly trusted, she had felt once for all. She didn't know what he
+could do to her; he hadn't prevented, on the spot though he was, one of
+the happiest things that had befallen her for so long--this quick,
+confident visit of Verena Tarrant. It was only just at the last that he
+had come in, and Verena must go now; Olive's detaining hand immediately
+relaxed itself.
+
+It is to be feared there was no disguise of Ransom's satisfaction at
+finding himself once more face to face with the charming creature with
+whom he had exchanged that final speechless smile the evening before. He
+was more glad to see her than if she had been an old friend, for it
+seemed to him that she had suddenly become a new one. "The delightful
+girl," he said to himself; "she smiles at me as if she liked me!" He
+could not know that this was fatuous, that she smiled so at every one;
+the first time she saw people she treated them as if she recognised
+them. Moreover, she did not seat herself again in his honour; she let it
+be seen that she was still going. The three stood there together in the
+middle of the long, characteristic room, and, for the first time in her
+life, Olive Chancellor chose not to introduce two persons who met under
+her roof. She hated Europe, but she could be European if it were
+necessary. Neither of her companions had an idea that in leaving them
+simply planted face to face (the terror of the American heart) she had
+so high a warrant; and presently Basil Ransom felt that he didn't care
+whether he were introduced or not, for the greatness of an evil didn't
+matter if the remedy were equally great.
+
+"Miss Tarrant won't be surprised if I recognise her--if I take the
+liberty to speak to her. She is a public character; she must pay the
+penalty of her distinction." These words he boldly addressed to the
+girl, with his most gallant Southern manner, saying to himself meanwhile
+that she was prettier still by daylight.
+
+"Oh, a great many gentlemen have spoken to me," Verena said. "There were
+quite a number at Topeka----" And her phrase lost itself in her look at
+Olive, as if she were wondering what was the matter with her.
+
+"Now, I am afraid you are going the very moment I appear," Ransom went
+on. "Do you know that's very cruel to me? I know what your ideas
+are--you expressed them last night in such beautiful language; of course
+you convinced me. I am ashamed of being a man; but I am, and I can't
+help it, and I'll do penance any way you may prescribe. _Must_ she go,
+Miss Olive?" he asked of his cousin. "Do you flee before the individual
+male?" And he turned to Verena.
+
+This young lady gave a laugh that resembled speech in liquid fusion. "Oh
+no; I like the individual!"
+
+As an incarnation of a "movement," Ransom thought her more and more
+singular, and he wondered how she came to be closeted so soon with his
+kinswoman, to whom, only a few hours before, she had been a complete
+stranger. These, however, were doubtless the normal proceedings of
+women. He begged her to sit down again; he was sure Miss Chancellor
+would be sorry to part with her. Verena, looking at her friend, not for
+permission, but for sympathy, dropped again into a chair, and Ransom
+waited to see Miss Chancellor do the same. She gratified him after a
+moment, because she could not refuse without appearing to put a hurt
+upon Verena; but it went hard with her, and she was altogether
+discomposed. She had never seen any one so free in her own drawing-room
+as this loud Southerner, to whom she had so rashly offered a footing; he
+extended invitations to her guests under her nose. That Verena should do
+as he asked her was a signal sign of the absence of that "home-culture"
+(it was so that Miss Chancellor expressed the missing quality) which she
+never supposed the girl possessed: fortunately, as it would be supplied
+to her in abundance in Charles Street. (Olive of course held that
+home-culture was perfectly compatible with the widest emancipation.) It
+was with a perfectly good conscience that Verena complied with Basil
+Ransom's request; but it took her quick sensibility only a moment to
+discover that her friend was not pleased. She scarcely knew what had
+ruffled her, but at the same instant there passed before her the vision
+of the anxieties (of this sudden, unexplained sort, for instance, and
+much worse) which intimate relations with Miss Chancellor might entail.
+
+"Now, I want you to tell me this," Basil Ransom said, leaning forward
+towards Verena, with his hands on his knees, and completely oblivious to
+his hostess. "Do you really believe all that pretty moonshine you talked
+last night? I could have listened to you for another hour; but I never
+heard such monstrous sentiments, I must protest--I must, as a
+calumniated, misrepresented man. Confess you meant it as a kind of
+_reductio ad absurdum_--a satire on Mrs. Farrinder?" He spoke in a tone
+of the freest pleasantry, with his familiar, friendly Southern cadence.
+
+Verena looked at him with eyes that grew large. "Why, you don't mean to
+say you don't believe in our cause?"
+
+"Oh, it won't do--it won't do!" Ransom went on, laughing. "You are on
+the wrong tack altogether. Do you really take the ground that your sex
+has been without influence? Influence? Why, you have led us all by the
+nose to where we are now! Wherever we are, it's all you. You are at the
+bottom of everything."
+
+"Oh yes, and we want to be at the top," said Verena.
+
+"Ah, the bottom is a better place, depend on it, when from there you
+move the whole mass! Besides, you are on the top as well; you are
+everywhere, you are everything. I am of the opinion of that historical
+character--wasn't he some king?--who thought there was a lady behind
+everything. Whatever it was, he held, you have only to look for her; she
+is the explanation. Well, I always look for her, and I always find her;
+of course, I am always delighted to do so; but it proves she is the
+universal cause. Now, you don't mean to deny that power, the power of
+setting men in motion. You are at the bottom of all the wars."
+
+"Well, I am like Mrs. Farrinder; I like opposition," Verena exclaimed,
+with a happy smile.
+
+"That proves, as I say, how in spite of your expressions of horror you
+delight in the shock of battle. What do you say to Helen of Troy and the
+fearful carnage she excited? It is well known that the Empress of France
+was at the bottom of the last war in that country. And as for our four
+fearful years of slaughter, of course, you won't deny that there the
+ladies were the great motive power. The Abolitionists brought it on, and
+were not the Abolitionists principally females? Who was that celebrity
+that was mentioned last night?--Eliza P. Moseley. I regard Eliza as the
+cause of the biggest war of which history preserves the record."
+
+Basil Ransom enjoyed his humour the more because Verena appeared to
+enjoy it; and the look with which she replied to him, at the end of this
+little tirade, "Why, sir, you ought to take the platform too; we might
+go round together as poison and antidote!"--this made him feel that he
+had convinced her, for the moment, quite as much as it was important he
+should. In Verena's face, however, it lasted but an instant--an instant
+after she had glanced at Olive Chancellor, who, with her eyes fixed
+intently on the ground (a look she was to learn to know so well), had a
+strange expression. The girl slowly got up; she felt that she must go.
+She guessed Miss Chancellor didn't like this handsome joker (it was so
+that Basil Ransom struck her); and it was impressed upon her ("in time,"
+as she thought) that her new friend would be more serious even than she
+about the woman-question, serious as she had hitherto believed herself
+to be.
+
+"I should like so much to have the pleasure of seeing you again," Ransom
+continued. "I think I should be able to interpret history for you by a
+new light."
+
+"Well, I should be very happy to see you in my home." These words had
+barely fallen from Verena's lips (her mother told her they were, in
+general, the proper thing to say when people expressed such a desire as
+that; she must not let it be assumed that she would come first to
+them)--she had hardly uttered this hospitable speech when she felt the
+hand of her hostess upon her arm and became aware that a passionate
+appeal sat in Olive's eyes.
+
+"You will just catch the Charles Street car," that young woman murmured,
+with muffled sweetness.
+
+Verena did not understand further than to see that she ought already to
+have departed; and the simplest response was to kiss Miss Chancellor, an
+act which she briefly performed. Basil Ransom understood still less, and
+it was a melancholy commentary on his contention that men are not
+inferior, that this meeting could not come, however rapidly, to a close
+without his plunging into a blunder which necessarily aggravated those
+he had already made. He had been invited by the little prophetess, and
+yet he had not been invited; but he did not take that up, because he
+must absolutely leave Boston on the morrow, and, besides, Miss
+Chancellor appeared to have something to say to it. But he put out his
+hand to Verena and said, "Good-bye, Miss Tarrant; are we not to have the
+pleasure of hearing you in New York? I am afraid we are sadly sunk."
+
+"Certainly, I should like to raise my voice in the biggest city," the
+girl replied.
+
+"Well, try to come on. I won't refute you. It would be a very stupid
+world, after all, if we always knew what women were going to say."
+
+Verena was conscious of the approach of the Charles Street car, as well
+as of the fact that Miss Chancellor was in pain; but she lingered long
+enough to remark that she could see he had the old-fashioned ideas--he
+regarded woman as the toy of man.
+
+"Don't say the toy--say the joy!" Ransom exclaimed. "There is one
+statement I will venture to advance; I am quite as fond of you as you
+are of each other!"
+
+"Much he knows about that!" said Verena, with a side-long smile at Olive
+Chancellor.
+
+For Olive, it made her more beautiful than ever; still, there was no
+trace of this mere personal elation in the splendid sententiousness with
+which, turning to Mr. Ransom, she remarked: "What women may be, or may
+not be, to each other, I won't attempt just now to say; but what _the
+truth_ may be to a human soul, I think perhaps even a woman may faintly
+suspect!"
+
+"The truth? My dear cousin, your truth is a most vain thing!"
+
+"Gracious me!" cried Verena Tarrant; and the gay vibration of her voice
+as she uttered this simple ejaculation was the last that Ransom heard of
+her. Miss Chancellor swept her out of the room, leaving the young man to
+extract a relish from the ineffable irony with which she uttered the
+words "even a woman." It was to be supposed, on general grounds, that
+she would reappear, but there was nothing in the glance she gave him, as
+she turned her back, that was an earnest of this. He stood there a
+moment, wondering; then his wonder spent itself on the page of a book
+which, according to his habit at such times, he had mechanically taken
+up, and in which he speedily became interested. He read it for five
+minutes in an uncomfortable-looking attitude, and quite forgot that he
+had been forsaken. He was recalled to this fact by the entrance of Mrs.
+Luna, arrayed as if for the street, and putting on her gloves again--she
+seemed always to be putting on her gloves. She wanted to know what in
+the world he was doing there alone--whether her sister had not been
+notified.
+
+"Oh yes," said Ransom, "she has just been with me, but she has gone
+downstairs with Miss Tarrant."
+
+"And who in the world is Miss Tarrant?"
+
+Ransom was surprised that Mrs. Luna should not know of the intimacy of
+the two young ladies, in spite of the brevity of their acquaintance,
+being already so great. But, apparently, Miss Olive had not mentioned
+her new friend. "Well, she is an inspirational speaker--the most
+charming creature in the world!"
+
+Mrs. Luna paused in her manipulations, gave an amazed, amused stare,
+then caused the room to ring with her laughter. "You don't mean to say
+you are converted--already?"
+
+"Converted to Miss Tarrant, decidedly."
+
+"You are not to belong to any Miss Tarrant; you are to belong to me,"
+Mrs. Luna said, having thought over her Southern kinsman during the
+twenty-four hours, and made up her mind that he would be a good man for
+a lone woman to know. Then she added: "Did you come here to meet
+her--the inspirational speaker?"
+
+"No; I came to bid your sister good-bye."
+
+"Are you really going? I haven't made you promise half the things I want
+yet. But we will settle that in New York. How do you get on with Olive
+Chancellor?" Mrs. Luna continued, making her points, as she always did,
+with eagerness, though her roundness and her dimples had hitherto
+prevented her from being accused of that vice. It was her practice to
+speak of her sister by her whole name, and you would have supposed, from
+her usual manner of alluding to her, that Olive was much the older,
+instead of having been born ten years later than Adeline. She had as
+many ways as possible of marking the gulf that divided them; but she
+bridged it over lightly now by saying to Basil Ransom; "Isn't she a dear
+old thing?"
+
+This bridge, he saw, would not bear his weight, and her question seemed
+to him to have more audacity than sense. Why should she be so insincere?
+She might know that a man couldn't recognise Miss Chancellor in such a
+description as that. She was not old--she was sharply young; and it was
+inconceivable to him, though he had just seen the little prophetess kiss
+her, that she should ever become any one's "dear." Least of all was she
+a "thing"; she was intensely, fearfully, a person. He hesitated a
+moment, and then he replied: "She's a very remarkable woman."
+
+"Take care--don't be reckless!" cried Mrs. Luna. "Do you think she is
+very dreadful?"
+
+"Don't say anything against my cousin," Basil answered; and at that
+moment Miss Chancellor re-entered the room. She murmured some request
+that he would excuse her absence, but her sister interrupted her with an
+inquiry about Miss Tarrant.
+
+"Mr. Ransom thinks her wonderfully charming. Why didn't you show her to
+me? Do you want to keep her all to yourself?"
+
+Olive rested her eyes for some moments upon Mrs. Luna, without speaking.
+Then she said: "Your veil is not put on straight, Adeline."
+
+"I look like a monster--that, evidently, is what you mean!" Adeline
+exclaimed, going to the mirror to rearrange the peccant tissue.
+
+Miss Chancellor did not again ask Ransom to be seated; she appeared to
+take it for granted that he would leave her now. But instead of this he
+returned to the subject of Verena; he asked her whether she supposed the
+girl would come out in public--would go about like Mrs. Farrinder?
+
+"Come out in public!" Olive repeated; "in public? Why, you don't imagine
+that pure voice is to be hushed?"
+
+"Oh, hushed, no! it's too sweet for that. But not raised to a scream;
+not forced and cracked and ruined. She oughtn't to become like the
+others. She ought to remain apart."
+
+"Apart--_apart_?" said Miss Chancellor; "when we shall all be looking to
+her, gathering about her, praying for her!" There was an exceeding scorn
+in her voice. "If _I_ can help her, she shall be an immense power for
+good."
+
+"An immense power for quackery, my dear Miss Olive!" This broke from
+Basil's lips in spite of a vow he had just taken not to say anything
+that should "aggravate" his hostess, who was in a state of tension it
+was not difficult to detect. But he had lowered his tone to friendly
+pleading, and the offensive word was mitigated by his smile.
+
+She moved away from him, backwards, as if he had given her a push. "Ah,
+well, now you are reckless," Mrs. Luna remarked, drawing out her ribbons
+before the mirror.
+
+"I don't think you would interfere if you knew how little you understand
+us," Miss Chancellor said to Ransom.
+
+"Whom do you mean by 'us'--your whole delightful sex? I don't understand
+_you_, Miss Olive."
+
+"Come away with me, and I'll explain her as we go," Mrs. Luna went on,
+having finished her toilet.
+
+Ransom offered his hand in farewell to his hostess; but Olive found it
+impossible to do anything but ignore the gesture. She could not have let
+him touch her. "Well, then, if you must exhibit her to the multitude,
+bring her on to New York," he said, with the same attempt at a light
+treatment.
+
+"You'll have _me_ in New York--you don't want any one else!" Mrs. Luna
+ejaculated, coquettishly. "I have made up my mind to winter there now."
+
+Olive Chancellor looked from one to the other of her two relatives, one
+near and the other distant, but each so little in sympathy with her, and
+it came over her that there might be a kind of protection for her in
+binding them together, entangling them with each other. She had never
+had an idea of that kind in her life before, and that this sudden
+subtlety should have gleamed upon her as a momentary talisman gives the
+measure of her present nervousness.
+
+"If I could take her to New York, I would take her farther," she
+remarked, hoping she was enigmatical.
+
+"You talk about 'taking' her, as if you were a lecture-agent. Are you
+going into that business?" Mrs. Luna asked.
+
+Ransom could not help noticing that Miss Chancellor would not shake
+hands with him, and he felt, on the whole, rather injured. He paused a
+moment before leaving the room--standing there with his hand on the knob
+of the door. "Look here, Miss Olive, what did you write to me to come
+and see you for?" He made this inquiry with a countenance not destitute
+of gaiety, but his eyes showed something of that yellow light--just
+momentarily lurid--of which mention has been made. Mrs. Luna was on her
+way downstairs, and her companions remained face to face.
+
+"Ask my sister--I think she will tell you," said Olive, turning away
+from him and going to the window. She remained there, looking out; she
+heard the door of the house close, and saw the two cross the street
+together. As they passed out of sight her fingers played, softly, a
+little air upon the pane; it seemed to her that she had had an
+inspiration.
+
+Basil Ransom, meanwhile, put the question to Mrs. Luna. "If she was not
+going to like me, why in the world did she write to me?"
+
+"Because she wanted you to know me--she thought _I_ would like you!" And
+apparently she had not been wrong; for Mrs. Luna, when they reached
+Beacon Street, would not hear of his leaving her to go her way alone,
+would not in the least admit his plea that he had only an hour or two
+more in Boston (he was to travel, economically, by the boat) and must
+devote the time to his business. She appealed to his Southern chivalry,
+and not in vain; practically, at least, he admitted the rights of women.
+
+
+
+
+XIII
+
+
+Mrs. Tarrant was delighted, as may be imagined, with her daughter's
+account of Miss Chancellor's interior, and the reception the girl had
+found there; and Verena, for the next month, took her way very often to
+Charles Street. "Just you be as nice to her as you know how," Mrs.
+Tarrant had said to her; and she reflected with some complacency that
+her daughter did know--she knew how to do everything of that sort. It
+was not that Verena had been taught; that branch of the education of
+young ladies which is known as "manners and deportment" had not figured,
+as a definite head, in Miss Tarrant's curriculum. She had been told,
+indeed, that she must not lie nor steal; but she had been told very
+little else about behaviour; her only great advantage, in short, had
+been the parental example. But her mother liked to think that she was
+quick and graceful, and she questioned her exhaustively as to the
+progress of this interesting episode; she didn't see why, as she said,
+it shouldn't be a permanent "stand-by" for Verena. In Mrs. Tarrant's
+meditations upon the girl's future she had never thought of a fine
+marriage as a reward of effort; she would have deemed herself very
+immoral if she had endeavoured to capture for her child a rich husband.
+She had not, in fact, a very vivid sense of the existence of such agents
+of fate; all the rich men she had seen already had wives, and the
+unmarried men, who were generally very young, were distinguished from
+each other not so much by the figure of their income, which came little
+into question, as by the degree of their interest in regenerating ideas.
+She supposed Verena would marry some one, some day, and she hoped the
+personage would be connected with public life--which meant, for Mrs.
+Tarrant, that his name would be visible, in the lamp-light, on a
+coloured poster, in the doorway of Tremont Temple. But she was not eager
+about this vision, for the implications of matrimony were for the most
+part wanting in brightness--consisted of a tired woman holding a baby
+over a furnace-register that emitted lukewarm air. A real lovely
+friendship with a young woman who had, as Mrs. Tarrant expressed it,
+"prop'ty," would occupy agreeably such an interval as might occur before
+Verena should meet her sterner fate; it would be a great thing for her
+to have a place to run into when she wanted a change, and there was no
+knowing but what it might end in her having two homes. For the idea of
+the home, like most American women of her quality, Mrs. Tarrant had an
+extreme reverence; and it was her candid faith that in all the
+vicissitudes of the past twenty years she had preserved the spirit of
+this institution. If it should exist in duplicate for Verena, the girl
+would be favoured indeed.
+
+All this was as nothing, however, compared with the fact that Miss
+Chancellor seemed to think her young friend's gift _was_ inspirational,
+or at any rate, as Selah had so often said, quite unique. She couldn't
+make out very exactly, by Verena, what she thought; but if the way Miss
+Chancellor had taken hold of her didn't show that she believed she could
+rouse the people, Mrs. Tarrant didn't know what it showed. It was a
+satisfaction to her that Verena evidently responded freely; she didn't
+think anything of what she spent in car-tickets, and indeed she had told
+her that Miss Chancellor wanted to stuff her pockets with them. At first
+she went in because her mother liked to have her; but now, evidently,
+she went because she was so much drawn. She expressed the highest
+admiration of her new friend; she said it took her a little while to see
+into her, but now that she did, well, she was perfectly splendid. When
+Verena wanted to admire she went ahead of every one, and it was
+delightful to see how she was stimulated by the young lady in Charles
+Street. They thought everything of each other--that was very plain; you
+could scarcely tell which thought most. Each thought the other so noble,
+and Mrs. Tarrant had a faith that between them they _would_ rouse the
+people. What Verena wanted was some one who would know how to handle her
+(her father hadn't handled anything except the healing, up to this time,
+with real success), and perhaps Miss Chancellor would take hold better
+than some that made more of a profession.
+
+"It's beautiful, the way she draws you out," Verena had said to her
+mother; "there's something so searching that the first time I visited
+her it quite realised my idea of the Day of Judgement. But she seems to
+show all that's in herself at the same time, and then you see how lovely
+it is. She's just as pure as she can live; you see if she is not, when
+you know her. She's so noble herself that she makes you feel as if you
+wouldn't want to be less so. She doesn't care for anything but the
+elevation of our sex; if she can work a little toward that, it's all she
+asks. I can tell you, she kindles me; she does, mother, really. She
+doesn't care a speck what she wears--only to have an elegant parlour.
+Well, she _has_ got that; it's a regular dream-like place to sit. She's
+going to have a tree in, next week; she says she wants to see me sitting
+under a tree. I believe it's some oriental idea; it has lately been
+introduced in Paris. She doesn't like French ideas as a general thing;
+but she says this has more nature than most. She has got so many of her
+own that I shouldn't think she would require to borrow any. I'd sit in a
+forest to hear her bring some of them out," Verena went on, with
+characteristic raciness. "She just quivers when she describes what our
+sex has been through. It's so interesting to me to hear what I have
+always felt. If she wasn't afraid of facing the public, she would go far
+ahead of me. But she doesn't want to speak herself; she only wants to
+call me out. Mother, if she doesn't attract attention to me there isn't
+any attention to be attracted. She says I have got the gift of
+expression--it doesn't matter where it comes from. She says it's a great
+advantage to a movement to be personified in a bright young figure.
+Well, of course I'm young, and I feel bright enough when once I get
+started. She says my serenity while exposed to the gaze of hundreds is
+in itself a qualification; in fact, she seems to think my serenity is
+quite God-given. She hasn't got much of it herself; she's the most
+emotional woman I have met, up to now. She wants to know how I can speak
+the way I do unless I feel; and of course I tell her I do feel, so far
+as I realise. She seems to be realising all the time; I never saw any
+one that took so little rest. She says I ought to do something great,
+and she makes me feel as if I should. She says I ought to have a wide
+influence, if I can obtain the ear of the public; and I say to her that
+if I do it will be all her influence."
+
+Selah Tarrant looked at all this from a higher standpoint than his wife;
+at least such an attitude on his part was to be inferred from his
+increased solemnity. He committed himself to no precipitate elation at
+the idea of his daughter's being taken up by a patroness of movements
+who happened to have money; he looked at his child only from the point
+of view of the service she might render to humanity. To keep her ideal
+pointing in the right direction, to guide and animate her moral
+life--this was a duty more imperative for a parent so closely identified
+with revelations and panaceas than seeing that she formed profitable
+worldly connexions. He was "off," moreover, so much of the time that he
+could keep little account of her comings and goings, and he had an air
+of being but vaguely aware of whom Miss Chancellor, the object now of
+his wife's perpetual reference, might be. Verena's initial appearance in
+Boston, as he called her performance at Miss Birdseye's, had been a
+great success; and this reflexion added, as I say, to his habitually
+sacerdotal expression. He looked like the priest of a religion that was
+passing through the stage of miracles; he carried his responsibility in
+the general elongation of his person, of his gestures (his hands were
+now always in the air, as if he were being photographed in postures), of
+his words and sentences, as well as in his smile, as noiseless as a
+patent hinge, and in the folds of his eternal waterproof. He was
+incapable of giving an off-hand answer or opinion on the simplest
+occasion, and his tone of high deliberation increased in proportion as
+the subject was trivial or domestic. If his wife asked him at dinner if
+the potatoes were good, he replied that they were strikingly fine (he
+used to speak of the newspaper as "fine"--he applied this term to
+objects the most dissimilar), and embarked on a parallel worthy of
+Plutarch, in which he compared them with other specimens of the same
+vegetable. He produced, or would have liked to produce, the impression
+of looking above and beyond everything, of not caring for the immediate,
+of reckoning only with the long run. In reality he had one all-absorbing
+solicitude--the desire to get paragraphs put into the newspapers,
+paragraphs of which he had hitherto been the subject, but of which he
+was now to divide the glory with his daughter. The newspapers were his
+world, the richest expression, in his eyes, of human life; and, for him,
+if a diviner day was to come upon earth, it would be brought about by
+copious advertisement in the daily prints. He looked with longing for
+the moment when Verena should be advertised among the "personals," and
+to his mind the supremely happy people were those (and there were a good
+many of them) of whom there was some journalistic mention every day in
+the year. Nothing less than this would really have satisfied Selah
+Tarrant; his ideal of bliss was to be as regularly and indispensably a
+component part of the newspaper as the title and date, or the list of
+fires, or the column of Western jokes. The vision of that publicity
+haunted his dreams, and he would gladly have sacrificed to it the
+innermost sanctities of home. Human existence to him, indeed, was a huge
+publicity, in which the only fault was that it was sometimes not
+sufficiently effective. There had been a Spiritualist paper of old which
+he used to pervade; but he could not persuade himself that through this
+medium his personality had attracted general attention; and, moreover,
+the sheet, as he said, was played out anyway. Success was not success so
+long as his daughter's _physique_, the rumour of her engagement, were
+not included in the "Jottings" with the certainty of being extensively
+copied.
+
+The account of her exploits in the West had not made their way to the
+seaboard with the promptitude that he had looked for; the reason of this
+being, he supposed, that the few addresses she had made had not been
+lectures, announced in advance, to which tickets had been sold, but
+incidents, of abrupt occurrence, of certain multitudinous meetings,
+where there had been other performers better known to fame. They had
+brought in no money; they had been delivered only for the good of the
+cause. If it could only be known that she spoke for nothing, that might
+deepen the reverberation; the only trouble was that her speaking for
+nothing was not the way to remind him that he had a remunerative
+daughter. It was not the way to stand out so very much either, Selah
+Tarrant felt; for there were plenty of others that knew how to make as
+little money as she would. To speak--that was the one thing that most
+people were willing to do for nothing; it was not a line in which it was
+easy to appear conspicuously disinterested. Disinterestedness, too, was
+incompatible with receipts; and receipts were what Selah Tarrant was, in
+his own parlance, after. He wished to bring about the day when they
+would flow in freely; the reader perhaps sees the gesture with which, in
+his colloquies with himself, he accompanied this mental image.
+
+It seemed to him at present that the fruitful time was not far off; it
+had been brought appreciably nearer by that fortunate evening at Miss
+Birdseye's. If Mrs. Farrinder could be induced to write an "open letter"
+about Verena, that would do more than anything else. Selah was not
+remarkable for delicacy of perception, but he knew the world he lived in
+well enough to be aware that Mrs. Farrinder was liable to rear up, as
+they used to say down in Pennsylvania, where he lived before he began to
+peddle lead-pencils. She wouldn't always take things as you might
+expect, and if it didn't meet her views to pay a public tribute to
+Verena, there wasn't any way known to Tarrant's ingenious mind of
+getting round her. If it was a question of a favour from Mrs. Farrinder,
+you just had to wait for it, as you would for a rise in the thermometer.
+He had told Miss Birdseye what he would like, and she seemed to think,
+from the way their celebrated friend had been affected, that the idea
+might take her some day of just letting the public know all she had
+felt. She was off somewhere now (since that evening), but Miss Birdseye
+had an idea that when she was back in Roxbury she would send for Verena
+and give her a few points. Meanwhile, at any rate, Selah was sure he had
+a card; he felt there was money in the air. It might already be said
+there were receipts from Charles Street; that rich, peculiar young woman
+seemed to want to lavish herself. He pretended, as I have intimated, not
+to notice this; but he never saw so much as when he had his eyes fixed
+on the cornice. He had no doubt that if he should make up his mind to
+take a hall some night, she would tell him where the bill might be sent.
+That was what he was thinking of now, whether he had better take a hall
+right away, so that Verena might leap at a bound into renown, or wait
+till she had made a few more appearances in private, so that curiosity
+might be worked up.
+
+These meditations accompanied him in his multifarious wanderings through
+the streets and the suburbs of the New England capital. As I have also
+mentioned, he was absent for hours--long periods during which Mrs.
+Tarrant, sustaining nature with a hard-boiled egg and a doughnut,
+wondered how in the world he stayed his stomach. He never wanted
+anything but a piece of pie when he came in; the only thing about which
+he was particular was that it should be served up hot. She had a private
+conviction that he partook, at the houses of his lady patients, of
+little lunches; she applied this term to any episodical repast, at any
+hour of the twenty-four. It is but fair to add that once, when she
+betrayed her suspicion, Selah remarked that the only refreshment _he_
+ever wanted was the sense that he was doing some good. This effort with
+him had many forms; it involved, among other things, a perpetual
+perambulation of the streets, a haunting of horse-cars,
+railway-stations, shops that were "selling off." But the places that
+knew him best were the offices of the newspapers and the vestibules of
+the hotels--the big marble-paved chambers of informal reunion which
+offer to the streets, through high glass plates, the sight of the
+American citizen suspended by his heels. Here, amid the piled-up
+luggage, the convenient spittoons, the elbowing loungers, the
+disconsolate "guests," the truculent Irish porters, the rows of
+shaggy-backed men in strange hats, writing letters at a table inlaid
+with advertisements, Selah Tarrant made innumerable contemplative
+stations. He could not have told you, at any particular moment, what he
+was doing; he only had a general sense that such places were national
+nerve-centres, and that the more one looked in, the more one was "on the
+spot." The _penetralia_ of the daily press were, however, still more
+fascinating, and the fact that they were less accessible, that here he
+found barriers in his path, only added to the zest of forcing an
+entrance. He abounded in pretexts; he even sometimes brought
+contributions; he was persistent and penetrating, he was known as the
+irrepressible Tarrant. He hung about, sat too long, took up the time of
+busy people, edged into the printing-rooms when he had been eliminated
+from the office, talked with the compositors till they set up his
+remarks by mistake, and to the newsboys when the compositors had turned
+their backs. He was always trying to find out what was "going in"; he
+would have liked to go in himself, bodily, and, failing in this, he
+hoped to get advertisements inserted gratis. The wish of his soul was
+that he might be interviewed; that made him hover at the editorial
+elbow. Once he thought he had been, and the headings, five or six deep,
+danced for days before his eyes; but the report never appeared. He
+expected his revenge for this the day after Verena should have burst
+forth; he saw the attitude in which he should receive the emissaries who
+would come after his daughter.
+
+
+
+
+XIV
+
+
+"We ought to have some one to meet her," Mrs. Tarrant said; "I presume
+she wouldn't care to come out just to see us." "She," between the mother
+and the daughter, at this period, could refer only to Olive Chancellor,
+who was discussed in the little house at Cambridge at all hours and from
+every possible point of view. It was never Verena now who began, for she
+had grown rather weary of the topic; she had her own ways of thinking of
+it, which were not her mother's, and if she lent herself to this lady's
+extensive considerations it was because that was the best way of keeping
+her thoughts to herself.
+
+Mrs. Tarrant had an idea that she (Mrs. Tarrant) liked to study people,
+and that she was now engaged in an analysis of Miss Chancellor. It
+carried her far, and she came out at unexpected times with her results.
+It was still her purpose to interpret the world to the ingenious mind of
+her daughter, and she translated Miss Chancellor with a confidence which
+made little account of the fact that she had seen her but once, while
+Verena had this advantage nearly every day. Verena felt that by this
+time she knew Olive very well, and her mother's most complicated
+versions of motive and temperament (Mrs. Tarrant, with the most
+imperfect idea of the meaning of the term, was always talking about
+people's temperament) rendered small justice to the phenomena it was now
+her privilege to observe in Charles Street. Olive was much more
+remarkable than Mrs. Tarrant suspected, remarkable as Mrs. Tarrant
+believed her to be. She had opened Verena's eyes to extraordinary
+pictures, made the girl believe that she had a heavenly mission, given
+her, as we have seen, quite a new measure of the interest of life. These
+were larger consequences than the possibility of meeting the leaders of
+society at Olive's house. She had met no one, as yet, but Mrs. Luna; her
+new friend seemed to wish to keep her quite for herself. This was the
+only reproach that Mrs. Tarrant directed to the new friend as yet; she
+was disappointed that Verena had not obtained more insight into the
+world of fashion. It was one of the prime articles of her faith that the
+world of fashion was wicked and hollow, and, moreover, Verena told her
+that Miss Chancellor loathed and despised it. She could not have
+informed you wherein it would profit her daughter (for the way those
+ladies shrank from any new gospel was notorious); nevertheless she was
+vexed that Verena shouldn't come back to her with a little more of the
+fragrance of Beacon Street. The girl herself would have been the most
+interested person in the world if she had not been the most resigned;
+she took all that was given her and was grateful, and missed nothing
+that was withheld; she was the most extraordinary mixture of eagerness
+and docility. Mrs. Tarrant theorised about temperaments and she loved
+her daughter; but she was only vaguely aware of the fact that she had at
+her side the sweetest flower of character (as one might say) that had
+ever bloomed on earth. She was proud of Verena's brightness, and of her
+special talent; but the commonness of her own surface was a
+non-conductor of the girl's quality. Therefore she thought that it would
+add to her success in life to know a few high-flyers, if only to put
+them to shame; as if anything could add to Verena's success, as if it
+were not supreme success simply to have been made as she was made.
+
+Mrs. Tarrant had gone into town to call upon Miss Chancellor; she
+carried out this resolve, on which she had bestowed infinite
+consideration, independently of Verena. She had decided that she had a
+pretext; her dignity required one, for she felt that at present the
+antique pride of the Greenstreets was terribly at the mercy of her
+curiosity. She wished to see Miss Chancellor again, and to see her among
+her charming appurtenances, which Verena had described to her with great
+minuteness. The pretext that she would have valued most was
+wanting--that of Olive's having come out to Cambridge to pay the visit
+that had been solicited from the first; so she had to take the next
+best--she had to say to herself that it was her duty to see what she
+should think of a place where her daughter spent so much time. To Miss
+Chancellor she would appear to have come to thank her for her
+hospitality; she knew, in advance, just the air she should take (or she
+fancied she knew it--Mrs. Tarrant's were not always what she supposed),
+just the _nuance_ (she had also an impression she knew a little French)
+of her tone. Olive, after the lapse of weeks, still showed no symptoms
+of presenting herself, and Mrs. Tarrant rebuked Verena with some
+sternness for not having made her feel that this attention was due to
+the mother of her friend. Verena could scarcely say to her she guessed
+Miss Chancellor didn't think much of that personage, true as it was that
+the girl had discerned this angular fact, which she attributed to
+Olive's extraordinary comprehensiveness of view. Verena herself did not
+suppose that her mother occupied a very important place in the universe;
+and Miss Chancellor never looked at anything smaller than that. Nor was
+she free to report (she was certainly now less frank at home, and,
+moreover, the suspicion was only just becoming distinct to her) that
+Olive would like to detach her from her parents altogether, and was
+therefore not interested in appearing to cultivate relations with them.
+Mrs. Tarrant, I may mention, had a further motive: she was consumed with
+the desire to behold Mrs. Luna. This circumstance may operate as a proof
+that the aridity of her life was great, and if it should have that
+effect I shall not be able to gainsay it. She had seen all the people
+who went to lectures, but there were hours when she desired, for a
+change, to see some who didn't go; and Mrs. Luna, from Verena's
+description of her, summed up the characteristics of this eccentric
+class.
+
+Verena had given great attention to Olive's brilliant sister; she had
+told her friend everything now--everything but one little secret,
+namely, that if she could have chosen at the beginning she would have
+liked to resemble Mrs. Luna. This lady fascinated her, carried off her
+imagination to strange lands; she should enjoy so much a long evening
+with her alone, when she might ask her ten thousand questions. But she
+never saw her alone, never saw her at all but in glimpses. Adeline
+flitted in and out, dressed for dinners and concerts, always saying
+something worldly to the young woman from Cambridge, and something to
+Olive that had a freedom which she herself would probably never arrive
+at (a failure of foresight on Verena's part). But Miss Chancellor never
+detained her, never gave Verena a chance to see her, never appeared to
+imagine that she could have the least interest in such a person; only
+took up the subject again after Adeline had left them--the subject, of
+course, which was always the same, the subject of what they should do
+together for their suffering sex. It was not that Verena was not
+interested in that--gracious, no; it opened up before her, in those
+wonderful colloquies with Olive, in the most inspiring way; but her
+fancy would make a dart to right or left when other game crossed their
+path, and her companion led her, intellectually, a dance in which her
+feet--that is, her head--failed her at times for weariness. Mrs. Tarrant
+found Miss Chancellor at home, but she was not gratified by even the
+most transient glimpse of Mrs. Luna; a fact which, in her heart, Verena
+regarded as fortunate, inasmuch as (she said to herself) if her mother,
+returning from Charles Street, began to explain Miss Chancellor to her
+with fresh energy, and as if she (Verena) had never seen her, and up to
+this time they had had nothing to say about her, to what developments
+(of the same sort) would not an encounter with Adeline have given rise?
+
+When Verena at last said to her friend that she thought she ought to
+come out to Cambridge--she didn't understand why she didn't--Olive
+expressed her reasons very frankly, admitted that she was jealous, that
+she didn't wish to think of the girl's belonging to any one but herself.
+Mr. and Mrs. Tarrant would have authority, opposed claims, and she
+didn't wish to see them, to remember that they existed. This was true,
+so far as it went; but Olive could not tell Verena everything--could not
+tell her that she hated that dreadful pair at Cambridge. As we know, she
+had forbidden herself this emotion as regards individuals; and she
+flattered herself that she considered the Tarrants as a type, a
+deplorable one, a class that, with the public at large, discredited the
+cause of the new truths. She had talked them over with Miss Birdseye
+(Olive was always looking after her now and giving her things--the good
+lady appeared at this period in wonderful caps and shawls--for she felt
+she couldn't thank her enough), and even Doctor Prance's fellow-lodger,
+whose animosity to flourishing evils lived in the happiest (though the
+most illicit) union with the mania for finding excuses, even Miss
+Birdseye was obliged to confess that if you came to examine his record,
+poor Selah didn't amount to so very much. How little he amounted to
+Olive perceived after she had made Verena talk, as the girl did
+immensely, about her father and mother--quite unconscious, meanwhile, of
+the conclusions she suggested to Miss Chancellor. Tarrant was a moralist
+without moral sense--that was very clear to Olive as she listened to the
+history of his daughter's childhood and youth, which Verena related with
+an extraordinary artless vividness. This narrative, tremendously
+fascinating to Miss Chancellor, made her feel in all sorts of
+ways--prompted her to ask herself whether the girl was also destitute of
+the perception of right and wrong. No, she was only supremely innocent;
+she didn't understand, she didn't interpret nor see the _portée_ of what
+she described; she had no idea whatever of judging her parents. Olive
+had wished to "realise" the conditions in which her wonderful young
+friend (she thought her more wonderful every day) had developed, and to
+this end, as I have related, she prompted her to infinite discourse. But
+now she was satisfied, the realisation was complete, and what she would
+have liked to impose on the girl was an effectual rupture with her past.
+That past she by no means absolutely deplored, for it had the merit of
+having initiated Verena (and her patroness, through her agency) into the
+miseries and mysteries of the People. It was her theory that Verena (in
+spite of the blood of the Greenstreets, and, after all, who were they?)
+was a flower of the great Democracy, and that it was impossible to have
+had an origin less distinguished than Tarrant himself. His birth, in
+some unheard-of place in Pennsylvania, was quite inexpressibly low, and
+Olive would have been much disappointed if it had been wanting in this
+defect. She liked to think that Verena, in her childhood, had known
+almost the extremity of poverty, and there was a kind of ferocity in the
+joy with which she reflected that there had been moments when this
+delicate creature came near (if the pinch had only lasted a little
+longer) to literally going without food. These things added to her value
+for Olive; they made that young lady feel that their common undertaking
+would, in consequence, be so much more serious. It is always supposed
+that revolutionists have been goaded, and the goading would have been
+rather deficient here were it not for such happy accidents in Verena's
+past. When she conveyed from her mother a summons to Cambridge for a
+particular occasion, Olive perceived that the great effort must now be
+made. Great efforts were nothing new to her--it was a great effort to
+live at all--but this one appeared to her exceptionally cruel. She
+determined, however, to make it, promising herself that her first visit
+to Mrs. Tarrant should also be her last. Her only consolation was that
+she expected to suffer intensely; for the prospect of suffering was
+always, spiritually speaking, so much cash in her pocket. It was
+arranged that Olive should come to tea (the repast that Selah designated
+as his supper), when Mrs. Tarrant, as we have seen, desired to do her
+honour by inviting another guest. This guest, after much deliberation
+between that lady and Verena, was selected, and the first person Olive
+saw on entering the little parlour in Cambridge was a young man with
+hair prematurely, or, as one felt that one should say, precociously
+white, whom she had a vague impression she had encountered before, and
+who was introduced to her as Mr. Matthias Pardon.
+
+She suffered less than she had hoped--she was so taken up with the
+consideration of Verena's interior. It was as bad as she could have
+desired; desired in order to feel that (to take her out of such a
+_milieu_ as that) she should have a right to draw her altogether to
+herself. Olive wished more and more to extract some definite pledge from
+her; she could hardly say what it had best be as yet; she only felt that
+it must be something that would have an absolute sanctity for Verena and
+would bind them together for life. On this occasion it seemed to shape
+itself in her mind; she began to see what it ought to be, though she
+also saw that she would perhaps have to wait awhile. Mrs. Tarrant, too,
+in her own house, became now a complete figure; there was no manner of
+doubt left as to her being vulgar. Olive Chancellor despised vulgarity,
+had a scent for it which she followed up in her own family, so that
+often, with a rising flush, she detected the taint even in Adeline.
+There were times, indeed, when every one seemed to have it, every one
+but Miss Birdseye (who had nothing to do with it--she was an antique)
+and the poorest, humblest people. The toilers and spinners, the very
+obscure, these were the only persons who were safe from it. Miss
+Chancellor would have been much happier if the movements she was
+interested in could have been carried on only by the people she liked,
+and if revolutions, somehow, didn't always have to begin with one's
+self--with internal convulsions, sacrifices, executions. A common end,
+unfortunately, however fine as regards a special result, does not make
+community impersonal.
+
+Mrs. Tarrant, with her soft corpulence, looked to her guest very
+bleached and tumid; her complexion had a kind of withered glaze; her
+hair, very scanty, was drawn off her forehead _à la Chinoise_; she had
+no eyebrows, and her eyes seemed to stare, like those of a figure of
+wax. When she talked and wished to insist, and she was always insisting,
+she puckered and distorted her face, with an effort to express the
+inexpressible, which turned out, after all, to be nothing. She had a
+kind of doleful elegance, tried to be confidential, lowered her voice
+and looked as if she wished to establish a secret understanding, in
+order to ask her visitor if she would venture on an apple-fritter. She
+wore a flowing mantle, which resembled her husband's waterproof--a
+garment which, when she turned to her daughter or talked about her,
+might have passed for the robe of a sort of priestess of maternity. She
+endeavoured to keep the conversation in a channel which would enable her
+to ask sudden incoherent questions of Olive, mainly as to whether she
+knew the principal ladies (the expression was Mrs. Tarrant's), not only
+in Boston, but in the other cities which, in her nomadic course, she
+herself had visited. Olive knew some of them, and of some of them had
+never heard; but she was irritated, and pretended a universal ignorance
+(she was conscious that she had never told so many fibs), by which her
+hostess was much disconcerted, although her questions had apparently
+been questions pure and simple, leading nowhither and without bearings
+on any new truth.
+
+
+
+
+XV
+
+
+Tarrant, however, kept an eye in that direction; he was solemnly civil
+to Miss Chancellor, handed her the dishes at table over and over again,
+and ventured to intimate that the apple-fritters were very fine; but,
+save for this, alluded to nothing more trivial than the regeneration of
+humanity and the strong hope he felt that Miss Birdseye would again have
+one of her delightful gatherings. With regard to this latter point he
+explained that it was not in order that he might again present his
+daughter to the company, but simply because on such occasions there was
+a valuable interchange of hopeful thought, a contact of mind with mind.
+If Verena had anything suggestive to contribute to the social problem,
+the opportunity would come--that was part of their faith. They couldn't
+reach out for it and try and push their way; if they were wanted, their
+hour would strike; if they were not, they would just keep still and let
+others press forward who seemed to be called. If they were called, they
+would know it; and if they weren't, they could just hold on to each
+other as they had always done. Tarrant was very fond of alternatives,
+and he mentioned several others; it was never his fault if his listeners
+failed to think him impartial. They hadn't much, as Miss Chancellor
+could see; she could tell by their manner of life that they hadn't raked
+in the dollars; but they had faith that, whether one raised one's voice
+or simply worked on in silence, the principal difficulties would
+straighten themselves out; and they had also a considerable experience
+of great questions. Tarrant spoke as if, as a family, they were prepared
+to take charge of them on moderate terms. He always said "ma'am" in
+speaking to Olive, to whom, moreover, the air had never been so filled
+with the sound of her own name. It was always in her ear, save when Mrs.
+Tarrant and Verena conversed in prolonged and ingenuous asides; this was
+still for her benefit, but the pronoun sufficed them. She had wished to
+judge Doctor Tarrant (not that she believed he had come honestly by his
+title), to make up her mind. She had done these things now, and she
+expressed to herself the kind of man she believed him to be in
+reflecting that if she should offer him ten thousand dollars to renounce
+all claim to Verena, keeping--he and his wife--clear of her for the rest
+of time, he would probably say, with his fearful smile, "Make it twenty,
+money down, and I'll do it." Some image of this transaction, as one of
+the possibilities of the future, outlined itself for Olive among the
+moral incisions of that evening. It seemed implied in the very place,
+the bald bareness of Tarrant's temporary lair, a wooden cottage, with a
+rough front yard, a little naked piazza, which seemed rather to expose
+than to protect, facing upon an unpaved road, in which the footway was
+overlaid with a strip of planks. These planks were embedded in ice or in
+liquid thaw, according to the momentary mood of the weather, and the
+advancing pedestrian traversed them in the attitude, and with a good
+deal of the suspense, of a rope-dancer. There was nothing in the house
+to speak of; nothing, to Olive's sense, but a smell of kerosene; though
+she had a consciousness of sitting down somewhere--the object creaked
+and rocked beneath her--and of the table at tea being covered with a
+cloth stamped in bright colours.
+
+As regards the pecuniary transaction with Selah, it was strange how she
+should have seen it through the conviction that Verena would never give
+up her parents. Olive was sure that she would never turn her back upon
+them, would always share with them. She would have despised her had she
+thought her capable of another course; yet it baffled her to understand
+why, when parents were so trashy, this natural law should not be
+suspended. Such a question brought her back, however, to her perpetual
+enigma, the mystery she had already turned over in her mind for hours
+together--the wonder of such people being Verena's progenitors at all.
+She had explained it, as we explain all exceptional things, by making
+the part, as the French say, of the miraculous. She had come to consider
+the girl as a wonder of wonders, to hold that no human origin, however
+congruous it might superficially appear, would sufficiently account for
+her; that her springing up between Selah and his wife was an exquisite
+whim of the creative force; and that in such a case a few shades more or
+less of the inexplicable didn't matter. It was notorious that great
+beauties, great geniuses, great characters, take their own times and
+places for coming into the world, leaving the gaping spectators to make
+them "fit in," and holding from far-off ancestors, or even, perhaps,
+straight from the divine generosity, much more than from their ugly or
+stupid progenitors. They were incalculable phenomena, anyway, as Selah
+would have said. Verena, for Olive, was the very type and model of the
+"gifted being"; her qualities had not been bought and paid for; they
+were like some brilliant birthday-present, left at the door by an
+unknown messenger, to be delightful for ever as an inexhaustible legacy,
+and amusing for ever from the obscurity of its source. They were
+superabundantly crude as yet--happily for Olive, who promised herself,
+as we know, to train and polish them--but they were as genuine as fruit
+and flowers, as the glow of the fire or the plash of water. For her
+scrutinising friend Verena had the disposition of the artist, the spirit
+to which all charming forms come easily and naturally. It required an
+effort at first to imagine an artist so untaught, so mistaught, so poor
+in experience; but then it required an effort also to imagine people
+like the old Tarrants, or a life so full as her life had been of ugly
+things. Only an exquisite creature could have resisted such
+associations, only a girl who had some natural light, some divine spark
+of taste. There were people like that, fresh from the hand of
+Omnipotence; they were far from common, but their existence was as
+incontestable as it was beneficent.
+
+Tarrant's talk about his daughter, her prospects, her enthusiasm, was
+terribly painful to Olive; it brought back to her what she had suffered
+already from the idea that he laid his hands upon her to make her speak.
+That he should be mixed up in any way with this exercise of her genius
+was a great injury to the cause, and Olive had already determined that
+in future Verena should dispense with his co-operation. The girl had
+virtually confessed that she lent herself to it only because it gave him
+pleasure, and that anything else would do as well, anything that would
+make her quiet a little before she began to "give out." Olive took upon
+herself to believe that _she_ could make her quiet, though, certainly,
+she had never had that effect upon any one; she would mount the platform
+with Verena if necessary, and lay her hands upon her head. Why in the
+world had a perverse fate decreed that Tarrant should take an interest
+in the affairs of Woman--as if she wanted _his_ aid to arrive at her
+goal; a charlatan of the poor, lean, shabby sort, without the humour,
+brilliancy, prestige, which sometimes throw a drapery over shallowness?
+Mr. Pardon evidently took an interest as well, and there was something
+in his appearance that seemed to say that his sympathy would not be
+dangerous. He was much at his ease, plainly, beneath the roof of the
+Tarrants, and Olive reflected that though Verena had told her much about
+him, she had not given her the idea that he was as intimate as that.
+What she had mainly said was that he sometimes took her to the theatre.
+Olive could enter, to a certain extent, into that; she herself had had a
+phase (some time after her father's death--her mother's had preceded
+his--when she bought the little house in Charles Street and began to
+live alone), during which she accompanied gentlemen to respectable
+places of amusement. She was accordingly not shocked at the idea of such
+adventures on Verena's part; than which, indeed, judging from her own
+experience, nothing could well have been less adventurous. Her
+recollections of these expeditions were as of something solemn and
+edifying--of the earnest interest in her welfare exhibited by her
+companion (there were few occasions on which the young Bostonian
+appeared to more advantage), of the comfort of other friends sitting
+near, who were sure to know whom she was with, of serious discussion
+between the acts in regard to the behaviour of the characters in the
+piece, and of the speech at the end with which, as the young man quitted
+her at her door, she rewarded his civility--"I must thank you for a very
+pleasant evening." She always felt that she made that too prim; her lips
+stiffened themselves as she spoke. But the whole affair had always a
+primness; this was discernible even to Olive's very limited sense of
+humour. It was not so religious as going to evening-service at King's
+Chapel; but it was the next thing to it. Of course all girls didn't do
+it; there were families that viewed such a custom with disfavour. But
+this was where the girls were of the romping sort; there had to be some
+things they were known not to do. As a general thing, moreover, the
+practice was confined to the decorous; it was a sign of culture and
+quiet tastes. All this made it innocent for Verena, whose life had
+exposed her to much worse dangers; but the thing referred itself in
+Olive's mind to a danger which cast a perpetual shadow there--the
+possibility of the girl's embarking with some ingenuous youth on an
+expedition that would last much longer than an evening. She was haunted,
+in a word, with the fear that Verena would marry, a fate to which she
+was altogether unprepared to surrender her; and this made her look with
+suspicion upon all male acquaintance.
+
+Mr. Pardon was not the only one she knew; she had an example of the rest
+in the persons of two young Harvard law-students, who presented
+themselves after tea on this same occasion. As they sat there Olive
+wondered whether Verena had kept something from her, whether she were,
+after all (like so many other girls in Cambridge), a college-"belle," an
+object of frequentation to undergraduates. It was natural that at the
+seat of a big university there should be girls like that, with students
+dangling after them, but she didn't want Verena to be one of them. There
+were some that received the Seniors and Juniors; others that were
+accessible to Sophomores and Freshmen. Certain young ladies
+distinguished the professional students; there was a group, even, that
+was on the best terms with the young men who were studying for the
+Unitarian ministry in that queer little barrack at the end of Divinity
+Avenue. The advent of the new visitors made Mrs. Tarrant bustle
+immensely; but after she had caused every one to change places two or
+three times with every one else the company subsided into a circle which
+was occasionally broken by wandering movements on the part of her
+husband, who, in the absence of anything to say on any subject whatever,
+placed himself at different points in listening attitudes, shaking his
+head slowly up and down, and gazing at the carpet with an air of
+supernatural attention. Mrs. Tarrant asked the young men from the Law
+School about their studies, and whether they meant to follow them up
+seriously; said she thought some of the laws were very unjust, and she
+hoped they meant to try and improve them. She had suffered by the laws
+herself, at the time her father died; she hadn't got half the prop'ty
+she should have got if they had been different. She thought they should
+be for public matters, not for people's private affairs; the idea always
+seemed to her to keep you down if you _were_ down, and to hedge you in
+with difficulties. Sometimes she thought it was a wonder how she had
+developed in the face of so many; but it was a proof that freedom was
+everywhere, if you only knew how to look for it.
+
+The two young men were in the best humour; they greeted these sallies
+with a merriment of which, though it was courteous in form, Olive was by
+no means unable to define the spirit. They talked naturally more with
+Verena than with her mother; and while they were so engaged Mrs. Tarrant
+explained to her who they were, and how one of them, the smaller, who
+was not quite so spruce, had brought the other, his particular friend,
+to introduce him. This friend, Mr. Burrage, was from New York; he was
+very fashionable, he went out a great deal in Boston ("I have no doubt
+you know some of the places," said Mrs. Tarrant); his "fam'ly" was very
+rich.
+
+"Well, he knows plenty of that sort," Mrs. Tarrant went on, "but he felt
+unsatisfied; he didn't know any one like _us_. He told Mr. Gracie
+(that's the little one) that he felt as if he _must_; it seemed as if he
+couldn't hold out. So we told Mr. Gracie, of course, to bring him right
+round. Well, I hope he'll get something from us, I'm sure. He has been
+reported to be engaged to Miss Winkworth; I have no doubt you know who I
+mean. But Mr. Gracie says he hasn't looked at her more than twice.
+That's the way rumours fly round in that set, I presume. Well, I am glad
+we are not in it, wherever we are! Mr. Gracie is very different; he is
+intensely plain, but I believe he is very learned. You don't think him
+plain? Oh, you don't know? Well, I suppose you don't care, you must see
+so many. But I must say, when a young man looks like that, I call him
+painfully plain. I heard Doctor Tarrant make the remark the last time he
+was here. I don't say but what the plainest are the best. Well, I had no
+idea we were going to have a party when I asked you. I wonder whether
+Verena hadn't better hand the cake; we generally find the students enjoy
+it so much."
+
+This office was ultimately delegated to Selah, who, after a considerable
+absence, reappeared with a dish of dainties, which he presented
+successively to each member of the company. Olive saw Verena lavish her
+smiles on Mr. Gracie and Mr. Burrage; the liveliest relation had
+established itself, and the latter gentleman in especial abounded in
+appreciative laughter. It might have been fancied, just from looking at
+the group, that Verena's vocation was to smile and talk with young men
+who bent towards her; might have been fancied, that is, by a person less
+sure of the contrary than Olive, who had reason to know that a "gifted
+being" is sent into the world for a very different purpose, and that
+making the time pass pleasantly for conceited young men is the last duty
+you are bound to think of if you happen to have a talent for embodying a
+cause. Olive tried to be glad that her friend had the richness of nature
+that makes a woman gracious without latent purposes; she reflected that
+Verena was not in the smallest degree a flirt, that she was only
+enchantingly and universally genial, that nature had given her a
+beautiful smile, which fell impartially on every one, man and woman,
+alike. Olive may have been right, but it shall be confided to the reader
+that in reality she never knew, by any sense of her own, whether Verena
+were a flirt or not. This young lady could not possibly have told her
+(even if she herself knew, which she didn't), and Olive, destitute of
+the quality, had no means of taking the measure in another of the subtle
+feminine desire to please. She could see the difference between Mr.
+Gracie and Mr. Burrage; her being bored by Mrs. Tarrant's attempting to
+point it out is perhaps a proof of that. It was a curious incident of
+her zeal for the regeneration of her sex that manly things were, perhaps
+on the whole, what she understood best. Mr. Burrage was rather a
+handsome youth, with a laughing, clever face, a certain sumptuosity of
+apparel, an air of belonging to the "fast set"--a precocious,
+good-natured man of the world, curious of new sensations and containing,
+perhaps, the making of a _dilettante_. Being, doubtless, a little
+ambitious, and liking to flatter himself that he appreciated worth in
+lowly forms, he had associated himself with the ruder but at the same
+time acuter personality of a genuine son of New England, who had a
+harder head than his own and a humour in reality more cynical, and who,
+having earlier knowledge of the Tarrants, had undertaken to show him
+something indigenous and curious, possibly even fascinating. Mr. Gracie
+was short, with a big head; he wore eye-glasses, looked unkempt, almost
+rustic, and said good things with his ugly lips. Verena had replies for
+a good many of them, and a pretty colour came into her face as she
+talked. Olive could see that she produced herself quite as well as one
+of these gentlemen had foretold the other that she would. Miss
+Chancellor knew what had passed between them as well as if she had heard
+it; Mr. Gracie had promised that he would lead her on, that she should
+justify his description and prove the raciest of her class. They would
+laugh about her as they went away, lighting their cigars, and for many
+days afterwards their discourse would be enlivened with quotations from
+the "women's rights girl."
+
+It was amazing how many ways men had of being antipathetic; these two
+were very different from Basil Ransom, and different from each other,
+and yet the manner of each conveyed an insult to one's womanhood. The
+worst of the case was that Verena would be sure not to perceive this
+outrage--not to dislike them in consequence. There were so many things
+that she hadn't yet learned to dislike, in spite of her friend's earnest
+efforts to teach her. She had the idea vividly (that was the marvel) of
+the cruelty of man, of his immemorial injustice; but it remained
+abstract, platonic; she didn't detest him in consequence. What was the
+use of her having that sharp, inspired vision of the history of the sex
+(it was, as she had said herself, exactly like Joan of Arc's absolutely
+supernatural apprehension of the state of France) if she wasn't going to
+carry it out, if she was going to behave as the ordinary pusillanimous,
+conventional young lady? It was all very well for her to have said that
+first day that she would renounce: did she look, at such a moment as
+this, like a young woman who had renounced? Suppose this glittering,
+laughing Burrage youth, with his chains and rings and shining shoes,
+should fall in love with her and try to bribe her, with his great
+possessions, to practise renunciations of another kind--to give up her
+holy work and to go with him to New York, there to live as his wife,
+partly bullied, partly pampered, in the accustomed Burrage manner? There
+was as little comfort for Olive as there had been on the whole alarm in
+the recollection of that off-hand speech of Verena's about her
+preference for "free unions." This had been mere maiden flippancy; she
+had not known the meaning of what she said. Though she had grown up
+among people who took for granted all sorts of queer laxities, she had
+kept the consummate innocence of the American girl, that innocence which
+was the greatest of all, for it had survived the abolition of walls and
+locks; and of the various remarks that had dropped from Verena
+expressing this quality that startling observation certainly expressed
+it most. It implied, at any rate, that unions of some kind or other had
+her approval, and did not exclude the dangers that might arise from
+encounters with young men in search of sensations.
+
+
+
+
+XVI
+
+
+Mr. Pardon, as Olive observed, was a little out of this combination; but
+he was not a person to allow himself to droop. He came and seated
+himself by Miss Chancellor and broached a literary subject; he asked her
+if she were following any of the current "serials" in the magazines. On
+her telling him that she never followed anything of that sort, he
+undertook a defence of the serial system, which she presently reminded
+him that she had not attacked. He was not discouraged by this retort,
+but glided gracefully off to the question of Mount Desert; conversation
+on some subject or other being evidently a necessity of his nature. He
+talked very quickly and softly, with words, and even sentences,
+imperfectly formed; there was a certain amiable flatness in his tone,
+and he abounded in exclamations--"Goodness gracious!" and "Mercy on
+us!"--not much in use among the sex whose profanity is apt to be coarse.
+He had small, fair features, remarkably neat, and pretty eyes, and a
+moustache that he caressed, and an air of juvenility much at variance
+with his grizzled locks, and the free familiar reference in which he was
+apt to indulge to his career as a journalist. His friends knew that in
+spite of his delicacy and his prattle he was what they called a live
+man; his appearance was perfectly reconcilable with a large degree of
+literary enterprise. It should be explained that for the most part they
+attached to this idea the same meaning as Selah Tarrant--a state of
+intimacy with the newspapers, the cultivation of the great arts of
+publicity. For this ingenuous son of his age all distinction between the
+person and the artist had ceased to exist; the writer was personal, the
+person food for newsboys, and everything and every one were every one's
+business. All things, with him, referred themselves to print, and print
+meant simply infinite reporting, a promptitude of announcement, abusive
+when necessary, or even when not, about his fellow-citizens. He poured
+contumely on their private life, on their personal appearance, with the
+best conscience in the world. His faith, again, was the faith of Selah
+Tarrant--that being in the newspapers is a condition of bliss, and that
+it would be fastidious to question the terms of the privilege. He was an
+_enfant de la balle_, as the French say; he had begun his career, at the
+age of fourteen, by going the rounds of the hotels, to cull flowers from
+the big, greasy registers which lie on the marble counters; and he might
+flatter himself that he had contributed in his measure, and on behalf of
+a vigilant public opinion, the pride of a democratic State, to the great
+end of preventing the American citizen from attempting clandestine
+journeys. Since then he had ascended other steps of the same ladder; he
+was the most brilliant young interviewer on the Boston press. He was
+particularly successful in drawing out the ladies; he had condensed into
+shorthand many of the most celebrated women of his time--some of these
+daughters of fame were very voluminous--and he was supposed to have a
+remarkably insinuating way of waiting upon _prime donne_ and actresses
+the morning after their arrival, or sometimes the very evening, while
+their luggage was being brought up. He was only twenty-eight years old,
+and, with his hoary head, was a thoroughly modern young man; he had no
+idea of not taking advantage of all the modern conveniences. He regarded
+the mission of mankind upon earth as a perpetual evolution of telegrams;
+everything to him was very much the same, he had no sense of proportion
+or quality; but the newest thing was what came nearest exciting in his
+mind the sentiment of respect. He was an object of extreme admiration to
+Selah Tarrant, who believed that he had mastered all the secrets of
+success, and who, when Mrs. Tarrant remarked (as she had done more than
+once) that it looked as if Mr. Pardon was really coming after Verena,
+declared that if he was, he was one of the few young men he should want
+to see in that connexion, one of the few he should be willing to allow
+to handle her. It was Tarrant's conviction that if Matthias Pardon
+should seek Verena in marriage, it would be with a view to producing her
+in public; and the advantage for the girl of having a husband who was at
+the same time reporter, interviewer, manager, agent, who had the command
+of the principal "dailies," would write her up and work her, as it were,
+scientifically--the attraction of all this was too obvious to be
+insisted on. Matthias had a mean opinion of Tarrant, thought him quite
+second-rate, a votary of played-out causes. It was his impression that
+he himself was in love with Verena, but his passion was not a jealous
+one, and included a remarkable disposition to share the object of his
+affection with the American people.
+
+He talked some time to Olive about Mount Desert, told her that in his
+letters he had described the company at the different hotels. He
+remarked, however, that a correspondent suffered a good deal to-day from
+the competition of the "lady-writers"; the sort of article they produced
+was sometimes more acceptable to the papers. He supposed she would be
+glad to hear that--he knew she was so interested in woman's having a
+free field. They certainly made lovely correspondents; they picked up
+something bright before you could turn round; there wasn't much you
+could keep away from them; you had to be lively if you wanted to get
+there first. Of course, they were naturally more chatty, and that was
+the style of literature that seemed to take most to-day; only they
+didn't write much but what ladies would want to read. Of course, he knew
+there were millions of lady-readers, but he intimated that _he_ didn't
+address himself exclusively to the gynecæum; he tried to put in
+something that would interest all parties. If you read a lady's letter
+you knew pretty well in advance what you would find. Now, what he tried
+for was that you shouldn't have the least idea; he always tried to have
+something that would make you jump. Mr. Pardon was not conceited more,
+at least, than is proper when youth and success go hand in hand, and it
+was natural he should not know in what spirit Miss Chancellor listened
+to him. Being aware that she was a woman of culture his desire was
+simply to supply her with the pabulum that she would expect. She thought
+him very inferior; she had heard he was intensely bright, but there was
+probably some mistake; there couldn't be any danger for Verena from a
+mind that took merely a gossip's view of great tendencies. Besides, he
+wasn't half educated, and it was her belief, or at least her hope, that
+an educative process was now going on for Verena (under her own
+direction) which would enable her to make such a discovery for herself.
+Olive had a standing quarrel with the levity, the good-nature, of the
+judgements of the day; many of them seemed to her weak to imbecility,
+losing sight of all measures and standards, lavishing superlatives,
+delighted to be fooled. The age seemed to her relaxed and demoralised,
+and I believe she looked to the influx of the great feminine element to
+make it feel and speak more sharply.
+
+"Well, it's a privilege to hear you two talk together," Mrs. Tarrant
+said to her; "it's what I call real conversation. It isn't often we have
+anything so fresh; it makes me feel as if I wanted to join in. I
+scarcely know whom to listen to most; Verena seems to be having such a
+time with those gentlemen. First I catch one thing and then another; it
+seems as if I couldn't take it all in. Perhaps I ought to pay more
+attention to Mr. Burrage; I don't want him to think we are not so
+cordial as they are in New York."
+
+She decided to draw nearer to the trio on the other side of the room,
+for she had perceived (as she devoutly hoped Miss Chancellor had not)
+that Verena was endeavouring to persuade either of her companions to go
+and talk to her dear friend, and that these unscrupulous young men,
+after a glance over their shoulder, appeared to plead for remission, to
+intimate that this was not what they had come round for. Selah wandered
+out of the room again with his collection of cakes, and Mr. Pardon began
+to talk to Olive about Verena, to say that he felt as if he couldn't say
+all he did feel with regard to the interest she had shown in her. Olive
+could not imagine why he was called upon to say or to feel anything, and
+she gave him short answers; while the poor young man, unconscious of his
+doom, remarked that he hoped she wasn't going to exercise any influence
+that would prevent Miss Tarrant from taking the rank that belonged to
+her. He thought there was too much hanging back; he wanted to see her in
+a front seat; he wanted to see her name in the biggest kind of bills and
+her portrait in the windows of the stores. She had genius, there was no
+doubt of that, and she would take a new line altogether. She had charm,
+and there was a great demand for that nowadays in connexion with new
+ideas. There were so many that seemed to have fallen dead for want of
+it. She ought to be carried straight ahead; she ought to walk right up
+to the top. There was a want of bold action; he didn't see what they
+were waiting for. He didn't suppose they were waiting till she was fifty
+years old; there were old ones enough in the field. He knew that Miss
+Chancellor appreciated the advantage of her girlhood, because Miss
+Verena had told him so. Her father was dreadfully slack, and the winter
+was ebbing away. Mr. Pardon went so far as to say that if Dr. Tarrant
+didn't see his way to do something, he should feel as if he should want
+to take hold himself. He expressed a hope at the same time that Olive
+had not any views that would lead her to bring her influence to bear to
+make Miss Verena hold back; also that she wouldn't consider that he
+pressed in too much. He knew that was a charge that people brought
+against newspaper-men--that they were rather apt to cross the line. He
+only worried because he thought those who were no doubt nearer to Miss
+Verena than he could hope to be were not sufficiently alive. He knew
+that she had appeared in two or three parlours since that evening at
+Miss Birdseye's, and he had heard of the delightful occasion at Miss
+Chancellor's own house, where so many of the first families had been
+invited to meet her. (This was an allusion to a small luncheon-party
+that Olive had given, when Verena discoursed to a dozen matrons and
+spinsters, selected by her hostess with infinite consideration and many
+spiritual scruples; a report of the affair, presumably from the hand of
+the young Matthias, who naturally had not been present, appeared with
+extraordinary promptness in an evening-paper.) That was very well so far
+as it went, but he wanted something on another scale, something so big
+that people would have to go round if they wanted to get past. Then
+lowering his voice a little, he mentioned what it was: a lecture in the
+Music Hall, at fifty cents a ticket, without her father, right there on
+her own basis. He lowered his voice still more and revealed to Miss
+Chancellor his innermost thought, having first assured himself that
+Selah was still absent and that Mrs. Tarrant was inquiring of Mr.
+Burrage whether he visited much on the new land. The truth was, Miss
+Verena wanted to "shed" her father altogether; she didn't want him
+pawing round her that way before she began; it didn't add in the least
+to the attraction. Mr. Pardon expressed the conviction that Miss
+Chancellor agreed with him in this, and it required a great effort of
+mind on Olive's part, so small was her desire to act in concert with Mr.
+Pardon, to admit to herself that she did. She asked him, with a certain
+lofty coldness--he didn't make her shy, now, a bit--whether he took a
+great interest in the improvement of the position of women. The question
+appeared to strike the young man as abrupt and irrelevant, to come down
+on him from a height with which he was not accustomed to hold
+intercourse. He was used to quick operations, however, and he had only a
+moment of bright blankness before replying:
+
+"Oh, there is nothing I wouldn't do for the ladies; just give me a
+chance and you'll see."
+
+Olive was silent a moment. "What I mean is--is your sympathy a sympathy
+with our sex, or a particular interest in Miss Tarrant?"
+
+"Well, sympathy is just sympathy--that's all I can say. It takes in Miss
+Verena and it takes in all others--except the lady-correspondents," the
+young man added, with a jocosity which, as he perceived even at the
+moment, was lost on Verena's friend. He was not more successful when he
+went on: "It takes in even you, Miss Chancellor!"
+
+Olive rose to her feet, hesitating; she wanted to go away, and yet she
+couldn't bear to leave Verena to be exploited, as she felt that she
+would be after her departure, that indeed she had already been, by those
+offensive young men. She had a strange sense, too, that her friend had
+neglected her for the last half-hour, had not been occupied with her,
+had placed a barrier between them--a barrier of broad male backs, of
+laughter that verged upon coarseness, of glancing smiles directed across
+the room, directed to Olive, which seemed rather to disconnect her with
+what was going forward on that side than to invite her to take part in
+it. If Verena recognised that Miss Chancellor was not in report, as her
+father said, when jocose young men ruled the scene, the discovery
+implied no great penetration; but the poor girl might have reflected
+further that to see it taken for granted that she was unadapted for such
+company could scarcely be more agreeable to Olive than to be dragged
+into it. This young lady's worst apprehensions were now justified by
+Mrs. Tarrant's crying to her that she must not go, as Mr. Burrage and
+Mr. Gracie were trying to persuade Verena to give them a little specimen
+of inspirational speaking, and she was sure her daughter would comply in
+a moment if Miss Chancellor would just tell her to compose herself. They
+had got to own up to it, Miss Chancellor could do more with her than any
+one else; but Mr. Gracie and Mr. Burrage had excited her so that she was
+afraid it would be rather an unsuccessful effort. The whole group had
+got up, and Verena came to Olive with her hands outstretched and no
+signs of a bad conscience in her bright face.
+
+"I know you like me to speak so much--I'll try to say something if you
+want me to. But I'm afraid there are not enough people; I can't do much
+with a small audience."
+
+"I wish we had brought some of our friends--they would have been
+delighted to come if we had given them a chance," said Mr. Burrage.
+"There is an immense desire throughout the University to hear you, and
+there is no such sympathetic audience as an audience of Harvard men.
+Gracie and I are only two, but Gracie is a host in himself, and I am
+sure he will say as much of me." The young man spoke these words freely
+and lightly, smiling at Verena, and even a little at Olive, with the air
+of one to whom a mastery of clever "chaff" was commonly attributed.
+
+"Mr. Burrage listens even better than he talks," his companion declared.
+"We have the habit of attention at lectures, you know. To be lectured by
+you would be an advantage indeed. We are sunk in ignorance and
+prejudice."
+
+"Ah, my prejudices," Burrage went on; "if you could see them--I assure
+you they are something monstrous!"
+
+"Give them a regular ducking and make them gasp," Matthias Pardon cried.
+"If you want an opportunity to act on Harvard College, now's your
+chance. These gentlemen will carry the news; it will be the narrow end
+of the wedge."
+
+"I can't tell what you like," Verena said, still looking into Olive's
+eyes.
+
+"I'm sure Miss Chancellor likes everything here," Mrs. Tarrant remarked,
+with a noble confidence.
+
+Selah had reappeared by this time; his lofty, contemplative person was
+framed by the doorway. "Want to try a little inspiration?" he inquired,
+looking round on the circle with an encouraging inflexion.
+
+"I'll do it alone, if you prefer," Verena said soothingly to her friend.
+"It might be a good chance to try without father."
+
+"You don't mean to say you ain't going to be supported?" Mrs. Tarrant
+exclaimed, with dismay.
+
+"Ah, I beseech you, give us the whole programme--don't omit any leading
+feature!" Mr. Burrage was heard to plead.
+
+"My only interest is to draw her out," said Selah, defending his
+integrity. "I will drop right out if I don't seem to vitalise. I have no
+desire to draw attention to my own poor gifts." This declaration
+appeared to be addressed to Miss Chancellor.
+
+"Well, there will be more inspiration if you don't touch her," Matthias
+Pardon said to him. "It will seem to come right down from--well,
+wherever it does come from."
+
+"Yes, we don't pretend to say that," Mrs. Tarrant murmured.
+
+This little discussion had brought the blood to Olive's face; she felt
+that every one present was looking at her--Verena most of all--and that
+here was a chance to take a more complete possession of the girl. Such
+chances were agitating; moreover, she didn't like, on any occasion, to
+be so prominent. But everything that had been said was benighted and
+vulgar; the place seemed thick with the very atmosphere out of which she
+wished to lift Verena. They were treating her as a show, as a social
+resource, and the two young men from the College were laughing at her
+shamelessly. She was not meant for that, and Olive would save her.
+Verena was so simple, she couldn't see herself; she was the only pure
+spirit in the odious group.
+
+"I want you to address audiences that are worth addressing--to convince
+people who are serious and sincere." Olive herself, as she spoke, heard
+the great shake in her voice. "Your mission is not to exhibit yourself
+as a pastime for individuals, but to touch the heart of communities, of
+nations."
+
+"Dear madam, I'm sure Miss Tarrant will touch my heart!" Mr. Burrage
+objected, gallantly.
+
+"Well, I don't know but she judges you young men fairly," said Mrs.
+Tarrant, with a sigh.
+
+Verena, diverted a moment from her communion with her friend, considered
+Mr. Burrage with a smile. "I don't believe you have got any heart, and I
+shouldn't care much if you had!"
+
+"You have no idea how much the way you say that increases my desire to
+hear you speak."
+
+"Do as you please, my dear," said Olive, almost inaudibly. "My carriage
+must be there--I must leave you, in any case."
+
+"I can see you don't want it," said Verena, wondering. "You would stay
+if you liked it, wouldn't you?"
+
+"I don't know what I should do. Come out with me!" Olive spoke almost
+with fierceness.
+
+"Well, you'll send them away no better than they came," said Matthias
+Pardon.
+
+"I guess you had better come round some other night," Selah suggested
+pacifically, but with a significance which fell upon Olive's ear.
+
+Mr. Gracie seemed inclined to make the sturdiest protest. "Look here,
+Miss Tarrant; do you want to save Harvard College, or do you not?" he
+demanded, with a humorous frown.
+
+"I didn't know _you_ were Harvard College!" Verena returned as
+humorously.
+
+"I am afraid you are rather disappointed in your evening if you expected
+to obtain some insight into our ideas," said Mrs. Tarrant, with an air
+of impotent sympathy, to Mr. Gracie.
+
+"Well, good-night, Miss Chancellor," she went on; "I hope you've got a
+warm wrap. I suppose you'll think we go a good deal by what you say in
+this house. Well, most people don't object to that. There's a little
+hole right there in the porch; it seems as if Doctor Tarrant couldn't
+remember to go for the man to fix it. I am afraid you'll think we're too
+much taken up with all these new hopes. Well, we _have_ enjoyed seeing
+you in our home; it quite raises my appetite for social intercourse. Did
+you come out on wheels? I can't stand a sleigh myself; it makes me
+sick."
+
+This was her hostess's response to Miss Chancellor's very summary
+farewell, uttered as the three ladies proceeded together to the door of
+the house. Olive had got herself out of the little parlour with a sort
+of blind, defiant dash; she had taken no perceptible leave of the rest
+of the company. When she was calm she had very good manners, but when
+she was agitated she was guilty of lapses, every one of which came back
+to her, magnified, in the watches of the night. Sometimes they excited
+remorse, and sometimes triumph; in the latter case she felt that she
+could not have been so justly vindictive in cold blood. Tarrant wished
+to guide her down the steps, out of the little yard, to her carriage; he
+reminded her that they had had ashes sprinkled on the planks on purpose.
+But she begged him to let her alone, she almost pushed him back; she
+drew Verena out into the dark freshness, closing the door of the house
+behind her. There was a splendid sky, all blue-black and silver--a
+sparkling wintry vault, where the stars were like a myriad points of
+ice. The air was silent and sharp, and the vague snow looked cruel.
+Olive knew now very definitely what the promise was that she wanted
+Verena to make; but it was too cold, she could keep her there bareheaded
+but an instant. Mrs. Tarrant, meanwhile, in the parlour, remarked that
+it seemed as if she couldn't trust Verena with her own parents; and
+Selah intimated that, with a proper invitation, his daughter would be
+very happy to address Harvard College at large. Mr. Burrage and Mr.
+Gracie said they would invite her on the spot, in the name of the
+University; and Matthias Pardon reflected (and asserted) with glee that
+this would be the newest thing yet. But he added that they would have a
+high time with Miss Chancellor first, and this was evidently the
+conviction of the company.
+
+"I can see you are angry at something," Verena said to Olive, as the two
+stood there in the starlight. "I hope it isn't me. What have I done?"
+
+"I am not angry--I am anxious. I am so afraid I shall lose you. Verena,
+don't fail me--don't fail me!" Olive spoke low, with a kind of passion.
+
+"Fail you? How can I fail?"
+
+"You can't, of course you can't. Your star is above you. But don't
+listen to _them_."
+
+"To whom do you mean, Olive? To my parents?"
+
+"Oh no, not your parents," Miss Chancellor replied, with some sharpness.
+She paused a moment, and then she said: "I don't care for your parents.
+I have told you that before; but now that I have seen them--as they
+wished, as you wished, and I didn't--I don't care for them; I must
+repeat it, Verena. I should be dishonest if I let you think I did."
+
+"Why, Olive Chancellor!" Verena murmured, as if she were trying, in
+spite of the sadness produced by this declaration, to do justice to her
+friend's impartiality.
+
+"Yes, I am hard; perhaps I am cruel; but we must be hard if we wish to
+triumph. Don't listen to young men when they try to mock and muddle you.
+They don't care for you; they don't care for _us_. They care only for
+their pleasure, for what they believe to be the right of the stronger.
+The stronger? I am not so sure!"
+
+"Some of them care so much--are supposed to care too much--for us,"
+Verena said, with a smile that looked dim in the darkness.
+
+"Yes, if we will give up everything. I have asked you before--are you
+prepared to give up?"
+
+"Do you mean, to give _you_ up?"
+
+"No, all our wretched sisters--all our hopes and purposes--all that we
+think Sacred and worth living for!"
+
+"Oh, they don't want that, Olive." Verena's smile became more distinct,
+and she added: "They don't want so much as that!"
+
+"Well, then, go in and speak for them--and sing for them--and dance for
+them!"
+
+"Olive, you are cruel!"
+
+"Yes, I am. But promise me one thing, and I shall be--oh, so tender!"
+
+"What a strange place for promises," said Verena, with a shiver, looking
+about her into the night.
+
+"Yes, I am dreadful; I know it. But promise." And Olive drew the girl
+nearer to her, flinging over her with one hand the fold of a cloak that
+hung ample upon her own meagre person, and holding her there with the
+other, while she looked at her, suppliant but half hesitating.
+"Promise!" she repeated.
+
+"Is it something terrible?"
+
+"Never to listen to one of them, never to be bribed----"
+
+At this moment the house-door was opened again, and the light of the
+hall projected itself across the little piazza. Matthias Pardon stood in
+the aperture, and Tarrant and his wife, with the two other visitors,
+appeared to have come forward as well, to see what detained Verena.
+
+"You seem to have started a kind of lecture out here," Mr. Pardon said.
+"You ladies had better look out, or you'll freeze together!"
+
+Verena was reminded by her mother that she would catch her death, but
+she had already heard sharply, low as they were spoken, five last words
+from Olive, who now abruptly released her and passed swiftly over the
+path from the porch to her waiting carriage. Tarrant creaked along, in
+pursuit, to assist Miss Chancellor; the others drew Verena into the
+house. "Promise me not to marry!"--that was what echoed in her startled
+mind, and repeated itself there when Mr. Burrage returned to the charge,
+asking her if she wouldn't at least appoint some evening when they might
+listen to her. She knew that Olive's injunction ought not to have
+surprised her; she had already felt it in the air; she would have said
+at any time, if she had been asked, that she didn't suppose Miss
+Chancellor would want her to marry. But the idea, uttered as her friend
+had uttered it, had a new solemnity, and the effect of that quick,
+violent colloquy was to make her nervous and impatient, as if she had
+had a sudden glimpse of futurity. That was rather awful, even if it
+represented the fate one would like.
+
+When the two young men from the College pressed their petition, she
+asked, with a laugh that surprised them, whether they wished to "mock
+and muddle" her. They went away, assenting to Mrs. Tarrant's last
+remark: "I am afraid you'll feel that you don't quite understand us
+yet." Matthias Pardon remained; her father and mother, expressing their
+perfect confidence that he would excuse them, went to bed and left him
+sitting there. He stayed a good while longer, nearly an hour, and said
+things that made Verena think that _he_, perhaps, would like to marry
+her. But while she listened to him, more abstractedly than her custom
+was, she remarked to herself that there could be no difficulty in
+promising Olive so far as he was concerned. He was very pleasant, and he
+knew an immense deal about everything, or, rather, about every one, and
+he would take her right into the midst of life. But she didn't wish to
+marry him, all the same, and after he had gone she reflected that, once
+she came to think of it, she didn't want to marry any one. So it would
+be easy, after all, to make Olive that promise, and it would give her so
+much pleasure!
+
+
+
+
+XVII
+
+
+The next time Verena saw Olive she said to her that she was ready to
+make the promise she had asked the other night; but, to her great
+surprise, this young woman answered her by a question intended to check
+such rashness. Miss Chancellor raised a warning finger; she had an air
+of dissuasion almost as solemn as her former pressure; her passionate
+impatience appeared to have given way to other considerations, to be
+replaced by the resignation that comes with deeper reflexion. It was
+tinged in this case, indeed, by such bitterness as might be permitted to
+a young lady who cultivated the brightness of a great faith.
+
+"Don't you want any promise at present?" Verena asked. "Why, Olive, how
+you change!"
+
+"My dear child, you are so young--so strangely young. I am a thousand
+years old; I have lived through generations--through centuries. I know
+what I know by experience; you know it by imagination. That is
+consistent with your being the fresh, bright creature that you are. I am
+constantly forgetting the difference between us--that you are a mere
+child as yet, though a child destined for great things. I forgot it the
+other night, but I have remembered it since. You must pass through a
+certain phase, and it would be very wrong in me to pretend to suppress
+it. That is all clear to me now; I see it was my jealousy that spoke--my
+restless, hungry jealousy. I have far too much of that; I oughtn't to
+give any one the right to say that it's a woman's quality. I don't want
+your signature; I only want your confidence--only what springs from
+that. I hope with all my soul that you won't marry; but if you don't it
+must not be because you have promised me. You know what I think--that
+there is something noble done when one makes a sacrifice for a great
+good. Priests--when they were real priests--never married, and what you
+and I dream of doing demands of us a kind of priesthood. It seems to me
+very poor, when friendship and faith and charity and the most
+interesting occupation in the world--when such a combination as this
+doesn't seem, by itself, enough to live for. No man that I have ever
+seen cares a straw in his heart for what we are trying to accomplish.
+They hate it; they scorn it; they will try to stamp it out whenever they
+can. Oh yes, I know there are men who pretend to care for it; but they
+are not really men, and I wouldn't be sure even of them! Any man that
+one would look at--with him, as a matter of course, it is war upon us to
+the knife. I don't mean to say there are not some male beings who are
+willing to patronise us a little; to pat us on the back and recommend a
+few moderate concessions; to say that there _are_ two or three little
+points in which society has not been quite just to us. But any man who
+pretends to accept our programme _in toto_, as you and I understand it,
+of his own free will, before he is forced to--such a person simply
+schemes to betray us. There are gentlemen in plenty who would be glad to
+stop your mouth by kissing you! If you become dangerous some day to
+their selfishness, to their vested interests, to their immorality--as I
+pray heaven every day, my dear friend, that you may!--it will be a grand
+thing for one of them if he can persuade you that he loves you. Then you
+will see what he will do with you, and how far his love will take him!
+It would be a sad day for you and for me and for all of us if you were
+to believe something of that kind. You see I am very calm now; I have
+thought it all out."
+
+Verena had listened with earnest eyes. "Why, Olive, you are quite a
+speaker yourself!" she exclaimed. "You would far surpass me if you would
+let yourself go."
+
+Miss Chancellor shook her head with a melancholy that was not devoid of
+sweetness. "I can speak to _you_; but that is no proof. The very stones
+of the street--all the dumb things of nature--might find a voice to talk
+to you. I have no facility; I am awkward and embarrassed and dry." When
+this young lady, after a struggle with the winds and waves of emotion,
+emerged into the quiet stream of a certain high reasonableness, she
+presented her most graceful aspect; she had a tone of softness and
+sympathy, a gentle dignity, a serenity of wisdom, which sealed the
+appreciation of those who knew her well enough to like her, and which
+always impressed Verena as something almost august. Such moods, however,
+were not often revealed to the public at large; they belonged to Miss
+Chancellor's very private life. One of them had possession of her at
+present, and she went on to explain the inconsequence which had puzzled
+her friend with the same quiet clearness, the detachment from error, of
+a woman whose self-scrutiny has been as sharp as her deflexion.
+
+"Don't think me capricious if I say I would rather trust you without a
+pledge. I owe you, I owe every one, an apology for my rudeness and
+fierceness at your mother's. It came over me--just seeing those young
+men--how exposed you are; and the idea made me (for the moment) frantic.
+I see your danger still, but I see other things too, and I have
+recovered my balance. You must be safe, Verena--you must be saved; but
+your safety must not come from your having tied your hands. It must come
+from the growth of your perception; from your seeing things, of
+yourself, sincerely and with conviction, in the light in which I see
+them; from your feeling that for your work your freedom is essential,
+and that there is no freedom for you and me save in religiously _not_
+doing what you will often be asked to do--and I never!" Miss Chancellor
+brought out these last words with a proud jerk which was not without its
+pathos. "Don't promise, don't promise!" she went on. "I would far rather
+you didn't. But don't fail me--don't fail me, or I shall die!"
+
+Her manner of repairing her inconsistency was altogether feminine: she
+wished to extract a certainty at the same time that she wished to
+deprecate a pledge, and she would have been delighted to put Verena into
+the enjoyment of that freedom which was so important for her by
+preventing her exercising it in a particular direction. The girl was now
+completely under her influence; she had latent curiosities and
+distractions--left to herself, she was not always thinking of the
+unhappiness of women; but the touch of Olive's tone worked a spell, and
+she found something to which at least a portion of her nature turned
+with eagerness in her companion's wider knowledge, her elevation of
+view. Miss Chancellor was historic and philosophic; or, at any rate, she
+appeared so to Verena, who felt that through such an association one
+might at last intellectually command all life. And there was a simpler
+impulse; Verena wished to please her if only because she had such a
+dread of displeasing her. Olive's displeasures, disappointments,
+disapprovals were tragic, truly memorable; she grew white under them,
+not shedding many tears, as a general thing, like inferior women (she
+cried when she was angry, not when she was hurt), but limping and
+panting, morally, as if she had received a wound that she would carry
+for life. On the other hand, her commendations, her satisfactions were
+as soft as a west wind; and she had this sign, the rarest of all, of
+generosity, that she liked obligations of gratitude when they were not
+laid upon her by men. Then, indeed, she scarcely recognised them. She
+considered men in general as so much in the debt of the opposite sex
+that any individual woman had an unlimited credit with them; she could
+not possibly overdraw the general feminine account. The unexpected
+temperance of her speech on this subject of Verena's accessibility to
+matrimonial error seemed to the girl to have an antique beauty, a wisdom
+purged of worldly elements; it reminded her of qualities that she
+believed to have been proper to Electra or Antigone. This made her wish
+the more to do something that would gratify Olive; and in spite of her
+friend's dissuasion she declared that she should like to promise. "I
+will promise, at any rate, not to marry any of those gentlemen that were
+at the house," she said. "Those seemed to be the ones you were
+principally afraid of."
+
+"You will promise not to marry any one you don't like," said Olive.
+"That would be a great comfort!"
+
+"But I do like Mr. Burrage and Mr. Gracie."
+
+"And Mr. Matthias Pardon? What a name!"
+
+"Well, he knows how to make himself agreeable. He can tell you
+everything you want to know."
+
+"You mean everything you don't! Well, if you like every one, I haven't
+the least objection. It would only be preferences that I should find
+alarming. I am not the least afraid of your marrying a repulsive man;
+your danger would come from an attractive one."
+
+"I'm glad to hear you admit that some _are_ attractive!" Verena
+exclaimed, with the light laugh which her reverence for Miss Chancellor
+had not yet quenched. "It sometimes seems as if there weren't any you
+could like!"
+
+"I can imagine a man I should like very much," Olive replied, after a
+moment. "But I don't like those I see. They seem to me poor creatures."
+And, indeed, her uppermost feeling in regard to them was a kind of cold
+scorn; she thought most of them palterers and bullies. The end of the
+colloquy was that Verena, having assented, with her usual docility, to
+her companion's optimistic contention that it was a "phase," this taste
+for evening-calls from collegians and newspaper-men, and would
+consequently pass away with the growth of her mind, remarked that the
+injustice of men might be an accident or might be a part of their
+nature, but at any rate she should have to change a good deal before she
+should want to marry.
+
+About the middle of December Miss Chancellor received a visit from
+Matthias Pardon, who had come to ask her what she meant to do about
+Verena. She had never invited him to call upon her, and the appearance
+of a gentleman whose desire to see her was so irrepressible as to
+dispense with such a preliminary was not in her career an accident
+frequent enough to have taught her equanimity. She thought Mr. Pardon's
+visit a liberty; but, if she expected to convey this idea to him by
+withholding any suggestion that he should sit down, she was greatly
+mistaken, inasmuch as he cut the ground from under her feet by himself
+offering her a chair. His manner represented hospitality enough for both
+of them, and she was obliged to listen, on the edge of her sofa (she
+could at least seat herself where she liked), to his extraordinary
+inquiry. Of course she was not obliged to answer it, and indeed she
+scarcely understood it. He explained that it was prompted by the intense
+interest he felt in Miss Verena; but that scarcely made it more
+comprehensible, such a sentiment (on his part) being such a curious
+mixture. He had a sort of enamel of good humour which showed that his
+indelicacy was his profession; and he asked for revelations of the _vie
+intime_ of his victims with the bland confidence of a fashionable
+physician inquiring about symptoms. He wanted to know what Miss
+Chancellor meant to do, because if she didn't mean to do anything, he
+had an idea--which he wouldn't conceal from her--of going into the
+enterprise himself. "You see, what I should like to know is this: do you
+consider that she belongs to you, or that she belongs to the people? If
+she belongs to you, why don't you bring her out?"
+
+He had no purpose and no consciousness of being impertinent; he only
+wished to talk over the matter sociably with Miss Chancellor. He knew,
+of course, that there was a presumption she would not be sociable, but
+no presumption had yet deterred him from presenting a surface which he
+believed to be polished till it shone; there was always a larger one in
+favour of his power to penetrate and of the majesty of the "great
+dailies." Indeed, he took so many things for granted that Olive remained
+dumb while she regarded them; and he availed himself of what he
+considered as a fortunate opening to be really very frank. He reminded
+her that he had known Miss Verena a good deal longer than she; he had
+travelled out to Cambridge the other winter (when he could get an
+off-night), with the thermometer at ten below zero. He had always
+thought her attractive, but it wasn't till this season that his eyes had
+been fully opened. Her talent had matured, and now he had no hesitation
+in calling her brilliant. Miss Chancellor could imagine whether, as an
+old friend, he could watch such a beautiful unfolding with indifference.
+She would fascinate the people, just as she had fascinated her (Miss
+Chancellor), and, he might be permitted to add, himself. The fact was,
+she was a great card, and some one ought to play it. There never had
+been a more attractive female speaker before the American public; she
+would walk right past Mrs. Farrinder, and Mrs. Farrinder knew it. There
+was room for both, no doubt, they had such a different style; anyhow,
+what he wanted to show was that there was room for Miss Verena. She
+didn't want any more tuning-up, she wanted to break right out. Moreover,
+he felt that any gentleman who should lead her to success would win her
+esteem; he might even attract her more powerfully--who could tell? If
+Miss Chancellor wanted to attach her permanently, she ought to push her
+right forward. He gathered from what Miss Verena had told him that she
+wanted to make her study up the subject a while longer--follow some kind
+of course. Well, now, he could assure her that there was no preparation
+so good as just seeing a couple of thousand people down there before you
+who have paid their money to have you tell them something. Miss Verena
+was a natural genius, and he hoped very much she wasn't going to take
+the nature out of her. She could study up as she went along; she had got
+the great thing that you couldn't learn, a kind of divine afflatus, as
+the ancients used to say, and she had better just begin on that. He
+wouldn't deny what was the matter with _him_; he was quite under the
+spell, and his admiration made him want to see her where she belonged.
+He shouldn't care so much how she got there, but it would certainly add
+to his pleasure if he could show her up to her place. Therefore, would
+Miss Chancellor just tell him this: How long did she expect to hold her
+back; how long did she expect a humble admirer to wait? Of course he
+hadn't come there to cross-question her; there was one thing he trusted
+he always kept clear of; when he was indiscreet he wanted to know it. He
+had come with a proposal of his own, and he hoped it would seem a
+sufficient warrant for his visit. Would Miss Chancellor be willing to
+divide a--the--well, he might call it the responsibilities? Couldn't
+they run Miss Verena together? In this case every one would be
+satisfied. She could travel round with her as her companion, and he
+would see that the American people walked up. If Miss Chancellor would
+just let her go a little, he would look after the rest. He wanted no
+odds; he only wanted her for about an hour and a half three or four
+evenings a week.
+
+Olive had time, in the course of this appeal, to make her faculties
+converge, to ask herself what she could say to this prodigious young man
+that would make him feel as how base a thing she held his proposal that
+they should constitute themselves into a company for drawing profit from
+Verena. Unfortunately, the most sarcastic inquiry that could occur to
+her as a response was also the most obvious one, so that he hesitated
+but a moment with his rejoinder after she had asked him how many
+thousands of dollars he expected to make.
+
+"For Miss Verena? It depends upon the time. She'd run for ten years, at
+least. I can't figure it up till all the States have been heard from,"
+he said, smiling.
+
+"I don't mean for Miss Tarrant, I mean for you," Olive returned, with
+the impression that she was looking him straight in the eye.
+
+"Oh, as many as you'll leave me!" Matthias Pardon answered, with a laugh
+that contained all, and more than all, the jocularity of the American
+press. "To speak seriously," he added, "I don't want to make money out
+of it."
+
+"What do you want to make then?"
+
+"Well, I want to make history! I want to help the ladies."
+
+"The ladies?" Olive murmured. "What do you know about ladies?" she was
+on the point of adding, when his promptness checked her.
+
+"All over the world. I want to work for their emancipation. I regard it
+as the great modern question."
+
+Miss Chancellor got up now; this was rather too strong. Whether,
+eventually, she was successful in what she attempted, the reader of her
+history will judge; but at this moment she had not that promise of
+success which resides in a willingness to make use of every aid that
+offers. Such is the penalty of being of a fastidious, exclusive,
+uncompromising nature; of seeing things not simply and sharply, but in
+perverse relations, in intertwisted strands. It seemed to our young lady
+that nothing could be less attractive than to owe her emancipation to
+such a one as Matthias Pardon; and it is curious that those qualities
+which he had in common with Verena, and which in her seemed to Olive
+romantic and touching--her having sprung from the "people," had an
+acquaintance with poverty, a hand-to-mouth development, and an
+experience of the seamy side of life--availed in no degree to conciliate
+Miss Chancellor. I suppose it was because he was a man. She told him
+that she was much obliged to him for his offer, but that he evidently
+didn't understand Verena and herself. No, not even Miss Tarrant, in
+spite of his long acquaintance with her. They had no desire to be
+notorious; they only wanted to be useful. They had no wish to make
+money; there would always be plenty of money for Miss Tarrant.
+Certainly, she should come before the public, and the world would
+acclaim her and hang upon her words; but crude, precipitate action was
+what both of them least desired. The change in the dreadful position of
+women was not a question for to-day simply, or for to-morrow, but for
+many years to come; and there would be a great deal to think of, to map
+out. One thing they were determined upon--that men shouldn't taunt them
+with being superficial. When Verena should appear it would be armed at
+all points, like Joan of Arc (this analogy had lodged itself in Olive's
+imagination); she should have facts and figures; she should meet men on
+their own ground. "What we mean to do, we mean to do well," Miss
+Chancellor said to her visitor, with considerable sternness; leaving him
+to make such an application to himself as his fancy might suggest.
+
+This announcement had little comfort for him; he felt baffled and
+disheartened--indeed, quite sick. Was it not sickening to hear her talk
+of this dreary process of preparation?--as if any one cared about that,
+and would know whether Verena were prepared or not! Had Miss Chancellor
+no faith in her girlhood? didn't she know what a card that would be?
+This was the last inquiry Olive allowed him the opportunity of making.
+She remarked to him that they might talk for ever without coming to an
+agreement--their points of view were so far apart. Besides, it was a
+woman's question; what they wanted was for women, and it should be by
+women. It had happened to the young Matthias more than once to be shown
+the way to the door, but the path of retreat had never yet seemed to him
+so unpleasant. He was naturally amiable, but it had not hitherto
+befallen him to be made to feel that he was not--and could not be--a
+factor in contemporary history: here was a rapacious woman who proposed
+to keep that favourable setting for herself. He let her know that she
+was right-down selfish, and that if she chose to sacrifice a beautiful
+nature to her antediluvian theories and love of power, a vigilant daily
+press--whose business it was to expose wrong-doing--would demand an
+account from her. She replied that, if the newspapers chose to insult
+her, that was their own affair; one outrage the more to the sex in her
+person was of little account. And after he had left her she seemed to
+see the glow of dawning success; the battle had begun, and something of
+the ecstasy of the martyr.
+
+
+
+
+XVIII
+
+
+Verena told her, a week after this, that Mr. Pardon wanted so much she
+should say she would marry him; and she added, with evident pleasure at
+being able to give her so agreeable a piece of news, that she had
+declined to say anything of the sort. She thought that now, at least,
+Olive must believe in her; for the proposal was more attractive than
+Miss Chancellor seemed able to understand. "He does place things in a
+very seductive light," Verena said; "he says that if I become his wife I
+shall be carried straight along by a force of excitement of which at
+present I have no idea. I shall wake up famous, if I marry him; I have
+only got to give out my feelings, and he will take care of the rest. He
+says every hour of my youth is precious to me, and that we should have a
+lovely time travelling round the country. I think you ought to allow
+that all that is rather dazzling--for I am not naturally concentrated,
+like you!"
+
+"He promises you success. What do you call success?" Olive inquired,
+looking at her friend with a kind of salutary coldness--a suspension of
+sympathy--with which Verena was now familiar (though she liked it no
+better than at first), and which made approbation more gracious when
+approbation came.
+
+Verena reflected a moment, and then answered, smiling, but with
+confidence: "Producing a pressure that shall be irresistible. Causing
+certain laws to be repealed by Congress and by the State legislatures,
+and others to be enacted." She repeated the words as if they had been
+part of a catechism committed to memory, while Olive saw that this
+mechanical tone was in the nature of a joke that she could not deny
+herself; they had had that definition so often before, and Miss
+Chancellor had had occasion so often to remind her what success _really_
+was. Of course it was easy to prove to her now that Mr. Pardon's
+glittering bait was a very different thing; was a mere trap and lure, a
+bribe to vanity and impatience, a device for making her give herself
+away--let alone fill his pockets while she did so. Olive was conscious
+enough of the girl's want of continuity; she had seen before how she
+could be passionately serious at times, and then perversely, even if
+innocently, trivial--as just now, when she seemed to wish to convert one
+of their most sacred formulas into a pleasantry. She had already quite
+recognised, however, that it was not of importance that Verena should be
+just like herself; she was all of one piece, and Verena was of many
+pieces, which had, where they fitted together, little capricious chinks,
+through which mocking inner lights seemed sometimes to gleam. It was a
+part of Verena's being unlike her that she should feel Mr. Pardon's
+promise of eternal excitement to be a brilliant thing, should indeed
+consider Mr. Pardon with any tolerance at all. But Olive tried afresh to
+allow for such aberrations, as a phase of youth and suburban culture;
+the more so that, even when she tried most, Verena reproached her--so
+far as Verena's incurable softness could reproach--with not allowing
+enough. Olive didn't appear to understand that, while Matthias Pardon
+drew that picture and tried to hold her hand (this image was
+unfortunate), she had given one long, fixed, wistful look, through the
+door he opened, at the bright tumult of the world, and then had turned
+away, solely for her friend's sake, to an austerer probation and a purer
+effort; solely for her friend's, that is, and that of the whole enslaved
+sisterhood. The fact remained, at any rate, that Verena had made a
+sacrifice; and this thought, after a while, gave Olive a greater sense
+of security. It seemed almost to seal the future; for Olive knew that
+the young interviewer would not easily be shaken off, and yet she was
+sure that Verena would never yield to him.
+
+It was true that at present Mr. Burrage came a great deal to the little
+house at Cambridge; Verena told her about that, told her so much that it
+was almost as good as if she had told her all. He came without Mr.
+Gracie now; he could find his way alone, and he seemed to wish that
+there should be no one else. He had made himself so pleasant to her
+mother that she almost always went out of the room; that was the
+highest proof Mrs. Tarrant could give of her appreciation of a
+"gentleman-caller." They knew everything about him by this time; that
+his father was dead, his mother very fashionable and prominent, and he
+himself in possession of a handsome patrimony. They thought ever so much
+of him in New York. He collected beautiful things, pictures and antiques
+and objects that he sent for to Europe on purpose, many of which were
+arranged in his rooms at Cambridge. He had intaglios and Spanish
+altar-cloths and drawings by the old masters. He was different from most
+others; he seemed to want so much to enjoy life, and to think you easily
+could if you would only let yourself go. Of course--judging by what _he_
+had--he appeared to think you required a great many things to keep you
+up. And then Verena told Olive--she could see it was after a little
+delay--that he wanted her to come round to his place and see his
+treasures. He wanted to show them to her, he was so sure she would
+admire them. Verena was sure also, but she wouldn't go alone, and she
+wanted Olive to go with her. They would have tea, and there would be
+other ladies, and Olive would tell her what she thought of a life that
+was so crowded with beauty. Miss Chancellor made her reflexions on all
+this, and the first of them was that it was happy for her that she had
+determined for the present to accept these accidents, for otherwise
+might she not now have had a deeper alarm? She wished to heaven that
+conceited young men with time on their hands would leave Verena alone;
+but evidently they wouldn't, and her best safety was in seeing as many
+as should turn up. If the type should become frequent, she would very
+soon judge it. If Olive had not been so grim, she would have had a smile
+to spare for the frankness with which the girl herself adopted this
+theory. She was eager to explain that Mr. Burrage didn't seem at all to
+want what poor Mr. Pardon had wanted; he made her talk about her views
+far more than that gentleman, but gave no sign of offering himself
+either as a husband or as a lecture-agent. The furthest he had gone as
+yet was to tell her that he liked her for the same reason that he liked
+old enamels and old embroideries; and when she said that she didn't see
+how she resembled such things, he had replied that it was because she
+was so peculiar and so delicate. She might be peculiar, but she had
+protested against the idea that she was delicate; it was the last thing
+that she wanted to be thought; and Olive could see from this how far she
+was from falling in with everything he said. When Miss Chancellor asked
+if she respected Mr. Burrage (and how solemn Olive could make that word
+she by this time knew), she answered, with her sweet, vain laugh, but
+apparently with perfect good faith, that it didn't matter whether she
+did or not, for what was the whole thing but simply a phase--the very
+one they had talked about? The sooner she got through it the better, was
+it not?--and she seemed to think that her transit would be materially
+quickened by a visit to Mr. Burrage's rooms. As I say, Verena was
+pleased to regard the phase as quite inevitable, and she had said more
+than once to Olive that if their struggle was to be with men, the more
+they knew about them the better. Miss Chancellor asked her why her
+mother should not go with her to see the curiosities, since she
+mentioned that their possessor had not neglected to invite Mrs. Tarrant;
+and Verena said that this, of course, would be very simple--only her
+mother wouldn't be able to tell her so well as Olive whether she ought
+to respect Mr. Burrage. This decision as to whether Mr. Burrage should
+be respected assumed in the life of these two remarkable young women,
+pitched in so high a moral key, the proportions of a momentous event.
+Olive shrank at first from facing it--not, indeed, the decision--for we
+know that her own mind had long since been made up in regard to the
+quantity of esteem due to almost any member of the other sex--but the
+incident itself, which, if Mr. Burrage should exasperate her further,
+might expose her to the danger of appearing to Verena to be unfair to
+him. It was her belief that he was playing a deeper game than the young
+Matthias, and she was very willing to watch him; but she thought it
+prudent not to attempt to cut short the phase (she adopted that
+classification) prematurely--an imputation she should incur if, without
+more delay, she were to "shut down," as Verena said, on the young
+connoisseur.
+
+It was settled, therefore, that Mrs. Tarrant should, with her daughter,
+accept Mr. Burrage's invitation; and in a few days these ladies paid a
+visit to his apartments. Verena subsequently, of course, had much to say
+about it, but she dilated even more upon her mother's impressions than
+upon her own. Mrs. Tarrant had carried away a supply which would last
+her all winter; there had been some New York ladies present who were
+"on" at that moment, and with whom her intercourse was rich in emotions.
+She had told them all that she should be happy to see them in her home,
+but they had not yet picked their way along the little planks of the
+front yard. Mr. Burrage, at all events, had been quite lovely, and had
+talked about his collections, which were wonderful, in the most
+interesting manner. Verena inclined to think he was to be respected. He
+admitted that he was not really studying law at all; he had only come to
+Cambridge for the form; but she didn't see why it wasn't enough when you
+made yourself as pleasant as that. She went so far as to ask Olive
+whether taste and art were not something, and her friend could see that
+she was certainly very much involved in the phase. Miss Chancellor, of
+course, had her answer ready. Taste and art were good when they enlarged
+the mind, not when they narrowed it. Verena assented to this, and said
+it remained to be seen what effect they had had upon Mr. Burrage--a
+remark which led Olive to fear that at such a rate much would remain,
+especially when Verena told her, later, that another visit to the young
+man's rooms was projected, and that this time she must come, he having
+expressed the greatest desire for the honour, and her own wish being
+greater still that they should look at some of his beautiful things
+together.
+
+A day or two after this, Mr. Henry Burrage left a card at Miss
+Chancellor's door, with a note in which he expressed the hope that she
+would take tea with him on a certain day on which he expected the
+company of his mother. Olive responded to this invitation, in
+conjunction with Verena; but in doing so she was in the position,
+singular for her, of not quite understanding what she was about. It
+seemed to her strange that Verena should urge her to take such a step
+when she was free to go without her, and it proved two things: first,
+that she was much interested in Mr. Henry Burrage, and second, that her
+nature was extraordinarily beautiful. Could anything, in effect, be less
+underhand than such an indifference to what she supposed to be the best
+opportunities for carrying on a flirtation? Verena wanted to know the
+truth, and it was clear that by this time she believed Olive Chancellor
+to have it, for the most part, in her keeping. Her insistence,
+therefore, proved, above all, that she cared more for her friend's
+opinion of Henry Burrage than for her own--a reminder, certainly, of the
+responsibility that Olive had incurred in undertaking to form this
+generous young mind, and of the exalted place that she now occupied in
+it. Such revelations ought to have been satisfactory; if they failed to
+be completely so, it was only on account of the elder girl's regret that
+the subject as to which her judgement was wanted should be a young man
+destitute of the worst vices. Henry Burrage had contributed to throw
+Miss Chancellor into a "state," as these young ladies called it, the
+night she met him at Mrs. Tarrant's; but it had none the less been
+conveyed to Olive by the voices of the air that he was a gentleman and a
+good fellow.
+
+This was painfully obvious when the visit to his rooms took place; he
+was so good-humoured, so amusing, so friendly and considerate, so
+attentive to Miss Chancellor, he did the honours of his bachelor-nest
+with so easy a grace, that Olive, part of the time, sat dumbly shaking
+her conscience, like a watch that wouldn't go, to make it tell her some
+better reason why she shouldn't like him. She saw that there would be no
+difficulty in disliking his mother; but that, unfortunately, would not
+serve her purpose nearly so well. Mrs. Burrage had come to spend a few
+days near her son; she was staying at an hotel in Boston. It presented
+itself to Olive that after this entertainment it would be an act of
+courtesy to call upon her; but here, at least, was the comfort that she
+could cover herself with the general absolution extended to the Boston
+temperament and leave her alone. It was slightly provoking, indeed, that
+Mrs. Burrage should have so much the air of a New Yorker who didn't
+particularly notice whether a Bostonian called or not; but there is ever
+an imperfection, I suppose, in even the sweetest revenge. She was a
+woman of society, large and voluminous, fair (in complexion) and
+regularly ugly, looking as if she ought to be slow and rather heavy, but
+disappointing this expectation by a quick, amused utterance, a short,
+bright, summary laugh, with which she appeared to dispose of the joke
+(whatever it was) for ever, and an air of recognising on the instant
+everything she saw and heard. She was evidently accustomed to talk, and
+even to listen, if not kept waiting too long for details and
+parentheses; she was not continuous, but frequent, as it were, and you
+could see that she hated explanations, though it was not to be supposed
+that she had anything to fear from them. Her favours were general, not
+particular; she was civil enough to every one, but not in any case
+endearing, and perfectly genial without being confiding, as people were
+in Boston when (in moments of exaltation) they wished to mark that they
+were not suspicious. There was something in her whole manner which
+seemed to say to Olive that she belonged to a larger world than hers;
+and our young lady was vexed at not hearing that she had lived for a
+good many years in Europe, as this would have made it easy to classify
+her as one of the corrupt. She learned, almost with a sense of injury,
+that neither the mother nor the son had been longer beyond the seas than
+she herself; and if they were to be judged as triflers they must be
+dealt with individually. Was it an aid to such a judgement to see that
+Mrs. Burrage was very much pleased with Boston, with Harvard College,
+with her son's interior, with her cup of tea (it was old Sèvres), which
+was not half so bad as she had expected, with the company he had asked
+to meet her (there were three or four gentlemen, one of whom was Mr.
+Gracie), and, last, not least, with Verena Tarrant, whom she addressed
+as a celebrity, kindly, cleverly, but without maternal tenderness or
+anything to mark the difference in their age? She spoke to her as if
+they were equals in that respect, as if Verena's genius and fame would
+make up the disparity, and the girl had no need of encouragement and
+patronage. She made no direct allusion, however, to her particular
+views, and asked her no question about her "gift"--an omission which
+Verena thought strange, and, with the most speculative candour, spoke of
+to Olive afterwards. Mrs. Burrage seemed to imply that every one present
+had some distinction and some talent, that they were all good company
+together. There was nothing in her manner to indicate that she was
+afraid of Verena on her son's account; she didn't resemble a person who
+would like him to marry the daughter of a mesmeric healer, and yet she
+appeared to think it charming that he should have such a young woman
+there to give gusto to her hour at Cambridge. Poor Olive was, in the
+nature of things, entangled in contradictions; she had a horror of the
+idea of Verena's marrying Mr. Burrage, and yet she was angry when his
+mother demeaned herself as if the little girl with red hair, whose
+freshness she enjoyed, could not be a serious danger. She saw all this
+through the blur of her shyness, the conscious, anxious silence to which
+she was so much of the time condemned. It may therefore be imagined how
+sharp her vision would have been could she only have taken the situation
+more simply; for she was intelligent enough not to have needed to be
+morbid, even for purposes of self-defence.
+
+I must add, however, that there was a moment when she came near being
+happy--or, at any rate, reflected that it was a pity she could not be
+so. Mrs. Burrage asked her son to play "some little thing," and he sat
+down to his piano and revealed a talent that might well have gratified
+that lady's pride. Olive was extremely susceptible to music, and it was
+impossible to her not to be soothed and beguiled by the young man's
+charming art. One "little thing" succeeded another; his selections were
+all very happy. His guests sat scattered in the red firelight,
+listening, silent, in comfortable attitudes; there was a faint fragrance
+from the burning logs, which mingled with the perfume of Schubert and
+Mendelssohn; the covered lamps made a glow here and there, and the
+cabinets and brackets produced brown shadows, out of which some precious
+object gleamed--some ivory carving or cinque-cento cup. It was given to
+Olive, under these circumstances, for half an hour, to surrender
+herself, to enjoy the music, to admit that Mr. Burrage played with
+exquisite taste, to feel as if the situation were a kind of truce. Her
+nerves were calmed, her problems--for the time--subsided. Civilisation,
+under such an influence, in such a setting, appeared to have done its
+work; harmony ruled the scene; human life ceased to be a battle. She
+went so far as to ask herself why one should have a quarrel with it; the
+relations of men and women, in that picturesque grouping, had not the
+air of being internecine. In short, she had an interval of unexpected
+rest, during which she kept her eyes mainly on Verena, who sat near Mrs.
+Burrage, letting herself go, evidently, more completely than Olive. To
+her, too, music was a delight, and her listening face turned itself to
+different parts of the room, unconsciously, while her eyes vaguely
+rested on the _bibelots_ that emerged into the firelight. At moments
+Mrs. Burrage bent her countenance upon her and smiled, at random,
+kindly; and then Verena smiled back, while her expression seemed to say
+that, oh yes, she was giving up everything, all principles, all
+projects. Even before it was time to go, Olive felt that they were both
+(Verena and she) quite demoralised, and she only summoned energy to take
+her companion away when she heard Mrs. Burrage propose to her to come
+and spend a fortnight in New York. Then Olive exclaimed to herself, "Is
+it a plot? Why in the world can't they let her alone?" and prepared to
+throw a fold of her mantle, as she had done before, over her young
+friend. Verena answered, somewhat impetuously, that she should be
+delighted to visit Mrs. Burrage; then checked her impetuosity, after a
+glance from Olive, by adding that perhaps this lady wouldn't ask her if
+she knew what strong ground she took on the emancipation of women. Mrs.
+Burrage looked at her son and laughed; she said she was perfectly aware
+of Verena's views, and that it was impossible to be more in sympathy
+with them than she herself. She took the greatest interest in the
+emancipation of women; she thought there was so much to be done. These
+were the only remarks that passed in reference to the great subject; and
+nothing more was said to Verena, either by Henry Burrage or by his
+friend Gracie, about her addressing the Harvard students. Verena had
+told her father that Olive had put her veto upon that, and Tarrant had
+said to the young men that it seemed as if Miss Chancellor was going to
+put the thing through in her own way. We know that he thought this way
+very circuitous; but Miss Chancellor made him feel that she was in
+earnest, and that idea frightened the resistance out of him--it had such
+terrible associations. The people he had ever seen who were most in
+earnest were a committee of gentlemen who had investigated the phenomena
+of the "materialisation" of spirits, some ten years before, and had bent
+the fierce light of the scientific method upon him. To Olive it appeared
+that Mr. Burrage and Mr. Gracie had ceased to be jocular; but that did
+not make them any less cynical. Henry Burrage said to Verena, as she was
+going, that he hoped she would think seriously of his mother's
+invitation; and she replied that she didn't know whether she should have
+much time in the future to give to people who already approved of her
+views: she expected to have her hands full with the others, who didn't.
+
+"Does your scheme of work exclude all distraction, all recreation,
+then?" the young man inquired; and his look expressed real suspense.
+
+Verena referred the matter, as usual, with her air of bright, ungrudging
+deference, to her companion. "Does it, should you say--our scheme of
+work?"
+
+"I am afraid the distraction we have had this afternoon must last us for
+a long time," Olive said, without harshness, but with considerable
+majesty.
+
+"Well, now, _is_ he to be respected?" Verena demanded, as the two young
+women took their way through the early darkness, pacing quietly side by
+side, in their winter-robes, like women consecrated to some holy office.
+
+Olive turned it over a moment. "Yes, very much--as a pianist!"
+
+Verena went into town with her in the horse-car--she was staying in
+Charles Street for a few days--and that evening she startled Olive by
+breaking out into a reflexion very similar to the whimsical falterings
+of which she herself had been conscious while they sat in Mr. Burrage's
+pretty rooms, but against which she had now violently reacted.
+
+"It would be very nice to do that always--just to take men as they are,
+and not to have to think about their badness. It would be very nice not
+to have so many questions, but to think they were all comfortably
+answered, so that one could sit there on an old Spanish leather chair,
+with the curtains drawn and keeping out the cold, the darkness, all the
+big, terrible, cruel world--sit there and listen for ever to Schubert
+and Mendelssohn. _They_ didn't care anything about female suffrage! And
+I didn't feel the want of a vote to-day at all, did you?" Verena
+inquired, ending, as she always ended in these few speculations, with an
+appeal to Olive.
+
+This young lady thought it necessary to give her a very firm answer. "I
+always feel it--everywhere--night and day. I feel it _here_"; and Olive
+laid her hand solemnly on her heart. "I feel it as a deep, unforgettable
+wrong; I feel it as one feels a stain that is on one's honour."
+
+Verena gave a clear laugh, and after that a soft sigh, and then said,
+"Do you know, Olive, I sometimes wonder whether, if it wasn't for you, I
+should feel it so very much!"
+
+"My own friend," Olive replied, "you have never yet said anything to me
+which expressed so clearly the closeness and sanctity of our union."
+
+"You do keep me up," Verena went on. "You are my conscience."
+
+"I should like to be able to say that you are my form--my envelope. But
+you are too beautiful for that!" So Olive returned her friend's
+compliment; and later she said that, of course, it would be far easier
+to give up everything and draw the curtains to and pass one's life in an
+artificial atmosphere, with rose-coloured lamps. It would be far easier
+to abandon the struggle, to leave all the unhappy women of the world to
+their immemorial misery, to lay down one's burden, close one's eyes to
+the whole dark picture, and, in short, simply expire. To this Verena
+objected that it would not be easy for her to expire at all; that such
+an idea was darker than anything the world contained; that she had not
+done with life yet, and that she didn't mean to allow her
+responsibilities to crush her. And then the two young women concluded,
+as they had concluded before, by finding themselves completely,
+inspiringly in agreement, full of the purpose to live indeed, and with
+high success; to become great, in order not to be obscure, and powerful,
+in order not to be useless. Olive had often declared before that her
+conception of life was as something sublime or as nothing at all. The
+world was full of evil, but she was glad to have been born before it had
+been swept away, while it was still there to face, to give one a task
+and a reward. When the great reforms should be consummated, when the day
+of justice should have dawned, would not life perhaps be rather poor and
+pale? She had never pretended to deny that the hope of fame, of the very
+highest distinction, was one of her strongest incitements; and she held
+that the most effective way of protesting against the state of bondage
+of women was for an individual member of the sex to become illustrious.
+A person who might have overheard some of the talk of this possibly
+infatuated pair would have been touched by their extreme familiarity
+with the idea of earthly glory. Verena had not invented it, but she had
+taken it eagerly from her friend, and she returned it with interest. To
+Olive it appeared that just this partnership of their two minds--each of
+them, by itself, lacking an important group of facets--made an organic
+whole which, for the work in hand, could not fail to be brilliantly
+effective. Verena was often far more irresponsive than she liked to see
+her; but the happy thing in her composition was that, after a short
+contact with the divine idea--Olive was always trying to flash it at
+her, like a jewel in an uncovered case--she kindled, flamed up, took the
+words from her friend's less persuasive lips, resolved herself into a
+magical voice, became again the pure young sibyl. Then Olive perceived
+how fatally, without Verena's tender notes, her crusade would lack
+sweetness, what the Catholics call unction; and, on the other hand, how
+weak Verena would be on the statistical and logical side if she herself
+should not bring up the rear. Together, in short, they would be
+complete, they would have everything, and together they would triumph.
+
+
+
+
+XIX
+
+
+This idea of their triumph, a triumph as yet ultimate and remote, but
+preceded by the solemn vista of an effort so religious as never to be
+wanting in ecstasy, became tremendously familiar to the two friends, but
+especially to Olive, during the winter of 187-, a season which ushered
+in the most momentous period of Miss Chancellor's life. About Christmas
+a step was taken which advanced her affairs immensely, and put them, to
+her apprehension, on a regular footing. This consisted in Verena's
+coming in to Charles Street to stay with her, in pursuance of an
+arrangement on Olive's part with Selah Tarrant and his wife that she
+should remain for many months. The coast was now perfectly clear. Mrs.
+Farrinder had started on her annual grand tour; she was rousing the
+people, from Maine to Texas; Matthias Pardon (it was to be supposed) had
+received, temporarily at least, his quietus; and Mrs. Luna was
+established in New York, where she had taken a house for a year, and
+whence she wrote to her sister that she was going to engage Basil Ransom
+(with whom she was in communication for this purpose) to do her
+law-business. Olive wondered what law-business Adeline could have, and
+hoped she would get into a pickle with her landlord or her milliner, so
+that repeated interviews with Mr. Ransom might become necessary. Mrs.
+Luna let her know very soon that these interviews had begun; the young
+Mississippian had come to dine with her; he hadn't got started much, by
+what she could make out, and she was even afraid that he didn't dine
+every day. But he wore a tall hat now, like a Northern gentleman, and
+Adeline intimated that she found him really attractive. He had been very
+nice to Newton, told him all about the war (quite the Southern version,
+of course, but Mrs. Luna didn't care anything about American politics,
+and she wanted her son to know all sides), and Newton did nothing but
+talk about him, calling him "Rannie," and imitating his pronunciation of
+certain words. Adeline subsequently wrote that she had made up her mind
+to put her affairs into his hands (Olive sighed, not unmagnanimously, as
+she thought of her sister's "affairs"), and later still she mentioned
+that she was thinking strongly of taking him to be Newton's tutor. She
+wished this interesting child to be privately educated, and it would be
+more agreeable to have in that relation a person who was already, as it
+were, a member of the family. Mrs. Luna wrote as if he were prepared to
+give up his profession to take charge of her son, and Olive was pretty
+sure that this was only a part of her grandeur, of the habit she had
+contracted, especially since living in Europe, of speaking as if in
+every case she required special arrangements.
+
+In spite of the difference in their age, Olive had long since judged
+her, and made up her mind that Adeline lacked every quality that a
+person needed to be interesting in her eyes. She was rich (or
+sufficiently so), she was conventional and timid, very fond of
+attentions from men (with whom indeed she was reputed bold, but Olive
+scorned such boldness as that), given up to a merely personal,
+egotistical, instinctive life, and as unconscious of the tendencies of
+the age, the revenges of the future, the new truths and the great social
+questions, as if she had been a mere bundle of dress-trimmings, which
+she very nearly was. It was perfectly observable that she had no
+conscience, and it irritated Olive deeply to see how much trouble a
+woman was spared when she was constructed on that system. Adeline's
+"affairs," as I have intimated, her social relations, her views of
+Newton's education, her practice and her theory (for she had plenty of
+that, such as it was, heaven save the mark!), her spasmodic disposition
+to marry again, and her still sillier retreats in the presence of danger
+(for she had not even the courage of her frivolity), these things had
+been a subject of tragic consideration to Olive ever since the return of
+the elder sister to America. The tragedy was not in any particular harm
+that Mrs. Luna could do her (for she did her good, rather, that is, she
+did her honour by laughing at her), but in the spectacle itself, the
+drama, guided by the hand of fate, of which the small, ignoble scenes
+unrolled themselves so logically. The _dénouement_ would of course be in
+keeping, and would consist simply of the spiritual death of Mrs. Luna,
+who would end by understanding no common speech of Olive's at all, and
+would sink into mere worldly plumpness, into the last complacency, the
+supreme imbecility, of petty, genteel conservatism. As for Newton, he
+would be more utterly odious, if possible, as he grew up, than he was
+already; in fact, he would not grow up at all, but only grow down, if
+his mother should continue her infatuated system with him. He was
+insufferably forward and selfish; under the pretext of keeping him, at
+any cost, refined, Adeline had coddled and caressed him, having him
+always in her petticoats, remitting his lessons when he pretended he had
+an earache, drawing him into the conversation, letting him answer her
+back, with an impertinence beyond his years, when she administered the
+smallest check. The place for him, in Olive's eyes, was one of the
+public schools, where the children of the people would teach him his
+small importance, teach it, if necessary, by the aid of an occasional
+drubbing; and the two ladies had a grand discussion on this point before
+Mrs. Luna left Boston--a scene which ended in Adeline's clutching the
+irrepressible Newton to her bosom (he came in at the moment), and
+demanding of him a vow that he would live and die in the principles of
+his mother. Mrs. Luna declared that if she must be trampled upon--and
+very likely it was her fate!--she would rather be trampled upon by men
+than by women, and that if Olive and her friends should get possession
+of the government they would be worse despots than those who were
+celebrated in history. Newton took an infant oath that he would never be
+a destructive, impious radical, and Olive felt that after this she
+needn't trouble herself any more about her sister, whom she simply
+committed to her fate. That fate might very properly be to marry an
+enemy of her country, a man who, no doubt, desired to treat women with
+the lash and manacles, as he and his people had formerly treated the
+wretched coloured race. If she was so fond of the fine old institutions
+of the past, he would supply them to her in abundance; and if she wanted
+so much to be a conservative, she could try first how she liked being a
+conservative's wife. If Olive troubled herself little about Adeline, she
+troubled herself more about Basil Ransom; she said to herself that since
+he hated women who respected themselves (and each other), destiny would
+use him rightly in hanging a person like Adeline round his neck. That
+would be the way poetic justice ought to work, for him--and the law that
+our prejudices, when they act themselves out, punish us in doing so.
+Olive considered all this, as it was her effort to consider everything,
+from a very high point of view, and ended by feeling sure it was not for
+the sake of any nervous personal security that she desired to see her
+two relations in New York get mixed up together. If such an event as
+their marriage would gratify her sense of fitness, it would be simply as
+an illustration of certain laws. Olive, thanks to the philosophic cast
+of her mind, was exceedingly fond of illustrations of laws.
+
+I hardly know, however, what illumination it was that sprang from her
+consciousness (now a source of considerable comfort) that Mrs. Farrinder
+was carrying the war into distant territories, and would return to
+Boston only in time to preside at a grand Female Convention, already
+advertised to take place in Boston in the month of June. It was
+agreeable to her that this imperial woman should be away; it made the
+field more free, the air more light; it suggested an exemption from
+official criticism. I have not taken space to mention certain episodes
+of the more recent intercourse of these ladies, and must content myself
+with tracing them, lightly, in their consequences. These may be summed
+up in the remark, which will doubtless startle no one by its freshness,
+that two imperial women are scarcely more likely to hit it off together,
+as the phrase is, than two imperial men. Since that party at Miss
+Birdseye's, so important in its results for Olive, she had had occasion
+to approach Mrs. Farrinder more nearly, and those overtures brought
+forth the knowledge that the great leader of the feminine revolution was
+the one person (in that part of the world) more concentrated, more
+determined, than herself. Miss Chancellor's aspirations, of late, had
+been immensely quickened; she had begun to believe in herself to a
+livelier tune than she had ever listened to before; and she now
+perceived that when spirit meets spirit there must either be mutual
+absorption or a sharp concussion. It had long been familiar to her that
+she should have to count with the obstinacy of the world at large, but
+she now discovered that she should have to count also with certain
+elements in the feminine camp. This complicated the problem, and such a
+complication, naturally, could not make Mrs. Farrinder appear more easy
+to assimilate. If Olive's was a high nature and so was hers, the fault
+was in neither; it was only an admonition that they were not needed as
+landmarks in the same part of the field. If such perceptions are
+delicate as between men, the reader need not be reminded of the
+exquisite form they may assume in natures more refined. So it was that
+Olive passed, in three months, from the stage of veneration to that of
+competition; and the process had been accelerated by the introduction of
+Verena into the fold. Mrs. Farrinder had behaved in the strangest way
+about Verena. First she had been struck with her, and then she hadn't;
+first she had seemed to want to take her in, then she had shied at her
+unmistakably--intimating to Olive that there were enough of that kind
+already. Of "that kind" indeed!--the phrase reverberated in Miss
+Chancellor's resentful soul. Was it possible she didn't know the kind
+Verena was of, and with what vulgar aspirants to notoriety did she
+confound her? It had been Olive's original desire to obtain Mrs.
+Farrinder's stamp for her _protégée_; she wished her to hold a
+commission from the commander-in-chief. With this view the two young
+women had made more than one pilgrimage to Roxbury, and on one of these
+occasions the sibylline mood (in its most charming form) had descended
+upon Verena. She had fallen into it, naturally and gracefully, in the
+course of talk, and poured out a stream of eloquence even more touching
+than her regular discourse at Miss Birdseye's. Mrs. Farrinder had taken
+it rather dryly, and certainly it didn't resemble her own style of
+oratory, remarkable and cogent as this was. There had been considerable
+question of her writing a letter to the New York _Tribune_, the effect
+of which should be to launch Miss Tarrant into renown; but this
+beneficent epistle never appeared, and now Olive saw that there was no
+favour to come from the prophetess of Roxbury. There had been
+primnesses, pruderies, small reserves, which ended by staying her pen.
+If Olive didn't say at once that she was jealous of Verena's more
+attractive manner, it was only because such a declaration was destined
+to produce more effect a little later. What she did say was that
+evidently Mrs. Farrinder wanted to keep the movement in her own
+hands--viewed with suspicion certain romantic, esthetic elements which
+Olive and Verena seemed to be trying to introduce into it. They insisted
+so much, for instance, on the historic unhappiness of women; but Mrs.
+Farrinder didn't appear to care anything for that, or indeed to know
+much about history at all. She seemed to begin just to-day, and she
+demanded their rights for them whether they were unhappy or not. The
+upshot of this was that Olive threw herself on Verena's neck with a
+movement which was half indignation, half rapture; she exclaimed that
+they would have to fight the battle without human help, but, after all,
+it was better so. If they were all in all to each other, what more could
+they want? They would be isolated, but they would be free; and this view
+of the situation brought with it a feeling that they had almost already
+begun to be a force. It was not, indeed, that Olive's resentment faded
+quite away; for not only had she the sense, doubtless very presumptuous,
+that Mrs. Farrinder was the only person thereabouts of a stature to
+judge her (a sufficient cause of antagonism in itself, for if we like to
+be praised by our betters we prefer that censure should come from the
+other sort), but the kind of opinion she had unexpectedly betrayed,
+after implying such esteem in the earlier phase of their intercourse,
+made Olive's cheeks occasionally flush. She prayed heaven that _she_
+might never become so personal, so narrow. She was frivolous, worldly,
+an amateur, a trifler, a frequenter of Beacon Street; her taking up
+Verena Tarrant was only a kind of elderly, ridiculous doll-dressing:
+this was the light in which Miss Chancellor had reason to believe that
+it now suited Mrs. Farrinder to regard her! It was fortunate, perhaps,
+that the misrepresentation was so gross; yet, none the less, tears of
+wrath rose more than once to Olive's eyes when she reflected that this
+particular wrong had been put upon her. Frivolous, worldly, Beacon
+Street! She appealed to Verena to share in her pledge that the world
+should know in due time how much of that sort of thing there was about
+her. As I have already hinted, Verena at such moments quite rose to the
+occasion; she had private pangs at committing herself to give the cold
+shoulder to Beacon Street for ever; but she was now so completely in
+Olive's hands that there was no sacrifice to which she would not have
+consented in order to prove that her benefactress was not frivolous.
+
+The matter of her coming to stay for so long in Charles Street was
+arranged during a visit that Selah Tarrant paid there at Miss
+Chancellor's request. This interview, which had some curious features,
+would be worth describing but I am forbidden to do more than mention the
+most striking of these. Olive wished to have an understanding with him;
+wished the situation to be clear, so that, disagreeable as it would be
+to her to receive him, she sent him a summons for a certain hour--an
+hour at which she had planned that Verena should be out of the house.
+She withheld this incident from the girl's knowledge, reflecting with
+some solemnity that it was the first deception (for Olive her silence
+was a deception) that she had yet practised on her friend, and wondering
+whether she should have to practise others in the future. She then and
+there made up her mind that she would not shrink from others should they
+be necessary. She notified Tarrant that she should keep Verena a long
+time, and Tarrant remarked that it was certainly very pleasant to see
+her so happily located. But he also intimated that he should like to
+know what Miss Chancellor laid out to do with her; and the tone of this
+suggestion made Olive feel how right she had been to foresee that their
+interview would have the stamp of business. It assumed that complexion
+very definitely when she crossed over to her desk and wrote Mr. Tarrant
+a cheque for a very considerable amount. "Leave us alone--entirely
+alone--for a year, and then I will write you another": it was with these
+words she handed him the little strip of paper that meant so much,
+feeling, as she did so, that surely Mrs. Farrinder herself could not be
+less amateurish than that. Selah looked at the cheque, at Miss
+Chancellor, at the cheque again, at the ceiling, at the floor, at the
+clock, and once more at his hostess; then the document disappeared
+beneath the folds of his waterproof, and she saw that he was putting it
+into some queer place on his queer person. "Well, if I didn't believe
+you were going to help her to develop," he remarked; and he stopped,
+while his hands continued to fumble, out of sight, and he treated Olive
+to his large joyless smile. She assured him that he need have no fear on
+that score; Verena's development was the thing in the world in which she
+took most interest; she should have every opportunity for a free
+expansion. "Yes, that's the great thing," Selah said; "it's more
+important than attracting a crowd. That's all we shall ask of you; let
+her act out her nature. Don't all the trouble of humanity come from our
+being pressed back? Don't shut down the cover, Miss Chancellor; just let
+her overflow!" And again Tarrant illuminated his inquiry, his metaphor,
+by the strange and silent lateral movement of his jaws. He added,
+presently, that he supposed he should have to fix it with Mis' Tarrant;
+but Olive made no answer to that; she only looked at him with a face in
+which she intended to express that there was nothing that need detain
+him longer. She knew it had been fixed with Mrs. Tarrant; she had been
+over all that with Verena, who had told her that her mother was willing
+to sacrifice her for her highest good. She had reason to know (not
+through Verena, of course) that Mrs. Tarrant had embraced, tenderly, the
+idea of a pecuniary compensation, and there was no fear of her making a
+scene when Tarrant should come back with a cheque in his pocket. "Well,
+I trust she _may_ develop, richly, and that you may accomplish what you
+desire; it seems as if we had only a little way to go further," that
+worthy observed, as he erected himself for departure.
+
+"It's not a little way; it's a very long way," Olive replied, rather
+sternly.
+
+Tarrant was on the threshold; he lingered a little, embarrassed by her
+grimness, for he himself had always inclined to rose-coloured views of
+progress, of the march of truth. He had never met any one so much in
+earnest as this definite, literal young woman, who had taken such an
+unhoped-for fancy to his daughter; whose longing for the new day had
+such perversities of pessimism, and who, in the midst of something that
+appeared to be terribly searching in her honesty, was willing to corrupt
+him, as a father, with the most extravagant orders on her bank. He
+hardly knew in what language to speak to her; it seemed as if there was
+nothing soothing enough, when a lady adopted that tone about a movement
+which was thought by some of the brightest to be so promising. "Oh,
+well, I guess there's some kind of mysterious law...." he murmured,
+almost timidly; and so he passed from Miss Chancellor's sight.
+
+
+
+
+XX
+
+
+She hoped she should not soon see him again, and there appeared to be no
+reason she should, if their intercourse was to be conducted by means of
+cheques. The understanding with Verena was, of course, complete; she had
+promised to stay with her friend as long as her friend should require
+it. She had said at first that she couldn't give up her mother, but she
+had been made to feel that there was no question of giving up. She
+should be as free as air, to go and come; she could spend hours and days
+with her mother, whenever Mrs. Tarrant required her attention; all that
+Olive asked of her was that, for the time, she should regard Charles
+Street as her home. There was no struggle about this, for the simple
+reason that by the time the question came to the front Verena was
+completely under the charm. The idea of Olive's charm will perhaps make
+the reader smile; but I use the word not in its derived, but in its
+literal sense. The fine web of authority, of dependence, that her
+strenuous companion had woven about her, was now as dense as a suit of
+golden mail; and Verena was thoroughly interested in their great
+undertaking; she saw it in the light of an active, enthusiastic faith.
+The benefit that her father desired for her was now assured; she
+expanded, developed, on the most liberal scale. Olive saw the
+difference, and you may imagine how she rejoiced in it; she had never
+known a greater pleasure. Verena's former attitude had been girlish
+submission, grateful, curious sympathy. She had given herself, in her
+young, amused surprise, because Olive's stronger will and the incisive
+proceedings with which she pointed her purpose drew her on. Besides, she
+was held by hospitality, the vision of new social horizons, the sense of
+novelty, and the love of change. But now the girl was disinterestedly
+attached to the precious things they were to do together; she cared
+about them for themselves, believed in them ardently, had them
+constantly in mind. Her share in the union of the two young women was no
+longer passive, purely appreciative; it was passionate, too, and it put
+forth a beautiful energy. If Olive desired to get Verena into training,
+she could flatter herself that the process had already begun, and that
+her colleague enjoyed it almost as much as she. Therefore she could say
+to herself, without the imputation of heartlessness, that when she left
+her mother it was for a noble, a sacred use. In point of fact, she left
+her very little, and she spent hours in jingling, aching, jostled
+journeys between Charles Street and the stale suburban cottage. Mrs.
+Tarrant sighed and grimaced, wrapped herself more than ever in her
+mantle, said she didn't know as she was fit to struggle alone, and that,
+half the time, if Verena was away, she wouldn't have the nerve to answer
+the door-bell; she was incapable, of course, of neglecting such an
+opportunity to posture as one who paid with her heart's blood for
+leading the van of human progress. But Verena had an inner sense (she
+judged her mother now, a little, for the first time) that she would be
+sorry to be taken at her word, and that she felt safe enough in trusting
+to her daughter's generosity. She could not divest herself of the
+faith--even now that Mrs. Luna was gone, leaving no trace, and the grey
+walls of a sedentary winter were apparently closing about the two young
+women--she could not renounce the theory that a residence in Charles
+Street must at least produce some contact with the brilliant classes.
+She was vexed at her daughter's resignation to not going to parties and
+to Miss Chancellor's not giving them; but it was nothing new for her to
+have to practise patience, and she could feel, at least, that it was
+just as handy for Mr. Burrage to call on the child in town, where he
+spent half his time, sleeping constantly at Parker's.
+
+It was a fact that this fortunate youth called very often, and Verena
+saw him with Olive's full concurrence whenever she was at home. It had
+now been quite agreed between them that no artificial limits should be
+set to the famous phase; and Olive had, while it lasted, a sense of real
+heroism in steeling herself against uneasiness. It seemed to her,
+moreover, only justice that she should make some concession; if Verena
+made a great sacrifice of filial duty in coming to live with her (this,
+of course, should be permanent--she would buy off the Tarrants from year
+to year), she must not incur the imputation (the world would judge her,
+in that case, ferociously) of keeping her from forming common social
+ties. The friendship of a young man and a young woman was, according to
+the pure code of New England, a common social tie; and as the weeks
+elapsed Miss Chancellor saw no reason to repent of her temerity. Verena
+was not falling in love; she felt that she should know it, should guess
+it on the spot. Verena was fond of human intercourse; she was
+essentially a sociable creature; she liked to shine and smile and talk
+and listen; and so far as Henry Burrage was concerned he introduced an
+element of easy and convenient relaxation into a life now a good deal
+stiffened (Olive was perfectly willing to own it) by great civic
+purposes. But the girl was being saved, without interference, by the
+simple operation of her interest in those very designs. From this time
+there was no need of putting pressure on her; her own springs were
+working; the fire with which she glowed came from within. Sacredly,
+brightly single she would remain; her only espousals would be at the
+altar of a great cause. Olive always absented herself when Mr. Burrage
+was announced; and when Verena afterwards attempted to give some account
+of his conversation she checked her, said she would rather know nothing
+about it--all with a very solemn mildness; this made her feel very
+superior, truly noble. She knew by this time (I scarcely can tell how,
+since Verena could give her no report) exactly what sort of a youth Mr.
+Burrage was: he was weakly pretentious, softly original, cultivated
+eccentricity, patronised progress, liked to have mysteries, sudden
+appointments to keep, anonymous persons to visit, the air of leading a
+double life, of being devoted to a girl whom people didn't know, or at
+least didn't meet. Of course he liked to make an impression on Verena;
+but what he mainly liked was to play her off upon the other girls, the
+daughters of fashion, with whom he danced at Papanti's. Such were the
+images that proceeded from Olive's rich moral consciousness. "Well, he
+_is_ greatly interested in our movement": so much Verena once managed to
+announce; but the words rather irritated Miss Chancellor, who, as we
+know, did not care to allow for accidental exceptions in the great
+masculine conspiracy.
+
+In the month of March Verena told her that Mr. Burrage was offering
+matrimony--offering it with much insistence, begging that she would at
+least wait and think of it before giving him a final answer. Verena was
+evidently very glad to be able to say to Olive that she had assured him
+she couldn't think of it, and that if he expected this he had better not
+come any more. He continued to come, and it was therefore to be supposed
+that he had ceased to count on such a concession; it was now Olive's
+opinion that he really didn't desire it. She had a theory that he
+proposed to almost any girl who was not likely to accept him--did it
+because he was making a collection of such episodes--a mental album of
+declarations, blushes, hesitations, refusals that just missed imposing
+themselves as acceptances, quite as he collected enamels and Cremona
+violins. He would be very sorry indeed to ally himself to the house of
+Tarrant; but such a fear didn't prevent him from holding it becoming in
+a man of taste to give that encouragement to low-born girls who were
+pretty, for one looked out for the special cases in which, for reasons
+(even the lowest might have reasons), they wouldn't "rise." "I told you
+I wouldn't marry him, and I won't," Verena said, delightedly, to her
+friend; her tone suggested that a certain credit belonged to her for the
+way she carried out her assurance. "I never thought you would, if you
+didn't want to," Olive replied to this; and Verena could have no
+rejoinder but the good-humour that sat in her eyes, unable as she was to
+say that she had wanted to. They had a little discussion, however, when
+she intimated that she pitied him for his discomfiture, Olive's
+contention being that, selfish, conceited, pampered and insincere, he
+might properly be left now to digest his affront. Miss Chancellor felt
+none of the remorse now that she would have felt six months before at
+standing in the way of such a chance for Verena, and she would have been
+very angry if any one had asked her if she were not afraid of taking too
+much upon herself. She would have said, moreover, that she stood in no
+one's way, and that even if she were not there Verena would never think
+seriously of a frivolous little man who fiddled while Rome was burning.
+This did not prevent Olive from making up her mind that they had better
+go to Europe in the spring; a year's residence in that quarter of the
+globe would be highly agreeable to Verena, and might even contribute to
+the evolution of her genius. It cost Miss Chancellor an effort to admit
+that any virtue still lingered in the elder world, and that it could
+have any important lesson for two such good Americans as her friend and
+herself; but it suited her just then to make this assumption, which was
+not altogether sincere. It was recommended by the idea that it would get
+her companion out of the way--out of the way of officious
+fellow-citizens--till she should be absolutely firm on her feet, and
+would also give greater intensity to their own long conversation. On
+that continent of strangers they would cleave more closely still to each
+other. This, of course, would be to fly before the inevitable "phase,"
+much more than to face it; but Olive decided that if they should reach
+unscathed the term of their delay (the first of July) she should have
+faced it as much as either justice or generosity demanded. I may as well
+say at once that she traversed most of this period without further
+serious alarms and with a great many little thrills of bliss and hope.
+
+Nothing happened to dissipate the good omens with which her partnership
+with Verena Tarrant was at present surrounded. They threw themselves
+into study; they had innumerable big books from the Athenæum, and
+consumed the midnight oil. Henry Burrage, after Verena had shaken her
+head at him so sweetly and sadly, returned to New York, giving no sign;
+they only heard that he had taken refuge under the ruffled maternal
+wing. (Olive, at least, took for granted the wing was ruffled; she could
+fancy how Mrs. Burrage would be affected by the knowledge that her son
+had been refused by the daughter of a mesmeric healer. She would be
+almost as angry as if she had learnt that he had been accepted.)
+Matthias Pardon had not yet taken his revenge in the newspapers; he was
+perhaps nursing his thunderbolts; at any rate, now that the operatic
+season had begun, he was much occupied in interviewing the principal
+singers, one of whom he described in one of the leading journals (Olive,
+at least, was sure it was only he who could write like that) as "a dear
+little woman with baby dimples and kittenish movements." The Tarrants
+were apparently given up to a measure of sensual ease with which they
+had not hitherto been familiar, thanks to the increase of income that
+they drew from their eccentric protectress. Mrs. Tarrant now enjoyed the
+ministrations of a "girl"; it was partly her pride (at any rate, she
+chose to give it this turn) that her house had for many years been
+conducted without the element--so debasing on both sides--of servile,
+mercenary labour. She wrote to Olive (she was perpetually writing to her
+now, but Olive never answered) that she was conscious of having fallen
+to a lower plane, but she admitted that it was a prop to her wasted
+spirit to have some one to converse with when Selah was off. Verena, of
+course, perceived the difference, which was inadequately explained by
+the theory of a sudden increase of her father's practice (nothing of her
+father's had ever increased like that), and ended by guessing the cause
+of it--a discovery which did not in the least disturb her equanimity.
+She accepted the idea that her parents should receive a pecuniary
+tribute from the extraordinary friend whom she had encountered on the
+threshold of womanhood, just as she herself accepted that friend's
+irresistible hospitality. She had no worldly pride, no traditions of
+independence, no ideas of what was done and what was not done; but there
+was only one thing that equalled this perfectly gentle and natural
+insensibility to favours--namely, the inveteracy of her habit of not
+asking them. Olive had had an apprehension that she would flush a little
+at learning the terms on which they should now be able to pursue their
+career together; but Verena never changed colour; it was either not new
+or not disagreeable to her that the authors of her being should be
+bought off, silenced by money, treated as the troublesome of the lower
+orders are treated when they are not locked up; so that her friend had a
+perception, after this, that it would probably be impossible in any way
+ever to offend her. She was too rancourless, too detached from
+conventional standards, too free from private self-reference. It was too
+much to say of her that she forgave injuries, since she was not
+conscious of them; there was in forgiveness a certain arrogance of which
+she was incapable, and her bright mildness glided over the many traps
+that life sets for our consistency. Olive had always held that pride was
+necessary to character, but there was no peculiarity of Verena's that
+could make her spirit seem less pure. The added luxuries in the little
+house at Cambridge, which even with their help was still such a penal
+settlement, made her feel afresh that before she came to the rescue the
+daughter of that house had traversed a desert of sordid misery. She had
+cooked and washed and swept and stitched; she had worked harder than any
+of Miss Chancellor's servants. These things had left no trace upon her
+person or her mind; everything fresh and fair renewed itself in her with
+extraordinary facility, everything ugly and tiresome evaporated as soon
+as it touched her; but Olive deemed that, being what she was, she had a
+right to immense compensations. In the future she should have exceeding
+luxury and ease, and Miss Chancellor had no difficulty in persuading
+herself that persons doing the high intellectual and moral work to which
+the two young ladies in Charles Street were now committed owed it to
+themselves, owed it to the groaning sisterhood, to cultivate the best
+material conditions. She herself was nothing of a sybarite, and she had
+proved, visiting the alleys and slums of Boston in the service of the
+Associated Charities, that there was no foulness of disease or misery
+she feared to look in the face; but her house had always been thoroughly
+well regulated, she was passionately clean, and she was an excellent
+woman of business. Now, however, she elevated daintiness to a religion;
+her interior shone with superfluous friction, with punctuality, with
+winter roses. Among these soft influences Verena herself bloomed like
+the flower that attains such perfection in Boston. Olive had always
+rated high the native refinement of her country-women, their latent
+"adaptability," their talent for accommodating themselves at a glance to
+changed conditions; but the way her companion rose with the level of the
+civilisation that surrounded her, the way she assimilated all delicacies
+and absorbed all traditions, left this friendly theory halting behind.
+The winter days were still, indoors, in Charles Street, and the winter
+nights secure from interruption. Our two young women had plenty of
+duties, but Olive had never favoured the custom of running in and out.
+Much conference on social and reformatory topics went forward under her
+roof, and she received her colleagues--she belonged to twenty
+associations and committees--only at pre-appointed hours, which she
+expected them to observe rigidly. Verena's share in these proceedings
+was not active; she hovered over them, smiling, listening, dropping
+occasionally a fanciful though never an idle word, like some gently
+animated image placed there for good omen. It was understood that her
+part was before the scenes, not behind; that she was not a prompter, but
+(potentially, at least) a "popular favourite," and that the work over
+which Miss Chancellor presided so efficiently was a general preparation
+of the platform on which, later, her companion would execute the most
+striking steps.
+
+The western windows of Olive's drawing-room, looking over the water,
+took in the red sunsets of winter; the long, low bridge that crawled, on
+its staggering posts, across the Charles; the casual patches of ice and
+snow; the desolate suburban horizons, peeled and made bald by the rigour
+of the season; the general hard, cold void of the prospect; the
+extrusion, at Charlestown, at Cambridge, of a few chimneys and steeples,
+straight, sordid tubes of factories and engine-shops, or spare,
+heavenward finger of the New England meeting-house. There was something
+inexorable in the poverty of the scene, shameful in the meanness of its
+details, which gave a collective impression of boards and tin and frozen
+earth, sheds and rotting piles, railway-lines striding flat across a
+thoroughfare of puddles, and tracks of the humbler, the universal
+horse-car, traversing obliquely this path of danger; loose fences,
+vacant lots, mounds of refuse, yards bestrewn with iron pipes, telegraph
+poles, and bare wooden backs of places. Verena thought such a view
+lovely, and she was by no means without excuse when, as the afternoon
+closed, the ugly picture was tinted with a clear, cold rosiness. The
+air, in its windless chill, seemed to tinkle like a crystal, the
+faintest gradations of tone were perceptible in the sky, the west became
+deep and delicate, everything grew doubly distinct before taking on the
+dimness of evening. There were pink flushes on snow, "tender" reflexions
+in patches of stiffened marsh, sounds of car-bells, no longer vulgar,
+but almost silvery, on the long bridge, lonely outlines of distant dusky
+undulations against the fading glow. These agreeable effects used to
+light up that end of the drawing-room, and Olive often sat at the window
+with her companion before it was time for the lamp. They admired the
+sunsets, they rejoiced in the ruddy spots projected upon the
+parlour-wall, they followed the darkening perspective in fanciful
+excursions. They watched the stellar points come out at last in a colder
+heaven, and then, shuddering a little, arm in arm, they turned away,
+with a sense that the winter night was even more cruel than the tyranny
+of men--turned back to drawn curtains and a brighter fire and a
+glittering tea-tray and more and more talk about the long martyrdom of
+women, a subject as to which Olive was inexhaustible and really most
+interesting. There were some nights of deep snowfall, when Charles
+Street was white and muffled and the door-bell foredoomed to silence,
+which seemed little islands of lamp-light, of enlarged and intensified
+vision. They read a great deal of history together, and read it ever
+with the same thought--that of finding confirmation in it for this idea
+that their sex had suffered inexpressibly, and that at any moment in the
+course of human affairs the state of the world would have been so much
+less horrible (history seemed to them in every way horrible) if women
+had been able to press down the scale. Verena was full of suggestions
+which stimulated discussions; it was she, oftenest, who kept in view the
+fact that a good many women in the past had been entrusted with power
+and had not always used it amiably, who brought up the wicked queens,
+the profligate mistresses of kings. These ladies were easily disposed of
+between the two, and the public crimes of Bloody Mary, the private
+misdemeanours of Faustina, wife of the pure Marcus Aurelius, were very
+satisfactorily classified. If the influence of women in the past
+accounted for every act of virtue that men had happened to achieve, it
+only made the matter balance properly that the influence of men should
+explain the casual irregularities of the other sex. Olive could see how
+few books had passed through Verena's hands, and how little the home of
+the Tarrants had been a house of reading; but the girl now traversed the
+fields of literature with her characteristic lightness of step.
+Everything she turned to or took up became an illustration of the
+facility, the "giftedness," which Olive, who had so little of it, never
+ceased to wonder at and prize. Nothing frightened her; she always smiled
+at it, she could do anything she tried. As she knew how to do other
+things, she knew how to study; she read quickly and remembered
+infallibly; could repeat, days afterward, passages that she appeared
+only to have glanced at. Olive, of course, was more and more happy to
+think that their cause should have the services of an organisation so
+rare.
+
+All this doubtless sounds rather dry, and I hasten to add that our
+friends were not always shut up in Miss Chancellor's strenuous parlour.
+In spite of Olive's desire to keep her precious inmate to herself and to
+bend her attention upon their common studies, in spite of her constantly
+reminding Verena that this winter was to be purely educative and that
+the platitudes of the satisfied and unregenerate would have little to
+teach her, in spite, in short, of the severe and constant duality of our
+young women, it must not be supposed that their life had not many
+personal confluents and tributaries. Individual and original as Miss
+Chancellor was universally acknowledged to be, she was yet a typical
+Bostonian, and as a typical Bostonian she could not fail to belong in
+some degree to a "set." It had been said of her that she was in it but
+not of it; but she was of it enough to go occasionally into other houses
+and to receive their occupants in her own. It was her belief that she
+filled her tea-pot with the spoon of hospitality, and made a good many
+select spirits feel that they were welcome under her roof at convenient
+hours. She had a preference for what she called _real_ people, and there
+were several whose reality she had tested by arts known to herself. This
+little society was rather suburban and miscellaneous; it was prolific in
+ladies who trotted about, early and late, with books from the Athenæum
+nursed behind their muff, or little nosegays of exquisite flowers that
+they were carrying as presents to each other. Verena, who, when Olive
+was not with her, indulged in a good deal of desultory contemplation at
+the window, saw them pass the house in Charles Street, always apparently
+straining a little, as if they might be too late for something. At
+almost any time, for she envied their preoccupation, she would have
+taken the chance with them. Very often, when she described them to her
+mother, Mrs. Tarrant didn't know who they were; there were even days
+(she had so many discouragements) when it seemed as if she didn't want
+to know. So long as they were not some one else, it seemed to be no use
+that they were themselves; whoever they were, they were sure to have
+that defect. Even after all her mother's disquisitions Verena had but
+vague ideas as to whom she would have liked them to be; and it was only
+when the girl talked of the concerts, to all of which Olive subscribed
+and conducted her inseparable friend, that Mrs. Tarrant appeared to feel
+in any degree that her daughter was living up to the standard formed for
+her in their Cambridge home. As all the world knows, the opportunities
+in Boston for hearing good music are numerous and excellent, and it had
+long been Miss Chancellor's practice to cultivate the best. She went in,
+as the phrase is, for the superior programmes, and that high, dim,
+dignified Music Hall, which has echoed in its time to so much eloquence
+and so much melody, and of which the very proportions and colour seem to
+teach respect and attention, shed the protection of its illuminated
+cornice, this winter, upon no faces more intelligently upturned than
+those of the young women for whom Bach and Beethoven only repeated, in a
+myriad forms, the idea that was always with them. Symphonies and fugues
+only stimulated their convictions, excited their revolutionary passion,
+led their imagination further in the direction in which it was always
+pressing. It lifted them to immeasurable heights; and as they sat
+looking at the great florid, sombre organ, overhanging the bronze statue
+of Beethoven, they felt that this was the only temple in which the
+votaries of their creed could worship.
+
+And yet their music was not their greatest joy, for they had two others
+which they cultivated at least as zealously. One of these was simply the
+society of old Miss Birdseye, of whom Olive saw more this winter than
+she had ever seen before. It had become apparent that her long and
+beautiful career was drawing to a close, her earnest, unremitting work
+was over, her old-fashioned weapons were broken and dull. Olive would
+have liked to hang them up as venerable relics of a patient fight, and
+this was what she seemed to do when she made the poor lady relate her
+battles--never glorious and brilliant, but obscure and wastefully
+heroic--call back the figures of her companions in arms, exhibit her
+medals and scars. Miss Birdseye knew that her uses were ended; she might
+pretend still to go about the business of unpopular causes, might fumble
+for papers in her immemorial satchel and think she had important
+appointments, might sign petitions, attend conventions, say to Doctor
+Prance that if she would only make her sleep she should live to see a
+great many improvements yet; she ached and was weary, growing almost as
+glad to look back (a great anomaly for Miss Birdseye) as to look
+forward. She let herself be coddled now by her friends of the new
+generation; there were days when she seemed to want nothing better than
+to sit by Olive's fire and ramble on about the old struggles, with a
+vague, comfortable sense--no physical rapture of Miss Birdseye's could
+be very acute--of immunity from wet feet, from the draughts that prevail
+at thin meetings, of independence of street-cars that would probably
+arrive overflowing; and also a pleased perception, not that she was an
+example to these fresh lives which began with more advantages than hers,
+but that she was in some degree an encouragement, as she helped them to
+measure the way the new truths had advanced--being able to tell them of
+such a different state of things when she was a young lady, the daughter
+of a very talented teacher (indeed her mother had been a teacher too),
+down in Connecticut. She had always had for Olive a kind of aroma of
+martyrdom, and her battered, unremunerated, un-pensioned old age brought
+angry tears, springing from depths of outraged theory, into Miss
+Chancellor's eyes. For Verena, too, she was a picturesque humanitary
+figure. Verena had been in the habit of meeting martyrs from her
+childhood up, but she had seen none with so many reminiscences as Miss
+Birdseye, or who had been so nearly scorched by penal fires. She had had
+escapes, in the early days of abolitionism, which it was a marvel she
+could tell with so little implication that she had shown courage. She
+had roamed through certain parts of the South, carrying the Bible to the
+slave; and more than one of her companions, in the course of these
+expeditions, had been tarred and feathered. She herself, at one season,
+had spent a month in a Georgian jail. She had preached temperance in
+Irish circles where the doctrine was received with missiles; she had
+interfered between wives and husbands mad with drink; she had taken
+filthy children, picked up in the street, to her own poor rooms, and had
+removed their pestilent rags and washed their sore bodies with slippery
+little hands. In her own person she appeared to Olive and Verena a
+representative of suffering humanity; the pity they felt for her was
+part of their pity for all who were weakest and most hardly used; and it
+struck Miss Chancellor (more especially) that this frumpy little
+missionary was the last link in a tradition, and that when she should be
+called away the heroic age of New England life--the age of plain living
+and high thinking, of pure ideals and earnest effort, of moral passion
+and noble experiment--would effectually be closed. It was the perennial
+freshness of Miss Birdseye's faith that had had such a contagion for
+these modern maidens, the unquenched flame of her transcendentalism, the
+simplicity of her vision, the way in which, in spite of mistakes,
+deceptions, the changing fashions of reform, which make the remedies of
+a previous generation look as ridiculous as their bonnets, the only
+thing that was still actual for her was the elevation of the species by
+the reading of Emerson and the frequentation of Tremont Temple. Olive
+had been active enough, for years, in the city-missions; she too had
+scoured dirty children, and, in squalid lodging-houses, had gone into
+rooms where the domestic situation was strained and the noises made the
+neighbours turn pale. But she reflected that after such exertions she
+had the refreshment of a pretty house, a drawing-room full of flowers, a
+crackling hearth, where she threw in pine-cones and made them snap, an
+imported tea-service, a Chickering piano, and the _Deutsche Rundschau_;
+whereas Miss Birdseye had only a bare, vulgar room, with a hideous
+flowered carpet (it looked like a dentist's), a cold furnace, the
+evening paper, and Doctor Prance. Olive and Verena were present at
+another of her gatherings before the winter ended; it resembled the
+occasion that we described at the beginning of this history, with the
+difference that Mrs. Farrinder was not there to oppress the company with
+her greatness, and that Verena made a speech without the co-operation of
+her father. This young lady had delivered herself with even finer effect
+than before, and Olive could see how much she had gained, in confidence
+and range of allusion, since the educative process in Charles Street
+began. Her _motif_ was now a kind of unprepared tribute to Miss
+Birdseye, the fruit of the occasion and of the unanimous tenderness of
+the younger members of the circle, which made her a willing mouthpiece.
+She pictured her laborious career, her early associates (Eliza P.
+Moseley was not neglected as Verena passed), her difficulties and
+dangers and triumphs, her humanising effect upon so many, her serene and
+honoured old age--expressed, in short, as one of the ladies said, just
+the very way they all felt about her. Verena's face brightened and grew
+triumphant as she spoke, but she brought tears into the eyes of most of
+the others. It was Olive's opinion that nothing could be more graceful
+and touching, and she saw that the impression made was now deeper than
+on the former evening. Miss Birdseye went about with her eighty years of
+innocence, her undiscriminating spectacles, asking her friends if it
+wasn't perfectly splendid; she took none of it to herself, she regarded
+it only as a brilliant expression of Verena's gift. Olive thought,
+afterwards, that if a collection could only be taken up on the spot, the
+good lady would be made easy for the rest of her days; then she
+remembered that most of her guests were as impecunious as herself.
+
+I have intimated that our young friends had a source of fortifying
+emotion which was distinct from the hours they spent with Beethoven and
+Bach, or in hearing Miss Birdseye describe Concord as it used to be.
+This consisted in the wonderful insight they had obtained into the
+history of feminine anguish. They perused that chapter perpetually and
+zealously, and they derived from it the purest part of their mission.
+Olive had pored over it so long, so earnestly, that she was now in
+complete possession of the subject; it was the one thing in life which
+she felt she had really mastered. She was able to exhibit it to Verena
+with the greatest authority and accuracy, to lead her up and down, in
+and out, through all the darkest and most tortuous passages. We know
+that she was without belief in her own eloquence, but she was very
+eloquent when she reminded Verena how the exquisite weakness of women
+had never been their defence, but had only exposed them to sufferings
+more acute than masculine grossness can conceive. Their odious partner
+had trampled upon them from the beginning of time, and their tenderness,
+their abnegation, had been his opportunity. All the bullied wives, the
+stricken mothers, the dishonoured, deserted maidens who have lived on
+the earth and longed to leave it, passed and repassed before her eyes,
+and the interminable dim procession seemed to stretch out a myriad hands
+to her. She sat with them at their trembling vigils, listened for the
+tread, the voice, at which they grew pale and sick, walked with them by
+the dark waters that offered to wash away misery and shame, took with
+them, even, when the vision grew intense, the last shuddering leap. She
+had analysed to an extraordinary fineness their susceptibility, their
+softness; she knew (or she thought she knew) all the possible tortures
+of anxiety, of suspense and dread; and she had made up her mind that it
+was women, in the end, who had paid for everything. In the last resort
+the whole burden of the human lot came upon them; it pressed upon them
+far more than on the others, the intolerable load of fate. It was they
+who sat cramped and chained to receive it; it was they who had done all
+the waiting and taken all the wounds. The sacrifices, the blood, the
+tears, the terrors were theirs. Their organism was in itself a challenge
+to suffering, and men had practised upon it with an impudence that knew
+no bounds. As they were the weakest most had been wrung from them, and
+as they were the most generous they had been most deceived. Olive
+Chancellor would have rested her case, had it been necessary, on those
+general facts; and her simple and comprehensive contention was that the
+peculiar wretchedness which had been the very essence of the feminine
+lot was a monstrous artificial imposition, crying aloud for redress. She
+was willing to admit that women, too, could be bad; that there were many
+about the world who were false, immoral, vile. But their errors were as
+nothing to their sufferings; they had expiated, in advance, an eternity,
+if need be, of misconduct. Olive poured forth these views to her
+listening and responsive friend; she presented them again and again, and
+there was no light in which they did not seem to palpitate with truth.
+Verena was immensely wrought upon; a subtle fire passed into her; she
+was not so hungry for revenge as Olive, but at the last, before they
+went to Europe (I shall take no place to describe the manner in which
+she threw herself into that project), she quite agreed with her
+companion that after so many ages of wrong (it would also be after the
+European journey) men must take _their_ turn, men must pay!
+
+
+
+
+BOOK SECOND
+
+
+
+
+XXI
+
+
+Basil Ransom lived in New York, rather far to the eastward, and in the
+upper reaches of the town; he occupied two small shabby rooms in a
+somewhat decayed mansion which stood next to the corner of the Second
+Avenue. The corner itself was formed by a considerable grocer's shop,
+the near neighbourhood of which was fatal to any pretensions Ransom and
+his fellow-lodgers might have had in regard to gentility of situation.
+The house had a red, rusty face, and faded green shutters, of which the
+slats were limp and at variance with each other. In one of the lower
+windows was suspended a fly-blown card, with the words "Table Board"
+affixed in letters cut (not very neatly) out of coloured paper, of
+graduated tints, and surrounded with a small band of stamped gilt. The
+two sides of the shop were protected by an immense pent-house shed,
+which projected over a greasy pavement and was supported by wooden posts
+fixed in the curbstone. Beneath it, on the dislocated flags, barrels and
+baskets were freely and picturesquely grouped; an open cellarway yawned
+beneath the feet of those who might pause to gaze too fondly on the
+savoury wares displayed in the window; a strong odour of smoked fish,
+combined with a fragrance of molasses, hung about the spot; the
+pavement, toward the gutters, was fringed with dirty panniers, heaped
+with potatoes, carrots, and onions; and a smart, bright waggon, with the
+horse detached from the shafts, drawn up on the edge of the abominable
+road (it contained holes and ruts a foot deep, and immemorial
+accumulations of stagnant mud), imparted an idle, rural, pastoral air to
+a scene otherwise perhaps expressive of a rank civilisation. The
+establishment was of the kind known to New Yorkers as a Dutch grocery;
+and red-faced, yellow-haired, bare-armed vendors might have been
+observed to lounge in the doorway. I mention it not on account of any
+particular influence it may have had on the life or the thoughts of
+Basil Ransom, but for old acquaintance sake and that of local colour;
+besides which, a figure is nothing without a setting, and our young man
+came and went every day, with rather an indifferent, unperceiving step,
+it is true, among the objects I have briefly designated. One of his
+rooms was directly above the street-door of the house; such a dormitory,
+when it is so exiguous, is called in the nomenclature of New York a
+"hall bedroom." The sitting-room, beside it, was slightly larger, and
+they both commanded a row of tenements no less degenerate than Ransom's
+own habitation--houses built forty years before, and already sere and
+superannuated. These were also painted red, and the bricks were
+accentuated by a white line; they were garnished, on the first floor,
+with balconies covered with small tin roofs, striped in different
+colours, and with an elaborate iron lattice-work, which gave them a
+repressive, cage-like appearance, and caused them slightly to resemble
+the little boxes for peeping unseen into the street, which are a feature
+of oriental towns. Such posts of observation commanded a view of the
+grocery on the corner, of the relaxed and disjointed roadway, enlivened
+at the curbstone with an occasional ash-barrel or with gas-lamps
+drooping from the perpendicular, and westward, at the end of the
+truncated vista, of the fantastic skeleton of the Elevated Railway,
+overhanging the transverse longitudinal street, which it darkened and
+smothered with the immeasurable spinal column and myriad clutching paws
+of an antediluvian monster. If the opportunity were not denied me here,
+I should like to give some account of Basil Ransom's interior, of
+certain curious persons of both sexes, for the most part not favourites
+of fortune, who had found an obscure asylum there; some picture of the
+crumpled little _table d'hôte_, at two dollars and a half a week, where
+everything felt sticky, which went forward in the low-ceiled basement,
+under the conduct of a couple of shuffling negresses, who mingled in the
+conversation and indulged in low, mysterious chuckles when it took a
+facetious turn. But we need, in strictness, concern ourselves with it no
+further than to gather the implication that the young Mississippian,
+even a year and a half after that momentous visit of his to Boston, had
+not made his profession very lucrative.
+
+He had been diligent, he had been ambitious, but he had not yet been
+successful. During the few weeks preceding the moment at which we meet
+him again, he had even begun to lose faith altogether in his earthly
+destiny. It became much of a question with him whether success in any
+form was written there; whether for a hungry young Mississippian,
+without means, without friends, wanting, too, in the highest energy, the
+wisdom of the serpent, personal arts and national prestige, the game of
+life was to be won in New York. He had been on the point of giving it up
+and returning to the home of his ancestors, where, as he heard from his
+mother, there was still just a sufficient supply of hot corn-cake to
+support existence. He had never believed much in his luck, but during
+the last year it had been guilty of aberrations surprising even to a
+constant, an imperturbable, victim of fate. Not only had he not extended
+his connexion, but he had lost most of the little business which was an
+object of complacency to him a twelvemonth before. He had had none but
+small jobs, and he had made a mess of more than one of them. Such
+accidents had not had a happy effect upon his reputation; he had been
+able to perceive that this fair flower may be nipped when it is so
+tender a bud as scarcely to be palpable. He had formed a partnership
+with a person who seemed likely to repair some of his deficiencies--a
+young man from Rhode Island, acquainted, according to his own
+expression, with the inside track. But this gentleman himself, as it
+turned out, would have been better for a good deal of remodelling, and
+Ransom's principal deficiency, which was, after all, that of cash, was
+not less apparent to him after his colleague, prior to a sudden and
+unexplained departure for Europe, had drawn the slender accumulations of
+the firm out of the bank. Ransom sat for hours in his office, waiting
+for clients who either did not come, or, if they did come, did not seem
+to find him encouraging, as they usually left him with the remark that
+they would think what they would do. They thought to little purpose, and
+seldom reappeared, so that at last he began to wonder whether there were
+not a prejudice against his Southern complexion. Perhaps they didn't
+like the way he spoke. If they could show him a better way, he was
+willing to adopt it; but the manner of New York could not be acquired by
+precept, and example, somehow, was not in this case contagious. He
+wondered whether he were stupid and unskilled, and he was finally
+obliged to confess to himself that he was unpractical.
+
+This confession was in itself a proof of the fact, for nothing could be
+less fruitful than such a speculation, terminating in such a way. He was
+perfectly aware that he cared a great deal for the theory, and so his
+visitors must have thought when they found him, with one of his long
+legs twisted round the other, reading a volume of De Tocqueville. That
+was the land of reading he liked; he had thought a great deal about
+social and economical questions, forms of government and the happiness
+of peoples. The convictions he had arrived at were not such as mix
+gracefully with the time-honoured verities a young lawyer looking out
+for business is in the habit of taking for granted; but he had to
+reflect that these doctrines would probably not contribute any more to
+his prosperity in Mississippi than in New York. Indeed, he scarcely
+could think of the country where they would be a particular advantage to
+him. It came home to him that his opinions were stiff, whereas in
+comparison his effort was lax; and he accordingly began to wonder
+whether he might not make a living by his opinions. He had always had a
+desire for public life; to cause one's ideas to be embodied in national
+conduct appeared to him the highest form of human enjoyment. But there
+was little enough that was public in his solitary studies, and he asked
+himself what was the use of his having an office at all, and why he
+might not as well carry on his profession at the Astor Library, where,
+in his spare hours and on chance holidays, he did an immense deal of
+suggestive reading. He took copious notes and memoranda, and these
+things sometimes shaped themselves in a way that might possibly commend
+them to the editors of periodicals. Readers perhaps would come, if
+clients didn't; so he produced, with a great deal of labour,
+half-a-dozen articles, from which, when they were finished, it seemed to
+him that he had omitted all the points he wished most to make, and
+addressed them to the powers that preside over weekly and monthly
+publications. They were all declined with thanks, and he would have been
+forced to believe that the accent of his languid clime brought him luck
+as little under the pen as on the lips, had not another explanation been
+suggested by one of the more explicit of his oracles, in relation to a
+paper on the rights of minorities. This gentleman pointed out that his
+doctrines were about three hundred years behind the age; doubtless some
+magazine of the sixteenth century would have been very happy to print
+them. This threw light on his own suspicion that he was attached to
+causes that could only, in the nature of things, be unpopular. The
+disagreeable editor was right about his being out of date, only he had
+got the time wrong. He had come centuries too soon; he was not too old,
+but too new. Such an impression, however, would not have prevented him
+from going into politics, if there had been any other way to represent
+constituencies than by being elected. People might be found eccentric
+enough to vote for him in Mississippi, but meanwhile where should he
+find the twenty-dollar greenbacks which it was his ambition to transmit
+from time to time to his female relations, confined so constantly to a
+farinaceous diet? It came over him with some force that his opinions
+would not yield interest, and the evaporation of this pleasing
+hypothesis made him feel like a man in an open boat, at sea, who should
+just have parted with his last rag of canvas.
+
+I shall not attempt a complete description of Ransom's ill-starred
+views, being convinced that the reader will guess them as he goes, for
+they had a frolicsome, ingenious way of peeping out of the young man's
+conversation. I shall do them sufficient justice in saying that he was
+by natural disposition a good deal of a stoic, and that, as the result
+of a considerable intellectual experience, he was, in social and
+political matters, a reactionary. I suppose he was very conceited, for
+he was much addicted to judging his age. He thought it talkative,
+querulous, hysterical, maudlin, full of false ideas, of unhealthy germs,
+of extravagant, dissipated habits, for which a great reckoning was in
+store. He was an immense admirer of the late Thomas Carlyle, and was
+very suspicious of the encroachments of modern democracy. I know not
+exactly how these queer heresies had planted themselves, but he had a
+longish pedigree (it had flowered at one time with English royalists and
+cavaliers), and he seemed at moments to be inhabited by some transmitted
+spirit of a robust but narrow ancestor, some broad-faced wig-wearer or
+sword-bearer, with a more primitive conception of manhood than our
+modern temperament appears to require, and a programme of human felicity
+much less varied. He liked his pedigree, he revered his forefathers, and
+he rather pitied those who might come after him. In saying so, however,
+I betray him a little, for he never mentioned such feelings as these.
+Though he thought the age too talkative, as I have hinted, he liked to
+talk as well as any one; but he could hold his tongue, if that were more
+expressive, and he usually did so when his perplexities were greatest.
+He had been sitting for several evenings in a beer-cellar, smoking his
+pipe with a profundity of reticence. This attitude was so unbroken that
+it marked a crisis--the complete, the acute consciousness of his
+personal situation. It was the cheapest way he knew of spending an
+evening. At this particular establishment the _Schoppen_ were very tall
+and the beer was very good; and as the host and most of the guests were
+German, and their colloquial tongue was unknown to him, he was not drawn
+into any undue expenditure of speech. He watched his smoke and he
+thought, thought so hard that at last he appeared to himself to have
+exhausted the thinkable. When this moment of combined relief and dismay
+arrived (on the last of the evenings that we are concerned with), he
+took his way down Third Avenue and reached his humble dwelling. Till
+within a short time there had been a resource for him at such an hour
+and in such a mood; a little variety-actress, who lived in the house,
+and with whom he had established the most cordial relations, was often
+having her supper (she took it somewhere, every night, after the
+theatre) in the dim, close dining-room, and he used to drop in and talk
+to her. But she had lately married, to his great amusement, and her
+husband had taken her on a wedding-tour, which was to be at the same
+time professional. On this occasion he mounted, with rather a heavy
+tread, to his rooms, where (on the rickety writing-table in the parlour)
+he found a note from Mrs. Luna. I need not reproduce it _in extenso_; a
+pale reflexion of it will serve. She reproached him with neglecting her,
+wanted to know what had become of him, whether he had grown too
+fashionable for a person who cared only for serious society. She accused
+him of having changed, and inquired as to the reason of his coldness.
+Was it too much to ask whether he could tell her at least in what manner
+she had offended him? She used to think they were so much in
+sympathy--he expressed her own ideas about everything so vividly. She
+liked intellectual companionship, and she had none now. She hoped very
+much he would come and see her--as he used to do six months before--the
+following evening; and however much she might have sinned or he might
+have altered, she was at least always his affectionate cousin Adeline.
+
+"What the deuce does she want of me now?" It was with this somewhat
+ungracious exclamation that he tossed away his cousin Adeline's missive.
+The gesture might have indicated that he meant to take no notice of her;
+nevertheless, after a day had elapsed, he presented himself before her.
+He knew what she wanted of old--that is, a year ago; she had wanted him
+to look after her property and to be tutor to her son. He had lent
+himself, good-naturedly, to this desire--he was touched by so much
+confidence--but the experiment had speedily collapsed. Mrs. Luna's
+affairs were in the hands of trustees, who had complete care of them,
+and Ransom instantly perceived that his function would be simply to
+meddle in things that didn't concern him. The levity with which she had
+exposed him to the derision of the lawful guardians of her fortune
+opened his eyes to some of the dangers of cousinship; nevertheless he
+said to himself that he might turn an honest penny by giving an hour or
+two every day to the education of her little boy. But this, too, proved
+a brief illusion. Ransom had to find his time in the afternoon; he left
+his business at five o'clock and remained with his young kinsman till
+the hour of dinner. At the end of a few weeks he thought himself lucky
+in retiring without broken shins. That Newton's little nature was
+remarkable had often been insisted on by his mother; but it was
+remarkable, Ransom saw, for the absence of any of the qualities which
+attach a teacher to a pupil. He was in truth an insufferable child,
+entertaining for the Latin language a personal, physical hostility,
+which expressed itself in convulsions of rage. During these paroxysms he
+kicked furiously at every one and everything--at poor "Rannie," at his
+mother, at Messrs. Andrews and Stoddard, at the illustrious men of Rome,
+at the universe in general, to which, as he lay on his back on the
+carpet, he presented a pair of singularly active little heels. Mrs. Luna
+had a way of being present at his lessons, and when they passed, as
+sooner or later they were sure to, into the stage I have described, she
+interceded for her overwrought darling, reminded Ransom that these were
+the signs of an exquisite sensibility, begged that the child might be
+allowed to rest a little, and spent the remainder of the time in
+conversation with the preceptor. It came to seem to him, very soon, that
+he was not earning his fee; besides which, it was disagreeable to him to
+have pecuniary relations with a lady who had not the art of concealing
+from him that she liked to place him under obligations. He resigned his
+tutorship, and drew a long breath, having a vague feeling that he had
+escaped a danger. He could not have told you exactly what it was, and he
+had a certain sentimental, provincial respect for women which even
+prevented him from attempting to give a name to it in his own thoughts.
+He was addicted with the ladies to the old forms of address and of
+gallantry; he held that they were delicate, agreeable creatures, whom
+Providence had placed under the protection of the bearded sex; and it
+was not merely a humorous idea with him that whatever might be the
+defects of Southern gentlemen, they were at any rate remarkable for
+their chivalry. He was a man who still, in a slangy age, could pronounce
+that word with a perfectly serious face.
+
+This boldness did not prevent him from thinking that women were
+essentially inferior to men, and infinitely tiresome when they declined
+to accept the lot which men had made for them. He had the most definite
+notions about their place in nature, in society, and was perfectly easy
+in his mind as to whether it excluded them from any proper homage. The
+chivalrous man paid that tax with alacrity. He admitted their rights;
+these consisted in a standing claim to the generosity and tenderness of
+the stronger race. The exercise of such feelings was full of advantage
+for both sexes, and they flowed most freely, of course, when women were
+gracious and grateful. It may be said that he had a higher conception of
+politeness than most of the persons who desired the advent of female
+law-makers. When I have added that he hated to see women eager and
+argumentative, and thought that their softness and docility were the
+inspiration, the opportunity (the highest) of man, I shall have sketched
+a state of mind which will doubtless strike many readers as painfully
+crude. It had prevented Basil Ransom, at any rate, from putting the dots
+on his _i_'s, as the French say, in this gradual discovery that Mrs.
+Luna was making love to him. The process went on a long time before he
+became aware of it. He had perceived very soon that she was a
+tremendously familiar little woman--that she took, more rapidly than he
+had ever known, a high degree of intimacy for granted. But as she had
+seemed to him neither very fresh nor very beautiful, so he could not
+easily have represented to himself why she should take it into her head
+to marry (it would never have occurred to him to doubt that she wanted
+marriage) an obscure and penniless Mississippian, with womenkind of his
+own to provide for. He could not guess that he answered to a certain
+secret ideal of Mrs. Luna's, who loved the landed gentry even when
+landless, who adored a Southerner under any circumstances, who thought
+her kinsman a fine, manly, melancholy, disinterested type, and who was
+sure that her views of public matters, the questions of the age, the
+vulgar character of modern life, would meet with a perfect response in
+his mind. She could see by the way he talked that he was a conservative,
+and this was the motto inscribed upon her own silken banner. She took
+this unpopular line both by temperament and by reaction from her
+sister's "extreme" views, the sight of the dreadful people that they
+brought about her. In reality, Olive was distinguished and
+discriminating, and Adeline was the dupe of confusions in which the
+worse was apt to be mistaken for the better. She talked to Ransom about
+the inferiority of republics, the distressing persons she had met abroad
+in the legations of the United States, the bad manners of servants and
+shopkeepers in that country, the hope she entertained that "the good old
+families" would make a stand; but he never suspected that she cultivated
+these topics (her treatment of them struck him as highly comical) for
+the purpose of leading him to the altar, of beguiling the way. Least of
+all could he suppose that she would be indifferent to his want of
+income--a point in which he failed to do her justice; for, thinking the
+fact that he had remained poor a proof of delicacy in that shopkeeping
+age, it gave her much pleasure to reflect that, as Newton's little
+property was settled on him (with safeguards which showed how
+long-headed poor Mr. Luna had been, and large-hearted, too, since to
+what he left _her_ no disagreeable conditions, such as eternal mourning,
+for instance, were attached)--that as Newton, I say, enjoyed the
+pecuniary independence which befitted his character, her own income was
+ample even for two, and she might give herself the luxury of taking a
+husband who should owe her something. Basil Ransom did not divine all
+this, but he divined that it was not for nothing that Mrs. Luna wrote
+him little notes every other day, that she proposed to drive him in the
+Park at unnatural hours, and that when he said he had his business to
+attend to, she replied: "Oh, a plague on your business! I am sick of
+that word--one hears of nothing else in America. There are ways of
+getting on without business, if you would only take them!" He seldom
+answered her notes, and he disliked extremely the way in which, in spite
+of her love of form and order, she attempted to clamber in at the window
+of one's house when one had locked the door; so that he began to
+interspace his visits considerably, and at last made them very rare.
+When I reflect on his habits of almost superstitious politeness to
+women, it comes over me that some very strong motive must have operated
+to make him give his friendly--his only too friendly--cousin the cold
+shoulder. Nevertheless, when he received her reproachful letter (after
+it had had time to work a little), he said to himself that he had
+perhaps been unjust and even brutal, and as he was easily touched by
+remorse of this kind, he took up the broken thread.
+
+
+
+
+XXII
+
+
+As he sat with Mrs. Luna, in her little back drawing-room, under the
+lamp, he felt rather more tolerant than before of the pressure she could
+not help putting upon him. Several months had elapsed, and he was no
+nearer to the sort of success he had hoped for. It stole over him gently
+that there was another sort, pretty visibly open to him, not so elevated
+nor so manly, it is true, but on which he should after all, perhaps, be
+able to reconcile it with his honour to fall back. Mrs. Luna had had an
+inspiration; for once in her life she had held her tongue. She had not
+made him a scene, there had been no question of an explanation; she had
+received him as if he had been there the day before, with the addition
+of a spice of mysterious melancholy. She might have made up her mind
+that she had lost him as what she had hoped, but that it was better than
+desolation to try and keep him as a friend. It was as if she wished him
+to see now how she tried. She was subdued and consolatory, she waited
+upon him, moved away a screen that intercepted the fire, remarked that
+he looked very tired, and rang for some tea. She made no inquiry about
+his affairs, never asked if he had been busy and prosperous; and this
+reticence struck him as unexpectedly delicate and discreet; it was as if
+she had guessed, by a subtle feminine faculty, that his professional
+career was nothing to boast of. There was a simplicity in him which
+permitted him to wonder whether she had not improved. The lamp-light was
+soft, the fire crackled pleasantly, everything that surrounded him
+betrayed a woman's taste and touch; the place was decorated and
+cushioned in perfection, delightfully private and personal, the picture
+of a well-appointed home. Mrs. Luna had complained of the difficulties
+of installing one's self in America, but Ransom remembered that he had
+received an impression similar to this in her sister's house in Boston,
+and reflected that these ladies had, as a family-trait, the art of
+making themselves comfortable. It was better for a winter's evening than
+the German beer-cellar (Mrs. Luna's tea was excellent), and his hostess
+herself appeared to-night almost as amiable as the variety-actress. At
+the end of an hour he felt, I will not say almost marriageable, but
+almost married. Images of leisure played before him, leisure in which he
+saw himself covering foolscap paper with his views on several subjects,
+and with favourable illustrations of Southern eloquence. It became
+tolerably vivid to him that if editors wouldn't print one's
+lucubrations, it would be a comfort to feel that one was able to publish
+them at one's own expense.
+
+He had a moment of almost complete illusion. Mrs. Luna had taken up her
+bit of crochet; she was sitting opposite to him, on the other side of
+the fire. Her white hands moved with little jerks as she took her
+stitches, and her rings flashed and twinkled in the light of the hearth.
+Her head fell a little to one side, exhibiting the plumpness of her chin
+and neck, and her dropped eyes (it gave her a little modest air) rested
+quietly on her work. A silence of a few moments had fallen upon their
+talk, and Adeline--who decidedly _had_ improved--appeared also to feel
+the charm of it, not to wish to break it. Basil Ransom was conscious of
+all this, and at the same time he was vaguely engaged in a speculation.
+If it gave one time, if it gave one leisure, was not that in itself a
+high motive? Thorough study of the question he cared for most--was not
+the chance for _that_ an infinitely desirable good? He seemed to see
+himself, to feel himself, in that very chair, in the evenings of the
+future, reading some indispensable book in the still lamp-light--Mrs.
+Luna knew where to get such pretty mellowing shades. Should he not be
+able to act in that way upon the public opinion of his time, to check
+certain tendencies, to point out certain dangers, to indulge in much
+salutary criticism? Was it not one's duty to put one's self in the best
+conditions for such action? And as the silence continued he almost fell
+to musing on his duty, almost persuaded himself that the moral law
+commanded him to marry Mrs. Luna. She looked up presently from her work,
+their eyes met, and she smiled. He might have believed she had guessed
+what he was thinking of. This idea startled him, alarmed him a little,
+so that when Mrs. Luna said, with her sociable manner, "There is nothing
+I like so much, of a winter's night, as a cosy _tête-à-tête_ by the
+fire. It's quite like Darby and Joan; what a pity the kettle has ceased
+singing!"--when she uttered these insinuating words he gave himself a
+little imperceptible shake, which was, however, enough to break the
+spell, and made no response more direct than to ask her, in a moment, in
+a tone of cold, mild curiosity, whether she had lately heard from her
+sister, and how long Miss Chancellor intended to remain in Europe.
+
+"Well, you _have_ been living in your hole!" Mrs. Luna exclaimed. "Olive
+came home six weeks ago. How long did you expect her to endure it?"
+
+"I am sure I don't know; I have never been there," Ransom replied.
+
+"Yes, that's what I like you for," Mrs. Luna remarked sweetly. "If a man
+is nice without it, it's such a pleasant change."
+
+The young man started, then gave a natural laugh. "Lord, how few reasons
+there must be!"
+
+"Oh, I mention that one because I can tell it. I shouldn't care to tell
+the others."
+
+"I am glad you have some to fall back upon, the day I should go," Ransom
+went on. "I thought you thought so much of Europe."
+
+"So I do; but it isn't everything," said Mrs. Luna philosophically. "You
+had better go there with me," she added, with a certain inconsequence.
+
+"One would go to the end of the world with so irresistible a lady!"
+Ransom exclaimed, falling into the tone which Mrs. Luna always found so
+unsatisfactory. It was a part of his Southern gallantry--his accent
+always came out strongly when he said anything of that sort--and it
+committed him to nothing in particular. She had had occasion to wish,
+more than once, that he wouldn't be so beastly polite, as she used to
+hear people say in England. She answered that she didn't care about
+ends, she cared about beginnings; but he didn't take up the declaration;
+he returned to the subject of Olive, wanted to know what she had done
+over there, whether she had worked them up much.
+
+"Oh, of course, she fascinated every one," said Mrs. Luna. "With her
+grace and beauty, her general style, how could she help that?"
+
+"But did she bring them round, did she swell the host that is prepared
+to march under her banner?"
+
+"I suppose she saw plenty of the strong-minded, plenty of vicious old
+maids, and fanatics, and frumps. But I haven't the least idea what she
+accomplished--what they call 'wonders,' I suppose."
+
+"Didn't you see her when she returned?" Basil Ransom asked.
+
+"How could I see her? I can see pretty far, but I can't see all the way
+to Boston." And then, in explaining that it was at this port that her
+sister had disembarked, Mrs. Luna further inquired whether he could
+imagine Olive doing anything in a first-rate way, as long as there were
+inferior ones. "Of course she likes bad ships--Boston steamers--just as
+she likes common people, and red-haired hoydens, and preposterous
+doctrines."
+
+Ransom was silent a moment. "Do you mean the--a--rather striking young
+lady whom I met in Boston a year ago last October? What was her
+name?--Miss Tarrant? Does Miss Chancellor like her as much as ever?"
+
+"Mercy! don't you know she took her to Europe? It was to form _her_ mind
+she went. Didn't I tell you that last summer? You used to come to see me
+then."
+
+"Oh yes, I remember," Ransom said, rather musingly. "And did she bring
+her back?"
+
+"Gracious, you don't suppose she would leave her! Olive thinks she's
+born to regenerate the world."
+
+"I remember you telling me that, too. It comes back to me. Well, is her
+mind formed?"
+
+"As I haven't seen it, I cannot tell you."
+
+"Aren't you going on there to see----"
+
+"To see whether Miss Tarrant's mind is formed?" Mrs. Luna broke in. "I
+will go if you would like me to. I remember your being immensely excited
+about her that time you met her. Don't you recollect that?"
+
+Ransom hesitated an instant. "I can't say I do. It is too long ago."
+
+"Yes, I have no doubt that's the way you change, about women! Poor Miss
+Tarrant, if she thinks she made an impression on you!"
+
+"She won't think about such things as that, if her mind has been formed
+by your sister," Ransom said. "It does come back to me now, what you
+told me about the growth of their intimacy. And do they mean to go on
+living together for ever?"
+
+"I suppose so--unless some one should take it into his head to marry
+Verena."
+
+"Verena--is that her name?" Ransom asked.
+
+Mrs. Luna looked at him with a suspended needle. "Well! have you
+forgotten that too? You told me yourself you thought it so pretty, that
+time in Boston, when you walked me up the hill." Ransom declared that he
+remembered that walk, but didn't remember everything he had said to her;
+and she suggested, very satirically, that perhaps he would like to marry
+Verena himself--he seemed so interested in her. Ransom shook his head
+sadly, and said he was afraid he was not in a position to marry;
+whereupon Mrs. Luna asked him what he meant--did he mean (after a
+moment's hesitation) that he was too poor?
+
+"Never in the world--I am very rich; I make an enormous income!" the
+young man exclaimed; so that, remarking his tone, and the slight flush
+of annoyance that rose to his face, Mrs. Luna was quick enough to judge
+that she had overstepped the mark. She remembered (she ought to have
+remembered before) that he had never taken her in the least into his
+confidence about his affairs. That was not the Southern way, and he was
+at least as proud as he was poor. In this surmise she was just; Basil
+Ransom would have despised himself if he had been capable of confessing
+to a woman that he couldn't make a living. Such questions were none of
+their business (their business was simply to be provided for, practise
+the domestic virtues, and be charmingly grateful), and there was, to his
+sense, something almost indecent in talking about them. Mrs. Luna felt
+doubly sorry for him as she perceived that he denied himself the luxury
+of sympathy (that is, of hers), and the vague but comprehensive sigh
+that passed her lips as she took up her crochet again was unusually
+expressive of helplessness. She said that of course she knew how great
+his talents were--he could do anything he wanted; and Basil Ransom
+wondered for a moment whether, if she were to ask him point-blank to
+marry her, it would be consistent with the high courtesy of a Southern
+gentleman to refuse. After she should be his wife he might of course
+confess to her that he was too poor to marry, for in that relation even
+a Southern gentleman of the highest tone must sometimes unbend. But he
+didn't in the least long for this arrangement, and was conscious that
+the most pertinent sequel to her conjecture would be for him to take up
+his hat and walk away.
+
+Within five minutes, however, he had come to desire to do this almost as
+little as to marry Mrs. Luna. He wanted to hear more about the girl who
+lived with Olive Chancellor. Something had revived in him--an old
+curiosity, an image half effaced--when he learned that she had come back
+to America. He had taken a wrong impression from what Mrs. Luna said,
+nearly a year before, about her sister's visit to Europe; he had
+supposed it was to be a long absence, that Miss Chancellor wanted
+perhaps to get the little prophetess away from her parents, possibly
+even away from some amorous entanglement. Then, no doubt, they wanted to
+study up the woman-question with the facilities that Europe would offer;
+he didn't know much about Europe, but he had an idea that it was a great
+place for facilities. His knowledge of Miss Chancellor's departure,
+accompanied by her young companion, had checked at the time, on Ransom's
+part, a certain habit of idle but none the less entertaining retrospect.
+His life, on the whole, had not been rich in episode, and that little
+chapter of his visit to his queer, clever, capricious cousin, with his
+evening at Miss Birdseye's, and his glimpse, repeated on the morrow, of
+the strange, beautiful, ridiculous, red-haired young _improvisatrice_,
+unrolled itself in his memory like a page of interesting fiction. The
+page seemed to fade, however, when he heard that the two girls had gone,
+for an indefinite time, to unknown lands; this carried them out of his
+range, spoiled the perspective, diminished their actuality; so that for
+several months past, with his increase of anxiety about his own affairs,
+and the low pitch of his spirits, he had not thought at all about Verena
+Tarrant. The fact that she was once more in Boston, with a certain
+contiguity that it seemed to imply between Boston and New York,
+presented itself now as important and agreeable. He was conscious that
+this was rather an anomaly, and his consciousness made him, had already
+made him, dissimulate slightly. He did not pick up his hat to go; he sat
+in his chair taking his chance of the tax which Mrs. Luna might lay upon
+his urbanity. He remembered that he had not made, as yet, any very eager
+inquiry about Newton, who at this late hour had succumbed to the only
+influence that tames the untamable and was sleeping the sleep of
+childhood, if not of innocence. Ransom repaired his neglect in a manner
+which elicited the most copious response from his hostess. The boy had
+had a good many tutors since Ransom gave him up, and it could not be
+said that his education languished. Mrs. Luna spoke with pride of the
+manner in which he went through them; if he did not master his lessons,
+he mastered his teachers, and she had the happy conviction that she gave
+him every advantage. Ransom's delay was diplomatic, but at the end of
+ten minutes he returned to the young ladies in Boston; he asked why,
+with their aggressive programme, one hadn't begun to feel their onset,
+why the echoes of Miss Tarrant's eloquence hadn't reached his ears.
+Hadn't she come out yet in public? was she not coming to stir them up in
+New York? He hoped she hadn't broken down.
+
+"She didn't seem to break down last summer, at the Female Convention,"
+Mrs. Luna replied. "Have you forgotten that too? Didn't I tell you of
+the sensation she produced there, and of what I heard from Boston about
+it? Do you mean to say I didn't give you that "Transcript," with the
+report of her great speech? It was just before they sailed for Europe;
+she went off with flying colours, in a blaze of fireworks." Ransom
+protested that he had not heard this affair mentioned till that moment,
+and then, when they compared dates, they found it had taken place just
+after his last visit to Mrs. Luna. This, of course, gave her a chance to
+say that he had treated her even worse than she supposed; it had been
+her impression, at any rate, that they had talked together about
+Verena's sudden bound into fame. Apparently she confounded him with some
+one else, that was very possible; he was not to suppose that he occupied
+such a distinct place in her mind, especially when she might die twenty
+deaths before he came near her. Ransom demurred to the implication that
+Miss Tarrant was famous; if she were famous, wouldn't she be in the New
+York papers? He hadn't seen her there, and he had no recollection of
+having encountered any mention at the time (last June, was it?) of her
+exploits at the Female Convention. A local reputation doubtless she had,
+but that had been the case a year and a half before, and what was
+expected of her then was to become a first-class national glory. He was
+willing to believe that she had created some excitement in Boston, but
+he shouldn't attach much importance to that till one began to see her
+photograph in the stores. Of course, one must give her time, but he had
+supposed Miss Chancellor was going to put her through faster.
+
+If he had taken a contradictious tone on purpose to draw Mrs. Luna out,
+he could not have elicited more of the information he desired. It was
+perfectly true that he had seen no reference to Verena's performances in
+the preceding June; there were periods when the newspapers seemed to him
+so idiotic that for weeks he never looked at one. He learned from Mrs.
+Luna that it was not Olive who had sent her the "Transcript" and in
+letters had added some private account of the doings at the convention
+to the testimony of that amiable sheet; she had been indebted for this
+service to a "gentleman-friend," who wrote her everything that happened
+in Boston, and what every one had every day for dinner. Not that it was
+necessary for her happiness to know; but the gentleman she spoke of
+didn't know what to invent to please her. A Bostonian couldn't imagine
+that one didn't want to know, and that was their idea of ingratiating
+themselves, or, at any rate, it was his, poor man. Olive would never
+have gone into particulars about Verena; she regarded her sister as
+quite too much one of the profane, and knew Adeline couldn't understand
+why, when she took to herself a bosom-friend, she should have been at
+such pains to select her in just the most dreadful class in the
+community. Verena was a perfect little adventuress, and quite third-rate
+into the bargain; but, of course, she was a pretty girl enough, if one
+cared for hair of the colour of cochineal. As for her people, they were
+too absolutely awful; it was exactly as if she, Mrs. Luna, had struck up
+an intimacy with the daughter of her chiropodist. It took Olive to
+invent such monstrosities, and to think she was doing something great
+for humanity when she did so; though, in spite of her wanting to turn
+everything over, and put the lowest highest, she could be just as
+contemptuous and invidious, when it came to really mixing, as if she
+were some grand old duchess. She must do her the justice to say that she
+hated the Tarrants, the father and mother; but, all the same, she let
+Verena run to and fro between Charles Street and the horrible hole they
+lived in, and Adeline knew from that gentleman who wrote so copiously
+that the girl now and then spent a week at a time at Cambridge. Her
+mother, who had been ill for some weeks, wanted her to sleep there. Mrs.
+Luna knew further, by her correspondent, that Verena had--or had had the
+winter before--a great deal of attention from gentlemen. She didn't know
+how she worked that into the idea that the female sex was sufficient to
+itself; but she had grounds for saying that this was one reason why
+Olive had taken her abroad. She was afraid Verena would give in to some
+man, and she wanted to make a break. Of course, any such giving in would
+be very awkward for a young woman who shrieked out on platforms that old
+maids were the highest type. Adeline guessed Olive had perfect control
+of her now, unless indeed she used the expeditions to Cambridge as a
+cover for meeting gentlemen. She was an artful little minx, and cared as
+much for the rights of women as she did for the Panama Canal; the only
+right of a woman she wanted was to climb up on top of something, where
+the men could look at her. She would stay with Olive as long as it
+served her purpose, because Olive, with her great respectability, could
+push her, and counteract the effect of her low relations, to say nothing
+of paying all her expenses and taking her the tour of Europe. "But, mark
+my words," said Mrs. Luna, "she will give Olive the greatest cut she has
+ever had in her life. She will run off with some lion-tamer; she will
+marry a circus-man!" And Mrs. Luna added that it would serve Olive
+Chancellor right. But she would take it hard; look out for tantrums
+then!
+
+Basil Ransom's emotions were peculiar while his hostess delivered
+herself, in a manner at once casual and emphatic, of these rather
+insidious remarks. He took them all in, for they represented to him
+certain very interesting facts; but he perceived at the same time that
+Mrs. Luna didn't know what she was talking about. He had seen Verena
+Tarrant only twice in his life, but it was no use telling him that she
+was an adventuress--though, certainly, it _was_ very likely she would
+end by giving Miss Chancellor a cut. He chuckled, with a certain
+grimness, as this image passed before him; it was not unpleasing, the
+idea that he should be avenged (for it would avenge him to know it) upon
+the wanton young woman who had invited him to come and see her in order
+simply to slap his face. But he had an odd sense of having lost
+something in not knowing of the other girl's appearance at the Women's
+Convention--a vague feeling that he had been cheated and trifled with.
+The complaint was idle, inasmuch as it was not probable he could have
+gone to Boston to listen to her; but it represented to him that he had
+not shared, even dimly and remotely, in an event which concerned her
+very closely. Why should he share, and what was more natural than that
+the things which concerned her closely should not concern him at all?
+This question came to him only as he walked home that evening; for the
+moment it remained quite in abeyance: therefore he was free to feel also
+that his imagination had been rather starved by his ignorance of the
+fact that she was near him again (comparatively), that she was in the
+dimness of the horizon (no longer beyond the curve of the globe), and
+yet he had not perceived it. This sense of personal loss, as I have
+called it, made him feel, further, that he had something to make up, to
+recover. He could scarcely have told you how he would go about it; but
+the idea, formless though it was, led him in a direction very different
+from the one he had been following a quarter of an hour before. As he
+watched it dance before him he fell into another silence, in the midst
+of which Mrs. Luna gave him another mystic smile. The effect of it was
+to make him rise to his feet; the whole landscape of his mind had
+suddenly been illuminated. Decidedly, it was _not_ his duty to marry
+Mrs. Luna, in order to have means to pursue his studies; he jerked
+himself back, as if he had been on the point of it.
+
+"You don't mean to say you are going already? I haven't said half I
+wanted to!" she exclaimed.
+
+He glanced at the clock, saw it was not yet late, took a turn about the
+room, then sat down again in a different place, while she followed him
+with her eyes, wondering what was the matter with him. Ransom took good
+care not to ask her what it was she had still to say, and perhaps it was
+to prevent her telling him that he now began to talk, freely, quickly,
+in quite a new tone. He stayed half an hour longer, and made himself
+very agreeable. It seemed to Mrs. Luna now that he had every distinction
+(she had known he had most), that he was really a charming man. He
+abounded in conversation, till at last he took up his hat in earnest; he
+talked about the state of the South, its social peculiarities, the ruin
+wrought by the war, the dilapidated gentry, the queer types of
+superannuated fire-eaters, ragged and unreconciled, all the pathos and
+all the comedy of it, making her laugh at one moment, almost cry at
+another, and say to herself throughout that when he took it into his
+head there was no one who could make a lady's evening pass so
+pleasantly. It was only afterwards that she asked herself why he had not
+taken it into his head till the last, so quickly. She delighted in the
+dilapidated gentry; her taste was completely different from her
+sister's, who took an interest only in the lower class, as it struggled
+to rise; what Adeline cared for was the fallen aristocracy (it seemed to
+be falling everywhere very much; was not Basil Ransom an example of it?
+was he not like a French _gentilhomme de province_ after the Revolution?
+or an old monarchical _émigré_ from the Languedoc?), the despoiled
+patriciate, I say, whose attitude was noble and touching, and toward
+whom one might exercise a charity as discreet as their pride was
+sensitive. In all Mrs. Luna's visions of herself, her discretion was the
+leading feature. "Are you going to let ten years elapse again before you
+come?" she asked, as Basil Ransom bade her good-night. "You must let me
+know, because between this and your next visit I shall have time to go
+to Europe and come back. I shall take care to arrive the day before."
+
+Instead of answering this sally, Ransom said, "Are you not going one of
+these days to Boston? Are you not going to pay your sister another
+visit?"
+
+Mrs. Luna stared. "What good will that do _you_? Excuse my stupidity,"
+she added; "of course, it gets me away. Thank you very much!"
+
+"I don't want you to go away; but I want to hear more about Miss Olive."
+
+"Why in the world? You know you loathe her!" Here, before Ransom could
+reply, Mrs. Luna again overtook herself. "I verily believe that by Miss
+Olive you mean Miss Verena!" Her eyes charged him a moment with this
+perverse intention; then she exclaimed, "Basil Ransom, _are_ you in love
+with that creature?"
+
+He gave a perfectly natural laugh, not pleading guilty, in order to
+practise on Mrs. Luna, but expressing the simple state of the case. "How
+should I be? I have seen her but twice in my life."
+
+"If you had seen her more, I shouldn't be afraid! Fancy your wanting to
+pack me off to Boston!" his hostess went on. "I am in no hurry to stay
+with Olive again; besides, that girl takes up the whole house. You had
+better go there yourself."
+
+"I should like nothing better," said Ransom.
+
+"Perhaps you would like me to ask Verena to spend a month with me--it
+might be a way of attracting you to the house," Adeline went on, in the
+tone of exuberant provocation.
+
+Ransom was on the point of replying that it would be a better way than
+any other, but he checked himself in time; he had never yet, even in
+joke, made so crude, so rude a speech to a lady. You only knew when he
+was joking with women by his super-added civility. "I beg you to believe
+there is nothing I would do for any woman in the world that I wouldn't
+do for you," he said, bending, for the last time, over Mrs. Luna's plump
+hand.
+
+"I shall remember that and keep you up to it!" she cried after him, as
+he went. But even with this rather lively exchange of vows he felt that
+he had got off rather easily. He walked slowly up Fifth Avenue, into
+which, out of Adeline's cross-street, he had turned, by the light of a
+fine winter moon; and at every corner he stopped a minute, lingered in
+meditation, while he exhaled a soft, vague sigh. This was an
+unconscious, involuntary expression of relief, such as a man might utter
+who had seen himself on the point of being run over and yet felt that he
+was whole. He didn't trouble himself much to ask what had saved him;
+whatever it was it had produced a reaction, so that he felt rather
+ashamed of having found his look-out of late so blank. By the time he
+reached his lodgings, his ambition, his resolution, had rekindled; he
+had remembered that he formerly supposed he was a man of ability, that
+nothing particular had occurred to make him doubt it (the evidence was
+only negative, not positive), and that at any rate he was young enough
+to have another try. He whistled that night as he went to bed.
+
+
+
+
+XXIII
+
+
+Three weeks afterward he stood in front of Olive Chancellor's house,
+looking up and down the street and hesitating. He had told Mrs. Luna
+that he should like nothing better than to make another journey to
+Boston; and it was not simply because he liked it that he had come. I
+was on the point of saying that a happy chance had favoured him, but it
+occurs to me that one is under no obligation to call chances by
+nattering epithets when they have been waited for so long. At any rate,
+the darkest hour is before the dawn; and a few days after that
+melancholy evening I have described, which Ransom spent in his German
+beer-cellar, before a single glass, soon emptied, staring at his future
+with an unremunerated eye, he found that the world appeared to have need
+of him yet. The "party," as he would have said (I cannot pretend that
+his speech was too heroic for that), for whom he had transacted business
+in Boston so many months before, and who had expressed at the time but a
+limited appreciation of his services (there had been between the lawyer
+and his client a divergence of judgement), observing, apparently, that
+they proved more fruitful than he expected, had reopened the affair and
+presently requested Ransom to transport himself again to the sister
+city. His errand demanded more time than before, and for three days he
+gave it his constant attention. On the fourth he found he was still
+detained; he should have to wait till the evening--some important papers
+were to be prepared. He determined to treat the interval as a holiday,
+and he wondered what one could do in Boston to give one's morning a
+festive complexion. The weather was brilliant enough to minister to any
+illusion, and he strolled along the streets, taking it in. In front of
+the Music Hall and of Tremont Temple he stopped, looking at the posters
+in the doorway; for was it not possible that Miss Chancellor's little
+friend might be just then addressing her fellow-citizens? Her name was
+absent, however, and this resource seemed to mock him. He knew no one in
+the place but Olive Chancellor, so there was no question of a visit to
+pay. He was perfectly resolved that he would never go near _her_ again;
+she was doubtless a very superior being, but she had been too rough with
+him to tempt him further. Politeness, even a largely-interpreted
+"chivalry", required nothing more than he had already done; he had
+quitted her, the other year, without telling her that she was a vixen,
+and that reticence was chivalrous enough. There was also Verena Tarrant,
+of course; he saw no reason to dissemble when he spoke of her to
+himself, and he allowed himself the entertainment of feeling that he
+should like very much to see her again. Very likely she wouldn't seem to
+him the same; the impression she had made upon him was due to some
+accident of mood or circumstance; and, at any rate, any charm she might
+have exhibited then had probably been obliterated by the coarsening
+effect of publicity and the tonic influence of his kinswoman. It will be
+observed that in this reasoning of Basil Ransom's the impression was
+freely recognised, and recognised as a phenomenon still present. The
+attraction might have vanished, as he said to himself, but the mental
+picture of it was yet vivid. The greater the pity that he couldn't call
+upon Verena (he called her by her name in his thoughts, it was so
+pretty) without calling upon Olive, and that Olive was so disagreeable
+as to place that effort beyond his strength. There was another
+consideration, with Ransom, which eminently belonged to the man; he
+believed that Miss Chancellor had conceived, in the course of those few
+hours, and in a manner that formed so absurd a sequel to her having gone
+out of her way to make his acquaintance, such a dislike to him that it
+would be odious to her to see him again within her doors; and he would
+have felt indelicate in taking warrant from her original invitation
+(before she had seen him) to inflict on her a presence which he had no
+reason to suppose the lapse of time had made less offensive. She had
+given him no sign of pardon or penitence in any of the little ways that
+are familiar to women--by sending him a message through her sister, or
+even a book, a photograph, a Christmas card, or a newspaper, by the
+post. He felt, in a word, not at liberty to ring at her door; he didn't
+know what kind of a fit the sight of his long Mississippian person would
+give her, and it was characteristic of him that he should wish so to
+spare the sensibilities of a young lady whom he had not found tender;
+being ever as willing to let women off easily in the particular case as
+he was fixed in the belief that the sex in general requires watching.
+
+Nevertheless, he found himself, at the end of half an hour, standing on
+the only spot in Charles Street which had any significance for him. It
+had occurred to him that if he couldn't call upon Verena without calling
+upon Olive, he should be exempt from that condition if he called upon
+Mrs. Tarrant. It was not her mother, truly, who had asked him, it was
+the girl herself; and he was conscious, as a candid young American, that
+a mother is always less accessible, more guarded by social prejudice,
+than a daughter. But he was at a pass in which it was permissible to
+strain a point, and he took his way in the direction in which he knew
+that Cambridge lay, remembering that Miss Tarrant's invitation had
+reference to that quarter and that Mrs. Luna had given him further
+evidence. Had she not said that Verena often went back there for visits
+of several days--that her mother had been ill and she gave her much
+care? There was nothing inconceivable in her being engaged at that hour
+(it was getting to be one o'clock) in one of those expeditions--nothing
+impossible in the chance that he might find her in Cambridge. The
+chance, at any rate, was worth taking; Cambridge, moreover, was worth
+seeing, and it was as good a way as another of keeping his holiday. It
+occurred to him, indeed, that Cambridge was a big place, and that he had
+no particular address. This reflexion overtook him just as he reached
+Olive's house, which, oddly enough, he was obliged to pass on his way to
+the mysterious suburb. That is partly why he paused there; he asked
+himself for a moment why he shouldn't ring the bell and obtain his
+needed information from the servant, who would be sure to be able to
+give it to him. He had just dismissed this method, as of questionable
+taste, when he heard the door of the house open, within the deep
+embrasure in which, in Charles Street, the main portals are set, and
+which are partly occupied by a flight of steps protected at the bottom
+by a second door, whose upper half, in either wing, consists of a sheet
+of glass. It was a minute before he could see who had come out, and in
+that minute he had time to turn away and then to turn back again, and to
+wonder which of the two inmates would appear to him, or whether he
+should behold neither or both.
+
+The person who had issued from the house descended the steps very
+slowly, as if on purpose to give him time to escape; and when at last
+the glass doors were divided they disclosed a little old lady. Ransom
+was disappointed; such an apparition was so scantily to his purpose. But
+the next minute his spirits rose again, for he was sure that he had seen
+the little old lady before. She stopped on the side-walk, and looked
+vaguely about her, in the manner of a person waiting for an omnibus or a
+street-car; she had a dingy, loosely-habited air, as if she had worn her
+clothes for many years and yet was even now imperfectly acquainted with
+them; a large, benignant face, caged in by the glass of her spectacles,
+which seemed to cover it almost equally everywhere, and a fat, rusty
+satchel, which hung low at her side, as if it wearied her to carry it.
+This gave Ransom time to recognise her; he knew in Boston no such figure
+as that save Miss Birdseye. Her party, her person, the exalted account
+Miss Chancellor gave of her, had kept a very distinct place in his mind;
+and while she stood there in dim circumspection she came back to him as
+a friend of yesterday. His necessity gave a point to the reminiscences
+she evoked; it took him only a moment to reflect that she would be able
+to tell him where Verena Tarrant was at that particular time, and where,
+if need be, her parents lived. Her eyes rested on him, and as she saw
+that he was looking at her she didn't go through the ceremony (she had
+broken so completely with all conventions) of removing them; he
+evidently represented nothing to her but a sentient fellow-citizen in
+the enjoyment of his rights, which included that of staring. Miss
+Birdseye's modesty had never pretended that it was not to be publicly
+challenged; there were so many bright new motives and ideas in the world
+that there might even be reasons for looking at her. When Ransom
+approached her and, raising his hat with a smile, said, "Shall I stop
+this car for you, Miss Birdseye?" she only looked at him more vaguely,
+in her complete failure to seize the idea that this might be simply
+Fame. She had trudged about the streets of Boston for fifty years, and
+at no period had she received that amount of attention from dark-eyed
+young men. She glanced, in an unprejudiced way, at the big
+parti-coloured human van which now jingled, toward them from out of the
+Cambridge road. "Well, I should like to get into it, if it will take me
+home," she answered. "Is this a South End car?"
+
+The vehicle had been stopped by the conductor, on his perceiving Miss
+Birdseye; he evidently recognised her as a frequent passenger. He went,
+however, through none of the forms of reassurance beyond remarking, "You
+want to get right in here--quick," but stood with his hand raised, in a
+threatening way, to the cord of his signal-bell.
+
+"You must allow me the honour of taking you home, madam; I will tell you
+who I am," Basil Ransom said, in obedience to a rapid reflexion. He
+helped her into the car, the conductor pressed a fraternal hand upon her
+back, and in a moment the young man was seated beside her, and the
+jingling had recommenced. At that hour of the day the car was almost
+empty, and they had it virtually to themselves.
+
+"Well, I know you are some one; I don't think you belong round here,"
+Miss Birdseye declared, as they proceeded.
+
+"I was once at your house--on a very interesting occasion. Do you
+remember a party you gave, a year ago last October, to which Miss
+Chancellor came, and another young lady, who made a wonderful speech?"
+
+"Oh yes! when Verena Tarrant moved us all so! There were a good many
+there; I don't remember all."
+
+"I was one of them," Basil Ransom said; "I came with Miss Chancellor,
+who is a kind of relation of mine, and you were very good to me."
+
+"What did I do?" asked Miss Birdseye candidly. Then, before he could
+answer her, she recognised him. "I remember you now, and Olive bringing
+you! You're a Southern gentleman--she told me about you afterwards. You
+don't approve of our great struggle--you want us to be kept down." The
+old lady spoke with perfect mildness, as if she had long ago done with
+passion and resentment. Then she added, "Well, I presume we can't have
+the sympathy of all."
+
+"Doesn't it look as if you had my sympathy, when I get into a car on
+purpose to see you home--one of the principal agitators?" Ransom
+inquired, laughing.
+
+"Did you get in on purpose?"
+
+"Quite on purpose. I am not so bad as Miss Chancellor thinks me."
+
+"Oh, I presume you have your ideas," said Miss Birdseye. "Of course,
+Southerners have peculiar views. I suppose they retain more than one
+might think. I hope you won't ride too far--I know my way round Boston."
+
+"Don't object to me, or think me officious," Ransom replied. "I want to
+ask you something."
+
+Miss Birdseye looked at him again. "Oh yes, I place you now; you
+conversed some with Doctor Prance."
+
+"To my great edification!" Ransom exclaimed. "And I hope Doctor Prance
+is well."
+
+"She looks after every one's health but her own," said Miss Birdseye,
+smiling. "When I tell her that, she says she hasn't got any to look
+after. She says she's the only woman in Boston that hasn't got a doctor.
+She was determined she wouldn't be a patient, and it seemed as if the
+only way not to be one was to be a doctor. She is trying to make me
+sleep; that's her principal occupation."
+
+"Is it possible you don't sleep yet?" Ransom asked, almost tenderly.
+
+"Well, just a little. But by the time I get to sleep I have to get up. I
+can't sleep when I want to live."
+
+"You ought to come down South," the young man suggested. "In that
+languid air you would doze deliciously!"
+
+"Well, I don't want to be languid," said Miss Birdseye. "Besides, I have
+been down South, in the old times, and I can't say they let me sleep
+very much; they were always round after me!"
+
+"Do you mean on account of the negroes?"
+
+"Yes, I couldn't think of anything else then. I carried them the Bible."
+
+Ransom was silent a moment; then he said, in a tone which evidently was
+carefully considerate, "I should like to hear all about that!"
+
+"Well, fortunately, we are not required now; we are required for
+something else." And Miss Birdseye looked at him with a wandering,
+tentative humour, as if he would know what she meant.
+
+"You mean for the other slaves!" he exclaimed, with a laugh. "You can
+carry them all the Bibles you want."
+
+"I want to carry them the Statute-book; that must be our Bible now."
+
+Ransom found himself liking Miss Birdseye very much, and it was quite
+without hypocrisy or a tinge too much of the local quality in his speech
+that he said: "Wherever you go, madam, it will matter little what you
+carry. You will always carry your goodness."
+
+For a minute she made no response. Then she murmured: "That's the way
+Olive Chancellor told me you talked."
+
+"I am afraid she has told you little good of me."
+
+"Well, I am sure she thinks she is right."
+
+"Thinks it?" said Ransom. "Why, she knows it, with supreme certainty! By
+the way, I hope she is well."
+
+Miss Birdseye stared again. "Haven't you seen her? Are you not
+visiting?"
+
+"Oh no, I am not visiting! I was literally passing her house when I met
+you."
+
+"Perhaps you live here now," said Miss Birdseye. And when he had
+corrected this impression, she added, in a tone which showed with what
+positive confidence he had now inspired her, "Hadn't you better drop
+in?"
+
+"It would give Miss Chancellor no pleasure," Basil Ransom rejoined. "She
+regards me as an enemy in the camp."
+
+"Well, she is very brave."
+
+"Precisely. And I am very timid."
+
+"Didn't you fight once?"
+
+"Yes; but it was in such a good cause!"
+
+Ransom meant this allusion to the great Secession and, by comparison, to
+the attitude of the resisting male (laudable even as that might be), to
+be decently jocular; but Miss Birdseye took it very seriously, and sat
+there for a good while as speechless as if she meant to convey that she
+had been going on too long now to be able to discuss the propriety of
+the late rebellion. The young man felt that he had silenced her, and he
+was very sorry; for, with all deference to the disinterested Southern
+attitude toward the unprotected female, what he had got into the car
+with her for was precisely to make her talk. He had wished for general,
+as well as for particular, news of Verena Tarrant; it was a topic on
+which he had proposed to draw Miss Birdseye out. He preferred not to
+broach it himself, and he waited awhile for another opening. At last,
+when he was on the point of exposing himself by a direct inquiry (he
+reflected that the exposure would in any case not be long averted), she
+anticipated him by saying, in a manner which showed that her thoughts
+had continued in the same train, "I wonder very much that Miss Tarrant
+didn't affect you that evening!"
+
+"Ah, but she did!" Ransom said, with alacrity. "I thought her very
+charming!"
+
+"Didn't you think her very reasonable?"
+
+"God forbid, madam! I consider women have no business to be reasonable."
+
+His companion turned upon him, slowly and mildly, and each of her
+glasses, in her aspect of reproach, had the glitter of an enormous tear.
+"Do you regard us, then, simply as lovely baubles?"
+
+The effect of this question, as coming from Miss Birdseye, and referring
+in some degree to her own venerable identity, was such as to move him to
+irresistible laughter. But he controlled himself quickly enough to say,
+with genuine expression, "I regard you as the dearest thing in life, the
+only thing which makes it worth living!"
+
+"Worth living for--you! But for us?" suggested Miss Birdseye.
+
+"It's worth any woman's while to be admired as I admire you. Miss
+Tarrant, of whom we were speaking, affected me, as you say, in this
+way--that I think more highly still, if possible, of the sex which
+produced such a delightful young lady."
+
+"Well, we think everything of her here," said Miss Birdseye. "It seems
+as if it were a real gift."
+
+"Does she speak often--is there any chance of my hearing her now?"
+
+"She raises her voice a good deal in the places round--like Framingham
+and Billerica. It seems as if she were gathering strength, just to break
+over Boston like a wave. In fact she did break, last summer. She is a
+growing power since her great success at the convention."
+
+"Ah! her success at the convention was very great?" Ransom inquired,
+putting discretion into his voice.
+
+Miss Birdseye hesitated a moment, in order to measure her response by
+the bounds of righteousness. "Well," she said, with the tenderness of a
+long retrospect, "I have seen nothing like it since I last listened to
+Eliza P. Moseley."
+
+"What a pity she isn't speaking somewhere to-night!" Ransom exclaimed.
+
+"Oh, to-night she's out in Cambridge. Olive Chancellor mentioned that."
+
+"Is she making a speech there?"
+
+"No; she's visiting her home."
+
+"I thought her home was in Charles Street?"
+
+"Well, no; that's her residence--her principal one--since she became so
+united to your cousin. Isn't Miss Chancellor your cousin?"
+
+"We don't insist on the relationship," said Ransom, smiling. "Are they
+very much united, the two young ladies?"
+
+"You would say so if you were to see Miss Chancellor when Verena rises
+to eloquence. It's as if the chords were strung across her own heart;
+she seems to vibrate, to echo with every word. It's a very close and
+very beautiful tie, and we think everything of it here. They will work
+together for a great good!"
+
+"I hope so," Ransom remarked. "But in spite of it Miss Tarrant spends a
+part of her time with her father and mother."
+
+"Yes, she seems to have something for every one. If you were to see her
+at home, you would think she was all the daughter. She leads a lovely
+life!" said Miss Birdseye.
+
+"See her at home? That's exactly what I want!" Ransom rejoined, feeling
+that if he was to come to this he needn't have had scruples at first. "I
+haven't forgotten that she invited me, when I met her."
+
+"Oh, of course she attracts many visitors," said Miss Birdseye, limiting
+her encouragement to this statement.
+
+"Yes; she must be used to admirers. And where, in Cambridge, do her
+family live?"
+
+"Oh, it's on one of those little streets that don't seem to have very
+much of a name. But they do call it--they do call it----" she meditated
+audibly.
+
+This process was interrupted by an abrupt allocution from the conductor.
+"I guess you change here for _your_ place. You want one of them blue
+cars."
+
+The good lady returned to a sense of the situation, and Ransom helped
+her out of the vehicle, with the aid, as before, of a certain amount of
+propulsion from the conductor. Her road branched off to the right, and
+she had to wait on the corner of a street, there being as yet no blue
+car within hail. The corner was quiet and the day favourable to
+patience--a day of relaxed rigour and intense brilliancy. It was as if
+the touch of the air itself were gloved, and the street-colouring had
+the richness of a superficial thaw. Ransom, of course, waited with his
+philanthropic companion, though she now protested more vigorously
+against the idea that a gentleman from the South should pretend to teach
+an old abolitionist the mysteries of Boston. He promised to leave her
+when he should have consigned her to the blue car; and meanwhile they
+stood in the sun, with their backs against an apothecary's window, and
+she tried again, at his suggestion, to remember the name of Doctor
+Tarrant's street. "I guess if you ask for Doctor Tarrant, any one can
+tell you," she said; and then suddenly the address came to her--the
+residence of the mesmeric healer was in Monadnoc Place.
+
+"But you'll have to ask for that, so it comes to the same," she went on.
+After this she added, with a friendliness more personal, "Ain't you
+going to see your cousin too?"
+
+"Not if I can help it!"
+
+Miss Birdseye gave a little ineffectual sigh. "Well, I suppose every one
+must act out their ideal. That's what Olive Chancellor does. She's a
+very noble character."
+
+"Oh yes, a glorious nature."
+
+"You know their opinions are just the same--hers and Verena's," Miss
+Birdseye placidly continued. "So why should you make a distinction?"
+
+"My dear madam," said Ransom, "does a woman consist of nothing but her
+opinions? I like Miss Tarrant's lovely face better, to begin with."
+
+"Well, she _is_ pretty-looking." And Miss Birdseye gave another sigh, as
+if she had had a theory submitted to her--that one about a lady's
+opinions--which, with all that was unfamiliar and peculiar lying behind
+it, she was really too old to look into much. It might have been the
+first time she really felt her age. "There's a blue car," she said, in a
+tone of mild relief.
+
+"It will be some moments before it gets here. Moreover, I don't believe
+that at bottom they _are_ Miss Tarrant's opinions," Ransom added.
+
+"You mustn't think she hasn't a strong hold of them," his companion
+exclaimed, more briskly. "If you think she is not sincere, you are very
+much mistaken. Those views are just her life."
+
+"Well, _she_ may bring me round to them," said Ransom, smiling.
+
+Miss Birdseye had been watching her blue car, the advance of which was
+temporarily obstructed. At this, she transferred her eyes to him, gazing
+at him solemnly out of the pervasive window of her spectacles. "Well, I
+shouldn't wonder if she did! Yes, that will be a good thing. I don't see
+how you can help being a good deal shaken by her. She has acted on so
+many."
+
+"I see: no doubt she will act on me." Then it occurred to Ransom to add:
+"By the way, Miss Birdseye, perhaps you will be so kind as not to
+mention this meeting of ours to my cousin, in case of your seeing her
+again. I have a perfectly good conscience in not calling upon her, but I
+shouldn't like her to think that I announced my slighting intention all
+over the town. I don't want to offend her, and she had better not know
+that I have been in Boston. If you don't tell her, no one else will."
+
+"Do you wish me to conceal----?" murmured Miss Birdseye, panting a
+little.
+
+"No, I don't want you to conceal anything. I only want you to let this
+incident pass--to say nothing."
+
+"Well, I never did anything of that kind."
+
+"Of what kind?" Ransom was half vexed, half touched by her inability to
+enter into his point of view, and her resistance made him hold to his
+idea the more. "It is very simple, what I ask of you. You are under no
+obligation to tell Miss Chancellor everything that happens to you, are
+you?"
+
+His request seemed still something of a shock to the poor old lady's
+candour. "Well, I see her very often, and we talk a great deal. And
+then--won't Verena tell her?"
+
+"I have thought of that--but I hope not."
+
+"She tells her most everything. Their union is so close."
+
+"She won't want her to be wounded," Ransom said ingeniously.
+
+"Well, you _are_ considerate." And Miss Birdseye continued to gaze at
+him. "It's a pity you can't sympathise."
+
+"As I tell you, perhaps Miss Tarrant will bring me round. You have
+before you a possible convert," Ransom went on, without, I fear, putting
+up the least little prayer to heaven that his dishonesty might be
+forgiven.
+
+"I should be very happy to think that--after I have told you her address
+in this secret way." A smile of infinite mildness glimmered in Miss
+Birdseye's face, and she added: "Well, I guess that will be your fate.
+She _has_ affected so many. I would keep very quiet if I thought that.
+Yes, she will bring you round."
+
+"I will let you know as soon as she does," Basil Ransom said. "Here is
+your car at last."
+
+"Well, I believe in the victory of the truth. I won't say anything." And
+she suffered the young man to lead her to the car, which had now stopped
+at their corner.
+
+"I hope very much I shall see you again," he remarked, as they went.
+
+"Well, I am always round the streets, in Boston." And while, lifting and
+pushing, he was helping again to insert her into the oblong receptacle,
+she turned a little and repeated, "She _will_ affect you! If that's to
+be your secret, I will keep it," Ransom heard her subjoin. He raised his
+hat and waved her a farewell, but she didn't see him; she was squeezing
+further into the car and making the discovery that this time it was full
+and there was no seat for her. Surely, however, he said to himself,
+every man in the place would offer his own to such an innocent old dear.
+
+
+END OF VOL. I
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's The Bostonians, Vol. I (of II), by Henry James
+
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+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Bostonians, Vol. I (of II), by Henry James
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Bostonians, Vol. I (of II)
+
+Author: Henry James
+
+Release Date: November 5, 2006 [EBook #19717]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE BOSTONIANS, VOL. I (OF II) ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by R. Cedron, Mary Meehan and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<h1>THE BOSTONIANS</h1>
+
+<h3>A NOVEL</h3>
+
+<h2>BY HENRY JAMES</h2>
+
+<h4>IN TWO VOLUMES</h4>
+
+<h4> VOL. I</h4>
+
+
+
+<h4>MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED<br />
+ST. MARTIN'S STREET, LONDON<br />
+1921</h4>
+
+<h4><i>First Published in 1886</i></h4>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<!-- Autogenerated TOC. Modify or delete as required. -->
+<p>
+<a href="#BOOK_FIRST">BOOK FIRST</a><br /><br />
+<a href="#I">I</a><br />
+<a href="#II">II</a><br />
+<a href="#III">III</a><br />
+<a href="#IV">IV</a><br />
+<a href="#V">V</a><br />
+<a href="#VI">VI</a><br />
+<a href="#VII">VII</a><br />
+<a href="#VIII">VIII</a><br />
+<a href="#IX">IX</a><br />
+<a href="#X">X</a><br />
+<a href="#XI">XI</a><br />
+<a href="#XII">XII</a><br />
+<a href="#XIII">XIII</a><br />
+<a href="#XIV">XIV</a><br />
+<a href="#XV">XV</a><br />
+<a href="#XVI">XVI</a><br />
+<a href="#XVII">XVII</a><br />
+<a href="#XVIII">XVIII</a><br />
+<a href="#XIX">XIX</a><br />
+<a href="#XX">XX</a><br /><br />
+<a href="#BOOK_SECOND">BOOK SECOND</a><br /><br />
+<a href="#XXI">XXI</a><br />
+<a href="#XXII">XXII</a><br />
+<a href="#XXIII">XXIII</a><br />
+</p>
+<!-- End Autogenerated TOC. -->
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="BOOK_FIRST" id="BOOK_FIRST"></a>BOOK FIRST</h2>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="I" id="I"></a>I</h2>
+
+
+<p>"Olive will come down in about ten minutes; she told me to tell you
+that. About ten; that is exactly like Olive. Neither five nor fifteen,
+and yet not ten exactly, but either nine or eleven. She didn't tell me
+to say she was glad to see you, because she doesn't know whether she is
+or not, and she wouldn't for the world expose herself to telling a fib.
+She is very honest, is Olive Chancellor; she is full of rectitude.
+Nobody tells fibs in Boston; I don't know what to make of them all.
+Well, I am very glad to see you, at any rate."</p>
+
+<p>These words were spoken with much volubility by a fair, plump, smiling
+woman who entered a narrow drawing-room in which a visitor, kept waiting
+for a few moments, was already absorbed in a book. The gentleman had not
+even needed to sit down to become interested: apparently he had taken up
+the volume from a table as soon as he came in, and, standing there,
+after a single glance round the apartment, had lost himself in its
+pages. He threw it down at the approach of Mrs. Luna, laughed, shook
+hands with her, and said in answer to her last remark, "You imply that
+you do tell fibs. Perhaps that is one."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh no; there is nothing wonderful in my being glad to see you," Mrs.
+Luna rejoined, "when I tell you that I have been three long weeks in
+this unprevaricating city."</p>
+
+<p>"That has an unflattering sound for me," said the young man. "I pretend
+not to prevaricate."</p>
+
+<p>"Dear me, what's the good of being a Southerner?" the lady asked. "Olive
+told me to tell you she hoped you will stay to dinner. And if she said
+it, she does really hope it. She is willing to risk that."</p>
+
+<p>"Just as I am?" the visitor inquired, presenting himself with rather a
+work-a-day aspect.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Luna glanced at him from head to foot, and gave a little smiling
+sigh, as if he had been a long sum in addition. And, indeed, he was very
+long, Basil Ransom, and he even looked a little hard and discouraging,
+like a column of figures, in spite of the friendly face which he bent
+upon his hostess's deputy, and which, in its thinness, had a deep dry
+line, a sort of premature wrinkle, on either side of the mouth. He was
+tall and lean, and dressed throughout in black; his shirt-collar was low
+and wide, and the triangle of linen, a little crumpled, exhibited by the
+opening of his waistcoat, was adorned by a pin containing a small red
+stone. In spite of this decoration the young man looked poor&mdash;as poor as
+a young man could look who had such a fine head and such magnificent
+eyes. Those of Basil Ransom were dark, deep, and glowing; his head had a
+character of elevation which fairly added to his stature; it was a head
+to be seen above the level of a crowd, on some judicial bench or
+political platform, or even on a bronze medal. His forehead was high and
+broad, and his thick black hair, perfectly straight and glossy, and
+without any division, rolled back from it in a leonine manner. These
+things, the eyes especially, with their smouldering fire, might have
+indicated that he was to be a great American statesman; or, on the other
+hand, they might simply have proved that he came from Carolina or
+Alabama. He came, in fact, from Mississippi, and he spoke very
+perceptibly with the accent of that country. It is not in my power to
+reproduce by any combination of characters this charming dialect; but
+the initiated reader will have no difficulty in evoking the sound, which
+is to be associated in the present instance with nothing vulgar or vain.
+This lean, pale, sallow, shabby, striking young man, with his superior
+head, his sedentary shoulders, his expression of bright grimness and
+hard enthusiasm, his provincial, distinguished appearance, is, as a
+representative of his sex, the most important personage in my narrative;
+he played a very active part in the events I have undertaken in some
+degree to set forth. And yet the reader who likes a complete image, who
+desires to read with the senses as well as with the reason, is entreated
+not to forget that he prolonged his consonants and swallowed his vowels,
+that he was guilty of elisions and interpolations which were equally
+unexpected, and that his discourse was pervaded by something sultry and
+vast, something almost African in its rich, basking tone, something that
+suggested the teeming expanse of the cotton-field. Mrs. Luna looked up
+at all this, but saw only a part of it; otherwise she would not have
+replied in a bantering manner, in answer to his inquiry: "Are you ever
+different from this?" Mrs. Luna was familiar&mdash;intolerably familiar.</p>
+
+<p>Basil Ransom coloured a little. Then he said: "Oh yes; when I dine out I
+usually carry a six-shooter and a bowie-knife." And he took up his hat
+vaguely&mdash;a soft black hat with a low crown and an immense straight brim.
+Mrs. Luna wanted to know what he was doing. She made him sit down; she
+assured him that her sister quite expected him, would feel as sorry as
+she could ever feel for anything&mdash;for she was a kind of fatalist,
+anyhow&mdash;if he didn't stay to dinner. It was an immense pity&mdash;she herself
+was going out; in Boston you must jump at invitations. Olive, too, was
+going somewhere after dinner, but he mustn't mind that; perhaps he would
+like to go with her. It wasn't a party&mdash;Olive didn't go to parties; it
+was one of those weird meetings she was so fond of.</p>
+
+<p>"What kind of meetings do you refer to? You speak as if it were a
+rendezvous of witches on the Brocken."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, so it is; they are all witches and wizards, mediums, and
+spirit-rappers, and roaring radicals."</p>
+
+<p>Basil Ransom stared; the yellow light in his brown eyes deepened. "Do
+you mean to say your sister's a roaring radical?"</p>
+
+<p>"A radical? She's a female Jacobin&mdash;she's a nihilist. Whatever is, is
+wrong, and all that sort of thing. If you are going to dine with her,
+you had better know it."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, murder!" murmured the young man vaguely, sinking back in his chair
+with his arms folded. He looked at Mrs. Luna with intelligent
+incredulity. She was sufficiently pretty; her hair was in clusters of
+curls, like bunches of grapes; her tight bodice seemed to crack with her
+vivacity; and from beneath the stiff little plaits of her petticoat a
+small fat foot protruded, resting upon a stilted heel. She was
+attractive and impertinent, especially the latter. He seemed to think it
+was a great pity, what she had told him; but he lost himself in this
+consideration, or, at any rate, said nothing for some time, while his
+eyes wandered over Mrs. Luna, and he probably wondered what body of
+doctrine <i>she</i> represented, little as she might partake of the nature of
+her sister. Many things were strange to Basil Ransom; Boston especially
+was strewn with surprises, and he was a man who liked to understand.
+Mrs. Luna was drawing on her gloves; Ransom had never seen any that were
+so long; they reminded him of stockings, and he wondered how she managed
+without garters above the elbow. "Well, I suppose I might have known
+that," he continued, at last.</p>
+
+<p>"You might have known what?"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, that Miss Chancellor would be all that you say. She was brought
+up in the city of reform."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, it isn't the city; it's just Olive Chancellor. She would reform the
+solar system if she could get hold of it. She'll reform you, if you
+don't look out. That's the way I found her when I returned from Europe."</p>
+
+<p>"Have you been in Europe?" Ransom asked.</p>
+
+<p>"Mercy, yes! Haven't you?"</p>
+
+<p>"No, I haven't been anywhere. Has your sister?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes; but she stayed only an hour or two. She hates it; she would like
+to abolish it. Didn't you know I had been to Europe?" Mrs. Luna went on,
+in the slightly aggrieved tone of a woman who discovers the limits of
+her reputation.</p>
+
+<p>Ransom reflected he might answer her that until five minutes ago he
+didn't know she existed; but he remembered that this was not the way in
+which a Southern gentleman spoke to ladies, and he contented himself
+with saying that he must condone his Boeotian ignorance (he was fond
+of an elegant phrase); that he lived in a part of the country where they
+didn't think much about Europe, and that he had always supposed she was
+domiciled in New York. This last remark he made at a venture, for he
+had, naturally, not devoted any supposition whatever to Mrs. Luna. His
+dishonesty, however, only exposed him the more.</p>
+
+<p>"If you thought I lived in New York, why in the world didn't you come
+and see me?" the lady inquired.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, you see, I don't go out much, except to the courts."</p>
+
+<p>"Do you mean the law-courts? Every one has got some profession over
+here! Are you very ambitious? You look as if you were."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, very," Basil Ransom replied, with a smile, and the curious
+feminine softness with which Southern gentlemen enunciate that adverb.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Luna explained that she had been living in Europe for several
+years&mdash;ever since her husband died&mdash;but had come home a month before,
+come home with her little boy, the only thing she had in the world, and
+was paying a visit to her sister, who, of course, was the nearest thing
+after the child. "But it isn't the same," she said. "Olive and I
+disagree so much."</p>
+
+<p>"While you and your little boy don't," the young man remarked.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh no, I never differ from Newton!" And Mrs. Luna added that now she
+was back she didn't know what she should do. That was the worst of
+coming back; it was like being born again, at one's age&mdash;one had to
+begin life afresh. One didn't even know what one had come back for.
+There were people who wanted one to spend the winter in Boston; but she
+couldn't stand that&mdash;she knew, at least, what she had not come back for.
+Perhaps she should take a house in Washington; did he ever hear of that
+little place? They had invented it while she was away. Besides, Olive
+didn't want her in Boston, and didn't go through the form of saying so.
+That was one comfort with Olive; she never went through any forms.</p>
+
+<p>Basil Ransom had got up just as Mrs. Luna made this last declaration;
+for a young lady had glided into the room, who stopped short as it fell
+upon her ears. She stood there looking, consciously and rather
+seriously, at Mr. Ransom; a smile of exceeding faintness played about
+her lips&mdash;it was just perceptible enough to light up the native gravity
+of her face. It might have been likened to a thin ray of moonlight
+resting upon the wall of a prison.</p>
+
+<p>"If that were true," she said, "I shouldn't tell you that I am very
+sorry to have kept you waiting."</p>
+
+<p>Her voice was low and agreeable&mdash;a cultivated voice&mdash;and she extended a
+slender white hand to her visitor, who remarked with some solemnity (he
+felt a certain guilt of participation in Mrs. Luna's indiscretion) that
+he was intensely happy to make her acquaintance. He observed that Miss
+Chancellor's hand was at once cold and limp; she merely placed it in
+his, without exerting the smallest pressure. Mrs. Luna explained to her
+sister that her freedom of speech was caused by his being a
+relation&mdash;though, indeed, he didn't seem to know much about them. She
+didn't believe he had ever heard of her, Mrs. Luna, though he pretended,
+with his Southern chivalry, that he had. She must be off to her dinner
+now, she saw the carriage was there, and in her absence Olive might give
+any version of her she chose.</p>
+
+<p>"I have told him you are a radical, and you may tell him, if you like,
+that I am a painted Jezebel. Try to reform him; a person from
+Mississippi is sure to be all wrong. I shall be back very late; we are
+going to a theatre-party; that's why we dine so early. Good-bye, Mr.
+Ransom," Mrs. Luna continued, gathering up the feathery white shawl
+which added to the volume of her fairness. "I hope you are going to stay
+a little, so that you may judge us for yourself. I should like you to
+see Newton, too; he is a noble little nature, and I want some advice
+about him. You only stay to-morrow? Why, what's the use of that? Well,
+mind you come and see me in New York; I shall be sure to be part of the
+winter there. I shall send you a card; I won't let you off. Don't come
+out; my sister has the first claim. Olive, why don't you take him to
+your female convention?" Mrs. Luna's familiarity extended even to her
+sister; she remarked to Miss Chancellor that she looked as if she were
+got up for a sea-voyage. "I am glad I haven't opinions that prevent my
+dressing in the evening!" she declared from the doorway. "The amount of
+thought they give to their clothing, the people who are afraid of
+looking frivolous!"</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="II" id="II"></a>II</h2>
+
+
+<p>Whether much or little consideration had been directed to the result,
+Miss Chancellor certainly would not have incurred this reproach. She was
+habited in a plain dark dress, without any ornaments, and her smooth,
+colourless hair was confined as carefully as that of her sister was
+encouraged to stray. She had instantly seated herself, and while Mrs.
+Luna talked she kept her eyes on the ground, glancing even less toward
+Basil Ransom than toward that woman of many words. The young man was
+therefore free to look at her; a contemplation which showed him that she
+was agitated and trying to conceal it. He wondered why she was agitated,
+not foreseeing that he was destined to discover, later, that her nature
+was like a skiff in a stormy sea. Even after her sister had passed out
+of the room she sat there with her eyes turned away, as if there had
+been a spell upon her which forbade her to raise them. Miss Olive
+Chancellor, it may be confided to the reader, to whom in the course of
+our history I shall be under the necessity of imparting much occult
+information, was subject to fits of tragic shyness, during which she was
+unable to meet even her own eyes in the mirror. One of these fits had
+suddenly seized her now, without any obvious cause, though, indeed, Mrs.
+Luna had made it worse by becoming instantly so personal. There was
+nothing in the world so personal as Mrs. Luna; her sister could have
+hated her for it if she had not forbidden herself this emotion as
+directed to individuals. Basil Ransom was a young man of first-rate
+intelligence, but conscious of the narrow range, as yet, of his
+experience. He was on his guard against generalisations which might be
+hasty; but he had arrived at two or three that were of value to a
+gentleman lately admitted to the New York bar and looking out for
+clients. One of them was to the effect that the simplest division it is
+possible to make of the human race is into the people who take things
+hard and the people who take them easy. He perceived very quickly that
+Miss Chancellor belonged to the former class. This was written so
+intensely in her delicate face that he felt an unformulated pity for her
+before they had exchanged twenty words. He himself, by nature, took
+things easy; if he had put on the screw of late, it was after reflexion,
+and because circumstances pressed him close. But this pale girl, with
+her light-green eyes, her pointed features and nervous manner, was
+visibly morbid; it was as plain as day that she was morbid. Poor Ransom
+announced this fact to himself as if he had made a great discovery; but
+in reality he had never been so "Boeotian" as at that moment. It proved
+nothing of any importance, with regard to Miss Chancellor, to say that
+she was morbid; any sufficient account of her would lie very much to the
+rear of that. Why was she morbid, and why was her morbidness typical?
+Ransom might have exulted if he had gone back far enough to explain that
+mystery. The women he had hitherto known had been mainly of his own soft
+clime, and it was not often they exhibited the tendency he detected (and
+cursorily deplored) in Mrs. Luna's sister. That was the way he liked
+them&mdash;not to think too much, not to feel any responsibility for the
+government of the world, such as he was sure Miss Chancellor felt. If
+they would only be private and passive, and have no feeling but for
+that, and leave publicity to the sex of tougher hide! Ransom was pleased
+with the vision of that remedy; it must be repeated that he was very
+provincial.</p>
+
+<p>These considerations were not present to him as definitely as I have
+written them here; they were summed up in the vague compassion which his
+cousin's figure excited in his mind, and which was yet accompanied with
+a sensible reluctance to know her better, obvious as it was that with
+such a face as that she must be remarkable. He was sorry for her, but he
+saw in a flash that no one could help her: that was what made her
+tragic. He had not, seeking his fortune, come away from the blighted
+South, which weighed upon his heart, to look out for tragedies; at least
+he didn't want them outside of his office in Pine Street. He broke the
+silence ensuing upon Mrs. Luna's departure by one of the courteous
+speeches to which blighted regions may still encourage a tendency, and
+presently found himself talking comfortably enough with his hostess.
+Though he had said to himself that no one could help her, the effect of
+his tone was to dispel her shyness; it was her great advantage (for the
+career she had proposed to herself) that in certain conditions she was
+liable suddenly to become bold. She was reassured at finding that her
+visitor was peculiar; the way he spoke told her that it was no wonder he
+had fought on the Southern side. She had never yet encountered a
+personage so exotic, and she always felt more at her ease in the
+presence of anything strange. It was the usual things of life that
+filled her with silent rage; which was natural enough, inasmuch as, to
+her vision, almost everything that was usual was iniquitous. She had no
+difficulty in asking him now whether he would not stay to dinner&mdash;she
+hoped Adeline had given him her message. It had been when she was
+upstairs with Adeline, as his card was brought up, a sudden and very
+abnormal inspiration to offer him this (for her) really ultimate favour;
+nothing could be further from her common habit than to entertain alone,
+at any repast, a gentleman she had never seen.</p>
+
+<p>It was the same sort of impulse that had moved her to write to Basil
+Ransom, in the spring, after hearing accidentally that he had come to
+the North and intended, in New York, to practise his profession. It was
+her nature to look out for duties, to appeal to her conscience for
+tasks. This attentive organ, earnestly consulted, had represented to her
+that he was an offshoot of the old slave-holding oligarchy which, within
+her own vivid remembrance, had plunged the country into blood and tears,
+and that, as associated with such abominations, he was not a worthy
+object of patronage for a person whose two brothers&mdash;her only ones&mdash;had
+given up life for the Northern cause. It reminded her, however, on the
+other hand, that he too had been much bereaved, and, moreover, that he
+had fought and offered his own life, even if it had not been taken. She
+could not defend herself against a rich admiration&mdash;a kind of tenderness
+of envy&mdash;of any one who had been so happy as to have that opportunity.
+The most secret, the most sacred hope of her nature was that she might
+some day have such a chance, that she might be a martyr and die for
+something. Basil Ransom had lived, but she knew he had lived to see
+bitter hours. His family was ruined; they had lost their slaves, their
+property, their friends and relations, their home; had tasted of all the
+cruelty of defeat. He had tried for a while to carry on the plantation
+himself, but he had a millstone of debt round his neck, and he longed
+for some work which would transport him to the haunts of men. The State
+of Mississippi seemed to him the state of despair; so he surrendered the
+remnants of his patrimony to his mother and sisters, and, at nearly
+thirty years of age, alighted for the first time in New York, in the
+costume of his province, with fifty dollars in his pocket and a gnawing
+hunger in his heart.</p>
+
+<p>That this incident had revealed to the young man his ignorance of many
+things&mdash;only, however, to make him say to himself, after the first angry
+blush, that here he would enter the game and here he would win it&mdash;so
+much Olive Chancellor could not know; what was sufficient for her was
+that he had rallied, as the French say, had accepted the accomplished
+fact, had admitted that North and South were a single, indivisible
+political organism. Their cousinship&mdash;that of Chancellors and
+Ransoms&mdash;was not very close; it was the kind of thing that one might
+take up or leave alone, as one pleased. It was "in the female line," as
+Basil Ransom had written, in answering her letter with a good deal of
+form and flourish; he spoke as if they had been royal houses. Her mother
+had wished to take it up; it was only the fear of seeming patronising to
+people in misfortune that had prevented her from writing to Mississippi.
+If it had been possible to send Mrs. Ransom money, or even clothes, she
+would have liked that; but she had no means of ascertaining how such an
+offering would be taken. By the time Basil came to the North&mdash;making
+advances, as it were&mdash;Mrs. Chancellor had passed away; so it was for
+Olive, left alone in the little house in Charles Street (Adeline being
+in Europe), to decide.</p>
+
+<p>She knew what her mother would have done, and that helped her decision;
+for her mother always chose the positive course. Olive had a fear of
+everything, but her greatest fear was of being afraid. She wished
+immensely to be generous, and how could one be generous unless one ran a
+risk? She had erected it into a sort of rule of conduct that whenever
+she saw a risk she was to take it; and she had frequent humiliations at
+finding herself safe after all. She was perfectly safe after writing to
+Basil Ransom; and, indeed, it was difficult to see what he could have
+done to her except thank her (he was only exceptionally superlative) for
+her letter, and assure her that he would come and see her the first time
+his business (he was beginning to get a little) should take him to
+Boston. He had now come, in redemption of his grateful vow, and even
+this did not make Miss Chancellor feel that she had courted danger. She
+saw (when once she had looked at him) that he would not put those
+worldly interpretations on things which, with her, it was both an
+impulse and a principle to defy. He was too simple&mdash;too
+Mississippian&mdash;for that; she was almost disappointed. She certainly had
+not hoped that she might have struck him as making unwomanly overtures
+(Miss Chancellor hated this epithet almost as much as she hated its
+opposite); but she had a presentiment that he would be too good-natured,
+primitive to that degree. Of all things in the world, contention was
+most sweet to her (though why it is hard to imagine, for it always cost
+her tears, headaches, a day or two in bed, acute emotion), and it was
+very possible Basil Ransom would not care to contend. Nothing could be
+more displeasing than this indifference when people didn't agree with
+you. That he should agree she did not in the least expect of him; how
+could a Mississippian agree? If she had supposed he would agree, she
+would not have written to him.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="III" id="III"></a>III</h2>
+
+
+<p>When he had told her that if she would take him as he was he should be
+very happy to dine with her, she excused herself a moment and went to
+give an order in the dining-room. The young man, left alone, looked
+about the parlour&mdash;the two parlours which, in their prolonged, adjacent
+narrowness, formed evidently one apartment&mdash;and wandered to the windows
+at the back, where there was a view of the water; Miss Chancellor having
+the good fortune to dwell on that side of Charles Street toward which,
+in the rear, the afternoon sun slants redly, from an horizon indented at
+empty intervals with wooden spires, the masts of lonely boats, the
+chimneys of dirty "works," over a brackish expanse of anomalous
+character, which is too big for a river and too small for a bay. The
+view seemed to him very picturesque, though in the gathered dusk little
+was left of it save a cold yellow streak in the west, a gleam of brown
+water, and the reflexion of the lights that had begun to show themselves
+in a row of houses, impressive to Ransom in their extreme modernness,
+which overlooked the same lagoon from a long embankment on the left,
+constructed of stones roughly piled. He thought this prospect, from a
+city-house, almost romantic; and he turned from it back to the interior
+illuminated now by a lamp which the parlour-maid had placed on a table
+while he stood at the window as to something still more genial and
+interesting. The artistic sense in Basil Ransom had not been highly
+cultivated; neither (though he had passed his early years as the son of
+a rich man) was his conception of material comfort very definite; it
+consisted mainly of the vision of plenty of cigars and brandy and water
+and newspapers, and a cane-bottomed arm-chair of the right inclination,
+from which he could stretch his legs. Nevertheless it seemed to him he
+had never seen an interior that was so much an interior as this queer
+corridor-shaped drawing-room of his new-found kinswoman; he had never
+felt himself in the presence of so much organised privacy or of so many
+objects that spoke of habits and tastes. Most of the people he had
+hitherto known had no tastes; they had a few habits, but these were not
+of a sort that required much upholstery. He had not as yet been in many
+houses in New York, and he had never before seen so many accessories.
+The general character of the place struck him as Bostonian; this was, in
+fact, very much what he had supposed Boston to be. He had always heard
+Boston was a city of culture, and now there was culture in Miss
+Chancellor's tables and sofas, in the books that were everywhere, on
+little shelves like brackets (as if a book were a statuette), in the
+photographs and watercolours that covered the walls, in the curtains
+that were festooned rather stiffly in the doorways. He looked at some of
+the books and saw that his cousin read German; and his impression of the
+importance of this (as a symptom of superiority) was not diminished by
+the fact that he himself had mastered the tongue (knowing it contained a
+large literature of jurisprudence) during a long, empty, deadly summer
+on the plantation. It is a curious proof of a certain crude modesty
+inherent in Basil Ransom that the main effect of his observing his
+cousin's German books was to give him an idea of the natural energy of
+Northerners. He had noticed it often before; he had already told himself
+that he must count with it. It was only after much experience he made
+the discovery that few Northerners were, in their secret soul, so
+energetic as he. Many other persons had made it before that. He knew
+very little about Miss Chancellor; he had come to see her only because
+she wrote to him; he would never have thought of looking her up, and
+since then there had been no one in New York he might ask about her.
+Therefore he could only guess that she was a rich young woman; such a
+house, inhabited in such a way by a quiet spinster, implied a
+considerable income. How much? he asked himself; five thousand, ten
+thousand, fifteen thousand a year? There was richness to our panting
+young man in the smallest of these figures. He was not of a mercenary
+spirit, but he had an immense desire for success, and he had more than
+once reflected that a moderate capital was an aid to achievement. He had
+seen in his younger years one of the biggest failures that history
+commemorates, an immense national <i>fiasco</i>, and it had implanted in his
+mind a deep aversion to the ineffectual. It came over him, while he
+waited for his hostess to reappear, that she was unmarried as well as
+rich, that she was sociable (her letter answered for that) as well as
+single; and he had for a moment a whimsical vision of becoming a partner
+in so flourishing a firm. He ground his teeth a little as he thought of
+the contrasts of the human lot; this cushioned feminine nest made him
+feel unhoused and underfed. Such a mood, however, could only be
+momentary, for he was conscious at bottom of a bigger stomach than all
+the culture of Charles Street could fill.</p>
+
+<p>Afterwards, when his cousin had come back and they had gone down to
+dinner together, where he sat facing her at a little table decorated in
+the middle with flowers, a position from which he had another view,
+through a window where the curtain remained undrawn by her direction
+(she called his attention to this&mdash;it was for his benefit), of the
+dusky, empty river, spotted with points of light&mdash;at this period, I say,
+it was very easy for him to remark to himself that nothing would induce
+him to make love to such a type as that. Several months later, in New
+York, in conversation with Mrs. Luna, of whom he was destined to see a
+good deal, he alluded by chance to this repast, to the way her sister
+had placed him at table, and to the remark with which she had pointed
+out the advantage of his seat.</p>
+
+<p>"That's what they call in Boston being very 'thoughtful,'" Mrs. Luna
+said, "giving you the Back Bay (don't you hate the name?) to look at,
+and then taking credit for it."</p>
+
+<p>This, however, was in the future; what Basil Ransom actually perceived
+was that Miss Chancellor was a signal old maid. That was her quality,
+her destiny; nothing could be more distinctly written. There are women
+who are unmarried by accident, and others who are unmarried by option;
+but Olive Chancellor was unmarried by every implication of her being.
+She was a spinster as Shelley was a lyric poet, or as the month of
+August is sultry. She was so essentially a celibate that Ransom found
+himself thinking of her as old, though when he came to look at her (as
+he said to himself) it was apparent that her years were fewer than his
+own. He did not dislike her, she had been so friendly; but, little by
+little, she gave him an uneasy feeling&mdash;the sense that you could never
+be safe with a person who took things so hard. It came over him that it
+was because she took things hard she had sought his acquaintance; it had
+been because she was strenuous, not because she was genial; she had had
+in her eye&mdash;and what an extraordinary eye it was!&mdash;not a pleasure, but a
+duty. She would expect him to be strenuous in return; but he
+couldn't&mdash;in private life, he couldn't; privacy for Basil Ransom
+consisted entirely in what he called "laying off." She was not so plain
+on further acquaintance as she had seemed to him at first; even the
+young Mississippian had culture enough to see that she was refined. Her
+white skin had a singular look of being drawn tightly across her face;
+but her features, though sharp and irregular, were delicate in a fashion
+that suggested good breeding. Their line was perverse, but it was not
+poor. The curious tint of her eyes was a living colour; when she turned
+it upon you, you thought vaguely of the glitter of green ice. She had
+absolutely no figure, and presented a certain appearance of feeling
+cold. With all this, there was something very modern and highly
+developed in her aspect; she had the advantages as well as the drawbacks
+of a nervous organisation. She smiled constantly at her guest, but from
+the beginning to the end of dinner, though he made several remarks that
+he thought might prove amusing, she never once laughed. Later, he saw
+that she was a woman without laughter; exhilaration, if it ever visited
+her, was dumb. Once only, in the course of his subsequent acquaintance
+with her, did it find a voice; and then the sound remained in Ransom's
+ear as one of the strangest he had heard.</p>
+
+<p>She asked him a great many questions, and made no comment on his
+answers, which only served to suggest to her fresh inquiries. Her
+shyness had quite left her, it did not come back; she had confidence
+enough to wish him to see that she took a great interest in him. Why
+should she? he wondered, He couldn't believe he was one of <i>her</i> kind;
+he was conscious of much Bohemianism&mdash;he drank beer, in New York, in
+cellars, knew no ladies, and was familiar with a "variety" actress.
+Certainly, as she knew him better, she would disapprove of him, though,
+of course, he would never mention the actress, nor even, if necessary,
+the beer. Ransom's conception of vice was purely as a series of special
+cases, of explicable accidents. Not that he cared; if it were a part of
+the Boston character to be inquiring, he would be to the last a
+courteous Mississippian. He would tell her about Mississippi as much as
+she liked; he didn't care how much he told her that the old ideas in the
+South were played out. She would not understand him any the better for
+that; she would not know how little his own views could be gathered from
+such a limited admission. What her sister imparted to him about her
+mania for "reform" had left in his mouth a kind of unpleasant
+aftertaste; he felt, at any rate, that if she had the religion of
+humanity&mdash;Basil Ransom had read Comte, he had read everything&mdash;she would
+never understand him. He, too, had a private vision of reform, but the
+first principle of it was to reform the reformers. As they drew to the
+close of a meal which, in spite of all latent incompatibilities, had
+gone off brilliantly, she said to him that she should have to leave him
+after dinner, unless perhaps he should be inclined to accompany her. She
+was going to a small gathering at the house of a friend who had asked a
+few people, "interested in new ideas," to meet Mrs. Farrinder.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, thank you," said Basil Ransom. "Is it a party? I haven't been to a
+party since Mississippi seceded."</p>
+
+<p>"No; Miss Birdseye doesn't give parties. She's an ascetic."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, well, we have had our dinner," Ransom rejoined, laughing.</p>
+
+<p>His hostess sat silent a moment, with her eyes on the ground; she looked
+at such times as if she were hesitating greatly between several things
+she might say, all so important that it was difficult to choose.</p>
+
+<p>"I think it might interest you," she remarked presently. "You will hear
+some discussion, if you are fond of that. Perhaps you wouldn't agree,"
+she added, resting her strange eyes on him.</p>
+
+<p>"Perhaps I shouldn't&mdash;I don't agree with everything," he said, smiling
+and stroking his leg.</p>
+
+<p>"Don't you care for human progress?" Miss Chancellor went on.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't know&mdash;I never saw any. Are you going to show me some?"</p>
+
+<p>"I can show you an earnest effort towards it. That's the most one can be
+sure of. But I am not sure you are worthy."</p>
+
+<p>"Is it something very Bostonian? I should like to see that," said Basil
+Ransom.</p>
+
+<p>"There are movements in other cities. Mrs. Farrinder goes everywhere;
+she may speak to-night."</p>
+
+<p>"Mrs. Farrinder, the celebrated&mdash;&mdash;?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, the celebrated; the great apostle of the emancipation of women.
+She is a great friend of Miss Birdseye."</p>
+
+<p>"And who is Miss Birdseye?"</p>
+
+<p>"She is one of our celebrities. She is the woman in the world, I
+suppose, who has laboured most for every wise reform. I think I ought to
+tell you," Miss Chancellor went on in a moment, "she was one of the
+earliest, one of the most passionate, of the old Abolitionists."</p>
+
+<p>She had thought, indeed, she ought to tell him that, and it threw her
+into a little tremor of excitement to do so. Yet, if she had been afraid
+he would show some irritation at this news, she was disappointed at the
+geniality with which he exclaimed:</p>
+
+<p>"Why, poor old lady&mdash;she must be quite mature!"</p>
+
+<p>It was therefore with some severity that she rejoined:</p>
+
+<p>"She will never be old. She is the youngest spirit I know. But if you
+are not in sympathy, perhaps you had better not come," she went on.</p>
+
+<p>"In sympathy with what, dear madam?" Basil Ransom asked, failing still,
+to her perception, to catch the tone of real seriousness. "If, as you
+say, there is to be a discussion, there will be different sides, and of
+course one can't sympathise with both."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, but every one will, in his way&mdash;or in her way&mdash;plead the cause of
+the new truths. If you don't care for them, you won't go with us."</p>
+
+<p>"I tell you I haven't the least idea what they are! I have never yet
+encountered in the world any but old truths&mdash;as old as the sun and moon.
+How can I know? But <i>do</i> take me; it's such a chance to see Boston."</p>
+
+<p>"It isn't Boston&mdash;it's humanity!" Miss Chancellor, as she made this
+remark, rose from her chair, and her movement seemed to say that she
+consented. But before she quitted her kinsman to get ready, she observed
+to him that she was sure he knew what she meant; he was only pretending
+he didn't.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, perhaps, after all, I have a general idea," he confessed; "but
+don't you see how this little reunion will give me a chance to fix it?"</p>
+
+<p>She lingered an instant, with her anxious face. "Mrs. Farrinder will fix
+it!" she said; and she went to prepare herself.</p>
+
+<p>It was in this poor young lady's nature to be anxious, to have scruple
+within scruple and to forecast the consequences of things. She returned
+in ten minutes, in her bonnet, which she had apparently assumed in
+recognition of Miss Birdseye's asceticism. As she stood there drawing on
+her gloves&mdash;her visitor had fortified himself against Mrs. Farrinder by
+another glass of wine&mdash;she declared to him that she quite repented of
+having proposed to him to go; something told her that he would be an
+unfavourable element.</p>
+
+<p>"Why, is it going to be a spiritual <i>s&eacute;ance</i>?" Basil Ransom asked.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, I have heard at Miss Birdseye's some inspirational speaking."
+Olive Chancellor was determined to look him straight in the face as she
+said this; her sense of the way it might strike him operated as a
+cogent, not as a deterrent, reason.</p>
+
+<p>"Why, Miss Olive, it's just got up on purpose for me!" cried the young
+Mississippian, radiant, and clasping his hands. She thought him very
+handsome as he said this, but reflected that unfortunately men didn't
+care for the truth, especially the new kinds, in proportion as they were
+good-looking. She had, however, a moral resource that she could always
+fall back upon; it had already been a comfort to her, on occasions of
+acute feeling, that she hated men, as a class, anyway. "And I want so
+much to see an old Abolitionist; I have never laid eyes on one," Basil
+Ransom added.</p>
+
+<p>"Of course you couldn't see one in the South; you were too afraid of
+them to let them come there!" She was now trying to think of something
+she might say that would be sufficiently disagreeable to make him cease
+to insist on accompanying her; for, strange to record&mdash;if anything, in a
+person of that intense sensibility, be stranger than any other&mdash;her
+second thought with regard to having asked him had deepened with the
+elapsing moments into an unreasoned terror of the effect of his
+presence. "Perhaps Miss Birdseye won't like you," she went on, as they
+waited for the carriage.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't know; I reckon she will," said Basil Ransom good-humouredly. He
+evidently had no intention of giving up his opportunity.</p>
+
+<p>From the window of the dining-room, at that moment, they heard the
+carriage drive up. Miss Birdseye lived at the South End; the distance
+was considerable, and Miss Chancellor had ordered a hackney-coach, it
+being one of the advantages of living in Charles Street that stables
+were near. The logic of her conduct was none of the clearest; for if she
+had been alone she would have proceeded to her destination by the aid of
+the street-car; not from economy (for she had the good fortune not to be
+obliged to consult it to that degree), and not from any love of
+wandering about Boston at night (a kind of exposure she greatly
+disliked), but by reason of a theory she devotedly nursed, a theory
+which bade her put off invidious differences and mingle in the common
+life. She would have gone on foot to Boylston Street, and there she
+would have taken the public conveyance (in her heart she loathed it) to
+the South End. Boston was full of poor girls who had to walk about at
+night and to squeeze into horse-cars in which every sense was
+displeased; and why should she hold herself superior to these? Olive
+Chancellor regulated her conduct on lofty principles, and this is why,
+having to-night the advantage of a gentleman's protection, she sent for
+a carriage to obliterate that patronage. If they had gone together in
+the common way she would have seemed to owe it to him that she should be
+so daring, and he belonged to a sex to which she wished to be under no
+obligations. Months before, when she wrote to him, it had been with the
+sense, rather, of putting <i>him</i> in debt. As they rolled toward the South
+End, side by side, in a good deal of silence, bouncing and bumping over
+the railway-tracks very little less, after all, than if their wheels had
+been fitted to them, and looking out on either side at rows of red
+houses, dusky in the lamp-light, with protuberant fronts, approached by
+ladders of stone; as they proceeded, with these contemplative
+undulations, Miss Chancellor said to her companion, with a concentrated
+desire to defy him, as a punishment for having thrown her (she couldn't
+tell why) into such a tremor:</p>
+
+<p>"Don't you believe, then, in the coming of a better day&mdash;in its being
+possible to do something for the human race?"</p>
+
+<p>Poor Ransom perceived the defiance, and he felt rather bewildered; he
+wondered what type, after all, he <i>had</i> got hold of, and what game was
+being played with him. Why had she made advances, if she wanted to pinch
+him this way? However, he was good for any game&mdash;that one as well as
+another&mdash;and he saw that he was "in" for something of which he had long
+desired to have a nearer view. "Well, Miss Olive," he answered, putting
+on again his big hat, which he had been holding in his lap, "what
+strikes me most is that the human race has got to bear its troubles."</p>
+
+<p>"That's what men say to women, to make them patient in the position they
+have made for them."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, the position of women!" Basil Ransom exclaimed. "The position of
+women is to make fools of men. I would change my position for yours any
+day," he went on. "That's what I said to myself as I sat there in your
+elegant home."</p>
+
+<p>He could not see, in the dimness of the carriage, that she had flushed
+quickly, and he did not know that she disliked to be reminded of certain
+things which, for her, were mitigations of the hard feminine lot. But
+the passionate quaver with which, a moment later, she answered him
+sufficiently assured him that he had touched her at a tender point.</p>
+
+<p>"Do you make it a reproach to me that I happen to have a little money?
+The dearest wish of my heart is to do something with it for others&mdash;for
+the miserable."</p>
+
+<p>Basil Ransom might have greeted this last declaration with the sympathy
+it deserved, might have commended the noble aspirations of his
+kinswoman. But what struck him, rather, was the oddity of so sudden a
+sharpness of pitch in an intercourse which, an hour or two before, had
+begun in perfect amity, and he burst once more into an irrepressible
+laugh. This made his companion feel, with intensity, how little she was
+joking. "I don't know why I should care what you think," she said.</p>
+
+<p>"Don't care&mdash;don't care. What does it matter? It is not of the slightest
+importance."</p>
+
+<p>He might say that, but it was not true; she felt that there were reasons
+why she should care. She had brought him into her life, and she should
+have to pay for it. But she wished to know the worst at once. "Are you
+against our emancipation?" she asked, turning a white face on him in the
+momentary radiance of a street-lamp.</p>
+
+<p>"Do you mean your voting and preaching and all that sort of thing?" He
+made this inquiry, but seeing how seriously she would take his answer,
+he was almost frightened, and hung fire. "I will tell you when I have
+heard Mrs. Farrinder."</p>
+
+<p>They had arrived at the address given by Miss Chancellor to the
+coachman, and their vehicle stopped with a lurch. Basil Ransom got out;
+he stood at the door with an extended hand, to assist the young lady.
+But she seemed to hesitate; she sat there with her spectral face. "You
+hate it!" she exclaimed, in a low tone.</p>
+
+<p>"Miss Birdseye will convert me," said Ransom, with intention; for he had
+grown very curious, and he was afraid that now, at the last, Miss
+Chancellor would prevent his entering the house. She alighted without
+his help, and behind her he ascended the high steps of Miss Birdseye's
+residence. He had grown very curious, and among the things he wanted to
+know was why in the world this ticklish spinster had written to him.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="IV" id="IV"></a>IV</h2>
+
+
+<p>She had told him before they started that they should be early; she
+wished to see Miss Birdseye alone, before the arrival of any one else.
+This was just for the pleasure of seeing her&mdash;it was an opportunity; she
+was always so taken up with others. She received Miss Chancellor in the
+hall of the mansion, which had a salient front, an enormous and very
+high number&mdash;756&mdash;painted in gilt on the glass light above the door, a
+tin sign bearing the name of a doctress (Mary J. Prance) suspended from
+one of the windows of the basement, and a peculiar look of being both
+new and faded&mdash;a kind of modern fatigue&mdash;like certain articles of
+commerce which are sold at a reduction as shop-worn. The hall was very
+narrow; a considerable part of it was occupied by a large hat-tree, from
+which several coats and shawls already depended; the rest offered space
+for certain lateral demonstrations on Miss Birdseye's part. She sidled
+about her visitors, and at last went round to open for them a door of
+further admission, which happened to be locked inside. She was a little
+old lady, with an enormous head; that was the first thing Ransom
+noticed&mdash;the vast, fair, protuberant, candid, ungarnished brow,
+surmounting a pair of weak, kind, tired-looking eyes, and ineffectually
+balanced in the rear by a cap which had the air of falling backward, and
+which Miss Birdseye suddenly felt for while she talked, with
+unsuccessful irrelevant movements. She had a sad, soft, pale face, which
+(and it was the effect of her whole head) looked as if it had been
+soaked, blurred, and made vague by exposure to some slow dissolvent. The
+long practice of philanthropy had not given accent to her features; it
+had rubbed out their transitions, their meanings. The waves of sympathy,
+of enthusiasm, had wrought upon them in the same way in which the waves
+of time finally modify the surface of old marble busts, gradually
+washing away their sharpness, their details. In her large countenance
+her dim little smile scarcely showed. It was a mere sketch of a smile, a
+kind of instalment, or payment on account; it seemed to say that she
+would smile more if she had time, but that you could see, without this,
+that she was gentle and easy to beguile.</p>
+
+<p>She always dressed in the same way: she wore a loose black jacket, with
+deep pockets, which were stuffed with papers, memoranda of a voluminous
+correspondence; and from beneath her jacket depended a short stuff
+dress. The brevity of this simple garment was the one device by which
+Miss Birdseye managed to suggest that she was a woman of business, that
+she wished to be free for action. She belonged to the Short-Skirts
+League, as a matter of course; for she belonged to any and every league
+that had been founded for almost any purpose whatever. This did not
+prevent her being a confused, entangled, inconsequent, discursive old
+woman, whose charity began at home and ended nowhere, whose credulity
+kept pace with it, and who knew less about her fellow-creatures, if
+possible, after fifty years of humanitary zeal, than on the day she had
+gone into the field to testify against the iniquity of most
+arrangements. Basil Ransom knew very little about such a life as hers,
+but she seemed to him a revelation of a class, and a multitude of
+socialistic figures, of names and episodes that he had heard of, grouped
+themselves behind her. She looked as if she had spent her life on
+platforms, in audiences, in conventions, in phalansteries, in <i>s&eacute;ances</i>;
+in her faded face there was a kind of reflexion of ugly lecture-lamps;
+with its habit of an upward angle, it seemed turned toward a public
+speaker, with an effort of respiration in the thick air in which social
+reforms are usually discussed. She talked continually, in a voice of
+which the spring seemed broken, like that of an over-worked bell-wire;
+and when Miss Chancellor explained that she had brought Mr. Ransom
+because he was so anxious to meet Mrs. Farrinder, she gave the young man
+a delicate, dirty, democratic little hand, looking at him kindly, as she
+could not help doing, but without the smallest discrimination as against
+others who might not have the good fortune (which involved, possibly, an
+injustice) to be present on such an interesting occasion. She struck him
+as very poor, but it was only afterward that he learned she had never
+had a penny in her life. No one had an idea how she lived; whenever
+money was given her she gave it away to a negro or a refugee. No woman
+could be less invidious, but on the whole she preferred these two
+classes of the human race. Since the Civil War much of her occupation
+was gone; for before that her best hours had been spent in fancying that
+she was helping some Southern slave to escape. It would have been a nice
+question whether, in her heart of hearts, for the sake of this
+excitement, she did not sometimes wish the blacks back in bondage. She
+had suffered in the same way by the relaxation of many European
+despotisms, for in former years much of the romance of her life had been
+in smoothing the pillow of exile for banished conspirators. Her refugees
+had been very precious to her; she was always trying to raise money for
+some cadaverous Pole, to obtain lessons for some shirtless Italian.
+There was a legend that an Hungarian had once possessed himself of her
+affections, and had disappeared after robbing her of everything she
+possessed. This, however, was very apocryphal, for she had never
+possessed anything, and it was open to grave doubt that she could have
+entertained a sentiment so personal. She was in love, even in those
+days, only with causes, and she languished only for emancipations. But
+they had been the happiest days, for when causes were embodied in
+foreigners (what else were the Africans?), they were certainly more
+appealing.</p>
+
+<p>She had just come down to see Doctor Prance&mdash;to see whether she wouldn't
+like to come up. But she wasn't in her room, and Miss Birdseye guessed
+she had gone out to her supper; she got her supper at a boarding-table
+about two blocks off. Miss Birdseye expressed the hope that Miss
+Chancellor had had hers; she would have had plenty of time to take it,
+for no one had come in yet; she didn't know what made them all so late.
+Ransom perceived that the garments suspended to the hat-rack were not a
+sign that Miss Birdseye's friends had assembled; if he had gone a little
+further still he would have recognised the house as one of those in
+which mysterious articles of clothing are always hooked to something in
+the hall. Miss Birdseye's visitors, those of Doctor Prance, and of other
+tenants&mdash;for Number 756 was the common residence of several persons,
+among whom there prevailed much vagueness of boundary&mdash;used to leave
+things to be called for; many of them went about with satchels and
+reticules, for which they were always looking for places of deposit.
+What completed the character of this interior was Miss Birdseye's own
+apartment, into which her guests presently made their way, and where
+they were joined by various other members of the good lady's circle.
+Indeed, it completed Miss Birdseye herself, if anything could be said to
+render that office to this essentially formless old woman, who had no
+more outline than a bundle of hay. But the bareness of her long, loose,
+empty parlour (it was shaped exactly like Miss Chancellor's) told that
+she had never had any needs but moral needs, and that all her history
+had been that of her sympathies. The place was lighted by a small hot
+glare of gas, which made it look white and featureless. It struck even
+Basil Ransom with its flatness, and he said to himself that his cousin
+must have a very big bee in her bonnet to make her like such a house. He
+did not know then, and he never knew, that she mortally disliked it, and
+that in a career in which she was constantly exposing herself to offence
+and laceration, her most poignant suffering came from the injury of her
+taste. She had tried to kill that nerve, to persuade herself that taste
+was only frivolity in the disguise of knowledge; but her susceptibility
+was constantly blooming afresh and making her wonder whether an absence
+of nice arrangements were a necessary part of the enthusiasm of
+humanity. Miss Birdseye was always trying to obtain employment, lessons
+in drawing, orders for portraits, for poor foreign artists, as to the
+greatness of whose talent she pledged herself without reserve; but in
+point of fact she had not the faintest sense of the scenic or plastic
+side of life.</p>
+
+<p>Toward nine o'clock the light of her hissing burners smote the majestic
+person of Mrs. Farrinder, who might have contributed to answer that
+question of Miss Chancellor's in the negative. She was a copious,
+handsome woman, in whom angularity had been corrected by the air of
+success; she had a rustling dress (it was evident what <i>she</i> thought
+about taste), abundant hair of a glossy blackness, a pair of folded
+arms, the expression of which seemed to say that rest, in such a career
+as hers, was as sweet as it was brief, and a terrible regularity of
+feature. I apply that adjective to her fine placid mask because she
+seemed to face you with a question of which the answer was preordained,
+to ask you how a countenance could fail to be noble of which the
+measurements were so correct. You could contest neither the measurements
+nor the nobleness, and had to feel that Mrs. Farrinder imposed herself.
+There was a lithographic smoothness about her, and a mixture of the
+American matron and the public character. There was something public in
+her eye, which was large, cold, and quiet; it had acquired a sort of
+exposed reticence from the habit of looking down from a lecture-desk,
+over a sea of heads, while its distinguished owner was eulogised by a
+leading citizen. Mrs. Farrinder, at almost any time, had the air of
+being introduced by a few remarks. She talked with great slowness and
+distinctness, and evidently a high sense of responsibility; she
+pronounced every syllable of every word and insisted on being explicit.
+If, in conversation with her, you attempted to take anything for
+granted, or to jump two or three steps at a time, she paused, looking at
+you with a cold patience, as if she knew that trick, and then went on at
+her own measured pace. She lectured on temperance and the rights of
+women; the ends she laboured for were to give the ballot to every woman
+in the country and to take the flowing bowl from every man. She was held
+to have a very fine manner, and to embody the domestic virtues and the
+graces of the drawing-room; to be a shining proof, in short, that the
+forum, for ladies, is not necessarily hostile to the fireside. She had a
+husband, and his name was Amariah.</p>
+
+<p>Doctor Prance had come back from supper and made her appearance in
+response to an invitation that Miss Birdseye's relaxed voice had tinkled
+down to her from the hall over the banisters, with much repetition, to
+secure attention. She was a plain, spare young woman, with short hair
+and an eye-glass; she looked about her with a kind of near-sighted
+deprecation, and seemed to hope that she should not be expected to
+generalise in any way, or supposed to have come up for any purpose more
+social than to see what Miss Birdseye wanted this time. By nine o'clock
+twenty other persons had arrived, and had placed themselves in the
+chairs that were ranged along the sides of the long, bald room, in which
+they ended by producing the similitude of an enormous street-car. The
+apartment contained little else but these chairs, many of which had a
+borrowed aspect, an implication of bare bedrooms in the upper regions; a
+table or two with a discoloured marble top, a few books, and a
+collection of newspapers piled up in corners. Ransom could see for
+himself that the occasion was not crudely festive; there was a want of
+convivial movement, and, among most of the visitors, even of mutual
+recognition. They sat there as if they were waiting for something; they
+looked obliquely and silently at Mrs. Farrinder, and were plainly under
+the impression that, fortunately, they were not there to amuse
+themselves. The ladies, who were much the more numerous, wore their
+bonnets, like Miss Chancellor; the men were in the garb of toil, many of
+them in weary-looking overcoats. Two or three had retained their
+overshoes, and as you approached them the odour of the india-rubber was
+perceptible. It was not, however, that Miss Birdseye ever noticed
+anything of that sort; she neither knew what she smelled nor tasted what
+she ate. Most of her friends had an anxious, haggard look, though there
+were sundry exceptions&mdash;half-a-dozen placid, florid faces. Basil Ransom
+wondered who they all were; he had a general idea they were mediums,
+communists, vegetarians. It was not, either, that Miss Birdseye failed
+to wander about among them with repetitions of inquiry and friendly
+absences of attention; she sat down near most of them in turn, saying
+"Yes, yes," vaguely and kindly, to remarks they made to her, feeling for
+the papers in the pockets of her loosened bodice, recovering her cap and
+sacrificing her spectacles, wondering most of all what had been her idea
+in convoking these people. Then she remembered that it had been
+connected in some way with Mrs. Farrinder; that this eloquent woman had
+promised to favour the company with a few reminiscences of her last
+campaign; to sketch even, perhaps, the lines on which she intended to
+operate during the coming winter. This was what Olive Chancellor had
+come to hear; this would be the attraction for the dark-eyed young man
+(he looked like a genius) she had brought with her. Miss Birdseye made
+her way back to the great lecturess, who was bending an indulgent
+attention on Miss Chancellor; the latter compressed into a small space,
+to be near her, and sitting with clasped hands and a concentration of
+inquiry which by contrast made Mrs. Farrinder's manner seem large and
+free. In her transit, however, the hostess was checked by the arrival of
+fresh pilgrims; she had no idea she had mentioned the occasion to so
+many people&mdash;she only remembered, as it were, those she had
+forgotten&mdash;and it was certainly a proof of the interest felt in Mrs.
+Farrinder's work. The people who had just come in were Doctor and Mrs.
+Tarrant and their daughter Verena; he was a mesmeric healer and she was
+of old Abolitionist stock. Miss Birdseye rested her dim, dry smile upon
+the daughter, who was new to her, and it floated before her that she
+would probably be remarkable as a genius; her parentage was an
+implication of that. There was a genius for Miss Birdseye in every bush.
+Selah Tarrant had effected wonderful cures; she knew so many people&mdash;if
+they would only try him. His wife was a daughter of Abraham Greenstreet;
+she had kept a runaway slave in her house for thirty days. That was
+years before, when this girl must have been a child; but hadn't it
+thrown a kind of rainbow over her cradle, and wouldn't she naturally
+have some gift? The girl was very pretty, though she had red hair.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="V" id="V"></a>V</h2>
+
+
+<p>Mrs. Farrinder, meanwhile, was not eager to address the assembly. She
+confessed as much to Olive Chancellor, with a smile which asked that a
+temporary lapse of promptness might not be too harshly judged. She had
+addressed so many assemblies, and she wanted to hear what other people
+had to say. Miss Chancellor herself had thought so much on the vital
+subject; would not she make a few remarks and give them some of her
+experiences? How did the ladies on Beacon Street feel about the ballot?
+Perhaps she could speak for <i>them</i> more than for some others. That was a
+branch of the question on which, it might be, the leaders had not
+information enough; but they wanted to take in everything, and why
+shouldn't Miss Chancellor just make that field her own? Mrs. Farrinder
+spoke in the tone of one who took views so wide that they might easily,
+at first, before you could see how she worked round, look almost
+meretricious; she was conscious of a scope that exceeded the first
+flight of your imagination. She urged upon her companion the idea of
+labouring in the world of fashion, appeared to attribute to her familiar
+relations with that mysterious realm, and wanted to know why she
+shouldn't stir up some of her friends down there on the Mill-dam?</p>
+
+<p>Olive Chancellor received this appeal with peculiar feelings. With her
+immense sympathy for reform, she found herself so often wishing that
+reformers were a little different. There was something grand about Mrs.
+Farrinder; it lifted one up to be with her: but there was a false note
+when she spoke to her young friend about the ladies in Beacon Street.
+Olive hated to hear that fine avenue talked about as if it were such a
+remarkable place, and to live there were a proof of worldly glory. All
+sorts of inferior people lived there, and so brilliant a woman as Mrs.
+Farrinder, who lived at Roxbury, ought not to mix things up. It was, of
+course, very wretched to be irritated by such mistakes; but this was not
+the first time Miss Chancellor had observed that the possession of
+nerves was not by itself a reason for embracing the new truths. She knew
+her place in the Boston hierarchy, and it was not what Mrs. Farrinder
+supposed; so that there was a want of perspective in talking to her as
+if she had been a representative of the aristocracy. Nothing could be
+weaker, she knew very well, than (in the United States) to apply that
+term too literally; nevertheless, it would represent a reality if one
+were to say that, by distinction, the Chancellors belonged to the
+<i>bourgeoisie</i>&mdash;the oldest and best. They might care for such a position
+or not (as it happened, they were very proud of it), but there they
+were, and it made Mrs. Farrinder seem provincial (there was something
+provincial, after all, in the way she did her hair too) not to
+understand. When Miss Birdseye spoke as if one were a "leader of
+society," Olive could forgive her even that odious expression, because,
+of course, one never pretended that she, poor dear, had the smallest
+sense of the real. She was heroic, she was sublime, the whole moral
+history of Boston was reflected in her displaced spectacles; but it was
+a part of her originality, as it were, that she was deliciously
+provincial. Olive Chancellor seemed to herself to have privileges enough
+without being affiliated to the exclusive set and having invitations to
+the smaller parties, which were the real test; it was a mercy for her
+that she had not that added immorality on her conscience. The ladies
+Mrs. Farrinder meant (it was to be supposed she meant some particular
+ones) might speak for themselves. She wished to work in another field;
+she had long been preoccupied with the romance of the people. She had an
+immense desire to know intimately some <i>very</i> poor girl. This might seem
+one of the most accessible of pleasures; but, in point of fact, she had
+not found it so. There were two or three pale shop-maidens whose
+acquaintance she had sought; but they had seemed afraid of her, and the
+attempt had come to nothing. She took them more tragically then they
+took themselves; they couldn't make out what she wanted them to do, and
+they always ended by being odiously mixed up with Charlie. Charlie was a
+young man in a white overcoat and a paper collar; it was for him, in the
+last analysis, that they cared much the most. They cared far more about
+Charlie than about the ballot. Olive Chancellor wondered how Mrs.
+Farrinder would treat that branch of the question. In her researches
+among her young townswomen she had always found this obtrusive swain
+planted in her path, and she grew at last to dislike him extremely. It
+filled her with exasperation to think that he should be necessary to the
+happiness of his victims (she had learned that whatever they might talk
+about with her, it was of him and him only that they discoursed among
+themselves), and one of the main recommendations of the evening club for
+her fatigued, underpaid sisters, which it had long been her dream to
+establish, was that it would in some degree undermine his
+position&mdash;distinct as her prevision might be that he would be in waiting
+at the door. She hardly knew what to say to Mrs. Farrinder when this
+momentarily misdirected woman, still preoccupied with the Mill-dam,
+returned to the charge.</p>
+
+<p>"We want labourers in that field, though I know two or three lovely
+women&mdash;sweet <i>home-women</i>&mdash;moving in circles that are for the most part
+closed to every new voice, who are doing their best to help on the
+fight. I have several names that might surprise you, names well known on
+State Street. But we can't have too many recruits, especially among
+those whose refinement is generally acknowledged. If it be necessary, we
+are prepared to take certain steps to conciliate the shrinking. Our
+movement is for all&mdash;it appeals to the most delicate ladies. Raise the
+standard among them, and bring me a thousand names. I know several that
+I should like to have. I look after the details as well as the big
+currents," Mrs. Farrinder added, in a tone as explanatory as could be
+expected of such a woman, and with a smile of which the sweetness was
+thrilling to her listener.</p>
+
+<p>"I can't talk to those people, I can't!" said Olive Chancellor, with a
+face which seemed to plead for a remission of responsibility. "I want to
+give myself up to others; I want to know everything that lies beneath
+and out of sight, don't you know? I want to enter into the lives of
+women who are lonely, who are piteous. I want to be near to them&mdash;to
+help them. I want to do something&mdash;oh, I should like so to speak!"</p>
+
+<p>"We should be glad to have you make a few remarks at present," Mrs.
+Farrinder declared, with a punctuality which revealed the faculty of
+presiding.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh dear, no, I can't speak; I have none of that sort of talent. I have
+no self-possession, no eloquence; I can't put three words together. But
+I do want to contribute."</p>
+
+<p>"What <i>have</i> you got?" Mrs. Farrinder inquired, looking at her
+interlocutress, up and down, with the eye of business, in which there
+was a certain chill. "Have you got money?"</p>
+
+<p>Olive was so agitated for the moment with the hope that this great woman
+would approve of her on the financial side that she took no time to
+reflect that some other quality might, in courtesy, have been suggested.
+But she confessed to possessing a certain capital, and the tone seemed
+rich and deep in which Mrs. Farrinder said to her, "Then contribute
+that!" She was so good as to develop this idea, and her picture of the
+part Miss Chancellor might play by making liberal donations to a fund
+for the diffusion among the women of America of a more adequate
+conception of their public and private rights&mdash;a fund her adviser had
+herself lately inaugurated&mdash;this bold, rapid sketch had the vividness
+which characterised the speaker's most successful public efforts. It
+placed Olive under the spell; it made her feel almost inspired. If her
+life struck others in that way&mdash;especially a woman like Mrs. Farrinder,
+whose horizon was so full&mdash;then there must be something for her to do.
+It was one thing to choose for herself, but now the great representative
+of the enfranchisement of their sex (from every form of bondage) had
+chosen for her.</p>
+
+<p>The barren, gas-lighted room grew richer and richer to her earnest eyes;
+it seemed to expand, to open itself to the great life of humanity. The
+serious, tired people, in their bonnets and overcoats, began to glow
+like a company of heroes. Yes, she would do something, Olive Chancellor
+said to herself; she would do something to brighten the darkness of that
+dreadful image that was always before her, and against which it seemed
+to her at times that she had been born to lead a crusade&mdash;the image of
+the unhappiness of women. The unhappiness of women! The voice of their
+silent suffering was always in her ears, the ocean of tears that they
+had shed from the beginning of time seemed to pour through her own eyes.
+Ages of oppression had rolled over them; uncounted millions had lived
+only to be tortured, to be crucified. They were her sisters, they were
+her own, and the day of their delivery had dawned. This was the only
+sacred cause; this was the great, the just revolution. It must triumph,
+it must sweep everything before it; it must exact from the other, the
+brutal, blood-stained, ravening race, the last particle of expiation! It
+would be the greatest change the world had seen; it would be a new era
+for the human family, and the names of those who had helped to show the
+way and lead the squadrons would be the brightest in the tables of fame.
+They would be names of women weak, insulted, persecuted, but devoted in
+every pulse of their being to the cause, and asking no better fate than
+to die for it. It was not clear to this interesting girl in what manner
+such a sacrifice (as this last) would be required of her, but she saw
+the matter through a kind of sunrise-mist of emotion which made danger
+as rosy as success. When Miss Birdseye approached, it transfigured her
+familiar, her comical shape, and made the poor little humanitary hack
+seem already a martyr. Olive Chancellor looked at her with love,
+remembered that she had never, in her long, unrewarded, weary life, had
+a thought or an impulse for herself. She had been consumed by the
+passion of sympathy; it had crumpled her into as many creases as an old
+glazed, distended glove. She had been laughed at, but she never knew it;
+she was treated as a bore, but she never cared. She had nothing in the
+world but the clothes on her back, and when she should go down into the
+grave she would leave nothing behind her but her grotesque,
+undistinguished, pathetic little name. And yet people said that women
+were vain, that they were personal, that they were interested! While
+Miss Birdseye stood there, asking Mrs. Farrinder if she wouldn't say
+something, Olive Chancellor tenderly fastened a small battered brooch
+which confined her collar and which had half detached itself.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="VI" id="VI"></a>VI</h2>
+
+
+<p>"Oh, thank you," said Miss Birdseye, "I shouldn't like to lose it; it
+was given me by Mirandola!" He had been one of her refugees in the old
+time, when two or three of her friends, acquainted with the limits of
+his resources, wondered how he had come into possession of the trinket.
+She had been diverted again, after her greeting with Doctor and Mrs.
+Tarrant, by stopping to introduce the tall, dark young man whom Miss
+Chancellor had brought with her to Doctor Prance. She had become
+conscious of his somewhat sombre figure, uplifted against the wall, near
+the door; he was leaning there in solitude, unacquainted with
+opportunities which Miss Birdseye felt to be, collectively, of value,
+and which were really, of course, what strangers came to Boston for. It
+did not occur to her to ask herself why Miss Chancellor didn't talk to
+him, since she had brought him; Miss Birdseye was incapable of a
+speculation of this kind. Olive, in fact, had remained vividly conscious
+of her kinsman's isolation until the moment when Mrs. Farrinder lifted
+her, with a word, to a higher plane. She watched him across the room;
+she saw that he might be bored. But she proposed to herself not to mind
+that; she had asked him, after all, not to come. Then he was no worse
+off than others; he was only waiting, like the rest; and before they
+left she would introduce him to Mrs. Farrinder. She might tell that lady
+who he was first; it was not every one that would care to know a person
+who had borne such a part in the Southern disloyalty. It came over our
+young lady that when she sought the acquaintance of her distant kinsman
+she had indeed done a more complicated thing than she suspected. The
+sudden uneasiness that he flung over her in the carriage had not left
+her, though she felt it less now she was with others, and especially
+that she was close to Mrs. Farrinder, who was such a fountain of
+strength. At any rate, if he was bored, he could speak to some one;
+there were excellent people near him, even if they <i>were</i> ardent
+reformers. He could speak to that pretty girl who had just come in&mdash;the
+one with red hair&mdash;if he liked; Southerners were supposed to be so
+chivalrous!</p>
+
+<p>Miss Birdseye reasoned much less, and did not offer to introduce him to
+Verena Tarrant, who was apparently being presented by her parents to a
+group of friends at the other end of the room. It came back to Miss
+Birdseye, in this connexion, that, sure enough, Verena had been away for
+a long time&mdash;for nearly a year; had been on a visit to friends in the
+West, and would therefore naturally be a stranger to most of the Boston
+circle. Doctor Prance was looking at her&mdash;at Miss Birdseye&mdash;with little,
+sharp, fixed pupils; and the good lady wondered whether she were angry
+at having been induced to come up. She had a general impression that
+when genius was original its temper was high, and all this would be the
+case with Doctor Prance. She wanted to say to her that she could go down
+again if she liked; but even to Miss Birdseye's unsophisticated mind
+this scarcely appeared, as regards a guest, an adequate formula of
+dismissal. She tried to bring the young Southerner out; she said to him
+that she presumed they would have some entertainment soon&mdash;Mrs.
+Farrinder could be interesting when she tried! And then she bethought
+herself to introduce him to Doctor Prance; it might serve as a reason
+for having brought her up. Moreover, it would do her good to break up
+her work now and then; she pursued her medical studies far into the
+night, and Miss Birdseye, who was nothing of a sleeper (Mary Prance,
+precisely, had wanted to treat her for it), had heard her, in the
+stillness of the small hours, with her open windows (she had fresh air
+on the brain), sharpening instruments (it was Miss Birdseye's mild
+belief that she dissected), in a little physiological laboratory which
+she had set up in her back room, the room which, if she hadn't been a
+doctor, might have been her "chamber," and perhaps was, even with the
+dissecting, Miss Birdseye didn't know! She explained her young friends
+to each other, a trifle incoherently, perhaps, and then went to stir up
+Mrs. Farrinder.</p>
+
+<p>Basil Ransom had already noticed Doctor Prance; he had not been at all
+bored, and had observed every one in the room, arriving at all sorts of
+ingenious inductions. The little medical lady struck him as a perfect
+example of the "Yankee female"&mdash;the figure which, in the unregenerate
+imagination of the children of the cotton-States, was produced by the
+New England school-system, the Puritan code, the ungenial climate, the
+absence of chivalry. Spare, dry, hard, without a curve, an inflexion or
+a grace, she seemed to ask no odds in the battle of life and to be
+prepared to give none. But Ransom could see that she was not an
+enthusiast, and after his contact with his cousin's enthusiasm this was
+rather a relief to him. She looked like a boy, and not even like a good
+boy. It was evident that if she had been a boy, she would have "cut"
+school, to try private experiments in mechanics or to make researches in
+natural history. It was true that if she had been a boy she would have
+borne some relation to a girl, whereas Doctor Prance appeared to bear
+none whatever. Except her intelligent eye, she had no features to speak
+of. Ransom asked her if she were acquainted with the lioness, and on her
+staring at him, without response, explained that he meant the renowned
+Mrs. Farrinder.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, I don't know as I ought to say that I'm acquainted with her; but
+I've heard her on the platform. I have paid my half-dollar," the doctor
+added, with a certain grimness.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, did she convince you?" Ransom inquired.</p>
+
+<p>"Convince me of what, sir?"</p>
+
+<p>"That women are so superior to men."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, deary me!" said Doctor Prance, with a little impatient sigh; "I
+guess I know more about women than she does."</p>
+
+<p>"And that isn't your opinion, I hope," said Ransom, laughing.</p>
+
+<p>"Men and women are all the same to me," Doctor Prance remarked. "I don't
+see any difference. There is room for improvement in both sexes. Neither
+of them is up to the standard." And on Ransom's asking her what the
+standard appeared to her to be, she said, "Well, they ought to live
+better; that's what they ought to do." And she went on to declare,
+further, that she thought they all talked too much. This had so long
+been Ransom's conviction that his heart quite warmed to Doctor Prance,
+and he paid homage to her wisdom in the manner of Mississippi&mdash;with a
+richness of compliment that made her turn her acute, suspicious eye upon
+him. This checked him; she was capable of thinking that <i>he</i> talked too
+much&mdash;she herself having, apparently, no general conversation. It was
+german to the matter, at any rate, for him to observe that he believed
+they were to have a lecture from Mrs. Farrinder&mdash;he didn't know why she
+didn't begin. "Yes," said Doctor Prance, rather dryly, "I suppose that's
+what Miss Birdseye called me up for. She seemed to think I wouldn't want
+to miss that."</p>
+
+<p>"Whereas, I infer, you could console yourself for the loss of the
+oration," Ransom suggested.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, I've got some work. I don't want any one to teach me what a woman
+can do!" Doctor Prance declared. "She can find out some things, if she
+tries. Besides, I am familiar with Mrs. Farrinder's system; I know all
+she has got to say."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, what is it, then, since she continues to remain silent?"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, what it amounts to is just that women want to have a better time.
+That's what it comes to in the end. I am aware of that, without her
+telling me."</p>
+
+<p>"And don't you sympathise with such an aspiration?"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, I don't know as I cultivate the sentimental side," said Doctor
+Prance. "There's plenty of sympathy without mine. If they want to have a
+better time, I suppose it's natural; so do men too, I suppose. But I
+don't know as it appeals to me&mdash;to make sacrifices for it; it ain't such
+a wonderful time&mdash;the best you <i>can</i> have!"</p>
+
+<p>This little lady was tough and technical; she evidently didn't care for
+great movements; she became more and more interesting to Basil Ransom,
+who, it is to be feared, had a fund of cynicism. He asked her if she
+knew his cousin, Miss Chancellor, whom he indicated, beside Mrs.
+Farrinder; <i>she</i> believed, on the contrary, in wonderful times (she
+thought they were coming); she had plenty of sympathy, and he was sure
+she was willing to make sacrifices.</p>
+
+<p>Doctor Prance looked at her across the room for a moment; then she said
+she didn't know her, but she guessed she knew others like her&mdash;she went
+to see them when they were sick. "She's having a private lecture to
+herself," Ransom remarked; whereupon Doctor Prance rejoined, "Well, I
+guess she'll have to pay for it!" She appeared to regret her own
+half-dollar, and to be vaguely impatient of the behaviour of her sex.
+Ransom became so sensible of this that he felt it was indelicate to
+allude further to the cause of woman, and, for a change, endeavoured to
+elicit from his companion some information about the gentlemen present.
+He had given her a chance, vainly, to start some topic herself; but he
+could see that she had no interests beyond the researches from which,
+this evening, she had been torn, and was incapable of asking him a
+personal question. She knew two or three of the gentlemen; she had seen
+them before at Miss Birdseye's. Of course she knew principally ladies;
+the time hadn't come when a lady-doctor was sent for by a gentleman, and
+she hoped it never would, though some people seemed to think that this
+was what lady-doctors were working for. She knew Mr. Pardon; that was
+the young man with the "side-whiskers" and the white hair; he was a kind
+of editor, and he wrote, too, "over his signature"&mdash;perhaps Basil had
+read some of his works; he was under thirty, in spite of his white hair.
+He was a great deal thought of in magazine circles. She believed he was
+very bright&mdash;but she hadn't read anything. She didn't read much&mdash;not for
+amusement; only the <i>Transcript</i>. She believed Mr. Pardon sometimes
+wrote in the <i>Transcript</i>; well, she supposed he <i>was</i> very bright. The
+other that she knew&mdash;only she didn't know him (she supposed Basil would
+think that queer)&mdash;was the tall, pale gentleman, with the black
+moustache and the eye-glass. She knew him because she had met him in
+society; but she didn't know him&mdash;well, because she didn't want to. If
+he should come and speak to her&mdash;and he looked as if he were going to
+work round that way&mdash;she should just say to him, "Yes, sir," or "No,
+sir," very coldly. She couldn't help it if he did think her dry; if <i>he</i>
+were a little more dry, it might be better for him. What was the matter
+with him? Oh, she thought she had mentioned that; he was a mesmeric
+healer, he made miraculous cures. She didn't believe in his system or
+disbelieve in it, one way or the other; she only knew that she had been
+called to see ladies he had worked on, and she found that he had made
+them lose a lot of valuable time. He talked to them&mdash;well, as if he
+didn't know what he was saying. She guessed he was quite ignorant of
+physiology, and she didn't think he ought to go round taking
+responsibilities. She didn't want to be narrow, but she thought a person
+ought to know something. She supposed Basil would think her very
+uplifted; but he had put the question to her, as she might say. All she
+could say was she didn't want him to be laying his hands on any of <i>her</i>
+folks; it was all done with the hands&mdash;what wasn't done with the tongue!
+Basil could see that Doctor Prance was irritated; that this extreme
+candour of allusion to her neighbour was probably not habitual to her,
+as a member of a society in which the casual expression of strong
+opinion generally produced waves of silence. But he blessed her
+irritation, for him it was so illuminating; and to draw further profit
+from it he asked her who the young lady was with the red hair&mdash;the
+pretty one, whom he had only noticed during the last ten minutes. She
+was Miss Tarrant, the daughter of the healer; hadn't she mentioned his
+name? Selah Tarrant; if he wanted to send for him. Doctor Prance wasn't
+acquainted with her, beyond knowing that she was the mesmerist's only
+child, and having heard something about her having some gift&mdash;she
+couldn't remember which it was. Oh, if she was his child, she would be
+sure to have some gift&mdash;if it was only the gift of the g&mdash;&mdash;well, she
+didn't mean to say that; but a talent for conversation. Perhaps she
+could die and come to life again; perhaps she would show them her gift,
+as no one seemed inclined to do anything. Yes, she was pretty-appearing,
+but there was a certain indication of an&aelig;mia, and Doctor Prance would be
+surprised if she didn't eat too much candy. Basil thought she had an
+engaging exterior; it was his private reflexion, coloured doubtless by
+"sectional" prejudice, that she was the first pretty girl he had seen in
+Boston. She was talking with some ladies at the other end of the room;
+and she had a large red fan, which she kept constantly in movement. She
+was not a quiet girl; she fidgeted, was restless, while she talked, and
+had the air of a person who, whatever she might be doing, would wish to
+be doing something else. If people watched her a good deal, she also
+returned their contemplation, and her charming eyes had several times
+encountered those of Basil Ransom. But they wandered mainly in the
+direction of Mrs. Farrinder&mdash;they lingered upon the serene solidity of
+the great oratress. It was easy to see that the girl admired this
+beneficent woman, and felt it a privilege to be near her. It was
+apparent, indeed, that she was excited by the company in which she found
+herself; a fact to be explained by a reference to that recent period of
+exile in the West, of which we have had a hint, and in consequence of
+which the present occasion may have seemed to her a return to
+intellectual life. Ransom secretly wished that his cousin&mdash;since fate
+was to reserve for him a cousin in Boston&mdash;had been more like that.</p>
+
+<p>By this time a certain agitation was perceptible; several ladies,
+impatient of vain delay, had left their places, to appeal personally to
+Mrs. Farrinder, who was presently surrounded with sympathetic
+remonstrants. Miss Birdseye had given her up; it had been enough for
+Miss Birdseye that she should have said, when pressed (so far as her
+hostess, muffled in laxity, could press) on the subject of the general
+expectation, that she could only deliver her message to an audience
+which she felt to be partially hostile. There was no hostility there;
+they were all only too much in sympathy. "I don't require sympathy," she
+said, with a tranquil smile, to Olive Chancellor; "I am only myself, I
+only rise to the occasion, when I see prejudice, when I see bigotry,
+when I see injustice, when I see conservatism, massed before me like an
+army. Then I feel&mdash;I feel as I imagine Napoleon Bonaparte to have felt
+on the eve of one of his great victories. I <i>must</i> have unfriendly
+elements&mdash;I like to win them over."</p>
+
+<p>Olive thought of Basil Ransom, and wondered whether he would do for an
+unfriendly element. She mentioned him to Mrs. Farrinder, who expressed
+an earnest hope that if he were opposed to the principles which were so
+dear to the rest of them, he might be induced to take the floor and
+testify on his own account. "I should be so happy to answer him," said
+Mrs. Farrinder, with supreme softness. "I should be so glad, at any
+rate, to exchange ideas with him." Olive felt a deep alarm at the idea
+of a public dispute between these two vigorous people (she had a
+perception that Ransom would be vigorous), not because she doubted of
+the happy issue, but because she herself would be in a false position,
+as having brought the offensive young man, and she had a horror of false
+positions. Miss Birdseye was incapable of resentment; she had invited
+forty people to hear Mrs. Farrinder speak, and now Mrs. Farrinder
+wouldn't speak. But she had such a beautiful reason for it! There was
+something martial and heroic in her pretext, and, besides, it was so
+characteristic, so free, that Miss Birdseye was quite consoled, and
+wandered away, looking at her other guests vaguely, as if she didn't
+know them from each other, while she mentioned to them, at a venture,
+the excuse for their disappointment, confident, evidently, that they
+would agree with her it was very fine. "But we can't pretend to be on
+the other side, just to start her up, can we?" she asked of Mr. Tarrant,
+who sat there beside his wife with a rather conscious but by no means
+complacent air of isolation from the rest of the company.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, I don't know&mdash;I guess we are all solid here," this gentleman
+replied, looking round him with a slow, deliberate smile, which made his
+mouth enormous, developed two wrinkles, as long as the wings of a bat,
+on either side of it, and showed a set of big, even, carnivorous teeth.</p>
+
+<p>"Selah," said his wife, laying her hand on the sleeve of his waterproof,
+"I wonder whether Miss Birdseye would be interested to hear Verena."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, if you mean she sings, it's a shame I haven't got a piano," Miss
+Birdseye took upon herself to respond. It came back to her that the girl
+had a gift.</p>
+
+<p>"She doesn't want a piano&mdash;she doesn't want anything," Selah remarked,
+giving no apparent attention to his wife. It was a part of his attitude
+in life never to appear to be indebted to another person for a
+suggestion, never to be surprised or unprepared.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, I don't know that the interest in singing is so general," said
+Miss Birdseye, quite unconscious of any slackness in preparing a
+substitute for the entertainment that had failed her.</p>
+
+<p>"It isn't singing, you'll see," Mrs. Tarrant declared.</p>
+
+<p>"What is it, then?"</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Tarrant unfurled his wrinkles, showed his back teeth. "It's
+inspirational."</p>
+
+<p>Miss Birdseye gave a small, vague, unsceptical laugh. "Well, if you can
+guarantee that&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"I think it would be acceptable," said Mrs. Tarrant; and putting up a
+half-gloved, familiar hand, she drew Miss Birdseye down to her, and the
+pair explained in alternation what it was their child could do.</p>
+
+<p>Meanwhile, Basil Ransom confessed to Doctor Prance that he was, after
+all, rather disappointed. He had expected more of a programme; he wanted
+to hear some of the new truths. Mrs. Farrinder, as he said, remained
+within her tent, and he had hoped not only to see these distinguished
+people but also to listen to them.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, <i>I</i> ain't disappointed," the sturdy little doctress replied. "If
+any question had been opened, I suppose I should have had to stay."</p>
+
+<p>"But I presume you don't propose to retire."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, I've got to pursue my studies some time. I don't want the
+gentlemen-doctors to get ahead of me."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, no one will ever get ahead of you, I'm very sure. And there is that
+pretty young lady going over to speak to Mrs. Farrinder. She's going to
+beg her for a speech&mdash;Mrs. Farrinder can't resist that."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, then, I'll just trickle out before she begins. Good-night, sir,"
+said Doctor Prance, who by this time had begun to appear to Ransom more
+susceptible of domestication, as if she had been a small
+forest-creature, a catamount or a ruffled doe, that had learned to stand
+still while you stroked it, or even to extend a paw. She ministered to
+health, and she was healthy herself; if his cousin could have been even
+of this type Basil would have felt himself more fortunate.</p>
+
+<p>"Good-night, Doctor," he replied. "You haven't told me, after all, your
+opinion of the capacity of the ladies."</p>
+
+<p>"Capacity for what?" said Doctor Prance. "They've got a capacity for
+making people waste time. All I know is that I don't want any one to
+tell <i>me</i> what a lady can do!" And she edged away from him softly, as if
+she had been traversing a hospital-ward, and presently he saw her reach
+the door, which, with the arrival of the later comers, had remained
+open. She stood there an instant, turning over the whole assembly a
+glance like the flash of a watchman's bull's-eye, and then quickly
+passed out. Ransom could see that she was impatient of the general
+question and bored with being reminded, even for the sake of her rights,
+that she was a woman&mdash;a detail that she was in the habit of forgetting,
+having as many rights as she had time for. It was certain that whatever
+might become of the movement at large, Doctor Prance's own little
+revolution was a success.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="VII" id="VII"></a>VII</h2>
+
+
+<p>She had no sooner left him than Olive Chancellor came towards him with
+eyes that seemed to say, "I don't care whether you are here now or
+not&mdash;I'm all right!" But what her lips said was much more gracious; she
+asked him if she mightn't have the pleasure of introducing him to Mrs.
+Farrinder. Ransom consented, with a little of his Southern flourish, and
+in a moment the lady got up to receive him from the midst of the circle
+that now surrounded her. It was an occasion for her to justify her
+reputation of an elegant manner, and it must be impartially related that
+she struck Ransom as having a dignity in conversation and a command of
+the noble style which could not have been surpassed by a daughter&mdash;one
+of the most accomplished, most far-descended daughters&mdash;of his own
+latitude. It was as if she had known that he was not eager for the
+changes she advocated, and wished to show him that, especially to a
+Southerner who had bitten the dust, her sex could be magnanimous. This
+knowledge of his secret heresy seemed to him to be also in the faces of
+the other ladies, whose circumspect glances, however (for he had not
+been introduced), treated it as a pity rather than as a shame. He was
+conscious of all these middle-aged feminine eyes, conscious of curls,
+rather limp, that depended from dusky bonnets, of heads poked forward,
+as if with a waiting, listening, familiar habit, of no one being very
+bright or gay&mdash;no one, at least, but that girl he had noticed before,
+who had a brilliant head, and who now hovered on the edge of the
+conclave. He met her eye again; she was watching him too. It had been in
+his thought that Mrs. Farrinder, to whom his cousin might have betrayed
+or misrepresented him, would perhaps defy him to combat, and he wondered
+whether he could pull himself together (he was extremely embarrassed)
+sufficiently to do honour to such a challenge. If she would fling down
+the glove on the temperance question, it seemed to him that it would be
+in him to pick it up; for the idea of a meddling legislation on this
+subject filled him with rage; the taste of liquor being good to him, and
+his conviction strong that civilisation itself would be in danger if it
+should fall into the power of a herd of vociferating women (I am but the
+reporter of his angry <i>formulae</i>) to prevent a gentleman from taking his
+glass. Mrs. Farrinder proved to him that she had not the eagerness of
+insecurity; she asked him if he wouldn't like to give the company some
+account of the social and political condition of the South. He begged to
+be excused, expressing at the same time a high sense of the honour done
+him by such a request, while he smiled to himself at the idea of his
+extemporising a lecture. He smiled even while he suspected the meaning
+of the look Miss Chancellor gave him: "Well, you are not of much account
+after all!" To talk to those people about the South&mdash;if they could have
+guessed how little he cared to do it! He had a passionate tenderness for
+his own country, and a sense of intimate connexion with it which would
+have made it as impossible for him to take a roomful of Northern
+fanatics into his confidence as to read aloud his mother's or his
+mistress's letters. To be quiet about the Southern land, not to touch
+her with vulgar hands, to leave her alone with her wounds and her
+memories, not prating in the market-place either of her troubles or her
+hopes, but waiting as a man should wait, for the slow process, the
+sensible beneficence, of time&mdash;this was the desire of Ransom's heart,
+and he was aware of how little it could minister to the entertainment of
+Miss Birdseye's guests.</p>
+
+<p>"We know so little about the women of the South; they are very
+voiceless," Mrs. Farrinder remarked. "How much can we count upon them?
+in what numbers would they flock to our standard? I have been
+recommended not to lecture in the Southern cities."</p>
+
+<p>"Ah, madam, that was very cruel advice&mdash;for us!" Basil Ransom exclaimed,
+with gallantry.</p>
+
+<p>"<i>I</i> had a magnificent audience last spring in St. Louis," a fresh young
+voice announced, over the heads of the gathered group&mdash;a voice which, on
+Basil's turning, like every one else, for an explanation, appeared to
+have proceeded from the pretty girl with red hair. She had coloured a
+little with the effort of making this declaration, and she stood there
+smiling at her listeners.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Farrinder bent a benignant brow upon her, in spite of her being,
+evidently, rather a surprise. "Oh, indeed; and your subject, my dear
+young lady?"</p>
+
+<p>"The past history, the present condition, and the future prospects of
+our sex."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, well, St. Louis&mdash;that's scarcely the South," said one of the
+ladies.</p>
+
+<p>"I'm sure the young lady would have had equal success at Charleston or
+New Orleans," Basil Ransom interposed.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, I wanted to go farther," the girl continued, "but I had no
+friends. I have friends in St. Louis."</p>
+
+<p>"You oughtn't to want for them anywhere," said Mrs. Farrinder, in a
+manner which, by this time, had quite explained her reputation. "I am
+acquainted with the loyalty of St. Louis."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, after that, you must let me introduce Miss Tarrant; she's
+perfectly dying to know you, Mrs. Farrinder." These words emanated from
+one of the gentlemen, the young man with white hair, who had been
+mentioned to Ransom by Doctor Prance as a celebrated magazinist. He,
+too, up to this moment, had hovered in the background, but he now gently
+clove the assembly (several of the ladies made way for him), leading in
+the daughter of the mesmerist.</p>
+
+<p>She laughed and continued to blush&mdash;her blush was the faintest pink; she
+looked very young and slim and fair as Mrs. Farrinder made way for her
+on the sofa which Olive Chancellor had quitted. "I <i>have</i> wanted to know
+you; I admire you so much; I hoped so you would speak to-night. It's too
+lovely to see you, Mrs. Farrinder." So she expressed herself, while the
+company watched the encounter with a look of refreshed inanition. "You
+don't know who I am, of course; I'm just a girl who wants to thank you
+for all you have done for us. For you have spoken for us girls, just as
+much as&mdash;just as much as&mdash;&mdash;" She hesitated now, looking about with
+enthusiastic eyes at the rest of the group, and meeting once more the
+gaze of Basil Ransom.</p>
+
+<p>"Just as much as for the old women," said Mrs. Farrinder genially. "You
+seem very well able to speak for yourself."</p>
+
+<p>"She speaks so beautifully&mdash;if she would only make a little address,"
+the young man who had introduced her remarked. "It's a new style, quite
+original," he added. He stood there with folded arms, looking down at
+his work, the conjunction of the two ladies, with a smile; and Basil
+Ransom, remembering what Miss Prance had told him, and enlightened by
+his observation in New York of some of the sources from which newspapers
+are fed, was immediately touched by the conviction that he perceived in
+it the material of a paragraph.</p>
+
+<p>"My dear child, if you'll take the floor, I'll call the meeting to
+order," said Mrs. Farrinder.</p>
+
+<p>The girl looked at her with extraordinary candour and confidence. "If I
+could only hear you first&mdash;just to give me an atmosphere."</p>
+
+<p>"I've got no atmosphere; there's very little of the Indian summer about
+<i>me</i>! I deal with facts&mdash;hard facts," Mrs. Farrinder replied. "Have you
+ever heard me? If so, you know how crisp I am."</p>
+
+<p>"Heard you? I've lived on you! It's so much to me to see you. Ask mother
+if it ain't!" She had expressed herself, from the first word she
+uttered, with a promptness and assurance which gave almost the
+impression of a lesson rehearsed in advance. And yet there was a strange
+spontaneity in her manner, and an air of artless enthusiasm, of personal
+purity. If she was theatrical, she was naturally theatrical. She looked
+up at Mrs. Farrinder with all her emotion in her smiling eyes. This lady
+had been the object of many ovations; it was familiar to her that the
+collective heart of her sex had gone forth to her; but, visibly, she was
+puzzled by this unforeseen embodiment of gratitude and fluency, and her
+eyes wandered over the girl with a certain reserve, while, within the
+depth of her eminently public manner, she asked herself whether Miss
+Tarrant were a remarkable young woman or only a forward minx. She found
+a response which committed her to neither view; she only said, "We want
+the young&mdash;of course we want the young!"</p>
+
+<p>"Who is that charming creature?" Basil Ransom heard his cousin ask, in a
+grave, lowered tone, of Matthias Pardon, the young man who had brought
+Miss Tarrant forward. He didn't know whether Miss Chancellor knew him,
+or whether her curiosity had pushed her to boldness. Ransom was near the
+pair, and had the benefit of Mr. Pardon's answer.</p>
+
+<p>"The daughter of Doctor Tarrant, the mesmeric healer&mdash;Miss Verena. She's
+a high-class speaker."</p>
+
+<p>"What do you mean?" Olive asked. "Does she give public addresses?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh yes, she has had quite a career in the West. I heard her last spring
+at Topeka. They call it inspirational. I don't know what it is&mdash;only
+it's exquisite; so fresh and poetical. She has to have her father to
+start her up. It seems to pass into her." And Mr. Pardon indulged in a
+gesture intended to signify the passage.</p>
+
+<p>Olive Chancellor made no rejoinder save a low, impatient sigh; she
+transferred her attention to the girl, who now held Mrs. Farrinder's
+hand in both her own, and was pleading with her just to prelude a
+little. "I want a starting-point&mdash;I want to know where I am," she said.
+"Just two or three of your grand old thoughts."</p>
+
+<p>Basil stepped nearer to his cousin; he remarked to her that Miss Verena
+was very pretty. She turned an instant, glanced at him, and then said,
+"Do you think so?" An instant later she added, "How you must hate this
+place!"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, not now, we are going to have some fun," Ransom replied
+good-humouredly, if a trifle coarsely; and the declaration had a point,
+for Miss Birdseye at this moment reappeared, followed by the mesmeric
+healer and his wife.</p>
+
+<p>"Ah, well, I see you are drawing her out," said Miss Birdseye to Mrs.
+Farrinder; and at the idea that this process had been necessary Basil
+Ransom broke into a smothered hilarity, a spasm which indicated that,
+for him, the fun had already begun, and procured him another grave
+glance from Miss Chancellor. Miss Verena seemed to him as far "out" as a
+young woman could be. "Here's her father, Doctor Tarrant&mdash;he has a
+wonderful gift&mdash;and her mother&mdash;she was a daughter of Abraham
+Greenstreet." Miss Birdseye presented her companion; she was sure Mrs.
+Farrinder would be interested; she wouldn't want to lose an opportunity,
+even if for herself the conditions were not favourable. And then Miss
+Birdseye addressed herself to the company more at large, widening the
+circle so as to take in the most scattered guests, and evidently feeling
+that after all it was a relief that one happened to have an obscurely
+inspired maiden on the premises when greater celebrities had betrayed
+the whimsicality of genius. It was a part of this whimsicality that Mrs.
+Farrinder&mdash;the reader may find it difficult to keep pace with her
+variations&mdash;appeared now to have decided to utter a few of her thoughts,
+so that her hostess could elicit a general response to the remark that
+it would be delightful to have both the old school and the new.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, perhaps you'll be disappointed in Verena," said Mrs. Tarrant,
+with an air of dolorous resignation to any event, and seating herself,
+with her gathered mantle, on the edge of a chair, as if she, at least,
+were ready, whoever else might keep on talking.</p>
+
+<p>"It isn't <i>me</i>, mother," Verena rejoined, with soft gravity, rather
+detached now from Mrs. Farrinder, and sitting with her eyes fixed
+thoughtfully on the ground. With deference to Mrs. Tarrant, a little
+more talk was necessary, for the young lady had as yet been
+insufficiently explained. Miss Birdseye felt this, but she was rather
+helpless about it, and delivered herself, with her universal
+familiarity, which embraced every one and everything, of a wandering,
+amiable tale, in which Abraham Greenstreet kept reappearing, in which
+Doctor Tarrant's miraculous cures were specified, with all the facts
+wanting, and in which Verena's successes in the West were related, not
+with emphasis or hyperbole, in which Miss Birdseye never indulged, but
+as accepted and recognised wonders, natural in an age of new
+revelations. She had heard of these things in detail only ten minutes
+before, from the girl's parents, but her hospitable soul had needed but
+a moment to swallow and assimilate them. If her account of them was not
+very lucid, it should be said in excuse for her that it was impossible
+to have any idea of Verena Tarrant unless one had heard her, and
+therefore still more impossible to give an idea to others. Mrs.
+Farrinder was perceptibly irritated; she appeared to have made up her
+mind, after her first hesitation, that the Tarrant family were
+fantastical and compromising. She had bent an eye of coldness on Selah
+and his wife&mdash;she might have regarded them all as a company of
+mountebanks.</p>
+
+<p>"Stand up and tell us what you have to say," she remarked, with some
+sternness, to Verena, who only raised her eyes to her, silently now,
+with the same sweetness, and then rested them on her father. This
+gentleman seemed to respond to an irresistible appeal; he looked round
+at the company with all his teeth, and said that these flattering
+allusions were not so embarrassing as they might otherwise be, inasmuch
+as any success that he and his daughter might have had was so thoroughly
+impersonal: he insisted on that word. They had just heard her say, "It
+is not <i>me</i>, mother," and he and Mrs. Tarrant and the girl herself were
+all equally aware it was not she. It was some power outside&mdash;it seemed
+to flow through her; he couldn't pretend to say why his daughter should
+be called, more than any one else. But it seemed as if she <i>was</i> called.
+When he just calmed her down by laying his hand on her a few moments, it
+seemed to come. It so happened that in the West it had taken the form of
+a considerable eloquence. She had certainly spoken with great facility
+to cultivated and high-minded audiences. She had long followed with
+sympathy the movement for the liberation of her sex from every sort of
+bondage; it had been her principal interest even as a child (he might
+mention that at the age of nine she had christened her favourite doll
+Eliza P. Moseley, in memory of a great precursor whom they all
+reverenced), and now the inspiration, if he might call it so, seemed
+just to flow in that channel. The voice that spoke from her lips seemed
+to want to take that form. It didn't seem as if it <i>could</i> take any
+other. She let it come out just as it would&mdash;she didn't pretend to have
+any control. They could judge for themselves whether the whole thing was
+not quite unique. That was why he was willing to talk about his own
+child that way, before a gathering of ladies and gentlemen; it was
+because they took no credit&mdash;they felt it was a power outside. If Verena
+felt she was going to be stimulated that evening, he was pretty sure
+they would be interested. Only he should have to request a few moments'
+silence, while she listened for the voice.</p>
+
+<p>Several of the ladies declared that they should be delighted&mdash;they hoped
+that Miss Tarrant was in good trim; whereupon they were corrected by
+others, who reminded them that it wasn't <i>her</i>&mdash;she had nothing to do
+with it&mdash;so her trim didn't matter; and a gentleman added that he
+guessed there were many present who had conversed with Eliza P. Moseley.
+Meanwhile Verena, more and more withdrawn into herself, but perfectly
+undisturbed by the public discussion of her mystic faculty, turned yet
+again, very prettily, to Mrs. Farrinder, and asked her if she wouldn't
+strike out&mdash;just to give her courage. By this time Mrs. Farrinder was in
+a condition of overhanging gloom; she greeted the charming suppliant
+with the frown of Juno. She disapproved completely of Doctor Tarrant's
+little speech, and she had less and less disposition to be associated
+with a miracle-monger. Abraham Greenstreet was very well, but Abraham
+Greenstreet was in his grave; and Eliza P. Moseley, after all, had been
+very tepid. Basil Ransom wondered whether it were effrontery or
+innocence that enabled Miss Tarrant to meet with such complacency the
+aloofness of the elder lady. At this moment he heard Olive Chancellor,
+at his elbow, with the tremor of excitement in her tone, suddenly
+exclaim: "Please begin, please begin! A voice, a human voice, is what we
+want."</p>
+
+<p>"I'll speak after you, and if you're a humbug, I'll expose you!" Mrs.
+Farrinder said. She was more majestic than facetious.</p>
+
+<p>"I'm sure we are all solid, as Doctor Tarrant says. I suppose we want to
+be quiet," Miss Birdseye remarked.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="VIII" id="VIII"></a>VIII</h2>
+
+
+<p>Verena Tarrant got up and went to her father in the middle of the room;
+Olive Chancellor crossed and resumed her place beside Mrs. Farrinder on
+the sofa the girl had quitted; and Miss Birdseye's visitors, for the
+rest, settled themselves attentively in chairs or leaned against the
+bare sides of the parlour. Verena took her father's hands, held them for
+a moment, while she stood before him, not looking at him, with her eyes
+towards the company; then, after an instant, her mother, rising, pushed
+forward, with an interesting sigh, the chair on which she had been
+sitting. Mrs. Tarrant was provided with another seat, and Verena,
+relinquishing her father's grasp, placed herself in the chair, which
+Tarrant put in position for her. She sat there with closed eyes, and her
+father now rested his long, lean hands upon her head. Basil Ransom
+watched these proceedings with much interest, for the girl amused and
+pleased him. She had far more colour than any one there, for whatever
+brightness was to be found in Miss Birdseye's rather faded and dingy
+human collection had gathered itself into this attractive but ambiguous
+young person. There was nothing ambiguous, by the way, about her
+confederate; Ransom simply loathed him, from the moment he opened his
+mouth; he was intensely familiar&mdash;that is, his type was; he was simply
+the detested carpet-bagger. He was false, cunning, vulgar, ignoble; the
+cheapest kind of human product. That he should be the father of a
+delicate, pretty girl, who was apparently clever too, whether she had a
+gift or no, this was an annoying, disconcerting fact. The white, puffy
+mother, with the high forehead, in the corner there, looked more like a
+lady; but if she were one, it was all the more shame to her to have
+mated with such a varlet, Ransom said to himself, making use, as he did
+generally, of terms of opprobrium extracted from the older English
+literature. He had seen Tarrant, or his equivalent, often before; he had
+"whipped" him, as he believed, controversially, again and again, at
+political meetings in blighted Southern towns, during the horrible
+period of reconstruction. If Mrs. Farrinder had looked at Verena Tarrant
+as if she were a mountebank, there was some excuse for it, inasmuch as
+the girl made much the same impression on Basil Ransom. He had never
+seen such an odd mixture of elements; she had the sweetest, most
+unworldly face, and yet, with it, an air of being on exhibition, of
+belonging to a troupe, of living in the gaslight, which pervaded even
+the details of her dress, fashioned evidently with an attempt at the
+histrionic. If she had produced a pair of castanets or a tambourine, he
+felt that such accessories would have been quite in keeping.</p>
+
+<p>Little Doctor Prance, with her hard good sense, had noted that she was
+an&aelig;mic, and had intimated that she was a deceiver. The value of her
+performance was yet to be proved, but she was certainly very pale, white
+as women are who have that shade of red hair; they look as if their
+blood had gone into it. There was, however, something rich in the
+fairness of this young lady; she was strong and supple, there was colour
+in her lips and eyes, and her tresses, gathered into a complicated coil,
+seemed to glow with the brightness of her nature. She had curious,
+radiant, liquid eyes (their smile was a sort of reflexion, like the
+glisten of a gem), and though she was not tall, she appeared to spring
+up, and carried her head as if it reached rather high. Ransom would have
+thought she looked like an Oriental, if it were not that Orientals are
+dark; and if she had only had a goat she would have resembled Esmeralda,
+though he had but a vague recollection of who Esmeralda had been. She
+wore a light-brown dress, of a shape that struck him as fantastic, a
+yellow petticoat, and a large crimson sash fastened at the side; while
+round her neck, and falling low upon her flat young chest, she had a
+double chain of amber beads. It must be added that, in spite of her
+melodramatic appearance, there was no symptom that her performance,
+whatever it was, would be of a melodramatic character. She was very
+quiet now, at least (she had folded her big fan), and her father
+continued the mysterious process of calming her down. Ransom wondered
+whether he wouldn't put her to sleep; for some minutes her eyes had
+remained closed; he heard a lady near him, apparently familiar with
+phenomena of this class, remark that she was going off. As yet the
+exhibition was not exciting, though it was certainly pleasant to have
+such a pretty girl placed there before one, like a moving statue. Doctor
+Tarrant looked at no one as he stroked and soothed his daughter; his
+eyes wandered round the cornice of the room, and he grinned upward, as
+if at an imaginary gallery. "Quietly&mdash;quietly," he murmured from time to
+time. "It will come, my good child, it will come. Just let it work&mdash;just
+let it gather. The spirit, you know; you've got to let the spirit come
+out when it will." He threw up his arms at moments, to rid himself of
+the wings of his long waterproof, which fell forward over his hands.
+Basil Ransom noticed all these things, and noticed also, opposite, the
+waiting face of his cousin, fixed, from her sofa, upon the closed eyes
+of the young prophetess. He grew more impatient at last, not of the
+delay of the edifying voice (though some time had elapsed), but of
+Tarrant's grotesque manipulations, which he resented as much as if he
+himself had felt their touch, and which seemed a dishonour to the
+passive maiden. They made him nervous, they made him angry, and it was
+only afterwards that he asked himself wherein they concerned him, and
+whether even a carpet-bagger hadn't a right to do what he pleased with
+his daughter. It was a relief to him when Verena got up from her chair,
+with a movement which made Tarrant drop into the background as if his
+part were now over. She stood there with a quiet face, serious and
+sightless; then, after a short further delay, she began to speak.</p>
+
+<p>She began incoherently, almost inaudibly, as if she were talking in a
+dream. Ransom could not understand her; he thought it very queer, and
+wondered what Doctor Prance would have said. "She's just arranging her
+ideas, and trying to get in report; she'll come out all right." This
+remark he heard dropped in a low tone by the mesmeric healer; "in
+report" was apparently Tarrant's version of <i>en rapport</i>. His prophecy
+was verified, and Verena did come out, after a little; she came out with
+a great deal of sweetness&mdash;with a very quaint and peculiar effect. She
+proceeded slowly, cautiously, as if she were listening for the prompter,
+catching, one by one, certain phrases that were whispered to her a great
+distance off, behind the scenes of the world. Then memory, or
+inspiration, returned to her, and presently she was in possession of her
+part. She played it with extraordinary simplicity and grace; at the end
+of ten minutes Ransom became aware that the whole audience&mdash;Mrs.
+Farrinder, Miss Chancellor, and the tough subject from Mississippi&mdash;were
+under the charm. I speak of ten minutes, but to tell the truth the young
+man lost all sense of time. He wondered afterwards how long she had
+spoken; then he counted that her strange, sweet, crude, absurd,
+enchanting improvisation must have lasted half an hour. It was not what
+she said; he didn't care for that, he scarcely understood it; he could
+only see that it was all about the gentleness and goodness of women, and
+how, during the long ages of history, they had been trampled under the
+iron heel of man. It was about their equality&mdash;perhaps even (he was not
+definitely conscious) about their superiority. It was about their day
+having come at last, about the universal sisterhood, about their duty to
+themselves and to each other. It was about such matters as these, and
+Basil Ransom was delighted to observe that such matters as these didn't
+spoil it. The effect was not in what she said, though she said some such
+pretty things, but in the picture and figure of the half-bedizened
+damsel (playing, now again, with her red fan), the visible freshness and
+purity of the little effort. When she had gained confidence she opened
+her eyes, and their shining softness was half the effect of her
+discourse. It was full of school-girl phrases, of patches of remembered
+eloquence, of childish lapses of logic, of flights of fancy which might
+indeed have had success at Topeka; but Ransom thought that if it had
+been much worse it would have been quite as good, for the argument, the
+doctrine, had absolutely nothing to do with it. It was simply an
+intensely personal exhibition, and the person making it happened to be
+fascinating. She might have offended the taste of certain people&mdash;Ransom
+could imagine that there were other Boston circles in which she would be
+thought pert; but for himself all he could feel was that to <i>his</i>
+starved senses she irresistibly appealed. He was the stiffest of
+conservatives, and his mind was steeled against the inanities she
+uttered&mdash;the rights and wrongs of women, the equality of the sexes, the
+hysterics of conventions, the further stultification of the suffrage,
+the prospect of conscript mothers in the national Senate. It made no
+difference; she didn't mean it, she didn't know what she meant, she had
+been stuffed with this trash by her father, and she was neither more nor
+less willing to say it than to say anything else; for the necessity of
+her nature was not to make converts to a ridiculous cause, but to emit
+those charming notes of her voice, to stand in those free young
+attitudes, to shake her braided locks like a naiad rising from the
+waves, to please every one who came near her, and to be happy that she
+pleased. I know not whether Ransom was aware of the bearings of this
+interpretation, which attributed to Miss Tarrant a singular hollowness
+of character; he contented himself with believing that she was as
+innocent as she was lovely, and with regarding her as a vocalist of
+exquisite faculty, condemned to sing bad music. How prettily, indeed,
+she made some of it sound!</p>
+
+<p>"Of course I only speak to women&mdash;to my own dear sisters; I don't speak
+to men, for I don't expect them to like what I say. They pretend to
+admire us very much, but I should like them to admire us a little less
+and to trust us a little more. I don't know what we have ever done to
+them that they should keep us out of everything. We have trusted <i>them</i>
+too much, and I think the time has come now for us to judge them, and
+say that by keeping us out we don't think they have done so well. When I
+look around me at the world, and at the state that men have brought it
+to, I confess I say to myself, "Well, if women had fixed it this way I
+should like to know what they would think of it!" When I see the
+dreadful misery of mankind and think of the suffering of which at any
+hour, at any moment, the world is full, I say that if this is the best
+they can do by themselves, they had better let us come in a little and
+see what <i>we</i> can do. We couldn't possibly make it worse, could we? If
+we had done only this, we shouldn't boast of it. Poverty, and ignorance,
+and crime; disease, and wickedness, and wars! Wars, always more wars,
+and always more and more. Blood, blood&mdash;the world is drenched with
+blood! To kill each other, with all sorts of expensive and perfected
+instruments, that is the most brilliant thing they have been able to
+invent. It seems to me that we might stop it, we might invent something
+better. The cruelty&mdash;the cruelty; there is so much, so much! Why
+shouldn't tenderness come in? Why should our woman's hearts be so full
+of it, and all so wasted and withered, while armies and prisons and
+helpless miseries grow greater all the while? I am only a girl, a simple
+American girl, and of course I haven't seen much, and there is a great
+deal of life that I don't know anything about. But there are some things
+I feel&mdash;it seems to me as if I had been born to feel them; they are in
+my ears in the stillness of the night and before my face in the visions
+of the darkness. It is what the great sisterhood of women might do if
+they should all join hands, and lift up their voices above the brutal
+uproar of the world, in which it is so hard for the plea of mercy or of
+justice, the moan of weakness and suffering, to be heard. We should
+quench it, we should make it still, and the sound of our lips would
+become the voice of universal peace! For this we must trust one another,
+we must be true and gentle and kind. We must remember that the world is
+ours too, ours&mdash;little as we have ever had to say about anything!&mdash;and
+that the question is <i>not</i> yet definitely settled whether it shall be a
+place of injustice or a place of love!"</p>
+
+<p>It was with this that the young lady finished her harangue, which was
+not followed by her sinking exhausted into her chair or by any of the
+traces of a laboured climax. She only turned away slowly towards her
+mother, smiling over her shoulder at the whole room, as if it had been a
+single person, without a flush in her whiteness, or the need of drawing
+a longer breath. The performance had evidently been very easy to her,
+and there might have been a kind of impertinence in her air of not
+having suffered from an exertion which had wrought so powerfully on
+every one else. Ransom broke into a genial laugh, which he instantly
+swallowed again, at the sweet grotesqueness of this virginal creature's
+standing up before a company of middle-aged people to talk to them about
+"love," the note on which she had closed her harangue. It was the most
+charming touch in the whole thing, and the most vivid proof of her
+innocence. She had had immense success, and Mrs. Tarrant, as she took
+her into her arms and kissed her, was certainly able to feel that the
+audience was not disappointed. They were exceedingly affected; they
+broke into exclamations and murmurs. Selah Tarrant went on conversing
+ostentatiously with his neighbours, slowly twirling his long thumbs and
+looking up at the cornice again, as if there could be nothing in the
+brilliant manner in which his daughter had acquitted herself to surprise
+<i>him</i>, who had heard her when she was still more remarkable, and who,
+moreover, remembered that the affair was so impersonal. Miss Birdseye
+looked round at the company with dim exultation; her large mild cheeks
+were shining with unwiped tears. Young Mr. Pardon remarked, in Ransom's
+hearing, that he knew parties who, if they had been present, would want
+to engage Miss Verena at a high figure for the winter campaign. And
+Ransom heard him add in a lower tone: "There's money for some one in
+that girl; you see if she don't have quite a run!" As for our
+Mississippian he kept his agreeable sensation for himself, only
+wondering whether he might not ask Miss Birdseye to present him to the
+heroine of the evening. Not immediately, of course, for the young man
+mingled with his Southern pride a shyness which often served all the
+purpose of humility. He was aware how much he was an outsider in such a
+house as that, and he was ready to wait for his coveted satisfaction
+till the others, who all hung together, should have given her the
+assurance of an approval which she would value, naturally, more than
+anything he could say to her. This episode had imparted animation to the
+assembly; a certain gaiety, even, expressed in a higher pitch of
+conversation, seemed to float in the heated air. People circulated more
+freely, and Verena Tarrant was presently hidden from Ransom's sight by
+the close-pressed ranks of the new friends she had made. "Well, I never
+heard it put <i>that</i> way!" Ransom heard one of the ladies exclaim; to
+which another replied that she wondered one of their bright women hadn't
+thought of it before. "Well, it <i>is</i> a gift, and no mistake," and "Well,
+they may call it what they please, it's a pleasure to listen to
+it"&mdash;these genial tributes fell from the lips of a pair of ruminating
+gentlemen. It was affirmed within Ransom's hearing that if they had a
+few more like that the matter would soon be fixed; and it was rejoined
+that they couldn't expect to have a great many&mdash;the style was so
+peculiar. It was generally admitted that the style was peculiar, but
+Miss Tarrant's peculiarity was the explanation of her success.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="IX" id="IX"></a>IX</h2>
+
+
+<p>Ransom approached Mrs. Farrinder again, who had remained on her sofa
+with Olive Chancellor; and as she turned her face to him he saw that she
+had felt the universal contagion. Her keen eye sparkled, there was a
+flush on her matronly cheek, and she had evidently made up her mind what
+line to take. Olive Chancellor sat motionless; her eyes were fixed on
+the floor with the rigid, alarmed expression of her moments of nervous
+diffidence; she gave no sign of observing her kinsman's approach. He
+said something to Mrs. Farrinder, something that imperfectly represented
+his admiration of Verena; and this lady replied with dignity that it was
+no wonder the girl spoke so well&mdash;she spoke in such a good cause. "She
+is very graceful, has a fine command of language; her father says it's a
+natural gift." Ransom saw that he should not in the least discover Mrs.
+Farrinder's real opinion, and her dissimulation added to his impression
+that she was a woman with a policy. It was none of his business whether
+in her heart she thought Verena a parrot or a genius; it was perceptible
+to him that she saw she would be effective, would help the cause. He
+stood almost appalled for a moment, as he said to himself that she would
+take her up and the girl would be ruined, would force her note and
+become a screamer. But he quickly dodged this vision, taking refuge in a
+mechanical appeal to his cousin, of whom he inquired how she liked Miss
+Verena. Olive made no answer; her head remained averted, she bored the
+carpet with her conscious eyes. Mrs. Farrinder glanced at her askance,
+and then said to Ransom serenely:</p>
+
+<p>"You praise the grace of your Southern ladies, but you have had to come
+North to see a human gazelle. Miss Tarrant is of the best New England
+stock&mdash;what <i>I</i> call the best!"</p>
+
+<p>"I'm sure from what I have seen of the Boston ladies, no manifestation
+of grace can excite my surprise," Ransom rejoined, looking, with his
+smile, at his cousin.</p>
+
+<p>"She has been powerfully affected," Mrs. Farrinder explained, very
+slightly dropping her voice, as Olive, apparently, still remained deaf.</p>
+
+<p>Miss Birdseye drew near at this moment; she wanted to know if Mrs.
+Farrinder didn't want to express some acknowledgment, on the part of the
+company at large, for the real stimulus Miss Tarrant had given them.
+Mrs. Farrinder said: Oh yes, she would speak now with pleasure; only she
+must have a glass of water first. Miss Birdseye replied that there was
+some coming in a moment; one of the ladies had asked for it, and Mr.
+Pardon had just stepped down to draw some. Basil took advantage of this
+intermission to ask Miss Birdseye if she would give him the great
+privilege of an introduction to Miss Verena. "Mrs. Farrinder will thank
+her for the company," he said, laughing, "but she won't thank her for
+me."</p>
+
+<p>Miss Birdseye manifested the greatest disposition to oblige him; she was
+so glad he had been impressed. She was proceeding to lead him toward
+Miss Tarrant when Olive Chancellor rose abruptly from her chair and laid
+her hand, with an arresting movement, on the arm of her hostess. She
+explained to her that she must go, that she was not very well, that her
+carriage was there; also that she hoped Miss Birdseye, if it was not
+asking too much, would accompany her to the door.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, you are impressed too," said Miss Birdseye, looking at her
+philosophically. "It seems as if no one had escaped."</p>
+
+<p>Ransom was disappointed; he saw he was going to be taken away, and,
+before he could suppress it, an exclamation burst from his lips&mdash;the
+first exclamation he could think of that would perhaps check his
+cousin's retreat: "Ah, Miss Olive, are you going to give up Mrs.
+Farrinder?"</p>
+
+<p>At this Miss Olive looked at him, showed him an extraordinary face, a
+face he scarcely understood or even recognised. It was portentously
+grave, the eyes were enlarged, there was a red spot in each of the
+cheeks, and as directed to him, a quick, piercing question, a kind of
+leaping challenge, in the whole expression. He could only answer this
+sudden gleam with a stare, and wonder afresh what trick his Northern
+kinswoman was destined to play him. Impressed too? He should think he
+had been! Mrs. Farrinder, who was decidedly a woman of the world, came
+to his assistance, or to Miss Chancellor's, and said she hoped very much
+Olive wouldn't stay&mdash;she felt these things too much. "If you stay, I
+won't speak," she added; "I should upset you altogether." And then she
+continued, tenderly, for so preponderantly intellectual a nature: "When
+women feel as you do, how can I doubt that we shall come out all right?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, we shall come out all right, I guess," murmured Miss Birdseye.</p>
+
+<p>"But you must remember Beacon Street," Mrs. Farrinder subjoined. "You
+must take advantage of your position&mdash;you must wake up the Back Bay!"</p>
+
+<p>"I'm sick of the Back Bay!" said Olive fiercely; and she passed to the
+door with Miss Birdseye, bidding good-bye to no one. She was so agitated
+that, evidently, she could not trust herself, and there was nothing for
+Ransom but to follow. At the door of the room, however, he was checked
+by a sudden pause on the part of the two ladies: Olive stopped and stood
+there hesitating. She looked round the room and spied out Verena, where
+she sat with her mother, the centre of a gratified group; then, throwing
+back her head with an air of decision, she crossed over to her. Ransom
+said to himself that now, perhaps, was his chance, and he quickly
+accompanied Miss Chancellor. The little knot of reformers watched her as
+she arrived; their faces expressed a suspicion of her social importance,
+mingled with conscientious scruples as to whether it were right to
+recognise it. Verena Tarrant saw that she was the object of this
+manifestation, and she got up to meet the lady whose approach was so
+full of point. Ransom perceived, however, or thought he perceived, that
+she recognised nothing; she had no suspicions of social importance. Yet
+she smiled with all her radiance, as she looked from Miss Chancellor to
+him; smiled because she liked to smile, to please, to feel her
+success&mdash;or was it because she was a perfect little actress, and this
+was part of her training? She took the hand that Olive put out to her;
+the others, rather solemnly, sat looking up from their chairs.</p>
+
+<p>"You don't know me, but I want to know you," Olive said. "I can thank
+you now. Will you come and see me?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh yes; where do you live?" Verena answered, in the tone of a girl for
+whom an invitation (she hadn't so many) was always an invitation.</p>
+
+<p>Miss Chancellor syllabled her address, and Mrs. Tarrant came forward,
+smiling. "I know about you, Miss Chancellor. I guess your father knew my
+father&mdash;Mr. Greenstreet. Verena will be very glad to visit you. We shall
+be very happy to see you in <i>our</i> home."</p>
+
+<p>Basil Ransom, while the mother spoke, wanted to say something to the
+daughter, who stood there so near him, but he could think of nothing
+that would do; certain words that came to him, his Mississippi phrases,
+seemed patronising and ponderous. Besides, he didn't wish to assent to
+what she had said; he wished simply to tell her she was delightful, and
+it was difficult to mark that difference. So he only smiled at her in
+silence, and she smiled back at him&mdash;a smile that seemed to him quite
+for himself.</p>
+
+<p>"Where do you live?" Olive asked; and Mrs. Tarrant replied that they
+lived at Cambridge, and that the horse-cars passed just near their door.
+Whereupon Olive insisted "Will you come very soon?" and Verena said, Oh
+yes, she would come very soon, and repeated the number in Charles
+Street, to show that she had taken heed of it. This was done with
+childlike good faith. Ransom saw that she would come and see any one who
+would ask her like that, and he regretted for a minute that he was not a
+Boston lady, so that he might extend to her such an invitation. Olive
+Chancellor held her hand a moment longer, looked at her in farewell, and
+then, saying, "Come, Mr. Ransom," drew him out of the room. In the hall
+they met Mr. Pardon, coming up from the lower regions with a jug of
+water and a tumbler. Miss Chancellor's hackney-coach was there, and when
+Basil had put her into it she said to him that she wouldn't trouble him
+to drive with her&mdash;his hotel was not near Charles Street. He had so
+little desire to sit by her side&mdash;he wanted to smoke&mdash;that it was only
+after the vehicle had rolled off that he reflected upon her coolness,
+and asked himself why the deuce she had brought him away. She <i>was</i> a
+very odd cousin, was this Boston cousin of his. He stood there a moment,
+looking at the light in Miss Birdseye's windows and greatly minded to
+re-enter the house, now he might speak to the girl. But he contented
+himself with the memory of her smile, and turned away with a sense of
+relief, after all, at having got out of such wild company, as well as
+with (in a different order) a vulgar consciousness of being very
+thirsty.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="X" id="X"></a>X</h2>
+
+
+<p>Verena Tarrant came in the very next day from Cambridge to Charles
+Street; that quarter of Boston is in direct communication with the
+academic suburb. It hardly seemed direct to poor Verena, perhaps, who,
+in the crowded street-car which deposited her finally at Miss
+Chancellor's door, had to stand up all the way, half suspended by a
+leathern strap from the glazed roof of the stifling vehicle, like some
+blooming cluster dangling in a hothouse. She was used, however, to these
+perpendicular journeys, and though, as we have seen, she was not
+inclined to accept without question the social arrangements of her time,
+it never would have occurred to her to criticise the railways of her
+native land. The promptness of her visit to Olive Chancellor had been an
+idea of her mother's, and Verena listened open-eyed while this lady, in
+the seclusion of the little house in Cambridge, while Selah Tarrant was
+"off," as they said, with his patients, sketched out a line of conduct
+for her. The girl was both submissive and unworldly, and she listened to
+her mother's enumeration of the possible advantages of an intimacy with
+Miss Chancellor as she would have listened to any other fairy-tale. It
+was still a part of the fairy-tale when this zealous parent put on with
+her own hands Verena's smart hat and feather, buttoned her little jacket
+(the buttons were immense and gilt), and presented her with twenty cents
+to pay her car-fare.</p>
+
+<p>There was never any knowing in advance how Mrs. Tarrant would take a
+thing, and even Verena, who, filially, was much less argumentative than
+in her civic and, as it were, public capacity, had a perception that her
+mother was queer. She was queer, indeed&mdash;a flaccid, relaxed, unhealthy,
+whimsical woman, who still had a capacity to cling. What she clung to
+was "society," and a position in the world which a secret whisper told
+her she had never had and a voice more audible reminded her she was in
+danger of losing. To keep it, to recover it, to reconsecrate it, was the
+ambition of her heart; this was one of the many reasons why Providence
+had judged her worthy of having so wonderful a child. Verena was born
+not only to lead their common sex out of bondage, but to remodel a
+visiting-list which bulged and contracted in the wrong places, like a
+country-made garment. As the daughter of Abraham Greenstreet, Mrs.
+Tarrant had passed her youth in the first Abolitionist circles, and she
+was aware how much such a prospect was clouded by her union with a young
+man who had begun life as an itinerant vendor of lead-pencils (he had
+called at Mr. Greenstreet's door in the exercise of this function), had
+afterwards been for a while a member of the celebrated Cayuga community,
+where there were no wives, or no husbands, or something of that sort
+(Mrs. Tarrant could never remember), and had still later (though before
+the development of the healing faculty) achieved distinction in the
+spiritualistic world. (He was an extraordinarily favoured medium, only
+he had had to stop for reasons of which Mrs. Tarrant possessed her
+version.) Even in a society much occupied with the effacement of
+prejudice there had been certain dim presumptions against this versatile
+being, who naturally had not wanted arts to ingratiate himself with Miss
+Greenstreet, her eyes, like his own, being fixed exclusively on the
+future. The young couple (he was considerably her elder) had gazed on
+the future together until they found that the past had completely
+forsaken them and that the present offered but a slender foothold. Mrs.
+Tarrant, in other words, incurred the displeasure of her family, who
+gave her husband to understand that, much as they desired to remove the
+shackles from the slave, there were kinds of behaviour which struck them
+as too unfettered. These had prevailed, to their thinking, at Cayuga,
+and they naturally felt it was no use for him to say that his residence
+there had been (for him&mdash;the community still existed) but a momentary
+episode, inasmuch as there was little more to be urged for the spiritual
+picnics and vegetarian camp-meetings in which the discountenanced pair
+now sought consolation.</p>
+
+<p>Such were the narrow views of people hitherto supposed capable of
+opening their hearts to all salutary novelties, but now put to a genuine
+test, as Mrs. Tarrant felt. Her husband's tastes rubbed off on her soft,
+moist moral surface, and the couple lived in an atmosphere of novelty,
+in which, occasionally, the accommodating wife encountered the fresh
+sensation of being in want of her dinner. Her father died, leaving,
+after all, very little money; he had spent his modest fortune upon the
+blacks. Selah Tarrant and his companion had strange adventures; she
+found herself completely enrolled in the great irregular army of
+nostrum-mongers, domiciled in humanitary Bohemia. It absorbed her like a
+social swamp; she sank into it a little more every day, without
+measuring the inches of her descent. Now she stood there up to her chin;
+it may probably be said of her that she had touched bottom. When she
+went to Miss Birdseye's it seemed to her that she re-entered society.
+The door that admitted her was not the door that admitted some of the
+others (she should never forget the tipped-up nose of Mrs. Farrinder),
+and the superior portal remained ajar, disclosing possible vistas. She
+had lived with long-haired men and short-haired women, she had
+contributed a flexible faith and an irremediable want of funds to a
+dozen social experiments, she had partaken of the comfort of a hundred
+religions, had followed innumerable dietary reforms, chiefly of the
+negative order, and had gone of an evening to a <i>s&eacute;ance</i> or a lecture as
+regularly as she had eaten her supper. Her husband always had tickets
+for lectures; in moments of irritation at the want of a certain sequence
+in their career, she had remarked to him that it was the only thing he
+did have. The memory of all the winter nights they had tramped through
+the slush (the tickets, alas! were not car-tickets) to hear Mrs. Ada T.
+P. Foat discourse on the "Summer-land," came back to her with
+bitterness. Selah was quite enthusiastic at one time about Mrs. Foat,
+and it was his wife's belief that he had been "associated" with her
+(that was Selah's expression in referring to such episodes) at Cayuga.
+The poor woman, matrimonially, had a great deal to put up with; it took,
+at moments, all her belief in his genius to sustain her. She knew that
+he was very magnetic (that, in fact, was his genius), and she felt that
+it was his magnetism that held her to him. He had carried her through
+things where she really didn't know what to think; there were moments
+when she suspected that she had lost the strong moral sense for which
+the Greenstreets were always so celebrated.</p>
+
+<p>Of course a woman who had had the bad taste to marry Selah Tarrant would
+not have been likely under any circumstances to possess a very straight
+judgement; but there is no doubt that this poor lady had grown
+dreadfully limp. She had blinked and compromised and shuffled; she asked
+herself whether, after all, it was any more than natural that she should
+have wanted to help her husband, in those exciting days of his
+mediumship, when the table, sometimes, wouldn't rise from the ground,
+the sofa wouldn't float through the air, and the soft hand of a lost
+loved one was not so alert as it might have been to visit the circle.
+Mrs. Tarrant's hand was soft enough for the most supernatural effect,
+and she consoled her conscience on such occasions by reflecting
+that she ministered to a belief in immortality. She was glad,
+somehow, for Verena's sake, that they had emerged from the phase of
+spirit-intercourse; her ambition for her daughter took another form than
+desiring that she, too, should minister to a belief in immortality. Yet
+among Mrs. Tarrant's multifarious memories these reminiscences of the
+darkened room, the waiting circle, the little taps on table and wall,
+the little touches on cheek and foot, the music in the air, the rain of
+flowers, the sense of something mysteriously flitting, were most
+tenderly cherished. She hated her husband for having magnetised her so
+that she consented to certain things, and even did them, the thought of
+which to-day would suddenly make her face burn; hated him for the manner
+in which, somehow, as she felt, he had lowered her social tone; yet at
+the same time she admired him for an impudence so consummate that it had
+ended (in the face of mortifications, exposures, failures, all the
+misery of a hand-to-mouth existence) by imposing itself on her as a kind
+of infallibility. She knew he was an awful humbug, and yet her knowledge
+had this imperfection, that he had never confessed it&mdash;a fact that was
+really grand when one thought of his opportunities for doing so. He had
+never allowed that he wasn't straight; the pair had so often been in the
+position of the two augurs behind the altar, and yet he had never given
+her a glance that the whole circle mightn't have observed. Even in the
+privacy of domestic intercourse he had phrases, excuses, explanations,
+ways of putting things, which, as she felt, were too sublime for just
+herself; they were pitched, as Selah's nature was pitched, altogether in
+the key of public life.</p>
+
+<p>So it had come to pass, in her distended and demoralised conscience,
+that with all the things she despised in her life and all the things she
+rather liked, between being worn out with her husband's inability to
+earn a living and a kind of terror of his consistency (he had a theory
+that they lived delightfully), it happened, I say, that the only very
+definite criticism she made of him to-day was that he didn't know how to
+speak. That was where the shoe pinched&mdash;that was where Selah was slim.
+He couldn't hold the attention of an audience, he was not acceptable as
+a lecturer. He had plenty of thoughts, but it seemed as if he couldn't
+fit them into each other. Public speaking had been a Greenstreet
+tradition, and if Mrs. Tarrant had been asked whether in her younger
+years she had ever supposed she should marry a mesmeric healer, she
+would have replied: "Well, I never thought I should marry a gentleman
+who would be silent on the platform!" This was her most general
+humiliation; it included and exceeded every other, and it was a poor
+consolation that Selah possessed as a substitute&mdash;his career as a
+healer, to speak of none other, was there to prove it&mdash;the eloquence of
+the hand. The Greenstreets had never set much store on manual activity;
+they believed in the influence of the lips. It may be imagined,
+therefore, with what exultation, as time went on, Mrs. Tarrant found
+herself the mother of an inspired maiden, a young lady from whose lips
+eloquence flowed in streams. The Greenstreet tradition would not perish,
+and the dry places of her life would, perhaps, be plentifully watered.
+It must be added that, of late, this sandy surface had been irrigated,
+in moderation, from another source. Since Selah had addicted himself to
+the mesmeric mystery, their home had been a little more what the home of
+a Greenstreet should be. He had "considerable many" patients, he got
+about two dollars a sitting, and he had effected some most gratifying
+cures. A lady in Cambridge had been so much indebted to him that she had
+recently persuaded them to take a house near her, in order that Doctor
+Tarrant might drop in at any time. He availed himself of this
+convenience&mdash;they had taken so many houses that another, more or less,
+didn't matter&mdash;and Mrs. Tarrant began to feel as if they really had
+"struck" something.</p>
+
+<p>Even to Verena, as we know, she was confused and confusing; the girl had
+not yet had an opportunity to ascertain the principles on which her
+mother's limpness was liable suddenly to become rigid. This phenomenon
+occurred when the vapours of social ambition mounted to her brain, when
+she extended an arm from which a crumpled dressing-gown fluttered back
+to seize the passing occasion. Then she surprised her daughter by a
+volubility of exhortation as to the duty of making acquaintances, and by
+the apparent wealth of her knowledge of the mysteries of good society.
+She had, in particular, a way of explaining confidentially&mdash;and in her
+desire to be graphic she often made up the oddest faces&mdash;the
+interpretation that you must sometimes give to the manners of the best
+people, and the delicate dignity with which you should meet them, which
+made Verena wonder what secret sources of information she possessed.
+Verena took life, as yet, very simply; she was not conscious of so many
+differences of social complexion. She knew that some people were rich
+and others poor, and that her father's house had never been visited by
+such abundance as might make one ask one's self whether it were right,
+in a world so full of the disinherited, to roll in luxury. But except
+when her mother made her slightly dizzy by a resentment of some slight
+that she herself had never perceived, or a flutter over some opportunity
+that appeared already to have passed (while Mrs. Tarrant was looking for
+something to "put on"), Verena had no vivid sense that she was not as
+good as any one else, for no authority appealing really to her
+imagination had fixed the place of mesmeric healers in the scale of
+fashion. It was impossible to know in advance how Mrs. Tarrant would
+take things. Sometimes she was abjectly indifferent; at others she
+thought that every one who looked at her wished to insult her. At
+moments she was full of suspicion of the ladies (they were mainly
+ladies) whom Selah mesmerised; then again she appeared to have given up
+everything but her slippers and the evening-paper (from this publication
+she derived inscrutable solace), so that if Mrs. Foat in person had
+returned from the summer-land (to which she had some time since taken
+her flight), she would not have disturbed Mrs. Tarrant's almost cynical
+equanimity.</p>
+
+<p>It was, however, in her social subtleties that she was most beyond her
+daughter; it was when she discovered extraordinary though latent
+longings on the part of people they met to make their acquaintance, that
+the girl became conscious of how much she herself had still to learn.
+All her desire was to learn, and it must be added that she regarded her
+mother, in perfect good faith, as a wonderful teacher. She was perplexed
+sometimes by her worldliness; that, somehow, was not a part of the
+higher life which every one in such a house as theirs must wish above
+all things to lead; and it was not involved in the reign of justice,
+which they were all trying to bring about, that such a strict account
+should be kept of every little snub. Her father seemed to Verena to move
+more consecutively on the high plane; though his indifference to
+old-fashioned standards, his perpetual invocation of the brighter day,
+had not yet led her to ask herself whether, after all, men are more
+disinterested than women. Was it interest that prompted her mother to
+respond so warmly to Miss Chancellor, to say to Verena, with an air of
+knowingness, that the thing to do was to go in and see her
+<i>immediately</i>? No italics can represent the earnestness of Mrs.
+Tarrant's emphasis. Why hadn't she said, as she had done in former
+cases, that if people wanted to see them they could come out to their
+home; that she was not so low down in the world as not to know there was
+such a ceremony as leaving cards? When Mrs. Tarrant began on the
+question of ceremonies she was apt to go far; but she had waived it in
+this case; it suited her more to hold that Miss Chancellor had been very
+gracious, that she was a most desirable friend, that she had been more
+affected than any one by Verena's beautiful outpouring; that she would
+open to her the best saloons in Boston; that when she said "Come soon"
+she meant the very next day, that this was the way to take it, anyhow
+(one must know when to go forward gracefully); and that in short she,
+Mrs. Tarrant, knew what she was talking about.</p>
+
+<p>Verena accepted all this, for she was young enough to enjoy any journey
+in a horse-car, and she was ever-curious about the world; she only
+wondered a little how her mother knew so much about Miss Chancellor just
+from looking at her once. What Verena had mainly observed in the young
+lady who came up to her that way the night before was that she was
+rather dolefully dressed, that she looked as if she had been crying
+(Verena recognised that look quickly, she had seen it so much), and that
+she was in a hurry to get away. However, if she was as remarkable as her
+mother said, one would very soon see it; and meanwhile there was nothing
+in the girl's feeling about herself, in her sense of her importance, to
+make it a painful effort for her to run the risk of a mistake. She had
+no particular feeling about herself; she only cared, as yet, for outside
+things. Even the development of her "gift" had not made her think
+herself too precious for mere experiments; she had neither a particle of
+diffidence nor a particle of vanity. Though it would have seemed to you
+eminently natural that a daughter of Selah Tarrant and his wife should
+be an inspirational speaker, yet, as you knew Verena better, you would
+have wondered immensely how she came to issue from such a pair. Her
+ideas of enjoyment were very simple; she enjoyed putting on her new hat,
+with its redundancy of feather, and twenty cents appeared to her a very
+large sum.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="XI" id="XI"></a>XI</h2>
+
+
+<p>"I was certain you would come&mdash;I have felt it all day&mdash;something told
+me!" It was with these words that Olive Chancellor greeted her young
+visitor, coming to her quickly from the window, where she might have
+been waiting for her arrival. Some weeks later she explained to Verena
+how definite this prevision had been, how it had filled her all day with
+a nervous agitation so violent as to be painful. She told her that such
+forebodings were a peculiarity of her organisation, that she didn't know
+what to make of them, that she had to accept them; and she mentioned, as
+another example, the sudden dread that had come to her the evening
+before in the carriage, after proposing to Mr. Ransom to go with her to
+Miss Birdseye's. This had been as strange as it had been instinctive,
+and the strangeness, of course, was what must have struck Mr. Ransom;
+for the idea that he might come had been hers, and yet she suddenly
+veered round. She couldn't help it; her heart had begun to throb with
+the conviction that if he crossed that threshold some harm would come of
+of it for her. She hadn't prevented him, and now she didn't care, for
+now, as she intimated, she had the interest of Verena, and that made her
+indifferent to every danger, to every ordinary pleasure. By this time
+Verena had learned how peculiarly her friend was constituted, how
+nervous and serious she was, how personal, how exclusive, what a force
+of will she had, what a concentration of purpose. Olive had taken her
+up, in the literal sense of the phrase, like a bird of the air, had
+spread an extraordinary pair of wings, and carried her through the
+dizzying void of space. Verena liked it, for the most part; liked to
+shoot upward without an effort of her own and look down upon all
+creation, upon all history, from such a height. From this first
+interview she felt that she was seized, and she gave herself up, only
+shutting her eyes a little, as we do whenever a person in whom we have
+perfect confidence proposes, with our assent, to subject us to some
+sensation.</p>
+
+<p>"I want to know you," Olive said, on this occasion; "I felt that I must
+last night, as soon as I heard you speak. You seem to me very wonderful.
+I don't know what to make of you. I think we ought to be friends; so I
+just asked you to come to me straight off, without preliminaries, and I
+believed you would come. It is so <i>right</i> that you have come, and it
+proves how right I was." These remarks fell from Miss Chancellor's lips
+one by one, as she caught her breath, with the tremor that was always in
+her voice, even when she was the least excited, while she made Verena
+sit down near her on the sofa, and looked at her all over in a manner
+that caused the girl to rejoice at having put on the jacket with the
+gilt buttons. It was this glance that was the beginning; it was with
+this quick survey, omitting nothing, that Olive took possession of her.
+"You are very remarkable; I wonder if you know how remarkable!" she went
+on, murmuring the words as if she were losing herself, becoming
+inadvertent in admiration.</p>
+
+<p>Verena sat there smiling, without a blush, but with a pure, bright look
+which, for her, would always make protests unnecessary. "Oh, it isn't
+me, you know; it's something outside!" She tossed this off lightly, as
+if she were in the habit of saying it, and Olive wondered whether it
+were a sincere disclaimer or only a phrase of the lips. The question was
+not a criticism, for she might have been satisfied that the girl was a
+mass of fluent catch-words and yet scarcely have liked her the less. It
+was just as she was that she liked her; she was so strange, so different
+from the girls one usually met, seemed to belong to some queer
+gipsy-land or transcendental Bohemia. With her bright, vulgar clothes,
+her salient appearance, she might have been a rope-dancer or a
+fortune-teller; and this had the immense merit, for Olive, that it
+appeared to make her belong to the "people," threw her into the social
+dusk of that mysterious democracy which Miss Chancellor held that the
+fortunate classes know so little about, and with which (in a future
+possibly very near) they will have to count. Moreover, the girl had
+moved her as she had never been moved, and the power to do that, from
+whatever source it came, was a force that one must admire. Her emotion
+was still acute, however much she might speak to her visitor as if
+everything that had happened seemed to her natural; and what kept it,
+above all, from subsiding was her sense that she found here what she had
+been looking for so long&mdash;a friend of her own sex with whom she might
+have a union of soul. It took a double consent to make a friendship, but
+it was not possible that this intensely sympathetic girl would refuse.
+Olive had the penetration to discover in a moment that she was a
+creature of unlimited generosity. I know not what may have been the
+reality of Miss Chancellor's other premonitions, but there is no doubt
+that in this respect she took Verena's measure on the spot. This was
+what she wanted; after that the rest didn't matter; Miss Tarrant might
+wear gilt buttons from head to foot, her soul could not be vulgar.</p>
+
+<p>"Mother told me I had better come right in," said Verena, looking now
+about the room, very glad to find herself in so pleasant a place, and
+noticing a great many things that she should like to see in detail.</p>
+
+<p>"Your mother saw that I meant what I said; it isn't everybody that does
+me the honour to perceive that. She saw that I was shaken from head to
+foot. I could only say three words&mdash;I couldn't have spoken more! What a
+power&mdash;what a power, Miss Tarrant!"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, I suppose it is a power. If it wasn't a power, it couldn't do much
+with me!"</p>
+
+<p>"You are so simple&mdash;so much like a child," Olive Chancellor said. That
+was the truth, and she wanted to say it because, quickly, without forms
+or circumlocutions, it made them familiar. She wished to arrive at this;
+her impatience was such that before the girl had been five minutes in
+the room she jumped to her point&mdash;inquired of her, interrupting herself,
+interrupting everything: "Will you be my friend, my friend of friends,
+beyond every one, everything, for ever and for ever?" Her face was full
+of eagerness and tenderness.</p>
+
+<p>Verena gave a laugh of clear amusement, without a shade of embarrassment
+or confusion. "Perhaps you like me too much."</p>
+
+<p>"Of course I like you too much! When I like, I like too much. But of
+course it's another thing, your liking me," Olive Chancellor added. "We
+must wait&mdash;we must wait. When I care for anything, I can be patient."
+She put out her hand to Verena, and the movement was at once so
+appealing and so confident that the girl instinctively placed her own in
+it. So, hand in hand, for some moments, these two young women sat
+looking at each other. "There is so much I want to ask you," said Olive.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, I can't say much except when father has worked on me," Verena
+answered with an ingenuousness beside which humility would have seemed
+pretentious.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't care anything about your father," Olive Chancellor rejoined
+very gravely, with a great air of security.</p>
+
+<p>"He is very good," Verena said simply. "And he's wonderfully magnetic."</p>
+
+<p>"It isn't your father, and it isn't your mother; I don't think of them,
+and it's not them I want. It's only you&mdash;just as you are."</p>
+
+<p>Verena dropped her eyes over the front of her dress. "Just as she was"
+seemed to her indeed very well.</p>
+
+<p>"Do you want me to give up&mdash;&mdash;?" she demanded, smiling.</p>
+
+<p>Olive Chancellor drew in her breath for an instant, like a creature in
+pain; then, with her quavering voice, touched with a vibration of
+anguish, she said; "Oh, how can I ask you to give up? <i>I</i> will give
+up&mdash;I will give up everything!"</p>
+
+<p>Filled with the impression of her hostess's agreeable interior, and of
+what her mother had told her about Miss Chancellor's wealth, her
+position in Boston society, Verena, in her fresh, diverted scrutiny of
+the surrounding objects, wondered what could be the need of this scheme
+of renunciation. Oh no, indeed, she hoped she wouldn't give up&mdash;at least
+not before she, Verena, had had a chance to see. She felt, however, that
+for the present there would be no answer for her save in the mere
+pressure of Miss Chancellor's eager nature, that intensity of emotion
+which made her suddenly exclaim, as if in a nervous ecstasy of
+anticipation, "But we must wait! Why do we talk of this? We must wait!
+All will be right," she added more calmly, with great sweetness.</p>
+
+<p>Verena wondered afterward why she had not been more afraid of her&mdash;why,
+indeed, she had not turned and saved herself by darting out of the room.
+But it was not in this young woman's nature to be either timid or
+cautious; she had as yet to make acquaintance with the sentiment of
+fear. She knew too little of the world to have learned to mistrust
+sudden enthusiasms, and if she had had a suspicion it would have been
+(in accordance with common worldly knowledge) the wrong one&mdash;the
+suspicion that such a whimsical liking would burn itself out. She could
+not have that one, for there was a light in Miss Chancellor's magnified
+face which seemed to say that a sentiment, with her, might consume its
+object, might consume Miss Chancellor, but would never consume itself.
+Verena, as yet, had no sense of being scorched; she was only agreeably
+warmed. She also had dreamed of a friendship, though it was not what she
+had dreamed of most, and it came over her that this was the one which
+fortune might have been keeping. She never held back.</p>
+
+<p>"Do you live here all alone?" she asked of Olive.</p>
+
+<p>"I shouldn't if you would come and live with me!"</p>
+
+<p>Even this really passionate rejoinder failed to make Verena shrink; she
+thought it so possible that in the wealthy class people made each other
+such easy proposals. It was a part of the romance, the luxury, of
+wealth; it belonged to the world of invitations, in which she had had so
+little share. But it seemed almost a mockery when she thought of the
+little house in Cambridge, where the boards were loose in the steps of
+the porch.</p>
+
+<p>"I must stay with my father and mother," she said. "And then I have my
+work, you know. That's the way I must live now."</p>
+
+<p>"Your work?" Olive repeated, not quite understanding.</p>
+
+<p>"My gift," said Verena, smiling.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh yes, you must use it. That's what I mean; you must move the world
+with it; it's divine."</p>
+
+<p>It was so much what she meant that she had lain awake all night thinking
+of it, and the substance of her thought was that if she could only
+rescue the girl from the danger of vulgar exploitation, could only
+constitute herself her protectress and devotee, the two, between them,
+might achieve the great result. Verena's genius was a mystery, and it
+might remain a mystery; it was impossible to see how this charming,
+blooming, simple creature, all youth and grace and innocence, got her
+extraordinary powers of reflexion. When her gift was not in exercise she
+appeared anything but reflective, and as she sat there now, for
+instance, you would never have dreamed that she had had a vivid
+revelation. Olive had to content herself, provisionally, with saying
+that her precious faculty had come to her just as her beauty and
+distinction (to Olive she was full of that quality) had come; it had
+dropped straight from heaven, without filtering through her parents,
+whom Miss Chancellor decidedly did not fancy. Even among reformers she
+discriminated; she thought all wise people wanted great changes, but the
+votaries of change were not necessarily wise. She remained silent a
+little, after her last remark, and then she repeated again, as if it
+were the solution of everything, as if it represented with absolute
+certainty some immense happiness in the future&mdash;"We must wait, we must
+wait!" Verena was perfectly willing to wait, though she did not exactly
+know what they were to wait for, and the aspiring frankness of her
+assent shone out of her face, and seemed to pacify their mutual gaze.
+Olive asked her innumerable questions; she wanted to enter into her
+life. It was one of those talks which people remember afterwards, in
+which every word has been given and taken, and in which they see the
+signs of a beginning that was to be justified. The more Olive learnt of
+her visitor's life the more she wanted to enter into it, the more it
+took her out of herself. Such strange lives are led in America, she
+always knew that; but this was queerer than anything she had dreamed of,
+and the queerest part was that the girl herself didn't appear to think
+it queer. She had been nursed in darkened rooms, and suckled in the
+midst of manifestations; she had begun to "attend lectures," as she
+said, when she was quite an infant, because her mother had no one to
+leave her with at home. She had sat on the knees of somnambulists, and
+had been passed from hand to hand by trance-speakers; she was familiar
+with every kind of "cure," and had grown up among lady-editors of
+newspapers advocating new religions, and people who disapproved of the
+marriage-tie. Verena talked of the marriage-tie as she would have talked
+of the last novel&mdash;as if she had heard it as frequently discussed; and
+at certain times, listening to the answers she made to her questions,
+Olive Chancellor closed her eyes in the manner of a person waiting till
+giddiness passed. Her young friend's revelations actually gave her a
+vertigo; they made her perceive everything from which she should have
+rescued her. Verena was perfectly uncontaminated, and she would never be
+touched by evil; but though Olive had no views about the marriage-tie
+except that she should hate it for herself&mdash;that particular reform she
+did not propose to consider&mdash;she didn't like the "atmosphere" of circles
+in which such institutions were called into question. She had no wish
+now to enter into an examination of that particular one; nevertheless,
+to make sure, she would just ask Verena whether she disapproved of it.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, I must say," said Miss Tarrant, "I prefer free unions."</p>
+
+<p>Olive held her breath an instant; such an idea was so disagreeable to
+her. Then, for all answer, she murmured, irresolutely, "I wish you would
+let me help you!" Yet it seemed, at the same time, that Verena needed
+little help, for it was more and more clear that her eloquence, when she
+stood up that way before a roomful of people, was literally inspiration.
+She answered all her friend's questions with a good-nature which
+evidently took no pains to make things plausible, an effort to oblige,
+not to please; but, after all, she could give very little account of
+herself. This was very visible when Olive asked her where she had got
+her "intense realisation" of the suffering of women; for her address at
+Miss Birdseye's showed that she, too (like Olive herself), had had that
+vision in the watches of the night. Verena thought a moment, as if to
+understand what her companion referred to, and then she inquired, always
+smiling, where Joan of Arc had got her idea of the suffering of France.
+This was so prettily said that Olive could scarcely keep from kissing
+her; she looked at the moment as if, like Joan, she might have had
+visits from the saints. Olive, of course, remembered afterwards that it
+had not literally answered the question; and she also reflected on
+something that made an answer seem more difficult&mdash;the fact that the
+girl had grown up among lady-doctors, lady-mediums, lady-editors,
+lady-preachers, lady-healers, women who, having rescued themselves from
+a passive existence, could illustrate only partially the misery of the
+sex at large. It was true that they might have illustrated it by their
+talk, by all they had "been through" and all they could tell a younger
+sister; but Olive was sure that Verena's prophetic impulse had not been
+stirred by the chatter of women (Miss Chancellor knew that sound as well
+as any one); it had proceeded rather out of their silence. She said to
+her visitor that whether or no the angels came down to her in glittering
+armour, she struck her as the only person she had yet encountered who
+had exactly the same tenderness, the same pity, for women that she
+herself had. Miss Birdseye had something of it, but Miss Birdseye wanted
+passion, wanted keenness, was capable of the weakest concessions. Mrs.
+Farrinder was not weak, of course, and she brought a great intellect to
+the matter; but she was not personal enough&mdash;she was too abstract.
+Verena was not abstract; she seemed to have lived in imagination through
+all the ages. Verena said she <i>did</i> think she had a certain amount of
+imagination; she supposed she couldn't be so effective on the platform
+if she hadn't a rich fancy. Then Olive said to her, taking her hand
+again, that she wanted her to assure her of this&mdash;that it was the only
+thing in all the world she cared for, the redemption of women, the thing
+she hoped under Providence to give her life to. Verena flushed a little
+at this appeal, and the deeper glow of her eyes was the first sign of
+exaltation she had offered. "Oh yes&mdash;I want to give my life!" she
+exclaimed, with a vibrating voice; and then she added gravely, "I want
+to do something great!"</p>
+
+<p>"You will, you will, we both will!" Olive Chancellor cried, in rapture.
+But after a little she went on: "I wonder if you know what it means,
+young and lovely as you are&mdash;giving your life!"</p>
+
+<p>Verena looked down for a moment in meditation.</p>
+
+<p>"Well," she replied, "I guess I have thought more than I appear."</p>
+
+<p>"Do you understand German? Do you know 'Faust'?" said Olive. "'<i>Entsagen
+sollst du, sollst entsagen!</i>'"</p>
+
+<p>"I don't know German; I should like so to study it; I want to know
+everything."</p>
+
+<p>"We will work at it together&mdash;we will study everything." Olive almost
+panted; and while she spoke the peaceful picture hung before her of
+still winter evenings under the lamp, with falling snow outside, and tea
+on a little table, and successful renderings, with a chosen companion,
+of Goethe, almost the only foreign author she cared about; for she hated
+the writing of the French, in spite of the importance they have given to
+women. Such a vision as this was the highest indulgence she could offer
+herself; she had it only at considerable intervals. It seemed as if
+Verena caught a glimpse of it too, for her face kindled still more, and
+she said she should like that ever so much. At the same time she asked
+the meaning of the German words.</p>
+
+<p>"'Thou shalt renounce, refrain, abstain!' That's the way Bayard Taylor
+has translated them," Olive answered.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, well, I guess I can abstain!" Verena exclaimed, with a laugh. And
+she got up rather quickly, as if by taking leave she might give a proof
+of what she meant. Olive put out her hands to hold her, and at this
+moment one of the <i>porti&egrave;res</i> of the room was pushed aside, while a
+gentleman was ushered in by Miss Chancellor's little parlour-maid.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="XII" id="XII"></a>XII</h2>
+
+
+<p>Verena recognised him; she had seen him the night before at Miss
+Birdseye's, and she said to her hostess, "Now I must go&mdash;you have got
+another caller!" It was Verena's belief that in the fashionable world
+(like Mrs. Farrinder, she thought Miss Chancellor belonged to
+it&mdash;thought that, in standing there, she herself was in it)&mdash;in the
+highest social walks it was the custom of a prior guest to depart when
+another friend arrived. She had been told at people's doors that she
+could not be received because the lady of the house had a visitor, and
+she had retired on these occasions with a feeling of awe much more than
+a sense of injury. They had not been the portals of fashion, but in this
+respect, she deemed, they had emulated such bulwarks. Olive Chancellor
+offered Basil Ransom a greeting which she believed to be consummately
+lady-like, and which the young man, narrating the scene several months
+later to Mrs. Luna, whose susceptibilities he did not feel himself
+obliged to consider (she considered his so little), described by saying
+that she glared at him. Olive had thought it very possible he would come
+that day if he was to leave Boston; though she was perfectly mindful
+that she had given him no encouragement at the moment they separated. If
+he should not come she should be annoyed, and if he should come she
+should be furious; she was also sufficiently mindful of that. But she
+had a foreboding that, of the two grievances, fortune would confer upon
+her only the less; the only one she had as yet was that he had responded
+to her letter&mdash;a complaint rather wanting in richness. If he came, at
+any rate, he would be likely to come shortly before dinner, at the same
+hour as yesterday. He had now anticipated this period considerably, and
+it seemed to Miss Chancellor that he had taken a base advantage of her,
+stolen a march upon her privacy. She was startled, disconcerted, but as
+I have said, she was rigorously lady-like. She was determined not again
+to be fantastic, as she had been about his coming to Miss Birdseye's.
+The strange dread associating itself with that was something which, she
+devoutly trusted, she had felt once for all. She didn't know what he
+could do to her; he hadn't prevented, on the spot though he was, one of
+the happiest things that had befallen her for so long&mdash;this quick,
+confident visit of Verena Tarrant. It was only just at the last that he
+had come in, and Verena must go now; Olive's detaining hand immediately
+relaxed itself.</p>
+
+<p>It is to be feared there was no disguise of Ransom's satisfaction at
+finding himself once more face to face with the charming creature with
+whom he had exchanged that final speechless smile the evening before. He
+was more glad to see her than if she had been an old friend, for it
+seemed to him that she had suddenly become a new one. "The delightful
+girl," he said to himself; "she smiles at me as if she liked me!" He
+could not know that this was fatuous, that she smiled so at every one;
+the first time she saw people she treated them as if she recognised
+them. Moreover, she did not seat herself again in his honour; she let it
+be seen that she was still going. The three stood there together in the
+middle of the long, characteristic room, and, for the first time in her
+life, Olive Chancellor chose not to introduce two persons who met under
+her roof. She hated Europe, but she could be European if it were
+necessary. Neither of her companions had an idea that in leaving them
+simply planted face to face (the terror of the American heart) she had
+so high a warrant; and presently Basil Ransom felt that he didn't care
+whether he were introduced or not, for the greatness of an evil didn't
+matter if the remedy were equally great.</p>
+
+<p>"Miss Tarrant won't be surprised if I recognise her&mdash;if I take the
+liberty to speak to her. She is a public character; she must pay the
+penalty of her distinction." These words he boldly addressed to the
+girl, with his most gallant Southern manner, saying to himself meanwhile
+that she was prettier still by daylight.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, a great many gentlemen have spoken to me," Verena said. "There were
+quite a number at Topeka&mdash;&mdash;" And her phrase lost itself in her look at
+Olive, as if she were wondering what was the matter with her.</p>
+
+<p>"Now, I am afraid you are going the very moment I appear," Ransom went
+on. "Do you know that's very cruel to me? I know what your ideas
+are&mdash;you expressed them last night in such beautiful language; of course
+you convinced me. I am ashamed of being a man; but I am, and I can't
+help it, and I'll do penance any way you may prescribe. <i>Must</i> she go,
+Miss Olive?" he asked of his cousin. "Do you flee before the individual
+male?" And he turned to Verena.</p>
+
+<p>This young lady gave a laugh that resembled speech in liquid fusion. "Oh
+no; I like the individual!"</p>
+
+<p>As an incarnation of a "movement," Ransom thought her more and more
+singular, and he wondered how she came to be closeted so soon with his
+kinswoman, to whom, only a few hours before, she had been a complete
+stranger. These, however, were doubtless the normal proceedings of
+women. He begged her to sit down again; he was sure Miss Chancellor
+would be sorry to part with her. Verena, looking at her friend, not for
+permission, but for sympathy, dropped again into a chair, and Ransom
+waited to see Miss Chancellor do the same. She gratified him after a
+moment, because she could not refuse without appearing to put a hurt
+upon Verena; but it went hard with her, and she was altogether
+discomposed. She had never seen any one so free in her own drawing-room
+as this loud Southerner, to whom she had so rashly offered a footing; he
+extended invitations to her guests under her nose. That Verena should do
+as he asked her was a signal sign of the absence of that "home-culture"
+(it was so that Miss Chancellor expressed the missing quality) which she
+never supposed the girl possessed: fortunately, as it would be supplied
+to her in abundance in Charles Street. (Olive of course held that
+home-culture was perfectly compatible with the widest emancipation.) It
+was with a perfectly good conscience that Verena complied with Basil
+Ransom's request; but it took her quick sensibility only a moment to
+discover that her friend was not pleased. She scarcely knew what had
+ruffled her, but at the same instant there passed before her the vision
+of the anxieties (of this sudden, unexplained sort, for instance, and
+much worse) which intimate relations with Miss Chancellor might entail.</p>
+
+<p>"Now, I want you to tell me this," Basil Ransom said, leaning forward
+towards Verena, with his hands on his knees, and completely oblivious to
+his hostess. "Do you really believe all that pretty moonshine you talked
+last night? I could have listened to you for another hour; but I never
+heard such monstrous sentiments, I must protest&mdash;I must, as a
+calumniated, misrepresented man. Confess you meant it as a kind of
+<i>reductio ad absurdum</i>&mdash;a satire on Mrs. Farrinder?" He spoke in a tone
+of the freest pleasantry, with his familiar, friendly Southern cadence.</p>
+
+<p>Verena looked at him with eyes that grew large. "Why, you don't mean to
+say you don't believe in our cause?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, it won't do&mdash;it won't do!" Ransom went on, laughing. "You are on
+the wrong tack altogether. Do you really take the ground that your sex
+has been without influence? Influence? Why, you have led us all by the
+nose to where we are now! Wherever we are, it's all you. You are at the
+bottom of everything."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh yes, and we want to be at the top," said Verena.</p>
+
+<p>"Ah, the bottom is a better place, depend on it, when from there you
+move the whole mass! Besides, you are on the top as well; you are
+everywhere, you are everything. I am of the opinion of that historical
+character&mdash;wasn't he some king?&mdash;who thought there was a lady behind
+everything. Whatever it was, he held, you have only to look for her; she
+is the explanation. Well, I always look for her, and I always find her;
+of course, I am always delighted to do so; but it proves she is the
+universal cause. Now, you don't mean to deny that power, the power of
+setting men in motion. You are at the bottom of all the wars."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, I am like Mrs. Farrinder; I like opposition," Verena exclaimed,
+with a happy smile.</p>
+
+<p>"That proves, as I say, how in spite of your expressions of horror you
+delight in the shock of battle. What do you say to Helen of Troy and the
+fearful carnage she excited? It is well known that the Empress of France
+was at the bottom of the last war in that country. And as for our four
+fearful years of slaughter, of course, you won't deny that there the
+ladies were the great motive power. The Abolitionists brought it on, and
+were not the Abolitionists principally females? Who was that celebrity
+that was mentioned last night?&mdash;Eliza P. Moseley. I regard Eliza as the
+cause of the biggest war of which history preserves the record."</p>
+
+<p>Basil Ransom enjoyed his humour the more because Verena appeared to
+enjoy it; and the look with which she replied to him, at the end of this
+little tirade, "Why, sir, you ought to take the platform too; we might
+go round together as poison and antidote!"&mdash;this made him feel that he
+had convinced her, for the moment, quite as much as it was important he
+should. In Verena's face, however, it lasted but an instant&mdash;an instant
+after she had glanced at Olive Chancellor, who, with her eyes fixed
+intently on the ground (a look she was to learn to know so well), had a
+strange expression. The girl slowly got up; she felt that she must go.
+She guessed Miss Chancellor didn't like this handsome joker (it was so
+that Basil Ransom struck her); and it was impressed upon her ("in time,"
+as she thought) that her new friend would be more serious even than she
+about the woman-question, serious as she had hitherto believed herself
+to be.</p>
+
+<p>"I should like so much to have the pleasure of seeing you again," Ransom
+continued. "I think I should be able to interpret history for you by a
+new light."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, I should be very happy to see you in my home." These words had
+barely fallen from Verena's lips (her mother told her they were, in
+general, the proper thing to say when people expressed such a desire as
+that; she must not let it be assumed that she would come first to
+them)&mdash;she had hardly uttered this hospitable speech when she felt the
+hand of her hostess upon her arm and became aware that a passionate
+appeal sat in Olive's eyes.</p>
+
+<p>"You will just catch the Charles Street car," that young woman murmured,
+with muffled sweetness.</p>
+
+<p>Verena did not understand further than to see that she ought already to
+have departed; and the simplest response was to kiss Miss Chancellor, an
+act which she briefly performed. Basil Ransom understood still less, and
+it was a melancholy commentary on his contention that men are not
+inferior, that this meeting could not come, however rapidly, to a close
+without his plunging into a blunder which necessarily aggravated those
+he had already made. He had been invited by the little prophetess, and
+yet he had not been invited; but he did not take that up, because he
+must absolutely leave Boston on the morrow, and, besides, Miss
+Chancellor appeared to have something to say to it. But he put out his
+hand to Verena and said, "Good-bye, Miss Tarrant; are we not to have the
+pleasure of hearing you in New York? I am afraid we are sadly sunk."</p>
+
+<p>"Certainly, I should like to raise my voice in the biggest city," the
+girl replied.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, try to come on. I won't refute you. It would be a very stupid
+world, after all, if we always knew what women were going to say."</p>
+
+<p>Verena was conscious of the approach of the Charles Street car, as well
+as of the fact that Miss Chancellor was in pain; but she lingered long
+enough to remark that she could see he had the old-fashioned ideas&mdash;he
+regarded woman as the toy of man.</p>
+
+<p>"Don't say the toy&mdash;say the joy!" Ransom exclaimed. "There is one
+statement I will venture to advance; I am quite as fond of you as you
+are of each other!"</p>
+
+<p>"Much he knows about that!" said Verena, with a side-long smile at Olive
+Chancellor.</p>
+
+<p>For Olive, it made her more beautiful than ever; still, there was no
+trace of this mere personal elation in the splendid sententiousness with
+which, turning to Mr. Ransom, she remarked: "What women may be, or may
+not be, to each other, I won't attempt just now to say; but what <i>the
+truth</i> may be to a human soul, I think perhaps even a woman may faintly
+suspect!"</p>
+
+<p>"The truth? My dear cousin, your truth is a most vain thing!"</p>
+
+<p>"Gracious me!" cried Verena Tarrant; and the gay vibration of her voice
+as she uttered this simple ejaculation was the last that Ransom heard of
+her. Miss Chancellor swept her out of the room, leaving the young man to
+extract a relish from the ineffable irony with which she uttered the
+words "even a woman." It was to be supposed, on general grounds, that
+she would reappear, but there was nothing in the glance she gave him, as
+she turned her back, that was an earnest of this. He stood there a
+moment, wondering; then his wonder spent itself on the page of a book
+which, according to his habit at such times, he had mechanically taken
+up, and in which he speedily became interested. He read it for five
+minutes in an uncomfortable-looking attitude, and quite forgot that he
+had been forsaken. He was recalled to this fact by the entrance of Mrs.
+Luna, arrayed as if for the street, and putting on her gloves again&mdash;she
+seemed always to be putting on her gloves. She wanted to know what in
+the world he was doing there alone&mdash;whether her sister had not been
+notified.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh yes," said Ransom, "she has just been with me, but she has gone
+downstairs with Miss Tarrant."</p>
+
+<p>"And who in the world is Miss Tarrant?"</p>
+
+<p>Ransom was surprised that Mrs. Luna should not know of the intimacy of
+the two young ladies, in spite of the brevity of their acquaintance,
+being already so great. But, apparently, Miss Olive had not mentioned
+her new friend. "Well, she is an inspirational speaker&mdash;the most
+charming creature in the world!"</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Luna paused in her manipulations, gave an amazed, amused stare,
+then caused the room to ring with her laughter. "You don't mean to say
+you are converted&mdash;already?"</p>
+
+<p>"Converted to Miss Tarrant, decidedly."</p>
+
+<p>"You are not to belong to any Miss Tarrant; you are to belong to me,"
+Mrs. Luna said, having thought over her Southern kinsman during the
+twenty-four hours, and made up her mind that he would be a good man for
+a lone woman to know. Then she added: "Did you come here to meet
+her&mdash;the inspirational speaker?"</p>
+
+<p>"No; I came to bid your sister good-bye."</p>
+
+<p>"Are you really going? I haven't made you promise half the things I want
+yet. But we will settle that in New York. How do you get on with Olive
+Chancellor?" Mrs. Luna continued, making her points, as she always did,
+with eagerness, though her roundness and her dimples had hitherto
+prevented her from being accused of that vice. It was her practice to
+speak of her sister by her whole name, and you would have supposed, from
+her usual manner of alluding to her, that Olive was much the older,
+instead of having been born ten years later than Adeline. She had as
+many ways as possible of marking the gulf that divided them; but she
+bridged it over lightly now by saying to Basil Ransom; "Isn't she a dear
+old thing?"</p>
+
+<p>This bridge, he saw, would not bear his weight, and her question seemed
+to him to have more audacity than sense. Why should she be so insincere?
+She might know that a man couldn't recognise Miss Chancellor in such a
+description as that. She was not old&mdash;she was sharply young; and it was
+inconceivable to him, though he had just seen the little prophetess kiss
+her, that she should ever become any one's "dear." Least of all was she
+a "thing"; she was intensely, fearfully, a person. He hesitated a
+moment, and then he replied: "She's a very remarkable woman."</p>
+
+<p>"Take care&mdash;don't be reckless!" cried Mrs. Luna. "Do you think she is
+very dreadful?"</p>
+
+<p>"Don't say anything against my cousin," Basil answered; and at that
+moment Miss Chancellor re-entered the room. She murmured some request
+that he would excuse her absence, but her sister interrupted her with an
+inquiry about Miss Tarrant.</p>
+
+<p>"Mr. Ransom thinks her wonderfully charming. Why didn't you show her to
+me? Do you want to keep her all to yourself?"</p>
+
+<p>Olive rested her eyes for some moments upon Mrs. Luna, without speaking.
+Then she said: "Your veil is not put on straight, Adeline."</p>
+
+<p>"I look like a monster&mdash;that, evidently, is what you mean!" Adeline
+exclaimed, going to the mirror to rearrange the peccant tissue.</p>
+
+<p>Miss Chancellor did not again ask Ransom to be seated; she appeared to
+take it for granted that he would leave her now. But instead of this he
+returned to the subject of Verena; he asked her whether she supposed the
+girl would come out in public&mdash;would go about like Mrs. Farrinder?</p>
+
+<p>"Come out in public!" Olive repeated; "in public? Why, you don't imagine
+that pure voice is to be hushed?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, hushed, no! it's too sweet for that. But not raised to a scream;
+not forced and cracked and ruined. She oughtn't to become like the
+others. She ought to remain apart."</p>
+
+<p>"Apart&mdash;<i>apart</i>?" said Miss Chancellor; "when we shall all be looking to
+her, gathering about her, praying for her!" There was an exceeding scorn
+in her voice. "If <i>I</i> can help her, she shall be an immense power for
+good."</p>
+
+<p>"An immense power for quackery, my dear Miss Olive!" This broke from
+Basil's lips in spite of a vow he had just taken not to say anything
+that should "aggravate" his hostess, who was in a state of tension it
+was not difficult to detect. But he had lowered his tone to friendly
+pleading, and the offensive word was mitigated by his smile.</p>
+
+<p>She moved away from him, backwards, as if he had given her a push. "Ah,
+well, now you are reckless," Mrs. Luna remarked, drawing out her ribbons
+before the mirror.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't think you would interfere if you knew how little you understand
+us," Miss Chancellor said to Ransom.</p>
+
+<p>"Whom do you mean by 'us'&mdash;your whole delightful sex? I don't understand
+<i>you</i>, Miss Olive."</p>
+
+<p>"Come away with me, and I'll explain her as we go," Mrs. Luna went on,
+having finished her toilet.</p>
+
+<p>Ransom offered his hand in farewell to his hostess; but Olive found it
+impossible to do anything but ignore the gesture. She could not have let
+him touch her. "Well, then, if you must exhibit her to the multitude,
+bring her on to New York," he said, with the same attempt at a light
+treatment.</p>
+
+<p>"You'll have <i>me</i> in New York&mdash;you don't want any one else!" Mrs. Luna
+ejaculated, coquettishly. "I have made up my mind to winter there now."</p>
+
+<p>Olive Chancellor looked from one to the other of her two relatives, one
+near and the other distant, but each so little in sympathy with her, and
+it came over her that there might be a kind of protection for her in
+binding them together, entangling them with each other. She had never
+had an idea of that kind in her life before, and that this sudden
+subtlety should have gleamed upon her as a momentary talisman gives the
+measure of her present nervousness.</p>
+
+<p>"If I could take her to New York, I would take her farther," she
+remarked, hoping she was enigmatical.</p>
+
+<p>"You talk about 'taking' her, as if you were a lecture-agent. Are you
+going into that business?" Mrs. Luna asked.</p>
+
+<p>Ransom could not help noticing that Miss Chancellor would not shake
+hands with him, and he felt, on the whole, rather injured. He paused a
+moment before leaving the room&mdash;standing there with his hand on the knob
+of the door. "Look here, Miss Olive, what did you write to me to come
+and see you for?" He made this inquiry with a countenance not destitute
+of gaiety, but his eyes showed something of that yellow light&mdash;just
+momentarily lurid&mdash;of which mention has been made. Mrs. Luna was on her
+way downstairs, and her companions remained face to face.</p>
+
+<p>"Ask my sister&mdash;I think she will tell you," said Olive, turning away
+from him and going to the window. She remained there, looking out; she
+heard the door of the house close, and saw the two cross the street
+together. As they passed out of sight her fingers played, softly, a
+little air upon the pane; it seemed to her that she had had an
+inspiration.</p>
+
+<p>Basil Ransom, meanwhile, put the question to Mrs. Luna. "If she was not
+going to like me, why in the world did she write to me?"</p>
+
+<p>"Because she wanted you to know me&mdash;she thought <i>I</i> would like you!" And
+apparently she had not been wrong; for Mrs. Luna, when they reached
+Beacon Street, would not hear of his leaving her to go her way alone,
+would not in the least admit his plea that he had only an hour or two
+more in Boston (he was to travel, economically, by the boat) and must
+devote the time to his business. She appealed to his Southern chivalry,
+and not in vain; practically, at least, he admitted the rights of women.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="XIII" id="XIII"></a>XIII</h2>
+
+
+<p>Mrs. Tarrant was delighted, as may be imagined, with her daughter's
+account of Miss Chancellor's interior, and the reception the girl had
+found there; and Verena, for the next month, took her way very often to
+Charles Street. "Just you be as nice to her as you know how," Mrs.
+Tarrant had said to her; and she reflected with some complacency that
+her daughter did know&mdash;she knew how to do everything of that sort. It
+was not that Verena had been taught; that branch of the education of
+young ladies which is known as "manners and deportment" had not figured,
+as a definite head, in Miss Tarrant's curriculum. She had been told,
+indeed, that she must not lie nor steal; but she had been told very
+little else about behaviour; her only great advantage, in short, had
+been the parental example. But her mother liked to think that she was
+quick and graceful, and she questioned her exhaustively as to the
+progress of this interesting episode; she didn't see why, as she said,
+it shouldn't be a permanent "stand-by" for Verena. In Mrs. Tarrant's
+meditations upon the girl's future she had never thought of a fine
+marriage as a reward of effort; she would have deemed herself very
+immoral if she had endeavoured to capture for her child a rich husband.
+She had not, in fact, a very vivid sense of the existence of such agents
+of fate; all the rich men she had seen already had wives, and the
+unmarried men, who were generally very young, were distinguished from
+each other not so much by the figure of their income, which came little
+into question, as by the degree of their interest in regenerating ideas.
+She supposed Verena would marry some one, some day, and she hoped the
+personage would be connected with public life&mdash;which meant, for Mrs.
+Tarrant, that his name would be visible, in the lamp-light, on a
+coloured poster, in the doorway of Tremont Temple. But she was not eager
+about this vision, for the implications of matrimony were for the most
+part wanting in brightness&mdash;consisted of a tired woman holding a baby
+over a furnace-register that emitted lukewarm air. A real lovely
+friendship with a young woman who had, as Mrs. Tarrant expressed it,
+"prop'ty," would occupy agreeably such an interval as might occur before
+Verena should meet her sterner fate; it would be a great thing for her
+to have a place to run into when she wanted a change, and there was no
+knowing but what it might end in her having two homes. For the idea of
+the home, like most American women of her quality, Mrs. Tarrant had an
+extreme reverence; and it was her candid faith that in all the
+vicissitudes of the past twenty years she had preserved the spirit of
+this institution. If it should exist in duplicate for Verena, the girl
+would be favoured indeed.</p>
+
+<p>All this was as nothing, however, compared with the fact that Miss
+Chancellor seemed to think her young friend's gift <i>was</i> inspirational,
+or at any rate, as Selah had so often said, quite unique. She couldn't
+make out very exactly, by Verena, what she thought; but if the way Miss
+Chancellor had taken hold of her didn't show that she believed she could
+rouse the people, Mrs. Tarrant didn't know what it showed. It was a
+satisfaction to her that Verena evidently responded freely; she didn't
+think anything of what she spent in car-tickets, and indeed she had told
+her that Miss Chancellor wanted to stuff her pockets with them. At first
+she went in because her mother liked to have her; but now, evidently,
+she went because she was so much drawn. She expressed the highest
+admiration of her new friend; she said it took her a little while to see
+into her, but now that she did, well, she was perfectly splendid. When
+Verena wanted to admire she went ahead of every one, and it was
+delightful to see how she was stimulated by the young lady in Charles
+Street. They thought everything of each other&mdash;that was very plain; you
+could scarcely tell which thought most. Each thought the other so noble,
+and Mrs. Tarrant had a faith that between them they <i>would</i> rouse the
+people. What Verena wanted was some one who would know how to handle her
+(her father hadn't handled anything except the healing, up to this time,
+with real success), and perhaps Miss Chancellor would take hold better
+than some that made more of a profession.</p>
+
+<p>"It's beautiful, the way she draws you out," Verena had said to her
+mother; "there's something so searching that the first time I visited
+her it quite realised my idea of the Day of Judgement. But she seems to
+show all that's in herself at the same time, and then you see how lovely
+it is. She's just as pure as she can live; you see if she is not, when
+you know her. She's so noble herself that she makes you feel as if you
+wouldn't want to be less so. She doesn't care for anything but the
+elevation of our sex; if she can work a little toward that, it's all she
+asks. I can tell you, she kindles me; she does, mother, really. She
+doesn't care a speck what she wears&mdash;only to have an elegant parlour.
+Well, she <i>has</i> got that; it's a regular dream-like place to sit. She's
+going to have a tree in, next week; she says she wants to see me sitting
+under a tree. I believe it's some oriental idea; it has lately been
+introduced in Paris. She doesn't like French ideas as a general thing;
+but she says this has more nature than most. She has got so many of her
+own that I shouldn't think she would require to borrow any. I'd sit in a
+forest to hear her bring some of them out," Verena went on, with
+characteristic raciness. "She just quivers when she describes what our
+sex has been through. It's so interesting to me to hear what I have
+always felt. If she wasn't afraid of facing the public, she would go far
+ahead of me. But she doesn't want to speak herself; she only wants to
+call me out. Mother, if she doesn't attract attention to me there isn't
+any attention to be attracted. She says I have got the gift of
+expression&mdash;it doesn't matter where it comes from. She says it's a great
+advantage to a movement to be personified in a bright young figure.
+Well, of course I'm young, and I feel bright enough when once I get
+started. She says my serenity while exposed to the gaze of hundreds is
+in itself a qualification; in fact, she seems to think my serenity is
+quite God-given. She hasn't got much of it herself; she's the most
+emotional woman I have met, up to now. She wants to know how I can speak
+the way I do unless I feel; and of course I tell her I do feel, so far
+as I realise. She seems to be realising all the time; I never saw any
+one that took so little rest. She says I ought to do something great,
+and she makes me feel as if I should. She says I ought to have a wide
+influence, if I can obtain the ear of the public; and I say to her that
+if I do it will be all her influence."</p>
+
+<p>Selah Tarrant looked at all this from a higher standpoint than his wife;
+at least such an attitude on his part was to be inferred from his
+increased solemnity. He committed himself to no precipitate elation at
+the idea of his daughter's being taken up by a patroness of movements
+who happened to have money; he looked at his child only from the point
+of view of the service she might render to humanity. To keep her ideal
+pointing in the right direction, to guide and animate her moral
+life&mdash;this was a duty more imperative for a parent so closely identified
+with revelations and panaceas than seeing that she formed profitable
+worldly connexions. He was "off," moreover, so much of the time that he
+could keep little account of her comings and goings, and he had an air
+of being but vaguely aware of whom Miss Chancellor, the object now of
+his wife's perpetual reference, might be. Verena's initial appearance in
+Boston, as he called her performance at Miss Birdseye's, had been a
+great success; and this reflexion added, as I say, to his habitually
+sacerdotal expression. He looked like the priest of a religion that was
+passing through the stage of miracles; he carried his responsibility in
+the general elongation of his person, of his gestures (his hands were
+now always in the air, as if he were being photographed in postures), of
+his words and sentences, as well as in his smile, as noiseless as a
+patent hinge, and in the folds of his eternal waterproof. He was
+incapable of giving an off-hand answer or opinion on the simplest
+occasion, and his tone of high deliberation increased in proportion as
+the subject was trivial or domestic. If his wife asked him at dinner if
+the potatoes were good, he replied that they were strikingly fine (he
+used to speak of the newspaper as "fine"&mdash;he applied this term to
+objects the most dissimilar), and embarked on a parallel worthy of
+Plutarch, in which he compared them with other specimens of the same
+vegetable. He produced, or would have liked to produce, the impression
+of looking above and beyond everything, of not caring for the immediate,
+of reckoning only with the long run. In reality he had one all-absorbing
+solicitude&mdash;the desire to get paragraphs put into the newspapers,
+paragraphs of which he had hitherto been the subject, but of which he
+was now to divide the glory with his daughter. The newspapers were his
+world, the richest expression, in his eyes, of human life; and, for him,
+if a diviner day was to come upon earth, it would be brought about by
+copious advertisement in the daily prints. He looked with longing for
+the moment when Verena should be advertised among the "personals," and
+to his mind the supremely happy people were those (and there were a good
+many of them) of whom there was some journalistic mention every day in
+the year. Nothing less than this would really have satisfied Selah
+Tarrant; his ideal of bliss was to be as regularly and indispensably a
+component part of the newspaper as the title and date, or the list of
+fires, or the column of Western jokes. The vision of that publicity
+haunted his dreams, and he would gladly have sacrificed to it the
+innermost sanctities of home. Human existence to him, indeed, was a huge
+publicity, in which the only fault was that it was sometimes not
+sufficiently effective. There had been a Spiritualist paper of old which
+he used to pervade; but he could not persuade himself that through this
+medium his personality had attracted general attention; and, moreover,
+the sheet, as he said, was played out anyway. Success was not success so
+long as his daughter's <i>physique</i>, the rumour of her engagement, were
+not included in the "Jottings" with the certainty of being extensively
+copied.</p>
+
+<p>The account of her exploits in the West had not made their way to the
+seaboard with the promptitude that he had looked for; the reason of this
+being, he supposed, that the few addresses she had made had not been
+lectures, announced in advance, to which tickets had been sold, but
+incidents, of abrupt occurrence, of certain multitudinous meetings,
+where there had been other performers better known to fame. They had
+brought in no money; they had been delivered only for the good of the
+cause. If it could only be known that she spoke for nothing, that might
+deepen the reverberation; the only trouble was that her speaking for
+nothing was not the way to remind him that he had a remunerative
+daughter. It was not the way to stand out so very much either, Selah
+Tarrant felt; for there were plenty of others that knew how to make as
+little money as she would. To speak&mdash;that was the one thing that most
+people were willing to do for nothing; it was not a line in which it was
+easy to appear conspicuously disinterested. Disinterestedness, too, was
+incompatible with receipts; and receipts were what Selah Tarrant was, in
+his own parlance, after. He wished to bring about the day when they
+would flow in freely; the reader perhaps sees the gesture with which, in
+his colloquies with himself, he accompanied this mental image.</p>
+
+<p>It seemed to him at present that the fruitful time was not far off; it
+had been brought appreciably nearer by that fortunate evening at Miss
+Birdseye's. If Mrs. Farrinder could be induced to write an "open letter"
+about Verena, that would do more than anything else. Selah was not
+remarkable for delicacy of perception, but he knew the world he lived in
+well enough to be aware that Mrs. Farrinder was liable to rear up, as
+they used to say down in Pennsylvania, where he lived before he began to
+peddle lead-pencils. She wouldn't always take things as you might
+expect, and if it didn't meet her views to pay a public tribute to
+Verena, there wasn't any way known to Tarrant's ingenious mind of
+getting round her. If it was a question of a favour from Mrs. Farrinder,
+you just had to wait for it, as you would for a rise in the thermometer.
+He had told Miss Birdseye what he would like, and she seemed to think,
+from the way their celebrated friend had been affected, that the idea
+might take her some day of just letting the public know all she had
+felt. She was off somewhere now (since that evening), but Miss Birdseye
+had an idea that when she was back in Roxbury she would send for Verena
+and give her a few points. Meanwhile, at any rate, Selah was sure he had
+a card; he felt there was money in the air. It might already be said
+there were receipts from Charles Street; that rich, peculiar young woman
+seemed to want to lavish herself. He pretended, as I have intimated, not
+to notice this; but he never saw so much as when he had his eyes fixed
+on the cornice. He had no doubt that if he should make up his mind to
+take a hall some night, she would tell him where the bill might be sent.
+That was what he was thinking of now, whether he had better take a hall
+right away, so that Verena might leap at a bound into renown, or wait
+till she had made a few more appearances in private, so that curiosity
+might be worked up.</p>
+
+<p>These meditations accompanied him in his multifarious wanderings through
+the streets and the suburbs of the New England capital. As I have also
+mentioned, he was absent for hours&mdash;long periods during which Mrs.
+Tarrant, sustaining nature with a hard-boiled egg and a doughnut,
+wondered how in the world he stayed his stomach. He never wanted
+anything but a piece of pie when he came in; the only thing about which
+he was particular was that it should be served up hot. She had a private
+conviction that he partook, at the houses of his lady patients, of
+little lunches; she applied this term to any episodical repast, at any
+hour of the twenty-four. It is but fair to add that once, when she
+betrayed her suspicion, Selah remarked that the only refreshment <i>he</i>
+ever wanted was the sense that he was doing some good. This effort with
+him had many forms; it involved, among other things, a perpetual
+perambulation of the streets, a haunting of horse-cars,
+railway-stations, shops that were "selling off." But the places that
+knew him best were the offices of the newspapers and the vestibules of
+the hotels&mdash;the big marble-paved chambers of informal reunion which
+offer to the streets, through high glass plates, the sight of the
+American citizen suspended by his heels. Here, amid the piled-up
+luggage, the convenient spittoons, the elbowing loungers, the
+disconsolate "guests," the truculent Irish porters, the rows of
+shaggy-backed men in strange hats, writing letters at a table inlaid
+with advertisements, Selah Tarrant made innumerable contemplative
+stations. He could not have told you, at any particular moment, what he
+was doing; he only had a general sense that such places were national
+nerve-centres, and that the more one looked in, the more one was "on the
+spot." The <i>penetralia</i> of the daily press were, however, still more
+fascinating, and the fact that they were less accessible, that here he
+found barriers in his path, only added to the zest of forcing an
+entrance. He abounded in pretexts; he even sometimes brought
+contributions; he was persistent and penetrating, he was known as the
+irrepressible Tarrant. He hung about, sat too long, took up the time of
+busy people, edged into the printing-rooms when he had been eliminated
+from the office, talked with the compositors till they set up his
+remarks by mistake, and to the newsboys when the compositors had turned
+their backs. He was always trying to find out what was "going in"; he
+would have liked to go in himself, bodily, and, failing in this, he
+hoped to get advertisements inserted gratis. The wish of his soul was
+that he might be interviewed; that made him hover at the editorial
+elbow. Once he thought he had been, and the headings, five or six deep,
+danced for days before his eyes; but the report never appeared. He
+expected his revenge for this the day after Verena should have burst
+forth; he saw the attitude in which he should receive the emissaries who
+would come after his daughter.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="XIV" id="XIV"></a>XIV</h2>
+
+
+<p>"We ought to have some one to meet her," Mrs. Tarrant said; "I presume
+she wouldn't care to come out just to see us." "She," between the mother
+and the daughter, at this period, could refer only to Olive Chancellor,
+who was discussed in the little house at Cambridge at all hours and from
+every possible point of view. It was never Verena now who began, for she
+had grown rather weary of the topic; she had her own ways of thinking of
+it, which were not her mother's, and if she lent herself to this lady's
+extensive considerations it was because that was the best way of keeping
+her thoughts to herself.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Tarrant had an idea that she (Mrs. Tarrant) liked to study people,
+and that she was now engaged in an analysis of Miss Chancellor. It
+carried her far, and she came out at unexpected times with her results.
+It was still her purpose to interpret the world to the ingenious mind of
+her daughter, and she translated Miss Chancellor with a confidence which
+made little account of the fact that she had seen her but once, while
+Verena had this advantage nearly every day. Verena felt that by this
+time she knew Olive very well, and her mother's most complicated
+versions of motive and temperament (Mrs. Tarrant, with the most
+imperfect idea of the meaning of the term, was always talking about
+people's temperament) rendered small justice to the phenomena it was now
+her privilege to observe in Charles Street. Olive was much more
+remarkable than Mrs. Tarrant suspected, remarkable as Mrs. Tarrant
+believed her to be. She had opened Verena's eyes to extraordinary
+pictures, made the girl believe that she had a heavenly mission, given
+her, as we have seen, quite a new measure of the interest of life. These
+were larger consequences than the possibility of meeting the leaders of
+society at Olive's house. She had met no one, as yet, but Mrs. Luna; her
+new friend seemed to wish to keep her quite for herself. This was the
+only reproach that Mrs. Tarrant directed to the new friend as yet; she
+was disappointed that Verena had not obtained more insight into the
+world of fashion. It was one of the prime articles of her faith that the
+world of fashion was wicked and hollow, and, moreover, Verena told her
+that Miss Chancellor loathed and despised it. She could not have
+informed you wherein it would profit her daughter (for the way those
+ladies shrank from any new gospel was notorious); nevertheless she was
+vexed that Verena shouldn't come back to her with a little more of the
+fragrance of Beacon Street. The girl herself would have been the most
+interested person in the world if she had not been the most resigned;
+she took all that was given her and was grateful, and missed nothing
+that was withheld; she was the most extraordinary mixture of eagerness
+and docility. Mrs. Tarrant theorised about temperaments and she loved
+her daughter; but she was only vaguely aware of the fact that she had at
+her side the sweetest flower of character (as one might say) that had
+ever bloomed on earth. She was proud of Verena's brightness, and of her
+special talent; but the commonness of her own surface was a
+non-conductor of the girl's quality. Therefore she thought that it would
+add to her success in life to know a few high-flyers, if only to put
+them to shame; as if anything could add to Verena's success, as if it
+were not supreme success simply to have been made as she was made.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Tarrant had gone into town to call upon Miss Chancellor; she
+carried out this resolve, on which she had bestowed infinite
+consideration, independently of Verena. She had decided that she had a
+pretext; her dignity required one, for she felt that at present the
+antique pride of the Greenstreets was terribly at the mercy of her
+curiosity. She wished to see Miss Chancellor again, and to see her among
+her charming appurtenances, which Verena had described to her with great
+minuteness. The pretext that she would have valued most was
+wanting&mdash;that of Olive's having come out to Cambridge to pay the visit
+that had been solicited from the first; so she had to take the next
+best&mdash;she had to say to herself that it was her duty to see what she
+should think of a place where her daughter spent so much time. To Miss
+Chancellor she would appear to have come to thank her for her
+hospitality; she knew, in advance, just the air she should take (or she
+fancied she knew it&mdash;Mrs. Tarrant's were not always what she supposed),
+just the <i>nuance</i> (she had also an impression she knew a little French)
+of her tone. Olive, after the lapse of weeks, still showed no symptoms
+of presenting herself, and Mrs. Tarrant rebuked Verena with some
+sternness for not having made her feel that this attention was due to
+the mother of her friend. Verena could scarcely say to her she guessed
+Miss Chancellor didn't think much of that personage, true as it was that
+the girl had discerned this angular fact, which she attributed to
+Olive's extraordinary comprehensiveness of view. Verena herself did not
+suppose that her mother occupied a very important place in the universe;
+and Miss Chancellor never looked at anything smaller than that. Nor was
+she free to report (she was certainly now less frank at home, and,
+moreover, the suspicion was only just becoming distinct to her) that
+Olive would like to detach her from her parents altogether, and was
+therefore not interested in appearing to cultivate relations with them.
+Mrs. Tarrant, I may mention, had a further motive: she was consumed with
+the desire to behold Mrs. Luna. This circumstance may operate as a proof
+that the aridity of her life was great, and if it should have that
+effect I shall not be able to gainsay it. She had seen all the people
+who went to lectures, but there were hours when she desired, for a
+change, to see some who didn't go; and Mrs. Luna, from Verena's
+description of her, summed up the characteristics of this eccentric
+class.</p>
+
+<p>Verena had given great attention to Olive's brilliant sister; she had
+told her friend everything now&mdash;everything but one little secret,
+namely, that if she could have chosen at the beginning she would have
+liked to resemble Mrs. Luna. This lady fascinated her, carried off her
+imagination to strange lands; she should enjoy so much a long evening
+with her alone, when she might ask her ten thousand questions. But she
+never saw her alone, never saw her at all but in glimpses. Adeline
+flitted in and out, dressed for dinners and concerts, always saying
+something worldly to the young woman from Cambridge, and something to
+Olive that had a freedom which she herself would probably never arrive
+at (a failure of foresight on Verena's part). But Miss Chancellor never
+detained her, never gave Verena a chance to see her, never appeared to
+imagine that she could have the least interest in such a person; only
+took up the subject again after Adeline had left them&mdash;the subject, of
+course, which was always the same, the subject of what they should do
+together for their suffering sex. It was not that Verena was not
+interested in that&mdash;gracious, no; it opened up before her, in those
+wonderful colloquies with Olive, in the most inspiring way; but her
+fancy would make a dart to right or left when other game crossed their
+path, and her companion led her, intellectually, a dance in which her
+feet&mdash;that is, her head&mdash;failed her at times for weariness. Mrs. Tarrant
+found Miss Chancellor at home, but she was not gratified by even the
+most transient glimpse of Mrs. Luna; a fact which, in her heart, Verena
+regarded as fortunate, inasmuch as (she said to herself) if her mother,
+returning from Charles Street, began to explain Miss Chancellor to her
+with fresh energy, and as if she (Verena) had never seen her, and up to
+this time they had had nothing to say about her, to what developments
+(of the same sort) would not an encounter with Adeline have given rise?</p>
+
+<p>When Verena at last said to her friend that she thought she ought to
+come out to Cambridge&mdash;she didn't understand why she didn't&mdash;Olive
+expressed her reasons very frankly, admitted that she was jealous, that
+she didn't wish to think of the girl's belonging to any one but herself.
+Mr. and Mrs. Tarrant would have authority, opposed claims, and she
+didn't wish to see them, to remember that they existed. This was true,
+so far as it went; but Olive could not tell Verena everything&mdash;could not
+tell her that she hated that dreadful pair at Cambridge. As we know, she
+had forbidden herself this emotion as regards individuals; and she
+flattered herself that she considered the Tarrants as a type, a
+deplorable one, a class that, with the public at large, discredited the
+cause of the new truths. She had talked them over with Miss Birdseye
+(Olive was always looking after her now and giving her things&mdash;the good
+lady appeared at this period in wonderful caps and shawls&mdash;for she felt
+she couldn't thank her enough), and even Doctor Prance's fellow-lodger,
+whose animosity to flourishing evils lived in the happiest (though the
+most illicit) union with the mania for finding excuses, even Miss
+Birdseye was obliged to confess that if you came to examine his record,
+poor Selah didn't amount to so very much. How little he amounted to
+Olive perceived after she had made Verena talk, as the girl did
+immensely, about her father and mother&mdash;quite unconscious, meanwhile, of
+the conclusions she suggested to Miss Chancellor. Tarrant was a moralist
+without moral sense&mdash;that was very clear to Olive as she listened to the
+history of his daughter's childhood and youth, which Verena related with
+an extraordinary artless vividness. This narrative, tremendously
+fascinating to Miss Chancellor, made her feel in all sorts of
+ways&mdash;prompted her to ask herself whether the girl was also destitute of
+the perception of right and wrong. No, she was only supremely innocent;
+she didn't understand, she didn't interpret nor see the <i>port&eacute;e</i> of what
+she described; she had no idea whatever of judging her parents. Olive
+had wished to "realise" the conditions in which her wonderful young
+friend (she thought her more wonderful every day) had developed, and to
+this end, as I have related, she prompted her to infinite discourse. But
+now she was satisfied, the realisation was complete, and what she would
+have liked to impose on the girl was an effectual rupture with her past.
+That past she by no means absolutely deplored, for it had the merit of
+having initiated Verena (and her patroness, through her agency) into the
+miseries and mysteries of the People. It was her theory that Verena (in
+spite of the blood of the Greenstreets, and, after all, who were they?)
+was a flower of the great Democracy, and that it was impossible to have
+had an origin less distinguished than Tarrant himself. His birth, in
+some unheard-of place in Pennsylvania, was quite inexpressibly low, and
+Olive would have been much disappointed if it had been wanting in this
+defect. She liked to think that Verena, in her childhood, had known
+almost the extremity of poverty, and there was a kind of ferocity in the
+joy with which she reflected that there had been moments when this
+delicate creature came near (if the pinch had only lasted a little
+longer) to literally going without food. These things added to her value
+for Olive; they made that young lady feel that their common undertaking
+would, in consequence, be so much more serious. It is always supposed
+that revolutionists have been goaded, and the goading would have been
+rather deficient here were it not for such happy accidents in Verena's
+past. When she conveyed from her mother a summons to Cambridge for a
+particular occasion, Olive perceived that the great effort must now be
+made. Great efforts were nothing new to her&mdash;it was a great effort to
+live at all&mdash;but this one appeared to her exceptionally cruel. She
+determined, however, to make it, promising herself that her first visit
+to Mrs. Tarrant should also be her last. Her only consolation was that
+she expected to suffer intensely; for the prospect of suffering was
+always, spiritually speaking, so much cash in her pocket. It was
+arranged that Olive should come to tea (the repast that Selah designated
+as his supper), when Mrs. Tarrant, as we have seen, desired to do her
+honour by inviting another guest. This guest, after much deliberation
+between that lady and Verena, was selected, and the first person Olive
+saw on entering the little parlour in Cambridge was a young man with
+hair prematurely, or, as one felt that one should say, precociously
+white, whom she had a vague impression she had encountered before, and
+who was introduced to her as Mr. Matthias Pardon.</p>
+
+<p>She suffered less than she had hoped&mdash;she was so taken up with the
+consideration of Verena's interior. It was as bad as she could have
+desired; desired in order to feel that (to take her out of such a
+<i>milieu</i> as that) she should have a right to draw her altogether to
+herself. Olive wished more and more to extract some definite pledge from
+her; she could hardly say what it had best be as yet; she only felt that
+it must be something that would have an absolute sanctity for Verena and
+would bind them together for life. On this occasion it seemed to shape
+itself in her mind; she began to see what it ought to be, though she
+also saw that she would perhaps have to wait awhile. Mrs. Tarrant, too,
+in her own house, became now a complete figure; there was no manner of
+doubt left as to her being vulgar. Olive Chancellor despised vulgarity,
+had a scent for it which she followed up in her own family, so that
+often, with a rising flush, she detected the taint even in Adeline.
+There were times, indeed, when every one seemed to have it, every one
+but Miss Birdseye (who had nothing to do with it&mdash;she was an antique)
+and the poorest, humblest people. The toilers and spinners, the very
+obscure, these were the only persons who were safe from it. Miss
+Chancellor would have been much happier if the movements she was
+interested in could have been carried on only by the people she liked,
+and if revolutions, somehow, didn't always have to begin with one's
+self&mdash;with internal convulsions, sacrifices, executions. A common end,
+unfortunately, however fine as regards a special result, does not make
+community impersonal.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Tarrant, with her soft corpulence, looked to her guest very
+bleached and tumid; her complexion had a kind of withered glaze; her
+hair, very scanty, was drawn off her forehead <i>&agrave; la Chinoise</i>; she had
+no eyebrows, and her eyes seemed to stare, like those of a figure of
+wax. When she talked and wished to insist, and she was always insisting,
+she puckered and distorted her face, with an effort to express the
+inexpressible, which turned out, after all, to be nothing. She had a
+kind of doleful elegance, tried to be confidential, lowered her voice
+and looked as if she wished to establish a secret understanding, in
+order to ask her visitor if she would venture on an apple-fritter. She
+wore a flowing mantle, which resembled her husband's waterproof&mdash;a
+garment which, when she turned to her daughter or talked about her,
+might have passed for the robe of a sort of priestess of maternity. She
+endeavoured to keep the conversation in a channel which would enable her
+to ask sudden incoherent questions of Olive, mainly as to whether she
+knew the principal ladies (the expression was Mrs. Tarrant's), not only
+in Boston, but in the other cities which, in her nomadic course, she
+herself had visited. Olive knew some of them, and of some of them had
+never heard; but she was irritated, and pretended a universal ignorance
+(she was conscious that she had never told so many fibs), by which her
+hostess was much disconcerted, although her questions had apparently
+been questions pure and simple, leading nowhither and without bearings
+on any new truth.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="XV" id="XV"></a>XV</h2>
+
+
+<p>Tarrant, however, kept an eye in that direction; he was solemnly civil
+to Miss Chancellor, handed her the dishes at table over and over again,
+and ventured to intimate that the apple-fritters were very fine; but,
+save for this, alluded to nothing more trivial than the regeneration of
+humanity and the strong hope he felt that Miss Birdseye would again have
+one of her delightful gatherings. With regard to this latter point he
+explained that it was not in order that he might again present his
+daughter to the company, but simply because on such occasions there was
+a valuable interchange of hopeful thought, a contact of mind with mind.
+If Verena had anything suggestive to contribute to the social problem,
+the opportunity would come&mdash;that was part of their faith. They couldn't
+reach out for it and try and push their way; if they were wanted, their
+hour would strike; if they were not, they would just keep still and let
+others press forward who seemed to be called. If they were called, they
+would know it; and if they weren't, they could just hold on to each
+other as they had always done. Tarrant was very fond of alternatives,
+and he mentioned several others; it was never his fault if his listeners
+failed to think him impartial. They hadn't much, as Miss Chancellor
+could see; she could tell by their manner of life that they hadn't raked
+in the dollars; but they had faith that, whether one raised one's voice
+or simply worked on in silence, the principal difficulties would
+straighten themselves out; and they had also a considerable experience
+of great questions. Tarrant spoke as if, as a family, they were prepared
+to take charge of them on moderate terms. He always said "ma'am" in
+speaking to Olive, to whom, moreover, the air had never been so filled
+with the sound of her own name. It was always in her ear, save when Mrs.
+Tarrant and Verena conversed in prolonged and ingenuous asides; this was
+still for her benefit, but the pronoun sufficed them. She had wished to
+judge Doctor Tarrant (not that she believed he had come honestly by his
+title), to make up her mind. She had done these things now, and she
+expressed to herself the kind of man she believed him to be in
+reflecting that if she should offer him ten thousand dollars to renounce
+all claim to Verena, keeping&mdash;he and his wife&mdash;clear of her for the rest
+of time, he would probably say, with his fearful smile, "Make it twenty,
+money down, and I'll do it." Some image of this transaction, as one of
+the possibilities of the future, outlined itself for Olive among the
+moral incisions of that evening. It seemed implied in the very place,
+the bald bareness of Tarrant's temporary lair, a wooden cottage, with a
+rough front yard, a little naked piazza, which seemed rather to expose
+than to protect, facing upon an unpaved road, in which the footway was
+overlaid with a strip of planks. These planks were embedded in ice or in
+liquid thaw, according to the momentary mood of the weather, and the
+advancing pedestrian traversed them in the attitude, and with a good
+deal of the suspense, of a rope-dancer. There was nothing in the house
+to speak of; nothing, to Olive's sense, but a smell of kerosene; though
+she had a consciousness of sitting down somewhere&mdash;the object creaked
+and rocked beneath her&mdash;and of the table at tea being covered with a
+cloth stamped in bright colours.</p>
+
+<p>As regards the pecuniary transaction with Selah, it was strange how she
+should have seen it through the conviction that Verena would never give
+up her parents. Olive was sure that she would never turn her back upon
+them, would always share with them. She would have despised her had she
+thought her capable of another course; yet it baffled her to understand
+why, when parents were so trashy, this natural law should not be
+suspended. Such a question brought her back, however, to her perpetual
+enigma, the mystery she had already turned over in her mind for hours
+together&mdash;the wonder of such people being Verena's progenitors at all.
+She had explained it, as we explain all exceptional things, by making
+the part, as the French say, of the miraculous. She had come to consider
+the girl as a wonder of wonders, to hold that no human origin, however
+congruous it might superficially appear, would sufficiently account for
+her; that her springing up between Selah and his wife was an exquisite
+whim of the creative force; and that in such a case a few shades more or
+less of the inexplicable didn't matter. It was notorious that great
+beauties, great geniuses, great characters, take their own times and
+places for coming into the world, leaving the gaping spectators to make
+them "fit in," and holding from far-off ancestors, or even, perhaps,
+straight from the divine generosity, much more than from their ugly or
+stupid progenitors. They were incalculable phenomena, anyway, as Selah
+would have said. Verena, for Olive, was the very type and model of the
+"gifted being"; her qualities had not been bought and paid for; they
+were like some brilliant birthday-present, left at the door by an
+unknown messenger, to be delightful for ever as an inexhaustible legacy,
+and amusing for ever from the obscurity of its source. They were
+superabundantly crude as yet&mdash;happily for Olive, who promised herself,
+as we know, to train and polish them&mdash;but they were as genuine as fruit
+and flowers, as the glow of the fire or the plash of water. For her
+scrutinising friend Verena had the disposition of the artist, the spirit
+to which all charming forms come easily and naturally. It required an
+effort at first to imagine an artist so untaught, so mistaught, so poor
+in experience; but then it required an effort also to imagine people
+like the old Tarrants, or a life so full as her life had been of ugly
+things. Only an exquisite creature could have resisted such
+associations, only a girl who had some natural light, some divine spark
+of taste. There were people like that, fresh from the hand of
+Omnipotence; they were far from common, but their existence was as
+incontestable as it was beneficent.</p>
+
+<p>Tarrant's talk about his daughter, her prospects, her enthusiasm, was
+terribly painful to Olive; it brought back to her what she had suffered
+already from the idea that he laid his hands upon her to make her speak.
+That he should be mixed up in any way with this exercise of her genius
+was a great injury to the cause, and Olive had already determined that
+in future Verena should dispense with his co-operation. The girl had
+virtually confessed that she lent herself to it only because it gave him
+pleasure, and that anything else would do as well, anything that would
+make her quiet a little before she began to "give out." Olive took upon
+herself to believe that <i>she</i> could make her quiet, though, certainly,
+she had never had that effect upon any one; she would mount the platform
+with Verena if necessary, and lay her hands upon her head. Why in the
+world had a perverse fate decreed that Tarrant should take an interest
+in the affairs of Woman&mdash;as if she wanted <i>his</i> aid to arrive at her
+goal; a charlatan of the poor, lean, shabby sort, without the humour,
+brilliancy, prestige, which sometimes throw a drapery over shallowness?
+Mr. Pardon evidently took an interest as well, and there was something
+in his appearance that seemed to say that his sympathy would not be
+dangerous. He was much at his ease, plainly, beneath the roof of the
+Tarrants, and Olive reflected that though Verena had told her much about
+him, she had not given her the idea that he was as intimate as that.
+What she had mainly said was that he sometimes took her to the theatre.
+Olive could enter, to a certain extent, into that; she herself had had a
+phase (some time after her father's death&mdash;her mother's had preceded
+his&mdash;when she bought the little house in Charles Street and began to
+live alone), during which she accompanied gentlemen to respectable
+places of amusement. She was accordingly not shocked at the idea of such
+adventures on Verena's part; than which, indeed, judging from her own
+experience, nothing could well have been less adventurous. Her
+recollections of these expeditions were as of something solemn and
+edifying&mdash;of the earnest interest in her welfare exhibited by her
+companion (there were few occasions on which the young Bostonian
+appeared to more advantage), of the comfort of other friends sitting
+near, who were sure to know whom she was with, of serious discussion
+between the acts in regard to the behaviour of the characters in the
+piece, and of the speech at the end with which, as the young man quitted
+her at her door, she rewarded his civility&mdash;"I must thank you for a very
+pleasant evening." She always felt that she made that too prim; her lips
+stiffened themselves as she spoke. But the whole affair had always a
+primness; this was discernible even to Olive's very limited sense of
+humour. It was not so religious as going to evening-service at King's
+Chapel; but it was the next thing to it. Of course all girls didn't do
+it; there were families that viewed such a custom with disfavour. But
+this was where the girls were of the romping sort; there had to be some
+things they were known not to do. As a general thing, moreover, the
+practice was confined to the decorous; it was a sign of culture and
+quiet tastes. All this made it innocent for Verena, whose life had
+exposed her to much worse dangers; but the thing referred itself in
+Olive's mind to a danger which cast a perpetual shadow there&mdash;the
+possibility of the girl's embarking with some ingenuous youth on an
+expedition that would last much longer than an evening. She was haunted,
+in a word, with the fear that Verena would marry, a fate to which she
+was altogether unprepared to surrender her; and this made her look with
+suspicion upon all male acquaintance.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Pardon was not the only one she knew; she had an example of the rest
+in the persons of two young Harvard law-students, who presented
+themselves after tea on this same occasion. As they sat there Olive
+wondered whether Verena had kept something from her, whether she were,
+after all (like so many other girls in Cambridge), a college-"belle," an
+object of frequentation to undergraduates. It was natural that at the
+seat of a big university there should be girls like that, with students
+dangling after them, but she didn't want Verena to be one of them. There
+were some that received the Seniors and Juniors; others that were
+accessible to Sophomores and Freshmen. Certain young ladies
+distinguished the professional students; there was a group, even, that
+was on the best terms with the young men who were studying for the
+Unitarian ministry in that queer little barrack at the end of Divinity
+Avenue. The advent of the new visitors made Mrs. Tarrant bustle
+immensely; but after she had caused every one to change places two or
+three times with every one else the company subsided into a circle which
+was occasionally broken by wandering movements on the part of her
+husband, who, in the absence of anything to say on any subject whatever,
+placed himself at different points in listening attitudes, shaking his
+head slowly up and down, and gazing at the carpet with an air of
+supernatural attention. Mrs. Tarrant asked the young men from the Law
+School about their studies, and whether they meant to follow them up
+seriously; said she thought some of the laws were very unjust, and she
+hoped they meant to try and improve them. She had suffered by the laws
+herself, at the time her father died; she hadn't got half the prop'ty
+she should have got if they had been different. She thought they should
+be for public matters, not for people's private affairs; the idea always
+seemed to her to keep you down if you <i>were</i> down, and to hedge you in
+with difficulties. Sometimes she thought it was a wonder how she had
+developed in the face of so many; but it was a proof that freedom was
+everywhere, if you only knew how to look for it.</p>
+
+<p>The two young men were in the best humour; they greeted these sallies
+with a merriment of which, though it was courteous in form, Olive was by
+no means unable to define the spirit. They talked naturally more with
+Verena than with her mother; and while they were so engaged Mrs. Tarrant
+explained to her who they were, and how one of them, the smaller, who
+was not quite so spruce, had brought the other, his particular friend,
+to introduce him. This friend, Mr. Burrage, was from New York; he was
+very fashionable, he went out a great deal in Boston ("I have no doubt
+you know some of the places," said Mrs. Tarrant); his "fam'ly" was very
+rich.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, he knows plenty of that sort," Mrs. Tarrant went on, "but he felt
+unsatisfied; he didn't know any one like <i>us</i>. He told Mr. Gracie
+(that's the little one) that he felt as if he <i>must</i>; it seemed as if he
+couldn't hold out. So we told Mr. Gracie, of course, to bring him right
+round. Well, I hope he'll get something from us, I'm sure. He has been
+reported to be engaged to Miss Winkworth; I have no doubt you know who I
+mean. But Mr. Gracie says he hasn't looked at her more than twice.
+That's the way rumours fly round in that set, I presume. Well, I am glad
+we are not in it, wherever we are! Mr. Gracie is very different; he is
+intensely plain, but I believe he is very learned. You don't think him
+plain? Oh, you don't know? Well, I suppose you don't care, you must see
+so many. But I must say, when a young man looks like that, I call him
+painfully plain. I heard Doctor Tarrant make the remark the last time he
+was here. I don't say but what the plainest are the best. Well, I had no
+idea we were going to have a party when I asked you. I wonder whether
+Verena hadn't better hand the cake; we generally find the students enjoy
+it so much."</p>
+
+<p>This office was ultimately delegated to Selah, who, after a considerable
+absence, reappeared with a dish of dainties, which he presented
+successively to each member of the company. Olive saw Verena lavish her
+smiles on Mr. Gracie and Mr. Burrage; the liveliest relation had
+established itself, and the latter gentleman in especial abounded in
+appreciative laughter. It might have been fancied, just from looking at
+the group, that Verena's vocation was to smile and talk with young men
+who bent towards her; might have been fancied, that is, by a person less
+sure of the contrary than Olive, who had reason to know that a "gifted
+being" is sent into the world for a very different purpose, and that
+making the time pass pleasantly for conceited young men is the last duty
+you are bound to think of if you happen to have a talent for embodying a
+cause. Olive tried to be glad that her friend had the richness of nature
+that makes a woman gracious without latent purposes; she reflected that
+Verena was not in the smallest degree a flirt, that she was only
+enchantingly and universally genial, that nature had given her a
+beautiful smile, which fell impartially on every one, man and woman,
+alike. Olive may have been right, but it shall be confided to the reader
+that in reality she never knew, by any sense of her own, whether Verena
+were a flirt or not. This young lady could not possibly have told her
+(even if she herself knew, which she didn't), and Olive, destitute of
+the quality, had no means of taking the measure in another of the subtle
+feminine desire to please. She could see the difference between Mr.
+Gracie and Mr. Burrage; her being bored by Mrs. Tarrant's attempting to
+point it out is perhaps a proof of that. It was a curious incident of
+her zeal for the regeneration of her sex that manly things were, perhaps
+on the whole, what she understood best. Mr. Burrage was rather a
+handsome youth, with a laughing, clever face, a certain sumptuosity of
+apparel, an air of belonging to the "fast set"&mdash;a precocious,
+good-natured man of the world, curious of new sensations and containing,
+perhaps, the making of a <i>dilettante</i>. Being, doubtless, a little
+ambitious, and liking to flatter himself that he appreciated worth in
+lowly forms, he had associated himself with the ruder but at the same
+time acuter personality of a genuine son of New England, who had a
+harder head than his own and a humour in reality more cynical, and who,
+having earlier knowledge of the Tarrants, had undertaken to show him
+something indigenous and curious, possibly even fascinating. Mr. Gracie
+was short, with a big head; he wore eye-glasses, looked unkempt, almost
+rustic, and said good things with his ugly lips. Verena had replies for
+a good many of them, and a pretty colour came into her face as she
+talked. Olive could see that she produced herself quite as well as one
+of these gentlemen had foretold the other that she would. Miss
+Chancellor knew what had passed between them as well as if she had heard
+it; Mr. Gracie had promised that he would lead her on, that she should
+justify his description and prove the raciest of her class. They would
+laugh about her as they went away, lighting their cigars, and for many
+days afterwards their discourse would be enlivened with quotations from
+the "women's rights girl."</p>
+
+<p>It was amazing how many ways men had of being antipathetic; these two
+were very different from Basil Ransom, and different from each other,
+and yet the manner of each conveyed an insult to one's womanhood. The
+worst of the case was that Verena would be sure not to perceive this
+outrage&mdash;not to dislike them in consequence. There were so many things
+that she hadn't yet learned to dislike, in spite of her friend's earnest
+efforts to teach her. She had the idea vividly (that was the marvel) of
+the cruelty of man, of his immemorial injustice; but it remained
+abstract, platonic; she didn't detest him in consequence. What was the
+use of her having that sharp, inspired vision of the history of the sex
+(it was, as she had said herself, exactly like Joan of Arc's absolutely
+supernatural apprehension of the state of France) if she wasn't going to
+carry it out, if she was going to behave as the ordinary pusillanimous,
+conventional young lady? It was all very well for her to have said that
+first day that she would renounce: did she look, at such a moment as
+this, like a young woman who had renounced? Suppose this glittering,
+laughing Burrage youth, with his chains and rings and shining shoes,
+should fall in love with her and try to bribe her, with his great
+possessions, to practise renunciations of another kind&mdash;to give up her
+holy work and to go with him to New York, there to live as his wife,
+partly bullied, partly pampered, in the accustomed Burrage manner? There
+was as little comfort for Olive as there had been on the whole alarm in
+the recollection of that off-hand speech of Verena's about her
+preference for "free unions." This had been mere maiden flippancy; she
+had not known the meaning of what she said. Though she had grown up
+among people who took for granted all sorts of queer laxities, she had
+kept the consummate innocence of the American girl, that innocence which
+was the greatest of all, for it had survived the abolition of walls and
+locks; and of the various remarks that had dropped from Verena
+expressing this quality that startling observation certainly expressed
+it most. It implied, at any rate, that unions of some kind or other had
+her approval, and did not exclude the dangers that might arise from
+encounters with young men in search of sensations.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="XVI" id="XVI"></a>XVI</h2>
+
+
+<p>Mr. Pardon, as Olive observed, was a little out of this combination; but
+he was not a person to allow himself to droop. He came and seated
+himself by Miss Chancellor and broached a literary subject; he asked her
+if she were following any of the current "serials" in the magazines. On
+her telling him that she never followed anything of that sort, he
+undertook a defence of the serial system, which she presently reminded
+him that she had not attacked. He was not discouraged by this retort,
+but glided gracefully off to the question of Mount Desert; conversation
+on some subject or other being evidently a necessity of his nature. He
+talked very quickly and softly, with words, and even sentences,
+imperfectly formed; there was a certain amiable flatness in his tone,
+and he abounded in exclamations&mdash;"Goodness gracious!" and "Mercy on
+us!"&mdash;not much in use among the sex whose profanity is apt to be coarse.
+He had small, fair features, remarkably neat, and pretty eyes, and a
+moustache that he caressed, and an air of juvenility much at variance
+with his grizzled locks, and the free familiar reference in which he was
+apt to indulge to his career as a journalist. His friends knew that in
+spite of his delicacy and his prattle he was what they called a live
+man; his appearance was perfectly reconcilable with a large degree of
+literary enterprise. It should be explained that for the most part they
+attached to this idea the same meaning as Selah Tarrant&mdash;a state of
+intimacy with the newspapers, the cultivation of the great arts of
+publicity. For this ingenuous son of his age all distinction between the
+person and the artist had ceased to exist; the writer was personal, the
+person food for newsboys, and everything and every one were every one's
+business. All things, with him, referred themselves to print, and print
+meant simply infinite reporting, a promptitude of announcement, abusive
+when necessary, or even when not, about his fellow-citizens. He poured
+contumely on their private life, on their personal appearance, with the
+best conscience in the world. His faith, again, was the faith of Selah
+Tarrant&mdash;that being in the newspapers is a condition of bliss, and that
+it would be fastidious to question the terms of the privilege. He was an
+<i>enfant de la balle</i>, as the French say; he had begun his career, at the
+age of fourteen, by going the rounds of the hotels, to cull flowers from
+the big, greasy registers which lie on the marble counters; and he might
+flatter himself that he had contributed in his measure, and on behalf of
+a vigilant public opinion, the pride of a democratic State, to the great
+end of preventing the American citizen from attempting clandestine
+journeys. Since then he had ascended other steps of the same ladder; he
+was the most brilliant young interviewer on the Boston press. He was
+particularly successful in drawing out the ladies; he had condensed into
+shorthand many of the most celebrated women of his time&mdash;some of these
+daughters of fame were very voluminous&mdash;and he was supposed to have a
+remarkably insinuating way of waiting upon <i>prime donne</i> and actresses
+the morning after their arrival, or sometimes the very evening, while
+their luggage was being brought up. He was only twenty-eight years old,
+and, with his hoary head, was a thoroughly modern young man; he had no
+idea of not taking advantage of all the modern conveniences. He regarded
+the mission of mankind upon earth as a perpetual evolution of telegrams;
+everything to him was very much the same, he had no sense of proportion
+or quality; but the newest thing was what came nearest exciting in his
+mind the sentiment of respect. He was an object of extreme admiration to
+Selah Tarrant, who believed that he had mastered all the secrets of
+success, and who, when Mrs. Tarrant remarked (as she had done more than
+once) that it looked as if Mr. Pardon was really coming after Verena,
+declared that if he was, he was one of the few young men he should want
+to see in that connexion, one of the few he should be willing to allow
+to handle her. It was Tarrant's conviction that if Matthias Pardon
+should seek Verena in marriage, it would be with a view to producing her
+in public; and the advantage for the girl of having a husband who was at
+the same time reporter, interviewer, manager, agent, who had the command
+of the principal "dailies," would write her up and work her, as it were,
+scientifically&mdash;the attraction of all this was too obvious to be
+insisted on. Matthias had a mean opinion of Tarrant, thought him quite
+second-rate, a votary of played-out causes. It was his impression that
+he himself was in love with Verena, but his passion was not a jealous
+one, and included a remarkable disposition to share the object of his
+affection with the American people.</p>
+
+<p>He talked some time to Olive about Mount Desert, told her that in his
+letters he had described the company at the different hotels. He
+remarked, however, that a correspondent suffered a good deal to-day from
+the competition of the "lady-writers"; the sort of article they produced
+was sometimes more acceptable to the papers. He supposed she would be
+glad to hear that&mdash;he knew she was so interested in woman's having a
+free field. They certainly made lovely correspondents; they picked up
+something bright before you could turn round; there wasn't much you
+could keep away from them; you had to be lively if you wanted to get
+there first. Of course, they were naturally more chatty, and that was
+the style of literature that seemed to take most to-day; only they
+didn't write much but what ladies would want to read. Of course, he knew
+there were millions of lady-readers, but he intimated that <i>he</i> didn't
+address himself exclusively to the gynec&aelig;um; he tried to put in
+something that would interest all parties. If you read a lady's letter
+you knew pretty well in advance what you would find. Now, what he tried
+for was that you shouldn't have the least idea; he always tried to have
+something that would make you jump. Mr. Pardon was not conceited more,
+at least, than is proper when youth and success go hand in hand, and it
+was natural he should not know in what spirit Miss Chancellor listened
+to him. Being aware that she was a woman of culture his desire was
+simply to supply her with the pabulum that she would expect. She thought
+him very inferior; she had heard he was intensely bright, but there was
+probably some mistake; there couldn't be any danger for Verena from a
+mind that took merely a gossip's view of great tendencies. Besides, he
+wasn't half educated, and it was her belief, or at least her hope, that
+an educative process was now going on for Verena (under her own
+direction) which would enable her to make such a discovery for herself.
+Olive had a standing quarrel with the levity, the good-nature, of the
+judgements of the day; many of them seemed to her weak to imbecility,
+losing sight of all measures and standards, lavishing superlatives,
+delighted to be fooled. The age seemed to her relaxed and demoralised,
+and I believe she looked to the influx of the great feminine element to
+make it feel and speak more sharply.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, it's a privilege to hear you two talk together," Mrs. Tarrant
+said to her; "it's what I call real conversation. It isn't often we have
+anything so fresh; it makes me feel as if I wanted to join in. I
+scarcely know whom to listen to most; Verena seems to be having such a
+time with those gentlemen. First I catch one thing and then another; it
+seems as if I couldn't take it all in. Perhaps I ought to pay more
+attention to Mr. Burrage; I don't want him to think we are not so
+cordial as they are in New York."</p>
+
+<p>She decided to draw nearer to the trio on the other side of the room,
+for she had perceived (as she devoutly hoped Miss Chancellor had not)
+that Verena was endeavouring to persuade either of her companions to go
+and talk to her dear friend, and that these unscrupulous young men,
+after a glance over their shoulder, appeared to plead for remission, to
+intimate that this was not what they had come round for. Selah wandered
+out of the room again with his collection of cakes, and Mr. Pardon began
+to talk to Olive about Verena, to say that he felt as if he couldn't say
+all he did feel with regard to the interest she had shown in her. Olive
+could not imagine why he was called upon to say or to feel anything, and
+she gave him short answers; while the poor young man, unconscious of his
+doom, remarked that he hoped she wasn't going to exercise any influence
+that would prevent Miss Tarrant from taking the rank that belonged to
+her. He thought there was too much hanging back; he wanted to see her in
+a front seat; he wanted to see her name in the biggest kind of bills and
+her portrait in the windows of the stores. She had genius, there was no
+doubt of that, and she would take a new line altogether. She had charm,
+and there was a great demand for that nowadays in connexion with new
+ideas. There were so many that seemed to have fallen dead for want of
+it. She ought to be carried straight ahead; she ought to walk right up
+to the top. There was a want of bold action; he didn't see what they
+were waiting for. He didn't suppose they were waiting till she was fifty
+years old; there were old ones enough in the field. He knew that Miss
+Chancellor appreciated the advantage of her girlhood, because Miss
+Verena had told him so. Her father was dreadfully slack, and the winter
+was ebbing away. Mr. Pardon went so far as to say that if Dr. Tarrant
+didn't see his way to do something, he should feel as if he should want
+to take hold himself. He expressed a hope at the same time that Olive
+had not any views that would lead her to bring her influence to bear to
+make Miss Verena hold back; also that she wouldn't consider that he
+pressed in too much. He knew that was a charge that people brought
+against newspaper-men&mdash;that they were rather apt to cross the line. He
+only worried because he thought those who were no doubt nearer to Miss
+Verena than he could hope to be were not sufficiently alive. He knew
+that she had appeared in two or three parlours since that evening at
+Miss Birdseye's, and he had heard of the delightful occasion at Miss
+Chancellor's own house, where so many of the first families had been
+invited to meet her. (This was an allusion to a small luncheon-party
+that Olive had given, when Verena discoursed to a dozen matrons and
+spinsters, selected by her hostess with infinite consideration and many
+spiritual scruples; a report of the affair, presumably from the hand of
+the young Matthias, who naturally had not been present, appeared with
+extraordinary promptness in an evening-paper.) That was very well so far
+as it went, but he wanted something on another scale, something so big
+that people would have to go round if they wanted to get past. Then
+lowering his voice a little, he mentioned what it was: a lecture in the
+Music Hall, at fifty cents a ticket, without her father, right there on
+her own basis. He lowered his voice still more and revealed to Miss
+Chancellor his innermost thought, having first assured himself that
+Selah was still absent and that Mrs. Tarrant was inquiring of Mr.
+Burrage whether he visited much on the new land. The truth was, Miss
+Verena wanted to "shed" her father altogether; she didn't want him
+pawing round her that way before she began; it didn't add in the least
+to the attraction. Mr. Pardon expressed the conviction that Miss
+Chancellor agreed with him in this, and it required a great effort of
+mind on Olive's part, so small was her desire to act in concert with Mr.
+Pardon, to admit to herself that she did. She asked him, with a certain
+lofty coldness&mdash;he didn't make her shy, now, a bit&mdash;whether he took a
+great interest in the improvement of the position of women. The question
+appeared to strike the young man as abrupt and irrelevant, to come down
+on him from a height with which he was not accustomed to hold
+intercourse. He was used to quick operations, however, and he had only a
+moment of bright blankness before replying:</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, there is nothing I wouldn't do for the ladies; just give me a
+chance and you'll see."</p>
+
+<p>Olive was silent a moment. "What I mean is&mdash;is your sympathy a sympathy
+with our sex, or a particular interest in Miss Tarrant?"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, sympathy is just sympathy&mdash;that's all I can say. It takes in Miss
+Verena and it takes in all others&mdash;except the lady-correspondents," the
+young man added, with a jocosity which, as he perceived even at the
+moment, was lost on Verena's friend. He was not more successful when he
+went on: "It takes in even you, Miss Chancellor!"</p>
+
+<p>Olive rose to her feet, hesitating; she wanted to go away, and yet she
+couldn't bear to leave Verena to be exploited, as she felt that she
+would be after her departure, that indeed she had already been, by those
+offensive young men. She had a strange sense, too, that her friend had
+neglected her for the last half-hour, had not been occupied with her,
+had placed a barrier between them&mdash;a barrier of broad male backs, of
+laughter that verged upon coarseness, of glancing smiles directed across
+the room, directed to Olive, which seemed rather to disconnect her with
+what was going forward on that side than to invite her to take part in
+it. If Verena recognised that Miss Chancellor was not in report, as her
+father said, when jocose young men ruled the scene, the discovery
+implied no great penetration; but the poor girl might have reflected
+further that to see it taken for granted that she was unadapted for such
+company could scarcely be more agreeable to Olive than to be dragged
+into it. This young lady's worst apprehensions were now justified by
+Mrs. Tarrant's crying to her that she must not go, as Mr. Burrage and
+Mr. Gracie were trying to persuade Verena to give them a little specimen
+of inspirational speaking, and she was sure her daughter would comply in
+a moment if Miss Chancellor would just tell her to compose herself. They
+had got to own up to it, Miss Chancellor could do more with her than any
+one else; but Mr. Gracie and Mr. Burrage had excited her so that she was
+afraid it would be rather an unsuccessful effort. The whole group had
+got up, and Verena came to Olive with her hands outstretched and no
+signs of a bad conscience in her bright face.</p>
+
+<p>"I know you like me to speak so much&mdash;I'll try to say something if you
+want me to. But I'm afraid there are not enough people; I can't do much
+with a small audience."</p>
+
+<p>"I wish we had brought some of our friends&mdash;they would have been
+delighted to come if we had given them a chance," said Mr. Burrage.
+"There is an immense desire throughout the University to hear you, and
+there is no such sympathetic audience as an audience of Harvard men.
+Gracie and I are only two, but Gracie is a host in himself, and I am
+sure he will say as much of me." The young man spoke these words freely
+and lightly, smiling at Verena, and even a little at Olive, with the air
+of one to whom a mastery of clever "chaff" was commonly attributed.</p>
+
+<p>"Mr. Burrage listens even better than he talks," his companion declared.
+"We have the habit of attention at lectures, you know. To be lectured by
+you would be an advantage indeed. We are sunk in ignorance and
+prejudice."</p>
+
+<p>"Ah, my prejudices," Burrage went on; "if you could see them&mdash;I assure
+you they are something monstrous!"</p>
+
+<p>"Give them a regular ducking and make them gasp," Matthias Pardon cried.
+"If you want an opportunity to act on Harvard College, now's your
+chance. These gentlemen will carry the news; it will be the narrow end
+of the wedge."</p>
+
+<p>"I can't tell what you like," Verena said, still looking into Olive's
+eyes.</p>
+
+<p>"I'm sure Miss Chancellor likes everything here," Mrs. Tarrant remarked,
+with a noble confidence.</p>
+
+<p>Selah had reappeared by this time; his lofty, contemplative person was
+framed by the doorway. "Want to try a little inspiration?" he inquired,
+looking round on the circle with an encouraging inflexion.</p>
+
+<p>"I'll do it alone, if you prefer," Verena said soothingly to her friend.
+"It might be a good chance to try without father."</p>
+
+<p>"You don't mean to say you ain't going to be supported?" Mrs. Tarrant
+exclaimed, with dismay.</p>
+
+<p>"Ah, I beseech you, give us the whole programme&mdash;don't omit any leading
+feature!" Mr. Burrage was heard to plead.</p>
+
+<p>"My only interest is to draw her out," said Selah, defending his
+integrity. "I will drop right out if I don't seem to vitalise. I have no
+desire to draw attention to my own poor gifts." This declaration
+appeared to be addressed to Miss Chancellor.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, there will be more inspiration if you don't touch her," Matthias
+Pardon said to him. "It will seem to come right down from&mdash;well,
+wherever it does come from."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, we don't pretend to say that," Mrs. Tarrant murmured.</p>
+
+<p>This little discussion had brought the blood to Olive's face; she felt
+that every one present was looking at her&mdash;Verena most of all&mdash;and that
+here was a chance to take a more complete possession of the girl. Such
+chances were agitating; moreover, she didn't like, on any occasion, to
+be so prominent. But everything that had been said was benighted and
+vulgar; the place seemed thick with the very atmosphere out of which she
+wished to lift Verena. They were treating her as a show, as a social
+resource, and the two young men from the College were laughing at her
+shamelessly. She was not meant for that, and Olive would save her.
+Verena was so simple, she couldn't see herself; she was the only pure
+spirit in the odious group.</p>
+
+<p>"I want you to address audiences that are worth addressing&mdash;to convince
+people who are serious and sincere." Olive herself, as she spoke, heard
+the great shake in her voice. "Your mission is not to exhibit yourself
+as a pastime for individuals, but to touch the heart of communities, of
+nations."</p>
+
+<p>"Dear madam, I'm sure Miss Tarrant will touch my heart!" Mr. Burrage
+objected, gallantly.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, I don't know but she judges you young men fairly," said Mrs.
+Tarrant, with a sigh.</p>
+
+<p>Verena, diverted a moment from her communion with her friend, considered
+Mr. Burrage with a smile. "I don't believe you have got any heart, and I
+shouldn't care much if you had!"</p>
+
+<p>"You have no idea how much the way you say that increases my desire to
+hear you speak."</p>
+
+<p>"Do as you please, my dear," said Olive, almost inaudibly. "My carriage
+must be there&mdash;I must leave you, in any case."</p>
+
+<p>"I can see you don't want it," said Verena, wondering. "You would stay
+if you liked it, wouldn't you?"</p>
+
+<p>"I don't know what I should do. Come out with me!" Olive spoke almost
+with fierceness.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, you'll send them away no better than they came," said Matthias
+Pardon.</p>
+
+<p>"I guess you had better come round some other night," Selah suggested
+pacifically, but with a significance which fell upon Olive's ear.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Gracie seemed inclined to make the sturdiest protest. "Look here,
+Miss Tarrant; do you want to save Harvard College, or do you not?" he
+demanded, with a humorous frown.</p>
+
+<p>"I didn't know <i>you</i> were Harvard College!" Verena returned as
+humorously.</p>
+
+<p>"I am afraid you are rather disappointed in your evening if you expected
+to obtain some insight into our ideas," said Mrs. Tarrant, with an air
+of impotent sympathy, to Mr. Gracie.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, good-night, Miss Chancellor," she went on; "I hope you've got a
+warm wrap. I suppose you'll think we go a good deal by what you say in
+this house. Well, most people don't object to that. There's a little
+hole right there in the porch; it seems as if Doctor Tarrant couldn't
+remember to go for the man to fix it. I am afraid you'll think we're too
+much taken up with all these new hopes. Well, we <i>have</i> enjoyed seeing
+you in our home; it quite raises my appetite for social intercourse. Did
+you come out on wheels? I can't stand a sleigh myself; it makes me
+sick."</p>
+
+<p>This was her hostess's response to Miss Chancellor's very summary
+farewell, uttered as the three ladies proceeded together to the door of
+the house. Olive had got herself out of the little parlour with a sort
+of blind, defiant dash; she had taken no perceptible leave of the rest
+of the company. When she was calm she had very good manners, but when
+she was agitated she was guilty of lapses, every one of which came back
+to her, magnified, in the watches of the night. Sometimes they excited
+remorse, and sometimes triumph; in the latter case she felt that she
+could not have been so justly vindictive in cold blood. Tarrant wished
+to guide her down the steps, out of the little yard, to her carriage; he
+reminded her that they had had ashes sprinkled on the planks on purpose.
+But she begged him to let her alone, she almost pushed him back; she
+drew Verena out into the dark freshness, closing the door of the house
+behind her. There was a splendid sky, all blue-black and silver&mdash;a
+sparkling wintry vault, where the stars were like a myriad points of
+ice. The air was silent and sharp, and the vague snow looked cruel.
+Olive knew now very definitely what the promise was that she wanted
+Verena to make; but it was too cold, she could keep her there bareheaded
+but an instant. Mrs. Tarrant, meanwhile, in the parlour, remarked that
+it seemed as if she couldn't trust Verena with her own parents; and
+Selah intimated that, with a proper invitation, his daughter would be
+very happy to address Harvard College at large. Mr. Burrage and Mr.
+Gracie said they would invite her on the spot, in the name of the
+University; and Matthias Pardon reflected (and asserted) with glee that
+this would be the newest thing yet. But he added that they would have a
+high time with Miss Chancellor first, and this was evidently the
+conviction of the company.</p>
+
+<p>"I can see you are angry at something," Verena said to Olive, as the two
+stood there in the starlight. "I hope it isn't me. What have I done?"</p>
+
+<p>"I am not angry&mdash;I am anxious. I am so afraid I shall lose you. Verena,
+don't fail me&mdash;don't fail me!" Olive spoke low, with a kind of passion.</p>
+
+<p>"Fail you? How can I fail?"</p>
+
+<p>"You can't, of course you can't. Your star is above you. But don't
+listen to <i>them</i>."</p>
+
+<p>"To whom do you mean, Olive? To my parents?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh no, not your parents," Miss Chancellor replied, with some sharpness.
+She paused a moment, and then she said: "I don't care for your parents.
+I have told you that before; but now that I have seen them&mdash;as they
+wished, as you wished, and I didn't&mdash;I don't care for them; I must
+repeat it, Verena. I should be dishonest if I let you think I did."</p>
+
+<p>"Why, Olive Chancellor!" Verena murmured, as if she were trying, in
+spite of the sadness produced by this declaration, to do justice to her
+friend's impartiality.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, I am hard; perhaps I am cruel; but we must be hard if we wish to
+triumph. Don't listen to young men when they try to mock and muddle you.
+They don't care for you; they don't care for <i>us</i>. They care only for
+their pleasure, for what they believe to be the right of the stronger.
+The stronger? I am not so sure!"</p>
+
+<p>"Some of them care so much&mdash;are supposed to care too much&mdash;for us,"
+Verena said, with a smile that looked dim in the darkness.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, if we will give up everything. I have asked you before&mdash;are you
+prepared to give up?"</p>
+
+<p>"Do you mean, to give <i>you</i> up?"</p>
+
+<p>"No, all our wretched sisters&mdash;all our hopes and purposes&mdash;all that we
+think Sacred and worth living for!"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, they don't want that, Olive." Verena's smile became more distinct,
+and she added: "They don't want so much as that!"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, then, go in and speak for them&mdash;and sing for them&mdash;and dance for
+them!"</p>
+
+<p>"Olive, you are cruel!"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, I am. But promise me one thing, and I shall be&mdash;oh, so tender!"</p>
+
+<p>"What a strange place for promises," said Verena, with a shiver, looking
+about her into the night.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, I am dreadful; I know it. But promise." And Olive drew the girl
+nearer to her, flinging over her with one hand the fold of a cloak that
+hung ample upon her own meagre person, and holding her there with the
+other, while she looked at her, suppliant but half hesitating.
+"Promise!" she repeated.</p>
+
+<p>"Is it something terrible?"</p>
+
+<p>"Never to listen to one of them, never to be bribed&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>At this moment the house-door was opened again, and the light of the
+hall projected itself across the little piazza. Matthias Pardon stood in
+the aperture, and Tarrant and his wife, with the two other visitors,
+appeared to have come forward as well, to see what detained Verena.</p>
+
+<p>"You seem to have started a kind of lecture out here," Mr. Pardon said.
+"You ladies had better look out, or you'll freeze together!"</p>
+
+<p>Verena was reminded by her mother that she would catch her death, but
+she had already heard sharply, low as they were spoken, five last words
+from Olive, who now abruptly released her and passed swiftly over the
+path from the porch to her waiting carriage. Tarrant creaked along, in
+pursuit, to assist Miss Chancellor; the others drew Verena into the
+house. "Promise me not to marry!"&mdash;that was what echoed in her startled
+mind, and repeated itself there when Mr. Burrage returned to the charge,
+asking her if she wouldn't at least appoint some evening when they might
+listen to her. She knew that Olive's injunction ought not to have
+surprised her; she had already felt it in the air; she would have said
+at any time, if she had been asked, that she didn't suppose Miss
+Chancellor would want her to marry. But the idea, uttered as her friend
+had uttered it, had a new solemnity, and the effect of that quick,
+violent colloquy was to make her nervous and impatient, as if she had
+had a sudden glimpse of futurity. That was rather awful, even if it
+represented the fate one would like.</p>
+
+<p>When the two young men from the College pressed their petition, she
+asked, with a laugh that surprised them, whether they wished to "mock
+and muddle" her. They went away, assenting to Mrs. Tarrant's last
+remark: "I am afraid you'll feel that you don't quite understand us
+yet." Matthias Pardon remained; her father and mother, expressing their
+perfect confidence that he would excuse them, went to bed and left him
+sitting there. He stayed a good while longer, nearly an hour, and said
+things that made Verena think that <i>he</i>, perhaps, would like to marry
+her. But while she listened to him, more abstractedly than her custom
+was, she remarked to herself that there could be no difficulty in
+promising Olive so far as he was concerned. He was very pleasant, and he
+knew an immense deal about everything, or, rather, about every one, and
+he would take her right into the midst of life. But she didn't wish to
+marry him, all the same, and after he had gone she reflected that, once
+she came to think of it, she didn't want to marry any one. So it would
+be easy, after all, to make Olive that promise, and it would give her so
+much pleasure!</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="XVII" id="XVII"></a>XVII</h2>
+
+
+<p>The next time Verena saw Olive she said to her that she was ready to
+make the promise she had asked the other night; but, to her great
+surprise, this young woman answered her by a question intended to check
+such rashness. Miss Chancellor raised a warning finger; she had an air
+of dissuasion almost as solemn as her former pressure; her passionate
+impatience appeared to have given way to other considerations, to be
+replaced by the resignation that comes with deeper reflexion. It was
+tinged in this case, indeed, by such bitterness as might be permitted to
+a young lady who cultivated the brightness of a great faith.</p>
+
+<p>"Don't you want any promise at present?" Verena asked. "Why, Olive, how
+you change!"</p>
+
+<p>"My dear child, you are so young&mdash;so strangely young. I am a thousand
+years old; I have lived through generations&mdash;through centuries. I know
+what I know by experience; you know it by imagination. That is
+consistent with your being the fresh, bright creature that you are. I am
+constantly forgetting the difference between us&mdash;that you are a mere
+child as yet, though a child destined for great things. I forgot it the
+other night, but I have remembered it since. You must pass through a
+certain phase, and it would be very wrong in me to pretend to suppress
+it. That is all clear to me now; I see it was my jealousy that spoke&mdash;my
+restless, hungry jealousy. I have far too much of that; I oughtn't to
+give any one the right to say that it's a woman's quality. I don't want
+your signature; I only want your confidence&mdash;only what springs from
+that. I hope with all my soul that you won't marry; but if you don't it
+must not be because you have promised me. You know what I think&mdash;that
+there is something noble done when one makes a sacrifice for a great
+good. Priests&mdash;when they were real priests&mdash;never married, and what you
+and I dream of doing demands of us a kind of priesthood. It seems to me
+very poor, when friendship and faith and charity and the most
+interesting occupation in the world&mdash;when such a combination as this
+doesn't seem, by itself, enough to live for. No man that I have ever
+seen cares a straw in his heart for what we are trying to accomplish.
+They hate it; they scorn it; they will try to stamp it out whenever they
+can. Oh yes, I know there are men who pretend to care for it; but they
+are not really men, and I wouldn't be sure even of them! Any man that
+one would look at&mdash;with him, as a matter of course, it is war upon us to
+the knife. I don't mean to say there are not some male beings who are
+willing to patronise us a little; to pat us on the back and recommend a
+few moderate concessions; to say that there <i>are</i> two or three little
+points in which society has not been quite just to us. But any man who
+pretends to accept our programme <i>in toto</i>, as you and I understand it,
+of his own free will, before he is forced to&mdash;such a person simply
+schemes to betray us. There are gentlemen in plenty who would be glad to
+stop your mouth by kissing you! If you become dangerous some day to
+their selfishness, to their vested interests, to their immorality&mdash;as I
+pray heaven every day, my dear friend, that you may!&mdash;it will be a grand
+thing for one of them if he can persuade you that he loves you. Then you
+will see what he will do with you, and how far his love will take him!
+It would be a sad day for you and for me and for all of us if you were
+to believe something of that kind. You see I am very calm now; I have
+thought it all out."</p>
+
+<p>Verena had listened with earnest eyes. "Why, Olive, you are quite a
+speaker yourself!" she exclaimed. "You would far surpass me if you would
+let yourself go."</p>
+
+<p>Miss Chancellor shook her head with a melancholy that was not devoid of
+sweetness. "I can speak to <i>you</i>; but that is no proof. The very stones
+of the street&mdash;all the dumb things of nature&mdash;might find a voice to talk
+to you. I have no facility; I am awkward and embarrassed and dry." When
+this young lady, after a struggle with the winds and waves of emotion,
+emerged into the quiet stream of a certain high reasonableness, she
+presented her most graceful aspect; she had a tone of softness and
+sympathy, a gentle dignity, a serenity of wisdom, which sealed the
+appreciation of those who knew her well enough to like her, and which
+always impressed Verena as something almost august. Such moods, however,
+were not often revealed to the public at large; they belonged to Miss
+Chancellor's very private life. One of them had possession of her at
+present, and she went on to explain the inconsequence which had puzzled
+her friend with the same quiet clearness, the detachment from error, of
+a woman whose self-scrutiny has been as sharp as her deflexion.</p>
+
+<p>"Don't think me capricious if I say I would rather trust you without a
+pledge. I owe you, I owe every one, an apology for my rudeness and
+fierceness at your mother's. It came over me&mdash;just seeing those young
+men&mdash;how exposed you are; and the idea made me (for the moment) frantic.
+I see your danger still, but I see other things too, and I have
+recovered my balance. You must be safe, Verena&mdash;you must be saved; but
+your safety must not come from your having tied your hands. It must come
+from the growth of your perception; from your seeing things, of
+yourself, sincerely and with conviction, in the light in which I see
+them; from your feeling that for your work your freedom is essential,
+and that there is no freedom for you and me save in religiously <i>not</i>
+doing what you will often be asked to do&mdash;and I never!" Miss Chancellor
+brought out these last words with a proud jerk which was not without its
+pathos. "Don't promise, don't promise!" she went on. "I would far rather
+you didn't. But don't fail me&mdash;don't fail me, or I shall die!"</p>
+
+<p>Her manner of repairing her inconsistency was altogether feminine: she
+wished to extract a certainty at the same time that she wished to
+deprecate a pledge, and she would have been delighted to put Verena into
+the enjoyment of that freedom which was so important for her by
+preventing her exercising it in a particular direction. The girl was now
+completely under her influence; she had latent curiosities and
+distractions&mdash;left to herself, she was not always thinking of the
+unhappiness of women; but the touch of Olive's tone worked a spell, and
+she found something to which at least a portion of her nature turned
+with eagerness in her companion's wider knowledge, her elevation of
+view. Miss Chancellor was historic and philosophic; or, at any rate, she
+appeared so to Verena, who felt that through such an association one
+might at last intellectually command all life. And there was a simpler
+impulse; Verena wished to please her if only because she had such a
+dread of displeasing her. Olive's displeasures, disappointments,
+disapprovals were tragic, truly memorable; she grew white under them,
+not shedding many tears, as a general thing, like inferior women (she
+cried when she was angry, not when she was hurt), but limping and
+panting, morally, as if she had received a wound that she would carry
+for life. On the other hand, her commendations, her satisfactions were
+as soft as a west wind; and she had this sign, the rarest of all, of
+generosity, that she liked obligations of gratitude when they were not
+laid upon her by men. Then, indeed, she scarcely recognised them. She
+considered men in general as so much in the debt of the opposite sex
+that any individual woman had an unlimited credit with them; she could
+not possibly overdraw the general feminine account. The unexpected
+temperance of her speech on this subject of Verena's accessibility to
+matrimonial error seemed to the girl to have an antique beauty, a wisdom
+purged of worldly elements; it reminded her of qualities that she
+believed to have been proper to Electra or Antigone. This made her wish
+the more to do something that would gratify Olive; and in spite of her
+friend's dissuasion she declared that she should like to promise. "I
+will promise, at any rate, not to marry any of those gentlemen that were
+at the house," she said. "Those seemed to be the ones you were
+principally afraid of."</p>
+
+<p>"You will promise not to marry any one you don't like," said Olive.
+"That would be a great comfort!"</p>
+
+<p>"But I do like Mr. Burrage and Mr. Gracie."</p>
+
+<p>"And Mr. Matthias Pardon? What a name!"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, he knows how to make himself agreeable. He can tell you
+everything you want to know."</p>
+
+<p>"You mean everything you don't! Well, if you like every one, I haven't
+the least objection. It would only be preferences that I should find
+alarming. I am not the least afraid of your marrying a repulsive man;
+your danger would come from an attractive one."</p>
+
+<p>"I'm glad to hear you admit that some <i>are</i> attractive!" Verena
+exclaimed, with the light laugh which her reverence for Miss Chancellor
+had not yet quenched. "It sometimes seems as if there weren't any you
+could like!"</p>
+
+<p>"I can imagine a man I should like very much," Olive replied, after a
+moment. "But I don't like those I see. They seem to me poor creatures."
+And, indeed, her uppermost feeling in regard to them was a kind of cold
+scorn; she thought most of them palterers and bullies. The end of the
+colloquy was that Verena, having assented, with her usual docility, to
+her companion's optimistic contention that it was a "phase," this taste
+for evening-calls from collegians and newspaper-men, and would
+consequently pass away with the growth of her mind, remarked that the
+injustice of men might be an accident or might be a part of their
+nature, but at any rate she should have to change a good deal before she
+should want to marry.</p>
+
+<p>About the middle of December Miss Chancellor received a visit from
+Matthias Pardon, who had come to ask her what she meant to do about
+Verena. She had never invited him to call upon her, and the appearance
+of a gentleman whose desire to see her was so irrepressible as to
+dispense with such a preliminary was not in her career an accident
+frequent enough to have taught her equanimity. She thought Mr. Pardon's
+visit a liberty; but, if she expected to convey this idea to him by
+withholding any suggestion that he should sit down, she was greatly
+mistaken, inasmuch as he cut the ground from under her feet by himself
+offering her a chair. His manner represented hospitality enough for both
+of them, and she was obliged to listen, on the edge of her sofa (she
+could at least seat herself where she liked), to his extraordinary
+inquiry. Of course she was not obliged to answer it, and indeed she
+scarcely understood it. He explained that it was prompted by the intense
+interest he felt in Miss Verena; but that scarcely made it more
+comprehensible, such a sentiment (on his part) being such a curious
+mixture. He had a sort of enamel of good humour which showed that his
+indelicacy was his profession; and he asked for revelations of the <i>vie
+intime</i> of his victims with the bland confidence of a fashionable
+physician inquiring about symptoms. He wanted to know what Miss
+Chancellor meant to do, because if she didn't mean to do anything, he
+had an idea&mdash;which he wouldn't conceal from her&mdash;of going into the
+enterprise himself. "You see, what I should like to know is this: do you
+consider that she belongs to you, or that she belongs to the people? If
+she belongs to you, why don't you bring her out?"</p>
+
+<p>He had no purpose and no consciousness of being impertinent; he only
+wished to talk over the matter sociably with Miss Chancellor. He knew,
+of course, that there was a presumption she would not be sociable, but
+no presumption had yet deterred him from presenting a surface which he
+believed to be polished till it shone; there was always a larger one in
+favour of his power to penetrate and of the majesty of the "great
+dailies." Indeed, he took so many things for granted that Olive remained
+dumb while she regarded them; and he availed himself of what he
+considered as a fortunate opening to be really very frank. He reminded
+her that he had known Miss Verena a good deal longer than she; he had
+travelled out to Cambridge the other winter (when he could get an
+off-night), with the thermometer at ten below zero. He had always
+thought her attractive, but it wasn't till this season that his eyes had
+been fully opened. Her talent had matured, and now he had no hesitation
+in calling her brilliant. Miss Chancellor could imagine whether, as an
+old friend, he could watch such a beautiful unfolding with indifference.
+She would fascinate the people, just as she had fascinated her (Miss
+Chancellor), and, he might be permitted to add, himself. The fact was,
+she was a great card, and some one ought to play it. There never had
+been a more attractive female speaker before the American public; she
+would walk right past Mrs. Farrinder, and Mrs. Farrinder knew it. There
+was room for both, no doubt, they had such a different style; anyhow,
+what he wanted to show was that there was room for Miss Verena. She
+didn't want any more tuning-up, she wanted to break right out. Moreover,
+he felt that any gentleman who should lead her to success would win her
+esteem; he might even attract her more powerfully&mdash;who could tell? If
+Miss Chancellor wanted to attach her permanently, she ought to push her
+right forward. He gathered from what Miss Verena had told him that she
+wanted to make her study up the subject a while longer&mdash;follow some kind
+of course. Well, now, he could assure her that there was no preparation
+so good as just seeing a couple of thousand people down there before you
+who have paid their money to have you tell them something. Miss Verena
+was a natural genius, and he hoped very much she wasn't going to take
+the nature out of her. She could study up as she went along; she had got
+the great thing that you couldn't learn, a kind of divine afflatus, as
+the ancients used to say, and she had better just begin on that. He
+wouldn't deny what was the matter with <i>him</i>; he was quite under the
+spell, and his admiration made him want to see her where she belonged.
+He shouldn't care so much how she got there, but it would certainly add
+to his pleasure if he could show her up to her place. Therefore, would
+Miss Chancellor just tell him this: How long did she expect to hold her
+back; how long did she expect a humble admirer to wait? Of course he
+hadn't come there to cross-question her; there was one thing he trusted
+he always kept clear of; when he was indiscreet he wanted to know it. He
+had come with a proposal of his own, and he hoped it would seem a
+sufficient warrant for his visit. Would Miss Chancellor be willing to
+divide a&mdash;the&mdash;well, he might call it the responsibilities? Couldn't
+they run Miss Verena together? In this case every one would be
+satisfied. She could travel round with her as her companion, and he
+would see that the American people walked up. If Miss Chancellor would
+just let her go a little, he would look after the rest. He wanted no
+odds; he only wanted her for about an hour and a half three or four
+evenings a week.</p>
+
+<p>Olive had time, in the course of this appeal, to make her faculties
+converge, to ask herself what she could say to this prodigious young man
+that would make him feel as how base a thing she held his proposal that
+they should constitute themselves into a company for drawing profit from
+Verena. Unfortunately, the most sarcastic inquiry that could occur to
+her as a response was also the most obvious one, so that he hesitated
+but a moment with his rejoinder after she had asked him how many
+thousands of dollars he expected to make.</p>
+
+<p>"For Miss Verena? It depends upon the time. She'd run for ten years, at
+least. I can't figure it up till all the States have been heard from,"
+he said, smiling.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't mean for Miss Tarrant, I mean for you," Olive returned, with
+the impression that she was looking him straight in the eye.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, as many as you'll leave me!" Matthias Pardon answered, with a laugh
+that contained all, and more than all, the jocularity of the American
+press. "To speak seriously," he added, "I don't want to make money out
+of it."</p>
+
+<p>"What do you want to make then?"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, I want to make history! I want to help the ladies."</p>
+
+<p>"The ladies?" Olive murmured. "What do you know about ladies?" she was
+on the point of adding, when his promptness checked her.</p>
+
+<p>"All over the world. I want to work for their emancipation. I regard it
+as the great modern question."</p>
+
+<p>Miss Chancellor got up now; this was rather too strong. Whether,
+eventually, she was successful in what she attempted, the reader of her
+history will judge; but at this moment she had not that promise of
+success which resides in a willingness to make use of every aid that
+offers. Such is the penalty of being of a fastidious, exclusive,
+uncompromising nature; of seeing things not simply and sharply, but in
+perverse relations, in intertwisted strands. It seemed to our young lady
+that nothing could be less attractive than to owe her emancipation to
+such a one as Matthias Pardon; and it is curious that those qualities
+which he had in common with Verena, and which in her seemed to Olive
+romantic and touching&mdash;her having sprung from the "people," had an
+acquaintance with poverty, a hand-to-mouth development, and an
+experience of the seamy side of life&mdash;availed in no degree to conciliate
+Miss Chancellor. I suppose it was because he was a man. She told him
+that she was much obliged to him for his offer, but that he evidently
+didn't understand Verena and herself. No, not even Miss Tarrant, in
+spite of his long acquaintance with her. They had no desire to be
+notorious; they only wanted to be useful. They had no wish to make
+money; there would always be plenty of money for Miss Tarrant.
+Certainly, she should come before the public, and the world would
+acclaim her and hang upon her words; but crude, precipitate action was
+what both of them least desired. The change in the dreadful position of
+women was not a question for to-day simply, or for to-morrow, but for
+many years to come; and there would be a great deal to think of, to map
+out. One thing they were determined upon&mdash;that men shouldn't taunt them
+with being superficial. When Verena should appear it would be armed at
+all points, like Joan of Arc (this analogy had lodged itself in Olive's
+imagination); she should have facts and figures; she should meet men on
+their own ground. "What we mean to do, we mean to do well," Miss
+Chancellor said to her visitor, with considerable sternness; leaving him
+to make such an application to himself as his fancy might suggest.</p>
+
+<p>This announcement had little comfort for him; he felt baffled and
+disheartened&mdash;indeed, quite sick. Was it not sickening to hear her talk
+of this dreary process of preparation?&mdash;as if any one cared about that,
+and would know whether Verena were prepared or not! Had Miss Chancellor
+no faith in her girlhood? didn't she know what a card that would be?
+This was the last inquiry Olive allowed him the opportunity of making.
+She remarked to him that they might talk for ever without coming to an
+agreement&mdash;their points of view were so far apart. Besides, it was a
+woman's question; what they wanted was for women, and it should be by
+women. It had happened to the young Matthias more than once to be shown
+the way to the door, but the path of retreat had never yet seemed to him
+so unpleasant. He was naturally amiable, but it had not hitherto
+befallen him to be made to feel that he was not&mdash;and could not be&mdash;a
+factor in contemporary history: here was a rapacious woman who proposed
+to keep that favourable setting for herself. He let her know that she
+was right-down selfish, and that if she chose to sacrifice a beautiful
+nature to her antediluvian theories and love of power, a vigilant daily
+press&mdash;whose business it was to expose wrong-doing&mdash;would demand an
+account from her. She replied that, if the newspapers chose to insult
+her, that was their own affair; one outrage the more to the sex in her
+person was of little account. And after he had left her she seemed to
+see the glow of dawning success; the battle had begun, and something of
+the ecstasy of the martyr.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="XVIII" id="XVIII"></a>XVIII</h2>
+
+
+<p>Verena told her, a week after this, that Mr. Pardon wanted so much she
+should say she would marry him; and she added, with evident pleasure at
+being able to give her so agreeable a piece of news, that she had
+declined to say anything of the sort. She thought that now, at least,
+Olive must believe in her; for the proposal was more attractive than
+Miss Chancellor seemed able to understand. "He does place things in a
+very seductive light," Verena said; "he says that if I become his wife I
+shall be carried straight along by a force of excitement of which at
+present I have no idea. I shall wake up famous, if I marry him; I have
+only got to give out my feelings, and he will take care of the rest. He
+says every hour of my youth is precious to me, and that we should have a
+lovely time travelling round the country. I think you ought to allow
+that all that is rather dazzling&mdash;for I am not naturally concentrated,
+like you!"</p>
+
+<p>"He promises you success. What do you call success?" Olive inquired,
+looking at her friend with a kind of salutary coldness&mdash;a suspension of
+sympathy&mdash;with which Verena was now familiar (though she liked it no
+better than at first), and which made approbation more gracious when
+approbation came.</p>
+
+<p>Verena reflected a moment, and then answered, smiling, but with
+confidence: "Producing a pressure that shall be irresistible. Causing
+certain laws to be repealed by Congress and by the State legislatures,
+and others to be enacted." She repeated the words as if they had been
+part of a catechism committed to memory, while Olive saw that this
+mechanical tone was in the nature of a joke that she could not deny
+herself; they had had that definition so often before, and Miss
+Chancellor had had occasion so often to remind her what success <i>really</i>
+was. Of course it was easy to prove to her now that Mr. Pardon's
+glittering bait was a very different thing; was a mere trap and lure, a
+bribe to vanity and impatience, a device for making her give herself
+away&mdash;let alone fill his pockets while she did so. Olive was conscious
+enough of the girl's want of continuity; she had seen before how she
+could be passionately serious at times, and then perversely, even if
+innocently, trivial&mdash;as just now, when she seemed to wish to convert one
+of their most sacred formulas into a pleasantry. She had already quite
+recognised, however, that it was not of importance that Verena should be
+just like herself; she was all of one piece, and Verena was of many
+pieces, which had, where they fitted together, little capricious chinks,
+through which mocking inner lights seemed sometimes to gleam. It was a
+part of Verena's being unlike her that she should feel Mr. Pardon's
+promise of eternal excitement to be a brilliant thing, should indeed
+consider Mr. Pardon with any tolerance at all. But Olive tried afresh to
+allow for such aberrations, as a phase of youth and suburban culture;
+the more so that, even when she tried most, Verena reproached her&mdash;so
+far as Verena's incurable softness could reproach&mdash;with not allowing
+enough. Olive didn't appear to understand that, while Matthias Pardon
+drew that picture and tried to hold her hand (this image was
+unfortunate), she had given one long, fixed, wistful look, through the
+door he opened, at the bright tumult of the world, and then had turned
+away, solely for her friend's sake, to an austerer probation and a purer
+effort; solely for her friend's, that is, and that of the whole enslaved
+sisterhood. The fact remained, at any rate, that Verena had made a
+sacrifice; and this thought, after a while, gave Olive a greater sense
+of security. It seemed almost to seal the future; for Olive knew that
+the young interviewer would not easily be shaken off, and yet she was
+sure that Verena would never yield to him.</p>
+
+<p>It was true that at present Mr. Burrage came a great deal to the little
+house at Cambridge; Verena told her about that, told her so much that it
+was almost as good as if she had told her all. He came without Mr.
+Gracie now; he could find his way alone, and he seemed to wish that
+there should be no one else. He had made himself so pleasant to her
+mother that she almost always went out of the room; that was the
+highest proof Mrs. Tarrant could give of her appreciation of a
+"gentleman-caller." They knew everything about him by this time; that
+his father was dead, his mother very fashionable and prominent, and he
+himself in possession of a handsome patrimony. They thought ever so much
+of him in New York. He collected beautiful things, pictures and antiques
+and objects that he sent for to Europe on purpose, many of which were
+arranged in his rooms at Cambridge. He had intaglios and Spanish
+altar-cloths and drawings by the old masters. He was different from most
+others; he seemed to want so much to enjoy life, and to think you easily
+could if you would only let yourself go. Of course&mdash;judging by what <i>he</i>
+had&mdash;he appeared to think you required a great many things to keep you
+up. And then Verena told Olive&mdash;she could see it was after a little
+delay&mdash;that he wanted her to come round to his place and see his
+treasures. He wanted to show them to her, he was so sure she would
+admire them. Verena was sure also, but she wouldn't go alone, and she
+wanted Olive to go with her. They would have tea, and there would be
+other ladies, and Olive would tell her what she thought of a life that
+was so crowded with beauty. Miss Chancellor made her reflexions on all
+this, and the first of them was that it was happy for her that she had
+determined for the present to accept these accidents, for otherwise
+might she not now have had a deeper alarm? She wished to heaven that
+conceited young men with time on their hands would leave Verena alone;
+but evidently they wouldn't, and her best safety was in seeing as many
+as should turn up. If the type should become frequent, she would very
+soon judge it. If Olive had not been so grim, she would have had a smile
+to spare for the frankness with which the girl herself adopted this
+theory. She was eager to explain that Mr. Burrage didn't seem at all to
+want what poor Mr. Pardon had wanted; he made her talk about her views
+far more than that gentleman, but gave no sign of offering himself
+either as a husband or as a lecture-agent. The furthest he had gone as
+yet was to tell her that he liked her for the same reason that he liked
+old enamels and old embroideries; and when she said that she didn't see
+how she resembled such things, he had replied that it was because she
+was so peculiar and so delicate. She might be peculiar, but she had
+protested against the idea that she was delicate; it was the last thing
+that she wanted to be thought; and Olive could see from this how far she
+was from falling in with everything he said. When Miss Chancellor asked
+if she respected Mr. Burrage (and how solemn Olive could make that word
+she by this time knew), she answered, with her sweet, vain laugh, but
+apparently with perfect good faith, that it didn't matter whether she
+did or not, for what was the whole thing but simply a phase&mdash;the very
+one they had talked about? The sooner she got through it the better, was
+it not?&mdash;and she seemed to think that her transit would be materially
+quickened by a visit to Mr. Burrage's rooms. As I say, Verena was
+pleased to regard the phase as quite inevitable, and she had said more
+than once to Olive that if their struggle was to be with men, the more
+they knew about them the better. Miss Chancellor asked her why her
+mother should not go with her to see the curiosities, since she
+mentioned that their possessor had not neglected to invite Mrs. Tarrant;
+and Verena said that this, of course, would be very simple&mdash;only her
+mother wouldn't be able to tell her so well as Olive whether she ought
+to respect Mr. Burrage. This decision as to whether Mr. Burrage should
+be respected assumed in the life of these two remarkable young women,
+pitched in so high a moral key, the proportions of a momentous event.
+Olive shrank at first from facing it&mdash;not, indeed, the decision&mdash;for we
+know that her own mind had long since been made up in regard to the
+quantity of esteem due to almost any member of the other sex&mdash;but the
+incident itself, which, if Mr. Burrage should exasperate her further,
+might expose her to the danger of appearing to Verena to be unfair to
+him. It was her belief that he was playing a deeper game than the young
+Matthias, and she was very willing to watch him; but she thought it
+prudent not to attempt to cut short the phase (she adopted that
+classification) prematurely&mdash;an imputation she should incur if, without
+more delay, she were to "shut down," as Verena said, on the young
+connoisseur.</p>
+
+<p>It was settled, therefore, that Mrs. Tarrant should, with her daughter,
+accept Mr. Burrage's invitation; and in a few days these ladies paid a
+visit to his apartments. Verena subsequently, of course, had much to say
+about it, but she dilated even more upon her mother's impressions than
+upon her own. Mrs. Tarrant had carried away a supply which would last
+her all winter; there had been some New York ladies present who were
+"on" at that moment, and with whom her intercourse was rich in emotions.
+She had told them all that she should be happy to see them in her home,
+but they had not yet picked their way along the little planks of the
+front yard. Mr. Burrage, at all events, had been quite lovely, and had
+talked about his collections, which were wonderful, in the most
+interesting manner. Verena inclined to think he was to be respected. He
+admitted that he was not really studying law at all; he had only come to
+Cambridge for the form; but she didn't see why it wasn't enough when you
+made yourself as pleasant as that. She went so far as to ask Olive
+whether taste and art were not something, and her friend could see that
+she was certainly very much involved in the phase. Miss Chancellor, of
+course, had her answer ready. Taste and art were good when they enlarged
+the mind, not when they narrowed it. Verena assented to this, and said
+it remained to be seen what effect they had had upon Mr. Burrage&mdash;a
+remark which led Olive to fear that at such a rate much would remain,
+especially when Verena told her, later, that another visit to the young
+man's rooms was projected, and that this time she must come, he having
+expressed the greatest desire for the honour, and her own wish being
+greater still that they should look at some of his beautiful things
+together.</p>
+
+<p>A day or two after this, Mr. Henry Burrage left a card at Miss
+Chancellor's door, with a note in which he expressed the hope that she
+would take tea with him on a certain day on which he expected the
+company of his mother. Olive responded to this invitation, in
+conjunction with Verena; but in doing so she was in the position,
+singular for her, of not quite understanding what she was about. It
+seemed to her strange that Verena should urge her to take such a step
+when she was free to go without her, and it proved two things: first,
+that she was much interested in Mr. Henry Burrage, and second, that her
+nature was extraordinarily beautiful. Could anything, in effect, be less
+underhand than such an indifference to what she supposed to be the best
+opportunities for carrying on a flirtation? Verena wanted to know the
+truth, and it was clear that by this time she believed Olive Chancellor
+to have it, for the most part, in her keeping. Her insistence,
+therefore, proved, above all, that she cared more for her friend's
+opinion of Henry Burrage than for her own&mdash;a reminder, certainly, of the
+responsibility that Olive had incurred in undertaking to form this
+generous young mind, and of the exalted place that she now occupied in
+it. Such revelations ought to have been satisfactory; if they failed to
+be completely so, it was only on account of the elder girl's regret that
+the subject as to which her judgement was wanted should be a young man
+destitute of the worst vices. Henry Burrage had contributed to throw
+Miss Chancellor into a "state," as these young ladies called it, the
+night she met him at Mrs. Tarrant's; but it had none the less been
+conveyed to Olive by the voices of the air that he was a gentleman and a
+good fellow.</p>
+
+<p>This was painfully obvious when the visit to his rooms took place; he
+was so good-humoured, so amusing, so friendly and considerate, so
+attentive to Miss Chancellor, he did the honours of his bachelor-nest
+with so easy a grace, that Olive, part of the time, sat dumbly shaking
+her conscience, like a watch that wouldn't go, to make it tell her some
+better reason why she shouldn't like him. She saw that there would be no
+difficulty in disliking his mother; but that, unfortunately, would not
+serve her purpose nearly so well. Mrs. Burrage had come to spend a few
+days near her son; she was staying at an hotel in Boston. It presented
+itself to Olive that after this entertainment it would be an act of
+courtesy to call upon her; but here, at least, was the comfort that she
+could cover herself with the general absolution extended to the Boston
+temperament and leave her alone. It was slightly provoking, indeed, that
+Mrs. Burrage should have so much the air of a New Yorker who didn't
+particularly notice whether a Bostonian called or not; but there is ever
+an imperfection, I suppose, in even the sweetest revenge. She was a
+woman of society, large and voluminous, fair (in complexion) and
+regularly ugly, looking as if she ought to be slow and rather heavy, but
+disappointing this expectation by a quick, amused utterance, a short,
+bright, summary laugh, with which she appeared to dispose of the joke
+(whatever it was) for ever, and an air of recognising on the instant
+everything she saw and heard. She was evidently accustomed to talk, and
+even to listen, if not kept waiting too long for details and
+parentheses; she was not continuous, but frequent, as it were, and you
+could see that she hated explanations, though it was not to be supposed
+that she had anything to fear from them. Her favours were general, not
+particular; she was civil enough to every one, but not in any case
+endearing, and perfectly genial without being confiding, as people were
+in Boston when (in moments of exaltation) they wished to mark that they
+were not suspicious. There was something in her whole manner which
+seemed to say to Olive that she belonged to a larger world than hers;
+and our young lady was vexed at not hearing that she had lived for a
+good many years in Europe, as this would have made it easy to classify
+her as one of the corrupt. She learned, almost with a sense of injury,
+that neither the mother nor the son had been longer beyond the seas than
+she herself; and if they were to be judged as triflers they must be
+dealt with individually. Was it an aid to such a judgement to see that
+Mrs. Burrage was very much pleased with Boston, with Harvard College,
+with her son's interior, with her cup of tea (it was old S&egrave;vres), which
+was not half so bad as she had expected, with the company he had asked
+to meet her (there were three or four gentlemen, one of whom was Mr.
+Gracie), and, last, not least, with Verena Tarrant, whom she addressed
+as a celebrity, kindly, cleverly, but without maternal tenderness or
+anything to mark the difference in their age? She spoke to her as if
+they were equals in that respect, as if Verena's genius and fame would
+make up the disparity, and the girl had no need of encouragement and
+patronage. She made no direct allusion, however, to her particular
+views, and asked her no question about her "gift"&mdash;an omission which
+Verena thought strange, and, with the most speculative candour, spoke of
+to Olive afterwards. Mrs. Burrage seemed to imply that every one present
+had some distinction and some talent, that they were all good company
+together. There was nothing in her manner to indicate that she was
+afraid of Verena on her son's account; she didn't resemble a person who
+would like him to marry the daughter of a mesmeric healer, and yet she
+appeared to think it charming that he should have such a young woman
+there to give gusto to her hour at Cambridge. Poor Olive was, in the
+nature of things, entangled in contradictions; she had a horror of the
+idea of Verena's marrying Mr. Burrage, and yet she was angry when his
+mother demeaned herself as if the little girl with red hair, whose
+freshness she enjoyed, could not be a serious danger. She saw all this
+through the blur of her shyness, the conscious, anxious silence to which
+she was so much of the time condemned. It may therefore be imagined how
+sharp her vision would have been could she only have taken the situation
+more simply; for she was intelligent enough not to have needed to be
+morbid, even for purposes of self-defence.</p>
+
+<p>I must add, however, that there was a moment when she came near being
+happy&mdash;or, at any rate, reflected that it was a pity she could not be
+so. Mrs. Burrage asked her son to play "some little thing," and he sat
+down to his piano and revealed a talent that might well have gratified
+that lady's pride. Olive was extremely susceptible to music, and it was
+impossible to her not to be soothed and beguiled by the young man's
+charming art. One "little thing" succeeded another; his selections were
+all very happy. His guests sat scattered in the red firelight,
+listening, silent, in comfortable attitudes; there was a faint fragrance
+from the burning logs, which mingled with the perfume of Schubert and
+Mendelssohn; the covered lamps made a glow here and there, and the
+cabinets and brackets produced brown shadows, out of which some precious
+object gleamed&mdash;some ivory carving or cinque-cento cup. It was given to
+Olive, under these circumstances, for half an hour, to surrender
+herself, to enjoy the music, to admit that Mr. Burrage played with
+exquisite taste, to feel as if the situation were a kind of truce. Her
+nerves were calmed, her problems&mdash;for the time&mdash;subsided. Civilisation,
+under such an influence, in such a setting, appeared to have done its
+work; harmony ruled the scene; human life ceased to be a battle. She
+went so far as to ask herself why one should have a quarrel with it; the
+relations of men and women, in that picturesque grouping, had not the
+air of being internecine. In short, she had an interval of unexpected
+rest, during which she kept her eyes mainly on Verena, who sat near Mrs.
+Burrage, letting herself go, evidently, more completely than Olive. To
+her, too, music was a delight, and her listening face turned itself to
+different parts of the room, unconsciously, while her eyes vaguely
+rested on the <i>bibelots</i> that emerged into the firelight. At moments
+Mrs. Burrage bent her countenance upon her and smiled, at random,
+kindly; and then Verena smiled back, while her expression seemed to say
+that, oh yes, she was giving up everything, all principles, all
+projects. Even before it was time to go, Olive felt that they were both
+(Verena and she) quite demoralised, and she only summoned energy to take
+her companion away when she heard Mrs. Burrage propose to her to come
+and spend a fortnight in New York. Then Olive exclaimed to herself, "Is
+it a plot? Why in the world can't they let her alone?" and prepared to
+throw a fold of her mantle, as she had done before, over her young
+friend. Verena answered, somewhat impetuously, that she should be
+delighted to visit Mrs. Burrage; then checked her impetuosity, after a
+glance from Olive, by adding that perhaps this lady wouldn't ask her if
+she knew what strong ground she took on the emancipation of women. Mrs.
+Burrage looked at her son and laughed; she said she was perfectly aware
+of Verena's views, and that it was impossible to be more in sympathy
+with them than she herself. She took the greatest interest in the
+emancipation of women; she thought there was so much to be done. These
+were the only remarks that passed in reference to the great subject; and
+nothing more was said to Verena, either by Henry Burrage or by his
+friend Gracie, about her addressing the Harvard students. Verena had
+told her father that Olive had put her veto upon that, and Tarrant had
+said to the young men that it seemed as if Miss Chancellor was going to
+put the thing through in her own way. We know that he thought this way
+very circuitous; but Miss Chancellor made him feel that she was in
+earnest, and that idea frightened the resistance out of him&mdash;it had such
+terrible associations. The people he had ever seen who were most in
+earnest were a committee of gentlemen who had investigated the phenomena
+of the "materialisation" of spirits, some ten years before, and had bent
+the fierce light of the scientific method upon him. To Olive it appeared
+that Mr. Burrage and Mr. Gracie had ceased to be jocular; but that did
+not make them any less cynical. Henry Burrage said to Verena, as she was
+going, that he hoped she would think seriously of his mother's
+invitation; and she replied that she didn't know whether she should have
+much time in the future to give to people who already approved of her
+views: she expected to have her hands full with the others, who didn't.</p>
+
+<p>"Does your scheme of work exclude all distraction, all recreation,
+then?" the young man inquired; and his look expressed real suspense.</p>
+
+<p>Verena referred the matter, as usual, with her air of bright, ungrudging
+deference, to her companion. "Does it, should you say&mdash;our scheme of
+work?"</p>
+
+<p>"I am afraid the distraction we have had this afternoon must last us for
+a long time," Olive said, without harshness, but with considerable
+majesty.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, now, <i>is</i> he to be respected?" Verena demanded, as the two young
+women took their way through the early darkness, pacing quietly side by
+side, in their winter-robes, like women consecrated to some holy office.</p>
+
+<p>Olive turned it over a moment. "Yes, very much&mdash;as a pianist!"</p>
+
+<p>Verena went into town with her in the horse-car&mdash;she was staying in
+Charles Street for a few days&mdash;and that evening she startled Olive by
+breaking out into a reflexion very similar to the whimsical falterings
+of which she herself had been conscious while they sat in Mr. Burrage's
+pretty rooms, but against which she had now violently reacted.</p>
+
+<p>"It would be very nice to do that always&mdash;just to take men as they are,
+and not to have to think about their badness. It would be very nice not
+to have so many questions, but to think they were all comfortably
+answered, so that one could sit there on an old Spanish leather chair,
+with the curtains drawn and keeping out the cold, the darkness, all the
+big, terrible, cruel world&mdash;sit there and listen for ever to Schubert
+and Mendelssohn. <i>They</i> didn't care anything about female suffrage! And
+I didn't feel the want of a vote to-day at all, did you?" Verena
+inquired, ending, as she always ended in these few speculations, with an
+appeal to Olive.</p>
+
+<p>This young lady thought it necessary to give her a very firm answer. "I
+always feel it&mdash;everywhere&mdash;night and day. I feel it <i>here</i>"; and Olive
+laid her hand solemnly on her heart. "I feel it as a deep, unforgettable
+wrong; I feel it as one feels a stain that is on one's honour."</p>
+
+<p>Verena gave a clear laugh, and after that a soft sigh, and then said,
+"Do you know, Olive, I sometimes wonder whether, if it wasn't for you, I
+should feel it so very much!"</p>
+
+<p>"My own friend," Olive replied, "you have never yet said anything to me
+which expressed so clearly the closeness and sanctity of our union."</p>
+
+<p>"You do keep me up," Verena went on. "You are my conscience."</p>
+
+<p>"I should like to be able to say that you are my form&mdash;my envelope. But
+you are too beautiful for that!" So Olive returned her friend's
+compliment; and later she said that, of course, it would be far easier
+to give up everything and draw the curtains to and pass one's life in an
+artificial atmosphere, with rose-coloured lamps. It would be far easier
+to abandon the struggle, to leave all the unhappy women of the world to
+their immemorial misery, to lay down one's burden, close one's eyes to
+the whole dark picture, and, in short, simply expire. To this Verena
+objected that it would not be easy for her to expire at all; that such
+an idea was darker than anything the world contained; that she had not
+done with life yet, and that she didn't mean to allow her
+responsibilities to crush her. And then the two young women concluded,
+as they had concluded before, by finding themselves completely,
+inspiringly in agreement, full of the purpose to live indeed, and with
+high success; to become great, in order not to be obscure, and powerful,
+in order not to be useless. Olive had often declared before that her
+conception of life was as something sublime or as nothing at all. The
+world was full of evil, but she was glad to have been born before it had
+been swept away, while it was still there to face, to give one a task
+and a reward. When the great reforms should be consummated, when the day
+of justice should have dawned, would not life perhaps be rather poor and
+pale? She had never pretended to deny that the hope of fame, of the very
+highest distinction, was one of her strongest incitements; and she held
+that the most effective way of protesting against the state of bondage
+of women was for an individual member of the sex to become illustrious.
+A person who might have overheard some of the talk of this possibly
+infatuated pair would have been touched by their extreme familiarity
+with the idea of earthly glory. Verena had not invented it, but she had
+taken it eagerly from her friend, and she returned it with interest. To
+Olive it appeared that just this partnership of their two minds&mdash;each of
+them, by itself, lacking an important group of facets&mdash;made an organic
+whole which, for the work in hand, could not fail to be brilliantly
+effective. Verena was often far more irresponsive than she liked to see
+her; but the happy thing in her composition was that, after a short
+contact with the divine idea&mdash;Olive was always trying to flash it at
+her, like a jewel in an uncovered case&mdash;she kindled, flamed up, took the
+words from her friend's less persuasive lips, resolved herself into a
+magical voice, became again the pure young sibyl. Then Olive perceived
+how fatally, without Verena's tender notes, her crusade would lack
+sweetness, what the Catholics call unction; and, on the other hand, how
+weak Verena would be on the statistical and logical side if she herself
+should not bring up the rear. Together, in short, they would be
+complete, they would have everything, and together they would triumph.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="XIX" id="XIX"></a>XIX</h2>
+
+
+<p>This idea of their triumph, a triumph as yet ultimate and remote, but
+preceded by the solemn vista of an effort so religious as never to be
+wanting in ecstasy, became tremendously familiar to the two friends, but
+especially to Olive, during the winter of 187-, a season which ushered
+in the most momentous period of Miss Chancellor's life. About Christmas
+a step was taken which advanced her affairs immensely, and put them, to
+her apprehension, on a regular footing. This consisted in Verena's
+coming in to Charles Street to stay with her, in pursuance of an
+arrangement on Olive's part with Selah Tarrant and his wife that she
+should remain for many months. The coast was now perfectly clear. Mrs.
+Farrinder had started on her annual grand tour; she was rousing the
+people, from Maine to Texas; Matthias Pardon (it was to be supposed) had
+received, temporarily at least, his quietus; and Mrs. Luna was
+established in New York, where she had taken a house for a year, and
+whence she wrote to her sister that she was going to engage Basil Ransom
+(with whom she was in communication for this purpose) to do her
+law-business. Olive wondered what law-business Adeline could have, and
+hoped she would get into a pickle with her landlord or her milliner, so
+that repeated interviews with Mr. Ransom might become necessary. Mrs.
+Luna let her know very soon that these interviews had begun; the young
+Mississippian had come to dine with her; he hadn't got started much, by
+what she could make out, and she was even afraid that he didn't dine
+every day. But he wore a tall hat now, like a Northern gentleman, and
+Adeline intimated that she found him really attractive. He had been very
+nice to Newton, told him all about the war (quite the Southern version,
+of course, but Mrs. Luna didn't care anything about American politics,
+and she wanted her son to know all sides), and Newton did nothing but
+talk about him, calling him "Rannie," and imitating his pronunciation of
+certain words. Adeline subsequently wrote that she had made up her mind
+to put her affairs into his hands (Olive sighed, not unmagnanimously, as
+she thought of her sister's "affairs"), and later still she mentioned
+that she was thinking strongly of taking him to be Newton's tutor. She
+wished this interesting child to be privately educated, and it would be
+more agreeable to have in that relation a person who was already, as it
+were, a member of the family. Mrs. Luna wrote as if he were prepared to
+give up his profession to take charge of her son, and Olive was pretty
+sure that this was only a part of her grandeur, of the habit she had
+contracted, especially since living in Europe, of speaking as if in
+every case she required special arrangements.</p>
+
+<p>In spite of the difference in their age, Olive had long since judged
+her, and made up her mind that Adeline lacked every quality that a
+person needed to be interesting in her eyes. She was rich (or
+sufficiently so), she was conventional and timid, very fond of
+attentions from men (with whom indeed she was reputed bold, but Olive
+scorned such boldness as that), given up to a merely personal,
+egotistical, instinctive life, and as unconscious of the tendencies of
+the age, the revenges of the future, the new truths and the great social
+questions, as if she had been a mere bundle of dress-trimmings, which
+she very nearly was. It was perfectly observable that she had no
+conscience, and it irritated Olive deeply to see how much trouble a
+woman was spared when she was constructed on that system. Adeline's
+"affairs," as I have intimated, her social relations, her views of
+Newton's education, her practice and her theory (for she had plenty of
+that, such as it was, heaven save the mark!), her spasmodic disposition
+to marry again, and her still sillier retreats in the presence of danger
+(for she had not even the courage of her frivolity), these things had
+been a subject of tragic consideration to Olive ever since the return of
+the elder sister to America. The tragedy was not in any particular harm
+that Mrs. Luna could do her (for she did her good, rather, that is, she
+did her honour by laughing at her), but in the spectacle itself, the
+drama, guided by the hand of fate, of which the small, ignoble scenes
+unrolled themselves so logically. The <i>d&eacute;nouement</i> would of course be in
+keeping, and would consist simply of the spiritual death of Mrs. Luna,
+who would end by understanding no common speech of Olive's at all, and
+would sink into mere worldly plumpness, into the last complacency, the
+supreme imbecility, of petty, genteel conservatism. As for Newton, he
+would be more utterly odious, if possible, as he grew up, than he was
+already; in fact, he would not grow up at all, but only grow down, if
+his mother should continue her infatuated system with him. He was
+insufferably forward and selfish; under the pretext of keeping him, at
+any cost, refined, Adeline had coddled and caressed him, having him
+always in her petticoats, remitting his lessons when he pretended he had
+an earache, drawing him into the conversation, letting him answer her
+back, with an impertinence beyond his years, when she administered the
+smallest check. The place for him, in Olive's eyes, was one of the
+public schools, where the children of the people would teach him his
+small importance, teach it, if necessary, by the aid of an occasional
+drubbing; and the two ladies had a grand discussion on this point before
+Mrs. Luna left Boston&mdash;a scene which ended in Adeline's clutching the
+irrepressible Newton to her bosom (he came in at the moment), and
+demanding of him a vow that he would live and die in the principles of
+his mother. Mrs. Luna declared that if she must be trampled upon&mdash;and
+very likely it was her fate!&mdash;she would rather be trampled upon by men
+than by women, and that if Olive and her friends should get possession
+of the government they would be worse despots than those who were
+celebrated in history. Newton took an infant oath that he would never be
+a destructive, impious radical, and Olive felt that after this she
+needn't trouble herself any more about her sister, whom she simply
+committed to her fate. That fate might very properly be to marry an
+enemy of her country, a man who, no doubt, desired to treat women with
+the lash and manacles, as he and his people had formerly treated the
+wretched coloured race. If she was so fond of the fine old institutions
+of the past, he would supply them to her in abundance; and if she wanted
+so much to be a conservative, she could try first how she liked being a
+conservative's wife. If Olive troubled herself little about Adeline, she
+troubled herself more about Basil Ransom; she said to herself that since
+he hated women who respected themselves (and each other), destiny would
+use him rightly in hanging a person like Adeline round his neck. That
+would be the way poetic justice ought to work, for him&mdash;and the law that
+our prejudices, when they act themselves out, punish us in doing so.
+Olive considered all this, as it was her effort to consider everything,
+from a very high point of view, and ended by feeling sure it was not for
+the sake of any nervous personal security that she desired to see her
+two relations in New York get mixed up together. If such an event as
+their marriage would gratify her sense of fitness, it would be simply as
+an illustration of certain laws. Olive, thanks to the philosophic cast
+of her mind, was exceedingly fond of illustrations of laws.</p>
+
+<p>I hardly know, however, what illumination it was that sprang from her
+consciousness (now a source of considerable comfort) that Mrs. Farrinder
+was carrying the war into distant territories, and would return to
+Boston only in time to preside at a grand Female Convention, already
+advertised to take place in Boston in the month of June. It was
+agreeable to her that this imperial woman should be away; it made the
+field more free, the air more light; it suggested an exemption from
+official criticism. I have not taken space to mention certain episodes
+of the more recent intercourse of these ladies, and must content myself
+with tracing them, lightly, in their consequences. These may be summed
+up in the remark, which will doubtless startle no one by its freshness,
+that two imperial women are scarcely more likely to hit it off together,
+as the phrase is, than two imperial men. Since that party at Miss
+Birdseye's, so important in its results for Olive, she had had occasion
+to approach Mrs. Farrinder more nearly, and those overtures brought
+forth the knowledge that the great leader of the feminine revolution was
+the one person (in that part of the world) more concentrated, more
+determined, than herself. Miss Chancellor's aspirations, of late, had
+been immensely quickened; she had begun to believe in herself to a
+livelier tune than she had ever listened to before; and she now
+perceived that when spirit meets spirit there must either be mutual
+absorption or a sharp concussion. It had long been familiar to her that
+she should have to count with the obstinacy of the world at large, but
+she now discovered that she should have to count also with certain
+elements in the feminine camp. This complicated the problem, and such a
+complication, naturally, could not make Mrs. Farrinder appear more easy
+to assimilate. If Olive's was a high nature and so was hers, the fault
+was in neither; it was only an admonition that they were not needed as
+landmarks in the same part of the field. If such perceptions are
+delicate as between men, the reader need not be reminded of the
+exquisite form they may assume in natures more refined. So it was that
+Olive passed, in three months, from the stage of veneration to that of
+competition; and the process had been accelerated by the introduction of
+Verena into the fold. Mrs. Farrinder had behaved in the strangest way
+about Verena. First she had been struck with her, and then she hadn't;
+first she had seemed to want to take her in, then she had shied at her
+unmistakably&mdash;intimating to Olive that there were enough of that kind
+already. Of "that kind" indeed!&mdash;the phrase reverberated in Miss
+Chancellor's resentful soul. Was it possible she didn't know the kind
+Verena was of, and with what vulgar aspirants to notoriety did she
+confound her? It had been Olive's original desire to obtain Mrs.
+Farrinder's stamp for her <i>prot&eacute;g&eacute;e</i>; she wished her to hold a
+commission from the commander-in-chief. With this view the two young
+women had made more than one pilgrimage to Roxbury, and on one of these
+occasions the sibylline mood (in its most charming form) had descended
+upon Verena. She had fallen into it, naturally and gracefully, in the
+course of talk, and poured out a stream of eloquence even more touching
+than her regular discourse at Miss Birdseye's. Mrs. Farrinder had taken
+it rather dryly, and certainly it didn't resemble her own style of
+oratory, remarkable and cogent as this was. There had been considerable
+question of her writing a letter to the New York <i>Tribune</i>, the effect
+of which should be to launch Miss Tarrant into renown; but this
+beneficent epistle never appeared, and now Olive saw that there was no
+favour to come from the prophetess of Roxbury. There had been
+primnesses, pruderies, small reserves, which ended by staying her pen.
+If Olive didn't say at once that she was jealous of Verena's more
+attractive manner, it was only because such a declaration was destined
+to produce more effect a little later. What she did say was that
+evidently Mrs. Farrinder wanted to keep the movement in her own
+hands&mdash;viewed with suspicion certain romantic, esthetic elements which
+Olive and Verena seemed to be trying to introduce into it. They insisted
+so much, for instance, on the historic unhappiness of women; but Mrs.
+Farrinder didn't appear to care anything for that, or indeed to know
+much about history at all. She seemed to begin just to-day, and she
+demanded their rights for them whether they were unhappy or not. The
+upshot of this was that Olive threw herself on Verena's neck with a
+movement which was half indignation, half rapture; she exclaimed that
+they would have to fight the battle without human help, but, after all,
+it was better so. If they were all in all to each other, what more could
+they want? They would be isolated, but they would be free; and this view
+of the situation brought with it a feeling that they had almost already
+begun to be a force. It was not, indeed, that Olive's resentment faded
+quite away; for not only had she the sense, doubtless very presumptuous,
+that Mrs. Farrinder was the only person thereabouts of a stature to
+judge her (a sufficient cause of antagonism in itself, for if we like to
+be praised by our betters we prefer that censure should come from the
+other sort), but the kind of opinion she had unexpectedly betrayed,
+after implying such esteem in the earlier phase of their intercourse,
+made Olive's cheeks occasionally flush. She prayed heaven that <i>she</i>
+might never become so personal, so narrow. She was frivolous, worldly,
+an amateur, a trifler, a frequenter of Beacon Street; her taking up
+Verena Tarrant was only a kind of elderly, ridiculous doll-dressing:
+this was the light in which Miss Chancellor had reason to believe that
+it now suited Mrs. Farrinder to regard her! It was fortunate, perhaps,
+that the misrepresentation was so gross; yet, none the less, tears of
+wrath rose more than once to Olive's eyes when she reflected that this
+particular wrong had been put upon her. Frivolous, worldly, Beacon
+Street! She appealed to Verena to share in her pledge that the world
+should know in due time how much of that sort of thing there was about
+her. As I have already hinted, Verena at such moments quite rose to the
+occasion; she had private pangs at committing herself to give the cold
+shoulder to Beacon Street for ever; but she was now so completely in
+Olive's hands that there was no sacrifice to which she would not have
+consented in order to prove that her benefactress was not frivolous.</p>
+
+<p>The matter of her coming to stay for so long in Charles Street was
+arranged during a visit that Selah Tarrant paid there at Miss
+Chancellor's request. This interview, which had some curious features,
+would be worth describing but I am forbidden to do more than mention the
+most striking of these. Olive wished to have an understanding with him;
+wished the situation to be clear, so that, disagreeable as it would be
+to her to receive him, she sent him a summons for a certain hour&mdash;an
+hour at which she had planned that Verena should be out of the house.
+She withheld this incident from the girl's knowledge, reflecting with
+some solemnity that it was the first deception (for Olive her silence
+was a deception) that she had yet practised on her friend, and wondering
+whether she should have to practise others in the future. She then and
+there made up her mind that she would not shrink from others should they
+be necessary. She notified Tarrant that she should keep Verena a long
+time, and Tarrant remarked that it was certainly very pleasant to see
+her so happily located. But he also intimated that he should like to
+know what Miss Chancellor laid out to do with her; and the tone of this
+suggestion made Olive feel how right she had been to foresee that their
+interview would have the stamp of business. It assumed that complexion
+very definitely when she crossed over to her desk and wrote Mr. Tarrant
+a cheque for a very considerable amount. "Leave us alone&mdash;entirely
+alone&mdash;for a year, and then I will write you another": it was with these
+words she handed him the little strip of paper that meant so much,
+feeling, as she did so, that surely Mrs. Farrinder herself could not be
+less amateurish than that. Selah looked at the cheque, at Miss
+Chancellor, at the cheque again, at the ceiling, at the floor, at the
+clock, and once more at his hostess; then the document disappeared
+beneath the folds of his waterproof, and she saw that he was putting it
+into some queer place on his queer person. "Well, if I didn't believe
+you were going to help her to develop," he remarked; and he stopped,
+while his hands continued to fumble, out of sight, and he treated Olive
+to his large joyless smile. She assured him that he need have no fear on
+that score; Verena's development was the thing in the world in which she
+took most interest; she should have every opportunity for a free
+expansion. "Yes, that's the great thing," Selah said; "it's more
+important than attracting a crowd. That's all we shall ask of you; let
+her act out her nature. Don't all the trouble of humanity come from our
+being pressed back? Don't shut down the cover, Miss Chancellor; just let
+her overflow!" And again Tarrant illuminated his inquiry, his metaphor,
+by the strange and silent lateral movement of his jaws. He added,
+presently, that he supposed he should have to fix it with Mis' Tarrant;
+but Olive made no answer to that; she only looked at him with a face in
+which she intended to express that there was nothing that need detain
+him longer. She knew it had been fixed with Mrs. Tarrant; she had been
+over all that with Verena, who had told her that her mother was willing
+to sacrifice her for her highest good. She had reason to know (not
+through Verena, of course) that Mrs. Tarrant had embraced, tenderly, the
+idea of a pecuniary compensation, and there was no fear of her making a
+scene when Tarrant should come back with a cheque in his pocket. "Well,
+I trust she <i>may</i> develop, richly, and that you may accomplish what you
+desire; it seems as if we had only a little way to go further," that
+worthy observed, as he erected himself for departure.</p>
+
+<p>"It's not a little way; it's a very long way," Olive replied, rather
+sternly.</p>
+
+<p>Tarrant was on the threshold; he lingered a little, embarrassed by her
+grimness, for he himself had always inclined to rose-coloured views of
+progress, of the march of truth. He had never met any one so much in
+earnest as this definite, literal young woman, who had taken such an
+unhoped-for fancy to his daughter; whose longing for the new day had
+such perversities of pessimism, and who, in the midst of something that
+appeared to be terribly searching in her honesty, was willing to corrupt
+him, as a father, with the most extravagant orders on her bank. He
+hardly knew in what language to speak to her; it seemed as if there was
+nothing soothing enough, when a lady adopted that tone about a movement
+which was thought by some of the brightest to be so promising. "Oh,
+well, I guess there's some kind of mysterious law...." he murmured,
+almost timidly; and so he passed from Miss Chancellor's sight.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="XX" id="XX"></a>XX</h2>
+
+
+<p>She hoped she should not soon see him again, and there appeared to be no
+reason she should, if their intercourse was to be conducted by means of
+cheques. The understanding with Verena was, of course, complete; she had
+promised to stay with her friend as long as her friend should require
+it. She had said at first that she couldn't give up her mother, but she
+had been made to feel that there was no question of giving up. She
+should be as free as air, to go and come; she could spend hours and days
+with her mother, whenever Mrs. Tarrant required her attention; all that
+Olive asked of her was that, for the time, she should regard Charles
+Street as her home. There was no struggle about this, for the simple
+reason that by the time the question came to the front Verena was
+completely under the charm. The idea of Olive's charm will perhaps make
+the reader smile; but I use the word not in its derived, but in its
+literal sense. The fine web of authority, of dependence, that her
+strenuous companion had woven about her, was now as dense as a suit of
+golden mail; and Verena was thoroughly interested in their great
+undertaking; she saw it in the light of an active, enthusiastic faith.
+The benefit that her father desired for her was now assured; she
+expanded, developed, on the most liberal scale. Olive saw the
+difference, and you may imagine how she rejoiced in it; she had never
+known a greater pleasure. Verena's former attitude had been girlish
+submission, grateful, curious sympathy. She had given herself, in her
+young, amused surprise, because Olive's stronger will and the incisive
+proceedings with which she pointed her purpose drew her on. Besides, she
+was held by hospitality, the vision of new social horizons, the sense of
+novelty, and the love of change. But now the girl was disinterestedly
+attached to the precious things they were to do together; she cared
+about them for themselves, believed in them ardently, had them
+constantly in mind. Her share in the union of the two young women was no
+longer passive, purely appreciative; it was passionate, too, and it put
+forth a beautiful energy. If Olive desired to get Verena into training,
+she could flatter herself that the process had already begun, and that
+her colleague enjoyed it almost as much as she. Therefore she could say
+to herself, without the imputation of heartlessness, that when she left
+her mother it was for a noble, a sacred use. In point of fact, she left
+her very little, and she spent hours in jingling, aching, jostled
+journeys between Charles Street and the stale suburban cottage. Mrs.
+Tarrant sighed and grimaced, wrapped herself more than ever in her
+mantle, said she didn't know as she was fit to struggle alone, and that,
+half the time, if Verena was away, she wouldn't have the nerve to answer
+the door-bell; she was incapable, of course, of neglecting such an
+opportunity to posture as one who paid with her heart's blood for
+leading the van of human progress. But Verena had an inner sense (she
+judged her mother now, a little, for the first time) that she would be
+sorry to be taken at her word, and that she felt safe enough in trusting
+to her daughter's generosity. She could not divest herself of the
+faith&mdash;even now that Mrs. Luna was gone, leaving no trace, and the grey
+walls of a sedentary winter were apparently closing about the two young
+women&mdash;she could not renounce the theory that a residence in Charles
+Street must at least produce some contact with the brilliant classes.
+She was vexed at her daughter's resignation to not going to parties and
+to Miss Chancellor's not giving them; but it was nothing new for her to
+have to practise patience, and she could feel, at least, that it was
+just as handy for Mr. Burrage to call on the child in town, where he
+spent half his time, sleeping constantly at Parker's.</p>
+
+<p>It was a fact that this fortunate youth called very often, and Verena
+saw him with Olive's full concurrence whenever she was at home. It had
+now been quite agreed between them that no artificial limits should be
+set to the famous phase; and Olive had, while it lasted, a sense of real
+heroism in steeling herself against uneasiness. It seemed to her,
+moreover, only justice that she should make some concession; if Verena
+made a great sacrifice of filial duty in coming to live with her (this,
+of course, should be permanent&mdash;she would buy off the Tarrants from year
+to year), she must not incur the imputation (the world would judge her,
+in that case, ferociously) of keeping her from forming common social
+ties. The friendship of a young man and a young woman was, according to
+the pure code of New England, a common social tie; and as the weeks
+elapsed Miss Chancellor saw no reason to repent of her temerity. Verena
+was not falling in love; she felt that she should know it, should guess
+it on the spot. Verena was fond of human intercourse; she was
+essentially a sociable creature; she liked to shine and smile and talk
+and listen; and so far as Henry Burrage was concerned he introduced an
+element of easy and convenient relaxation into a life now a good deal
+stiffened (Olive was perfectly willing to own it) by great civic
+purposes. But the girl was being saved, without interference, by the
+simple operation of her interest in those very designs. From this time
+there was no need of putting pressure on her; her own springs were
+working; the fire with which she glowed came from within. Sacredly,
+brightly single she would remain; her only espousals would be at the
+altar of a great cause. Olive always absented herself when Mr. Burrage
+was announced; and when Verena afterwards attempted to give some account
+of his conversation she checked her, said she would rather know nothing
+about it&mdash;all with a very solemn mildness; this made her feel very
+superior, truly noble. She knew by this time (I scarcely can tell how,
+since Verena could give her no report) exactly what sort of a youth Mr.
+Burrage was: he was weakly pretentious, softly original, cultivated
+eccentricity, patronised progress, liked to have mysteries, sudden
+appointments to keep, anonymous persons to visit, the air of leading a
+double life, of being devoted to a girl whom people didn't know, or at
+least didn't meet. Of course he liked to make an impression on Verena;
+but what he mainly liked was to play her off upon the other girls, the
+daughters of fashion, with whom he danced at Papanti's. Such were the
+images that proceeded from Olive's rich moral consciousness. "Well, he
+<i>is</i> greatly interested in our movement": so much Verena once managed to
+announce; but the words rather irritated Miss Chancellor, who, as we
+know, did not care to allow for accidental exceptions in the great
+masculine conspiracy.</p>
+
+<p>In the month of March Verena told her that Mr. Burrage was offering
+matrimony&mdash;offering it with much insistence, begging that she would at
+least wait and think of it before giving him a final answer. Verena was
+evidently very glad to be able to say to Olive that she had assured him
+she couldn't think of it, and that if he expected this he had better not
+come any more. He continued to come, and it was therefore to be supposed
+that he had ceased to count on such a concession; it was now Olive's
+opinion that he really didn't desire it. She had a theory that he
+proposed to almost any girl who was not likely to accept him&mdash;did it
+because he was making a collection of such episodes&mdash;a mental album of
+declarations, blushes, hesitations, refusals that just missed imposing
+themselves as acceptances, quite as he collected enamels and Cremona
+violins. He would be very sorry indeed to ally himself to the house of
+Tarrant; but such a fear didn't prevent him from holding it becoming in
+a man of taste to give that encouragement to low-born girls who were
+pretty, for one looked out for the special cases in which, for reasons
+(even the lowest might have reasons), they wouldn't "rise." "I told you
+I wouldn't marry him, and I won't," Verena said, delightedly, to her
+friend; her tone suggested that a certain credit belonged to her for the
+way she carried out her assurance. "I never thought you would, if you
+didn't want to," Olive replied to this; and Verena could have no
+rejoinder but the good-humour that sat in her eyes, unable as she was to
+say that she had wanted to. They had a little discussion, however, when
+she intimated that she pitied him for his discomfiture, Olive's
+contention being that, selfish, conceited, pampered and insincere, he
+might properly be left now to digest his affront. Miss Chancellor felt
+none of the remorse now that she would have felt six months before at
+standing in the way of such a chance for Verena, and she would have been
+very angry if any one had asked her if she were not afraid of taking too
+much upon herself. She would have said, moreover, that she stood in no
+one's way, and that even if she were not there Verena would never think
+seriously of a frivolous little man who fiddled while Rome was burning.
+This did not prevent Olive from making up her mind that they had better
+go to Europe in the spring; a year's residence in that quarter of the
+globe would be highly agreeable to Verena, and might even contribute to
+the evolution of her genius. It cost Miss Chancellor an effort to admit
+that any virtue still lingered in the elder world, and that it could
+have any important lesson for two such good Americans as her friend and
+herself; but it suited her just then to make this assumption, which was
+not altogether sincere. It was recommended by the idea that it would get
+her companion out of the way&mdash;out of the way of officious
+fellow-citizens&mdash;till she should be absolutely firm on her feet, and
+would also give greater intensity to their own long conversation. On
+that continent of strangers they would cleave more closely still to each
+other. This, of course, would be to fly before the inevitable "phase,"
+much more than to face it; but Olive decided that if they should reach
+unscathed the term of their delay (the first of July) she should have
+faced it as much as either justice or generosity demanded. I may as well
+say at once that she traversed most of this period without further
+serious alarms and with a great many little thrills of bliss and hope.</p>
+
+<p>Nothing happened to dissipate the good omens with which her partnership
+with Verena Tarrant was at present surrounded. They threw themselves
+into study; they had innumerable big books from the Athen&aelig;um, and
+consumed the midnight oil. Henry Burrage, after Verena had shaken her
+head at him so sweetly and sadly, returned to New York, giving no sign;
+they only heard that he had taken refuge under the ruffled maternal
+wing. (Olive, at least, took for granted the wing was ruffled; she could
+fancy how Mrs. Burrage would be affected by the knowledge that her son
+had been refused by the daughter of a mesmeric healer. She would be
+almost as angry as if she had learnt that he had been accepted.)
+Matthias Pardon had not yet taken his revenge in the newspapers; he was
+perhaps nursing his thunderbolts; at any rate, now that the operatic
+season had begun, he was much occupied in interviewing the principal
+singers, one of whom he described in one of the leading journals (Olive,
+at least, was sure it was only he who could write like that) as "a dear
+little woman with baby dimples and kittenish movements." The Tarrants
+were apparently given up to a measure of sensual ease with which they
+had not hitherto been familiar, thanks to the increase of income that
+they drew from their eccentric protectress. Mrs. Tarrant now enjoyed the
+ministrations of a "girl"; it was partly her pride (at any rate, she
+chose to give it this turn) that her house had for many years been
+conducted without the element&mdash;so debasing on both sides&mdash;of servile,
+mercenary labour. She wrote to Olive (she was perpetually writing to her
+now, but Olive never answered) that she was conscious of having fallen
+to a lower plane, but she admitted that it was a prop to her wasted
+spirit to have some one to converse with when Selah was off. Verena, of
+course, perceived the difference, which was inadequately explained by
+the theory of a sudden increase of her father's practice (nothing of her
+father's had ever increased like that), and ended by guessing the cause
+of it&mdash;a discovery which did not in the least disturb her equanimity.
+She accepted the idea that her parents should receive a pecuniary
+tribute from the extraordinary friend whom she had encountered on the
+threshold of womanhood, just as she herself accepted that friend's
+irresistible hospitality. She had no worldly pride, no traditions of
+independence, no ideas of what was done and what was not done; but there
+was only one thing that equalled this perfectly gentle and natural
+insensibility to favours&mdash;namely, the inveteracy of her habit of not
+asking them. Olive had had an apprehension that she would flush a little
+at learning the terms on which they should now be able to pursue their
+career together; but Verena never changed colour; it was either not new
+or not disagreeable to her that the authors of her being should be
+bought off, silenced by money, treated as the troublesome of the lower
+orders are treated when they are not locked up; so that her friend had a
+perception, after this, that it would probably be impossible in any way
+ever to offend her. She was too rancourless, too detached from
+conventional standards, too free from private self-reference. It was too
+much to say of her that she forgave injuries, since she was not
+conscious of them; there was in forgiveness a certain arrogance of which
+she was incapable, and her bright mildness glided over the many traps
+that life sets for our consistency. Olive had always held that pride was
+necessary to character, but there was no peculiarity of Verena's that
+could make her spirit seem less pure. The added luxuries in the little
+house at Cambridge, which even with their help was still such a penal
+settlement, made her feel afresh that before she came to the rescue the
+daughter of that house had traversed a desert of sordid misery. She had
+cooked and washed and swept and stitched; she had worked harder than any
+of Miss Chancellor's servants. These things had left no trace upon her
+person or her mind; everything fresh and fair renewed itself in her with
+extraordinary facility, everything ugly and tiresome evaporated as soon
+as it touched her; but Olive deemed that, being what she was, she had a
+right to immense compensations. In the future she should have exceeding
+luxury and ease, and Miss Chancellor had no difficulty in persuading
+herself that persons doing the high intellectual and moral work to which
+the two young ladies in Charles Street were now committed owed it to
+themselves, owed it to the groaning sisterhood, to cultivate the best
+material conditions. She herself was nothing of a sybarite, and she had
+proved, visiting the alleys and slums of Boston in the service of the
+Associated Charities, that there was no foulness of disease or misery
+she feared to look in the face; but her house had always been thoroughly
+well regulated, she was passionately clean, and she was an excellent
+woman of business. Now, however, she elevated daintiness to a religion;
+her interior shone with superfluous friction, with punctuality, with
+winter roses. Among these soft influences Verena herself bloomed like
+the flower that attains such perfection in Boston. Olive had always
+rated high the native refinement of her country-women, their latent
+"adaptability," their talent for accommodating themselves at a glance to
+changed conditions; but the way her companion rose with the level of the
+civilisation that surrounded her, the way she assimilated all delicacies
+and absorbed all traditions, left this friendly theory halting behind.
+The winter days were still, indoors, in Charles Street, and the winter
+nights secure from interruption. Our two young women had plenty of
+duties, but Olive had never favoured the custom of running in and out.
+Much conference on social and reformatory topics went forward under her
+roof, and she received her colleagues&mdash;she belonged to twenty
+associations and committees&mdash;only at pre-appointed hours, which she
+expected them to observe rigidly. Verena's share in these proceedings
+was not active; she hovered over them, smiling, listening, dropping
+occasionally a fanciful though never an idle word, like some gently
+animated image placed there for good omen. It was understood that her
+part was before the scenes, not behind; that she was not a prompter, but
+(potentially, at least) a "popular favourite," and that the work over
+which Miss Chancellor presided so efficiently was a general preparation
+of the platform on which, later, her companion would execute the most
+striking steps.</p>
+
+<p>The western windows of Olive's drawing-room, looking over the water,
+took in the red sunsets of winter; the long, low bridge that crawled, on
+its staggering posts, across the Charles; the casual patches of ice and
+snow; the desolate suburban horizons, peeled and made bald by the rigour
+of the season; the general hard, cold void of the prospect; the
+extrusion, at Charlestown, at Cambridge, of a few chimneys and steeples,
+straight, sordid tubes of factories and engine-shops, or spare,
+heavenward finger of the New England meeting-house. There was something
+inexorable in the poverty of the scene, shameful in the meanness of its
+details, which gave a collective impression of boards and tin and frozen
+earth, sheds and rotting piles, railway-lines striding flat across a
+thoroughfare of puddles, and tracks of the humbler, the universal
+horse-car, traversing obliquely this path of danger; loose fences,
+vacant lots, mounds of refuse, yards bestrewn with iron pipes, telegraph
+poles, and bare wooden backs of places. Verena thought such a view
+lovely, and she was by no means without excuse when, as the afternoon
+closed, the ugly picture was tinted with a clear, cold rosiness. The
+air, in its windless chill, seemed to tinkle like a crystal, the
+faintest gradations of tone were perceptible in the sky, the west became
+deep and delicate, everything grew doubly distinct before taking on the
+dimness of evening. There were pink flushes on snow, "tender" reflexions
+in patches of stiffened marsh, sounds of car-bells, no longer vulgar,
+but almost silvery, on the long bridge, lonely outlines of distant dusky
+undulations against the fading glow. These agreeable effects used to
+light up that end of the drawing-room, and Olive often sat at the window
+with her companion before it was time for the lamp. They admired the
+sunsets, they rejoiced in the ruddy spots projected upon the
+parlour-wall, they followed the darkening perspective in fanciful
+excursions. They watched the stellar points come out at last in a colder
+heaven, and then, shuddering a little, arm in arm, they turned away,
+with a sense that the winter night was even more cruel than the tyranny
+of men&mdash;turned back to drawn curtains and a brighter fire and a
+glittering tea-tray and more and more talk about the long martyrdom of
+women, a subject as to which Olive was inexhaustible and really most
+interesting. There were some nights of deep snowfall, when Charles
+Street was white and muffled and the door-bell foredoomed to silence,
+which seemed little islands of lamp-light, of enlarged and intensified
+vision. They read a great deal of history together, and read it ever
+with the same thought&mdash;that of finding confirmation in it for this idea
+that their sex had suffered inexpressibly, and that at any moment in the
+course of human affairs the state of the world would have been so much
+less horrible (history seemed to them in every way horrible) if women
+had been able to press down the scale. Verena was full of suggestions
+which stimulated discussions; it was she, oftenest, who kept in view the
+fact that a good many women in the past had been entrusted with power
+and had not always used it amiably, who brought up the wicked queens,
+the profligate mistresses of kings. These ladies were easily disposed of
+between the two, and the public crimes of Bloody Mary, the private
+misdemeanours of Faustina, wife of the pure Marcus Aurelius, were very
+satisfactorily classified. If the influence of women in the past
+accounted for every act of virtue that men had happened to achieve, it
+only made the matter balance properly that the influence of men should
+explain the casual irregularities of the other sex. Olive could see how
+few books had passed through Verena's hands, and how little the home of
+the Tarrants had been a house of reading; but the girl now traversed the
+fields of literature with her characteristic lightness of step.
+Everything she turned to or took up became an illustration of the
+facility, the "giftedness," which Olive, who had so little of it, never
+ceased to wonder at and prize. Nothing frightened her; she always smiled
+at it, she could do anything she tried. As she knew how to do other
+things, she knew how to study; she read quickly and remembered
+infallibly; could repeat, days afterward, passages that she appeared
+only to have glanced at. Olive, of course, was more and more happy to
+think that their cause should have the services of an organisation so
+rare.</p>
+
+<p>All this doubtless sounds rather dry, and I hasten to add that our
+friends were not always shut up in Miss Chancellor's strenuous parlour.
+In spite of Olive's desire to keep her precious inmate to herself and to
+bend her attention upon their common studies, in spite of her constantly
+reminding Verena that this winter was to be purely educative and that
+the platitudes of the satisfied and unregenerate would have little to
+teach her, in spite, in short, of the severe and constant duality of our
+young women, it must not be supposed that their life had not many
+personal confluents and tributaries. Individual and original as Miss
+Chancellor was universally acknowledged to be, she was yet a typical
+Bostonian, and as a typical Bostonian she could not fail to belong in
+some degree to a "set." It had been said of her that she was in it but
+not of it; but she was of it enough to go occasionally into other houses
+and to receive their occupants in her own. It was her belief that she
+filled her tea-pot with the spoon of hospitality, and made a good many
+select spirits feel that they were welcome under her roof at convenient
+hours. She had a preference for what she called <i>real</i> people, and there
+were several whose reality she had tested by arts known to herself. This
+little society was rather suburban and miscellaneous; it was prolific in
+ladies who trotted about, early and late, with books from the Athen&aelig;um
+nursed behind their muff, or little nosegays of exquisite flowers that
+they were carrying as presents to each other. Verena, who, when Olive
+was not with her, indulged in a good deal of desultory contemplation at
+the window, saw them pass the house in Charles Street, always apparently
+straining a little, as if they might be too late for something. At
+almost any time, for she envied their preoccupation, she would have
+taken the chance with them. Very often, when she described them to her
+mother, Mrs. Tarrant didn't know who they were; there were even days
+(she had so many discouragements) when it seemed as if she didn't want
+to know. So long as they were not some one else, it seemed to be no use
+that they were themselves; whoever they were, they were sure to have
+that defect. Even after all her mother's disquisitions Verena had but
+vague ideas as to whom she would have liked them to be; and it was only
+when the girl talked of the concerts, to all of which Olive subscribed
+and conducted her inseparable friend, that Mrs. Tarrant appeared to feel
+in any degree that her daughter was living up to the standard formed for
+her in their Cambridge home. As all the world knows, the opportunities
+in Boston for hearing good music are numerous and excellent, and it had
+long been Miss Chancellor's practice to cultivate the best. She went in,
+as the phrase is, for the superior programmes, and that high, dim,
+dignified Music Hall, which has echoed in its time to so much eloquence
+and so much melody, and of which the very proportions and colour seem to
+teach respect and attention, shed the protection of its illuminated
+cornice, this winter, upon no faces more intelligently upturned than
+those of the young women for whom Bach and Beethoven only repeated, in a
+myriad forms, the idea that was always with them. Symphonies and fugues
+only stimulated their convictions, excited their revolutionary passion,
+led their imagination further in the direction in which it was always
+pressing. It lifted them to immeasurable heights; and as they sat
+looking at the great florid, sombre organ, overhanging the bronze statue
+of Beethoven, they felt that this was the only temple in which the
+votaries of their creed could worship.</p>
+
+<p>And yet their music was not their greatest joy, for they had two others
+which they cultivated at least as zealously. One of these was simply the
+society of old Miss Birdseye, of whom Olive saw more this winter than
+she had ever seen before. It had become apparent that her long and
+beautiful career was drawing to a close, her earnest, unremitting work
+was over, her old-fashioned weapons were broken and dull. Olive would
+have liked to hang them up as venerable relics of a patient fight, and
+this was what she seemed to do when she made the poor lady relate her
+battles&mdash;never glorious and brilliant, but obscure and wastefully
+heroic&mdash;call back the figures of her companions in arms, exhibit her
+medals and scars. Miss Birdseye knew that her uses were ended; she might
+pretend still to go about the business of unpopular causes, might fumble
+for papers in her immemorial satchel and think she had important
+appointments, might sign petitions, attend conventions, say to Doctor
+Prance that if she would only make her sleep she should live to see a
+great many improvements yet; she ached and was weary, growing almost as
+glad to look back (a great anomaly for Miss Birdseye) as to look
+forward. She let herself be coddled now by her friends of the new
+generation; there were days when she seemed to want nothing better than
+to sit by Olive's fire and ramble on about the old struggles, with a
+vague, comfortable sense&mdash;no physical rapture of Miss Birdseye's could
+be very acute&mdash;of immunity from wet feet, from the draughts that prevail
+at thin meetings, of independence of street-cars that would probably
+arrive overflowing; and also a pleased perception, not that she was an
+example to these fresh lives which began with more advantages than hers,
+but that she was in some degree an encouragement, as she helped them to
+measure the way the new truths had advanced&mdash;being able to tell them of
+such a different state of things when she was a young lady, the daughter
+of a very talented teacher (indeed her mother had been a teacher too),
+down in Connecticut. She had always had for Olive a kind of aroma of
+martyrdom, and her battered, unremunerated, un-pensioned old age brought
+angry tears, springing from depths of outraged theory, into Miss
+Chancellor's eyes. For Verena, too, she was a picturesque humanitary
+figure. Verena had been in the habit of meeting martyrs from her
+childhood up, but she had seen none with so many reminiscences as Miss
+Birdseye, or who had been so nearly scorched by penal fires. She had had
+escapes, in the early days of abolitionism, which it was a marvel she
+could tell with so little implication that she had shown courage. She
+had roamed through certain parts of the South, carrying the Bible to the
+slave; and more than one of her companions, in the course of these
+expeditions, had been tarred and feathered. She herself, at one season,
+had spent a month in a Georgian jail. She had preached temperance in
+Irish circles where the doctrine was received with missiles; she had
+interfered between wives and husbands mad with drink; she had taken
+filthy children, picked up in the street, to her own poor rooms, and had
+removed their pestilent rags and washed their sore bodies with slippery
+little hands. In her own person she appeared to Olive and Verena a
+representative of suffering humanity; the pity they felt for her was
+part of their pity for all who were weakest and most hardly used; and it
+struck Miss Chancellor (more especially) that this frumpy little
+missionary was the last link in a tradition, and that when she should be
+called away the heroic age of New England life&mdash;the age of plain living
+and high thinking, of pure ideals and earnest effort, of moral passion
+and noble experiment&mdash;would effectually be closed. It was the perennial
+freshness of Miss Birdseye's faith that had had such a contagion for
+these modern maidens, the unquenched flame of her transcendentalism, the
+simplicity of her vision, the way in which, in spite of mistakes,
+deceptions, the changing fashions of reform, which make the remedies of
+a previous generation look as ridiculous as their bonnets, the only
+thing that was still actual for her was the elevation of the species by
+the reading of Emerson and the frequentation of Tremont Temple. Olive
+had been active enough, for years, in the city-missions; she too had
+scoured dirty children, and, in squalid lodging-houses, had gone into
+rooms where the domestic situation was strained and the noises made the
+neighbours turn pale. But she reflected that after such exertions she
+had the refreshment of a pretty house, a drawing-room full of flowers, a
+crackling hearth, where she threw in pine-cones and made them snap, an
+imported tea-service, a Chickering piano, and the <i>Deutsche Rundschau</i>;
+whereas Miss Birdseye had only a bare, vulgar room, with a hideous
+flowered carpet (it looked like a dentist's), a cold furnace, the
+evening paper, and Doctor Prance. Olive and Verena were present at
+another of her gatherings before the winter ended; it resembled the
+occasion that we described at the beginning of this history, with the
+difference that Mrs. Farrinder was not there to oppress the company with
+her greatness, and that Verena made a speech without the co-operation of
+her father. This young lady had delivered herself with even finer effect
+than before, and Olive could see how much she had gained, in confidence
+and range of allusion, since the educative process in Charles Street
+began. Her <i>motif</i> was now a kind of unprepared tribute to Miss
+Birdseye, the fruit of the occasion and of the unanimous tenderness of
+the younger members of the circle, which made her a willing mouthpiece.
+She pictured her laborious career, her early associates (Eliza P.
+Moseley was not neglected as Verena passed), her difficulties and
+dangers and triumphs, her humanising effect upon so many, her serene and
+honoured old age&mdash;expressed, in short, as one of the ladies said, just
+the very way they all felt about her. Verena's face brightened and grew
+triumphant as she spoke, but she brought tears into the eyes of most of
+the others. It was Olive's opinion that nothing could be more graceful
+and touching, and she saw that the impression made was now deeper than
+on the former evening. Miss Birdseye went about with her eighty years of
+innocence, her undiscriminating spectacles, asking her friends if it
+wasn't perfectly splendid; she took none of it to herself, she regarded
+it only as a brilliant expression of Verena's gift. Olive thought,
+afterwards, that if a collection could only be taken up on the spot, the
+good lady would be made easy for the rest of her days; then she
+remembered that most of her guests were as impecunious as herself.</p>
+
+<p>I have intimated that our young friends had a source of fortifying
+emotion which was distinct from the hours they spent with Beethoven and
+Bach, or in hearing Miss Birdseye describe Concord as it used to be.
+This consisted in the wonderful insight they had obtained into the
+history of feminine anguish. They perused that chapter perpetually and
+zealously, and they derived from it the purest part of their mission.
+Olive had pored over it so long, so earnestly, that she was now in
+complete possession of the subject; it was the one thing in life which
+she felt she had really mastered. She was able to exhibit it to Verena
+with the greatest authority and accuracy, to lead her up and down, in
+and out, through all the darkest and most tortuous passages. We know
+that she was without belief in her own eloquence, but she was very
+eloquent when she reminded Verena how the exquisite weakness of women
+had never been their defence, but had only exposed them to sufferings
+more acute than masculine grossness can conceive. Their odious partner
+had trampled upon them from the beginning of time, and their tenderness,
+their abnegation, had been his opportunity. All the bullied wives, the
+stricken mothers, the dishonoured, deserted maidens who have lived on
+the earth and longed to leave it, passed and repassed before her eyes,
+and the interminable dim procession seemed to stretch out a myriad hands
+to her. She sat with them at their trembling vigils, listened for the
+tread, the voice, at which they grew pale and sick, walked with them by
+the dark waters that offered to wash away misery and shame, took with
+them, even, when the vision grew intense, the last shuddering leap. She
+had analysed to an extraordinary fineness their susceptibility, their
+softness; she knew (or she thought she knew) all the possible tortures
+of anxiety, of suspense and dread; and she had made up her mind that it
+was women, in the end, who had paid for everything. In the last resort
+the whole burden of the human lot came upon them; it pressed upon them
+far more than on the others, the intolerable load of fate. It was they
+who sat cramped and chained to receive it; it was they who had done all
+the waiting and taken all the wounds. The sacrifices, the blood, the
+tears, the terrors were theirs. Their organism was in itself a challenge
+to suffering, and men had practised upon it with an impudence that knew
+no bounds. As they were the weakest most had been wrung from them, and
+as they were the most generous they had been most deceived. Olive
+Chancellor would have rested her case, had it been necessary, on those
+general facts; and her simple and comprehensive contention was that the
+peculiar wretchedness which had been the very essence of the feminine
+lot was a monstrous artificial imposition, crying aloud for redress. She
+was willing to admit that women, too, could be bad; that there were many
+about the world who were false, immoral, vile. But their errors were as
+nothing to their sufferings; they had expiated, in advance, an eternity,
+if need be, of misconduct. Olive poured forth these views to her
+listening and responsive friend; she presented them again and again, and
+there was no light in which they did not seem to palpitate with truth.
+Verena was immensely wrought upon; a subtle fire passed into her; she
+was not so hungry for revenge as Olive, but at the last, before they
+went to Europe (I shall take no place to describe the manner in which
+she threw herself into that project), she quite agreed with her
+companion that after so many ages of wrong (it would also be after the
+European journey) men must take <i>their</i> turn, men must pay!</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="BOOK_SECOND" id="BOOK_SECOND"></a>BOOK SECOND</h2>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="XXI" id="XXI"></a>XXI</h2>
+
+
+<p>Basil Ransom lived in New York, rather far to the eastward, and in the
+upper reaches of the town; he occupied two small shabby rooms in a
+somewhat decayed mansion which stood next to the corner of the Second
+Avenue. The corner itself was formed by a considerable grocer's shop,
+the near neighbourhood of which was fatal to any pretensions Ransom and
+his fellow-lodgers might have had in regard to gentility of situation.
+The house had a red, rusty face, and faded green shutters, of which the
+slats were limp and at variance with each other. In one of the lower
+windows was suspended a fly-blown card, with the words "Table Board"
+affixed in letters cut (not very neatly) out of coloured paper, of
+graduated tints, and surrounded with a small band of stamped gilt. The
+two sides of the shop were protected by an immense pent-house shed,
+which projected over a greasy pavement and was supported by wooden posts
+fixed in the curbstone. Beneath it, on the dislocated flags, barrels and
+baskets were freely and picturesquely grouped; an open cellarway yawned
+beneath the feet of those who might pause to gaze too fondly on the
+savoury wares displayed in the window; a strong odour of smoked fish,
+combined with a fragrance of molasses, hung about the spot; the
+pavement, toward the gutters, was fringed with dirty panniers, heaped
+with potatoes, carrots, and onions; and a smart, bright waggon, with the
+horse detached from the shafts, drawn up on the edge of the abominable
+road (it contained holes and ruts a foot deep, and immemorial
+accumulations of stagnant mud), imparted an idle, rural, pastoral air to
+a scene otherwise perhaps expressive of a rank civilisation. The
+establishment was of the kind known to New Yorkers as a Dutch grocery;
+and red-faced, yellow-haired, bare-armed vendors might have been
+observed to lounge in the doorway. I mention it not on account of any
+particular influence it may have had on the life or the thoughts of
+Basil Ransom, but for old acquaintance sake and that of local colour;
+besides which, a figure is nothing without a setting, and our young man
+came and went every day, with rather an indifferent, unperceiving step,
+it is true, among the objects I have briefly designated. One of his
+rooms was directly above the street-door of the house; such a dormitory,
+when it is so exiguous, is called in the nomenclature of New York a
+"hall bedroom." The sitting-room, beside it, was slightly larger, and
+they both commanded a row of tenements no less degenerate than Ransom's
+own habitation&mdash;houses built forty years before, and already sere and
+superannuated. These were also painted red, and the bricks were
+accentuated by a white line; they were garnished, on the first floor,
+with balconies covered with small tin roofs, striped in different
+colours, and with an elaborate iron lattice-work, which gave them a
+repressive, cage-like appearance, and caused them slightly to resemble
+the little boxes for peeping unseen into the street, which are a feature
+of oriental towns. Such posts of observation commanded a view of the
+grocery on the corner, of the relaxed and disjointed roadway, enlivened
+at the curbstone with an occasional ash-barrel or with gas-lamps
+drooping from the perpendicular, and westward, at the end of the
+truncated vista, of the fantastic skeleton of the Elevated Railway,
+overhanging the transverse longitudinal street, which it darkened and
+smothered with the immeasurable spinal column and myriad clutching paws
+of an antediluvian monster. If the opportunity were not denied me here,
+I should like to give some account of Basil Ransom's interior, of
+certain curious persons of both sexes, for the most part not favourites
+of fortune, who had found an obscure asylum there; some picture of the
+crumpled little <i>table d'h&ocirc;te</i>, at two dollars and a half a week, where
+everything felt sticky, which went forward in the low-ceiled basement,
+under the conduct of a couple of shuffling negresses, who mingled in the
+conversation and indulged in low, mysterious chuckles when it took a
+facetious turn. But we need, in strictness, concern ourselves with it no
+further than to gather the implication that the young Mississippian,
+even a year and a half after that momentous visit of his to Boston, had
+not made his profession very lucrative.</p>
+
+<p>He had been diligent, he had been ambitious, but he had not yet been
+successful. During the few weeks preceding the moment at which we meet
+him again, he had even begun to lose faith altogether in his earthly
+destiny. It became much of a question with him whether success in any
+form was written there; whether for a hungry young Mississippian,
+without means, without friends, wanting, too, in the highest energy, the
+wisdom of the serpent, personal arts and national prestige, the game of
+life was to be won in New York. He had been on the point of giving it up
+and returning to the home of his ancestors, where, as he heard from his
+mother, there was still just a sufficient supply of hot corn-cake to
+support existence. He had never believed much in his luck, but during
+the last year it had been guilty of aberrations surprising even to a
+constant, an imperturbable, victim of fate. Not only had he not extended
+his connexion, but he had lost most of the little business which was an
+object of complacency to him a twelvemonth before. He had had none but
+small jobs, and he had made a mess of more than one of them. Such
+accidents had not had a happy effect upon his reputation; he had been
+able to perceive that this fair flower may be nipped when it is so
+tender a bud as scarcely to be palpable. He had formed a partnership
+with a person who seemed likely to repair some of his deficiencies&mdash;a
+young man from Rhode Island, acquainted, according to his own
+expression, with the inside track. But this gentleman himself, as it
+turned out, would have been better for a good deal of remodelling, and
+Ransom's principal deficiency, which was, after all, that of cash, was
+not less apparent to him after his colleague, prior to a sudden and
+unexplained departure for Europe, had drawn the slender accumulations of
+the firm out of the bank. Ransom sat for hours in his office, waiting
+for clients who either did not come, or, if they did come, did not seem
+to find him encouraging, as they usually left him with the remark that
+they would think what they would do. They thought to little purpose, and
+seldom reappeared, so that at last he began to wonder whether there were
+not a prejudice against his Southern complexion. Perhaps they didn't
+like the way he spoke. If they could show him a better way, he was
+willing to adopt it; but the manner of New York could not be acquired by
+precept, and example, somehow, was not in this case contagious. He
+wondered whether he were stupid and unskilled, and he was finally
+obliged to confess to himself that he was unpractical.</p>
+
+<p>This confession was in itself a proof of the fact, for nothing could be
+less fruitful than such a speculation, terminating in such a way. He was
+perfectly aware that he cared a great deal for the theory, and so his
+visitors must have thought when they found him, with one of his long
+legs twisted round the other, reading a volume of De Tocqueville. That
+was the land of reading he liked; he had thought a great deal about
+social and economical questions, forms of government and the happiness
+of peoples. The convictions he had arrived at were not such as mix
+gracefully with the time-honoured verities a young lawyer looking out
+for business is in the habit of taking for granted; but he had to
+reflect that these doctrines would probably not contribute any more to
+his prosperity in Mississippi than in New York. Indeed, he scarcely
+could think of the country where they would be a particular advantage to
+him. It came home to him that his opinions were stiff, whereas in
+comparison his effort was lax; and he accordingly began to wonder
+whether he might not make a living by his opinions. He had always had a
+desire for public life; to cause one's ideas to be embodied in national
+conduct appeared to him the highest form of human enjoyment. But there
+was little enough that was public in his solitary studies, and he asked
+himself what was the use of his having an office at all, and why he
+might not as well carry on his profession at the Astor Library, where,
+in his spare hours and on chance holidays, he did an immense deal of
+suggestive reading. He took copious notes and memoranda, and these
+things sometimes shaped themselves in a way that might possibly commend
+them to the editors of periodicals. Readers perhaps would come, if
+clients didn't; so he produced, with a great deal of labour,
+half-a-dozen articles, from which, when they were finished, it seemed to
+him that he had omitted all the points he wished most to make, and
+addressed them to the powers that preside over weekly and monthly
+publications. They were all declined with thanks, and he would have been
+forced to believe that the accent of his languid clime brought him luck
+as little under the pen as on the lips, had not another explanation been
+suggested by one of the more explicit of his oracles, in relation to a
+paper on the rights of minorities. This gentleman pointed out that his
+doctrines were about three hundred years behind the age; doubtless some
+magazine of the sixteenth century would have been very happy to print
+them. This threw light on his own suspicion that he was attached to
+causes that could only, in the nature of things, be unpopular. The
+disagreeable editor was right about his being out of date, only he had
+got the time wrong. He had come centuries too soon; he was not too old,
+but too new. Such an impression, however, would not have prevented him
+from going into politics, if there had been any other way to represent
+constituencies than by being elected. People might be found eccentric
+enough to vote for him in Mississippi, but meanwhile where should he
+find the twenty-dollar greenbacks which it was his ambition to transmit
+from time to time to his female relations, confined so constantly to a
+farinaceous diet? It came over him with some force that his opinions
+would not yield interest, and the evaporation of this pleasing
+hypothesis made him feel like a man in an open boat, at sea, who should
+just have parted with his last rag of canvas.</p>
+
+<p>I shall not attempt a complete description of Ransom's ill-starred
+views, being convinced that the reader will guess them as he goes, for
+they had a frolicsome, ingenious way of peeping out of the young man's
+conversation. I shall do them sufficient justice in saying that he was
+by natural disposition a good deal of a stoic, and that, as the result
+of a considerable intellectual experience, he was, in social and
+political matters, a reactionary. I suppose he was very conceited, for
+he was much addicted to judging his age. He thought it talkative,
+querulous, hysterical, maudlin, full of false ideas, of unhealthy germs,
+of extravagant, dissipated habits, for which a great reckoning was in
+store. He was an immense admirer of the late Thomas Carlyle, and was
+very suspicious of the encroachments of modern democracy. I know not
+exactly how these queer heresies had planted themselves, but he had a
+longish pedigree (it had flowered at one time with English royalists and
+cavaliers), and he seemed at moments to be inhabited by some transmitted
+spirit of a robust but narrow ancestor, some broad-faced wig-wearer or
+sword-bearer, with a more primitive conception of manhood than our
+modern temperament appears to require, and a programme of human felicity
+much less varied. He liked his pedigree, he revered his forefathers, and
+he rather pitied those who might come after him. In saying so, however,
+I betray him a little, for he never mentioned such feelings as these.
+Though he thought the age too talkative, as I have hinted, he liked to
+talk as well as any one; but he could hold his tongue, if that were more
+expressive, and he usually did so when his perplexities were greatest.
+He had been sitting for several evenings in a beer-cellar, smoking his
+pipe with a profundity of reticence. This attitude was so unbroken that
+it marked a crisis&mdash;the complete, the acute consciousness of his
+personal situation. It was the cheapest way he knew of spending an
+evening. At this particular establishment the <i>Schoppen</i> were very tall
+and the beer was very good; and as the host and most of the guests were
+German, and their colloquial tongue was unknown to him, he was not drawn
+into any undue expenditure of speech. He watched his smoke and he
+thought, thought so hard that at last he appeared to himself to have
+exhausted the thinkable. When this moment of combined relief and dismay
+arrived (on the last of the evenings that we are concerned with), he
+took his way down Third Avenue and reached his humble dwelling. Till
+within a short time there had been a resource for him at such an hour
+and in such a mood; a little variety-actress, who lived in the house,
+and with whom he had established the most cordial relations, was often
+having her supper (she took it somewhere, every night, after the
+theatre) in the dim, close dining-room, and he used to drop in and talk
+to her. But she had lately married, to his great amusement, and her
+husband had taken her on a wedding-tour, which was to be at the same
+time professional. On this occasion he mounted, with rather a heavy
+tread, to his rooms, where (on the rickety writing-table in the parlour)
+he found a note from Mrs. Luna. I need not reproduce it <i>in extenso</i>; a
+pale reflexion of it will serve. She reproached him with neglecting her,
+wanted to know what had become of him, whether he had grown too
+fashionable for a person who cared only for serious society. She accused
+him of having changed, and inquired as to the reason of his coldness.
+Was it too much to ask whether he could tell her at least in what manner
+she had offended him? She used to think they were so much in
+sympathy&mdash;he expressed her own ideas about everything so vividly. She
+liked intellectual companionship, and she had none now. She hoped very
+much he would come and see her&mdash;as he used to do six months before&mdash;the
+following evening; and however much she might have sinned or he might
+have altered, she was at least always his affectionate cousin Adeline.</p>
+
+<p>"What the deuce does she want of me now?" It was with this somewhat
+ungracious exclamation that he tossed away his cousin Adeline's missive.
+The gesture might have indicated that he meant to take no notice of her;
+nevertheless, after a day had elapsed, he presented himself before her.
+He knew what she wanted of old&mdash;that is, a year ago; she had wanted him
+to look after her property and to be tutor to her son. He had lent
+himself, good-naturedly, to this desire&mdash;he was touched by so much
+confidence&mdash;but the experiment had speedily collapsed. Mrs. Luna's
+affairs were in the hands of trustees, who had complete care of them,
+and Ransom instantly perceived that his function would be simply to
+meddle in things that didn't concern him. The levity with which she had
+exposed him to the derision of the lawful guardians of her fortune
+opened his eyes to some of the dangers of cousinship; nevertheless he
+said to himself that he might turn an honest penny by giving an hour or
+two every day to the education of her little boy. But this, too, proved
+a brief illusion. Ransom had to find his time in the afternoon; he left
+his business at five o'clock and remained with his young kinsman till
+the hour of dinner. At the end of a few weeks he thought himself lucky
+in retiring without broken shins. That Newton's little nature was
+remarkable had often been insisted on by his mother; but it was
+remarkable, Ransom saw, for the absence of any of the qualities which
+attach a teacher to a pupil. He was in truth an insufferable child,
+entertaining for the Latin language a personal, physical hostility,
+which expressed itself in convulsions of rage. During these paroxysms he
+kicked furiously at every one and everything&mdash;at poor "Rannie," at his
+mother, at Messrs. Andrews and Stoddard, at the illustrious men of Rome,
+at the universe in general, to which, as he lay on his back on the
+carpet, he presented a pair of singularly active little heels. Mrs. Luna
+had a way of being present at his lessons, and when they passed, as
+sooner or later they were sure to, into the stage I have described, she
+interceded for her overwrought darling, reminded Ransom that these were
+the signs of an exquisite sensibility, begged that the child might be
+allowed to rest a little, and spent the remainder of the time in
+conversation with the preceptor. It came to seem to him, very soon, that
+he was not earning his fee; besides which, it was disagreeable to him to
+have pecuniary relations with a lady who had not the art of concealing
+from him that she liked to place him under obligations. He resigned his
+tutorship, and drew a long breath, having a vague feeling that he had
+escaped a danger. He could not have told you exactly what it was, and he
+had a certain sentimental, provincial respect for women which even
+prevented him from attempting to give a name to it in his own thoughts.
+He was addicted with the ladies to the old forms of address and of
+gallantry; he held that they were delicate, agreeable creatures, whom
+Providence had placed under the protection of the bearded sex; and it
+was not merely a humorous idea with him that whatever might be the
+defects of Southern gentlemen, they were at any rate remarkable for
+their chivalry. He was a man who still, in a slangy age, could pronounce
+that word with a perfectly serious face.</p>
+
+<p>This boldness did not prevent him from thinking that women were
+essentially inferior to men, and infinitely tiresome when they declined
+to accept the lot which men had made for them. He had the most definite
+notions about their place in nature, in society, and was perfectly easy
+in his mind as to whether it excluded them from any proper homage. The
+chivalrous man paid that tax with alacrity. He admitted their rights;
+these consisted in a standing claim to the generosity and tenderness of
+the stronger race. The exercise of such feelings was full of advantage
+for both sexes, and they flowed most freely, of course, when women were
+gracious and grateful. It may be said that he had a higher conception of
+politeness than most of the persons who desired the advent of female
+law-makers. When I have added that he hated to see women eager and
+argumentative, and thought that their softness and docility were the
+inspiration, the opportunity (the highest) of man, I shall have sketched
+a state of mind which will doubtless strike many readers as painfully
+crude. It had prevented Basil Ransom, at any rate, from putting the dots
+on his <i>i</i>'s, as the French say, in this gradual discovery that Mrs.
+Luna was making love to him. The process went on a long time before he
+became aware of it. He had perceived very soon that she was a
+tremendously familiar little woman&mdash;that she took, more rapidly than he
+had ever known, a high degree of intimacy for granted. But as she had
+seemed to him neither very fresh nor very beautiful, so he could not
+easily have represented to himself why she should take it into her head
+to marry (it would never have occurred to him to doubt that she wanted
+marriage) an obscure and penniless Mississippian, with womenkind of his
+own to provide for. He could not guess that he answered to a certain
+secret ideal of Mrs. Luna's, who loved the landed gentry even when
+landless, who adored a Southerner under any circumstances, who thought
+her kinsman a fine, manly, melancholy, disinterested type, and who was
+sure that her views of public matters, the questions of the age, the
+vulgar character of modern life, would meet with a perfect response in
+his mind. She could see by the way he talked that he was a conservative,
+and this was the motto inscribed upon her own silken banner. She took
+this unpopular line both by temperament and by reaction from her
+sister's "extreme" views, the sight of the dreadful people that they
+brought about her. In reality, Olive was distinguished and
+discriminating, and Adeline was the dupe of confusions in which the
+worse was apt to be mistaken for the better. She talked to Ransom about
+the inferiority of republics, the distressing persons she had met abroad
+in the legations of the United States, the bad manners of servants and
+shopkeepers in that country, the hope she entertained that "the good old
+families" would make a stand; but he never suspected that she cultivated
+these topics (her treatment of them struck him as highly comical) for
+the purpose of leading him to the altar, of beguiling the way. Least of
+all could he suppose that she would be indifferent to his want of
+income&mdash;a point in which he failed to do her justice; for, thinking the
+fact that he had remained poor a proof of delicacy in that shopkeeping
+age, it gave her much pleasure to reflect that, as Newton's little
+property was settled on him (with safeguards which showed how
+long-headed poor Mr. Luna had been, and large-hearted, too, since to
+what he left <i>her</i> no disagreeable conditions, such as eternal mourning,
+for instance, were attached)&mdash;that as Newton, I say, enjoyed the
+pecuniary independence which befitted his character, her own income was
+ample even for two, and she might give herself the luxury of taking a
+husband who should owe her something. Basil Ransom did not divine all
+this, but he divined that it was not for nothing that Mrs. Luna wrote
+him little notes every other day, that she proposed to drive him in the
+Park at unnatural hours, and that when he said he had his business to
+attend to, she replied: "Oh, a plague on your business! I am sick of
+that word&mdash;one hears of nothing else in America. There are ways of
+getting on without business, if you would only take them!" He seldom
+answered her notes, and he disliked extremely the way in which, in spite
+of her love of form and order, she attempted to clamber in at the window
+of one's house when one had locked the door; so that he began to
+interspace his visits considerably, and at last made them very rare.
+When I reflect on his habits of almost superstitious politeness to
+women, it comes over me that some very strong motive must have operated
+to make him give his friendly&mdash;his only too friendly&mdash;cousin the cold
+shoulder. Nevertheless, when he received her reproachful letter (after
+it had had time to work a little), he said to himself that he had
+perhaps been unjust and even brutal, and as he was easily touched by
+remorse of this kind, he took up the broken thread.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="XXII" id="XXII"></a>XXII</h2>
+
+
+<p>As he sat with Mrs. Luna, in her little back drawing-room, under the
+lamp, he felt rather more tolerant than before of the pressure she could
+not help putting upon him. Several months had elapsed, and he was no
+nearer to the sort of success he had hoped for. It stole over him gently
+that there was another sort, pretty visibly open to him, not so elevated
+nor so manly, it is true, but on which he should after all, perhaps, be
+able to reconcile it with his honour to fall back. Mrs. Luna had had an
+inspiration; for once in her life she had held her tongue. She had not
+made him a scene, there had been no question of an explanation; she had
+received him as if he had been there the day before, with the addition
+of a spice of mysterious melancholy. She might have made up her mind
+that she had lost him as what she had hoped, but that it was better than
+desolation to try and keep him as a friend. It was as if she wished him
+to see now how she tried. She was subdued and consolatory, she waited
+upon him, moved away a screen that intercepted the fire, remarked that
+he looked very tired, and rang for some tea. She made no inquiry about
+his affairs, never asked if he had been busy and prosperous; and this
+reticence struck him as unexpectedly delicate and discreet; it was as if
+she had guessed, by a subtle feminine faculty, that his professional
+career was nothing to boast of. There was a simplicity in him which
+permitted him to wonder whether she had not improved. The lamp-light was
+soft, the fire crackled pleasantly, everything that surrounded him
+betrayed a woman's taste and touch; the place was decorated and
+cushioned in perfection, delightfully private and personal, the picture
+of a well-appointed home. Mrs. Luna had complained of the difficulties
+of installing one's self in America, but Ransom remembered that he had
+received an impression similar to this in her sister's house in Boston,
+and reflected that these ladies had, as a family-trait, the art of
+making themselves comfortable. It was better for a winter's evening than
+the German beer-cellar (Mrs. Luna's tea was excellent), and his hostess
+herself appeared to-night almost as amiable as the variety-actress. At
+the end of an hour he felt, I will not say almost marriageable, but
+almost married. Images of leisure played before him, leisure in which he
+saw himself covering foolscap paper with his views on several subjects,
+and with favourable illustrations of Southern eloquence. It became
+tolerably vivid to him that if editors wouldn't print one's
+lucubrations, it would be a comfort to feel that one was able to publish
+them at one's own expense.</p>
+
+<p>He had a moment of almost complete illusion. Mrs. Luna had taken up her
+bit of crochet; she was sitting opposite to him, on the other side of
+the fire. Her white hands moved with little jerks as she took her
+stitches, and her rings flashed and twinkled in the light of the hearth.
+Her head fell a little to one side, exhibiting the plumpness of her chin
+and neck, and her dropped eyes (it gave her a little modest air) rested
+quietly on her work. A silence of a few moments had fallen upon their
+talk, and Adeline&mdash;who decidedly <i>had</i> improved&mdash;appeared also to feel
+the charm of it, not to wish to break it. Basil Ransom was conscious of
+all this, and at the same time he was vaguely engaged in a speculation.
+If it gave one time, if it gave one leisure, was not that in itself a
+high motive? Thorough study of the question he cared for most&mdash;was not
+the chance for <i>that</i> an infinitely desirable good? He seemed to see
+himself, to feel himself, in that very chair, in the evenings of the
+future, reading some indispensable book in the still lamp-light&mdash;Mrs.
+Luna knew where to get such pretty mellowing shades. Should he not be
+able to act in that way upon the public opinion of his time, to check
+certain tendencies, to point out certain dangers, to indulge in much
+salutary criticism? Was it not one's duty to put one's self in the best
+conditions for such action? And as the silence continued he almost fell
+to musing on his duty, almost persuaded himself that the moral law
+commanded him to marry Mrs. Luna. She looked up presently from her work,
+their eyes met, and she smiled. He might have believed she had guessed
+what he was thinking of. This idea startled him, alarmed him a little,
+so that when Mrs. Luna said, with her sociable manner, "There is nothing
+I like so much, of a winter's night, as a cosy <i>t&ecirc;te-&agrave;-t&ecirc;te</i> by the
+fire. It's quite like Darby and Joan; what a pity the kettle has ceased
+singing!"&mdash;when she uttered these insinuating words he gave himself a
+little imperceptible shake, which was, however, enough to break the
+spell, and made no response more direct than to ask her, in a moment, in
+a tone of cold, mild curiosity, whether she had lately heard from her
+sister, and how long Miss Chancellor intended to remain in Europe.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, you <i>have</i> been living in your hole!" Mrs. Luna exclaimed. "Olive
+came home six weeks ago. How long did you expect her to endure it?"</p>
+
+<p>"I am sure I don't know; I have never been there," Ransom replied.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, that's what I like you for," Mrs. Luna remarked sweetly. "If a man
+is nice without it, it's such a pleasant change."</p>
+
+<p>The young man started, then gave a natural laugh. "Lord, how few reasons
+there must be!"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, I mention that one because I can tell it. I shouldn't care to tell
+the others."</p>
+
+<p>"I am glad you have some to fall back upon, the day I should go," Ransom
+went on. "I thought you thought so much of Europe."</p>
+
+<p>"So I do; but it isn't everything," said Mrs. Luna philosophically. "You
+had better go there with me," she added, with a certain inconsequence.</p>
+
+<p>"One would go to the end of the world with so irresistible a lady!"
+Ransom exclaimed, falling into the tone which Mrs. Luna always found so
+unsatisfactory. It was a part of his Southern gallantry&mdash;his accent
+always came out strongly when he said anything of that sort&mdash;and it
+committed him to nothing in particular. She had had occasion to wish,
+more than once, that he wouldn't be so beastly polite, as she used to
+hear people say in England. She answered that she didn't care about
+ends, she cared about beginnings; but he didn't take up the declaration;
+he returned to the subject of Olive, wanted to know what she had done
+over there, whether she had worked them up much.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, of course, she fascinated every one," said Mrs. Luna. "With her
+grace and beauty, her general style, how could she help that?"</p>
+
+<p>"But did she bring them round, did she swell the host that is prepared
+to march under her banner?"</p>
+
+<p>"I suppose she saw plenty of the strong-minded, plenty of vicious old
+maids, and fanatics, and frumps. But I haven't the least idea what she
+accomplished&mdash;what they call 'wonders,' I suppose."</p>
+
+<p>"Didn't you see her when she returned?" Basil Ransom asked.</p>
+
+<p>"How could I see her? I can see pretty far, but I can't see all the way
+to Boston." And then, in explaining that it was at this port that her
+sister had disembarked, Mrs. Luna further inquired whether he could
+imagine Olive doing anything in a first-rate way, as long as there were
+inferior ones. "Of course she likes bad ships&mdash;Boston steamers&mdash;just as
+she likes common people, and red-haired hoydens, and preposterous
+doctrines."</p>
+
+<p>Ransom was silent a moment. "Do you mean the&mdash;a&mdash;rather striking young
+lady whom I met in Boston a year ago last October? What was her
+name?&mdash;Miss Tarrant? Does Miss Chancellor like her as much as ever?"</p>
+
+<p>"Mercy! don't you know she took her to Europe? It was to form <i>her</i> mind
+she went. Didn't I tell you that last summer? You used to come to see me
+then."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh yes, I remember," Ransom said, rather musingly. "And did she bring
+her back?"</p>
+
+<p>"Gracious, you don't suppose she would leave her! Olive thinks she's
+born to regenerate the world."</p>
+
+<p>"I remember you telling me that, too. It comes back to me. Well, is her
+mind formed?"</p>
+
+<p>"As I haven't seen it, I cannot tell you."</p>
+
+<p>"Aren't you going on there to see&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"To see whether Miss Tarrant's mind is formed?" Mrs. Luna broke in. "I
+will go if you would like me to. I remember your being immensely excited
+about her that time you met her. Don't you recollect that?"</p>
+
+<p>Ransom hesitated an instant. "I can't say I do. It is too long ago."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, I have no doubt that's the way you change, about women! Poor Miss
+Tarrant, if she thinks she made an impression on you!"</p>
+
+<p>"She won't think about such things as that, if her mind has been formed
+by your sister," Ransom said. "It does come back to me now, what you
+told me about the growth of their intimacy. And do they mean to go on
+living together for ever?"</p>
+
+<p>"I suppose so&mdash;unless some one should take it into his head to marry
+Verena."</p>
+
+<p>"Verena&mdash;is that her name?" Ransom asked.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Luna looked at him with a suspended needle. "Well! have you
+forgotten that too? You told me yourself you thought it so pretty, that
+time in Boston, when you walked me up the hill." Ransom declared that he
+remembered that walk, but didn't remember everything he had said to her;
+and she suggested, very satirically, that perhaps he would like to marry
+Verena himself&mdash;he seemed so interested in her. Ransom shook his head
+sadly, and said he was afraid he was not in a position to marry;
+whereupon Mrs. Luna asked him what he meant&mdash;did he mean (after a
+moment's hesitation) that he was too poor?</p>
+
+<p>"Never in the world&mdash;I am very rich; I make an enormous income!" the
+young man exclaimed; so that, remarking his tone, and the slight flush
+of annoyance that rose to his face, Mrs. Luna was quick enough to judge
+that she had overstepped the mark. She remembered (she ought to have
+remembered before) that he had never taken her in the least into his
+confidence about his affairs. That was not the Southern way, and he was
+at least as proud as he was poor. In this surmise she was just; Basil
+Ransom would have despised himself if he had been capable of confessing
+to a woman that he couldn't make a living. Such questions were none of
+their business (their business was simply to be provided for, practise
+the domestic virtues, and be charmingly grateful), and there was, to his
+sense, something almost indecent in talking about them. Mrs. Luna felt
+doubly sorry for him as she perceived that he denied himself the luxury
+of sympathy (that is, of hers), and the vague but comprehensive sigh
+that passed her lips as she took up her crochet again was unusually
+expressive of helplessness. She said that of course she knew how great
+his talents were&mdash;he could do anything he wanted; and Basil Ransom
+wondered for a moment whether, if she were to ask him point-blank to
+marry her, it would be consistent with the high courtesy of a Southern
+gentleman to refuse. After she should be his wife he might of course
+confess to her that he was too poor to marry, for in that relation even
+a Southern gentleman of the highest tone must sometimes unbend. But he
+didn't in the least long for this arrangement, and was conscious that
+the most pertinent sequel to her conjecture would be for him to take up
+his hat and walk away.</p>
+
+<p>Within five minutes, however, he had come to desire to do this almost as
+little as to marry Mrs. Luna. He wanted to hear more about the girl who
+lived with Olive Chancellor. Something had revived in him&mdash;an old
+curiosity, an image half effaced&mdash;when he learned that she had come back
+to America. He had taken a wrong impression from what Mrs. Luna said,
+nearly a year before, about her sister's visit to Europe; he had
+supposed it was to be a long absence, that Miss Chancellor wanted
+perhaps to get the little prophetess away from her parents, possibly
+even away from some amorous entanglement. Then, no doubt, they wanted to
+study up the woman-question with the facilities that Europe would offer;
+he didn't know much about Europe, but he had an idea that it was a great
+place for facilities. His knowledge of Miss Chancellor's departure,
+accompanied by her young companion, had checked at the time, on Ransom's
+part, a certain habit of idle but none the less entertaining retrospect.
+His life, on the whole, had not been rich in episode, and that little
+chapter of his visit to his queer, clever, capricious cousin, with his
+evening at Miss Birdseye's, and his glimpse, repeated on the morrow, of
+the strange, beautiful, ridiculous, red-haired young <i>improvisatrice</i>,
+unrolled itself in his memory like a page of interesting fiction. The
+page seemed to fade, however, when he heard that the two girls had gone,
+for an indefinite time, to unknown lands; this carried them out of his
+range, spoiled the perspective, diminished their actuality; so that for
+several months past, with his increase of anxiety about his own affairs,
+and the low pitch of his spirits, he had not thought at all about Verena
+Tarrant. The fact that she was once more in Boston, with a certain
+contiguity that it seemed to imply between Boston and New York,
+presented itself now as important and agreeable. He was conscious that
+this was rather an anomaly, and his consciousness made him, had already
+made him, dissimulate slightly. He did not pick up his hat to go; he sat
+in his chair taking his chance of the tax which Mrs. Luna might lay upon
+his urbanity. He remembered that he had not made, as yet, any very eager
+inquiry about Newton, who at this late hour had succumbed to the only
+influence that tames the untamable and was sleeping the sleep of
+childhood, if not of innocence. Ransom repaired his neglect in a manner
+which elicited the most copious response from his hostess. The boy had
+had a good many tutors since Ransom gave him up, and it could not be
+said that his education languished. Mrs. Luna spoke with pride of the
+manner in which he went through them; if he did not master his lessons,
+he mastered his teachers, and she had the happy conviction that she gave
+him every advantage. Ransom's delay was diplomatic, but at the end of
+ten minutes he returned to the young ladies in Boston; he asked why,
+with their aggressive programme, one hadn't begun to feel their onset,
+why the echoes of Miss Tarrant's eloquence hadn't reached his ears.
+Hadn't she come out yet in public? was she not coming to stir them up in
+New York? He hoped she hadn't broken down.</p>
+
+<p>"She didn't seem to break down last summer, at the Female Convention,"
+Mrs. Luna replied. "Have you forgotten that too? Didn't I tell you of
+the sensation she produced there, and of what I heard from Boston about
+it? Do you mean to say I didn't give you that "Transcript," with the
+report of her great speech? It was just before they sailed for Europe;
+she went off with flying colours, in a blaze of fireworks." Ransom
+protested that he had not heard this affair mentioned till that moment,
+and then, when they compared dates, they found it had taken place just
+after his last visit to Mrs. Luna. This, of course, gave her a chance to
+say that he had treated her even worse than she supposed; it had been
+her impression, at any rate, that they had talked together about
+Verena's sudden bound into fame. Apparently she confounded him with some
+one else, that was very possible; he was not to suppose that he occupied
+such a distinct place in her mind, especially when she might die twenty
+deaths before he came near her. Ransom demurred to the implication that
+Miss Tarrant was famous; if she were famous, wouldn't she be in the New
+York papers? He hadn't seen her there, and he had no recollection of
+having encountered any mention at the time (last June, was it?) of her
+exploits at the Female Convention. A local reputation doubtless she had,
+but that had been the case a year and a half before, and what was
+expected of her then was to become a first-class national glory. He was
+willing to believe that she had created some excitement in Boston, but
+he shouldn't attach much importance to that till one began to see her
+photograph in the stores. Of course, one must give her time, but he had
+supposed Miss Chancellor was going to put her through faster.</p>
+
+<p>If he had taken a contradictious tone on purpose to draw Mrs. Luna out,
+he could not have elicited more of the information he desired. It was
+perfectly true that he had seen no reference to Verena's performances in
+the preceding June; there were periods when the newspapers seemed to him
+so idiotic that for weeks he never looked at one. He learned from Mrs.
+Luna that it was not Olive who had sent her the "Transcript" and in
+letters had added some private account of the doings at the convention
+to the testimony of that amiable sheet; she had been indebted for this
+service to a "gentleman-friend," who wrote her everything that happened
+in Boston, and what every one had every day for dinner. Not that it was
+necessary for her happiness to know; but the gentleman she spoke of
+didn't know what to invent to please her. A Bostonian couldn't imagine
+that one didn't want to know, and that was their idea of ingratiating
+themselves, or, at any rate, it was his, poor man. Olive would never
+have gone into particulars about Verena; she regarded her sister as
+quite too much one of the profane, and knew Adeline couldn't understand
+why, when she took to herself a bosom-friend, she should have been at
+such pains to select her in just the most dreadful class in the
+community. Verena was a perfect little adventuress, and quite third-rate
+into the bargain; but, of course, she was a pretty girl enough, if one
+cared for hair of the colour of cochineal. As for her people, they were
+too absolutely awful; it was exactly as if she, Mrs. Luna, had struck up
+an intimacy with the daughter of her chiropodist. It took Olive to
+invent such monstrosities, and to think she was doing something great
+for humanity when she did so; though, in spite of her wanting to turn
+everything over, and put the lowest highest, she could be just as
+contemptuous and invidious, when it came to really mixing, as if she
+were some grand old duchess. She must do her the justice to say that she
+hated the Tarrants, the father and mother; but, all the same, she let
+Verena run to and fro between Charles Street and the horrible hole they
+lived in, and Adeline knew from that gentleman who wrote so copiously
+that the girl now and then spent a week at a time at Cambridge. Her
+mother, who had been ill for some weeks, wanted her to sleep there. Mrs.
+Luna knew further, by her correspondent, that Verena had&mdash;or had had the
+winter before&mdash;a great deal of attention from gentlemen. She didn't know
+how she worked that into the idea that the female sex was sufficient to
+itself; but she had grounds for saying that this was one reason why
+Olive had taken her abroad. She was afraid Verena would give in to some
+man, and she wanted to make a break. Of course, any such giving in would
+be very awkward for a young woman who shrieked out on platforms that old
+maids were the highest type. Adeline guessed Olive had perfect control
+of her now, unless indeed she used the expeditions to Cambridge as a
+cover for meeting gentlemen. She was an artful little minx, and cared as
+much for the rights of women as she did for the Panama Canal; the only
+right of a woman she wanted was to climb up on top of something, where
+the men could look at her. She would stay with Olive as long as it
+served her purpose, because Olive, with her great respectability, could
+push her, and counteract the effect of her low relations, to say nothing
+of paying all her expenses and taking her the tour of Europe. "But, mark
+my words," said Mrs. Luna, "she will give Olive the greatest cut she has
+ever had in her life. She will run off with some lion-tamer; she will
+marry a circus-man!" And Mrs. Luna added that it would serve Olive
+Chancellor right. But she would take it hard; look out for tantrums
+then!</p>
+
+<p>Basil Ransom's emotions were peculiar while his hostess delivered
+herself, in a manner at once casual and emphatic, of these rather
+insidious remarks. He took them all in, for they represented to him
+certain very interesting facts; but he perceived at the same time that
+Mrs. Luna didn't know what she was talking about. He had seen Verena
+Tarrant only twice in his life, but it was no use telling him that she
+was an adventuress&mdash;though, certainly, it <i>was</i> very likely she would
+end by giving Miss Chancellor a cut. He chuckled, with a certain
+grimness, as this image passed before him; it was not unpleasing, the
+idea that he should be avenged (for it would avenge him to know it) upon
+the wanton young woman who had invited him to come and see her in order
+simply to slap his face. But he had an odd sense of having lost
+something in not knowing of the other girl's appearance at the Women's
+Convention&mdash;a vague feeling that he had been cheated and trifled with.
+The complaint was idle, inasmuch as it was not probable he could have
+gone to Boston to listen to her; but it represented to him that he had
+not shared, even dimly and remotely, in an event which concerned her
+very closely. Why should he share, and what was more natural than that
+the things which concerned her closely should not concern him at all?
+This question came to him only as he walked home that evening; for the
+moment it remained quite in abeyance: therefore he was free to feel also
+that his imagination had been rather starved by his ignorance of the
+fact that she was near him again (comparatively), that she was in the
+dimness of the horizon (no longer beyond the curve of the globe), and
+yet he had not perceived it. This sense of personal loss, as I have
+called it, made him feel, further, that he had something to make up, to
+recover. He could scarcely have told you how he would go about it; but
+the idea, formless though it was, led him in a direction very different
+from the one he had been following a quarter of an hour before. As he
+watched it dance before him he fell into another silence, in the midst
+of which Mrs. Luna gave him another mystic smile. The effect of it was
+to make him rise to his feet; the whole landscape of his mind had
+suddenly been illuminated. Decidedly, it was <i>not</i> his duty to marry
+Mrs. Luna, in order to have means to pursue his studies; he jerked
+himself back, as if he had been on the point of it.</p>
+
+<p>"You don't mean to say you are going already? I haven't said half I
+wanted to!" she exclaimed.</p>
+
+<p>He glanced at the clock, saw it was not yet late, took a turn about the
+room, then sat down again in a different place, while she followed him
+with her eyes, wondering what was the matter with him. Ransom took good
+care not to ask her what it was she had still to say, and perhaps it was
+to prevent her telling him that he now began to talk, freely, quickly,
+in quite a new tone. He stayed half an hour longer, and made himself
+very agreeable. It seemed to Mrs. Luna now that he had every distinction
+(she had known he had most), that he was really a charming man. He
+abounded in conversation, till at last he took up his hat in earnest; he
+talked about the state of the South, its social peculiarities, the ruin
+wrought by the war, the dilapidated gentry, the queer types of
+superannuated fire-eaters, ragged and unreconciled, all the pathos and
+all the comedy of it, making her laugh at one moment, almost cry at
+another, and say to herself throughout that when he took it into his
+head there was no one who could make a lady's evening pass so
+pleasantly. It was only afterwards that she asked herself why he had not
+taken it into his head till the last, so quickly. She delighted in the
+dilapidated gentry; her taste was completely different from her
+sister's, who took an interest only in the lower class, as it struggled
+to rise; what Adeline cared for was the fallen aristocracy (it seemed to
+be falling everywhere very much; was not Basil Ransom an example of it?
+was he not like a French <i>gentilhomme de province</i> after the Revolution?
+or an old monarchical <i>&eacute;migr&eacute;</i> from the Languedoc?), the despoiled
+patriciate, I say, whose attitude was noble and touching, and toward
+whom one might exercise a charity as discreet as their pride was
+sensitive. In all Mrs. Luna's visions of herself, her discretion was the
+leading feature. "Are you going to let ten years elapse again before you
+come?" she asked, as Basil Ransom bade her good-night. "You must let me
+know, because between this and your next visit I shall have time to go
+to Europe and come back. I shall take care to arrive the day before."</p>
+
+<p>Instead of answering this sally, Ransom said, "Are you not going one of
+these days to Boston? Are you not going to pay your sister another
+visit?"</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Luna stared. "What good will that do <i>you</i>? Excuse my stupidity,"
+she added; "of course, it gets me away. Thank you very much!"</p>
+
+<p>"I don't want you to go away; but I want to hear more about Miss Olive."</p>
+
+<p>"Why in the world? You know you loathe her!" Here, before Ransom could
+reply, Mrs. Luna again overtook herself. "I verily believe that by Miss
+Olive you mean Miss Verena!" Her eyes charged him a moment with this
+perverse intention; then she exclaimed, "Basil Ransom, <i>are</i> you in love
+with that creature?"</p>
+
+<p>He gave a perfectly natural laugh, not pleading guilty, in order to
+practise on Mrs. Luna, but expressing the simple state of the case. "How
+should I be? I have seen her but twice in my life."</p>
+
+<p>"If you had seen her more, I shouldn't be afraid! Fancy your wanting to
+pack me off to Boston!" his hostess went on. "I am in no hurry to stay
+with Olive again; besides, that girl takes up the whole house. You had
+better go there yourself."</p>
+
+<p>"I should like nothing better," said Ransom.</p>
+
+<p>"Perhaps you would like me to ask Verena to spend a month with me&mdash;it
+might be a way of attracting you to the house," Adeline went on, in the
+tone of exuberant provocation.</p>
+
+<p>Ransom was on the point of replying that it would be a better way than
+any other, but he checked himself in time; he had never yet, even in
+joke, made so crude, so rude a speech to a lady. You only knew when he
+was joking with women by his super-added civility. "I beg you to believe
+there is nothing I would do for any woman in the world that I wouldn't
+do for you," he said, bending, for the last time, over Mrs. Luna's plump
+hand.</p>
+
+<p>"I shall remember that and keep you up to it!" she cried after him, as
+he went. But even with this rather lively exchange of vows he felt that
+he had got off rather easily. He walked slowly up Fifth Avenue, into
+which, out of Adeline's cross-street, he had turned, by the light of a
+fine winter moon; and at every corner he stopped a minute, lingered in
+meditation, while he exhaled a soft, vague sigh. This was an
+unconscious, involuntary expression of relief, such as a man might utter
+who had seen himself on the point of being run over and yet felt that he
+was whole. He didn't trouble himself much to ask what had saved him;
+whatever it was it had produced a reaction, so that he felt rather
+ashamed of having found his look-out of late so blank. By the time he
+reached his lodgings, his ambition, his resolution, had rekindled; he
+had remembered that he formerly supposed he was a man of ability, that
+nothing particular had occurred to make him doubt it (the evidence was
+only negative, not positive), and that at any rate he was young enough
+to have another try. He whistled that night as he went to bed.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="XXIII" id="XXIII"></a>XXIII</h2>
+
+
+<p>Three weeks afterward he stood in front of Olive Chancellor's house,
+looking up and down the street and hesitating. He had told Mrs. Luna
+that he should like nothing better than to make another journey to
+Boston; and it was not simply because he liked it that he had come. I
+was on the point of saying that a happy chance had favoured him, but it
+occurs to me that one is under no obligation to call chances by
+nattering epithets when they have been waited for so long. At any rate,
+the darkest hour is before the dawn; and a few days after that
+melancholy evening I have described, which Ransom spent in his German
+beer-cellar, before a single glass, soon emptied, staring at his future
+with an unremunerated eye, he found that the world appeared to have need
+of him yet. The "party," as he would have said (I cannot pretend that
+his speech was too heroic for that), for whom he had transacted business
+in Boston so many months before, and who had expressed at the time but a
+limited appreciation of his services (there had been between the lawyer
+and his client a divergence of judgement), observing, apparently, that
+they proved more fruitful than he expected, had reopened the affair and
+presently requested Ransom to transport himself again to the sister
+city. His errand demanded more time than before, and for three days he
+gave it his constant attention. On the fourth he found he was still
+detained; he should have to wait till the evening&mdash;some important papers
+were to be prepared. He determined to treat the interval as a holiday,
+and he wondered what one could do in Boston to give one's morning a
+festive complexion. The weather was brilliant enough to minister to any
+illusion, and he strolled along the streets, taking it in. In front of
+the Music Hall and of Tremont Temple he stopped, looking at the posters
+in the doorway; for was it not possible that Miss Chancellor's little
+friend might be just then addressing her fellow-citizens? Her name was
+absent, however, and this resource seemed to mock him. He knew no one in
+the place but Olive Chancellor, so there was no question of a visit to
+pay. He was perfectly resolved that he would never go near <i>her</i> again;
+she was doubtless a very superior being, but she had been too rough with
+him to tempt him further. Politeness, even a largely-interpreted
+"chivalry", required nothing more than he had already done; he had
+quitted her, the other year, without telling her that she was a vixen,
+and that reticence was chivalrous enough. There was also Verena Tarrant,
+of course; he saw no reason to dissemble when he spoke of her to
+himself, and he allowed himself the entertainment of feeling that he
+should like very much to see her again. Very likely she wouldn't seem to
+him the same; the impression she had made upon him was due to some
+accident of mood or circumstance; and, at any rate, any charm she might
+have exhibited then had probably been obliterated by the coarsening
+effect of publicity and the tonic influence of his kinswoman. It will be
+observed that in this reasoning of Basil Ransom's the impression was
+freely recognised, and recognised as a phenomenon still present. The
+attraction might have vanished, as he said to himself, but the mental
+picture of it was yet vivid. The greater the pity that he couldn't call
+upon Verena (he called her by her name in his thoughts, it was so
+pretty) without calling upon Olive, and that Olive was so disagreeable
+as to place that effort beyond his strength. There was another
+consideration, with Ransom, which eminently belonged to the man; he
+believed that Miss Chancellor had conceived, in the course of those few
+hours, and in a manner that formed so absurd a sequel to her having gone
+out of her way to make his acquaintance, such a dislike to him that it
+would be odious to her to see him again within her doors; and he would
+have felt indelicate in taking warrant from her original invitation
+(before she had seen him) to inflict on her a presence which he had no
+reason to suppose the lapse of time had made less offensive. She had
+given him no sign of pardon or penitence in any of the little ways that
+are familiar to women&mdash;by sending him a message through her sister, or
+even a book, a photograph, a Christmas card, or a newspaper, by the
+post. He felt, in a word, not at liberty to ring at her door; he didn't
+know what kind of a fit the sight of his long Mississippian person would
+give her, and it was characteristic of him that he should wish so to
+spare the sensibilities of a young lady whom he had not found tender;
+being ever as willing to let women off easily in the particular case as
+he was fixed in the belief that the sex in general requires watching.</p>
+
+<p>Nevertheless, he found himself, at the end of half an hour, standing on
+the only spot in Charles Street which had any significance for him. It
+had occurred to him that if he couldn't call upon Verena without calling
+upon Olive, he should be exempt from that condition if he called upon
+Mrs. Tarrant. It was not her mother, truly, who had asked him, it was
+the girl herself; and he was conscious, as a candid young American, that
+a mother is always less accessible, more guarded by social prejudice,
+than a daughter. But he was at a pass in which it was permissible to
+strain a point, and he took his way in the direction in which he knew
+that Cambridge lay, remembering that Miss Tarrant's invitation had
+reference to that quarter and that Mrs. Luna had given him further
+evidence. Had she not said that Verena often went back there for visits
+of several days&mdash;that her mother had been ill and she gave her much
+care? There was nothing inconceivable in her being engaged at that hour
+(it was getting to be one o'clock) in one of those expeditions&mdash;nothing
+impossible in the chance that he might find her in Cambridge. The
+chance, at any rate, was worth taking; Cambridge, moreover, was worth
+seeing, and it was as good a way as another of keeping his holiday. It
+occurred to him, indeed, that Cambridge was a big place, and that he had
+no particular address. This reflexion overtook him just as he reached
+Olive's house, which, oddly enough, he was obliged to pass on his way to
+the mysterious suburb. That is partly why he paused there; he asked
+himself for a moment why he shouldn't ring the bell and obtain his
+needed information from the servant, who would be sure to be able to
+give it to him. He had just dismissed this method, as of questionable
+taste, when he heard the door of the house open, within the deep
+embrasure in which, in Charles Street, the main portals are set, and
+which are partly occupied by a flight of steps protected at the bottom
+by a second door, whose upper half, in either wing, consists of a sheet
+of glass. It was a minute before he could see who had come out, and in
+that minute he had time to turn away and then to turn back again, and to
+wonder which of the two inmates would appear to him, or whether he
+should behold neither or both.</p>
+
+<p>The person who had issued from the house descended the steps very
+slowly, as if on purpose to give him time to escape; and when at last
+the glass doors were divided they disclosed a little old lady. Ransom
+was disappointed; such an apparition was so scantily to his purpose. But
+the next minute his spirits rose again, for he was sure that he had seen
+the little old lady before. She stopped on the side-walk, and looked
+vaguely about her, in the manner of a person waiting for an omnibus or a
+street-car; she had a dingy, loosely-habited air, as if she had worn her
+clothes for many years and yet was even now imperfectly acquainted with
+them; a large, benignant face, caged in by the glass of her spectacles,
+which seemed to cover it almost equally everywhere, and a fat, rusty
+satchel, which hung low at her side, as if it wearied her to carry it.
+This gave Ransom time to recognise her; he knew in Boston no such figure
+as that save Miss Birdseye. Her party, her person, the exalted account
+Miss Chancellor gave of her, had kept a very distinct place in his mind;
+and while she stood there in dim circumspection she came back to him as
+a friend of yesterday. His necessity gave a point to the reminiscences
+she evoked; it took him only a moment to reflect that she would be able
+to tell him where Verena Tarrant was at that particular time, and where,
+if need be, her parents lived. Her eyes rested on him, and as she saw
+that he was looking at her she didn't go through the ceremony (she had
+broken so completely with all conventions) of removing them; he
+evidently represented nothing to her but a sentient fellow-citizen in
+the enjoyment of his rights, which included that of staring. Miss
+Birdseye's modesty had never pretended that it was not to be publicly
+challenged; there were so many bright new motives and ideas in the world
+that there might even be reasons for looking at her. When Ransom
+approached her and, raising his hat with a smile, said, "Shall I stop
+this car for you, Miss Birdseye?" she only looked at him more vaguely,
+in her complete failure to seize the idea that this might be simply
+Fame. She had trudged about the streets of Boston for fifty years, and
+at no period had she received that amount of attention from dark-eyed
+young men. She glanced, in an unprejudiced way, at the big
+parti-coloured human van which now jingled, toward them from out of the
+Cambridge road. "Well, I should like to get into it, if it will take me
+home," she answered. "Is this a South End car?"</p>
+
+<p>The vehicle had been stopped by the conductor, on his perceiving Miss
+Birdseye; he evidently recognised her as a frequent passenger. He went,
+however, through none of the forms of reassurance beyond remarking, "You
+want to get right in here&mdash;quick," but stood with his hand raised, in a
+threatening way, to the cord of his signal-bell.</p>
+
+<p>"You must allow me the honour of taking you home, madam; I will tell you
+who I am," Basil Ransom said, in obedience to a rapid reflexion. He
+helped her into the car, the conductor pressed a fraternal hand upon her
+back, and in a moment the young man was seated beside her, and the
+jingling had recommenced. At that hour of the day the car was almost
+empty, and they had it virtually to themselves.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, I know you are some one; I don't think you belong round here,"
+Miss Birdseye declared, as they proceeded.</p>
+
+<p>"I was once at your house&mdash;on a very interesting occasion. Do you
+remember a party you gave, a year ago last October, to which Miss
+Chancellor came, and another young lady, who made a wonderful speech?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh yes! when Verena Tarrant moved us all so! There were a good many
+there; I don't remember all."</p>
+
+<p>"I was one of them," Basil Ransom said; "I came with Miss Chancellor,
+who is a kind of relation of mine, and you were very good to me."</p>
+
+<p>"What did I do?" asked Miss Birdseye candidly. Then, before he could
+answer her, she recognised him. "I remember you now, and Olive bringing
+you! You're a Southern gentleman&mdash;she told me about you afterwards. You
+don't approve of our great struggle&mdash;you want us to be kept down." The
+old lady spoke with perfect mildness, as if she had long ago done with
+passion and resentment. Then she added, "Well, I presume we can't have
+the sympathy of all."</p>
+
+<p>"Doesn't it look as if you had my sympathy, when I get into a car on
+purpose to see you home&mdash;one of the principal agitators?" Ransom
+inquired, laughing.</p>
+
+<p>"Did you get in on purpose?"</p>
+
+<p>"Quite on purpose. I am not so bad as Miss Chancellor thinks me."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, I presume you have your ideas," said Miss Birdseye. "Of course,
+Southerners have peculiar views. I suppose they retain more than one
+might think. I hope you won't ride too far&mdash;I know my way round Boston."</p>
+
+<p>"Don't object to me, or think me officious," Ransom replied. "I want to
+ask you something."</p>
+
+<p>Miss Birdseye looked at him again. "Oh yes, I place you now; you
+conversed some with Doctor Prance."</p>
+
+<p>"To my great edification!" Ransom exclaimed. "And I hope Doctor Prance
+is well."</p>
+
+<p>"She looks after every one's health but her own," said Miss Birdseye,
+smiling. "When I tell her that, she says she hasn't got any to look
+after. She says she's the only woman in Boston that hasn't got a doctor.
+She was determined she wouldn't be a patient, and it seemed as if the
+only way not to be one was to be a doctor. She is trying to make me
+sleep; that's her principal occupation."</p>
+
+<p>"Is it possible you don't sleep yet?" Ransom asked, almost tenderly.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, just a little. But by the time I get to sleep I have to get up. I
+can't sleep when I want to live."</p>
+
+<p>"You ought to come down South," the young man suggested. "In that
+languid air you would doze deliciously!"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, I don't want to be languid," said Miss Birdseye. "Besides, I have
+been down South, in the old times, and I can't say they let me sleep
+very much; they were always round after me!"</p>
+
+<p>"Do you mean on account of the negroes?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, I couldn't think of anything else then. I carried them the Bible."</p>
+
+<p>Ransom was silent a moment; then he said, in a tone which evidently was
+carefully considerate, "I should like to hear all about that!"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, fortunately, we are not required now; we are required for
+something else." And Miss Birdseye looked at him with a wandering,
+tentative humour, as if he would know what she meant.</p>
+
+<p>"You mean for the other slaves!" he exclaimed, with a laugh. "You can
+carry them all the Bibles you want."</p>
+
+<p>"I want to carry them the Statute-book; that must be our Bible now."</p>
+
+<p>Ransom found himself liking Miss Birdseye very much, and it was quite
+without hypocrisy or a tinge too much of the local quality in his speech
+that he said: "Wherever you go, madam, it will matter little what you
+carry. You will always carry your goodness."</p>
+
+<p>For a minute she made no response. Then she murmured: "That's the way
+Olive Chancellor told me you talked."</p>
+
+<p>"I am afraid she has told you little good of me."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, I am sure she thinks she is right."</p>
+
+<p>"Thinks it?" said Ransom. "Why, she knows it, with supreme certainty! By
+the way, I hope she is well."</p>
+
+<p>Miss Birdseye stared again. "Haven't you seen her? Are you not
+visiting?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh no, I am not visiting! I was literally passing her house when I met
+you."</p>
+
+<p>"Perhaps you live here now," said Miss Birdseye. And when he had
+corrected this impression, she added, in a tone which showed with what
+positive confidence he had now inspired her, "Hadn't you better drop
+in?"</p>
+
+<p>"It would give Miss Chancellor no pleasure," Basil Ransom rejoined. "She
+regards me as an enemy in the camp."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, she is very brave."</p>
+
+<p>"Precisely. And I am very timid."</p>
+
+<p>"Didn't you fight once?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes; but it was in such a good cause!"</p>
+
+<p>Ransom meant this allusion to the great Secession and, by comparison, to
+the attitude of the resisting male (laudable even as that might be), to
+be decently jocular; but Miss Birdseye took it very seriously, and sat
+there for a good while as speechless as if she meant to convey that she
+had been going on too long now to be able to discuss the propriety of
+the late rebellion. The young man felt that he had silenced her, and he
+was very sorry; for, with all deference to the disinterested Southern
+attitude toward the unprotected female, what he had got into the car
+with her for was precisely to make her talk. He had wished for general,
+as well as for particular, news of Verena Tarrant; it was a topic on
+which he had proposed to draw Miss Birdseye out. He preferred not to
+broach it himself, and he waited awhile for another opening. At last,
+when he was on the point of exposing himself by a direct inquiry (he
+reflected that the exposure would in any case not be long averted), she
+anticipated him by saying, in a manner which showed that her thoughts
+had continued in the same train, "I wonder very much that Miss Tarrant
+didn't affect you that evening!"</p>
+
+<p>"Ah, but she did!" Ransom said, with alacrity. "I thought her very
+charming!"</p>
+
+<p>"Didn't you think her very reasonable?"</p>
+
+<p>"God forbid, madam! I consider women have no business to be reasonable."</p>
+
+<p>His companion turned upon him, slowly and mildly, and each of her
+glasses, in her aspect of reproach, had the glitter of an enormous tear.
+"Do you regard us, then, simply as lovely baubles?"</p>
+
+<p>The effect of this question, as coming from Miss Birdseye, and referring
+in some degree to her own venerable identity, was such as to move him to
+irresistible laughter. But he controlled himself quickly enough to say,
+with genuine expression, "I regard you as the dearest thing in life, the
+only thing which makes it worth living!"</p>
+
+<p>"Worth living for&mdash;you! But for us?" suggested Miss Birdseye.</p>
+
+<p>"It's worth any woman's while to be admired as I admire you. Miss
+Tarrant, of whom we were speaking, affected me, as you say, in this
+way&mdash;that I think more highly still, if possible, of the sex which
+produced such a delightful young lady."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, we think everything of her here," said Miss Birdseye. "It seems
+as if it were a real gift."</p>
+
+<p>"Does she speak often&mdash;is there any chance of my hearing her now?"</p>
+
+<p>"She raises her voice a good deal in the places round&mdash;like Framingham
+and Billerica. It seems as if she were gathering strength, just to break
+over Boston like a wave. In fact she did break, last summer. She is a
+growing power since her great success at the convention."</p>
+
+<p>"Ah! her success at the convention was very great?" Ransom inquired,
+putting discretion into his voice.</p>
+
+<p>Miss Birdseye hesitated a moment, in order to measure her response by
+the bounds of righteousness. "Well," she said, with the tenderness of a
+long retrospect, "I have seen nothing like it since I last listened to
+Eliza P. Moseley."</p>
+
+<p>"What a pity she isn't speaking somewhere to-night!" Ransom exclaimed.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, to-night she's out in Cambridge. Olive Chancellor mentioned that."</p>
+
+<p>"Is she making a speech there?"</p>
+
+<p>"No; she's visiting her home."</p>
+
+<p>"I thought her home was in Charles Street?"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, no; that's her residence&mdash;her principal one&mdash;since she became so
+united to your cousin. Isn't Miss Chancellor your cousin?"</p>
+
+<p>"We don't insist on the relationship," said Ransom, smiling. "Are they
+very much united, the two young ladies?"</p>
+
+<p>"You would say so if you were to see Miss Chancellor when Verena rises
+to eloquence. It's as if the chords were strung across her own heart;
+she seems to vibrate, to echo with every word. It's a very close and
+very beautiful tie, and we think everything of it here. They will work
+together for a great good!"</p>
+
+<p>"I hope so," Ransom remarked. "But in spite of it Miss Tarrant spends a
+part of her time with her father and mother."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, she seems to have something for every one. If you were to see her
+at home, you would think she was all the daughter. She leads a lovely
+life!" said Miss Birdseye.</p>
+
+<p>"See her at home? That's exactly what I want!" Ransom rejoined, feeling
+that if he was to come to this he needn't have had scruples at first. "I
+haven't forgotten that she invited me, when I met her."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, of course she attracts many visitors," said Miss Birdseye, limiting
+her encouragement to this statement.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes; she must be used to admirers. And where, in Cambridge, do her
+family live?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, it's on one of those little streets that don't seem to have very
+much of a name. But they do call it&mdash;they do call it&mdash;&mdash;" she meditated
+audibly.</p>
+
+<p>This process was interrupted by an abrupt allocution from the conductor.
+"I guess you change here for <i>your</i> place. You want one of them blue
+cars."</p>
+
+<p>The good lady returned to a sense of the situation, and Ransom helped
+her out of the vehicle, with the aid, as before, of a certain amount of
+propulsion from the conductor. Her road branched off to the right, and
+she had to wait on the corner of a street, there being as yet no blue
+car within hail. The corner was quiet and the day favourable to
+patience&mdash;a day of relaxed rigour and intense brilliancy. It was as if
+the touch of the air itself were gloved, and the street-colouring had
+the richness of a superficial thaw. Ransom, of course, waited with his
+philanthropic companion, though she now protested more vigorously
+against the idea that a gentleman from the South should pretend to teach
+an old abolitionist the mysteries of Boston. He promised to leave her
+when he should have consigned her to the blue car; and meanwhile they
+stood in the sun, with their backs against an apothecary's window, and
+she tried again, at his suggestion, to remember the name of Doctor
+Tarrant's street. "I guess if you ask for Doctor Tarrant, any one can
+tell you," she said; and then suddenly the address came to her&mdash;the
+residence of the mesmeric healer was in Monadnoc Place.</p>
+
+<p>"But you'll have to ask for that, so it comes to the same," she went on.
+After this she added, with a friendliness more personal, "Ain't you
+going to see your cousin too?"</p>
+
+<p>"Not if I can help it!"</p>
+
+<p>Miss Birdseye gave a little ineffectual sigh. "Well, I suppose every one
+must act out their ideal. That's what Olive Chancellor does. She's a
+very noble character."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh yes, a glorious nature."</p>
+
+<p>"You know their opinions are just the same&mdash;hers and Verena's," Miss
+Birdseye placidly continued. "So why should you make a distinction?"</p>
+
+<p>"My dear madam," said Ransom, "does a woman consist of nothing but her
+opinions? I like Miss Tarrant's lovely face better, to begin with."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, she <i>is</i> pretty-looking." And Miss Birdseye gave another sigh, as
+if she had had a theory submitted to her&mdash;that one about a lady's
+opinions&mdash;which, with all that was unfamiliar and peculiar lying behind
+it, she was really too old to look into much. It might have been the
+first time she really felt her age. "There's a blue car," she said, in a
+tone of mild relief.</p>
+
+<p>"It will be some moments before it gets here. Moreover, I don't believe
+that at bottom they <i>are</i> Miss Tarrant's opinions," Ransom added.</p>
+
+<p>"You mustn't think she hasn't a strong hold of them," his companion
+exclaimed, more briskly. "If you think she is not sincere, you are very
+much mistaken. Those views are just her life."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, <i>she</i> may bring me round to them," said Ransom, smiling.</p>
+
+<p>Miss Birdseye had been watching her blue car, the advance of which was
+temporarily obstructed. At this, she transferred her eyes to him, gazing
+at him solemnly out of the pervasive window of her spectacles. "Well, I
+shouldn't wonder if she did! Yes, that will be a good thing. I don't see
+how you can help being a good deal shaken by her. She has acted on so
+many."</p>
+
+<p>"I see: no doubt she will act on me." Then it occurred to Ransom to add:
+"By the way, Miss Birdseye, perhaps you will be so kind as not to
+mention this meeting of ours to my cousin, in case of your seeing her
+again. I have a perfectly good conscience in not calling upon her, but I
+shouldn't like her to think that I announced my slighting intention all
+over the town. I don't want to offend her, and she had better not know
+that I have been in Boston. If you don't tell her, no one else will."</p>
+
+<p>"Do you wish me to conceal&mdash;&mdash;?" murmured Miss Birdseye, panting a
+little.</p>
+
+<p>"No, I don't want you to conceal anything. I only want you to let this
+incident pass&mdash;to say nothing."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, I never did anything of that kind."</p>
+
+<p>"Of what kind?" Ransom was half vexed, half touched by her inability to
+enter into his point of view, and her resistance made him hold to his
+idea the more. "It is very simple, what I ask of you. You are under no
+obligation to tell Miss Chancellor everything that happens to you, are
+you?"</p>
+
+<p>His request seemed still something of a shock to the poor old lady's
+candour. "Well, I see her very often, and we talk a great deal. And
+then&mdash;won't Verena tell her?"</p>
+
+<p>"I have thought of that&mdash;but I hope not."</p>
+
+<p>"She tells her most everything. Their union is so close."</p>
+
+<p>"She won't want her to be wounded," Ransom said ingeniously.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, you <i>are</i> considerate." And Miss Birdseye continued to gaze at
+him. "It's a pity you can't sympathise."</p>
+
+<p>"As I tell you, perhaps Miss Tarrant will bring me round. You have
+before you a possible convert," Ransom went on, without, I fear, putting
+up the least little prayer to heaven that his dishonesty might be
+forgiven.</p>
+
+<p>"I should be very happy to think that&mdash;after I have told you her address
+in this secret way." A smile of infinite mildness glimmered in Miss
+Birdseye's face, and she added: "Well, I guess that will be your fate.
+She <i>has</i> affected so many. I would keep very quiet if I thought that.
+Yes, she will bring you round."</p>
+
+<p>"I will let you know as soon as she does," Basil Ransom said. "Here is
+your car at last."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, I believe in the victory of the truth. I won't say anything." And
+she suffered the young man to lead her to the car, which had now stopped
+at their corner.</p>
+
+<p>"I hope very much I shall see you again," he remarked, as they went.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, I am always round the streets, in Boston." And while, lifting and
+pushing, he was helping again to insert her into the oblong receptacle,
+she turned a little and repeated, "She <i>will</i> affect you! If that's to
+be your secret, I will keep it," Ransom heard her subjoin. He raised his
+hat and waved her a farewell, but she didn't see him; she was squeezing
+further into the car and making the discovery that this time it was full
+and there was no seat for her. Surely, however, he said to himself,
+every man in the place would offer his own to such an innocent old dear.</p>
+
+
+<p>END OF VOL. I</p>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's The Bostonians, Vol. I (of II), by Henry James
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE BOSTONIANS, VOL. I (OF II) ***
+
+***** This file should be named 19717-h.htm or 19717-h.zip *****
+This and all associated files of various formats will be found in:
+        http://www.gutenberg.org/1/9/7/1/19717/
+
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diff --git a/19717.txt b/19717.txt
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+++ b/19717.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,7734 @@
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Bostonians, Vol. I (of II), by Henry James
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Bostonians, Vol. I (of II)
+
+Author: Henry James
+
+Release Date: November 5, 2006 [EBook #19717]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE BOSTONIANS, VOL. I (OF II) ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by R. Cedron, Mary Meehan and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+                            THE BOSTONIANS
+
+                               A NOVEL
+
+                            BY HENRY JAMES
+
+                            IN TWO VOLUMES
+
+                               VOL. I
+
+
+
+MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED
+ST. MARTIN'S STREET, LONDON
+1921
+
+_First Published in_ 1886
+
+
+
+
+BOOK FIRST
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+
+"Olive will come down in about ten minutes; she told me to tell you
+that. About ten; that is exactly like Olive. Neither five nor fifteen,
+and yet not ten exactly, but either nine or eleven. She didn't tell me
+to say she was glad to see you, because she doesn't know whether she is
+or not, and she wouldn't for the world expose herself to telling a fib.
+She is very honest, is Olive Chancellor; she is full of rectitude.
+Nobody tells fibs in Boston; I don't know what to make of them all.
+Well, I am very glad to see you, at any rate."
+
+These words were spoken with much volubility by a fair, plump, smiling
+woman who entered a narrow drawing-room in which a visitor, kept waiting
+for a few moments, was already absorbed in a book. The gentleman had not
+even needed to sit down to become interested: apparently he had taken up
+the volume from a table as soon as he came in, and, standing there,
+after a single glance round the apartment, had lost himself in its
+pages. He threw it down at the approach of Mrs. Luna, laughed, shook
+hands with her, and said in answer to her last remark, "You imply that
+you do tell fibs. Perhaps that is one."
+
+"Oh no; there is nothing wonderful in my being glad to see you," Mrs.
+Luna rejoined, "when I tell you that I have been three long weeks in
+this unprevaricating city."
+
+"That has an unflattering sound for me," said the young man. "I pretend
+not to prevaricate."
+
+"Dear me, what's the good of being a Southerner?" the lady asked. "Olive
+told me to tell you she hoped you will stay to dinner. And if she said
+it, she does really hope it. She is willing to risk that."
+
+"Just as I am?" the visitor inquired, presenting himself with rather a
+work-a-day aspect.
+
+Mrs. Luna glanced at him from head to foot, and gave a little smiling
+sigh, as if he had been a long sum in addition. And, indeed, he was very
+long, Basil Ransom, and he even looked a little hard and discouraging,
+like a column of figures, in spite of the friendly face which he bent
+upon his hostess's deputy, and which, in its thinness, had a deep dry
+line, a sort of premature wrinkle, on either side of the mouth. He was
+tall and lean, and dressed throughout in black; his shirt-collar was low
+and wide, and the triangle of linen, a little crumpled, exhibited by the
+opening of his waistcoat, was adorned by a pin containing a small red
+stone. In spite of this decoration the young man looked poor--as poor as
+a young man could look who had such a fine head and such magnificent
+eyes. Those of Basil Ransom were dark, deep, and glowing; his head had a
+character of elevation which fairly added to his stature; it was a head
+to be seen above the level of a crowd, on some judicial bench or
+political platform, or even on a bronze medal. His forehead was high and
+broad, and his thick black hair, perfectly straight and glossy, and
+without any division, rolled back from it in a leonine manner. These
+things, the eyes especially, with their smouldering fire, might have
+indicated that he was to be a great American statesman; or, on the other
+hand, they might simply have proved that he came from Carolina or
+Alabama. He came, in fact, from Mississippi, and he spoke very
+perceptibly with the accent of that country. It is not in my power to
+reproduce by any combination of characters this charming dialect; but
+the initiated reader will have no difficulty in evoking the sound, which
+is to be associated in the present instance with nothing vulgar or vain.
+This lean, pale, sallow, shabby, striking young man, with his superior
+head, his sedentary shoulders, his expression of bright grimness and
+hard enthusiasm, his provincial, distinguished appearance, is, as a
+representative of his sex, the most important personage in my narrative;
+he played a very active part in the events I have undertaken in some
+degree to set forth. And yet the reader who likes a complete image, who
+desires to read with the senses as well as with the reason, is entreated
+not to forget that he prolonged his consonants and swallowed his vowels,
+that he was guilty of elisions and interpolations which were equally
+unexpected, and that his discourse was pervaded by something sultry and
+vast, something almost African in its rich, basking tone, something that
+suggested the teeming expanse of the cotton-field. Mrs. Luna looked up
+at all this, but saw only a part of it; otherwise she would not have
+replied in a bantering manner, in answer to his inquiry: "Are you ever
+different from this?" Mrs. Luna was familiar--intolerably familiar.
+
+Basil Ransom coloured a little. Then he said: "Oh yes; when I dine out I
+usually carry a six-shooter and a bowie-knife." And he took up his hat
+vaguely--a soft black hat with a low crown and an immense straight brim.
+Mrs. Luna wanted to know what he was doing. She made him sit down; she
+assured him that her sister quite expected him, would feel as sorry as
+she could ever feel for anything--for she was a kind of fatalist,
+anyhow--if he didn't stay to dinner. It was an immense pity--she herself
+was going out; in Boston you must jump at invitations. Olive, too, was
+going somewhere after dinner, but he mustn't mind that; perhaps he would
+like to go with her. It wasn't a party--Olive didn't go to parties; it
+was one of those weird meetings she was so fond of.
+
+"What kind of meetings do you refer to? You speak as if it were a
+rendezvous of witches on the Brocken."
+
+"Well, so it is; they are all witches and wizards, mediums, and
+spirit-rappers, and roaring radicals."
+
+Basil Ransom stared; the yellow light in his brown eyes deepened. "Do
+you mean to say your sister's a roaring radical?"
+
+"A radical? She's a female Jacobin--she's a nihilist. Whatever is, is
+wrong, and all that sort of thing. If you are going to dine with her,
+you had better know it."
+
+"Oh, murder!" murmured the young man vaguely, sinking back in his chair
+with his arms folded. He looked at Mrs. Luna with intelligent
+incredulity. She was sufficiently pretty; her hair was in clusters of
+curls, like bunches of grapes; her tight bodice seemed to crack with her
+vivacity; and from beneath the stiff little plaits of her petticoat a
+small fat foot protruded, resting upon a stilted heel. She was
+attractive and impertinent, especially the latter. He seemed to think it
+was a great pity, what she had told him; but he lost himself in this
+consideration, or, at any rate, said nothing for some time, while his
+eyes wandered over Mrs. Luna, and he probably wondered what body of
+doctrine _she_ represented, little as she might partake of the nature of
+her sister. Many things were strange to Basil Ransom; Boston especially
+was strewn with surprises, and he was a man who liked to understand.
+Mrs. Luna was drawing on her gloves; Ransom had never seen any that were
+so long; they reminded him of stockings, and he wondered how she managed
+without garters above the elbow. "Well, I suppose I might have known
+that," he continued, at last.
+
+"You might have known what?"
+
+"Well, that Miss Chancellor would be all that you say. She was brought
+up in the city of reform."
+
+"Oh, it isn't the city; it's just Olive Chancellor. She would reform the
+solar system if she could get hold of it. She'll reform you, if you
+don't look out. That's the way I found her when I returned from Europe."
+
+"Have you been in Europe?" Ransom asked.
+
+"Mercy, yes! Haven't you?"
+
+"No, I haven't been anywhere. Has your sister?"
+
+"Yes; but she stayed only an hour or two. She hates it; she would like
+to abolish it. Didn't you know I had been to Europe?" Mrs. Luna went on,
+in the slightly aggrieved tone of a woman who discovers the limits of
+her reputation.
+
+Ransom reflected he might answer her that until five minutes ago he
+didn't know she existed; but he remembered that this was not the way in
+which a Southern gentleman spoke to ladies, and he contented himself
+with saying that he must condone his Boeotian ignorance (he was fond
+of an elegant phrase); that he lived in a part of the country where they
+didn't think much about Europe, and that he had always supposed she was
+domiciled in New York. This last remark he made at a venture, for he
+had, naturally, not devoted any supposition whatever to Mrs. Luna. His
+dishonesty, however, only exposed him the more.
+
+"If you thought I lived in New York, why in the world didn't you come
+and see me?" the lady inquired.
+
+"Well, you see, I don't go out much, except to the courts."
+
+"Do you mean the law-courts? Every one has got some profession over
+here! Are you very ambitious? You look as if you were."
+
+"Yes, very," Basil Ransom replied, with a smile, and the curious
+feminine softness with which Southern gentlemen enunciate that adverb.
+
+Mrs. Luna explained that she had been living in Europe for several
+years--ever since her husband died--but had come home a month before,
+come home with her little boy, the only thing she had in the world, and
+was paying a visit to her sister, who, of course, was the nearest thing
+after the child. "But it isn't the same," she said. "Olive and I
+disagree so much."
+
+"While you and your little boy don't," the young man remarked.
+
+"Oh no, I never differ from Newton!" And Mrs. Luna added that now she
+was back she didn't know what she should do. That was the worst of
+coming back; it was like being born again, at one's age--one had to
+begin life afresh. One didn't even know what one had come back for.
+There were people who wanted one to spend the winter in Boston; but she
+couldn't stand that--she knew, at least, what she had not come back for.
+Perhaps she should take a house in Washington; did he ever hear of that
+little place? They had invented it while she was away. Besides, Olive
+didn't want her in Boston, and didn't go through the form of saying so.
+That was one comfort with Olive; she never went through any forms.
+
+Basil Ransom had got up just as Mrs. Luna made this last declaration;
+for a young lady had glided into the room, who stopped short as it fell
+upon her ears. She stood there looking, consciously and rather
+seriously, at Mr. Ransom; a smile of exceeding faintness played about
+her lips--it was just perceptible enough to light up the native gravity
+of her face. It might have been likened to a thin ray of moonlight
+resting upon the wall of a prison.
+
+"If that were true," she said, "I shouldn't tell you that I am very
+sorry to have kept you waiting."
+
+Her voice was low and agreeable--a cultivated voice--and she extended a
+slender white hand to her visitor, who remarked with some solemnity (he
+felt a certain guilt of participation in Mrs. Luna's indiscretion) that
+he was intensely happy to make her acquaintance. He observed that Miss
+Chancellor's hand was at once cold and limp; she merely placed it in
+his, without exerting the smallest pressure. Mrs. Luna explained to her
+sister that her freedom of speech was caused by his being a
+relation--though, indeed, he didn't seem to know much about them. She
+didn't believe he had ever heard of her, Mrs. Luna, though he pretended,
+with his Southern chivalry, that he had. She must be off to her dinner
+now, she saw the carriage was there, and in her absence Olive might give
+any version of her she chose.
+
+"I have told him you are a radical, and you may tell him, if you like,
+that I am a painted Jezebel. Try to reform him; a person from
+Mississippi is sure to be all wrong. I shall be back very late; we are
+going to a theatre-party; that's why we dine so early. Good-bye, Mr.
+Ransom," Mrs. Luna continued, gathering up the feathery white shawl
+which added to the volume of her fairness. "I hope you are going to stay
+a little, so that you may judge us for yourself. I should like you to
+see Newton, too; he is a noble little nature, and I want some advice
+about him. You only stay to-morrow? Why, what's the use of that? Well,
+mind you come and see me in New York; I shall be sure to be part of the
+winter there. I shall send you a card; I won't let you off. Don't come
+out; my sister has the first claim. Olive, why don't you take him to
+your female convention?" Mrs. Luna's familiarity extended even to her
+sister; she remarked to Miss Chancellor that she looked as if she were
+got up for a sea-voyage. "I am glad I haven't opinions that prevent my
+dressing in the evening!" she declared from the doorway. "The amount of
+thought they give to their clothing, the people who are afraid of
+looking frivolous!"
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+
+Whether much or little consideration had been directed to the result,
+Miss Chancellor certainly would not have incurred this reproach. She was
+habited in a plain dark dress, without any ornaments, and her smooth,
+colourless hair was confined as carefully as that of her sister was
+encouraged to stray. She had instantly seated herself, and while Mrs.
+Luna talked she kept her eyes on the ground, glancing even less toward
+Basil Ransom than toward that woman of many words. The young man was
+therefore free to look at her; a contemplation which showed him that she
+was agitated and trying to conceal it. He wondered why she was agitated,
+not foreseeing that he was destined to discover, later, that her nature
+was like a skiff in a stormy sea. Even after her sister had passed out
+of the room she sat there with her eyes turned away, as if there had
+been a spell upon her which forbade her to raise them. Miss Olive
+Chancellor, it may be confided to the reader, to whom in the course of
+our history I shall be under the necessity of imparting much occult
+information, was subject to fits of tragic shyness, during which she was
+unable to meet even her own eyes in the mirror. One of these fits had
+suddenly seized her now, without any obvious cause, though, indeed, Mrs.
+Luna had made it worse by becoming instantly so personal. There was
+nothing in the world so personal as Mrs. Luna; her sister could have
+hated her for it if she had not forbidden herself this emotion as
+directed to individuals. Basil Ransom was a young man of first-rate
+intelligence, but conscious of the narrow range, as yet, of his
+experience. He was on his guard against generalisations which might be
+hasty; but he had arrived at two or three that were of value to a
+gentleman lately admitted to the New York bar and looking out for
+clients. One of them was to the effect that the simplest division it is
+possible to make of the human race is into the people who take things
+hard and the people who take them easy. He perceived very quickly that
+Miss Chancellor belonged to the former class. This was written so
+intensely in her delicate face that he felt an unformulated pity for her
+before they had exchanged twenty words. He himself, by nature, took
+things easy; if he had put on the screw of late, it was after reflexion,
+and because circumstances pressed him close. But this pale girl, with
+her light-green eyes, her pointed features and nervous manner, was
+visibly morbid; it was as plain as day that she was morbid. Poor Ransom
+announced this fact to himself as if he had made a great discovery; but
+in reality he had never been so "Boeotian" as at that moment. It proved
+nothing of any importance, with regard to Miss Chancellor, to say that
+she was morbid; any sufficient account of her would lie very much to the
+rear of that. Why was she morbid, and why was her morbidness typical?
+Ransom might have exulted if he had gone back far enough to explain that
+mystery. The women he had hitherto known had been mainly of his own soft
+clime, and it was not often they exhibited the tendency he detected (and
+cursorily deplored) in Mrs. Luna's sister. That was the way he liked
+them--not to think too much, not to feel any responsibility for the
+government of the world, such as he was sure Miss Chancellor felt. If
+they would only be private and passive, and have no feeling but for
+that, and leave publicity to the sex of tougher hide! Ransom was pleased
+with the vision of that remedy; it must be repeated that he was very
+provincial.
+
+These considerations were not present to him as definitely as I have
+written them here; they were summed up in the vague compassion which his
+cousin's figure excited in his mind, and which was yet accompanied with
+a sensible reluctance to know her better, obvious as it was that with
+such a face as that she must be remarkable. He was sorry for her, but he
+saw in a flash that no one could help her: that was what made her
+tragic. He had not, seeking his fortune, come away from the blighted
+South, which weighed upon his heart, to look out for tragedies; at least
+he didn't want them outside of his office in Pine Street. He broke the
+silence ensuing upon Mrs. Luna's departure by one of the courteous
+speeches to which blighted regions may still encourage a tendency, and
+presently found himself talking comfortably enough with his hostess.
+Though he had said to himself that no one could help her, the effect of
+his tone was to dispel her shyness; it was her great advantage (for the
+career she had proposed to herself) that in certain conditions she was
+liable suddenly to become bold. She was reassured at finding that her
+visitor was peculiar; the way he spoke told her that it was no wonder he
+had fought on the Southern side. She had never yet encountered a
+personage so exotic, and she always felt more at her ease in the
+presence of anything strange. It was the usual things of life that
+filled her with silent rage; which was natural enough, inasmuch as, to
+her vision, almost everything that was usual was iniquitous. She had no
+difficulty in asking him now whether he would not stay to dinner--she
+hoped Adeline had given him her message. It had been when she was
+upstairs with Adeline, as his card was brought up, a sudden and very
+abnormal inspiration to offer him this (for her) really ultimate favour;
+nothing could be further from her common habit than to entertain alone,
+at any repast, a gentleman she had never seen.
+
+It was the same sort of impulse that had moved her to write to Basil
+Ransom, in the spring, after hearing accidentally that he had come to
+the North and intended, in New York, to practise his profession. It was
+her nature to look out for duties, to appeal to her conscience for
+tasks. This attentive organ, earnestly consulted, had represented to her
+that he was an offshoot of the old slave-holding oligarchy which, within
+her own vivid remembrance, had plunged the country into blood and tears,
+and that, as associated with such abominations, he was not a worthy
+object of patronage for a person whose two brothers--her only ones--had
+given up life for the Northern cause. It reminded her, however, on the
+other hand, that he too had been much bereaved, and, moreover, that he
+had fought and offered his own life, even if it had not been taken. She
+could not defend herself against a rich admiration--a kind of tenderness
+of envy--of any one who had been so happy as to have that opportunity.
+The most secret, the most sacred hope of her nature was that she might
+some day have such a chance, that she might be a martyr and die for
+something. Basil Ransom had lived, but she knew he had lived to see
+bitter hours. His family was ruined; they had lost their slaves, their
+property, their friends and relations, their home; had tasted of all the
+cruelty of defeat. He had tried for a while to carry on the plantation
+himself, but he had a millstone of debt round his neck, and he longed
+for some work which would transport him to the haunts of men. The State
+of Mississippi seemed to him the state of despair; so he surrendered the
+remnants of his patrimony to his mother and sisters, and, at nearly
+thirty years of age, alighted for the first time in New York, in the
+costume of his province, with fifty dollars in his pocket and a gnawing
+hunger in his heart.
+
+That this incident had revealed to the young man his ignorance of many
+things--only, however, to make him say to himself, after the first angry
+blush, that here he would enter the game and here he would win it--so
+much Olive Chancellor could not know; what was sufficient for her was
+that he had rallied, as the French say, had accepted the accomplished
+fact, had admitted that North and South were a single, indivisible
+political organism. Their cousinship--that of Chancellors and
+Ransoms--was not very close; it was the kind of thing that one might
+take up or leave alone, as one pleased. It was "in the female line," as
+Basil Ransom had written, in answering her letter with a good deal of
+form and flourish; he spoke as if they had been royal houses. Her mother
+had wished to take it up; it was only the fear of seeming patronising to
+people in misfortune that had prevented her from writing to Mississippi.
+If it had been possible to send Mrs. Ransom money, or even clothes, she
+would have liked that; but she had no means of ascertaining how such an
+offering would be taken. By the time Basil came to the North--making
+advances, as it were--Mrs. Chancellor had passed away; so it was for
+Olive, left alone in the little house in Charles Street (Adeline being
+in Europe), to decide.
+
+She knew what her mother would have done, and that helped her decision;
+for her mother always chose the positive course. Olive had a fear of
+everything, but her greatest fear was of being afraid. She wished
+immensely to be generous, and how could one be generous unless one ran a
+risk? She had erected it into a sort of rule of conduct that whenever
+she saw a risk she was to take it; and she had frequent humiliations at
+finding herself safe after all. She was perfectly safe after writing to
+Basil Ransom; and, indeed, it was difficult to see what he could have
+done to her except thank her (he was only exceptionally superlative) for
+her letter, and assure her that he would come and see her the first time
+his business (he was beginning to get a little) should take him to
+Boston. He had now come, in redemption of his grateful vow, and even
+this did not make Miss Chancellor feel that she had courted danger. She
+saw (when once she had looked at him) that he would not put those
+worldly interpretations on things which, with her, it was both an
+impulse and a principle to defy. He was too simple--too
+Mississippian--for that; she was almost disappointed. She certainly had
+not hoped that she might have struck him as making unwomanly overtures
+(Miss Chancellor hated this epithet almost as much as she hated its
+opposite); but she had a presentiment that he would be too good-natured,
+primitive to that degree. Of all things in the world, contention was
+most sweet to her (though why it is hard to imagine, for it always cost
+her tears, headaches, a day or two in bed, acute emotion), and it was
+very possible Basil Ransom would not care to contend. Nothing could be
+more displeasing than this indifference when people didn't agree with
+you. That he should agree she did not in the least expect of him; how
+could a Mississippian agree? If she had supposed he would agree, she
+would not have written to him.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+
+When he had told her that if she would take him as he was he should be
+very happy to dine with her, she excused herself a moment and went to
+give an order in the dining-room. The young man, left alone, looked
+about the parlour--the two parlours which, in their prolonged, adjacent
+narrowness, formed evidently one apartment--and wandered to the windows
+at the back, where there was a view of the water; Miss Chancellor having
+the good fortune to dwell on that side of Charles Street toward which,
+in the rear, the afternoon sun slants redly, from an horizon indented at
+empty intervals with wooden spires, the masts of lonely boats, the
+chimneys of dirty "works," over a brackish expanse of anomalous
+character, which is too big for a river and too small for a bay. The
+view seemed to him very picturesque, though in the gathered dusk little
+was left of it save a cold yellow streak in the west, a gleam of brown
+water, and the reflexion of the lights that had begun to show themselves
+in a row of houses, impressive to Ransom in their extreme modernness,
+which overlooked the same lagoon from a long embankment on the left,
+constructed of stones roughly piled. He thought this prospect, from a
+city-house, almost romantic; and he turned from it back to the interior
+illuminated now by a lamp which the parlour-maid had placed on a table
+while he stood at the window as to something still more genial and
+interesting. The artistic sense in Basil Ransom had not been highly
+cultivated; neither (though he had passed his early years as the son of
+a rich man) was his conception of material comfort very definite; it
+consisted mainly of the vision of plenty of cigars and brandy and water
+and newspapers, and a cane-bottomed arm-chair of the right inclination,
+from which he could stretch his legs. Nevertheless it seemed to him he
+had never seen an interior that was so much an interior as this queer
+corridor-shaped drawing-room of his new-found kinswoman; he had never
+felt himself in the presence of so much organised privacy or of so many
+objects that spoke of habits and tastes. Most of the people he had
+hitherto known had no tastes; they had a few habits, but these were not
+of a sort that required much upholstery. He had not as yet been in many
+houses in New York, and he had never before seen so many accessories.
+The general character of the place struck him as Bostonian; this was, in
+fact, very much what he had supposed Boston to be. He had always heard
+Boston was a city of culture, and now there was culture in Miss
+Chancellor's tables and sofas, in the books that were everywhere, on
+little shelves like brackets (as if a book were a statuette), in the
+photographs and watercolours that covered the walls, in the curtains
+that were festooned rather stiffly in the doorways. He looked at some of
+the books and saw that his cousin read German; and his impression of the
+importance of this (as a symptom of superiority) was not diminished by
+the fact that he himself had mastered the tongue (knowing it contained a
+large literature of jurisprudence) during a long, empty, deadly summer
+on the plantation. It is a curious proof of a certain crude modesty
+inherent in Basil Ransom that the main effect of his observing his
+cousin's German books was to give him an idea of the natural energy of
+Northerners. He had noticed it often before; he had already told himself
+that he must count with it. It was only after much experience he made
+the discovery that few Northerners were, in their secret soul, so
+energetic as he. Many other persons had made it before that. He knew
+very little about Miss Chancellor; he had come to see her only because
+she wrote to him; he would never have thought of looking her up, and
+since then there had been no one in New York he might ask about her.
+Therefore he could only guess that she was a rich young woman; such a
+house, inhabited in such a way by a quiet spinster, implied a
+considerable income. How much? he asked himself; five thousand, ten
+thousand, fifteen thousand a year? There was richness to our panting
+young man in the smallest of these figures. He was not of a mercenary
+spirit, but he had an immense desire for success, and he had more than
+once reflected that a moderate capital was an aid to achievement. He had
+seen in his younger years one of the biggest failures that history
+commemorates, an immense national _fiasco_, and it had implanted in his
+mind a deep aversion to the ineffectual. It came over him, while he
+waited for his hostess to reappear, that she was unmarried as well as
+rich, that she was sociable (her letter answered for that) as well as
+single; and he had for a moment a whimsical vision of becoming a partner
+in so flourishing a firm. He ground his teeth a little as he thought of
+the contrasts of the human lot; this cushioned feminine nest made him
+feel unhoused and underfed. Such a mood, however, could only be
+momentary, for he was conscious at bottom of a bigger stomach than all
+the culture of Charles Street could fill.
+
+Afterwards, when his cousin had come back and they had gone down to
+dinner together, where he sat facing her at a little table decorated in
+the middle with flowers, a position from which he had another view,
+through a window where the curtain remained undrawn by her direction
+(she called his attention to this--it was for his benefit), of the
+dusky, empty river, spotted with points of light--at this period, I say,
+it was very easy for him to remark to himself that nothing would induce
+him to make love to such a type as that. Several months later, in New
+York, in conversation with Mrs. Luna, of whom he was destined to see a
+good deal, he alluded by chance to this repast, to the way her sister
+had placed him at table, and to the remark with which she had pointed
+out the advantage of his seat.
+
+"That's what they call in Boston being very 'thoughtful,'" Mrs. Luna
+said, "giving you the Back Bay (don't you hate the name?) to look at,
+and then taking credit for it."
+
+This, however, was in the future; what Basil Ransom actually perceived
+was that Miss Chancellor was a signal old maid. That was her quality,
+her destiny; nothing could be more distinctly written. There are women
+who are unmarried by accident, and others who are unmarried by option;
+but Olive Chancellor was unmarried by every implication of her being.
+She was a spinster as Shelley was a lyric poet, or as the month of
+August is sultry. She was so essentially a celibate that Ransom found
+himself thinking of her as old, though when he came to look at her (as
+he said to himself) it was apparent that her years were fewer than his
+own. He did not dislike her, she had been so friendly; but, little by
+little, she gave him an uneasy feeling--the sense that you could never
+be safe with a person who took things so hard. It came over him that it
+was because she took things hard she had sought his acquaintance; it had
+been because she was strenuous, not because she was genial; she had had
+in her eye--and what an extraordinary eye it was!--not a pleasure, but a
+duty. She would expect him to be strenuous in return; but he
+couldn't--in private life, he couldn't; privacy for Basil Ransom
+consisted entirely in what he called "laying off." She was not so plain
+on further acquaintance as she had seemed to him at first; even the
+young Mississippian had culture enough to see that she was refined. Her
+white skin had a singular look of being drawn tightly across her face;
+but her features, though sharp and irregular, were delicate in a fashion
+that suggested good breeding. Their line was perverse, but it was not
+poor. The curious tint of her eyes was a living colour; when she turned
+it upon you, you thought vaguely of the glitter of green ice. She had
+absolutely no figure, and presented a certain appearance of feeling
+cold. With all this, there was something very modern and highly
+developed in her aspect; she had the advantages as well as the drawbacks
+of a nervous organisation. She smiled constantly at her guest, but from
+the beginning to the end of dinner, though he made several remarks that
+he thought might prove amusing, she never once laughed. Later, he saw
+that she was a woman without laughter; exhilaration, if it ever visited
+her, was dumb. Once only, in the course of his subsequent acquaintance
+with her, did it find a voice; and then the sound remained in Ransom's
+ear as one of the strangest he had heard.
+
+She asked him a great many questions, and made no comment on his
+answers, which only served to suggest to her fresh inquiries. Her
+shyness had quite left her, it did not come back; she had confidence
+enough to wish him to see that she took a great interest in him. Why
+should she? he wondered, He couldn't believe he was one of _her_ kind;
+he was conscious of much Bohemianism--he drank beer, in New York, in
+cellars, knew no ladies, and was familiar with a "variety" actress.
+Certainly, as she knew him better, she would disapprove of him, though,
+of course, he would never mention the actress, nor even, if necessary,
+the beer. Ransom's conception of vice was purely as a series of special
+cases, of explicable accidents. Not that he cared; if it were a part of
+the Boston character to be inquiring, he would be to the last a
+courteous Mississippian. He would tell her about Mississippi as much as
+she liked; he didn't care how much he told her that the old ideas in the
+South were played out. She would not understand him any the better for
+that; she would not know how little his own views could be gathered from
+such a limited admission. What her sister imparted to him about her
+mania for "reform" had left in his mouth a kind of unpleasant
+aftertaste; he felt, at any rate, that if she had the religion of
+humanity--Basil Ransom had read Comte, he had read everything--she would
+never understand him. He, too, had a private vision of reform, but the
+first principle of it was to reform the reformers. As they drew to the
+close of a meal which, in spite of all latent incompatibilities, had
+gone off brilliantly, she said to him that she should have to leave him
+after dinner, unless perhaps he should be inclined to accompany her. She
+was going to a small gathering at the house of a friend who had asked a
+few people, "interested in new ideas," to meet Mrs. Farrinder.
+
+"Oh, thank you," said Basil Ransom. "Is it a party? I haven't been to a
+party since Mississippi seceded."
+
+"No; Miss Birdseye doesn't give parties. She's an ascetic."
+
+"Oh, well, we have had our dinner," Ransom rejoined, laughing.
+
+His hostess sat silent a moment, with her eyes on the ground; she looked
+at such times as if she were hesitating greatly between several things
+she might say, all so important that it was difficult to choose.
+
+"I think it might interest you," she remarked presently. "You will hear
+some discussion, if you are fond of that. Perhaps you wouldn't agree,"
+she added, resting her strange eyes on him.
+
+"Perhaps I shouldn't--I don't agree with everything," he said, smiling
+and stroking his leg.
+
+"Don't you care for human progress?" Miss Chancellor went on.
+
+"I don't know--I never saw any. Are you going to show me some?"
+
+"I can show you an earnest effort towards it. That's the most one can be
+sure of. But I am not sure you are worthy."
+
+"Is it something very Bostonian? I should like to see that," said Basil
+Ransom.
+
+"There are movements in other cities. Mrs. Farrinder goes everywhere;
+she may speak to-night."
+
+"Mrs. Farrinder, the celebrated----?"
+
+"Yes, the celebrated; the great apostle of the emancipation of women.
+She is a great friend of Miss Birdseye."
+
+"And who is Miss Birdseye?"
+
+"She is one of our celebrities. She is the woman in the world, I
+suppose, who has laboured most for every wise reform. I think I ought to
+tell you," Miss Chancellor went on in a moment, "she was one of the
+earliest, one of the most passionate, of the old Abolitionists."
+
+She had thought, indeed, she ought to tell him that, and it threw her
+into a little tremor of excitement to do so. Yet, if she had been afraid
+he would show some irritation at this news, she was disappointed at the
+geniality with which he exclaimed:
+
+"Why, poor old lady--she must be quite mature!"
+
+It was therefore with some severity that she rejoined:
+
+"She will never be old. She is the youngest spirit I know. But if you
+are not in sympathy, perhaps you had better not come," she went on.
+
+"In sympathy with what, dear madam?" Basil Ransom asked, failing still,
+to her perception, to catch the tone of real seriousness. "If, as you
+say, there is to be a discussion, there will be different sides, and of
+course one can't sympathise with both."
+
+"Yes, but every one will, in his way--or in her way--plead the cause of
+the new truths. If you don't care for them, you won't go with us."
+
+"I tell you I haven't the least idea what they are! I have never yet
+encountered in the world any but old truths--as old as the sun and moon.
+How can I know? But _do_ take me; it's such a chance to see Boston."
+
+"It isn't Boston--it's humanity!" Miss Chancellor, as she made this
+remark, rose from her chair, and her movement seemed to say that she
+consented. But before she quitted her kinsman to get ready, she observed
+to him that she was sure he knew what she meant; he was only pretending
+he didn't.
+
+"Well, perhaps, after all, I have a general idea," he confessed; "but
+don't you see how this little reunion will give me a chance to fix it?"
+
+She lingered an instant, with her anxious face. "Mrs. Farrinder will fix
+it!" she said; and she went to prepare herself.
+
+It was in this poor young lady's nature to be anxious, to have scruple
+within scruple and to forecast the consequences of things. She returned
+in ten minutes, in her bonnet, which she had apparently assumed in
+recognition of Miss Birdseye's asceticism. As she stood there drawing on
+her gloves--her visitor had fortified himself against Mrs. Farrinder by
+another glass of wine--she declared to him that she quite repented of
+having proposed to him to go; something told her that he would be an
+unfavourable element.
+
+"Why, is it going to be a spiritual _seance_?" Basil Ransom asked.
+
+"Well, I have heard at Miss Birdseye's some inspirational speaking."
+Olive Chancellor was determined to look him straight in the face as she
+said this; her sense of the way it might strike him operated as a
+cogent, not as a deterrent, reason.
+
+"Why, Miss Olive, it's just got up on purpose for me!" cried the young
+Mississippian, radiant, and clasping his hands. She thought him very
+handsome as he said this, but reflected that unfortunately men didn't
+care for the truth, especially the new kinds, in proportion as they were
+good-looking. She had, however, a moral resource that she could always
+fall back upon; it had already been a comfort to her, on occasions of
+acute feeling, that she hated men, as a class, anyway. "And I want so
+much to see an old Abolitionist; I have never laid eyes on one," Basil
+Ransom added.
+
+"Of course you couldn't see one in the South; you were too afraid of
+them to let them come there!" She was now trying to think of something
+she might say that would be sufficiently disagreeable to make him cease
+to insist on accompanying her; for, strange to record--if anything, in a
+person of that intense sensibility, be stranger than any other--her
+second thought with regard to having asked him had deepened with the
+elapsing moments into an unreasoned terror of the effect of his
+presence. "Perhaps Miss Birdseye won't like you," she went on, as they
+waited for the carriage.
+
+"I don't know; I reckon she will," said Basil Ransom good-humouredly. He
+evidently had no intention of giving up his opportunity.
+
+From the window of the dining-room, at that moment, they heard the
+carriage drive up. Miss Birdseye lived at the South End; the distance
+was considerable, and Miss Chancellor had ordered a hackney-coach, it
+being one of the advantages of living in Charles Street that stables
+were near. The logic of her conduct was none of the clearest; for if she
+had been alone she would have proceeded to her destination by the aid of
+the street-car; not from economy (for she had the good fortune not to be
+obliged to consult it to that degree), and not from any love of
+wandering about Boston at night (a kind of exposure she greatly
+disliked), but by reason of a theory she devotedly nursed, a theory
+which bade her put off invidious differences and mingle in the common
+life. She would have gone on foot to Boylston Street, and there she
+would have taken the public conveyance (in her heart she loathed it) to
+the South End. Boston was full of poor girls who had to walk about at
+night and to squeeze into horse-cars in which every sense was
+displeased; and why should she hold herself superior to these? Olive
+Chancellor regulated her conduct on lofty principles, and this is why,
+having to-night the advantage of a gentleman's protection, she sent for
+a carriage to obliterate that patronage. If they had gone together in
+the common way she would have seemed to owe it to him that she should be
+so daring, and he belonged to a sex to which she wished to be under no
+obligations. Months before, when she wrote to him, it had been with the
+sense, rather, of putting _him_ in debt. As they rolled toward the South
+End, side by side, in a good deal of silence, bouncing and bumping over
+the railway-tracks very little less, after all, than if their wheels had
+been fitted to them, and looking out on either side at rows of red
+houses, dusky in the lamp-light, with protuberant fronts, approached by
+ladders of stone; as they proceeded, with these contemplative
+undulations, Miss Chancellor said to her companion, with a concentrated
+desire to defy him, as a punishment for having thrown her (she couldn't
+tell why) into such a tremor:
+
+"Don't you believe, then, in the coming of a better day--in its being
+possible to do something for the human race?"
+
+Poor Ransom perceived the defiance, and he felt rather bewildered; he
+wondered what type, after all, he _had_ got hold of, and what game was
+being played with him. Why had she made advances, if she wanted to pinch
+him this way? However, he was good for any game--that one as well as
+another--and he saw that he was "in" for something of which he had long
+desired to have a nearer view. "Well, Miss Olive," he answered, putting
+on again his big hat, which he had been holding in his lap, "what
+strikes me most is that the human race has got to bear its troubles."
+
+"That's what men say to women, to make them patient in the position they
+have made for them."
+
+"Oh, the position of women!" Basil Ransom exclaimed. "The position of
+women is to make fools of men. I would change my position for yours any
+day," he went on. "That's what I said to myself as I sat there in your
+elegant home."
+
+He could not see, in the dimness of the carriage, that she had flushed
+quickly, and he did not know that she disliked to be reminded of certain
+things which, for her, were mitigations of the hard feminine lot. But
+the passionate quaver with which, a moment later, she answered him
+sufficiently assured him that he had touched her at a tender point.
+
+"Do you make it a reproach to me that I happen to have a little money?
+The dearest wish of my heart is to do something with it for others--for
+the miserable."
+
+Basil Ransom might have greeted this last declaration with the sympathy
+it deserved, might have commended the noble aspirations of his
+kinswoman. But what struck him, rather, was the oddity of so sudden a
+sharpness of pitch in an intercourse which, an hour or two before, had
+begun in perfect amity, and he burst once more into an irrepressible
+laugh. This made his companion feel, with intensity, how little she was
+joking. "I don't know why I should care what you think," she said.
+
+"Don't care--don't care. What does it matter? It is not of the slightest
+importance."
+
+He might say that, but it was not true; she felt that there were reasons
+why she should care. She had brought him into her life, and she should
+have to pay for it. But she wished to know the worst at once. "Are you
+against our emancipation?" she asked, turning a white face on him in the
+momentary radiance of a street-lamp.
+
+"Do you mean your voting and preaching and all that sort of thing?" He
+made this inquiry, but seeing how seriously she would take his answer,
+he was almost frightened, and hung fire. "I will tell you when I have
+heard Mrs. Farrinder."
+
+They had arrived at the address given by Miss Chancellor to the
+coachman, and their vehicle stopped with a lurch. Basil Ransom got out;
+he stood at the door with an extended hand, to assist the young lady.
+But she seemed to hesitate; she sat there with her spectral face. "You
+hate it!" she exclaimed, in a low tone.
+
+"Miss Birdseye will convert me," said Ransom, with intention; for he had
+grown very curious, and he was afraid that now, at the last, Miss
+Chancellor would prevent his entering the house. She alighted without
+his help, and behind her he ascended the high steps of Miss Birdseye's
+residence. He had grown very curious, and among the things he wanted to
+know was why in the world this ticklish spinster had written to him.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+
+She had told him before they started that they should be early; she
+wished to see Miss Birdseye alone, before the arrival of any one else.
+This was just for the pleasure of seeing her--it was an opportunity; she
+was always so taken up with others. She received Miss Chancellor in the
+hall of the mansion, which had a salient front, an enormous and very
+high number--756--painted in gilt on the glass light above the door, a
+tin sign bearing the name of a doctress (Mary J. Prance) suspended from
+one of the windows of the basement, and a peculiar look of being both
+new and faded--a kind of modern fatigue--like certain articles of
+commerce which are sold at a reduction as shop-worn. The hall was very
+narrow; a considerable part of it was occupied by a large hat-tree, from
+which several coats and shawls already depended; the rest offered space
+for certain lateral demonstrations on Miss Birdseye's part. She sidled
+about her visitors, and at last went round to open for them a door of
+further admission, which happened to be locked inside. She was a little
+old lady, with an enormous head; that was the first thing Ransom
+noticed--the vast, fair, protuberant, candid, ungarnished brow,
+surmounting a pair of weak, kind, tired-looking eyes, and ineffectually
+balanced in the rear by a cap which had the air of falling backward, and
+which Miss Birdseye suddenly felt for while she talked, with
+unsuccessful irrelevant movements. She had a sad, soft, pale face, which
+(and it was the effect of her whole head) looked as if it had been
+soaked, blurred, and made vague by exposure to some slow dissolvent. The
+long practice of philanthropy had not given accent to her features; it
+had rubbed out their transitions, their meanings. The waves of sympathy,
+of enthusiasm, had wrought upon them in the same way in which the waves
+of time finally modify the surface of old marble busts, gradually
+washing away their sharpness, their details. In her large countenance
+her dim little smile scarcely showed. It was a mere sketch of a smile, a
+kind of instalment, or payment on account; it seemed to say that she
+would smile more if she had time, but that you could see, without this,
+that she was gentle and easy to beguile.
+
+She always dressed in the same way: she wore a loose black jacket, with
+deep pockets, which were stuffed with papers, memoranda of a voluminous
+correspondence; and from beneath her jacket depended a short stuff
+dress. The brevity of this simple garment was the one device by which
+Miss Birdseye managed to suggest that she was a woman of business, that
+she wished to be free for action. She belonged to the Short-Skirts
+League, as a matter of course; for she belonged to any and every league
+that had been founded for almost any purpose whatever. This did not
+prevent her being a confused, entangled, inconsequent, discursive old
+woman, whose charity began at home and ended nowhere, whose credulity
+kept pace with it, and who knew less about her fellow-creatures, if
+possible, after fifty years of humanitary zeal, than on the day she had
+gone into the field to testify against the iniquity of most
+arrangements. Basil Ransom knew very little about such a life as hers,
+but she seemed to him a revelation of a class, and a multitude of
+socialistic figures, of names and episodes that he had heard of, grouped
+themselves behind her. She looked as if she had spent her life on
+platforms, in audiences, in conventions, in phalansteries, in _seances_;
+in her faded face there was a kind of reflexion of ugly lecture-lamps;
+with its habit of an upward angle, it seemed turned toward a public
+speaker, with an effort of respiration in the thick air in which social
+reforms are usually discussed. She talked continually, in a voice of
+which the spring seemed broken, like that of an over-worked bell-wire;
+and when Miss Chancellor explained that she had brought Mr. Ransom
+because he was so anxious to meet Mrs. Farrinder, she gave the young man
+a delicate, dirty, democratic little hand, looking at him kindly, as she
+could not help doing, but without the smallest discrimination as against
+others who might not have the good fortune (which involved, possibly, an
+injustice) to be present on such an interesting occasion. She struck him
+as very poor, but it was only afterward that he learned she had never
+had a penny in her life. No one had an idea how she lived; whenever
+money was given her she gave it away to a negro or a refugee. No woman
+could be less invidious, but on the whole she preferred these two
+classes of the human race. Since the Civil War much of her occupation
+was gone; for before that her best hours had been spent in fancying that
+she was helping some Southern slave to escape. It would have been a nice
+question whether, in her heart of hearts, for the sake of this
+excitement, she did not sometimes wish the blacks back in bondage. She
+had suffered in the same way by the relaxation of many European
+despotisms, for in former years much of the romance of her life had been
+in smoothing the pillow of exile for banished conspirators. Her refugees
+had been very precious to her; she was always trying to raise money for
+some cadaverous Pole, to obtain lessons for some shirtless Italian.
+There was a legend that an Hungarian had once possessed himself of her
+affections, and had disappeared after robbing her of everything she
+possessed. This, however, was very apocryphal, for she had never
+possessed anything, and it was open to grave doubt that she could have
+entertained a sentiment so personal. She was in love, even in those
+days, only with causes, and she languished only for emancipations. But
+they had been the happiest days, for when causes were embodied in
+foreigners (what else were the Africans?), they were certainly more
+appealing.
+
+She had just come down to see Doctor Prance--to see whether she wouldn't
+like to come up. But she wasn't in her room, and Miss Birdseye guessed
+she had gone out to her supper; she got her supper at a boarding-table
+about two blocks off. Miss Birdseye expressed the hope that Miss
+Chancellor had had hers; she would have had plenty of time to take it,
+for no one had come in yet; she didn't know what made them all so late.
+Ransom perceived that the garments suspended to the hat-rack were not a
+sign that Miss Birdseye's friends had assembled; if he had gone a little
+further still he would have recognised the house as one of those in
+which mysterious articles of clothing are always hooked to something in
+the hall. Miss Birdseye's visitors, those of Doctor Prance, and of other
+tenants--for Number 756 was the common residence of several persons,
+among whom there prevailed much vagueness of boundary--used to leave
+things to be called for; many of them went about with satchels and
+reticules, for which they were always looking for places of deposit.
+What completed the character of this interior was Miss Birdseye's own
+apartment, into which her guests presently made their way, and where
+they were joined by various other members of the good lady's circle.
+Indeed, it completed Miss Birdseye herself, if anything could be said to
+render that office to this essentially formless old woman, who had no
+more outline than a bundle of hay. But the bareness of her long, loose,
+empty parlour (it was shaped exactly like Miss Chancellor's) told that
+she had never had any needs but moral needs, and that all her history
+had been that of her sympathies. The place was lighted by a small hot
+glare of gas, which made it look white and featureless. It struck even
+Basil Ransom with its flatness, and he said to himself that his cousin
+must have a very big bee in her bonnet to make her like such a house. He
+did not know then, and he never knew, that she mortally disliked it, and
+that in a career in which she was constantly exposing herself to offence
+and laceration, her most poignant suffering came from the injury of her
+taste. She had tried to kill that nerve, to persuade herself that taste
+was only frivolity in the disguise of knowledge; but her susceptibility
+was constantly blooming afresh and making her wonder whether an absence
+of nice arrangements were a necessary part of the enthusiasm of
+humanity. Miss Birdseye was always trying to obtain employment, lessons
+in drawing, orders for portraits, for poor foreign artists, as to the
+greatness of whose talent she pledged herself without reserve; but in
+point of fact she had not the faintest sense of the scenic or plastic
+side of life.
+
+Toward nine o'clock the light of her hissing burners smote the majestic
+person of Mrs. Farrinder, who might have contributed to answer that
+question of Miss Chancellor's in the negative. She was a copious,
+handsome woman, in whom angularity had been corrected by the air of
+success; she had a rustling dress (it was evident what _she_ thought
+about taste), abundant hair of a glossy blackness, a pair of folded
+arms, the expression of which seemed to say that rest, in such a career
+as hers, was as sweet as it was brief, and a terrible regularity of
+feature. I apply that adjective to her fine placid mask because she
+seemed to face you with a question of which the answer was preordained,
+to ask you how a countenance could fail to be noble of which the
+measurements were so correct. You could contest neither the measurements
+nor the nobleness, and had to feel that Mrs. Farrinder imposed herself.
+There was a lithographic smoothness about her, and a mixture of the
+American matron and the public character. There was something public in
+her eye, which was large, cold, and quiet; it had acquired a sort of
+exposed reticence from the habit of looking down from a lecture-desk,
+over a sea of heads, while its distinguished owner was eulogised by a
+leading citizen. Mrs. Farrinder, at almost any time, had the air of
+being introduced by a few remarks. She talked with great slowness and
+distinctness, and evidently a high sense of responsibility; she
+pronounced every syllable of every word and insisted on being explicit.
+If, in conversation with her, you attempted to take anything for
+granted, or to jump two or three steps at a time, she paused, looking at
+you with a cold patience, as if she knew that trick, and then went on at
+her own measured pace. She lectured on temperance and the rights of
+women; the ends she laboured for were to give the ballot to every woman
+in the country and to take the flowing bowl from every man. She was held
+to have a very fine manner, and to embody the domestic virtues and the
+graces of the drawing-room; to be a shining proof, in short, that the
+forum, for ladies, is not necessarily hostile to the fireside. She had a
+husband, and his name was Amariah.
+
+Doctor Prance had come back from supper and made her appearance in
+response to an invitation that Miss Birdseye's relaxed voice had tinkled
+down to her from the hall over the banisters, with much repetition, to
+secure attention. She was a plain, spare young woman, with short hair
+and an eye-glass; she looked about her with a kind of near-sighted
+deprecation, and seemed to hope that she should not be expected to
+generalise in any way, or supposed to have come up for any purpose more
+social than to see what Miss Birdseye wanted this time. By nine o'clock
+twenty other persons had arrived, and had placed themselves in the
+chairs that were ranged along the sides of the long, bald room, in which
+they ended by producing the similitude of an enormous street-car. The
+apartment contained little else but these chairs, many of which had a
+borrowed aspect, an implication of bare bedrooms in the upper regions; a
+table or two with a discoloured marble top, a few books, and a
+collection of newspapers piled up in corners. Ransom could see for
+himself that the occasion was not crudely festive; there was a want of
+convivial movement, and, among most of the visitors, even of mutual
+recognition. They sat there as if they were waiting for something; they
+looked obliquely and silently at Mrs. Farrinder, and were plainly under
+the impression that, fortunately, they were not there to amuse
+themselves. The ladies, who were much the more numerous, wore their
+bonnets, like Miss Chancellor; the men were in the garb of toil, many of
+them in weary-looking overcoats. Two or three had retained their
+overshoes, and as you approached them the odour of the india-rubber was
+perceptible. It was not, however, that Miss Birdseye ever noticed
+anything of that sort; she neither knew what she smelled nor tasted what
+she ate. Most of her friends had an anxious, haggard look, though there
+were sundry exceptions--half-a-dozen placid, florid faces. Basil Ransom
+wondered who they all were; he had a general idea they were mediums,
+communists, vegetarians. It was not, either, that Miss Birdseye failed
+to wander about among them with repetitions of inquiry and friendly
+absences of attention; she sat down near most of them in turn, saying
+"Yes, yes," vaguely and kindly, to remarks they made to her, feeling for
+the papers in the pockets of her loosened bodice, recovering her cap and
+sacrificing her spectacles, wondering most of all what had been her idea
+in convoking these people. Then she remembered that it had been
+connected in some way with Mrs. Farrinder; that this eloquent woman had
+promised to favour the company with a few reminiscences of her last
+campaign; to sketch even, perhaps, the lines on which she intended to
+operate during the coming winter. This was what Olive Chancellor had
+come to hear; this would be the attraction for the dark-eyed young man
+(he looked like a genius) she had brought with her. Miss Birdseye made
+her way back to the great lecturess, who was bending an indulgent
+attention on Miss Chancellor; the latter compressed into a small space,
+to be near her, and sitting with clasped hands and a concentration of
+inquiry which by contrast made Mrs. Farrinder's manner seem large and
+free. In her transit, however, the hostess was checked by the arrival of
+fresh pilgrims; she had no idea she had mentioned the occasion to so
+many people--she only remembered, as it were, those she had
+forgotten--and it was certainly a proof of the interest felt in Mrs.
+Farrinder's work. The people who had just come in were Doctor and Mrs.
+Tarrant and their daughter Verena; he was a mesmeric healer and she was
+of old Abolitionist stock. Miss Birdseye rested her dim, dry smile upon
+the daughter, who was new to her, and it floated before her that she
+would probably be remarkable as a genius; her parentage was an
+implication of that. There was a genius for Miss Birdseye in every bush.
+Selah Tarrant had effected wonderful cures; she knew so many people--if
+they would only try him. His wife was a daughter of Abraham Greenstreet;
+she had kept a runaway slave in her house for thirty days. That was
+years before, when this girl must have been a child; but hadn't it
+thrown a kind of rainbow over her cradle, and wouldn't she naturally
+have some gift? The girl was very pretty, though she had red hair.
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+
+Mrs. Farrinder, meanwhile, was not eager to address the assembly. She
+confessed as much to Olive Chancellor, with a smile which asked that a
+temporary lapse of promptness might not be too harshly judged. She had
+addressed so many assemblies, and she wanted to hear what other people
+had to say. Miss Chancellor herself had thought so much on the vital
+subject; would not she make a few remarks and give them some of her
+experiences? How did the ladies on Beacon Street feel about the ballot?
+Perhaps she could speak for _them_ more than for some others. That was a
+branch of the question on which, it might be, the leaders had not
+information enough; but they wanted to take in everything, and why
+shouldn't Miss Chancellor just make that field her own? Mrs. Farrinder
+spoke in the tone of one who took views so wide that they might easily,
+at first, before you could see how she worked round, look almost
+meretricious; she was conscious of a scope that exceeded the first
+flight of your imagination. She urged upon her companion the idea of
+labouring in the world of fashion, appeared to attribute to her familiar
+relations with that mysterious realm, and wanted to know why she
+shouldn't stir up some of her friends down there on the Mill-dam?
+
+Olive Chancellor received this appeal with peculiar feelings. With her
+immense sympathy for reform, she found herself so often wishing that
+reformers were a little different. There was something grand about Mrs.
+Farrinder; it lifted one up to be with her: but there was a false note
+when she spoke to her young friend about the ladies in Beacon Street.
+Olive hated to hear that fine avenue talked about as if it were such a
+remarkable place, and to live there were a proof of worldly glory. All
+sorts of inferior people lived there, and so brilliant a woman as Mrs.
+Farrinder, who lived at Roxbury, ought not to mix things up. It was, of
+course, very wretched to be irritated by such mistakes; but this was not
+the first time Miss Chancellor had observed that the possession of
+nerves was not by itself a reason for embracing the new truths. She knew
+her place in the Boston hierarchy, and it was not what Mrs. Farrinder
+supposed; so that there was a want of perspective in talking to her as
+if she had been a representative of the aristocracy. Nothing could be
+weaker, she knew very well, than (in the United States) to apply that
+term too literally; nevertheless, it would represent a reality if one
+were to say that, by distinction, the Chancellors belonged to the
+_bourgeoisie_--the oldest and best. They might care for such a position
+or not (as it happened, they were very proud of it), but there they
+were, and it made Mrs. Farrinder seem provincial (there was something
+provincial, after all, in the way she did her hair too) not to
+understand. When Miss Birdseye spoke as if one were a "leader of
+society," Olive could forgive her even that odious expression, because,
+of course, one never pretended that she, poor dear, had the smallest
+sense of the real. She was heroic, she was sublime, the whole moral
+history of Boston was reflected in her displaced spectacles; but it was
+a part of her originality, as it were, that she was deliciously
+provincial. Olive Chancellor seemed to herself to have privileges enough
+without being affiliated to the exclusive set and having invitations to
+the smaller parties, which were the real test; it was a mercy for her
+that she had not that added immorality on her conscience. The ladies
+Mrs. Farrinder meant (it was to be supposed she meant some particular
+ones) might speak for themselves. She wished to work in another field;
+she had long been preoccupied with the romance of the people. She had an
+immense desire to know intimately some _very_ poor girl. This might seem
+one of the most accessible of pleasures; but, in point of fact, she had
+not found it so. There were two or three pale shop-maidens whose
+acquaintance she had sought; but they had seemed afraid of her, and the
+attempt had come to nothing. She took them more tragically then they
+took themselves; they couldn't make out what she wanted them to do, and
+they always ended by being odiously mixed up with Charlie. Charlie was a
+young man in a white overcoat and a paper collar; it was for him, in the
+last analysis, that they cared much the most. They cared far more about
+Charlie than about the ballot. Olive Chancellor wondered how Mrs.
+Farrinder would treat that branch of the question. In her researches
+among her young townswomen she had always found this obtrusive swain
+planted in her path, and she grew at last to dislike him extremely. It
+filled her with exasperation to think that he should be necessary to the
+happiness of his victims (she had learned that whatever they might talk
+about with her, it was of him and him only that they discoursed among
+themselves), and one of the main recommendations of the evening club for
+her fatigued, underpaid sisters, which it had long been her dream to
+establish, was that it would in some degree undermine his
+position--distinct as her prevision might be that he would be in waiting
+at the door. She hardly knew what to say to Mrs. Farrinder when this
+momentarily misdirected woman, still preoccupied with the Mill-dam,
+returned to the charge.
+
+"We want labourers in that field, though I know two or three lovely
+women--sweet _home-women_--moving in circles that are for the most part
+closed to every new voice, who are doing their best to help on the
+fight. I have several names that might surprise you, names well known on
+State Street. But we can't have too many recruits, especially among
+those whose refinement is generally acknowledged. If it be necessary, we
+are prepared to take certain steps to conciliate the shrinking. Our
+movement is for all--it appeals to the most delicate ladies. Raise the
+standard among them, and bring me a thousand names. I know several that
+I should like to have. I look after the details as well as the big
+currents," Mrs. Farrinder added, in a tone as explanatory as could be
+expected of such a woman, and with a smile of which the sweetness was
+thrilling to her listener.
+
+"I can't talk to those people, I can't!" said Olive Chancellor, with a
+face which seemed to plead for a remission of responsibility. "I want to
+give myself up to others; I want to know everything that lies beneath
+and out of sight, don't you know? I want to enter into the lives of
+women who are lonely, who are piteous. I want to be near to them--to
+help them. I want to do something--oh, I should like so to speak!"
+
+"We should be glad to have you make a few remarks at present," Mrs.
+Farrinder declared, with a punctuality which revealed the faculty of
+presiding.
+
+"Oh dear, no, I can't speak; I have none of that sort of talent. I have
+no self-possession, no eloquence; I can't put three words together. But
+I do want to contribute."
+
+"What _have_ you got?" Mrs. Farrinder inquired, looking at her
+interlocutress, up and down, with the eye of business, in which there
+was a certain chill. "Have you got money?"
+
+Olive was so agitated for the moment with the hope that this great woman
+would approve of her on the financial side that she took no time to
+reflect that some other quality might, in courtesy, have been suggested.
+But she confessed to possessing a certain capital, and the tone seemed
+rich and deep in which Mrs. Farrinder said to her, "Then contribute
+that!" She was so good as to develop this idea, and her picture of the
+part Miss Chancellor might play by making liberal donations to a fund
+for the diffusion among the women of America of a more adequate
+conception of their public and private rights--a fund her adviser had
+herself lately inaugurated--this bold, rapid sketch had the vividness
+which characterised the speaker's most successful public efforts. It
+placed Olive under the spell; it made her feel almost inspired. If her
+life struck others in that way--especially a woman like Mrs. Farrinder,
+whose horizon was so full--then there must be something for her to do.
+It was one thing to choose for herself, but now the great representative
+of the enfranchisement of their sex (from every form of bondage) had
+chosen for her.
+
+The barren, gas-lighted room grew richer and richer to her earnest eyes;
+it seemed to expand, to open itself to the great life of humanity. The
+serious, tired people, in their bonnets and overcoats, began to glow
+like a company of heroes. Yes, she would do something, Olive Chancellor
+said to herself; she would do something to brighten the darkness of that
+dreadful image that was always before her, and against which it seemed
+to her at times that she had been born to lead a crusade--the image of
+the unhappiness of women. The unhappiness of women! The voice of their
+silent suffering was always in her ears, the ocean of tears that they
+had shed from the beginning of time seemed to pour through her own eyes.
+Ages of oppression had rolled over them; uncounted millions had lived
+only to be tortured, to be crucified. They were her sisters, they were
+her own, and the day of their delivery had dawned. This was the only
+sacred cause; this was the great, the just revolution. It must triumph,
+it must sweep everything before it; it must exact from the other, the
+brutal, blood-stained, ravening race, the last particle of expiation! It
+would be the greatest change the world had seen; it would be a new era
+for the human family, and the names of those who had helped to show the
+way and lead the squadrons would be the brightest in the tables of fame.
+They would be names of women weak, insulted, persecuted, but devoted in
+every pulse of their being to the cause, and asking no better fate than
+to die for it. It was not clear to this interesting girl in what manner
+such a sacrifice (as this last) would be required of her, but she saw
+the matter through a kind of sunrise-mist of emotion which made danger
+as rosy as success. When Miss Birdseye approached, it transfigured her
+familiar, her comical shape, and made the poor little humanitary hack
+seem already a martyr. Olive Chancellor looked at her with love,
+remembered that she had never, in her long, unrewarded, weary life, had
+a thought or an impulse for herself. She had been consumed by the
+passion of sympathy; it had crumpled her into as many creases as an old
+glazed, distended glove. She had been laughed at, but she never knew it;
+she was treated as a bore, but she never cared. She had nothing in the
+world but the clothes on her back, and when she should go down into the
+grave she would leave nothing behind her but her grotesque,
+undistinguished, pathetic little name. And yet people said that women
+were vain, that they were personal, that they were interested! While
+Miss Birdseye stood there, asking Mrs. Farrinder if she wouldn't say
+something, Olive Chancellor tenderly fastened a small battered brooch
+which confined her collar and which had half detached itself.
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+
+"Oh, thank you," said Miss Birdseye, "I shouldn't like to lose it; it
+was given me by Mirandola!" He had been one of her refugees in the old
+time, when two or three of her friends, acquainted with the limits of
+his resources, wondered how he had come into possession of the trinket.
+She had been diverted again, after her greeting with Doctor and Mrs.
+Tarrant, by stopping to introduce the tall, dark young man whom Miss
+Chancellor had brought with her to Doctor Prance. She had become
+conscious of his somewhat sombre figure, uplifted against the wall, near
+the door; he was leaning there in solitude, unacquainted with
+opportunities which Miss Birdseye felt to be, collectively, of value,
+and which were really, of course, what strangers came to Boston for. It
+did not occur to her to ask herself why Miss Chancellor didn't talk to
+him, since she had brought him; Miss Birdseye was incapable of a
+speculation of this kind. Olive, in fact, had remained vividly conscious
+of her kinsman's isolation until the moment when Mrs. Farrinder lifted
+her, with a word, to a higher plane. She watched him across the room;
+she saw that he might be bored. But she proposed to herself not to mind
+that; she had asked him, after all, not to come. Then he was no worse
+off than others; he was only waiting, like the rest; and before they
+left she would introduce him to Mrs. Farrinder. She might tell that lady
+who he was first; it was not every one that would care to know a person
+who had borne such a part in the Southern disloyalty. It came over our
+young lady that when she sought the acquaintance of her distant kinsman
+she had indeed done a more complicated thing than she suspected. The
+sudden uneasiness that he flung over her in the carriage had not left
+her, though she felt it less now she was with others, and especially
+that she was close to Mrs. Farrinder, who was such a fountain of
+strength. At any rate, if he was bored, he could speak to some one;
+there were excellent people near him, even if they _were_ ardent
+reformers. He could speak to that pretty girl who had just come in--the
+one with red hair--if he liked; Southerners were supposed to be so
+chivalrous!
+
+Miss Birdseye reasoned much less, and did not offer to introduce him to
+Verena Tarrant, who was apparently being presented by her parents to a
+group of friends at the other end of the room. It came back to Miss
+Birdseye, in this connexion, that, sure enough, Verena had been away for
+a long time--for nearly a year; had been on a visit to friends in the
+West, and would therefore naturally be a stranger to most of the Boston
+circle. Doctor Prance was looking at her--at Miss Birdseye--with little,
+sharp, fixed pupils; and the good lady wondered whether she were angry
+at having been induced to come up. She had a general impression that
+when genius was original its temper was high, and all this would be the
+case with Doctor Prance. She wanted to say to her that she could go down
+again if she liked; but even to Miss Birdseye's unsophisticated mind
+this scarcely appeared, as regards a guest, an adequate formula of
+dismissal. She tried to bring the young Southerner out; she said to him
+that she presumed they would have some entertainment soon--Mrs.
+Farrinder could be interesting when she tried! And then she bethought
+herself to introduce him to Doctor Prance; it might serve as a reason
+for having brought her up. Moreover, it would do her good to break up
+her work now and then; she pursued her medical studies far into the
+night, and Miss Birdseye, who was nothing of a sleeper (Mary Prance,
+precisely, had wanted to treat her for it), had heard her, in the
+stillness of the small hours, with her open windows (she had fresh air
+on the brain), sharpening instruments (it was Miss Birdseye's mild
+belief that she dissected), in a little physiological laboratory which
+she had set up in her back room, the room which, if she hadn't been a
+doctor, might have been her "chamber," and perhaps was, even with the
+dissecting, Miss Birdseye didn't know! She explained her young friends
+to each other, a trifle incoherently, perhaps, and then went to stir up
+Mrs. Farrinder.
+
+Basil Ransom had already noticed Doctor Prance; he had not been at all
+bored, and had observed every one in the room, arriving at all sorts of
+ingenious inductions. The little medical lady struck him as a perfect
+example of the "Yankee female"--the figure which, in the unregenerate
+imagination of the children of the cotton-States, was produced by the
+New England school-system, the Puritan code, the ungenial climate, the
+absence of chivalry. Spare, dry, hard, without a curve, an inflexion or
+a grace, she seemed to ask no odds in the battle of life and to be
+prepared to give none. But Ransom could see that she was not an
+enthusiast, and after his contact with his cousin's enthusiasm this was
+rather a relief to him. She looked like a boy, and not even like a good
+boy. It was evident that if she had been a boy, she would have "cut"
+school, to try private experiments in mechanics or to make researches in
+natural history. It was true that if she had been a boy she would have
+borne some relation to a girl, whereas Doctor Prance appeared to bear
+none whatever. Except her intelligent eye, she had no features to speak
+of. Ransom asked her if she were acquainted with the lioness, and on her
+staring at him, without response, explained that he meant the renowned
+Mrs. Farrinder.
+
+"Well, I don't know as I ought to say that I'm acquainted with her; but
+I've heard her on the platform. I have paid my half-dollar," the doctor
+added, with a certain grimness.
+
+"Well, did she convince you?" Ransom inquired.
+
+"Convince me of what, sir?"
+
+"That women are so superior to men."
+
+"Oh, deary me!" said Doctor Prance, with a little impatient sigh; "I
+guess I know more about women than she does."
+
+"And that isn't your opinion, I hope," said Ransom, laughing.
+
+"Men and women are all the same to me," Doctor Prance remarked. "I don't
+see any difference. There is room for improvement in both sexes. Neither
+of them is up to the standard." And on Ransom's asking her what the
+standard appeared to her to be, she said, "Well, they ought to live
+better; that's what they ought to do." And she went on to declare,
+further, that she thought they all talked too much. This had so long
+been Ransom's conviction that his heart quite warmed to Doctor Prance,
+and he paid homage to her wisdom in the manner of Mississippi--with a
+richness of compliment that made her turn her acute, suspicious eye upon
+him. This checked him; she was capable of thinking that _he_ talked too
+much--she herself having, apparently, no general conversation. It was
+german to the matter, at any rate, for him to observe that he believed
+they were to have a lecture from Mrs. Farrinder--he didn't know why she
+didn't begin. "Yes," said Doctor Prance, rather dryly, "I suppose that's
+what Miss Birdseye called me up for. She seemed to think I wouldn't want
+to miss that."
+
+"Whereas, I infer, you could console yourself for the loss of the
+oration," Ransom suggested.
+
+"Well, I've got some work. I don't want any one to teach me what a woman
+can do!" Doctor Prance declared. "She can find out some things, if she
+tries. Besides, I am familiar with Mrs. Farrinder's system; I know all
+she has got to say."
+
+"Well, what is it, then, since she continues to remain silent?"
+
+"Well, what it amounts to is just that women want to have a better time.
+That's what it comes to in the end. I am aware of that, without her
+telling me."
+
+"And don't you sympathise with such an aspiration?"
+
+"Well, I don't know as I cultivate the sentimental side," said Doctor
+Prance. "There's plenty of sympathy without mine. If they want to have a
+better time, I suppose it's natural; so do men too, I suppose. But I
+don't know as it appeals to me--to make sacrifices for it; it ain't such
+a wonderful time--the best you _can_ have!"
+
+This little lady was tough and technical; she evidently didn't care for
+great movements; she became more and more interesting to Basil Ransom,
+who, it is to be feared, had a fund of cynicism. He asked her if she
+knew his cousin, Miss Chancellor, whom he indicated, beside Mrs.
+Farrinder; _she_ believed, on the contrary, in wonderful times (she
+thought they were coming); she had plenty of sympathy, and he was sure
+she was willing to make sacrifices.
+
+Doctor Prance looked at her across the room for a moment; then she said
+she didn't know her, but she guessed she knew others like her--she went
+to see them when they were sick. "She's having a private lecture to
+herself," Ransom remarked; whereupon Doctor Prance rejoined, "Well, I
+guess she'll have to pay for it!" She appeared to regret her own
+half-dollar, and to be vaguely impatient of the behaviour of her sex.
+Ransom became so sensible of this that he felt it was indelicate to
+allude further to the cause of woman, and, for a change, endeavoured to
+elicit from his companion some information about the gentlemen present.
+He had given her a chance, vainly, to start some topic herself; but he
+could see that she had no interests beyond the researches from which,
+this evening, she had been torn, and was incapable of asking him a
+personal question. She knew two or three of the gentlemen; she had seen
+them before at Miss Birdseye's. Of course she knew principally ladies;
+the time hadn't come when a lady-doctor was sent for by a gentleman, and
+she hoped it never would, though some people seemed to think that this
+was what lady-doctors were working for. She knew Mr. Pardon; that was
+the young man with the "side-whiskers" and the white hair; he was a kind
+of editor, and he wrote, too, "over his signature"--perhaps Basil had
+read some of his works; he was under thirty, in spite of his white hair.
+He was a great deal thought of in magazine circles. She believed he was
+very bright--but she hadn't read anything. She didn't read much--not for
+amusement; only the _Transcript_. She believed Mr. Pardon sometimes
+wrote in the _Transcript_; well, she supposed he _was_ very bright. The
+other that she knew--only she didn't know him (she supposed Basil would
+think that queer)--was the tall, pale gentleman, with the black
+moustache and the eye-glass. She knew him because she had met him in
+society; but she didn't know him--well, because she didn't want to. If
+he should come and speak to her--and he looked as if he were going to
+work round that way--she should just say to him, "Yes, sir," or "No,
+sir," very coldly. She couldn't help it if he did think her dry; if _he_
+were a little more dry, it might be better for him. What was the matter
+with him? Oh, she thought she had mentioned that; he was a mesmeric
+healer, he made miraculous cures. She didn't believe in his system or
+disbelieve in it, one way or the other; she only knew that she had been
+called to see ladies he had worked on, and she found that he had made
+them lose a lot of valuable time. He talked to them--well, as if he
+didn't know what he was saying. She guessed he was quite ignorant of
+physiology, and she didn't think he ought to go round taking
+responsibilities. She didn't want to be narrow, but she thought a person
+ought to know something. She supposed Basil would think her very
+uplifted; but he had put the question to her, as she might say. All she
+could say was she didn't want him to be laying his hands on any of _her_
+folks; it was all done with the hands--what wasn't done with the tongue!
+Basil could see that Doctor Prance was irritated; that this extreme
+candour of allusion to her neighbour was probably not habitual to her,
+as a member of a society in which the casual expression of strong
+opinion generally produced waves of silence. But he blessed her
+irritation, for him it was so illuminating; and to draw further profit
+from it he asked her who the young lady was with the red hair--the
+pretty one, whom he had only noticed during the last ten minutes. She
+was Miss Tarrant, the daughter of the healer; hadn't she mentioned his
+name? Selah Tarrant; if he wanted to send for him. Doctor Prance wasn't
+acquainted with her, beyond knowing that she was the mesmerist's only
+child, and having heard something about her having some gift--she
+couldn't remember which it was. Oh, if she was his child, she would be
+sure to have some gift--if it was only the gift of the g----well, she
+didn't mean to say that; but a talent for conversation. Perhaps she
+could die and come to life again; perhaps she would show them her gift,
+as no one seemed inclined to do anything. Yes, she was pretty-appearing,
+but there was a certain indication of anaemia, and Doctor Prance would be
+surprised if she didn't eat too much candy. Basil thought she had an
+engaging exterior; it was his private reflexion, coloured doubtless by
+"sectional" prejudice, that she was the first pretty girl he had seen in
+Boston. She was talking with some ladies at the other end of the room;
+and she had a large red fan, which she kept constantly in movement. She
+was not a quiet girl; she fidgeted, was restless, while she talked, and
+had the air of a person who, whatever she might be doing, would wish to
+be doing something else. If people watched her a good deal, she also
+returned their contemplation, and her charming eyes had several times
+encountered those of Basil Ransom. But they wandered mainly in the
+direction of Mrs. Farrinder--they lingered upon the serene solidity of
+the great oratress. It was easy to see that the girl admired this
+beneficent woman, and felt it a privilege to be near her. It was
+apparent, indeed, that she was excited by the company in which she found
+herself; a fact to be explained by a reference to that recent period of
+exile in the West, of which we have had a hint, and in consequence of
+which the present occasion may have seemed to her a return to
+intellectual life. Ransom secretly wished that his cousin--since fate
+was to reserve for him a cousin in Boston--had been more like that.
+
+By this time a certain agitation was perceptible; several ladies,
+impatient of vain delay, had left their places, to appeal personally to
+Mrs. Farrinder, who was presently surrounded with sympathetic
+remonstrants. Miss Birdseye had given her up; it had been enough for
+Miss Birdseye that she should have said, when pressed (so far as her
+hostess, muffled in laxity, could press) on the subject of the general
+expectation, that she could only deliver her message to an audience
+which she felt to be partially hostile. There was no hostility there;
+they were all only too much in sympathy. "I don't require sympathy," she
+said, with a tranquil smile, to Olive Chancellor; "I am only myself, I
+only rise to the occasion, when I see prejudice, when I see bigotry,
+when I see injustice, when I see conservatism, massed before me like an
+army. Then I feel--I feel as I imagine Napoleon Bonaparte to have felt
+on the eve of one of his great victories. I _must_ have unfriendly
+elements--I like to win them over."
+
+Olive thought of Basil Ransom, and wondered whether he would do for an
+unfriendly element. She mentioned him to Mrs. Farrinder, who expressed
+an earnest hope that if he were opposed to the principles which were so
+dear to the rest of them, he might be induced to take the floor and
+testify on his own account. "I should be so happy to answer him," said
+Mrs. Farrinder, with supreme softness. "I should be so glad, at any
+rate, to exchange ideas with him." Olive felt a deep alarm at the idea
+of a public dispute between these two vigorous people (she had a
+perception that Ransom would be vigorous), not because she doubted of
+the happy issue, but because she herself would be in a false position,
+as having brought the offensive young man, and she had a horror of false
+positions. Miss Birdseye was incapable of resentment; she had invited
+forty people to hear Mrs. Farrinder speak, and now Mrs. Farrinder
+wouldn't speak. But she had such a beautiful reason for it! There was
+something martial and heroic in her pretext, and, besides, it was so
+characteristic, so free, that Miss Birdseye was quite consoled, and
+wandered away, looking at her other guests vaguely, as if she didn't
+know them from each other, while she mentioned to them, at a venture,
+the excuse for their disappointment, confident, evidently, that they
+would agree with her it was very fine. "But we can't pretend to be on
+the other side, just to start her up, can we?" she asked of Mr. Tarrant,
+who sat there beside his wife with a rather conscious but by no means
+complacent air of isolation from the rest of the company.
+
+"Well, I don't know--I guess we are all solid here," this gentleman
+replied, looking round him with a slow, deliberate smile, which made his
+mouth enormous, developed two wrinkles, as long as the wings of a bat,
+on either side of it, and showed a set of big, even, carnivorous teeth.
+
+"Selah," said his wife, laying her hand on the sleeve of his waterproof,
+"I wonder whether Miss Birdseye would be interested to hear Verena."
+
+"Well, if you mean she sings, it's a shame I haven't got a piano," Miss
+Birdseye took upon herself to respond. It came back to her that the girl
+had a gift.
+
+"She doesn't want a piano--she doesn't want anything," Selah remarked,
+giving no apparent attention to his wife. It was a part of his attitude
+in life never to appear to be indebted to another person for a
+suggestion, never to be surprised or unprepared.
+
+"Well, I don't know that the interest in singing is so general," said
+Miss Birdseye, quite unconscious of any slackness in preparing a
+substitute for the entertainment that had failed her.
+
+"It isn't singing, you'll see," Mrs. Tarrant declared.
+
+"What is it, then?"
+
+Mr. Tarrant unfurled his wrinkles, showed his back teeth. "It's
+inspirational."
+
+Miss Birdseye gave a small, vague, unsceptical laugh. "Well, if you can
+guarantee that----"
+
+"I think it would be acceptable," said Mrs. Tarrant; and putting up a
+half-gloved, familiar hand, she drew Miss Birdseye down to her, and the
+pair explained in alternation what it was their child could do.
+
+Meanwhile, Basil Ransom confessed to Doctor Prance that he was, after
+all, rather disappointed. He had expected more of a programme; he wanted
+to hear some of the new truths. Mrs. Farrinder, as he said, remained
+within her tent, and he had hoped not only to see these distinguished
+people but also to listen to them.
+
+"Well, _I_ ain't disappointed," the sturdy little doctress replied. "If
+any question had been opened, I suppose I should have had to stay."
+
+"But I presume you don't propose to retire."
+
+"Well, I've got to pursue my studies some time. I don't want the
+gentlemen-doctors to get ahead of me."
+
+"Oh, no one will ever get ahead of you, I'm very sure. And there is that
+pretty young lady going over to speak to Mrs. Farrinder. She's going to
+beg her for a speech--Mrs. Farrinder can't resist that."
+
+"Well, then, I'll just trickle out before she begins. Good-night, sir,"
+said Doctor Prance, who by this time had begun to appear to Ransom more
+susceptible of domestication, as if she had been a small
+forest-creature, a catamount or a ruffled doe, that had learned to stand
+still while you stroked it, or even to extend a paw. She ministered to
+health, and she was healthy herself; if his cousin could have been even
+of this type Basil would have felt himself more fortunate.
+
+"Good-night, Doctor," he replied. "You haven't told me, after all, your
+opinion of the capacity of the ladies."
+
+"Capacity for what?" said Doctor Prance. "They've got a capacity for
+making people waste time. All I know is that I don't want any one to
+tell _me_ what a lady can do!" And she edged away from him softly, as if
+she had been traversing a hospital-ward, and presently he saw her reach
+the door, which, with the arrival of the later comers, had remained
+open. She stood there an instant, turning over the whole assembly a
+glance like the flash of a watchman's bull's-eye, and then quickly
+passed out. Ransom could see that she was impatient of the general
+question and bored with being reminded, even for the sake of her rights,
+that she was a woman--a detail that she was in the habit of forgetting,
+having as many rights as she had time for. It was certain that whatever
+might become of the movement at large, Doctor Prance's own little
+revolution was a success.
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+
+She had no sooner left him than Olive Chancellor came towards him with
+eyes that seemed to say, "I don't care whether you are here now or
+not--I'm all right!" But what her lips said was much more gracious; she
+asked him if she mightn't have the pleasure of introducing him to Mrs.
+Farrinder. Ransom consented, with a little of his Southern flourish, and
+in a moment the lady got up to receive him from the midst of the circle
+that now surrounded her. It was an occasion for her to justify her
+reputation of an elegant manner, and it must be impartially related that
+she struck Ransom as having a dignity in conversation and a command of
+the noble style which could not have been surpassed by a daughter--one
+of the most accomplished, most far-descended daughters--of his own
+latitude. It was as if she had known that he was not eager for the
+changes she advocated, and wished to show him that, especially to a
+Southerner who had bitten the dust, her sex could be magnanimous. This
+knowledge of his secret heresy seemed to him to be also in the faces of
+the other ladies, whose circumspect glances, however (for he had not
+been introduced), treated it as a pity rather than as a shame. He was
+conscious of all these middle-aged feminine eyes, conscious of curls,
+rather limp, that depended from dusky bonnets, of heads poked forward,
+as if with a waiting, listening, familiar habit, of no one being very
+bright or gay--no one, at least, but that girl he had noticed before,
+who had a brilliant head, and who now hovered on the edge of the
+conclave. He met her eye again; she was watching him too. It had been in
+his thought that Mrs. Farrinder, to whom his cousin might have betrayed
+or misrepresented him, would perhaps defy him to combat, and he wondered
+whether he could pull himself together (he was extremely embarrassed)
+sufficiently to do honour to such a challenge. If she would fling down
+the glove on the temperance question, it seemed to him that it would be
+in him to pick it up; for the idea of a meddling legislation on this
+subject filled him with rage; the taste of liquor being good to him, and
+his conviction strong that civilisation itself would be in danger if it
+should fall into the power of a herd of vociferating women (I am but the
+reporter of his angry _formulae_) to prevent a gentleman from taking his
+glass. Mrs. Farrinder proved to him that she had not the eagerness of
+insecurity; she asked him if he wouldn't like to give the company some
+account of the social and political condition of the South. He begged to
+be excused, expressing at the same time a high sense of the honour done
+him by such a request, while he smiled to himself at the idea of his
+extemporising a lecture. He smiled even while he suspected the meaning
+of the look Miss Chancellor gave him: "Well, you are not of much account
+after all!" To talk to those people about the South--if they could have
+guessed how little he cared to do it! He had a passionate tenderness for
+his own country, and a sense of intimate connexion with it which would
+have made it as impossible for him to take a roomful of Northern
+fanatics into his confidence as to read aloud his mother's or his
+mistress's letters. To be quiet about the Southern land, not to touch
+her with vulgar hands, to leave her alone with her wounds and her
+memories, not prating in the market-place either of her troubles or her
+hopes, but waiting as a man should wait, for the slow process, the
+sensible beneficence, of time--this was the desire of Ransom's heart,
+and he was aware of how little it could minister to the entertainment of
+Miss Birdseye's guests.
+
+"We know so little about the women of the South; they are very
+voiceless," Mrs. Farrinder remarked. "How much can we count upon them?
+in what numbers would they flock to our standard? I have been
+recommended not to lecture in the Southern cities."
+
+"Ah, madam, that was very cruel advice--for us!" Basil Ransom exclaimed,
+with gallantry.
+
+"_I_ had a magnificent audience last spring in St. Louis," a fresh young
+voice announced, over the heads of the gathered group--a voice which, on
+Basil's turning, like every one else, for an explanation, appeared to
+have proceeded from the pretty girl with red hair. She had coloured a
+little with the effort of making this declaration, and she stood there
+smiling at her listeners.
+
+Mrs. Farrinder bent a benignant brow upon her, in spite of her being,
+evidently, rather a surprise. "Oh, indeed; and your subject, my dear
+young lady?"
+
+"The past history, the present condition, and the future prospects of
+our sex."
+
+"Oh, well, St. Louis--that's scarcely the South," said one of the
+ladies.
+
+"I'm sure the young lady would have had equal success at Charleston or
+New Orleans," Basil Ransom interposed.
+
+"Well, I wanted to go farther," the girl continued, "but I had no
+friends. I have friends in St. Louis."
+
+"You oughtn't to want for them anywhere," said Mrs. Farrinder, in a
+manner which, by this time, had quite explained her reputation. "I am
+acquainted with the loyalty of St. Louis."
+
+"Well, after that, you must let me introduce Miss Tarrant; she's
+perfectly dying to know you, Mrs. Farrinder." These words emanated from
+one of the gentlemen, the young man with white hair, who had been
+mentioned to Ransom by Doctor Prance as a celebrated magazinist. He,
+too, up to this moment, had hovered in the background, but he now gently
+clove the assembly (several of the ladies made way for him), leading in
+the daughter of the mesmerist.
+
+She laughed and continued to blush--her blush was the faintest pink; she
+looked very young and slim and fair as Mrs. Farrinder made way for her
+on the sofa which Olive Chancellor had quitted. "I _have_ wanted to know
+you; I admire you so much; I hoped so you would speak to-night. It's too
+lovely to see you, Mrs. Farrinder." So she expressed herself, while the
+company watched the encounter with a look of refreshed inanition. "You
+don't know who I am, of course; I'm just a girl who wants to thank you
+for all you have done for us. For you have spoken for us girls, just as
+much as--just as much as----" She hesitated now, looking about with
+enthusiastic eyes at the rest of the group, and meeting once more the
+gaze of Basil Ransom.
+
+"Just as much as for the old women," said Mrs. Farrinder genially. "You
+seem very well able to speak for yourself."
+
+"She speaks so beautifully--if she would only make a little address,"
+the young man who had introduced her remarked. "It's a new style, quite
+original," he added. He stood there with folded arms, looking down at
+his work, the conjunction of the two ladies, with a smile; and Basil
+Ransom, remembering what Miss Prance had told him, and enlightened by
+his observation in New York of some of the sources from which newspapers
+are fed, was immediately touched by the conviction that he perceived in
+it the material of a paragraph.
+
+"My dear child, if you'll take the floor, I'll call the meeting to
+order," said Mrs. Farrinder.
+
+The girl looked at her with extraordinary candour and confidence. "If I
+could only hear you first--just to give me an atmosphere."
+
+"I've got no atmosphere; there's very little of the Indian summer about
+_me_! I deal with facts--hard facts," Mrs. Farrinder replied. "Have you
+ever heard me? If so, you know how crisp I am."
+
+"Heard you? I've lived on you! It's so much to me to see you. Ask mother
+if it ain't!" She had expressed herself, from the first word she
+uttered, with a promptness and assurance which gave almost the
+impression of a lesson rehearsed in advance. And yet there was a strange
+spontaneity in her manner, and an air of artless enthusiasm, of personal
+purity. If she was theatrical, she was naturally theatrical. She looked
+up at Mrs. Farrinder with all her emotion in her smiling eyes. This lady
+had been the object of many ovations; it was familiar to her that the
+collective heart of her sex had gone forth to her; but, visibly, she was
+puzzled by this unforeseen embodiment of gratitude and fluency, and her
+eyes wandered over the girl with a certain reserve, while, within the
+depth of her eminently public manner, she asked herself whether Miss
+Tarrant were a remarkable young woman or only a forward minx. She found
+a response which committed her to neither view; she only said, "We want
+the young--of course we want the young!"
+
+"Who is that charming creature?" Basil Ransom heard his cousin ask, in a
+grave, lowered tone, of Matthias Pardon, the young man who had brought
+Miss Tarrant forward. He didn't know whether Miss Chancellor knew him,
+or whether her curiosity had pushed her to boldness. Ransom was near the
+pair, and had the benefit of Mr. Pardon's answer.
+
+"The daughter of Doctor Tarrant, the mesmeric healer--Miss Verena. She's
+a high-class speaker."
+
+"What do you mean?" Olive asked. "Does she give public addresses?"
+
+"Oh yes, she has had quite a career in the West. I heard her last spring
+at Topeka. They call it inspirational. I don't know what it is--only
+it's exquisite; so fresh and poetical. She has to have her father to
+start her up. It seems to pass into her." And Mr. Pardon indulged in a
+gesture intended to signify the passage.
+
+Olive Chancellor made no rejoinder save a low, impatient sigh; she
+transferred her attention to the girl, who now held Mrs. Farrinder's
+hand in both her own, and was pleading with her just to prelude a
+little. "I want a starting-point--I want to know where I am," she said.
+"Just two or three of your grand old thoughts."
+
+Basil stepped nearer to his cousin; he remarked to her that Miss Verena
+was very pretty. She turned an instant, glanced at him, and then said,
+"Do you think so?" An instant later she added, "How you must hate this
+place!"
+
+"Oh, not now, we are going to have some fun," Ransom replied
+good-humouredly, if a trifle coarsely; and the declaration had a point,
+for Miss Birdseye at this moment reappeared, followed by the mesmeric
+healer and his wife.
+
+"Ah, well, I see you are drawing her out," said Miss Birdseye to Mrs.
+Farrinder; and at the idea that this process had been necessary Basil
+Ransom broke into a smothered hilarity, a spasm which indicated that,
+for him, the fun had already begun, and procured him another grave
+glance from Miss Chancellor. Miss Verena seemed to him as far "out" as a
+young woman could be. "Here's her father, Doctor Tarrant--he has a
+wonderful gift--and her mother--she was a daughter of Abraham
+Greenstreet." Miss Birdseye presented her companion; she was sure Mrs.
+Farrinder would be interested; she wouldn't want to lose an opportunity,
+even if for herself the conditions were not favourable. And then Miss
+Birdseye addressed herself to the company more at large, widening the
+circle so as to take in the most scattered guests, and evidently feeling
+that after all it was a relief that one happened to have an obscurely
+inspired maiden on the premises when greater celebrities had betrayed
+the whimsicality of genius. It was a part of this whimsicality that Mrs.
+Farrinder--the reader may find it difficult to keep pace with her
+variations--appeared now to have decided to utter a few of her thoughts,
+so that her hostess could elicit a general response to the remark that
+it would be delightful to have both the old school and the new.
+
+"Well, perhaps you'll be disappointed in Verena," said Mrs. Tarrant,
+with an air of dolorous resignation to any event, and seating herself,
+with her gathered mantle, on the edge of a chair, as if she, at least,
+were ready, whoever else might keep on talking.
+
+"It isn't _me_, mother," Verena rejoined, with soft gravity, rather
+detached now from Mrs. Farrinder, and sitting with her eyes fixed
+thoughtfully on the ground. With deference to Mrs. Tarrant, a little
+more talk was necessary, for the young lady had as yet been
+insufficiently explained. Miss Birdseye felt this, but she was rather
+helpless about it, and delivered herself, with her universal
+familiarity, which embraced every one and everything, of a wandering,
+amiable tale, in which Abraham Greenstreet kept reappearing, in which
+Doctor Tarrant's miraculous cures were specified, with all the facts
+wanting, and in which Verena's successes in the West were related, not
+with emphasis or hyperbole, in which Miss Birdseye never indulged, but
+as accepted and recognised wonders, natural in an age of new
+revelations. She had heard of these things in detail only ten minutes
+before, from the girl's parents, but her hospitable soul had needed but
+a moment to swallow and assimilate them. If her account of them was not
+very lucid, it should be said in excuse for her that it was impossible
+to have any idea of Verena Tarrant unless one had heard her, and
+therefore still more impossible to give an idea to others. Mrs.
+Farrinder was perceptibly irritated; she appeared to have made up her
+mind, after her first hesitation, that the Tarrant family were
+fantastical and compromising. She had bent an eye of coldness on Selah
+and his wife--she might have regarded them all as a company of
+mountebanks.
+
+"Stand up and tell us what you have to say," she remarked, with some
+sternness, to Verena, who only raised her eyes to her, silently now,
+with the same sweetness, and then rested them on her father. This
+gentleman seemed to respond to an irresistible appeal; he looked round
+at the company with all his teeth, and said that these flattering
+allusions were not so embarrassing as they might otherwise be, inasmuch
+as any success that he and his daughter might have had was so thoroughly
+impersonal: he insisted on that word. They had just heard her say, "It
+is not _me_, mother," and he and Mrs. Tarrant and the girl herself were
+all equally aware it was not she. It was some power outside--it seemed
+to flow through her; he couldn't pretend to say why his daughter should
+be called, more than any one else. But it seemed as if she _was_ called.
+When he just calmed her down by laying his hand on her a few moments, it
+seemed to come. It so happened that in the West it had taken the form of
+a considerable eloquence. She had certainly spoken with great facility
+to cultivated and high-minded audiences. She had long followed with
+sympathy the movement for the liberation of her sex from every sort of
+bondage; it had been her principal interest even as a child (he might
+mention that at the age of nine she had christened her favourite doll
+Eliza P. Moseley, in memory of a great precursor whom they all
+reverenced), and now the inspiration, if he might call it so, seemed
+just to flow in that channel. The voice that spoke from her lips seemed
+to want to take that form. It didn't seem as if it _could_ take any
+other. She let it come out just as it would--she didn't pretend to have
+any control. They could judge for themselves whether the whole thing was
+not quite unique. That was why he was willing to talk about his own
+child that way, before a gathering of ladies and gentlemen; it was
+because they took no credit--they felt it was a power outside. If Verena
+felt she was going to be stimulated that evening, he was pretty sure
+they would be interested. Only he should have to request a few moments'
+silence, while she listened for the voice.
+
+Several of the ladies declared that they should be delighted--they hoped
+that Miss Tarrant was in good trim; whereupon they were corrected by
+others, who reminded them that it wasn't _her_--she had nothing to do
+with it--so her trim didn't matter; and a gentleman added that he
+guessed there were many present who had conversed with Eliza P. Moseley.
+Meanwhile Verena, more and more withdrawn into herself, but perfectly
+undisturbed by the public discussion of her mystic faculty, turned yet
+again, very prettily, to Mrs. Farrinder, and asked her if she wouldn't
+strike out--just to give her courage. By this time Mrs. Farrinder was in
+a condition of overhanging gloom; she greeted the charming suppliant
+with the frown of Juno. She disapproved completely of Doctor Tarrant's
+little speech, and she had less and less disposition to be associated
+with a miracle-monger. Abraham Greenstreet was very well, but Abraham
+Greenstreet was in his grave; and Eliza P. Moseley, after all, had been
+very tepid. Basil Ransom wondered whether it were effrontery or
+innocence that enabled Miss Tarrant to meet with such complacency the
+aloofness of the elder lady. At this moment he heard Olive Chancellor,
+at his elbow, with the tremor of excitement in her tone, suddenly
+exclaim: "Please begin, please begin! A voice, a human voice, is what we
+want."
+
+"I'll speak after you, and if you're a humbug, I'll expose you!" Mrs.
+Farrinder said. She was more majestic than facetious.
+
+"I'm sure we are all solid, as Doctor Tarrant says. I suppose we want to
+be quiet," Miss Birdseye remarked.
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+
+Verena Tarrant got up and went to her father in the middle of the room;
+Olive Chancellor crossed and resumed her place beside Mrs. Farrinder on
+the sofa the girl had quitted; and Miss Birdseye's visitors, for the
+rest, settled themselves attentively in chairs or leaned against the
+bare sides of the parlour. Verena took her father's hands, held them for
+a moment, while she stood before him, not looking at him, with her eyes
+towards the company; then, after an instant, her mother, rising, pushed
+forward, with an interesting sigh, the chair on which she had been
+sitting. Mrs. Tarrant was provided with another seat, and Verena,
+relinquishing her father's grasp, placed herself in the chair, which
+Tarrant put in position for her. She sat there with closed eyes, and her
+father now rested his long, lean hands upon her head. Basil Ransom
+watched these proceedings with much interest, for the girl amused and
+pleased him. She had far more colour than any one there, for whatever
+brightness was to be found in Miss Birdseye's rather faded and dingy
+human collection had gathered itself into this attractive but ambiguous
+young person. There was nothing ambiguous, by the way, about her
+confederate; Ransom simply loathed him, from the moment he opened his
+mouth; he was intensely familiar--that is, his type was; he was simply
+the detested carpet-bagger. He was false, cunning, vulgar, ignoble; the
+cheapest kind of human product. That he should be the father of a
+delicate, pretty girl, who was apparently clever too, whether she had a
+gift or no, this was an annoying, disconcerting fact. The white, puffy
+mother, with the high forehead, in the corner there, looked more like a
+lady; but if she were one, it was all the more shame to her to have
+mated with such a varlet, Ransom said to himself, making use, as he did
+generally, of terms of opprobrium extracted from the older English
+literature. He had seen Tarrant, or his equivalent, often before; he had
+"whipped" him, as he believed, controversially, again and again, at
+political meetings in blighted Southern towns, during the horrible
+period of reconstruction. If Mrs. Farrinder had looked at Verena Tarrant
+as if she were a mountebank, there was some excuse for it, inasmuch as
+the girl made much the same impression on Basil Ransom. He had never
+seen such an odd mixture of elements; she had the sweetest, most
+unworldly face, and yet, with it, an air of being on exhibition, of
+belonging to a troupe, of living in the gaslight, which pervaded even
+the details of her dress, fashioned evidently with an attempt at the
+histrionic. If she had produced a pair of castanets or a tambourine, he
+felt that such accessories would have been quite in keeping.
+
+Little Doctor Prance, with her hard good sense, had noted that she was
+anaemic, and had intimated that she was a deceiver. The value of her
+performance was yet to be proved, but she was certainly very pale, white
+as women are who have that shade of red hair; they look as if their
+blood had gone into it. There was, however, something rich in the
+fairness of this young lady; she was strong and supple, there was colour
+in her lips and eyes, and her tresses, gathered into a complicated coil,
+seemed to glow with the brightness of her nature. She had curious,
+radiant, liquid eyes (their smile was a sort of reflexion, like the
+glisten of a gem), and though she was not tall, she appeared to spring
+up, and carried her head as if it reached rather high. Ransom would have
+thought she looked like an Oriental, if it were not that Orientals are
+dark; and if she had only had a goat she would have resembled Esmeralda,
+though he had but a vague recollection of who Esmeralda had been. She
+wore a light-brown dress, of a shape that struck him as fantastic, a
+yellow petticoat, and a large crimson sash fastened at the side; while
+round her neck, and falling low upon her flat young chest, she had a
+double chain of amber beads. It must be added that, in spite of her
+melodramatic appearance, there was no symptom that her performance,
+whatever it was, would be of a melodramatic character. She was very
+quiet now, at least (she had folded her big fan), and her father
+continued the mysterious process of calming her down. Ransom wondered
+whether he wouldn't put her to sleep; for some minutes her eyes had
+remained closed; he heard a lady near him, apparently familiar with
+phenomena of this class, remark that she was going off. As yet the
+exhibition was not exciting, though it was certainly pleasant to have
+such a pretty girl placed there before one, like a moving statue. Doctor
+Tarrant looked at no one as he stroked and soothed his daughter; his
+eyes wandered round the cornice of the room, and he grinned upward, as
+if at an imaginary gallery. "Quietly--quietly," he murmured from time to
+time. "It will come, my good child, it will come. Just let it work--just
+let it gather. The spirit, you know; you've got to let the spirit come
+out when it will." He threw up his arms at moments, to rid himself of
+the wings of his long waterproof, which fell forward over his hands.
+Basil Ransom noticed all these things, and noticed also, opposite, the
+waiting face of his cousin, fixed, from her sofa, upon the closed eyes
+of the young prophetess. He grew more impatient at last, not of the
+delay of the edifying voice (though some time had elapsed), but of
+Tarrant's grotesque manipulations, which he resented as much as if he
+himself had felt their touch, and which seemed a dishonour to the
+passive maiden. They made him nervous, they made him angry, and it was
+only afterwards that he asked himself wherein they concerned him, and
+whether even a carpet-bagger hadn't a right to do what he pleased with
+his daughter. It was a relief to him when Verena got up from her chair,
+with a movement which made Tarrant drop into the background as if his
+part were now over. She stood there with a quiet face, serious and
+sightless; then, after a short further delay, she began to speak.
+
+She began incoherently, almost inaudibly, as if she were talking in a
+dream. Ransom could not understand her; he thought it very queer, and
+wondered what Doctor Prance would have said. "She's just arranging her
+ideas, and trying to get in report; she'll come out all right." This
+remark he heard dropped in a low tone by the mesmeric healer; "in
+report" was apparently Tarrant's version of _en rapport_. His prophecy
+was verified, and Verena did come out, after a little; she came out with
+a great deal of sweetness--with a very quaint and peculiar effect. She
+proceeded slowly, cautiously, as if she were listening for the prompter,
+catching, one by one, certain phrases that were whispered to her a great
+distance off, behind the scenes of the world. Then memory, or
+inspiration, returned to her, and presently she was in possession of her
+part. She played it with extraordinary simplicity and grace; at the end
+of ten minutes Ransom became aware that the whole audience--Mrs.
+Farrinder, Miss Chancellor, and the tough subject from Mississippi--were
+under the charm. I speak of ten minutes, but to tell the truth the young
+man lost all sense of time. He wondered afterwards how long she had
+spoken; then he counted that her strange, sweet, crude, absurd,
+enchanting improvisation must have lasted half an hour. It was not what
+she said; he didn't care for that, he scarcely understood it; he could
+only see that it was all about the gentleness and goodness of women, and
+how, during the long ages of history, they had been trampled under the
+iron heel of man. It was about their equality--perhaps even (he was not
+definitely conscious) about their superiority. It was about their day
+having come at last, about the universal sisterhood, about their duty to
+themselves and to each other. It was about such matters as these, and
+Basil Ransom was delighted to observe that such matters as these didn't
+spoil it. The effect was not in what she said, though she said some such
+pretty things, but in the picture and figure of the half-bedizened
+damsel (playing, now again, with her red fan), the visible freshness and
+purity of the little effort. When she had gained confidence she opened
+her eyes, and their shining softness was half the effect of her
+discourse. It was full of school-girl phrases, of patches of remembered
+eloquence, of childish lapses of logic, of flights of fancy which might
+indeed have had success at Topeka; but Ransom thought that if it had
+been much worse it would have been quite as good, for the argument, the
+doctrine, had absolutely nothing to do with it. It was simply an
+intensely personal exhibition, and the person making it happened to be
+fascinating. She might have offended the taste of certain people--Ransom
+could imagine that there were other Boston circles in which she would be
+thought pert; but for himself all he could feel was that to _his_
+starved senses she irresistibly appealed. He was the stiffest of
+conservatives, and his mind was steeled against the inanities she
+uttered--the rights and wrongs of women, the equality of the sexes, the
+hysterics of conventions, the further stultification of the suffrage,
+the prospect of conscript mothers in the national Senate. It made no
+difference; she didn't mean it, she didn't know what she meant, she had
+been stuffed with this trash by her father, and she was neither more nor
+less willing to say it than to say anything else; for the necessity of
+her nature was not to make converts to a ridiculous cause, but to emit
+those charming notes of her voice, to stand in those free young
+attitudes, to shake her braided locks like a naiad rising from the
+waves, to please every one who came near her, and to be happy that she
+pleased. I know not whether Ransom was aware of the bearings of this
+interpretation, which attributed to Miss Tarrant a singular hollowness
+of character; he contented himself with believing that she was as
+innocent as she was lovely, and with regarding her as a vocalist of
+exquisite faculty, condemned to sing bad music. How prettily, indeed,
+she made some of it sound!
+
+"Of course I only speak to women--to my own dear sisters; I don't speak
+to men, for I don't expect them to like what I say. They pretend to
+admire us very much, but I should like them to admire us a little less
+and to trust us a little more. I don't know what we have ever done to
+them that they should keep us out of everything. We have trusted _them_
+too much, and I think the time has come now for us to judge them, and
+say that by keeping us out we don't think they have done so well. When I
+look around me at the world, and at the state that men have brought it
+to, I confess I say to myself, "Well, if women had fixed it this way I
+should like to know what they would think of it!" When I see the
+dreadful misery of mankind and think of the suffering of which at any
+hour, at any moment, the world is full, I say that if this is the best
+they can do by themselves, they had better let us come in a little and
+see what _we_ can do. We couldn't possibly make it worse, could we? If
+we had done only this, we shouldn't boast of it. Poverty, and ignorance,
+and crime; disease, and wickedness, and wars! Wars, always more wars,
+and always more and more. Blood, blood--the world is drenched with
+blood! To kill each other, with all sorts of expensive and perfected
+instruments, that is the most brilliant thing they have been able to
+invent. It seems to me that we might stop it, we might invent something
+better. The cruelty--the cruelty; there is so much, so much! Why
+shouldn't tenderness come in? Why should our woman's hearts be so full
+of it, and all so wasted and withered, while armies and prisons and
+helpless miseries grow greater all the while? I am only a girl, a simple
+American girl, and of course I haven't seen much, and there is a great
+deal of life that I don't know anything about. But there are some things
+I feel--it seems to me as if I had been born to feel them; they are in
+my ears in the stillness of the night and before my face in the visions
+of the darkness. It is what the great sisterhood of women might do if
+they should all join hands, and lift up their voices above the brutal
+uproar of the world, in which it is so hard for the plea of mercy or of
+justice, the moan of weakness and suffering, to be heard. We should
+quench it, we should make it still, and the sound of our lips would
+become the voice of universal peace! For this we must trust one another,
+we must be true and gentle and kind. We must remember that the world is
+ours too, ours--little as we have ever had to say about anything!--and
+that the question is _not_ yet definitely settled whether it shall be a
+place of injustice or a place of love!"
+
+It was with this that the young lady finished her harangue, which was
+not followed by her sinking exhausted into her chair or by any of the
+traces of a laboured climax. She only turned away slowly towards her
+mother, smiling over her shoulder at the whole room, as if it had been a
+single person, without a flush in her whiteness, or the need of drawing
+a longer breath. The performance had evidently been very easy to her,
+and there might have been a kind of impertinence in her air of not
+having suffered from an exertion which had wrought so powerfully on
+every one else. Ransom broke into a genial laugh, which he instantly
+swallowed again, at the sweet grotesqueness of this virginal creature's
+standing up before a company of middle-aged people to talk to them about
+"love," the note on which she had closed her harangue. It was the most
+charming touch in the whole thing, and the most vivid proof of her
+innocence. She had had immense success, and Mrs. Tarrant, as she took
+her into her arms and kissed her, was certainly able to feel that the
+audience was not disappointed. They were exceedingly affected; they
+broke into exclamations and murmurs. Selah Tarrant went on conversing
+ostentatiously with his neighbours, slowly twirling his long thumbs and
+looking up at the cornice again, as if there could be nothing in the
+brilliant manner in which his daughter had acquitted herself to surprise
+_him_, who had heard her when she was still more remarkable, and who,
+moreover, remembered that the affair was so impersonal. Miss Birdseye
+looked round at the company with dim exultation; her large mild cheeks
+were shining with unwiped tears. Young Mr. Pardon remarked, in Ransom's
+hearing, that he knew parties who, if they had been present, would want
+to engage Miss Verena at a high figure for the winter campaign. And
+Ransom heard him add in a lower tone: "There's money for some one in
+that girl; you see if she don't have quite a run!" As for our
+Mississippian he kept his agreeable sensation for himself, only
+wondering whether he might not ask Miss Birdseye to present him to the
+heroine of the evening. Not immediately, of course, for the young man
+mingled with his Southern pride a shyness which often served all the
+purpose of humility. He was aware how much he was an outsider in such a
+house as that, and he was ready to wait for his coveted satisfaction
+till the others, who all hung together, should have given her the
+assurance of an approval which she would value, naturally, more than
+anything he could say to her. This episode had imparted animation to the
+assembly; a certain gaiety, even, expressed in a higher pitch of
+conversation, seemed to float in the heated air. People circulated more
+freely, and Verena Tarrant was presently hidden from Ransom's sight by
+the close-pressed ranks of the new friends she had made. "Well, I never
+heard it put _that_ way!" Ransom heard one of the ladies exclaim; to
+which another replied that she wondered one of their bright women hadn't
+thought of it before. "Well, it _is_ a gift, and no mistake," and "Well,
+they may call it what they please, it's a pleasure to listen to
+it"--these genial tributes fell from the lips of a pair of ruminating
+gentlemen. It was affirmed within Ransom's hearing that if they had a
+few more like that the matter would soon be fixed; and it was rejoined
+that they couldn't expect to have a great many--the style was so
+peculiar. It was generally admitted that the style was peculiar, but
+Miss Tarrant's peculiarity was the explanation of her success.
+
+
+
+
+IX
+
+
+Ransom approached Mrs. Farrinder again, who had remained on her sofa
+with Olive Chancellor; and as she turned her face to him he saw that she
+had felt the universal contagion. Her keen eye sparkled, there was a
+flush on her matronly cheek, and she had evidently made up her mind what
+line to take. Olive Chancellor sat motionless; her eyes were fixed on
+the floor with the rigid, alarmed expression of her moments of nervous
+diffidence; she gave no sign of observing her kinsman's approach. He
+said something to Mrs. Farrinder, something that imperfectly represented
+his admiration of Verena; and this lady replied with dignity that it was
+no wonder the girl spoke so well--she spoke in such a good cause. "She
+is very graceful, has a fine command of language; her father says it's a
+natural gift." Ransom saw that he should not in the least discover Mrs.
+Farrinder's real opinion, and her dissimulation added to his impression
+that she was a woman with a policy. It was none of his business whether
+in her heart she thought Verena a parrot or a genius; it was perceptible
+to him that she saw she would be effective, would help the cause. He
+stood almost appalled for a moment, as he said to himself that she would
+take her up and the girl would be ruined, would force her note and
+become a screamer. But he quickly dodged this vision, taking refuge in a
+mechanical appeal to his cousin, of whom he inquired how she liked Miss
+Verena. Olive made no answer; her head remained averted, she bored the
+carpet with her conscious eyes. Mrs. Farrinder glanced at her askance,
+and then said to Ransom serenely:
+
+"You praise the grace of your Southern ladies, but you have had to come
+North to see a human gazelle. Miss Tarrant is of the best New England
+stock--what _I_ call the best!"
+
+"I'm sure from what I have seen of the Boston ladies, no manifestation
+of grace can excite my surprise," Ransom rejoined, looking, with his
+smile, at his cousin.
+
+"She has been powerfully affected," Mrs. Farrinder explained, very
+slightly dropping her voice, as Olive, apparently, still remained deaf.
+
+Miss Birdseye drew near at this moment; she wanted to know if Mrs.
+Farrinder didn't want to express some acknowledgment, on the part of the
+company at large, for the real stimulus Miss Tarrant had given them.
+Mrs. Farrinder said: Oh yes, she would speak now with pleasure; only she
+must have a glass of water first. Miss Birdseye replied that there was
+some coming in a moment; one of the ladies had asked for it, and Mr.
+Pardon had just stepped down to draw some. Basil took advantage of this
+intermission to ask Miss Birdseye if she would give him the great
+privilege of an introduction to Miss Verena. "Mrs. Farrinder will thank
+her for the company," he said, laughing, "but she won't thank her for
+me."
+
+Miss Birdseye manifested the greatest disposition to oblige him; she was
+so glad he had been impressed. She was proceeding to lead him toward
+Miss Tarrant when Olive Chancellor rose abruptly from her chair and laid
+her hand, with an arresting movement, on the arm of her hostess. She
+explained to her that she must go, that she was not very well, that her
+carriage was there; also that she hoped Miss Birdseye, if it was not
+asking too much, would accompany her to the door.
+
+"Well, you are impressed too," said Miss Birdseye, looking at her
+philosophically. "It seems as if no one had escaped."
+
+Ransom was disappointed; he saw he was going to be taken away, and,
+before he could suppress it, an exclamation burst from his lips--the
+first exclamation he could think of that would perhaps check his
+cousin's retreat: "Ah, Miss Olive, are you going to give up Mrs.
+Farrinder?"
+
+At this Miss Olive looked at him, showed him an extraordinary face, a
+face he scarcely understood or even recognised. It was portentously
+grave, the eyes were enlarged, there was a red spot in each of the
+cheeks, and as directed to him, a quick, piercing question, a kind of
+leaping challenge, in the whole expression. He could only answer this
+sudden gleam with a stare, and wonder afresh what trick his Northern
+kinswoman was destined to play him. Impressed too? He should think he
+had been! Mrs. Farrinder, who was decidedly a woman of the world, came
+to his assistance, or to Miss Chancellor's, and said she hoped very much
+Olive wouldn't stay--she felt these things too much. "If you stay, I
+won't speak," she added; "I should upset you altogether." And then she
+continued, tenderly, for so preponderantly intellectual a nature: "When
+women feel as you do, how can I doubt that we shall come out all right?"
+
+"Oh, we shall come out all right, I guess," murmured Miss Birdseye.
+
+"But you must remember Beacon Street," Mrs. Farrinder subjoined. "You
+must take advantage of your position--you must wake up the Back Bay!"
+
+"I'm sick of the Back Bay!" said Olive fiercely; and she passed to the
+door with Miss Birdseye, bidding good-bye to no one. She was so agitated
+that, evidently, she could not trust herself, and there was nothing for
+Ransom but to follow. At the door of the room, however, he was checked
+by a sudden pause on the part of the two ladies: Olive stopped and stood
+there hesitating. She looked round the room and spied out Verena, where
+she sat with her mother, the centre of a gratified group; then, throwing
+back her head with an air of decision, she crossed over to her. Ransom
+said to himself that now, perhaps, was his chance, and he quickly
+accompanied Miss Chancellor. The little knot of reformers watched her as
+she arrived; their faces expressed a suspicion of her social importance,
+mingled with conscientious scruples as to whether it were right to
+recognise it. Verena Tarrant saw that she was the object of this
+manifestation, and she got up to meet the lady whose approach was so
+full of point. Ransom perceived, however, or thought he perceived, that
+she recognised nothing; she had no suspicions of social importance. Yet
+she smiled with all her radiance, as she looked from Miss Chancellor to
+him; smiled because she liked to smile, to please, to feel her
+success--or was it because she was a perfect little actress, and this
+was part of her training? She took the hand that Olive put out to her;
+the others, rather solemnly, sat looking up from their chairs.
+
+"You don't know me, but I want to know you," Olive said. "I can thank
+you now. Will you come and see me?"
+
+"Oh yes; where do you live?" Verena answered, in the tone of a girl for
+whom an invitation (she hadn't so many) was always an invitation.
+
+Miss Chancellor syllabled her address, and Mrs. Tarrant came forward,
+smiling. "I know about you, Miss Chancellor. I guess your father knew my
+father--Mr. Greenstreet. Verena will be very glad to visit you. We shall
+be very happy to see you in _our_ home."
+
+Basil Ransom, while the mother spoke, wanted to say something to the
+daughter, who stood there so near him, but he could think of nothing
+that would do; certain words that came to him, his Mississippi phrases,
+seemed patronising and ponderous. Besides, he didn't wish to assent to
+what she had said; he wished simply to tell her she was delightful, and
+it was difficult to mark that difference. So he only smiled at her in
+silence, and she smiled back at him--a smile that seemed to him quite
+for himself.
+
+"Where do you live?" Olive asked; and Mrs. Tarrant replied that they
+lived at Cambridge, and that the horse-cars passed just near their door.
+Whereupon Olive insisted "Will you come very soon?" and Verena said, Oh
+yes, she would come very soon, and repeated the number in Charles
+Street, to show that she had taken heed of it. This was done with
+childlike good faith. Ransom saw that she would come and see any one who
+would ask her like that, and he regretted for a minute that he was not a
+Boston lady, so that he might extend to her such an invitation. Olive
+Chancellor held her hand a moment longer, looked at her in farewell, and
+then, saying, "Come, Mr. Ransom," drew him out of the room. In the hall
+they met Mr. Pardon, coming up from the lower regions with a jug of
+water and a tumbler. Miss Chancellor's hackney-coach was there, and when
+Basil had put her into it she said to him that she wouldn't trouble him
+to drive with her--his hotel was not near Charles Street. He had so
+little desire to sit by her side--he wanted to smoke--that it was only
+after the vehicle had rolled off that he reflected upon her coolness,
+and asked himself why the deuce she had brought him away. She _was_ a
+very odd cousin, was this Boston cousin of his. He stood there a moment,
+looking at the light in Miss Birdseye's windows and greatly minded to
+re-enter the house, now he might speak to the girl. But he contented
+himself with the memory of her smile, and turned away with a sense of
+relief, after all, at having got out of such wild company, as well as
+with (in a different order) a vulgar consciousness of being very
+thirsty.
+
+
+
+
+X
+
+
+Verena Tarrant came in the very next day from Cambridge to Charles
+Street; that quarter of Boston is in direct communication with the
+academic suburb. It hardly seemed direct to poor Verena, perhaps, who,
+in the crowded street-car which deposited her finally at Miss
+Chancellor's door, had to stand up all the way, half suspended by a
+leathern strap from the glazed roof of the stifling vehicle, like some
+blooming cluster dangling in a hothouse. She was used, however, to these
+perpendicular journeys, and though, as we have seen, she was not
+inclined to accept without question the social arrangements of her time,
+it never would have occurred to her to criticise the railways of her
+native land. The promptness of her visit to Olive Chancellor had been an
+idea of her mother's, and Verena listened open-eyed while this lady, in
+the seclusion of the little house in Cambridge, while Selah Tarrant was
+"off," as they said, with his patients, sketched out a line of conduct
+for her. The girl was both submissive and unworldly, and she listened to
+her mother's enumeration of the possible advantages of an intimacy with
+Miss Chancellor as she would have listened to any other fairy-tale. It
+was still a part of the fairy-tale when this zealous parent put on with
+her own hands Verena's smart hat and feather, buttoned her little jacket
+(the buttons were immense and gilt), and presented her with twenty cents
+to pay her car-fare.
+
+There was never any knowing in advance how Mrs. Tarrant would take a
+thing, and even Verena, who, filially, was much less argumentative than
+in her civic and, as it were, public capacity, had a perception that her
+mother was queer. She was queer, indeed--a flaccid, relaxed, unhealthy,
+whimsical woman, who still had a capacity to cling. What she clung to
+was "society," and a position in the world which a secret whisper told
+her she had never had and a voice more audible reminded her she was in
+danger of losing. To keep it, to recover it, to reconsecrate it, was the
+ambition of her heart; this was one of the many reasons why Providence
+had judged her worthy of having so wonderful a child. Verena was born
+not only to lead their common sex out of bondage, but to remodel a
+visiting-list which bulged and contracted in the wrong places, like a
+country-made garment. As the daughter of Abraham Greenstreet, Mrs.
+Tarrant had passed her youth in the first Abolitionist circles, and she
+was aware how much such a prospect was clouded by her union with a young
+man who had begun life as an itinerant vendor of lead-pencils (he had
+called at Mr. Greenstreet's door in the exercise of this function), had
+afterwards been for a while a member of the celebrated Cayuga community,
+where there were no wives, or no husbands, or something of that sort
+(Mrs. Tarrant could never remember), and had still later (though before
+the development of the healing faculty) achieved distinction in the
+spiritualistic world. (He was an extraordinarily favoured medium, only
+he had had to stop for reasons of which Mrs. Tarrant possessed her
+version.) Even in a society much occupied with the effacement of
+prejudice there had been certain dim presumptions against this versatile
+being, who naturally had not wanted arts to ingratiate himself with Miss
+Greenstreet, her eyes, like his own, being fixed exclusively on the
+future. The young couple (he was considerably her elder) had gazed on
+the future together until they found that the past had completely
+forsaken them and that the present offered but a slender foothold. Mrs.
+Tarrant, in other words, incurred the displeasure of her family, who
+gave her husband to understand that, much as they desired to remove the
+shackles from the slave, there were kinds of behaviour which struck them
+as too unfettered. These had prevailed, to their thinking, at Cayuga,
+and they naturally felt it was no use for him to say that his residence
+there had been (for him--the community still existed) but a momentary
+episode, inasmuch as there was little more to be urged for the spiritual
+picnics and vegetarian camp-meetings in which the discountenanced pair
+now sought consolation.
+
+Such were the narrow views of people hitherto supposed capable of
+opening their hearts to all salutary novelties, but now put to a genuine
+test, as Mrs. Tarrant felt. Her husband's tastes rubbed off on her soft,
+moist moral surface, and the couple lived in an atmosphere of novelty,
+in which, occasionally, the accommodating wife encountered the fresh
+sensation of being in want of her dinner. Her father died, leaving,
+after all, very little money; he had spent his modest fortune upon the
+blacks. Selah Tarrant and his companion had strange adventures; she
+found herself completely enrolled in the great irregular army of
+nostrum-mongers, domiciled in humanitary Bohemia. It absorbed her like a
+social swamp; she sank into it a little more every day, without
+measuring the inches of her descent. Now she stood there up to her chin;
+it may probably be said of her that she had touched bottom. When she
+went to Miss Birdseye's it seemed to her that she re-entered society.
+The door that admitted her was not the door that admitted some of the
+others (she should never forget the tipped-up nose of Mrs. Farrinder),
+and the superior portal remained ajar, disclosing possible vistas. She
+had lived with long-haired men and short-haired women, she had
+contributed a flexible faith and an irremediable want of funds to a
+dozen social experiments, she had partaken of the comfort of a hundred
+religions, had followed innumerable dietary reforms, chiefly of the
+negative order, and had gone of an evening to a _seance_ or a lecture as
+regularly as she had eaten her supper. Her husband always had tickets
+for lectures; in moments of irritation at the want of a certain sequence
+in their career, she had remarked to him that it was the only thing he
+did have. The memory of all the winter nights they had tramped through
+the slush (the tickets, alas! were not car-tickets) to hear Mrs. Ada T.
+P. Foat discourse on the "Summer-land," came back to her with
+bitterness. Selah was quite enthusiastic at one time about Mrs. Foat,
+and it was his wife's belief that he had been "associated" with her
+(that was Selah's expression in referring to such episodes) at Cayuga.
+The poor woman, matrimonially, had a great deal to put up with; it took,
+at moments, all her belief in his genius to sustain her. She knew that
+he was very magnetic (that, in fact, was his genius), and she felt that
+it was his magnetism that held her to him. He had carried her through
+things where she really didn't know what to think; there were moments
+when she suspected that she had lost the strong moral sense for which
+the Greenstreets were always so celebrated.
+
+Of course a woman who had had the bad taste to marry Selah Tarrant would
+not have been likely under any circumstances to possess a very straight
+judgement; but there is no doubt that this poor lady had grown
+dreadfully limp. She had blinked and compromised and shuffled; she asked
+herself whether, after all, it was any more than natural that she should
+have wanted to help her husband, in those exciting days of his
+mediumship, when the table, sometimes, wouldn't rise from the ground,
+the sofa wouldn't float through the air, and the soft hand of a lost
+loved one was not so alert as it might have been to visit the circle.
+Mrs. Tarrant's hand was soft enough for the most supernatural effect,
+and she consoled her conscience on such occasions by reflecting
+that she ministered to a belief in immortality. She was glad,
+somehow, for Verena's sake, that they had emerged from the phase of
+spirit-intercourse; her ambition for her daughter took another form than
+desiring that she, too, should minister to a belief in immortality. Yet
+among Mrs. Tarrant's multifarious memories these reminiscences of the
+darkened room, the waiting circle, the little taps on table and wall,
+the little touches on cheek and foot, the music in the air, the rain of
+flowers, the sense of something mysteriously flitting, were most
+tenderly cherished. She hated her husband for having magnetised her so
+that she consented to certain things, and even did them, the thought of
+which to-day would suddenly make her face burn; hated him for the manner
+in which, somehow, as she felt, he had lowered her social tone; yet at
+the same time she admired him for an impudence so consummate that it had
+ended (in the face of mortifications, exposures, failures, all the
+misery of a hand-to-mouth existence) by imposing itself on her as a kind
+of infallibility. She knew he was an awful humbug, and yet her knowledge
+had this imperfection, that he had never confessed it--a fact that was
+really grand when one thought of his opportunities for doing so. He had
+never allowed that he wasn't straight; the pair had so often been in the
+position of the two augurs behind the altar, and yet he had never given
+her a glance that the whole circle mightn't have observed. Even in the
+privacy of domestic intercourse he had phrases, excuses, explanations,
+ways of putting things, which, as she felt, were too sublime for just
+herself; they were pitched, as Selah's nature was pitched, altogether in
+the key of public life.
+
+So it had come to pass, in her distended and demoralised conscience,
+that with all the things she despised in her life and all the things she
+rather liked, between being worn out with her husband's inability to
+earn a living and a kind of terror of his consistency (he had a theory
+that they lived delightfully), it happened, I say, that the only very
+definite criticism she made of him to-day was that he didn't know how to
+speak. That was where the shoe pinched--that was where Selah was slim.
+He couldn't hold the attention of an audience, he was not acceptable as
+a lecturer. He had plenty of thoughts, but it seemed as if he couldn't
+fit them into each other. Public speaking had been a Greenstreet
+tradition, and if Mrs. Tarrant had been asked whether in her younger
+years she had ever supposed she should marry a mesmeric healer, she
+would have replied: "Well, I never thought I should marry a gentleman
+who would be silent on the platform!" This was her most general
+humiliation; it included and exceeded every other, and it was a poor
+consolation that Selah possessed as a substitute--his career as a
+healer, to speak of none other, was there to prove it--the eloquence of
+the hand. The Greenstreets had never set much store on manual activity;
+they believed in the influence of the lips. It may be imagined,
+therefore, with what exultation, as time went on, Mrs. Tarrant found
+herself the mother of an inspired maiden, a young lady from whose lips
+eloquence flowed in streams. The Greenstreet tradition would not perish,
+and the dry places of her life would, perhaps, be plentifully watered.
+It must be added that, of late, this sandy surface had been irrigated,
+in moderation, from another source. Since Selah had addicted himself to
+the mesmeric mystery, their home had been a little more what the home of
+a Greenstreet should be. He had "considerable many" patients, he got
+about two dollars a sitting, and he had effected some most gratifying
+cures. A lady in Cambridge had been so much indebted to him that she had
+recently persuaded them to take a house near her, in order that Doctor
+Tarrant might drop in at any time. He availed himself of this
+convenience--they had taken so many houses that another, more or less,
+didn't matter--and Mrs. Tarrant began to feel as if they really had
+"struck" something.
+
+Even to Verena, as we know, she was confused and confusing; the girl had
+not yet had an opportunity to ascertain the principles on which her
+mother's limpness was liable suddenly to become rigid. This phenomenon
+occurred when the vapours of social ambition mounted to her brain, when
+she extended an arm from which a crumpled dressing-gown fluttered back
+to seize the passing occasion. Then she surprised her daughter by a
+volubility of exhortation as to the duty of making acquaintances, and by
+the apparent wealth of her knowledge of the mysteries of good society.
+She had, in particular, a way of explaining confidentially--and in her
+desire to be graphic she often made up the oddest faces--the
+interpretation that you must sometimes give to the manners of the best
+people, and the delicate dignity with which you should meet them, which
+made Verena wonder what secret sources of information she possessed.
+Verena took life, as yet, very simply; she was not conscious of so many
+differences of social complexion. She knew that some people were rich
+and others poor, and that her father's house had never been visited by
+such abundance as might make one ask one's self whether it were right,
+in a world so full of the disinherited, to roll in luxury. But except
+when her mother made her slightly dizzy by a resentment of some slight
+that she herself had never perceived, or a flutter over some opportunity
+that appeared already to have passed (while Mrs. Tarrant was looking for
+something to "put on"), Verena had no vivid sense that she was not as
+good as any one else, for no authority appealing really to her
+imagination had fixed the place of mesmeric healers in the scale of
+fashion. It was impossible to know in advance how Mrs. Tarrant would
+take things. Sometimes she was abjectly indifferent; at others she
+thought that every one who looked at her wished to insult her. At
+moments she was full of suspicion of the ladies (they were mainly
+ladies) whom Selah mesmerised; then again she appeared to have given up
+everything but her slippers and the evening-paper (from this publication
+she derived inscrutable solace), so that if Mrs. Foat in person had
+returned from the summer-land (to which she had some time since taken
+her flight), she would not have disturbed Mrs. Tarrant's almost cynical
+equanimity.
+
+It was, however, in her social subtleties that she was most beyond her
+daughter; it was when she discovered extraordinary though latent
+longings on the part of people they met to make their acquaintance, that
+the girl became conscious of how much she herself had still to learn.
+All her desire was to learn, and it must be added that she regarded her
+mother, in perfect good faith, as a wonderful teacher. She was perplexed
+sometimes by her worldliness; that, somehow, was not a part of the
+higher life which every one in such a house as theirs must wish above
+all things to lead; and it was not involved in the reign of justice,
+which they were all trying to bring about, that such a strict account
+should be kept of every little snub. Her father seemed to Verena to move
+more consecutively on the high plane; though his indifference to
+old-fashioned standards, his perpetual invocation of the brighter day,
+had not yet led her to ask herself whether, after all, men are more
+disinterested than women. Was it interest that prompted her mother to
+respond so warmly to Miss Chancellor, to say to Verena, with an air of
+knowingness, that the thing to do was to go in and see her
+_immediately_? No italics can represent the earnestness of Mrs.
+Tarrant's emphasis. Why hadn't she said, as she had done in former
+cases, that if people wanted to see them they could come out to their
+home; that she was not so low down in the world as not to know there was
+such a ceremony as leaving cards? When Mrs. Tarrant began on the
+question of ceremonies she was apt to go far; but she had waived it in
+this case; it suited her more to hold that Miss Chancellor had been very
+gracious, that she was a most desirable friend, that she had been more
+affected than any one by Verena's beautiful outpouring; that she would
+open to her the best saloons in Boston; that when she said "Come soon"
+she meant the very next day, that this was the way to take it, anyhow
+(one must know when to go forward gracefully); and that in short she,
+Mrs. Tarrant, knew what she was talking about.
+
+Verena accepted all this, for she was young enough to enjoy any journey
+in a horse-car, and she was ever-curious about the world; she only
+wondered a little how her mother knew so much about Miss Chancellor just
+from looking at her once. What Verena had mainly observed in the young
+lady who came up to her that way the night before was that she was
+rather dolefully dressed, that she looked as if she had been crying
+(Verena recognised that look quickly, she had seen it so much), and that
+she was in a hurry to get away. However, if she was as remarkable as her
+mother said, one would very soon see it; and meanwhile there was nothing
+in the girl's feeling about herself, in her sense of her importance, to
+make it a painful effort for her to run the risk of a mistake. She had
+no particular feeling about herself; she only cared, as yet, for outside
+things. Even the development of her "gift" had not made her think
+herself too precious for mere experiments; she had neither a particle of
+diffidence nor a particle of vanity. Though it would have seemed to you
+eminently natural that a daughter of Selah Tarrant and his wife should
+be an inspirational speaker, yet, as you knew Verena better, you would
+have wondered immensely how she came to issue from such a pair. Her
+ideas of enjoyment were very simple; she enjoyed putting on her new hat,
+with its redundancy of feather, and twenty cents appeared to her a very
+large sum.
+
+
+
+
+XI
+
+
+"I was certain you would come--I have felt it all day--something told
+me!" It was with these words that Olive Chancellor greeted her young
+visitor, coming to her quickly from the window, where she might have
+been waiting for her arrival. Some weeks later she explained to Verena
+how definite this prevision had been, how it had filled her all day with
+a nervous agitation so violent as to be painful. She told her that such
+forebodings were a peculiarity of her organisation, that she didn't know
+what to make of them, that she had to accept them; and she mentioned, as
+another example, the sudden dread that had come to her the evening
+before in the carriage, after proposing to Mr. Ransom to go with her to
+Miss Birdseye's. This had been as strange as it had been instinctive,
+and the strangeness, of course, was what must have struck Mr. Ransom;
+for the idea that he might come had been hers, and yet she suddenly
+veered round. She couldn't help it; her heart had begun to throb with
+the conviction that if he crossed that threshold some harm would come of
+of it for her. She hadn't prevented him, and now she didn't care, for
+now, as she intimated, she had the interest of Verena, and that made her
+indifferent to every danger, to every ordinary pleasure. By this time
+Verena had learned how peculiarly her friend was constituted, how
+nervous and serious she was, how personal, how exclusive, what a force
+of will she had, what a concentration of purpose. Olive had taken her
+up, in the literal sense of the phrase, like a bird of the air, had
+spread an extraordinary pair of wings, and carried her through the
+dizzying void of space. Verena liked it, for the most part; liked to
+shoot upward without an effort of her own and look down upon all
+creation, upon all history, from such a height. From this first
+interview she felt that she was seized, and she gave herself up, only
+shutting her eyes a little, as we do whenever a person in whom we have
+perfect confidence proposes, with our assent, to subject us to some
+sensation.
+
+"I want to know you," Olive said, on this occasion; "I felt that I must
+last night, as soon as I heard you speak. You seem to me very wonderful.
+I don't know what to make of you. I think we ought to be friends; so I
+just asked you to come to me straight off, without preliminaries, and I
+believed you would come. It is so _right_ that you have come, and it
+proves how right I was." These remarks fell from Miss Chancellor's lips
+one by one, as she caught her breath, with the tremor that was always in
+her voice, even when she was the least excited, while she made Verena
+sit down near her on the sofa, and looked at her all over in a manner
+that caused the girl to rejoice at having put on the jacket with the
+gilt buttons. It was this glance that was the beginning; it was with
+this quick survey, omitting nothing, that Olive took possession of her.
+"You are very remarkable; I wonder if you know how remarkable!" she went
+on, murmuring the words as if she were losing herself, becoming
+inadvertent in admiration.
+
+Verena sat there smiling, without a blush, but with a pure, bright look
+which, for her, would always make protests unnecessary. "Oh, it isn't
+me, you know; it's something outside!" She tossed this off lightly, as
+if she were in the habit of saying it, and Olive wondered whether it
+were a sincere disclaimer or only a phrase of the lips. The question was
+not a criticism, for she might have been satisfied that the girl was a
+mass of fluent catch-words and yet scarcely have liked her the less. It
+was just as she was that she liked her; she was so strange, so different
+from the girls one usually met, seemed to belong to some queer
+gipsy-land or transcendental Bohemia. With her bright, vulgar clothes,
+her salient appearance, she might have been a rope-dancer or a
+fortune-teller; and this had the immense merit, for Olive, that it
+appeared to make her belong to the "people," threw her into the social
+dusk of that mysterious democracy which Miss Chancellor held that the
+fortunate classes know so little about, and with which (in a future
+possibly very near) they will have to count. Moreover, the girl had
+moved her as she had never been moved, and the power to do that, from
+whatever source it came, was a force that one must admire. Her emotion
+was still acute, however much she might speak to her visitor as if
+everything that had happened seemed to her natural; and what kept it,
+above all, from subsiding was her sense that she found here what she had
+been looking for so long--a friend of her own sex with whom she might
+have a union of soul. It took a double consent to make a friendship, but
+it was not possible that this intensely sympathetic girl would refuse.
+Olive had the penetration to discover in a moment that she was a
+creature of unlimited generosity. I know not what may have been the
+reality of Miss Chancellor's other premonitions, but there is no doubt
+that in this respect she took Verena's measure on the spot. This was
+what she wanted; after that the rest didn't matter; Miss Tarrant might
+wear gilt buttons from head to foot, her soul could not be vulgar.
+
+"Mother told me I had better come right in," said Verena, looking now
+about the room, very glad to find herself in so pleasant a place, and
+noticing a great many things that she should like to see in detail.
+
+"Your mother saw that I meant what I said; it isn't everybody that does
+me the honour to perceive that. She saw that I was shaken from head to
+foot. I could only say three words--I couldn't have spoken more! What a
+power--what a power, Miss Tarrant!"
+
+"Yes, I suppose it is a power. If it wasn't a power, it couldn't do much
+with me!"
+
+"You are so simple--so much like a child," Olive Chancellor said. That
+was the truth, and she wanted to say it because, quickly, without forms
+or circumlocutions, it made them familiar. She wished to arrive at this;
+her impatience was such that before the girl had been five minutes in
+the room she jumped to her point--inquired of her, interrupting herself,
+interrupting everything: "Will you be my friend, my friend of friends,
+beyond every one, everything, for ever and for ever?" Her face was full
+of eagerness and tenderness.
+
+Verena gave a laugh of clear amusement, without a shade of embarrassment
+or confusion. "Perhaps you like me too much."
+
+"Of course I like you too much! When I like, I like too much. But of
+course it's another thing, your liking me," Olive Chancellor added. "We
+must wait--we must wait. When I care for anything, I can be patient."
+She put out her hand to Verena, and the movement was at once so
+appealing and so confident that the girl instinctively placed her own in
+it. So, hand in hand, for some moments, these two young women sat
+looking at each other. "There is so much I want to ask you," said Olive.
+
+"Well, I can't say much except when father has worked on me," Verena
+answered with an ingenuousness beside which humility would have seemed
+pretentious.
+
+"I don't care anything about your father," Olive Chancellor rejoined
+very gravely, with a great air of security.
+
+"He is very good," Verena said simply. "And he's wonderfully magnetic."
+
+"It isn't your father, and it isn't your mother; I don't think of them,
+and it's not them I want. It's only you--just as you are."
+
+Verena dropped her eyes over the front of her dress. "Just as she was"
+seemed to her indeed very well.
+
+"Do you want me to give up----?" she demanded, smiling.
+
+Olive Chancellor drew in her breath for an instant, like a creature in
+pain; then, with her quavering voice, touched with a vibration of
+anguish, she said; "Oh, how can I ask you to give up? _I_ will give
+up--I will give up everything!"
+
+Filled with the impression of her hostess's agreeable interior, and of
+what her mother had told her about Miss Chancellor's wealth, her
+position in Boston society, Verena, in her fresh, diverted scrutiny of
+the surrounding objects, wondered what could be the need of this scheme
+of renunciation. Oh no, indeed, she hoped she wouldn't give up--at least
+not before she, Verena, had had a chance to see. She felt, however, that
+for the present there would be no answer for her save in the mere
+pressure of Miss Chancellor's eager nature, that intensity of emotion
+which made her suddenly exclaim, as if in a nervous ecstasy of
+anticipation, "But we must wait! Why do we talk of this? We must wait!
+All will be right," she added more calmly, with great sweetness.
+
+Verena wondered afterward why she had not been more afraid of her--why,
+indeed, she had not turned and saved herself by darting out of the room.
+But it was not in this young woman's nature to be either timid or
+cautious; she had as yet to make acquaintance with the sentiment of
+fear. She knew too little of the world to have learned to mistrust
+sudden enthusiasms, and if she had had a suspicion it would have been
+(in accordance with common worldly knowledge) the wrong one--the
+suspicion that such a whimsical liking would burn itself out. She could
+not have that one, for there was a light in Miss Chancellor's magnified
+face which seemed to say that a sentiment, with her, might consume its
+object, might consume Miss Chancellor, but would never consume itself.
+Verena, as yet, had no sense of being scorched; she was only agreeably
+warmed. She also had dreamed of a friendship, though it was not what she
+had dreamed of most, and it came over her that this was the one which
+fortune might have been keeping. She never held back.
+
+"Do you live here all alone?" she asked of Olive.
+
+"I shouldn't if you would come and live with me!"
+
+Even this really passionate rejoinder failed to make Verena shrink; she
+thought it so possible that in the wealthy class people made each other
+such easy proposals. It was a part of the romance, the luxury, of
+wealth; it belonged to the world of invitations, in which she had had so
+little share. But it seemed almost a mockery when she thought of the
+little house in Cambridge, where the boards were loose in the steps of
+the porch.
+
+"I must stay with my father and mother," she said. "And then I have my
+work, you know. That's the way I must live now."
+
+"Your work?" Olive repeated, not quite understanding.
+
+"My gift," said Verena, smiling.
+
+"Oh yes, you must use it. That's what I mean; you must move the world
+with it; it's divine."
+
+It was so much what she meant that she had lain awake all night thinking
+of it, and the substance of her thought was that if she could only
+rescue the girl from the danger of vulgar exploitation, could only
+constitute herself her protectress and devotee, the two, between them,
+might achieve the great result. Verena's genius was a mystery, and it
+might remain a mystery; it was impossible to see how this charming,
+blooming, simple creature, all youth and grace and innocence, got her
+extraordinary powers of reflexion. When her gift was not in exercise she
+appeared anything but reflective, and as she sat there now, for
+instance, you would never have dreamed that she had had a vivid
+revelation. Olive had to content herself, provisionally, with saying
+that her precious faculty had come to her just as her beauty and
+distinction (to Olive she was full of that quality) had come; it had
+dropped straight from heaven, without filtering through her parents,
+whom Miss Chancellor decidedly did not fancy. Even among reformers she
+discriminated; she thought all wise people wanted great changes, but the
+votaries of change were not necessarily wise. She remained silent a
+little, after her last remark, and then she repeated again, as if it
+were the solution of everything, as if it represented with absolute
+certainty some immense happiness in the future--"We must wait, we must
+wait!" Verena was perfectly willing to wait, though she did not exactly
+know what they were to wait for, and the aspiring frankness of her
+assent shone out of her face, and seemed to pacify their mutual gaze.
+Olive asked her innumerable questions; she wanted to enter into her
+life. It was one of those talks which people remember afterwards, in
+which every word has been given and taken, and in which they see the
+signs of a beginning that was to be justified. The more Olive learnt of
+her visitor's life the more she wanted to enter into it, the more it
+took her out of herself. Such strange lives are led in America, she
+always knew that; but this was queerer than anything she had dreamed of,
+and the queerest part was that the girl herself didn't appear to think
+it queer. She had been nursed in darkened rooms, and suckled in the
+midst of manifestations; she had begun to "attend lectures," as she
+said, when she was quite an infant, because her mother had no one to
+leave her with at home. She had sat on the knees of somnambulists, and
+had been passed from hand to hand by trance-speakers; she was familiar
+with every kind of "cure," and had grown up among lady-editors of
+newspapers advocating new religions, and people who disapproved of the
+marriage-tie. Verena talked of the marriage-tie as she would have talked
+of the last novel--as if she had heard it as frequently discussed; and
+at certain times, listening to the answers she made to her questions,
+Olive Chancellor closed her eyes in the manner of a person waiting till
+giddiness passed. Her young friend's revelations actually gave her a
+vertigo; they made her perceive everything from which she should have
+rescued her. Verena was perfectly uncontaminated, and she would never be
+touched by evil; but though Olive had no views about the marriage-tie
+except that she should hate it for herself--that particular reform she
+did not propose to consider--she didn't like the "atmosphere" of circles
+in which such institutions were called into question. She had no wish
+now to enter into an examination of that particular one; nevertheless,
+to make sure, she would just ask Verena whether she disapproved of it.
+
+"Well, I must say," said Miss Tarrant, "I prefer free unions."
+
+Olive held her breath an instant; such an idea was so disagreeable to
+her. Then, for all answer, she murmured, irresolutely, "I wish you would
+let me help you!" Yet it seemed, at the same time, that Verena needed
+little help, for it was more and more clear that her eloquence, when she
+stood up that way before a roomful of people, was literally inspiration.
+She answered all her friend's questions with a good-nature which
+evidently took no pains to make things plausible, an effort to oblige,
+not to please; but, after all, she could give very little account of
+herself. This was very visible when Olive asked her where she had got
+her "intense realisation" of the suffering of women; for her address at
+Miss Birdseye's showed that she, too (like Olive herself), had had that
+vision in the watches of the night. Verena thought a moment, as if to
+understand what her companion referred to, and then she inquired, always
+smiling, where Joan of Arc had got her idea of the suffering of France.
+This was so prettily said that Olive could scarcely keep from kissing
+her; she looked at the moment as if, like Joan, she might have had
+visits from the saints. Olive, of course, remembered afterwards that it
+had not literally answered the question; and she also reflected on
+something that made an answer seem more difficult--the fact that the
+girl had grown up among lady-doctors, lady-mediums, lady-editors,
+lady-preachers, lady-healers, women who, having rescued themselves from
+a passive existence, could illustrate only partially the misery of the
+sex at large. It was true that they might have illustrated it by their
+talk, by all they had "been through" and all they could tell a younger
+sister; but Olive was sure that Verena's prophetic impulse had not been
+stirred by the chatter of women (Miss Chancellor knew that sound as well
+as any one); it had proceeded rather out of their silence. She said to
+her visitor that whether or no the angels came down to her in glittering
+armour, she struck her as the only person she had yet encountered who
+had exactly the same tenderness, the same pity, for women that she
+herself had. Miss Birdseye had something of it, but Miss Birdseye wanted
+passion, wanted keenness, was capable of the weakest concessions. Mrs.
+Farrinder was not weak, of course, and she brought a great intellect to
+the matter; but she was not personal enough--she was too abstract.
+Verena was not abstract; she seemed to have lived in imagination through
+all the ages. Verena said she _did_ think she had a certain amount of
+imagination; she supposed she couldn't be so effective on the platform
+if she hadn't a rich fancy. Then Olive said to her, taking her hand
+again, that she wanted her to assure her of this--that it was the only
+thing in all the world she cared for, the redemption of women, the thing
+she hoped under Providence to give her life to. Verena flushed a little
+at this appeal, and the deeper glow of her eyes was the first sign of
+exaltation she had offered. "Oh yes--I want to give my life!" she
+exclaimed, with a vibrating voice; and then she added gravely, "I want
+to do something great!"
+
+"You will, you will, we both will!" Olive Chancellor cried, in rapture.
+But after a little she went on: "I wonder if you know what it means,
+young and lovely as you are--giving your life!"
+
+Verena looked down for a moment in meditation.
+
+"Well," she replied, "I guess I have thought more than I appear."
+
+"Do you understand German? Do you know 'Faust'?" said Olive. "'_Entsagen
+sollst du, sollst entsagen!_'"
+
+"I don't know German; I should like so to study it; I want to know
+everything."
+
+"We will work at it together--we will study everything." Olive almost
+panted; and while she spoke the peaceful picture hung before her of
+still winter evenings under the lamp, with falling snow outside, and tea
+on a little table, and successful renderings, with a chosen companion,
+of Goethe, almost the only foreign author she cared about; for she hated
+the writing of the French, in spite of the importance they have given to
+women. Such a vision as this was the highest indulgence she could offer
+herself; she had it only at considerable intervals. It seemed as if
+Verena caught a glimpse of it too, for her face kindled still more, and
+she said she should like that ever so much. At the same time she asked
+the meaning of the German words.
+
+"'Thou shalt renounce, refrain, abstain!' That's the way Bayard Taylor
+has translated them," Olive answered.
+
+"Oh, well, I guess I can abstain!" Verena exclaimed, with a laugh. And
+she got up rather quickly, as if by taking leave she might give a proof
+of what she meant. Olive put out her hands to hold her, and at this
+moment one of the _portieres_ of the room was pushed aside, while a
+gentleman was ushered in by Miss Chancellor's little parlour-maid.
+
+
+
+
+XII
+
+
+Verena recognised him; she had seen him the night before at Miss
+Birdseye's, and she said to her hostess, "Now I must go--you have got
+another caller!" It was Verena's belief that in the fashionable world
+(like Mrs. Farrinder, she thought Miss Chancellor belonged to
+it--thought that, in standing there, she herself was in it)--in the
+highest social walks it was the custom of a prior guest to depart when
+another friend arrived. She had been told at people's doors that she
+could not be received because the lady of the house had a visitor, and
+she had retired on these occasions with a feeling of awe much more than
+a sense of injury. They had not been the portals of fashion, but in this
+respect, she deemed, they had emulated such bulwarks. Olive Chancellor
+offered Basil Ransom a greeting which she believed to be consummately
+lady-like, and which the young man, narrating the scene several months
+later to Mrs. Luna, whose susceptibilities he did not feel himself
+obliged to consider (she considered his so little), described by saying
+that she glared at him. Olive had thought it very possible he would come
+that day if he was to leave Boston; though she was perfectly mindful
+that she had given him no encouragement at the moment they separated. If
+he should not come she should be annoyed, and if he should come she
+should be furious; she was also sufficiently mindful of that. But she
+had a foreboding that, of the two grievances, fortune would confer upon
+her only the less; the only one she had as yet was that he had responded
+to her letter--a complaint rather wanting in richness. If he came, at
+any rate, he would be likely to come shortly before dinner, at the same
+hour as yesterday. He had now anticipated this period considerably, and
+it seemed to Miss Chancellor that he had taken a base advantage of her,
+stolen a march upon her privacy. She was startled, disconcerted, but as
+I have said, she was rigorously lady-like. She was determined not again
+to be fantastic, as she had been about his coming to Miss Birdseye's.
+The strange dread associating itself with that was something which, she
+devoutly trusted, she had felt once for all. She didn't know what he
+could do to her; he hadn't prevented, on the spot though he was, one of
+the happiest things that had befallen her for so long--this quick,
+confident visit of Verena Tarrant. It was only just at the last that he
+had come in, and Verena must go now; Olive's detaining hand immediately
+relaxed itself.
+
+It is to be feared there was no disguise of Ransom's satisfaction at
+finding himself once more face to face with the charming creature with
+whom he had exchanged that final speechless smile the evening before. He
+was more glad to see her than if she had been an old friend, for it
+seemed to him that she had suddenly become a new one. "The delightful
+girl," he said to himself; "she smiles at me as if she liked me!" He
+could not know that this was fatuous, that she smiled so at every one;
+the first time she saw people she treated them as if she recognised
+them. Moreover, she did not seat herself again in his honour; she let it
+be seen that she was still going. The three stood there together in the
+middle of the long, characteristic room, and, for the first time in her
+life, Olive Chancellor chose not to introduce two persons who met under
+her roof. She hated Europe, but she could be European if it were
+necessary. Neither of her companions had an idea that in leaving them
+simply planted face to face (the terror of the American heart) she had
+so high a warrant; and presently Basil Ransom felt that he didn't care
+whether he were introduced or not, for the greatness of an evil didn't
+matter if the remedy were equally great.
+
+"Miss Tarrant won't be surprised if I recognise her--if I take the
+liberty to speak to her. She is a public character; she must pay the
+penalty of her distinction." These words he boldly addressed to the
+girl, with his most gallant Southern manner, saying to himself meanwhile
+that she was prettier still by daylight.
+
+"Oh, a great many gentlemen have spoken to me," Verena said. "There were
+quite a number at Topeka----" And her phrase lost itself in her look at
+Olive, as if she were wondering what was the matter with her.
+
+"Now, I am afraid you are going the very moment I appear," Ransom went
+on. "Do you know that's very cruel to me? I know what your ideas
+are--you expressed them last night in such beautiful language; of course
+you convinced me. I am ashamed of being a man; but I am, and I can't
+help it, and I'll do penance any way you may prescribe. _Must_ she go,
+Miss Olive?" he asked of his cousin. "Do you flee before the individual
+male?" And he turned to Verena.
+
+This young lady gave a laugh that resembled speech in liquid fusion. "Oh
+no; I like the individual!"
+
+As an incarnation of a "movement," Ransom thought her more and more
+singular, and he wondered how she came to be closeted so soon with his
+kinswoman, to whom, only a few hours before, she had been a complete
+stranger. These, however, were doubtless the normal proceedings of
+women. He begged her to sit down again; he was sure Miss Chancellor
+would be sorry to part with her. Verena, looking at her friend, not for
+permission, but for sympathy, dropped again into a chair, and Ransom
+waited to see Miss Chancellor do the same. She gratified him after a
+moment, because she could not refuse without appearing to put a hurt
+upon Verena; but it went hard with her, and she was altogether
+discomposed. She had never seen any one so free in her own drawing-room
+as this loud Southerner, to whom she had so rashly offered a footing; he
+extended invitations to her guests under her nose. That Verena should do
+as he asked her was a signal sign of the absence of that "home-culture"
+(it was so that Miss Chancellor expressed the missing quality) which she
+never supposed the girl possessed: fortunately, as it would be supplied
+to her in abundance in Charles Street. (Olive of course held that
+home-culture was perfectly compatible with the widest emancipation.) It
+was with a perfectly good conscience that Verena complied with Basil
+Ransom's request; but it took her quick sensibility only a moment to
+discover that her friend was not pleased. She scarcely knew what had
+ruffled her, but at the same instant there passed before her the vision
+of the anxieties (of this sudden, unexplained sort, for instance, and
+much worse) which intimate relations with Miss Chancellor might entail.
+
+"Now, I want you to tell me this," Basil Ransom said, leaning forward
+towards Verena, with his hands on his knees, and completely oblivious to
+his hostess. "Do you really believe all that pretty moonshine you talked
+last night? I could have listened to you for another hour; but I never
+heard such monstrous sentiments, I must protest--I must, as a
+calumniated, misrepresented man. Confess you meant it as a kind of
+_reductio ad absurdum_--a satire on Mrs. Farrinder?" He spoke in a tone
+of the freest pleasantry, with his familiar, friendly Southern cadence.
+
+Verena looked at him with eyes that grew large. "Why, you don't mean to
+say you don't believe in our cause?"
+
+"Oh, it won't do--it won't do!" Ransom went on, laughing. "You are on
+the wrong tack altogether. Do you really take the ground that your sex
+has been without influence? Influence? Why, you have led us all by the
+nose to where we are now! Wherever we are, it's all you. You are at the
+bottom of everything."
+
+"Oh yes, and we want to be at the top," said Verena.
+
+"Ah, the bottom is a better place, depend on it, when from there you
+move the whole mass! Besides, you are on the top as well; you are
+everywhere, you are everything. I am of the opinion of that historical
+character--wasn't he some king?--who thought there was a lady behind
+everything. Whatever it was, he held, you have only to look for her; she
+is the explanation. Well, I always look for her, and I always find her;
+of course, I am always delighted to do so; but it proves she is the
+universal cause. Now, you don't mean to deny that power, the power of
+setting men in motion. You are at the bottom of all the wars."
+
+"Well, I am like Mrs. Farrinder; I like opposition," Verena exclaimed,
+with a happy smile.
+
+"That proves, as I say, how in spite of your expressions of horror you
+delight in the shock of battle. What do you say to Helen of Troy and the
+fearful carnage she excited? It is well known that the Empress of France
+was at the bottom of the last war in that country. And as for our four
+fearful years of slaughter, of course, you won't deny that there the
+ladies were the great motive power. The Abolitionists brought it on, and
+were not the Abolitionists principally females? Who was that celebrity
+that was mentioned last night?--Eliza P. Moseley. I regard Eliza as the
+cause of the biggest war of which history preserves the record."
+
+Basil Ransom enjoyed his humour the more because Verena appeared to
+enjoy it; and the look with which she replied to him, at the end of this
+little tirade, "Why, sir, you ought to take the platform too; we might
+go round together as poison and antidote!"--this made him feel that he
+had convinced her, for the moment, quite as much as it was important he
+should. In Verena's face, however, it lasted but an instant--an instant
+after she had glanced at Olive Chancellor, who, with her eyes fixed
+intently on the ground (a look she was to learn to know so well), had a
+strange expression. The girl slowly got up; she felt that she must go.
+She guessed Miss Chancellor didn't like this handsome joker (it was so
+that Basil Ransom struck her); and it was impressed upon her ("in time,"
+as she thought) that her new friend would be more serious even than she
+about the woman-question, serious as she had hitherto believed herself
+to be.
+
+"I should like so much to have the pleasure of seeing you again," Ransom
+continued. "I think I should be able to interpret history for you by a
+new light."
+
+"Well, I should be very happy to see you in my home." These words had
+barely fallen from Verena's lips (her mother told her they were, in
+general, the proper thing to say when people expressed such a desire as
+that; she must not let it be assumed that she would come first to
+them)--she had hardly uttered this hospitable speech when she felt the
+hand of her hostess upon her arm and became aware that a passionate
+appeal sat in Olive's eyes.
+
+"You will just catch the Charles Street car," that young woman murmured,
+with muffled sweetness.
+
+Verena did not understand further than to see that she ought already to
+have departed; and the simplest response was to kiss Miss Chancellor, an
+act which she briefly performed. Basil Ransom understood still less, and
+it was a melancholy commentary on his contention that men are not
+inferior, that this meeting could not come, however rapidly, to a close
+without his plunging into a blunder which necessarily aggravated those
+he had already made. He had been invited by the little prophetess, and
+yet he had not been invited; but he did not take that up, because he
+must absolutely leave Boston on the morrow, and, besides, Miss
+Chancellor appeared to have something to say to it. But he put out his
+hand to Verena and said, "Good-bye, Miss Tarrant; are we not to have the
+pleasure of hearing you in New York? I am afraid we are sadly sunk."
+
+"Certainly, I should like to raise my voice in the biggest city," the
+girl replied.
+
+"Well, try to come on. I won't refute you. It would be a very stupid
+world, after all, if we always knew what women were going to say."
+
+Verena was conscious of the approach of the Charles Street car, as well
+as of the fact that Miss Chancellor was in pain; but she lingered long
+enough to remark that she could see he had the old-fashioned ideas--he
+regarded woman as the toy of man.
+
+"Don't say the toy--say the joy!" Ransom exclaimed. "There is one
+statement I will venture to advance; I am quite as fond of you as you
+are of each other!"
+
+"Much he knows about that!" said Verena, with a side-long smile at Olive
+Chancellor.
+
+For Olive, it made her more beautiful than ever; still, there was no
+trace of this mere personal elation in the splendid sententiousness with
+which, turning to Mr. Ransom, she remarked: "What women may be, or may
+not be, to each other, I won't attempt just now to say; but what _the
+truth_ may be to a human soul, I think perhaps even a woman may faintly
+suspect!"
+
+"The truth? My dear cousin, your truth is a most vain thing!"
+
+"Gracious me!" cried Verena Tarrant; and the gay vibration of her voice
+as she uttered this simple ejaculation was the last that Ransom heard of
+her. Miss Chancellor swept her out of the room, leaving the young man to
+extract a relish from the ineffable irony with which she uttered the
+words "even a woman." It was to be supposed, on general grounds, that
+she would reappear, but there was nothing in the glance she gave him, as
+she turned her back, that was an earnest of this. He stood there a
+moment, wondering; then his wonder spent itself on the page of a book
+which, according to his habit at such times, he had mechanically taken
+up, and in which he speedily became interested. He read it for five
+minutes in an uncomfortable-looking attitude, and quite forgot that he
+had been forsaken. He was recalled to this fact by the entrance of Mrs.
+Luna, arrayed as if for the street, and putting on her gloves again--she
+seemed always to be putting on her gloves. She wanted to know what in
+the world he was doing there alone--whether her sister had not been
+notified.
+
+"Oh yes," said Ransom, "she has just been with me, but she has gone
+downstairs with Miss Tarrant."
+
+"And who in the world is Miss Tarrant?"
+
+Ransom was surprised that Mrs. Luna should not know of the intimacy of
+the two young ladies, in spite of the brevity of their acquaintance,
+being already so great. But, apparently, Miss Olive had not mentioned
+her new friend. "Well, she is an inspirational speaker--the most
+charming creature in the world!"
+
+Mrs. Luna paused in her manipulations, gave an amazed, amused stare,
+then caused the room to ring with her laughter. "You don't mean to say
+you are converted--already?"
+
+"Converted to Miss Tarrant, decidedly."
+
+"You are not to belong to any Miss Tarrant; you are to belong to me,"
+Mrs. Luna said, having thought over her Southern kinsman during the
+twenty-four hours, and made up her mind that he would be a good man for
+a lone woman to know. Then she added: "Did you come here to meet
+her--the inspirational speaker?"
+
+"No; I came to bid your sister good-bye."
+
+"Are you really going? I haven't made you promise half the things I want
+yet. But we will settle that in New York. How do you get on with Olive
+Chancellor?" Mrs. Luna continued, making her points, as she always did,
+with eagerness, though her roundness and her dimples had hitherto
+prevented her from being accused of that vice. It was her practice to
+speak of her sister by her whole name, and you would have supposed, from
+her usual manner of alluding to her, that Olive was much the older,
+instead of having been born ten years later than Adeline. She had as
+many ways as possible of marking the gulf that divided them; but she
+bridged it over lightly now by saying to Basil Ransom; "Isn't she a dear
+old thing?"
+
+This bridge, he saw, would not bear his weight, and her question seemed
+to him to have more audacity than sense. Why should she be so insincere?
+She might know that a man couldn't recognise Miss Chancellor in such a
+description as that. She was not old--she was sharply young; and it was
+inconceivable to him, though he had just seen the little prophetess kiss
+her, that she should ever become any one's "dear." Least of all was she
+a "thing"; she was intensely, fearfully, a person. He hesitated a
+moment, and then he replied: "She's a very remarkable woman."
+
+"Take care--don't be reckless!" cried Mrs. Luna. "Do you think she is
+very dreadful?"
+
+"Don't say anything against my cousin," Basil answered; and at that
+moment Miss Chancellor re-entered the room. She murmured some request
+that he would excuse her absence, but her sister interrupted her with an
+inquiry about Miss Tarrant.
+
+"Mr. Ransom thinks her wonderfully charming. Why didn't you show her to
+me? Do you want to keep her all to yourself?"
+
+Olive rested her eyes for some moments upon Mrs. Luna, without speaking.
+Then she said: "Your veil is not put on straight, Adeline."
+
+"I look like a monster--that, evidently, is what you mean!" Adeline
+exclaimed, going to the mirror to rearrange the peccant tissue.
+
+Miss Chancellor did not again ask Ransom to be seated; she appeared to
+take it for granted that he would leave her now. But instead of this he
+returned to the subject of Verena; he asked her whether she supposed the
+girl would come out in public--would go about like Mrs. Farrinder?
+
+"Come out in public!" Olive repeated; "in public? Why, you don't imagine
+that pure voice is to be hushed?"
+
+"Oh, hushed, no! it's too sweet for that. But not raised to a scream;
+not forced and cracked and ruined. She oughtn't to become like the
+others. She ought to remain apart."
+
+"Apart--_apart_?" said Miss Chancellor; "when we shall all be looking to
+her, gathering about her, praying for her!" There was an exceeding scorn
+in her voice. "If _I_ can help her, she shall be an immense power for
+good."
+
+"An immense power for quackery, my dear Miss Olive!" This broke from
+Basil's lips in spite of a vow he had just taken not to say anything
+that should "aggravate" his hostess, who was in a state of tension it
+was not difficult to detect. But he had lowered his tone to friendly
+pleading, and the offensive word was mitigated by his smile.
+
+She moved away from him, backwards, as if he had given her a push. "Ah,
+well, now you are reckless," Mrs. Luna remarked, drawing out her ribbons
+before the mirror.
+
+"I don't think you would interfere if you knew how little you understand
+us," Miss Chancellor said to Ransom.
+
+"Whom do you mean by 'us'--your whole delightful sex? I don't understand
+_you_, Miss Olive."
+
+"Come away with me, and I'll explain her as we go," Mrs. Luna went on,
+having finished her toilet.
+
+Ransom offered his hand in farewell to his hostess; but Olive found it
+impossible to do anything but ignore the gesture. She could not have let
+him touch her. "Well, then, if you must exhibit her to the multitude,
+bring her on to New York," he said, with the same attempt at a light
+treatment.
+
+"You'll have _me_ in New York--you don't want any one else!" Mrs. Luna
+ejaculated, coquettishly. "I have made up my mind to winter there now."
+
+Olive Chancellor looked from one to the other of her two relatives, one
+near and the other distant, but each so little in sympathy with her, and
+it came over her that there might be a kind of protection for her in
+binding them together, entangling them with each other. She had never
+had an idea of that kind in her life before, and that this sudden
+subtlety should have gleamed upon her as a momentary talisman gives the
+measure of her present nervousness.
+
+"If I could take her to New York, I would take her farther," she
+remarked, hoping she was enigmatical.
+
+"You talk about 'taking' her, as if you were a lecture-agent. Are you
+going into that business?" Mrs. Luna asked.
+
+Ransom could not help noticing that Miss Chancellor would not shake
+hands with him, and he felt, on the whole, rather injured. He paused a
+moment before leaving the room--standing there with his hand on the knob
+of the door. "Look here, Miss Olive, what did you write to me to come
+and see you for?" He made this inquiry with a countenance not destitute
+of gaiety, but his eyes showed something of that yellow light--just
+momentarily lurid--of which mention has been made. Mrs. Luna was on her
+way downstairs, and her companions remained face to face.
+
+"Ask my sister--I think she will tell you," said Olive, turning away
+from him and going to the window. She remained there, looking out; she
+heard the door of the house close, and saw the two cross the street
+together. As they passed out of sight her fingers played, softly, a
+little air upon the pane; it seemed to her that she had had an
+inspiration.
+
+Basil Ransom, meanwhile, put the question to Mrs. Luna. "If she was not
+going to like me, why in the world did she write to me?"
+
+"Because she wanted you to know me--she thought _I_ would like you!" And
+apparently she had not been wrong; for Mrs. Luna, when they reached
+Beacon Street, would not hear of his leaving her to go her way alone,
+would not in the least admit his plea that he had only an hour or two
+more in Boston (he was to travel, economically, by the boat) and must
+devote the time to his business. She appealed to his Southern chivalry,
+and not in vain; practically, at least, he admitted the rights of women.
+
+
+
+
+XIII
+
+
+Mrs. Tarrant was delighted, as may be imagined, with her daughter's
+account of Miss Chancellor's interior, and the reception the girl had
+found there; and Verena, for the next month, took her way very often to
+Charles Street. "Just you be as nice to her as you know how," Mrs.
+Tarrant had said to her; and she reflected with some complacency that
+her daughter did know--she knew how to do everything of that sort. It
+was not that Verena had been taught; that branch of the education of
+young ladies which is known as "manners and deportment" had not figured,
+as a definite head, in Miss Tarrant's curriculum. She had been told,
+indeed, that she must not lie nor steal; but she had been told very
+little else about behaviour; her only great advantage, in short, had
+been the parental example. But her mother liked to think that she was
+quick and graceful, and she questioned her exhaustively as to the
+progress of this interesting episode; she didn't see why, as she said,
+it shouldn't be a permanent "stand-by" for Verena. In Mrs. Tarrant's
+meditations upon the girl's future she had never thought of a fine
+marriage as a reward of effort; she would have deemed herself very
+immoral if she had endeavoured to capture for her child a rich husband.
+She had not, in fact, a very vivid sense of the existence of such agents
+of fate; all the rich men she had seen already had wives, and the
+unmarried men, who were generally very young, were distinguished from
+each other not so much by the figure of their income, which came little
+into question, as by the degree of their interest in regenerating ideas.
+She supposed Verena would marry some one, some day, and she hoped the
+personage would be connected with public life--which meant, for Mrs.
+Tarrant, that his name would be visible, in the lamp-light, on a
+coloured poster, in the doorway of Tremont Temple. But she was not eager
+about this vision, for the implications of matrimony were for the most
+part wanting in brightness--consisted of a tired woman holding a baby
+over a furnace-register that emitted lukewarm air. A real lovely
+friendship with a young woman who had, as Mrs. Tarrant expressed it,
+"prop'ty," would occupy agreeably such an interval as might occur before
+Verena should meet her sterner fate; it would be a great thing for her
+to have a place to run into when she wanted a change, and there was no
+knowing but what it might end in her having two homes. For the idea of
+the home, like most American women of her quality, Mrs. Tarrant had an
+extreme reverence; and it was her candid faith that in all the
+vicissitudes of the past twenty years she had preserved the spirit of
+this institution. If it should exist in duplicate for Verena, the girl
+would be favoured indeed.
+
+All this was as nothing, however, compared with the fact that Miss
+Chancellor seemed to think her young friend's gift _was_ inspirational,
+or at any rate, as Selah had so often said, quite unique. She couldn't
+make out very exactly, by Verena, what she thought; but if the way Miss
+Chancellor had taken hold of her didn't show that she believed she could
+rouse the people, Mrs. Tarrant didn't know what it showed. It was a
+satisfaction to her that Verena evidently responded freely; she didn't
+think anything of what she spent in car-tickets, and indeed she had told
+her that Miss Chancellor wanted to stuff her pockets with them. At first
+she went in because her mother liked to have her; but now, evidently,
+she went because she was so much drawn. She expressed the highest
+admiration of her new friend; she said it took her a little while to see
+into her, but now that she did, well, she was perfectly splendid. When
+Verena wanted to admire she went ahead of every one, and it was
+delightful to see how she was stimulated by the young lady in Charles
+Street. They thought everything of each other--that was very plain; you
+could scarcely tell which thought most. Each thought the other so noble,
+and Mrs. Tarrant had a faith that between them they _would_ rouse the
+people. What Verena wanted was some one who would know how to handle her
+(her father hadn't handled anything except the healing, up to this time,
+with real success), and perhaps Miss Chancellor would take hold better
+than some that made more of a profession.
+
+"It's beautiful, the way she draws you out," Verena had said to her
+mother; "there's something so searching that the first time I visited
+her it quite realised my idea of the Day of Judgement. But she seems to
+show all that's in herself at the same time, and then you see how lovely
+it is. She's just as pure as she can live; you see if she is not, when
+you know her. She's so noble herself that she makes you feel as if you
+wouldn't want to be less so. She doesn't care for anything but the
+elevation of our sex; if she can work a little toward that, it's all she
+asks. I can tell you, she kindles me; she does, mother, really. She
+doesn't care a speck what she wears--only to have an elegant parlour.
+Well, she _has_ got that; it's a regular dream-like place to sit. She's
+going to have a tree in, next week; she says she wants to see me sitting
+under a tree. I believe it's some oriental idea; it has lately been
+introduced in Paris. She doesn't like French ideas as a general thing;
+but she says this has more nature than most. She has got so many of her
+own that I shouldn't think she would require to borrow any. I'd sit in a
+forest to hear her bring some of them out," Verena went on, with
+characteristic raciness. "She just quivers when she describes what our
+sex has been through. It's so interesting to me to hear what I have
+always felt. If she wasn't afraid of facing the public, she would go far
+ahead of me. But she doesn't want to speak herself; she only wants to
+call me out. Mother, if she doesn't attract attention to me there isn't
+any attention to be attracted. She says I have got the gift of
+expression--it doesn't matter where it comes from. She says it's a great
+advantage to a movement to be personified in a bright young figure.
+Well, of course I'm young, and I feel bright enough when once I get
+started. She says my serenity while exposed to the gaze of hundreds is
+in itself a qualification; in fact, she seems to think my serenity is
+quite God-given. She hasn't got much of it herself; she's the most
+emotional woman I have met, up to now. She wants to know how I can speak
+the way I do unless I feel; and of course I tell her I do feel, so far
+as I realise. She seems to be realising all the time; I never saw any
+one that took so little rest. She says I ought to do something great,
+and she makes me feel as if I should. She says I ought to have a wide
+influence, if I can obtain the ear of the public; and I say to her that
+if I do it will be all her influence."
+
+Selah Tarrant looked at all this from a higher standpoint than his wife;
+at least such an attitude on his part was to be inferred from his
+increased solemnity. He committed himself to no precipitate elation at
+the idea of his daughter's being taken up by a patroness of movements
+who happened to have money; he looked at his child only from the point
+of view of the service she might render to humanity. To keep her ideal
+pointing in the right direction, to guide and animate her moral
+life--this was a duty more imperative for a parent so closely identified
+with revelations and panaceas than seeing that she formed profitable
+worldly connexions. He was "off," moreover, so much of the time that he
+could keep little account of her comings and goings, and he had an air
+of being but vaguely aware of whom Miss Chancellor, the object now of
+his wife's perpetual reference, might be. Verena's initial appearance in
+Boston, as he called her performance at Miss Birdseye's, had been a
+great success; and this reflexion added, as I say, to his habitually
+sacerdotal expression. He looked like the priest of a religion that was
+passing through the stage of miracles; he carried his responsibility in
+the general elongation of his person, of his gestures (his hands were
+now always in the air, as if he were being photographed in postures), of
+his words and sentences, as well as in his smile, as noiseless as a
+patent hinge, and in the folds of his eternal waterproof. He was
+incapable of giving an off-hand answer or opinion on the simplest
+occasion, and his tone of high deliberation increased in proportion as
+the subject was trivial or domestic. If his wife asked him at dinner if
+the potatoes were good, he replied that they were strikingly fine (he
+used to speak of the newspaper as "fine"--he applied this term to
+objects the most dissimilar), and embarked on a parallel worthy of
+Plutarch, in which he compared them with other specimens of the same
+vegetable. He produced, or would have liked to produce, the impression
+of looking above and beyond everything, of not caring for the immediate,
+of reckoning only with the long run. In reality he had one all-absorbing
+solicitude--the desire to get paragraphs put into the newspapers,
+paragraphs of which he had hitherto been the subject, but of which he
+was now to divide the glory with his daughter. The newspapers were his
+world, the richest expression, in his eyes, of human life; and, for him,
+if a diviner day was to come upon earth, it would be brought about by
+copious advertisement in the daily prints. He looked with longing for
+the moment when Verena should be advertised among the "personals," and
+to his mind the supremely happy people were those (and there were a good
+many of them) of whom there was some journalistic mention every day in
+the year. Nothing less than this would really have satisfied Selah
+Tarrant; his ideal of bliss was to be as regularly and indispensably a
+component part of the newspaper as the title and date, or the list of
+fires, or the column of Western jokes. The vision of that publicity
+haunted his dreams, and he would gladly have sacrificed to it the
+innermost sanctities of home. Human existence to him, indeed, was a huge
+publicity, in which the only fault was that it was sometimes not
+sufficiently effective. There had been a Spiritualist paper of old which
+he used to pervade; but he could not persuade himself that through this
+medium his personality had attracted general attention; and, moreover,
+the sheet, as he said, was played out anyway. Success was not success so
+long as his daughter's _physique_, the rumour of her engagement, were
+not included in the "Jottings" with the certainty of being extensively
+copied.
+
+The account of her exploits in the West had not made their way to the
+seaboard with the promptitude that he had looked for; the reason of this
+being, he supposed, that the few addresses she had made had not been
+lectures, announced in advance, to which tickets had been sold, but
+incidents, of abrupt occurrence, of certain multitudinous meetings,
+where there had been other performers better known to fame. They had
+brought in no money; they had been delivered only for the good of the
+cause. If it could only be known that she spoke for nothing, that might
+deepen the reverberation; the only trouble was that her speaking for
+nothing was not the way to remind him that he had a remunerative
+daughter. It was not the way to stand out so very much either, Selah
+Tarrant felt; for there were plenty of others that knew how to make as
+little money as she would. To speak--that was the one thing that most
+people were willing to do for nothing; it was not a line in which it was
+easy to appear conspicuously disinterested. Disinterestedness, too, was
+incompatible with receipts; and receipts were what Selah Tarrant was, in
+his own parlance, after. He wished to bring about the day when they
+would flow in freely; the reader perhaps sees the gesture with which, in
+his colloquies with himself, he accompanied this mental image.
+
+It seemed to him at present that the fruitful time was not far off; it
+had been brought appreciably nearer by that fortunate evening at Miss
+Birdseye's. If Mrs. Farrinder could be induced to write an "open letter"
+about Verena, that would do more than anything else. Selah was not
+remarkable for delicacy of perception, but he knew the world he lived in
+well enough to be aware that Mrs. Farrinder was liable to rear up, as
+they used to say down in Pennsylvania, where he lived before he began to
+peddle lead-pencils. She wouldn't always take things as you might
+expect, and if it didn't meet her views to pay a public tribute to
+Verena, there wasn't any way known to Tarrant's ingenious mind of
+getting round her. If it was a question of a favour from Mrs. Farrinder,
+you just had to wait for it, as you would for a rise in the thermometer.
+He had told Miss Birdseye what he would like, and she seemed to think,
+from the way their celebrated friend had been affected, that the idea
+might take her some day of just letting the public know all she had
+felt. She was off somewhere now (since that evening), but Miss Birdseye
+had an idea that when she was back in Roxbury she would send for Verena
+and give her a few points. Meanwhile, at any rate, Selah was sure he had
+a card; he felt there was money in the air. It might already be said
+there were receipts from Charles Street; that rich, peculiar young woman
+seemed to want to lavish herself. He pretended, as I have intimated, not
+to notice this; but he never saw so much as when he had his eyes fixed
+on the cornice. He had no doubt that if he should make up his mind to
+take a hall some night, she would tell him where the bill might be sent.
+That was what he was thinking of now, whether he had better take a hall
+right away, so that Verena might leap at a bound into renown, or wait
+till she had made a few more appearances in private, so that curiosity
+might be worked up.
+
+These meditations accompanied him in his multifarious wanderings through
+the streets and the suburbs of the New England capital. As I have also
+mentioned, he was absent for hours--long periods during which Mrs.
+Tarrant, sustaining nature with a hard-boiled egg and a doughnut,
+wondered how in the world he stayed his stomach. He never wanted
+anything but a piece of pie when he came in; the only thing about which
+he was particular was that it should be served up hot. She had a private
+conviction that he partook, at the houses of his lady patients, of
+little lunches; she applied this term to any episodical repast, at any
+hour of the twenty-four. It is but fair to add that once, when she
+betrayed her suspicion, Selah remarked that the only refreshment _he_
+ever wanted was the sense that he was doing some good. This effort with
+him had many forms; it involved, among other things, a perpetual
+perambulation of the streets, a haunting of horse-cars,
+railway-stations, shops that were "selling off." But the places that
+knew him best were the offices of the newspapers and the vestibules of
+the hotels--the big marble-paved chambers of informal reunion which
+offer to the streets, through high glass plates, the sight of the
+American citizen suspended by his heels. Here, amid the piled-up
+luggage, the convenient spittoons, the elbowing loungers, the
+disconsolate "guests," the truculent Irish porters, the rows of
+shaggy-backed men in strange hats, writing letters at a table inlaid
+with advertisements, Selah Tarrant made innumerable contemplative
+stations. He could not have told you, at any particular moment, what he
+was doing; he only had a general sense that such places were national
+nerve-centres, and that the more one looked in, the more one was "on the
+spot." The _penetralia_ of the daily press were, however, still more
+fascinating, and the fact that they were less accessible, that here he
+found barriers in his path, only added to the zest of forcing an
+entrance. He abounded in pretexts; he even sometimes brought
+contributions; he was persistent and penetrating, he was known as the
+irrepressible Tarrant. He hung about, sat too long, took up the time of
+busy people, edged into the printing-rooms when he had been eliminated
+from the office, talked with the compositors till they set up his
+remarks by mistake, and to the newsboys when the compositors had turned
+their backs. He was always trying to find out what was "going in"; he
+would have liked to go in himself, bodily, and, failing in this, he
+hoped to get advertisements inserted gratis. The wish of his soul was
+that he might be interviewed; that made him hover at the editorial
+elbow. Once he thought he had been, and the headings, five or six deep,
+danced for days before his eyes; but the report never appeared. He
+expected his revenge for this the day after Verena should have burst
+forth; he saw the attitude in which he should receive the emissaries who
+would come after his daughter.
+
+
+
+
+XIV
+
+
+"We ought to have some one to meet her," Mrs. Tarrant said; "I presume
+she wouldn't care to come out just to see us." "She," between the mother
+and the daughter, at this period, could refer only to Olive Chancellor,
+who was discussed in the little house at Cambridge at all hours and from
+every possible point of view. It was never Verena now who began, for she
+had grown rather weary of the topic; she had her own ways of thinking of
+it, which were not her mother's, and if she lent herself to this lady's
+extensive considerations it was because that was the best way of keeping
+her thoughts to herself.
+
+Mrs. Tarrant had an idea that she (Mrs. Tarrant) liked to study people,
+and that she was now engaged in an analysis of Miss Chancellor. It
+carried her far, and she came out at unexpected times with her results.
+It was still her purpose to interpret the world to the ingenious mind of
+her daughter, and she translated Miss Chancellor with a confidence which
+made little account of the fact that she had seen her but once, while
+Verena had this advantage nearly every day. Verena felt that by this
+time she knew Olive very well, and her mother's most complicated
+versions of motive and temperament (Mrs. Tarrant, with the most
+imperfect idea of the meaning of the term, was always talking about
+people's temperament) rendered small justice to the phenomena it was now
+her privilege to observe in Charles Street. Olive was much more
+remarkable than Mrs. Tarrant suspected, remarkable as Mrs. Tarrant
+believed her to be. She had opened Verena's eyes to extraordinary
+pictures, made the girl believe that she had a heavenly mission, given
+her, as we have seen, quite a new measure of the interest of life. These
+were larger consequences than the possibility of meeting the leaders of
+society at Olive's house. She had met no one, as yet, but Mrs. Luna; her
+new friend seemed to wish to keep her quite for herself. This was the
+only reproach that Mrs. Tarrant directed to the new friend as yet; she
+was disappointed that Verena had not obtained more insight into the
+world of fashion. It was one of the prime articles of her faith that the
+world of fashion was wicked and hollow, and, moreover, Verena told her
+that Miss Chancellor loathed and despised it. She could not have
+informed you wherein it would profit her daughter (for the way those
+ladies shrank from any new gospel was notorious); nevertheless she was
+vexed that Verena shouldn't come back to her with a little more of the
+fragrance of Beacon Street. The girl herself would have been the most
+interested person in the world if she had not been the most resigned;
+she took all that was given her and was grateful, and missed nothing
+that was withheld; she was the most extraordinary mixture of eagerness
+and docility. Mrs. Tarrant theorised about temperaments and she loved
+her daughter; but she was only vaguely aware of the fact that she had at
+her side the sweetest flower of character (as one might say) that had
+ever bloomed on earth. She was proud of Verena's brightness, and of her
+special talent; but the commonness of her own surface was a
+non-conductor of the girl's quality. Therefore she thought that it would
+add to her success in life to know a few high-flyers, if only to put
+them to shame; as if anything could add to Verena's success, as if it
+were not supreme success simply to have been made as she was made.
+
+Mrs. Tarrant had gone into town to call upon Miss Chancellor; she
+carried out this resolve, on which she had bestowed infinite
+consideration, independently of Verena. She had decided that she had a
+pretext; her dignity required one, for she felt that at present the
+antique pride of the Greenstreets was terribly at the mercy of her
+curiosity. She wished to see Miss Chancellor again, and to see her among
+her charming appurtenances, which Verena had described to her with great
+minuteness. The pretext that she would have valued most was
+wanting--that of Olive's having come out to Cambridge to pay the visit
+that had been solicited from the first; so she had to take the next
+best--she had to say to herself that it was her duty to see what she
+should think of a place where her daughter spent so much time. To Miss
+Chancellor she would appear to have come to thank her for her
+hospitality; she knew, in advance, just the air she should take (or she
+fancied she knew it--Mrs. Tarrant's were not always what she supposed),
+just the _nuance_ (she had also an impression she knew a little French)
+of her tone. Olive, after the lapse of weeks, still showed no symptoms
+of presenting herself, and Mrs. Tarrant rebuked Verena with some
+sternness for not having made her feel that this attention was due to
+the mother of her friend. Verena could scarcely say to her she guessed
+Miss Chancellor didn't think much of that personage, true as it was that
+the girl had discerned this angular fact, which she attributed to
+Olive's extraordinary comprehensiveness of view. Verena herself did not
+suppose that her mother occupied a very important place in the universe;
+and Miss Chancellor never looked at anything smaller than that. Nor was
+she free to report (she was certainly now less frank at home, and,
+moreover, the suspicion was only just becoming distinct to her) that
+Olive would like to detach her from her parents altogether, and was
+therefore not interested in appearing to cultivate relations with them.
+Mrs. Tarrant, I may mention, had a further motive: she was consumed with
+the desire to behold Mrs. Luna. This circumstance may operate as a proof
+that the aridity of her life was great, and if it should have that
+effect I shall not be able to gainsay it. She had seen all the people
+who went to lectures, but there were hours when she desired, for a
+change, to see some who didn't go; and Mrs. Luna, from Verena's
+description of her, summed up the characteristics of this eccentric
+class.
+
+Verena had given great attention to Olive's brilliant sister; she had
+told her friend everything now--everything but one little secret,
+namely, that if she could have chosen at the beginning she would have
+liked to resemble Mrs. Luna. This lady fascinated her, carried off her
+imagination to strange lands; she should enjoy so much a long evening
+with her alone, when she might ask her ten thousand questions. But she
+never saw her alone, never saw her at all but in glimpses. Adeline
+flitted in and out, dressed for dinners and concerts, always saying
+something worldly to the young woman from Cambridge, and something to
+Olive that had a freedom which she herself would probably never arrive
+at (a failure of foresight on Verena's part). But Miss Chancellor never
+detained her, never gave Verena a chance to see her, never appeared to
+imagine that she could have the least interest in such a person; only
+took up the subject again after Adeline had left them--the subject, of
+course, which was always the same, the subject of what they should do
+together for their suffering sex. It was not that Verena was not
+interested in that--gracious, no; it opened up before her, in those
+wonderful colloquies with Olive, in the most inspiring way; but her
+fancy would make a dart to right or left when other game crossed their
+path, and her companion led her, intellectually, a dance in which her
+feet--that is, her head--failed her at times for weariness. Mrs. Tarrant
+found Miss Chancellor at home, but she was not gratified by even the
+most transient glimpse of Mrs. Luna; a fact which, in her heart, Verena
+regarded as fortunate, inasmuch as (she said to herself) if her mother,
+returning from Charles Street, began to explain Miss Chancellor to her
+with fresh energy, and as if she (Verena) had never seen her, and up to
+this time they had had nothing to say about her, to what developments
+(of the same sort) would not an encounter with Adeline have given rise?
+
+When Verena at last said to her friend that she thought she ought to
+come out to Cambridge--she didn't understand why she didn't--Olive
+expressed her reasons very frankly, admitted that she was jealous, that
+she didn't wish to think of the girl's belonging to any one but herself.
+Mr. and Mrs. Tarrant would have authority, opposed claims, and she
+didn't wish to see them, to remember that they existed. This was true,
+so far as it went; but Olive could not tell Verena everything--could not
+tell her that she hated that dreadful pair at Cambridge. As we know, she
+had forbidden herself this emotion as regards individuals; and she
+flattered herself that she considered the Tarrants as a type, a
+deplorable one, a class that, with the public at large, discredited the
+cause of the new truths. She had talked them over with Miss Birdseye
+(Olive was always looking after her now and giving her things--the good
+lady appeared at this period in wonderful caps and shawls--for she felt
+she couldn't thank her enough), and even Doctor Prance's fellow-lodger,
+whose animosity to flourishing evils lived in the happiest (though the
+most illicit) union with the mania for finding excuses, even Miss
+Birdseye was obliged to confess that if you came to examine his record,
+poor Selah didn't amount to so very much. How little he amounted to
+Olive perceived after she had made Verena talk, as the girl did
+immensely, about her father and mother--quite unconscious, meanwhile, of
+the conclusions she suggested to Miss Chancellor. Tarrant was a moralist
+without moral sense--that was very clear to Olive as she listened to the
+history of his daughter's childhood and youth, which Verena related with
+an extraordinary artless vividness. This narrative, tremendously
+fascinating to Miss Chancellor, made her feel in all sorts of
+ways--prompted her to ask herself whether the girl was also destitute of
+the perception of right and wrong. No, she was only supremely innocent;
+she didn't understand, she didn't interpret nor see the _portee_ of what
+she described; she had no idea whatever of judging her parents. Olive
+had wished to "realise" the conditions in which her wonderful young
+friend (she thought her more wonderful every day) had developed, and to
+this end, as I have related, she prompted her to infinite discourse. But
+now she was satisfied, the realisation was complete, and what she would
+have liked to impose on the girl was an effectual rupture with her past.
+That past she by no means absolutely deplored, for it had the merit of
+having initiated Verena (and her patroness, through her agency) into the
+miseries and mysteries of the People. It was her theory that Verena (in
+spite of the blood of the Greenstreets, and, after all, who were they?)
+was a flower of the great Democracy, and that it was impossible to have
+had an origin less distinguished than Tarrant himself. His birth, in
+some unheard-of place in Pennsylvania, was quite inexpressibly low, and
+Olive would have been much disappointed if it had been wanting in this
+defect. She liked to think that Verena, in her childhood, had known
+almost the extremity of poverty, and there was a kind of ferocity in the
+joy with which she reflected that there had been moments when this
+delicate creature came near (if the pinch had only lasted a little
+longer) to literally going without food. These things added to her value
+for Olive; they made that young lady feel that their common undertaking
+would, in consequence, be so much more serious. It is always supposed
+that revolutionists have been goaded, and the goading would have been
+rather deficient here were it not for such happy accidents in Verena's
+past. When she conveyed from her mother a summons to Cambridge for a
+particular occasion, Olive perceived that the great effort must now be
+made. Great efforts were nothing new to her--it was a great effort to
+live at all--but this one appeared to her exceptionally cruel. She
+determined, however, to make it, promising herself that her first visit
+to Mrs. Tarrant should also be her last. Her only consolation was that
+she expected to suffer intensely; for the prospect of suffering was
+always, spiritually speaking, so much cash in her pocket. It was
+arranged that Olive should come to tea (the repast that Selah designated
+as his supper), when Mrs. Tarrant, as we have seen, desired to do her
+honour by inviting another guest. This guest, after much deliberation
+between that lady and Verena, was selected, and the first person Olive
+saw on entering the little parlour in Cambridge was a young man with
+hair prematurely, or, as one felt that one should say, precociously
+white, whom she had a vague impression she had encountered before, and
+who was introduced to her as Mr. Matthias Pardon.
+
+She suffered less than she had hoped--she was so taken up with the
+consideration of Verena's interior. It was as bad as she could have
+desired; desired in order to feel that (to take her out of such a
+_milieu_ as that) she should have a right to draw her altogether to
+herself. Olive wished more and more to extract some definite pledge from
+her; she could hardly say what it had best be as yet; she only felt that
+it must be something that would have an absolute sanctity for Verena and
+would bind them together for life. On this occasion it seemed to shape
+itself in her mind; she began to see what it ought to be, though she
+also saw that she would perhaps have to wait awhile. Mrs. Tarrant, too,
+in her own house, became now a complete figure; there was no manner of
+doubt left as to her being vulgar. Olive Chancellor despised vulgarity,
+had a scent for it which she followed up in her own family, so that
+often, with a rising flush, she detected the taint even in Adeline.
+There were times, indeed, when every one seemed to have it, every one
+but Miss Birdseye (who had nothing to do with it--she was an antique)
+and the poorest, humblest people. The toilers and spinners, the very
+obscure, these were the only persons who were safe from it. Miss
+Chancellor would have been much happier if the movements she was
+interested in could have been carried on only by the people she liked,
+and if revolutions, somehow, didn't always have to begin with one's
+self--with internal convulsions, sacrifices, executions. A common end,
+unfortunately, however fine as regards a special result, does not make
+community impersonal.
+
+Mrs. Tarrant, with her soft corpulence, looked to her guest very
+bleached and tumid; her complexion had a kind of withered glaze; her
+hair, very scanty, was drawn off her forehead _a la Chinoise_; she had
+no eyebrows, and her eyes seemed to stare, like those of a figure of
+wax. When she talked and wished to insist, and she was always insisting,
+she puckered and distorted her face, with an effort to express the
+inexpressible, which turned out, after all, to be nothing. She had a
+kind of doleful elegance, tried to be confidential, lowered her voice
+and looked as if she wished to establish a secret understanding, in
+order to ask her visitor if she would venture on an apple-fritter. She
+wore a flowing mantle, which resembled her husband's waterproof--a
+garment which, when she turned to her daughter or talked about her,
+might have passed for the robe of a sort of priestess of maternity. She
+endeavoured to keep the conversation in a channel which would enable her
+to ask sudden incoherent questions of Olive, mainly as to whether she
+knew the principal ladies (the expression was Mrs. Tarrant's), not only
+in Boston, but in the other cities which, in her nomadic course, she
+herself had visited. Olive knew some of them, and of some of them had
+never heard; but she was irritated, and pretended a universal ignorance
+(she was conscious that she had never told so many fibs), by which her
+hostess was much disconcerted, although her questions had apparently
+been questions pure and simple, leading nowhither and without bearings
+on any new truth.
+
+
+
+
+XV
+
+
+Tarrant, however, kept an eye in that direction; he was solemnly civil
+to Miss Chancellor, handed her the dishes at table over and over again,
+and ventured to intimate that the apple-fritters were very fine; but,
+save for this, alluded to nothing more trivial than the regeneration of
+humanity and the strong hope he felt that Miss Birdseye would again have
+one of her delightful gatherings. With regard to this latter point he
+explained that it was not in order that he might again present his
+daughter to the company, but simply because on such occasions there was
+a valuable interchange of hopeful thought, a contact of mind with mind.
+If Verena had anything suggestive to contribute to the social problem,
+the opportunity would come--that was part of their faith. They couldn't
+reach out for it and try and push their way; if they were wanted, their
+hour would strike; if they were not, they would just keep still and let
+others press forward who seemed to be called. If they were called, they
+would know it; and if they weren't, they could just hold on to each
+other as they had always done. Tarrant was very fond of alternatives,
+and he mentioned several others; it was never his fault if his listeners
+failed to think him impartial. They hadn't much, as Miss Chancellor
+could see; she could tell by their manner of life that they hadn't raked
+in the dollars; but they had faith that, whether one raised one's voice
+or simply worked on in silence, the principal difficulties would
+straighten themselves out; and they had also a considerable experience
+of great questions. Tarrant spoke as if, as a family, they were prepared
+to take charge of them on moderate terms. He always said "ma'am" in
+speaking to Olive, to whom, moreover, the air had never been so filled
+with the sound of her own name. It was always in her ear, save when Mrs.
+Tarrant and Verena conversed in prolonged and ingenuous asides; this was
+still for her benefit, but the pronoun sufficed them. She had wished to
+judge Doctor Tarrant (not that she believed he had come honestly by his
+title), to make up her mind. She had done these things now, and she
+expressed to herself the kind of man she believed him to be in
+reflecting that if she should offer him ten thousand dollars to renounce
+all claim to Verena, keeping--he and his wife--clear of her for the rest
+of time, he would probably say, with his fearful smile, "Make it twenty,
+money down, and I'll do it." Some image of this transaction, as one of
+the possibilities of the future, outlined itself for Olive among the
+moral incisions of that evening. It seemed implied in the very place,
+the bald bareness of Tarrant's temporary lair, a wooden cottage, with a
+rough front yard, a little naked piazza, which seemed rather to expose
+than to protect, facing upon an unpaved road, in which the footway was
+overlaid with a strip of planks. These planks were embedded in ice or in
+liquid thaw, according to the momentary mood of the weather, and the
+advancing pedestrian traversed them in the attitude, and with a good
+deal of the suspense, of a rope-dancer. There was nothing in the house
+to speak of; nothing, to Olive's sense, but a smell of kerosene; though
+she had a consciousness of sitting down somewhere--the object creaked
+and rocked beneath her--and of the table at tea being covered with a
+cloth stamped in bright colours.
+
+As regards the pecuniary transaction with Selah, it was strange how she
+should have seen it through the conviction that Verena would never give
+up her parents. Olive was sure that she would never turn her back upon
+them, would always share with them. She would have despised her had she
+thought her capable of another course; yet it baffled her to understand
+why, when parents were so trashy, this natural law should not be
+suspended. Such a question brought her back, however, to her perpetual
+enigma, the mystery she had already turned over in her mind for hours
+together--the wonder of such people being Verena's progenitors at all.
+She had explained it, as we explain all exceptional things, by making
+the part, as the French say, of the miraculous. She had come to consider
+the girl as a wonder of wonders, to hold that no human origin, however
+congruous it might superficially appear, would sufficiently account for
+her; that her springing up between Selah and his wife was an exquisite
+whim of the creative force; and that in such a case a few shades more or
+less of the inexplicable didn't matter. It was notorious that great
+beauties, great geniuses, great characters, take their own times and
+places for coming into the world, leaving the gaping spectators to make
+them "fit in," and holding from far-off ancestors, or even, perhaps,
+straight from the divine generosity, much more than from their ugly or
+stupid progenitors. They were incalculable phenomena, anyway, as Selah
+would have said. Verena, for Olive, was the very type and model of the
+"gifted being"; her qualities had not been bought and paid for; they
+were like some brilliant birthday-present, left at the door by an
+unknown messenger, to be delightful for ever as an inexhaustible legacy,
+and amusing for ever from the obscurity of its source. They were
+superabundantly crude as yet--happily for Olive, who promised herself,
+as we know, to train and polish them--but they were as genuine as fruit
+and flowers, as the glow of the fire or the plash of water. For her
+scrutinising friend Verena had the disposition of the artist, the spirit
+to which all charming forms come easily and naturally. It required an
+effort at first to imagine an artist so untaught, so mistaught, so poor
+in experience; but then it required an effort also to imagine people
+like the old Tarrants, or a life so full as her life had been of ugly
+things. Only an exquisite creature could have resisted such
+associations, only a girl who had some natural light, some divine spark
+of taste. There were people like that, fresh from the hand of
+Omnipotence; they were far from common, but their existence was as
+incontestable as it was beneficent.
+
+Tarrant's talk about his daughter, her prospects, her enthusiasm, was
+terribly painful to Olive; it brought back to her what she had suffered
+already from the idea that he laid his hands upon her to make her speak.
+That he should be mixed up in any way with this exercise of her genius
+was a great injury to the cause, and Olive had already determined that
+in future Verena should dispense with his co-operation. The girl had
+virtually confessed that she lent herself to it only because it gave him
+pleasure, and that anything else would do as well, anything that would
+make her quiet a little before she began to "give out." Olive took upon
+herself to believe that _she_ could make her quiet, though, certainly,
+she had never had that effect upon any one; she would mount the platform
+with Verena if necessary, and lay her hands upon her head. Why in the
+world had a perverse fate decreed that Tarrant should take an interest
+in the affairs of Woman--as if she wanted _his_ aid to arrive at her
+goal; a charlatan of the poor, lean, shabby sort, without the humour,
+brilliancy, prestige, which sometimes throw a drapery over shallowness?
+Mr. Pardon evidently took an interest as well, and there was something
+in his appearance that seemed to say that his sympathy would not be
+dangerous. He was much at his ease, plainly, beneath the roof of the
+Tarrants, and Olive reflected that though Verena had told her much about
+him, she had not given her the idea that he was as intimate as that.
+What she had mainly said was that he sometimes took her to the theatre.
+Olive could enter, to a certain extent, into that; she herself had had a
+phase (some time after her father's death--her mother's had preceded
+his--when she bought the little house in Charles Street and began to
+live alone), during which she accompanied gentlemen to respectable
+places of amusement. She was accordingly not shocked at the idea of such
+adventures on Verena's part; than which, indeed, judging from her own
+experience, nothing could well have been less adventurous. Her
+recollections of these expeditions were as of something solemn and
+edifying--of the earnest interest in her welfare exhibited by her
+companion (there were few occasions on which the young Bostonian
+appeared to more advantage), of the comfort of other friends sitting
+near, who were sure to know whom she was with, of serious discussion
+between the acts in regard to the behaviour of the characters in the
+piece, and of the speech at the end with which, as the young man quitted
+her at her door, she rewarded his civility--"I must thank you for a very
+pleasant evening." She always felt that she made that too prim; her lips
+stiffened themselves as she spoke. But the whole affair had always a
+primness; this was discernible even to Olive's very limited sense of
+humour. It was not so religious as going to evening-service at King's
+Chapel; but it was the next thing to it. Of course all girls didn't do
+it; there were families that viewed such a custom with disfavour. But
+this was where the girls were of the romping sort; there had to be some
+things they were known not to do. As a general thing, moreover, the
+practice was confined to the decorous; it was a sign of culture and
+quiet tastes. All this made it innocent for Verena, whose life had
+exposed her to much worse dangers; but the thing referred itself in
+Olive's mind to a danger which cast a perpetual shadow there--the
+possibility of the girl's embarking with some ingenuous youth on an
+expedition that would last much longer than an evening. She was haunted,
+in a word, with the fear that Verena would marry, a fate to which she
+was altogether unprepared to surrender her; and this made her look with
+suspicion upon all male acquaintance.
+
+Mr. Pardon was not the only one she knew; she had an example of the rest
+in the persons of two young Harvard law-students, who presented
+themselves after tea on this same occasion. As they sat there Olive
+wondered whether Verena had kept something from her, whether she were,
+after all (like so many other girls in Cambridge), a college-"belle," an
+object of frequentation to undergraduates. It was natural that at the
+seat of a big university there should be girls like that, with students
+dangling after them, but she didn't want Verena to be one of them. There
+were some that received the Seniors and Juniors; others that were
+accessible to Sophomores and Freshmen. Certain young ladies
+distinguished the professional students; there was a group, even, that
+was on the best terms with the young men who were studying for the
+Unitarian ministry in that queer little barrack at the end of Divinity
+Avenue. The advent of the new visitors made Mrs. Tarrant bustle
+immensely; but after she had caused every one to change places two or
+three times with every one else the company subsided into a circle which
+was occasionally broken by wandering movements on the part of her
+husband, who, in the absence of anything to say on any subject whatever,
+placed himself at different points in listening attitudes, shaking his
+head slowly up and down, and gazing at the carpet with an air of
+supernatural attention. Mrs. Tarrant asked the young men from the Law
+School about their studies, and whether they meant to follow them up
+seriously; said she thought some of the laws were very unjust, and she
+hoped they meant to try and improve them. She had suffered by the laws
+herself, at the time her father died; she hadn't got half the prop'ty
+she should have got if they had been different. She thought they should
+be for public matters, not for people's private affairs; the idea always
+seemed to her to keep you down if you _were_ down, and to hedge you in
+with difficulties. Sometimes she thought it was a wonder how she had
+developed in the face of so many; but it was a proof that freedom was
+everywhere, if you only knew how to look for it.
+
+The two young men were in the best humour; they greeted these sallies
+with a merriment of which, though it was courteous in form, Olive was by
+no means unable to define the spirit. They talked naturally more with
+Verena than with her mother; and while they were so engaged Mrs. Tarrant
+explained to her who they were, and how one of them, the smaller, who
+was not quite so spruce, had brought the other, his particular friend,
+to introduce him. This friend, Mr. Burrage, was from New York; he was
+very fashionable, he went out a great deal in Boston ("I have no doubt
+you know some of the places," said Mrs. Tarrant); his "fam'ly" was very
+rich.
+
+"Well, he knows plenty of that sort," Mrs. Tarrant went on, "but he felt
+unsatisfied; he didn't know any one like _us_. He told Mr. Gracie
+(that's the little one) that he felt as if he _must_; it seemed as if he
+couldn't hold out. So we told Mr. Gracie, of course, to bring him right
+round. Well, I hope he'll get something from us, I'm sure. He has been
+reported to be engaged to Miss Winkworth; I have no doubt you know who I
+mean. But Mr. Gracie says he hasn't looked at her more than twice.
+That's the way rumours fly round in that set, I presume. Well, I am glad
+we are not in it, wherever we are! Mr. Gracie is very different; he is
+intensely plain, but I believe he is very learned. You don't think him
+plain? Oh, you don't know? Well, I suppose you don't care, you must see
+so many. But I must say, when a young man looks like that, I call him
+painfully plain. I heard Doctor Tarrant make the remark the last time he
+was here. I don't say but what the plainest are the best. Well, I had no
+idea we were going to have a party when I asked you. I wonder whether
+Verena hadn't better hand the cake; we generally find the students enjoy
+it so much."
+
+This office was ultimately delegated to Selah, who, after a considerable
+absence, reappeared with a dish of dainties, which he presented
+successively to each member of the company. Olive saw Verena lavish her
+smiles on Mr. Gracie and Mr. Burrage; the liveliest relation had
+established itself, and the latter gentleman in especial abounded in
+appreciative laughter. It might have been fancied, just from looking at
+the group, that Verena's vocation was to smile and talk with young men
+who bent towards her; might have been fancied, that is, by a person less
+sure of the contrary than Olive, who had reason to know that a "gifted
+being" is sent into the world for a very different purpose, and that
+making the time pass pleasantly for conceited young men is the last duty
+you are bound to think of if you happen to have a talent for embodying a
+cause. Olive tried to be glad that her friend had the richness of nature
+that makes a woman gracious without latent purposes; she reflected that
+Verena was not in the smallest degree a flirt, that she was only
+enchantingly and universally genial, that nature had given her a
+beautiful smile, which fell impartially on every one, man and woman,
+alike. Olive may have been right, but it shall be confided to the reader
+that in reality she never knew, by any sense of her own, whether Verena
+were a flirt or not. This young lady could not possibly have told her
+(even if she herself knew, which she didn't), and Olive, destitute of
+the quality, had no means of taking the measure in another of the subtle
+feminine desire to please. She could see the difference between Mr.
+Gracie and Mr. Burrage; her being bored by Mrs. Tarrant's attempting to
+point it out is perhaps a proof of that. It was a curious incident of
+her zeal for the regeneration of her sex that manly things were, perhaps
+on the whole, what she understood best. Mr. Burrage was rather a
+handsome youth, with a laughing, clever face, a certain sumptuosity of
+apparel, an air of belonging to the "fast set"--a precocious,
+good-natured man of the world, curious of new sensations and containing,
+perhaps, the making of a _dilettante_. Being, doubtless, a little
+ambitious, and liking to flatter himself that he appreciated worth in
+lowly forms, he had associated himself with the ruder but at the same
+time acuter personality of a genuine son of New England, who had a
+harder head than his own and a humour in reality more cynical, and who,
+having earlier knowledge of the Tarrants, had undertaken to show him
+something indigenous and curious, possibly even fascinating. Mr. Gracie
+was short, with a big head; he wore eye-glasses, looked unkempt, almost
+rustic, and said good things with his ugly lips. Verena had replies for
+a good many of them, and a pretty colour came into her face as she
+talked. Olive could see that she produced herself quite as well as one
+of these gentlemen had foretold the other that she would. Miss
+Chancellor knew what had passed between them as well as if she had heard
+it; Mr. Gracie had promised that he would lead her on, that she should
+justify his description and prove the raciest of her class. They would
+laugh about her as they went away, lighting their cigars, and for many
+days afterwards their discourse would be enlivened with quotations from
+the "women's rights girl."
+
+It was amazing how many ways men had of being antipathetic; these two
+were very different from Basil Ransom, and different from each other,
+and yet the manner of each conveyed an insult to one's womanhood. The
+worst of the case was that Verena would be sure not to perceive this
+outrage--not to dislike them in consequence. There were so many things
+that she hadn't yet learned to dislike, in spite of her friend's earnest
+efforts to teach her. She had the idea vividly (that was the marvel) of
+the cruelty of man, of his immemorial injustice; but it remained
+abstract, platonic; she didn't detest him in consequence. What was the
+use of her having that sharp, inspired vision of the history of the sex
+(it was, as she had said herself, exactly like Joan of Arc's absolutely
+supernatural apprehension of the state of France) if she wasn't going to
+carry it out, if she was going to behave as the ordinary pusillanimous,
+conventional young lady? It was all very well for her to have said that
+first day that she would renounce: did she look, at such a moment as
+this, like a young woman who had renounced? Suppose this glittering,
+laughing Burrage youth, with his chains and rings and shining shoes,
+should fall in love with her and try to bribe her, with his great
+possessions, to practise renunciations of another kind--to give up her
+holy work and to go with him to New York, there to live as his wife,
+partly bullied, partly pampered, in the accustomed Burrage manner? There
+was as little comfort for Olive as there had been on the whole alarm in
+the recollection of that off-hand speech of Verena's about her
+preference for "free unions." This had been mere maiden flippancy; she
+had not known the meaning of what she said. Though she had grown up
+among people who took for granted all sorts of queer laxities, she had
+kept the consummate innocence of the American girl, that innocence which
+was the greatest of all, for it had survived the abolition of walls and
+locks; and of the various remarks that had dropped from Verena
+expressing this quality that startling observation certainly expressed
+it most. It implied, at any rate, that unions of some kind or other had
+her approval, and did not exclude the dangers that might arise from
+encounters with young men in search of sensations.
+
+
+
+
+XVI
+
+
+Mr. Pardon, as Olive observed, was a little out of this combination; but
+he was not a person to allow himself to droop. He came and seated
+himself by Miss Chancellor and broached a literary subject; he asked her
+if she were following any of the current "serials" in the magazines. On
+her telling him that she never followed anything of that sort, he
+undertook a defence of the serial system, which she presently reminded
+him that she had not attacked. He was not discouraged by this retort,
+but glided gracefully off to the question of Mount Desert; conversation
+on some subject or other being evidently a necessity of his nature. He
+talked very quickly and softly, with words, and even sentences,
+imperfectly formed; there was a certain amiable flatness in his tone,
+and he abounded in exclamations--"Goodness gracious!" and "Mercy on
+us!"--not much in use among the sex whose profanity is apt to be coarse.
+He had small, fair features, remarkably neat, and pretty eyes, and a
+moustache that he caressed, and an air of juvenility much at variance
+with his grizzled locks, and the free familiar reference in which he was
+apt to indulge to his career as a journalist. His friends knew that in
+spite of his delicacy and his prattle he was what they called a live
+man; his appearance was perfectly reconcilable with a large degree of
+literary enterprise. It should be explained that for the most part they
+attached to this idea the same meaning as Selah Tarrant--a state of
+intimacy with the newspapers, the cultivation of the great arts of
+publicity. For this ingenuous son of his age all distinction between the
+person and the artist had ceased to exist; the writer was personal, the
+person food for newsboys, and everything and every one were every one's
+business. All things, with him, referred themselves to print, and print
+meant simply infinite reporting, a promptitude of announcement, abusive
+when necessary, or even when not, about his fellow-citizens. He poured
+contumely on their private life, on their personal appearance, with the
+best conscience in the world. His faith, again, was the faith of Selah
+Tarrant--that being in the newspapers is a condition of bliss, and that
+it would be fastidious to question the terms of the privilege. He was an
+_enfant de la balle_, as the French say; he had begun his career, at the
+age of fourteen, by going the rounds of the hotels, to cull flowers from
+the big, greasy registers which lie on the marble counters; and he might
+flatter himself that he had contributed in his measure, and on behalf of
+a vigilant public opinion, the pride of a democratic State, to the great
+end of preventing the American citizen from attempting clandestine
+journeys. Since then he had ascended other steps of the same ladder; he
+was the most brilliant young interviewer on the Boston press. He was
+particularly successful in drawing out the ladies; he had condensed into
+shorthand many of the most celebrated women of his time--some of these
+daughters of fame were very voluminous--and he was supposed to have a
+remarkably insinuating way of waiting upon _prime donne_ and actresses
+the morning after their arrival, or sometimes the very evening, while
+their luggage was being brought up. He was only twenty-eight years old,
+and, with his hoary head, was a thoroughly modern young man; he had no
+idea of not taking advantage of all the modern conveniences. He regarded
+the mission of mankind upon earth as a perpetual evolution of telegrams;
+everything to him was very much the same, he had no sense of proportion
+or quality; but the newest thing was what came nearest exciting in his
+mind the sentiment of respect. He was an object of extreme admiration to
+Selah Tarrant, who believed that he had mastered all the secrets of
+success, and who, when Mrs. Tarrant remarked (as she had done more than
+once) that it looked as if Mr. Pardon was really coming after Verena,
+declared that if he was, he was one of the few young men he should want
+to see in that connexion, one of the few he should be willing to allow
+to handle her. It was Tarrant's conviction that if Matthias Pardon
+should seek Verena in marriage, it would be with a view to producing her
+in public; and the advantage for the girl of having a husband who was at
+the same time reporter, interviewer, manager, agent, who had the command
+of the principal "dailies," would write her up and work her, as it were,
+scientifically--the attraction of all this was too obvious to be
+insisted on. Matthias had a mean opinion of Tarrant, thought him quite
+second-rate, a votary of played-out causes. It was his impression that
+he himself was in love with Verena, but his passion was not a jealous
+one, and included a remarkable disposition to share the object of his
+affection with the American people.
+
+He talked some time to Olive about Mount Desert, told her that in his
+letters he had described the company at the different hotels. He
+remarked, however, that a correspondent suffered a good deal to-day from
+the competition of the "lady-writers"; the sort of article they produced
+was sometimes more acceptable to the papers. He supposed she would be
+glad to hear that--he knew she was so interested in woman's having a
+free field. They certainly made lovely correspondents; they picked up
+something bright before you could turn round; there wasn't much you
+could keep away from them; you had to be lively if you wanted to get
+there first. Of course, they were naturally more chatty, and that was
+the style of literature that seemed to take most to-day; only they
+didn't write much but what ladies would want to read. Of course, he knew
+there were millions of lady-readers, but he intimated that _he_ didn't
+address himself exclusively to the gynecaeum; he tried to put in
+something that would interest all parties. If you read a lady's letter
+you knew pretty well in advance what you would find. Now, what he tried
+for was that you shouldn't have the least idea; he always tried to have
+something that would make you jump. Mr. Pardon was not conceited more,
+at least, than is proper when youth and success go hand in hand, and it
+was natural he should not know in what spirit Miss Chancellor listened
+to him. Being aware that she was a woman of culture his desire was
+simply to supply her with the pabulum that she would expect. She thought
+him very inferior; she had heard he was intensely bright, but there was
+probably some mistake; there couldn't be any danger for Verena from a
+mind that took merely a gossip's view of great tendencies. Besides, he
+wasn't half educated, and it was her belief, or at least her hope, that
+an educative process was now going on for Verena (under her own
+direction) which would enable her to make such a discovery for herself.
+Olive had a standing quarrel with the levity, the good-nature, of the
+judgements of the day; many of them seemed to her weak to imbecility,
+losing sight of all measures and standards, lavishing superlatives,
+delighted to be fooled. The age seemed to her relaxed and demoralised,
+and I believe she looked to the influx of the great feminine element to
+make it feel and speak more sharply.
+
+"Well, it's a privilege to hear you two talk together," Mrs. Tarrant
+said to her; "it's what I call real conversation. It isn't often we have
+anything so fresh; it makes me feel as if I wanted to join in. I
+scarcely know whom to listen to most; Verena seems to be having such a
+time with those gentlemen. First I catch one thing and then another; it
+seems as if I couldn't take it all in. Perhaps I ought to pay more
+attention to Mr. Burrage; I don't want him to think we are not so
+cordial as they are in New York."
+
+She decided to draw nearer to the trio on the other side of the room,
+for she had perceived (as she devoutly hoped Miss Chancellor had not)
+that Verena was endeavouring to persuade either of her companions to go
+and talk to her dear friend, and that these unscrupulous young men,
+after a glance over their shoulder, appeared to plead for remission, to
+intimate that this was not what they had come round for. Selah wandered
+out of the room again with his collection of cakes, and Mr. Pardon began
+to talk to Olive about Verena, to say that he felt as if he couldn't say
+all he did feel with regard to the interest she had shown in her. Olive
+could not imagine why he was called upon to say or to feel anything, and
+she gave him short answers; while the poor young man, unconscious of his
+doom, remarked that he hoped she wasn't going to exercise any influence
+that would prevent Miss Tarrant from taking the rank that belonged to
+her. He thought there was too much hanging back; he wanted to see her in
+a front seat; he wanted to see her name in the biggest kind of bills and
+her portrait in the windows of the stores. She had genius, there was no
+doubt of that, and she would take a new line altogether. She had charm,
+and there was a great demand for that nowadays in connexion with new
+ideas. There were so many that seemed to have fallen dead for want of
+it. She ought to be carried straight ahead; she ought to walk right up
+to the top. There was a want of bold action; he didn't see what they
+were waiting for. He didn't suppose they were waiting till she was fifty
+years old; there were old ones enough in the field. He knew that Miss
+Chancellor appreciated the advantage of her girlhood, because Miss
+Verena had told him so. Her father was dreadfully slack, and the winter
+was ebbing away. Mr. Pardon went so far as to say that if Dr. Tarrant
+didn't see his way to do something, he should feel as if he should want
+to take hold himself. He expressed a hope at the same time that Olive
+had not any views that would lead her to bring her influence to bear to
+make Miss Verena hold back; also that she wouldn't consider that he
+pressed in too much. He knew that was a charge that people brought
+against newspaper-men--that they were rather apt to cross the line. He
+only worried because he thought those who were no doubt nearer to Miss
+Verena than he could hope to be were not sufficiently alive. He knew
+that she had appeared in two or three parlours since that evening at
+Miss Birdseye's, and he had heard of the delightful occasion at Miss
+Chancellor's own house, where so many of the first families had been
+invited to meet her. (This was an allusion to a small luncheon-party
+that Olive had given, when Verena discoursed to a dozen matrons and
+spinsters, selected by her hostess with infinite consideration and many
+spiritual scruples; a report of the affair, presumably from the hand of
+the young Matthias, who naturally had not been present, appeared with
+extraordinary promptness in an evening-paper.) That was very well so far
+as it went, but he wanted something on another scale, something so big
+that people would have to go round if they wanted to get past. Then
+lowering his voice a little, he mentioned what it was: a lecture in the
+Music Hall, at fifty cents a ticket, without her father, right there on
+her own basis. He lowered his voice still more and revealed to Miss
+Chancellor his innermost thought, having first assured himself that
+Selah was still absent and that Mrs. Tarrant was inquiring of Mr.
+Burrage whether he visited much on the new land. The truth was, Miss
+Verena wanted to "shed" her father altogether; she didn't want him
+pawing round her that way before she began; it didn't add in the least
+to the attraction. Mr. Pardon expressed the conviction that Miss
+Chancellor agreed with him in this, and it required a great effort of
+mind on Olive's part, so small was her desire to act in concert with Mr.
+Pardon, to admit to herself that she did. She asked him, with a certain
+lofty coldness--he didn't make her shy, now, a bit--whether he took a
+great interest in the improvement of the position of women. The question
+appeared to strike the young man as abrupt and irrelevant, to come down
+on him from a height with which he was not accustomed to hold
+intercourse. He was used to quick operations, however, and he had only a
+moment of bright blankness before replying:
+
+"Oh, there is nothing I wouldn't do for the ladies; just give me a
+chance and you'll see."
+
+Olive was silent a moment. "What I mean is--is your sympathy a sympathy
+with our sex, or a particular interest in Miss Tarrant?"
+
+"Well, sympathy is just sympathy--that's all I can say. It takes in Miss
+Verena and it takes in all others--except the lady-correspondents," the
+young man added, with a jocosity which, as he perceived even at the
+moment, was lost on Verena's friend. He was not more successful when he
+went on: "It takes in even you, Miss Chancellor!"
+
+Olive rose to her feet, hesitating; she wanted to go away, and yet she
+couldn't bear to leave Verena to be exploited, as she felt that she
+would be after her departure, that indeed she had already been, by those
+offensive young men. She had a strange sense, too, that her friend had
+neglected her for the last half-hour, had not been occupied with her,
+had placed a barrier between them--a barrier of broad male backs, of
+laughter that verged upon coarseness, of glancing smiles directed across
+the room, directed to Olive, which seemed rather to disconnect her with
+what was going forward on that side than to invite her to take part in
+it. If Verena recognised that Miss Chancellor was not in report, as her
+father said, when jocose young men ruled the scene, the discovery
+implied no great penetration; but the poor girl might have reflected
+further that to see it taken for granted that she was unadapted for such
+company could scarcely be more agreeable to Olive than to be dragged
+into it. This young lady's worst apprehensions were now justified by
+Mrs. Tarrant's crying to her that she must not go, as Mr. Burrage and
+Mr. Gracie were trying to persuade Verena to give them a little specimen
+of inspirational speaking, and she was sure her daughter would comply in
+a moment if Miss Chancellor would just tell her to compose herself. They
+had got to own up to it, Miss Chancellor could do more with her than any
+one else; but Mr. Gracie and Mr. Burrage had excited her so that she was
+afraid it would be rather an unsuccessful effort. The whole group had
+got up, and Verena came to Olive with her hands outstretched and no
+signs of a bad conscience in her bright face.
+
+"I know you like me to speak so much--I'll try to say something if you
+want me to. But I'm afraid there are not enough people; I can't do much
+with a small audience."
+
+"I wish we had brought some of our friends--they would have been
+delighted to come if we had given them a chance," said Mr. Burrage.
+"There is an immense desire throughout the University to hear you, and
+there is no such sympathetic audience as an audience of Harvard men.
+Gracie and I are only two, but Gracie is a host in himself, and I am
+sure he will say as much of me." The young man spoke these words freely
+and lightly, smiling at Verena, and even a little at Olive, with the air
+of one to whom a mastery of clever "chaff" was commonly attributed.
+
+"Mr. Burrage listens even better than he talks," his companion declared.
+"We have the habit of attention at lectures, you know. To be lectured by
+you would be an advantage indeed. We are sunk in ignorance and
+prejudice."
+
+"Ah, my prejudices," Burrage went on; "if you could see them--I assure
+you they are something monstrous!"
+
+"Give them a regular ducking and make them gasp," Matthias Pardon cried.
+"If you want an opportunity to act on Harvard College, now's your
+chance. These gentlemen will carry the news; it will be the narrow end
+of the wedge."
+
+"I can't tell what you like," Verena said, still looking into Olive's
+eyes.
+
+"I'm sure Miss Chancellor likes everything here," Mrs. Tarrant remarked,
+with a noble confidence.
+
+Selah had reappeared by this time; his lofty, contemplative person was
+framed by the doorway. "Want to try a little inspiration?" he inquired,
+looking round on the circle with an encouraging inflexion.
+
+"I'll do it alone, if you prefer," Verena said soothingly to her friend.
+"It might be a good chance to try without father."
+
+"You don't mean to say you ain't going to be supported?" Mrs. Tarrant
+exclaimed, with dismay.
+
+"Ah, I beseech you, give us the whole programme--don't omit any leading
+feature!" Mr. Burrage was heard to plead.
+
+"My only interest is to draw her out," said Selah, defending his
+integrity. "I will drop right out if I don't seem to vitalise. I have no
+desire to draw attention to my own poor gifts." This declaration
+appeared to be addressed to Miss Chancellor.
+
+"Well, there will be more inspiration if you don't touch her," Matthias
+Pardon said to him. "It will seem to come right down from--well,
+wherever it does come from."
+
+"Yes, we don't pretend to say that," Mrs. Tarrant murmured.
+
+This little discussion had brought the blood to Olive's face; she felt
+that every one present was looking at her--Verena most of all--and that
+here was a chance to take a more complete possession of the girl. Such
+chances were agitating; moreover, she didn't like, on any occasion, to
+be so prominent. But everything that had been said was benighted and
+vulgar; the place seemed thick with the very atmosphere out of which she
+wished to lift Verena. They were treating her as a show, as a social
+resource, and the two young men from the College were laughing at her
+shamelessly. She was not meant for that, and Olive would save her.
+Verena was so simple, she couldn't see herself; she was the only pure
+spirit in the odious group.
+
+"I want you to address audiences that are worth addressing--to convince
+people who are serious and sincere." Olive herself, as she spoke, heard
+the great shake in her voice. "Your mission is not to exhibit yourself
+as a pastime for individuals, but to touch the heart of communities, of
+nations."
+
+"Dear madam, I'm sure Miss Tarrant will touch my heart!" Mr. Burrage
+objected, gallantly.
+
+"Well, I don't know but she judges you young men fairly," said Mrs.
+Tarrant, with a sigh.
+
+Verena, diverted a moment from her communion with her friend, considered
+Mr. Burrage with a smile. "I don't believe you have got any heart, and I
+shouldn't care much if you had!"
+
+"You have no idea how much the way you say that increases my desire to
+hear you speak."
+
+"Do as you please, my dear," said Olive, almost inaudibly. "My carriage
+must be there--I must leave you, in any case."
+
+"I can see you don't want it," said Verena, wondering. "You would stay
+if you liked it, wouldn't you?"
+
+"I don't know what I should do. Come out with me!" Olive spoke almost
+with fierceness.
+
+"Well, you'll send them away no better than they came," said Matthias
+Pardon.
+
+"I guess you had better come round some other night," Selah suggested
+pacifically, but with a significance which fell upon Olive's ear.
+
+Mr. Gracie seemed inclined to make the sturdiest protest. "Look here,
+Miss Tarrant; do you want to save Harvard College, or do you not?" he
+demanded, with a humorous frown.
+
+"I didn't know _you_ were Harvard College!" Verena returned as
+humorously.
+
+"I am afraid you are rather disappointed in your evening if you expected
+to obtain some insight into our ideas," said Mrs. Tarrant, with an air
+of impotent sympathy, to Mr. Gracie.
+
+"Well, good-night, Miss Chancellor," she went on; "I hope you've got a
+warm wrap. I suppose you'll think we go a good deal by what you say in
+this house. Well, most people don't object to that. There's a little
+hole right there in the porch; it seems as if Doctor Tarrant couldn't
+remember to go for the man to fix it. I am afraid you'll think we're too
+much taken up with all these new hopes. Well, we _have_ enjoyed seeing
+you in our home; it quite raises my appetite for social intercourse. Did
+you come out on wheels? I can't stand a sleigh myself; it makes me
+sick."
+
+This was her hostess's response to Miss Chancellor's very summary
+farewell, uttered as the three ladies proceeded together to the door of
+the house. Olive had got herself out of the little parlour with a sort
+of blind, defiant dash; she had taken no perceptible leave of the rest
+of the company. When she was calm she had very good manners, but when
+she was agitated she was guilty of lapses, every one of which came back
+to her, magnified, in the watches of the night. Sometimes they excited
+remorse, and sometimes triumph; in the latter case she felt that she
+could not have been so justly vindictive in cold blood. Tarrant wished
+to guide her down the steps, out of the little yard, to her carriage; he
+reminded her that they had had ashes sprinkled on the planks on purpose.
+But she begged him to let her alone, she almost pushed him back; she
+drew Verena out into the dark freshness, closing the door of the house
+behind her. There was a splendid sky, all blue-black and silver--a
+sparkling wintry vault, where the stars were like a myriad points of
+ice. The air was silent and sharp, and the vague snow looked cruel.
+Olive knew now very definitely what the promise was that she wanted
+Verena to make; but it was too cold, she could keep her there bareheaded
+but an instant. Mrs. Tarrant, meanwhile, in the parlour, remarked that
+it seemed as if she couldn't trust Verena with her own parents; and
+Selah intimated that, with a proper invitation, his daughter would be
+very happy to address Harvard College at large. Mr. Burrage and Mr.
+Gracie said they would invite her on the spot, in the name of the
+University; and Matthias Pardon reflected (and asserted) with glee that
+this would be the newest thing yet. But he added that they would have a
+high time with Miss Chancellor first, and this was evidently the
+conviction of the company.
+
+"I can see you are angry at something," Verena said to Olive, as the two
+stood there in the starlight. "I hope it isn't me. What have I done?"
+
+"I am not angry--I am anxious. I am so afraid I shall lose you. Verena,
+don't fail me--don't fail me!" Olive spoke low, with a kind of passion.
+
+"Fail you? How can I fail?"
+
+"You can't, of course you can't. Your star is above you. But don't
+listen to _them_."
+
+"To whom do you mean, Olive? To my parents?"
+
+"Oh no, not your parents," Miss Chancellor replied, with some sharpness.
+She paused a moment, and then she said: "I don't care for your parents.
+I have told you that before; but now that I have seen them--as they
+wished, as you wished, and I didn't--I don't care for them; I must
+repeat it, Verena. I should be dishonest if I let you think I did."
+
+"Why, Olive Chancellor!" Verena murmured, as if she were trying, in
+spite of the sadness produced by this declaration, to do justice to her
+friend's impartiality.
+
+"Yes, I am hard; perhaps I am cruel; but we must be hard if we wish to
+triumph. Don't listen to young men when they try to mock and muddle you.
+They don't care for you; they don't care for _us_. They care only for
+their pleasure, for what they believe to be the right of the stronger.
+The stronger? I am not so sure!"
+
+"Some of them care so much--are supposed to care too much--for us,"
+Verena said, with a smile that looked dim in the darkness.
+
+"Yes, if we will give up everything. I have asked you before--are you
+prepared to give up?"
+
+"Do you mean, to give _you_ up?"
+
+"No, all our wretched sisters--all our hopes and purposes--all that we
+think Sacred and worth living for!"
+
+"Oh, they don't want that, Olive." Verena's smile became more distinct,
+and she added: "They don't want so much as that!"
+
+"Well, then, go in and speak for them--and sing for them--and dance for
+them!"
+
+"Olive, you are cruel!"
+
+"Yes, I am. But promise me one thing, and I shall be--oh, so tender!"
+
+"What a strange place for promises," said Verena, with a shiver, looking
+about her into the night.
+
+"Yes, I am dreadful; I know it. But promise." And Olive drew the girl
+nearer to her, flinging over her with one hand the fold of a cloak that
+hung ample upon her own meagre person, and holding her there with the
+other, while she looked at her, suppliant but half hesitating.
+"Promise!" she repeated.
+
+"Is it something terrible?"
+
+"Never to listen to one of them, never to be bribed----"
+
+At this moment the house-door was opened again, and the light of the
+hall projected itself across the little piazza. Matthias Pardon stood in
+the aperture, and Tarrant and his wife, with the two other visitors,
+appeared to have come forward as well, to see what detained Verena.
+
+"You seem to have started a kind of lecture out here," Mr. Pardon said.
+"You ladies had better look out, or you'll freeze together!"
+
+Verena was reminded by her mother that she would catch her death, but
+she had already heard sharply, low as they were spoken, five last words
+from Olive, who now abruptly released her and passed swiftly over the
+path from the porch to her waiting carriage. Tarrant creaked along, in
+pursuit, to assist Miss Chancellor; the others drew Verena into the
+house. "Promise me not to marry!"--that was what echoed in her startled
+mind, and repeated itself there when Mr. Burrage returned to the charge,
+asking her if she wouldn't at least appoint some evening when they might
+listen to her. She knew that Olive's injunction ought not to have
+surprised her; she had already felt it in the air; she would have said
+at any time, if she had been asked, that she didn't suppose Miss
+Chancellor would want her to marry. But the idea, uttered as her friend
+had uttered it, had a new solemnity, and the effect of that quick,
+violent colloquy was to make her nervous and impatient, as if she had
+had a sudden glimpse of futurity. That was rather awful, even if it
+represented the fate one would like.
+
+When the two young men from the College pressed their petition, she
+asked, with a laugh that surprised them, whether they wished to "mock
+and muddle" her. They went away, assenting to Mrs. Tarrant's last
+remark: "I am afraid you'll feel that you don't quite understand us
+yet." Matthias Pardon remained; her father and mother, expressing their
+perfect confidence that he would excuse them, went to bed and left him
+sitting there. He stayed a good while longer, nearly an hour, and said
+things that made Verena think that _he_, perhaps, would like to marry
+her. But while she listened to him, more abstractedly than her custom
+was, she remarked to herself that there could be no difficulty in
+promising Olive so far as he was concerned. He was very pleasant, and he
+knew an immense deal about everything, or, rather, about every one, and
+he would take her right into the midst of life. But she didn't wish to
+marry him, all the same, and after he had gone she reflected that, once
+she came to think of it, she didn't want to marry any one. So it would
+be easy, after all, to make Olive that promise, and it would give her so
+much pleasure!
+
+
+
+
+XVII
+
+
+The next time Verena saw Olive she said to her that she was ready to
+make the promise she had asked the other night; but, to her great
+surprise, this young woman answered her by a question intended to check
+such rashness. Miss Chancellor raised a warning finger; she had an air
+of dissuasion almost as solemn as her former pressure; her passionate
+impatience appeared to have given way to other considerations, to be
+replaced by the resignation that comes with deeper reflexion. It was
+tinged in this case, indeed, by such bitterness as might be permitted to
+a young lady who cultivated the brightness of a great faith.
+
+"Don't you want any promise at present?" Verena asked. "Why, Olive, how
+you change!"
+
+"My dear child, you are so young--so strangely young. I am a thousand
+years old; I have lived through generations--through centuries. I know
+what I know by experience; you know it by imagination. That is
+consistent with your being the fresh, bright creature that you are. I am
+constantly forgetting the difference between us--that you are a mere
+child as yet, though a child destined for great things. I forgot it the
+other night, but I have remembered it since. You must pass through a
+certain phase, and it would be very wrong in me to pretend to suppress
+it. That is all clear to me now; I see it was my jealousy that spoke--my
+restless, hungry jealousy. I have far too much of that; I oughtn't to
+give any one the right to say that it's a woman's quality. I don't want
+your signature; I only want your confidence--only what springs from
+that. I hope with all my soul that you won't marry; but if you don't it
+must not be because you have promised me. You know what I think--that
+there is something noble done when one makes a sacrifice for a great
+good. Priests--when they were real priests--never married, and what you
+and I dream of doing demands of us a kind of priesthood. It seems to me
+very poor, when friendship and faith and charity and the most
+interesting occupation in the world--when such a combination as this
+doesn't seem, by itself, enough to live for. No man that I have ever
+seen cares a straw in his heart for what we are trying to accomplish.
+They hate it; they scorn it; they will try to stamp it out whenever they
+can. Oh yes, I know there are men who pretend to care for it; but they
+are not really men, and I wouldn't be sure even of them! Any man that
+one would look at--with him, as a matter of course, it is war upon us to
+the knife. I don't mean to say there are not some male beings who are
+willing to patronise us a little; to pat us on the back and recommend a
+few moderate concessions; to say that there _are_ two or three little
+points in which society has not been quite just to us. But any man who
+pretends to accept our programme _in toto_, as you and I understand it,
+of his own free will, before he is forced to--such a person simply
+schemes to betray us. There are gentlemen in plenty who would be glad to
+stop your mouth by kissing you! If you become dangerous some day to
+their selfishness, to their vested interests, to their immorality--as I
+pray heaven every day, my dear friend, that you may!--it will be a grand
+thing for one of them if he can persuade you that he loves you. Then you
+will see what he will do with you, and how far his love will take him!
+It would be a sad day for you and for me and for all of us if you were
+to believe something of that kind. You see I am very calm now; I have
+thought it all out."
+
+Verena had listened with earnest eyes. "Why, Olive, you are quite a
+speaker yourself!" she exclaimed. "You would far surpass me if you would
+let yourself go."
+
+Miss Chancellor shook her head with a melancholy that was not devoid of
+sweetness. "I can speak to _you_; but that is no proof. The very stones
+of the street--all the dumb things of nature--might find a voice to talk
+to you. I have no facility; I am awkward and embarrassed and dry." When
+this young lady, after a struggle with the winds and waves of emotion,
+emerged into the quiet stream of a certain high reasonableness, she
+presented her most graceful aspect; she had a tone of softness and
+sympathy, a gentle dignity, a serenity of wisdom, which sealed the
+appreciation of those who knew her well enough to like her, and which
+always impressed Verena as something almost august. Such moods, however,
+were not often revealed to the public at large; they belonged to Miss
+Chancellor's very private life. One of them had possession of her at
+present, and she went on to explain the inconsequence which had puzzled
+her friend with the same quiet clearness, the detachment from error, of
+a woman whose self-scrutiny has been as sharp as her deflexion.
+
+"Don't think me capricious if I say I would rather trust you without a
+pledge. I owe you, I owe every one, an apology for my rudeness and
+fierceness at your mother's. It came over me--just seeing those young
+men--how exposed you are; and the idea made me (for the moment) frantic.
+I see your danger still, but I see other things too, and I have
+recovered my balance. You must be safe, Verena--you must be saved; but
+your safety must not come from your having tied your hands. It must come
+from the growth of your perception; from your seeing things, of
+yourself, sincerely and with conviction, in the light in which I see
+them; from your feeling that for your work your freedom is essential,
+and that there is no freedom for you and me save in religiously _not_
+doing what you will often be asked to do--and I never!" Miss Chancellor
+brought out these last words with a proud jerk which was not without its
+pathos. "Don't promise, don't promise!" she went on. "I would far rather
+you didn't. But don't fail me--don't fail me, or I shall die!"
+
+Her manner of repairing her inconsistency was altogether feminine: she
+wished to extract a certainty at the same time that she wished to
+deprecate a pledge, and she would have been delighted to put Verena into
+the enjoyment of that freedom which was so important for her by
+preventing her exercising it in a particular direction. The girl was now
+completely under her influence; she had latent curiosities and
+distractions--left to herself, she was not always thinking of the
+unhappiness of women; but the touch of Olive's tone worked a spell, and
+she found something to which at least a portion of her nature turned
+with eagerness in her companion's wider knowledge, her elevation of
+view. Miss Chancellor was historic and philosophic; or, at any rate, she
+appeared so to Verena, who felt that through such an association one
+might at last intellectually command all life. And there was a simpler
+impulse; Verena wished to please her if only because she had such a
+dread of displeasing her. Olive's displeasures, disappointments,
+disapprovals were tragic, truly memorable; she grew white under them,
+not shedding many tears, as a general thing, like inferior women (she
+cried when she was angry, not when she was hurt), but limping and
+panting, morally, as if she had received a wound that she would carry
+for life. On the other hand, her commendations, her satisfactions were
+as soft as a west wind; and she had this sign, the rarest of all, of
+generosity, that she liked obligations of gratitude when they were not
+laid upon her by men. Then, indeed, she scarcely recognised them. She
+considered men in general as so much in the debt of the opposite sex
+that any individual woman had an unlimited credit with them; she could
+not possibly overdraw the general feminine account. The unexpected
+temperance of her speech on this subject of Verena's accessibility to
+matrimonial error seemed to the girl to have an antique beauty, a wisdom
+purged of worldly elements; it reminded her of qualities that she
+believed to have been proper to Electra or Antigone. This made her wish
+the more to do something that would gratify Olive; and in spite of her
+friend's dissuasion she declared that she should like to promise. "I
+will promise, at any rate, not to marry any of those gentlemen that were
+at the house," she said. "Those seemed to be the ones you were
+principally afraid of."
+
+"You will promise not to marry any one you don't like," said Olive.
+"That would be a great comfort!"
+
+"But I do like Mr. Burrage and Mr. Gracie."
+
+"And Mr. Matthias Pardon? What a name!"
+
+"Well, he knows how to make himself agreeable. He can tell you
+everything you want to know."
+
+"You mean everything you don't! Well, if you like every one, I haven't
+the least objection. It would only be preferences that I should find
+alarming. I am not the least afraid of your marrying a repulsive man;
+your danger would come from an attractive one."
+
+"I'm glad to hear you admit that some _are_ attractive!" Verena
+exclaimed, with the light laugh which her reverence for Miss Chancellor
+had not yet quenched. "It sometimes seems as if there weren't any you
+could like!"
+
+"I can imagine a man I should like very much," Olive replied, after a
+moment. "But I don't like those I see. They seem to me poor creatures."
+And, indeed, her uppermost feeling in regard to them was a kind of cold
+scorn; she thought most of them palterers and bullies. The end of the
+colloquy was that Verena, having assented, with her usual docility, to
+her companion's optimistic contention that it was a "phase," this taste
+for evening-calls from collegians and newspaper-men, and would
+consequently pass away with the growth of her mind, remarked that the
+injustice of men might be an accident or might be a part of their
+nature, but at any rate she should have to change a good deal before she
+should want to marry.
+
+About the middle of December Miss Chancellor received a visit from
+Matthias Pardon, who had come to ask her what she meant to do about
+Verena. She had never invited him to call upon her, and the appearance
+of a gentleman whose desire to see her was so irrepressible as to
+dispense with such a preliminary was not in her career an accident
+frequent enough to have taught her equanimity. She thought Mr. Pardon's
+visit a liberty; but, if she expected to convey this idea to him by
+withholding any suggestion that he should sit down, she was greatly
+mistaken, inasmuch as he cut the ground from under her feet by himself
+offering her a chair. His manner represented hospitality enough for both
+of them, and she was obliged to listen, on the edge of her sofa (she
+could at least seat herself where she liked), to his extraordinary
+inquiry. Of course she was not obliged to answer it, and indeed she
+scarcely understood it. He explained that it was prompted by the intense
+interest he felt in Miss Verena; but that scarcely made it more
+comprehensible, such a sentiment (on his part) being such a curious
+mixture. He had a sort of enamel of good humour which showed that his
+indelicacy was his profession; and he asked for revelations of the _vie
+intime_ of his victims with the bland confidence of a fashionable
+physician inquiring about symptoms. He wanted to know what Miss
+Chancellor meant to do, because if she didn't mean to do anything, he
+had an idea--which he wouldn't conceal from her--of going into the
+enterprise himself. "You see, what I should like to know is this: do you
+consider that she belongs to you, or that she belongs to the people? If
+she belongs to you, why don't you bring her out?"
+
+He had no purpose and no consciousness of being impertinent; he only
+wished to talk over the matter sociably with Miss Chancellor. He knew,
+of course, that there was a presumption she would not be sociable, but
+no presumption had yet deterred him from presenting a surface which he
+believed to be polished till it shone; there was always a larger one in
+favour of his power to penetrate and of the majesty of the "great
+dailies." Indeed, he took so many things for granted that Olive remained
+dumb while she regarded them; and he availed himself of what he
+considered as a fortunate opening to be really very frank. He reminded
+her that he had known Miss Verena a good deal longer than she; he had
+travelled out to Cambridge the other winter (when he could get an
+off-night), with the thermometer at ten below zero. He had always
+thought her attractive, but it wasn't till this season that his eyes had
+been fully opened. Her talent had matured, and now he had no hesitation
+in calling her brilliant. Miss Chancellor could imagine whether, as an
+old friend, he could watch such a beautiful unfolding with indifference.
+She would fascinate the people, just as she had fascinated her (Miss
+Chancellor), and, he might be permitted to add, himself. The fact was,
+she was a great card, and some one ought to play it. There never had
+been a more attractive female speaker before the American public; she
+would walk right past Mrs. Farrinder, and Mrs. Farrinder knew it. There
+was room for both, no doubt, they had such a different style; anyhow,
+what he wanted to show was that there was room for Miss Verena. She
+didn't want any more tuning-up, she wanted to break right out. Moreover,
+he felt that any gentleman who should lead her to success would win her
+esteem; he might even attract her more powerfully--who could tell? If
+Miss Chancellor wanted to attach her permanently, she ought to push her
+right forward. He gathered from what Miss Verena had told him that she
+wanted to make her study up the subject a while longer--follow some kind
+of course. Well, now, he could assure her that there was no preparation
+so good as just seeing a couple of thousand people down there before you
+who have paid their money to have you tell them something. Miss Verena
+was a natural genius, and he hoped very much she wasn't going to take
+the nature out of her. She could study up as she went along; she had got
+the great thing that you couldn't learn, a kind of divine afflatus, as
+the ancients used to say, and she had better just begin on that. He
+wouldn't deny what was the matter with _him_; he was quite under the
+spell, and his admiration made him want to see her where she belonged.
+He shouldn't care so much how she got there, but it would certainly add
+to his pleasure if he could show her up to her place. Therefore, would
+Miss Chancellor just tell him this: How long did she expect to hold her
+back; how long did she expect a humble admirer to wait? Of course he
+hadn't come there to cross-question her; there was one thing he trusted
+he always kept clear of; when he was indiscreet he wanted to know it. He
+had come with a proposal of his own, and he hoped it would seem a
+sufficient warrant for his visit. Would Miss Chancellor be willing to
+divide a--the--well, he might call it the responsibilities? Couldn't
+they run Miss Verena together? In this case every one would be
+satisfied. She could travel round with her as her companion, and he
+would see that the American people walked up. If Miss Chancellor would
+just let her go a little, he would look after the rest. He wanted no
+odds; he only wanted her for about an hour and a half three or four
+evenings a week.
+
+Olive had time, in the course of this appeal, to make her faculties
+converge, to ask herself what she could say to this prodigious young man
+that would make him feel as how base a thing she held his proposal that
+they should constitute themselves into a company for drawing profit from
+Verena. Unfortunately, the most sarcastic inquiry that could occur to
+her as a response was also the most obvious one, so that he hesitated
+but a moment with his rejoinder after she had asked him how many
+thousands of dollars he expected to make.
+
+"For Miss Verena? It depends upon the time. She'd run for ten years, at
+least. I can't figure it up till all the States have been heard from,"
+he said, smiling.
+
+"I don't mean for Miss Tarrant, I mean for you," Olive returned, with
+the impression that she was looking him straight in the eye.
+
+"Oh, as many as you'll leave me!" Matthias Pardon answered, with a laugh
+that contained all, and more than all, the jocularity of the American
+press. "To speak seriously," he added, "I don't want to make money out
+of it."
+
+"What do you want to make then?"
+
+"Well, I want to make history! I want to help the ladies."
+
+"The ladies?" Olive murmured. "What do you know about ladies?" she was
+on the point of adding, when his promptness checked her.
+
+"All over the world. I want to work for their emancipation. I regard it
+as the great modern question."
+
+Miss Chancellor got up now; this was rather too strong. Whether,
+eventually, she was successful in what she attempted, the reader of her
+history will judge; but at this moment she had not that promise of
+success which resides in a willingness to make use of every aid that
+offers. Such is the penalty of being of a fastidious, exclusive,
+uncompromising nature; of seeing things not simply and sharply, but in
+perverse relations, in intertwisted strands. It seemed to our young lady
+that nothing could be less attractive than to owe her emancipation to
+such a one as Matthias Pardon; and it is curious that those qualities
+which he had in common with Verena, and which in her seemed to Olive
+romantic and touching--her having sprung from the "people," had an
+acquaintance with poverty, a hand-to-mouth development, and an
+experience of the seamy side of life--availed in no degree to conciliate
+Miss Chancellor. I suppose it was because he was a man. She told him
+that she was much obliged to him for his offer, but that he evidently
+didn't understand Verena and herself. No, not even Miss Tarrant, in
+spite of his long acquaintance with her. They had no desire to be
+notorious; they only wanted to be useful. They had no wish to make
+money; there would always be plenty of money for Miss Tarrant.
+Certainly, she should come before the public, and the world would
+acclaim her and hang upon her words; but crude, precipitate action was
+what both of them least desired. The change in the dreadful position of
+women was not a question for to-day simply, or for to-morrow, but for
+many years to come; and there would be a great deal to think of, to map
+out. One thing they were determined upon--that men shouldn't taunt them
+with being superficial. When Verena should appear it would be armed at
+all points, like Joan of Arc (this analogy had lodged itself in Olive's
+imagination); she should have facts and figures; she should meet men on
+their own ground. "What we mean to do, we mean to do well," Miss
+Chancellor said to her visitor, with considerable sternness; leaving him
+to make such an application to himself as his fancy might suggest.
+
+This announcement had little comfort for him; he felt baffled and
+disheartened--indeed, quite sick. Was it not sickening to hear her talk
+of this dreary process of preparation?--as if any one cared about that,
+and would know whether Verena were prepared or not! Had Miss Chancellor
+no faith in her girlhood? didn't she know what a card that would be?
+This was the last inquiry Olive allowed him the opportunity of making.
+She remarked to him that they might talk for ever without coming to an
+agreement--their points of view were so far apart. Besides, it was a
+woman's question; what they wanted was for women, and it should be by
+women. It had happened to the young Matthias more than once to be shown
+the way to the door, but the path of retreat had never yet seemed to him
+so unpleasant. He was naturally amiable, but it had not hitherto
+befallen him to be made to feel that he was not--and could not be--a
+factor in contemporary history: here was a rapacious woman who proposed
+to keep that favourable setting for herself. He let her know that she
+was right-down selfish, and that if she chose to sacrifice a beautiful
+nature to her antediluvian theories and love of power, a vigilant daily
+press--whose business it was to expose wrong-doing--would demand an
+account from her. She replied that, if the newspapers chose to insult
+her, that was their own affair; one outrage the more to the sex in her
+person was of little account. And after he had left her she seemed to
+see the glow of dawning success; the battle had begun, and something of
+the ecstasy of the martyr.
+
+
+
+
+XVIII
+
+
+Verena told her, a week after this, that Mr. Pardon wanted so much she
+should say she would marry him; and she added, with evident pleasure at
+being able to give her so agreeable a piece of news, that she had
+declined to say anything of the sort. She thought that now, at least,
+Olive must believe in her; for the proposal was more attractive than
+Miss Chancellor seemed able to understand. "He does place things in a
+very seductive light," Verena said; "he says that if I become his wife I
+shall be carried straight along by a force of excitement of which at
+present I have no idea. I shall wake up famous, if I marry him; I have
+only got to give out my feelings, and he will take care of the rest. He
+says every hour of my youth is precious to me, and that we should have a
+lovely time travelling round the country. I think you ought to allow
+that all that is rather dazzling--for I am not naturally concentrated,
+like you!"
+
+"He promises you success. What do you call success?" Olive inquired,
+looking at her friend with a kind of salutary coldness--a suspension of
+sympathy--with which Verena was now familiar (though she liked it no
+better than at first), and which made approbation more gracious when
+approbation came.
+
+Verena reflected a moment, and then answered, smiling, but with
+confidence: "Producing a pressure that shall be irresistible. Causing
+certain laws to be repealed by Congress and by the State legislatures,
+and others to be enacted." She repeated the words as if they had been
+part of a catechism committed to memory, while Olive saw that this
+mechanical tone was in the nature of a joke that she could not deny
+herself; they had had that definition so often before, and Miss
+Chancellor had had occasion so often to remind her what success _really_
+was. Of course it was easy to prove to her now that Mr. Pardon's
+glittering bait was a very different thing; was a mere trap and lure, a
+bribe to vanity and impatience, a device for making her give herself
+away--let alone fill his pockets while she did so. Olive was conscious
+enough of the girl's want of continuity; she had seen before how she
+could be passionately serious at times, and then perversely, even if
+innocently, trivial--as just now, when she seemed to wish to convert one
+of their most sacred formulas into a pleasantry. She had already quite
+recognised, however, that it was not of importance that Verena should be
+just like herself; she was all of one piece, and Verena was of many
+pieces, which had, where they fitted together, little capricious chinks,
+through which mocking inner lights seemed sometimes to gleam. It was a
+part of Verena's being unlike her that she should feel Mr. Pardon's
+promise of eternal excitement to be a brilliant thing, should indeed
+consider Mr. Pardon with any tolerance at all. But Olive tried afresh to
+allow for such aberrations, as a phase of youth and suburban culture;
+the more so that, even when she tried most, Verena reproached her--so
+far as Verena's incurable softness could reproach--with not allowing
+enough. Olive didn't appear to understand that, while Matthias Pardon
+drew that picture and tried to hold her hand (this image was
+unfortunate), she had given one long, fixed, wistful look, through the
+door he opened, at the bright tumult of the world, and then had turned
+away, solely for her friend's sake, to an austerer probation and a purer
+effort; solely for her friend's, that is, and that of the whole enslaved
+sisterhood. The fact remained, at any rate, that Verena had made a
+sacrifice; and this thought, after a while, gave Olive a greater sense
+of security. It seemed almost to seal the future; for Olive knew that
+the young interviewer would not easily be shaken off, and yet she was
+sure that Verena would never yield to him.
+
+It was true that at present Mr. Burrage came a great deal to the little
+house at Cambridge; Verena told her about that, told her so much that it
+was almost as good as if she had told her all. He came without Mr.
+Gracie now; he could find his way alone, and he seemed to wish that
+there should be no one else. He had made himself so pleasant to her
+mother that she almost always went out of the room; that was the
+highest proof Mrs. Tarrant could give of her appreciation of a
+"gentleman-caller." They knew everything about him by this time; that
+his father was dead, his mother very fashionable and prominent, and he
+himself in possession of a handsome patrimony. They thought ever so much
+of him in New York. He collected beautiful things, pictures and antiques
+and objects that he sent for to Europe on purpose, many of which were
+arranged in his rooms at Cambridge. He had intaglios and Spanish
+altar-cloths and drawings by the old masters. He was different from most
+others; he seemed to want so much to enjoy life, and to think you easily
+could if you would only let yourself go. Of course--judging by what _he_
+had--he appeared to think you required a great many things to keep you
+up. And then Verena told Olive--she could see it was after a little
+delay--that he wanted her to come round to his place and see his
+treasures. He wanted to show them to her, he was so sure she would
+admire them. Verena was sure also, but she wouldn't go alone, and she
+wanted Olive to go with her. They would have tea, and there would be
+other ladies, and Olive would tell her what she thought of a life that
+was so crowded with beauty. Miss Chancellor made her reflexions on all
+this, and the first of them was that it was happy for her that she had
+determined for the present to accept these accidents, for otherwise
+might she not now have had a deeper alarm? She wished to heaven that
+conceited young men with time on their hands would leave Verena alone;
+but evidently they wouldn't, and her best safety was in seeing as many
+as should turn up. If the type should become frequent, she would very
+soon judge it. If Olive had not been so grim, she would have had a smile
+to spare for the frankness with which the girl herself adopted this
+theory. She was eager to explain that Mr. Burrage didn't seem at all to
+want what poor Mr. Pardon had wanted; he made her talk about her views
+far more than that gentleman, but gave no sign of offering himself
+either as a husband or as a lecture-agent. The furthest he had gone as
+yet was to tell her that he liked her for the same reason that he liked
+old enamels and old embroideries; and when she said that she didn't see
+how she resembled such things, he had replied that it was because she
+was so peculiar and so delicate. She might be peculiar, but she had
+protested against the idea that she was delicate; it was the last thing
+that she wanted to be thought; and Olive could see from this how far she
+was from falling in with everything he said. When Miss Chancellor asked
+if she respected Mr. Burrage (and how solemn Olive could make that word
+she by this time knew), she answered, with her sweet, vain laugh, but
+apparently with perfect good faith, that it didn't matter whether she
+did or not, for what was the whole thing but simply a phase--the very
+one they had talked about? The sooner she got through it the better, was
+it not?--and she seemed to think that her transit would be materially
+quickened by a visit to Mr. Burrage's rooms. As I say, Verena was
+pleased to regard the phase as quite inevitable, and she had said more
+than once to Olive that if their struggle was to be with men, the more
+they knew about them the better. Miss Chancellor asked her why her
+mother should not go with her to see the curiosities, since she
+mentioned that their possessor had not neglected to invite Mrs. Tarrant;
+and Verena said that this, of course, would be very simple--only her
+mother wouldn't be able to tell her so well as Olive whether she ought
+to respect Mr. Burrage. This decision as to whether Mr. Burrage should
+be respected assumed in the life of these two remarkable young women,
+pitched in so high a moral key, the proportions of a momentous event.
+Olive shrank at first from facing it--not, indeed, the decision--for we
+know that her own mind had long since been made up in regard to the
+quantity of esteem due to almost any member of the other sex--but the
+incident itself, which, if Mr. Burrage should exasperate her further,
+might expose her to the danger of appearing to Verena to be unfair to
+him. It was her belief that he was playing a deeper game than the young
+Matthias, and she was very willing to watch him; but she thought it
+prudent not to attempt to cut short the phase (she adopted that
+classification) prematurely--an imputation she should incur if, without
+more delay, she were to "shut down," as Verena said, on the young
+connoisseur.
+
+It was settled, therefore, that Mrs. Tarrant should, with her daughter,
+accept Mr. Burrage's invitation; and in a few days these ladies paid a
+visit to his apartments. Verena subsequently, of course, had much to say
+about it, but she dilated even more upon her mother's impressions than
+upon her own. Mrs. Tarrant had carried away a supply which would last
+her all winter; there had been some New York ladies present who were
+"on" at that moment, and with whom her intercourse was rich in emotions.
+She had told them all that she should be happy to see them in her home,
+but they had not yet picked their way along the little planks of the
+front yard. Mr. Burrage, at all events, had been quite lovely, and had
+talked about his collections, which were wonderful, in the most
+interesting manner. Verena inclined to think he was to be respected. He
+admitted that he was not really studying law at all; he had only come to
+Cambridge for the form; but she didn't see why it wasn't enough when you
+made yourself as pleasant as that. She went so far as to ask Olive
+whether taste and art were not something, and her friend could see that
+she was certainly very much involved in the phase. Miss Chancellor, of
+course, had her answer ready. Taste and art were good when they enlarged
+the mind, not when they narrowed it. Verena assented to this, and said
+it remained to be seen what effect they had had upon Mr. Burrage--a
+remark which led Olive to fear that at such a rate much would remain,
+especially when Verena told her, later, that another visit to the young
+man's rooms was projected, and that this time she must come, he having
+expressed the greatest desire for the honour, and her own wish being
+greater still that they should look at some of his beautiful things
+together.
+
+A day or two after this, Mr. Henry Burrage left a card at Miss
+Chancellor's door, with a note in which he expressed the hope that she
+would take tea with him on a certain day on which he expected the
+company of his mother. Olive responded to this invitation, in
+conjunction with Verena; but in doing so she was in the position,
+singular for her, of not quite understanding what she was about. It
+seemed to her strange that Verena should urge her to take such a step
+when she was free to go without her, and it proved two things: first,
+that she was much interested in Mr. Henry Burrage, and second, that her
+nature was extraordinarily beautiful. Could anything, in effect, be less
+underhand than such an indifference to what she supposed to be the best
+opportunities for carrying on a flirtation? Verena wanted to know the
+truth, and it was clear that by this time she believed Olive Chancellor
+to have it, for the most part, in her keeping. Her insistence,
+therefore, proved, above all, that she cared more for her friend's
+opinion of Henry Burrage than for her own--a reminder, certainly, of the
+responsibility that Olive had incurred in undertaking to form this
+generous young mind, and of the exalted place that she now occupied in
+it. Such revelations ought to have been satisfactory; if they failed to
+be completely so, it was only on account of the elder girl's regret that
+the subject as to which her judgement was wanted should be a young man
+destitute of the worst vices. Henry Burrage had contributed to throw
+Miss Chancellor into a "state," as these young ladies called it, the
+night she met him at Mrs. Tarrant's; but it had none the less been
+conveyed to Olive by the voices of the air that he was a gentleman and a
+good fellow.
+
+This was painfully obvious when the visit to his rooms took place; he
+was so good-humoured, so amusing, so friendly and considerate, so
+attentive to Miss Chancellor, he did the honours of his bachelor-nest
+with so easy a grace, that Olive, part of the time, sat dumbly shaking
+her conscience, like a watch that wouldn't go, to make it tell her some
+better reason why she shouldn't like him. She saw that there would be no
+difficulty in disliking his mother; but that, unfortunately, would not
+serve her purpose nearly so well. Mrs. Burrage had come to spend a few
+days near her son; she was staying at an hotel in Boston. It presented
+itself to Olive that after this entertainment it would be an act of
+courtesy to call upon her; but here, at least, was the comfort that she
+could cover herself with the general absolution extended to the Boston
+temperament and leave her alone. It was slightly provoking, indeed, that
+Mrs. Burrage should have so much the air of a New Yorker who didn't
+particularly notice whether a Bostonian called or not; but there is ever
+an imperfection, I suppose, in even the sweetest revenge. She was a
+woman of society, large and voluminous, fair (in complexion) and
+regularly ugly, looking as if she ought to be slow and rather heavy, but
+disappointing this expectation by a quick, amused utterance, a short,
+bright, summary laugh, with which she appeared to dispose of the joke
+(whatever it was) for ever, and an air of recognising on the instant
+everything she saw and heard. She was evidently accustomed to talk, and
+even to listen, if not kept waiting too long for details and
+parentheses; she was not continuous, but frequent, as it were, and you
+could see that she hated explanations, though it was not to be supposed
+that she had anything to fear from them. Her favours were general, not
+particular; she was civil enough to every one, but not in any case
+endearing, and perfectly genial without being confiding, as people were
+in Boston when (in moments of exaltation) they wished to mark that they
+were not suspicious. There was something in her whole manner which
+seemed to say to Olive that she belonged to a larger world than hers;
+and our young lady was vexed at not hearing that she had lived for a
+good many years in Europe, as this would have made it easy to classify
+her as one of the corrupt. She learned, almost with a sense of injury,
+that neither the mother nor the son had been longer beyond the seas than
+she herself; and if they were to be judged as triflers they must be
+dealt with individually. Was it an aid to such a judgement to see that
+Mrs. Burrage was very much pleased with Boston, with Harvard College,
+with her son's interior, with her cup of tea (it was old Sevres), which
+was not half so bad as she had expected, with the company he had asked
+to meet her (there were three or four gentlemen, one of whom was Mr.
+Gracie), and, last, not least, with Verena Tarrant, whom she addressed
+as a celebrity, kindly, cleverly, but without maternal tenderness or
+anything to mark the difference in their age? She spoke to her as if
+they were equals in that respect, as if Verena's genius and fame would
+make up the disparity, and the girl had no need of encouragement and
+patronage. She made no direct allusion, however, to her particular
+views, and asked her no question about her "gift"--an omission which
+Verena thought strange, and, with the most speculative candour, spoke of
+to Olive afterwards. Mrs. Burrage seemed to imply that every one present
+had some distinction and some talent, that they were all good company
+together. There was nothing in her manner to indicate that she was
+afraid of Verena on her son's account; she didn't resemble a person who
+would like him to marry the daughter of a mesmeric healer, and yet she
+appeared to think it charming that he should have such a young woman
+there to give gusto to her hour at Cambridge. Poor Olive was, in the
+nature of things, entangled in contradictions; she had a horror of the
+idea of Verena's marrying Mr. Burrage, and yet she was angry when his
+mother demeaned herself as if the little girl with red hair, whose
+freshness she enjoyed, could not be a serious danger. She saw all this
+through the blur of her shyness, the conscious, anxious silence to which
+she was so much of the time condemned. It may therefore be imagined how
+sharp her vision would have been could she only have taken the situation
+more simply; for she was intelligent enough not to have needed to be
+morbid, even for purposes of self-defence.
+
+I must add, however, that there was a moment when she came near being
+happy--or, at any rate, reflected that it was a pity she could not be
+so. Mrs. Burrage asked her son to play "some little thing," and he sat
+down to his piano and revealed a talent that might well have gratified
+that lady's pride. Olive was extremely susceptible to music, and it was
+impossible to her not to be soothed and beguiled by the young man's
+charming art. One "little thing" succeeded another; his selections were
+all very happy. His guests sat scattered in the red firelight,
+listening, silent, in comfortable attitudes; there was a faint fragrance
+from the burning logs, which mingled with the perfume of Schubert and
+Mendelssohn; the covered lamps made a glow here and there, and the
+cabinets and brackets produced brown shadows, out of which some precious
+object gleamed--some ivory carving or cinque-cento cup. It was given to
+Olive, under these circumstances, for half an hour, to surrender
+herself, to enjoy the music, to admit that Mr. Burrage played with
+exquisite taste, to feel as if the situation were a kind of truce. Her
+nerves were calmed, her problems--for the time--subsided. Civilisation,
+under such an influence, in such a setting, appeared to have done its
+work; harmony ruled the scene; human life ceased to be a battle. She
+went so far as to ask herself why one should have a quarrel with it; the
+relations of men and women, in that picturesque grouping, had not the
+air of being internecine. In short, she had an interval of unexpected
+rest, during which she kept her eyes mainly on Verena, who sat near Mrs.
+Burrage, letting herself go, evidently, more completely than Olive. To
+her, too, music was a delight, and her listening face turned itself to
+different parts of the room, unconsciously, while her eyes vaguely
+rested on the _bibelots_ that emerged into the firelight. At moments
+Mrs. Burrage bent her countenance upon her and smiled, at random,
+kindly; and then Verena smiled back, while her expression seemed to say
+that, oh yes, she was giving up everything, all principles, all
+projects. Even before it was time to go, Olive felt that they were both
+(Verena and she) quite demoralised, and she only summoned energy to take
+her companion away when she heard Mrs. Burrage propose to her to come
+and spend a fortnight in New York. Then Olive exclaimed to herself, "Is
+it a plot? Why in the world can't they let her alone?" and prepared to
+throw a fold of her mantle, as she had done before, over her young
+friend. Verena answered, somewhat impetuously, that she should be
+delighted to visit Mrs. Burrage; then checked her impetuosity, after a
+glance from Olive, by adding that perhaps this lady wouldn't ask her if
+she knew what strong ground she took on the emancipation of women. Mrs.
+Burrage looked at her son and laughed; she said she was perfectly aware
+of Verena's views, and that it was impossible to be more in sympathy
+with them than she herself. She took the greatest interest in the
+emancipation of women; she thought there was so much to be done. These
+were the only remarks that passed in reference to the great subject; and
+nothing more was said to Verena, either by Henry Burrage or by his
+friend Gracie, about her addressing the Harvard students. Verena had
+told her father that Olive had put her veto upon that, and Tarrant had
+said to the young men that it seemed as if Miss Chancellor was going to
+put the thing through in her own way. We know that he thought this way
+very circuitous; but Miss Chancellor made him feel that she was in
+earnest, and that idea frightened the resistance out of him--it had such
+terrible associations. The people he had ever seen who were most in
+earnest were a committee of gentlemen who had investigated the phenomena
+of the "materialisation" of spirits, some ten years before, and had bent
+the fierce light of the scientific method upon him. To Olive it appeared
+that Mr. Burrage and Mr. Gracie had ceased to be jocular; but that did
+not make them any less cynical. Henry Burrage said to Verena, as she was
+going, that he hoped she would think seriously of his mother's
+invitation; and she replied that she didn't know whether she should have
+much time in the future to give to people who already approved of her
+views: she expected to have her hands full with the others, who didn't.
+
+"Does your scheme of work exclude all distraction, all recreation,
+then?" the young man inquired; and his look expressed real suspense.
+
+Verena referred the matter, as usual, with her air of bright, ungrudging
+deference, to her companion. "Does it, should you say--our scheme of
+work?"
+
+"I am afraid the distraction we have had this afternoon must last us for
+a long time," Olive said, without harshness, but with considerable
+majesty.
+
+"Well, now, _is_ he to be respected?" Verena demanded, as the two young
+women took their way through the early darkness, pacing quietly side by
+side, in their winter-robes, like women consecrated to some holy office.
+
+Olive turned it over a moment. "Yes, very much--as a pianist!"
+
+Verena went into town with her in the horse-car--she was staying in
+Charles Street for a few days--and that evening she startled Olive by
+breaking out into a reflexion very similar to the whimsical falterings
+of which she herself had been conscious while they sat in Mr. Burrage's
+pretty rooms, but against which she had now violently reacted.
+
+"It would be very nice to do that always--just to take men as they are,
+and not to have to think about their badness. It would be very nice not
+to have so many questions, but to think they were all comfortably
+answered, so that one could sit there on an old Spanish leather chair,
+with the curtains drawn and keeping out the cold, the darkness, all the
+big, terrible, cruel world--sit there and listen for ever to Schubert
+and Mendelssohn. _They_ didn't care anything about female suffrage! And
+I didn't feel the want of a vote to-day at all, did you?" Verena
+inquired, ending, as she always ended in these few speculations, with an
+appeal to Olive.
+
+This young lady thought it necessary to give her a very firm answer. "I
+always feel it--everywhere--night and day. I feel it _here_"; and Olive
+laid her hand solemnly on her heart. "I feel it as a deep, unforgettable
+wrong; I feel it as one feels a stain that is on one's honour."
+
+Verena gave a clear laugh, and after that a soft sigh, and then said,
+"Do you know, Olive, I sometimes wonder whether, if it wasn't for you, I
+should feel it so very much!"
+
+"My own friend," Olive replied, "you have never yet said anything to me
+which expressed so clearly the closeness and sanctity of our union."
+
+"You do keep me up," Verena went on. "You are my conscience."
+
+"I should like to be able to say that you are my form--my envelope. But
+you are too beautiful for that!" So Olive returned her friend's
+compliment; and later she said that, of course, it would be far easier
+to give up everything and draw the curtains to and pass one's life in an
+artificial atmosphere, with rose-coloured lamps. It would be far easier
+to abandon the struggle, to leave all the unhappy women of the world to
+their immemorial misery, to lay down one's burden, close one's eyes to
+the whole dark picture, and, in short, simply expire. To this Verena
+objected that it would not be easy for her to expire at all; that such
+an idea was darker than anything the world contained; that she had not
+done with life yet, and that she didn't mean to allow her
+responsibilities to crush her. And then the two young women concluded,
+as they had concluded before, by finding themselves completely,
+inspiringly in agreement, full of the purpose to live indeed, and with
+high success; to become great, in order not to be obscure, and powerful,
+in order not to be useless. Olive had often declared before that her
+conception of life was as something sublime or as nothing at all. The
+world was full of evil, but she was glad to have been born before it had
+been swept away, while it was still there to face, to give one a task
+and a reward. When the great reforms should be consummated, when the day
+of justice should have dawned, would not life perhaps be rather poor and
+pale? She had never pretended to deny that the hope of fame, of the very
+highest distinction, was one of her strongest incitements; and she held
+that the most effective way of protesting against the state of bondage
+of women was for an individual member of the sex to become illustrious.
+A person who might have overheard some of the talk of this possibly
+infatuated pair would have been touched by their extreme familiarity
+with the idea of earthly glory. Verena had not invented it, but she had
+taken it eagerly from her friend, and she returned it with interest. To
+Olive it appeared that just this partnership of their two minds--each of
+them, by itself, lacking an important group of facets--made an organic
+whole which, for the work in hand, could not fail to be brilliantly
+effective. Verena was often far more irresponsive than she liked to see
+her; but the happy thing in her composition was that, after a short
+contact with the divine idea--Olive was always trying to flash it at
+her, like a jewel in an uncovered case--she kindled, flamed up, took the
+words from her friend's less persuasive lips, resolved herself into a
+magical voice, became again the pure young sibyl. Then Olive perceived
+how fatally, without Verena's tender notes, her crusade would lack
+sweetness, what the Catholics call unction; and, on the other hand, how
+weak Verena would be on the statistical and logical side if she herself
+should not bring up the rear. Together, in short, they would be
+complete, they would have everything, and together they would triumph.
+
+
+
+
+XIX
+
+
+This idea of their triumph, a triumph as yet ultimate and remote, but
+preceded by the solemn vista of an effort so religious as never to be
+wanting in ecstasy, became tremendously familiar to the two friends, but
+especially to Olive, during the winter of 187-, a season which ushered
+in the most momentous period of Miss Chancellor's life. About Christmas
+a step was taken which advanced her affairs immensely, and put them, to
+her apprehension, on a regular footing. This consisted in Verena's
+coming in to Charles Street to stay with her, in pursuance of an
+arrangement on Olive's part with Selah Tarrant and his wife that she
+should remain for many months. The coast was now perfectly clear. Mrs.
+Farrinder had started on her annual grand tour; she was rousing the
+people, from Maine to Texas; Matthias Pardon (it was to be supposed) had
+received, temporarily at least, his quietus; and Mrs. Luna was
+established in New York, where she had taken a house for a year, and
+whence she wrote to her sister that she was going to engage Basil Ransom
+(with whom she was in communication for this purpose) to do her
+law-business. Olive wondered what law-business Adeline could have, and
+hoped she would get into a pickle with her landlord or her milliner, so
+that repeated interviews with Mr. Ransom might become necessary. Mrs.
+Luna let her know very soon that these interviews had begun; the young
+Mississippian had come to dine with her; he hadn't got started much, by
+what she could make out, and she was even afraid that he didn't dine
+every day. But he wore a tall hat now, like a Northern gentleman, and
+Adeline intimated that she found him really attractive. He had been very
+nice to Newton, told him all about the war (quite the Southern version,
+of course, but Mrs. Luna didn't care anything about American politics,
+and she wanted her son to know all sides), and Newton did nothing but
+talk about him, calling him "Rannie," and imitating his pronunciation of
+certain words. Adeline subsequently wrote that she had made up her mind
+to put her affairs into his hands (Olive sighed, not unmagnanimously, as
+she thought of her sister's "affairs"), and later still she mentioned
+that she was thinking strongly of taking him to be Newton's tutor. She
+wished this interesting child to be privately educated, and it would be
+more agreeable to have in that relation a person who was already, as it
+were, a member of the family. Mrs. Luna wrote as if he were prepared to
+give up his profession to take charge of her son, and Olive was pretty
+sure that this was only a part of her grandeur, of the habit she had
+contracted, especially since living in Europe, of speaking as if in
+every case she required special arrangements.
+
+In spite of the difference in their age, Olive had long since judged
+her, and made up her mind that Adeline lacked every quality that a
+person needed to be interesting in her eyes. She was rich (or
+sufficiently so), she was conventional and timid, very fond of
+attentions from men (with whom indeed she was reputed bold, but Olive
+scorned such boldness as that), given up to a merely personal,
+egotistical, instinctive life, and as unconscious of the tendencies of
+the age, the revenges of the future, the new truths and the great social
+questions, as if she had been a mere bundle of dress-trimmings, which
+she very nearly was. It was perfectly observable that she had no
+conscience, and it irritated Olive deeply to see how much trouble a
+woman was spared when she was constructed on that system. Adeline's
+"affairs," as I have intimated, her social relations, her views of
+Newton's education, her practice and her theory (for she had plenty of
+that, such as it was, heaven save the mark!), her spasmodic disposition
+to marry again, and her still sillier retreats in the presence of danger
+(for she had not even the courage of her frivolity), these things had
+been a subject of tragic consideration to Olive ever since the return of
+the elder sister to America. The tragedy was not in any particular harm
+that Mrs. Luna could do her (for she did her good, rather, that is, she
+did her honour by laughing at her), but in the spectacle itself, the
+drama, guided by the hand of fate, of which the small, ignoble scenes
+unrolled themselves so logically. The _denouement_ would of course be in
+keeping, and would consist simply of the spiritual death of Mrs. Luna,
+who would end by understanding no common speech of Olive's at all, and
+would sink into mere worldly plumpness, into the last complacency, the
+supreme imbecility, of petty, genteel conservatism. As for Newton, he
+would be more utterly odious, if possible, as he grew up, than he was
+already; in fact, he would not grow up at all, but only grow down, if
+his mother should continue her infatuated system with him. He was
+insufferably forward and selfish; under the pretext of keeping him, at
+any cost, refined, Adeline had coddled and caressed him, having him
+always in her petticoats, remitting his lessons when he pretended he had
+an earache, drawing him into the conversation, letting him answer her
+back, with an impertinence beyond his years, when she administered the
+smallest check. The place for him, in Olive's eyes, was one of the
+public schools, where the children of the people would teach him his
+small importance, teach it, if necessary, by the aid of an occasional
+drubbing; and the two ladies had a grand discussion on this point before
+Mrs. Luna left Boston--a scene which ended in Adeline's clutching the
+irrepressible Newton to her bosom (he came in at the moment), and
+demanding of him a vow that he would live and die in the principles of
+his mother. Mrs. Luna declared that if she must be trampled upon--and
+very likely it was her fate!--she would rather be trampled upon by men
+than by women, and that if Olive and her friends should get possession
+of the government they would be worse despots than those who were
+celebrated in history. Newton took an infant oath that he would never be
+a destructive, impious radical, and Olive felt that after this she
+needn't trouble herself any more about her sister, whom she simply
+committed to her fate. That fate might very properly be to marry an
+enemy of her country, a man who, no doubt, desired to treat women with
+the lash and manacles, as he and his people had formerly treated the
+wretched coloured race. If she was so fond of the fine old institutions
+of the past, he would supply them to her in abundance; and if she wanted
+so much to be a conservative, she could try first how she liked being a
+conservative's wife. If Olive troubled herself little about Adeline, she
+troubled herself more about Basil Ransom; she said to herself that since
+he hated women who respected themselves (and each other), destiny would
+use him rightly in hanging a person like Adeline round his neck. That
+would be the way poetic justice ought to work, for him--and the law that
+our prejudices, when they act themselves out, punish us in doing so.
+Olive considered all this, as it was her effort to consider everything,
+from a very high point of view, and ended by feeling sure it was not for
+the sake of any nervous personal security that she desired to see her
+two relations in New York get mixed up together. If such an event as
+their marriage would gratify her sense of fitness, it would be simply as
+an illustration of certain laws. Olive, thanks to the philosophic cast
+of her mind, was exceedingly fond of illustrations of laws.
+
+I hardly know, however, what illumination it was that sprang from her
+consciousness (now a source of considerable comfort) that Mrs. Farrinder
+was carrying the war into distant territories, and would return to
+Boston only in time to preside at a grand Female Convention, already
+advertised to take place in Boston in the month of June. It was
+agreeable to her that this imperial woman should be away; it made the
+field more free, the air more light; it suggested an exemption from
+official criticism. I have not taken space to mention certain episodes
+of the more recent intercourse of these ladies, and must content myself
+with tracing them, lightly, in their consequences. These may be summed
+up in the remark, which will doubtless startle no one by its freshness,
+that two imperial women are scarcely more likely to hit it off together,
+as the phrase is, than two imperial men. Since that party at Miss
+Birdseye's, so important in its results for Olive, she had had occasion
+to approach Mrs. Farrinder more nearly, and those overtures brought
+forth the knowledge that the great leader of the feminine revolution was
+the one person (in that part of the world) more concentrated, more
+determined, than herself. Miss Chancellor's aspirations, of late, had
+been immensely quickened; she had begun to believe in herself to a
+livelier tune than she had ever listened to before; and she now
+perceived that when spirit meets spirit there must either be mutual
+absorption or a sharp concussion. It had long been familiar to her that
+she should have to count with the obstinacy of the world at large, but
+she now discovered that she should have to count also with certain
+elements in the feminine camp. This complicated the problem, and such a
+complication, naturally, could not make Mrs. Farrinder appear more easy
+to assimilate. If Olive's was a high nature and so was hers, the fault
+was in neither; it was only an admonition that they were not needed as
+landmarks in the same part of the field. If such perceptions are
+delicate as between men, the reader need not be reminded of the
+exquisite form they may assume in natures more refined. So it was that
+Olive passed, in three months, from the stage of veneration to that of
+competition; and the process had been accelerated by the introduction of
+Verena into the fold. Mrs. Farrinder had behaved in the strangest way
+about Verena. First she had been struck with her, and then she hadn't;
+first she had seemed to want to take her in, then she had shied at her
+unmistakably--intimating to Olive that there were enough of that kind
+already. Of "that kind" indeed!--the phrase reverberated in Miss
+Chancellor's resentful soul. Was it possible she didn't know the kind
+Verena was of, and with what vulgar aspirants to notoriety did she
+confound her? It had been Olive's original desire to obtain Mrs.
+Farrinder's stamp for her _protegee_; she wished her to hold a
+commission from the commander-in-chief. With this view the two young
+women had made more than one pilgrimage to Roxbury, and on one of these
+occasions the sibylline mood (in its most charming form) had descended
+upon Verena. She had fallen into it, naturally and gracefully, in the
+course of talk, and poured out a stream of eloquence even more touching
+than her regular discourse at Miss Birdseye's. Mrs. Farrinder had taken
+it rather dryly, and certainly it didn't resemble her own style of
+oratory, remarkable and cogent as this was. There had been considerable
+question of her writing a letter to the New York _Tribune_, the effect
+of which should be to launch Miss Tarrant into renown; but this
+beneficent epistle never appeared, and now Olive saw that there was no
+favour to come from the prophetess of Roxbury. There had been
+primnesses, pruderies, small reserves, which ended by staying her pen.
+If Olive didn't say at once that she was jealous of Verena's more
+attractive manner, it was only because such a declaration was destined
+to produce more effect a little later. What she did say was that
+evidently Mrs. Farrinder wanted to keep the movement in her own
+hands--viewed with suspicion certain romantic, esthetic elements which
+Olive and Verena seemed to be trying to introduce into it. They insisted
+so much, for instance, on the historic unhappiness of women; but Mrs.
+Farrinder didn't appear to care anything for that, or indeed to know
+much about history at all. She seemed to begin just to-day, and she
+demanded their rights for them whether they were unhappy or not. The
+upshot of this was that Olive threw herself on Verena's neck with a
+movement which was half indignation, half rapture; she exclaimed that
+they would have to fight the battle without human help, but, after all,
+it was better so. If they were all in all to each other, what more could
+they want? They would be isolated, but they would be free; and this view
+of the situation brought with it a feeling that they had almost already
+begun to be a force. It was not, indeed, that Olive's resentment faded
+quite away; for not only had she the sense, doubtless very presumptuous,
+that Mrs. Farrinder was the only person thereabouts of a stature to
+judge her (a sufficient cause of antagonism in itself, for if we like to
+be praised by our betters we prefer that censure should come from the
+other sort), but the kind of opinion she had unexpectedly betrayed,
+after implying such esteem in the earlier phase of their intercourse,
+made Olive's cheeks occasionally flush. She prayed heaven that _she_
+might never become so personal, so narrow. She was frivolous, worldly,
+an amateur, a trifler, a frequenter of Beacon Street; her taking up
+Verena Tarrant was only a kind of elderly, ridiculous doll-dressing:
+this was the light in which Miss Chancellor had reason to believe that
+it now suited Mrs. Farrinder to regard her! It was fortunate, perhaps,
+that the misrepresentation was so gross; yet, none the less, tears of
+wrath rose more than once to Olive's eyes when she reflected that this
+particular wrong had been put upon her. Frivolous, worldly, Beacon
+Street! She appealed to Verena to share in her pledge that the world
+should know in due time how much of that sort of thing there was about
+her. As I have already hinted, Verena at such moments quite rose to the
+occasion; she had private pangs at committing herself to give the cold
+shoulder to Beacon Street for ever; but she was now so completely in
+Olive's hands that there was no sacrifice to which she would not have
+consented in order to prove that her benefactress was not frivolous.
+
+The matter of her coming to stay for so long in Charles Street was
+arranged during a visit that Selah Tarrant paid there at Miss
+Chancellor's request. This interview, which had some curious features,
+would be worth describing but I am forbidden to do more than mention the
+most striking of these. Olive wished to have an understanding with him;
+wished the situation to be clear, so that, disagreeable as it would be
+to her to receive him, she sent him a summons for a certain hour--an
+hour at which she had planned that Verena should be out of the house.
+She withheld this incident from the girl's knowledge, reflecting with
+some solemnity that it was the first deception (for Olive her silence
+was a deception) that she had yet practised on her friend, and wondering
+whether she should have to practise others in the future. She then and
+there made up her mind that she would not shrink from others should they
+be necessary. She notified Tarrant that she should keep Verena a long
+time, and Tarrant remarked that it was certainly very pleasant to see
+her so happily located. But he also intimated that he should like to
+know what Miss Chancellor laid out to do with her; and the tone of this
+suggestion made Olive feel how right she had been to foresee that their
+interview would have the stamp of business. It assumed that complexion
+very definitely when she crossed over to her desk and wrote Mr. Tarrant
+a cheque for a very considerable amount. "Leave us alone--entirely
+alone--for a year, and then I will write you another": it was with these
+words she handed him the little strip of paper that meant so much,
+feeling, as she did so, that surely Mrs. Farrinder herself could not be
+less amateurish than that. Selah looked at the cheque, at Miss
+Chancellor, at the cheque again, at the ceiling, at the floor, at the
+clock, and once more at his hostess; then the document disappeared
+beneath the folds of his waterproof, and she saw that he was putting it
+into some queer place on his queer person. "Well, if I didn't believe
+you were going to help her to develop," he remarked; and he stopped,
+while his hands continued to fumble, out of sight, and he treated Olive
+to his large joyless smile. She assured him that he need have no fear on
+that score; Verena's development was the thing in the world in which she
+took most interest; she should have every opportunity for a free
+expansion. "Yes, that's the great thing," Selah said; "it's more
+important than attracting a crowd. That's all we shall ask of you; let
+her act out her nature. Don't all the trouble of humanity come from our
+being pressed back? Don't shut down the cover, Miss Chancellor; just let
+her overflow!" And again Tarrant illuminated his inquiry, his metaphor,
+by the strange and silent lateral movement of his jaws. He added,
+presently, that he supposed he should have to fix it with Mis' Tarrant;
+but Olive made no answer to that; she only looked at him with a face in
+which she intended to express that there was nothing that need detain
+him longer. She knew it had been fixed with Mrs. Tarrant; she had been
+over all that with Verena, who had told her that her mother was willing
+to sacrifice her for her highest good. She had reason to know (not
+through Verena, of course) that Mrs. Tarrant had embraced, tenderly, the
+idea of a pecuniary compensation, and there was no fear of her making a
+scene when Tarrant should come back with a cheque in his pocket. "Well,
+I trust she _may_ develop, richly, and that you may accomplish what you
+desire; it seems as if we had only a little way to go further," that
+worthy observed, as he erected himself for departure.
+
+"It's not a little way; it's a very long way," Olive replied, rather
+sternly.
+
+Tarrant was on the threshold; he lingered a little, embarrassed by her
+grimness, for he himself had always inclined to rose-coloured views of
+progress, of the march of truth. He had never met any one so much in
+earnest as this definite, literal young woman, who had taken such an
+unhoped-for fancy to his daughter; whose longing for the new day had
+such perversities of pessimism, and who, in the midst of something that
+appeared to be terribly searching in her honesty, was willing to corrupt
+him, as a father, with the most extravagant orders on her bank. He
+hardly knew in what language to speak to her; it seemed as if there was
+nothing soothing enough, when a lady adopted that tone about a movement
+which was thought by some of the brightest to be so promising. "Oh,
+well, I guess there's some kind of mysterious law...." he murmured,
+almost timidly; and so he passed from Miss Chancellor's sight.
+
+
+
+
+XX
+
+
+She hoped she should not soon see him again, and there appeared to be no
+reason she should, if their intercourse was to be conducted by means of
+cheques. The understanding with Verena was, of course, complete; she had
+promised to stay with her friend as long as her friend should require
+it. She had said at first that she couldn't give up her mother, but she
+had been made to feel that there was no question of giving up. She
+should be as free as air, to go and come; she could spend hours and days
+with her mother, whenever Mrs. Tarrant required her attention; all that
+Olive asked of her was that, for the time, she should regard Charles
+Street as her home. There was no struggle about this, for the simple
+reason that by the time the question came to the front Verena was
+completely under the charm. The idea of Olive's charm will perhaps make
+the reader smile; but I use the word not in its derived, but in its
+literal sense. The fine web of authority, of dependence, that her
+strenuous companion had woven about her, was now as dense as a suit of
+golden mail; and Verena was thoroughly interested in their great
+undertaking; she saw it in the light of an active, enthusiastic faith.
+The benefit that her father desired for her was now assured; she
+expanded, developed, on the most liberal scale. Olive saw the
+difference, and you may imagine how she rejoiced in it; she had never
+known a greater pleasure. Verena's former attitude had been girlish
+submission, grateful, curious sympathy. She had given herself, in her
+young, amused surprise, because Olive's stronger will and the incisive
+proceedings with which she pointed her purpose drew her on. Besides, she
+was held by hospitality, the vision of new social horizons, the sense of
+novelty, and the love of change. But now the girl was disinterestedly
+attached to the precious things they were to do together; she cared
+about them for themselves, believed in them ardently, had them
+constantly in mind. Her share in the union of the two young women was no
+longer passive, purely appreciative; it was passionate, too, and it put
+forth a beautiful energy. If Olive desired to get Verena into training,
+she could flatter herself that the process had already begun, and that
+her colleague enjoyed it almost as much as she. Therefore she could say
+to herself, without the imputation of heartlessness, that when she left
+her mother it was for a noble, a sacred use. In point of fact, she left
+her very little, and she spent hours in jingling, aching, jostled
+journeys between Charles Street and the stale suburban cottage. Mrs.
+Tarrant sighed and grimaced, wrapped herself more than ever in her
+mantle, said she didn't know as she was fit to struggle alone, and that,
+half the time, if Verena was away, she wouldn't have the nerve to answer
+the door-bell; she was incapable, of course, of neglecting such an
+opportunity to posture as one who paid with her heart's blood for
+leading the van of human progress. But Verena had an inner sense (she
+judged her mother now, a little, for the first time) that she would be
+sorry to be taken at her word, and that she felt safe enough in trusting
+to her daughter's generosity. She could not divest herself of the
+faith--even now that Mrs. Luna was gone, leaving no trace, and the grey
+walls of a sedentary winter were apparently closing about the two young
+women--she could not renounce the theory that a residence in Charles
+Street must at least produce some contact with the brilliant classes.
+She was vexed at her daughter's resignation to not going to parties and
+to Miss Chancellor's not giving them; but it was nothing new for her to
+have to practise patience, and she could feel, at least, that it was
+just as handy for Mr. Burrage to call on the child in town, where he
+spent half his time, sleeping constantly at Parker's.
+
+It was a fact that this fortunate youth called very often, and Verena
+saw him with Olive's full concurrence whenever she was at home. It had
+now been quite agreed between them that no artificial limits should be
+set to the famous phase; and Olive had, while it lasted, a sense of real
+heroism in steeling herself against uneasiness. It seemed to her,
+moreover, only justice that she should make some concession; if Verena
+made a great sacrifice of filial duty in coming to live with her (this,
+of course, should be permanent--she would buy off the Tarrants from year
+to year), she must not incur the imputation (the world would judge her,
+in that case, ferociously) of keeping her from forming common social
+ties. The friendship of a young man and a young woman was, according to
+the pure code of New England, a common social tie; and as the weeks
+elapsed Miss Chancellor saw no reason to repent of her temerity. Verena
+was not falling in love; she felt that she should know it, should guess
+it on the spot. Verena was fond of human intercourse; she was
+essentially a sociable creature; she liked to shine and smile and talk
+and listen; and so far as Henry Burrage was concerned he introduced an
+element of easy and convenient relaxation into a life now a good deal
+stiffened (Olive was perfectly willing to own it) by great civic
+purposes. But the girl was being saved, without interference, by the
+simple operation of her interest in those very designs. From this time
+there was no need of putting pressure on her; her own springs were
+working; the fire with which she glowed came from within. Sacredly,
+brightly single she would remain; her only espousals would be at the
+altar of a great cause. Olive always absented herself when Mr. Burrage
+was announced; and when Verena afterwards attempted to give some account
+of his conversation she checked her, said she would rather know nothing
+about it--all with a very solemn mildness; this made her feel very
+superior, truly noble. She knew by this time (I scarcely can tell how,
+since Verena could give her no report) exactly what sort of a youth Mr.
+Burrage was: he was weakly pretentious, softly original, cultivated
+eccentricity, patronised progress, liked to have mysteries, sudden
+appointments to keep, anonymous persons to visit, the air of leading a
+double life, of being devoted to a girl whom people didn't know, or at
+least didn't meet. Of course he liked to make an impression on Verena;
+but what he mainly liked was to play her off upon the other girls, the
+daughters of fashion, with whom he danced at Papanti's. Such were the
+images that proceeded from Olive's rich moral consciousness. "Well, he
+_is_ greatly interested in our movement": so much Verena once managed to
+announce; but the words rather irritated Miss Chancellor, who, as we
+know, did not care to allow for accidental exceptions in the great
+masculine conspiracy.
+
+In the month of March Verena told her that Mr. Burrage was offering
+matrimony--offering it with much insistence, begging that she would at
+least wait and think of it before giving him a final answer. Verena was
+evidently very glad to be able to say to Olive that she had assured him
+she couldn't think of it, and that if he expected this he had better not
+come any more. He continued to come, and it was therefore to be supposed
+that he had ceased to count on such a concession; it was now Olive's
+opinion that he really didn't desire it. She had a theory that he
+proposed to almost any girl who was not likely to accept him--did it
+because he was making a collection of such episodes--a mental album of
+declarations, blushes, hesitations, refusals that just missed imposing
+themselves as acceptances, quite as he collected enamels and Cremona
+violins. He would be very sorry indeed to ally himself to the house of
+Tarrant; but such a fear didn't prevent him from holding it becoming in
+a man of taste to give that encouragement to low-born girls who were
+pretty, for one looked out for the special cases in which, for reasons
+(even the lowest might have reasons), they wouldn't "rise." "I told you
+I wouldn't marry him, and I won't," Verena said, delightedly, to her
+friend; her tone suggested that a certain credit belonged to her for the
+way she carried out her assurance. "I never thought you would, if you
+didn't want to," Olive replied to this; and Verena could have no
+rejoinder but the good-humour that sat in her eyes, unable as she was to
+say that she had wanted to. They had a little discussion, however, when
+she intimated that she pitied him for his discomfiture, Olive's
+contention being that, selfish, conceited, pampered and insincere, he
+might properly be left now to digest his affront. Miss Chancellor felt
+none of the remorse now that she would have felt six months before at
+standing in the way of such a chance for Verena, and she would have been
+very angry if any one had asked her if she were not afraid of taking too
+much upon herself. She would have said, moreover, that she stood in no
+one's way, and that even if she were not there Verena would never think
+seriously of a frivolous little man who fiddled while Rome was burning.
+This did not prevent Olive from making up her mind that they had better
+go to Europe in the spring; a year's residence in that quarter of the
+globe would be highly agreeable to Verena, and might even contribute to
+the evolution of her genius. It cost Miss Chancellor an effort to admit
+that any virtue still lingered in the elder world, and that it could
+have any important lesson for two such good Americans as her friend and
+herself; but it suited her just then to make this assumption, which was
+not altogether sincere. It was recommended by the idea that it would get
+her companion out of the way--out of the way of officious
+fellow-citizens--till she should be absolutely firm on her feet, and
+would also give greater intensity to their own long conversation. On
+that continent of strangers they would cleave more closely still to each
+other. This, of course, would be to fly before the inevitable "phase,"
+much more than to face it; but Olive decided that if they should reach
+unscathed the term of their delay (the first of July) she should have
+faced it as much as either justice or generosity demanded. I may as well
+say at once that she traversed most of this period without further
+serious alarms and with a great many little thrills of bliss and hope.
+
+Nothing happened to dissipate the good omens with which her partnership
+with Verena Tarrant was at present surrounded. They threw themselves
+into study; they had innumerable big books from the Athenaeum, and
+consumed the midnight oil. Henry Burrage, after Verena had shaken her
+head at him so sweetly and sadly, returned to New York, giving no sign;
+they only heard that he had taken refuge under the ruffled maternal
+wing. (Olive, at least, took for granted the wing was ruffled; she could
+fancy how Mrs. Burrage would be affected by the knowledge that her son
+had been refused by the daughter of a mesmeric healer. She would be
+almost as angry as if she had learnt that he had been accepted.)
+Matthias Pardon had not yet taken his revenge in the newspapers; he was
+perhaps nursing his thunderbolts; at any rate, now that the operatic
+season had begun, he was much occupied in interviewing the principal
+singers, one of whom he described in one of the leading journals (Olive,
+at least, was sure it was only he who could write like that) as "a dear
+little woman with baby dimples and kittenish movements." The Tarrants
+were apparently given up to a measure of sensual ease with which they
+had not hitherto been familiar, thanks to the increase of income that
+they drew from their eccentric protectress. Mrs. Tarrant now enjoyed the
+ministrations of a "girl"; it was partly her pride (at any rate, she
+chose to give it this turn) that her house had for many years been
+conducted without the element--so debasing on both sides--of servile,
+mercenary labour. She wrote to Olive (she was perpetually writing to her
+now, but Olive never answered) that she was conscious of having fallen
+to a lower plane, but she admitted that it was a prop to her wasted
+spirit to have some one to converse with when Selah was off. Verena, of
+course, perceived the difference, which was inadequately explained by
+the theory of a sudden increase of her father's practice (nothing of her
+father's had ever increased like that), and ended by guessing the cause
+of it--a discovery which did not in the least disturb her equanimity.
+She accepted the idea that her parents should receive a pecuniary
+tribute from the extraordinary friend whom she had encountered on the
+threshold of womanhood, just as she herself accepted that friend's
+irresistible hospitality. She had no worldly pride, no traditions of
+independence, no ideas of what was done and what was not done; but there
+was only one thing that equalled this perfectly gentle and natural
+insensibility to favours--namely, the inveteracy of her habit of not
+asking them. Olive had had an apprehension that she would flush a little
+at learning the terms on which they should now be able to pursue their
+career together; but Verena never changed colour; it was either not new
+or not disagreeable to her that the authors of her being should be
+bought off, silenced by money, treated as the troublesome of the lower
+orders are treated when they are not locked up; so that her friend had a
+perception, after this, that it would probably be impossible in any way
+ever to offend her. She was too rancourless, too detached from
+conventional standards, too free from private self-reference. It was too
+much to say of her that she forgave injuries, since she was not
+conscious of them; there was in forgiveness a certain arrogance of which
+she was incapable, and her bright mildness glided over the many traps
+that life sets for our consistency. Olive had always held that pride was
+necessary to character, but there was no peculiarity of Verena's that
+could make her spirit seem less pure. The added luxuries in the little
+house at Cambridge, which even with their help was still such a penal
+settlement, made her feel afresh that before she came to the rescue the
+daughter of that house had traversed a desert of sordid misery. She had
+cooked and washed and swept and stitched; she had worked harder than any
+of Miss Chancellor's servants. These things had left no trace upon her
+person or her mind; everything fresh and fair renewed itself in her with
+extraordinary facility, everything ugly and tiresome evaporated as soon
+as it touched her; but Olive deemed that, being what she was, she had a
+right to immense compensations. In the future she should have exceeding
+luxury and ease, and Miss Chancellor had no difficulty in persuading
+herself that persons doing the high intellectual and moral work to which
+the two young ladies in Charles Street were now committed owed it to
+themselves, owed it to the groaning sisterhood, to cultivate the best
+material conditions. She herself was nothing of a sybarite, and she had
+proved, visiting the alleys and slums of Boston in the service of the
+Associated Charities, that there was no foulness of disease or misery
+she feared to look in the face; but her house had always been thoroughly
+well regulated, she was passionately clean, and she was an excellent
+woman of business. Now, however, she elevated daintiness to a religion;
+her interior shone with superfluous friction, with punctuality, with
+winter roses. Among these soft influences Verena herself bloomed like
+the flower that attains such perfection in Boston. Olive had always
+rated high the native refinement of her country-women, their latent
+"adaptability," their talent for accommodating themselves at a glance to
+changed conditions; but the way her companion rose with the level of the
+civilisation that surrounded her, the way she assimilated all delicacies
+and absorbed all traditions, left this friendly theory halting behind.
+The winter days were still, indoors, in Charles Street, and the winter
+nights secure from interruption. Our two young women had plenty of
+duties, but Olive had never favoured the custom of running in and out.
+Much conference on social and reformatory topics went forward under her
+roof, and she received her colleagues--she belonged to twenty
+associations and committees--only at pre-appointed hours, which she
+expected them to observe rigidly. Verena's share in these proceedings
+was not active; she hovered over them, smiling, listening, dropping
+occasionally a fanciful though never an idle word, like some gently
+animated image placed there for good omen. It was understood that her
+part was before the scenes, not behind; that she was not a prompter, but
+(potentially, at least) a "popular favourite," and that the work over
+which Miss Chancellor presided so efficiently was a general preparation
+of the platform on which, later, her companion would execute the most
+striking steps.
+
+The western windows of Olive's drawing-room, looking over the water,
+took in the red sunsets of winter; the long, low bridge that crawled, on
+its staggering posts, across the Charles; the casual patches of ice and
+snow; the desolate suburban horizons, peeled and made bald by the rigour
+of the season; the general hard, cold void of the prospect; the
+extrusion, at Charlestown, at Cambridge, of a few chimneys and steeples,
+straight, sordid tubes of factories and engine-shops, or spare,
+heavenward finger of the New England meeting-house. There was something
+inexorable in the poverty of the scene, shameful in the meanness of its
+details, which gave a collective impression of boards and tin and frozen
+earth, sheds and rotting piles, railway-lines striding flat across a
+thoroughfare of puddles, and tracks of the humbler, the universal
+horse-car, traversing obliquely this path of danger; loose fences,
+vacant lots, mounds of refuse, yards bestrewn with iron pipes, telegraph
+poles, and bare wooden backs of places. Verena thought such a view
+lovely, and she was by no means without excuse when, as the afternoon
+closed, the ugly picture was tinted with a clear, cold rosiness. The
+air, in its windless chill, seemed to tinkle like a crystal, the
+faintest gradations of tone were perceptible in the sky, the west became
+deep and delicate, everything grew doubly distinct before taking on the
+dimness of evening. There were pink flushes on snow, "tender" reflexions
+in patches of stiffened marsh, sounds of car-bells, no longer vulgar,
+but almost silvery, on the long bridge, lonely outlines of distant dusky
+undulations against the fading glow. These agreeable effects used to
+light up that end of the drawing-room, and Olive often sat at the window
+with her companion before it was time for the lamp. They admired the
+sunsets, they rejoiced in the ruddy spots projected upon the
+parlour-wall, they followed the darkening perspective in fanciful
+excursions. They watched the stellar points come out at last in a colder
+heaven, and then, shuddering a little, arm in arm, they turned away,
+with a sense that the winter night was even more cruel than the tyranny
+of men--turned back to drawn curtains and a brighter fire and a
+glittering tea-tray and more and more talk about the long martyrdom of
+women, a subject as to which Olive was inexhaustible and really most
+interesting. There were some nights of deep snowfall, when Charles
+Street was white and muffled and the door-bell foredoomed to silence,
+which seemed little islands of lamp-light, of enlarged and intensified
+vision. They read a great deal of history together, and read it ever
+with the same thought--that of finding confirmation in it for this idea
+that their sex had suffered inexpressibly, and that at any moment in the
+course of human affairs the state of the world would have been so much
+less horrible (history seemed to them in every way horrible) if women
+had been able to press down the scale. Verena was full of suggestions
+which stimulated discussions; it was she, oftenest, who kept in view the
+fact that a good many women in the past had been entrusted with power
+and had not always used it amiably, who brought up the wicked queens,
+the profligate mistresses of kings. These ladies were easily disposed of
+between the two, and the public crimes of Bloody Mary, the private
+misdemeanours of Faustina, wife of the pure Marcus Aurelius, were very
+satisfactorily classified. If the influence of women in the past
+accounted for every act of virtue that men had happened to achieve, it
+only made the matter balance properly that the influence of men should
+explain the casual irregularities of the other sex. Olive could see how
+few books had passed through Verena's hands, and how little the home of
+the Tarrants had been a house of reading; but the girl now traversed the
+fields of literature with her characteristic lightness of step.
+Everything she turned to or took up became an illustration of the
+facility, the "giftedness," which Olive, who had so little of it, never
+ceased to wonder at and prize. Nothing frightened her; she always smiled
+at it, she could do anything she tried. As she knew how to do other
+things, she knew how to study; she read quickly and remembered
+infallibly; could repeat, days afterward, passages that she appeared
+only to have glanced at. Olive, of course, was more and more happy to
+think that their cause should have the services of an organisation so
+rare.
+
+All this doubtless sounds rather dry, and I hasten to add that our
+friends were not always shut up in Miss Chancellor's strenuous parlour.
+In spite of Olive's desire to keep her precious inmate to herself and to
+bend her attention upon their common studies, in spite of her constantly
+reminding Verena that this winter was to be purely educative and that
+the platitudes of the satisfied and unregenerate would have little to
+teach her, in spite, in short, of the severe and constant duality of our
+young women, it must not be supposed that their life had not many
+personal confluents and tributaries. Individual and original as Miss
+Chancellor was universally acknowledged to be, she was yet a typical
+Bostonian, and as a typical Bostonian she could not fail to belong in
+some degree to a "set." It had been said of her that she was in it but
+not of it; but she was of it enough to go occasionally into other houses
+and to receive their occupants in her own. It was her belief that she
+filled her tea-pot with the spoon of hospitality, and made a good many
+select spirits feel that they were welcome under her roof at convenient
+hours. She had a preference for what she called _real_ people, and there
+were several whose reality she had tested by arts known to herself. This
+little society was rather suburban and miscellaneous; it was prolific in
+ladies who trotted about, early and late, with books from the Athenaeum
+nursed behind their muff, or little nosegays of exquisite flowers that
+they were carrying as presents to each other. Verena, who, when Olive
+was not with her, indulged in a good deal of desultory contemplation at
+the window, saw them pass the house in Charles Street, always apparently
+straining a little, as if they might be too late for something. At
+almost any time, for she envied their preoccupation, she would have
+taken the chance with them. Very often, when she described them to her
+mother, Mrs. Tarrant didn't know who they were; there were even days
+(she had so many discouragements) when it seemed as if she didn't want
+to know. So long as they were not some one else, it seemed to be no use
+that they were themselves; whoever they were, they were sure to have
+that defect. Even after all her mother's disquisitions Verena had but
+vague ideas as to whom she would have liked them to be; and it was only
+when the girl talked of the concerts, to all of which Olive subscribed
+and conducted her inseparable friend, that Mrs. Tarrant appeared to feel
+in any degree that her daughter was living up to the standard formed for
+her in their Cambridge home. As all the world knows, the opportunities
+in Boston for hearing good music are numerous and excellent, and it had
+long been Miss Chancellor's practice to cultivate the best. She went in,
+as the phrase is, for the superior programmes, and that high, dim,
+dignified Music Hall, which has echoed in its time to so much eloquence
+and so much melody, and of which the very proportions and colour seem to
+teach respect and attention, shed the protection of its illuminated
+cornice, this winter, upon no faces more intelligently upturned than
+those of the young women for whom Bach and Beethoven only repeated, in a
+myriad forms, the idea that was always with them. Symphonies and fugues
+only stimulated their convictions, excited their revolutionary passion,
+led their imagination further in the direction in which it was always
+pressing. It lifted them to immeasurable heights; and as they sat
+looking at the great florid, sombre organ, overhanging the bronze statue
+of Beethoven, they felt that this was the only temple in which the
+votaries of their creed could worship.
+
+And yet their music was not their greatest joy, for they had two others
+which they cultivated at least as zealously. One of these was simply the
+society of old Miss Birdseye, of whom Olive saw more this winter than
+she had ever seen before. It had become apparent that her long and
+beautiful career was drawing to a close, her earnest, unremitting work
+was over, her old-fashioned weapons were broken and dull. Olive would
+have liked to hang them up as venerable relics of a patient fight, and
+this was what she seemed to do when she made the poor lady relate her
+battles--never glorious and brilliant, but obscure and wastefully
+heroic--call back the figures of her companions in arms, exhibit her
+medals and scars. Miss Birdseye knew that her uses were ended; she might
+pretend still to go about the business of unpopular causes, might fumble
+for papers in her immemorial satchel and think she had important
+appointments, might sign petitions, attend conventions, say to Doctor
+Prance that if she would only make her sleep she should live to see a
+great many improvements yet; she ached and was weary, growing almost as
+glad to look back (a great anomaly for Miss Birdseye) as to look
+forward. She let herself be coddled now by her friends of the new
+generation; there were days when she seemed to want nothing better than
+to sit by Olive's fire and ramble on about the old struggles, with a
+vague, comfortable sense--no physical rapture of Miss Birdseye's could
+be very acute--of immunity from wet feet, from the draughts that prevail
+at thin meetings, of independence of street-cars that would probably
+arrive overflowing; and also a pleased perception, not that she was an
+example to these fresh lives which began with more advantages than hers,
+but that she was in some degree an encouragement, as she helped them to
+measure the way the new truths had advanced--being able to tell them of
+such a different state of things when she was a young lady, the daughter
+of a very talented teacher (indeed her mother had been a teacher too),
+down in Connecticut. She had always had for Olive a kind of aroma of
+martyrdom, and her battered, unremunerated, un-pensioned old age brought
+angry tears, springing from depths of outraged theory, into Miss
+Chancellor's eyes. For Verena, too, she was a picturesque humanitary
+figure. Verena had been in the habit of meeting martyrs from her
+childhood up, but she had seen none with so many reminiscences as Miss
+Birdseye, or who had been so nearly scorched by penal fires. She had had
+escapes, in the early days of abolitionism, which it was a marvel she
+could tell with so little implication that she had shown courage. She
+had roamed through certain parts of the South, carrying the Bible to the
+slave; and more than one of her companions, in the course of these
+expeditions, had been tarred and feathered. She herself, at one season,
+had spent a month in a Georgian jail. She had preached temperance in
+Irish circles where the doctrine was received with missiles; she had
+interfered between wives and husbands mad with drink; she had taken
+filthy children, picked up in the street, to her own poor rooms, and had
+removed their pestilent rags and washed their sore bodies with slippery
+little hands. In her own person she appeared to Olive and Verena a
+representative of suffering humanity; the pity they felt for her was
+part of their pity for all who were weakest and most hardly used; and it
+struck Miss Chancellor (more especially) that this frumpy little
+missionary was the last link in a tradition, and that when she should be
+called away the heroic age of New England life--the age of plain living
+and high thinking, of pure ideals and earnest effort, of moral passion
+and noble experiment--would effectually be closed. It was the perennial
+freshness of Miss Birdseye's faith that had had such a contagion for
+these modern maidens, the unquenched flame of her transcendentalism, the
+simplicity of her vision, the way in which, in spite of mistakes,
+deceptions, the changing fashions of reform, which make the remedies of
+a previous generation look as ridiculous as their bonnets, the only
+thing that was still actual for her was the elevation of the species by
+the reading of Emerson and the frequentation of Tremont Temple. Olive
+had been active enough, for years, in the city-missions; she too had
+scoured dirty children, and, in squalid lodging-houses, had gone into
+rooms where the domestic situation was strained and the noises made the
+neighbours turn pale. But she reflected that after such exertions she
+had the refreshment of a pretty house, a drawing-room full of flowers, a
+crackling hearth, where she threw in pine-cones and made them snap, an
+imported tea-service, a Chickering piano, and the _Deutsche Rundschau_;
+whereas Miss Birdseye had only a bare, vulgar room, with a hideous
+flowered carpet (it looked like a dentist's), a cold furnace, the
+evening paper, and Doctor Prance. Olive and Verena were present at
+another of her gatherings before the winter ended; it resembled the
+occasion that we described at the beginning of this history, with the
+difference that Mrs. Farrinder was not there to oppress the company with
+her greatness, and that Verena made a speech without the co-operation of
+her father. This young lady had delivered herself with even finer effect
+than before, and Olive could see how much she had gained, in confidence
+and range of allusion, since the educative process in Charles Street
+began. Her _motif_ was now a kind of unprepared tribute to Miss
+Birdseye, the fruit of the occasion and of the unanimous tenderness of
+the younger members of the circle, which made her a willing mouthpiece.
+She pictured her laborious career, her early associates (Eliza P.
+Moseley was not neglected as Verena passed), her difficulties and
+dangers and triumphs, her humanising effect upon so many, her serene and
+honoured old age--expressed, in short, as one of the ladies said, just
+the very way they all felt about her. Verena's face brightened and grew
+triumphant as she spoke, but she brought tears into the eyes of most of
+the others. It was Olive's opinion that nothing could be more graceful
+and touching, and she saw that the impression made was now deeper than
+on the former evening. Miss Birdseye went about with her eighty years of
+innocence, her undiscriminating spectacles, asking her friends if it
+wasn't perfectly splendid; she took none of it to herself, she regarded
+it only as a brilliant expression of Verena's gift. Olive thought,
+afterwards, that if a collection could only be taken up on the spot, the
+good lady would be made easy for the rest of her days; then she
+remembered that most of her guests were as impecunious as herself.
+
+I have intimated that our young friends had a source of fortifying
+emotion which was distinct from the hours they spent with Beethoven and
+Bach, or in hearing Miss Birdseye describe Concord as it used to be.
+This consisted in the wonderful insight they had obtained into the
+history of feminine anguish. They perused that chapter perpetually and
+zealously, and they derived from it the purest part of their mission.
+Olive had pored over it so long, so earnestly, that she was now in
+complete possession of the subject; it was the one thing in life which
+she felt she had really mastered. She was able to exhibit it to Verena
+with the greatest authority and accuracy, to lead her up and down, in
+and out, through all the darkest and most tortuous passages. We know
+that she was without belief in her own eloquence, but she was very
+eloquent when she reminded Verena how the exquisite weakness of women
+had never been their defence, but had only exposed them to sufferings
+more acute than masculine grossness can conceive. Their odious partner
+had trampled upon them from the beginning of time, and their tenderness,
+their abnegation, had been his opportunity. All the bullied wives, the
+stricken mothers, the dishonoured, deserted maidens who have lived on
+the earth and longed to leave it, passed and repassed before her eyes,
+and the interminable dim procession seemed to stretch out a myriad hands
+to her. She sat with them at their trembling vigils, listened for the
+tread, the voice, at which they grew pale and sick, walked with them by
+the dark waters that offered to wash away misery and shame, took with
+them, even, when the vision grew intense, the last shuddering leap. She
+had analysed to an extraordinary fineness their susceptibility, their
+softness; she knew (or she thought she knew) all the possible tortures
+of anxiety, of suspense and dread; and she had made up her mind that it
+was women, in the end, who had paid for everything. In the last resort
+the whole burden of the human lot came upon them; it pressed upon them
+far more than on the others, the intolerable load of fate. It was they
+who sat cramped and chained to receive it; it was they who had done all
+the waiting and taken all the wounds. The sacrifices, the blood, the
+tears, the terrors were theirs. Their organism was in itself a challenge
+to suffering, and men had practised upon it with an impudence that knew
+no bounds. As they were the weakest most had been wrung from them, and
+as they were the most generous they had been most deceived. Olive
+Chancellor would have rested her case, had it been necessary, on those
+general facts; and her simple and comprehensive contention was that the
+peculiar wretchedness which had been the very essence of the feminine
+lot was a monstrous artificial imposition, crying aloud for redress. She
+was willing to admit that women, too, could be bad; that there were many
+about the world who were false, immoral, vile. But their errors were as
+nothing to their sufferings; they had expiated, in advance, an eternity,
+if need be, of misconduct. Olive poured forth these views to her
+listening and responsive friend; she presented them again and again, and
+there was no light in which they did not seem to palpitate with truth.
+Verena was immensely wrought upon; a subtle fire passed into her; she
+was not so hungry for revenge as Olive, but at the last, before they
+went to Europe (I shall take no place to describe the manner in which
+she threw herself into that project), she quite agreed with her
+companion that after so many ages of wrong (it would also be after the
+European journey) men must take _their_ turn, men must pay!
+
+
+
+
+BOOK SECOND
+
+
+
+
+XXI
+
+
+Basil Ransom lived in New York, rather far to the eastward, and in the
+upper reaches of the town; he occupied two small shabby rooms in a
+somewhat decayed mansion which stood next to the corner of the Second
+Avenue. The corner itself was formed by a considerable grocer's shop,
+the near neighbourhood of which was fatal to any pretensions Ransom and
+his fellow-lodgers might have had in regard to gentility of situation.
+The house had a red, rusty face, and faded green shutters, of which the
+slats were limp and at variance with each other. In one of the lower
+windows was suspended a fly-blown card, with the words "Table Board"
+affixed in letters cut (not very neatly) out of coloured paper, of
+graduated tints, and surrounded with a small band of stamped gilt. The
+two sides of the shop were protected by an immense pent-house shed,
+which projected over a greasy pavement and was supported by wooden posts
+fixed in the curbstone. Beneath it, on the dislocated flags, barrels and
+baskets were freely and picturesquely grouped; an open cellarway yawned
+beneath the feet of those who might pause to gaze too fondly on the
+savoury wares displayed in the window; a strong odour of smoked fish,
+combined with a fragrance of molasses, hung about the spot; the
+pavement, toward the gutters, was fringed with dirty panniers, heaped
+with potatoes, carrots, and onions; and a smart, bright waggon, with the
+horse detached from the shafts, drawn up on the edge of the abominable
+road (it contained holes and ruts a foot deep, and immemorial
+accumulations of stagnant mud), imparted an idle, rural, pastoral air to
+a scene otherwise perhaps expressive of a rank civilisation. The
+establishment was of the kind known to New Yorkers as a Dutch grocery;
+and red-faced, yellow-haired, bare-armed vendors might have been
+observed to lounge in the doorway. I mention it not on account of any
+particular influence it may have had on the life or the thoughts of
+Basil Ransom, but for old acquaintance sake and that of local colour;
+besides which, a figure is nothing without a setting, and our young man
+came and went every day, with rather an indifferent, unperceiving step,
+it is true, among the objects I have briefly designated. One of his
+rooms was directly above the street-door of the house; such a dormitory,
+when it is so exiguous, is called in the nomenclature of New York a
+"hall bedroom." The sitting-room, beside it, was slightly larger, and
+they both commanded a row of tenements no less degenerate than Ransom's
+own habitation--houses built forty years before, and already sere and
+superannuated. These were also painted red, and the bricks were
+accentuated by a white line; they were garnished, on the first floor,
+with balconies covered with small tin roofs, striped in different
+colours, and with an elaborate iron lattice-work, which gave them a
+repressive, cage-like appearance, and caused them slightly to resemble
+the little boxes for peeping unseen into the street, which are a feature
+of oriental towns. Such posts of observation commanded a view of the
+grocery on the corner, of the relaxed and disjointed roadway, enlivened
+at the curbstone with an occasional ash-barrel or with gas-lamps
+drooping from the perpendicular, and westward, at the end of the
+truncated vista, of the fantastic skeleton of the Elevated Railway,
+overhanging the transverse longitudinal street, which it darkened and
+smothered with the immeasurable spinal column and myriad clutching paws
+of an antediluvian monster. If the opportunity were not denied me here,
+I should like to give some account of Basil Ransom's interior, of
+certain curious persons of both sexes, for the most part not favourites
+of fortune, who had found an obscure asylum there; some picture of the
+crumpled little _table d'hote_, at two dollars and a half a week, where
+everything felt sticky, which went forward in the low-ceiled basement,
+under the conduct of a couple of shuffling negresses, who mingled in the
+conversation and indulged in low, mysterious chuckles when it took a
+facetious turn. But we need, in strictness, concern ourselves with it no
+further than to gather the implication that the young Mississippian,
+even a year and a half after that momentous visit of his to Boston, had
+not made his profession very lucrative.
+
+He had been diligent, he had been ambitious, but he had not yet been
+successful. During the few weeks preceding the moment at which we meet
+him again, he had even begun to lose faith altogether in his earthly
+destiny. It became much of a question with him whether success in any
+form was written there; whether for a hungry young Mississippian,
+without means, without friends, wanting, too, in the highest energy, the
+wisdom of the serpent, personal arts and national prestige, the game of
+life was to be won in New York. He had been on the point of giving it up
+and returning to the home of his ancestors, where, as he heard from his
+mother, there was still just a sufficient supply of hot corn-cake to
+support existence. He had never believed much in his luck, but during
+the last year it had been guilty of aberrations surprising even to a
+constant, an imperturbable, victim of fate. Not only had he not extended
+his connexion, but he had lost most of the little business which was an
+object of complacency to him a twelvemonth before. He had had none but
+small jobs, and he had made a mess of more than one of them. Such
+accidents had not had a happy effect upon his reputation; he had been
+able to perceive that this fair flower may be nipped when it is so
+tender a bud as scarcely to be palpable. He had formed a partnership
+with a person who seemed likely to repair some of his deficiencies--a
+young man from Rhode Island, acquainted, according to his own
+expression, with the inside track. But this gentleman himself, as it
+turned out, would have been better for a good deal of remodelling, and
+Ransom's principal deficiency, which was, after all, that of cash, was
+not less apparent to him after his colleague, prior to a sudden and
+unexplained departure for Europe, had drawn the slender accumulations of
+the firm out of the bank. Ransom sat for hours in his office, waiting
+for clients who either did not come, or, if they did come, did not seem
+to find him encouraging, as they usually left him with the remark that
+they would think what they would do. They thought to little purpose, and
+seldom reappeared, so that at last he began to wonder whether there were
+not a prejudice against his Southern complexion. Perhaps they didn't
+like the way he spoke. If they could show him a better way, he was
+willing to adopt it; but the manner of New York could not be acquired by
+precept, and example, somehow, was not in this case contagious. He
+wondered whether he were stupid and unskilled, and he was finally
+obliged to confess to himself that he was unpractical.
+
+This confession was in itself a proof of the fact, for nothing could be
+less fruitful than such a speculation, terminating in such a way. He was
+perfectly aware that he cared a great deal for the theory, and so his
+visitors must have thought when they found him, with one of his long
+legs twisted round the other, reading a volume of De Tocqueville. That
+was the land of reading he liked; he had thought a great deal about
+social and economical questions, forms of government and the happiness
+of peoples. The convictions he had arrived at were not such as mix
+gracefully with the time-honoured verities a young lawyer looking out
+for business is in the habit of taking for granted; but he had to
+reflect that these doctrines would probably not contribute any more to
+his prosperity in Mississippi than in New York. Indeed, he scarcely
+could think of the country where they would be a particular advantage to
+him. It came home to him that his opinions were stiff, whereas in
+comparison his effort was lax; and he accordingly began to wonder
+whether he might not make a living by his opinions. He had always had a
+desire for public life; to cause one's ideas to be embodied in national
+conduct appeared to him the highest form of human enjoyment. But there
+was little enough that was public in his solitary studies, and he asked
+himself what was the use of his having an office at all, and why he
+might not as well carry on his profession at the Astor Library, where,
+in his spare hours and on chance holidays, he did an immense deal of
+suggestive reading. He took copious notes and memoranda, and these
+things sometimes shaped themselves in a way that might possibly commend
+them to the editors of periodicals. Readers perhaps would come, if
+clients didn't; so he produced, with a great deal of labour,
+half-a-dozen articles, from which, when they were finished, it seemed to
+him that he had omitted all the points he wished most to make, and
+addressed them to the powers that preside over weekly and monthly
+publications. They were all declined with thanks, and he would have been
+forced to believe that the accent of his languid clime brought him luck
+as little under the pen as on the lips, had not another explanation been
+suggested by one of the more explicit of his oracles, in relation to a
+paper on the rights of minorities. This gentleman pointed out that his
+doctrines were about three hundred years behind the age; doubtless some
+magazine of the sixteenth century would have been very happy to print
+them. This threw light on his own suspicion that he was attached to
+causes that could only, in the nature of things, be unpopular. The
+disagreeable editor was right about his being out of date, only he had
+got the time wrong. He had come centuries too soon; he was not too old,
+but too new. Such an impression, however, would not have prevented him
+from going into politics, if there had been any other way to represent
+constituencies than by being elected. People might be found eccentric
+enough to vote for him in Mississippi, but meanwhile where should he
+find the twenty-dollar greenbacks which it was his ambition to transmit
+from time to time to his female relations, confined so constantly to a
+farinaceous diet? It came over him with some force that his opinions
+would not yield interest, and the evaporation of this pleasing
+hypothesis made him feel like a man in an open boat, at sea, who should
+just have parted with his last rag of canvas.
+
+I shall not attempt a complete description of Ransom's ill-starred
+views, being convinced that the reader will guess them as he goes, for
+they had a frolicsome, ingenious way of peeping out of the young man's
+conversation. I shall do them sufficient justice in saying that he was
+by natural disposition a good deal of a stoic, and that, as the result
+of a considerable intellectual experience, he was, in social and
+political matters, a reactionary. I suppose he was very conceited, for
+he was much addicted to judging his age. He thought it talkative,
+querulous, hysterical, maudlin, full of false ideas, of unhealthy germs,
+of extravagant, dissipated habits, for which a great reckoning was in
+store. He was an immense admirer of the late Thomas Carlyle, and was
+very suspicious of the encroachments of modern democracy. I know not
+exactly how these queer heresies had planted themselves, but he had a
+longish pedigree (it had flowered at one time with English royalists and
+cavaliers), and he seemed at moments to be inhabited by some transmitted
+spirit of a robust but narrow ancestor, some broad-faced wig-wearer or
+sword-bearer, with a more primitive conception of manhood than our
+modern temperament appears to require, and a programme of human felicity
+much less varied. He liked his pedigree, he revered his forefathers, and
+he rather pitied those who might come after him. In saying so, however,
+I betray him a little, for he never mentioned such feelings as these.
+Though he thought the age too talkative, as I have hinted, he liked to
+talk as well as any one; but he could hold his tongue, if that were more
+expressive, and he usually did so when his perplexities were greatest.
+He had been sitting for several evenings in a beer-cellar, smoking his
+pipe with a profundity of reticence. This attitude was so unbroken that
+it marked a crisis--the complete, the acute consciousness of his
+personal situation. It was the cheapest way he knew of spending an
+evening. At this particular establishment the _Schoppen_ were very tall
+and the beer was very good; and as the host and most of the guests were
+German, and their colloquial tongue was unknown to him, he was not drawn
+into any undue expenditure of speech. He watched his smoke and he
+thought, thought so hard that at last he appeared to himself to have
+exhausted the thinkable. When this moment of combined relief and dismay
+arrived (on the last of the evenings that we are concerned with), he
+took his way down Third Avenue and reached his humble dwelling. Till
+within a short time there had been a resource for him at such an hour
+and in such a mood; a little variety-actress, who lived in the house,
+and with whom he had established the most cordial relations, was often
+having her supper (she took it somewhere, every night, after the
+theatre) in the dim, close dining-room, and he used to drop in and talk
+to her. But she had lately married, to his great amusement, and her
+husband had taken her on a wedding-tour, which was to be at the same
+time professional. On this occasion he mounted, with rather a heavy
+tread, to his rooms, where (on the rickety writing-table in the parlour)
+he found a note from Mrs. Luna. I need not reproduce it _in extenso_; a
+pale reflexion of it will serve. She reproached him with neglecting her,
+wanted to know what had become of him, whether he had grown too
+fashionable for a person who cared only for serious society. She accused
+him of having changed, and inquired as to the reason of his coldness.
+Was it too much to ask whether he could tell her at least in what manner
+she had offended him? She used to think they were so much in
+sympathy--he expressed her own ideas about everything so vividly. She
+liked intellectual companionship, and she had none now. She hoped very
+much he would come and see her--as he used to do six months before--the
+following evening; and however much she might have sinned or he might
+have altered, she was at least always his affectionate cousin Adeline.
+
+"What the deuce does she want of me now?" It was with this somewhat
+ungracious exclamation that he tossed away his cousin Adeline's missive.
+The gesture might have indicated that he meant to take no notice of her;
+nevertheless, after a day had elapsed, he presented himself before her.
+He knew what she wanted of old--that is, a year ago; she had wanted him
+to look after her property and to be tutor to her son. He had lent
+himself, good-naturedly, to this desire--he was touched by so much
+confidence--but the experiment had speedily collapsed. Mrs. Luna's
+affairs were in the hands of trustees, who had complete care of them,
+and Ransom instantly perceived that his function would be simply to
+meddle in things that didn't concern him. The levity with which she had
+exposed him to the derision of the lawful guardians of her fortune
+opened his eyes to some of the dangers of cousinship; nevertheless he
+said to himself that he might turn an honest penny by giving an hour or
+two every day to the education of her little boy. But this, too, proved
+a brief illusion. Ransom had to find his time in the afternoon; he left
+his business at five o'clock and remained with his young kinsman till
+the hour of dinner. At the end of a few weeks he thought himself lucky
+in retiring without broken shins. That Newton's little nature was
+remarkable had often been insisted on by his mother; but it was
+remarkable, Ransom saw, for the absence of any of the qualities which
+attach a teacher to a pupil. He was in truth an insufferable child,
+entertaining for the Latin language a personal, physical hostility,
+which expressed itself in convulsions of rage. During these paroxysms he
+kicked furiously at every one and everything--at poor "Rannie," at his
+mother, at Messrs. Andrews and Stoddard, at the illustrious men of Rome,
+at the universe in general, to which, as he lay on his back on the
+carpet, he presented a pair of singularly active little heels. Mrs. Luna
+had a way of being present at his lessons, and when they passed, as
+sooner or later they were sure to, into the stage I have described, she
+interceded for her overwrought darling, reminded Ransom that these were
+the signs of an exquisite sensibility, begged that the child might be
+allowed to rest a little, and spent the remainder of the time in
+conversation with the preceptor. It came to seem to him, very soon, that
+he was not earning his fee; besides which, it was disagreeable to him to
+have pecuniary relations with a lady who had not the art of concealing
+from him that she liked to place him under obligations. He resigned his
+tutorship, and drew a long breath, having a vague feeling that he had
+escaped a danger. He could not have told you exactly what it was, and he
+had a certain sentimental, provincial respect for women which even
+prevented him from attempting to give a name to it in his own thoughts.
+He was addicted with the ladies to the old forms of address and of
+gallantry; he held that they were delicate, agreeable creatures, whom
+Providence had placed under the protection of the bearded sex; and it
+was not merely a humorous idea with him that whatever might be the
+defects of Southern gentlemen, they were at any rate remarkable for
+their chivalry. He was a man who still, in a slangy age, could pronounce
+that word with a perfectly serious face.
+
+This boldness did not prevent him from thinking that women were
+essentially inferior to men, and infinitely tiresome when they declined
+to accept the lot which men had made for them. He had the most definite
+notions about their place in nature, in society, and was perfectly easy
+in his mind as to whether it excluded them from any proper homage. The
+chivalrous man paid that tax with alacrity. He admitted their rights;
+these consisted in a standing claim to the generosity and tenderness of
+the stronger race. The exercise of such feelings was full of advantage
+for both sexes, and they flowed most freely, of course, when women were
+gracious and grateful. It may be said that he had a higher conception of
+politeness than most of the persons who desired the advent of female
+law-makers. When I have added that he hated to see women eager and
+argumentative, and thought that their softness and docility were the
+inspiration, the opportunity (the highest) of man, I shall have sketched
+a state of mind which will doubtless strike many readers as painfully
+crude. It had prevented Basil Ransom, at any rate, from putting the dots
+on his _i_'s, as the French say, in this gradual discovery that Mrs.
+Luna was making love to him. The process went on a long time before he
+became aware of it. He had perceived very soon that she was a
+tremendously familiar little woman--that she took, more rapidly than he
+had ever known, a high degree of intimacy for granted. But as she had
+seemed to him neither very fresh nor very beautiful, so he could not
+easily have represented to himself why she should take it into her head
+to marry (it would never have occurred to him to doubt that she wanted
+marriage) an obscure and penniless Mississippian, with womenkind of his
+own to provide for. He could not guess that he answered to a certain
+secret ideal of Mrs. Luna's, who loved the landed gentry even when
+landless, who adored a Southerner under any circumstances, who thought
+her kinsman a fine, manly, melancholy, disinterested type, and who was
+sure that her views of public matters, the questions of the age, the
+vulgar character of modern life, would meet with a perfect response in
+his mind. She could see by the way he talked that he was a conservative,
+and this was the motto inscribed upon her own silken banner. She took
+this unpopular line both by temperament and by reaction from her
+sister's "extreme" views, the sight of the dreadful people that they
+brought about her. In reality, Olive was distinguished and
+discriminating, and Adeline was the dupe of confusions in which the
+worse was apt to be mistaken for the better. She talked to Ransom about
+the inferiority of republics, the distressing persons she had met abroad
+in the legations of the United States, the bad manners of servants and
+shopkeepers in that country, the hope she entertained that "the good old
+families" would make a stand; but he never suspected that she cultivated
+these topics (her treatment of them struck him as highly comical) for
+the purpose of leading him to the altar, of beguiling the way. Least of
+all could he suppose that she would be indifferent to his want of
+income--a point in which he failed to do her justice; for, thinking the
+fact that he had remained poor a proof of delicacy in that shopkeeping
+age, it gave her much pleasure to reflect that, as Newton's little
+property was settled on him (with safeguards which showed how
+long-headed poor Mr. Luna had been, and large-hearted, too, since to
+what he left _her_ no disagreeable conditions, such as eternal mourning,
+for instance, were attached)--that as Newton, I say, enjoyed the
+pecuniary independence which befitted his character, her own income was
+ample even for two, and she might give herself the luxury of taking a
+husband who should owe her something. Basil Ransom did not divine all
+this, but he divined that it was not for nothing that Mrs. Luna wrote
+him little notes every other day, that she proposed to drive him in the
+Park at unnatural hours, and that when he said he had his business to
+attend to, she replied: "Oh, a plague on your business! I am sick of
+that word--one hears of nothing else in America. There are ways of
+getting on without business, if you would only take them!" He seldom
+answered her notes, and he disliked extremely the way in which, in spite
+of her love of form and order, she attempted to clamber in at the window
+of one's house when one had locked the door; so that he began to
+interspace his visits considerably, and at last made them very rare.
+When I reflect on his habits of almost superstitious politeness to
+women, it comes over me that some very strong motive must have operated
+to make him give his friendly--his only too friendly--cousin the cold
+shoulder. Nevertheless, when he received her reproachful letter (after
+it had had time to work a little), he said to himself that he had
+perhaps been unjust and even brutal, and as he was easily touched by
+remorse of this kind, he took up the broken thread.
+
+
+
+
+XXII
+
+
+As he sat with Mrs. Luna, in her little back drawing-room, under the
+lamp, he felt rather more tolerant than before of the pressure she could
+not help putting upon him. Several months had elapsed, and he was no
+nearer to the sort of success he had hoped for. It stole over him gently
+that there was another sort, pretty visibly open to him, not so elevated
+nor so manly, it is true, but on which he should after all, perhaps, be
+able to reconcile it with his honour to fall back. Mrs. Luna had had an
+inspiration; for once in her life she had held her tongue. She had not
+made him a scene, there had been no question of an explanation; she had
+received him as if he had been there the day before, with the addition
+of a spice of mysterious melancholy. She might have made up her mind
+that she had lost him as what she had hoped, but that it was better than
+desolation to try and keep him as a friend. It was as if she wished him
+to see now how she tried. She was subdued and consolatory, she waited
+upon him, moved away a screen that intercepted the fire, remarked that
+he looked very tired, and rang for some tea. She made no inquiry about
+his affairs, never asked if he had been busy and prosperous; and this
+reticence struck him as unexpectedly delicate and discreet; it was as if
+she had guessed, by a subtle feminine faculty, that his professional
+career was nothing to boast of. There was a simplicity in him which
+permitted him to wonder whether she had not improved. The lamp-light was
+soft, the fire crackled pleasantly, everything that surrounded him
+betrayed a woman's taste and touch; the place was decorated and
+cushioned in perfection, delightfully private and personal, the picture
+of a well-appointed home. Mrs. Luna had complained of the difficulties
+of installing one's self in America, but Ransom remembered that he had
+received an impression similar to this in her sister's house in Boston,
+and reflected that these ladies had, as a family-trait, the art of
+making themselves comfortable. It was better for a winter's evening than
+the German beer-cellar (Mrs. Luna's tea was excellent), and his hostess
+herself appeared to-night almost as amiable as the variety-actress. At
+the end of an hour he felt, I will not say almost marriageable, but
+almost married. Images of leisure played before him, leisure in which he
+saw himself covering foolscap paper with his views on several subjects,
+and with favourable illustrations of Southern eloquence. It became
+tolerably vivid to him that if editors wouldn't print one's
+lucubrations, it would be a comfort to feel that one was able to publish
+them at one's own expense.
+
+He had a moment of almost complete illusion. Mrs. Luna had taken up her
+bit of crochet; she was sitting opposite to him, on the other side of
+the fire. Her white hands moved with little jerks as she took her
+stitches, and her rings flashed and twinkled in the light of the hearth.
+Her head fell a little to one side, exhibiting the plumpness of her chin
+and neck, and her dropped eyes (it gave her a little modest air) rested
+quietly on her work. A silence of a few moments had fallen upon their
+talk, and Adeline--who decidedly _had_ improved--appeared also to feel
+the charm of it, not to wish to break it. Basil Ransom was conscious of
+all this, and at the same time he was vaguely engaged in a speculation.
+If it gave one time, if it gave one leisure, was not that in itself a
+high motive? Thorough study of the question he cared for most--was not
+the chance for _that_ an infinitely desirable good? He seemed to see
+himself, to feel himself, in that very chair, in the evenings of the
+future, reading some indispensable book in the still lamp-light--Mrs.
+Luna knew where to get such pretty mellowing shades. Should he not be
+able to act in that way upon the public opinion of his time, to check
+certain tendencies, to point out certain dangers, to indulge in much
+salutary criticism? Was it not one's duty to put one's self in the best
+conditions for such action? And as the silence continued he almost fell
+to musing on his duty, almost persuaded himself that the moral law
+commanded him to marry Mrs. Luna. She looked up presently from her work,
+their eyes met, and she smiled. He might have believed she had guessed
+what he was thinking of. This idea startled him, alarmed him a little,
+so that when Mrs. Luna said, with her sociable manner, "There is nothing
+I like so much, of a winter's night, as a cosy _tete-a-tete_ by the
+fire. It's quite like Darby and Joan; what a pity the kettle has ceased
+singing!"--when she uttered these insinuating words he gave himself a
+little imperceptible shake, which was, however, enough to break the
+spell, and made no response more direct than to ask her, in a moment, in
+a tone of cold, mild curiosity, whether she had lately heard from her
+sister, and how long Miss Chancellor intended to remain in Europe.
+
+"Well, you _have_ been living in your hole!" Mrs. Luna exclaimed. "Olive
+came home six weeks ago. How long did you expect her to endure it?"
+
+"I am sure I don't know; I have never been there," Ransom replied.
+
+"Yes, that's what I like you for," Mrs. Luna remarked sweetly. "If a man
+is nice without it, it's such a pleasant change."
+
+The young man started, then gave a natural laugh. "Lord, how few reasons
+there must be!"
+
+"Oh, I mention that one because I can tell it. I shouldn't care to tell
+the others."
+
+"I am glad you have some to fall back upon, the day I should go," Ransom
+went on. "I thought you thought so much of Europe."
+
+"So I do; but it isn't everything," said Mrs. Luna philosophically. "You
+had better go there with me," she added, with a certain inconsequence.
+
+"One would go to the end of the world with so irresistible a lady!"
+Ransom exclaimed, falling into the tone which Mrs. Luna always found so
+unsatisfactory. It was a part of his Southern gallantry--his accent
+always came out strongly when he said anything of that sort--and it
+committed him to nothing in particular. She had had occasion to wish,
+more than once, that he wouldn't be so beastly polite, as she used to
+hear people say in England. She answered that she didn't care about
+ends, she cared about beginnings; but he didn't take up the declaration;
+he returned to the subject of Olive, wanted to know what she had done
+over there, whether she had worked them up much.
+
+"Oh, of course, she fascinated every one," said Mrs. Luna. "With her
+grace and beauty, her general style, how could she help that?"
+
+"But did she bring them round, did she swell the host that is prepared
+to march under her banner?"
+
+"I suppose she saw plenty of the strong-minded, plenty of vicious old
+maids, and fanatics, and frumps. But I haven't the least idea what she
+accomplished--what they call 'wonders,' I suppose."
+
+"Didn't you see her when she returned?" Basil Ransom asked.
+
+"How could I see her? I can see pretty far, but I can't see all the way
+to Boston." And then, in explaining that it was at this port that her
+sister had disembarked, Mrs. Luna further inquired whether he could
+imagine Olive doing anything in a first-rate way, as long as there were
+inferior ones. "Of course she likes bad ships--Boston steamers--just as
+she likes common people, and red-haired hoydens, and preposterous
+doctrines."
+
+Ransom was silent a moment. "Do you mean the--a--rather striking young
+lady whom I met in Boston a year ago last October? What was her
+name?--Miss Tarrant? Does Miss Chancellor like her as much as ever?"
+
+"Mercy! don't you know she took her to Europe? It was to form _her_ mind
+she went. Didn't I tell you that last summer? You used to come to see me
+then."
+
+"Oh yes, I remember," Ransom said, rather musingly. "And did she bring
+her back?"
+
+"Gracious, you don't suppose she would leave her! Olive thinks she's
+born to regenerate the world."
+
+"I remember you telling me that, too. It comes back to me. Well, is her
+mind formed?"
+
+"As I haven't seen it, I cannot tell you."
+
+"Aren't you going on there to see----"
+
+"To see whether Miss Tarrant's mind is formed?" Mrs. Luna broke in. "I
+will go if you would like me to. I remember your being immensely excited
+about her that time you met her. Don't you recollect that?"
+
+Ransom hesitated an instant. "I can't say I do. It is too long ago."
+
+"Yes, I have no doubt that's the way you change, about women! Poor Miss
+Tarrant, if she thinks she made an impression on you!"
+
+"She won't think about such things as that, if her mind has been formed
+by your sister," Ransom said. "It does come back to me now, what you
+told me about the growth of their intimacy. And do they mean to go on
+living together for ever?"
+
+"I suppose so--unless some one should take it into his head to marry
+Verena."
+
+"Verena--is that her name?" Ransom asked.
+
+Mrs. Luna looked at him with a suspended needle. "Well! have you
+forgotten that too? You told me yourself you thought it so pretty, that
+time in Boston, when you walked me up the hill." Ransom declared that he
+remembered that walk, but didn't remember everything he had said to her;
+and she suggested, very satirically, that perhaps he would like to marry
+Verena himself--he seemed so interested in her. Ransom shook his head
+sadly, and said he was afraid he was not in a position to marry;
+whereupon Mrs. Luna asked him what he meant--did he mean (after a
+moment's hesitation) that he was too poor?
+
+"Never in the world--I am very rich; I make an enormous income!" the
+young man exclaimed; so that, remarking his tone, and the slight flush
+of annoyance that rose to his face, Mrs. Luna was quick enough to judge
+that she had overstepped the mark. She remembered (she ought to have
+remembered before) that he had never taken her in the least into his
+confidence about his affairs. That was not the Southern way, and he was
+at least as proud as he was poor. In this surmise she was just; Basil
+Ransom would have despised himself if he had been capable of confessing
+to a woman that he couldn't make a living. Such questions were none of
+their business (their business was simply to be provided for, practise
+the domestic virtues, and be charmingly grateful), and there was, to his
+sense, something almost indecent in talking about them. Mrs. Luna felt
+doubly sorry for him as she perceived that he denied himself the luxury
+of sympathy (that is, of hers), and the vague but comprehensive sigh
+that passed her lips as she took up her crochet again was unusually
+expressive of helplessness. She said that of course she knew how great
+his talents were--he could do anything he wanted; and Basil Ransom
+wondered for a moment whether, if she were to ask him point-blank to
+marry her, it would be consistent with the high courtesy of a Southern
+gentleman to refuse. After she should be his wife he might of course
+confess to her that he was too poor to marry, for in that relation even
+a Southern gentleman of the highest tone must sometimes unbend. But he
+didn't in the least long for this arrangement, and was conscious that
+the most pertinent sequel to her conjecture would be for him to take up
+his hat and walk away.
+
+Within five minutes, however, he had come to desire to do this almost as
+little as to marry Mrs. Luna. He wanted to hear more about the girl who
+lived with Olive Chancellor. Something had revived in him--an old
+curiosity, an image half effaced--when he learned that she had come back
+to America. He had taken a wrong impression from what Mrs. Luna said,
+nearly a year before, about her sister's visit to Europe; he had
+supposed it was to be a long absence, that Miss Chancellor wanted
+perhaps to get the little prophetess away from her parents, possibly
+even away from some amorous entanglement. Then, no doubt, they wanted to
+study up the woman-question with the facilities that Europe would offer;
+he didn't know much about Europe, but he had an idea that it was a great
+place for facilities. His knowledge of Miss Chancellor's departure,
+accompanied by her young companion, had checked at the time, on Ransom's
+part, a certain habit of idle but none the less entertaining retrospect.
+His life, on the whole, had not been rich in episode, and that little
+chapter of his visit to his queer, clever, capricious cousin, with his
+evening at Miss Birdseye's, and his glimpse, repeated on the morrow, of
+the strange, beautiful, ridiculous, red-haired young _improvisatrice_,
+unrolled itself in his memory like a page of interesting fiction. The
+page seemed to fade, however, when he heard that the two girls had gone,
+for an indefinite time, to unknown lands; this carried them out of his
+range, spoiled the perspective, diminished their actuality; so that for
+several months past, with his increase of anxiety about his own affairs,
+and the low pitch of his spirits, he had not thought at all about Verena
+Tarrant. The fact that she was once more in Boston, with a certain
+contiguity that it seemed to imply between Boston and New York,
+presented itself now as important and agreeable. He was conscious that
+this was rather an anomaly, and his consciousness made him, had already
+made him, dissimulate slightly. He did not pick up his hat to go; he sat
+in his chair taking his chance of the tax which Mrs. Luna might lay upon
+his urbanity. He remembered that he had not made, as yet, any very eager
+inquiry about Newton, who at this late hour had succumbed to the only
+influence that tames the untamable and was sleeping the sleep of
+childhood, if not of innocence. Ransom repaired his neglect in a manner
+which elicited the most copious response from his hostess. The boy had
+had a good many tutors since Ransom gave him up, and it could not be
+said that his education languished. Mrs. Luna spoke with pride of the
+manner in which he went through them; if he did not master his lessons,
+he mastered his teachers, and she had the happy conviction that she gave
+him every advantage. Ransom's delay was diplomatic, but at the end of
+ten minutes he returned to the young ladies in Boston; he asked why,
+with their aggressive programme, one hadn't begun to feel their onset,
+why the echoes of Miss Tarrant's eloquence hadn't reached his ears.
+Hadn't she come out yet in public? was she not coming to stir them up in
+New York? He hoped she hadn't broken down.
+
+"She didn't seem to break down last summer, at the Female Convention,"
+Mrs. Luna replied. "Have you forgotten that too? Didn't I tell you of
+the sensation she produced there, and of what I heard from Boston about
+it? Do you mean to say I didn't give you that "Transcript," with the
+report of her great speech? It was just before they sailed for Europe;
+she went off with flying colours, in a blaze of fireworks." Ransom
+protested that he had not heard this affair mentioned till that moment,
+and then, when they compared dates, they found it had taken place just
+after his last visit to Mrs. Luna. This, of course, gave her a chance to
+say that he had treated her even worse than she supposed; it had been
+her impression, at any rate, that they had talked together about
+Verena's sudden bound into fame. Apparently she confounded him with some
+one else, that was very possible; he was not to suppose that he occupied
+such a distinct place in her mind, especially when she might die twenty
+deaths before he came near her. Ransom demurred to the implication that
+Miss Tarrant was famous; if she were famous, wouldn't she be in the New
+York papers? He hadn't seen her there, and he had no recollection of
+having encountered any mention at the time (last June, was it?) of her
+exploits at the Female Convention. A local reputation doubtless she had,
+but that had been the case a year and a half before, and what was
+expected of her then was to become a first-class national glory. He was
+willing to believe that she had created some excitement in Boston, but
+he shouldn't attach much importance to that till one began to see her
+photograph in the stores. Of course, one must give her time, but he had
+supposed Miss Chancellor was going to put her through faster.
+
+If he had taken a contradictious tone on purpose to draw Mrs. Luna out,
+he could not have elicited more of the information he desired. It was
+perfectly true that he had seen no reference to Verena's performances in
+the preceding June; there were periods when the newspapers seemed to him
+so idiotic that for weeks he never looked at one. He learned from Mrs.
+Luna that it was not Olive who had sent her the "Transcript" and in
+letters had added some private account of the doings at the convention
+to the testimony of that amiable sheet; she had been indebted for this
+service to a "gentleman-friend," who wrote her everything that happened
+in Boston, and what every one had every day for dinner. Not that it was
+necessary for her happiness to know; but the gentleman she spoke of
+didn't know what to invent to please her. A Bostonian couldn't imagine
+that one didn't want to know, and that was their idea of ingratiating
+themselves, or, at any rate, it was his, poor man. Olive would never
+have gone into particulars about Verena; she regarded her sister as
+quite too much one of the profane, and knew Adeline couldn't understand
+why, when she took to herself a bosom-friend, she should have been at
+such pains to select her in just the most dreadful class in the
+community. Verena was a perfect little adventuress, and quite third-rate
+into the bargain; but, of course, she was a pretty girl enough, if one
+cared for hair of the colour of cochineal. As for her people, they were
+too absolutely awful; it was exactly as if she, Mrs. Luna, had struck up
+an intimacy with the daughter of her chiropodist. It took Olive to
+invent such monstrosities, and to think she was doing something great
+for humanity when she did so; though, in spite of her wanting to turn
+everything over, and put the lowest highest, she could be just as
+contemptuous and invidious, when it came to really mixing, as if she
+were some grand old duchess. She must do her the justice to say that she
+hated the Tarrants, the father and mother; but, all the same, she let
+Verena run to and fro between Charles Street and the horrible hole they
+lived in, and Adeline knew from that gentleman who wrote so copiously
+that the girl now and then spent a week at a time at Cambridge. Her
+mother, who had been ill for some weeks, wanted her to sleep there. Mrs.
+Luna knew further, by her correspondent, that Verena had--or had had the
+winter before--a great deal of attention from gentlemen. She didn't know
+how she worked that into the idea that the female sex was sufficient to
+itself; but she had grounds for saying that this was one reason why
+Olive had taken her abroad. She was afraid Verena would give in to some
+man, and she wanted to make a break. Of course, any such giving in would
+be very awkward for a young woman who shrieked out on platforms that old
+maids were the highest type. Adeline guessed Olive had perfect control
+of her now, unless indeed she used the expeditions to Cambridge as a
+cover for meeting gentlemen. She was an artful little minx, and cared as
+much for the rights of women as she did for the Panama Canal; the only
+right of a woman she wanted was to climb up on top of something, where
+the men could look at her. She would stay with Olive as long as it
+served her purpose, because Olive, with her great respectability, could
+push her, and counteract the effect of her low relations, to say nothing
+of paying all her expenses and taking her the tour of Europe. "But, mark
+my words," said Mrs. Luna, "she will give Olive the greatest cut she has
+ever had in her life. She will run off with some lion-tamer; she will
+marry a circus-man!" And Mrs. Luna added that it would serve Olive
+Chancellor right. But she would take it hard; look out for tantrums
+then!
+
+Basil Ransom's emotions were peculiar while his hostess delivered
+herself, in a manner at once casual and emphatic, of these rather
+insidious remarks. He took them all in, for they represented to him
+certain very interesting facts; but he perceived at the same time that
+Mrs. Luna didn't know what she was talking about. He had seen Verena
+Tarrant only twice in his life, but it was no use telling him that she
+was an adventuress--though, certainly, it _was_ very likely she would
+end by giving Miss Chancellor a cut. He chuckled, with a certain
+grimness, as this image passed before him; it was not unpleasing, the
+idea that he should be avenged (for it would avenge him to know it) upon
+the wanton young woman who had invited him to come and see her in order
+simply to slap his face. But he had an odd sense of having lost
+something in not knowing of the other girl's appearance at the Women's
+Convention--a vague feeling that he had been cheated and trifled with.
+The complaint was idle, inasmuch as it was not probable he could have
+gone to Boston to listen to her; but it represented to him that he had
+not shared, even dimly and remotely, in an event which concerned her
+very closely. Why should he share, and what was more natural than that
+the things which concerned her closely should not concern him at all?
+This question came to him only as he walked home that evening; for the
+moment it remained quite in abeyance: therefore he was free to feel also
+that his imagination had been rather starved by his ignorance of the
+fact that she was near him again (comparatively), that she was in the
+dimness of the horizon (no longer beyond the curve of the globe), and
+yet he had not perceived it. This sense of personal loss, as I have
+called it, made him feel, further, that he had something to make up, to
+recover. He could scarcely have told you how he would go about it; but
+the idea, formless though it was, led him in a direction very different
+from the one he had been following a quarter of an hour before. As he
+watched it dance before him he fell into another silence, in the midst
+of which Mrs. Luna gave him another mystic smile. The effect of it was
+to make him rise to his feet; the whole landscape of his mind had
+suddenly been illuminated. Decidedly, it was _not_ his duty to marry
+Mrs. Luna, in order to have means to pursue his studies; he jerked
+himself back, as if he had been on the point of it.
+
+"You don't mean to say you are going already? I haven't said half I
+wanted to!" she exclaimed.
+
+He glanced at the clock, saw it was not yet late, took a turn about the
+room, then sat down again in a different place, while she followed him
+with her eyes, wondering what was the matter with him. Ransom took good
+care not to ask her what it was she had still to say, and perhaps it was
+to prevent her telling him that he now began to talk, freely, quickly,
+in quite a new tone. He stayed half an hour longer, and made himself
+very agreeable. It seemed to Mrs. Luna now that he had every distinction
+(she had known he had most), that he was really a charming man. He
+abounded in conversation, till at last he took up his hat in earnest; he
+talked about the state of the South, its social peculiarities, the ruin
+wrought by the war, the dilapidated gentry, the queer types of
+superannuated fire-eaters, ragged and unreconciled, all the pathos and
+all the comedy of it, making her laugh at one moment, almost cry at
+another, and say to herself throughout that when he took it into his
+head there was no one who could make a lady's evening pass so
+pleasantly. It was only afterwards that she asked herself why he had not
+taken it into his head till the last, so quickly. She delighted in the
+dilapidated gentry; her taste was completely different from her
+sister's, who took an interest only in the lower class, as it struggled
+to rise; what Adeline cared for was the fallen aristocracy (it seemed to
+be falling everywhere very much; was not Basil Ransom an example of it?
+was he not like a French _gentilhomme de province_ after the Revolution?
+or an old monarchical _emigre_ from the Languedoc?), the despoiled
+patriciate, I say, whose attitude was noble and touching, and toward
+whom one might exercise a charity as discreet as their pride was
+sensitive. In all Mrs. Luna's visions of herself, her discretion was the
+leading feature. "Are you going to let ten years elapse again before you
+come?" she asked, as Basil Ransom bade her good-night. "You must let me
+know, because between this and your next visit I shall have time to go
+to Europe and come back. I shall take care to arrive the day before."
+
+Instead of answering this sally, Ransom said, "Are you not going one of
+these days to Boston? Are you not going to pay your sister another
+visit?"
+
+Mrs. Luna stared. "What good will that do _you_? Excuse my stupidity,"
+she added; "of course, it gets me away. Thank you very much!"
+
+"I don't want you to go away; but I want to hear more about Miss Olive."
+
+"Why in the world? You know you loathe her!" Here, before Ransom could
+reply, Mrs. Luna again overtook herself. "I verily believe that by Miss
+Olive you mean Miss Verena!" Her eyes charged him a moment with this
+perverse intention; then she exclaimed, "Basil Ransom, _are_ you in love
+with that creature?"
+
+He gave a perfectly natural laugh, not pleading guilty, in order to
+practise on Mrs. Luna, but expressing the simple state of the case. "How
+should I be? I have seen her but twice in my life."
+
+"If you had seen her more, I shouldn't be afraid! Fancy your wanting to
+pack me off to Boston!" his hostess went on. "I am in no hurry to stay
+with Olive again; besides, that girl takes up the whole house. You had
+better go there yourself."
+
+"I should like nothing better," said Ransom.
+
+"Perhaps you would like me to ask Verena to spend a month with me--it
+might be a way of attracting you to the house," Adeline went on, in the
+tone of exuberant provocation.
+
+Ransom was on the point of replying that it would be a better way than
+any other, but he checked himself in time; he had never yet, even in
+joke, made so crude, so rude a speech to a lady. You only knew when he
+was joking with women by his super-added civility. "I beg you to believe
+there is nothing I would do for any woman in the world that I wouldn't
+do for you," he said, bending, for the last time, over Mrs. Luna's plump
+hand.
+
+"I shall remember that and keep you up to it!" she cried after him, as
+he went. But even with this rather lively exchange of vows he felt that
+he had got off rather easily. He walked slowly up Fifth Avenue, into
+which, out of Adeline's cross-street, he had turned, by the light of a
+fine winter moon; and at every corner he stopped a minute, lingered in
+meditation, while he exhaled a soft, vague sigh. This was an
+unconscious, involuntary expression of relief, such as a man might utter
+who had seen himself on the point of being run over and yet felt that he
+was whole. He didn't trouble himself much to ask what had saved him;
+whatever it was it had produced a reaction, so that he felt rather
+ashamed of having found his look-out of late so blank. By the time he
+reached his lodgings, his ambition, his resolution, had rekindled; he
+had remembered that he formerly supposed he was a man of ability, that
+nothing particular had occurred to make him doubt it (the evidence was
+only negative, not positive), and that at any rate he was young enough
+to have another try. He whistled that night as he went to bed.
+
+
+
+
+XXIII
+
+
+Three weeks afterward he stood in front of Olive Chancellor's house,
+looking up and down the street and hesitating. He had told Mrs. Luna
+that he should like nothing better than to make another journey to
+Boston; and it was not simply because he liked it that he had come. I
+was on the point of saying that a happy chance had favoured him, but it
+occurs to me that one is under no obligation to call chances by
+nattering epithets when they have been waited for so long. At any rate,
+the darkest hour is before the dawn; and a few days after that
+melancholy evening I have described, which Ransom spent in his German
+beer-cellar, before a single glass, soon emptied, staring at his future
+with an unremunerated eye, he found that the world appeared to have need
+of him yet. The "party," as he would have said (I cannot pretend that
+his speech was too heroic for that), for whom he had transacted business
+in Boston so many months before, and who had expressed at the time but a
+limited appreciation of his services (there had been between the lawyer
+and his client a divergence of judgement), observing, apparently, that
+they proved more fruitful than he expected, had reopened the affair and
+presently requested Ransom to transport himself again to the sister
+city. His errand demanded more time than before, and for three days he
+gave it his constant attention. On the fourth he found he was still
+detained; he should have to wait till the evening--some important papers
+were to be prepared. He determined to treat the interval as a holiday,
+and he wondered what one could do in Boston to give one's morning a
+festive complexion. The weather was brilliant enough to minister to any
+illusion, and he strolled along the streets, taking it in. In front of
+the Music Hall and of Tremont Temple he stopped, looking at the posters
+in the doorway; for was it not possible that Miss Chancellor's little
+friend might be just then addressing her fellow-citizens? Her name was
+absent, however, and this resource seemed to mock him. He knew no one in
+the place but Olive Chancellor, so there was no question of a visit to
+pay. He was perfectly resolved that he would never go near _her_ again;
+she was doubtless a very superior being, but she had been too rough with
+him to tempt him further. Politeness, even a largely-interpreted
+"chivalry", required nothing more than he had already done; he had
+quitted her, the other year, without telling her that she was a vixen,
+and that reticence was chivalrous enough. There was also Verena Tarrant,
+of course; he saw no reason to dissemble when he spoke of her to
+himself, and he allowed himself the entertainment of feeling that he
+should like very much to see her again. Very likely she wouldn't seem to
+him the same; the impression she had made upon him was due to some
+accident of mood or circumstance; and, at any rate, any charm she might
+have exhibited then had probably been obliterated by the coarsening
+effect of publicity and the tonic influence of his kinswoman. It will be
+observed that in this reasoning of Basil Ransom's the impression was
+freely recognised, and recognised as a phenomenon still present. The
+attraction might have vanished, as he said to himself, but the mental
+picture of it was yet vivid. The greater the pity that he couldn't call
+upon Verena (he called her by her name in his thoughts, it was so
+pretty) without calling upon Olive, and that Olive was so disagreeable
+as to place that effort beyond his strength. There was another
+consideration, with Ransom, which eminently belonged to the man; he
+believed that Miss Chancellor had conceived, in the course of those few
+hours, and in a manner that formed so absurd a sequel to her having gone
+out of her way to make his acquaintance, such a dislike to him that it
+would be odious to her to see him again within her doors; and he would
+have felt indelicate in taking warrant from her original invitation
+(before she had seen him) to inflict on her a presence which he had no
+reason to suppose the lapse of time had made less offensive. She had
+given him no sign of pardon or penitence in any of the little ways that
+are familiar to women--by sending him a message through her sister, or
+even a book, a photograph, a Christmas card, or a newspaper, by the
+post. He felt, in a word, not at liberty to ring at her door; he didn't
+know what kind of a fit the sight of his long Mississippian person would
+give her, and it was characteristic of him that he should wish so to
+spare the sensibilities of a young lady whom he had not found tender;
+being ever as willing to let women off easily in the particular case as
+he was fixed in the belief that the sex in general requires watching.
+
+Nevertheless, he found himself, at the end of half an hour, standing on
+the only spot in Charles Street which had any significance for him. It
+had occurred to him that if he couldn't call upon Verena without calling
+upon Olive, he should be exempt from that condition if he called upon
+Mrs. Tarrant. It was not her mother, truly, who had asked him, it was
+the girl herself; and he was conscious, as a candid young American, that
+a mother is always less accessible, more guarded by social prejudice,
+than a daughter. But he was at a pass in which it was permissible to
+strain a point, and he took his way in the direction in which he knew
+that Cambridge lay, remembering that Miss Tarrant's invitation had
+reference to that quarter and that Mrs. Luna had given him further
+evidence. Had she not said that Verena often went back there for visits
+of several days--that her mother had been ill and she gave her much
+care? There was nothing inconceivable in her being engaged at that hour
+(it was getting to be one o'clock) in one of those expeditions--nothing
+impossible in the chance that he might find her in Cambridge. The
+chance, at any rate, was worth taking; Cambridge, moreover, was worth
+seeing, and it was as good a way as another of keeping his holiday. It
+occurred to him, indeed, that Cambridge was a big place, and that he had
+no particular address. This reflexion overtook him just as he reached
+Olive's house, which, oddly enough, he was obliged to pass on his way to
+the mysterious suburb. That is partly why he paused there; he asked
+himself for a moment why he shouldn't ring the bell and obtain his
+needed information from the servant, who would be sure to be able to
+give it to him. He had just dismissed this method, as of questionable
+taste, when he heard the door of the house open, within the deep
+embrasure in which, in Charles Street, the main portals are set, and
+which are partly occupied by a flight of steps protected at the bottom
+by a second door, whose upper half, in either wing, consists of a sheet
+of glass. It was a minute before he could see who had come out, and in
+that minute he had time to turn away and then to turn back again, and to
+wonder which of the two inmates would appear to him, or whether he
+should behold neither or both.
+
+The person who had issued from the house descended the steps very
+slowly, as if on purpose to give him time to escape; and when at last
+the glass doors were divided they disclosed a little old lady. Ransom
+was disappointed; such an apparition was so scantily to his purpose. But
+the next minute his spirits rose again, for he was sure that he had seen
+the little old lady before. She stopped on the side-walk, and looked
+vaguely about her, in the manner of a person waiting for an omnibus or a
+street-car; she had a dingy, loosely-habited air, as if she had worn her
+clothes for many years and yet was even now imperfectly acquainted with
+them; a large, benignant face, caged in by the glass of her spectacles,
+which seemed to cover it almost equally everywhere, and a fat, rusty
+satchel, which hung low at her side, as if it wearied her to carry it.
+This gave Ransom time to recognise her; he knew in Boston no such figure
+as that save Miss Birdseye. Her party, her person, the exalted account
+Miss Chancellor gave of her, had kept a very distinct place in his mind;
+and while she stood there in dim circumspection she came back to him as
+a friend of yesterday. His necessity gave a point to the reminiscences
+she evoked; it took him only a moment to reflect that she would be able
+to tell him where Verena Tarrant was at that particular time, and where,
+if need be, her parents lived. Her eyes rested on him, and as she saw
+that he was looking at her she didn't go through the ceremony (she had
+broken so completely with all conventions) of removing them; he
+evidently represented nothing to her but a sentient fellow-citizen in
+the enjoyment of his rights, which included that of staring. Miss
+Birdseye's modesty had never pretended that it was not to be publicly
+challenged; there were so many bright new motives and ideas in the world
+that there might even be reasons for looking at her. When Ransom
+approached her and, raising his hat with a smile, said, "Shall I stop
+this car for you, Miss Birdseye?" she only looked at him more vaguely,
+in her complete failure to seize the idea that this might be simply
+Fame. She had trudged about the streets of Boston for fifty years, and
+at no period had she received that amount of attention from dark-eyed
+young men. She glanced, in an unprejudiced way, at the big
+parti-coloured human van which now jingled, toward them from out of the
+Cambridge road. "Well, I should like to get into it, if it will take me
+home," she answered. "Is this a South End car?"
+
+The vehicle had been stopped by the conductor, on his perceiving Miss
+Birdseye; he evidently recognised her as a frequent passenger. He went,
+however, through none of the forms of reassurance beyond remarking, "You
+want to get right in here--quick," but stood with his hand raised, in a
+threatening way, to the cord of his signal-bell.
+
+"You must allow me the honour of taking you home, madam; I will tell you
+who I am," Basil Ransom said, in obedience to a rapid reflexion. He
+helped her into the car, the conductor pressed a fraternal hand upon her
+back, and in a moment the young man was seated beside her, and the
+jingling had recommenced. At that hour of the day the car was almost
+empty, and they had it virtually to themselves.
+
+"Well, I know you are some one; I don't think you belong round here,"
+Miss Birdseye declared, as they proceeded.
+
+"I was once at your house--on a very interesting occasion. Do you
+remember a party you gave, a year ago last October, to which Miss
+Chancellor came, and another young lady, who made a wonderful speech?"
+
+"Oh yes! when Verena Tarrant moved us all so! There were a good many
+there; I don't remember all."
+
+"I was one of them," Basil Ransom said; "I came with Miss Chancellor,
+who is a kind of relation of mine, and you were very good to me."
+
+"What did I do?" asked Miss Birdseye candidly. Then, before he could
+answer her, she recognised him. "I remember you now, and Olive bringing
+you! You're a Southern gentleman--she told me about you afterwards. You
+don't approve of our great struggle--you want us to be kept down." The
+old lady spoke with perfect mildness, as if she had long ago done with
+passion and resentment. Then she added, "Well, I presume we can't have
+the sympathy of all."
+
+"Doesn't it look as if you had my sympathy, when I get into a car on
+purpose to see you home--one of the principal agitators?" Ransom
+inquired, laughing.
+
+"Did you get in on purpose?"
+
+"Quite on purpose. I am not so bad as Miss Chancellor thinks me."
+
+"Oh, I presume you have your ideas," said Miss Birdseye. "Of course,
+Southerners have peculiar views. I suppose they retain more than one
+might think. I hope you won't ride too far--I know my way round Boston."
+
+"Don't object to me, or think me officious," Ransom replied. "I want to
+ask you something."
+
+Miss Birdseye looked at him again. "Oh yes, I place you now; you
+conversed some with Doctor Prance."
+
+"To my great edification!" Ransom exclaimed. "And I hope Doctor Prance
+is well."
+
+"She looks after every one's health but her own," said Miss Birdseye,
+smiling. "When I tell her that, she says she hasn't got any to look
+after. She says she's the only woman in Boston that hasn't got a doctor.
+She was determined she wouldn't be a patient, and it seemed as if the
+only way not to be one was to be a doctor. She is trying to make me
+sleep; that's her principal occupation."
+
+"Is it possible you don't sleep yet?" Ransom asked, almost tenderly.
+
+"Well, just a little. But by the time I get to sleep I have to get up. I
+can't sleep when I want to live."
+
+"You ought to come down South," the young man suggested. "In that
+languid air you would doze deliciously!"
+
+"Well, I don't want to be languid," said Miss Birdseye. "Besides, I have
+been down South, in the old times, and I can't say they let me sleep
+very much; they were always round after me!"
+
+"Do you mean on account of the negroes?"
+
+"Yes, I couldn't think of anything else then. I carried them the Bible."
+
+Ransom was silent a moment; then he said, in a tone which evidently was
+carefully considerate, "I should like to hear all about that!"
+
+"Well, fortunately, we are not required now; we are required for
+something else." And Miss Birdseye looked at him with a wandering,
+tentative humour, as if he would know what she meant.
+
+"You mean for the other slaves!" he exclaimed, with a laugh. "You can
+carry them all the Bibles you want."
+
+"I want to carry them the Statute-book; that must be our Bible now."
+
+Ransom found himself liking Miss Birdseye very much, and it was quite
+without hypocrisy or a tinge too much of the local quality in his speech
+that he said: "Wherever you go, madam, it will matter little what you
+carry. You will always carry your goodness."
+
+For a minute she made no response. Then she murmured: "That's the way
+Olive Chancellor told me you talked."
+
+"I am afraid she has told you little good of me."
+
+"Well, I am sure she thinks she is right."
+
+"Thinks it?" said Ransom. "Why, she knows it, with supreme certainty! By
+the way, I hope she is well."
+
+Miss Birdseye stared again. "Haven't you seen her? Are you not
+visiting?"
+
+"Oh no, I am not visiting! I was literally passing her house when I met
+you."
+
+"Perhaps you live here now," said Miss Birdseye. And when he had
+corrected this impression, she added, in a tone which showed with what
+positive confidence he had now inspired her, "Hadn't you better drop
+in?"
+
+"It would give Miss Chancellor no pleasure," Basil Ransom rejoined. "She
+regards me as an enemy in the camp."
+
+"Well, she is very brave."
+
+"Precisely. And I am very timid."
+
+"Didn't you fight once?"
+
+"Yes; but it was in such a good cause!"
+
+Ransom meant this allusion to the great Secession and, by comparison, to
+the attitude of the resisting male (laudable even as that might be), to
+be decently jocular; but Miss Birdseye took it very seriously, and sat
+there for a good while as speechless as if she meant to convey that she
+had been going on too long now to be able to discuss the propriety of
+the late rebellion. The young man felt that he had silenced her, and he
+was very sorry; for, with all deference to the disinterested Southern
+attitude toward the unprotected female, what he had got into the car
+with her for was precisely to make her talk. He had wished for general,
+as well as for particular, news of Verena Tarrant; it was a topic on
+which he had proposed to draw Miss Birdseye out. He preferred not to
+broach it himself, and he waited awhile for another opening. At last,
+when he was on the point of exposing himself by a direct inquiry (he
+reflected that the exposure would in any case not be long averted), she
+anticipated him by saying, in a manner which showed that her thoughts
+had continued in the same train, "I wonder very much that Miss Tarrant
+didn't affect you that evening!"
+
+"Ah, but she did!" Ransom said, with alacrity. "I thought her very
+charming!"
+
+"Didn't you think her very reasonable?"
+
+"God forbid, madam! I consider women have no business to be reasonable."
+
+His companion turned upon him, slowly and mildly, and each of her
+glasses, in her aspect of reproach, had the glitter of an enormous tear.
+"Do you regard us, then, simply as lovely baubles?"
+
+The effect of this question, as coming from Miss Birdseye, and referring
+in some degree to her own venerable identity, was such as to move him to
+irresistible laughter. But he controlled himself quickly enough to say,
+with genuine expression, "I regard you as the dearest thing in life, the
+only thing which makes it worth living!"
+
+"Worth living for--you! But for us?" suggested Miss Birdseye.
+
+"It's worth any woman's while to be admired as I admire you. Miss
+Tarrant, of whom we were speaking, affected me, as you say, in this
+way--that I think more highly still, if possible, of the sex which
+produced such a delightful young lady."
+
+"Well, we think everything of her here," said Miss Birdseye. "It seems
+as if it were a real gift."
+
+"Does she speak often--is there any chance of my hearing her now?"
+
+"She raises her voice a good deal in the places round--like Framingham
+and Billerica. It seems as if she were gathering strength, just to break
+over Boston like a wave. In fact she did break, last summer. She is a
+growing power since her great success at the convention."
+
+"Ah! her success at the convention was very great?" Ransom inquired,
+putting discretion into his voice.
+
+Miss Birdseye hesitated a moment, in order to measure her response by
+the bounds of righteousness. "Well," she said, with the tenderness of a
+long retrospect, "I have seen nothing like it since I last listened to
+Eliza P. Moseley."
+
+"What a pity she isn't speaking somewhere to-night!" Ransom exclaimed.
+
+"Oh, to-night she's out in Cambridge. Olive Chancellor mentioned that."
+
+"Is she making a speech there?"
+
+"No; she's visiting her home."
+
+"I thought her home was in Charles Street?"
+
+"Well, no; that's her residence--her principal one--since she became so
+united to your cousin. Isn't Miss Chancellor your cousin?"
+
+"We don't insist on the relationship," said Ransom, smiling. "Are they
+very much united, the two young ladies?"
+
+"You would say so if you were to see Miss Chancellor when Verena rises
+to eloquence. It's as if the chords were strung across her own heart;
+she seems to vibrate, to echo with every word. It's a very close and
+very beautiful tie, and we think everything of it here. They will work
+together for a great good!"
+
+"I hope so," Ransom remarked. "But in spite of it Miss Tarrant spends a
+part of her time with her father and mother."
+
+"Yes, she seems to have something for every one. If you were to see her
+at home, you would think she was all the daughter. She leads a lovely
+life!" said Miss Birdseye.
+
+"See her at home? That's exactly what I want!" Ransom rejoined, feeling
+that if he was to come to this he needn't have had scruples at first. "I
+haven't forgotten that she invited me, when I met her."
+
+"Oh, of course she attracts many visitors," said Miss Birdseye, limiting
+her encouragement to this statement.
+
+"Yes; she must be used to admirers. And where, in Cambridge, do her
+family live?"
+
+"Oh, it's on one of those little streets that don't seem to have very
+much of a name. But they do call it--they do call it----" she meditated
+audibly.
+
+This process was interrupted by an abrupt allocution from the conductor.
+"I guess you change here for _your_ place. You want one of them blue
+cars."
+
+The good lady returned to a sense of the situation, and Ransom helped
+her out of the vehicle, with the aid, as before, of a certain amount of
+propulsion from the conductor. Her road branched off to the right, and
+she had to wait on the corner of a street, there being as yet no blue
+car within hail. The corner was quiet and the day favourable to
+patience--a day of relaxed rigour and intense brilliancy. It was as if
+the touch of the air itself were gloved, and the street-colouring had
+the richness of a superficial thaw. Ransom, of course, waited with his
+philanthropic companion, though she now protested more vigorously
+against the idea that a gentleman from the South should pretend to teach
+an old abolitionist the mysteries of Boston. He promised to leave her
+when he should have consigned her to the blue car; and meanwhile they
+stood in the sun, with their backs against an apothecary's window, and
+she tried again, at his suggestion, to remember the name of Doctor
+Tarrant's street. "I guess if you ask for Doctor Tarrant, any one can
+tell you," she said; and then suddenly the address came to her--the
+residence of the mesmeric healer was in Monadnoc Place.
+
+"But you'll have to ask for that, so it comes to the same," she went on.
+After this she added, with a friendliness more personal, "Ain't you
+going to see your cousin too?"
+
+"Not if I can help it!"
+
+Miss Birdseye gave a little ineffectual sigh. "Well, I suppose every one
+must act out their ideal. That's what Olive Chancellor does. She's a
+very noble character."
+
+"Oh yes, a glorious nature."
+
+"You know their opinions are just the same--hers and Verena's," Miss
+Birdseye placidly continued. "So why should you make a distinction?"
+
+"My dear madam," said Ransom, "does a woman consist of nothing but her
+opinions? I like Miss Tarrant's lovely face better, to begin with."
+
+"Well, she _is_ pretty-looking." And Miss Birdseye gave another sigh, as
+if she had had a theory submitted to her--that one about a lady's
+opinions--which, with all that was unfamiliar and peculiar lying behind
+it, she was really too old to look into much. It might have been the
+first time she really felt her age. "There's a blue car," she said, in a
+tone of mild relief.
+
+"It will be some moments before it gets here. Moreover, I don't believe
+that at bottom they _are_ Miss Tarrant's opinions," Ransom added.
+
+"You mustn't think she hasn't a strong hold of them," his companion
+exclaimed, more briskly. "If you think she is not sincere, you are very
+much mistaken. Those views are just her life."
+
+"Well, _she_ may bring me round to them," said Ransom, smiling.
+
+Miss Birdseye had been watching her blue car, the advance of which was
+temporarily obstructed. At this, she transferred her eyes to him, gazing
+at him solemnly out of the pervasive window of her spectacles. "Well, I
+shouldn't wonder if she did! Yes, that will be a good thing. I don't see
+how you can help being a good deal shaken by her. She has acted on so
+many."
+
+"I see: no doubt she will act on me." Then it occurred to Ransom to add:
+"By the way, Miss Birdseye, perhaps you will be so kind as not to
+mention this meeting of ours to my cousin, in case of your seeing her
+again. I have a perfectly good conscience in not calling upon her, but I
+shouldn't like her to think that I announced my slighting intention all
+over the town. I don't want to offend her, and she had better not know
+that I have been in Boston. If you don't tell her, no one else will."
+
+"Do you wish me to conceal----?" murmured Miss Birdseye, panting a
+little.
+
+"No, I don't want you to conceal anything. I only want you to let this
+incident pass--to say nothing."
+
+"Well, I never did anything of that kind."
+
+"Of what kind?" Ransom was half vexed, half touched by her inability to
+enter into his point of view, and her resistance made him hold to his
+idea the more. "It is very simple, what I ask of you. You are under no
+obligation to tell Miss Chancellor everything that happens to you, are
+you?"
+
+His request seemed still something of a shock to the poor old lady's
+candour. "Well, I see her very often, and we talk a great deal. And
+then--won't Verena tell her?"
+
+"I have thought of that--but I hope not."
+
+"She tells her most everything. Their union is so close."
+
+"She won't want her to be wounded," Ransom said ingeniously.
+
+"Well, you _are_ considerate." And Miss Birdseye continued to gaze at
+him. "It's a pity you can't sympathise."
+
+"As I tell you, perhaps Miss Tarrant will bring me round. You have
+before you a possible convert," Ransom went on, without, I fear, putting
+up the least little prayer to heaven that his dishonesty might be
+forgiven.
+
+"I should be very happy to think that--after I have told you her address
+in this secret way." A smile of infinite mildness glimmered in Miss
+Birdseye's face, and she added: "Well, I guess that will be your fate.
+She _has_ affected so many. I would keep very quiet if I thought that.
+Yes, she will bring you round."
+
+"I will let you know as soon as she does," Basil Ransom said. "Here is
+your car at last."
+
+"Well, I believe in the victory of the truth. I won't say anything." And
+she suffered the young man to lead her to the car, which had now stopped
+at their corner.
+
+"I hope very much I shall see you again," he remarked, as they went.
+
+"Well, I am always round the streets, in Boston." And while, lifting and
+pushing, he was helping again to insert her into the oblong receptacle,
+she turned a little and repeated, "She _will_ affect you! If that's to
+be your secret, I will keep it," Ransom heard her subjoin. He raised his
+hat and waved her a farewell, but she didn't see him; she was squeezing
+further into the car and making the discovery that this time it was full
+and there was no seat for her. Surely, however, he said to himself,
+every man in the place would offer his own to such an innocent old dear.
+
+
+END OF VOL. I
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's The Bostonians, Vol. I (of II), by Henry James
+
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