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+Project Gutenberg's The Bostonians, Vol. II (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. II (of II)
+
+Author: Henry James
+
+Release Date: November 5, 2006 [EBook #19718]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE BOSTONIANS, VOL. II (OF II) ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Suzanne Lybarger, Mary Meehan and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+                             THE BOSTONIANS
+
+                                A NOVEL
+
+                             BY HENRY JAMES
+
+                             IN TWO VOLUMES
+
+                                VOL. II
+
+
+
+MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED
+ST. MARTIN'S STREET, LONDON
+1921
+
+_First published in 1886_
+
+
+
+
+BOOK SECOND (_Continued_)
+
+
+
+
+XXIV
+
+
+A little more than an hour after this he stood in the parlour of Doctor
+Tarrant's suburban residence, in Monadnoc Place. He had induced a
+juvenile maid-servant, by an appeal somewhat impassioned, to let the
+ladies know that he was there; and she had returned, after a long
+absence, to say that Miss Tarrant would come down to him in a little
+while. He possessed himself, according to his wont, of the nearest book
+(it lay on the table, with an old magazine and a little japanned tray
+containing Tarrant's professional cards--his denomination as a mesmeric
+healer), and spent ten minutes in turning it over. It was a biography of
+Mrs. Ada T. P. Foat, the celebrated trance-lecturer, and was embellished
+by a portrait representing the lady with a surprised expression and
+innumerable ringlets. Ransom said to himself, after reading a few pages,
+that much ridicule had been cast upon Southern literature; but if that
+was a fair specimen of Northern!--and he threw it back upon the table
+with a gesture almost as contemptuous as if he had not known perfectly,
+after so long a residence in the North, that it was not, while he
+wondered whether this was the sort of thing Miss Tarrant had been
+brought up on. There was no other book to be seen, and he remembered to
+have read the magazine; so there was finally nothing for him, as the
+occupants of the house failed still to appear, but to stare before him,
+into the bright, bare, common little room, which was so hot that he
+wished to open a window, and of which an ugly, undraped cross-light
+seemed to have taken upon itself to reveal the poverty. Ransom, as I
+have mentioned, had not a high standard of comfort and noticed little,
+usually, how people's houses were furnished--it was only when they were
+very pretty that he observed; but what he saw while he waited at Doctor
+Tarrant's made him say to himself that it was no wonder Verena liked
+better to live with Olive Chancellor. He even began to wonder whether it
+were for the sake of that superior softness she had cultivated Miss
+Chancellor's favour, and whether Mrs. Luna had been right about her
+being mercenary and insincere. So many minutes elapsed before she
+appeared that he had time to remember he really knew nothing to the
+contrary, as well as to consider the oddity (so great when one did
+consider it) of his coming out to Cambridge to see her, when he had only
+a few hours in Boston to spare, a year and a half after she had given
+him her very casual invitation. She had not refused to receive him, at
+any rate; she was free to, if it didn't please her. And not only this,
+but she was apparently making herself fine in his honour, inasmuch as he
+heard a rapid footstep move to and fro above his head, and even, through
+the slightness which in Monadnoc Place did service for an upper floor,
+the sound of drawers and presses opened and closed. Some one was "flying
+round," as they said in Mississippi. At last the stairs creaked under a
+light tread, and the next moment a brilliant person came into the room.
+
+His reminiscence of her had been very pretty; but now that she had
+developed and matured, the little prophetess was prettier still. Her
+splendid hair seemed to shine; her cheek and chin had a curve which
+struck him by its fineness; her eyes and lips were full of smiles and
+greetings. She had appeared to him before as a creature of brightness,
+but now she lighted up the place, she irradiated, she made everything
+that surrounded her of no consequence; dropping upon the shabby sofa
+with an effect as charming as if she had been a nymph sinking on a
+leopard-skin, and with the native sweetness of her voice forcing him to
+listen till she spoke again. It was not long before he perceived that
+this added lustre was simply success; she was young and tender still,
+but the sound of a great applauding audience had been in her ears; it
+formed an element in which she felt buoyant and floated. Still,
+however, her glance was as pure as it was direct, and that fantastic
+fairness hung about her which had made an impression on him of old,
+and which reminded him of unworldly places--he didn't know
+where--convent-cloisters or vales of Arcady. At that other time she had
+been parti-coloured and bedizened, and she had always an air of costume,
+only now her costume was richer and more chastened. It was her line, her
+condition, part of her expression. If at Miss Birdseye's, and afterwards
+in Charles Street, she might have been a rope-dancer, to-day she made a
+"scene" of the mean little room in Monadnoc Place, such a scene as a
+prima donna makes of daubed canvas and dusty boards. She addressed Basil
+Ransom as if she had seen him the other week and his merits were fresh
+to her, though she let him, while she sat smiling at him, explain in his
+own rather ceremonious way why it was he had presumed to call upon her
+on so slight an acquaintance--on an invitation which she herself had had
+more than time to forget. His explanation, as a finished and
+satisfactory thing, quite broke down; there was no more impressive
+reason than that he had simply wished to see her. He became aware that
+this motive loomed large, and that her listening smile, innocent as it
+was, in the Arcadian manner, of mockery, seemed to accuse him of not
+having the courage of his inclination. He had alluded especially to
+their meeting at Miss Chancellor's; there it was that she had told him
+she should be glad to see him in her home.
+
+"Oh yes, I remember perfectly, and I remember quite as well seeing you
+at Miss Birdseye's the night before. I made a speech--don't you
+remember? That was delightful."
+
+"It was delightful indeed," said Basil Ransom.
+
+"I don't mean my speech; I mean the whole thing. It was then I made Miss
+Chancellor's acquaintance. I don't know whether you know how we work
+together. She has done so much for me."
+
+"Do you still make speeches?" Ransom asked, conscious, as soon as he had
+uttered it, that the question was below the mark.
+
+"Still? Why, I should hope so; it's all I'm good for! It's my life--or
+it's going to be. And it's Miss Chancellor's too. We are determined to
+do something."
+
+"And does she make speeches too?"
+
+"Well, she makes mine--or the best part of them. She tells me what to
+say--the real things, the strong things. It's Miss Chancellor as much as
+me!" said the singular girl, with a generous complacency which was yet
+half ludicrous.
+
+"I should like to hear you again," Basil Ransom rejoined.
+
+"Well, you must come some night. You will have plenty of chances. We are
+going on from triumph to triumph."
+
+Her brightness, her self-possession, her air of being a public
+character, her mixture of the girlish and the comprehensive, startled
+and confounded her visitor, who felt that if he had come to gratify his
+curiosity he should be in danger of going away still more curious than
+satiated. She added in her gay, friendly, trustful tone--the tone of
+facile intercourse, the tone in which happy, flower-crowned maidens may
+have talked to sunburnt young men in the golden age--"I am very familiar
+with your name; Miss Chancellor has told me all about you."
+
+"All about me?" Ransom raised his black eyebrows. "How could she do
+that? She doesn't know anything about me!"
+
+"Well, she told me you are a great enemy to our movement. Isn't that
+true? I think you expressed some unfavourable idea that day I met you at
+her house."
+
+"If you regard me as an enemy, it's very kind of you to receive me."
+
+"Oh, a great many gentlemen call," Verena said, calmly and brightly.
+"Some call simply to inquire. Some call because they have heard of me,
+or been present on some occasion when I have moved them. Every one is so
+interested."
+
+"And you have been in Europe," Ransom remarked, in a moment.
+
+"Oh yes, we went over to see if they were in advance. We had a
+magnificent time--we saw all the leaders."
+
+"The leaders?" Ransom repeated.
+
+"Of the emancipation of our sex. There are gentlemen there, as well as
+ladies. Olive had splendid introductions in all countries, and we
+conversed with all the earnest people. We heard much that was
+suggestive. And as for Europe!"--and the young lady paused, smiling at
+him and ending in a happy sigh, as if there were more to say on the
+subject than she could attempt on such short notice.
+
+"I suppose it's very attractive," said Ransom encouragingly.
+
+"It's just a dream!"
+
+"And did you find that they were in advance?"
+
+"Well, Miss Chancellor thought they were. She was surprised at some
+things we observed, and concluded that perhaps she hadn't done the
+Europeans justice--she has got such an open mind, it's as wide as the
+sea!--while I incline to the opinion that on the whole _we_ make the
+better show. The state of the movement there reflects their general
+culture, and their general culture is higher than ours (I mean taking
+the term in its broadest sense). On the other hand, the _special_
+condition--moral, social, personal--of our sex seems to me to be
+superior in this country; I mean regarded in relation--in proportion as
+it were--to the social phase at large. I must add that we did see some
+noble specimens over there. In England we met some lovely women, highly
+cultivated, and of immense organising power. In France we saw some
+wonderful, contagious types; we passed a delightful evening with the
+celebrated Marie Verneuil; she was released from prison, you know, only
+a few weeks before. Our total impression was that it is only a question
+of time--the future is ours. But everywhere we heard one cry--'How long,
+O Lord, how long?'"
+
+Basil Ransom listened to this considerable statement with a feeling
+which, as the current of Miss Tarrant's facile utterance flowed on, took
+the form of an hilarity charmed into stillness by the fear of losing
+something. There was indeed a sweet comicality in seeing this pretty
+girl sit there and, in answer to a casual, civil inquiry, drop into
+oratory as a natural thing. Had she forgotten where she was, and did she
+take him for a full house? She had the same turns and cadences, almost
+the same gestures, as if she had been on the platform; and the great
+queerness of it was that, with such a manner, she should escape being
+odious. She was not odious, she was delightful; she was not dogmatic,
+she was genial. No wonder she was a success, if she speechified as a
+bird sings! Ransom could see, too, from her easy lapse, how the
+lecture-tone was the thing in the world with which, by education, by
+association, she was most familiar. He didn't know what to make of her;
+she was an astounding young phenomenon. The other time came back to him
+afresh, and how she had stood up at Miss Birdseye's; it occurred to him
+that an element, here, had been wanting. Several moments after she had
+ceased speaking he became conscious that the expression of his face
+presented a perceptible analogy to a broad grin. He changed his posture,
+saying the first thing that came into his head. "I presume you do
+without your father now."
+
+"Without my father?"
+
+"To set you going, as he did that time I heard you."
+
+"Oh, I see; you thought I had begun a lecture!" And she laughed, in
+perfect good humour. "They tell me I speak as I talk, so I suppose I
+talk as I speak. But you mustn't put me on what I saw and heard in
+Europe. That's to be the title of an address I am now preparing, by the
+way. Yes, I don't depend on father any more," she went on, while
+Ransom's sense of having said too sarcastic a thing was deepened by her
+perfect indifference to it. "He finds his patients draw off about
+enough, any way. But I owe him everything; if it hadn't been for him, no
+one would ever have known I had a gift--not even myself. He started me
+so, once for all, that I now go alone."
+
+"You go beautifully," said Ransom, wanting to say something agreeable,
+and even respectfully tender, to her, but troubled by the fact that
+there was nothing he could say that didn't sound rather like chaff.
+There was no resentment in her, however, for in a moment she said to
+him, as quickly as it occurred to her, in the manner of a person
+repairing an accidental omission, "It was very good of you to come so
+far."
+
+This was a sort of speech it was never safe to make to Ransom; there was
+no telling what retribution it might entail. "Do you suppose any journey
+is too great, too wearisome, when it's a question of so great a
+pleasure?" On this occasion it was not worse than that.
+
+"Well, people _have_ come from other cities," Verena answered, not with
+pretended humility, but with pretended pride. "Do you know Cambridge?"
+
+"This is the first time I have ever been here."
+
+"Well, I suppose you have heard of the university; it's so celebrated."
+
+"Yes--even in Mississippi. I suppose it's very fine."
+
+"I presume it is," said Verena; "but you can't expect me to speak with
+much admiration of an institution of which the doors are closed to our
+sex."
+
+"Do you then advocate a system of education in common?"
+
+"I advocate equal rights, equal opportunities, equal privileges. So does
+Miss Chancellor," Verena added, with just a perceptible air of feeling
+that her declaration needed support.
+
+"Oh, I thought what she wanted was simply a different inequality--simply
+to turn out the men altogether," Ransom said.
+
+"Well, she thinks we have great arrears to make up. I do tell her,
+sometimes, that what she desires is not only justice but vengeance. I
+think she admits that," Verena continued, with a certain solemnity. The
+subject, however, held her but an instant, and before Ransom had time to
+make any comment, she went on, in a different tone: "You don't mean to
+say you live in Mississippi _now_? Miss Chancellor told me when you were
+in Boston before, that you had located in New York." She persevered in
+this reference to himself, for when he had assented to her remark about
+New York, she asked him whether he had quite given up the South.
+
+"Given it up--the poor, dear, desolate old South? Heaven forbid!" Basil
+Ransom exclaimed.
+
+She looked at him for a moment with an added softness. "I presume it is
+natural you should love your home. But I am afraid you think I don't
+love mine much; I have been here--for so long--so little. Miss
+Chancellor _has_ absorbed me--there is no doubt about that. But it's a
+pity I wasn't with her to-day." Ransom made no answer to this; he was
+incapable of telling Miss Tarrant that if she had been he would not have
+called upon her. It was not, indeed, that he was not incapable of
+hypocrisy, for when she had asked him if he had seen his cousin the
+night before, and he had replied that he hadn't seen her at all, and she
+had exclaimed with a candour which the next minute made her blush, "Ah,
+you don't mean to say you haven't forgiven her!"--after this he put on a
+look of innocence sufficient to carry off the inquiry, "Forgiven her for
+what?"
+
+Verena coloured at the sound of her own words. "Well, I could see how
+much she felt, that time at her house."
+
+"What did she feel?" Basil Ransom asked, with the natural provokingness
+of a man.
+
+I know not whether Verena was provoked, but she answered with more
+spirit than sequence: "Well, you know you _did_ pour contempt on us,
+ever so much; I could see how it worked Olive up. Are you not going to
+see her at all?"
+
+"Well, I shall think about that; I am here only for three or four days,"
+said Ransom, smiling as men smile when they are perfectly
+unsatisfactory.
+
+It is very possible that Verena was provoked, inaccessible as she was,
+in a general way, to irritation; for she rejoined in a moment, with a
+little deliberate air: "Well, perhaps it's as well you shouldn't go, if
+you haven't changed at all."
+
+"I haven't changed at all," said the young man, smiling still, with his
+elbows on the arms of his chair, his shoulders pushed up a little, and
+his thin brown hands interlocked in front of him.
+
+"Well, I have had visitors who were quite opposed!" Verena announced, as
+if such news could not possibly alarm her. Then she added, "How then did
+you know I was out here?"
+
+"Miss Birdseye told me."
+
+"Oh, I am so glad you went to see _her_!" the girl cried, speaking again
+with the impetuosity of a moment before.
+
+"I didn't go to see her. I met her in the street, just as she was
+leaving Miss Chancellor's door. I spoke to her, and accompanied her some
+distance. I passed that way because I knew it was the direct way to
+Cambridge--from the Common--and I was coming out to see you any way--on
+the chance."
+
+"On the chance?" Verena repeated.
+
+"Yes; Mrs. Luna, in New York, told me you were sometimes here, and I
+wanted, at any rate, to make the attempt to find you."
+
+It may be communicated to the reader that it was very agreeable to
+Verena to learn that her visitor had made this arduous pilgrimage (for
+she knew well enough how people in Boston regarded a winter journey to
+the academic suburb) with only half the prospect of a reward; but her
+pleasure was mixed with other feelings, or at least with the
+consciousness that the whole situation was rather less simple than the
+elements of her life had been hitherto. There was the germ of disorder
+in this invidious distinction which Mr. Ransom had suddenly made between
+Olive Chancellor, who was related to him by blood, and herself, who had
+never been related to him in any way whatever. She knew Olive by this
+time well enough to wish not to reveal it to her, and yet it would be
+something quite new for her to undertake to conceal such an incident as
+her having spent an hour with Mr. Ransom during a flying visit he had
+made to Boston. She had spent hours with other gentlemen, whom Olive
+didn't see; but that was different, because her friend knew about her
+doing it and didn't care, in regard to the persons--didn't care, that
+is, as she would care in this case. It was vivid to Verena's mind that
+now Olive _would_ care. She had talked about Mr. Burrage, and Mr.
+Pardon, and even about some gentlemen in Europe, and she had not (after
+the first few days, a year and a half before) talked about Mr. Ransom.
+
+Nevertheless there were reasons, clear to Verena's view, for wishing
+either that he would go and see Olive or would keep away from _her_; and
+the responsibility of treating the fact that he had not so kept away as
+a secret seemed the greater, perhaps, in the light of this other fact,
+that so far as simply seeing Mr. Ransom went--why, she quite liked it.
+She had remembered him perfectly after their two former meetings,
+superficial as their contact then had been; she had thought of him at
+moments and wondered whether she should like him if she were to know him
+better. Now, at the end of twenty minutes, she did know him better, and
+found that he had rather a curious, but still a pleasant way. There he
+was, at any rate, and she didn't wish his call to be spoiled by any
+uncomfortable implication of consequences. So she glanced off, at the
+touch of Mrs. Luna's name; it seemed to afford relief. "Oh yes, Mrs.
+Luna--isn't she fascinating?"
+
+Ransom hesitated a little. "Well, no, I don't think she is."
+
+"You ought to like her--she hates our movement!" And Verena asked,
+further, numerous questions about the brilliant Adeline; whether he saw
+her often, whether she went out much, whether she was admired in New
+York, whether he thought her very handsome. He answered to the best of
+his ability, but soon made the reflexion that he had not come out to
+Monadnoc Place to talk about Mrs. Luna; in consequence of which, to
+change the subject (as well as to acquit himself of a social duty), he
+began to speak of Verena's parents, to express regret that Mrs. Tarrant
+had been sick, and fear that he was not to have the pleasure of seeing
+her. "She is a great deal better," Verena said; "but she's lying down;
+she lies down a great deal when she has got nothing else to do. Mother's
+very peculiar," she added in a moment; "she lies down when she feels
+well and happy, and when she's sick she walks about--she roams all round
+the house. If you hear her on the stairs a good deal, you can be pretty
+sure she's very bad. She'll be very much interested to hear about you
+after you have left."
+
+Ransom glanced at his watch. "I hope I am not staying too long--that I
+am not taking you away from her."
+
+"Oh no; she likes visitors, even when she can't see them. If it didn't
+take her so long to rise, she would have been down here by this time. I
+suppose you think she has missed me, since I have been so absorbed.
+Well, so she has, but she knows it's for my good. She would make any
+sacrifice for affection."
+
+The fancy suddenly struck Ransom of asking, in response to this, "And
+you? would you make any?"
+
+Verena gave him a bright natural stare. "Any sacrifice for affection?"
+She thought a moment, and then she said: "I don't think I have a right
+to say, because I have never been asked. I don't remember ever to have
+had to make a sacrifice--not an important one."
+
+"Lord! you must have had a happy life!"
+
+"I have been very fortunate, I know that. I don't know what to do when I
+think how some women--how most women--suffer. But I must not speak of
+that," she went on, with her smile coming back to her. "If you oppose
+our movement, you won't want to hear of the suffering of women!"
+
+"The suffering of women is the suffering of all humanity," Ransom
+returned. "Do you think any movement is going to stop that--or all the
+lectures from now to doomsday? We are born to suffer--and to bear it,
+like decent people."
+
+"Oh, I adore heroism!" Verena interposed.
+
+"And as for women," Ransom went on, "they have one source of happiness
+that is closed to us--the consciousness that their presence here below
+lifts half the load of _our_ suffering."
+
+Verena thought this very graceful, but she was not sure it was not
+rather sophistical; she would have liked to have Olive's judgement upon
+it. As that was not possible for the present, she abandoned the question
+(since learning that Mr. Ransom had passed over Olive, to come to her,
+she had become rather fidgety), and inquired of the young man,
+irrelevantly, whether he knew any one else in Cambridge.
+
+"Not a creature; as I tell you, I have never been here before. Your
+image alone attracted me; this charming interview will be henceforth my
+only association with the place."
+
+"It's a pity you couldn't have a few more," said Verena musingly.
+
+"A few more interviews? I should be unspeakably delighted!"
+
+"A few more associations. Did you see the colleges as you came?"
+
+"I had a glimpse of a large enclosure, with some big buildings. Perhaps
+I can look at them better as I go back to Boston."
+
+"Oh yes, you ought to see them--they have improved so much of late. The
+inner life, of course, is the greatest interest, but there is some fine
+architecture, if you are not familiar with Europe." She paused a moment,
+looking at him with an eye that seemed to brighten, and continued
+quickly, like a person who had collected herself for a little jump, "If
+you would like to walk round a little, I shall be very glad to show
+you."
+
+"To walk round--with you to show me?" Ransom repeated. "My dear Miss
+Tarrant, it would be the greatest privilege--the greatest happiness--of
+my life. What a delightful idea--what an ideal guide!"
+
+Verena got up; she would go and put on her hat; he must wait a little.
+Her offer had a frankness and friendliness which gave him a new
+sensation, and he could not know that as soon as she had made it (though
+she had hesitated too, with a moment of intense reflexion), she seemed
+to herself strangely reckless. An impulse pushed her; she obeyed it with
+her eyes open. She felt as a girl feels when she commits her first
+conscious indiscretion. She had done many things before which many
+people would have called indiscreet, but that quality had not even
+faintly belonged to them in her own mind; she had done them in perfect
+good faith and with a remarkable absence of palpitation. This
+superficially ingenuous proposal to walk around the colleges with Mr.
+Ransom had really another colour; it deepened the ambiguity of her
+position, by reason of a prevision which I shall presently mention. If
+Olive was not to know that she had seen him, this extension of their
+interview would double her secret. And yet, while she saw it grow--this
+monstrous little mystery--she couldn't feel sorry that she was going out
+with Olive's cousin. As I have already said, she had become nervous. She
+went to put on her hat, but at the door of the room she stopped, turned
+round, and presented herself to her visitor with a small spot in either
+cheek, which had appeared there within the instant. "I have suggested
+this, because it seems to me I ought to do something for you--in
+return," she said. "It's nothing, simply sitting there with me. And we
+haven't got anything else. This is our only hospitality. And the day
+seems so splendid."
+
+The modesty, the sweetness, of this little explanation, with a kind of
+intimated desire, constituting almost an appeal, for rightness, which
+seemed to pervade it, left a fragrance in the air after she had
+vanished. Ransom walked up and down the room, with his hands in his
+pockets, under the influence of it, without taking up even once the book
+about Mrs. Foat. He occupied the time in asking himself by what
+perversity of fate or of inclination such a charming creature was
+ranting upon platforms and living in Olive Chancellor's pocket, or how a
+ranter and sycophant could possibly be so engaging. And she was so
+disturbingly beautiful, too. This last fact was not less evident when
+she came down arranged for their walk. They left the house, and as they
+proceeded he remembered that he had asked himself earlier how he could
+do honour to such a combination of leisure and ethereal mildness as he
+had waked up to that morning--a mildness that seemed the very breath of
+his own latitude. This question was answered now; to do exactly what he
+was doing at that moment was an observance sufficiently festive.
+
+
+
+
+XXV
+
+
+They passed through two or three small, short streets, which, with their
+little wooden houses, with still more wooden door-yards, looked as if
+they had been constructed by the nearest carpenter and his boy--a
+sightless, soundless, interspaced, embryonic region--and entered a long
+avenue which, fringed on either side with fresh villas, offering
+themselves trustfully to the public, had the distinction of a wide
+pavement of neat red brick. The new paint on the square detached houses
+shone afar off in the transparent air: they had, on top, little cupolas
+and belvederes, in front a pillared piazza, made bare by the indoor life
+of winter, on either side a bow-window or two, and everywhere an
+embellishment of scallops, brackets, cornices, wooden flourishes. They
+stood, for the most part, on small eminences, lifted above the
+impertinence of hedge or paling, well up before the world, with all the
+good conscience which in many cases came, as Ransom saw (and he had
+noticed the same ornament when he traversed with Olive the quarter of
+Boston inhabited by Miss Birdseye), from a silvered number, affixed to
+the glass above the door, in figures huge enough to be read by the
+people who, in the periodic horse-cars, travelled along the middle of
+the avenue. It was to these glittering badges that many of the houses on
+either side owed their principal identity. One of the horse-cars now
+advanced in the straight, spacious distance; it was almost the only
+object that animated the prospect, which, in its large cleanness, its
+implication of strict business-habits on the part of all the people who
+were not there, Ransom thought very impressive. As he went on with
+Verena he asked her about the Women's Convention, the year before;
+whether it had accomplished much work and she had enjoyed it.
+
+"What do you care about the work it accomplished?" said the girl. "You
+don't take any interest in that."
+
+"You mistake my attitude. I don't like it, but I greatly fear it."
+
+In answer to this Verena gave a free laugh. "I don't believe you fear
+much!"
+
+"The bravest men have been afraid of women. Won't you even tell me
+whether you enjoyed it? I am told you made an immense sensation
+there--that you leaped into fame."
+
+Verena never waved off an allusion to her ability, her eloquence; she
+took it seriously, without any flutter or protest, and had no more
+manner about it than if it concerned the goddess Minerva. "I believe I
+attracted considerable attention; of course, that's what Olive wants--it
+paves the way for future work. I have no doubt I reached many that
+wouldn't have been reached otherwise. They think that's my great use--to
+take hold of the outsiders, as it were; of those who are prejudiced or
+thoughtless, or who don't care about anything unless it's amusing. I
+wake up the attention."
+
+"That's the class to which I belong," Ransom said. "Am I not an
+outsider? I wonder whether you would have reached me--or waked up my
+attention!"
+
+Verena was silent awhile, as they walked; he heard the light click of
+her boots on the smooth bricks. Then--"I think I _have_ waked it up a
+little," she replied, looking straight before her.
+
+"Most assuredly! You have made me wish tremendously to contradict you."
+
+"Well, that's a good sign."
+
+"I suppose it was very exciting--your convention," Ransom went on, in a
+moment; "the sort of thing you would miss very much if you were to
+return to the ancient fold."
+
+"The ancient fold, you say very well, where women were slaughtered like
+sheep! Oh, last June, for a week, we just quivered! There were delegates
+from every State and every city; we lived in a crowd of people and of
+ideas; the heat was intense, the weather magnificent, and great thoughts
+and brilliant sayings flew round like darting fireflies. Olive had six
+celebrated, high-minded women staying in her house--two in a room; and
+in the summer evenings we sat in the open windows, in her parlour,
+looking out on the bay, with the lights gleaming in the water, and
+talked over the doings of the morning, the speeches, the incidents, the
+fresh contributions to the cause. We had some tremendously earnest
+discussions, which it would have been a benefit to you to hear, or any
+man who doesn't think that we can rise to the highest point. Then we had
+some refreshment--we consumed quantities of ice-cream!" said Verena, in
+whom the note of gaiety alternated with that of earnestness, almost of
+exaltation, in a manner which seemed to Basil Ransom absolutely and
+fascinatingly original. "Those were great nights!" she added, between a
+laugh and a sigh.
+
+Her description of the convention put the scene before him vividly; he
+seemed to see the crowded, overheated hall, which he was sure was filled
+with carpet-baggers, to hear flushed women, with loosened
+bonnet-strings, forcing thin voices into ineffectual shrillness. It made
+him angry, and all the more angry, that he hadn't a reason, to think of
+the charming creature at his side being mixed up with such elements,
+pushed and elbowed by them, conjoined with them in emulation, in
+unsightly strainings and clappings and shoutings, in wordy, windy
+iteration of inanities. Worst of all was the idea that she should have
+expressed such a congregation to itself so acceptably, have been
+acclaimed and applauded by hoarse throats, have been lifted up, to all
+the vulgar multitude, as the queen of the occasion. He made the
+reflexion, afterwards, that he was singularly ill-grounded in his wrath,
+inasmuch as it was none of his business what use Miss Tarrant chose to
+make of her energies, and, in addition to this, nothing else was to have
+been expected of her. But that reflexion was absent now, and in its
+absence he saw only the fact that his companion had been odiously
+perverted. "Well, Miss Tarrant," he said, with a deeper seriousness than
+showed in his voice, "I am forced to the painful conclusion that you are
+simply ruined."
+
+"Ruined? Ruined yourself!"
+
+"Oh, I know the kind of women that Miss Chancellor had at her house, and
+what a group you must have made when you looked out at the Back Bay! It
+depresses me very much to think of it."
+
+"We made a lovely, interesting group, and if we had had a spare minute
+we would have been photographed," Verena said.
+
+This led him to ask her if she had ever subjected herself to the
+process; and she answered that a photographer had been after her as soon
+as she got back from Europe, and that she had sat for him, and that
+there were certain shops in Boston where her portrait could be obtained.
+She gave him this information very simply, without pretence of vagueness
+of knowledge, spoke of the matter rather respectfully, indeed, as if it
+might be of some importance; and when he said that he should go and buy
+one of the little pictures as soon as he returned to town, contented
+herself with replying, "Well, be sure you pick out a good one!" He had
+not been altogether without a hope that she would offer to give him one,
+with her name written beneath, which was a mode of acquisition he would
+greatly have preferred; but this, evidently, had not occurred to her,
+and now, as they went further, her thought was following a different
+train. That was proved by her remarking, at the end of a silence,
+inconsequently, "Well, it showed I have a great use!" As he stared,
+wondering what she meant, she explained that she referred to the
+brilliancy of her success at the convention. "It proved I have a great
+use," she repeated, "and that is all I care for!"
+
+"The use of a truly amiable woman is to make some honest man happy,"
+Ransom said, with a sententiousness of which he was perfectly aware.
+
+It was so marked that it caused her to stop short in the middle of the
+broad walk, while she looked at him with shining eyes. "See here, Mr.
+Ransom, do you know what strikes me?" she exclaimed. "The interest you
+take in me isn't really controversial--a bit. It's quite personal!" She
+was the most extraordinary girl; she could speak such words as those
+without the smallest look of added consciousness coming into her face,
+without the least supposable intention of coquetry, or any visible
+purpose of challenging the young man to say more.
+
+"My interest in you--my interest in you," he began. Then hesitating, he
+broke off suddenly. "It is certain your discovery doesn't make it any
+less!"
+
+"Well, that's better," she went on; "for we needn't dispute."
+
+He laughed at the way she arranged it, and they presently reached the
+irregular group of heterogeneous buildings--chapels, dormitories,
+libraries, halls--which, scattered among slender trees, over a space
+reserved by means of a low rustic fence, rather than enclosed (for
+Harvard knows nothing either of the jealousy or the dignity of high
+walls and guarded gateways), constitutes the great university of
+Massachusetts. The yard, or college-precinct, is traversed by a number
+of straight little paths, over which, at certain hours of the day, a
+thousand undergraduates, with books under their arm and youth in their
+step, flit from one school to another. Verena Tarrant knew her way
+round, as she said to her companion; it was not the first time she had
+taken an admiring visitor to see the local monuments. Basil Ransom,
+walking with her from point to point, admired them all, and thought
+several of them exceedingly quaint and venerable. The rectangular
+structures of old red brick especially gratified his eye; the afternoon
+sun was yellow on their homely faces; their windows showed a peep of
+flower-pots and bright-coloured curtains; they wore an expression of
+scholastic quietude, and exhaled for the young Mississippian a
+tradition, an antiquity. "This is the place where I ought to have been,"
+he said to his charming guide. "I should have had a good time if I had
+been able to study here."
+
+"Yes; I presume you feel yourself drawn to any place where ancient
+prejudices are garnered up," she answered, not without archness. "I know
+by the stand you take about our cause that you share the superstitions
+of the old bookmen. You ought to have been at one of those really
+mediæval universities that we saw on the other side, at Oxford, or
+Göttingen, or Padua. You would have been in perfect sympathy with their
+spirit."
+
+"Well, I don't know much about those old haunts," Ransom rejoined. "I
+reckon this is good enough for me. And then it would have had the
+advantage that your residence isn't far, you know."
+
+"Oh, I guess we shouldn't have seen you much at my residence! As you
+live in New York, you come, but here you wouldn't; that is always the
+way." With this light philosophy Verena beguiled the transit to the
+library, into which she introduced her companion with the air of a
+person familiar with the sanctified spot. This edifice, a diminished
+copy of the chapel of King's College, at the greater Cambridge, is a
+rich and impressive institution; and as he stood there, in the bright,
+heated stillness, which seemed suffused with the odour of old print and
+old bindings, and looked up into the high, light vaults that hung over
+quiet book-laden galleries, alcoves and tables, and glazed cases where
+rarer treasures gleamed more vaguely, over busts of benefactors and
+portraits of worthies, bowed heads of working students and the gentle
+creak of passing messengers--as he took possession, in a comprehensive
+glance, of the wealth and wisdom of the place, he felt more than ever
+the soreness of an opportunity missed; but he abstained from expressing
+it (it was too deep for that), and in a moment Verena had introduced him
+to a young lady, a friend of hers, who, as she explained, was working on
+the catalogue, and whom she had asked for on entering the library, at a
+desk where another young lady was occupied. Miss Catching, the
+first-mentioned young lady, presented herself with promptness, offered
+Verena a low-toned but appreciative greeting, and, after a little,
+undertook to explain to Ransom the mysteries of the catalogue, which
+consisted of a myriad little cards, disposed alphabetically in immense
+chests of drawers. Ransom was deeply interested, and as, with Verena, he
+followed Miss Catching about (she was so good as to show them the
+establishment in all its ramifications), he considered with attention
+the young lady's fair ringlets and refined, anxious expression, saying
+to himself that this was in the highest degree a New England type.
+Verena found an opportunity to mention to him that she was wrapped up in
+the cause, and there was a moment during which he was afraid that his
+companion would expose him to her as one of its traducers; but there was
+that in Miss Catching's manner (and in the influence of the lofty halls)
+which deprecated loud pleasantry, and seemed to say, moreover, that if
+she were treated to such a revelation she should not know under what
+letter to range it.
+
+"Now there is one place where perhaps it would be indelicate to take a
+Mississippian," Verena said, after this episode. "I mean the great place
+that towers above the others--that big building with the beautiful
+pinnacles, which you see from every point." But Basil Ransom had heard
+of the great Memorial Hall; he knew what memories it enshrined, and the
+worst that he should have to suffer there; and the ornate, overtopping
+structure, which was the finest piece of architecture he had ever seen,
+had moreover solicited his enlarged curiosity for the last half-hour. He
+thought there was rather too much brick about it, but it was buttressed,
+cloistered, turreted, dedicated, superscribed, as he had never seen
+anything; though it didn't look old, it looked significant; it covered a
+large area, and it sprang majestic into the winter air. It was detached
+from the rest of the collegiate group, and stood in a grassy triangle of
+its own. As he approached it with Verena she suddenly stopped, to
+decline responsibility. "Now mind, if you don't like what's inside, it
+isn't my fault."
+
+He looked at her an instant, smiling. "Is there anything against
+Mississippi?"
+
+"Well, no, I don't think she is mentioned. But there is great praise of
+our young men in the war."
+
+"It says they were brave, I suppose."
+
+"Yes, it says so in Latin."
+
+"Well, so they were--I know something about that," Basil Ransom said. "I
+must be brave enough to face them--it isn't the first time." And they
+went up the low steps and passed into the tall doors. The Memorial Hall
+of Harvard consists of three main divisions: one of them a theatre, for
+academic ceremonies; another a vast refectory, covered with a timbered
+roof, hung about with portraits and lighted by stained windows, like the
+halls of the colleges of Oxford; and the third, the most interesting, a
+chamber high, dim, and severe, consecrated to the sons of the university
+who fell in the long Civil War. Ransom and his companion wandered from
+one part of the building to another, and stayed their steps at several
+impressive points; but they lingered longest in the presence of the
+white, ranged tablets, each of which, in its proud, sad clearness, is
+inscribed with the name of a student-soldier. The effect of the place is
+singularly noble and solemn, and it is impossible to feel it without a
+lifting of the heart. It stands there for duty and honour, it speaks of
+sacrifice and example, seems a kind of temple to youth, manhood,
+generosity. Most of them were young, all were in their prime, and all of
+them had fallen; this simple idea hovers before the visitor and makes
+him read with tenderness each name and place--names often without other
+history, and forgotten Southern battles. For Ransom these things were
+not a challenge nor a taunt; they touched him with respect, with the
+sentiment of beauty. He was capable of being a generous foeman, and he
+forgot, now, the whole question of sides and parties; the simple emotion
+of the old fighting-time came back to him, and the monument around him
+seemed an embodiment of that memory; it arched over friends as well as
+enemies, the victims of defeat as well as the sons of triumph.
+
+"It is very beautiful--but I think it is very dreadful!" This remark,
+from Verena, called him back to the present. "It's a real sin to put up
+such a building, just to glorify a lot of bloodshed. If it wasn't so
+majestic, I would have it pulled down."
+
+"That is delightful feminine logic!" Ransom answered. "If, when women
+have the conduct of affairs, they fight as well as they reason, surely
+for them too we shall have to set up memorials."
+
+Verena retorted that they would reason so well they would have no need
+to fight--they would usher in the reign of peace. "But this is very
+peaceful too," she added, looking about her; and she sat down on a low
+stone ledge, as if to enjoy the influence of the scene. Ransom left her
+alone for ten minutes; he wished to take another look at the inscribed
+tablets, and read again the names of the various engagements, at several
+of which he had been present. When he came back to her she greeted him
+abruptly, with a question which had no reference to the solemnity of the
+spot. "If Miss Birdseye knew you were coming out to see me, can't _she_
+easily tell Olive? Then won't Olive make her reflexions about your
+neglect of herself?"
+
+"I don't care for her reflexions. At any rate, I asked Miss Birdseye, as
+a favour, not to mention to her that she had met me," Ransom added.
+
+Verena was silent a moment. "Your logic is most as good as a woman's. Do
+change your mind and go to see her now," she went on. "She will probably
+be at home by the time you get to Charles Street. If she was a little
+strange, a little stiff with you before (I know just how she must have
+been), all that will be different to-day."
+
+"Why will it be different?"
+
+"Oh, she will be easier, more genial, much softer."
+
+"I don't believe it," said Ransom; and his scepticism seemed none the
+less complete because it was light and smiling.
+
+"She is much happier now--she can afford not to mind you."
+
+"Not to mind me? That's a nice inducement for a gentleman to go and see
+a lady!"
+
+"Well, she will be more gracious, because she feels now that she is more
+successful."
+
+"You mean because she has brought you out? Oh, I have no doubt that has
+cleared the air for her immensely, and you have improved her very much.
+But I have got a charming impression out here, and I have no wish to put
+another--which won't be charming, anyhow you arrange it--on top of it."
+
+"Well, she will be sure to know you have been round here, at any rate,"
+Verena rejoined.
+
+"How will she know, unless you tell her?"
+
+"I tell her everything," said the girl; and now as soon as she had
+spoken, she blushed. He stood before her, tracing a figure on the mosaic
+pavement with his cane, conscious that in a moment they had become more
+intimate. They were discussing their affairs, which had nothing to do
+with the heroic symbols that surrounded them; but their affairs had
+suddenly grown so serious that there was no want of decency in their
+lingering there for the purpose. The implication that his visit might
+remain as a secret between them made them both feel it differently. To
+ask her to keep it so would have been, as it seemed to Ransom, a
+liberty, and, moreover, he didn't care so much as that; but if she were
+to prefer to do so such a preference would only make him consider the
+more that his expedition had been a success.
+
+"Oh, then, you can tell her this!" he said in a moment.
+
+"If I shouldn't, it would be the first----" And Verena checked herself.
+
+"You must arrange that with your conscience," Ransom went on, laughing.
+
+They came out of the hall, passed down the steps, and emerged from the
+Delta, as that portion of the college precinct is called. The afternoon
+had begun to wane, but the air was filled with a pink brightness, and
+there was a cool, pure smell, a vague breath of spring.
+
+"Well, if I don't tell Olive, then you must leave me here," said Verena,
+stopping in the path and putting out a hand of farewell.
+
+"I don't understand. What has that to do with it? Besides I thought you
+said you _must_ tell," Ransom added. In playing with the subject this
+way, in enjoying her visible hesitation, he was slightly conscious of a
+man's brutality--of being pushed by an impulse to test her good-nature,
+which seemed to have no limit. It showed no sign of perturbation as she
+answered:
+
+"Well, I want to be free--to do as I think best. And, if there is a
+chance of my keeping it back, there mustn't be anything more--there must
+not, Mr. Ransom, really."
+
+"Anything more? Why, what are you afraid there will be--if I should
+simply walk home with you?"
+
+"I must go alone, I must hurry back to mother," she said, for all reply.
+And she again put out her hand, which he had not taken before.
+
+Of course he took it now, and even held it a moment; he didn't like
+being dismissed, and was thinking of pretexts to linger. "Miss Birdseye
+said you would convert me, but you haven't yet," it came into his head
+to say.
+
+"You can't tell yet; wait a little. My influence is peculiar; it
+sometimes comes out a long time afterwards!" This speech, on Verena's
+part, was evidently perfunctory, and the grandeur of her self-reference
+jocular; she was much more serious when she went on quickly, "Do you
+mean to say Miss Birdseye promised you that?"
+
+"Oh yes. Talk about influence! you should have seen the influence I
+obtained over her."
+
+"Well, what good will it do, if I'm going to tell Olive about your
+visit?"
+
+"Well, you see, I think she hopes you won't. She believes you are going
+to convert me privately--so that I shall blaze forth, suddenly, out of
+the darkness of Mississippi, as a first-class proselyte: very effective
+and dramatic."
+
+Verena struck Basil Ransom as constantly simple, but there were moments
+when her candour seemed to him preternatural. "If I thought that would
+be the effect, I might make an exception," she remarked, speaking as if
+such a result were, after all, possible.
+
+"Oh, Miss Tarrant, you will convert me enough, any way," said the young
+man.
+
+"Enough? What do you mean by enough?"
+
+"Enough to make me terribly unhappy."
+
+She looked at him a moment, evidently not understanding; but she tossed
+him a retort at a venture, turned away, and took her course homeward.
+The retort was that if he should be unhappy it would serve him right--a
+form of words that committed her to nothing. As he returned to Boston he
+saw how curious he should be to learn whether she had betrayed him, as
+it were, to Miss Chancellor. He might learn through Mrs. Luna; that
+would almost reconcile him to going to see her again. Olive would
+mention it in writing to her sister, and Adeline would repeat the
+complaint. Perhaps she herself would even make him a scene about it;
+that would be, for him, part of the unhappiness he had foretold to
+Verena Tarrant.
+
+
+
+
+XXVI
+
+
+"Mrs. Henry Burrage, at home Wednesday evening, March 26th, at half-past
+nine o'clock." It was in consequence of having received a card with
+these words inscribed upon it that Basil Ransom presented himself, on
+the evening she had designated, at the house of a lady he had never
+heard of before. The account of the relation of effect to cause is not
+complete, however, unless I mention that the card bore, furthermore, in
+the left-hand lower corner, the words: "An Address from Miss Verena
+Tarrant." He had an idea (it came mainly from the look and even the
+odour of the engraved pasteboard) that Mrs. Burrage was a member of the
+fashionable world, and it was with considerable surprise that he found
+himself in such an element. He wondered what had induced a denizen of
+that fine air to send him an invitation; then he said to himself that,
+obviously, Verena Tarrant had simply requested that this should be done.
+Mrs. Henry Burrage, whoever she might be, had asked her if she shouldn't
+like some of her own friends to be present, and she had said, Oh yes,
+and mentioned him in the happy group. She had been able to give Mrs.
+Burrage his address, for had it not been contained in the short letter
+he despatched to Monadnoc Place soon after his return from Boston, in
+which he thanked Miss Tarrant afresh for the charming hour she had
+enabled him to spend at Cambridge? She had not answered his letter at
+the time, but Mrs. Burrage's card was a very good answer. Such a missive
+deserved a rejoinder, and it was by way of rejoinder that he entered the
+street car which, on the evening of March 26th, was to deposit him at a
+corner adjacent to Mrs. Burrage's dwelling. He almost never went to
+evening parties (he knew scarcely any one who gave them, though Mrs.
+Luna had broken him in a little), and he was sure this occasion was of
+festive intention, would have nothing in common with the nocturnal
+"exercises" at Miss Birdseye's; but he would have exposed himself to
+almost any social discomfort in order to see Verena Tarrant on the
+platform. The platform it evidently was to be--private if not
+public--since one was admitted by a ticket given away if not sold. He
+took his in his pocket, quite ready to present it at the door. It would
+take some time for me to explain the contradiction to the reader; but
+Basil Ransom's desire to be present at one of Verena's regular
+performances was not diminished by the fact that he detested her views
+and thought the whole business a poor perversity. He understood her now
+very well (since his visit to Cambridge); he saw she was honest and
+natural; she had queer, bad lecture-blood in her veins, and a comically
+false idea of the aptitude of little girls for conducting movements; but
+her enthusiasm was of the purest, her illusions had a fragrance, and so
+far as the mania for producing herself personally was concerned, it had
+been distilled into her by people who worked her for ends which to Basil
+Ransom could only appear insane. She was a touching, ingenuous victim,
+unconscious of the pernicious forces which were hurrying her to her
+ruin. With this idea of ruin there had already associated itself in the
+young man's mind, the idea--a good deal more dim and incomplete--of
+rescue; and it was the disposition to confirm himself in the view that
+her charm was her own, and her fallacies, her absurdity, a mere
+reflexion of unlucky circumstance, that led him to make an effort to
+behold her in the position in which he could least bear to think of her.
+Such a glimpse was all that was wanted to prove to him that she was a
+person for whom he might open an unlimited credit of tender compassion.
+He expected to suffer--to suffer deliciously.
+
+By the time he had crossed Mrs. Burrage's threshold there was no doubt
+whatever in his mind that he was in the fashionable world. It was
+embodied strikingly in the stout, elderly, ugly lady, dressed in a
+brilliant colour, with a twinkle of jewels and a bosom much uncovered,
+who stood near the door of the first room, and with whom the people
+passing in before him were shaking hands. Ransom made her a Mississipian
+bow, and she said she was delighted to see him, while people behind him
+pressed him forward. He yielded to the impulsion, and found himself in a
+great saloon, amid lights and flowers, where the company was dense, and
+there were more twinkling, smiling ladies, with uncovered bosoms. It was
+certainly the fashionable world, for there was no one there whom he had
+ever seen before. The walls of the room were covered with pictures--the
+very ceiling was painted and framed. The people pushed each other a
+little, edged about, advanced and retreated, looking at each other with
+differing faces--sometimes blandly, unperceivingly, sometimes with a
+harshness of contemplation, a kind of cruelty, Ransom thought; sometimes
+with sudden nods and grimaces, inarticulate murmurs, followed by a quick
+reaction, a sort of gloom. He was now absolutely certain that he was in
+the best society. He was carried further and further forward, and saw
+that another room stretched beyond the one he had entered, in which
+there was a sort of little stage, covered with a red cloth, and an
+immense collection of chairs, arranged in rows. He became aware that
+people looked at him, as well as at each other, rather more, indeed,
+than at each other, and he wondered whether it were very visible in his
+appearance that his being there was a kind of exception. He didn't know
+how much his head looked over the heads of others, or that his brown
+complexion, fuliginous eye, and straight black hair, the leonine fall of
+which I mentioned in the first pages of this narrative, gave him that
+relief which, in the best society, has the great advantage of suggesting
+a topic. But there were other topics besides, as was proved by a
+fragment of conversation, between two ladies, which reached his ear
+while he stood rather wistfully wondering where Verena Tarrant might be.
+
+"Are you a member?" one of the ladies said to the other. "I didn't know
+you had joined."
+
+"Oh, I haven't; nothing would induce me."
+
+"That's not fair; you have all the fun and none of the responsibility."
+
+"Oh, the--the fun!" exclaimed the second lady.
+
+"You needn't abuse us, or I will never invite you," said the first.
+
+"Well, I thought it was meant to be improving; that's all I mean; very
+good for the mind. Now, this woman to-night; isn't she from Boston?"
+
+"Yes, I believe they have brought her on, just for this."
+
+"Well, you must be pretty desperate when you have got to go to Boston
+for your entertainment."
+
+"Well, there's a similar society there, and I never heard of their
+sending to New York."
+
+"Of course not, they think they have got everything. But doesn't it make
+your life a burden thinking what you can possibly have?"
+
+"Oh dear, no. I am going to have Professor Gougenheim--all about the
+Talmud. You must come."
+
+"Well, I'll come," said the second lady; "but nothing would induce me to
+be a regular member."
+
+Whatever the mystic circle might be, Ransom agreed with the second lady
+that regular membership must have terrors, and he admired her
+independence in such an artificial world. A considerable part of the
+company had now directed itself to the further apartment--people had
+begun to occupy the chairs, to confront the empty platform. He reached
+the wide doors, and saw that the place was a spacious music-room,
+decorated in white and gold, with a polished floor and marble busts of
+composers, on brackets attached to the delicate panels. He forbore to
+enter, however, being shy about taking a seat, and seeing that the
+ladies were arranging themselves first. He turned back into the first
+room, to wait till the audience had massed itself, conscious that even
+if he were behind every one he should be able to make a long neck; and
+here, suddenly, in a corner, his eyes rested upon Olive Chancellor. She
+was seated a little apart, in an angle of the room, and she was looking
+straight at him; but as soon as she perceived that he saw her she
+dropped her eyes, giving no sign of recognition. Ransom hesitated a
+moment, but the next he went straight over to her. It had been in his
+mind that if Verena Tarrant was there, _she_ would be there; an instinct
+told him that Miss Chancellor would not allow her dear friend to come to
+New York without her. It was very possible she meant to "cut"
+him--especially if she knew of his having cut her, the other week, in
+Boston; but it was his duty to take for granted she would speak to him,
+until the contrary should be definitely proved. Though he had seen her
+only twice he remembered well how acutely shy she was capable of being,
+and he thought it possible one of these spasms had seized her at the
+present time.
+
+When he stood before her he found his conjecture perfectly just; she was
+white with the intensity of her self-consciousness; she was altogether
+in a very uncomfortable state. She made no response to his offer to
+shake hands with her, and he saw that she would never go through that
+ceremony again. She looked up at him when he spoke to her, and her lips
+moved; but her face was intensely grave and her eye had almost a
+feverish light. She had evidently got into her corner to be out of the
+way; he recognised in her the air of an interloper, as he had felt it in
+himself. The small sofa on which she had placed herself had the form to
+which the French give the name of _causeuse_; there was room on it for
+just another person, and Ransom asked her, with a cheerful accent, if he
+might sit down beside her. She turned towards him when he had done so,
+turned everything but her eyes, and opened and shut her fan while she
+waited for her fit of diffidence to pass away. Ransom himself did not
+wait; he took a jocular tone about their encounter, asking her if she
+had come to New York to rouse the people. She glanced round the room;
+the backs of Mrs. Burrage's guests, mainly, were presented to them, and
+their position was partly masked by a pyramid of flowers which rose from
+a pedestal close to Olive's end of the sofa and diffused a fragrance in
+the air.
+
+"Do you call these 'the people'?" she asked.
+
+"I haven't the least idea. I don't know who any of them are, not even
+who Mrs. Henry Burrage is, I simply received an invitation."
+
+Miss Chancellor gave him no information on the point he had mentioned;
+she only said, in a moment: "Do you go wherever you are invited?"
+
+"Why, I go if I think I may find you there," the young man replied
+gallantly. "My card mentioned that Miss Tarrant would give an address,
+and I knew that wherever she is you are not far off. I have heard you
+are inseparable, from Mrs. Luna."
+
+"Yes, we are inseparable. That is exactly why I am here."
+
+"It's the fashionable world, then, you are going to stir up."
+
+Olive remained for some time with her eyes fastened to the floor; then
+she flashed them up at her interlocutor. "It's a part of our life to go
+anywhere--to carry our work where it seems most needed. We have taught
+ourselves to stifle repulsion, distaste."
+
+"Oh, I think this is very amusing," said Ransom. "It's a beautiful
+house, and there are some very pretty faces. We haven't anything so
+brilliant in Mississippi."
+
+To everything he said Olive offered at first a momentary silence, but
+the worst of her shyness was apparently leaving her.
+
+"Are you successful in New York? do you like it?" she presently asked,
+uttering the inquiry in a tone of infinite melancholy, as if the eternal
+sense of duty forced it from her lips.
+
+"Oh, successful! I am not successful as you and Miss Tarrant are; for
+(to my barbaric eyes) it is a great sign of prosperity to be the
+heroines of an occasion like this."
+
+"Do I look like the heroine of an occasion?" asked Olive Chancellor,
+without an intention of humour, but with an effect that was almost
+comical.
+
+"You would if you didn't hide yourself away. Are you not going into the
+other room to hear the speech? Everything is prepared."
+
+"I am going when I am notified--when I am invited."
+
+There was considerable majesty in her tone, and Ransom saw that
+something was wrong, that she felt neglected. To see that she was as
+ticklish with others as she had been with him made him feel forgiving,
+and there was in his manner a perfect disposition to forget their
+differences as he said, "Oh, there is plenty of time; the place isn't
+half full yet."
+
+She made no direct rejoinder to this, but she asked him about his mother
+and sisters, what news he received from the South. "Have they any
+happiness?" she inquired, rather as if she warned him to take care not
+to pretend they had. He neglected her warning to the point of saying
+that there was one happiness they always had--that of having learned not
+to think about it too much, and to make the best of their circumstances.
+She listened to this with an air of great reserve, and apparently
+thought he had wished to give her a lesson; for she suddenly broke out,
+"You mean that you have traced a certain line for them, and that that's
+all you know about it!"
+
+Ransom stared at her, surprised; he felt, now, that she would always
+surprise him. "Ah, don't be rough with me," he said, in his soft
+Southern voice; "don't you remember how you knocked me about when I
+called on you in Boston?"
+
+"You hold us in chains, and then, when we writhe in our agony, you say
+we don't behave prettily!" These words, which did not lessen Ransom's
+wonderment, were the young lady's answer to his deprecatory speech. She
+saw that he was honestly bewildered and that in a moment more he would
+laugh at her, as he had done a year and a half before (she remembered it
+as if it had been yesterday); and to stop that off, at any cost, she
+went on hurriedly--"If you listen to Miss Tarrant, you will know what I
+mean."
+
+"Oh, Miss Tarrant--Miss Tarrant!" And Basil Ransom's laughter came.
+
+She had not escaped that mockery, after all, and she looked at him
+sharply now, her embarrassment having quite cleared up. "What do you
+know about her? What observation have you had?"
+
+Ransom met her eye, and for a moment they scrutinised each other. Did
+she know of his interview with Verena a month before, and was her
+reserve simply the wish to place on him the burden of declaring that he
+had been to Boston since they last met, and yet had not called in
+Charles Street? He thought there was suspicion in her face; but in
+regard to Verena she would always be suspicious. If he had done at that
+moment just what would gratify him he would have said to her that he
+knew a great deal about Miss Tarrant, having lately had a long walk and
+talk with her; but he checked himself, with the reflexion that if Verena
+had not betrayed him it would be very wrong in him to betray her. The
+sweetness of the idea that she should have thought the episode of his
+visit to Monadnoc Place worth placing under the rose, was quenched for
+the moment in his regret at not being able to let his disagreeable
+cousin know that he had passed _her_ over. "Don't you remember my
+hearing her speak that night at Miss Birdseye's?" he said presently.
+"And I met her the next day at your house, you know."
+
+"She has developed greatly since then," Olive remarked dryly; and Ransom
+felt sure that Verena had held her tongue.
+
+At this moment a gentleman made his way through the clusters of Mrs.
+Burrage's guests and presented himself to Olive. "If you will do me the
+honour to take my arm I will find a good seat for you in the other room.
+It's getting to be time for Miss Tarrant to reveal herself. I have been
+taking her into the picture-room; there were some things she wanted to
+see. She is with my mother now," he added, as if Miss Chancellor's grave
+face constituted a sort of demand for an explanation of her friend's
+absence. "She said she was a little nervous; so I thought we would just
+move about."
+
+"It's the first time I have ever heard of that!" said Olive Chancellor,
+preparing to surrender herself to the young man's guidance. He told her
+that he had reserved the best seat for her; it was evidently his desire
+to conciliate her, to treat her as a person of importance. Before
+leading her away, he shook hands with Ransom and remarked that he was
+very glad to see him; and Ransom saw that he must be the master of the
+house, though he could scarcely be the son of the stout lady in the
+doorway. He was a fresh, pleasant, handsome young man, with a bright
+friendly manner; he recommended Ransom to take a seat in the other room,
+without delay; if he had never heard Miss Tarrant he would have one of
+the greatest pleasures of his life.
+
+"Oh, Mr. Ransom only comes to ventilate his prejudices," Miss Chancellor
+said, as she turned her back to her kinsman. He shrank from pushing into
+the front of the company, which was now rapidly filling the music-room,
+and contented himself with lingering in the doorway, where several
+gentlemen were stationed. The seats were all occupied; all, that is,
+save one, towards which he saw Miss Chancellor and her companion direct
+themselves, squeezing and edging past the people who were standing up
+against the walls. This was quite in front, close to the little
+platform; every one noticed Olive as she went, and Ransom heard a
+gentleman near him say to another--"I guess she's one of the same kind."
+He looked for Verena, but she was apparently keeping out of sight.
+Suddenly he felt himself smartly tapped on the back, and, turning round,
+perceived Mrs. Luna, who had been prodding him with her fan.
+
+
+
+
+XXVII
+
+
+"You won't speak to me in my own house--that I have almost grown used
+to; but if you are going to pass me over in public I think you might
+give me warning first." This was only her archness, and he knew what to
+make of that now; she was dressed in yellow and looked very plump and
+gay. He wondered at the unerring instinct by which she had discovered
+his exposed quarter. The outer room was completely empty; she had come
+in at the further door and found the field free for her operations. He
+offered to find her a place where she could see and hear Miss Tarrant,
+to get her a chair to stand on, even, if she wished to look over the
+heads of the gentlemen in the doorway; a proposal which she greeted with
+the inquiry--"Do you suppose I came here for the sake of that
+chatterbox? haven't I told you what I think of her?"
+
+"Well, you certainly did not come here for my sake," said Ransom,
+anticipating this insinuation; "for you couldn't possibly have known I
+was coming."
+
+"I guessed it--a presentiment told me!" Mrs. Luna declared; and she
+looked up at him with searching, accusing eyes. "I know what you have
+come for," she cried in a moment. "You never mentioned to me that you
+knew Mrs. Burrage!"
+
+"I don't--I never had heard of her till she asked me."
+
+"Then why in the world _did_ she ask you?"
+
+Ransom had spoken a trifle rashly; it came over him, quickly, that there
+were reasons why he had better not have said that. But almost as quickly
+he covered up his mistake. "I suppose your sister was so good as to ask
+for a card for me."
+
+"My sister? My grandmother! I know how Olive loves you. Mr. Ransom, you
+are very deep." She had drawn him well into the room, out of earshot of
+the group in the doorway, and he felt that if she should be able to
+compass her wish she would organise a little entertainment for herself,
+in the outer drawing-room, in opposition to Miss Tarrant's address.
+"Please come and sit down here a moment; we shall be quite undisturbed.
+I have something very particular to say to you." She led the way to the
+little sofa in the corner, where he had been talking with Olive a few
+minutes before, and he accompanied her, with extreme reluctance,
+grudging the moments that he should be obliged to give to her. He had
+quite forgotten that he once had a vision of spending his life in her
+society, and he looked at his watch as he made the observation:
+
+"I haven't the least idea of losing any of the sport in there, you
+know."
+
+He felt, the next instant, that he oughtn't to have said that either;
+but he was irritated, disconcerted, and he couldn't help it. It was in
+the nature of a gallant Mississippian to do everything a lady asked him,
+and he had never, remarkable as it may appear, been in the position of
+finding such a request so incompatible with his own desires as now. It
+was a new predicament, for Mrs. Luna evidently meant to keep him if she
+could. She looked round the room, more and more pleased at their having
+it to themselves, and for the moment said nothing more about the
+singularity of his being there. On the contrary, she became freshly
+jocular, remarked that now they had got hold of him they wouldn't easily
+let him go, they would make him entertain them, induce him to give a
+lecture--on the "Lights and Shadows of Southern Life," or the "Social
+Peculiarities of Mississippi"--before the Wednesday Club.
+
+"And what in the world is the Wednesday Club? I suppose it's what those
+ladies were talking about," Ransom said.
+
+"I don't know your ladies, but the Wednesday Club is this thing. I don't
+mean you and me here together, but all those deluded beings in the other
+room. It is New York trying to be like Boston. It is the culture, the
+good form, of the metropolis. You might not think it, but it is. It's
+the 'quiet set'; they _are_ quiet enough; you might hear a pin drop, in
+there. Is some one going to offer up a prayer? How happy Olive must be,
+to be taken so seriously! They form an association for meeting at each
+other's houses, every week, and having some performance, or some paper
+read, or some subject explained. The more dreary it is and the more
+fearful the subject, the more they think it is what it ought to be. They
+have an idea this is the way to make New York society intellectual.
+There's a sumptuary law--isn't that what you call it?--about suppers,
+and they restrict themselves to a kind of Spartan broth. When it's made
+by their French cooks it isn't bad. Mrs. Burrage is one of the principal
+members--one of the founders, I believe; and when her turn has come
+round, formerly--it comes only once in the winter for each--I am told
+she has usually had very good music. But that is thought rather a base
+evasion, a begging of the question; the vulgar set can easily keep up
+with them on music. So Mrs. Burrage conceived the extraordinary
+idea"--and it was wonderful to hear how Mrs. Luna pronounced that
+adjective--"of sending on to Boston for that girl. It was her son, of
+course, who put it into her head; he has been at Cambridge for some
+years--that's where Verena lived, you know--and he was as thick with her
+as you please out there. Now that he is no longer there it suits him
+very well to have her here. She is coming on a visit to his mother when
+Olive goes. I asked them to stay with me, but Olive declined,
+majestically; she said they wished to be in some place where they would
+be free to receive 'sympathising friends.' So they are staying at some
+extraordinary kind of New Jerusalem boarding-house, in Tenth Street;
+Olive thinks it's her duty to go to such places. I was greatly surprised
+that she should let Verena be drawn into such a worldly crowd as this;
+but she told me they had made up their minds not to let _any_ occasion
+slip, that they could sow the seed of truth in drawing-rooms as well as
+in workshops, and that if a single person was brought round to their
+ideas they should have been justified in coming on. That's what they are
+doing in there--sowing the seed; but you shall not be the one that's
+brought round, I shall take care of that. Have you seen my delightful
+sister yet? The way she _does_ arrange herself when she wants to protest
+against frills! She looks as if she thought it pretty barren ground
+round here, now she has come to see it. I don't think she thinks you can
+be saved in a French dress, anyhow. I must say I call it a _very_ base
+evasion of Mrs. Burrage's, producing Verena Tarrant; it's worse than the
+meretricious music. Why didn't she honestly send for a _ballerina_ from
+Niblo's--if she wanted a young woman capering about on a platform? They
+don't care a fig about poor Olive's ideas; it's only because Verena has
+strange hair, and shiny eyes, and gets herself up like a
+prestidigitator's assistant. I have never understood how Olive can
+reconcile herself to Verena's really low style of dress. I suppose it's
+only because her clothes are so fearfully made. You look as if you
+didn't believe me--but I assure you that the cut is revolutionary; and
+that's a salve to Olive's conscience."
+
+Ransom was surprised to hear that he looked as if he didn't believe her,
+for he had found himself, after his first uneasiness, listening with
+considerable interest to her account of the circumstances under which
+Miss Tarrant was visiting New York. After a moment, as the result of
+some private reflexion, he propounded this question: "Is the son of the
+lady of the house a handsome young man, very polite, in a white vest?"
+
+"I don't know the colour of his vest--but he has a kind of fawning
+manner. Verena judges from that that he is in love with her."
+
+"Perhaps he is," said Ransom. "You say it was his idea to get her to
+come on."
+
+"Oh, he likes to flirt; that is highly probable."
+
+"Perhaps she has brought him round."
+
+"Not to where she wants, I think. The property is very large; he will
+have it all one of these days."
+
+"Do you mean she wishes to impose on him the yoke of matrimony?" Ransom
+asked, with Southern languor.
+
+"I believe she thinks matrimony an exploded superstition; but there is
+here and there a case in which it is still the best thing; when the
+gentleman's name happens to be Burrage and the young lady's Tarrant. I
+don't admire 'Burrage' so much myself. But I think she would have
+captured this present scion if it hadn't been for Olive. Olive stands
+between them--she wants to keep her in the single sisterhood; to keep
+her, above all, for herself. Of course she won't listen to her marrying,
+and she has put a spoke in the wheel. She has brought her to New York;
+that may seem against what I say; but the girl pulls hard, she has to
+humour her, to give her her head sometimes, to throw something
+overboard, in short, to save the rest. You may say, as regards Mr.
+Burrage, that it's a queer taste in a gentleman; but there is no arguing
+about that. It's queer taste in a lady, too; for she is a lady, poor
+Olive. You can see that to-night. She is dressed like a book-agent, but
+she is more distinguished than any one here. Verena, beside her, looks
+like a walking advertisement."
+
+When Mrs. Luna paused, Basil Ransom became aware that, in the other
+room, Verena's address had begun; the sound of her clear, bright,
+ringing voice, an admirable voice for public uses, came to them from the
+distance. His eagerness to stand where he could hear her better, and see
+her into the bargain, made him start in his place, and this movement
+produced an outgush of mocking laughter on the part of his companion.
+But she didn't say--"Go, go, deluded man, I take pity on you!" she only
+remarked, with light impertinence, that he surely wouldn't be so wanting
+in gallantry as to leave a lady absolutely alone in a public place--it
+was so Mrs. Luna was pleased to qualify Mrs. Burrage's drawing-room--in
+the face of her entreaty that he would remain with her. She had the
+better of poor Ransom, thanks to the superstitions of Mississippi. It
+was in his simple code a gross rudeness to withdraw from conversation
+with a lady at a party before another gentleman should have come to take
+one's place; it was to inflict on the lady a kind of outrage. The other
+gentlemen, at Mrs. Burrage's, were all too well occupied; there was not
+the smallest chance of one of them coming to his rescue. He couldn't
+leave Mrs. Luna, and yet he couldn't stay with her and lose the only
+thing he had come so much out of his way for. "Let me at least find you
+a place over there, in the doorway. You can stand upon a chair--you can
+lean on me."
+
+"Thank you very much; I would much rather lean on this sofa. And I am
+much too tired to stand on chairs. Besides, I wouldn't for the world
+that either Verena or Olive should see me craning over the heads of the
+crowd--as if I attached the smallest importance to their perorations!"
+
+"It isn't time for the peroration yet," Ransom said, with savage
+dryness; and he sat forward, with his elbow on his knees, his eyes on
+the ground, a flush in his sallow cheek.
+
+"It's never time to say such things as those," Mrs. Luna remarked,
+arranging her laces.
+
+"How do you know what she is saying?"
+
+"I can tell by the way her voice goes up and down. It sounds so silly."
+
+Ransom sat there five minutes longer--minutes which, he felt, the
+recording angel ought to write down to his credit--and asked himself how
+Mrs. Luna could be such a goose as not to see that she was making him
+hate her. But she was goose enough for anything. He tried to appear
+indifferent, and it occurred to him to doubt whether the Mississippi
+system could be right, after all. It certainly hadn't foreseen such a
+case as this. "It's as plain as day that Mr. Burrage intends to marry
+her--if he can," he said in a minute; that remark being better
+calculated than any other he could think of to dissimulate his real
+state of mind.
+
+It drew no rejoinder from his companion, and after an instant he turned
+his head a little and glanced at her. The result of something that
+silently passed between them was to make her say, abruptly: "Mr. Ransom,
+my sister never sent you an invitation to this place. Didn't it come
+from Verena Tarrant?"
+
+"I haven't the least idea."
+
+"As you hadn't the least acquaintance with Mrs. Burrage, who else could
+it have come from?"
+
+"If it came from Miss Tarrant, I ought at least to recognise her
+courtesy by listening to her."
+
+"If you rise from this sofa I will tell Olive what I suspect. She will
+be perfectly capable of carrying Verena off to China--or anywhere out of
+your reach."
+
+"And pray what is it you suspect?"
+
+"That you two have been in correspondence."
+
+"Tell her whatever you like, Mrs. Luna," said the young man, with the
+grimness of resignation.
+
+"You are quite unable to deny it, I see."
+
+"I never contradict a lady."
+
+"We shall see if I can't make you tell a fib. Haven't you been seeing
+Miss Tarrant, too?"
+
+"Where should I have seen her? I can't see all the way to Boston, as you
+said the other day."
+
+"Haven't you been there--on secret visits?"
+
+Ransom started just perceptibly; but to conceal it, the next instant, he
+stood up.
+
+"They wouldn't be secret if I were to tell you."
+
+Looking down at her he saw that her words were a happy hit, not the
+result of definite knowledge. But she appeared to him vain, egotistical,
+grasping, odious.
+
+"Well, I shall give the alarm," she went on; "that is, I will if you
+leave me. Is that the way a Southern gentleman treats a lady? Do as I
+wish, and I will let you off!"
+
+"You won't let me off from staying with you."
+
+"Is it such a _corvée_? I never heard of such rudeness!" Mrs. Luna
+cried. "All the same, I am determined to keep you if I can!"
+
+Ransom felt that she must be in the wrong, and yet superficially she
+seemed (and it was quite intolerable) to have right on her side. All
+this while Verena's golden voice, with her words indistinct, solicited,
+tantalised his ear. The question had evidently got on Mrs. Luna's
+nerves; she had reached that point of feminine embroilment when a woman
+is perverse for the sake of perversity, and even with a clear vision of
+bad consequences.
+
+"You have lost your head," he relieved himself by saying, as he looked
+down at her.
+
+"I wish you would go and get me some tea."
+
+"You say that only to embarrass me." He had hardly spoken when a great
+sound of applause, the clapping of many hands, and the cry from fifty
+throats of "Brava, brava!" floated in and died away. All Ransom's pulses
+throbbed, he flung his scruples to the winds, and after remarking to
+Mrs. Luna--still with all due ceremony--that he feared he must resign
+himself to forfeiting her good opinion, turned his back upon her and
+strode away to the open door of the music-room. "Well, I have never been
+so insulted!" he heard her exclaim, with exceeding sharpness, as he left
+her; and, glancing back at her, as he took up his position, he saw her
+still seated on her sofa--alone in the lamp-lit desert--with her eyes
+making, across the empty space, little vindictive points. Well, she
+could come where he was, if she wanted him so much; he would support her
+on an ottoman, and make it easy for her to see. But Mrs. Luna was
+uncompromising; he became aware, after a minute, that she had withdrawn,
+majestically, from the place, and he did not see her again that evening.
+
+
+
+
+XXVIII
+
+
+He could command the music-room very well from where he stood, behind a
+thick outer fringe of intently listening men. Verena Tarrant was erect
+on her little platform, dressed in white, with flowers in her bosom. The
+red cloth beneath her feet looked rich in the light of lamps placed on
+high pedestals on either side of the stage; it gave her figure a setting
+of colour which made it more pure and salient. She moved freely in her
+exposed isolation, yet with great sobriety of gesture; there was no
+table in front of her, and she had no notes in her hand, but stood there
+like an actress before the footlights, or a singer spinning vocal sounds
+to a silver thread. There was such a risk that a slim provincial girl,
+pretending to fascinate a couple of hundred _blasé_ New Yorkers by
+simply giving them her ideas, would fail of her effect, that at the end
+of a few moments Basil Ransom became aware that he was watching her in
+very much the same excited way as if she had been performing, high above
+his head, on the trapeze. Yet, as one listened, it was impossible not to
+perceive that she was in perfect possession of her faculties, her
+subject, her audience; and he remembered the other time at Miss
+Birdseye's well enough to be able to measure the ground she had
+travelled since then. This exhibition was much more complete, her manner
+much more assured; she seemed to speak and survey the whole place from a
+much greater height. Her voice, too, had developed; he had forgotten how
+beautiful it could be when she raised it to its full capacity. Such a
+tone as that, so pure and rich, and yet so young, so natural,
+constituted in itself a talent; he didn't wonder that they had made a
+fuss about her at the Female Convention, if she filled their hideous
+hall with such a music. He had read, of old, of the _improvisatrice_ of
+Italy, and this was a chastened, modern, American version of the type, a
+New England Corinna, with a mission instead of a lyre. The most graceful
+part of her was her earnestness, the way her delightful eyes, wandering
+over the "fashionable audience" (before which she was so perfectly
+unabashed), as if she wished to resolve it into a single sentient
+personality, seemed to say that the only thing in life she cared for was
+to put the truth into a form that would render conviction irresistible.
+She was as simple as she was charming, and there was not a glance or
+motion that did not seem part of the pure, still-burning passion that
+animated her. She had indeed--it was manifest--reduced the company to
+unanimity; their attention was anything but languid; they smiled back at
+her when she smiled; they were noiseless, motionless when she was
+solemn; and it was evident that the entertainment which Mrs. Burrage had
+had the happy thought of offering to her friends would be memorable in
+the annals of the Wednesday Club. It was agreeable to Basil Ransom to
+think that Verena noticed him in his corner; her eyes played over her
+listeners so freely that you couldn't say they rested in one place more
+than another; nevertheless, a single rapid ray, which, however, didn't
+in the least strike him as a deviation from her ridiculous, fantastic,
+delightful argument, let him now that he had been missed and now was
+particularly spoken to. This glance was a sufficient assurance that his
+invitation had come to him by the girl's request. He took for granted
+the matter of her speech was ridiculous; how could it help being, and
+what did it signify if it was? She was none the less charming for that,
+and the moonshine she had been plied with was none the less moonshine
+for her being charming. After he had stood there a quarter of an hour he
+became conscious that he should not be able to repeat a word she had
+said; he had not definitely heeded it, and yet he had not lost a
+vibration of her voice. He had discovered Olive Chancellor by this time;
+she was in the front row of chairs, at the end, on the left; her back
+was turned to him, but he could see half her sharp profile, bent down a
+little and absolutely motionless. Even across the wide interval her
+attitude expressed to him a kind of rapturous stillness, the
+concentration of triumph. There were several irrepressible effusions of
+applause, instantly self-checked, but Olive never looked up, at the
+loudest, and such a calmness as that could only be the result of
+passionate volition. Success was in the air, and she was tasting it; she
+tasted it, as she did everything, in a way of her own. Success for
+Verena was success for her, and Ransom was sure that the only thing
+wanting to her triumph was that he should have been placed in the line
+of her vision, so that she might enjoy his embarrassment and confusion,
+might say to him, in one of her dumb, cold flashes--"_Now_ do you think
+our movement is not a force--_now_ do you think that women are meant to
+be slaves?" Honestly, he was not conscious of any confusion; it
+subverted none of his heresies to perceive that Verena Tarrant had even
+more power to fix his attention than he had hitherto supposed. It was
+fixed in a way it had not been yet, however, by his at last
+understanding her speech, feeling it reach his inner sense through the
+impediment of mere dazzled vision. Certain phrases took on a meaning for
+him--an appeal she was making to those who still resisted the beneficent
+influence of the truth. They appeared to be mocking, cynical men,
+mainly; many of whom were such triflers and idlers, so heartless and
+brainless that it didn't matter much what they thought on any subject;
+if the old tyranny needed to be propped up by _them_ it showed it was in
+a pretty bad way. But there were others whose prejudice was stronger and
+more cultivated, pretended to rest upon study and argument. To those she
+wished particularly to address herself; she wanted to waylay them, to
+say, "Look here, you're all wrong; you'll be so much happier when I have
+convinced you. Just give me five minutes," she should like to say; "just
+sit down here and let me ask a simple question. Do you think any state
+of society can come to good that is based upon an organised wrong?" That
+was the simple question that Verena desired to propound, and Basil
+smiled across the room at her with an amused tenderness as he gathered
+that she conceived it to be a poser. He didn't think it would frighten
+him much if she were to ask him that, and he would sit down with her for
+as many minutes as she liked.
+
+He, of course, was one of the systematic scoffers, one of those to whom
+she said--"Do you know how you strike me? You strike me as men who are
+starving to death while they have a cupboard at home, all full of bread
+and meat and wine; or as blind, demented beings who let themselves be
+cast into a debtor's prison, while in their pocket they have the key of
+vaults and treasure-chests heaped up with gold and silver. The meat and
+wine, the gold and silver," Verena went on, "are simply the suppressed
+and wasted force, the precious sovereign remedy, of which society
+insanely deprives itself--the genius, the intelligence, the inspiration
+of women. It is dying, inch by inch, in the midst of old superstitions
+which it invokes in vain, and yet it has the elixir of life in its
+hands. Let it drink but a draught, and it will bloom once more; it will
+be refreshed, radiant; it will find its youth again. The heart, the
+heart is cold, and nothing but the touch of woman can warm it, make it
+act. We _are_ the Heart of humanity, and let us have the courage to
+insist on it! The public life of the world will move in the same barren,
+mechanical, vicious circle--the circle of egotism, cruelty, ferocity,
+jealousy, greed, of blind striving to do things only for _some_, at the
+cost of others, instead of trying to do everything for all. All, all?
+Who dares to say 'all' when we are not there? We are an equal, a
+splendid, an inestimable part. Try us and you'll see--you will wonder
+how, without us, society has ever dragged itself even this distance--so
+wretchedly small compared with what it might have been--on its painful
+earthly pilgrimage. That is what I should like above all to pour into
+the ears of those who still hold out, who stiffen their necks and repeat
+hard, empty formulas, which are as dry as a broken gourd that has been
+flung away in the desert. I would take them by their selfishness, their
+indolence, their interest. I am not here to recriminate, nor to deepen
+the gulf that already yawns between the sexes, and I don't accept the
+doctrine that they are natural enemies, since my plea is for a union far
+more intimate--provided it be equal--than any that the sages and
+philosophers of former times have ever dreamed of. Therefore I shall not
+touch upon the subject of men's being most easily influenced by
+considerations of what is most agreeable and profitable for _them_; I
+shall simply assume that they _are_ so influenced, and I shall say to
+them that our cause would long ago have been gained if their vision were
+not so dim, so veiled, even in matters in which their own interests are
+concerned. If they had the same quick sight as women, if they had the
+intelligence of the heart, the world would be very different now; and I
+assure you that half the bitterness of our lot is to see so clearly and
+not to be able to do! Good gentlemen all, if I could make you believe
+how much brighter and fairer and sweeter the garden of life would be for
+you, if you would only let us help you to keep it in order! You would
+like so much better to walk there, and you would find grass and trees
+and flowers that would make you think you were in Eden. That is what I
+should like to press home to each of you, personally, individually--to
+give him the vision of the world as it hangs perpetually before me,
+redeemed, transfigured, by a new moral tone. There would be generosity,
+tenderness, sympathy, where there is now only brute force and sordid
+rivalry. But you really do strike me as stupid even about your own
+welfare! Some of you say that we have already all the influence we can
+possibly require, and talk as if we ought to be grateful that we are
+allowed even to breathe. Pray, who shall judge what we require if not we
+ourselves? We require simply freedom; we require the lid to be taken off
+the box in which we have been kept for centuries. You say it's a very
+comfortable, cozy, convenient box, with nice glass sides, so that we can
+see out, and that all that's wanted is to give another quiet turn to the
+key. That is very easily answered. Good gentlemen, you have never been
+in the box, and you haven't the least idea how it feels!"
+
+The historian who has gathered these documents together does not deem it
+necessary to give a larger specimen of Verena's eloquence, especially as
+Basil Ransom, through whose ears we are listening to it, arrived, at
+this point, at a definite conclusion. He had taken her measure as a
+public speaker, judged her importance in the field of discussion, the
+cause of reform. Her speech, in itself, had about the value of a pretty
+essay, committed to memory and delivered by a bright girl at an
+"academy"; it was vague, thin, rambling, a tissue of generalities that
+glittered agreeably enough in Mrs. Burrage's veiled lamplight. From any
+serious point of view it was neither worth answering nor worth
+considering, and Basil Ransom made his reflexions on the crazy character
+of the age in which such a performance as that was treated as an
+intellectual effort, a contribution to a question. He asked himself what
+either he or any one else would think of it if Miss Chancellor--or even
+Mrs. Luna--had been on the platform instead of the actual declaimer.
+Nevertheless, its importance was high, and consisted precisely, in part,
+of the fact that the voice was not the voice of Olive or of Adeline. Its
+importance was that Verena was unspeakably attractive, and this was all
+the greater for him in the light of the fact, which quietly dawned upon
+him as he stood there, that he was falling in love with her. It had
+tapped at his heart for recognition, and before he could hesitate or
+challenge, the door had sprung open and the mansion was illuminated. He
+gave no outward sign; he stood gazing as at a picture; but the room
+wavered before his eyes, even Verena's figure danced a little. This did
+not make the sequel of her discourse more clear to him; her meaning
+faded again into the agreeable vague, and he simply felt her presence,
+tasted her voice. Yet the act of reflexion was not suspended; he found
+himself rejoicing that she was so weak in argument, so inevitably
+verbose. The idea that she was brilliant, that she counted as a factor
+only because the public mind was in a muddle, was not an humiliation but
+a delight to him; it was a proof that her apostleship was all nonsense,
+the most passing of fashions, the veriest of delusions, and that she was
+meant for something divinely different--for privacy, for him, for love.
+He took no measure of the duration of her talk; he only knew, when it
+was over and succeeded by a clapping of hands, an immense buzz of voices
+and shuffling of chairs, that it had been capitally bad, and that her
+personal success, wrapping it about with a glamour like the silver mist
+that surrounds a fountain, was such as to prevent its badness from being
+a cause of mortification to her lover. The company--such of it as did
+not immediately close together around Verena--filed away into the other
+rooms, bore him in its current into the neighbourhood of a table spread
+for supper, where he looked for signs of the sumptuary law mentioned to
+him by Mrs. Luna. It appeared to be embodied mainly in the glitter of
+crystal and silver, and the fresh tints of mysterious viands and
+jellies, which looked desirable in the soft circle projected by
+lace-fringed lamps. He heard the popping of corks, he felt a pressure of
+elbows, a thickening of the crowd, perceived that he was glowered at,
+squeezed against the table, by contending gentlemen who observed that he
+usurped space, was neither feeding himself nor helping others to feed.
+He had lost sight of Verena; she had been borne away in clouds of
+compliment; but he found himself thinking--almost paternally--that
+she must be hungry after so much chatter, and he hoped some one was
+getting her something to eat. After a moment, just as he was edging
+away, for his own opportunity to sup much better than usual was
+not what was uppermost in his mind, this little vision was suddenly
+embodied--embodied by the appearance of Miss Tarrant, who faced him, in
+the press, attached to the arm of a young man now recognisable to him as
+the son of the house--the smiling, fragrant youth who an hour before had
+interrupted his colloquy with Olive. He was leading her to the table,
+while people made way for them, covering Verena with gratulations of
+word and look. Ransom could see that, according to a phrase which came
+back to him just then, oddly, out of some novel or poem he had read of
+old, she was the cynosure of every eye. She looked beautiful, and they
+were a beautiful couple. As soon as she saw him, she put out her left
+hand to him--the other was in Mr. Burrage's arm--and said: "Well, don't
+you think it's all true?"
+
+"No, not a word of it!" Ransom answered, with a kind of joyous
+sincerity. "But it doesn't make any difference."
+
+"Oh, it makes a great deal of difference to me!" Verena cried.
+
+"I mean to me. I don't care in the least whether I agree with you,"
+Ransom said, looking askance at young Mr. Burrage, who had detached
+himself and was getting something for Verena to eat.
+
+"Ah, well, if you are so indifferent!"
+
+"It's not because I'm indifferent!" His eyes came back to her own, the
+expression of which had changed before they quitted them. She began to
+complain to her companion, who brought her something very dainty on a
+plate, that Mr. Ransom was "standing out," that he was about the hardest
+subject she had encountered yet. Henry Burrage smiled upon Ransom in a
+way that was meant to show he remembered having already spoken to him,
+while the Mississippian said to himself that there was nothing on the
+face of it to make it strange there should be between these fair,
+successful young persons some such question of love or marriage as Mrs.
+Luna had tattled about. Mr. Burrage was successful, he could see that in
+the turn of an eye; not perhaps as having a commanding intellect or a
+very strong character, but as being rich, polite, handsome, happy,
+amiable, and as wearing a splendid camellia in his buttonhole. And that
+_he_, at any rate, thought Verena had succeeded was proved by the
+casual, civil tone, and the contented distraction of eye, with which he
+exclaimed, "You don't mean to say you were not moved by that! It's my
+opinion that Miss Tarrant will carry everything before her." He was so
+pleased himself, and so safe in his conviction, that it didn't matter to
+him what any one else thought; which was, after all, just Basil Ransom's
+own state of mind.
+
+"Oh! I didn't say I wasn't moved," the Mississippian remarked.
+
+"Moved the wrong way!" said Verena. "Never mind; you'll be left behind."
+
+"If I am, you will come back to console me."
+
+"_Back?_ I shall never come back!" the girl replied gaily.
+
+"You'll be the very first!" Ransom went on, feeling himself now, and as
+if by a sudden clearing up of his spiritual atmosphere, no longer in the
+vein for making the concessions of chivalry, and yet conscious that his
+words were an expression of homage.
+
+"Oh, I call that presumptuous!" Mr. Burrage exclaimed, turning away to
+get a glass of water for Verena, who had refused to accept champagne,
+mentioning that she had never drunk any in her life and that she
+associated a kind of iniquity with it. Olive had no wine in her house
+(not that Verena gave this explanation) but her father's old madeira and
+a little claret; of the former of which liquors Basil Ransom had highly
+approved the day he dined with her.
+
+"Does he believe in all those lunacies?" he inquired, knowing perfectly
+what to think about the charge of presumption brought by Mr. Burrage.
+
+"Why, he's crazy about our movement," Verena responded. "He's one of my
+most gratifying converts."
+
+"And don't you despise him for it?"
+
+"Despise him? Why, you seem to think I swing round pretty often!"
+
+"Well, I have an idea that I shall see you swing round yet," Ransom
+remarked, in a tone in which it would have appeared to Henry Burrage,
+had he heard these words, that presumption was pushed to fatuity.
+
+On Verena, however, they produced no impression that prevented her from
+saying simply, without the least rancour, "Well, if you expect to draw
+me back five hundred years, I hope you won't tell Miss Birdseye." And as
+Ransom did not seize immediately the reason of her allusion, she went
+on, "You know she is convinced it will be just the other way. I went to
+see her after you had been at Cambridge--almost immediately."
+
+"Darling old lady--I hope she's well," the young man said.
+
+"Well, she's tremendously interested."
+
+"She's always interested in something, isn't she?"
+
+"Well, this time it's in our relations, yours and mine," Verena replied,
+in a tone in which only Verena could say a thing like that. "You ought
+to see how she throws herself into them. She is sure it will all work
+round for your good."
+
+"All what, Miss Tarrant?" Ransom asked.
+
+"Well, what I told her. She is sure you are going to become one of our
+leaders, that you are very gifted for treating great questions and
+acting on masses of people, that you will become quite enthusiastic
+about our uprising, and that when you go up to the top as one of our
+champions it will all have been through me."
+
+Ransom stood there, smiling at her; the dusky glow in his eyes expressed
+a softness representing no prevision of such laurels, but which
+testified none the less to Verena's influence. "And what you want is
+that I shouldn't undeceive her?"
+
+"Well, I don't want you to be hypocritical--if you shouldn't take our
+side; but I do think that it would be sweet if the dear old thing could
+just cling to her illusion. She won't live so very long, probably; she
+told me the other day she was ready for her final rest; so it wouldn't
+interfere much with your freedom. She feels quite romantic about
+it--your being a Southerner and all, and not naturally in sympathy with
+Boston ideas, and your meeting her that way in the street and making
+yourself known to her. She won't believe but what I shall move you."
+
+"Don't fear, Miss Tarrant, she shall be satisfied," Ransom said, with a
+laugh which he could see she but partially understood. He was prevented
+from making his meaning more clear by the return of Mr. Burrage,
+bringing not only Verena's glass of water but a smooth-faced, rosy,
+smiling old gentleman, who had a velvet waistcoat, and thin white hair,
+brushed effectively, and whom he introduced to Verena under a name which
+Ransom recognised as that of a rich and venerable citizen, conspicuous
+for his public spirit and his large almsgiving. Ransom had lived long
+enough in New York to know that a request from this ancient worthy to be
+made known to Miss Tarrant would mark her for the approval of the
+respectable, stamp her as a success of no vulgar sort; and as he turned
+away, a faint, inaudible sigh passed his lips, dictated by the sense
+that he himself belonged to a terribly small and obscure minority. He
+turned away because, as we know, he had been taught that a gentleman
+talking to a lady must always do that when a new gentleman is presented;
+though he observed, looking back, after a minute, that young Mr. Burrage
+evidently had no intention of abdicating in favour of the eminent
+philanthropist. He thought he had better go home; he didn't know what
+might happen at such a party as that, nor when the proceedings might be
+supposed to terminate; but after considering it a minute he dismissed
+the idea that there was a chance of Verena's speaking again. If he was a
+little vague about this, however, there was no doubt in his mind as to
+the obligation he was under to take leave first of Mrs. Burrage. He
+wished he knew where Verena was staying; he wanted to see her alone, not
+in a supper-room crowded with millionaires. As he looked about for the
+hostess it occurred to him that she would know, and that if he were able
+to quench a certain shyness sufficiently to ask her, she would tell him.
+Having satisfied himself presently that she was not in the supper-room,
+he made his way back to the parlours, where the company now was much
+diminished. He looked again into the music-room, tenanted only by
+half-a-dozen couples, who were cultivating privacy among the empty
+chairs, and here he perceived Mrs. Burrage sitting in conversation with
+Olive Chancellor (the latter, apparently, had not moved from her place),
+before the deserted scene of Verena's triumph. His search had been so
+little for Olive that at the sight of her he faltered a moment; then he
+pulled himself together, advancing with a consciousness of the
+Mississippi manner. He felt Olive's eyes receiving him; she looked at
+him as if it was just the hope that she shouldn't meet him again that
+had made her remain where she was. Mrs. Burrage got up, as he bade her
+good-night, and Olive followed her example.
+
+"So glad you were able to come. Wonderful creature, isn't she? She can
+do anything she wants."
+
+These words from the elder lady Ransom received at first with a reserve
+which, as he trusted, suggested extreme respect; and it was a fact that
+his silence had a kind of Southern solemnity in it. Then he said, in a
+tone equally expressive of great deliberation:
+
+"Yes, madam, I think I never was present at an exhibition, an
+entertainment of any kind, which held me more completely under the
+charm."
+
+"Delighted you liked it. I didn't know what in the world to have, and
+this has proved an inspiration--for me as well as for Miss Tarrant. Miss
+Chancellor has been telling me how they have worked together; it's
+really quite beautiful. Miss Chancellor is Miss Tarrant's great friend
+and colleague. Miss Tarrant assures me that she couldn't do anything
+without her." After which explanation, turning to Olive, Mrs. Burrage
+murmured: "Let me introduce Mr. ---- introduce Mr. ----"
+
+But she had forgotten poor Ransom's name, forgotten who had asked her
+for a card for him; and, perceiving it, he came to her rescue with the
+observation that he was a kind of cousin of Miss Olive's, if she didn't
+repudiate him, and that he knew what a tremendous partnership existed
+between the two young ladies. "When I applauded I was applauding the
+firm--that is, you too," he said, smiling, to his kinswoman.
+
+"Your applause? I confess I don't understand it," Olive replied, with
+much promptitude.
+
+"Well, to tell the truth, I didn't myself!"
+
+"Oh yes, of course, I know; that's why--that's why----" And this further
+speech of Mrs. Burrage's, in reference to the relationship between the
+young man and her companion, faded also into vagueness. She had been on
+the point of saying it was the reason why he was in her house; but she
+had bethought herself in time that this ought to pass as a matter of
+course. Basil Ransom could see she was a woman who could carry off an
+awkwardness like that, and he considered her with a sense of her
+importance. She had a brisk, familiar, slightly impatient way, and if
+she had not spoken so fast, and had more of the softness of the Southern
+matron, she would have reminded him of a certain type of woman he had
+seen of old, before the changes in his own part of the world--the
+clever, capable, hospitable proprietress, widowed or unmarried, of a big
+plantation carried on by herself. "If you are her cousin, do take Miss
+Chancellor to have some supper--instead of going away," she went on,
+with her infelicitous readiness.
+
+At this Olive instantly seated herself again.
+
+"I am much obliged to you; I never touch supper. I shall not leave this
+room--I like it."
+
+"Then let me send you something--or let Mr. ----, your cousin, remain
+with you."
+
+Olive looked at Mrs. Burrage with a strange beseechingness, "I am very
+tired, I must rest. These occasions leave me exhausted."
+
+"Ah yes, I can imagine that. Well, then, you shall be quite quiet--I
+shall come back to you." And with a smile of farewell for Basil Ransom,
+Mrs. Burrage moved away.
+
+Basil lingered a moment, though he saw that Olive wished to get rid of
+him. "I won't disturb you further than to ask you a single question," he
+said. "Where are you staying? I want to come and see Miss Tarrant. I
+don't say I want to come and see you, because I have an idea that it
+would give you no pleasure." It had occurred to him that he might obtain
+their address from Mrs. Luna--he only knew vaguely it was Tenth Street;
+much as he had displeased her she couldn't refuse him that; but suddenly
+the greater simplicity and frankness of applying directly to Olive, even
+at the risk of appearing to brave her, recommended itself. He couldn't,
+of course, call upon Verena without her knowing it, and she might as
+well make her protest (since he proposed to pay no heed to it) sooner as
+later. He had seen nothing, personally, of their life together, but it
+had come over him that what Miss Chancellor most disliked in him (had
+she not, on the very threshold of their acquaintance, had a sort of
+mystical foreboding of it?) was the possibility that he would interfere.
+It was quite on the cards that he might; yet it was decent, all the
+same, to ask her rather than any one else. It was better that his
+interference should be accompanied with all the forms of chivalry.
+
+Olive took no notice of his remark as to how she herself might be
+affected by his visit; but she asked in a moment why he should think it
+necessary to call on Miss Tarrant. "You know you are not in sympathy,"
+she added, in a tone which contained a really touching element of
+entreaty that he would not even pretend to prove he was.
+
+I know not whether Basil was touched, but he said, with every appearance
+of a conciliatory purpose--"I wish to thank her for all the interesting
+information she has given me this evening."
+
+"If you think it generous to come and scoff at her, of course she has no
+defence; you will be glad to know that."
+
+"Dear Miss Chancellor, if you are not a defence--a battery of many
+guns!" Ransom exclaimed.
+
+"Well, she at least is not mine!" Olive returned, springing to her feet.
+She looked round her as if she were really pressed too hard, panting
+like a hunted creature.
+
+"Your defence is your certain immunity from attack. Perhaps if you won't
+tell me where you are staying, you will kindly ask Miss Tarrant herself
+to do so. Would she send me a word on a card?"
+
+"We are in West Tenth Street," Olive said; and she gave the number. "Of
+course you are free to come."
+
+"Of course I am! Why shouldn't I be? But I am greatly obliged to you for
+the information. I will ask her to come out, so that you won't see us."
+And he turned away, with the sense that it was really insufferable, her
+attempt always to give him the air of being in the wrong. If that was
+the kind of spirit in which women were going to act when they had more
+power!
+
+
+
+
+XXIX
+
+
+Mrs. Luna was early in the field the next day, and her sister wondered
+to what she owed the honour of a visit from her at eleven o'clock in the
+morning. She very soon saw, when Adeline asked her whether it had been
+she who procured for Basil Ransom an invitation to Mrs. Burrage's.
+
+"Me--why in the world should it have been me?" Olive asked, feeling
+something of a pang at the implication that it had not been Adeline, as
+she supposed.
+
+"I didn't know--but you took him up so."
+
+"Why, Adeline Luna, when did I ever----?" Miss Chancellor exclaimed,
+staring and intensely grave.
+
+"You don't mean to say you have forgotten how you brought him on to see
+you, a year and a half ago!"
+
+"I didn't bring him on--I said if he happened to be there."
+
+"Yes, I remember how it was: he did happen, and then you happened to
+hate him, and tried to get out of it."
+
+Miss Chancellor saw, I say, why Adeline had come to her at the hour she
+knew she was always writing letters, after having given her all the
+attention that was necessary the day before; she had come simply to make
+herself disagreeable, as Olive knew, of old, the spirit sometimes moved
+her irresistibly to do. It seemed to her that Adeline had been
+disagreeable enough in not having beguiled Basil Ransom into a marriage,
+according to that memorable calculation of probabilities in which she
+indulged (with a licence that she scarcely liked definitely to recall)
+when the pair made acquaintance under her eyes in Charles Street, and
+Mrs. Luna seemed to take to him as much as she herself did little. She
+would gladly have accepted him as a brother-in-law, for the harm such a
+relation could do one was limited and definite; whereas in his general
+capacity of being at large in her life the ability of the young
+Mississippian to injure her seemed somehow immense. "I wrote to
+him--that time--for a perfectly definite reason," she said. "I thought
+mother would have liked us to know him. But it was a mistake."
+
+"How do you know it was a mistake? Mother would have liked him, I
+daresay."
+
+"I mean my acting as I did; it was a theory of duty which I allowed to
+press me too much. I always do. Duty should be obvious; one shouldn't
+hunt round for it."
+
+"Was it very obvious when it brought you on here?" asked Mrs. Luna, who
+was distinctly out of humour.
+
+Olive looked for a moment at the toe of her shoe. "I had an idea that
+you would have married him by this time," she presently remarked.
+
+"Marry him yourself, my dear! What put such an idea into your head?"
+
+"You wrote to me at first so much about him. You told me he was
+tremendously attentive, and that you liked him."
+
+"His state of mind is one thing and mine is another. How can I marry
+every man that hangs about me--that dogs my footsteps? I might as well
+become a Mormon at once!" Mrs. Luna delivered herself of this argument
+with a certain charitable air, as if her sister could not be expected to
+understand such a situation by her own light.
+
+Olive waived the discussion, and simply said: "I took for granted _you_
+had got him the invitation."
+
+"I, my dear? That would be quite at variance with my attitude of
+discouragement."
+
+"Then she simply sent it herself."
+
+"Whom do you mean by 'she'?"
+
+"Mrs. Burrage, of course."
+
+"I thought that you might mean Verena," said Mrs. Luna casually.
+
+"Verena--to him? Why in the world----?" And Olive gave the cold glare
+with which her sister was familiar.
+
+"Why in the world not--since she knows him?"
+
+"She had seen him twice in her life before last night, when she met him
+for the third time and spoke to him."
+
+"Did she tell you that?"
+
+"She tells me everything."
+
+"Are you very sure?"
+
+"Adeline Luna, what _do_ you mean?" Miss Chancellor murmured.
+
+"Are you very sure that last night was only the third time?" Mrs. Luna
+went on.
+
+Olive threw back her head and swept her sister from her bonnet to her
+lowest flounce. "You have no right to hint at such a thing as that
+unless you know!"
+
+"Oh, I know--I know, at any rate, more than you do!" And then Mrs. Luna,
+sitting with her sister, much withdrawn, in one of the windows of the
+big, hot, faded parlour of the boarding-house in Tenth Street, where
+there was a rug before the chimney representing a Newfoundland dog
+saving a child from drowning, and a row of chromo-lithographs on the
+walls, imparted to her the impression she had received the evening
+before--the impression of Basil Ransom's keen curiosity about Verena
+Tarrant. Verena must have asked Mrs. Burrage to send him a card, and
+asked it without mentioning the fact to Olive--for wouldn't Olive
+certainly have remembered it? It was no use her saying that Mrs. Burrage
+might have sent it of her own movement, because she wasn't aware of his
+existence, and why should she be? Basil Ransom himself had told her he
+didn't know Mrs. Burrage. Mrs. Luna knew whom he knew and whom he
+didn't, or at least the sort of people, and they were not the sort that
+belonged to the Wednesday Club. That was one reason why she didn't care
+about him for any intimate relation--that he didn't seem to have any
+taste for making nice friends. Olive would know what _her_ taste was in
+this respect, though it wasn't that young woman's own any more than his.
+It was positive that the suggestion about the card could only have come
+from Verena. At any rate Olive could easily ask, or if she was afraid of
+her telling a fib she could ask Mrs. Burrage. It was true Mrs. Burrage
+might have been put on her guard by Verena, and would perhaps invent
+some other account of the matter; therefore Olive had better just
+believe what _she_ believed, that Verena had secured his presence at the
+party and had had private reasons for doing so. It is to be feared that
+Ransom's remark to Mrs. Luna the night before about her having lost her
+head was near to the mark; for if she had not been blinded by her
+rancour she would have guessed the horror with which she inspired her
+sister when she spoke in that offhand way of Verena's lying and Mrs.
+Burrage's lying. Did people lie like that in Mrs. Luna's set? It was
+Olive's plan of life not to lie, and attributing a similar disposition
+to people she liked, it was impossible for her to believe that Verena
+had had the intention of deceiving her. Mrs. Luna, in a calmer hour,
+might also have divined that Olive would make her private comments on
+the strange story of Basil Ransom's having made up to Verena out of
+pique at Adeline's rebuff; for this was the account of the matter that
+she now offered to Miss Chancellor. Olive did two things: she listened
+intently and eagerly, judging there was distinct danger in the air
+(which, however, she had not wanted Mrs. Luna to tell her, having
+perceived it for herself the night before); and she saw that poor
+Adeline was fabricating fearfully, that the "rebuff" was altogether an
+invention. Mr. Ransom was evidently preoccupied with Verena, but he had
+not needed Mrs. Luna's cruelty to make him so. So Olive maintained an
+attitude of great reserve; she did not take upon herself to announce
+that her own version was that Adeline, for reasons absolutely
+imperceptible to others, had tried to catch Basil Ransom, had failed in
+her attempt, and, furious at seeing Verena preferred to a person of her
+importance (Olive remembered the _spretae injuria formae_), now wished
+to do both him and the girl an ill turn. This would be accomplished if
+she could induce Olive to interfere. Miss Chancellor was conscious of an
+abundant readiness to interfere, but it was not because she cared for
+Adeline's mortification. I am not sure, even, that she did not think her
+_fiasco_ but another illustration of her sister's general uselessness,
+and rather despise her for it; being perfectly able at once to hold that
+nothing is baser than the effort to entrap a man, and to think it very
+ignoble to have to renounce it because you can't. Olive kept these
+reflexions to herself, but she went so far as to say to her sister that
+she didn't see where the "pique" came in. How could it hurt Adeline that
+he should turn his attention to Verena? What was Verena to her?
+
+"Why, Olive Chancellor, how can you ask?" Mrs. Luna boldly responded.
+"Isn't Verena everything to you, and aren't you everything to me, and
+wouldn't an attempt--a successful one--to take Verena away from you
+knock you up fearfully, and shouldn't I suffer, as you know I suffer, by
+sympathy?"
+
+I have said that it was Miss Chancellor's plan of life not to lie, but
+such a plan was compatible with a kind of consideration for the truth
+which led her to shrink from producing it on poor occasions. So she
+didn't say, "Dear me, Adeline, what humbug! you know you hate Verena and
+would be very glad if she were drowned!" She only said, "Well, I see;
+but it's very roundabout." What she did see was that Mrs. Luna was eager
+to help her to stop off Basil Ransom from "making head," as the phrase
+was; and the fact that her motive was spite, and not tenderness for the
+Bostonians, would not make her assistance less welcome if the danger
+were real. She herself had a nervous dread, but she had that about
+everything; still, Adeline had perhaps seen something, and what in the
+world did she mean by her reference to Verena's having had secret
+meetings? When pressed on this point, Mrs. Luna could only say that she
+didn't pretend to give definite information, and she wasn't a spy
+anyway, but that the night before he had positively flaunted in her face
+his admiration for the girl, his enthusiasm for her way of standing up
+there. Of course he hated her ideas, but he was quite conceited enough
+to think she would give them up. Perhaps it was all directed at
+_her_--as if she cared! It would depend a good deal on the girl herself;
+certainly, if there was any likelihood of Verena's being affected, she
+should advise Olive to look out. She knew best what to do; it was only
+Adeline's duty to give her the benefit of her own impression, whether
+she was thanked for it or not. She only wished to put her on her guard,
+and it was just like Olive to receive such information so coldly; she
+was the most disappointing woman she knew.
+
+Miss Chancellor's coldness was not diminished by this rebuke; for it had
+come over her that, after all, she had never opened herself at that rate
+to Adeline, had never let her see the real intensity of her desire to
+keep the sort of danger there was now a question of away from Verena,
+had given her no warrant for regarding her as her friend's keeper; so
+that she was taken aback by the flatness of Mrs. Luna's assumption that
+she was ready to enter into a conspiracy to circumvent and frustrate the
+girl. Olive put on all her majesty to dispel this impression, and if she
+could not help being aware that she made Mrs. Luna still angrier, on the
+whole, than at first, she felt that she would much rather disappoint her
+than give herself away to her--especially as she was intensely eager to
+profit by her warning!
+
+
+
+
+XXX
+
+
+Mrs. Luna would have been still less satisfied with the manner in which
+Olive received her proffered assistance had she known how many
+confidences that reticent young woman might have made her in return.
+Olive's whole life now was a matter for whispered communications; she
+felt this herself, as she sought the privacy of her own apartment after
+her interview with her sister. She had for the moment time to think;
+Verena having gone out with Mr. Burrage, who had made an appointment the
+night before to call for her to drive at that early hour. They had other
+engagements in the afternoon--the principal of which was to meet a group
+of earnest people at the house of one of the great local promoters.
+Olive would whisk Verena off to these appointments directly after lunch;
+she flattered herself that she could arrange matters so that there would
+not be half an hour in the day during which Basil Ransom, complacently
+calling, would find the Bostonians in the house. She had had this well
+in mind when, at Mrs. Burrage's, she was driven to give him their
+address; and she had had it also in mind that she would ask Verena, as a
+special favour, to accompany her back to Boston on the next day but one,
+which was the morning of the morrow. There had been considerable talk of
+her staying a few days with Mrs. Burrage--staying on after her own
+departure; but Verena backed out of it spontaneously, seeing how the
+idea worried her friend. Olive had accepted the sacrifice, and their
+visit to New York was now cut down, in intention, to four days, one of
+which, the moment she perceived whither Basil Ransom was tending, Miss
+Chancellor promised herself also to suppress. She had not mentioned that
+to Verena yet; she hesitated a little, having a slightly bad conscience
+about the concessions she had already obtained from her friend. Verena
+made such concessions with a generosity which caused one's heart to ache
+for admiration, even while one asked for them; and never once had Olive
+known her to demand the smallest credit for any virtue she showed in
+this way, or to bargain for an instant about any effort she made to
+oblige. She had been delighted with the idea of spending a week under
+Mrs. Burrage's roof; she had said, too, that she believed her mother
+would die happy (not that there was the least prospect of Mrs. Tarrant's
+dying) if she could hear of her having such an experience as that; and
+yet, perceiving how solemn Olive looked about it, how she blanched and
+brooded at the prospect, she had offered to give it up, with a smile
+sweeter, if possible, than any that had ever sat in her eyes. Olive knew
+what that meant for her, knew what a power of enjoyment she still had,
+in spite of the tension of their common purpose, their vital work, which
+had now, as they equally felt, passed into the stage of realisation, of
+fruition; and that is why her conscience rather pricked her for
+consenting to this further act of renunciation, especially as their
+position seemed really so secure, on the part of one who had already
+given herself away so sublimely.
+
+Secure as their position might be, Olive called herself a blind idiot
+for having, in spite of all her first shrinkings, agreed to bring Verena
+to New York. Verena had jumped at the invitation, the very
+unexpectedness of which on Mrs. Burrage's part--it was such an odd idea
+to have come to a mere worldling--carried a kind of persuasion with it.
+Olive's immediate sentiment had been an instinctive general fear; but,
+later, she had dismissed that as unworthy; she had decided (and such a
+decision was nothing new) that where their mission was concerned they
+ought to face everything. Such an opportunity would contribute too much
+to Verena's reputation and authority to justify a refusal at the bidding
+of apprehensions which were after all only vague. Olive's specific
+terrors and dangers had by this time very much blown over; Basil Ransom
+had given no sign of life for ages, and Henry Burrage had certainly got
+his quietus before they went to Europe. If it had occurred to his mother
+that she might convert Verena into the animating principle of a big
+soiree, she was at least acting in good faith, for it could be no more
+her wish to-day that he should marry Selah Tarrant's daughter than it
+was her wish a year before. And then they should do some good to the
+benighted, the most benighted, the fashionable benighted; they should
+perhaps make them furious--there was always some good in that. Lastly,
+Olive was conscious of a personal temptation in the matter; she was not
+insensible to the pleasure of appearing in a distinguished New York
+circle as a representative woman, an important Bostonian, the prompter,
+colleague, associate of one of the most original girls of the time.
+Basil Ransom was the person she had least expected to meet at Mrs.
+Burrage's; it had been her belief that they might easily spend four days
+in a city of more than a million of inhabitants without that
+disagreeable accident. But it had occurred; nothing was wanting to make
+it seem serious; and, setting her teeth, she shook herself, morally,
+hard, for having fallen into the trap of fate. Well, she would scramble
+out, with only a scare, probably. Henry Burrage was very attentive, but
+somehow she didn't fear him now; and it was only natural he should feel
+that he couldn't be polite enough, after they had consented to be
+exploited in that worldly way by his mother. The other danger was the
+worst; the palpitation of her strange dread, the night of Miss
+Birdseye's party, came back to her. Mr. Burrage seemed, indeed, a
+protection; she reflected, with relief, that it had been arranged that
+after taking Verena to drive in the Park and see the Museum of Art in
+the morning, they should in the evening dine with him at Delmonico's (he
+was to invite another gentleman), and go afterwards to the German opera.
+Olive had kept all this to herself, as I have said; revealing to her
+sister neither the vividness of her prevision that Basil Ransom would
+look blank when he came down to Tenth Street and learned they had
+flitted, nor the eagerness of her desire just to find herself once more
+in the Boston train. It had been only this prevision that sustained her
+when she gave Mr. Ransom their number.
+
+Verena came to her room shortly before luncheon, to let her know she had
+returned; and while they sat there, waiting to stop their ears when the
+gong announcing the repast was beaten, at the foot of the stairs, by a
+negro in a white jacket, she narrated to her friend her adventures with
+Mr. Burrage--expatiated on the beauty of the park, the splendour and
+interest of the Museum, the wonder of the young man's acquaintance with
+everything it contained, the swiftness of his horses, the softness of
+his English cart, the pleasure of rolling at that pace over roads as
+firm as marble, the entertainment he promised them for the evening.
+Olive listened in serious silence; she saw Verena was quite carried
+away; of course she hadn't gone so far with her without knowing that
+phase.
+
+"Did Mr. Burrage try to make love to you?" Miss Chancellor inquired at
+last, without a smile.
+
+Verena had taken off her hat to arrange her feather, and as she placed
+it on her head again, her uplifted arms making a frame for her face, she
+said: "Yes, I suppose it was meant for love."
+
+Olive waited for her to tell more, to tell how she had treated him, kept
+him in his place, made him feel that that question was over long ago;
+but as Verena gave her no further information she did not insist,
+conscious as she always was that in such a relation as theirs there
+should be a great respect on either side for the liberty of each. She
+had never yet infringed on Verena's, and of course she wouldn't begin
+now. Moreover, with the request that she meant presently to make of her
+she felt that she must be discreet. She wondered whether Henry Burrage
+were really going to begin again; whether his mother had only been
+acting in his interest in getting them to come on. Certainly, the bright
+spot in such a prospect was that if she listened to him she couldn't
+listen to Basil Ransom; and he _had_ told Olive herself last night, when
+he put them into their carriage, that he hoped to prove to her yet that
+he had come round to her gospel. But the old sickness stole upon her
+again, the faintness of discouragement, as she asked herself why in the
+name of pity Verena should listen to any one at all but Olive
+Chancellor. Again it came over her, when she saw the brightness, the
+happy look, the girl brought back, as it had done in the earlier months,
+that the great trouble was that weak spot of Verena's, that sole
+infirmity and subtle flaw, which she had expressed to her very soon
+after they began to live together, in saying (she remembered it through
+the ineffaceable impression made by her friend's avowal), "I'll tell you
+what is the matter with you--you don't dislike men as a class!" Verena
+had replied on this occasion, "Well, no, I don't dislike them when they
+are pleasant!" As if organised atrociousness could ever be pleasant!
+Olive disliked them most when they were least unpleasant. After a
+little, at present, she remarked, referring to Henry Burrage: "It is not
+right of him, not decent, after your making him feel how, while he was
+at Cambridge, he wearied you, tormented you."
+
+"Oh, I didn't show anything," said Verena gaily. "I am learning to
+dissimulate," she added in a moment. "I suppose you have to as you go
+along. I pretend not to notice."
+
+At this moment the gong sounded for luncheon, and the two young women
+covered up their ears, face to face, Verena with her quick smile, Olive
+with her pale patience. When they could hear themselves speak, the
+latter said abruptly:
+
+"How did Mrs. Burrage come to invite Mr. Ransom to her party? He told
+Adeline he had never seen her before."
+
+"Oh, I asked her to send him an invitation--after she had written to me,
+to thank me, when it was definitely settled we should come on. She asked
+me in her letter if there were any friends of mine in the city to whom I
+should like her to send cards, and I mentioned Mr. Ransom."
+
+Verena spoke without a single instant's hesitation, and the only sign of
+embarrassment she gave was that she got up from her chair, passing in
+this manner a little out of Olive's scrutiny. It was easy for her not to
+falter, because she was glad of the chance. She wanted to be very simple
+in all her relations with her friend, and of course it was not simple so
+soon as she began to keep things back. She could at any rate keep back
+as little as possible, and she felt as if she were making up for a
+dereliction when she answered Olive's inquiry so promptly.
+
+"You never told me of that," Miss Chancellor remarked, in a low tone.
+
+"I didn't want to. I know you don't like him, and I thought it would
+give you pain. Yet I wanted him to be there--I wanted him to hear."
+
+"What does it matter--why should you care about him?"
+
+"Well, because he is so awfully opposed!"
+
+"How do you know that, Verena?"
+
+At this point Verena began to hesitate. It was not, after all, so easy
+to keep back only a little; it appeared rather as if one must either
+tell everything or hide everything. The former course had already
+presented itself to her as unduly harsh; it was because it seemed so
+that she had ended by keeping the incident of Basil Ransom's visit to
+Monadnoc Place buried in unspoken, in unspeakable, considerations, the
+only secret she had in the world--the only thing that was all her own.
+She was so glad to say what she could without betraying herself that it
+was only after she had spoken that she perceived there was a danger of
+Olive's pushing the inquiry to the point where, to defend herself as it
+were, she should be obliged to practise a positive deception; and she
+was conscious at the same time that the moment her secret was threatened
+it became dearer to her. She began to pray silently that Olive might not
+push; for it would be odious, it would be impossible, to defend herself
+by a lie. Meanwhile, however, she had to answer, and the way she
+answered was by exclaiming, much more quickly than the reflexions I note
+might have appeared to permit, "Well, if you can't tell from his
+appearance! He's the type of the reactionary."
+
+Verena went to the toilet-glass to see that she had put on her hat
+properly, and Olive slowly got up, in the manner of a person not in the
+least eager for food. "Let him react as he likes--for heaven's sake
+don't mind him!" That was Miss Chancellor's rejoinder, and Verena felt
+that it didn't say all that was in her mind. She wished she would come
+down to luncheon, for she, at least, was honestly hungry. She even
+suspected Olive had an idea she was afraid to express, such distress it
+would bring with it. "Well, you know, Verena, this isn't our _real_
+life--it isn't our work," Olive went on.
+
+"Well, no, it isn't, certainly," said Verena, not pretending at first
+that she did not know what Olive meant. In a moment, however, she added,
+"Do you refer to this social intercourse with Mr. Burrage?"
+
+"Not to that only." Then Olive asked abruptly, looking at her, "How did
+you know his address?"
+
+"His address?"
+
+"Mr. Ransom's--to enable Mrs. Burrage to invite him?"
+
+They stood for a moment interchanging a gaze. "It was in a letter I got
+from him."
+
+At these words there came into Olive's face an expression which made her
+companion cross over to her directly and take her by the hand. But the
+tone was different from what Verena expected, when she said, with cold
+surprise: "Oh, you are in correspondence!" It showed an immense effort
+of self-control.
+
+"He wrote to me once--I never told you," Verena rejoined, smiling. She
+felt that her friend's strange, uneasy eyes searched very far; a little
+more and they would go to the very bottom. Well, they might go if they
+would; she didn't, after all, care so much about her secret as that. For
+the moment, however, Verena did not learn what Olive had discovered,
+inasmuch as she only remarked presently that it was really time to go
+down. As they descended the staircase she put her arm into Miss
+Chancellor's and perceived that she was trembling.
+
+Of course there were plenty of people in New York interested in the
+uprising, and Olive had made appointments, in advance, which filled the
+whole afternoon. Everybody wanted to meet them, and wanted everybody
+else to do so, and Verena saw they could easily have quite a vogue, if
+they only chose to stay and work that vein. Very likely, as Olive said,
+it wasn't their real life, and people didn't seem to have such a grip of
+the movement as they had in Boston; but there was something in the air
+that carried one along, and a sense of vastness and variety, of the
+infinite possibilities of a great city, which--Verena hardly knew
+whether she ought to confess it to herself--might in the end make up for
+the want of the Boston earnestness. Certainly, the people seemed very
+much alive, and there was no other place where so many cheering reports
+could flow in, owing to the number of electric feelers that stretched
+away everywhere. The principal centre appeared to be Mrs. Croucher's, on
+Fifty-sixth Street, where there was an informal gathering of
+sympathisers who didn't seem as if they could forgive her when they
+learned that she had been speaking the night before in a circle in which
+none of them were acquainted. Certainly, they were very different from
+the group she had addressed at Mrs. Burrage's, and Verena heaved a thin,
+private sigh, expressive of some helplessness, as she thought what a
+big, complicated world it was, and how it evidently contained a little
+of everything. There was a general demand that she should repeat her
+address in a more congenial atmosphere; to which she replied that Olive
+made her engagements for her, and that as the address had been intended
+just to lead people on, perhaps she would think Mrs. Croucher's friends
+had reached a higher point. She was as cautious as this because she saw
+that Olive was now just straining to get out of the city; she didn't
+want to say anything that would tie them. When she felt her trembling
+that way before luncheon it made her quite sick to realise how much her
+friend was wrapped up in her--how terribly she would suffer from the
+least deviation. After they had started for their round of engagements
+the very first thing Verena spoke of in the carriage (Olive had taken
+one, in her liberal way, for the whole time) was the fact that her
+correspondence with Mr. Ransom, as her friend had called it, had
+consisted on his part of only one letter. It was a very short one, too;
+it had come to her a little more than a month before. Olive knew she got
+letters from gentlemen; she didn't see why she should attach such
+importance to this one. Miss Chancellor was leaning back in the
+carriage, very still, very grave, with her head against the cushioned
+surface, only turning her eyes towards the girl.
+
+"You attach importance yourself; otherwise you would have told me."
+
+"I knew you wouldn't like it--because you don't like _him_."
+
+"I don't think of him," said Olive; "he's nothing to me." Then she
+added, suddenly, "Have you noticed that I am afraid to face what I don't
+like?"
+
+Verena could not say that she had, and yet it was not just on Olive's
+part to speak as if she were an easy person to tell such a thing to: the
+way she lay there, white and weak, like a wounded creature, sufficiently
+proved the contrary. "You have such a fearful power of suffering," she
+replied in a moment.
+
+To this at first Miss Chancellor made no rejoinder; but after a little
+she said, in the same attitude, "Yes, _you_ could make me."
+
+Verena took her hand and held it awhile. "I never will, till I have been
+through everything myself."
+
+"_You_ were not made to suffer--you were made to enjoy," Olive said, in
+very much the same tone in which she had told her that what was the
+matter with her was that she didn't dislike men as a class--a tone which
+implied that the contrary would have been much more natural and perhaps
+rather higher. Perhaps it would; but Verena was unable to rebut the
+charge; she felt this, as she looked out of the window of the carriage
+at the bright, amusing city, where the elements seemed so numerous, the
+animation so immense, the shops so brilliant, the women so strikingly
+dressed, and knew that these things quickened her curiosity, all her
+pulses.
+
+"Well, I suppose I mustn't presume on it," she remarked, glancing back
+at Olive with her natural sweetness, her uncontradicting grace.
+
+That young lady lifted her hand to her lips--held it there a moment; the
+movement seemed to say, "When you are so divinely docile, how can I help
+the dread of losing you?" This idea, however, was unspoken, and Olive
+Chancellor's uttered words, as the carriage rolled on, were different.
+
+"Verena, I don't understand why he wrote to you."
+
+"He wrote to me because he likes me. Perhaps you'll say you don't
+understand why he likes me," the girl continued, laughing. "He liked me
+the first time he saw me."
+
+"Oh, that time!" Olive murmured.
+
+"And still more the second."
+
+"Did he tell you that in his letter?" Miss Chancellor inquired.
+
+"Yes, my dear, he told me that. Only he expressed it more gracefully."
+Verena was very happy to say that; a written phrase of Basil Ransom's
+sufficiently justified her.
+
+"It was my intuition--it was my foreboding!" Olive exclaimed, closing
+her eyes.
+
+"I thought you said you didn't dislike him."
+
+"It isn't dislike--it's simple dread. Is that all there is between you?"
+
+"Why, Olive Chancellor, what do you think?" Verena asked, feeling now
+distinctly like a coward. Five minutes afterwards she said to Olive that
+if it would give her pleasure they would leave New York on the morrow,
+without taking a fourth day; and as soon as she had done so she felt
+better, especially when she saw how gratefully Olive looked at her for
+the concession, how eagerly she rose to the offer in saying, "Well, if
+you _do_ feel that it isn't our own life--our very own!" It was with
+these words, and others besides, and with an unusually weak, indefinite
+kiss, as if she wished to protest that, after all, a single day didn't
+matter, and yet accepted the sacrifice and was a little ashamed of
+it--it was in this manner that the agreement as to an immediate retreat
+was sealed. Verena could not shut her eyes to the fact that for a month
+she had been less frank, and if she wished to do penance this
+abbreviation of their pleasure in New York, even if it made her almost
+completely miss Basil Ransom, was easier than to tell Olive just now
+that the letter was _not_ all, that there had been a long visit, a talk,
+and a walk besides, which she had been covering up for ever so many
+weeks. And of what consequence, anyway, was the missing? Was it such a
+pleasure to converse with a gentleman who only wanted to let you
+know--and why he should want it so much Verena couldn't guess--that he
+thought you quite preposterous? Olive took her from place to place, and
+she ended by forgetting everything but the present hour, and the bigness
+and variety of New York, and the entertainment of rolling about in a
+carriage with silk cushions, and meeting new faces, new expressions of
+curiosity and sympathy, assurances that one was watched and followed.
+Mingled with this was a bright consciousness, sufficient for the moment,
+that one was moreover to dine at Delmonico's and go to the German opera.
+There was enough of the epicurean in Verena's composition to make it
+easy for her in certain conditions to live only for the hour.
+
+
+
+
+XXXI
+
+
+When she returned with her companion to the establishment in Tenth
+Street she saw two notes lying on the table in the hall; one of which
+she perceived to be addressed to Miss Chancellor, the other to herself.
+The hand was different, but she recognised both. Olive was behind her on
+the steps, talking to the coachman about sending another carriage for
+them in half an hour (they had left themselves but just time to dress);
+so that she simply possessed herself of her own note and ascended to her
+room. As she did so she felt that all the while she had known it would
+be there, and was conscious of a kind of treachery, an unfriendly
+wilfulness, in not being more prepared for it. If she could roll about
+New York the whole afternoon and forget that there might be difficulties
+ahead, that didn't alter the fact that there _were_ difficulties, and
+that they might even become considerable--might not be settled by her
+simply going back to Boston. Half an hour later, as she drove up the
+Fifth Avenue with Olive (there seemed to be so much crowded into that
+one day), smoothing her light gloves, wishing her fan were a little
+nicer, and proving by the answering, familiar brightness with which she
+looked out on the lamp-lighted streets that, whatever theory might be
+entertained as to the genesis of her talent and her personal nature, the
+blood of the lecture-going, night-walking Tarrants did distinctly flow
+in her veins; as the pair proceeded, I say, to the celebrated
+restaurant, at the door of which Mr. Burrage had promised to be in
+vigilant expectancy of their carriage, Verena found a sufficiently gay
+and natural tone of voice for remarking to her friend that Mr. Ransom
+had called upon her while they were out, and had left a note in which
+there were many compliments for Miss Chancellor.
+
+"That's wholly your own affair, my dear," Olive replied, with a
+melancholy sigh, gazing down the vista of Fourteenth Street (which they
+happened just then to be traversing, with much agitation), toward the
+queer barrier of the elevated railway.
+
+It was nothing new to Verena that if the great striving of Olive's life
+was for justice she yet sometimes failed to arrive at it in particular
+cases; and she reflected that it was rather late for her to say, like
+that, that Basil Ransom's letters were only his correspondent's
+business. Had not his kinswoman quite made the subject her own during
+their drive that afternoon? Verena determined now that her companion
+should hear all there was to be heard about the letter; asking herself
+whether, if she told her at present more than she cared to know, it
+wouldn't make up for her hitherto having told her less. "He brought it
+with him, written, in case I should be out. He wants to see me
+to-morrow--he says he has ever so much to say to me. He proposes an
+hour--says he hopes it won't be inconvenient for me to see him about
+eleven in the morning; thinks I may have no other engagement so early as
+that. Of course our return to Boston settles it," Verena added, with
+serenity.
+
+Miss Chancellor said nothing for a moment; then she replied, "Yes,
+unless you invite him to come on with you in the train."
+
+"Why, Olive, how bitter you are!" Verena exclaimed, in genuine surprise.
+
+Olive could not justify her bitterness by saying that her companion had
+spoken as if she were disappointed, because Verena had not. So she
+simply remarked, "I don't see what he can have to say to you--that would
+be worth your hearing."
+
+"Well, of course, it's the other side. He has got it on the brain!" said
+Verena, with a laugh which seemed to relegate the whole matter to the
+category of the unimportant.
+
+"If we should stay, would you see him--at eleven o'clock?" Olive
+inquired.
+
+"Why do you ask that--when I have given it up?"
+
+"Do you consider it such a tremendous sacrifice?"
+
+"No," said Verena good-naturedly; "but I confess I am curious."
+
+"Curious--how do you mean?"
+
+"Well, to hear the other side."
+
+"Oh heaven!" Olive Chancellor murmured, turning her face upon her.
+
+"You must remember I have never heard it." And Verena smiled into her
+friend's wan gaze.
+
+"Do you want to hear all the infamy that is in the world?"
+
+"No, it isn't that; but the more he should talk the better chance he
+would give me. I guess I can meet him."
+
+"Life is too short. Leave him as he is."
+
+"Well," Verena went on, "there are many I haven't cared to move at all,
+whom I might have been more interested in than in him. But to make him
+give in just at two or three points--that I should like better than
+anything I have done."
+
+"You have no business to enter upon a contest that isn't equal; and it
+wouldn't be, with Mr. Ransom."
+
+"The inequality would be that I have right on my side."
+
+"What is that--for a man? For what was their brutality given them, but
+to make that up?"
+
+"I don't think he's brutal; I should like to see," said Verena gaily.
+
+Olive's eyes lingered a little on her own; then they turned away,
+vaguely, blindly, out of the carriage-window, and Verena made the
+reflexion that she looked strangely little like a person who was going
+to dine at Delmonico's. How terribly she worried about everything, and
+how tragical was her nature; how anxious, suspicious, exposed to subtle
+influences! In their long intimacy Verena had come to revere most of her
+friend's peculiarities; they were a proof of her depth and devotion, and
+were so bound up with what was noble in her that she was rarely provoked
+to criticise them separately. But at present, suddenly, Olive's
+earnestness began to appear as inharmonious with the scheme of the
+universe as if it had been a broken saw; and she was positively glad she
+had not told her about Basil Ransom's appearance in Monadnoc Place. If
+she worried so about what she knew, how much would she not have worried
+about the rest! Verena had by this time made up her mind that her
+acquaintance with Mr. Ransom was the most episodical, most superficial,
+most unimportant of all possible relations.
+
+Olive Chancellor watched Henry Burrage very closely that evening; she
+had a special reason for doing so, and her entertainment, during the
+successive hours, was derived much less from the delicate little feast
+over which this insinuating proselyte presided, in the brilliant public
+room of the establishment, where French waiters flitted about on deep
+carpets and parties at neighbouring tables excited curiosity and
+conjecture, or even from the magnificent music of _Lohengrin_, than from
+a secret process of comparison and verification, which shall presently
+be explained to the reader. As some discredit has possibly been thrown
+upon her impartiality it is a pleasure to be able to say that on her
+return from the opera she took a step dictated by an earnest
+consideration of justice--of the promptness with which Verena had told
+her of the note left by Basil Ransom in the afternoon. She drew Verena
+into her room with her. The girl, on the way back to Tenth Street, had
+spoken only of Wagner's music, of the singers, the orchestra, the
+immensity of the house, her tremendous pleasure. Olive could see how
+fond she might become of New York, where that kind of pleasure was so
+much more in the air.
+
+"Well, Mr. Burrage was certainly very kind to us--no one could have been
+more thoughtful," Olive said; and she coloured a little at the look with
+which Verena greeted this tribute of appreciation from Miss Chancellor
+to a single gentleman.
+
+"I am so glad you were struck with that, because I do think we have been
+a little rough to him." Verena's _we_ was angelic. "He was particularly
+attentive to you, my dear; he has got over me. He looked at you so
+sweetly. Dearest Olive, if you marry him----!" And Miss Tarrant, who was
+in high spirits, embraced her companion, to check her own silliness.
+
+"He wants you to stay there, all the same. They haven't given _that_
+up," Olive remarked, turning to a drawer, out of which she took a
+letter.
+
+"Did he tell you that, pray? He said nothing more about it to me."
+
+"When we came in this afternoon I found this note from Mrs. Burrage. You
+had better read it." And she presented the document, open, to Verena.
+
+The purpose of it was to say that Mrs. Burrage could really not
+reconcile herself to the loss of Verena's visit, on which both she and
+her son had counted so much. She was sure they would be able to make it
+as interesting to Miss Tarrant as it would be to themselves. She, Mrs.
+Burrage, moreover, felt as if she hadn't heard half she wanted about
+Miss Tarrant's views, and there were so many more who were present at
+the address, who had come to her that afternoon (losing not a minute, as
+Miss Chancellor could see) to ask how in the world they too could learn
+more--how they could get at the fair speaker and question her about
+certain details. She hoped so much, therefore, that even if the young
+ladies should be unable to alter their decision about the visit they
+might at least see their way to staying over long enough to allow her to
+arrange an informal meeting for some of these poor thirsty souls. Might
+she not at least talk over the question with Miss Chancellor? She gave
+her notice that she would attack her on the subject of the visit too.
+Might she not see her on the morrow, and might she ask of her the very
+great favour that the interview should be at Mrs. Burrage's own house?
+She had something very particular to say to her, as regards which
+perfect privacy was a great consideration, and Miss Chancellor would
+doubtless recognise that this would be best secured under Mrs. Burrage's
+roof. She would therefore send her carriage for Miss Chancellor at any
+hour that would be convenient to the latter. She really thought much
+good might come from their having a satisfactory talk.
+
+Verena read this epistle with much deliberation; it seemed to her
+mysterious, and confirmed the idea she had received the night
+before--the idea that she had not got quite a correct impression of this
+clever, worldly, curious woman on the occasion of her visit to
+Cambridge, when they met her at her son's rooms. As she gave the letter
+back to Olive she said, "That's why he didn't seem to believe we are
+really leaving to-morrow. He knows she had written that, and he thinks
+it will keep us."
+
+"Well, if I were to say it may--should you think me too miserably
+changeful?"
+
+Verena stared, with all her candour, and it was so very queer that Olive
+should now wish to linger that the sense of it, for the moment, almost
+covered the sense of its being pleasant. But that came out after an
+instant, and she said, with great honesty, "You needn't drag me away for
+consistency's sake. It would be absurd for me to pretend that I don't
+like being here."
+
+"I think perhaps I ought to see her." Olive was very thoughtful.
+
+"How lovely it must be to have a secret with Mrs. Burrage!" Verena
+exclaimed.
+
+"It won't be a secret from you."
+
+"Dearest, you needn't tell me unless you want," Verena went on, thinking
+of her own unimparted knowledge.
+
+"I thought it was our plan to divide everything. It was certainly mine."
+
+"Ah, don't talk about plans!" Verena exclaimed, rather ruefully. "You
+see, if we _are_ going to stay to-morrow, how foolish it was to have
+any. There is more in her letter than is expressed," she added, as Olive
+appeared to be studying in her face the reasons for and against making
+this concession to Mrs. Burrage, and that was rather embarrassing.
+
+"I thought it over all the evening--so that if now you will consent we
+will stay."
+
+"Darling--what a spirit you have got! All through all those dear little
+dishes--all through _Lohengrin_! As I haven't thought it over at all,
+you must settle it. You know I am not difficult."
+
+"And would you go and stay with Mrs. Burrage, after all, if she should
+say anything to me that seems to make it desirable?"
+
+Verena broke into a laugh. "You know it's not our real life!"
+
+Olive said nothing for a moment; then she replied: "Don't think _I_ can
+forget that. If I suggest a deviation, it's only because it sometimes
+seems to me that perhaps, after all, almost anything is better than the
+form reality _may_ take with us." This was slightly obscure, as well as
+very melancholy, and Verena was relieved when her companion remarked, in
+a moment, "You must think me strangely inconsequent"; for this gave her
+a chance to reply, soothingly:
+
+"Why, you don't suppose I expect you to keep always screwed up! I will
+stay a week with Mrs. Burrage, or a fortnight, or a month, or anything
+you like," she pursued; "anything it may seem to you best to tell her
+after you have seen her."
+
+"Do you leave it all to me? You don't give me much help," Olive said.
+
+"Help to what?"
+
+"Help to help _you_."
+
+"I don't want any help; I am quite strong enough!" Verena cried gaily.
+The next moment she inquired, in an appeal half comical, half touching,
+"My dear colleague, why do you make me say such conceited things?"
+
+"And if you do stay--just even to-morrow--shall you be--very much of the
+time--with Mr. Ransom?"
+
+As Verena for the moment appeared ironically-minded, she might have
+found a fresh subject for hilarity in the tremulous, tentative tone in
+which Olive made this inquiry. But it had not that effect; it produced
+the first manifestation of impatience--the first, literally, and the
+first note of reproach--that had occurred in the course of their
+remarkable intimacy. The colour rose to Verena's cheek, and her eye for
+an instant looked moist.
+
+"I don't know what you always think, Olive, nor why you don't seem able
+to trust me. You didn't, from the first, with gentlemen. Perhaps you
+were right then--I don't say; but surely it is very different now. I
+don't think I ought to be suspected so much. Why have you a manner as if
+I had to be watched, as if I wanted to run away with every man that
+speaks to me? I should think I had proved how little I care. I thought
+you had discovered by this time that I am serious; that I have dedicated
+my life; that there is something unspeakably dear to me. But you begin
+again, every time--you don't do me justice. I must take everything that
+comes. I mustn't be afraid. I thought we had agreed that we were to do
+our work in the midst of the world, facing everything, keeping straight
+on, always taking hold. And now that it all opens out so magnificently,
+and victory is really sitting on our banners, it is strange of you to
+doubt of me, to suppose I am not more wedded to all our old dreams than
+ever. I told you the first time I saw you that I could renounce, and
+knowing better to-day, perhaps, what that means, I am ready to say it
+again. That I can, that I will! Why, Olive Chancellor," Verena cried,
+panting, a moment, with her eloquence, and with the rush of a
+culminating idea, "haven't you discovered by this time that I _have_
+renounced?"
+
+The habit of public speaking, the training, the practice, in which she
+had been immersed, enabled Verena to unroll a coil of propositions
+dedicated even to a private interest with the most touching, most
+cumulative effect. Olive was completely aware of this, and she stilled
+herself, while the girl uttered one soft, pleading sentence after
+another, into the same rapt attention she was in the habit of sending up
+from the benches of an auditorium. She looked at Verena fixedly, felt
+that she was stirred to her depths, that she was exquisitely passionate
+and sincere, that she was a quivering, spotless, consecrated maiden,
+that she really had renounced, that they were both safe, and that her
+own injustice and indelicacy had been great. She came to her slowly,
+took her in her arms and held her long--giving her a silent kiss. From
+which Verena knew that she believed her.
+
+
+
+
+XXXII
+
+
+The hour that Olive proposed to Mrs. Burrage, in a note sent early the
+next morning, for the interview to which she consented to lend herself,
+was the stroke of noon; this period of the day being chosen in
+consequence of a prevision of many subsequent calls upon her time. She
+remarked in her note that she did not wish any carriage to be sent for
+her, and she surged and swayed up the Fifth Avenue on one of the
+convulsive, clattering omnibuses which circulate in that thoroughfare.
+One of her reasons for mentioning twelve o'clock had been that she knew
+Basil Ransom was to call at Tenth Street at eleven, and (as she supposed
+he didn't intend to stay all day) this would give her time to see him
+come and go. It had been tacitly agreed between them, the night before,
+that Verena was quite firm enough in her faith to submit to his visit,
+and that such a course would be much more dignified than dodging it.
+This understanding passed from one to the other during that dumb embrace
+which I have described as taking place before they separated for the
+night. Shortly before noon, Olive, passing out of the house, looked into
+the big, sunny double parlour, where, in the morning, with all the
+husbands absent for the day and all the wives and spinsters launched
+upon the town, a young man desiring to hold a debate with a young lady
+might enjoy every advantage in the way of a clear field. Basil Ransom
+was still there; he and Verena, with the place to themselves, were
+standing in the recess of a window, their backs presented to the door.
+If he had got up, perhaps he was going, and Olive, softly closing the
+door again, waited a little in the hall, ready to pass into the back
+part of the house if she should hear him coming out. No sound, however,
+reached her ear; apparently he did mean to stay all day, and she should
+find him there on her return. She left the house, knowing they were
+looking at her from the window as she descended the steps, but feeling
+she could not bear to see Basil Ransom's face. As she walked, averting
+her own, towards the Fifth Avenue, on the sunny side, she was barely
+conscious of the loveliness of the day, the perfect weather, all
+suffused and tinted with spring, which sometimes descends upon New York
+when the winds of March have been stilled; she was given up only to the
+remembrance of that moment when she herself had stood at a window (the
+second time he came to see her in Boston), and watched Basil Ransom pass
+out with Adeline--with Adeline who had seemed capable then of getting
+such a hold on him but had proved as ineffectual in this respect as she
+was in every other. She recalled the vision she had allowed to dance
+before her as she saw the pair cross the street together, laughing and
+talking, and how it seemed to interpose itself against the fears which
+already then--so strangely--haunted her. Now that she saw it so
+fruitless--and that Verena, moreover, had turned out really so
+great--she was rather ashamed of it; she felt associated, however
+remotely, in the reasons which had made Mrs. Luna tell her so many fibs
+the day before, and there could be nothing elevating in that. As for the
+other reasons why her fidgety sister had failed and Mr. Ransom had held
+his own course, naturally Miss Chancellor didn't like to think of them.
+
+If she had wondered what Mrs. Burrage wished so particularly to talk
+about, she waited some time for the clearing-up of the mystery. During
+this interval she sat in a remarkably pretty boudoir, where there were
+flowers and faiences and little French pictures, and watched her hostess
+revolve round the subject in circles the vagueness of which she tried to
+dissimulate. Olive believed she was a person who never could enjoy
+asking a favour, especially of a votary of the new ideas; and that was
+evidently what was coming. She had asked one already, but that had been
+handsomely paid for; the note from Mrs. Burrage which Verena found
+awaiting her in Tenth Street, on her arrival, contained the largest
+cheque this young woman had ever received for an address. The request
+that hung fire had reference to Verena too, of course; and Olive needed
+no prompting to feel that her friend's being a young person who took
+money could not make Mrs. Burrage's present effort more agreeable. To
+this taking of money (for when it came to Verena it was as if it came to
+her as well) she herself was now completely inured; money was a
+tremendous force, and when one wanted to assault the wrong with every
+engine one was happy not to lack the sinews of war. She liked her
+hostess better this morning than she had liked her before; she had more
+than ever the air of taking all sorts of sentiments and views for
+granted between them; which could only be flattering to Olive so long as
+it was really Mrs. Burrage who made each advance, while her visitor sat
+watchful and motionless. She had a light, clever, familiar way of
+traversing an immense distance with a very few words, as when she
+remarked, "Well, then, it is settled that she will come, and will stay
+till she is tired."
+
+Nothing of the kind had been settled, but Olive helped Mrs. Burrage
+(this time) more than she knew by saying, "Why do you want her to visit
+you, Mrs. Burrage? why do you want her socially? Are you not aware that
+your son, a year ago, desired to marry her?"
+
+"My dear Miss Chancellor, that is just what I wish to talk to you about.
+I am aware of everything; I don't believe you ever met any one who is
+aware of more things than I." And Olive had to believe this, as Mrs.
+Burrage held up, smiling, her intelligent, proud, good-natured,
+successful head. "I knew a year ago that my son was in love with your
+friend, I know that he has been so ever since, and that in consequence
+he would like to marry her to-day. I daresay you don't like the idea of
+her marrying at all; it would break up a friendship which is so full of
+interest" (Olive wondered for a moment whether she had been going to say
+"so full of profit") "for you. This is why I hesitated; but since you
+are willing to talk about it, that is just what I want."
+
+"I don't see what good it will do," Olive said.
+
+"How can we tell till we try? I never give a thing up till I have turned
+it over in every sense."
+
+It was Mrs. Burrage, however, who did most of the talking; Olive only
+inserted from time to time an inquiry, a protest, a correction, an
+ejaculation tinged with irony. None of these things checked or diverted
+her hostess; Olive saw more and more that she wished to please her, to
+win her over, to smooth matters down, to place them in a new and
+original light. She was very clever and (little by little Olive said to
+herself) absolutely unscrupulous, but she didn't think she was clever
+enough for what she had undertaken. This was neither more nor less, in
+the first place, than to persuade Miss Chancellor that she and her son
+were consumed with sympathy for the movement to which Miss Chancellor
+had dedicated her life. But how could Olive believe that, when she saw
+the type to which Mrs. Burrage belonged--a type into which nature
+herself had inserted a face turned in the very opposite way from all
+earnest and improving things? People like Mrs. Burrage lived and
+fattened on abuses, prejudices, privileges, on the petrified, cruel
+fashions of the past. It must be added, however, that if her hostess was
+a humbug, Olive had never met one who provoked her less; she was such a
+brilliant, genial, artistic one, with such a recklessness of perfidy,
+such a willingness to bribe you if she couldn't deceive you. She seemed
+to be offering Olive all the kingdoms of the earth if she would only
+exert herself to bring about a state of feeling on Verena Tarrant's part
+which would lead the girl to accept Henry Burrage.
+
+"We know it's you--the whole business; that you can do what you please.
+You could decide it to-morrow with a word."
+
+She had hesitated at first, and spoken of her hesitation, and it might
+have appeared that she would need all her courage to say to Olive, that
+way, face to face, that Verena was in such subjection to her. But she
+didn't look afraid; she only looked as if it were an infinite pity Miss
+Chancellor couldn't understand what immense advantages and rewards there
+would be for her in striking an alliance with the house of Burrage.
+Olive was so impressed with this, so occupied, even, in wondering what
+these mystic benefits might be, and whether after all there might not be
+a protection in them (from something worse), a fund of some sort that
+she and Verena might convert to a large use, setting aside the mother
+and son when once they had got what they had to give--she was so
+arrested with the vague daze of this vision, the sense of Mrs. Burrage's
+full hands, her eagerness, her thinking it worth while to flatter and
+conciliate, whatever her pretexts and pretensions might be, that she was
+almost insensible, for the time, to the strangeness of such a woman's
+coming round to a positive desire for a connexion with the Tarrants.
+Mrs. Burrage had indeed explained this partly by saying that her son's
+condition was wearing her out, and that she would enter into anything
+that would make him happier, make him better. She was fonder of him than
+of the whole world beside, and it was an anguish to her to see him
+yearning for Miss Tarrant only to lose her. She made that charge about
+Olive's power in the matter in such a way that it seemed at the same
+time a tribute to her force of character.
+
+"I don't know on what terms you suppose me to be with my friend," Olive
+returned, with considerable majesty. "She will do exactly as she likes,
+in such a case as the one you allude to. She is absolutely free; you
+speak as if I were her keeper!"
+
+Then Mrs. Burrage explained that of course she didn't mean that Miss
+Chancellor exercised a conscious tyranny; but only that Verena had a
+boundless admiration for her, saw through her eyes, took the impress of
+all her opinions, preferences. She was sure that if Olive would only
+take a favourable view of her son Miss Tarrant would instantly throw
+herself into it. "It's very true that you may ask me," added Mrs.
+Burrage, smiling, "how you can take a favourable view of a young man who
+wants to marry the very person in the world you want most to keep
+unmarried!"
+
+This description of Verena was of course perfectly correct; but it was
+not agreeable to Olive to have the fact in question so clearly
+perceived, even by a person who expressed it with an air intimating that
+there was nothing in the world _she_ couldn't understand.
+
+"Did your son know that you were going to speak to me about this?" Olive
+asked, rather coldly, waiving the question of her influence on Verena
+and the state in which she wished her to remain.
+
+"Oh yes, poor dear boy; we had a long talk yesterday, and I told him I
+would do what I could for him. Do you remember the little visit I paid
+to Cambridge last spring, when I saw you at his rooms? Then it was I
+began to perceive how the wind was setting; but yesterday we had a real
+_éclaircissement_. I didn't like it at all, at first; I don't mind
+telling you that, now--now that I am really enthusiastic about it. When
+a girl is as charming, as original, as Miss Tarrant, it doesn't in the
+least matter who she is; she makes herself the standard by which you
+measure her; she makes her own position. And then Miss Tarrant has such
+a future!" Mrs. Burrage added, quickly, as if that were the last thing
+to be overlooked. "The whole question has come up again--the feeling
+that Henry tried to think dead, or at least dying, has revived, through
+the--I hardly know what to call it, but I really may say the
+unexpectedly great effect of her appearance here. She was really
+wonderful on Wednesday evening; prejudice, conventionality, every
+presumption there might be against her, had to fall to the ground. I
+expected a success, but I didn't expect what you gave us," Mrs. Burrage
+went on, smiling, while Olive noted her "you." "In short, my poor boy
+flamed up again; and now I see that he will never again care for any
+girl as he cares for that one. My dear Miss Chancellor, _j'en ai pris
+mon parti_, and perhaps you know my way of doing that sort of thing. I
+am not at all good at resigning myself, but I am excellent at taking up
+a craze. I haven't renounced, I have only changed sides. For or against,
+I must be a partisan. Don't you know that kind of nature? Henry has put
+the affair into my hands, and you see I put it into yours. Do help me;
+let us work together."
+
+This was a long, explicit speech for Mrs. Burrage, who dealt, usually,
+in the cursory and allusive; and she may very well have expected that
+Miss Chancellor would recognise its importance. What Olive did, in fact,
+was simply to inquire, by way of rejoinder: "Why did you ask us to come
+on?"
+
+If Mrs. Burrage hesitated now, it was only for twenty seconds. "Simply
+because we are so interested in your work."
+
+"That surprises me," said Olive thoughtfully.
+
+"I daresay you don't believe it; but such a judgement is superficial. I
+am sure we give proof in the offer we make," Mrs. Burrage remarked, with
+a good deal of point. "There are plenty of girls--without any views at
+all--who would be delighted to marry my son. He is very clever, and he
+has a large fortune. Add to that that he's an angel!"
+
+That was very true, and Olive felt all the more that the attitude of
+these fortunate people, for whom the world was so well arranged just as
+it was, was very curious. But as she sat there it came over her that the
+human spirit has many variations, that the influence of the truth is
+great, and that there are such things in life as happy surprises, quite
+as well as disagreeable ones. Nothing, certainly, forced such people to
+fix their affections on the daughter of a "healer"; it would be very
+clumsy to pick her out of her generation only for the purpose of
+frustrating her. Moreover, her observation of their young host at
+Delmonico's and in the spacious box at the Academy of Music, where they
+had privacy and ease, and murmured words could pass without making
+neighbours more given up to the stage turn their heads--her
+consideration of Henry Burrage's manner, suggested to her that she had
+measured him rather scantily the year before, that he was as much in
+love as the feebler passions of the age permitted (for though Miss
+Chancellor believed in the amelioration of humanity, she thought there
+was too much water in the blood of all of us), that he prized Verena for
+her rarity, which was her genius, her gift, and would therefore have an
+interest in promoting it, and that he was of so soft and fine a paste
+that his wife might do what she liked with him. Of course there would be
+the mother-in-law to count with; but unless she was perjuring herself
+shamelessly Mrs. Burrage really had the wish to project herself into the
+new atmosphere, or at least to be generous personally; so that, oddly
+enough, the fear that most glanced before Olive was not that this high,
+free matron, slightly irritable with cleverness and at the same time
+good-natured with prosperity, would bully her son's bride, but rather
+that she might take too fond a possession of her. It was a fear which
+may be described as a presentiment of jealousy. It occurred,
+accordingly, to Miss Chancellor's quick conscience that, possibly, the
+proposal which presented itself in circumstances so complicated and
+anomalous was simply a magnificent chance, an improvement on the very
+best, even, that she had dreamed of for Verena. It meant a large command
+of money--much larger than her own; the association of a couple of
+clever people who simulated conviction very well, whether they felt it
+or not, and who had a hundred useful worldly ramifications, and a kind
+of social pedestal from which she might really shine afar. The
+conscience I have spoken of grew positively sick as it thought of having
+such a problem as that to consider, such an ordeal to traverse. In the
+presence of such a contingency the poor girl felt grim and helpless; she
+could only vaguely wonder whether she were called upon in the name of
+duty to lend a hand to the torture of her own spirit.
+
+"And if she should marry him, how could I be sure that--afterwards--you
+would care so much about the question which has all our thoughts, hers
+and mine?" This inquiry evolved itself from Olive's rapid meditation;
+but even to herself it seemed a little rough.
+
+Mrs. Burrage took it admirably. "You think we are feigning an interest,
+only to get hold of her? That's not very nice of you, Miss Chancellor;
+but of course you have to be tremendously careful. I assure you my son
+tells me he firmly believes your movement is the great question of the
+immediate future, that it has entered into a new phase; into what does
+he call it? the domain of practical politics. As for me, you don't
+suppose I don't want everything we poor women can get, or that I would
+refuse any privilege or advantage that's offered me? I don't rant or
+rave about anything, but I have--as I told you just now--my own quiet
+way of being zealous. If you had no worse partisan than I, you would do
+very well. My son has talked to me immensely about your ideas; and even
+if I should enter into them only because he does, I should do so quite
+enough. You may say you don't see Henry dangling about after a wife who
+gives public addresses; but I am convinced that a great many things are
+coming to pass--very soon, too--that we don't see in advance. Henry is a
+gentleman to his finger-tips, and there is not a situation in which he
+will not conduct himself with tact."
+
+Olive could see that they really wanted Verena immensely, and it was
+impossible for her to believe that if they were to get her they would
+not treat her well. It came to her that they would even overindulge her,
+flatter her, spoil her; she was perfectly capable, for the moment, of
+assuming that Verena was susceptible of deterioration and that her own
+treatment of her had been discriminatingly severe. She had a hundred
+protests, objections, replies; her only embarrassment could be as to
+which she should use first.
+
+"I think you have never seen Doctor Tarrant and his wife," she remarked,
+with a calmness which she felt to be very pregnant.
+
+"You mean they are absolutely fearful? My son has told me they are quite
+impossible, and I am quite prepared for that. Do you ask how we should
+get on with them? My dear young lady, we should get on as you do!"
+
+If Olive had answers, so had Mrs. Burrage; she had still an answer when
+her visitor, taking up the supposition that it was in her power to
+dispose in any manner whatsoever of Verena, declared that she didn't
+know why Mrs. Burrage addressed herself to _her_, that Miss Tarrant was
+free as air, that her future was in her own hands, that such a matter as
+this was a kind of thing with which it could never occur to one to
+interfere. "Dear Miss Chancellor, we don't ask you to interfere. The
+only thing we ask of you is simply _not_ to interfere."
+
+"And have you sent for me only for that?"
+
+"For that, and for what I hinted at in my note; that you would really
+exercise your influence with Miss Tarrant to induce her to come to us
+now for a week or two. That is really, after all, the main thing I ask.
+Lend her to us, here, for a little while, and we will take care of the
+rest. That sounds conceited--but she _would_ have a good time."
+
+"She doesn't live for that," said Olive.
+
+"What I mean is that she should deliver an address every night!" Mrs.
+Burrage returned, smiling.
+
+"I think you try to prove too much. You do believe--though you pretend
+you don't--that I control her actions, and as far as possible her
+desires, and that I am jealous of any other relations she may possibly
+form. I can imagine that we may perhaps have that air, though it only
+proves how little such an association as ours is understood, and how
+superficial is still"--Olive felt that her "still" was really
+historical--"the interpretation of many of the elements in the activity
+of women, how much the public conscience with regard to them needs to be
+educated. Your conviction with respect to my attitude being what I
+believe it to be," Miss Chancellor went on, "I am surprised at your not
+perceiving how little it is in my interest to deliver my--my victim up
+to you."
+
+If we were at this moment to take, in a single glance, an inside view of
+Mrs. Burrage (a liberty we have not yet ventured on), I suspect we
+should find that she was considerably exasperated at her visitor's
+superior tone, at seeing herself regarded by this dry, shy, obstinate,
+provincial young woman as superficial. If she liked Verena very nearly
+as much as she tried to convince Miss Chancellor, she was conscious of
+disliking Miss Chancellor more than she should probably ever be able to
+reveal to Verena. It was doubtless partly her irritation that found a
+voice as she said, after a self-administered pinch of caution not to say
+too much, "Of course it would be absurd in us to assume that Miss
+Tarrant would find my son irresistible, especially as she has already
+refused him. But even if she should remain obdurate, should you consider
+yourself quite safe as regards others?"
+
+The manner in which Miss Chancellor rose from her chair on hearing these
+words showed her hostess that if she had wished to take a little revenge
+by frightening her, the experiment was successful. "What others do you
+mean?" Olive asked, standing very straight, and turning down her eyes as
+from a great height.
+
+Mrs. Burrage--since we have begun to look into her mind we may continue
+the process--had not meant any one in particular; but a train of
+association was suddenly kindled in her thought by the flash of the
+girl's resentment. She remembered the gentleman who had come up to her
+in the music-room, after Miss Tarrant's address, while she was talking
+with Olive, and to whom that young lady had given so cold a welcome. "I
+don't mean any one in particular; but, for instance, there is the young
+man to whom she asked me to send an invitation to my party, and who
+looked to me like a possible admirer." Mrs. Burrage also got up; then
+she stood a moment, closer to her visitor. "Don't you think it's a good
+deal to expect that, young, pretty, attractive, clever, charming as she
+is, you should be able to keep her always, to exclude other affections,
+to cut off a whole side of life, to defend her against dangers--if you
+call them dangers--to which every young woman who is not positively
+repulsive is exposed? My dear young lady, I wonder if I might give you
+three words of advice?" Mrs. Burrage did not wait till Olive had
+answered this inquiry; she went on quickly, with her air of knowing
+exactly what she wanted to say and feeling at the same time that, good
+as it might be, the manner of saying it, like the manner of saying most
+other things, was not worth troubling much about. "Don't attempt the
+impossible. You have got hold of a good thing; don't spoil it by trying
+to stretch it too far. If you don't take the better, perhaps you will
+have to take the worse; if it's safety you want I should think she was
+much safer with my son--for with us you know the worst--than as a
+possible prey to adventurers, to exploiters, or to people who, once they
+had got hold of her, would shut her up altogether."
+
+Olive dropped her eyes; she couldn't endure Mrs. Burrage's horrible
+expression of being near the mark, her look of worldly cleverness, of a
+confidence born of much experience. She felt that nothing would be
+spared her, that she should have to go to the end, that this ordeal also
+must be faced, and that, in particular, there was a detestable wisdom in
+her hostess's advice. She was conscious, however, of no obligation to
+recognise it then and there; she wanted to get off, and even to carry
+Mrs. Burrage's sapient words along with her--to hurry to some place
+where she might be alone and think. "I don't know why you have thought
+it right to send for me only to say this. I take no interest whatever in
+your son--in his settling in life." And she gathered her mantle more
+closely about her, turning away.
+
+"It is exceedingly kind of you to have come," said Mrs. Burrage
+imperturbably. "Think of what I have said; I am sure you won't feel that
+you have wasted your hour."
+
+"I have a great many things to think of!" Olive exclaimed insincerely;
+for she knew that Mrs. Burrage's ideas would haunt her.
+
+"And tell her that if she will make us the little visit, all New York
+shall sit at her feet!"
+
+That was what Olive wanted, and yet it seemed a mockery to hear Mrs.
+Burrage say it. Miss Chancellor retreated, making no response even when
+her hostess declared again that she was under great obligations to her
+for coming. When she reached the street she found she was deeply
+agitated, but not with a sense of weakness; she hurried along, excited
+and dismayed, feeling that her insufferable conscience was bristling
+like some irritated animal, that a magnificent offer had really been
+made to Verena, and that there was no way for her to persuade herself
+she might be silent about it. Of course, if Verena should be tempted by
+the idea of being made so much of by the Burrages, the danger of Basil
+Ransom getting any kind of hold on her would cease to be pressing. That
+was what was present to Olive as she walked along, and that was what
+made her nervous, conscious only of this problem that had suddenly
+turned the bright day to greyness, heedless of the sophisticated-looking
+people who passed her on the wide Fifth Avenue pavement. It had risen in
+her mind the day before, planted first by Mrs. Burrage's note; and then,
+as we know, she had vaguely entertained the conception, asking Verena
+whether she would make the visit if it were again to be pressed upon
+them. It had been pressed, certainly, and the terms of the problem were
+now so much sharper that they seemed cruel. What had been in her own
+mind was that if Verena should appear to lend herself to the Burrages
+Basil Ransom might be discouraged--might think that, shabby and poor,
+there was no chance for him as against people with every advantage of
+fortune and position. She didn't see him relax his purpose so easily;
+she knew she didn't believe he was of that pusillanimous fibre. Still,
+it was a chance, and any chance that might help her had been worth
+considering. At present she saw it was a question not of Verena's
+lending herself, but of a positive gift, or at least of a bargain in
+which the terms would be immensely liberal. It would be impossible to
+use the Burrages as a shelter on the assumption that they were not
+dangerous, for they became dangerous from the moment they set up as
+sympathisers, took the ground that what they offered the girl was simply
+a boundless opportunity. It came back to Olive, again and again, that
+this was, and could only be, fantastic and false; but it was always
+possible that Verena might not think it so, might trust them all the
+way. When Miss Chancellor had a pair of alternatives to consider, a
+question of duty to study, she put a kind of passion into it--felt,
+above all, that the matter must be settled that very hour, before
+anything in life could go on. It seemed to her at present that she
+couldn't re-enter the house in Tenth Street without having decided first
+whether she might trust the Burrages or not. By "trust" them, she meant
+trust them to fail in winning Verena over, while at the same time they
+put Basil Ransom on a false scent. Olive was able to say to herself that
+he probably wouldn't have the hardihood to push after her into those
+gilded saloons, which, in any event, would be closed to him as soon as
+the mother and son should discover what he wanted. She even asked
+herself whether Verena would not be still better defended from the young
+Southerner in New York, amid complicated hospitalities, than in Boston
+with a cousin of the enemy. She continued to walk down the Fifth Avenue,
+without noticing the cross-streets, and after a while became conscious
+that she was approaching Washington Square. By this time she had also
+definitely reasoned it out that Basil Ransom and Henry Burrage could not
+both capture Miss Tarrant, that therefore there could not be two
+dangers, but only one; that this was a good deal gained, and that it
+behoved her to determine which peril had most reality, in order that she
+might deal with that one only. She held her way to the Square, which, as
+all the world knows, is of great extent and open to the encircling
+street. The trees and grass-plats had begun to bud and sprout, the
+fountains plashed in the sunshine, the children of the quarter, both the
+dingier types from the south side, who played games that required much
+chalking of the paved walks, and much sprawling and crouching there,
+under the feet of passers, and the little curled and feathered people
+who drove their hoops under the eyes of French nursemaids--all the
+infant population filled the vernal air with small sounds which had a
+crude, tender quality, like the leaves and the thin herbage. Olive
+wandered through the place, and ended by sitting down on one of the
+continuous benches. It was a long time since she had done anything so
+vague, so wasteful. There were a dozen things which, as she was staying
+over in New York, she ought to do; but she forgot them, or, if she
+thought of them, felt that they were now of no moment. She remained in
+her place an hour, brooding, tremulous, turning over and over certain
+thoughts. It seemed to her that she was face to face with a crisis of
+her destiny, and that she must not shrink from seeing it exactly as it
+was. Before she rose to return to Tenth Street she had made up her mind
+that there was no menace so great as the menace of Basil Ransom; she had
+accepted in thought any arrangement which would deliver her from that.
+If the Burrages were to take Verena they would take her from Olive
+immeasurably less than he would do; it was from him, from him they would
+take her most. She walked back to her boarding-house, and the servant
+who admitted her said, in answer to her inquiry as to whether Verena
+were at home, that Miss Tarrant had gone out with the gentleman who
+called in the morning, and had not yet come in. Olive stood staring; the
+clock in the hall marked three.
+
+
+
+
+XXXIII
+
+
+"Come out with me, Miss Tarrant; come out with me. _Do_ come out with
+me." That was what Basil Ransom had been saying to Verena when they
+stood where Olive perceived them, in the embrasure of the window. It had
+of course taken considerable talk to lead up to this; for the tone, even
+more than the words, indicated a large increase of intimacy. Verena was
+mindful of this when he spoke; and it frightened her a little, made her
+uneasy, which was one of the reasons why she got up from her chair and
+went to the window--an inconsequent movement, inasmuch as her wish was
+to impress upon him that it was impossible she should comply with his
+request. It would have served this end much better for her to sit, very
+firmly, in her place. He made her nervous and restless; she was
+beginning to perceive that he produced a peculiar effect upon her.
+Certainly, she had been out with him at home the very first time he
+called upon her; but it seemed to her to make an important difference
+that she herself should then have proposed the walk--simply because it
+was the easiest thing to do when a person came to see you in Monadnoc
+Place.
+
+They had gone out that time because she wanted to, not because he did.
+And then it was one thing for her to stroll with him round Cambridge,
+where she knew every step and had the confidence and freedom which came
+from being on her own ground, and the pretext, which was perfectly
+natural, of wanting to show him the colleges, and quite another thing to
+go wandering with him through the streets of this great strange city,
+which, attractive, delightful as it was, had not the suitableness even
+of being his home, not his real one. He wanted to show her something, he
+wanted to show her everything; but she was not sure now--after an hour's
+talk--that she particularly wanted to see anything more that he could
+show her. He had shown her a great deal while he sat there, especially
+what balderdash he thought it--the whole idea of women's being equal to
+men. He seemed to have come only for that, for he was all the while
+revolving round it; she couldn't speak of anything but what he brought
+it back to the question of some new truth like that. He didn't say so in
+so many words; on the contrary, he was tremendously insinuating and
+satirical, and pretended to think she had proved all and a great deal
+more than she wanted to prove; but his exaggeration, and the way he rung
+all the changes on two or three of the points she had made at Mrs.
+Burrage's, were just the sign that he was a scoffer of scoffers. He
+wouldn't do anything but laugh; he seemed to think that he might laugh
+at her all day without her taking offence. Well, he might if it amused
+him; but she didn't see why she should ramble round New York with him to
+give him his opportunity.
+
+She had told him, and she had told Olive, that she was determined to
+produce some effect on him; but now, suddenly, she felt differently
+about that--she ceased to care whether she produced any effect or not.
+She didn't see why she should take him so seriously, when he wouldn't
+take her so; that is, wouldn't take her ideas. She had guessed before
+that he didn't want to discuss them; this had been in her mind when she
+said to him at Cambridge that his interest in her was personal, not
+controversial. Then she had simply meant that, as an inquiring young
+Southerner, he had wanted to see what a bright New England girl was
+like; but since then it had become a little more clear to her--her short
+talk with Ransom at Mrs. Burrage's threw some light upon the
+question--what the personal interest of a young Southerner (however
+inquiring merely) might amount to. Did he too want to make love to her?
+This idea made Verena rather impatient, weary in advance. The thing she
+desired least in the world was to be put into the wrong with Olive; for
+she had certainly given her ground to believe (not only in their scene
+the night before, which was a simple repetition, but all along, from the
+very first) that she really had an interest which would transcend any
+attraction coming from such a source as that. If yesterday it seemed to
+her that she should like to struggle with Mr. Ransom, to refute and
+convince him, she had this morning gone into the parlour to receive him
+with the idea that, now they were alone together in a quiet, favourable
+place, he would perhaps take up the different points of her address one
+by one, as several gentlemen had done after hearing her on other
+occasions. There was nothing she liked so well as that, and Olive never
+had anything to say against it. But he hadn't taken up anything; he had
+simply laughed and chaffed, and unrolled a string of queer fancies about
+the delightful way women would fix things when, as she said in her
+address, they should get out of their box. He kept talking about the
+box; he seemed as if he wouldn't let go that simile. He said that he had
+come to look at her through the glass sides, and if he wasn't afraid of
+hurting her he would smash them in. He was determined to find the key
+that would open it, if he had to look for it all over the world; it was
+tantalising only to be able to talk to her through the keyhole. If he
+didn't want to take up the subject, he at least wanted to take _her_
+up--to keep his hand upon her as long as he could. Verena had had no
+such sensation since the first day she went in to see Olive Chancellor,
+when she felt herself plucked from the earth and borne aloft.
+
+"It's the most lovely day, and I should like so much to show you New
+York, as you showed me your beautiful Harvard," Basil Ransom went on,
+pressing her to accede to his proposal. "You said that was the only
+thing you could do for me then, and so this is the only thing I can do
+for you here. It would be odious to see you go away, giving me nothing
+but this stiff little talk in a boarding-house parlour."
+
+"Mercy, if you call this stiff!" Verena exclaimed, laughing, while at
+that moment Olive passed out of the house and descended the steps before
+her eyes.
+
+"My poor cousin's stiff; she won't turn her head a hair's breadth to
+look at us," said the young man. Olive's figure, as she went by, was,
+for Verena, full of a queer, touching, tragic expression, saying ever so
+many things, both familiar and strange; and Basil Ransom's companion
+privately remarked how little men knew about women, or indeed about what
+was really delicate, that he, without any cruel intention, should attach
+an idea of ridicule to such an incarnation of the pathetic, should speak
+rough, derisive words about it. Ransom, in truth, to-day, was not
+disposed to be very scrupulous, and he only wanted to get rid of Olive
+Chancellor, whose image, at last, decidedly bothered and bored him. He
+was glad to see her go out; but that was not sufficient, she would come
+back quick enough; the place itself contained her, expressed her. For
+to-day he wanted to take possession of Verena, to carry her to a
+distance, to reproduce a little the happy conditions they had enjoyed
+the day of his visit to Cambridge. And the fact that in the nature of
+things it could only be for to-day made his desire more keen, more full
+of purpose. He had thought over the whole question in the last
+forty-eight hours, and it was his belief that he saw things in their
+absolute reality. He took a greater interest in her than he had taken in
+any one yet, but he proposed, after to-day, not to let that accident
+make any difference. This was precisely what gave its high value to the
+present limited occasion. He was too shamefully poor, too shabbily and
+meagrely equipped, to have the right to talk of marriage to a girl in
+Verena's very peculiar position. He understood now how good that
+position was, from a worldly point of view; her address at Mrs.
+Burrage's gave him something definite to go upon, showed him what she
+could do, that people would flock in thousands to an exhibition so
+charming (and small blame to them); that she might easily have a big
+career, like that of a distinguished actress or singer, and that she
+would make money in quantities only slightly smaller than performers of
+that kind. Who wouldn't pay half a dollar for such an hour as he had
+passed at Mrs. Burrage's? The sort of thing she was able to do, to say,
+was an article for which there was more and more demand--fluent, pretty,
+third-rate palaver, conscious or unconscious perfected humbug; the
+stupid, gregarious, gullible public, the enlightened democracy of his
+native land, could swallow unlimited draughts of it. He was sure she
+could go, like that, for several years, with her portrait in the
+druggists' windows and her posters on the fences, and during that time
+would make a fortune sufficient to keep her in affluence for evermore. I
+shall perhaps expose our young man to the contempt of superior minds if
+I say that all this seemed to him an insuperable impediment to his
+making up to Verena. His scruples were doubtless begotten of a false
+pride, a sentiment in which there was a thread of moral tinsel, as there
+was in the Southern idea of chivalry; but he felt ashamed of his own
+poverty, the positive flatness of his situation, when he thought of the
+gilded nimbus that surrounded the protégée of Mrs. Burrage. This shame
+was possible to him even while he was conscious of what a mean business
+it was to practise upon human imbecility, how much better it was even to
+be seedy and obscure, discouraged about one's self. He had been born to
+the prospect of a fortune, and in spite of the years of misery that
+followed the war had never rid himself of the belief that a gentleman
+who desired to unite himself to a charming girl couldn't yet ask her to
+come and live with him in sordid conditions. On the other hand it was no
+possible basis of matrimony that Verena should continue for his
+advantage the exercise of her remunerative profession; if he should
+become her husband he should know a way to strike her dumb. In the midst
+of this an irrepressible desire urged him on to taste, for once, deeply,
+all that he was condemned to lose, or at any rate forbidden to attempt
+to gain. To spend a day with her and not to see her again--that
+presented itself to him at once as the least and the most that was
+possible. He did not need even to remind himself that young Mr. Burrage
+was able to offer her everything _he_ lacked, including the most amiable
+adhesion to her views.
+
+"It will be charming in the Park to-day. Why not take a stroll with me
+there as I did with you in the little park at Harvard?" he asked, when
+Olive had disappeared.
+
+"Oh, I have seen it, very well, in every corner. A friend of mine kindly
+took me to drive there yesterday," Verena said.
+
+"A friend?--do you mean Mr. Burrage?" And Ransom stood looking at her
+with his extraordinary eyes. "Of course, I haven't a vehicle to drive
+you in; but we can sit on a bench and talk." She didn't say it was Mr.
+Burrage, but she was unable to say it was not, and something in her face
+showed him that he had guessed. So he went on: "Is it only with him you
+can go out? Won't he like it, and may you only do what he likes? Mrs.
+Luna told me he wants to marry you, and I saw at his mother's how he
+stuck to you. If you are going to marry him, you can drive with him
+every day in the year, and that's just a reason for your giving me an
+hour or two now, before it becomes impossible." He didn't mind much what
+he said--it had been his plan not to mind much to-day--and so long as he
+made her do what he wanted he didn't care much how he did it. But he saw
+that his words brought the colour to her face; she stared, surprised at
+his freedom and familiarity. He went on, dropping the hardness, the
+irony of which he was conscious, out of his tone. "I know it's no
+business of mine whom you marry, or even whom you drive with, and I beg
+your pardon if I seem indiscreet and obtrusive; but I would give
+anything just to detach you a little from your ties, your belongings,
+and feel for an hour or two, as if--as if----" And he paused.
+
+"As if what?" she asked, very seriously.
+
+"As if there were no such person as Mr. Burrage--as Miss Chancellor--in
+the whole place." This had not been what he was going to say; he used
+different words.
+
+"I don't know what you mean, why you speak of other persons. I can do as
+I like, perfectly. But I don't know why you should take so for granted
+that _that_ would be it!" Verena spoke these words not out of coquetry,
+or to make him beg her more for a favour, but because she was thinking,
+and she wanted to gain a moment. His allusion to Henry Burrage touched
+her, his belief that she had been in the Park under circumstances more
+agreeable than those he proposed. They were not; somehow, she wanted him
+to know that. To wander there with a companion, slowly stopping,
+lounging, looking at the animals as she had seen the people do the day
+before; to sit down in some out-of-the-way part where there were distant
+views, which she had noticed from her high perch beside Henry
+Burrage--she had to look down so, it made her feel unduly fine: that was
+much more to her taste, much more her idea of true enjoyment. It came
+over her that Mr. Ransom had given up his work to come to her at such an
+hour; people of his kind, in the morning, were always getting their
+living, and it was only for Mr. Burrage that it didn't matter, inasmuch
+as he had no profession. Mr. Ransom simply wanted to give up his whole
+day. That pressed upon her; she was, as the most good-natured girl in
+the world, too entirely tender not to feel any sacrifice that was made
+for her; she had always done everything that people asked. Then, if
+Olive should make that strange arrangement for her to go to Mrs.
+Burrage's he would take it as a proof that there was something serious
+between her and the gentleman of the house, in spite of anything she
+might say to the contrary; moreover, if she should go she wouldn't be
+able to receive Mr. Ransom there. Olive would trust her not to, and she
+must certainly, in future, not disappoint Olive nor keep anything back
+from her, whatever she might have done in the past. Besides, she didn't
+want to do that; she thought it much better not. It was this idea of the
+episode which was possibly in store for her in New York, and from which
+her present companion would be so completely excluded, that worked upon
+her now with a rapid transition, urging her to grant him what he asked,
+so that in advance she should have made up for what she might not do for
+him later. But most of all she disliked his thinking she was engaged to
+some one. She didn't know, it is true, why she should mind it; and
+indeed, at this moment, our young lady's feelings were not in any way
+clear to her. She did not see what was the use of letting her
+acquaintance with Mr. Ransom become much closer (since his interest did
+really seem personal); and yet she presently asked him why he wanted her
+to go out with him, and whether there was anything particular he wanted
+to say to her (there was no one like Verena for making speeches
+apparently flirtatious, with the best faith and the most innocent
+intention in the world); as if that would not be precisely a reason to
+make it well she should get rid of him altogether.
+
+"Of course I have something particular to say to you--I have a
+tremendous lot to say to you!" the young man exclaimed. "Far more than I
+can say in this stuck-up, confined room, which is public, too, so that
+any one may come in from one moment to another. Besides," he added
+sophistically, "it isn't proper for me to pay a visit of three hours."
+
+Verena did not take up the sophistry, nor ask him whether it would be
+more proper for her to ramble about the city with him for an equal
+period; she only said, "Is it something that I shall care to hear, or
+that will do me any good?"
+
+"Well, I hope it will do you good; but I don't suppose you will care
+much to hear it." Basil Ransom hesitated a moment, smiling at her; then
+he went on: "It's to tell you, once for all, how much I really do differ
+from you!" He said this at a venture, but it was a happy inspiration.
+
+If it was only that, Verena thought she might go, for that was not
+personal. "Well, I'm glad you care so much," she answered musingly. But
+she had another scruple still, and she expressed it in saying that she
+should like Olive very much to find her when she came in.
+
+"That's all very well," Ransom returned; "but does she think that she
+only has a right to go out? Does she expect you to keep the house
+because she's abroad? If she stays out long enough, she will find you
+when she comes in."
+
+"Her going out that way--it proves that she trusts me," Verena said,
+with a candour which alarmed her as soon as she had spoken.
+
+Her alarm was just, for Basil Ransom instantly caught up her words, with
+a great mocking amazement. "Trusts you? and why shouldn't she trust you?
+Are you a little girl of ten and she your governess? Haven't you any
+liberty at all, and is she always watching you and holding you to an
+account? Have you such vagabond instincts that you are only thought safe
+when you are between four walls?" Ransom was going on to speak, in the
+same tone, of her having felt it necessary to keep Olive in ignorance of
+his visit to Cambridge--a fact they had touched on, by implication, in
+their short talk at Mrs. Burrage's; but in a moment he saw that he had
+said enough. As for Verena, she had said more than she meant, and the
+simplest way to unsay it was to go and get her bonnet and jacket and let
+him take her where he liked. Five minutes later he was walking up and
+down the parlour, waiting while she prepared herself to go out.
+
+They went up to the Central Park by the elevated railway, and Verena
+reflected, as they proceeded, that anyway Olive was probably disposing
+of her somehow at Mrs. Burrage's, and that therefore there wasn't much
+harm in her just taking this little run on her own responsibility,
+especially as she should only be out an hour--which would be just the
+duration of Olive's absence. The beauty of the "elevated" was that it
+took you up to the Park and brought you back in a few minutes, and you
+had all the rest of the hour to walk about and see the place. It was so
+pleasant now that one was glad to see it twice over. The long, narrow
+enclosure, across which the houses in the streets that border it look at
+each other with their glittering windows, bristled with the raw delicacy
+of April, and, in spite of its rockwork grottoes and tunnels, its
+pavilions and statues, its too numerous paths and pavements, lakes too
+big for the landscape and bridges too big for the lakes, expressed all
+the fragrance and freshness of the most charming moment of the year.
+Once Verena was fairly launched the spirit of the day took possession of
+her; she was glad to have come, she forgot about Olive, enjoyed the
+sense of wandering in the great city with a remarkable young man who
+would take beautiful care of her, while no one else in the world knew
+where she was. It was very different from her drive yesterday with Mr.
+Burrage, but it was more free, more intense, more full of amusing
+incident and opportunity. She could stop and look at everything now, and
+indulge all her curiosities, even the most childish; she could feel as
+if she were out for the day, though she was not really--as she had not
+done since she was a little girl, when in the country, once or twice,
+when her father and mother had drifted into summer quarters, gone out of
+town like people of fashion, she had, with a chance companion, strayed
+far from home, spent hours in the woods and fields, looking for
+raspberries and playing she was a gipsy. Basil Ransom had begun with
+proposing, strenuously, that she should come somewhere and have
+luncheon; he had brought her out half an hour before that meal was
+served in West Tenth Street, and he maintained that he owed her the
+compensation of seeing that she was properly fed; he knew a very quiet,
+luxurious French restaurant, near the top of the Fifth Avenue: he didn't
+tell her that he knew it through having once lunched there in company
+with Mrs. Luna. Verena for the present declined his hospitality--said
+she was going to be out so short a time that it wasn't worth the
+trouble; she should not be hungry, luncheon to her was nothing, she
+would eat when she went home. When he pressed her she said she would see
+later, perhaps, if she should find she wanted something. She would have
+liked immensely to go with him to an eating-house, and yet, with this,
+she was afraid, just as she was rather afraid, at bottom, and in the
+intervals of her quick pulsations of amusement, of the whole expedition,
+not knowing why she had come, though it made her happy, and reflecting
+that there was really nothing Mr. Ransom could have to say to her that
+would concern her closely enough. He knew what he intended about her
+sharing the noon-day repast with him somehow; it had been part of his
+plan that she should sit opposite him at a little table, taking her
+napkin out of its curious folds--sit there smiling back at him while he
+said to her certain things that hummed, like memories of tunes, in his
+fancy, and they waited till something extremely good, and a little
+vague, chosen out of a French _carte_, was brought them. That was not at
+all compatible with her going home at the end of half an hour, as she
+seemed to expect to. They visited the animals in the little zoological
+garden which forms one of the attractions of the Central Park; they
+observed the swans in the ornamental water, and they even considered the
+question of taking a boat for half an hour, Ransom saying that they
+needed this to make their visit complete. Verena replied that she didn't
+see why it should be complete, and after having threaded the devious
+ways of the Ramble, lost themselves in the Maze, and admired all the
+statues and busts of great men with which the grounds are decorated,
+they contented themselves with resting on a sequestered bench, where,
+however, there was a pretty glimpse of the distance and an occasional
+stroller creaked by on the asphalt walk.
+
+They had had by this time a great deal of talk, none of which,
+nevertheless, had been serious to Verena's view. Mr. Ransom continued to
+joke about everything, including the emancipation of women; Verena, who
+had always lived with people who took the world very earnestly, had
+never encountered such a power of disparagement or heard so much sarcasm
+levelled at the institutions of her country and the tendencies of the
+age. At first she replied to him, contradicted, showed a high spirit of
+retort, turning his irreverence against himself; she was too quick and
+ingenious not to be able to think of something to oppose--talking in a
+fanciful strain--to almost everything he said. But little by little she
+grew weary and rather sad; brought up, as she had been, to admire new
+ideas, to criticise the social arrangements that one met almost
+everywhere, and to disapprove of a great many things, she had yet never
+dreamed of such a wholesale arraignment as Mr. Ransom's, so much
+bitterness as she saw lurking beneath his exaggerations, his
+misrepresentations. She knew he was an intense conservative, but she
+didn't know that being a conservative could make a person so aggressive
+and unmerciful. She thought conservatives were only smug and stubborn
+and self-complacent, satisfied with what actually existed; but Mr.
+Ransom didn't seem any more satisfied with what existed than with what
+she wanted to exist, and he was ready to say worse things about some of
+those whom she would have supposed to be on his own side than she
+thought it right to say about almost any one. She ceased after a while
+to care to argue with him, and wondered what could have happened to him
+to make him so perverse. Probably something had gone wrong in his
+life--he had had some misfortune that coloured his whole view of the
+world. He was a cynic; she had often heard about that state of mind,
+though she had never encountered it, for all the people she had seen
+only cared, if possible, too much. Of Basil Ransom's personal history
+she knew only what Olive had told her, and that was but a general
+outline, which left plenty of room for private dramas, secret
+disappointments and sufferings. As she sat there beside him she thought
+of some of these things, asked herself whether they were what he was
+thinking of when he said, for instance, that he was sick of all the
+modern cant about freedom and had no sympathy with those who wanted an
+extension of it. What was needed for the good of the world was that
+people should make a better use of the liberty they possessed. Such
+declarations as this took Verena's breath away; she didn't suppose you
+could hear any one say such a thing as that in the nineteenth century,
+even the least advanced. It was of a piece with his denouncing the
+spread of education; he thought the spread of education a gigantic
+farce--people stuffing their heads with a lot of empty catchwords that
+prevented them from doing their work quietly and honestly. You had a
+right to an education only if you had an intelligence, and if you looked
+at the matter with any desire to see things as they are you soon
+perceived that an intelligence was a very rare luxury, the attribute of
+one person in a hundred. He seemed to take a pretty low view of
+humanity, anyway. Verena hoped that something really bad had happened to
+him--not by way of gratifying any resentment he aroused in her nature,
+but to help herself to forgive him for so much contempt and brutality.
+She wanted to forgive him, for after they had sat on their bench half an
+hour and his jesting mood had abated a little, so that he talked with
+more consideration (as it seemed) and more sincerity, a strange feeling
+came over her, a perfect willingness not to keep insisting on her own
+side and a desire not to part from him with a mere accentuation of their
+differences. Strange I call the nature of her reflexions, for they
+softly battled with each other as she listened, in the warm, still air,
+touched with the far-away hum of the immense city, to his deep, sweet,
+distinct voice, expressing monstrous opinions with exotic cadences and
+mild, familiar laughs, which, as he leaned towards her, almost tickled
+her cheek and ear. It seemed to her strangely harsh, almost cruel, to
+have brought her out only to say to her things which, after all, free as
+she was to contradict them and tolerant as she always tried to be, could
+only give her pain; yet there was a spell upon her as she listened; it
+was in her nature to be easily submissive, to like being overborne. She
+could be silent when people insisted, and silent without acrimony. Her
+whole relation to Olive was a kind of tacit, tender assent to passionate
+insistence, and if this had ended by being easy and agreeable to her
+(and indeed had never been anything else), it may be supposed that the
+struggle of yielding to a will which she felt to be stronger even than
+Olive's was not of long duration. Ransom's will had the effect of making
+her linger even while she knew the afternoon was going on, that Olive
+would have come back and found her still absent, and would have been
+submerged again in the bitter waves of anxiety. She saw her, in fact, as
+she must be at that moment, posted at the window of her room in Tenth
+Street, watching for some sign of her return, listening for her step on
+the staircase, her voice in the hall. Verena looked at this image as at
+a painted picture, perceived all it represented, every detail. If it
+didn't move her more, make her start to her feet, dart away from Basil
+Ransom and hurry back to her friend, this was because the very torment
+to which she was conscious of subjecting that friend made her say to
+herself that it must be the very last. This was the last time she could
+ever sit by Mr. Ransom and hear him express himself in a manner that
+interfered so with her life; the ordeal had been so personal and so
+complete that she forgot, for the moment, it was also the first time it
+had occurred. It might have been going on for months. She was perfectly
+aware that it could bring them to nothing, for one must lead one's own
+life; it was impossible to lead the life of another, especially when
+that other was so different, so arbitrary and unscrupulous.
+
+
+
+
+XXXIV
+
+
+"I presume you are the only person in this country who feels as you do,"
+she observed at last.
+
+"Not the only person who feels so, but very possibly the only person who
+thinks so. I have an idea that my convictions exist in a vague,
+unformulated state in the minds of a great many of my fellow-citizens.
+If I should succeed some day in giving them adequate expression I should
+simply put into shape the slumbering instincts of an important
+minority."
+
+"I am glad you admit it's a minority!" Verena exclaimed. "That's
+fortunate for us poor creatures. And what do you call adequate
+expression? I presume you would like to be President of the United
+States?"
+
+"And breathe forth my views in glowing messages to a palpitating Senate?
+That is exactly what I should like to be; you read my aspirations
+wonderfully well."
+
+"Well, do you consider that you have advanced far in that direction, as
+yet?" Verena asked.
+
+This question, with the tone in which it happened to be uttered, seemed
+to the young man to project rather an ironical light upon his present
+beggarly condition, so that for a moment he said nothing; a moment
+during which if his neighbour had glanced round at his face she would
+have seen it ornamented by an incipient blush. Her words had for him the
+effect of a sudden, though, on the part of a young woman who had of
+course every right to defend herself, a perfectly legitimate taunt. They
+appeared only to repeat in another form (so at least his exaggerated
+Southern pride, his hot sensibility, interpreted the matter) the idea
+that a gentleman so dreadfully backward in the path of fortune had no
+right to take up the time of a brilliant, successful girl, even for the
+purpose of satisfying himself that he renounced her. But the reminder
+only sharpened his wish to make her feel that if he had renounced, it
+was simply on account of that same ugly, accidental, outside
+backwardness; and if he had not, he went so far as to flatter himself,
+he might triumph over the whole accumulation of her prejudices--over all
+the bribes of her notoriety. The deepest feeling in Ransom's bosom in
+relation to her was the conviction that she was made for love, as he had
+said to himself while he listened to her at Mrs. Burrage's. She was
+profoundly unconscious of it, and another ideal, crude and thin and
+artificial, had interposed itself; but in the presence of a man she
+should really care for, this false, flimsy structure would rattle to her
+feet, and the emancipation of Olive Chancellor's sex (what sex was it,
+great heaven? he used profanely to ask himself) would be relegated to
+the land of vapours, of dead phrases. The reader may imagine whether
+such an impression as this made it any more agreeable to Basil to have
+to believe it would be indelicate in him to try to woo her. He would
+have resented immensely the imputation that he had done anything of that
+sort yet. "Ah, Miss Tarrant, my success in life is one thing--my
+ambition is another!" he exclaimed presently, in answer to her inquiry.
+"Nothing is more possible than that I may be poor and unheard of all my
+days; and in that case no one but myself will know the visions of
+greatness I have stifled and buried."
+
+"Why do you talk of being poor and unheard of? Aren't you getting on
+quite well in this city?"
+
+This question of Verena's left him no time, or at least no coolness, to
+remember that to Mrs. Luna and to Olive he had put a fine face on his
+prospects, and that any impression the girl might have about them was
+but the natural echo of what these ladies believed. It had to his ear
+such a subtly mocking, defiant, unconsciously injurious quality, that
+the only answer he could make to it seemed to him for the moment to be
+an outstretched arm, which, passing round her waist, should draw her so
+close to him as to enable him to give her a concise account of his
+situation in the form of a deliberate kiss. If the moment I speak of had
+lasted a few seconds longer I know not what monstrous proceeding of this
+kind it would have been my difficult duty to describe; it was
+fortunately arrested by the arrival of a nursery-maid pushing a
+perambulator and accompanied by an infant who toddled in her wake. Both
+the nurse and her companion gazed fixedly, and it seemed to Ransom even
+sternly, at the striking couple on the bench; and meanwhile Verena,
+looking with a quickened eye at the children (she adored children), went
+on--
+
+"It sounds too flat for you to talk about your remaining unheard of. Of
+course you are ambitious; any one can see that, to look at you. And once
+your ambition is excited in any particular direction, people had better
+look out. With your will!" she added, with a curious mocking candour.
+
+"What do you know about my will?" he asked, laughing a little awkwardly,
+as if he had really attempted to kiss her--in the course of the second
+independent interview he had ever had with her--and been rebuffed.
+
+"I know it's stronger than mine. It made me come out, when I thought I
+had much better not, and it keeps me sitting here long after I should
+have started for home."
+
+"Give me the day, dear Miss Tarrant, give me the day," Basil Ransom
+murmured; and as she turned her face upon him, moved by the expression
+of his voice, he added--"Come and dine with me, since you wouldn't
+lunch. Are you really not faint and weak?"
+
+"I am faint and weak at all the horrible things you have said; I have
+lunched on abominations. And now you want me to dine with you? Thank
+you; I think you're cool!" Verena cried, with a laugh which her
+chronicler knows to have been expressive of some embarrassment, though
+Basil Ransom did not.
+
+"You must remember that I have, on two different occasions, listened to
+you for an hour, in speechless, submissive attention, and that I shall
+probably do it a great many times more."
+
+"Why should you ever listen to me again, when you loathe my ideas?"
+
+"I don't listen to your ideas; I listen to your voice."
+
+"Ah, I told Olive!" said Verena, quickly, as if his words had confirmed
+an old fear; which was general, however, and did not relate particularly
+to him.
+
+Ransom still had an impression that he was not making love to her,
+especially when he could observe, with all the superiority of a man--"I
+wonder whether you have understood ten words I have said to you?"
+
+"I should think you had made it clear enough--you had rubbed it in!"
+
+"What have you understood, then?"
+
+"Why, that you want to put us back further than we have been at any
+period."
+
+"I have been joking; I have been piling it up," Ransom said, making that
+concession unexpectedly to the girl. Every now and then he had an air of
+relaxing himself, becoming absent, ceasing to care to discuss.
+
+She was capable of noticing this, and in a moment she asked--"Why don't
+you write out your ideas?"
+
+This touched again upon the matter of his failure; it was curious how
+she couldn't keep off it, hit it every time. "Do you mean for the
+public? I have written many things, but I can't get them printed."
+
+"Then it would seem that there are not so many people--so many as you
+said just now--who agree with you."
+
+"Well," said Basil Ransom, "editors are a mean, timorous lot, always
+saying they want something original, but deadly afraid of it when it
+comes."
+
+"Is it for papers, magazines?" As it sank into Verena's mind more deeply
+that the contributions of this remarkable young man had been
+rejected--contributions in which, apparently, everything she held dear
+was riddled with scorn--she felt a strange pity and sadness, a sense of
+injustice. "I am very sorry you can't get published," she said, so
+simply that he looked up at her, from the figure he was scratching on
+the asphalt with his stick, to see whether such a tone as that, in
+relation to such a fact, were not "put on." But it was evidently
+genuine, and Verena added that she supposed getting published was very
+difficult always; she remembered, though she didn't mention, how little
+success her father had when he tried. She hoped Mr. Ransom would keep
+on; he would be sure to succeed at last. Then she continued, smiling,
+with more irony: "You may denounce me by name if you like. Only please
+don't say anything about Olive Chancellor."
+
+"How little you understand what I want to achieve!" Basil Ransom
+exclaimed. "There you are--you women--all over; always meaning,
+yourselves, something personal, and always thinking it is meant by
+others!"
+
+"Yes, that's the charge they make," said Verena gaily.
+
+"I don't want to touch you, or Miss Chancellor, or Mrs. Farrinder, or
+Miss Birdseye, or the shade of Eliza P. Moseley, or any other gifted and
+celebrated being on earth--or in heaven."
+
+"Oh, I suppose you want to destroy us by neglect, by silence!" Verena
+exclaimed, with the same brightness.
+
+"No, I don't want to destroy you, any more than I want to save you.
+There has been far too much talk about you, and I want to leave you
+alone altogether. My interest is in my own sex; yours evidently can look
+after itself. That's what I want to save."
+
+Verena saw that he was more serious now than he had been before, that he
+was not piling it up satirically, but saying really and a trifle
+wearily, as if suddenly he were tired of much talk, what he meant. "To
+save it from what?" she asked.
+
+"From the most damnable feminisation! I am so far from thinking, as you
+set forth the other night, that there is not enough women in our general
+life, that it has long been pressed home to me that there is a great
+deal too much. The whole generation is womanised; the masculine tone is
+passing out of the world; it's a feminine, a nervous, hysterical,
+chattering, canting age, an age of hollow phrases and false delicacy and
+exaggerated solicitudes and coddled sensibilities, which, if we don't
+soon look out, will usher in the reign of mediocrity, of the feeblest
+and flattest and the most pretentious that has ever been. The masculine
+character, the ability to dare and endure, to know and yet not fear
+reality, to look the world in the face and take it for what it is--a
+very queer and partly very base mixture--that is what I want to
+preserve, or rather, as I may say, to recover; and I must tell you that
+I don't in the least care what becomes of you ladies while I make the
+attempt!"
+
+The poor fellow delivered himself of these narrow notions (the rejection
+of which by leading periodicals was certainly not a matter for surprise)
+with low, soft earnestness, bending towards her so as to give out his
+whole idea, yet apparently forgetting for the moment how offensive it
+must be to her now that it was articulated in that calm, severe way, in
+which no allowance was to be made for hyperbole. Verena did not remind
+herself of this; she was too much impressed by his manner and by the
+novelty of a man taking that sort of religious tone about such a cause.
+It told her on the spot, from one minute to the other and once for all,
+that the man who could give her that impression would never come round.
+She felt cold, slightly sick, though she replied that now he summed up
+his creed in such a distinct, lucid way, it was much more
+comfortable--one knew with what one was dealing; a declaration much at
+variance with the fact, for Verena had never felt less gratified in her
+life. The ugliness of her companion's profession of faith made her
+shiver; it would have been difficult to her to imagine anything more
+crudely profane. She was determined, however, not to betray any shudder
+that could suggest weakness, and the best way she could think of to
+disguise her emotion was to remark in a tone which, although not assumed
+for that purpose, was really the most effective revenge, inasmuch as it
+always produced on Ransom's part (it was not peculiar, among women, to
+Verena) an angry helplessness--"Mr. Ransom, I assure you this is an age
+of conscience."
+
+"That's a part of your cant. It's an age of unspeakable shams, as
+Carlyle says."
+
+"Well," returned Verena, "it's all very comfortable for you to say that
+you wish to leave us alone. But you can't leave us alone. We are here,
+and we have got to be disposed of. You have got to put us somewhere.
+It's a remarkable social system that has no place for _us_!" the girl
+went on, with her most charming laugh.
+
+"No place in public. My plan is to keep you at home and have a better
+time with you there than ever."
+
+"I'm glad it's to be better; there's room for it. Woe to American
+womanhood when you start a movement for being more--what you like to
+be--at home!"
+
+"Lord, how you're perverted; you, the very genius!" Basil Ransom
+murmured, looking at her with the kindest eyes.
+
+She paid no attention to this, she went on, "And those who have got no
+home (there are millions, you know), what are you going to do with
+_them_? You must remember that women marry--are given in marriage--less
+and less; that isn't their career, as a matter of course, any more. You
+can't tell them to go and mind their husband and children, when they
+have no husband and children to mind."
+
+"Oh," said Ransom, "that's a detail! And for myself, I confess, I have
+such a boundless appreciation of your sex in private life that I am
+perfectly ready to advocate a man's having a half-a-dozen wives."
+
+"The civilisation of the Turks, then, strikes you as the highest?"
+
+"The Turks have a second-rate religion; they are fatalists, and that
+keeps them down. Besides, their women are not nearly so charming as
+ours--or as ours would be if this modern pestilence were eradicated.
+Think what a confession you make when you say that women are less and
+less sought in marriage; what a testimony that is to the pernicious
+effect on their manners, their person, their nature, of this fatuous
+agitation."
+
+"That's very complimentary to me!" Verena broke in, lightly.
+
+But Ransom was carried over her interruption by the current of his
+argument. "There are a thousand ways in which any woman, all women,
+married or single, may find occupation. They may find it in making
+society agreeable."
+
+"Agreeable to men, of course."
+
+"To whom else, pray? Dear Miss Tarrant, what is most agreeable to women
+is to be agreeable to men! That is a truth as old as the human race, and
+don't let Olive Chancellor persuade you that she and Mrs. Farrinder have
+invented any that can take its place, or that is more profound, more
+durable."
+
+Verena waived this point of the discussion; she only said: "Well, I am
+glad to hear you are prepared to see the place all choked up with old
+maids!"
+
+"I don't object to the _old_ old maids; they were delightful; they had
+always plenty to do, and didn't wander about the world crying out for a
+vocation. It is the new old maid that you have invented from whom I pray
+to be delivered." He didn't say he meant Olive Chancellor, but Verena
+looked at him as if she suspected him of doing so; and to put her off
+that scent he went on, taking up what she had said a moment before: "As
+for its not being complimentary to you, my remark about the effect on
+the women themselves of this pernicious craze, my dear Miss Tarrant, you
+may be quite at your ease. You stand apart, you are unique,
+extraordinary; you constitute a category by yourself. In you the
+elements have been mixed in a manner so felicitous that I regard you as
+quite incorruptible. I don't know where you come from nor how you come
+to be what you are, but you are outside and above all vulgarising
+influences. Besides, you ought to know," the young man proceeded, in the
+same cool, mild, deliberate tone, as if he were demonstrating a
+mathematical solution, "you ought to know that your connexion with all
+these rantings and ravings is the most unreal, accidental, illusory
+thing in the world. You think you care about them, but you don't at all.
+They were imposed upon you by circumstances, by unfortunate
+associations, and you accepted them as you would have accepted any other
+burden, on account of the sweetness of your nature. You always want to
+please some one, and now you go lecturing about the country, and trying
+to provoke demonstrations, in order to please Miss Chancellor, just as
+you did it before to please your father and mother. It isn't _you_, the
+least in the world, but an inflated little figure (very remarkable in
+its way too) whom you have invented and set on its feet, pulling
+strings, behind it, to make it move and speak, while you try to conceal
+and efface yourself there. Ah, Miss Tarrant, if it's a question of
+pleasing, how much you might please some one else by tipping your
+preposterous puppet over and standing forth in your freedom as well as
+in your loveliness!"
+
+While Basil Ransom spoke--and he had not spoken just that way
+yet--Verena sat there deeply attentive, with her eyes on the ground; but
+as soon as he ceased she sprang to her feet--something made her feel
+that their association had already lasted quite too long. She turned
+away from him as if she wished to leave him, and indeed were about to
+attempt to do so. She didn't desire to look at him now, or even to have
+much more conversation with him. "Something," I say, made her feel so,
+but it was partly his curious manner--so serene and explicit, as if he
+knew the whole thing to an absolute certainty--which partly scared her
+and partly made her feel angry. She began to move along the path to one
+of the gates, as if it were settled that they should immediately leave
+the place. He laid it all out so clearly; if he had had a revelation he
+couldn't speak otherwise. That description of herself as something
+different from what she was trying to be, the charge of want of reality,
+made her heart beat with pain; she was sure, at any rate, it was her
+real self that was there with him now, where she oughtn't to be. In a
+moment he was at her side again, going with her; and as they walked it
+came over her that some of the things he had said to her were far beyond
+what Olive could have imagined as the very worst possible. What would be
+her state now, poor forsaken friend, if some of them had been borne to
+her in the voices of the air? Verena had been affected by her
+companion's speech (his manner had changed so; it seemed to express
+something quite different) in a way that pushed her to throw up the
+discussion and determine that as soon as they should get out of the park
+she would go off by herself; but she still had her wits about her
+sufficiently to think it important she should give no sign of
+discomposure, of confessing that she was driven from the field. She
+appeared to herself to notice and reply to his extraordinary
+observations enough, without taking them up too much, when she said,
+tossing the words over her shoulder at Ransom, while she moved quickly:
+"I presume, from what you say, that you don't think I have much
+ability."
+
+He hesitated before answering, while his long legs easily kept pace with
+her rapid step--her charming, touching, hurrying step, which expressed
+all the trepidation she was anxious to conceal. "Immense ability, but
+not in the line in which you most try to have it. In a very different
+line, Miss Tarrant! Ability is no word for it; it's genius!"
+
+She felt his eyes on her face--ever so close and fixed there--after he
+had chosen to reply to her question that way. She was beginning to
+blush; if he had kept them longer, and on the part of any one else, she
+would have called such a stare impertinent. Verena had been commended of
+old by Olive for her serenity "while exposed to the gaze of hundreds";
+but a change had taken place, and she was now unable to endure the
+contemplation of an individual. She wished to detach him, to lead him
+off again into the general; and for this purpose, at the end of a
+moment, she made another inquiry: "I am to understand, then, as your
+last word that you regard us as quite inferior?"
+
+"For public, civic uses, absolutely--perfectly weak and second-rate. I
+know nothing more indicative of the muddled sentiment of the time than
+that any number of men should be found to pretend that they regard you
+in any other light. But privately, personally, it's another affair. In
+the realm of family life and the domestic affections----"
+
+At this Verena broke in, with a nervous laugh, "Don't say that; it's
+only a phrase!"
+
+"Well, it's a better one than any of yours," said Basil Ransom, turning
+with her out of one of the smaller gates--the first they had come to.
+They emerged into the species of _plaza_ formed by the numbered street
+which constitutes the southern extremity of the park and the termination
+of the Sixth Avenue. The glow of the splendid afternoon was over
+everything, and the day seemed to Ransom still in its youth. The bowers
+and boskages stretched behind them, the artificial lakes and cockneyfied
+landscapes, making all the region bright with the sense of air and
+space, and raw natural tints, and vegetation too diminutive to
+overshadow. The chocolate-coloured houses, in tall, new rows, surveyed
+the expanse; the street cars rattled in the foreground, changing horses
+while the horses steamed, and absorbing and emitting passengers; and the
+beer-saloons, with exposed shoulders and sides, which in New York do a
+good deal towards representing the picturesque, the "bit" appreciated by
+painters, announced themselves in signs of large lettering to the sky.
+Groups of the unemployed, the children of disappointment from beyond the
+seas, propped themselves against the low, sunny wall of the park; and on
+the other side the commercial vista of the Sixth Avenue stretched away
+with a remarkable absence of aerial perspective.
+
+"I must go home; good-bye," Verena said, abruptly, to her companion.
+
+"Go home? You won't come and dine, then?"
+
+Verena knew people who dined at midday and others who dined in the
+evening, and others still who never dined at all; but she knew no one
+who dined at half-past three. Ransom's attachment to this idea therefore
+struck her as queer and infelicitous, and she supposed it betrayed the
+habits of Mississippi. But that couldn't make it any more acceptable to
+her, in spite of his looking so disappointed--with his dimly-glowing
+eyes--that he was heedless for the moment that the main fact connected
+with her return to Tenth Street was that she wished to go alone.
+
+"I must leave you, right away," she said. "Please don't ask me to stay;
+you wouldn't if you knew how little I want to!" Her manner was different
+now, and her face as well, and though she smiled more than ever she had
+never seemed to him more serious.
+
+"Alone, do you mean? Really I can't let you do that," Ransom replied,
+extremely shocked at this sacrifice being asked of him. "I have brought
+you this immense distance, I am responsible for you, and I must place
+you where I found you."
+
+"Mr. Ransom, I must, I will!" she exclaimed, in a tone he had not yet
+heard her use; so that, a good deal amazed, puzzled and pained, he saw
+that he should make a mistake if he were to insist. He had known that
+their expedition must end in a separation which could not be sweet, but
+he had counted on making some of the terms of it himself. When he
+expressed the hope that she would at least allow him to put her into a
+car, she replied that she wished no car; she wanted to walk. This image
+of her "streaking off" by herself, as he figured it, did not mend the
+matter; but in the presence of her sudden nervous impatience he felt
+that here was a feminine mystery which must be allowed to take its
+course.
+
+"It costs me more than you probably suspect, but I submit. Heaven guard
+you and bless you, Miss Tarrant!"
+
+She turned her face away from him as if she were straining at a leash;
+then she rejoined, in the most unexpected manner: "I hope very much you
+_will_ get printed."
+
+"Get my articles published?" He stared, and broke out: "Oh, you
+delightful being!"
+
+"Good-bye," she repeated; and now she gave him her hand. As he held it a
+moment, and asked her if she were really leaving the city so soon that
+she mightn't see him again, she answered: "If I stay it will be at a
+place to which you mustn't come. They wouldn't let you see me."
+
+He had not intended to put that question to her; he had set himself a
+limit. But the limit had suddenly moved on. "Do you mean at that house
+where I heard you speak?"
+
+"I may go there for a few days."
+
+"If it's forbidden to me to go and see you there, why did you send me a
+card?"
+
+"Because I wanted to convert you then."
+
+"And now you give me up?"
+
+"No, no; I want you to remain as you are!"
+
+She looked strange, with her more mechanical smile, as she said this,
+and he didn't know what idea was in her head. She had already left him,
+but he called after her, "If you do stay, I will come!" She neither
+turned nor made an answer, and all that was left to him was to watch her
+till she passed out of sight. Her back, with its charming young form,
+seemed to repeat that last puzzle, which was almost a challenge.
+
+For this, however, Verena Tarrant had not meant it. She wanted, in spite
+of the greater delay and the way Olive would wonder, to walk home,
+because it gave her time to think, and think again, how glad she was
+(really, positively, _now_) that Mr. Ransom was on the wrong side. If he
+had been on the right----! She did not finish this proposition. She
+found Olive waiting for her in exactly the manner she had foreseen; she
+turned to her, as she came in, a face sufficiently terrible. Verena
+instantly explained herself, related exactly what she had been doing;
+then went on, without giving her friend time for question or comment:
+"And you--you paid your visit to Mrs. Burrage?"
+
+"Yes, I went through that."
+
+"And did she press the question of my coming there?"
+
+"Very much indeed."
+
+"And what did you say?"
+
+"I said very little, but she gave me such assurances----"
+
+"That you thought I ought to go?"
+
+Olive was silent a moment; then she said: "She declares they are devoted
+to the cause, and that New York will be at your feet."
+
+Verena took Miss Chancellor's shoulders in each of her hands, and gave
+her back, for an instant, her gaze, her silence. Then she broke out,
+with a kind of passion: "I don't care for her assurances--I don't care
+for New York! I won't go to them--I won't--do you understand?" Suddenly
+her voice changed, she passed her arms round her friend and buried her
+face in her neck. "Olive Chancellor, take me away, take me away!" she
+went on. In a moment Olive felt that she was sobbing and that the
+question was settled, the question she herself had debated in anguish a
+couple of hours before.
+
+
+
+
+BOOK THIRD
+
+
+
+
+XXXV
+
+
+The August night had gathered by the time Basil Ransom, having finished
+his supper, stepped out upon the piazza of the little hotel. It was a
+very little hotel and of a very slight and loose construction; the tread
+of a tall Mississippian made the staircase groan and the windows rattle
+in their frames. He was very hungry when he arrived, having not had a
+moment, in Boston, on his way through, to eat even the frugal morsel
+with which he was accustomed to sustain nature between a breakfast that
+consisted of a cup of coffee and a dinner that consisted of a cup of
+tea. He had had his cup of tea now, and very bad it was, brought him by
+a pale, round-backed young lady, with auburn ringlets, a fancy belt, and
+an expression of limited tolerance for a gentleman who could not choose
+quickly between fried fish, fried steak, and baked beans. The train for
+Marmion left Boston at four o'clock in the afternoon, and rambled
+fitfully toward the southern cape, while the shadows grew long in the
+stony pastures and the slanting light gilded the straggling, shabby
+woods, and painted the ponds and marshes with yellow gleams. The
+ripeness of summer lay upon the land, and yet there was nothing in the
+country Basil Ransom traversed that seemed susceptible of maturity;
+nothing but the apples in the little tough, dense orchards, which gave a
+suggestion of sour fruition here and there, and the tall, bright
+goldenrod at the bottom of the bare stone dykes. There were no fields of
+yellow grain; only here and there a crop of brown hay. But there was a
+kind of soft scrubbiness in the landscape, and a sweetness begotten of
+low horizons, of mild air, with a possibility of summer haze, of
+unregarded inlets where on August mornings the water must be brightly
+blue. Ransom had heard that the Cape was the Italy, so to speak, of
+Massachusetts; it had been described to him as the drowsy Cape, the
+languid Cape, the Cape not of storms, but of eternal peace. He knew that
+the Bostonians had been drawn thither, for the hot weeks, by its
+sedative influence, by the conviction that its toneless air would
+minister to perfect rest. In a career in which there was so much nervous
+excitement as in theirs they had no wish to be wound up when they went
+out of town; they were sufficiently wound up at all times by the sense
+of all their sex had been through. They wanted to live idly, to unbend
+and lie in hammocks, and also to keep out of the crowd, the rush of the
+watering-place. Ransom could see there was no crowd at Marmion, as soon
+as he got there, though indeed there was a rush, which directed itself
+to the only vehicle in waiting outside of the small, lonely, hut-like
+station, so distant from the village that, as far as one looked along
+the sandy, sketchy road which was supposed to lead to it, one saw only
+an empty land on either side. Six or eight men in "dusters," carrying
+parcels and handbags, projected themselves upon the solitary, rickety
+carry-all, so that Ransom could read his own fate, while the ruminating
+conductor of the vehicle, a lean, shambling citizen, with a long neck
+and a tuft on his chin, guessed that if he wanted to get to the hotel
+before dusk he would have to strike out. His valise was attached in a
+precarious manner to the rear of the carry-all. "Well, I'll chance it,"
+the driver remarked sadly, when Ransom protested against its insecure
+position. He recognised the southern quality of that picturesque
+fatalism--judged that Miss Chancellor and Verena Tarrant must be pretty
+thoroughly relaxed if they had given themselves up to the genius of the
+place. This was what he hoped for and counted on, as he took his way,
+the sole pedestrian in the group that had quitted the train, in the wake
+of the overladen carry-all. It helped him to enjoy the first country
+walk he had had for many months, for more than months, for years, that
+the reflexion was forced upon him as he went (the mild, vague scenery,
+just beginning to be dim with twilight, suggested it at every step) that
+the two young women who constituted, at Marmion, his whole prefigurement
+of a social circle, must, in such a locality as that, be taking a
+regular holiday. The sense of all the wrongs they had still to redress
+must be lighter there than it was in Boston; the ardent young man had,
+for the hour, an ingenuous hope that they had left their opinions in the
+city. He liked the very smell of the soil as he wandered along; cool,
+soft whiffs of evening met him at bends of the road which disclosed very
+little more--unless it might be a band of straight-stemmed woodland,
+keeping, a little, the red glow from the west, or (as he went further)
+an old house, shingled all over, grey and slightly collapsing, which
+looked down at him from a steep bank, at the top of wooden steps. He was
+already refreshed; he had tasted the breath of nature, measured his long
+grind in New York, without a vacation, with the repetition of the daily
+movement up and down the long, straight, maddening city, like a bucket
+in a well or a shuttle in a loom.
+
+He lit his cigar in the office of the hotel--a small room on the right
+of the door, where a "register," meagrely inscribed, led a terribly
+public life on the little bare desk, and got its pages dogs'-eared
+before they were covered. Local worthies, of a vague identity, used to
+lounge there, as Ransom perceived the next day, by the hour. They tipped
+back their chairs against the wall, seldom spoke, and might have been
+supposed, with their converging vision, to be watching something out of
+the window, if there had been anything at Marmion to watch. Sometimes
+one of them got up and went to the desk, on which he leaned his elbows,
+hunching a pair of sloping shoulders to an uncollared neck. For the
+fiftieth time he perused the fly-blown page of the recording volume,
+where the names followed each other with such jumps of date. The others
+watched him while he did so--or contemplated in silence some "guest" of
+the hostelry, when such a personage entered the place with an air of
+appealing from the general irresponsibility of the establishment and
+found no one but the village-philosophers to address himself to. It was
+an establishment conducted by invisible, elusive agencies; they had a
+kind of stronghold in the dining-room, which was kept locked at all but
+sacramental hours. There was a tradition that a "boy" exercised some
+tutelary function as regards the crumpled register; but when he was
+inquired about, it was usually elicited from the impartial circle in the
+office either that he was somewhere round or that he had gone a-fishing.
+Except the haughty waitress who has just been mentioned as giving Ransom
+his supper, and who only emerged at meal-times from her mystic
+seclusion, this impalpable youth was the single person on the premises
+who represented domestic service. Anxious lady-boarders, wrapped in
+shawls, were seen waiting for him, as if he had been the doctor, on
+horse-hair rocking-chairs, in the little public parlour; others peered
+vaguely out of back doors and windows, thinking that if he were
+somewhere round they might see him. Sometimes people went to the door of
+the dining-room and tried it, shaking it a little, timidly, to see if it
+would yield; then, finding it fast, came away, looking, if they had been
+observed, shy and snubbed, at their fellows. Some of them went so far as
+to say that they didn't think it was a very good hotel.
+
+Ransom, however, didn't much care whether it were good or not; he hadn't
+come to Marmion for the love of the hotel. Now that he had got there,
+however, he didn't know exactly what to do; his course seemed rather
+less easy than it had done when, suddenly, the night before, tired, sick
+of the city-air, and hungry for a holiday, he decided to take the next
+morning's train to Boston, and there take another to the shores of
+Buzzard's Bay. The hotel itself offered few resources; the inmates were
+not numerous; they moved about a little outside, on the small piazza and
+in the rough yard which interposed between the house and the road, and
+then they dropped off into the unmitigated dusk. This element, touched
+only in two or three places by a far-away dim glimmer, presented itself
+to Ransom as his sole entertainment. Though it was pervaded by that
+curious, pure, earthy smell which in New England, in summer, hangs in
+the nocturnal air, Ransom bethought himself that the place might be a
+little dull for persons who had not come to it, as he had, to take
+possession of Verena Tarrant. The unfriendly inn, which suggested
+dreadfully to Ransom (he despised the practice) an early bed-time,
+seemed to have no relation to anything, not even to itself; but a
+fellow-tenant of whom he made an inquiry told him the village was
+sprinkled round. Basil presently walked along the road in search of it,
+under the stars, smoking one of the good cigars which constituted his
+only tribute to luxury. He reflected that it would hardly do to begin
+his attack that night; he ought to give the Bostonians a certain amount
+of notice of his appearance on the scene. He thought it very possible,
+indeed, that they might be addicted to the vile habit of "retiring" with
+the cocks and hens. He was sure that was one of the things Olive
+Chancellor would do so long as he should stay--on purpose to spite him;
+she would make Verena Tarrant go to bed at unnatural hours, just to
+deprive him of his evenings. He walked some distance without
+encountering a creature or discerning an habitation; but he enjoyed the
+splendid starlight, the stillness, the shrill melancholy of the
+crickets, which seemed to make all the vague forms of the country
+pulsate around him; the whole impression was a bath of freshness after
+the long strain of the preceding two years and his recent sweltering
+weeks in New York. At the end of ten minutes (his stroll had been slow)
+a figure drew near him, at first indistinct, but presently defining
+itself as that of a woman. She was walking apparently without purpose,
+like himself, or without other purpose than that of looking at the
+stars, which she paused for an instant, throwing back her head, to
+contemplate, as he drew nearer to her. In a moment he was very close; he
+saw her look at him, through the clear gloom, as they passed each other.
+She was small and slim; he made out her head and face, saw that her hair
+was cropped; had an impression of having seen her before. He noticed
+that as she went by she turned as well as himself, and that there was a
+sort of recognition in her movement. Then he felt sure that he had seen
+her elsewhere, and before she had added to the distance that separated
+them he stopped short, looking after her. She noticed his halt, paused
+equally, and for a moment they stood there face to face, at a certain
+interval, in the darkness.
+
+"I beg your pardon--is it Doctor Prance?" he found himself demanding.
+
+For a minute there was no answer; then came the voice of the little
+lady:
+
+"Yes, sir; I am Doctor Prance. Any one sick at the hotel?"
+
+"I hope not; I don't know," Ransom said, laughing.
+
+Then he took a few steps, mentioned his name, recalled his having met
+her at Miss Birdseye's, ever so long before (nearly two years), and
+expressed the hope that she had not forgotten that.
+
+She thought it over a little--she was evidently addicted neither to
+empty phrases nor to unconsidered assertions. "I presume you mean that
+night Miss Tarrant launched out so."
+
+"That very night. We had a very interesting conversation."
+
+"Well, I remember I lost a good deal," said Doctor Prance.
+
+"Well, I don't know; I have an idea you made it up in other ways,"
+Ransom returned, laughing still.
+
+He saw her bright little eyes engage with his own. Staying, apparently,
+in the village, she had come out, bare-headed, for an evening walk, and
+if it had been possible to imagine Doctor Prance bored and in want of
+recreation, the way she lingered there as if she were quite willing to
+have another talk might have suggested to Basil Ransom this condition.
+"Why, don't you consider her career very remarkable?"
+
+"Oh yes; everything is remarkable nowadays; we live in an age of
+wonders!" the young man replied, much amused to find himself discussing
+the object of his adoration in this casual way, in the dark, on a lonely
+country-road, with a short-haired female physician. It was astonishing
+how quickly Doctor Prance and he had made friends again. "I suppose, by
+the way, you know Miss Tarrant and Miss Chancellor are staying down
+here?" he went on.
+
+"Well, yes, I suppose I know it. I am visiting Miss Chancellor," the dry
+little woman added.
+
+"Oh indeed? I am delighted to hear it!" Ransom exclaimed, feeling that
+he might have a friend in the camp. "Then you can inform me where those
+ladies have their house."
+
+"Yes, I guess I can tell it in the dark. I will show you round now, if
+you like."
+
+"I shall be glad to see it, though I am not sure I shall go in
+immediately. I must reconnoitre a little first. That makes me so very
+happy to have met you. I think it's very wonderful--your knowing me."
+
+Doctor Prance did not repudiate this compliment, but she presently
+observed: "You didn't pass out of my mind entirely, because I have heard
+about you since, from Miss Birdseye."
+
+"Ah yes, I saw her in the spring. I hope she is in health and
+happiness."
+
+"She is always in happiness, but she can't be said to be in health. She
+is very weak; she is failing."
+
+"I am very sorry for that."
+
+"She is also visiting Miss Chancellor," Doctor Prance observed, after a
+pause which was an illustration of an appearance she had of thinking
+that certain things didn't at all imply some others.
+
+"Why, my cousin has got all the distinguished women!" Basil Ransom
+exclaimed.
+
+"Is Miss Chancellor your cousin? There isn't much family resemblance.
+Miss Birdseye came down for the benefit of the country air, and I came
+down to see if I could help her to get some good from it. She wouldn't
+much, if she were left to herself. Miss Birdseye has a very fine
+character, but she hasn't much idea of hygiene." Doctor Prance was
+evidently more and more disposed to be chatty. Ransom appreciated this
+fact, and said he hoped she, too, was getting some good from the
+country-air--he was afraid she was very much confined to her profession,
+in Boston; to which she replied--"Well, I was just taking a little
+exercise along the road. I presume you don't realise what it is to be
+one of four ladies grouped together in a small frame-house."
+
+Ransom remembered how he had liked her before, and he felt that, as the
+phrase was, he was going to like her again. He wanted to express his
+good-will to her, and would greatly have enjoyed being at liberty to
+offer her a cigar. He didn't know what to offer her or what to do,
+unless he should invite her to sit with him on a fence. He did realise
+perfectly what the situation in the small frame-house must be, and
+entered with instant sympathy into the feelings which had led Doctor
+Prance to detach herself from the circle and wander forth under the
+constellations, all of which he was sure she knew. He asked her
+permission to accompany her on her walk, but she said she was not going
+much further in that direction; she was going to turn round. He turned
+round with her, and they went back together to the village, in which he
+at last began to discover a certain consistency, signs of habitation,
+houses disposed with a rough resemblance to a plan. The road wandered
+among them with a kind of accommodating sinuosity, and there were even
+cross-streets, and an oil-lamp on a corner, and here and there the small
+sign of a closed shop, with an indistinctly countrified lettering. There
+were lights now in the windows of some of the houses, and Doctor Prance
+mentioned to her companion several of the inhabitants of the little
+town, who appeared all to rejoice in the prefix of captain. They were
+retired shipmasters; there was quite a little nest of these worthies,
+two or three of whom might be seen lingering in their dim doorways, as
+if they were conscious of a want of encouragement to sit up, and yet
+remembered the nights in far-away waters when they would not have
+thought of turning in at all. Marmion called itself a town, but it was a
+good deal shrunken since the decline in the shipbuilding interest; it
+turned out a good many vessels every year, in the palmy days, before the
+war. There were shipyards still, where you could almost pick up the old
+shavings, the old nails and rivets, but they were grass-grown now, and
+the water lapped them without anything to interfere. There was a kind of
+arm of the sea put in; it went up some way, it wasn't the real sea, but
+very quiet, like a river; that was more attractive to some. Doctor
+Prance didn't say the place was picturesque, or quaint, or weird; but he
+could see that was what she meant when she said it was mouldering away.
+Even under the mantle of night he himself gathered the impression that
+it had had a larger life, seen better days. Doctor Prance made no remark
+designed to elicit from him an account of his motives in coming to
+Marmion; she asked him neither when he had arrived nor how long he
+intended to stay. His allusion to his cousinship with Miss Chancellor
+might have served to her mind as a reason; yet, on the other hand, it
+would have been open to her to wonder why, if he had come to see the
+young ladies from Charles Street, he was not in more of a hurry to
+present himself. It was plain Doctor Prance didn't go into that kind of
+analysis. If Ransom had complained to her of a sore throat she would
+have inquired with precision about his symptoms; but she was incapable
+of asking him any question with a social bearing. Sociably enough,
+however, they continued to wander through the principal street of the
+little town, darkened in places by immense old elms, which made a
+blackness overhead. There was a salt smell in the air, as if they were
+nearer the water; Doctor Prance said that Olive's house was at the other
+end.
+
+"I shall take it as a kindness if, for this evening, you don't mention
+that you have happened to meet me," Ransom remarked, after a little. He
+had changed his mind about giving notice.
+
+"Well, I wouldn't," his companion replied; as if she didn't need any
+caution in regard to making vain statements.
+
+"I want to keep my arrival a little surprise for to-morrow. It will be a
+great pleasure to me to see Miss Birdseye," he went on, rather
+hypocritically, as if that at bottom had been to his mind the main
+attraction of Marmion.
+
+Doctor Prance did not reveal her private comment, whatever it was, on
+this intimation; she only said, after some hesitation--"Well, I presume
+the old lady will take quite an interest in your being here."
+
+"I have no doubt she is capable even of that degree of philanthropy."
+
+"Well, she has charity for all, but she does--even she--prefer her own
+side. She regards you as quite an acquisition."
+
+Ransom could not but feel flattered at the idea that he had been a
+subject of conversation--as this implied--in the little circle at Miss
+Chancellor's; but he was at a loss, for the moment, to perceive what he
+had done up to this time to gratify the senior member of the group. "I
+hope she will find me an acquisition after I have been here a few days,"
+he said, laughing.
+
+"Well, she thinks you are one of the most important converts yet,"
+Doctor Prance replied, in a colourless way, as if she would not have
+pretended to explain why.
+
+"A convert--me? Do you mean of Miss Tarrant's?" It had come over him
+that Miss Birdseye, in fact, when he was parting with her after their
+meeting in Boston, had assented to his request for secrecy (which at
+first had struck her as somewhat unholy) on the ground that Verena would
+bring him into the fold. He wondered whether that young lady had been
+telling her old friend that she had succeeded with him. He thought this
+improbable; but it didn't matter, and he said, gaily, "Well, I can
+easily let her suppose so!"
+
+It was evident that it would be no easier for Doctor Prance to subscribe
+to a deception than it had been for her venerable patient; but she went
+so far as to reply, "Well, I hope you won't let her suppose you are
+where you were that time I conversed with you. I could see where you
+were then!"
+
+"It was in about the same place you were, wasn't it?"
+
+"Well," said Doctor Prance, with a small sigh, "I am afraid I have moved
+back, if anything!" Her sigh told him a good deal; it seemed a thin,
+self-controlled protest against the tone of Miss Chancellor's interior,
+of which it was her present fortune to form a part: and the way she
+hovered round, indistinct in the gloom, as if she were rather loath to
+resume her place there, completed his impression that the little
+doctress had a line of her own.
+
+"That, at least, must distress Miss Birdseye," he said reproachfully.
+
+"Not much, because I am not of importance. They think women the equals
+of men; but they are a great deal more pleased when a man joins than
+when a woman does."
+
+Ransom complimented Doctor Prance on the lucidity of her mind, and then
+he said: "Is Miss Birdseye really sick? Is her condition very
+precarious?"
+
+"Well, she is very old, and very--very gentle," Doctor Prance answered,
+hesitating a moment for her adjective. "Under those circumstances a
+person may flicker out."
+
+"We must trim the lamp," said Ransom; "I will take my turn, with
+pleasure, in watching the sacred flame."
+
+"It will be a pity if she doesn't live to hear Miss Tarrant's great
+effort," his companion went on.
+
+"Miss Tarrant's? What's that?"
+
+"Well, it's the principal interest, in there." And Doctor Prance now
+vaguely indicated, with a movement of her head, a small white house,
+much detached from its neighbours, which stood on their left, with its
+back to the water, at a little distance from the road. It exhibited more
+signs of animation than any of its fellows; several windows, notably
+those of the ground floor, were open to the warm evening, and a large
+shaft of light was projected upon the grassy wayside in front of it.
+Ransom, in his determination to be discreet, checked the advance of his
+companion, who added presently, with a short, suppressed laugh--"You can
+see it is, from that!" He listened, to ascertain what she meant, and
+after an instant a sound came to his ear--a sound he knew already well,
+which carried the accents of Verena Tarrant, in ample periods and
+cadences, out into the stillness of the August night.
+
+"Murder, what a lovely voice!" he exclaimed involuntarily.
+
+Doctor Prance's eye gleamed towards him a moment, and she observed,
+humorously (she was relaxing immensely), "Perhaps Miss Birdseye is
+right!" Then, as he made no rejoinder, only listening to the vocal
+inflexions that floated out of the house, she went on--"She's practising
+her speech."
+
+"Her speech? Is she going to deliver one here?"
+
+"No, as soon as they go back to town--at the Music Hall."
+
+Ransom's attention was now transferred to his companion. "Is that why
+you call it her great effort?"
+
+"Well, so they think it, I believe. She practises that way every night;
+she reads portions of it aloud to Miss Chancellor and Miss Birdseye."
+
+"And that's the time you choose for your walk?" Ransom said, smiling.
+
+"Well, it's the time my old lady has least need of me; she's too
+absorbed."
+
+Doctor Prance dealt in facts; Ransom had already discovered that; and
+some of her facts were very interesting.
+
+"The Music Hall--isn't that your great building?" he asked.
+
+"Well, it's the biggest we've got; it's pretty big, but it isn't so big
+as Miss Chancellor's ideas," added Doctor Prance. "She has taken it to
+bring out Miss Tarrant before the general public--she has never appeared
+that way in Boston--on a great scale. She expects her to make a big
+sensation. It will be a great night, and they are preparing for it. They
+consider it her real beginning."
+
+"And this is the preparation?" Basil Ransom said.
+
+"Yes; as I say, it's their principal interest."
+
+Ransom listened, and while he listened he meditated. He had thought it
+possible Verena's principles might have been shaken by the profession of
+faith to which he treated her in New York; but this hardly looked like
+it. For some moments Doctor Prance and he stood together in silence.
+
+"You don't hear the words," the doctor remarked, with a smile which, in
+the dark, looked Mephistophelean.
+
+"Oh, I know the words!" the young man exclaimed, with rather a groan, as
+he offered her his hand for good-night.
+
+
+
+
+XXXVI
+
+
+A certain prudence had determined him to put off his visit till the
+morning; he thought it more probable that at that time he should be able
+to see Verena alone, whereas in the evening the two young women would be
+sure to be sitting together. When the morrow dawned, however, Basil
+Ransom felt none of the trepidation of the procrastinator; he knew
+nothing of the reception that awaited him, but he took his way to the
+cottage designated to him over-night by Doctor Prance, with the step of
+a man much more conscious of his own purpose than of possible obstacles.
+He made the reflexion, as he went, that to see a place for the first
+time at night is like reading a foreign author in a translation. At the
+present hour--it was getting towards eleven o'clock--he felt that he was
+dealing with the original. The little straggling, loosely-clustered town
+lay along the edge of a blue inlet, on the other side of which was a
+low, wooded shore, with a gleam of white sand where it touched the
+water. The narrow bay carried the vision outward to a picture that
+seemed at once bright and dim--a shining, slumbering summer sea, and a
+far-off, circling line of coast, which, under the August sun, was hazy
+and delicate. Ransom regarded the place as a town because Doctor Prance
+had called it one; but it was a town where you smelt the breath of the
+hay in the streets and you might gather blackberries in the principal
+square. The houses looked at each other across the grass--low, rusty,
+crooked, distended houses, with dry, cracked faces and the dim eyes of
+small-paned, stiffly-sliding windows. Their little door-yards bristled
+with rank, old-fashioned flowers, mostly yellow; and on the quarter that
+stood back from the sea the fields sloped upward, and the woods in which
+they presently lost themselves looked down over the roofs. Bolts and
+bars were not a part of the domestic machinery of Marmion, and the
+responsive menial, receiving the visitor on the threshold, was a
+creature rather desired than definitely possessed; so that Basil Ransom
+found Miss Chancellor's house-door gaping wide (as he had seen it the
+night before), and destitute even of a knocker or a bell-handle. From
+where he stood in the porch he could see the whole of the little
+sitting-room on the left of the hall--see that it stretched straight
+through to the back windows; that it was garnished with photographs of
+foreign works of art, pinned upon the walls, and enriched with a piano
+and other little extemporised embellishments, such as ingenious women
+lavish upon the houses they hire for a few weeks. Verena told him
+afterwards that Olive had taken her cottage furnished, but that the
+paucity of chairs and tables and bedsteads was such that their little
+party used almost to sit down, to lie down, in turn. On the other hand
+they had all George Eliot's writings, and two photographs of the Sistine
+Madonna. Ransom rapped with his stick on the lintel of the door, but no
+one came to receive him; so he made his way into the parlour, where he
+observed that his cousin Olive had as many German books as ever lying
+about. He dipped into this literature, momentarily, according to his
+wont, and then remembered that this was not what he had come for and
+that as he waited at the door he had seen, through another door, opening
+at the opposite end of the hall, signs of a small verandah attached to
+the other face of the house. Thinking the ladies might be assembled
+there in the shade, he pushed aside the muslin curtain of the back
+window, and saw that the advantages of Miss Chancellor's summer
+residence were in this quarter. There was a verandah, in fact, to which
+a wide, horizontal trellis, covered with an ancient vine, formed a kind
+of extension. Beyond the trellis was a small, lonely garden; beyond the
+garden was a large, vague, woody space, where a few piles of old timber
+were disposed, and which he afterwards learned to be a relic of the
+shipbuilding era described to him by Doctor Prance; and still beyond
+this again was the charming lake-like estuary he had already admired.
+His eyes did not rest upon the distance; they were attracted by a figure
+seated under the trellis, where the chequers of sun, in the interstices
+of the vine leaves, fell upon a bright-coloured rug spread out on the
+ground. The floor of the roughly-constructed verandah was so low that
+there was virtually no difference in the level. It took Ransom only a
+moment to recognise Miss Birdseye, though her back was turned to the
+house. She was alone; she sat there motionless (she had a newspaper in
+her lap, but her attitude was not that of a reader), looking at the
+shimmering bay. She might be asleep; that was why Ransom moderated the
+process of his long legs as he came round through the house to join her.
+This precaution represented his only scruple. He stepped across the
+verandah and stood close to her, but she did not appear to notice him.
+Visibly, she was dozing, or presumably, rather, for her head was
+enveloped in an old faded straw hat, which concealed the upper part of
+her face. There were two or three other chairs near her, and a table on
+which were half-a-dozen books and periodicals, together with a glass
+containing a colourless liquid, on the top of which a spoon was laid.
+Ransom desired only to respect her repose, so he sat down in one of the
+chairs and waited till she should become aware of his presence. He
+thought Miss Chancellor's back-garden a delightful spot, and his jaded
+senses tasted the breeze--the idle, wandering summer wind--that stirred
+the vine leaves over his head. The hazy shores on the other side of the
+water, which had tints more delicate than the street vistas of New York
+(they seemed powdered with silver, a sort of midsummer light), suggested
+to him a land of dreams, a country in a picture. Basil Ransom had seen
+very few pictures, there were none in Mississippi; but he had a vision
+at times of something that would be more refined than the real world,
+and the situation in which he now found himself pleased him almost as
+much as if it had been a striking work of art. He was unable to see, as
+I have said, whether Miss Birdseye were taking in the prospect through
+open or only, imagination aiding (she had plenty of that), through
+closed, tired, dazzled eyes. She appeared to him, as the minutes elapsed
+and he sat beside her, the incarnation of well-earned rest, of patient,
+submissive superannuation. At the end of her long day's work she might
+have been placed there to enjoy this dim prevision of the peaceful
+river, the gleaming shores, of the paradise her unselfish life had
+certainly qualified her to enter, and which, apparently, would so soon
+be opened to her. After a while she said, placidly, without turning:
+
+"I suppose it's about time I should take my remedy again. It does seem
+as if she had found the right thing; don't you think so?"
+
+"Do you mean the contents of that tumbler? I shall be delighted to give
+it to you, and you must tell me how much you take." And Basil Ransom,
+getting up, possessed himself of the glass on the table.
+
+At the sound of his voice Miss Birdseye pushed back her straw hat by a
+movement that was familiar to her, and twisting about her muffled figure
+a little (even in August she felt the cold, and had to be much covered
+up to sit out), directed at him a speculative, unastonished gaze.
+
+"One spoonful--two?" Ransom asked, stirring the dose and smiling.
+
+"Well, I guess I'll take two this time."
+
+"Certainly, Doctor Prance couldn't help finding the right thing," Ransom
+said, as he administered the medicine; while the movement with which she
+extended her face to take it made her seem doubly childlike.
+
+He put down the glass, and she relapsed into her position; she seemed to
+be considering. "It's homeopathic," she remarked, in a moment.
+
+"Oh, I have no doubt of that; I presume you wouldn't take anything
+else."
+
+"Well, it's generally admitted now to be the true system."
+
+Ransom moved closer to her, placed himself where she could see him
+better. "It's a great thing to have the true system," he said, bending
+towards her in a friendly way; "I'm sure you have it in everything." He
+was not often hypocritical; but when he was he went all lengths.
+
+"Well, I don't know that any one has a right to say that. I thought you
+were Verena," she added in a moment, taking him in again with her mild,
+deliberate vision.
+
+"I have been waiting for you to recognise me; of course you didn't know
+I was here--I only arrived last night."
+
+"Well, I'm glad you have come to see Olive now."
+
+"You remember that I wouldn't do that when I met you last?"
+
+"You asked me not to mention to her that I had met you; that's what I
+principally recall."
+
+"And don't you remember what I told you I wanted to do? I wanted to go
+out to Cambridge and see Miss Tarrant. Thanks to the information that
+you were so good as to give me, I was able to do so."
+
+"Yes, she gave me quite a little description of your visit," said Miss
+Birdseye, with a smile and a vague sound in her throat--a sort of
+pensive, private reference to the idea of laughter--of which Ransom
+never learned the exact significance, though he retained for a long time
+afterwards a kindly memory of the old lady's manner at the moment.
+
+"I don't know how much she enjoyed it, but it was an immense pleasure to
+me; so great a one that, as you see, I have come to call upon her
+again."
+
+"Then, I presume, she _has_ shaken you?"
+
+"She has shaken me tremendously!" said Ransom, laughing.
+
+"Well, you'll be a great addition," Miss Birdseye returned. "And this
+time your visit is also for Miss Chancellor?"
+
+"That depends on whether she will receive me."
+
+"Well, if she knows you are shaken, that will go a great way," said Miss
+Birdseye, a little musingly, as if even to her unsophisticated mind it
+had been manifested that one's relations with Miss Chancellor might be
+ticklish. "But she can't receive you now--can she?--because she's out.
+She has gone to the post office for the Boston letters, and they get so
+many every day that she had to take Verena with her to help her carry
+them home. One of them wanted to stay with me, because Doctor Prance has
+gone fishing, but I said I presumed I could be left alone for about
+seven minutes. I know how they love to be together; it seems as if one
+_couldn't_ go out without the other. That's what they came down here
+for, because it's quiet, and it didn't look as if there was any one else
+they would be much drawn to. So it would be a pity for me to come down
+after them just to spoil it!"
+
+"I am afraid I shall spoil it, Miss Birdseye."
+
+"Oh, well, a gentleman," murmured the ancient woman.
+
+"Yes, what can you expect of a gentleman? I certainly shall spoil it if
+I can."
+
+"You had better go fishing with Doctor Prance," said Miss Birdseye, with
+a serenity which showed that she was far from measuring the sinister
+quality of the announcement he had just made.
+
+"I shan't object to that at all. The days here must be very long--very
+full of hours. Have you got the doctor with you?" Ransom inquired, as if
+he knew nothing at all about her.
+
+"Yes, Miss Chancellor invited us both; she is very thoughtful. She is
+not merely a theoretic philanthropist--she goes into details," said Miss
+Birdseye, presenting her large person, in her chair, as if she herself
+were only an item. "It seems as if we were not so much wanted in Boston,
+just in August."
+
+"And here you sit and enjoy the breeze, and admire the view," the young
+man remarked, wondering when the two messengers, whose seven minutes
+must long since have expired, would return from the post office.
+
+"Yes, I enjoy everything in this little old-world place; I didn't
+suppose I should be satisfied to be so passive. It's a great contrast to
+my former exertions. But somehow it doesn't seem as if there were any
+trouble, or any wrong round here; and if there should be, there are Miss
+Chancellor and Miss Tarrant to look after it. They seem to think I had
+better fold my hands. Besides, when helpful, generous minds begin to
+flock in from _your_ part of the country," Miss Birdseye continued,
+looking at him from under the distorted and discoloured canopy of her
+hat with a benignity which completed the idea in any cheerful sense he
+chose.
+
+He felt by this time that he was committed to rather a dishonest part;
+he was pledged not to give a shock to her optimism. This might cost him,
+in the coming days, a good deal of dissimulation, but he was now saved
+from any further expenditure of ingenuity by certain warning sounds
+which admonished him that he must keep his wits about him for a purpose
+more urgent. There were voices in the hall of the house, voices he knew,
+which came nearer, quickly; so that before he had time to rise one of
+the speakers had come out with the exclamation--"Dear Miss Birdseye,
+here are seven letters for you!" The words fell to the ground, indeed,
+before they were fairly spoken, and when Ransom got up, turning, he saw
+Olive Chancellor standing there, with the parcel from the post office in
+her hand. She stared at him in sudden horror; for the moment her
+self-possession completely deserted her. There was so little of any
+greeting in her face save the greeting of dismay, that he felt there was
+nothing for him to say to her, nothing that could mitigate the odious
+fact of his being there. He could only let her take it in, let her
+divine that, this time, he was not to be got rid of. In an instant--to
+ease off the situation--he held out his hand for Miss Birdseye's
+letters, and it was a proof of Olive's having turned rather faint and
+weak that she gave them up to him. He delivered the packet to the old
+lady, and now Verena had appeared in the doorway of the house. As soon
+as she saw him, she blushed crimson; but she did not, like Olive, stand
+voiceless.
+
+"Why, Mr. Ransom," she cried out, "where in the world were _you_ washed
+ashore?" Miss Birdseye, meanwhile, taking her letters, had no appearance
+of observing that the encounter between Olive and her visitor was a kind
+of concussion.
+
+It was Verena who eased off the situation; her gay challenge rose to her
+lips as promptly as if she had had no cause for embarrassment. She was
+not confused even when she blushed, and her alertness may perhaps be
+explained by the habit of public speaking. Ransom smiled at her while
+she came forward, but he spoke first to Olive, who had already turned
+her eyes away from him and gazed at the blue sea-view as if she were
+wondering what was going to happen to her at last.
+
+"Of course you are very much surprised to see me; but I hope to be able
+to induce you to regard me not absolutely in the light of an intruder. I
+found your door open, and I walked in, and Miss Birdseye seemed to think
+I might stay. Miss Birdseye, I put myself under your protection; I
+invoke you; I appeal to you," the young man went on. "Adopt me, answer
+for me, cover me with the mantle of your charity!"
+
+Miss Birdseye looked up from her letters, as if at first she had only
+faintly heard his appeal. She turned her eyes from Olive to Verena; then
+she said, "Doesn't it seem as if we had room for all? When I remember
+what I have seen in the South, Mr. Ransom's being here strikes me as a
+great triumph."
+
+Olive evidently failed to understand, and Verena broke in with
+eagerness, "It was by my letter, of course, that you knew we were here.
+The one I wrote just before we came, Olive," she went on. "Don't you
+remember I showed it to you?"
+
+At the mention of this act of submission on her friend's part Olive
+started, flashing her a strange look; then she said to Basil that she
+didn't see why he should explain so much about his coming; every one had
+a right to come. It was a very charming place; it ought to do any one
+good. "But it will have one defect for you," she added; "three-quarters
+of the summer residents are women!"
+
+This attempted pleasantry on Miss Chancellor's part, so unexpected, so
+incongruous, uttered with white lips and cold eyes, struck Ransom to
+that degree by its oddity that he could not resist exchanging a glance
+of wonder with Verena, who, if she had had the opportunity, could
+probably have explained to him the phenomenon. Olive had recovered
+herself, reminded herself that she was safe, that her companion in New
+York had repudiated, denounced her pursuer; and, as a proof to her own
+sense of her security, as well as a touching mark to Verena that now,
+after what had passed, she had no fear, she felt that a certain light
+mockery would be effective.
+
+"Ah, Miss Olive, don't pretend to think I love your sex so little, when
+you know that what you really object to in me is that I love it too
+much!" Ransom was not brazen, he was not impudent, he was really a very
+modest man; but he was aware that whatever he said or did he was
+condemned to seem impudent now, and he argued within himself that if he
+was to have the dishonour of being thought brazen he might as well have
+the comfort. He didn't care a straw, in truth, how he was judged or how
+he might offend; he had a purpose which swallowed up such inanities as
+that, and he was so full of it that it kept him firm, balanced him, gave
+him an assurance that might easily have been confounded with a cold
+detachment. "This place will do me good," he pursued; "I haven't had a
+holiday for more than two years, I couldn't have gone another day; I was
+finished. I would have written to you beforehand that I was coming, but
+I only started at a few hours' notice. It occurred to me that this would
+be just what I wanted; I remembered what Miss Tarrant had said in her
+note, that it was a place where people could lie on the ground and wear
+their old clothes. I delight to lie on the ground, and all my clothes
+are old. I hope to be able to stay three or four weeks."
+
+Olive listened till he had done speaking; she stood a single moment
+longer, and then, without a word, a glance, she rushed into the house.
+Ransom saw that Miss Birdseye was immersed in her letters; so he went
+straight to Verena and stood before her, looking far into her eyes. He
+was not smiling now, as he had been in speaking to Olive. "Will you come
+somewhere apart, where I can speak to you alone?"
+
+"Why have you done this? It was not right in you to come!" Verena looked
+still as if she were blushing, but Ransom perceived he must allow for
+her having been delicately scorched by the sun.
+
+"I have come because it is necessary--because I have something very
+important to say to you. A great number of things."
+
+"The same things you said in New York? I don't want to hear them
+again--they were horrible!"
+
+"No, not the same--different ones. I want you to come out with me, away
+from here."
+
+"You always want me to come out! We can't go out here; we _are_ out, as
+much as we can be!" Verena laughed. She tried to turn it off--feeling
+that something really impended.
+
+"Come down into the garden, and out beyond there--to the water, where we
+can speak. It's what I have come for; it was not for what I told Miss
+Olive!"
+
+He had lowered his voice, as if Miss Olive might still hear them, and
+there was something strangely grave--altogether solemn, indeed--in its
+tone. Verena looked around her, at the splendid summer day, at the
+much-swathed, formless figure of Miss Birdseye, holding her letter
+inside her hat. "Mr. Ransom!" she articulated then, simply; and as her
+eyes met his again they showed him a couple of tears.
+
+"It's not to make you suffer, I honestly believe. I don't want to say
+anything that will hurt you. How can I possibly hurt you, when I feel to
+you as I do?" he went on, with suppressed force.
+
+She said no more, but all her face entreated him to let her off, to
+spare her; and as this look deepened, a quick sense of elation and
+success began to throb in his heart, for it told him exactly what he
+wanted to know. It told him that she was afraid of him, that she had
+ceased to trust herself, that the way he had read her nature was the
+right way (she was tremendously open to attack, she was meant for love,
+she was meant for him), and that his arriving at the point at which he
+wished to arrive was only a question of time. This happy consciousness
+made him extraordinarily tender to her; he couldn't put enough
+reassurance into his smile, his low murmur, as he said: "Only give me
+ten minutes; don't receive me by turning me away. It's my holiday--my
+poor little holiday; don't spoil it."
+
+Three minutes later Miss Birdseye, looking up from her letter, saw them
+move together through the bristling garden and traverse a gap in the old
+fence which enclosed the further side of it. They passed into the
+ancient shipyard which lay beyond, and which was now a mere vague,
+grass-grown approach to the waterside, bestrewn with a few remnants of
+supererogatory timber. She saw them stroll forward to the edge of the
+bay and stand there, taking the soft breeze in their faces. She watched
+them a little, and it warmed her heart to see the stiff-necked young
+Southerner led captive by a daughter of New England trained in the right
+school, who would impose her opinions in their integrity. Considering
+how prejudiced he must have been he was certainly behaving very well;
+even at that distance Miss Birdseye dimly made out that there was
+something positively humble in the way he invited Verena Tarrant to seat
+herself on a low pile of weather-blackened planks, which constituted the
+principal furniture of the place, and something, perhaps, just a trifle
+too expressive of righteous triumph in the manner in which the girl put
+the suggestion by and stood where she liked, a little proudly, turning a
+good deal away from him. Miss Birdseye could see as much as this, but
+she couldn't hear, so that she didn't know what it was that made Verena
+turn suddenly back to him, at something he said. If she had known,
+perhaps his observation would have struck her as less singular--under
+the circumstances in which these two young persons met--than it may
+appear to the reader.
+
+"They have accepted one of my articles; I think it's the best." These
+were the first words that passed Basil Ransom's lips after the pair had
+withdrawn as far as it was possible to withdraw (in that direction) from
+the house.
+
+"Oh, is it printed--when does it appear?" Verena asked that question
+instantly; it sprang from her lips in a manner that completely belied
+the air of keeping herself at a distance from him which she had worn a
+few moments before.
+
+He didn't tell her again this time, as he had told her when, on the
+occasion of their walk together in New York, she expressed an
+inconsequent hope that his fortune as a rejected contributor would take
+a turn--he didn't remark to her once more that she was a delightful
+being; he only went on (as if her revulsion were a matter of course) to
+explain everything he could, so that she might as soon as possible know
+him better and see how completely she could trust him. "That was, at
+bottom, the reason I came here. The essay in question is the most
+important thing I have done in the way of a literary attempt, and I
+determined to give up the game or to persist, according as I should be
+able to bring it to the light or not. The other day I got a letter from
+the editor of the _Rational Review_, telling me that he should be very
+happy to print it, that he thought it very remarkable, and that he
+should be glad to hear from me again. He shall hear from me again--he
+needn't be afraid! It contained a good many of the opinions I have
+expressed to you, and a good many more besides. I really believe it will
+attract some attention. At any rate, the simple fact that it is to be
+published makes an era in my life. This will seem pitiful to you, no
+doubt, who publish yourself, have been before the world these several
+years, and are flushed with every kind of triumph; but to me it's simply
+a tremendous affair. It makes me believe I may do something; it has
+changed the whole way I look at my future. I have been building castles
+in the air, and I have put you in the biggest and fairest of them.
+That's a great change, and, as I say, it's really why I came on."
+
+Verena lost not a word of this gentle, conciliatory, explicit statement;
+it was full of surprises for her, and as soon as Ransom had stopped
+speaking she inquired: "Why, didn't you feel satisfied about your future
+before?"
+
+Her tone made him feel how little she had suspected he could have the
+weakness of a discouragement, how little of a question it must have
+seemed to her that he would one day triumph on his own erratic line. It
+was the sweetest tribute he had yet received to the idea that he might
+have ability; the letter of the editor of the _Rational Review_ was
+nothing to it. "No, I felt very blue; it didn't seem to me at all clear
+that there was a place for me in the world."
+
+"Gracious!" said Verena Tarrant.
+
+A quarter of an hour later Miss Birdseye, who had returned to her
+letters (she had a correspondent at Framingham who usually wrote fifteen
+pages), became aware that Verena, who was now alone, was re-entering the
+house. She stopped her on her way, and said she hoped she hadn't pushed
+Mr. Ransom overboard.
+
+"Oh no; he has gone off--round the other way."
+
+"Well, I hope he is going to speak for us soon."
+
+Verena hesitated a moment. "He speaks with the pen. He has written a
+very fine article--for the _Rational Review_."
+
+Miss Birdseye gazed at her young friend complacently; the sheets of her
+interminable letter fluttered in the breeze. "Well, it's delightful to
+see the way it goes on, isn't it?"
+
+Verena scarcely knew what to say; then, remembering that Doctor Prance
+had told her that they might lose their dear old companion any day, and
+confronting it with something Basil Ransom had just said--that the
+_Rational Review_ was a quarterly and the editor had notified him that
+his article would appear only in the number after the next--she
+reflected that perhaps Miss Birdseye wouldn't be there, so many months
+later, to see how it was her supposed consort had spoken. She might,
+therefore, be left to believe what she liked to believe, without fear of
+a day of reckoning. Verena committed herself to nothing more
+confirmatory than a kiss, however, which the old lady's displaced
+head-gear enabled her to imprint upon her forehead and which caused Miss
+Birdseye to exclaim, "Why, Verena Tarrant, how cold your lips are!" It
+was not surprising to Verena to hear that her lips were cold; a mortal
+chill had crept over her, for she knew that this time she should have a
+tremendous scene with Olive.
+
+She found her in her room, to which she had fled on quitting Mr.
+Ransom's presence; she sat in the window, having evidently sunk into a
+chair the moment she came in, a position from which she must have seen
+Verena walk through the garden and down to the water with the intruder.
+She remained as she had collapsed, quite prostrate; her attitude was the
+same as that other time Verena had found her waiting, in New York. What
+Olive was likely to say to her first the girl scarcely knew; her mind,
+at any rate, was full of an intention of her own. She went straight to
+her and fell on her knees before her, taking hold of the hands which
+were clasped together, with nervous intensity, in Miss Chancellor's lap.
+Verena remained a moment, looking up at her, and then said:
+
+"There is something I want to tell you now, without a moment's delay;
+something I didn't tell you at the time it happened, nor afterwards. Mr.
+Ransom came out to see me once, at Cambridge, a little while before we
+went to New York. He spent a couple of hours with me; we took a walk
+together and saw the colleges. It was after that that he wrote to
+me--when I answered his letter, as I told you in New York. I didn't tell
+you then of his visit. We had a great deal of talk about him, and I kept
+that back. I did so on purpose; I can't explain why, except that I
+didn't like to tell you, and that I thought it better. But now I want
+you to know everything; when you know that, you _will_ know everything.
+It was only one visit--about two hours. I enjoyed it very much--he
+seemed so much interested. One reason I didn't tell you was that I
+didn't want you to know that he had come on to Boston, and called on me
+in Cambridge, without going to see you. I thought it might affect you
+disagreeably. I suppose you will think I deceived you; certainly I left
+you with a wrong impression. But now I want you to know all--all!"
+
+Verena spoke with breathless haste and eagerness; there was a kind of
+passion in the way she tried to expiate her former want of candour.
+Olive listened, staring; at first she seemed scarcely to understand. But
+Verena perceived that she understood sufficiently when she broke out:
+"You deceived me--you deceived me! Well, I must say I like your deceit
+better than such dreadful revelations! And what does anything matter
+when he has come after you now? What does he want--what has he come
+for?"
+
+"He has come to ask me to be his wife."
+
+Verena said this with the same eagerness, with as determined an air of
+not incurring any reproach this time. But as soon as she had spoken she
+buried her head in Olive's lap.
+
+Olive made no attempt to raise it again, and returned none of the
+pressure of her hands; she only sat silent for a time, during which
+Verena wondered that the idea of the episode at Cambridge, laid bare
+only after so many months, should not have struck her more deeply.
+Presently she saw it was because the horror of what had just happened
+drew her off from it. At last Olive asked: "Is that what he told you,
+off there by the water?"
+
+"Yes"--and Verena looked up--"he wanted me to know it right away. He
+says it's only fair to you that he should give notice of his intentions.
+He wants to try and make me like him--so he says. He wants to see more
+of me, and he wants me to know him better."
+
+Olive lay back in her chair, with dilated eyes and parted lips. "Verena
+Tarrant, what _is_ there between you? what _can_ I hold on to, what
+_can_ I believe? Two hours, in Cambridge, before we went to New York?"
+The sense that Verena had been perfidious there--perfidious in her
+reticence--now began to roll over her. "Mercy of heaven, how you did
+act!"
+
+"Olive, it was to spare you."
+
+"To spare me? If you really wished to spare me he wouldn't be here now!"
+
+Miss Chancellor flashed this out with a sudden violence, a spasm which
+threw Verena off and made her rise to her feet. For an instant the two
+young women stood confronted, and a person who had seen them at that
+moment might have taken them for enemies rather than friends. But any
+such opposition could last but a few seconds. Verena replied, with a
+tremor in her voice which was not that of passion, but of charity: "Do
+you mean that I expected him, that I brought him? I never in my life was
+more surprised at anything than when I saw him there."
+
+"Hasn't he the delicacy of one of his own slave-drivers? Doesn't he know
+you loathe him?"
+
+Verena looked at her friend with a degree of majesty which, with her,
+was rare. "I don't loathe him--I only dislike his opinions."
+
+"Dislike! Oh, misery!" And Olive turned away to the open window, leaning
+her forehead against the lifted sash.
+
+Verena hesitated, then went to her, passing her arm round her. "Don't
+scold me! help me--help me!" she murmured.
+
+Olive gave her a sidelong look; then, catching her up and facing her
+again--"Will you come away, now, by the next train?"
+
+"Flee from him again, as I did in New York? No, no, Olive Chancellor,
+that's not the way," Verena went on, reasoningly, as if all the wisdom
+of the ages were seated on her lips. "Then how can we leave Miss
+Birdseye, in her state? We must stay here--we must fight it out here."
+
+"Why not be honest, if you have been false--really honest, not only half
+so? Why not tell him plainly that you love him?"
+
+"Love him, Olive? why, I scarcely know him."
+
+"You'll have a chance, if he stays a month!"
+
+"I don't dislike him, certainly, as you do. But how can I love him when
+he tells me he wants me to give up everything, all our work, our faith,
+our future, never to give another address, to open my lips in public?
+How can I consent to that?" Verena went on, smiling strangely.
+
+"He asks you that, just that way?"
+
+"No; it's not that way. It's very kindly."
+
+"Kindly? Heaven help you, don't grovel! Doesn't he know it's my house?"
+Olive added, in a moment.
+
+"Of course he won't come into it, if you forbid him."
+
+"So that you may meet him in other places--on the shore, in the
+country?"
+
+"I certainly shan't avoid him, hide away from him," said Verena proudly.
+"I thought I made you believe, in New York, that I really cared for our
+aspirations. The way for me then is to meet him, feeling conscious of my
+strength. What if I do like him? what does it matter? I like my work in
+the world, I like everything I believe in, better."
+
+Olive listened to this, and the memory of how, in the house in Tenth
+Street, Verena had rebuked her doubts, professed her own faith anew,
+came back to her with a force which made the present situation appear
+slightly less terrific. Nevertheless, she gave no assent to the girl's
+logic; she only replied: "But you didn't meet him there; you hurried
+away from New York, after I was willing you should stay. He affected you
+very much there; you were not so calm when you came back to me from your
+expedition to the park as you pretend to be now. To get away from him
+you gave up all the rest."
+
+"I know I wasn't so calm. But now I have had three months to think about
+it--about the way he affected me there. I take it very quietly."
+
+"No, you don't; you are not calm now!"
+
+Verena was silent a moment, while Olive's eyes continued to search her,
+accuse her, condemn her. "It's all the more reason you shouldn't give me
+stab after stab," she replied, with a gentleness which was infinitely
+touching.
+
+It had an instant effect upon Olive; she burst into tears, threw herself
+on her friend's bosom. "Oh, don't desert me--don't desert me, or you'll
+kill me in torture," she moaned, shuddering.
+
+"You must help me--you must help me!" cried Verena, imploringly too.
+
+
+
+
+XXXVII
+
+
+Basil Ransom spent nearly a month at Marmion; in announcing this fact I
+am very conscious of its extraordinary character. Poor Olive may well
+have been thrown back into her alarms by his presenting himself there;
+for after her return from New York she took to her soul the conviction
+that she had really done with him. Not only did the impulse of revulsion
+under which Verena had demanded that their departure from Tenth Street
+should be immediate appear to her a proof that it had been sufficient
+for her young friend to touch Mr. Ransom's moral texture with her
+finger, as it were, in order to draw back for ever; but what she had
+learned from her companion of his own manifestations, his apparent
+disposition to throw up the game, added to her feeling of security. He
+had spoken to Verena of their little excursion as his last opportunity,
+let her know that he regarded it not as the beginning of a more intimate
+acquaintance but as the end even of such relations as already existed
+between them. He gave her up, for reasons best known to himself; if he
+wanted to frighten Olive he judged that he had frightened her enough:
+his Southern chivalry suggested to him perhaps that he ought to let her
+off before he had worried her to death. Doubtless, too, he had perceived
+how vain it was to hope to make Verena abjure a faith so solidly
+founded; and though he admired her enough to wish to possess her on his
+own terms, he shrank from the mortification which the future would have
+in keeping for him--that of finding that, after six months of courting
+and in spite of all her sympathy, her desire to do what people expected
+of her, she despised his opinions as much as the first day. Olive
+Chancellor was able to a certain extent to believe what she wished to
+believe, and that was one reason why she had twisted Verena's flight
+from New York, just after she let her friend see how much she should
+like to drink deeper of the cup, into a warrant for living in a fool's
+paradise. If she had been less afraid, she would have read things more
+clearly; she would have seen that we don't run away from people unless
+we fear them and that we don't fear them unless we know that we are
+unarmed. Verena feared Basil Ransom now (though this time she declined
+to run); but now she had taken up her weapons, she had told Olive she
+was exposed, she had asked _her_ to be her defence. Poor Olive was
+stricken as she had never been before, but the extremity of her danger
+gave her a desperate energy. The only comfort in her situation was that
+this time Verena had confessed her peril, had thrown herself into her
+hands. "I like him--I can't help it--I do like him. I don't want to
+marry him, I don't want to embrace his ideas, which are unspeakably
+false and horrible; but I like him better than any gentleman I have
+seen." So much as this the girl announced to her friend as soon as the
+conversation of which I have just given a sketch was resumed, as it was
+very soon, you may be sure, and very often, in the course of the next
+few days. That was her way of saying that a great crisis had arrived in
+her life, and the statement needed very little amplification to stand as
+a shy avowal that she too had succumbed to the universal passion. Olive
+had had her suspicions, her terrors, before; but she perceived now how
+idle and foolish they had been, and that this was a different affair
+from any of the "phases" of which she had hitherto anxiously watched the
+development. As I say, she felt it to be a considerable mercy that
+Verena's attitude was frank, for it gave her something to take hold of;
+she could no longer be put off with sophistries about receiving visits
+from handsome and unscrupulous young men for the sake of the
+opportunities it gave one to convert them. She took hold, accordingly,
+with passion, with fury; after the shock of Ransom's arrival had passed
+away she determined that he should not find her chilled into dumb
+submission. Verena had told her that she wanted her to hold her tight,
+to rescue her; and there was no fear that, for an instant, she should
+sleep at her post.
+
+"I like him--I like him; but I want to hate----"
+
+"You want to hate him!" Olive broke in.
+
+"No, I want to hate my liking. I want you to keep before me all the
+reasons why I should--many of them so fearfully important. Don't let me
+lose sight of anything! Don't be afraid I shall not be grateful when you
+remind me."
+
+That was one of the singular speeches that Verena made in the course of
+their constant discussion of the terrible question, and it must be
+confessed that she made a great many. The strangest of all was when she
+protested, as she did again and again to Olive, against the idea of
+their seeking safety in retreat. She said there was a want of dignity in
+it--that she had been ashamed, afterwards, of what she had done in
+rushing away from New York. This care for her moral appearance was, on
+Verena's part, something new; inasmuch as, though she had struck that
+note on previous occasions--had insisted on its being her duty to face
+the accidents and alarms of life--she had never erected such a standard
+in the face of a disaster so sharply possible. It was not her habit
+either to talk or to think about her dignity, and when Olive found her
+taking that tone she felt more than ever that the dreadful, ominous,
+fatal part of the situation was simply that now, for the first time in
+all the history of their sacred friendship, Verena was not sincere. She
+was not sincere when she told her that she wanted to be helped against
+Mr. Ransom--when she exhorted her, that way, to keep everything that was
+salutary and fortifying before her eyes. Olive did not go so far as to
+believe that she was playing a part and putting her off with words
+which, glossing over her treachery, only made it more cruel; she would
+have admitted that that treachery was as yet unwitting, that Verena
+deceived herself first of all, thinking she really wished to be saved.
+Her phrases about her dignity were insincere, as well as her pretext
+that they must stay to look after Miss Birdseye: as if Doctor Prance
+were not abundantly able to discharge that function and would not be
+enchanted to get them out of the house! Olive had perfectly divined by
+this time that Doctor Prance had no sympathy with their movement, no
+general ideas; that she was simply shut up to petty questions of
+physiological science and of her own professional activity. She would
+never have invited her down if she had realised this in advance so much
+as the doctor's dry detachment from all their discussions, their
+readings and practisings, her constant expeditions to fish and botanise,
+subsequently enabled her to do. She was very narrow, but it did seem as
+if she knew more about Miss Birdseye's peculiar physical
+conditions--they were _very_ peculiar--than any one else, and this was a
+comfort at a time when that admirable woman seemed to be suffering a
+loss of vitality.
+
+"The great point is that it must be met some time, and it will be a
+tremendous relief to have it over. He is determined to have it out with
+me, and if the battle doesn't come off to-day we shall have to fight it
+to-morrow. I don't see why this isn't as good a time as any other. My
+lecture for the Music Hall is as good as finished, and I haven't got
+anything else to do; so I can give all my attention to our personal
+struggle. It requires a good deal, you would admit, if you knew how
+wonderfully he can talk. If we should leave this place to-morrow he
+would come after us to the very next one. He would follow us everywhere.
+A little while ago we could have escaped him, because he says that then
+he had no money. He hasn't got much now, but he has got enough to pay
+his way. He is so encouraged by the reception of his article by the
+editor of the _Rational Review_, that he is sure that in future his pen
+will be a resource."
+
+These remarks were uttered by Verena after Basil Ransom had been three
+days at Marmion, and when she reached this point her companion
+interrupted her with the inquiry, "Is that what he proposes to support
+you with--his pen?"
+
+"Oh yes; of course he admits we should be terribly poor."
+
+"And this vision of a literary career is based entirely upon an article
+that hasn't yet seen the light? I don't see how a man of any refinement
+can approach a woman with so beggarly an account of his position in
+life."
+
+"He says he wouldn't--he would have been ashamed--three months ago; that
+was why, when we were in New York, and he felt, even then--well (so he
+says) all he feels now, he made up his mind not to persist, to let me
+go. But just lately a change has taken place; his state of mind altered
+completely, in the course of a week, in consequence of the letter that
+editor wrote him about his contribution, and his paying for it right
+off. It was a remarkably flattering letter. He says he believes in his
+future now; he has before him a vision of distinction, of influence, and
+of fortune, not great, perhaps, but sufficient to make life tolerable.
+He doesn't think life is very delightful, in the nature of things; but
+one of the best things a man can do with it is to get hold of some woman
+(of course, she must please him very much, to make it worth while) whom
+he may draw close to him."
+
+"And couldn't he get hold of any one but you--among all the exposed
+millions of our sex?" poor Olive groaned. "Why must he pick you out,
+when everything he knew about you showed you to be, exactly, the very
+last?"
+
+"That's just what I have asked him, and he only remarks that there is no
+reasoning about such things. He fell in love with me that first evening,
+at Miss Birdseye's. So you see there was some ground for that mystic
+apprehension of yours. It seems as if I pleased him more than any one."
+
+Olive flung herself over on the couch, burying her face in the cushions,
+which she tumbled in her despair, and moaning out that he didn't love
+Verena, he never had loved her, it was only his hatred of their cause
+that made him pretend it; he wanted to do that an injury, to do it the
+worst he could think of. He didn't love her, he hated her, he only
+wanted to smother her, to crush her, to kill her--as she would
+infallibly see that he would if she listened to him. It was because he
+knew that her voice had magic in it, and from the moment he caught its
+first note he had determined to destroy it. It was not tenderness that
+moved him--it was devilish malignity; tenderness would be incapable of
+requiring the horrible sacrifice that he was not ashamed to ask, of
+requiring her to commit perjury and blasphemy, to desert a work, an
+interest, with which her very heart-strings were interlaced, to give the
+lie to her whole young past, to her purest, holiest ambitions. Olive put
+forward no claim of her own, breathed, at first, at least, not a word of
+remonstrance in the name of her personal loss, of their blighted union;
+she only dwelt upon the unspeakable tragedy of a defection from their
+standard, of a failure on Verena's part to carry out what she had
+undertaken, of the horror of seeing her bright career blotted out with
+darkness and tears, of the joy and elation that would fill the breast of
+all their adversaries at this illustrious, consummate proof of the
+fickleness, the futility, the predestined servility, of women. A man had
+only to whistle for her, and she who had pretended most was delighted to
+come and kneel at his feet. Olive's most passionate protest was summed
+up in her saying that if Verena were to forsake them it would put back
+the emancipation of women a hundred years. She did not, during these
+dreadful days, talk continuously; she had long periods of pale,
+intensely anxious, watchful silence, interrupted by outbreaks of
+passionate argument, entreaty, invocation. It was Verena who talked
+incessantly, Verena who was in a state entirely new to her, and, as any
+one could see, in an attitude entirely unnatural and overdone. If she
+was deceiving herself, as Olive said, there was something very affecting
+in her effort, her ingenuity. If she tried to appear to Olive impartial,
+coldly judicious, in her attitude with regard to Basil Ransom, and only
+anxious to see, for the moral satisfaction of the thing, how good a
+case, as a lover, he might make out for himself and how much he might
+touch her susceptibilities, she endeavoured, still more earnestly, to
+practise this fraud upon her own imagination. She abounded in every
+proof that she should be in despair if she should be overborne, and she
+thought of arguments even more convincing, if possible, than Olive's,
+why she should hold on to her old faith, why she should resist even at
+the cost of acute temporary suffering. She was voluble, fluent,
+feverish; she was perpetually bringing up the subject, as if to
+encourage her friend, to show how she kept possession of her judgement,
+how independent she remained.
+
+No stranger situation can be imagined than that of these extraordinary
+young women at this juncture; it was so singular on Verena's part, in
+particular, that I despair of presenting it to the reader with the air
+of reality. To understand it, one must bear in mind her peculiar
+frankness, natural and acquired, her habit of discussing questions,
+sentiments, moralities, her education, in the atmosphere of
+lecture-rooms, of _séances_, her familiarity with the vocabulary of
+emotion, the mysteries of "the spiritual life." She had learned to
+breathe and move in a rarefied air, as she would have learned to speak
+Chinese if her success in life had depended upon it; but this dazzling
+trick, and all her artlessly artful facilities, were not a part of her
+essence, an expression of her innermost preferences. What _was_ a part
+of her essence was the extraordinary generosity with which she could
+expose herself, give herself away, turn herself inside out, for the
+satisfaction of a person who made demands of her. Olive, as we know, had
+made the reflexion that no one was naturally less preoccupied with the
+idea of her dignity, and though Verena put it forward as an excuse for
+remaining where they were, it must be admitted that in reality she was
+very deficient in the desire to be consistent with herself. Olive had
+contributed with all her zeal to the development of Verena's gift; but I
+scarcely venture to think now, what she may have said to herself, in the
+secrecy of deep meditation, about the consequences of cultivating an
+abundant eloquence. Did she say that Verena was attempting to smother
+her now in her own phrases? did she view with dismay the fatal effect of
+trying to have an answer for everything? From Olive's condition during
+these lamentable weeks there is a certain propriety--a delicacy enjoined
+by the respect for misfortune--in averting our head. She neither ate nor
+slept; she could scarcely speak without bursting into tears; she felt so
+implacably, insidiously baffled. She remembered the magnanimity with
+which she had declined (the winter before the last) to receive the vow
+of eternal maidenhood which she had at first demanded and then put by as
+too crude a test, but which Verena, for a precious hour, for ever flown,
+would _then_ have been willing to take. She repented of it with
+bitterness and rage; and then she asked herself, more desperately still,
+whether even if she held that pledge she should be brave enough to
+enforce it in the face of actual complications. She believed that if it
+were in her power to say, "No, I won't let you off; I have your solemn
+word, and I won't!" Verena would bow to that decree and remain with her;
+but the magic would have passed out of her spirit for ever, the
+sweetness out of their friendship, the efficacy out of their work. She
+said to her again and again that she had utterly changed since that hour
+she came to her, in New York, after her morning with Mr. Ransom, and
+sobbed out that they must hurry away. Then she had been wounded,
+outraged, sickened, and in the interval nothing had happened, nothing
+but that one exchange of letters, which she knew about, to bring her
+round to a shameless tolerance. Shameless Verena admitted it to be; she
+assented over and over to this proposition, and explained, as eagerly
+each time as if it were the first, what it was that had come to pass,
+what it was that had brought her round. It had simply come over her that
+she liked him, that this was the true point of view, the only one from
+which one could consider the situation in a way that would lead to what
+she called a _real_ solution--a permanent rest. On this particular point
+Verena never responded, in the liberal way I have mentioned, without
+asseverating at the same time that what she desired most in the world
+was to prove (the picture Olive had held up from the first) that a woman
+_could_ live on persistently, clinging to a great, vivifying, redemptory
+idea, without the help of a man. To testify to the end against the stale
+superstition--mother of every misery--that those gentry were as
+indispensable as they had proclaimed themselves on the house-tops--that,
+she passionately protested, was as inspiring a thought in the present
+poignant crisis as it had ever been.
+
+The one grain of comfort that Olive extracted from the terrors that
+pressed upon her was that now she knew the worst; she knew it since
+Verena had told her, after so long and so ominous a reticence, of the
+detestable episode at Cambridge. That seemed to her the worst, because
+it had been thunder in a clear sky; the incident had sprung from a
+quarter from which, months before, all symptoms appeared to have
+vanished. Though Verena had now done all she could to make up for her
+perfidious silence by repeating everything that passed between them as
+she sat with Mr. Ransom in Monadnoc Place or strolled with him through
+the colleges, it imposed itself upon Olive that that occasion was the
+key of all that had happened since, that he had then obtained an
+irremediable hold upon her. If Verena had spoken at the time, she would
+never have let her go to New York; the sole compensation for that
+hideous mistake was that the girl, recognising it to the full, evidently
+deemed now that she couldn't be communicative enough. There were certain
+afternoons in August, long, beautiful and terrible, when one felt that
+the summer was rounding its curve, and the rustle of the full-leaved
+trees in the slanting golden light, in the breeze that ought to be
+delicious, seemed the voice of the coming autumn, of the warnings and
+dangers of life--portentous, insufferable hours when, as she sat under
+the softly swaying vine-leaves of the trellis with Miss Birdseye and
+tried, in order to still her nerves, to read something aloud to her
+guest, the sound of her own quavering voice made her think more of that
+baleful day at Cambridge than even of the fact that at that very moment
+Verena was "off" with Mr. Ransom--had gone to take the little daily walk
+with him to which it had been arranged that their enjoyment of each
+other's society should be reduced. Arranged, I say; but that is not
+exactly the word to describe the compromise arrived at by a kind of
+tacit exchange of tearful entreaty and tightened grasp, after Ransom had
+made it definite to Verena that he was indeed going to stay a month and
+she had promised that she would not resort to base evasions, to flight
+(which would avail her nothing, he notified her), but would give him a
+chance, would listen to him a few minutes every day. He had insisted
+that the few minutes should be an hour, and the way to spend it was
+obvious. They wandered along the waterside to a rocky, shrub-covered
+point, which made a walk of just the right duration. Here all the homely
+languor of the region, the mild, fragrant Cape-quality, the sweetness of
+white sands, quiet waters, low promontories where there were paths among
+the barberries and tidal pools gleamed in the sunset--here all the
+spirit of a ripe summer afternoon seemed to hang in the air. There were
+wood-walks too; they sometimes followed bosky uplands, where accident
+had grouped the trees with odd effects of "style," and where in grassy
+intervals and fragrant nooks of rest they came out upon sudden patches
+of Arcady. In such places Verena listened to her companion with her
+watch in her hand, and she wondered, very sincerely, how he could care
+for a girl who made the conditions of courtship so odious. He had
+recognised, of course, at the very first, that he could not inflict
+himself again upon Miss Chancellor, and after that awkward morning-call
+I have described he did not again, for the first three weeks of his stay
+at Marmion, penetrate into the cottage whose back windows overlooked the
+deserted shipyard. Olive, as may be imagined, made, on this occasion, no
+protest for the sake of being ladylike or of preventing him from putting
+her apparently in the wrong. The situation between them was too grim; it
+was war to the knife, it was a question of which should pull hardest. So
+Verena took a tryst with the young man as if she had been a maid-servant
+and Basil Ransom a "follower." They met a little way from the house;
+beyond it, outside the village.
+
+
+
+
+XXXVIII
+
+
+Olive thought she knew the worst, as we have perceived; but the worst
+was really something she could not know, inasmuch as up to this time
+Verena chose as little to confide to her on that one point as she was
+careful to expatiate with her on every other. The change that had taken
+place in the object of Basil Ransom's merciless devotion since the
+episode in New York was, briefly, just this change--that the words he
+had spoken to her there about her genuine vocation, as distinguished
+from the hollow and factitious ideal with which her family and her
+association with Olive Chancellor had saddled her--these words, the most
+effective and penetrating he had uttered, had sunk into her soul and
+worked and fermented there. She had come at last to believe them, and
+that was the alteration, the transformation. They had kindled a light in
+which she saw herself afresh and, strange to say, liked herself better
+than in the old exaggerated glamour of the lecture-lamps. She could not
+tell Olive this yet, for it struck at the root of everything, and the
+dreadful, delightful sensation filled her with a kind of awe at all that
+it implied and portended. She was to burn everything she had adored; she
+was to adore everything she had burned. The extraordinary part of it was
+that though she felt the situation to be, as I say, tremendously
+serious, she was not ashamed of the treachery which she--yes, decidedly,
+by this time she must admit it to herself--she meditated. It was simply
+that the truth had changed sides; that radiant image began to look at
+her from Basil Ransom's expressive eyes. She loved, she was in love--she
+felt it in every throb of her being. Instead of being constituted by
+nature for entertaining that sentiment in an exceptionally small degree
+(which had been the implication of her whole crusade, the warrant for
+her offer of old to Olive to renounce), she was framed, apparently, to
+allow it the largest range, the highest intensity. It was always
+passion, in fact; but now the object was other. Formerly she had been
+convinced that the fire of her spirit was a kind of double flame, one
+half of which was responsive friendship for a most extraordinary person,
+and the other pity for the sufferings of women in general. Verena gazed
+aghast at the colourless dust into which, in three short months
+(counting from the episode in New York), such a conviction as that could
+crumble; she felt it must be a magical touch that could bring about such
+a cataclysm. Why Basil Ransom had been deputed by fate to exercise this
+spell was more than she could say--poor Verena, who up to so lately had
+flattered herself that she had a wizard's wand in her own pocket.
+
+When she saw him a little way off, about five o'clock--the hour she
+usually went out to meet him--waiting for her at a bend of the road
+which lost itself, after a winding, straggling mile or two, in the
+indented, insulated "point," where the wandering bee droned through the
+hot hours with a vague, misguided flight, she felt that his tall,
+watching figure, with the low horizon behind, represented well the
+importance, the towering eminence he had in her mind--the fact that he
+was just now, to her vision, the most definite and upright, the most
+incomparable, object in the world. If he had not been at his post when
+she expected him she would have had to stop and lean against something,
+for weakness; her whole being would have throbbed more painfully than it
+throbbed at present, though finding him there made her nervous enough.
+And who was he, what was he? she asked herself. What did he offer her
+besides a chance (in which there was no compensation of brilliancy or
+fashion) to falsify, in a conspicuous manner, every hope and pledge she
+had hitherto given? He allowed her, certainly, no illusion on the
+subject of the fate she should meet as his wife; he flung over it no
+rosiness of promised ease; he let her know that she should be poor,
+withdrawn from view, a partner of his struggle, of his severe, hard,
+unique stoicism. When he spoke of such things as these, and bent his
+eyes on her, she could not keep the tears from her own; she felt that to
+throw herself into his life (bare and arid as for the time it was) was
+the condition of happiness for her, and yet that the obstacles were
+terrible, cruel. It must not be thought that the revolution which was
+taking place in her was unaccompanied with suffering. She suffered less
+than Olive certainly, for her bent was not, like her friend's, in that
+direction; but as the wheel of her experience went round she had the
+sensation of being ground very small indeed. With her light, bright
+texture, her complacent responsiveness, her genial, graceful, ornamental
+cast, her desire to keep on pleasing others at the time when a force she
+had never felt before was pushing her to please herself, poor Verena
+lived in these days in a state of moral tension--with a sense of being
+strained and aching--which she didn't betray more only because it was
+absolutely not in her power to look desperate. An immense pity for Olive
+sat in her heart, and she asked herself how far it was necessary to go
+in the path of self-sacrifice. Nothing was wanting to make the wrong she
+should do her complete; she had deceived her up to the very last; only
+three months earlier she had reasserted her vows, given her word, with
+every show of fidelity and enthusiasm. There were hours when it seemed
+to Verena that she must really push her inquiry no further, but content
+herself with the conclusion that she loved as deeply as a woman could
+love and that it didn't make any difference. She felt Olive's grasp too
+clinching, too terrible. She said to herself that she should never dare,
+that she might as well give up early as late; that the scene, at the
+end, would be something she couldn't face; that she had no right to
+blast the poor creature's whole future. She had a vision of those
+dreadful years; she knew that Olive would never get over the
+disappointment. It would touch her in the point where she felt
+everything most keenly; she would be incurably lonely and eternally
+humiliated. It was a very peculiar thing, their friendship; it had
+elements which made it probably as complete as any (between women) that
+had ever existed. Of course it had been more on Olive's side than on
+hers, she had always known that; but that, again, didn't make any
+difference. It was of no use for her to tell herself that Olive had
+begun it entirely and she had only responded out of a kind of charmed
+politeness, at first, to a tremendous appeal. She had lent herself,
+given herself, utterly, and she ought to have known better if she didn't
+mean to abide by it. At the end of three weeks she felt that her inquiry
+was complete, but that after all nothing was gained except an immense
+interest in Basil Ransom's views and the prospect of an eternal
+heartache. He had told her he wanted her to know him, and now she knew
+him pretty thoroughly. She knew him and she adored him, but it didn't
+make any difference. To give him up or to give Olive up--this effort
+would be the greater of the two.
+
+If Basil Ransom had the advantage, as far back as that day in New York,
+of having struck a note which was to reverberate, it may easily be
+imagined that he did not fail to follow it up. If he had projected a new
+light into Verena's mind, and made the idea of giving herself to a man
+more agreeable to her than that of giving herself to a movement, he
+found means to deepen this illumination, to drag her former standard in
+the dust. He was in a very odd situation indeed, carrying on his siege
+with his hands tied. As he had to do everything in an hour a day, he
+perceived that he must confine himself to the essential. The essential
+was to show her how much he loved her, and then to press, to press,
+always to press. His hovering about Miss Chancellor's habitation without
+going in was a strange regimen to be subjected to, and he was sorry not
+to see more of Miss Birdseye, besides often not knowing what to do with
+himself in the mornings and evenings. Fortunately he had brought plenty
+of books (volumes of rusty aspect, picked up at New York bookstalls),
+and in such an affair as this he could take the less when the more was
+forbidden him. For the mornings, sometimes, he had the resource of
+Doctor Prance, with whom he made a great many excursions on the water.
+She was devoted to boating and an ardent fisherwoman, and they used to
+pull out into the bay together, cast their lines, and talk a prodigious
+amount of heresy. She met him, as Verena met him, "in the environs," but
+in a different spirit. He was immensely amused at her attitude, and saw
+that nothing in the world could, as he expressed it, make her wink. She
+would never blench nor show surprise; she had an air of taking
+everything abnormal for granted; betrayed no consciousness of the oddity
+of Ransom's situation; said nothing to indicate she had noticed that
+Miss Chancellor was in a frenzy or that Verena had a daily appointment.
+You might have supposed from her manner that it was as natural for
+Ransom to sit on a fence half a mile off as in one of the red
+rocking-chairs, of the so-called "Shaker" species, which adorned Miss
+Chancellor's back verandah. The only thing our young man didn't like
+about Doctor Prance was the impression she gave him (out of the crevices
+of her reticence he hardly knew how it leaked) that she thought Verena
+rather slim. She took an ironical view of almost any kind of courtship,
+and he could see she didn't wonder women were such featherheads, so long
+as, whatever brittle follies they cultivated, they could get men to come
+and sit on fences for them. Doctor Prance told him Miss Birdseye noticed
+nothing; she had sunk, within a few days, into a kind of transfigured
+torpor; she didn't seem to know whether Mr. Ransom were anywhere round
+or not. She guessed she thought he had just come down for a day and gone
+off again; she probably supposed he just wanted to get toned up a little
+by Miss Tarrant. Sometimes, out in the boat, when she looked at him in
+vague, sociable silence, while she waited for a bite (she delighted in a
+bite), she had an expression of diabolical shrewdness. When Ransom was
+not scorching there beside her (he didn't mind the sun of
+Massachusetts), he lounged about in the pastoral land which hung (at a
+very moderate elevation) above the shore. He always had a book in his
+pocket, and he lay under whispering trees and kicked his heels and made
+up his mind on what side he should take Verena the next time. At the end
+of a fortnight he had succeeded (so he believed, at least) far better
+than he had hoped, in this sense, that the girl had now the air of
+making much more light of her "gift." He was indeed quite appalled at
+the facility with which she threw it over, gave up the idea that it was
+useful and precious. That had been what he wanted her to do, and the
+fact of the sacrifice (once she had fairly looked at it) costing her so
+little only proved his contention, only made it clear that it was not
+necessary to her happiness to spend half her life ranting (no matter how
+prettily) in public. All the same he said to himself that, to make up
+for the loss of whatever was sweet in the reputation of the thing, he
+should have to be tremendously nice to her in all the coming years.
+During the first week he was at Marmion she made of him an inquiry which
+touched on this point.
+
+"Well, if it's all a mere delusion, why should this facility have been
+given me--why should I have been saddled with a superfluous talent? I
+don't care much about it--I don't mind telling you that; but I confess I
+should like to know what is to become of all that part of me, if I
+retire into private life, and live, as you say, simply to be charming
+for you. I shall be like a singer with a beautiful voice (you have told
+me yourself my voice is beautiful) who has accepted some decree of never
+raising a note. Isn't that a great waste, a great violation of nature?
+Were not our talents given us to use, and have we any right to smother
+them and deprive our fellow-creatures of such pleasure as they may
+confer? In the arrangement you propose" (that was Verena's way of
+speaking of the question of their marriage) "I don't see what provision
+is made for the poor faithful, dismissed servant. It is all very well to
+be charming to you, but there are people who have told me that once I
+get on a platform I am charming to all the world. There is no harm in my
+speaking of that, because you have told me so yourself. Perhaps you
+intend to have a platform erected in our front parlour, where I can
+address you every evening, and put you to sleep after your work. I say
+our _front_ parlour, as if it were certain we should have two! It
+doesn't look as if our means would permit that--and we must have some
+place to dine, if there is to be a platform in our sitting-room."
+
+"My dear young woman, it will be easy to solve the difficulty: the
+dining-table itself shall be our platform, and you shall mount on top of
+that." This was Basil Ransom's sportive reply to his companion's very
+natural appeal for light, and the reader will remark that if it led her
+to push her investigation no further, she was very easily satisfied.
+There was more reason, however, as well as more appreciation of a very
+considerable mystery, in what he went on to say. "Charming to me,
+charming to all the world? What will become of your charm?--is that what
+you want to know? It will be about five thousand times greater than it
+is now; that's what will become of it. We shall find plenty of room for
+your facility; it will lubricate our whole existence. Believe me, Miss
+Tarrant, these things will take care of themselves. You won't sing in
+the Music Hall, but you will sing to me; you will sing to every one who
+knows you and approaches you. Your gift is indestructible; don't talk as
+if I either wanted to wipe it out or should be able to make it a
+particle less divine. I want to give it another direction, certainly;
+but I don't want to stop your activity. Your gift is the gift of
+expression, and there is nothing I can do for you that will make you
+less expressive. It won't gush out at a fixed hour and on a fixed day,
+but it will irrigate, it will fertilise, it will brilliantly adorn your
+conversation. Think how delightful it will be when your influence
+becomes really social. Your facility, as you call it, will simply make
+you, in conversation, the most charming woman in America."
+
+It is to be feared, indeed, that Verena was easily satisfied (convinced,
+I mean, not that she ought to succumb to him, but that there were
+lovely, neglected, almost unsuspected truths on his side); and there is
+further evidence on the same head in the fact that after the first once
+or twice she found nothing to say to him (much as she was always saying
+to herself) about the cruel effect her apostasy would have upon Olive.
+She forbore to plead that reason after she had seen how angry it made
+him, and with how almost savage a contempt he denounced so flimsy a
+pretext. He wanted to know since when it was more becoming to take up
+with a morbid old maid than with an honourable young man; and when
+Verena pronounced the sacred name of friendship he inquired what
+fanatical sophistry excluded him from a similar privilege. She had told
+him, in a moment of expansion (Verena believed she was immensely on her
+guard, but her guard was very apt to be lowered), that his visits to
+Marmion cast in Olive's view a remarkable light upon his chivalry; she
+chose to regard his resolute pursuit of Verena as a covert persecution
+of herself. Verena repented, as soon as she had spoken, of having given
+further currency to this taunt; but she perceived the next moment no
+harm was done, Basil Ransom taking in perfectly good part Miss
+Chancellor's reflexions on his delicacy, and making them the subject of
+much free laughter. She could not know, for in the midst of his hilarity
+the young man did not compose himself to tell her, that he had made up
+his mind on this question before he left New York--as long ago as when
+he wrote her the note (subsequent to her departure from that city) to
+which allusion has already been made, and which was simply the fellow of
+the letter addressed to her after his visit to Cambridge: a friendly,
+respectful, yet rather pregnant sign that, decidedly, on second
+thoughts, separation didn't imply for him the intention of silence. We
+know a little about his second thoughts, as much as is essential, and
+especially how the occasion of their springing up had been the windfall
+of an editor's encouragement. The importance of that encouragement, to
+Basil's imagination, was doubtless much augmented by his desire for an
+excuse to take up again a line of behaviour which he had forsworn (small
+as had, as yet, been his opportunity to indulge in it) very much less
+than he supposed; still, it worked an appreciable revolution in his view
+of his case, and made him ask himself what amount of consideration he
+should (from the most refined Southern point of view) owe Miss
+Chancellor in the event of his deciding to go after Verena Tarrant in
+earnest. He was not slow to decide that he owed her none. Chivalry had
+to do with one's relations with people one hated, not with those one
+loved. He didn't hate poor Miss Olive, though she might make him yet;
+and even if he did, any chivalry was all moonshine which should require
+him to give up the girl he adored in order that his third cousin should
+see he could be gallant. Chivalry was forbearance and generosity with
+regard to the weak; and there was nothing weak about Miss Olive, she was
+a fighting woman, and she would fight him to the death, giving him not
+an inch of odds. He felt that she was fighting there all day long, in
+her cottage fortress; her resistance was in the air he breathed, and
+Verena came out to him sometimes quite limp and pale from the tussle.
+
+It was in the same jocose spirit with which he regarded Olive's view of
+the sort of standard a Mississippian should live up to that he talked to
+Verena about the lecture she was preparing for her great exhibition at
+the Music Hall. He learned from her that she was to take the field in
+the manner of Mrs. Farrinder, for a winter campaign, carrying with her a
+tremendous big gun. Her engagements were all made, her route was marked
+out; she expected to repeat her lecture in about fifty different places.
+It was to be called "A Woman's Reason," and both Olive and Miss Birdseye
+thought it, so far as they could tell in advance, her most promising
+effort. She wasn't going to trust to inspiration this time; she didn't
+want to meet a big Boston audience without knowing where she was.
+Inspiration, moreover, seemed rather to have faded away; in consequence
+of Olive's influence she had read and studied so much that it seemed now
+as if everything must take form beforehand. Olive was a splendid critic,
+whether he liked her or not, and she had made her go over every word of
+her lecture twenty times. There wasn't an intonation she hadn't made her
+practise; it was very different from the old system, when her father had
+worked her up. If Basil considered women superficial, it was a pity he
+couldn't see what Olive's standard of preparation was, or be present at
+their rehearsals, in the evening, in their little parlour. Ransom's
+state of mind in regard to the affair at the Music Hall was simply
+this--that he was determined to circumvent it if he could. He covered it
+with ridicule, in talking of it to Verena, and the shafts he levelled at
+it went so far that he could see she thought he exaggerated his dislike
+to it. In point of fact he could not have overstated that; so odious did
+the idea seem to him that she was soon to be launched in a more
+infatuated career. He vowed to himself that she should never take that
+fresh start which would commit her irretrievably if she should succeed
+(and she would succeed--he had not the slightest doubt of her power to
+produce a sensation in the Music Hall), to the acclamations of the
+newspapers. He didn't care for her engagements, her campaigns, or all
+the expectancy of her friends; to "squelch" all that, at a stroke, was
+the dearest wish of his heart. It would represent to him his own
+success, it would symbolise his victory. It became a fixed idea with
+him, and he warned her again and again. When she laughed and said she
+didn't see how he could stop her unless he kidnapped her, he really
+pitied her for not perceiving, beneath his ominous pleasantries, the
+firmness of his resolution. He felt almost capable of kidnapping her. It
+was palpably in the air that she would become "widely popular," and that
+idea simply sickened him. He felt as differently as possible about it
+from Mr. Matthias Pardon.
+
+One afternoon, as he returned with Verena from a walk which had been
+accomplished completely within the prescribed conditions, he saw, from a
+distance, Doctor Prance, who had emerged bare-headed from the cottage,
+and, shading her eyes from the red, declining sun, was looking up and
+down the road. It was part of the regulation that Ransom should separate
+from Verena before reaching the house, and they had just paused to
+exchange their last words (which every day promoted the situation more
+than any others), when Doctor Prance began to beckon to them with much
+animation. They hurried forward, Verena pressing her hand to her heart,
+for she had instantly guessed that something terrible had happened to
+Olive--she had given out, fainted away, perhaps fallen dead, with the
+cruelty of the strain. Doctor Prance watched them come, with a curious
+look in her face; it was not a smile, but a kind of exaggerated
+intimation that she noticed nothing. In an instant she had told them
+what was the matter. Miss Birdseye had had a sudden weakness; she had
+remarked abruptly that she was dying, and her pulse, sure enough, had
+fallen to nothing. She was down on the piazza with Miss Chancellor and
+herself, and they had tried to get her up to bed. But she wouldn't let
+them move her; she was passing away, and she wanted to pass away just
+there, in such a pleasant place, in her customary chair, looking at the
+sunset. She asked for Miss Tarrant, and Miss Chancellor told her she was
+out--walking with Mr. Ransom. Then she wanted to know if Mr. Ransom was
+still there--she supposed he had gone. (Basil knew, by Verena, apart
+from this, that his name had not been mentioned to the old lady since
+the morning he saw her.) She expressed a wish to see him--she had
+something to say to him; and Miss Chancellor told her that he would be
+back soon, with Verena, and that they would bring him in. Miss Birdseye
+said she hoped they wouldn't be long, because she was sinking; and
+Doctor Prance now added, like a person who knew what she was talking
+about, that it was, in fact, the end. She had darted out two or three
+times to look for them, and they must step right in. Verena had scarcely
+given her time to tell her story; she had already rushed into the house.
+Ransom followed with Doctor Prance, conscious that for him the occasion
+was doubly solemn; inasmuch as if he was to see poor Miss Birdseye yield
+up her philanthropic soul, he was on the other hand doubtless to receive
+from Miss Chancellor a reminder that _she_ had no intention of quitting
+the game.
+
+By the time he had made this reflexion he stood in the presence of his
+kinswoman and her venerable guest, who was sitting just as he had seen
+her before, muffled and bonneted, on the back piazza of the cottage.
+Olive Chancellor was on one side of her holding one of her hands, and on
+the other was Verena, who had dropped on her knees, close to her,
+bending over those of the old lady. "Did you ask for me--did you want
+me?" the girl said tenderly. "I will never leave you again."
+
+"Oh, I won't keep you long. I only wanted to see you once more." Miss
+Birdseye's voice was very low, like that of a person breathing with
+difficulty; but it had no painful nor querulous note--it expressed only
+the cheerful weariness which had marked all this last period of her
+life, and which seemed to make it now as blissful as it was suitable
+that she should pass away. Her head was thrown back against the top of
+the chair, the ribbon which confined her ancient hat hung loose, and the
+late afternoon light covered her octogenarian face and gave it a kind of
+fairness, a double placidity. There was, to Ransom, something almost
+august in the trustful renunciation of her countenance; something in it
+seemed to say that she had been ready long before, but as the time was
+not ripe she had waited, with her usual faith that all was for the best;
+only, at present, since the right conditions met, she couldn't help
+feeling that it was quite a luxury, the greatest she had ever tasted.
+Ransom knew why it was that Verena had tears in her eyes as she looked
+up at her patient old friend; she had spoken to him, often, during the
+last three weeks, of the stories Miss Birdseye had told her of the great
+work of her life, her mission, repeated year after year, among the
+Southern blacks. She had gone among them with every precaution, to teach
+them to read and write; she had carried them Bibles and told them of the
+friends they had in the North who prayed for their deliverance. Ransom
+knew that Verena didn't reproduce these legends with a view to making
+him ashamed of his Southern origin, his connexion with people who, in a
+past not yet remote, had made that kind of apostleship necessary; he
+knew this because she had heard what he thought of all that chapter
+himself; he had given her a kind of historical summary of the slavery
+question which left her no room to say that he was more tender to that
+particular example of human imbecility than he was to any other. But she
+had told him that this was what _she_ would have liked to do--to wander,
+alone, with her life in her hand, on an errand of mercy, through a
+country in which society was arrayed against her; she would have liked
+it much better than simply talking about the right from the gas-lighted
+vantage of the New England platform. Ransom had replied simply
+"Balderdash!" it being his theory, as we have perceived, that he knew
+much more about Verena's native bent than the young lady herself. This
+did not, however, as he was perfectly aware, prevent her feeling that
+she had come too late for the heroic age of New England life, and
+regarding Miss Birdseye as a battered, immemorial monument of it. Ransom
+could share such an admiration as that, especially at this moment; he
+had said to Verena, more than once, that he wished he might have met the
+old lady in Carolina or Georgia before the war--shown her round among
+the negroes and talked over New England ideas with her; there were a
+good many he didn't care much about now, but at that time they would
+have been tremendously refreshing. Miss Birdseye had given herself away
+so lavishly all her life that it was rather odd there was anything left
+of her for the supreme surrender. When he looked at Olive he saw that
+she meant to ignore him; and during the few minutes he remained on the
+spot his kinswoman never met his eye. She turned away, indeed, as soon
+as Doctor Prance said, leaning over Miss Birdseye, "I have brought Mr.
+Ransom to you. Don't you remember you asked for him?"
+
+"I am very glad to see you again," Ransom remarked. "It was very good of
+you to think of me." At the sound of his voice Olive rose and left her
+place; she sank into a chair at the other end of the piazza, turning
+round to rest her arms on the back and bury her head in them.
+
+Miss Birdseye looked at the young man still more dimly than she had ever
+done before. "I thought you were gone. You never came back."
+
+"He spends all his time in long walks; he enjoys the country so much,"
+Verena said.
+
+"Well, it's very beautiful, what I see from here. I haven't been strong
+enough to move round since the first days. But I am going to move now."
+She smiled when Ransom made a gesture as if to help her, and added: "Oh,
+I don't mean I am going to move out of my chair."
+
+"Mr. Ransom has been out in a boat with me several times. I have been
+showing him how to cast a line," said Doctor Prance, who appeared to
+deprecate a sentimental tendency.
+
+"Oh, well, then, you have been one of our party; there seems to be every
+reason why you should feel that you belong to us." Miss Birdseye looked
+at the visitor with a sort of misty earnestness, as if she wished to
+communicate with him further; then her glance turned slightly aside; she
+tried to see what had become of Olive. She perceived that Miss
+Chancellor had withdrawn herself, and, closing her eyes, she mused,
+ineffectually, on the mystery she had not grasped, the peculiarity of
+Basil Ransom's relations with her hostess. She was visibly too weak to
+concern herself with it very actively; she only felt, now that she
+seemed really to be going, a desire to reconcile and harmonise. But she
+presently exhaled a low, soft sigh--a kind of confession that it was too
+mixed, that she gave it up. Ransom had feared for a moment that she was
+about to indulge in some appeal to Olive, some attempt to make him join
+hands with that young lady, as a supreme satisfaction to herself. But he
+saw that her strength failed her, and that, besides, things were getting
+less clear to her; to his considerable relief, inasmuch as, though he
+would not have objected to joining hands, the expression of Miss
+Chancellor's figure and her averted face, with their desperate collapse,
+showed him well enough how _she_ would have met such a proposal. What
+Miss Birdseye clung to, with benignant perversity, was the idea that, in
+spite of his exclusion from the house, which was perhaps only the result
+of a certain high-strung jealousy on Olive's part of her friend's other
+personal ties, Verena had drawn him in, had made him sympathise with the
+great reform and desire to work for it. Ransom saw no reason why such an
+illusion should be dear to Miss Birdseye; his contact with her in the
+past had been so momentary that he could not account for her taking an
+interest in his views, in his throwing his weight into the right scale.
+It was part of the general desire for justice that fermented within her,
+the passion for progress; and it was also in some degree her interest in
+Verena--a suspicion, innocent and idyllic, as any such suspicion on Miss
+Birdseye's part must be, that there was something between them, that the
+closest of all unions (as Miss Birdseye at least supposed it was) was
+preparing itself. Then his being a Southerner gave a point to the whole
+thing; to bring round a Southerner would be a real encouragement for one
+who had seen, even at a time when she was already an old woman, what was
+the tone of opinion in the cotton States. Ransom had no wish to
+discourage her, and he bore well in mind the caution Doctor Prance had
+given him about destroying her last theory. He only bowed his head very
+humbly, not knowing what he had done to earn the honour of being the
+subject of it. His eyes met Verena's as she looked up at him from her
+place at Miss Birdseye's feet, and he saw she was following his thought,
+throwing herself into it, and trying to communicate to him a wish. The
+wish touched him immensely; she was dreadfully afraid he would betray
+her to Miss Birdseye--let her know how she had cooled off. Verena was
+ashamed of that now, and trembled at the danger of exposure; her eyes
+adjured him to be careful of what he said. Her tremor made him glow a
+little in return, for it seemed to him the fullest confession of his
+influence she had yet made.
+
+"We have been a very happy little party," she said to the old lady. "It
+is delightful that you should have been able to be with us all these
+weeks."
+
+"It has been a great rest. I am very tired. I can't speak much. It has
+been a lovely time. I have done so much--so many things."
+
+"I guess I wouldn't talk much, Miss Birdseye," said Doctor Prance, who
+had now knelt down on the other side of her. "We know how much you have
+done. Don't you suppose every one knows _your_ life?"
+
+"It isn't much--only I tried to take hold. When I look back from here,
+from where we've sat, I can measure the progress. That's what I wanted
+to say to you and Mr. Ransom--because I'm going fast. Hold on to me,
+that's right; but you can't keep me. I don't want to stay now; I presume
+I shall join some of the others that we lost long ago. Their faces come
+back to me now, quite fresh. It seems as if they might be waiting; as if
+they were all there; as if they wanted to hear. You mustn't think
+there's no progress because you don't see it all right off; that's what
+I wanted to say. It isn't till you have gone a long way that you can
+feel what's been done. That's what I see when I look back from here; I
+see that the community wasn't half waked up when I was young."
+
+"It is you that have waked it up more than any one else, and it's for
+that we honour you, Miss Birdseye!" Verena cried, with a sudden violence
+of emotion. "If you were to live for a thousand years, you would think
+only of others--you would think only of helping on humanity. You are our
+heroine, you are our saint, and there has never been any one like you!"
+Verena had no glance for Ransom now, and there was neither deprecation
+nor entreaty in her face. A wave of contrition, of shame, had swept over
+her--a quick desire to atone for her secret swerving by a renewed
+recognition of the nobleness of such a life as Miss Birdseye's.
+
+"Oh, I haven't effected very much; I have only cared and hoped. You will
+do more than I have ever done--you and Olive Chancellor, because you are
+young and bright, brighter than I ever was; and besides, everything has
+got started."
+
+"Well, you've got started, Miss Birdseye," Doctor Prance remarked, with
+raised eyebrows, protesting dryly but kindly, and putting forward, with
+an air as if, after all, it didn't matter much, an authority that had
+been superseded. The manner in which this competent little woman
+indulged her patient showed sufficiently that the good lady was sinking
+fast.
+
+"We will think of you always, and your name will be sacred to us, and
+that will teach us singleness and devotion," Verena went on, in the same
+tone, still not meeting Ransom's eyes again, and speaking as if she were
+trying now to stop herself, to tie herself by a vow.
+
+"Well, it's the thing you and Olive have given your lives to that has
+absorbed me most, of late years. I did want to see justice done--to us.
+I haven't seen it, but you will. And Olive will. Where is she--why isn't
+she near me, to bid me farewell? And Mr. Ransom will--and he will be
+proud to have helped."
+
+"Oh, mercy, mercy!" cried Verena, burying her head in Miss Birdseye's
+lap.
+
+"You are not mistaken if you think I desire above all things that your
+weakness, your generosity, should be protected," Ransom said, rather
+ambiguously, but with pointed respectfulness. "I shall remember you as
+an example of what women are capable of," he added; and he had no
+subsequent compunctions for the speech, for he thought poor Miss
+Birdseye, for all her absence of profile, essentially feminine.
+
+A kind of frantic moan from Olive Chancellor responded to these words,
+which had evidently struck her as an insolent sarcasm; and at the same
+moment Doctor Prance sent Ransom a glance which was an adjuration to
+depart.
+
+"Good-bye, Olive Chancellor," Miss Birdseye murmured. "I don't want to
+stay, though I should like to see what you will see."
+
+"I shall see nothing but shame and ruin!" Olive shrieked, rushing across
+to her old friend, while Ransom discreetly quitted the scene.
+
+
+
+
+XXXIX
+
+
+He met Doctor Prance in the village the next morning, and as soon as he
+looked at her he saw that the event which had been impending at Miss
+Chancellor's had taken place. It was not that her aspect was funereal;
+but it contained, somehow, an announcement that she had, for the
+present, no more thought to give to casting a line. Miss Birdseye had
+quietly passed away, in the evening, an hour or two after Ransom's
+visit. They had wheeled her chair into the house; there had been nothing
+to do but wait for complete extinction. Miss Chancellor and Miss Tarrant
+had sat by her there, without moving, each of her hands in theirs, and
+she had just melted away, towards eight o'clock. It was a lovely death;
+Doctor Prance intimated that she had never seen any that she thought
+more seasonable. She added that she was a good woman--one of the old
+sort; and that was the only funeral oration that Basil Ransom was
+destined to hear pronounced upon Miss Birdseye. The impression of the
+simplicity and humility of her end remained with him, and he reflected
+more than once, during the days that followed, that the absence of pomp
+and circumstance which had marked her career marked also the
+consecration of her memory. She had been almost celebrated, she had been
+active, earnest, ubiquitous beyond any one else, she had given herself
+utterly to charities and creeds and causes; and yet the only persons,
+apparently, to whom her death made a real difference were three young
+women in a small "frame-house" on Cape Cod. Ransom learned from Doctor
+Prance that her mortal remains were to be committed to their rest in the
+little cemetery at Marmion, in sight of the pretty sea-view she loved to
+gaze at, among old mossy headstones of mariners and fisher-folk. She had
+seen the place when she first came down, when she was able to drive out
+a little, and she had said she thought it must be pleasant to lie there.
+It was not an injunction, a definite request; it had not occurred to
+Miss Birdseye, at the end of her days, to take an exacting line or to
+make, for the first time in eighty years, a personal claim. But Olive
+Chancellor and Verena had put their construction on her appreciation of
+the quietest corner of the striving, suffering world so weary a pilgrim
+of philanthropy had ever beheld.
+
+In the course of the day Ransom received a note of five lines from
+Verena, the purport of which was to tell him that he must not expect to
+see her again for the present; she wished to be very quiet and think
+things over. She added the recommendation that he should leave the
+neighbourhood for three or four days; there were plenty of strange old
+places to see in that part of the country. Ransom meditated deeply on
+this missive, and perceived that he should be guilty of very bad taste
+in not immediately absenting himself. He knew that to Olive Chancellor's
+vision his conduct already wore that stain, and it was useless,
+therefore, for him to consider how he could displease her either less or
+more. But he wished to convey to Verena the impression that he would do
+anything in the wide world to gratify _her_ except give her up, and as
+he packed his valise he had an idea that he was both behaving
+beautifully and showing the finest diplomatic sense. To go away proved
+to himself how secure he felt, what a conviction he had that however she
+might turn and twist in his grasp he held her fast. The emotion she had
+expressed as he stood there before poor Miss Birdseye was only one of
+her instinctive contortions; he had taken due note of that--said to
+himself that a good many more would probably occur before she would be
+quiet. A woman that listens is lost, the old proverb says; and what had
+Verena done for the last three weeks but listen?--not very long each
+day, but with a degree of attention of which her not withdrawing from
+Marmion was the measure. She had not told him that Olive wanted to whisk
+her away, but he had not needed this confidence to know that if she
+stayed on the field it was because she preferred to. She probably had an
+idea she was fighting, but if she should fight no harder than she had
+fought up to now he should continue to take the same view of his
+success. She meant her request that he should go away for a few days as
+something combative; but, decidedly, he scarcely felt the blow. He liked
+to think that he had great tact with women, and he was sure Verena would
+be struck with this quality in reading, in the note he presently
+addressed her in reply to her own, that he had determined to take a
+little run to Provincetown. As there was no one under the rather
+ineffectual roof which sheltered him to whose hand he could entrust the
+billet--at the Marmion hotel one had to be one's own messenger--he
+walked to the village post-office to request that his note should be put
+into Miss Chancellor's box. Here he met Doctor Prance, for a second time
+that day; she had come to deposit the letters by which Olive notified a
+few of Miss Birdseye's friends of the time and place of her obsequies.
+This young lady was shut up with Verena, and Doctor Prance was
+transacting all their business for them. Ransom felt that he made no
+admission that would impugn his estimate of the sex to which she in a
+manner belonged, in reflecting that she would acquit herself of these
+delegated duties with the greatest rapidity and accuracy. He told her he
+was going to absent himself for a few days, and expressed a friendly
+hope that he should find her at Marmion on his return.
+
+Her keen eye gauged him a moment, to see if he were joking; then she
+said, "Well, I presume you think I can do as I like. But I can't."
+
+"You mean you have got to go back to work?"
+
+"Well, yes; my place is empty in the city."
+
+"So is every other place. You had better remain till the end of the
+season."
+
+"It's all one season to me. I want to see my office-slate. I wouldn't
+have stayed so long for any one but her."
+
+"Well, then, good-bye," Ransom said. "I shall always remember our little
+expeditions. And I wish you every professional distinction."
+
+"That's why I want to go back," Doctor Prance replied, with her flat,
+limited manner. He kept her a moment; he wanted to ask her about Verena.
+While he was hesitating how to form his question she remarked, evidently
+wishing to leave him a little memento of her sympathy, "Well, I hope you
+will be able to follow up your views."
+
+"My views, Miss Prance? I am sure I have never mentioned them to you!"
+Then Ransom added, "How is Miss Tarrant to-day? is she more calm?"
+
+"Oh no, she isn't calm at all," Doctor Prance answered, very definitely.
+
+"Do you mean she's excited, emotional?"
+
+"Well, she doesn't talk, she's perfectly still, and so is Miss
+Chancellor. They're as still as two watchers--they don't speak. But you
+can hear the silence vibrate."
+
+"Vibrate?"
+
+"Well, they are very nervous."
+
+Ransom was confident, as I say, yet the effort that he made to extract a
+good omen from this characterisation of the two ladies at the cottage
+was not altogether successful. He would have liked to ask Doctor Prance
+whether she didn't think he might count on Verena in the end; but he was
+too shy for this, the subject of his relations with Miss Tarrant never
+yet having been touched upon between them; and, besides, he didn't care
+to hear himself put a question which was more or less an implication of
+a doubt. So he compromised, with a sort of oblique and general inquiry
+about Olive; that might draw some light. "What do you think of Miss
+Chancellor--how does she strike you?"
+
+Doctor Prance reflected a little, with an apparent consciousness that he
+meant more than he asked. "Well, she's losing flesh," she presently
+replied; and Ransom turned away, not encouraged, and feeling that, no
+doubt, the little doctress had better go back to her office-slate.
+
+He did the thing handsomely, remained at Provincetown a week, inhaling
+the delicious air, smoking innumerable cigars, and lounging among the
+ancient wharves, where the grass grew thick and the impression of fallen
+greatness was still stronger than at Marmion. Like his friends the
+Bostonians he was very nervous; there were days when he felt he must
+rush back to the margin of that mild inlet; the voices of the air
+whispered to him that in his absence he was being outwitted.
+Nevertheless he stayed the time he had determined to stay; quieting
+himself with the reflexion that there was nothing they could do to elude
+him unless, perhaps, they should start again for Europe, which they were
+not likely to do. If Miss Olive tried to hide Verena away in the United
+States he would undertake to find her--though he was obliged to confess
+that a flight to Europe would baffle him, owing to his want of cash for
+pursuit. Nothing, however, was less probable than that they would cross
+the Atlantic on the eve of Verena's projected _début_ at the Music Hall.
+Before he went back to Marmion he wrote to this young lady, to announce
+his reappearance there and let her know that he expected she would come
+out to meet him the morning after. This conveyed the assurance that he
+intended to take as much of the day as he could get; he had had enough
+of the system of dragging through all the hours till a mere fraction of
+time was left before night, and he couldn't wait so long, at any rate,
+the day after his return. It was the afternoon train that had brought
+him back from Provincetown, and in the evening he ascertained that the
+Bostonians had not deserted the field. There were lights in the windows
+of the house under the elms, and he stood where he had stood that
+evening with Doctor Prance and listened to the waves of Verena's voice,
+as she rehearsed her lecture. There were no waves this time, no sounds,
+and no sign of life but the lamps; the place had apparently not ceased
+to be given over to the conscious silence described by Doctor Prance.
+Ransom felt that he gave an immense proof of chivalry in not calling
+upon Verena to grant him an interview on the spot. She had not answered
+his last note, but the next day she kept the tryst, at the hour he had
+proposed; he saw her advance along the road, in a white dress, under a
+big parasol, and again he found himself liking immensely the way she
+walked. He was dismayed, however, at her face and what it portended;
+pale, with red eyes, graver than she had ever been before, she appeared
+to have spent the period of his absence in violent weeping. Yet that it
+was not for him she had been crying was proved by the very first word
+she spoke.
+
+"I only came out to tell you definitely it's impossible! I have thought
+over everything, taking plenty of time--over and over; and that is my
+answer, finally, positively. You must take it--you shall have no other."
+
+Basil Ransom gazed, frowning fearfully. "And why not, pray?"
+
+"Because I can't, I can't, I can't, I can't!" she repeated passionately,
+with her altered, distorted face.
+
+"Damnation!" murmured the young man. He seized her hand, drew it into
+his arm, forcing her to walk with him along the road.
+
+That afternoon Olive Chancellor came out of her house and wandered for a
+long time upon the shore. She looked up and down the bay, at the sails
+that gleamed on the blue water, shifting in the breeze and the light;
+they were a source of interest to her that they had never been before.
+It was a day she was destined never to forget; she felt it to be the
+saddest, the most wounding of her life. Unrest and haunting fear had not
+possession of her now, as they had held her in New York when Basil
+Ransom carried off Verena, to mark her for his own, in the park. But an
+immeasurable load of misery seemed to sit upon her soul; she ached with
+the bitterness of her melancholy, she was dumb and cold with despair.
+She had spent the violence of her terror, the eagerness of her grief,
+and now she was too weary to struggle with fate. She appeared to herself
+almost to have accepted it, as she wandered forth in the beautiful
+afternoon with the knowledge that the "ten minutes" which Verena had
+told her she meant to devote to Mr. Ransom that morning had developed
+suddenly into an embarkation for the day. They had gone out in a boat
+together; one of the village worthies, from whom small craft were to be
+hired, had, at Verena's request, sent his little son to Miss
+Chancellor's cottage with that information. She had not understood
+whether they had taken the boatman with them. Even when the information
+came (and it came at a moment of considerable reassurance), Olive's
+nerves were not ploughed up by it as they had been, for instance, by the
+other expedition, in New York; and she could measure the distance she
+had traversed since then. It had not driven her away on the instant to
+pace the shore in frenzy, to challenge every boat that passed, and beg
+that the young lady who was sailing somewhere in the bay with a dark
+gentleman with long hair should be entreated immediately to return. On
+the contrary, after the first quiver of pain inflicted by the news she
+had been able to occupy herself, to look after her house, to write her
+morning's letters, to go into her accounts, which she had had some time
+on her mind. She had wanted to put off thinking, for she knew to what
+hideous recognitions that would bring her round again. These were summed
+up in the fact that Verena was now not to be trusted for an hour. She
+had sworn to her the night before, with a face like a lacerated angel's,
+that her choice was made, that their union and their work were more to
+her than any other life could ever be, and that she deeply believed that
+should she forswear these holy things she would simply waste away, in
+the end, with remorse and shame. She would see Mr. Ransom just once
+more, for ten minutes, to utter one or two supreme truths to him, and
+then they would take up their old, happy, active, fruitful days again,
+would throw themselves more than ever into their splendid effort. Olive
+had seen how Verena was moved by Miss Birdseye's death, how at the sight
+of that unique woman's majestically simple withdrawal from a scene in
+which she had held every vulgar aspiration, every worldly standard and
+lure, so cheap, the girl had been touched again with the spirit of their
+most confident hours, had flamed up with the faith that no narrow
+personal joy could compare in sweetness with the idea of doing something
+for those who had always suffered and who waited still. This helped
+Olive to believe that she might begin to count upon her again, conscious
+as she was at the same time that Verena had been strangely weakened and
+strained by her odious ordeal. Oh, Olive knew that she loved him--knew
+what the passion was with which the wretched girl had to struggle; and
+she did her the justice to believe that her professions were sincere,
+her effort was real. Harassed and embittered as she was, Olive
+Chancellor still proposed to herself to be rigidly just, and that is why
+she pitied Verena now with an unspeakable pity, regarded her as the
+victim of an atrocious spell, and reserved all her execration and
+contempt for the author of their common misery. If Verena had stepped
+into a boat with him half an hour after declaring that she would give
+him his dismissal in twenty words, that was because he had ways, known
+to himself and other men, of creating situations without an issue, of
+forcing her to do things she could do only with sharp repugnance, under
+the menace of pain that would be sharper still. But all the same, what
+actually stared her in the face was that Verena was not to be trusted,
+even after rallying again as passionately as she had done during the
+days that followed Miss Birdseye's death. Olive would have liked to know
+the pang of penance that _she_ would have been afraid, in her place, to
+incur; to see the locked door which _she_ would not have managed to
+force open!
+
+This inexpressibly mournful sense that, after all, Verena, in her
+exquisite delicacy and generosity, was appointed only to show how women
+had from the beginning of time been the sport of men's selfishness and
+avidity, this dismal conviction accompanied Olive on her walk, which
+lasted all the afternoon, and in which she found a kind of tragic
+relief. She went very far, keeping in the lonely places, unveiling her
+face to the splendid light, which seemed to make a mock of the darkness
+and bitterness of her spirit. There were little sandy coves, where the
+rocks were clean, where she made long stations, sinking down in them as
+if she hoped she should never rise again. It was the first time she had
+been out since Miss Birdseye's death, except the hour when, with the
+dozen sympathisers who came from Boston, she stood by the tired old
+woman's grave. Since then, for three days, she had been writing letters,
+narrating, describing to those who hadn't come; there were some, she
+thought, who might have managed to do so, instead of despatching her
+pages of diffuse reminiscence and asking her for all particulars in
+return. Selah Tarrant and his wife had come, obtrusively, as she
+thought, for they never had had very much intercourse with Miss
+Birdseye; and if it was for Verena's sake, Verena was there to pay every
+tribute herself. Mrs. Tarrant had evidently hoped Miss Chancellor would
+ask her to stay on at Marmion, but Olive felt how little she was in a
+state for such heroics of hospitality. It was precisely in order that
+she should not have to do that sort of thing that she had given Selah
+such considerable sums, on two occasions, at a year's interval. If the
+Tarrants wanted a change of air they could travel all over the
+country--their present means permitted it; they could go to Saratoga or
+Newport if they liked. Their appearance showed that they could put their
+hands into their pockets (or into hers); at least Mrs. Tarrant's did.
+Selah still sported (on a hot day in August) his immemorial waterproof;
+but his wife rustled over the low tombstones at Marmion in garments of
+which (little as she was versed in such inquiries) Olive could see that
+the cost had been large. Besides, after Doctor Prance had gone (when all
+was over), she felt what a relief it was that Verena and she could be
+just together--together with the monstrous wedge of a question that had
+come up between them. That was company enough, great heaven! and she had
+not got rid of such an inmate as Doctor Prance only to put Mrs. Tarrant
+in her place.
+
+Did Verena's strange aberration, on this particular day, suggest to
+Olive that it was no use striving, that the world was all a great trap
+or trick, of which women were ever the punctual dupes, so that it was
+the worst of the curse that rested upon them that they must most
+humiliate those who had most their cause at heart? Did she say to
+herself that their weakness was not only lamentable but hideous--hideous
+their predestined subjection to man's larger and grosser insistence? Did
+she ask herself why she should give up her life to save a sex which,
+after all, didn't wish to be saved, and which rejected the truth even
+after it had bathed them with its auroral light and they had pretended
+to be fed and fortified? These are mysteries into which I shall not
+attempt to enter, speculations with which I have no concern; it is
+sufficient for us to know that all human effort had never seemed to her
+so barren and thankless as on that fatal afternoon. Her eyes rested on
+the boats she saw in the distance, and she wondered if in one of them
+Verena were floating to her fate; but so far from straining forward to
+beckon her home she almost wished that she might glide away for ever,
+that _she_ might never see her again, never undergo the horrible details
+of a more deliberate separation. Olive lived over, in her miserable
+musings, her life for the last two years; she knew, again, how noble and
+beautiful her scheme had been, but how it had all rested on an illusion
+of which the very thought made her feel faint and sick. What was before
+her now was the reality, with the beautiful, indifferent sky pouring
+down its complacent rays upon it. The reality was simply that Verena had
+been more to her than she ever was to Verena, and that, with her
+exquisite natural art, the girl had cared for their cause only because,
+for the time, no interest, no fascination, was greater. Her talent, the
+talent which was to achieve such wonders, was nothing to her; it was too
+easy, she could leave it alone, as she might close her piano, for
+months; it was only to Olive that it was everything. Verena had
+submitted, she had responded, she had lent herself to Olive's incitement
+and exhortation, because she was sympathetic and young and abundant and
+fanciful; but it had been a kind of hothouse loyalty, the mere contagion
+of example, and a sentiment springing up from within had easily breathed
+a chill upon it. Did Olive ask herself whether, for so many months, her
+companion had been only the most unconscious and most successful of
+humbugs? Here again I must plead a certain incompetence to give an
+answer. Positive it is that she spared herself none of the inductions of
+a reverie that seemed to dry up the mists and ambiguities of life. These
+hours of backward clearness come to all men and women, once at least,
+when they read the past in the light of the present, with the reasons of
+things, like unobserved finger-posts, protruding where they never saw
+them before. The journey behind them is mapped out and figured, with its
+false steps, its wrong observations, all its infatuated, deluded
+geography. They understand as Olive understood, but it is probable that
+they rarely suffer as she suffered. The sense of regret for her baffled
+calculations burned within her like a fire, and the splendour of the
+vision over which the curtain of mourning now was dropped brought to her
+eyes slow, still tears, tears that came one by one, neither easing her
+nerves nor lightening her load of pain. She thought of her innumerable
+talks with Verena, of the pledges they had exchanged, of their earnest
+studies, their faithful work, their certain reward, the winter nights
+under the lamp, when they thrilled with previsions as just and a passion
+as high as had ever found shelter in a pair of human hearts. The pity of
+it, the misery of such a fall after such a flight, could express itself
+only, as the poor girl prolonged the vague pauses of her unnoticed
+ramble, in a low, inarticulate murmur of anguish.
+
+The afternoon waned, bringing with it the slight chill which, at the
+summer's end, begins to mark the shortening days. She turned her face
+homeward, and by this time became conscious that if Verena's companion
+had not yet brought her back there might be ground for uneasiness as to
+what had happened to them. It seemed to her that no sail-boat could have
+put into the town without passing more or less before her eyes and
+showing her whom it carried; she had seen a dozen, freighted only with
+the figures of men. An accident was perfectly possible (what could
+Ransom, with his plantation habits, know about the management of a
+sail?), and once that danger loomed before her--the signal loveliness of
+the weather had prevented its striking her before--Olive's imagination
+hurried, with a bound, to the worst. She saw the boat overturned and
+drifting out to sea, and (after a week of nameless horror) the body of
+an unknown young woman, defaced beyond recognition, but with long auburn
+hair and in a white dress, washed up in some far-away cove. An hour
+before, her mind had rested with a sort of relief on the idea that
+Verena should sink for ever beneath the horizon, so that their
+tremendous trouble might never be; but now, with the lateness of the
+hour, a sharp, immediate anxiety took the place of that intended
+resignation; and she quickened her step, with a heart that galloped too
+as she went. Then it was, above all, that she felt how _she_ had
+understood friendship, and how never again to see the face of the
+creature she had taken to her soul would be for her as the stroke of
+blindness. The twilight had become thick by the time she reached Marmion
+and paused for an instant in front of her house, over which the elms
+that stood on the grassy wayside appeared to her to hang a blacker
+curtain than ever before.
+
+There was no candle in any window, and when she pushed in and stood in
+the hall, listening a moment, her step awakened no answering sound. Her
+heart failed her; Verena's staying out in a boat from ten o'clock in the
+morning till nightfall was too unnatural, and she gave a cry, as she
+rushed into the low, dim parlour (darkened on one side, at that hour, by
+the wide-armed foliage, and on the other by the veranda and trellis),
+which expressed only a wild personal passion, a desire to take her
+friend in her arms again on any terms, even the most cruel to herself.
+The next moment she started back, with another and a different
+exclamation, for Verena was in the room, motionless, in a corner--the
+first place in which she had seated herself on re-entering the
+house--looking at her with a silent face which seemed strange,
+unnatural, in the dusk. Olive stopped short, and for a minute the two
+women remained as they were, gazing at each other in the dimness. After
+that, too, Olive still said nothing; she only went to Verena and sat
+down beside her. She didn't know what to make of her manner; she had
+never been like that before. She was unwilling to speak; she seemed
+crushed and humbled. This was almost the worst--if anything could be
+worse than what had gone before; and Olive took her hand with an
+irresistible impulse of compassion and assurance. From the way it lay in
+her own she guessed her whole feeling--saw it was a kind of shame, shame
+for her weakness, her swift surrender, her insane gyration, in the
+morning. Verena expressed it by no protest and no explanation; she
+appeared not even to wish to hear the sound of her own voice. Her
+silence itself was an appeal--an appeal to Olive to ask no questions
+(she could trust her to inflict no spoken reproach); only to wait till
+she could lift up her head again. Olive understood, or thought she
+understood, and the woefulness of it all only seemed the deeper. She
+would just sit there and hold her hand; that was all she could do; they
+were beyond each other's help in any other way now. Verena leaned her
+head back and closed her eyes, and for an hour, as nightfall settled in
+the room, neither of the young women spoke. Distinctly, it was a kind of
+shame. After a while the parlour-maid, very casual, in the manner of the
+servants at Marmion, appeared on the threshold with a lamp; but Olive
+motioned her frantically away. She wished to keep the darkness. It was a
+kind of shame.
+
+The next morning Basil Ransom rapped loudly with his walking-stick on
+the lintel of Miss Chancellor's house-door, which, as usual on fine
+days, stood open. There was no need he should wait till the servant had
+answered his summons; for Olive, who had reason to believe he would
+come, and who had been lurking in the sitting-room for a purpose of her
+own, stepped forth into the little hall.
+
+"I am sorry to disturb you; I had the hope that--for a moment--I might
+see Miss Tarrant." That was the speech with which (and a measured
+salutation) he greeted his advancing kinswoman. She faced him an
+instant, and her strange green eyes caught the light.
+
+"It's impossible. You may believe that when I say it."
+
+"Why is it impossible?" he asked, smiling in spite of an inward
+displeasure. And as Olive gave him no answer, only gazing at him with a
+cold audacity which he had not hitherto observed in her, he added a
+little explanation. "It is simply to have seen her before I go--to have
+said five words to her. I want her to know that I have made up my
+mind--since yesterday--to leave this place; I shall take the train at
+noon."
+
+It was not to gratify Olive Chancellor that he had determined to go
+away, or even that he told her this; yet he was surprised that his words
+brought no expression of pleasure to her face. "I don't think it is of
+much importance whether you go away or not. Miss Tarrant herself has
+gone away."
+
+"Miss Tarrant--gone away?" This announcement was so much at variance
+with Verena's apparent intentions the night before that his ejaculation
+expressed chagrin as well as surprise, and in doing so it gave Olive a
+momentary advantage. It was the only one she had ever had, and the poor
+girl may be excused for having enjoyed it--so far as enjoyment was
+possible to her. Basil Ransom's visible discomfiture was more agreeable
+to her than anything had been for a long time.
+
+"I went with her myself to the early train; and I saw it leave the
+station." And Olive kept her eyes unaverted, for the satisfaction of
+seeing how he took it.
+
+It must be confessed that he took it rather ill. He had decided it was
+best he should retire, but Verena's retiring was another matter. "And
+where is she gone?" he asked, with a frown.
+
+"I don't think I am obliged to tell you."
+
+"Of course not! Excuse my asking. It is much better that I should find
+it out for myself, because if I owed the information to you I should
+perhaps feel a certain delicacy as regards profiting by it."
+
+"Gracious heaven!" cried Miss Chancellor, at the idea of Ransom's
+delicacy. Then she added more deliberately: "You will not find out for
+yourself."
+
+"You think not?"
+
+"I am sure of it!" And her enjoyment of the situation becoming acute,
+there broke from her lips a shrill, unfamiliar, troubled sound, which
+performed the office of a laugh, a laugh of triumph, but which, at a
+distance, might have passed almost as well for a wail of despair. It
+rang in Ransom's ears as he quickly turned away.
+
+
+
+
+XL
+
+
+It was Mrs. Luna who received him, as she had received him on the
+occasion of his first visit to Charles Street; by which I do not mean
+quite in the same way. She had known very little about him then, but she
+knew too much for her happiness to-day, and she had with him now a
+little invidious, contemptuous manner, as if everything he should say or
+do could be a proof only of abominable duplicity and perversity. She had
+a theory that he had treated her shamefully; and he knew it--I do not
+mean the fact, but the theory: which led him to reflect that her
+resentments were as shallow as her opinions, inasmuch as if she really
+believed in her grievance, or if it had had any dignity, she would not
+have consented to see him. He had not presented himself at Miss
+Chancellor's door without a very good reason, and having done so he
+could not turn away so long as there was any one in the house of whom he
+might have speech. He had sent up his name to Mrs. Luna, after being
+told that she was staying there, on the mere chance that she would see
+him; for he thought a refusal a very possible sequel to the letters she
+had written him during the past four or five months--letters he had
+scarcely read, full of allusions of the most cutting sort to proceedings
+of his, in the past, of which he had no recollection whatever. They
+bored him, for he had quite other matters in his mind.
+
+"I don't wonder you have the bad taste, the crudity," she said, as soon
+as he came into the room, looking at him more sternly than he would have
+believed possible to her.
+
+He saw that this was an allusion to his not having been to see her since
+the period of her sister's visit to New York; he having conceived for
+her, the evening of Mrs. Burrage's party, a sentiment of aversion which
+put an end to such attentions. He didn't laugh, he was too worried and
+preoccupied; but he replied, in a tone which apparently annoyed her as
+much as any indecent mirth: "I thought it very possible you wouldn't see
+me."
+
+"Why shouldn't I see you, if I should take it into my head? Do you
+suppose I care whether I see you or not?"
+
+"I supposed you wanted to, from your letters."
+
+"Then why did you think I would refuse?"
+
+"Because that's the sort of thing women do."
+
+"Women--women! You know much about them!"
+
+"I am learning something every day."
+
+"You haven't learned yet, apparently, to answer their letters. It's
+rather a surprise to me that you don't pretend not to have received
+mine."
+
+Ransom could smile now; the opportunity to vent the exasperation that
+had been consuming him almost restored his good humour. "What could I
+say? You overwhelmed me. Besides, I did answer one of them."
+
+"One of them? You speak as if I had written you a dozen!" Mrs. Luna
+cried.
+
+"I thought that was your contention--that you had done me the honour to
+address me so many. They were crushing, and when a man's crushed, it's
+all over."
+
+"Yes, you look as if you were in very small pieces! I am glad that I
+shall never see you again."
+
+"I can see now why you received me--to tell me that," Ransom said.
+
+"It is a kind of pleasure. I am going back to Europe."
+
+"Really? for Newton's education?"
+
+"Ah, I wonder you can have the face to speak of that--after the way you
+deserted him!"
+
+"Let us abandon the subject, then, and I will tell you what I want."
+
+"I don't in the least care what you want," Mrs. Luna remarked. "And you
+haven't even the grace to ask me where I am going--over there."
+
+"What difference does that make to me--once you leave these shores?"
+
+Mrs. Luna rose to her feet. "Ah, chivalry, chivalry!" she exclaimed. And
+she walked away to the window--one of the windows from which Ransom had
+first enjoyed, at Olive's solicitation, the view of the Back Bay. Mrs.
+Luna looked forth at it with little of the air of a person who was sorry
+to be about to lose it. "I am determined you shall know where I am
+going," she said in a moment. "I am going to Florence."
+
+"Don't be afraid!" he replied. "I shall go to Rome."
+
+"And you'll carry there more impertinence than has been seen there since
+the old emperors."
+
+"Were the emperors impertinent, in addition to their other vices? I am
+determined, on my side, that you shall know what I have come for,"
+Ransom said. "I wouldn't ask you if I could ask any one else; but I am
+very hard pressed, and I don't know who can help me."
+
+Mrs. Luna turned on him a face of the frankest derision. "Help you? Do
+you remember the last time I asked you to help me?"
+
+"That evening at Mrs. Burrage's? Surely I wasn't wanting then; I
+remember urging on your acceptance a chair, so that you might stand on
+it, to see and to hear."
+
+"To see and to hear what, please? Your disgusting infatuation!"
+
+"It's just about that I want to speak to you," Ransom pursued. "As you
+already know all about it, you have no new shock to receive, and I
+therefore venture to ask you----"
+
+"Where tickets for her lecture to-night can be obtained? Is it possible
+she hasn't sent you one?"
+
+"I assure you I didn't come to Boston to hear it," said Ransom, with a
+sadness which Mrs. Luna evidently regarded as a refinement of outrage.
+"What I should like to ascertain is where Miss Tarrant may be found at
+the present moment."
+
+"And do you think that's a delicate inquiry to make of _me_?"
+
+"I don't see why it shouldn't be, but I know you don't think it is, and
+that is why, as I say, I mention the matter to you only because I can
+imagine absolutely no one else who is in a position to assist me. I have
+been to the house of Miss Tarrant's parents, in Cambridge, but it is
+closed and empty, destitute of any sign of life. I went there first, on
+arriving this morning, and rang at this door only when my journey to
+Monadnoc Place had proved fruitless. Your sister's servant told me that
+Miss Tarrant was not staying here, but she added that Mrs. Luna was. No
+doubt you won't be pleased at having been spoken of as a sort of
+equivalent; and I didn't say to myself--or to the servant--that you
+would do as well; I only reflected that I could at least try you. I
+didn't even ask for Miss Chancellor, as I am sure she would give me no
+information whatever."
+
+Mrs. Luna listened to this candid account of the young man's proceedings
+with her head turned a little over her shoulder at him, and her eyes
+fixed as unsympathetically as possible upon his own. "What you propose,
+then, as I understand it," she said in a moment, "is that I should
+betray my sister to you."
+
+"Worse than that; I propose that you should betray Miss Tarrant
+herself."
+
+"What do I care about Miss Tarrant? I don't know what you are talking
+about."
+
+"Haven't you really any idea where she is living? Haven't you seen her
+here? Are Miss Olive and she not constantly together?"
+
+Mrs. Luna, at this, turned full round upon him, and, with folded arms
+and her head tossed back, exclaimed: "Look here, Basil Ransom, I never
+thought you were a fool, but it strikes me that since we last met you
+have lost your wits!"
+
+"There is no doubt of that," Ransom answered, smiling.
+
+"Do you mean to tell me you don't know everything about Miss Tarrant
+that can be known?"
+
+"I have neither seen her nor heard of her for the last ten weeks; Miss
+Chancellor has hidden her away."
+
+"Hidden her away, with all the walls and fences of Boston flaming to-day
+with her name?"
+
+"Oh yes, I have noticed that, and I have no doubt that by waiting till
+this evening I shall be able to see her. But I don't want to wait till
+this evening; I want to see her now, and not in public--in private."
+
+"Do you indeed?--how interesting!" cried Mrs. Luna, with rippling
+laughter. "And pray what do you want to do with her?"
+
+Ransom hesitated a little. "I think I would rather not tell you."
+
+"Your charming frankness, then, has its limits! My poor cousin, you are
+really too _naïf_. Do you suppose it matters a straw to me?"
+
+Ransom made no answer to this appeal, but after an instant he broke out:
+"Honestly, Mrs. Luna, can you give me no clue?"
+
+"Lord, what terrible eyes you make, and what terrible words you use!
+'Honestly,' quoth he! Do you think I am so fond of the creature that I
+want to keep her all to myself?"
+
+"I don't know; I don't understand," said Ransom, slowly and softly, but
+still with his terrible eyes.
+
+"And do you think I understand any better? You are not a very edifying
+young man," Mrs. Luna went on; "but I really think you have deserved a
+better fate than to be jilted and thrown over by a girl of that class."
+
+"I haven't been jilted. I like her very much, but she never encouraged
+me."
+
+At this Mrs. Luna broke again into articulate scoffing. "It is very odd
+that at your age you should be so little a man of the world!"
+
+Ransom made her no other answer than to remark, thoughtfully and rather
+absently: "Your sister is really very clever."
+
+"By which you mean, I suppose, that I am not!" Mrs. Luna suddenly
+changed her tone, and said, with the greatest sweetness and humility:
+"God knows, I have never pretended to be!"
+
+Ransom looked at her a moment, and guessed the meaning of this altered
+note. It had suddenly come over her that with her portrait in half the
+shop-fronts, her advertisement on all the fences, and the great occasion
+on which she was to reveal herself to the country at large close at
+hand, Verena had become so conscious of high destinies that her dear
+friend's Southern kinsman really appeared to her very small game, and
+she might therefore be regarded as having cast him off. If this were the
+case, it would perhaps be well for Mrs. Luna still to hold on. Basil's
+induction was very rapid, but it gave him time to decide that the best
+thing to say to his interlocutress was: "On what day do you sail for
+Europe?"
+
+"Perhaps I shall not sail at all," Mrs. Luna replied, looking out of the
+window.
+
+"And in that case--poor Newton's education?"
+
+"I should try to content myself with a country which has given you
+yours."
+
+"Don't you want him, then, to be a man of the world?"
+
+"Ah, the world, the world!" she murmured, while she watched, in the
+deepening dusk, the lights of the town begin to reflect themselves in
+the Back Bay. "Has it been such a source of happiness to me that I
+belong to it?"
+
+"Perhaps, after all, I shall be able to go to Florence!" said Ransom,
+laughing.
+
+She faced him once more, this time slowly, and declared that she had
+never known anything so strange as his state of mind--she would be so
+glad to have an explanation of it. With the opinions he professed (it
+was for them she had liked him--she didn't like his character), why on
+earth should he be running after a little fifth-rate _poseuse_, and in
+such a frenzy to get hold of her? He might say it was none of her
+business, and of course she would have no answer to that; therefore she
+admitted that she asked simply out of intellectual curiosity, and
+because one always was tormented at the sight of a painful
+contradiction. With the things she had heard him say about his
+convictions and theories, his view of life and the great questions of
+the future, she should have thought he would find Miss Tarrant's
+attitudinising absolutely nauseous. Were not her views the same as
+Olive's and hadn't Olive and he signally failed to hit it off together?
+Mrs. Luna only asked because she was really quite puzzled. "Don't you
+know that some minds, when they see a mystery, can't rest till they
+clear it up?"
+
+"You can't be more puzzled than I am," said Ransom. "Apparently the
+explanation is to be found in a sort of reversal of the formula you were
+so good, just now, as to apply to me. You like my opinions, but you
+entertain a different sentiment for my character. I deplore Miss
+Tarrant's opinions, but her character--well, her character pleases me."
+
+Mrs. Luna stared, as if she were waiting, the explanation surely not
+being complete. "But as much as that?" she inquired.
+
+"As much as what?" said Ransom, smiling. Then he added, "Your sister has
+beaten me."
+
+"I thought she had beaten some one of late; she has seemed so gay and
+happy. I didn't suppose it was _all_ because I was going away."
+
+"Has she seemed very gay?" Ransom inquired, with a sinking of the heart.
+He wore such a long face, as he asked this question, that Mrs. Luna was
+again moved to audible mirth, after which she explained:
+
+"Of course I mean gay for her. Everything is relative. With her
+impatience for this lecture of her friend's to-night, she's in an
+unspeakable state! She can't sit still for three minutes, she goes out
+fifteen times a day, and there has been enough arranging and
+interviewing, and discussing and telegraphing and advertising, enough
+wire-pulling and rushing about, to put an army in the field. What is it
+they are always doing to the armies in Europe?--mobilising them? Well,
+Verena has been mobilised, and this has been headquarters."
+
+"And shall you go to the Music Hall to-night?"
+
+"For what do you take me? I have no desire to be shrieked at for an
+hour."
+
+"No doubt, no doubt, Miss Olive must be in a state," Ransom went on,
+rather absently. Then he said, with abruptness, in a different tone: "If
+this house has been, as you say, headquarters, how comes it you haven't
+seen her?"
+
+"Seen Olive? I have seen nothing else!"
+
+"I mean Miss Tarrant. She must be somewhere--in the place--if she's to
+speak to-night."
+
+"Should you like me to go out and look for her? _Il ne manquerait plus
+que cela!_" cried Mrs. Luna. "What's the matter with you, Basil Ransom,
+and what are you after?" she demanded, with considerable sharpness. She
+had tried haughtiness and she had tried humility, but they brought her
+equally face to face with a competitor whom she couldn't take seriously,
+yet who was none the less objectionable for all that.
+
+I know not whether Ransom would have attempted to answer her question
+had an obstacle not presented itself; at any rate, at the moment she
+spoke, the curtain in the doorway was pushed aside, and a visitor
+crossed the threshold. "Mercy! how provoking!" Mrs. Luna exclaimed,
+audibly enough; and without moving from her place she bent an
+uncharitable eye upon the invader, a gentleman whom Ransom had the sense
+of having met before. He was a young man with a fresh face and abundant
+locks, prematurely white; he stood smiling at Mrs. Luna, quite undaunted
+by the absence of any demonstration in his favour. She looked as if she
+didn't know him, while Ransom prepared to depart, leaving them to settle
+it together.
+
+"I'm afraid you don't remember me, though I have seen you before," said
+the young man, very amiably. "I was here a week ago, and Miss Chancellor
+presented me to you."
+
+"Oh yes; she's not at home now," Mrs. Luna returned vaguely.
+
+"So I was told--but I didn't let that prevent me." And the young man
+included Basil Ransom in the smile with which he made himself more
+welcome than Mrs. Luna appeared disposed to make him, and by which he
+seemed to call attention to his superiority. "There is a matter on which
+I want very much to obtain some information, and I have no doubt you
+will be so good as to give it to me."
+
+"It comes back to me--you have something to do with the newspapers,"
+said Mrs. Luna; and Ransom too, by this time, had placed the young man
+among his reminiscences. He had been at Miss Birdseye's famous party,
+and Doctor Prance had there described him as a brilliant journalist.
+
+It was quite with the air of such a personage that he accepted Mrs.
+Luna's definition, and he continued to radiate towards Ransom (as if, in
+return, he remembered _his_ face), while he dropped, confidentially, the
+word that expressed everything--"The _Vesper_, don't you know?" Then he
+went on: "Now, Mrs. Luna, I don't care, I'm not going to let you off! We
+want the last news about Miss Verena, and it has got to come out of this
+house."
+
+"Oh murder!" Ransom muttered, beneath his breath, taking up his hat.
+
+"Miss Chancellor has hidden her away; I have been scouring the city in
+search of her, and her own father hasn't seen her for a week. We have
+got his ideas; they are very easy to get, but that isn't what we want."
+
+"And what do you want?" Ransom was now impelled to inquire, as Mr.
+Pardon (even the name at present came back to him) appeared sufficiently
+to have introduced himself.
+
+"We want to know how she feels about to-night; what report she makes of
+her nerves, her anticipations; how she looked, what she had on, up to
+six o'clock. Gracious! if I could see her I should know what I wanted,
+and so would she, I guess!" Mr. Pardon exclaimed. "You must know
+something, Mrs. Luna; it isn't natural you shouldn't. I won't inquire
+any further where she is, because that might seem a little pushing, if
+she does wish to withdraw herself--though I am bound to say I think she
+makes a mistake; we could work up these last hours for her! But can't
+you tell me any little personal items--the sort of thing the people
+like? What is she going to have for supper? or is she going to
+speak--a--without previous nourishment?"
+
+"Really, sir, I don't know, and I don't in the least care; I have
+nothing to do with the business!" Mrs. Luna cried angrily.
+
+The reporter stared; then, eagerly, "You have nothing to do with it--you
+take an unfavourable view, you protest?" And he was already feeling in a
+side-pocket for his notebook.
+
+"Mercy on us! are you going to put _that_ in the paper?" Mrs. Luna
+exclaimed; and in spite of the sense, detestable to him, that everything
+he wished most to avert was fast closing over the girl, Ransom broke
+into cynical laughter.
+
+"Ah, but do protest, madam; let us at least have that fragment!" Mr.
+Pardon went on. "A protest from this house would be a charming note. We
+_must_ have it--we've got nothing else! The public are almost as much
+interested in your sister as they are in Miss Verena; they know to what
+extent she has backed her: and I should be so delighted (I see the
+heading, from here, so attractive!) just to take down 'What Miss
+Chancellor's Family Think about It!'"
+
+Mrs. Luna sank into the nearest chair, with a groan, covering her face
+with her hands. "Heaven help me, I am glad I am going to Europe!"
+
+"That is another little item--everything counts," said Matthias Pardon,
+making a rapid entry in his tablets. "May I inquire whether you are
+going to Europe in consequence of your disapproval of your sister's
+views?"
+
+Mrs. Luna sprang up again, almost snatching the memoranda out of his
+hand. "If you have the impertinence to publish a word about me, or to
+mention my name in print, I will come to your office and make such a
+scene!"
+
+"Dearest lady, that would be a godsend!" Mr. Pardon cried
+enthusiastically; but he put his notebook back into his pocket.
+
+"Have you made an exhaustive search for Miss Tarrant?" Basil Ransom
+asked of him. Mr. Pardon, at this inquiry, eyed him with a sudden,
+familiar archness, expressive of the idea of competition; so that Ransom
+added: "You needn't be afraid, I'm not a reporter."
+
+"I didn't know but what you had come on from New York."
+
+"So I have--but not as the representative of a newspaper."
+
+"Fancy his taking you----" Mrs. Luna murmured, with indignation.
+
+"Well, I have been everywhere I could think of," Mr. Pardon remarked. "I
+have been hunting round after your sister's agent, but I haven't been
+able to catch up with him; I suppose he has been hunting on his side.
+Miss Chancellor told me--Mrs. Luna may remember it--that she shouldn't
+be here at all during the week, and that she preferred not to tell me
+either where or how she was to spend her time until the momentous
+evening. Of course I let her know that I should find out if I could, and
+you may remember," he said to Mrs. Luna, "the conversation we had on the
+subject. I remarked, candidly, that if they didn't look out they would
+overdo the quietness. Doctor Tarrant has felt very low about it.
+However, I have done what I could with the material at my command, and
+the _Vesper_ has let the public know that her whereabouts was the
+biggest mystery of the season. It's difficult to get round the
+_Vesper_."
+
+"I am almost afraid to open my lips in your presence," Mrs. Luna broke
+in, "but I must say that I think my sister was strangely communicative.
+She told you ever so much that I wouldn't have breathed."
+
+"I should like to try you with something you know!" Matthias Pardon
+returned imperturbably. "This isn't a fair trial, because you don't
+know. Miss Chancellor came round--came round considerably, there's no
+doubt of that; because a year or two ago she was terribly
+unapproachable. If I have mollified her, madam, why shouldn't I mollify
+you? She realises that I can help her now, and as I ain't rancorous I am
+willing to help her all she'll let me. The trouble is, she won't let me
+enough, yet; it seems as if she couldn't believe it of me. At any rate,"
+he pursued, addressing himself more particularly to Ransom, "half an
+hour ago, at the Hall, they knew nothing whatever about Miss Tarrant,
+beyond the fact that about a month ago she came there, with Miss
+Chancellor, to try her voice, which rang all over the place, like
+silver, and that Miss Chancellor guaranteed her absolute punctuality
+to-night."
+
+"Well, that's all that is required," said Ransom, at hazard; and he put
+out his hand, in farewell, to Mrs. Luna.
+
+"Do you desert me already?" she demanded, giving him a glance which
+would have embarrassed any spectator but a reporter of the _Vesper_.
+
+"I have fifty things to do; you must excuse me." He was nervous,
+restless, his heart was beating much faster than usual; he couldn't
+stand still, and he had no compunction whatever about leaving her to get
+rid, by herself, of Mr. Pardon.
+
+This gentleman continued to mix in the conversation, possibly from the
+hope that if he should linger either Miss Tarrant or Miss Chancellor
+would make her appearance. "Every seat in the Hall is sold; the crowd is
+expected to be immense. When our Boston public _does_ take an idea!" Mr.
+Pardon exclaimed.
+
+Ransom only wanted to get away, and in order to facilitate his release
+by implying that in such a case he should see her again, he said to Mrs.
+Luna, rather hypocritically, from the threshold, "You had really better
+come to-night."
+
+"I am not like the Boston public--I don't take an idea!" she replied.
+
+"Do you mean to say you are not going?" cried Mr. Pardon, with widely
+open eyes, clapping his hand again to his pocket. "Don't you regard her
+as a wonderful genius?"
+
+Mrs. Luna was sorely tried, and the vexation of seeing Ransom slip away
+from her with his thoughts visibly on Verena, leaving her face to face
+with the odious newspaper man, whose presence made passionate protest
+impossible--the annoyance of seeing everything and every one mock at her
+and fail to compensate her was such that she lost her head, while
+rashness leaped to her lips and jerked out the answer--"No indeed; I
+think her a vulgar idiot!"
+
+"Ah, madam, I should never permit myself to print that!" Ransom heard
+Mr. Pardon rejoin reproachfully, as he dropped the _portière_ of the
+drawing-room.
+
+
+
+
+XLI
+
+
+He walked about for the next two hours, walked all over Boston, heedless
+of his course, and conscious only of an unwillingness to return to his
+hotel and an inability to eat his dinner or rest his weary legs. He had
+been roaming in very much the same desperate fashion, at once eager and
+purposeless, for many days before he left New York, and he knew that his
+agitation and suspense must wear themselves out. At present they pressed
+him more than ever; they had become tremendously acute. The early dusk
+of the last half of November had gathered thick, but the evening was
+fine and the lighted streets had the animation and variety of a winter
+that had begun with brilliancy. The shop-fronts glowed through frosty
+panes, the passers bustled on the pavement, the bells of the street-cars
+jangled in the cold air, the newsboys hawked the evening papers, the
+vestibules of the theatres, illuminated and flanked with coloured
+posters and the photographs of actresses, exhibited seductively their
+swinging doors of red leather or baize, spotted with little brass nails.
+Behind great plates of glass the interior of the hotels became visible,
+with marble-paved lobbies, white with electric lamps, and columns, and
+Westerners on divans stretching their legs, while behind a counter, set
+apart and covered with an array of periodicals and novels in paper
+covers, little boys, with the faces of old men, showing plans of the
+play-houses and offering librettos, sold orchestra-chairs at a premium.
+When from time to time Ransom paused at a corner, hesitating which way
+to drift, he looked up and saw the stars, sharp and near, scintillating
+over the town. Boston seemed to him big and full of nocturnal life, very
+much awake and preparing for an evening of pleasure.
+
+He passed and repassed the Music Hall, saw Verena immensely advertised,
+gazed down the vista, the approach for pedestrians, which leads out of
+School Street, and thought it looked expectant and ominous. People had
+not begun to enter yet, but the place was ready, lighted and open, and
+the interval would be only too short. So it appeared to Ransom, while at
+the same time he wished immensely the crisis were over. Everything that
+surrounded him referred itself to the idea with which his mind was
+palpitating, the question whether he might not still intervene as
+against the girl's jump into the abyss. He believed that all Boston was
+going to hear her, or that at least every one was whom he saw in the
+streets; and there was a kind of incentive and inspiration in this
+thought. The vision of wresting her from the mighty multitude set him
+off again, to stride through the population that would fight for her. It
+was not too late, for he felt strong; it would not be too late even if
+she should already stand there before thousands of converging eyes. He
+had had his ticket since the morning, and now the time was going on. He
+went back to his hotel at last for ten minutes, and refreshed himself by
+dressing a little and by drinking a glass of wine. Then he took his way
+once more to the Music Hall, and saw that people were beginning to go
+in--the first drops of the great stream, among whom there were many
+women. Since seven o'clock the minutes had moved fast--before that they
+had dragged--and now there was only half an hour. Ransom passed in with
+the others; he knew just where his seat was; he had chosen it, on
+reaching Boston, from the few that were left, with what he believed to
+be care. But now, as he stood beneath the far-away panelled roof,
+stretching above the line of little tongues of flame which marked its
+junction with the walls, he felt that this didn't matter much, since he
+certainly was not going to subside into his place. He was not one of the
+audience; he was apart, unique, and had come on a business altogether
+special. It wouldn't have mattered if, in advance, he had got no place
+at all and had just left himself to pay for standing-room at the last.
+The people came pouring in, and in a very short time there would only be
+standing-room left. Ransom had no definite plan; he had mainly wanted to
+get inside of the building, so that, on a view of the field, he might
+make up his mind. He had never been in the Music Hall before, and its
+lofty vaults and rows of overhanging balconies made it to his
+imagination immense and impressive. There were two or three moments
+during which he felt as he could imagine a young man to feel who,
+waiting in a public place, has made up his mind, for reasons of his own,
+to discharge a pistol at the king or the president.
+
+The place struck him with a kind of Roman vastness; the doors which
+opened out of the upper balconies, high aloft, and which were constantly
+swinging to and fro with the passage of spectators and ushers, reminded
+him of the _vomitoria_ that he had read about in descriptions of the
+Colosseum. The huge organ, the background of the stage--a stage occupied
+with tiers of seats for choruses and civic worthies--lifted to the dome
+its shining pipes and sculptured pinnacles, and some genius of music or
+oratory erected himself in monumental bronze at the base. The hall was
+so capacious and serious, and the audience increased so rapidly without
+filling it, giving Ransom a sense of the numbers it would contain when
+it was packed, that the courage of the two young women, face to face
+with so tremendous an ordeal, hovered before him as really sublime,
+especially the conscious tension of poor Olive, who would have been
+spared none of the anxieties and tremors, none of the previsions of
+accident or calculations of failure. In the front of the stage was a
+slim, high desk, like a music-stand, with a cover of red velvet, and
+near it was a light ornamental chair, on which he was sure Verena would
+not seat herself, though he could fancy her leaning at moments on the
+back. Behind this was a kind of semicircle of a dozen arm-chairs, which
+had evidently been arranged for the friends of the speaker, her sponsors
+and patrons. The hall was more and more full of premonitory sounds;
+people making a noise as they unfolded, on hinges, their seats, and
+itinerant boys, whose voices as they cried out "Photographs of Miss
+Tarrant--sketch of her life!" or "Portraits of the Speaker--story of her
+career!" sounded small and piping in the general immensity. Before
+Ransom was aware of it several of the arm-chairs, in the row behind the
+lecturer's desk, were occupied, with gaps, and in a moment he
+recognised, even across the interval, three of the persons who had
+appeared. The straight-featured woman with bands of glossy hair and
+eyebrows that told at a distance, could only be Mrs. Farrinder, just as
+the gentleman beside her, in a white overcoat, with an umbrella and a
+vague face, was probably her husband Amariah. At the opposite end of the
+row were another pair, whom Ransom, unacquainted with certain chapters
+of Verena's history, perceived without surprise to be Mrs. Burrage and
+her insinuating son. Apparently their interest in Miss Tarrant was more
+than a momentary fad, since--like himself--they had made the journey
+from New York to hear her. There were other figures, unknown to our
+young man, here and there, in the semicircle; but several places were
+still empty (one of which was of course reserved for Olive), and it
+occurred to Ransom, even in his preoccupation, that one of them ought to
+remain so--ought to be left to symbolise the presence, in the spirit, of
+Miss Birdseye.
+
+He bought one of the photographs of Verena, and thought it shockingly
+bad, and bought also the sketch of her life, which many people seemed to
+be reading, but crumpled it up in his pocket for future consideration.
+Verena was not in the least present to him in connexion with this
+exhibition of enterprise and puffery; what he saw was Olive, struggling
+and yielding, making every sacrifice of taste for the sake of the
+largest hearing, and conforming herself to a great popular system.
+Whether she had struggled or not, there was a catch-penny effect about
+the whole thing which added to the fever in his cheek and made him wish
+he had money to buy up the stock of the vociferous little boys. Suddenly
+the notes of the organ rolled out into the hall, and he became aware
+that the overture or prelude had begun. This, too, seemed to him a piece
+of claptrap, but he didn't wait to think of it; he instantly edged out
+of his place, which he had chosen near the end of a row, and reached one
+of the numerous doors. If he had had no definite plan he now had at
+least an irresistible impulse, and he felt the prick of shame at having
+faltered for a moment. It had been his tacit calculation that Verena,
+still enshrined in mystery by her companion, would not have reached the
+scene of her performance till within a few minutes of the time at which
+she was to come forth; so that he had lost nothing by waiting, up to
+this moment, before the platform. But now he must overtake his
+opportunity. Before passing out of the hall into the lobby he paused,
+and with his back to the stage, gave a look at the gathered auditory. It
+had become densely numerous, and, suffused with the evenly distributed
+gaslight, which fell from a great elevation, and the thick atmosphere
+that hangs for ever in such places, it appeared to pile itself high and
+to look dimly expectant and formidable. He had a throb of uneasiness at
+his private purpose of balking it of its entertainment, its victim--a
+glimpse of the ferocity that lurks in a disappointed mob. But the
+thought of that danger only made him pass more quickly through the ugly
+corridors; he felt that his plan was definite enough now, and he found
+that he had no need even of asking the way to a certain small door (one
+or more of them), which he meant to push open. In taking his place in
+the morning he had assured himself as to the side of the house on which
+(with its approach to the platform) the withdrawing room of singers and
+speakers was situated; he had chosen his seat in that quarter, and he
+now had not far to go before he reached it. No one heeded or challenged
+him; Miss Tarrant's auditors were still pouring in (the occasion was
+evidently to have been an unprecedented success of curiosity), and had
+all the attention of the ushers. Ransom opened a door at the end of the
+passage, and it admitted him into a sort of vestibule, quite bare save
+that at a second door, opposite to him, stood a figure at the sight of
+which he paused for a moment in his advance.
+
+The figure was simply that of a robust policeman, in his helmet and
+brass buttons--a policeman who was expecting him--Ransom could see that
+in a twinkling. He judged in the same space of time that Olive
+Chancellor had heard of his having arrived and had applied for the
+protection of this functionary, who was now simply guarding the ingress
+and was prepared to defend it against all comers. There was a slight
+element of surprise in this, as he had reasoned that his nervous
+kinswoman was absent from her house for the day--had been spending it
+all in Verena's retreat, wherever that was. The surprise was not great
+enough, however, to interrupt his course for more than an instant, and
+he crossed the room and stood before the belted sentinel. For a moment
+neither spoke; they looked at each other very hard in the eyes, and
+Ransom heard the organ, beyond partitions, launching its waves of sound
+through the hall. They seemed to be very near it, and the whole place
+vibrated. The policeman was a tall, lean-faced, sallow man, with a stoop
+of the shoulders, a small, steady eye, and something in his mouth which
+made a protuberance in his cheek. Ransom could see that he was very
+strong, but he believed that he himself was not materially less so.
+However, he had not come there to show physical fight--a public tussle
+about Verena was not an attractive idea, except perhaps, after all, if
+he should get the worst of it, from the point of view of Olive's new
+system of advertising; and, moreover, it would not be in the least
+necessary. Still he said nothing, and still the policeman remained dumb,
+and there was something in the way the moments elapsed and in our young
+man's consciousness that Verena was separated from him only by a couple
+of thin planks, which made him feel that she too expected him, but in
+another sense; that she had nothing to do with this parade of
+resistance, that she would know in a moment, by quick intuition, that he
+was there, and that she was only praying to be rescued, to be saved.
+Face to face with Olive she hadn't the courage, but she would have it
+with her hand in his. It came to him that there was no one in the world
+less sure of her business just at that moment than Olive Chancellor; it
+was as if he could see, through the door, the terrible way her eyes were
+fixed on Verena while she held her watch in her hand and Verena looked
+away from her. Olive would have been so thankful that she should begin
+before the hour, but of course that was impossible. Ransom asked no
+questions--that seemed a waste of time; he only said, after a minute, to
+the policeman:
+
+"I should like very much to see Miss Tarrant, if you will be so good as
+to take in my card."
+
+The guardian of order, well planted just between him and the handle of
+the door, took from Ransom the morsel of pasteboard which he held out to
+him, read slowly the name inscribed on it, turned it over and looked at
+the back, then returned it to his interlocutor. "Well, I guess it ain't
+much use," he remarked.
+
+"How can you know that? You have no business to decline my request."
+
+"Well, I guess I have about as much business as you have to make it."
+Then he added, "You are just the very man she wants to keep out."
+
+"I don't think Miss Tarrant wants to keep me out," Ransom returned.
+
+"I don't know much about her, she hasn't hired the hall. It's the other
+one--Miss Chancellor; it's her that runs this lecture."
+
+"And she has asked you to keep me out? How absurd!" exclaimed Ransom
+ingeniously.
+
+"She tells me you're none too fit to be round alone; you have got this
+thing on the brain. I guess you'd better be quiet," said the policeman.
+
+"Quiet? Is it possible to be more quiet than I am?"
+
+"Well, I've seen crazy folks that were a good deal like you. If you want
+to see the speaker why don't you go and set round in the hall, with the
+rest of the public?" And the policeman waited, in an immovable,
+ruminating, reasonable manner, for an answer to this inquiry.
+
+Ransom had one, on the instant, at his service. "Because I don't want
+simply to see her; I want also to speak to her--in private."
+
+"Yes--it's always intensely private," said the policeman. "Now I
+wouldn't lose the lecture if I was you. I guess it will do you good."
+
+"The lecture?" Ransom repeated, laughing. "It won't take place."
+
+"Yes it will--as quick as the organ stops." Then the policeman added, as
+to himself, "Why the devil don't it?"
+
+"Because Miss Tarrant has sent up to the organist to tell him to keep
+on."
+
+"Who has she sent, do you s'pose?" And Ransom's new acquaintance entered
+into his humour. "I guess Miss Chancellor isn't her nigger."
+
+"She has sent her father, or perhaps even her mother. They are in there
+too."
+
+"How do you know that?" asked the policeman consideringly.
+
+"Oh, I know everything," Ransom answered, smiling.
+
+"Well, I guess they didn't come here to listen to that organ. We'll hear
+something else before long, if he doesn't stop."
+
+"You will hear a good deal, very soon," Ransom remarked.
+
+The serenity of his self-confidence appeared at last to make an
+impression on his antagonist, who lowered his head a little, like some
+butting animal, and looked at the young man from beneath bushy eyebrows.
+"Well, I _have_ heard a good deal, since I've been in Boston."
+
+"Oh, Boston's a great place," Ransom rejoined inattentively. He was not
+listening to the policeman or to the organ now, for the sound of voices
+had reached him from the other side of the door. The policeman took no
+further notice of it than to lean back against the panels, with folded
+arms; and there was another pause, between them, during which the
+playing of the organ ceased.
+
+"I will just wait here, with your permission," said Ransom, "and
+presently I shall be called."
+
+"Who do you s'pose will call you?"
+
+"Well, Miss Tarrant, I hope."
+
+"She'll have to square the other one first."
+
+Ransom took out his watch, which he had adapted, on purpose, several
+hours before, to Boston time, and saw that the minutes had sped with
+increasing velocity during this interview, and that it now marked five
+minutes past eight. "Miss Chancellor will have to square the public," he
+said in a moment; and the words were far from being an empty profession
+of security, for the conviction already in possession of him, that a
+drama in which he, though cut off, was an actor, had been going on for
+some time in the apartment he was prevented from entering, that the
+situation was extraordinarily strained there, and that it could not come
+to an end without an appeal to him--this transcendental assumption
+acquired an infinitely greater force the instant he perceived that
+Verena was even now keeping her audience waiting. Why didn't she go on?
+Why, except that she knew he was there, and was gaining time?
+
+"Well, I guess she has shown herself," said the door-keeper, whose
+discussion with Ransom now appeared to have passed, on his own part, and
+without the slightest prejudice to his firmness, into a sociable,
+gossiping phase.
+
+"If she had shown herself, we should hear the reception, the applause."
+
+"Well, there they air; they are going to give it to her," the policeman
+announced.
+
+He had an odious appearance of being in the right, for there indeed they
+seemed to be--they were giving it to her. A general hubbub rose from the
+floor and the galleries of the hall--the sound of several thousand
+people stamping with their feet and rapping with their umbrellas and
+sticks. Ransom felt faint, and for a little while he stood with his gaze
+interlocked with that of the policeman. Then suddenly a wave of coolness
+seemed to break over him, and he exclaimed: "My dear fellow, that isn't
+applause--it's impatience. It isn't a reception, it's a call!"
+
+The policeman neither assented to this proposition nor denied it; he
+only transferred the protuberance in his cheek to the other side, and
+observed:
+
+"I guess she's sick."
+
+"Oh, I hope not!" said Ransom, very gently. The stamping and rapping
+swelled and swelled for a minute, and then it subsided; but before it
+had done so Ransom's definition of it had plainly become the true one.
+The tone of the manifestation was good-humoured, but it was not
+gratulatory. He looked at his watch again, and saw that five minutes
+more had elapsed, and he remembered what the newspaperman in Charles
+Street had said about Olive's guaranteeing Verena's punctuality. Oddly
+enough, at the moment the image of this gentleman recurred to him, the
+gentleman himself burst through the other door, in a state of the
+liveliest agitation.
+
+"Why in the name of goodness don't she go on? If she wants to make them
+call her, they've done it about enough!" Mr. Pardon turned, pressingly,
+from Ransom to the policeman and back again, and in his preoccupation
+gave no sign of having met the Mississippian before.
+
+"I guess she's sick," said the policeman.
+
+"The public'll be sick!" cried the distressed reporter. "If she's sick,
+why doesn't she send for a doctor? All Boston is packed into this house,
+and she has got to talk to it. I want to go in and see."
+
+"You can't go in," said the policeman drily.
+
+"Why can't I go in, I should like to know? I want to go in for the
+_Vesper_"!
+
+"You can't go in for anything. I'm keeping this man out, too," the
+policeman added genially, as if to make Mr. Pardon's exclusion appear
+less invidious.
+
+"Why, they'd ought to let _you_ in," said Matthias, staring a moment at
+Ransom.
+
+"May be they'd ought, but they won't," the policeman remarked.
+
+"Gracious me!" panted Mr. Pardon; "I knew from the first Miss Chancellor
+would make a mess of it! Where's Mr. Filer?" he went on eagerly,
+addressing himself apparently to either of the others, or to both.
+
+"I guess he's at the door, counting the money," said the policeman.
+
+"Well, he'll have to give it back if he don't look out!"
+
+"Maybe he will. I'll let _him_ in if he comes, but he's the only one.
+She is on now," the policeman added, without emotion.
+
+His ear had caught the first faint murmur of another explosion of sound.
+This time, unmistakably, it was applause--the clapping of multitudinous
+hands, mingled with the noise of many throats. The demonstration,
+however, though considerable, was not what might have been expected, and
+it died away quickly. Mr. Pardon stood listening, with an expression of
+some alarm. "Merciful fathers! can't they give her more than that?" he
+cried. "I'll just fly round and see!"
+
+When he had hurried away again, Ransom said to the policeman--"Who is
+Mr. Filer?"
+
+"Oh, he's an old friend of mine. He's the man that runs Miss
+Chancellor."
+
+"That runs her?"
+
+"Just the same as she runs Miss Tarrant. He runs the pair, as you might
+say. He's in the lecture-business."
+
+"Then he had better talk to the public himself."
+
+"Oh, _he_ can't talk; he can only boss!"
+
+The opposite door at this moment was pushed open again, and a large,
+heated-looking man, with a little stiff beard on the end of his chin and
+his overcoat flying behind him, strode forward with an imprecation.
+"What the h---- are they doing in the parlour? This sort of thing's
+about played out!"
+
+"Ain't she up there now?" the policeman asked.
+
+"It's not Miss Tarrant," Ransom said, as if he knew all about it. He
+perceived in a moment that this was Mr. Filer, Olive Chancellor's agent;
+an inference instantly followed by the reflexion that such a personage
+would have been warned against him by his kinswoman and would doubtless
+attempt to hold him, or his influence, accountable for Verena's
+unexpected delay. Mr. Filer only glanced at him, however, and to
+Ransom's surprise appeared to have no theory of his identity; a fact
+implying that Miss Chancellor had considered that the greater discretion
+was (except to the policeman) to hold her tongue about him altogether.
+
+"Up there? It's her jackass of a father that's up there!" cried Mr.
+Filer, with his hand on the latch of the door, which the policeman had
+allowed him to approach.
+
+"Is he asking for a doctor?" the latter inquired dispassionately.
+
+"You're the sort of doctor he'll want, if he doesn't produce the girl!
+You don't mean to say they've locked themselves in? What the plague are
+they after?"
+
+"They've got the key on that side," said the policeman, while Mr. Filer
+discharged at the door a volley of sharp knocks, at the same time
+violently shaking the handle.
+
+"If the door was locked, what was the good of your standing before it?"
+Ransom inquired.
+
+"So as you couldn't do that"; and the policeman nodded at Mr. Filer.
+
+"You see your interference has done very little good."
+
+"I dunno; she has got to come out yet."
+
+Mr. Filer meanwhile had continued to thump and shake, demanding instant
+admission and inquiring if they were going to let the audience pull the
+house down. Another round of applause had broken out, directed
+perceptibly to some apology, some solemn circumlocution, of Selah
+Tarrant's; this covered the sound of the agent's voice, as well as that
+of a confused and divided response, proceeding from the parlour. For a
+minute nothing definite was audible; the door remained closed, and
+Matthias Pardon reappeared in the vestibule.
+
+"He says she's just a little faint--from nervousness. She'll be all
+ready in about three minutes." This announcement was Mr. Pardon's
+contribution to the crisis; and he added that the crowd was a lovely
+crowd, it was a real Boston crowd, it was perfectly good-humoured.
+
+"There's a lovely crowd, and a real Boston one too, I guess, in here!"
+cried Mr. Filer, now banging very hard. "I've handled prima donnas, and
+I've handled natural curiosities, but I've never seen anything up to
+this. Mind what I say, ladies; if you don't let me in, I'll smash down
+the door!"
+
+"Don't seem as if _you_ could make it much worse, does it?" the
+policeman observed to Ransom, strolling aside a little, with the air of
+being superseded.
+
+
+
+
+XLII
+
+
+Ransom made no reply; he was watching the door, which at that moment
+gave way from within. Verena stood there--it was she, evidently, who had
+opened it--and her eyes went straight to his. She was dressed in white,
+and her face was whiter than her garment; above it her hair seemed to
+shine like fire. She took a step forward; but before she could take
+another he had come down to her, on the threshold of the room. Her face
+was full of suffering, and he did not attempt--before all those eyes--to
+take her hand; he only said in a low tone, "I have been waiting for
+you--a long time!"
+
+"I know it--I saw you in your seat--I want to speak to you."
+
+"Well, Miss Tarrant, don't you think you'd better be on the platform?"
+cried Mr. Filer, making with both his arms a movement as if to sweep her
+before him, through the waiting-room, up into the presence of the
+public.
+
+"In a moment I shall be ready. My father is making that all right." And,
+to Ransom's surprise, she smiled, with all her sweetness, at the
+irrepressible agent; appeared to wish genuinely to reassure him.
+
+The three had moved together into the waiting-room, and there at the
+farther end of it, beyond the vulgar, perfunctory chairs and tables,
+under the flaring gas, he saw Mrs. Tarrant sitting upright on a sofa,
+with immense rigidity, and a large flushed visage, full of suppressed
+distortion, and beside her prostrate, fallen over, her head buried in
+the lap of Verena's mother, the tragic figure of Olive Chancellor.
+Ransom could scarcely know how much Olive's having flung herself upon
+Mrs. Tarrant's bosom testified to the convulsive scene that had just
+taken place behind the locked door. He closed it again, sharply, in the
+face of the reporter and the policeman, and at the same moment Selah
+Tarrant descended, through the aperture leading to the platform, from
+his brief communion with the public. On seeing Ransom he stopped short,
+and, gathering his waterproof about him, measured the young man from
+head to foot.
+
+"Well, sir, perhaps _you_ would like to go and explain our hitch," he
+remarked, indulging in a smile so comprehensive that the corners of his
+mouth seemed almost to meet behind. "I presume that you, better than any
+one else, can give them an insight into our difficulties!"
+
+"Father, be still; father, it will come out all right in a moment!"
+cried Verena, below her breath, panting like an emergent diver.
+
+"There's one thing I want to know: are we going to spend half an hour
+talking over our domestic affairs?" Mr. Filer demanded, wiping his
+indignant countenance. "Is Miss Tarrant going to lecture, or ain't she
+going to lecture? If she ain't, she'll please to show cause why. Is she
+aware that every quarter of a second, at the present instant, is worth
+about five hundred dollars?"
+
+"I know that--I know that, Mr. Filer; I will begin in a moment!" Verena
+went on. "I only want to speak to Mr. Ransom--just three words. They are
+perfectly quiet--don't you see how quiet they are? They trust me, they
+trust me, don't they, father? I only want to speak to Mr. Ransom."
+
+"Who the devil is Mr. Ransom?" cried the exasperated, bewildered Filer.
+
+Verena spoke to the others, but she looked at her lover, and the
+expression of her eyes was ineffably touching and beseeching. She
+trembled with nervous passion, there were sobs and supplications in her
+voice, and Ransom felt himself flushing with pure pity for her pain--her
+inevitable agony. But at the same moment he had another perception,
+which brushed aside remorse; he saw that he could do what he wanted,
+that she begged him, with all her being, to spare her, but that so long
+as he should protest she was submissive, helpless. What he wanted, in
+this light, flamed before him and challenged all his manhood, tossing
+his determination to a height from which not only Doctor Tarrant, and
+Mr. Filer, and Olive, over there, in her sightless, soundless shame, but
+the great expectant hall as well, and the mighty multitude, in suspense,
+keeping quiet from minute to minute and holding the breath of its
+anger--from which all these things looked small, surmountable, and of
+the moment only. He didn't quite understand, as yet, however; he saw
+that Verena had not refused, but temporised, that the spell upon
+her--thanks to which he should still be able to rescue her--had been the
+knowledge that he was near.
+
+"Come away, come away," he murmured quickly, putting out his two hands
+to her.
+
+She took one of them, as if to plead, not to consent. "Oh, let me off,
+let me off--for _her_, for the others! It's too terrible, it's
+impossible!"
+
+"What I want to know is why Mr. Ransom isn't in the hands of the
+police!" wailed Mrs. Tarrant, from her sofa.
+
+"I have been, madam, for the last quarter of an hour." Ransom felt more
+and more that he could manage it, if he only kept cool. He bent over
+Verena with a tenderness in which he was careless, now, of observation.
+"Dearest, I told you, I warned you. I left you alone for ten weeks; but
+could that make you doubt it was coming? Not for worlds, not for
+millions, shall you give yourself to that roaring crowd. Don't ask me to
+care for them, or for any one! What do they care for you but to gape and
+grin and babble? You are mine, you are not theirs."
+
+"What under the sun is the man talking about? With the most magnificent
+audience ever brought together! The city of Boston is under this roof!"
+Mr. Filer gaspingly interposed.
+
+"The city of Boston be damned!" said Ransom.
+
+"Mr. Ransom is very much interested in my daughter. He doesn't approve
+of our views," Selah Tarrant explained.
+
+"It's the most horrible, wicked, immoral selfishness I ever heard in my
+life!" roared Mrs. Tarrant.
+
+"Selfishness! Mrs. Tarrant, do you suppose I pretend not to be selfish?"
+
+"Do you want us all murdered by the mob, then?"
+
+"They can have their money--can't you give them back their money?" cried
+Verena, turning frantically round the circle.
+
+"Verena Tarrant, you don't mean to say you are going to back down?" her
+mother shrieked.
+
+"Good God! that I should make her suffer like this!" said Ransom to
+himself; and to put an end to the odious scene he would have seized
+Verena in his arms and broken away into the outer world, if Olive, who
+at Mrs. Tarrant's last loud challenge had sprung to her feet, had not at
+the same time thrown herself between them with a force which made the
+girl relinquish her grasp of Ransom's hand. To his astonishment, the
+eyes that looked at him out of her scared, haggard face were, like
+Verena's, eyes of tremendous entreaty. There was a moment during which
+she would have been ready to go down on her knees to him, in order that
+the lecture should go on.
+
+"If you don't agree with her, take her up on the platform, and have it
+out there; the public would like that, first-rate!" Mr. Filer said to
+Ransom, as if he thought this suggestion practical.
+
+"She had prepared a lovely address!" Selah remarked mournfully, as if to
+the company in general.
+
+No one appeared to heed the observation, but his wife broke out again.
+"Verena Tarrant, I should like to slap you! Do you call such a man as
+that a gentleman? I don't know where your father's spirit is, to let him
+stay!"
+
+Olive, meanwhile, was literally praying to her kinsman. "Let her appear
+this once, just this once: not to ruin, not to shame! Haven't you any
+pity; do you want me to be hooted? It's only for an hour. Haven't you
+any soul?"
+
+Her face and voice were terrible to Ransom; she had flung herself upon
+Verena and was holding her close, and he could see that her friend's
+suffering was faint in comparison to her own. "Why for an hour, when
+it's all false and damnable? An hour is as bad as ten years! She's mine
+or she isn't, and if she's mine, she's all mine!"
+
+"Yours! Yours! Verena, think, think what you're doing!" Olive moaned,
+bending over her.
+
+Mr. Filer was now pouring forth his nature in objurgations and oaths,
+and brandishing before the culprits--Verena and Ransom--the extreme
+penalty of the law. Mrs. Tarrant had burst into violent hysterics, while
+Selah revolved vaguely about the room and declared that it seemed as if
+the better day was going to be put off for quite a while. "Don't you see
+how good, how sweet they are--giving us all this time? Don't you think
+that when they behave like that--without a sound, for five minutes--they
+ought to be rewarded?" Verena asked, smiling divinely, at Ransom.
+Nothing could have been more tender, more exquisite, than the way she
+put her appeal upon the ground of simple charity, kindness to the great
+good-natured, childish public.
+
+"Miss Chancellor may reward them in any way she likes. Give them back
+their money and a little present to each."
+
+"Money and presents? I should like to shoot you, sir!" yelled Mr. Filer.
+The audience had really been very patient, and up to this point deserved
+Verena's praise; but it was now long past eight o'clock, and symptoms of
+irritation--cries and groans and hisses--began again to proceed from the
+hall. Mr. Filer launched himself into the passage leading to the stage,
+and Selah rushed after him. Mrs. Tarrant extended herself, sobbing, on
+the sofa, and Olive, quivering in the storm, inquired of Ransom what he
+wanted her to do, what humiliation, what degradation, what sacrifice he
+imposed.
+
+"I'll do anything--I'll be abject--I'll be vile--I'll go down in the
+dust!"
+
+"I ask nothing of you, and I have nothing to do with you," Ransom said.
+"That is, I ask, at the most, that you shouldn't expect that, wishing to
+make Verena my wife, I should say to her, 'Oh yes, you can take an hour
+or two out of it!' Verena," he went on, "all this is out of
+it--dreadfully, odiously--and it's a great deal too much! Come, come as
+far away from here as possible, and we'll settle the rest!"
+
+The combined effort of Mr. Filer and Selah Tarrant to pacify the public
+had not, apparently, the success it deserved; the house continued in
+uproar and the volume of sound increased. "Leave us alone, leave us
+alone for a single minute!" cried Verena; "just let me speak to him, and
+it will be all right!" She rushed over to her mother, drew her, dragged
+her from the sofa, led her to the door of the room. Mrs. Tarrant, on the
+way, reunited herself with Olive (the horror of the situation had at
+least that compensation for her), and, clinging and staggering together,
+the distracted women, pushed by Verena, passed into the vestibule, now,
+as Ransom saw, deserted by the policeman and the reporter, who had
+rushed round to where the battle was thickest.
+
+"Oh, why did you come--why, why?" And Verena, turning back, threw
+herself upon him with a protest which was all, and more than all, a
+surrender. She had never yet given herself to him so much as in that
+movement of reproach.
+
+"Didn't you expect me, and weren't you sure?" he asked, smiling at her
+and standing there till she arrived.
+
+"I didn't know--it was terrible--it's awful! I saw you in your place, in
+the house, when you came. As soon as we got here I went out to those
+steps that go up to the stage and I looked out, with my father--from
+behind him--and saw you in a minute. Then I felt too nervous to speak! I
+could never, never, if you were there! My father didn't know you, and I
+said nothing, but Olive guessed as soon as I came back. She rushed at
+me, and she looked at me--oh, how she looked! and she guessed. She
+didn't need to go out to see for herself, and when she saw how I was
+trembling she began to tremble herself, to believe, as I believed, we
+were lost. Listen to them, listen to them, in the house! Now I want you
+to go away--I will see you to-morrow, as long as you wish. That's all I
+want now; if you will only go away it's not too late, and everything
+will be all right!"
+
+Preoccupied as Ransom was with the simple purpose of getting her bodily
+out of the place, he could yet notice her strange, touching tone, and
+her air of believing that she might really persuade him. She had
+evidently given up everything now--every pretence of a different
+conviction and of loyalty to her cause; all this had fallen from her as
+soon as she felt him near, and she asked him to go away just as any
+plighted maiden might have asked any favour of her lover. But it was the
+poor girl's misfortune that whatever she did or said, or left unsaid,
+only had the effect of making her dearer to him and making the people
+who were clamouring for her seem more and more a raving rabble.
+
+He indulged not in the smallest recognition of her request, and simply
+said, "Surely Olive must have believed, must have known, I would come."
+
+"She would have been sure if you hadn't become so unexpectedly quiet
+after I left Marmion. You seemed to concur, to be willing to wait."
+
+"So I was, for a few weeks. But they ended yesterday. I was furious that
+morning, when I learned your flight, and during the week that followed I
+made two or three attempts to find you. Then I stopped--I thought it
+better. I saw you were very well hidden; I determined not even to write.
+I felt I _could_ wait--with that last day at Marmion to think of.
+Besides, to leave you with her awhile, for the last, seemed more decent.
+Perhaps you'll tell me now where you were."
+
+"I was with father and mother. She sent me to them that morning, with a
+letter. I don't know what was in it. Perhaps there was money," said
+Verena, who evidently now would tell him everything.
+
+"And where did they take you?"
+
+"I don't know--to places. I was in Boston once, for a day; but only in a
+carriage. They were as frightened as Olive; they were bound to save me!"
+
+"They shouldn't have brought you here to-night then. How could you
+possibly doubt of my coming?"
+
+"I don't know what I thought, and I didn't know, till I saw you, that
+all the strength I had hoped for would leave me in a flash, and that if
+I attempted to speak--with you sitting there--I should make the most
+shameful failure. We had a sickening scene here--I begged for delay, for
+time to recover. We waited and waited, and when I heard you at the door
+talking to the policeman, it seemed to me everything was gone. But it
+will still come back, if you will leave me. They are quiet again--father
+must be interesting them."
+
+"I hope he is!" Ransom exclaimed. "If Miss Chancellor ordered the
+policeman, she must have expected me."
+
+"That was only after she knew you were in the house. She flew out into
+the lobby with father, and they seized him and posted him there. She
+locked the door; she seemed to think they would break it down. I didn't
+wait for that, but from the moment I knew you were on the other side of
+it I couldn't go on--I was paralysed. It has made me feel better to talk
+to you--and now I could appear," Verena added.
+
+"My darling child, haven't you a shawl or a mantle?" Ransom returned,
+for all answer, looking about him. He perceived, tossed upon a chair, a
+long, furred cloak, which he caught up and, before she could resist,
+threw over her. She even let him arrange it, and, standing there, draped
+from head to foot in it, contented herself with saying, after a moment:
+
+"I don't understand--where shall we go? Where will you take me?"
+
+"We shall catch the night-train for New York, and the first thing in the
+morning we shall be married."
+
+Verena remained gazing at him, with swimming eyes. "And what will the
+people do? Listen, listen!"
+
+"Your father is ceasing to interest them. They'll howl and thump,
+according to their nature."
+
+"Ah, their nature's fine!" Verena pleaded.
+
+"Dearest, that's one of the fallacies I shall have to woo you from. Hear
+them, the senseless brutes!" The storm was now raging in the hall, and
+it deepened, to such a point that Verena turned to him in a supreme
+appeal.
+
+"I could soothe them with a word!"
+
+"Keep your soothing words for me--you will have need of them all, in our
+coming time," Ransom said, laughing. He pulled open the door again,
+which led into the lobby, but he was driven back, with Verena, by a
+furious onset from Mrs. Tarrant. Seeing her daughter fairly arrayed for
+departure, she hurled herself upon her, half in indignation, half in a
+blind impulse to cling, and with an outpouring of tears, reproaches,
+prayers, strange scraps of argument and iterations of farewell, closed
+her about with an embrace which was partly a supreme caress, partly the
+salutary castigation she had, three minutes before, expressed the wish
+to administer, and altogether for the moment a check upon the girl's
+flight.
+
+"Mother, dearest, it's all for the best, I can't help it, I love you
+just the same; let me go, let me go!" Verena stammered, kissing her
+again, struggling to free herself, and holding out her hand to Ransom.
+He saw now that she only wanted to get away, to leave everything behind
+her. Olive was close at hand, on the threshold of the room, and as soon
+as Ransom looked at her he became aware that the weakness she had just
+shown had passed away. She had straightened herself again, and she was
+upright in her desolation. The expression of her face was a thing to
+remain with him for ever; it was impossible to imagine a more vivid
+presentment of blighted hope and wounded pride. Dry, desperate, rigid,
+she yet wavered and seemed uncertain; her pale, glittering eyes
+straining forward, as if they were looking for death. Ransom had a
+vision, even at that crowded moment, that if she could have met it there
+and then, bristling with steel or lurid with fire, she would have rushed
+on it without a tremor, like the heroine that she was. All this while
+the great agitation in the hall rose and fell, in waves and surges, as
+if Selah Tarrant and the agent were talking to the multitude, trying to
+calm them, succeeding for the moment, and then letting them loose again.
+Whirled down by one of the fitful gusts, a lady and a gentleman issued
+from the passage, and Ransom, glancing at them, recognised Mrs.
+Farrinder and her husband.
+
+"Well, Miss Chancellor," said that more successful woman, with
+considerable asperity, "if this is the way you're going to reinstate our
+sex!" She passed rapidly through the room, followed by Amariah, who
+remarked in his transit that it seemed as if there had been a want of
+organisation, and the two retreated expeditiously, without the lady's
+having taken the smallest notice of Verena, whose conflict with her
+mother prolonged itself. Ransom, striving, with all needful
+consideration for Mrs. Tarrant, to separate these two, addressed not a
+word to Olive; it was the last of her, for him, and he neither saw how
+her livid face suddenly glowed, as if Mrs. Farrinder's words had been a
+lash, nor how, as if with a sudden inspiration, she rushed to the
+approach to the platform. If he had observed her, it might have seemed
+to him that she hoped to find the fierce expiation she sought for in
+exposure to the thousands she had disappointed and deceived, in offering
+herself to be trampled to death and torn to pieces. She might have
+suggested to him some feminine firebrand of Paris revolutions, erect on
+a barricade, or even the sacrificial figure of Hypatia, whirled through
+the furious mob of Alexandria. She was arrested an instant by the
+arrival of Mrs. Burrage and her son, who had quitted the stage on
+observing the withdrawal of the Farrinders, and who swept into the room
+in the manner of people seeking shelter from a thunderstorm. The
+mother's face expressed the well-bred surprise of a person who should
+have been asked out to dinner and seen the cloth pulled off the table;
+the young man, who supported her on his arm, instantly lost himself in
+the spectacle of Verena disengaging herself from Mrs. Tarrant, only to
+be again overwhelmed, and in the unexpected presence of the
+Mississippian. His handsome blue eyes turned from one to the other, and
+he looked infinitely annoyed and bewildered. It even seemed to occur to
+him that he might, perhaps, interpose with effect, and he evidently
+would have liked to say that, without really bragging, _he_ would at
+least have kept the affair from turning into a row. But Verena, muffled
+and escaping, was deaf to him, and Ransom didn't look the right person
+to address such a remark as that to. Mrs. Burrage and Olive, as the
+latter shot past, exchanged a glance which represented quick irony on
+one side and indiscriminating defiance on the other.
+
+"Oh, are _you_ going to speak?" the lady from New York inquired, with
+her cursory laugh.
+
+Olive had already disappeared; but Ransom heard her answer flung behind
+her into the room. "I am going to be hissed and hooted and insulted!"
+
+"Olive, Olive!" Verena suddenly shrieked; and her piercing cry might
+have reached the front. But Ransom had already, by muscular force,
+wrenched her away, and was hurrying her out, leaving Mrs. Tarrant to
+heave herself into the arms of Mrs. Burrage, who, he was sure, would,
+within a minute, loom upon her attractively through her tears, and
+supply her with a reminiscence, destined to be valuable, of aristocratic
+support and clever composure. In the outer labyrinth hasty groups, a
+little scared, were leaving the hall, giving up the game. Ransom, as he
+went, thrust the hood of Verena's long cloak over her head, to conceal
+her face and her identity. It quite prevented recognition, and as they
+mingled in the issuing crowd he perceived the quick, complete,
+tremendous silence which, in the hall, had greeted Olive Chancellor's
+rush to the front. Every sound instantly dropped, the hush was
+respectful, the great public waited, and whatever she should say to them
+(and he thought she might indeed be rather embarrassed) it was not
+apparent that they were likely to hurl the benches at her. Ransom,
+palpitating with his victory, felt now a little sorry for her, and was
+relieved to know that, even when exasperated, a Boston audience is not
+ungenerous. "Ah, now I am glad!" said Verena, when they reached the
+street. But though she was glad, he presently discovered that, beneath
+her hood, she was in tears. It is to be feared that with the union, so
+far from brilliant, into which she was about to enter, these were not
+the last she was destined to shed.
+
+THE END
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's The Bostonians, Vol. II (of II), by Henry James
+
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+<pre>
+
+Project Gutenberg's The Bostonians, Vol. II (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. II (of II)
+
+Author: Henry James
+
+Release Date: November 5, 2006 [EBook #19718]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE BOSTONIANS, VOL. II (OF II) ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Suzanne Lybarger, 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. II</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_SECOND">BOOK SECOND (<i>Continued</i>)</a><br /><br />
+<a href="#XXIV">XXIV</a><br />
+<a href="#XXV">XXV</a><br />
+<a href="#XXVI">XXVI</a><br />
+<a href="#XXVII">XXVII</a><br />
+<a href="#XXVIII">XXVIII</a><br />
+<a href="#XXIX">XXIX</a><br />
+<a href="#XXX">XXX</a><br />
+<a href="#XXXI">XXXI</a><br />
+<a href="#XXXII">XXXII</a><br />
+<a href="#XXXIII">XXXIII</a><br />
+<a href="#XXXIV">XXXIV</a><br /><br />
+<a href="#BOOK_THIRD">BOOK THIRD</a><br /><br />
+<a href="#XXXV">XXXV</a><br />
+<a href="#XXXVI">XXXVI</a><br />
+<a href="#XXXVII">XXXVII</a><br />
+<a href="#XXXVIII">XXXVIII</a><br />
+<a href="#XXXIX">XXXIX</a><br />
+<a href="#XL">XL</a><br />
+<a href="#XLI">XLI</a><br />
+<a href="#XLII">XLII</a><br />
+</p>
+<!-- End Autogenerated TOC. -->
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="BOOK_SECOND" id="BOOK_SECOND"></a>BOOK SECOND</h2>
+
+<h3>(<i>Continued</i>)</h3>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="XXIV" id="XXIV"></a>XXIV</h2>
+
+
+<p>A little more than an hour after this he stood in the parlour of Doctor
+Tarrant's suburban residence, in Monadnoc Place. He had induced a
+juvenile maid-servant, by an appeal somewhat impassioned, to let the
+ladies know that he was there; and she had returned, after a long
+absence, to say that Miss Tarrant would come down to him in a little
+while. He possessed himself, according to his wont, of the nearest book
+(it lay on the table, with an old magazine and a little japanned tray
+containing Tarrant's professional cards&mdash;his denomination as a mesmeric
+healer), and spent ten minutes in turning it over. It was a biography of
+Mrs. Ada T. P. Foat, the celebrated trance-lecturer, and was embellished
+by a portrait representing the lady with a surprised expression and
+innumerable ringlets. Ransom said to himself, after reading a few pages,
+that much ridicule had been cast upon Southern literature; but if that
+was a fair specimen of Northern!&mdash;and he threw it back upon the table
+with a gesture almost as contemptuous as if he had not known perfectly,
+after so long a residence in the North, that it was not, while he
+wondered whether this was the sort of thing Miss Tarrant had been
+brought up on. There was no other book to be seen, and he remembered to
+have read the magazine; so there was finally nothing for him, as the
+occupants of the house failed still to appear, but to stare before him,
+into the bright, bare, common little room, which was so hot that he
+wished to open a window, and of which an ugly, undraped cross-light
+seemed to have taken upon itself to reveal the poverty. Ransom, as I
+have mentioned, had not a high standard of comfort and noticed little,
+usually, how people's houses were furnished&mdash;it was only when they were
+very pretty that he observed; but what he saw while he waited at Doctor
+Tarrant's made him say to himself that it was no wonder Verena liked
+better to live with Olive Chancellor. He even began to wonder whether it
+were for the sake of that superior softness she had cultivated Miss
+Chancellor's favour, and whether Mrs. Luna had been right about her
+being mercenary and insincere. So many minutes elapsed before she
+appeared that he had time to remember he really knew nothing to the
+contrary, as well as to consider the oddity (so great when one did
+consider it) of his coming out to Cambridge to see her, when he had only
+a few hours in Boston to spare, a year and a half after she had given
+him her very casual invitation. She had not refused to receive him, at
+any rate; she was free to, if it didn't please her. And not only this,
+but she was apparently making herself fine in his honour, inasmuch as he
+heard a rapid footstep move to and fro above his head, and even, through
+the slightness which in Monadnoc Place did service for an upper floor,
+the sound of drawers and presses opened and closed. Some one was "flying
+round," as they said in Mississippi. At last the stairs creaked under a
+light tread, and the next moment a brilliant person came into the room.</p>
+
+<p>His reminiscence of her had been very pretty; but now that she had
+developed and matured, the little prophetess was prettier still. Her
+splendid hair seemed to shine; her cheek and chin had a curve which
+struck him by its fineness; her eyes and lips were full of smiles and
+greetings. She had appeared to him before as a creature of brightness,
+but now she lighted up the place, she irradiated, she made everything
+that surrounded her of no consequence; dropping upon the shabby sofa
+with an effect as charming as if she had been a nymph sinking on a
+leopard-skin, and with the native sweetness of her voice forcing him to
+listen till she spoke again. It was not long before he perceived that
+this added lustre was simply success; she was young and tender still,
+but the sound of a great applauding audience had been in her ears; it
+formed an element in which she felt buoyant and floated. Still,
+however, her glance was as pure as it was direct, and that fantastic
+fairness hung about her which had made an impression on him of old,
+and which reminded him of unworldly places&mdash;he didn't know
+where&mdash;convent-cloisters or vales of Arcady. At that other time she had
+been parti-coloured and bedizened, and she had always an air of costume,
+only now her costume was richer and more chastened. It was her line, her
+condition, part of her expression. If at Miss Birdseye's, and afterwards
+in Charles Street, she might have been a rope-dancer, to-day she made a
+"scene" of the mean little room in Monadnoc Place, such a scene as a
+prima donna makes of daubed canvas and dusty boards. She addressed Basil
+Ransom as if she had seen him the other week and his merits were fresh
+to her, though she let him, while she sat smiling at him, explain in his
+own rather ceremonious way why it was he had presumed to call upon her
+on so slight an acquaintance&mdash;on an invitation which she herself had had
+more than time to forget. His explanation, as a finished and
+satisfactory thing, quite broke down; there was no more impressive
+reason than that he had simply wished to see her. He became aware that
+this motive loomed large, and that her listening smile, innocent as it
+was, in the Arcadian manner, of mockery, seemed to accuse him of not
+having the courage of his inclination. He had alluded especially to
+their meeting at Miss Chancellor's; there it was that she had told him
+she should be glad to see him in her home.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh yes, I remember perfectly, and I remember quite as well seeing you
+at Miss Birdseye's the night before. I made a speech&mdash;don't you
+remember? That was delightful."</p>
+
+<p>"It was delightful indeed," said Basil Ransom.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't mean my speech; I mean the whole thing. It was then I made Miss
+Chancellor's acquaintance. I don't know whether you know how we work
+together. She has done so much for me."</p>
+
+<p>"Do you still make speeches?" Ransom asked, conscious, as soon as he had
+uttered it, that the question was below the mark.</p>
+
+<p>"Still? Why, I should hope so; it's all I'm good for! It's my life&mdash;or
+it's going to be. And it's Miss Chancellor's too. We are determined to
+do something."</p>
+
+<p>"And does she make speeches too?"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, she makes mine&mdash;or the best part of them. She tells me what to
+say&mdash;the real things, the strong things. It's Miss Chancellor as much as
+me!" said the singular girl, with a generous complacency which was yet
+half ludicrous.</p>
+
+<p>"I should like to hear you again," Basil Ransom rejoined.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, you must come some night. You will have plenty of chances. We are
+going on from triumph to triumph."</p>
+
+<p>Her brightness, her self-possession, her air of being a public
+character, her mixture of the girlish and the comprehensive, startled
+and confounded her visitor, who felt that if he had come to gratify his
+curiosity he should be in danger of going away still more curious than
+satiated. She added in her gay, friendly, trustful tone&mdash;the tone of
+facile intercourse, the tone in which happy, flower-crowned maidens may
+have talked to sunburnt young men in the golden age&mdash;"I am very familiar
+with your name; Miss Chancellor has told me all about you."</p>
+
+<p>"All about me?" Ransom raised his black eyebrows. "How could she do
+that? She doesn't know anything about me!"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, she told me you are a great enemy to our movement. Isn't that
+true? I think you expressed some unfavourable idea that day I met you at
+her house."</p>
+
+<p>"If you regard me as an enemy, it's very kind of you to receive me."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, a great many gentlemen call," Verena said, calmly and brightly.
+"Some call simply to inquire. Some call because they have heard of me,
+or been present on some occasion when I have moved them. Every one is so
+interested."</p>
+
+<p>"And you have been in Europe," Ransom remarked, in a moment.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh yes, we went over to see if they were in advance. We had a
+magnificent time&mdash;we saw all the leaders."</p>
+
+<p>"The leaders?" Ransom repeated.</p>
+
+<p>"Of the emancipation of our sex. There are gentlemen there, as well as
+ladies. Olive had splendid introductions in all countries, and we
+conversed with all the earnest people. We heard much that was
+suggestive. And as for Europe!"&mdash;and the young lady paused, smiling at
+him and ending in a happy sigh, as if there were more to say on the
+subject than she could attempt on such short notice.</p>
+
+<p>"I suppose it's very attractive," said Ransom encouragingly.</p>
+
+<p>"It's just a dream!"</p>
+
+<p>"And did you find that they were in advance?"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, Miss Chancellor thought they were. She was surprised at some
+things we observed, and concluded that perhaps she hadn't done the
+Europeans justice&mdash;she has got such an open mind, it's as wide as the
+sea!&mdash;while I incline to the opinion that on the whole <i>we</i> make the
+better show. The state of the movement there reflects their general
+culture, and their general culture is higher than ours (I mean taking
+the term in its broadest sense). On the other hand, the <i>special</i>
+condition&mdash;moral, social, personal&mdash;of our sex seems to me to be
+superior in this country; I mean regarded in relation&mdash;in proportion as
+it were&mdash;to the social phase at large. I must add that we did see some
+noble specimens over there. In England we met some lovely women, highly
+cultivated, and of immense organising power. In France we saw some
+wonderful, contagious types; we passed a delightful evening with the
+celebrated Marie Verneuil; she was released from prison, you know, only
+a few weeks before. Our total impression was that it is only a question
+of time&mdash;the future is ours. But everywhere we heard one cry&mdash;'How long,
+O Lord, how long?'"</p>
+
+<p>Basil Ransom listened to this considerable statement with a feeling
+which, as the current of Miss Tarrant's facile utterance flowed on, took
+the form of an hilarity charmed into stillness by the fear of losing
+something. There was indeed a sweet comicality in seeing this pretty
+girl sit there and, in answer to a casual, civil inquiry, drop into
+oratory as a natural thing. Had she forgotten where she was, and did she
+take him for a full house? She had the same turns and cadences, almost
+the same gestures, as if she had been on the platform; and the great
+queerness of it was that, with such a manner, she should escape being
+odious. She was not odious, she was delightful; she was not dogmatic,
+she was genial. No wonder she was a success, if she speechified as a
+bird sings! Ransom could see, too, from her easy lapse, how the
+lecture-tone was the thing in the world with which, by education, by
+association, she was most familiar. He didn't know what to make of her;
+she was an astounding young phenomenon. The other time came back to him
+afresh, and how she had stood up at Miss Birdseye's; it occurred to him
+that an element, here, had been wanting. Several moments after she had
+ceased speaking he became conscious that the expression of his face
+presented a perceptible analogy to a broad grin. He changed his posture,
+saying the first thing that came into his head. "I presume you do
+without your father now."</p>
+
+<p>"Without my father?"</p>
+
+<p>"To set you going, as he did that time I heard you."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, I see; you thought I had begun a lecture!" And she laughed, in
+perfect good humour. "They tell me I speak as I talk, so I suppose I
+talk as I speak. But you mustn't put me on what I saw and heard in
+Europe. That's to be the title of an address I am now preparing, by the
+way. Yes, I don't depend on father any more," she went on, while
+Ransom's sense of having said too sarcastic a thing was deepened by her
+perfect indifference to it. "He finds his patients draw off about
+enough, any way. But I owe him everything; if it hadn't been for him, no
+one would ever have known I had a gift&mdash;not even myself. He started me
+so, once for all, that I now go alone."</p>
+
+<p>"You go beautifully," said Ransom, wanting to say something agreeable,
+and even respectfully tender, to her, but troubled by the fact that
+there was nothing he could say that didn't sound rather like chaff.
+There was no resentment in her, however, for in a moment she said to
+him, as quickly as it occurred to her, in the manner of a person
+repairing an accidental omission, "It was very good of you to come so
+far."</p>
+
+<p>This was a sort of speech it was never safe to make to Ransom; there was
+no telling what retribution it might entail. "Do you suppose any journey
+is too great, too wearisome, when it's a question of so great a
+pleasure?" On this occasion it was not worse than that.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, people <i>have</i> come from other cities," Verena answered, not with
+pretended humility, but with pretended pride. "Do you know Cambridge?"</p>
+
+<p>"This is the first time I have ever been here."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, I suppose you have heard of the university; it's so celebrated."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes&mdash;even in Mississippi. I suppose it's very fine."</p>
+
+<p>"I presume it is," said Verena; "but you can't expect me to speak with
+much admiration of an institution of which the doors are closed to our
+sex."</p>
+
+<p>"Do you then advocate a system of education in common?"</p>
+
+<p>"I advocate equal rights, equal opportunities, equal privileges. So does
+Miss Chancellor," Verena added, with just a perceptible air of feeling
+that her declaration needed support.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, I thought what she wanted was simply a different inequality&mdash;simply
+to turn out the men altogether," Ransom said.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, she thinks we have great arrears to make up. I do tell her,
+sometimes, that what she desires is not only justice but vengeance. I
+think she admits that," Verena continued, with a certain solemnity. The
+subject, however, held her but an instant, and before Ransom had time to
+make any comment, she went on, in a different tone: "You don't mean to
+say you live in Mississippi <i>now</i>? Miss Chancellor told me when you were
+in Boston before, that you had located in New York." She persevered in
+this reference to himself, for when he had assented to her remark about
+New York, she asked him whether he had quite given up the South.</p>
+
+<p>"Given it up&mdash;the poor, dear, desolate old South? Heaven forbid!" Basil
+Ransom exclaimed.</p>
+
+<p>She looked at him for a moment with an added softness. "I presume it is
+natural you should love your home. But I am afraid you think I don't
+love mine much; I have been here&mdash;for so long&mdash;so little. Miss
+Chancellor <i>has</i> absorbed me&mdash;there is no doubt about that. But it's a
+pity I wasn't with her to-day." Ransom made no answer to this; he was
+incapable of telling Miss Tarrant that if she had been he would not have
+called upon her. It was not, indeed, that he was not incapable of
+hypocrisy, for when she had asked him if he had seen his cousin the
+night before, and he had replied that he hadn't seen her at all, and she
+had exclaimed with a candour which the next minute made her blush, "Ah,
+you don't mean to say you haven't forgiven her!"&mdash;after this he put on a
+look of innocence sufficient to carry off the inquiry, "Forgiven her for
+what?"</p>
+
+<p>Verena coloured at the sound of her own words. "Well, I could see how
+much she felt, that time at her house."</p>
+
+<p>"What did she feel?" Basil Ransom asked, with the natural provokingness
+of a man.</p>
+
+<p>I know not whether Verena was provoked, but she answered with more
+spirit than sequence: "Well, you know you <i>did</i> pour contempt on us,
+ever so much; I could see how it worked Olive up. Are you not going to
+see her at all?"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, I shall think about that; I am here only for three or four days,"
+said Ransom, smiling as men smile when they are perfectly
+unsatisfactory.</p>
+
+<p>It is very possible that Verena was provoked, inaccessible as she was,
+in a general way, to irritation; for she rejoined in a moment, with a
+little deliberate air: "Well, perhaps it's as well you shouldn't go, if
+you haven't changed at all."</p>
+
+<p>"I haven't changed at all," said the young man, smiling still, with his
+elbows on the arms of his chair, his shoulders pushed up a little, and
+his thin brown hands interlocked in front of him.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, I have had visitors who were quite opposed!" Verena announced, as
+if such news could not possibly alarm her. Then she added, "How then did
+you know I was out here?"</p>
+
+<p>"Miss Birdseye told me."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, I am so glad you went to see <i>her</i>!" the girl cried, speaking again
+with the impetuosity of a moment before.</p>
+
+<p>"I didn't go to see her. I met her in the street, just as she was
+leaving Miss Chancellor's door. I spoke to her, and accompanied her some
+distance. I passed that way because I knew it was the direct way to
+Cambridge&mdash;from the Common&mdash;and I was coming out to see you any way&mdash;on
+the chance."</p>
+
+<p>"On the chance?" Verena repeated.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes; Mrs. Luna, in New York, told me you were sometimes here, and I
+wanted, at any rate, to make the attempt to find you."</p>
+
+<p>It may be communicated to the reader that it was very agreeable to
+Verena to learn that her visitor had made this arduous pilgrimage (for
+she knew well enough how people in Boston regarded a winter journey to
+the academic suburb) with only half the prospect of a reward; but her
+pleasure was mixed with other feelings, or at least with the
+consciousness that the whole situation was rather less simple than the
+elements of her life had been hitherto. There was the germ of disorder
+in this invidious distinction which Mr. Ransom had suddenly made between
+Olive Chancellor, who was related to him by blood, and herself, who had
+never been related to him in any way whatever. She knew Olive by this
+time well enough to wish not to reveal it to her, and yet it would be
+something quite new for her to undertake to conceal such an incident as
+her having spent an hour with Mr. Ransom during a flying visit he had
+made to Boston. She had spent hours with other gentlemen, whom Olive
+didn't see; but that was different, because her friend knew about her
+doing it and didn't care, in regard to the persons&mdash;didn't care, that
+is, as she would care in this case. It was vivid to Verena's mind that
+now Olive <i>would</i> care. She had talked about Mr. Burrage, and Mr.
+Pardon, and even about some gentlemen in Europe, and she had not (after
+the first few days, a year and a half before) talked about Mr. Ransom.</p>
+
+<p>Nevertheless there were reasons, clear to Verena's view, for wishing
+either that he would go and see Olive or would keep away from <i>her</i>; and
+the responsibility of treating the fact that he had not so kept away as
+a secret seemed the greater, perhaps, in the light of this other fact,
+that so far as simply seeing Mr. Ransom went&mdash;why, she quite liked it.
+She had remembered him perfectly after their two former meetings,
+superficial as their contact then had been; she had thought of him at
+moments and wondered whether she should like him if she were to know him
+better. Now, at the end of twenty minutes, she did know him better, and
+found that he had rather a curious, but still a pleasant way. There he
+was, at any rate, and she didn't wish his call to be spoiled by any
+uncomfortable implication of consequences. So she glanced off, at the
+touch of Mrs. Luna's name; it seemed to afford relief. "Oh yes, Mrs.
+Luna&mdash;isn't she fascinating?"</p>
+
+<p>Ransom hesitated a little. "Well, no, I don't think she is."</p>
+
+<p>"You ought to like her&mdash;she hates our movement!" And Verena asked,
+further, numerous questions about the brilliant Adeline; whether he saw
+her often, whether she went out much, whether she was admired in New
+York, whether he thought her very handsome. He answered to the best of
+his ability, but soon made the reflexion that he had not come out to
+Monadnoc Place to talk about Mrs. Luna; in consequence of which, to
+change the subject (as well as to acquit himself of a social duty), he
+began to speak of Verena's parents, to express regret that Mrs. Tarrant
+had been sick, and fear that he was not to have the pleasure of seeing
+her. "She is a great deal better," Verena said; "but she's lying down;
+she lies down a great deal when she has got nothing else to do. Mother's
+very peculiar," she added in a moment; "she lies down when she feels
+well and happy, and when she's sick she walks about&mdash;she roams all round
+the house. If you hear her on the stairs a good deal, you can be pretty
+sure she's very bad. She'll be very much interested to hear about you
+after you have left."</p>
+
+<p>Ransom glanced at his watch. "I hope I am not staying too long&mdash;that I
+am not taking you away from her."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh no; she likes visitors, even when she can't see them. If it didn't
+take her so long to rise, she would have been down here by this time. I
+suppose you think she has missed me, since I have been so absorbed.
+Well, so she has, but she knows it's for my good. She would make any
+sacrifice for affection."</p>
+
+<p>The fancy suddenly struck Ransom of asking, in response to this, "And
+you? would you make any?"</p>
+
+<p>Verena gave him a bright natural stare. "Any sacrifice for affection?"
+She thought a moment, and then she said: "I don't think I have a right
+to say, because I have never been asked. I don't remember ever to have
+had to make a sacrifice&mdash;not an important one."</p>
+
+<p>"Lord! you must have had a happy life!"</p>
+
+<p>"I have been very fortunate, I know that. I don't know what to do when I
+think how some women&mdash;how most women&mdash;suffer. But I must not speak of
+that," she went on, with her smile coming back to her. "If you oppose
+our movement, you won't want to hear of the suffering of women!"</p>
+
+<p>"The suffering of women is the suffering of all humanity," Ransom
+returned. "Do you think any movement is going to stop that&mdash;or all the
+lectures from now to doomsday? We are born to suffer&mdash;and to bear it,
+like decent people."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, I adore heroism!" Verena interposed.</p>
+
+<p>"And as for women," Ransom went on, "they have one source of happiness
+that is closed to us&mdash;the consciousness that their presence here below
+lifts half the load of <i>our</i> suffering."</p>
+
+<p>Verena thought this very graceful, but she was not sure it was not
+rather sophistical; she would have liked to have Olive's judgement upon
+it. As that was not possible for the present, she abandoned the question
+(since learning that Mr. Ransom had passed over Olive, to come to her,
+she had become rather fidgety), and inquired of the young man,
+irrelevantly, whether he knew any one else in Cambridge.</p>
+
+<p>"Not a creature; as I tell you, I have never been here before. Your
+image alone attracted me; this charming interview will be henceforth my
+only association with the place."</p>
+
+<p>"It's a pity you couldn't have a few more," said Verena musingly.</p>
+
+<p>"A few more interviews? I should be unspeakably delighted!"</p>
+
+<p>"A few more associations. Did you see the colleges as you came?"</p>
+
+<p>"I had a glimpse of a large enclosure, with some big buildings. Perhaps
+I can look at them better as I go back to Boston."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh yes, you ought to see them&mdash;they have improved so much of late. The
+inner life, of course, is the greatest interest, but there is some fine
+architecture, if you are not familiar with Europe." She paused a moment,
+looking at him with an eye that seemed to brighten, and continued
+quickly, like a person who had collected herself for a little jump, "If
+you would like to walk round a little, I shall be very glad to show
+you."</p>
+
+<p>"To walk round&mdash;with you to show me?" Ransom repeated. "My dear Miss
+Tarrant, it would be the greatest privilege&mdash;the greatest happiness&mdash;of
+my life. What a delightful idea&mdash;what an ideal guide!"</p>
+
+<p>Verena got up; she would go and put on her hat; he must wait a little.
+Her offer had a frankness and friendliness which gave him a new
+sensation, and he could not know that as soon as she had made it (though
+she had hesitated too, with a moment of intense reflexion), she seemed
+to herself strangely reckless. An impulse pushed her; she obeyed it with
+her eyes open. She felt as a girl feels when she commits her first
+conscious indiscretion. She had done many things before which many
+people would have called indiscreet, but that quality had not even
+faintly belonged to them in her own mind; she had done them in perfect
+good faith and with a remarkable absence of palpitation. This
+superficially ingenuous proposal to walk around the colleges with Mr.
+Ransom had really another colour; it deepened the ambiguity of her
+position, by reason of a prevision which I shall presently mention. If
+Olive was not to know that she had seen him, this extension of their
+interview would double her secret. And yet, while she saw it grow&mdash;this
+monstrous little mystery&mdash;she couldn't feel sorry that she was going out
+with Olive's cousin. As I have already said, she had become nervous. She
+went to put on her hat, but at the door of the room she stopped, turned
+round, and presented herself to her visitor with a small spot in either
+cheek, which had appeared there within the instant. "I have suggested
+this, because it seems to me I ought to do something for you&mdash;in
+return," she said. "It's nothing, simply sitting there with me. And we
+haven't got anything else. This is our only hospitality. And the day
+seems so splendid."</p>
+
+<p>The modesty, the sweetness, of this little explanation, with a kind of
+intimated desire, constituting almost an appeal, for rightness, which
+seemed to pervade it, left a fragrance in the air after she had
+vanished. Ransom walked up and down the room, with his hands in his
+pockets, under the influence of it, without taking up even once the book
+about Mrs. Foat. He occupied the time in asking himself by what
+perversity of fate or of inclination such a charming creature was
+ranting upon platforms and living in Olive Chancellor's pocket, or how a
+ranter and sycophant could possibly be so engaging. And she was so
+disturbingly beautiful, too. This last fact was not less evident when
+she came down arranged for their walk. They left the house, and as they
+proceeded he remembered that he had asked himself earlier how he could
+do honour to such a combination of leisure and ethereal mildness as he
+had waked up to that morning&mdash;a mildness that seemed the very breath of
+his own latitude. This question was answered now; to do exactly what he
+was doing at that moment was an observance sufficiently festive.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="XXV" id="XXV"></a>XXV</h2>
+
+
+<p>They passed through two or three small, short streets, which, with their
+little wooden houses, with still more wooden door-yards, looked as if
+they had been constructed by the nearest carpenter and his boy&mdash;a
+sightless, soundless, interspaced, embryonic region&mdash;and entered a long
+avenue which, fringed on either side with fresh villas, offering
+themselves trustfully to the public, had the distinction of a wide
+pavement of neat red brick. The new paint on the square detached houses
+shone afar off in the transparent air: they had, on top, little cupolas
+and belvederes, in front a pillared piazza, made bare by the indoor life
+of winter, on either side a bow-window or two, and everywhere an
+embellishment of scallops, brackets, cornices, wooden flourishes. They
+stood, for the most part, on small eminences, lifted above the
+impertinence of hedge or paling, well up before the world, with all the
+good conscience which in many cases came, as Ransom saw (and he had
+noticed the same ornament when he traversed with Olive the quarter of
+Boston inhabited by Miss Birdseye), from a silvered number, affixed to
+the glass above the door, in figures huge enough to be read by the
+people who, in the periodic horse-cars, travelled along the middle of
+the avenue. It was to these glittering badges that many of the houses on
+either side owed their principal identity. One of the horse-cars now
+advanced in the straight, spacious distance; it was almost the only
+object that animated the prospect, which, in its large cleanness, its
+implication of strict business-habits on the part of all the people who
+were not there, Ransom thought very impressive. As he went on with
+Verena he asked her about the Women's Convention, the year before;
+whether it had accomplished much work and she had enjoyed it.</p>
+
+<p>"What do you care about the work it accomplished?" said the girl. "You
+don't take any interest in that."</p>
+
+<p>"You mistake my attitude. I don't like it, but I greatly fear it."</p>
+
+<p>In answer to this Verena gave a free laugh. "I don't believe you fear
+much!"</p>
+
+<p>"The bravest men have been afraid of women. Won't you even tell me
+whether you enjoyed it? I am told you made an immense sensation
+there&mdash;that you leaped into fame."</p>
+
+<p>Verena never waved off an allusion to her ability, her eloquence; she
+took it seriously, without any flutter or protest, and had no more
+manner about it than if it concerned the goddess Minerva. "I believe I
+attracted considerable attention; of course, that's what Olive wants&mdash;it
+paves the way for future work. I have no doubt I reached many that
+wouldn't have been reached otherwise. They think that's my great use&mdash;to
+take hold of the outsiders, as it were; of those who are prejudiced or
+thoughtless, or who don't care about anything unless it's amusing. I
+wake up the attention."</p>
+
+<p>"That's the class to which I belong," Ransom said. "Am I not an
+outsider? I wonder whether you would have reached me&mdash;or waked up my
+attention!"</p>
+
+<p>Verena was silent awhile, as they walked; he heard the light click of
+her boots on the smooth bricks. Then&mdash;"I think I <i>have</i> waked it up a
+little," she replied, looking straight before her.</p>
+
+<p>"Most assuredly! You have made me wish tremendously to contradict you."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, that's a good sign."</p>
+
+<p>"I suppose it was very exciting&mdash;your convention," Ransom went on, in a
+moment; "the sort of thing you would miss very much if you were to
+return to the ancient fold."</p>
+
+<p>"The ancient fold, you say very well, where women were slaughtered like
+sheep! Oh, last June, for a week, we just quivered! There were delegates
+from every State and every city; we lived in a crowd of people and of
+ideas; the heat was intense, the weather magnificent, and great thoughts
+and brilliant sayings flew round like darting fireflies. Olive had six
+celebrated, high-minded women staying in her house&mdash;two in a room; and
+in the summer evenings we sat in the open windows, in her parlour,
+looking out on the bay, with the lights gleaming in the water, and
+talked over the doings of the morning, the speeches, the incidents, the
+fresh contributions to the cause. We had some tremendously earnest
+discussions, which it would have been a benefit to you to hear, or any
+man who doesn't think that we can rise to the highest point. Then we had
+some refreshment&mdash;we consumed quantities of ice-cream!" said Verena, in
+whom the note of gaiety alternated with that of earnestness, almost of
+exaltation, in a manner which seemed to Basil Ransom absolutely and
+fascinatingly original. "Those were great nights!" she added, between a
+laugh and a sigh.</p>
+
+<p>Her description of the convention put the scene before him vividly; he
+seemed to see the crowded, overheated hall, which he was sure was filled
+with carpet-baggers, to hear flushed women, with loosened
+bonnet-strings, forcing thin voices into ineffectual shrillness. It made
+him angry, and all the more angry, that he hadn't a reason, to think of
+the charming creature at his side being mixed up with such elements,
+pushed and elbowed by them, conjoined with them in emulation, in
+unsightly strainings and clappings and shoutings, in wordy, windy
+iteration of inanities. Worst of all was the idea that she should have
+expressed such a congregation to itself so acceptably, have been
+acclaimed and applauded by hoarse throats, have been lifted up, to all
+the vulgar multitude, as the queen of the occasion. He made the
+reflexion, afterwards, that he was singularly ill-grounded in his wrath,
+inasmuch as it was none of his business what use Miss Tarrant chose to
+make of her energies, and, in addition to this, nothing else was to have
+been expected of her. But that reflexion was absent now, and in its
+absence he saw only the fact that his companion had been odiously
+perverted. "Well, Miss Tarrant," he said, with a deeper seriousness than
+showed in his voice, "I am forced to the painful conclusion that you are
+simply ruined."</p>
+
+<p>"Ruined? Ruined yourself!"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, I know the kind of women that Miss Chancellor had at her house, and
+what a group you must have made when you looked out at the Back Bay! It
+depresses me very much to think of it."</p>
+
+<p>"We made a lovely, interesting group, and if we had had a spare minute
+we would have been photographed," Verena said.</p>
+
+<p>This led him to ask her if she had ever subjected herself to the
+process; and she answered that a photographer had been after her as soon
+as she got back from Europe, and that she had sat for him, and that
+there were certain shops in Boston where her portrait could be obtained.
+She gave him this information very simply, without pretence of vagueness
+of knowledge, spoke of the matter rather respectfully, indeed, as if it
+might be of some importance; and when he said that he should go and buy
+one of the little pictures as soon as he returned to town, contented
+herself with replying, "Well, be sure you pick out a good one!" He had
+not been altogether without a hope that she would offer to give him one,
+with her name written beneath, which was a mode of acquisition he would
+greatly have preferred; but this, evidently, had not occurred to her,
+and now, as they went further, her thought was following a different
+train. That was proved by her remarking, at the end of a silence,
+inconsequently, "Well, it showed I have a great use!" As he stared,
+wondering what she meant, she explained that she referred to the
+brilliancy of her success at the convention. "It proved I have a great
+use," she repeated, "and that is all I care for!"</p>
+
+<p>"The use of a truly amiable woman is to make some honest man happy,"
+Ransom said, with a sententiousness of which he was perfectly aware.</p>
+
+<p>It was so marked that it caused her to stop short in the middle of the
+broad walk, while she looked at him with shining eyes. "See here, Mr.
+Ransom, do you know what strikes me?" she exclaimed. "The interest you
+take in me isn't really controversial&mdash;a bit. It's quite personal!" She
+was the most extraordinary girl; she could speak such words as those
+without the smallest look of added consciousness coming into her face,
+without the least supposable intention of coquetry, or any visible
+purpose of challenging the young man to say more.</p>
+
+<p>"My interest in you&mdash;my interest in you," he began. Then hesitating, he
+broke off suddenly. "It is certain your discovery doesn't make it any
+less!"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, that's better," she went on; "for we needn't dispute."</p>
+
+<p>He laughed at the way she arranged it, and they presently reached the
+irregular group of heterogeneous buildings&mdash;chapels, dormitories,
+libraries, halls&mdash;which, scattered among slender trees, over a space
+reserved by means of a low rustic fence, rather than enclosed (for
+Harvard knows nothing either of the jealousy or the dignity of high
+walls and guarded gateways), constitutes the great university of
+Massachusetts. The yard, or college-precinct, is traversed by a number
+of straight little paths, over which, at certain hours of the day, a
+thousand undergraduates, with books under their arm and youth in their
+step, flit from one school to another. Verena Tarrant knew her way
+round, as she said to her companion; it was not the first time she had
+taken an admiring visitor to see the local monuments. Basil Ransom,
+walking with her from point to point, admired them all, and thought
+several of them exceedingly quaint and venerable. The rectangular
+structures of old red brick especially gratified his eye; the afternoon
+sun was yellow on their homely faces; their windows showed a peep of
+flower-pots and bright-coloured curtains; they wore an expression of
+scholastic quietude, and exhaled for the young Mississippian a
+tradition, an antiquity. "This is the place where I ought to have been,"
+he said to his charming guide. "I should have had a good time if I had
+been able to study here."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes; I presume you feel yourself drawn to any place where ancient
+prejudices are garnered up," she answered, not without archness. "I know
+by the stand you take about our cause that you share the superstitions
+of the old bookmen. You ought to have been at one of those really
+medi&aelig;val universities that we saw on the other side, at Oxford, or
+G&ouml;ttingen, or Padua. You would have been in perfect sympathy with their
+spirit."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, I don't know much about those old haunts," Ransom rejoined. "I
+reckon this is good enough for me. And then it would have had the
+advantage that your residence isn't far, you know."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, I guess we shouldn't have seen you much at my residence! As you
+live in New York, you come, but here you wouldn't; that is always the
+way." With this light philosophy Verena beguiled the transit to the
+library, into which she introduced her companion with the air of a
+person familiar with the sanctified spot. This edifice, a diminished
+copy of the chapel of King's College, at the greater Cambridge, is a
+rich and impressive institution; and as he stood there, in the bright,
+heated stillness, which seemed suffused with the odour of old print and
+old bindings, and looked up into the high, light vaults that hung over
+quiet book-laden galleries, alcoves and tables, and glazed cases where
+rarer treasures gleamed more vaguely, over busts of benefactors and
+portraits of worthies, bowed heads of working students and the gentle
+creak of passing messengers&mdash;as he took possession, in a comprehensive
+glance, of the wealth and wisdom of the place, he felt more than ever
+the soreness of an opportunity missed; but he abstained from expressing
+it (it was too deep for that), and in a moment Verena had introduced him
+to a young lady, a friend of hers, who, as she explained, was working on
+the catalogue, and whom she had asked for on entering the library, at a
+desk where another young lady was occupied. Miss Catching, the
+first-mentioned young lady, presented herself with promptness, offered
+Verena a low-toned but appreciative greeting, and, after a little,
+undertook to explain to Ransom the mysteries of the catalogue, which
+consisted of a myriad little cards, disposed alphabetically in immense
+chests of drawers. Ransom was deeply interested, and as, with Verena, he
+followed Miss Catching about (she was so good as to show them the
+establishment in all its ramifications), he considered with attention
+the young lady's fair ringlets and refined, anxious expression, saying
+to himself that this was in the highest degree a New England type.
+Verena found an opportunity to mention to him that she was wrapped up in
+the cause, and there was a moment during which he was afraid that his
+companion would expose him to her as one of its traducers; but there was
+that in Miss Catching's manner (and in the influence of the lofty halls)
+which deprecated loud pleasantry, and seemed to say, moreover, that if
+she were treated to such a revelation she should not know under what
+letter to range it.</p>
+
+<p>"Now there is one place where perhaps it would be indelicate to take a
+Mississippian," Verena said, after this episode. "I mean the great place
+that towers above the others&mdash;that big building with the beautiful
+pinnacles, which you see from every point." But Basil Ransom had heard
+of the great Memorial Hall; he knew what memories it enshrined, and the
+worst that he should have to suffer there; and the ornate, overtopping
+structure, which was the finest piece of architecture he had ever seen,
+had moreover solicited his enlarged curiosity for the last half-hour. He
+thought there was rather too much brick about it, but it was buttressed,
+cloistered, turreted, dedicated, superscribed, as he had never seen
+anything; though it didn't look old, it looked significant; it covered a
+large area, and it sprang majestic into the winter air. It was detached
+from the rest of the collegiate group, and stood in a grassy triangle of
+its own. As he approached it with Verena she suddenly stopped, to
+decline responsibility. "Now mind, if you don't like what's inside, it
+isn't my fault."</p>
+
+<p>He looked at her an instant, smiling. "Is there anything against
+Mississippi?"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, no, I don't think she is mentioned. But there is great praise of
+our young men in the war."</p>
+
+<p>"It says they were brave, I suppose."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, it says so in Latin."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, so they were&mdash;I know something about that," Basil Ransom said. "I
+must be brave enough to face them&mdash;it isn't the first time." And they
+went up the low steps and passed into the tall doors. The Memorial Hall
+of Harvard consists of three main divisions: one of them a theatre, for
+academic ceremonies; another a vast refectory, covered with a timbered
+roof, hung about with portraits and lighted by stained windows, like the
+halls of the colleges of Oxford; and the third, the most interesting, a
+chamber high, dim, and severe, consecrated to the sons of the university
+who fell in the long Civil War. Ransom and his companion wandered from
+one part of the building to another, and stayed their steps at several
+impressive points; but they lingered longest in the presence of the
+white, ranged tablets, each of which, in its proud, sad clearness, is
+inscribed with the name of a student-soldier. The effect of the place is
+singularly noble and solemn, and it is impossible to feel it without a
+lifting of the heart. It stands there for duty and honour, it speaks of
+sacrifice and example, seems a kind of temple to youth, manhood,
+generosity. Most of them were young, all were in their prime, and all of
+them had fallen; this simple idea hovers before the visitor and makes
+him read with tenderness each name and place&mdash;names often without other
+history, and forgotten Southern battles. For Ransom these things were
+not a challenge nor a taunt; they touched him with respect, with the
+sentiment of beauty. He was capable of being a generous foeman, and he
+forgot, now, the whole question of sides and parties; the simple emotion
+of the old fighting-time came back to him, and the monument around him
+seemed an embodiment of that memory; it arched over friends as well as
+enemies, the victims of defeat as well as the sons of triumph.</p>
+
+<p>"It is very beautiful&mdash;but I think it is very dreadful!" This remark,
+from Verena, called him back to the present. "It's a real sin to put up
+such a building, just to glorify a lot of bloodshed. If it wasn't so
+majestic, I would have it pulled down."</p>
+
+<p>"That is delightful feminine logic!" Ransom answered. "If, when women
+have the conduct of affairs, they fight as well as they reason, surely
+for them too we shall have to set up memorials."</p>
+
+<p>Verena retorted that they would reason so well they would have no need
+to fight&mdash;they would usher in the reign of peace. "But this is very
+peaceful too," she added, looking about her; and she sat down on a low
+stone ledge, as if to enjoy the influence of the scene. Ransom left her
+alone for ten minutes; he wished to take another look at the inscribed
+tablets, and read again the names of the various engagements, at several
+of which he had been present. When he came back to her she greeted him
+abruptly, with a question which had no reference to the solemnity of the
+spot. "If Miss Birdseye knew you were coming out to see me, can't <i>she</i>
+easily tell Olive? Then won't Olive make her reflexions about your
+neglect of herself?"</p>
+
+<p>"I don't care for her reflexions. At any rate, I asked Miss Birdseye, as
+a favour, not to mention to her that she had met me," Ransom added.</p>
+
+<p>Verena was silent a moment. "Your logic is most as good as a woman's. Do
+change your mind and go to see her now," she went on. "She will probably
+be at home by the time you get to Charles Street. If she was a little
+strange, a little stiff with you before (I know just how she must have
+been), all that will be different to-day."</p>
+
+<p>"Why will it be different?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, she will be easier, more genial, much softer."</p>
+
+<p>"I don't believe it," said Ransom; and his scepticism seemed none the
+less complete because it was light and smiling.</p>
+
+<p>"She is much happier now&mdash;she can afford not to mind you."</p>
+
+<p>"Not to mind me? That's a nice inducement for a gentleman to go and see
+a lady!"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, she will be more gracious, because she feels now that she is more
+successful."</p>
+
+<p>"You mean because she has brought you out? Oh, I have no doubt that has
+cleared the air for her immensely, and you have improved her very much.
+But I have got a charming impression out here, and I have no wish to put
+another&mdash;which won't be charming, anyhow you arrange it&mdash;on top of it."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, she will be sure to know you have been round here, at any rate,"
+Verena rejoined.</p>
+
+<p>"How will she know, unless you tell her?"</p>
+
+<p>"I tell her everything," said the girl; and now as soon as she had
+spoken, she blushed. He stood before her, tracing a figure on the mosaic
+pavement with his cane, conscious that in a moment they had become more
+intimate. They were discussing their affairs, which had nothing to do
+with the heroic symbols that surrounded them; but their affairs had
+suddenly grown so serious that there was no want of decency in their
+lingering there for the purpose. The implication that his visit might
+remain as a secret between them made them both feel it differently. To
+ask her to keep it so would have been, as it seemed to Ransom, a
+liberty, and, moreover, he didn't care so much as that; but if she were
+to prefer to do so such a preference would only make him consider the
+more that his expedition had been a success.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, then, you can tell her this!" he said in a moment.</p>
+
+<p>"If I shouldn't, it would be the first&mdash;&mdash;" And Verena checked herself.</p>
+
+<p>"You must arrange that with your conscience," Ransom went on, laughing.</p>
+
+<p>They came out of the hall, passed down the steps, and emerged from the
+Delta, as that portion of the college precinct is called. The afternoon
+had begun to wane, but the air was filled with a pink brightness, and
+there was a cool, pure smell, a vague breath of spring.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, if I don't tell Olive, then you must leave me here," said Verena,
+stopping in the path and putting out a hand of farewell.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't understand. What has that to do with it? Besides I thought you
+said you <i>must</i> tell," Ransom added. In playing with the subject this
+way, in enjoying her visible hesitation, he was slightly conscious of a
+man's brutality&mdash;of being pushed by an impulse to test her good-nature,
+which seemed to have no limit. It showed no sign of perturbation as she
+answered:</p>
+
+<p>"Well, I want to be free&mdash;to do as I think best. And, if there is a
+chance of my keeping it back, there mustn't be anything more&mdash;there must
+not, Mr. Ransom, really."</p>
+
+<p>"Anything more? Why, what are you afraid there will be&mdash;if I should
+simply walk home with you?"</p>
+
+<p>"I must go alone, I must hurry back to mother," she said, for all reply.
+And she again put out her hand, which he had not taken before.</p>
+
+<p>Of course he took it now, and even held it a moment; he didn't like
+being dismissed, and was thinking of pretexts to linger. "Miss Birdseye
+said you would convert me, but you haven't yet," it came into his head
+to say.</p>
+
+<p>"You can't tell yet; wait a little. My influence is peculiar; it
+sometimes comes out a long time afterwards!" This speech, on Verena's
+part, was evidently perfunctory, and the grandeur of her self-reference
+jocular; she was much more serious when she went on quickly, "Do you
+mean to say Miss Birdseye promised you that?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh yes. Talk about influence! you should have seen the influence I
+obtained over her."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, what good will it do, if I'm going to tell Olive about your
+visit?"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, you see, I think she hopes you won't. She believes you are going
+to convert me privately&mdash;so that I shall blaze forth, suddenly, out of
+the darkness of Mississippi, as a first-class proselyte: very effective
+and dramatic."</p>
+
+<p>Verena struck Basil Ransom as constantly simple, but there were moments
+when her candour seemed to him preternatural. "If I thought that would
+be the effect, I might make an exception," she remarked, speaking as if
+such a result were, after all, possible.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, Miss Tarrant, you will convert me enough, any way," said the young
+man.</p>
+
+<p>"Enough? What do you mean by enough?"</p>
+
+<p>"Enough to make me terribly unhappy."</p>
+
+<p>She looked at him a moment, evidently not understanding; but she tossed
+him a retort at a venture, turned away, and took her course homeward.
+The retort was that if he should be unhappy it would serve him right&mdash;a
+form of words that committed her to nothing. As he returned to Boston he
+saw how curious he should be to learn whether she had betrayed him, as
+it were, to Miss Chancellor. He might learn through Mrs. Luna; that
+would almost reconcile him to going to see her again. Olive would
+mention it in writing to her sister, and Adeline would repeat the
+complaint. Perhaps she herself would even make him a scene about it;
+that would be, for him, part of the unhappiness he had foretold to
+Verena Tarrant.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="XXVI" id="XXVI"></a>XXVI</h2>
+
+
+<p>"Mrs. Henry Burrage, at home Wednesday evening, March 26th, at half-past
+nine o'clock." It was in consequence of having received a card with
+these words inscribed upon it that Basil Ransom presented himself, on
+the evening she had designated, at the house of a lady he had never
+heard of before. The account of the relation of effect to cause is not
+complete, however, unless I mention that the card bore, furthermore, in
+the left-hand lower corner, the words: "An Address from Miss Verena
+Tarrant." He had an idea (it came mainly from the look and even the
+odour of the engraved pasteboard) that Mrs. Burrage was a member of the
+fashionable world, and it was with considerable surprise that he found
+himself in such an element. He wondered what had induced a denizen of
+that fine air to send him an invitation; then he said to himself that,
+obviously, Verena Tarrant had simply requested that this should be done.
+Mrs. Henry Burrage, whoever she might be, had asked her if she shouldn't
+like some of her own friends to be present, and she had said, Oh yes,
+and mentioned him in the happy group. She had been able to give Mrs.
+Burrage his address, for had it not been contained in the short letter
+he despatched to Monadnoc Place soon after his return from Boston, in
+which he thanked Miss Tarrant afresh for the charming hour she had
+enabled him to spend at Cambridge? She had not answered his letter at
+the time, but Mrs. Burrage's card was a very good answer. Such a missive
+deserved a rejoinder, and it was by way of rejoinder that he entered the
+street car which, on the evening of March 26th, was to deposit him at a
+corner adjacent to Mrs. Burrage's dwelling. He almost never went to
+evening parties (he knew scarcely any one who gave them, though Mrs.
+Luna had broken him in a little), and he was sure this occasion was of
+festive intention, would have nothing in common with the nocturnal
+"exercises" at Miss Birdseye's; but he would have exposed himself to
+almost any social discomfort in order to see Verena Tarrant on the
+platform. The platform it evidently was to be&mdash;private if not
+public&mdash;since one was admitted by a ticket given away if not sold. He
+took his in his pocket, quite ready to present it at the door. It would
+take some time for me to explain the contradiction to the reader; but
+Basil Ransom's desire to be present at one of Verena's regular
+performances was not diminished by the fact that he detested her views
+and thought the whole business a poor perversity. He understood her now
+very well (since his visit to Cambridge); he saw she was honest and
+natural; she had queer, bad lecture-blood in her veins, and a comically
+false idea of the aptitude of little girls for conducting movements; but
+her enthusiasm was of the purest, her illusions had a fragrance, and so
+far as the mania for producing herself personally was concerned, it had
+been distilled into her by people who worked her for ends which to Basil
+Ransom could only appear insane. She was a touching, ingenuous victim,
+unconscious of the pernicious forces which were hurrying her to her
+ruin. With this idea of ruin there had already associated itself in the
+young man's mind, the idea&mdash;a good deal more dim and incomplete&mdash;of
+rescue; and it was the disposition to confirm himself in the view that
+her charm was her own, and her fallacies, her absurdity, a mere
+reflexion of unlucky circumstance, that led him to make an effort to
+behold her in the position in which he could least bear to think of her.
+Such a glimpse was all that was wanted to prove to him that she was a
+person for whom he might open an unlimited credit of tender compassion.
+He expected to suffer&mdash;to suffer deliciously.</p>
+
+<p>By the time he had crossed Mrs. Burrage's threshold there was no doubt
+whatever in his mind that he was in the fashionable world. It was
+embodied strikingly in the stout, elderly, ugly lady, dressed in a
+brilliant colour, with a twinkle of jewels and a bosom much uncovered,
+who stood near the door of the first room, and with whom the people
+passing in before him were shaking hands. Ransom made her a Mississipian
+bow, and she said she was delighted to see him, while people behind him
+pressed him forward. He yielded to the impulsion, and found himself in a
+great saloon, amid lights and flowers, where the company was dense, and
+there were more twinkling, smiling ladies, with uncovered bosoms. It was
+certainly the fashionable world, for there was no one there whom he had
+ever seen before. The walls of the room were covered with pictures&mdash;the
+very ceiling was painted and framed. The people pushed each other a
+little, edged about, advanced and retreated, looking at each other with
+differing faces&mdash;sometimes blandly, unperceivingly, sometimes with a
+harshness of contemplation, a kind of cruelty, Ransom thought; sometimes
+with sudden nods and grimaces, inarticulate murmurs, followed by a quick
+reaction, a sort of gloom. He was now absolutely certain that he was in
+the best society. He was carried further and further forward, and saw
+that another room stretched beyond the one he had entered, in which
+there was a sort of little stage, covered with a red cloth, and an
+immense collection of chairs, arranged in rows. He became aware that
+people looked at him, as well as at each other, rather more, indeed,
+than at each other, and he wondered whether it were very visible in his
+appearance that his being there was a kind of exception. He didn't know
+how much his head looked over the heads of others, or that his brown
+complexion, fuliginous eye, and straight black hair, the leonine fall of
+which I mentioned in the first pages of this narrative, gave him that
+relief which, in the best society, has the great advantage of suggesting
+a topic. But there were other topics besides, as was proved by a
+fragment of conversation, between two ladies, which reached his ear
+while he stood rather wistfully wondering where Verena Tarrant might be.</p>
+
+<p>"Are you a member?" one of the ladies said to the other. "I didn't know
+you had joined."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, I haven't; nothing would induce me."</p>
+
+<p>"That's not fair; you have all the fun and none of the responsibility."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, the&mdash;the fun!" exclaimed the second lady.</p>
+
+<p>"You needn't abuse us, or I will never invite you," said the first.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, I thought it was meant to be improving; that's all I mean; very
+good for the mind. Now, this woman to-night; isn't she from Boston?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, I believe they have brought her on, just for this."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, you must be pretty desperate when you have got to go to Boston
+for your entertainment."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, there's a similar society there, and I never heard of their
+sending to New York."</p>
+
+<p>"Of course not, they think they have got everything. But doesn't it make
+your life a burden thinking what you can possibly have?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh dear, no. I am going to have Professor Gougenheim&mdash;all about the
+Talmud. You must come."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, I'll come," said the second lady; "but nothing would induce me to
+be a regular member."</p>
+
+<p>Whatever the mystic circle might be, Ransom agreed with the second lady
+that regular membership must have terrors, and he admired her
+independence in such an artificial world. A considerable part of the
+company had now directed itself to the further apartment&mdash;people had
+begun to occupy the chairs, to confront the empty platform. He reached
+the wide doors, and saw that the place was a spacious music-room,
+decorated in white and gold, with a polished floor and marble busts of
+composers, on brackets attached to the delicate panels. He forbore to
+enter, however, being shy about taking a seat, and seeing that the
+ladies were arranging themselves first. He turned back into the first
+room, to wait till the audience had massed itself, conscious that even
+if he were behind every one he should be able to make a long neck; and
+here, suddenly, in a corner, his eyes rested upon Olive Chancellor. She
+was seated a little apart, in an angle of the room, and she was looking
+straight at him; but as soon as she perceived that he saw her she
+dropped her eyes, giving no sign of recognition. Ransom hesitated a
+moment, but the next he went straight over to her. It had been in his
+mind that if Verena Tarrant was there, <i>she</i> would be there; an instinct
+told him that Miss Chancellor would not allow her dear friend to come to
+New York without her. It was very possible she meant to "cut"
+him&mdash;especially if she knew of his having cut her, the other week, in
+Boston; but it was his duty to take for granted she would speak to him,
+until the contrary should be definitely proved. Though he had seen her
+only twice he remembered well how acutely shy she was capable of being,
+and he thought it possible one of these spasms had seized her at the
+present time.</p>
+
+<p>When he stood before her he found his conjecture perfectly just; she was
+white with the intensity of her self-consciousness; she was altogether
+in a very uncomfortable state. She made no response to his offer to
+shake hands with her, and he saw that she would never go through that
+ceremony again. She looked up at him when he spoke to her, and her lips
+moved; but her face was intensely grave and her eye had almost a
+feverish light. She had evidently got into her corner to be out of the
+way; he recognised in her the air of an interloper, as he had felt it in
+himself. The small sofa on which she had placed herself had the form to
+which the French give the name of <i>causeuse</i>; there was room on it for
+just another person, and Ransom asked her, with a cheerful accent, if he
+might sit down beside her. She turned towards him when he had done so,
+turned everything but her eyes, and opened and shut her fan while she
+waited for her fit of diffidence to pass away. Ransom himself did not
+wait; he took a jocular tone about their encounter, asking her if she
+had come to New York to rouse the people. She glanced round the room;
+the backs of Mrs. Burrage's guests, mainly, were presented to them, and
+their position was partly masked by a pyramid of flowers which rose from
+a pedestal close to Olive's end of the sofa and diffused a fragrance in
+the air.</p>
+
+<p>"Do you call these 'the people'?" she asked.</p>
+
+<p>"I haven't the least idea. I don't know who any of them are, not even
+who Mrs. Henry Burrage is, I simply received an invitation."</p>
+
+<p>Miss Chancellor gave him no information on the point he had mentioned;
+she only said, in a moment: "Do you go wherever you are invited?"</p>
+
+<p>"Why, I go if I think I may find you there," the young man replied
+gallantly. "My card mentioned that Miss Tarrant would give an address,
+and I knew that wherever she is you are not far off. I have heard you
+are inseparable, from Mrs. Luna."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, we are inseparable. That is exactly why I am here."</p>
+
+<p>"It's the fashionable world, then, you are going to stir up."</p>
+
+<p>Olive remained for some time with her eyes fastened to the floor; then
+she flashed them up at her interlocutor. "It's a part of our life to go
+anywhere&mdash;to carry our work where it seems most needed. We have taught
+ourselves to stifle repulsion, distaste."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, I think this is very amusing," said Ransom. "It's a beautiful
+house, and there are some very pretty faces. We haven't anything so
+brilliant in Mississippi."</p>
+
+<p>To everything he said Olive offered at first a momentary silence, but
+the worst of her shyness was apparently leaving her.</p>
+
+<p>"Are you successful in New York? do you like it?" she presently asked,
+uttering the inquiry in a tone of infinite melancholy, as if the eternal
+sense of duty forced it from her lips.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, successful! I am not successful as you and Miss Tarrant are; for
+(to my barbaric eyes) it is a great sign of prosperity to be the
+heroines of an occasion like this."</p>
+
+<p>"Do I look like the heroine of an occasion?" asked Olive Chancellor,
+without an intention of humour, but with an effect that was almost
+comical.</p>
+
+<p>"You would if you didn't hide yourself away. Are you not going into the
+other room to hear the speech? Everything is prepared."</p>
+
+<p>"I am going when I am notified&mdash;when I am invited."</p>
+
+<p>There was considerable majesty in her tone, and Ransom saw that
+something was wrong, that she felt neglected. To see that she was as
+ticklish with others as she had been with him made him feel forgiving,
+and there was in his manner a perfect disposition to forget their
+differences as he said, "Oh, there is plenty of time; the place isn't
+half full yet."</p>
+
+<p>She made no direct rejoinder to this, but she asked him about his mother
+and sisters, what news he received from the South. "Have they any
+happiness?" she inquired, rather as if she warned him to take care not
+to pretend they had. He neglected her warning to the point of saying
+that there was one happiness they always had&mdash;that of having learned not
+to think about it too much, and to make the best of their circumstances.
+She listened to this with an air of great reserve, and apparently
+thought he had wished to give her a lesson; for she suddenly broke out,
+"You mean that you have traced a certain line for them, and that that's
+all you know about it!"</p>
+
+<p>Ransom stared at her, surprised; he felt, now, that she would always
+surprise him. "Ah, don't be rough with me," he said, in his soft
+Southern voice; "don't you remember how you knocked me about when I
+called on you in Boston?"</p>
+
+<p>"You hold us in chains, and then, when we writhe in our agony, you say
+we don't behave prettily!" These words, which did not lessen Ransom's
+wonderment, were the young lady's answer to his deprecatory speech. She
+saw that he was honestly bewildered and that in a moment more he would
+laugh at her, as he had done a year and a half before (she remembered it
+as if it had been yesterday); and to stop that off, at any cost, she
+went on hurriedly&mdash;"If you listen to Miss Tarrant, you will know what I
+mean."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, Miss Tarrant&mdash;Miss Tarrant!" And Basil Ransom's laughter came.</p>
+
+<p>She had not escaped that mockery, after all, and she looked at him
+sharply now, her embarrassment having quite cleared up. "What do you
+know about her? What observation have you had?"</p>
+
+<p>Ransom met her eye, and for a moment they scrutinised each other. Did
+she know of his interview with Verena a month before, and was her
+reserve simply the wish to place on him the burden of declaring that he
+had been to Boston since they last met, and yet had not called in
+Charles Street? He thought there was suspicion in her face; but in
+regard to Verena she would always be suspicious. If he had done at that
+moment just what would gratify him he would have said to her that he
+knew a great deal about Miss Tarrant, having lately had a long walk and
+talk with her; but he checked himself, with the reflexion that if Verena
+had not betrayed him it would be very wrong in him to betray her. The
+sweetness of the idea that she should have thought the episode of his
+visit to Monadnoc Place worth placing under the rose, was quenched for
+the moment in his regret at not being able to let his disagreeable
+cousin know that he had passed <i>her</i> over. "Don't you remember my
+hearing her speak that night at Miss Birdseye's?" he said presently.
+"And I met her the next day at your house, you know."</p>
+
+<p>"She has developed greatly since then," Olive remarked dryly; and Ransom
+felt sure that Verena had held her tongue.</p>
+
+<p>At this moment a gentleman made his way through the clusters of Mrs.
+Burrage's guests and presented himself to Olive. "If you will do me the
+honour to take my arm I will find a good seat for you in the other room.
+It's getting to be time for Miss Tarrant to reveal herself. I have been
+taking her into the picture-room; there were some things she wanted to
+see. She is with my mother now," he added, as if Miss Chancellor's grave
+face constituted a sort of demand for an explanation of her friend's
+absence. "She said she was a little nervous; so I thought we would just
+move about."</p>
+
+<p>"It's the first time I have ever heard of that!" said Olive Chancellor,
+preparing to surrender herself to the young man's guidance. He told her
+that he had reserved the best seat for her; it was evidently his desire
+to conciliate her, to treat her as a person of importance. Before
+leading her away, he shook hands with Ransom and remarked that he was
+very glad to see him; and Ransom saw that he must be the master of the
+house, though he could scarcely be the son of the stout lady in the
+doorway. He was a fresh, pleasant, handsome young man, with a bright
+friendly manner; he recommended Ransom to take a seat in the other room,
+without delay; if he had never heard Miss Tarrant he would have one of
+the greatest pleasures of his life.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, Mr. Ransom only comes to ventilate his prejudices," Miss Chancellor
+said, as she turned her back to her kinsman. He shrank from pushing into
+the front of the company, which was now rapidly filling the music-room,
+and contented himself with lingering in the doorway, where several
+gentlemen were stationed. The seats were all occupied; all, that is,
+save one, towards which he saw Miss Chancellor and her companion direct
+themselves, squeezing and edging past the people who were standing up
+against the walls. This was quite in front, close to the little
+platform; every one noticed Olive as she went, and Ransom heard a
+gentleman near him say to another&mdash;"I guess she's one of the same kind."
+He looked for Verena, but she was apparently keeping out of sight.
+Suddenly he felt himself smartly tapped on the back, and, turning round,
+perceived Mrs. Luna, who had been prodding him with her fan.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="XXVII" id="XXVII"></a>XXVII</h2>
+
+
+<p>"You won't speak to me in my own house&mdash;that I have almost grown used
+to; but if you are going to pass me over in public I think you might
+give me warning first." This was only her archness, and he knew what to
+make of that now; she was dressed in yellow and looked very plump and
+gay. He wondered at the unerring instinct by which she had discovered
+his exposed quarter. The outer room was completely empty; she had come
+in at the further door and found the field free for her operations. He
+offered to find her a place where she could see and hear Miss Tarrant,
+to get her a chair to stand on, even, if she wished to look over the
+heads of the gentlemen in the doorway; a proposal which she greeted with
+the inquiry&mdash;"Do you suppose I came here for the sake of that
+chatterbox? haven't I told you what I think of her?"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, you certainly did not come here for my sake," said Ransom,
+anticipating this insinuation; "for you couldn't possibly have known I
+was coming."</p>
+
+<p>"I guessed it&mdash;a presentiment told me!" Mrs. Luna declared; and she
+looked up at him with searching, accusing eyes. "I know what you have
+come for," she cried in a moment. "You never mentioned to me that you
+knew Mrs. Burrage!"</p>
+
+<p>"I don't&mdash;I never had heard of her till she asked me."</p>
+
+<p>"Then why in the world <i>did</i> she ask you?"</p>
+
+<p>Ransom had spoken a trifle rashly; it came over him, quickly, that there
+were reasons why he had better not have said that. But almost as quickly
+he covered up his mistake. "I suppose your sister was so good as to ask
+for a card for me."</p>
+
+<p>"My sister? My grandmother! I know how Olive loves you. Mr. Ransom, you
+are very deep." She had drawn him well into the room, out of earshot of
+the group in the doorway, and he felt that if she should be able to
+compass her wish she would organise a little entertainment for herself,
+in the outer drawing-room, in opposition to Miss Tarrant's address.
+"Please come and sit down here a moment; we shall be quite undisturbed.
+I have something very particular to say to you." She led the way to the
+little sofa in the corner, where he had been talking with Olive a few
+minutes before, and he accompanied her, with extreme reluctance,
+grudging the moments that he should be obliged to give to her. He had
+quite forgotten that he once had a vision of spending his life in her
+society, and he looked at his watch as he made the observation:</p>
+
+<p>"I haven't the least idea of losing any of the sport in there, you
+know."</p>
+
+<p>He felt, the next instant, that he oughtn't to have said that either;
+but he was irritated, disconcerted, and he couldn't help it. It was in
+the nature of a gallant Mississippian to do everything a lady asked him,
+and he had never, remarkable as it may appear, been in the position of
+finding such a request so incompatible with his own desires as now. It
+was a new predicament, for Mrs. Luna evidently meant to keep him if she
+could. She looked round the room, more and more pleased at their having
+it to themselves, and for the moment said nothing more about the
+singularity of his being there. On the contrary, she became freshly
+jocular, remarked that now they had got hold of him they wouldn't easily
+let him go, they would make him entertain them, induce him to give a
+lecture&mdash;on the "Lights and Shadows of Southern Life," or the "Social
+Peculiarities of Mississippi"&mdash;before the Wednesday Club.</p>
+
+<p>"And what in the world is the Wednesday Club? I suppose it's what those
+ladies were talking about," Ransom said.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't know your ladies, but the Wednesday Club is this thing. I don't
+mean you and me here together, but all those deluded beings in the other
+room. It is New York trying to be like Boston. It is the culture, the
+good form, of the metropolis. You might not think it, but it is. It's
+the 'quiet set'; they <i>are</i> quiet enough; you might hear a pin drop, in
+there. Is some one going to offer up a prayer? How happy Olive must be,
+to be taken so seriously! They form an association for meeting at each
+other's houses, every week, and having some performance, or some paper
+read, or some subject explained. The more dreary it is and the more
+fearful the subject, the more they think it is what it ought to be. They
+have an idea this is the way to make New York society intellectual.
+There's a sumptuary law&mdash;isn't that what you call it?&mdash;about suppers,
+and they restrict themselves to a kind of Spartan broth. When it's made
+by their French cooks it isn't bad. Mrs. Burrage is one of the principal
+members&mdash;one of the founders, I believe; and when her turn has come
+round, formerly&mdash;it comes only once in the winter for each&mdash;I am told
+she has usually had very good music. But that is thought rather a base
+evasion, a begging of the question; the vulgar set can easily keep up
+with them on music. So Mrs. Burrage conceived the extraordinary
+idea"&mdash;and it was wonderful to hear how Mrs. Luna pronounced that
+adjective&mdash;"of sending on to Boston for that girl. It was her son, of
+course, who put it into her head; he has been at Cambridge for some
+years&mdash;that's where Verena lived, you know&mdash;and he was as thick with her
+as you please out there. Now that he is no longer there it suits him
+very well to have her here. She is coming on a visit to his mother when
+Olive goes. I asked them to stay with me, but Olive declined,
+majestically; she said they wished to be in some place where they would
+be free to receive 'sympathising friends.' So they are staying at some
+extraordinary kind of New Jerusalem boarding-house, in Tenth Street;
+Olive thinks it's her duty to go to such places. I was greatly surprised
+that she should let Verena be drawn into such a worldly crowd as this;
+but she told me they had made up their minds not to let <i>any</i> occasion
+slip, that they could sow the seed of truth in drawing-rooms as well as
+in workshops, and that if a single person was brought round to their
+ideas they should have been justified in coming on. That's what they are
+doing in there&mdash;sowing the seed; but you shall not be the one that's
+brought round, I shall take care of that. Have you seen my delightful
+sister yet? The way she <i>does</i> arrange herself when she wants to protest
+against frills! She looks as if she thought it pretty barren ground
+round here, now she has come to see it. I don't think she thinks you can
+be saved in a French dress, anyhow. I must say I call it a <i>very</i> base
+evasion of Mrs. Burrage's, producing Verena Tarrant; it's worse than the
+meretricious music. Why didn't she honestly send for a <i>ballerina</i> from
+Niblo's&mdash;if she wanted a young woman capering about on a platform? They
+don't care a fig about poor Olive's ideas; it's only because Verena has
+strange hair, and shiny eyes, and gets herself up like a
+prestidigitator's assistant. I have never understood how Olive can
+reconcile herself to Verena's really low style of dress. I suppose it's
+only because her clothes are so fearfully made. You look as if you
+didn't believe me&mdash;but I assure you that the cut is revolutionary; and
+that's a salve to Olive's conscience."</p>
+
+<p>Ransom was surprised to hear that he looked as if he didn't believe her,
+for he had found himself, after his first uneasiness, listening with
+considerable interest to her account of the circumstances under which
+Miss Tarrant was visiting New York. After a moment, as the result of
+some private reflexion, he propounded this question: "Is the son of the
+lady of the house a handsome young man, very polite, in a white vest?"</p>
+
+<p>"I don't know the colour of his vest&mdash;but he has a kind of fawning
+manner. Verena judges from that that he is in love with her."</p>
+
+<p>"Perhaps he is," said Ransom. "You say it was his idea to get her to
+come on."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, he likes to flirt; that is highly probable."</p>
+
+<p>"Perhaps she has brought him round."</p>
+
+<p>"Not to where she wants, I think. The property is very large; he will
+have it all one of these days."</p>
+
+<p>"Do you mean she wishes to impose on him the yoke of matrimony?" Ransom
+asked, with Southern languor.</p>
+
+<p>"I believe she thinks matrimony an exploded superstition; but there is
+here and there a case in which it is still the best thing; when the
+gentleman's name happens to be Burrage and the young lady's Tarrant. I
+don't admire 'Burrage' so much myself. But I think she would have
+captured this present scion if it hadn't been for Olive. Olive stands
+between them&mdash;she wants to keep her in the single sisterhood; to keep
+her, above all, for herself. Of course she won't listen to her marrying,
+and she has put a spoke in the wheel. She has brought her to New York;
+that may seem against what I say; but the girl pulls hard, she has to
+humour her, to give her her head sometimes, to throw something
+overboard, in short, to save the rest. You may say, as regards Mr.
+Burrage, that it's a queer taste in a gentleman; but there is no arguing
+about that. It's queer taste in a lady, too; for she is a lady, poor
+Olive. You can see that to-night. She is dressed like a book-agent, but
+she is more distinguished than any one here. Verena, beside her, looks
+like a walking advertisement."</p>
+
+<p>When Mrs. Luna paused, Basil Ransom became aware that, in the other
+room, Verena's address had begun; the sound of her clear, bright,
+ringing voice, an admirable voice for public uses, came to them from the
+distance. His eagerness to stand where he could hear her better, and see
+her into the bargain, made him start in his place, and this movement
+produced an outgush of mocking laughter on the part of his companion.
+But she didn't say&mdash;"Go, go, deluded man, I take pity on you!" she only
+remarked, with light impertinence, that he surely wouldn't be so wanting
+in gallantry as to leave a lady absolutely alone in a public place&mdash;it
+was so Mrs. Luna was pleased to qualify Mrs. Burrage's drawing-room&mdash;in
+the face of her entreaty that he would remain with her. She had the
+better of poor Ransom, thanks to the superstitions of Mississippi. It
+was in his simple code a gross rudeness to withdraw from conversation
+with a lady at a party before another gentleman should have come to take
+one's place; it was to inflict on the lady a kind of outrage. The other
+gentlemen, at Mrs. Burrage's, were all too well occupied; there was not
+the smallest chance of one of them coming to his rescue. He couldn't
+leave Mrs. Luna, and yet he couldn't stay with her and lose the only
+thing he had come so much out of his way for. "Let me at least find you
+a place over there, in the doorway. You can stand upon a chair&mdash;you can
+lean on me."</p>
+
+<p>"Thank you very much; I would much rather lean on this sofa. And I am
+much too tired to stand on chairs. Besides, I wouldn't for the world
+that either Verena or Olive should see me craning over the heads of the
+crowd&mdash;as if I attached the smallest importance to their perorations!"</p>
+
+<p>"It isn't time for the peroration yet," Ransom said, with savage
+dryness; and he sat forward, with his elbow on his knees, his eyes on
+the ground, a flush in his sallow cheek.</p>
+
+<p>"It's never time to say such things as those," Mrs. Luna remarked,
+arranging her laces.</p>
+
+<p>"How do you know what she is saying?"</p>
+
+<p>"I can tell by the way her voice goes up and down. It sounds so silly."</p>
+
+<p>Ransom sat there five minutes longer&mdash;minutes which, he felt, the
+recording angel ought to write down to his credit&mdash;and asked himself how
+Mrs. Luna could be such a goose as not to see that she was making him
+hate her. But she was goose enough for anything. He tried to appear
+indifferent, and it occurred to him to doubt whether the Mississippi
+system could be right, after all. It certainly hadn't foreseen such a
+case as this. "It's as plain as day that Mr. Burrage intends to marry
+her&mdash;if he can," he said in a minute; that remark being better
+calculated than any other he could think of to dissimulate his real
+state of mind.</p>
+
+<p>It drew no rejoinder from his companion, and after an instant he turned
+his head a little and glanced at her. The result of something that
+silently passed between them was to make her say, abruptly: "Mr. Ransom,
+my sister never sent you an invitation to this place. Didn't it come
+from Verena Tarrant?"</p>
+
+<p>"I haven't the least idea."</p>
+
+<p>"As you hadn't the least acquaintance with Mrs. Burrage, who else could
+it have come from?"</p>
+
+<p>"If it came from Miss Tarrant, I ought at least to recognise her
+courtesy by listening to her."</p>
+
+<p>"If you rise from this sofa I will tell Olive what I suspect. She will
+be perfectly capable of carrying Verena off to China&mdash;or anywhere out of
+your reach."</p>
+
+<p>"And pray what is it you suspect?"</p>
+
+<p>"That you two have been in correspondence."</p>
+
+<p>"Tell her whatever you like, Mrs. Luna," said the young man, with the
+grimness of resignation.</p>
+
+<p>"You are quite unable to deny it, I see."</p>
+
+<p>"I never contradict a lady."</p>
+
+<p>"We shall see if I can't make you tell a fib. Haven't you been seeing
+Miss Tarrant, too?"</p>
+
+<p>"Where should I have seen her? I can't see all the way to Boston, as you
+said the other day."</p>
+
+<p>"Haven't you been there&mdash;on secret visits?"</p>
+
+<p>Ransom started just perceptibly; but to conceal it, the next instant, he
+stood up.</p>
+
+<p>"They wouldn't be secret if I were to tell you."</p>
+
+<p>Looking down at her he saw that her words were a happy hit, not the
+result of definite knowledge. But she appeared to him vain, egotistical,
+grasping, odious.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, I shall give the alarm," she went on; "that is, I will if you
+leave me. Is that the way a Southern gentleman treats a lady? Do as I
+wish, and I will let you off!"</p>
+
+<p>"You won't let me off from staying with you."</p>
+
+<p>"Is it such a <i>corv&eacute;e</i>? I never heard of such rudeness!" Mrs. Luna
+cried. "All the same, I am determined to keep you if I can!"</p>
+
+<p>Ransom felt that she must be in the wrong, and yet superficially she
+seemed (and it was quite intolerable) to have right on her side. All
+this while Verena's golden voice, with her words indistinct, solicited,
+tantalised his ear. The question had evidently got on Mrs. Luna's
+nerves; she had reached that point of feminine embroilment when a woman
+is perverse for the sake of perversity, and even with a clear vision of
+bad consequences.</p>
+
+<p>"You have lost your head," he relieved himself by saying, as he looked
+down at her.</p>
+
+<p>"I wish you would go and get me some tea."</p>
+
+<p>"You say that only to embarrass me." He had hardly spoken when a great
+sound of applause, the clapping of many hands, and the cry from fifty
+throats of "Brava, brava!" floated in and died away. All Ransom's pulses
+throbbed, he flung his scruples to the winds, and after remarking to
+Mrs. Luna&mdash;still with all due ceremony&mdash;that he feared he must resign
+himself to forfeiting her good opinion, turned his back upon her and
+strode away to the open door of the music-room. "Well, I have never been
+so insulted!" he heard her exclaim, with exceeding sharpness, as he left
+her; and, glancing back at her, as he took up his position, he saw her
+still seated on her sofa&mdash;alone in the lamp-lit desert&mdash;with her eyes
+making, across the empty space, little vindictive points. Well, she
+could come where he was, if she wanted him so much; he would support her
+on an ottoman, and make it easy for her to see. But Mrs. Luna was
+uncompromising; he became aware, after a minute, that she had withdrawn,
+majestically, from the place, and he did not see her again that evening.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="XXVIII" id="XXVIII"></a>XXVIII</h2>
+
+
+<p>He could command the music-room very well from where he stood, behind a
+thick outer fringe of intently listening men. Verena Tarrant was erect
+on her little platform, dressed in white, with flowers in her bosom. The
+red cloth beneath her feet looked rich in the light of lamps placed on
+high pedestals on either side of the stage; it gave her figure a setting
+of colour which made it more pure and salient. She moved freely in her
+exposed isolation, yet with great sobriety of gesture; there was no
+table in front of her, and she had no notes in her hand, but stood there
+like an actress before the footlights, or a singer spinning vocal sounds
+to a silver thread. There was such a risk that a slim provincial girl,
+pretending to fascinate a couple of hundred <i>blas&eacute;</i> New Yorkers by
+simply giving them her ideas, would fail of her effect, that at the end
+of a few moments Basil Ransom became aware that he was watching her in
+very much the same excited way as if she had been performing, high above
+his head, on the trapeze. Yet, as one listened, it was impossible not to
+perceive that she was in perfect possession of her faculties, her
+subject, her audience; and he remembered the other time at Miss
+Birdseye's well enough to be able to measure the ground she had
+travelled since then. This exhibition was much more complete, her manner
+much more assured; she seemed to speak and survey the whole place from a
+much greater height. Her voice, too, had developed; he had forgotten how
+beautiful it could be when she raised it to its full capacity. Such a
+tone as that, so pure and rich, and yet so young, so natural,
+constituted in itself a talent; he didn't wonder that they had made a
+fuss about her at the Female Convention, if she filled their hideous
+hall with such a music. He had read, of old, of the <i>improvisatrice</i> of
+Italy, and this was a chastened, modern, American version of the type, a
+New England Corinna, with a mission instead of a lyre. The most graceful
+part of her was her earnestness, the way her delightful eyes, wandering
+over the "fashionable audience" (before which she was so perfectly
+unabashed), as if she wished to resolve it into a single sentient
+personality, seemed to say that the only thing in life she cared for was
+to put the truth into a form that would render conviction irresistible.
+She was as simple as she was charming, and there was not a glance or
+motion that did not seem part of the pure, still-burning passion that
+animated her. She had indeed&mdash;it was manifest&mdash;reduced the company to
+unanimity; their attention was anything but languid; they smiled back at
+her when she smiled; they were noiseless, motionless when she was
+solemn; and it was evident that the entertainment which Mrs. Burrage had
+had the happy thought of offering to her friends would be memorable in
+the annals of the Wednesday Club. It was agreeable to Basil Ransom to
+think that Verena noticed him in his corner; her eyes played over her
+listeners so freely that you couldn't say they rested in one place more
+than another; nevertheless, a single rapid ray, which, however, didn't
+in the least strike him as a deviation from her ridiculous, fantastic,
+delightful argument, let him now that he had been missed and now was
+particularly spoken to. This glance was a sufficient assurance that his
+invitation had come to him by the girl's request. He took for granted
+the matter of her speech was ridiculous; how could it help being, and
+what did it signify if it was? She was none the less charming for that,
+and the moonshine she had been plied with was none the less moonshine
+for her being charming. After he had stood there a quarter of an hour he
+became conscious that he should not be able to repeat a word she had
+said; he had not definitely heeded it, and yet he had not lost a
+vibration of her voice. He had discovered Olive Chancellor by this time;
+she was in the front row of chairs, at the end, on the left; her back
+was turned to him, but he could see half her sharp profile, bent down a
+little and absolutely motionless. Even across the wide interval her
+attitude expressed to him a kind of rapturous stillness, the
+concentration of triumph. There were several irrepressible effusions of
+applause, instantly self-checked, but Olive never looked up, at the
+loudest, and such a calmness as that could only be the result of
+passionate volition. Success was in the air, and she was tasting it; she
+tasted it, as she did everything, in a way of her own. Success for
+Verena was success for her, and Ransom was sure that the only thing
+wanting to her triumph was that he should have been placed in the line
+of her vision, so that she might enjoy his embarrassment and confusion,
+might say to him, in one of her dumb, cold flashes&mdash;"<i>Now</i> do you think
+our movement is not a force&mdash;<i>now</i> do you think that women are meant to
+be slaves?" Honestly, he was not conscious of any confusion; it
+subverted none of his heresies to perceive that Verena Tarrant had even
+more power to fix his attention than he had hitherto supposed. It was
+fixed in a way it had not been yet, however, by his at last
+understanding her speech, feeling it reach his inner sense through the
+impediment of mere dazzled vision. Certain phrases took on a meaning for
+him&mdash;an appeal she was making to those who still resisted the beneficent
+influence of the truth. They appeared to be mocking, cynical men,
+mainly; many of whom were such triflers and idlers, so heartless and
+brainless that it didn't matter much what they thought on any subject;
+if the old tyranny needed to be propped up by <i>them</i> it showed it was in
+a pretty bad way. But there were others whose prejudice was stronger and
+more cultivated, pretended to rest upon study and argument. To those she
+wished particularly to address herself; she wanted to waylay them, to
+say, "Look here, you're all wrong; you'll be so much happier when I have
+convinced you. Just give me five minutes," she should like to say; "just
+sit down here and let me ask a simple question. Do you think any state
+of society can come to good that is based upon an organised wrong?" That
+was the simple question that Verena desired to propound, and Basil
+smiled across the room at her with an amused tenderness as he gathered
+that she conceived it to be a poser. He didn't think it would frighten
+him much if she were to ask him that, and he would sit down with her for
+as many minutes as she liked.</p>
+
+<p>He, of course, was one of the systematic scoffers, one of those to whom
+she said&mdash;"Do you know how you strike me? You strike me as men who are
+starving to death while they have a cupboard at home, all full of bread
+and meat and wine; or as blind, demented beings who let themselves be
+cast into a debtor's prison, while in their pocket they have the key of
+vaults and treasure-chests heaped up with gold and silver. The meat and
+wine, the gold and silver," Verena went on, "are simply the suppressed
+and wasted force, the precious sovereign remedy, of which society
+insanely deprives itself&mdash;the genius, the intelligence, the inspiration
+of women. It is dying, inch by inch, in the midst of old superstitions
+which it invokes in vain, and yet it has the elixir of life in its
+hands. Let it drink but a draught, and it will bloom once more; it will
+be refreshed, radiant; it will find its youth again. The heart, the
+heart is cold, and nothing but the touch of woman can warm it, make it
+act. We <i>are</i> the Heart of humanity, and let us have the courage to
+insist on it! The public life of the world will move in the same barren,
+mechanical, vicious circle&mdash;the circle of egotism, cruelty, ferocity,
+jealousy, greed, of blind striving to do things only for <i>some</i>, at the
+cost of others, instead of trying to do everything for all. All, all?
+Who dares to say 'all' when we are not there? We are an equal, a
+splendid, an inestimable part. Try us and you'll see&mdash;you will wonder
+how, without us, society has ever dragged itself even this distance&mdash;so
+wretchedly small compared with what it might have been&mdash;on its painful
+earthly pilgrimage. That is what I should like above all to pour into
+the ears of those who still hold out, who stiffen their necks and repeat
+hard, empty formulas, which are as dry as a broken gourd that has been
+flung away in the desert. I would take them by their selfishness, their
+indolence, their interest. I am not here to recriminate, nor to deepen
+the gulf that already yawns between the sexes, and I don't accept the
+doctrine that they are natural enemies, since my plea is for a union far
+more intimate&mdash;provided it be equal&mdash;than any that the sages and
+philosophers of former times have ever dreamed of. Therefore I shall not
+touch upon the subject of men's being most easily influenced by
+considerations of what is most agreeable and profitable for <i>them</i>; I
+shall simply assume that they <i>are</i> so influenced, and I shall say to
+them that our cause would long ago have been gained if their vision were
+not so dim, so veiled, even in matters in which their own interests are
+concerned. If they had the same quick sight as women, if they had the
+intelligence of the heart, the world would be very different now; and I
+assure you that half the bitterness of our lot is to see so clearly and
+not to be able to do! Good gentlemen all, if I could make you believe
+how much brighter and fairer and sweeter the garden of life would be for
+you, if you would only let us help you to keep it in order! You would
+like so much better to walk there, and you would find grass and trees
+and flowers that would make you think you were in Eden. That is what I
+should like to press home to each of you, personally, individually&mdash;to
+give him the vision of the world as it hangs perpetually before me,
+redeemed, transfigured, by a new moral tone. There would be generosity,
+tenderness, sympathy, where there is now only brute force and sordid
+rivalry. But you really do strike me as stupid even about your own
+welfare! Some of you say that we have already all the influence we can
+possibly require, and talk as if we ought to be grateful that we are
+allowed even to breathe. Pray, who shall judge what we require if not we
+ourselves? We require simply freedom; we require the lid to be taken off
+the box in which we have been kept for centuries. You say it's a very
+comfortable, cozy, convenient box, with nice glass sides, so that we can
+see out, and that all that's wanted is to give another quiet turn to the
+key. That is very easily answered. Good gentlemen, you have never been
+in the box, and you haven't the least idea how it feels!"</p>
+
+<p>The historian who has gathered these documents together does not deem it
+necessary to give a larger specimen of Verena's eloquence, especially as
+Basil Ransom, through whose ears we are listening to it, arrived, at
+this point, at a definite conclusion. He had taken her measure as a
+public speaker, judged her importance in the field of discussion, the
+cause of reform. Her speech, in itself, had about the value of a pretty
+essay, committed to memory and delivered by a bright girl at an
+"academy"; it was vague, thin, rambling, a tissue of generalities that
+glittered agreeably enough in Mrs. Burrage's veiled lamplight. From any
+serious point of view it was neither worth answering nor worth
+considering, and Basil Ransom made his reflexions on the crazy character
+of the age in which such a performance as that was treated as an
+intellectual effort, a contribution to a question. He asked himself what
+either he or any one else would think of it if Miss Chancellor&mdash;or even
+Mrs. Luna&mdash;had been on the platform instead of the actual declaimer.
+Nevertheless, its importance was high, and consisted precisely, in part,
+of the fact that the voice was not the voice of Olive or of Adeline. Its
+importance was that Verena was unspeakably attractive, and this was all
+the greater for him in the light of the fact, which quietly dawned upon
+him as he stood there, that he was falling in love with her. It had
+tapped at his heart for recognition, and before he could hesitate or
+challenge, the door had sprung open and the mansion was illuminated. He
+gave no outward sign; he stood gazing as at a picture; but the room
+wavered before his eyes, even Verena's figure danced a little. This did
+not make the sequel of her discourse more clear to him; her meaning
+faded again into the agreeable vague, and he simply felt her presence,
+tasted her voice. Yet the act of reflexion was not suspended; he found
+himself rejoicing that she was so weak in argument, so inevitably
+verbose. The idea that she was brilliant, that she counted as a factor
+only because the public mind was in a muddle, was not an humiliation but
+a delight to him; it was a proof that her apostleship was all nonsense,
+the most passing of fashions, the veriest of delusions, and that she was
+meant for something divinely different&mdash;for privacy, for him, for love.
+He took no measure of the duration of her talk; he only knew, when it
+was over and succeeded by a clapping of hands, an immense buzz of voices
+and shuffling of chairs, that it had been capitally bad, and that her
+personal success, wrapping it about with a glamour like the silver mist
+that surrounds a fountain, was such as to prevent its badness from being
+a cause of mortification to her lover. The company&mdash;such of it as did
+not immediately close together around Verena&mdash;filed away into the other
+rooms, bore him in its current into the neighbourhood of a table spread
+for supper, where he looked for signs of the sumptuary law mentioned to
+him by Mrs. Luna. It appeared to be embodied mainly in the glitter of
+crystal and silver, and the fresh tints of mysterious viands and
+jellies, which looked desirable in the soft circle projected by
+lace-fringed lamps. He heard the popping of corks, he felt a pressure of
+elbows, a thickening of the crowd, perceived that he was glowered at,
+squeezed against the table, by contending gentlemen who observed that he
+usurped space, was neither feeding himself nor helping others to feed.
+He had lost sight of Verena; she had been borne away in clouds of
+compliment; but he found himself thinking&mdash;almost paternally&mdash;that
+she must be hungry after so much chatter, and he hoped some one was
+getting her something to eat. After a moment, just as he was edging
+away, for his own opportunity to sup much better than usual was
+not what was uppermost in his mind, this little vision was suddenly
+embodied&mdash;embodied by the appearance of Miss Tarrant, who faced him, in
+the press, attached to the arm of a young man now recognisable to him as
+the son of the house&mdash;the smiling, fragrant youth who an hour before had
+interrupted his colloquy with Olive. He was leading her to the table,
+while people made way for them, covering Verena with gratulations of
+word and look. Ransom could see that, according to a phrase which came
+back to him just then, oddly, out of some novel or poem he had read of
+old, she was the cynosure of every eye. She looked beautiful, and they
+were a beautiful couple. As soon as she saw him, she put out her left
+hand to him&mdash;the other was in Mr. Burrage's arm&mdash;and said: "Well, don't
+you think it's all true?"</p>
+
+<p>"No, not a word of it!" Ransom answered, with a kind of joyous
+sincerity. "But it doesn't make any difference."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, it makes a great deal of difference to me!" Verena cried.</p>
+
+<p>"I mean to me. I don't care in the least whether I agree with you,"
+Ransom said, looking askance at young Mr. Burrage, who had detached
+himself and was getting something for Verena to eat.</p>
+
+<p>"Ah, well, if you are so indifferent!"</p>
+
+<p>"It's not because I'm indifferent!" His eyes came back to her own, the
+expression of which had changed before they quitted them. She began to
+complain to her companion, who brought her something very dainty on a
+plate, that Mr. Ransom was "standing out," that he was about the hardest
+subject she had encountered yet. Henry Burrage smiled upon Ransom in a
+way that was meant to show he remembered having already spoken to him,
+while the Mississippian said to himself that there was nothing on the
+face of it to make it strange there should be between these fair,
+successful young persons some such question of love or marriage as Mrs.
+Luna had tattled about. Mr. Burrage was successful, he could see that in
+the turn of an eye; not perhaps as having a commanding intellect or a
+very strong character, but as being rich, polite, handsome, happy,
+amiable, and as wearing a splendid camellia in his buttonhole. And that
+<i>he</i>, at any rate, thought Verena had succeeded was proved by the
+casual, civil tone, and the contented distraction of eye, with which he
+exclaimed, "You don't mean to say you were not moved by that! It's my
+opinion that Miss Tarrant will carry everything before her." He was so
+pleased himself, and so safe in his conviction, that it didn't matter to
+him what any one else thought; which was, after all, just Basil Ransom's
+own state of mind.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh! I didn't say I wasn't moved," the Mississippian remarked.</p>
+
+<p>"Moved the wrong way!" said Verena. "Never mind; you'll be left behind."</p>
+
+<p>"If I am, you will come back to console me."</p>
+
+<p>"<i>Back?</i> I shall never come back!" the girl replied gaily.</p>
+
+<p>"You'll be the very first!" Ransom went on, feeling himself now, and as
+if by a sudden clearing up of his spiritual atmosphere, no longer in the
+vein for making the concessions of chivalry, and yet conscious that his
+words were an expression of homage.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, I call that presumptuous!" Mr. Burrage exclaimed, turning away to
+get a glass of water for Verena, who had refused to accept champagne,
+mentioning that she had never drunk any in her life and that she
+associated a kind of iniquity with it. Olive had no wine in her house
+(not that Verena gave this explanation) but her father's old madeira and
+a little claret; of the former of which liquors Basil Ransom had highly
+approved the day he dined with her.</p>
+
+<p>"Does he believe in all those lunacies?" he inquired, knowing perfectly
+what to think about the charge of presumption brought by Mr. Burrage.</p>
+
+<p>"Why, he's crazy about our movement," Verena responded. "He's one of my
+most gratifying converts."</p>
+
+<p>"And don't you despise him for it?"</p>
+
+<p>"Despise him? Why, you seem to think I swing round pretty often!"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, I have an idea that I shall see you swing round yet," Ransom
+remarked, in a tone in which it would have appeared to Henry Burrage,
+had he heard these words, that presumption was pushed to fatuity.</p>
+
+<p>On Verena, however, they produced no impression that prevented her from
+saying simply, without the least rancour, "Well, if you expect to draw
+me back five hundred years, I hope you won't tell Miss Birdseye." And as
+Ransom did not seize immediately the reason of her allusion, she went
+on, "You know she is convinced it will be just the other way. I went to
+see her after you had been at Cambridge&mdash;almost immediately."</p>
+
+<p>"Darling old lady&mdash;I hope she's well," the young man said.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, she's tremendously interested."</p>
+
+<p>"She's always interested in something, isn't she?"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, this time it's in our relations, yours and mine," Verena replied,
+in a tone in which only Verena could say a thing like that. "You ought
+to see how she throws herself into them. She is sure it will all work
+round for your good."</p>
+
+<p>"All what, Miss Tarrant?" Ransom asked.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, what I told her. She is sure you are going to become one of our
+leaders, that you are very gifted for treating great questions and
+acting on masses of people, that you will become quite enthusiastic
+about our uprising, and that when you go up to the top as one of our
+champions it will all have been through me."</p>
+
+<p>Ransom stood there, smiling at her; the dusky glow in his eyes expressed
+a softness representing no prevision of such laurels, but which
+testified none the less to Verena's influence. "And what you want is
+that I shouldn't undeceive her?"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, I don't want you to be hypocritical&mdash;if you shouldn't take our
+side; but I do think that it would be sweet if the dear old thing could
+just cling to her illusion. She won't live so very long, probably; she
+told me the other day she was ready for her final rest; so it wouldn't
+interfere much with your freedom. She feels quite romantic about
+it&mdash;your being a Southerner and all, and not naturally in sympathy with
+Boston ideas, and your meeting her that way in the street and making
+yourself known to her. She won't believe but what I shall move you."</p>
+
+<p>"Don't fear, Miss Tarrant, she shall be satisfied," Ransom said, with a
+laugh which he could see she but partially understood. He was prevented
+from making his meaning more clear by the return of Mr. Burrage,
+bringing not only Verena's glass of water but a smooth-faced, rosy,
+smiling old gentleman, who had a velvet waistcoat, and thin white hair,
+brushed effectively, and whom he introduced to Verena under a name which
+Ransom recognised as that of a rich and venerable citizen, conspicuous
+for his public spirit and his large almsgiving. Ransom had lived long
+enough in New York to know that a request from this ancient worthy to be
+made known to Miss Tarrant would mark her for the approval of the
+respectable, stamp her as a success of no vulgar sort; and as he turned
+away, a faint, inaudible sigh passed his lips, dictated by the sense
+that he himself belonged to a terribly small and obscure minority. He
+turned away because, as we know, he had been taught that a gentleman
+talking to a lady must always do that when a new gentleman is presented;
+though he observed, looking back, after a minute, that young Mr. Burrage
+evidently had no intention of abdicating in favour of the eminent
+philanthropist. He thought he had better go home; he didn't know what
+might happen at such a party as that, nor when the proceedings might be
+supposed to terminate; but after considering it a minute he dismissed
+the idea that there was a chance of Verena's speaking again. If he was a
+little vague about this, however, there was no doubt in his mind as to
+the obligation he was under to take leave first of Mrs. Burrage. He
+wished he knew where Verena was staying; he wanted to see her alone, not
+in a supper-room crowded with millionaires. As he looked about for the
+hostess it occurred to him that she would know, and that if he were able
+to quench a certain shyness sufficiently to ask her, she would tell him.
+Having satisfied himself presently that she was not in the supper-room,
+he made his way back to the parlours, where the company now was much
+diminished. He looked again into the music-room, tenanted only by
+half-a-dozen couples, who were cultivating privacy among the empty
+chairs, and here he perceived Mrs. Burrage sitting in conversation with
+Olive Chancellor (the latter, apparently, had not moved from her place),
+before the deserted scene of Verena's triumph. His search had been so
+little for Olive that at the sight of her he faltered a moment; then he
+pulled himself together, advancing with a consciousness of the
+Mississippi manner. He felt Olive's eyes receiving him; she looked at
+him as if it was just the hope that she shouldn't meet him again that
+had made her remain where she was. Mrs. Burrage got up, as he bade her
+good-night, and Olive followed her example.</p>
+
+<p>"So glad you were able to come. Wonderful creature, isn't she? She can
+do anything she wants."</p>
+
+<p>These words from the elder lady Ransom received at first with a reserve
+which, as he trusted, suggested extreme respect; and it was a fact that
+his silence had a kind of Southern solemnity in it. Then he said, in a
+tone equally expressive of great deliberation:</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, madam, I think I never was present at an exhibition, an
+entertainment of any kind, which held me more completely under the
+charm."</p>
+
+<p>"Delighted you liked it. I didn't know what in the world to have, and
+this has proved an inspiration&mdash;for me as well as for Miss Tarrant. Miss
+Chancellor has been telling me how they have worked together; it's
+really quite beautiful. Miss Chancellor is Miss Tarrant's great friend
+and colleague. Miss Tarrant assures me that she couldn't do anything
+without her." After which explanation, turning to Olive, Mrs. Burrage
+murmured: "Let me introduce Mr. &mdash;&mdash; introduce Mr. &mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>But she had forgotten poor Ransom's name, forgotten who had asked her
+for a card for him; and, perceiving it, he came to her rescue with the
+observation that he was a kind of cousin of Miss Olive's, if she didn't
+repudiate him, and that he knew what a tremendous partnership existed
+between the two young ladies. "When I applauded I was applauding the
+firm&mdash;that is, you too," he said, smiling, to his kinswoman.</p>
+
+<p>"Your applause? I confess I don't understand it," Olive replied, with
+much promptitude.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, to tell the truth, I didn't myself!"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh yes, of course, I know; that's why&mdash;that's why&mdash;&mdash;" And this further
+speech of Mrs. Burrage's, in reference to the relationship between the
+young man and her companion, faded also into vagueness. She had been on
+the point of saying it was the reason why he was in her house; but she
+had bethought herself in time that this ought to pass as a matter of
+course. Basil Ransom could see she was a woman who could carry off an
+awkwardness like that, and he considered her with a sense of her
+importance. She had a brisk, familiar, slightly impatient way, and if
+she had not spoken so fast, and had more of the softness of the Southern
+matron, she would have reminded him of a certain type of woman he had
+seen of old, before the changes in his own part of the world&mdash;the
+clever, capable, hospitable proprietress, widowed or unmarried, of a big
+plantation carried on by herself. "If you are her cousin, do take Miss
+Chancellor to have some supper&mdash;instead of going away," she went on,
+with her infelicitous readiness.</p>
+
+<p>At this Olive instantly seated herself again.</p>
+
+<p>"I am much obliged to you; I never touch supper. I shall not leave this
+room&mdash;I like it."</p>
+
+<p>"Then let me send you something&mdash;or let Mr. &mdash;&mdash;, your cousin, remain
+with you."</p>
+
+<p>Olive looked at Mrs. Burrage with a strange beseechingness, "I am very
+tired, I must rest. These occasions leave me exhausted."</p>
+
+<p>"Ah yes, I can imagine that. Well, then, you shall be quite quiet&mdash;I
+shall come back to you." And with a smile of farewell for Basil Ransom,
+Mrs. Burrage moved away.</p>
+
+<p>Basil lingered a moment, though he saw that Olive wished to get rid of
+him. "I won't disturb you further than to ask you a single question," he
+said. "Where are you staying? I want to come and see Miss Tarrant. I
+don't say I want to come and see you, because I have an idea that it
+would give you no pleasure." It had occurred to him that he might obtain
+their address from Mrs. Luna&mdash;he only knew vaguely it was Tenth Street;
+much as he had displeased her she couldn't refuse him that; but suddenly
+the greater simplicity and frankness of applying directly to Olive, even
+at the risk of appearing to brave her, recommended itself. He couldn't,
+of course, call upon Verena without her knowing it, and she might as
+well make her protest (since he proposed to pay no heed to it) sooner as
+later. He had seen nothing, personally, of their life together, but it
+had come over him that what Miss Chancellor most disliked in him (had
+she not, on the very threshold of their acquaintance, had a sort of
+mystical foreboding of it?) was the possibility that he would interfere.
+It was quite on the cards that he might; yet it was decent, all the
+same, to ask her rather than any one else. It was better that his
+interference should be accompanied with all the forms of chivalry.</p>
+
+<p>Olive took no notice of his remark as to how she herself might be
+affected by his visit; but she asked in a moment why he should think it
+necessary to call on Miss Tarrant. "You know you are not in sympathy,"
+she added, in a tone which contained a really touching element of
+entreaty that he would not even pretend to prove he was.</p>
+
+<p>I know not whether Basil was touched, but he said, with every appearance
+of a conciliatory purpose&mdash;"I wish to thank her for all the interesting
+information she has given me this evening."</p>
+
+<p>"If you think it generous to come and scoff at her, of course she has no
+defence; you will be glad to know that."</p>
+
+<p>"Dear Miss Chancellor, if you are not a defence&mdash;a battery of many
+guns!" Ransom exclaimed.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, she at least is not mine!" Olive returned, springing to her feet.
+She looked round her as if she were really pressed too hard, panting
+like a hunted creature.</p>
+
+<p>"Your defence is your certain immunity from attack. Perhaps if you won't
+tell me where you are staying, you will kindly ask Miss Tarrant herself
+to do so. Would she send me a word on a card?"</p>
+
+<p>"We are in West Tenth Street," Olive said; and she gave the number. "Of
+course you are free to come."</p>
+
+<p>"Of course I am! Why shouldn't I be? But I am greatly obliged to you for
+the information. I will ask her to come out, so that you won't see us."
+And he turned away, with the sense that it was really insufferable, her
+attempt always to give him the air of being in the wrong. If that was
+the kind of spirit in which women were going to act when they had more
+power!</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="XXIX" id="XXIX"></a>XXIX</h2>
+
+
+<p>Mrs. Luna was early in the field the next day, and her sister wondered
+to what she owed the honour of a visit from her at eleven o'clock in the
+morning. She very soon saw, when Adeline asked her whether it had been
+she who procured for Basil Ransom an invitation to Mrs. Burrage's.</p>
+
+<p>"Me&mdash;why in the world should it have been me?" Olive asked, feeling
+something of a pang at the implication that it had not been Adeline, as
+she supposed.</p>
+
+<p>"I didn't know&mdash;but you took him up so."</p>
+
+<p>"Why, Adeline Luna, when did I ever&mdash;&mdash;?" Miss Chancellor exclaimed,
+staring and intensely grave.</p>
+
+<p>"You don't mean to say you have forgotten how you brought him on to see
+you, a year and a half ago!"</p>
+
+<p>"I didn't bring him on&mdash;I said if he happened to be there."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, I remember how it was: he did happen, and then you happened to
+hate him, and tried to get out of it."</p>
+
+<p>Miss Chancellor saw, I say, why Adeline had come to her at the hour she
+knew she was always writing letters, after having given her all the
+attention that was necessary the day before; she had come simply to make
+herself disagreeable, as Olive knew, of old, the spirit sometimes moved
+her irresistibly to do. It seemed to her that Adeline had been
+disagreeable enough in not having beguiled Basil Ransom into a marriage,
+according to that memorable calculation of probabilities in which she
+indulged (with a licence that she scarcely liked definitely to recall)
+when the pair made acquaintance under her eyes in Charles Street, and
+Mrs. Luna seemed to take to him as much as she herself did little. She
+would gladly have accepted him as a brother-in-law, for the harm such a
+relation could do one was limited and definite; whereas in his general
+capacity of being at large in her life the ability of the young
+Mississippian to injure her seemed somehow immense. "I wrote to
+him&mdash;that time&mdash;for a perfectly definite reason," she said. "I thought
+mother would have liked us to know him. But it was a mistake."</p>
+
+<p>"How do you know it was a mistake? Mother would have liked him, I
+daresay."</p>
+
+<p>"I mean my acting as I did; it was a theory of duty which I allowed to
+press me too much. I always do. Duty should be obvious; one shouldn't
+hunt round for it."</p>
+
+<p>"Was it very obvious when it brought you on here?" asked Mrs. Luna, who
+was distinctly out of humour.</p>
+
+<p>Olive looked for a moment at the toe of her shoe. "I had an idea that
+you would have married him by this time," she presently remarked.</p>
+
+<p>"Marry him yourself, my dear! What put such an idea into your head?"</p>
+
+<p>"You wrote to me at first so much about him. You told me he was
+tremendously attentive, and that you liked him."</p>
+
+<p>"His state of mind is one thing and mine is another. How can I marry
+every man that hangs about me&mdash;that dogs my footsteps? I might as well
+become a Mormon at once!" Mrs. Luna delivered herself of this argument
+with a certain charitable air, as if her sister could not be expected to
+understand such a situation by her own light.</p>
+
+<p>Olive waived the discussion, and simply said: "I took for granted <i>you</i>
+had got him the invitation."</p>
+
+<p>"I, my dear? That would be quite at variance with my attitude of
+discouragement."</p>
+
+<p>"Then she simply sent it herself."</p>
+
+<p>"Whom do you mean by 'she'?"</p>
+
+<p>"Mrs. Burrage, of course."</p>
+
+<p>"I thought that you might mean Verena," said Mrs. Luna casually.</p>
+
+<p>"Verena&mdash;to him? Why in the world&mdash;&mdash;?" And Olive gave the cold glare
+with which her sister was familiar.</p>
+
+<p>"Why in the world not&mdash;since she knows him?"</p>
+
+<p>"She had seen him twice in her life before last night, when she met him
+for the third time and spoke to him."</p>
+
+<p>"Did she tell you that?"</p>
+
+<p>"She tells me everything."</p>
+
+<p>"Are you very sure?"</p>
+
+<p>"Adeline Luna, what <i>do</i> you mean?" Miss Chancellor murmured.</p>
+
+<p>"Are you very sure that last night was only the third time?" Mrs. Luna
+went on.</p>
+
+<p>Olive threw back her head and swept her sister from her bonnet to her
+lowest flounce. "You have no right to hint at such a thing as that
+unless you know!"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, I know&mdash;I know, at any rate, more than you do!" And then Mrs. Luna,
+sitting with her sister, much withdrawn, in one of the windows of the
+big, hot, faded parlour of the boarding-house in Tenth Street, where
+there was a rug before the chimney representing a Newfoundland dog
+saving a child from drowning, and a row of chromo-lithographs on the
+walls, imparted to her the impression she had received the evening
+before&mdash;the impression of Basil Ransom's keen curiosity about Verena
+Tarrant. Verena must have asked Mrs. Burrage to send him a card, and
+asked it without mentioning the fact to Olive&mdash;for wouldn't Olive
+certainly have remembered it? It was no use her saying that Mrs. Burrage
+might have sent it of her own movement, because she wasn't aware of his
+existence, and why should she be? Basil Ransom himself had told her he
+didn't know Mrs. Burrage. Mrs. Luna knew whom he knew and whom he
+didn't, or at least the sort of people, and they were not the sort that
+belonged to the Wednesday Club. That was one reason why she didn't care
+about him for any intimate relation&mdash;that he didn't seem to have any
+taste for making nice friends. Olive would know what <i>her</i> taste was in
+this respect, though it wasn't that young woman's own any more than his.
+It was positive that the suggestion about the card could only have come
+from Verena. At any rate Olive could easily ask, or if she was afraid of
+her telling a fib she could ask Mrs. Burrage. It was true Mrs. Burrage
+might have been put on her guard by Verena, and would perhaps invent
+some other account of the matter; therefore Olive had better just
+believe what <i>she</i> believed, that Verena had secured his presence at the
+party and had had private reasons for doing so. It is to be feared that
+Ransom's remark to Mrs. Luna the night before about her having lost her
+head was near to the mark; for if she had not been blinded by her
+rancour she would have guessed the horror with which she inspired her
+sister when she spoke in that offhand way of Verena's lying and Mrs.
+Burrage's lying. Did people lie like that in Mrs. Luna's set? It was
+Olive's plan of life not to lie, and attributing a similar disposition
+to people she liked, it was impossible for her to believe that Verena
+had had the intention of deceiving her. Mrs. Luna, in a calmer hour,
+might also have divined that Olive would make her private comments on
+the strange story of Basil Ransom's having made up to Verena out of
+pique at Adeline's rebuff; for this was the account of the matter that
+she now offered to Miss Chancellor. Olive did two things: she listened
+intently and eagerly, judging there was distinct danger in the air
+(which, however, she had not wanted Mrs. Luna to tell her, having
+perceived it for herself the night before); and she saw that poor
+Adeline was fabricating fearfully, that the "rebuff" was altogether an
+invention. Mr. Ransom was evidently preoccupied with Verena, but he had
+not needed Mrs. Luna's cruelty to make him so. So Olive maintained an
+attitude of great reserve; she did not take upon herself to announce
+that her own version was that Adeline, for reasons absolutely
+imperceptible to others, had tried to catch Basil Ransom, had failed in
+her attempt, and, furious at seeing Verena preferred to a person of her
+importance (Olive remembered the <i>spretae injuria formae</i>), now wished
+to do both him and the girl an ill turn. This would be accomplished if
+she could induce Olive to interfere. Miss Chancellor was conscious of an
+abundant readiness to interfere, but it was not because she cared for
+Adeline's mortification. I am not sure, even, that she did not think her
+<i>fiasco</i> but another illustration of her sister's general uselessness,
+and rather despise her for it; being perfectly able at once to hold that
+nothing is baser than the effort to entrap a man, and to think it very
+ignoble to have to renounce it because you can't. Olive kept these
+reflexions to herself, but she went so far as to say to her sister that
+she didn't see where the "pique" came in. How could it hurt Adeline that
+he should turn his attention to Verena? What was Verena to her?</p>
+
+<p>"Why, Olive Chancellor, how can you ask?" Mrs. Luna boldly responded.
+"Isn't Verena everything to you, and aren't you everything to me, and
+wouldn't an attempt&mdash;a successful one&mdash;to take Verena away from you
+knock you up fearfully, and shouldn't I suffer, as you know I suffer, by
+sympathy?"</p>
+
+<p>I have said that it was Miss Chancellor's plan of life not to lie, but
+such a plan was compatible with a kind of consideration for the truth
+which led her to shrink from producing it on poor occasions. So she
+didn't say, "Dear me, Adeline, what humbug! you know you hate Verena and
+would be very glad if she were drowned!" She only said, "Well, I see;
+but it's very roundabout." What she did see was that Mrs. Luna was eager
+to help her to stop off Basil Ransom from "making head," as the phrase
+was; and the fact that her motive was spite, and not tenderness for the
+Bostonians, would not make her assistance less welcome if the danger
+were real. She herself had a nervous dread, but she had that about
+everything; still, Adeline had perhaps seen something, and what in the
+world did she mean by her reference to Verena's having had secret
+meetings? When pressed on this point, Mrs. Luna could only say that she
+didn't pretend to give definite information, and she wasn't a spy
+anyway, but that the night before he had positively flaunted in her face
+his admiration for the girl, his enthusiasm for her way of standing up
+there. Of course he hated her ideas, but he was quite conceited enough
+to think she would give them up. Perhaps it was all directed at
+<i>her</i>&mdash;as if she cared! It would depend a good deal on the girl herself;
+certainly, if there was any likelihood of Verena's being affected, she
+should advise Olive to look out. She knew best what to do; it was only
+Adeline's duty to give her the benefit of her own impression, whether
+she was thanked for it or not. She only wished to put her on her guard,
+and it was just like Olive to receive such information so coldly; she
+was the most disappointing woman she knew.</p>
+
+<p>Miss Chancellor's coldness was not diminished by this rebuke; for it had
+come over her that, after all, she had never opened herself at that rate
+to Adeline, had never let her see the real intensity of her desire to
+keep the sort of danger there was now a question of away from Verena,
+had given her no warrant for regarding her as her friend's keeper; so
+that she was taken aback by the flatness of Mrs. Luna's assumption that
+she was ready to enter into a conspiracy to circumvent and frustrate the
+girl. Olive put on all her majesty to dispel this impression, and if she
+could not help being aware that she made Mrs. Luna still angrier, on the
+whole, than at first, she felt that she would much rather disappoint her
+than give herself away to her&mdash;especially as she was intensely eager to
+profit by her warning!</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="XXX" id="XXX"></a>XXX</h2>
+
+
+<p>Mrs. Luna would have been still less satisfied with the manner in which
+Olive received her proffered assistance had she known how many
+confidences that reticent young woman might have made her in return.
+Olive's whole life now was a matter for whispered communications; she
+felt this herself, as she sought the privacy of her own apartment after
+her interview with her sister. She had for the moment time to think;
+Verena having gone out with Mr. Burrage, who had made an appointment the
+night before to call for her to drive at that early hour. They had other
+engagements in the afternoon&mdash;the principal of which was to meet a group
+of earnest people at the house of one of the great local promoters.
+Olive would whisk Verena off to these appointments directly after lunch;
+she flattered herself that she could arrange matters so that there would
+not be half an hour in the day during which Basil Ransom, complacently
+calling, would find the Bostonians in the house. She had had this well
+in mind when, at Mrs. Burrage's, she was driven to give him their
+address; and she had had it also in mind that she would ask Verena, as a
+special favour, to accompany her back to Boston on the next day but one,
+which was the morning of the morrow. There had been considerable talk of
+her staying a few days with Mrs. Burrage&mdash;staying on after her own
+departure; but Verena backed out of it spontaneously, seeing how the
+idea worried her friend. Olive had accepted the sacrifice, and their
+visit to New York was now cut down, in intention, to four days, one of
+which, the moment she perceived whither Basil Ransom was tending, Miss
+Chancellor promised herself also to suppress. She had not mentioned that
+to Verena yet; she hesitated a little, having a slightly bad conscience
+about the concessions she had already obtained from her friend. Verena
+made such concessions with a generosity which caused one's heart to ache
+for admiration, even while one asked for them; and never once had Olive
+known her to demand the smallest credit for any virtue she showed in
+this way, or to bargain for an instant about any effort she made to
+oblige. She had been delighted with the idea of spending a week under
+Mrs. Burrage's roof; she had said, too, that she believed her mother
+would die happy (not that there was the least prospect of Mrs. Tarrant's
+dying) if she could hear of her having such an experience as that; and
+yet, perceiving how solemn Olive looked about it, how she blanched and
+brooded at the prospect, she had offered to give it up, with a smile
+sweeter, if possible, than any that had ever sat in her eyes. Olive knew
+what that meant for her, knew what a power of enjoyment she still had,
+in spite of the tension of their common purpose, their vital work, which
+had now, as they equally felt, passed into the stage of realisation, of
+fruition; and that is why her conscience rather pricked her for
+consenting to this further act of renunciation, especially as their
+position seemed really so secure, on the part of one who had already
+given herself away so sublimely.</p>
+
+<p>Secure as their position might be, Olive called herself a blind idiot
+for having, in spite of all her first shrinkings, agreed to bring Verena
+to New York. Verena had jumped at the invitation, the very
+unexpectedness of which on Mrs. Burrage's part&mdash;it was such an odd idea
+to have come to a mere worldling&mdash;carried a kind of persuasion with it.
+Olive's immediate sentiment had been an instinctive general fear; but,
+later, she had dismissed that as unworthy; she had decided (and such a
+decision was nothing new) that where their mission was concerned they
+ought to face everything. Such an opportunity would contribute too much
+to Verena's reputation and authority to justify a refusal at the bidding
+of apprehensions which were after all only vague. Olive's specific
+terrors and dangers had by this time very much blown over; Basil Ransom
+had given no sign of life for ages, and Henry Burrage had certainly got
+his quietus before they went to Europe. If it had occurred to his mother
+that she might convert Verena into the animating principle of a big
+soiree, she was at least acting in good faith, for it could be no more
+her wish to-day that he should marry Selah Tarrant's daughter than it
+was her wish a year before. And then they should do some good to the
+benighted, the most benighted, the fashionable benighted; they should
+perhaps make them furious&mdash;there was always some good in that. Lastly,
+Olive was conscious of a personal temptation in the matter; she was not
+insensible to the pleasure of appearing in a distinguished New York
+circle as a representative woman, an important Bostonian, the prompter,
+colleague, associate of one of the most original girls of the time.
+Basil Ransom was the person she had least expected to meet at Mrs.
+Burrage's; it had been her belief that they might easily spend four days
+in a city of more than a million of inhabitants without that
+disagreeable accident. But it had occurred; nothing was wanting to make
+it seem serious; and, setting her teeth, she shook herself, morally,
+hard, for having fallen into the trap of fate. Well, she would scramble
+out, with only a scare, probably. Henry Burrage was very attentive, but
+somehow she didn't fear him now; and it was only natural he should feel
+that he couldn't be polite enough, after they had consented to be
+exploited in that worldly way by his mother. The other danger was the
+worst; the palpitation of her strange dread, the night of Miss
+Birdseye's party, came back to her. Mr. Burrage seemed, indeed, a
+protection; she reflected, with relief, that it had been arranged that
+after taking Verena to drive in the Park and see the Museum of Art in
+the morning, they should in the evening dine with him at Delmonico's (he
+was to invite another gentleman), and go afterwards to the German opera.
+Olive had kept all this to herself, as I have said; revealing to her
+sister neither the vividness of her prevision that Basil Ransom would
+look blank when he came down to Tenth Street and learned they had
+flitted, nor the eagerness of her desire just to find herself once more
+in the Boston train. It had been only this prevision that sustained her
+when she gave Mr. Ransom their number.</p>
+
+<p>Verena came to her room shortly before luncheon, to let her know she had
+returned; and while they sat there, waiting to stop their ears when the
+gong announcing the repast was beaten, at the foot of the stairs, by a
+negro in a white jacket, she narrated to her friend her adventures with
+Mr. Burrage&mdash;expatiated on the beauty of the park, the splendour and
+interest of the Museum, the wonder of the young man's acquaintance with
+everything it contained, the swiftness of his horses, the softness of
+his English cart, the pleasure of rolling at that pace over roads as
+firm as marble, the entertainment he promised them for the evening.
+Olive listened in serious silence; she saw Verena was quite carried
+away; of course she hadn't gone so far with her without knowing that
+phase.</p>
+
+<p>"Did Mr. Burrage try to make love to you?" Miss Chancellor inquired at
+last, without a smile.</p>
+
+<p>Verena had taken off her hat to arrange her feather, and as she placed
+it on her head again, her uplifted arms making a frame for her face, she
+said: "Yes, I suppose it was meant for love."</p>
+
+<p>Olive waited for her to tell more, to tell how she had treated him, kept
+him in his place, made him feel that that question was over long ago;
+but as Verena gave her no further information she did not insist,
+conscious as she always was that in such a relation as theirs there
+should be a great respect on either side for the liberty of each. She
+had never yet infringed on Verena's, and of course she wouldn't begin
+now. Moreover, with the request that she meant presently to make of her
+she felt that she must be discreet. She wondered whether Henry Burrage
+were really going to begin again; whether his mother had only been
+acting in his interest in getting them to come on. Certainly, the bright
+spot in such a prospect was that if she listened to him she couldn't
+listen to Basil Ransom; and he <i>had</i> told Olive herself last night, when
+he put them into their carriage, that he hoped to prove to her yet that
+he had come round to her gospel. But the old sickness stole upon her
+again, the faintness of discouragement, as she asked herself why in the
+name of pity Verena should listen to any one at all but Olive
+Chancellor. Again it came over her, when she saw the brightness, the
+happy look, the girl brought back, as it had done in the earlier months,
+that the great trouble was that weak spot of Verena's, that sole
+infirmity and subtle flaw, which she had expressed to her very soon
+after they began to live together, in saying (she remembered it through
+the ineffaceable impression made by her friend's avowal), "I'll tell you
+what is the matter with you&mdash;you don't dislike men as a class!" Verena
+had replied on this occasion, "Well, no, I don't dislike them when they
+are pleasant!" As if organised atrociousness could ever be pleasant!
+Olive disliked them most when they were least unpleasant. After a
+little, at present, she remarked, referring to Henry Burrage: "It is not
+right of him, not decent, after your making him feel how, while he was
+at Cambridge, he wearied you, tormented you."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, I didn't show anything," said Verena gaily. "I am learning to
+dissimulate," she added in a moment. "I suppose you have to as you go
+along. I pretend not to notice."</p>
+
+<p>At this moment the gong sounded for luncheon, and the two young women
+covered up their ears, face to face, Verena with her quick smile, Olive
+with her pale patience. When they could hear themselves speak, the
+latter said abruptly:</p>
+
+<p>"How did Mrs. Burrage come to invite Mr. Ransom to her party? He told
+Adeline he had never seen her before."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, I asked her to send him an invitation&mdash;after she had written to me,
+to thank me, when it was definitely settled we should come on. She asked
+me in her letter if there were any friends of mine in the city to whom I
+should like her to send cards, and I mentioned Mr. Ransom."</p>
+
+<p>Verena spoke without a single instant's hesitation, and the only sign of
+embarrassment she gave was that she got up from her chair, passing in
+this manner a little out of Olive's scrutiny. It was easy for her not to
+falter, because she was glad of the chance. She wanted to be very simple
+in all her relations with her friend, and of course it was not simple so
+soon as she began to keep things back. She could at any rate keep back
+as little as possible, and she felt as if she were making up for a
+dereliction when she answered Olive's inquiry so promptly.</p>
+
+<p>"You never told me of that," Miss Chancellor remarked, in a low tone.</p>
+
+<p>"I didn't want to. I know you don't like him, and I thought it would
+give you pain. Yet I wanted him to be there&mdash;I wanted him to hear."</p>
+
+<p>"What does it matter&mdash;why should you care about him?"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, because he is so awfully opposed!"</p>
+
+<p>"How do you know that, Verena?"</p>
+
+<p>At this point Verena began to hesitate. It was not, after all, so easy
+to keep back only a little; it appeared rather as if one must either
+tell everything or hide everything. The former course had already
+presented itself to her as unduly harsh; it was because it seemed so
+that she had ended by keeping the incident of Basil Ransom's visit to
+Monadnoc Place buried in unspoken, in unspeakable, considerations, the
+only secret she had in the world&mdash;the only thing that was all her own.
+She was so glad to say what she could without betraying herself that it
+was only after she had spoken that she perceived there was a danger of
+Olive's pushing the inquiry to the point where, to defend herself as it
+were, she should be obliged to practise a positive deception; and she
+was conscious at the same time that the moment her secret was threatened
+it became dearer to her. She began to pray silently that Olive might not
+push; for it would be odious, it would be impossible, to defend herself
+by a lie. Meanwhile, however, she had to answer, and the way she
+answered was by exclaiming, much more quickly than the reflexions I note
+might have appeared to permit, "Well, if you can't tell from his
+appearance! He's the type of the reactionary."</p>
+
+<p>Verena went to the toilet-glass to see that she had put on her hat
+properly, and Olive slowly got up, in the manner of a person not in the
+least eager for food. "Let him react as he likes&mdash;for heaven's sake
+don't mind him!" That was Miss Chancellor's rejoinder, and Verena felt
+that it didn't say all that was in her mind. She wished she would come
+down to luncheon, for she, at least, was honestly hungry. She even
+suspected Olive had an idea she was afraid to express, such distress it
+would bring with it. "Well, you know, Verena, this isn't our <i>real</i>
+life&mdash;it isn't our work," Olive went on.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, no, it isn't, certainly," said Verena, not pretending at first
+that she did not know what Olive meant. In a moment, however, she added,
+"Do you refer to this social intercourse with Mr. Burrage?"</p>
+
+<p>"Not to that only." Then Olive asked abruptly, looking at her, "How did
+you know his address?"</p>
+
+<p>"His address?"</p>
+
+<p>"Mr. Ransom's&mdash;to enable Mrs. Burrage to invite him?"</p>
+
+<p>They stood for a moment interchanging a gaze. "It was in a letter I got
+from him."</p>
+
+<p>At these words there came into Olive's face an expression which made her
+companion cross over to her directly and take her by the hand. But the
+tone was different from what Verena expected, when she said, with cold
+surprise: "Oh, you are in correspondence!" It showed an immense effort
+of self-control.</p>
+
+<p>"He wrote to me once&mdash;I never told you," Verena rejoined, smiling. She
+felt that her friend's strange, uneasy eyes searched very far; a little
+more and they would go to the very bottom. Well, they might go if they
+would; she didn't, after all, care so much about her secret as that. For
+the moment, however, Verena did not learn what Olive had discovered,
+inasmuch as she only remarked presently that it was really time to go
+down. As they descended the staircase she put her arm into Miss
+Chancellor's and perceived that she was trembling.</p>
+
+<p>Of course there were plenty of people in New York interested in the
+uprising, and Olive had made appointments, in advance, which filled the
+whole afternoon. Everybody wanted to meet them, and wanted everybody
+else to do so, and Verena saw they could easily have quite a vogue, if
+they only chose to stay and work that vein. Very likely, as Olive said,
+it wasn't their real life, and people didn't seem to have such a grip of
+the movement as they had in Boston; but there was something in the air
+that carried one along, and a sense of vastness and variety, of the
+infinite possibilities of a great city, which&mdash;Verena hardly knew
+whether she ought to confess it to herself&mdash;might in the end make up for
+the want of the Boston earnestness. Certainly, the people seemed very
+much alive, and there was no other place where so many cheering reports
+could flow in, owing to the number of electric feelers that stretched
+away everywhere. The principal centre appeared to be Mrs. Croucher's, on
+Fifty-sixth Street, where there was an informal gathering of
+sympathisers who didn't seem as if they could forgive her when they
+learned that she had been speaking the night before in a circle in which
+none of them were acquainted. Certainly, they were very different from
+the group she had addressed at Mrs. Burrage's, and Verena heaved a thin,
+private sigh, expressive of some helplessness, as she thought what a
+big, complicated world it was, and how it evidently contained a little
+of everything. There was a general demand that she should repeat her
+address in a more congenial atmosphere; to which she replied that Olive
+made her engagements for her, and that as the address had been intended
+just to lead people on, perhaps she would think Mrs. Croucher's friends
+had reached a higher point. She was as cautious as this because she saw
+that Olive was now just straining to get out of the city; she didn't
+want to say anything that would tie them. When she felt her trembling
+that way before luncheon it made her quite sick to realise how much her
+friend was wrapped up in her&mdash;how terribly she would suffer from the
+least deviation. After they had started for their round of engagements
+the very first thing Verena spoke of in the carriage (Olive had taken
+one, in her liberal way, for the whole time) was the fact that her
+correspondence with Mr. Ransom, as her friend had called it, had
+consisted on his part of only one letter. It was a very short one, too;
+it had come to her a little more than a month before. Olive knew she got
+letters from gentlemen; she didn't see why she should attach such
+importance to this one. Miss Chancellor was leaning back in the
+carriage, very still, very grave, with her head against the cushioned
+surface, only turning her eyes towards the girl.</p>
+
+<p>"You attach importance yourself; otherwise you would have told me."</p>
+
+<p>"I knew you wouldn't like it&mdash;because you don't like <i>him</i>."</p>
+
+<p>"I don't think of him," said Olive; "he's nothing to me." Then she
+added, suddenly, "Have you noticed that I am afraid to face what I don't
+like?"</p>
+
+<p>Verena could not say that she had, and yet it was not just on Olive's
+part to speak as if she were an easy person to tell such a thing to: the
+way she lay there, white and weak, like a wounded creature, sufficiently
+proved the contrary. "You have such a fearful power of suffering," she
+replied in a moment.</p>
+
+<p>To this at first Miss Chancellor made no rejoinder; but after a little
+she said, in the same attitude, "Yes, <i>you</i> could make me."</p>
+
+<p>Verena took her hand and held it awhile. "I never will, till I have been
+through everything myself."</p>
+
+<p>"<i>You</i> were not made to suffer&mdash;you were made to enjoy," Olive said, in
+very much the same tone in which she had told her that what was the
+matter with her was that she didn't dislike men as a class&mdash;a tone which
+implied that the contrary would have been much more natural and perhaps
+rather higher. Perhaps it would; but Verena was unable to rebut the
+charge; she felt this, as she looked out of the window of the carriage
+at the bright, amusing city, where the elements seemed so numerous, the
+animation so immense, the shops so brilliant, the women so strikingly
+dressed, and knew that these things quickened her curiosity, all her
+pulses.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, I suppose I mustn't presume on it," she remarked, glancing back
+at Olive with her natural sweetness, her uncontradicting grace.</p>
+
+<p>That young lady lifted her hand to her lips&mdash;held it there a moment; the
+movement seemed to say, "When you are so divinely docile, how can I help
+the dread of losing you?" This idea, however, was unspoken, and Olive
+Chancellor's uttered words, as the carriage rolled on, were different.</p>
+
+<p>"Verena, I don't understand why he wrote to you."</p>
+
+<p>"He wrote to me because he likes me. Perhaps you'll say you don't
+understand why he likes me," the girl continued, laughing. "He liked me
+the first time he saw me."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, that time!" Olive murmured.</p>
+
+<p>"And still more the second."</p>
+
+<p>"Did he tell you that in his letter?" Miss Chancellor inquired.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, my dear, he told me that. Only he expressed it more gracefully."
+Verena was very happy to say that; a written phrase of Basil Ransom's
+sufficiently justified her.</p>
+
+<p>"It was my intuition&mdash;it was my foreboding!" Olive exclaimed, closing
+her eyes.</p>
+
+<p>"I thought you said you didn't dislike him."</p>
+
+<p>"It isn't dislike&mdash;it's simple dread. Is that all there is between you?"</p>
+
+<p>"Why, Olive Chancellor, what do you think?" Verena asked, feeling now
+distinctly like a coward. Five minutes afterwards she said to Olive that
+if it would give her pleasure they would leave New York on the morrow,
+without taking a fourth day; and as soon as she had done so she felt
+better, especially when she saw how gratefully Olive looked at her for
+the concession, how eagerly she rose to the offer in saying, "Well, if
+you <i>do</i> feel that it isn't our own life&mdash;our very own!" It was with
+these words, and others besides, and with an unusually weak, indefinite
+kiss, as if she wished to protest that, after all, a single day didn't
+matter, and yet accepted the sacrifice and was a little ashamed of
+it&mdash;it was in this manner that the agreement as to an immediate retreat
+was sealed. Verena could not shut her eyes to the fact that for a month
+she had been less frank, and if she wished to do penance this
+abbreviation of their pleasure in New York, even if it made her almost
+completely miss Basil Ransom, was easier than to tell Olive just now
+that the letter was <i>not</i> all, that there had been a long visit, a talk,
+and a walk besides, which she had been covering up for ever so many
+weeks. And of what consequence, anyway, was the missing? Was it such a
+pleasure to converse with a gentleman who only wanted to let you
+know&mdash;and why he should want it so much Verena couldn't guess&mdash;that he
+thought you quite preposterous? Olive took her from place to place, and
+she ended by forgetting everything but the present hour, and the bigness
+and variety of New York, and the entertainment of rolling about in a
+carriage with silk cushions, and meeting new faces, new expressions of
+curiosity and sympathy, assurances that one was watched and followed.
+Mingled with this was a bright consciousness, sufficient for the moment,
+that one was moreover to dine at Delmonico's and go to the German opera.
+There was enough of the epicurean in Verena's composition to make it
+easy for her in certain conditions to live only for the hour.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="XXXI" id="XXXI"></a>XXXI</h2>
+
+
+<p>When she returned with her companion to the establishment in Tenth
+Street she saw two notes lying on the table in the hall; one of which
+she perceived to be addressed to Miss Chancellor, the other to herself.
+The hand was different, but she recognised both. Olive was behind her on
+the steps, talking to the coachman about sending another carriage for
+them in half an hour (they had left themselves but just time to dress);
+so that she simply possessed herself of her own note and ascended to her
+room. As she did so she felt that all the while she had known it would
+be there, and was conscious of a kind of treachery, an unfriendly
+wilfulness, in not being more prepared for it. If she could roll about
+New York the whole afternoon and forget that there might be difficulties
+ahead, that didn't alter the fact that there <i>were</i> difficulties, and
+that they might even become considerable&mdash;might not be settled by her
+simply going back to Boston. Half an hour later, as she drove up the
+Fifth Avenue with Olive (there seemed to be so much crowded into that
+one day), smoothing her light gloves, wishing her fan were a little
+nicer, and proving by the answering, familiar brightness with which she
+looked out on the lamp-lighted streets that, whatever theory might be
+entertained as to the genesis of her talent and her personal nature, the
+blood of the lecture-going, night-walking Tarrants did distinctly flow
+in her veins; as the pair proceeded, I say, to the celebrated
+restaurant, at the door of which Mr. Burrage had promised to be in
+vigilant expectancy of their carriage, Verena found a sufficiently gay
+and natural tone of voice for remarking to her friend that Mr. Ransom
+had called upon her while they were out, and had left a note in which
+there were many compliments for Miss Chancellor.</p>
+
+<p>"That's wholly your own affair, my dear," Olive replied, with a
+melancholy sigh, gazing down the vista of Fourteenth Street (which they
+happened just then to be traversing, with much agitation), toward the
+queer barrier of the elevated railway.</p>
+
+<p>It was nothing new to Verena that if the great striving of Olive's life
+was for justice she yet sometimes failed to arrive at it in particular
+cases; and she reflected that it was rather late for her to say, like
+that, that Basil Ransom's letters were only his correspondent's
+business. Had not his kinswoman quite made the subject her own during
+their drive that afternoon? Verena determined now that her companion
+should hear all there was to be heard about the letter; asking herself
+whether, if she told her at present more than she cared to know, it
+wouldn't make up for her hitherto having told her less. "He brought it
+with him, written, in case I should be out. He wants to see me
+to-morrow&mdash;he says he has ever so much to say to me. He proposes an
+hour&mdash;says he hopes it won't be inconvenient for me to see him about
+eleven in the morning; thinks I may have no other engagement so early as
+that. Of course our return to Boston settles it," Verena added, with
+serenity.</p>
+
+<p>Miss Chancellor said nothing for a moment; then she replied, "Yes,
+unless you invite him to come on with you in the train."</p>
+
+<p>"Why, Olive, how bitter you are!" Verena exclaimed, in genuine surprise.</p>
+
+<p>Olive could not justify her bitterness by saying that her companion had
+spoken as if she were disappointed, because Verena had not. So she
+simply remarked, "I don't see what he can have to say to you&mdash;that would
+be worth your hearing."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, of course, it's the other side. He has got it on the brain!" said
+Verena, with a laugh which seemed to relegate the whole matter to the
+category of the unimportant.</p>
+
+<p>"If we should stay, would you see him&mdash;at eleven o'clock?" Olive
+inquired.</p>
+
+<p>"Why do you ask that&mdash;when I have given it up?"</p>
+
+<p>"Do you consider it such a tremendous sacrifice?"</p>
+
+<p>"No," said Verena good-naturedly; "but I confess I am curious."</p>
+
+<p>"Curious&mdash;how do you mean?"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, to hear the other side."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh heaven!" Olive Chancellor murmured, turning her face upon her.</p>
+
+<p>"You must remember I have never heard it." And Verena smiled into her
+friend's wan gaze.</p>
+
+<p>"Do you want to hear all the infamy that is in the world?"</p>
+
+<p>"No, it isn't that; but the more he should talk the better chance he
+would give me. I guess I can meet him."</p>
+
+<p>"Life is too short. Leave him as he is."</p>
+
+<p>"Well," Verena went on, "there are many I haven't cared to move at all,
+whom I might have been more interested in than in him. But to make him
+give in just at two or three points&mdash;that I should like better than
+anything I have done."</p>
+
+<p>"You have no business to enter upon a contest that isn't equal; and it
+wouldn't be, with Mr. Ransom."</p>
+
+<p>"The inequality would be that I have right on my side."</p>
+
+<p>"What is that&mdash;for a man? For what was their brutality given them, but
+to make that up?"</p>
+
+<p>"I don't think he's brutal; I should like to see," said Verena gaily.</p>
+
+<p>Olive's eyes lingered a little on her own; then they turned away,
+vaguely, blindly, out of the carriage-window, and Verena made the
+reflexion that she looked strangely little like a person who was going
+to dine at Delmonico's. How terribly she worried about everything, and
+how tragical was her nature; how anxious, suspicious, exposed to subtle
+influences! In their long intimacy Verena had come to revere most of her
+friend's peculiarities; they were a proof of her depth and devotion, and
+were so bound up with what was noble in her that she was rarely provoked
+to criticise them separately. But at present, suddenly, Olive's
+earnestness began to appear as inharmonious with the scheme of the
+universe as if it had been a broken saw; and she was positively glad she
+had not told her about Basil Ransom's appearance in Monadnoc Place. If
+she worried so about what she knew, how much would she not have worried
+about the rest! Verena had by this time made up her mind that her
+acquaintance with Mr. Ransom was the most episodical, most superficial,
+most unimportant of all possible relations.</p>
+
+<p>Olive Chancellor watched Henry Burrage very closely that evening; she
+had a special reason for doing so, and her entertainment, during the
+successive hours, was derived much less from the delicate little feast
+over which this insinuating proselyte presided, in the brilliant public
+room of the establishment, where French waiters flitted about on deep
+carpets and parties at neighbouring tables excited curiosity and
+conjecture, or even from the magnificent music of <i>Lohengrin</i>, than from
+a secret process of comparison and verification, which shall presently
+be explained to the reader. As some discredit has possibly been thrown
+upon her impartiality it is a pleasure to be able to say that on her
+return from the opera she took a step dictated by an earnest
+consideration of justice&mdash;of the promptness with which Verena had told
+her of the note left by Basil Ransom in the afternoon. She drew Verena
+into her room with her. The girl, on the way back to Tenth Street, had
+spoken only of Wagner's music, of the singers, the orchestra, the
+immensity of the house, her tremendous pleasure. Olive could see how
+fond she might become of New York, where that kind of pleasure was so
+much more in the air.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, Mr. Burrage was certainly very kind to us&mdash;no one could have been
+more thoughtful," Olive said; and she coloured a little at the look with
+which Verena greeted this tribute of appreciation from Miss Chancellor
+to a single gentleman.</p>
+
+<p>"I am so glad you were struck with that, because I do think we have been
+a little rough to him." Verena's <i>we</i> was angelic. "He was particularly
+attentive to you, my dear; he has got over me. He looked at you so
+sweetly. Dearest Olive, if you marry him&mdash;&mdash;!" And Miss Tarrant, who was
+in high spirits, embraced her companion, to check her own silliness.</p>
+
+<p>"He wants you to stay there, all the same. They haven't given <i>that</i>
+up," Olive remarked, turning to a drawer, out of which she took a
+letter.</p>
+
+<p>"Did he tell you that, pray? He said nothing more about it to me."</p>
+
+<p>"When we came in this afternoon I found this note from Mrs. Burrage. You
+had better read it." And she presented the document, open, to Verena.</p>
+
+<p>The purpose of it was to say that Mrs. Burrage could really not
+reconcile herself to the loss of Verena's visit, on which both she and
+her son had counted so much. She was sure they would be able to make it
+as interesting to Miss Tarrant as it would be to themselves. She, Mrs.
+Burrage, moreover, felt as if she hadn't heard half she wanted about
+Miss Tarrant's views, and there were so many more who were present at
+the address, who had come to her that afternoon (losing not a minute, as
+Miss Chancellor could see) to ask how in the world they too could learn
+more&mdash;how they could get at the fair speaker and question her about
+certain details. She hoped so much, therefore, that even if the young
+ladies should be unable to alter their decision about the visit they
+might at least see their way to staying over long enough to allow her to
+arrange an informal meeting for some of these poor thirsty souls. Might
+she not at least talk over the question with Miss Chancellor? She gave
+her notice that she would attack her on the subject of the visit too.
+Might she not see her on the morrow, and might she ask of her the very
+great favour that the interview should be at Mrs. Burrage's own house?
+She had something very particular to say to her, as regards which
+perfect privacy was a great consideration, and Miss Chancellor would
+doubtless recognise that this would be best secured under Mrs. Burrage's
+roof. She would therefore send her carriage for Miss Chancellor at any
+hour that would be convenient to the latter. She really thought much
+good might come from their having a satisfactory talk.</p>
+
+<p>Verena read this epistle with much deliberation; it seemed to her
+mysterious, and confirmed the idea she had received the night
+before&mdash;the idea that she had not got quite a correct impression of this
+clever, worldly, curious woman on the occasion of her visit to
+Cambridge, when they met her at her son's rooms. As she gave the letter
+back to Olive she said, "That's why he didn't seem to believe we are
+really leaving to-morrow. He knows she had written that, and he thinks
+it will keep us."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, if I were to say it may&mdash;should you think me too miserably
+changeful?"</p>
+
+<p>Verena stared, with all her candour, and it was so very queer that Olive
+should now wish to linger that the sense of it, for the moment, almost
+covered the sense of its being pleasant. But that came out after an
+instant, and she said, with great honesty, "You needn't drag me away for
+consistency's sake. It would be absurd for me to pretend that I don't
+like being here."</p>
+
+<p>"I think perhaps I ought to see her." Olive was very thoughtful.</p>
+
+<p>"How lovely it must be to have a secret with Mrs. Burrage!" Verena
+exclaimed.</p>
+
+<p>"It won't be a secret from you."</p>
+
+<p>"Dearest, you needn't tell me unless you want," Verena went on, thinking
+of her own unimparted knowledge.</p>
+
+<p>"I thought it was our plan to divide everything. It was certainly mine."</p>
+
+<p>"Ah, don't talk about plans!" Verena exclaimed, rather ruefully. "You
+see, if we <i>are</i> going to stay to-morrow, how foolish it was to have
+any. There is more in her letter than is expressed," she added, as Olive
+appeared to be studying in her face the reasons for and against making
+this concession to Mrs. Burrage, and that was rather embarrassing.</p>
+
+<p>"I thought it over all the evening&mdash;so that if now you will consent we
+will stay."</p>
+
+<p>"Darling&mdash;what a spirit you have got! All through all those dear little
+dishes&mdash;all through <i>Lohengrin</i>! As I haven't thought it over at all,
+you must settle it. You know I am not difficult."</p>
+
+<p>"And would you go and stay with Mrs. Burrage, after all, if she should
+say anything to me that seems to make it desirable?"</p>
+
+<p>Verena broke into a laugh. "You know it's not our real life!"</p>
+
+<p>Olive said nothing for a moment; then she replied: "Don't think <i>I</i> can
+forget that. If I suggest a deviation, it's only because it sometimes
+seems to me that perhaps, after all, almost anything is better than the
+form reality <i>may</i> take with us." This was slightly obscure, as well as
+very melancholy, and Verena was relieved when her companion remarked, in
+a moment, "You must think me strangely inconsequent"; for this gave her
+a chance to reply, soothingly:</p>
+
+<p>"Why, you don't suppose I expect you to keep always screwed up! I will
+stay a week with Mrs. Burrage, or a fortnight, or a month, or anything
+you like," she pursued; "anything it may seem to you best to tell her
+after you have seen her."</p>
+
+<p>"Do you leave it all to me? You don't give me much help," Olive said.</p>
+
+<p>"Help to what?"</p>
+
+<p>"Help to help <i>you</i>."</p>
+
+<p>"I don't want any help; I am quite strong enough!" Verena cried gaily.
+The next moment she inquired, in an appeal half comical, half touching,
+"My dear colleague, why do you make me say such conceited things?"</p>
+
+<p>"And if you do stay&mdash;just even to-morrow&mdash;shall you be&mdash;very much of the
+time&mdash;with Mr. Ransom?"</p>
+
+<p>As Verena for the moment appeared ironically-minded, she might have
+found a fresh subject for hilarity in the tremulous, tentative tone in
+which Olive made this inquiry. But it had not that effect; it produced
+the first manifestation of impatience&mdash;the first, literally, and the
+first note of reproach&mdash;that had occurred in the course of their
+remarkable intimacy. The colour rose to Verena's cheek, and her eye for
+an instant looked moist.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't know what you always think, Olive, nor why you don't seem able
+to trust me. You didn't, from the first, with gentlemen. Perhaps you
+were right then&mdash;I don't say; but surely it is very different now. I
+don't think I ought to be suspected so much. Why have you a manner as if
+I had to be watched, as if I wanted to run away with every man that
+speaks to me? I should think I had proved how little I care. I thought
+you had discovered by this time that I am serious; that I have dedicated
+my life; that there is something unspeakably dear to me. But you begin
+again, every time&mdash;you don't do me justice. I must take everything that
+comes. I mustn't be afraid. I thought we had agreed that we were to do
+our work in the midst of the world, facing everything, keeping straight
+on, always taking hold. And now that it all opens out so magnificently,
+and victory is really sitting on our banners, it is strange of you to
+doubt of me, to suppose I am not more wedded to all our old dreams than
+ever. I told you the first time I saw you that I could renounce, and
+knowing better to-day, perhaps, what that means, I am ready to say it
+again. That I can, that I will! Why, Olive Chancellor," Verena cried,
+panting, a moment, with her eloquence, and with the rush of a
+culminating idea, "haven't you discovered by this time that I <i>have</i>
+renounced?"</p>
+
+<p>The habit of public speaking, the training, the practice, in which she
+had been immersed, enabled Verena to unroll a coil of propositions
+dedicated even to a private interest with the most touching, most
+cumulative effect. Olive was completely aware of this, and she stilled
+herself, while the girl uttered one soft, pleading sentence after
+another, into the same rapt attention she was in the habit of sending up
+from the benches of an auditorium. She looked at Verena fixedly, felt
+that she was stirred to her depths, that she was exquisitely passionate
+and sincere, that she was a quivering, spotless, consecrated maiden,
+that she really had renounced, that they were both safe, and that her
+own injustice and indelicacy had been great. She came to her slowly,
+took her in her arms and held her long&mdash;giving her a silent kiss. From
+which Verena knew that she believed her.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="XXXII" id="XXXII"></a>XXXII</h2>
+
+
+<p>The hour that Olive proposed to Mrs. Burrage, in a note sent early the
+next morning, for the interview to which she consented to lend herself,
+was the stroke of noon; this period of the day being chosen in
+consequence of a prevision of many subsequent calls upon her time. She
+remarked in her note that she did not wish any carriage to be sent for
+her, and she surged and swayed up the Fifth Avenue on one of the
+convulsive, clattering omnibuses which circulate in that thoroughfare.
+One of her reasons for mentioning twelve o'clock had been that she knew
+Basil Ransom was to call at Tenth Street at eleven, and (as she supposed
+he didn't intend to stay all day) this would give her time to see him
+come and go. It had been tacitly agreed between them, the night before,
+that Verena was quite firm enough in her faith to submit to his visit,
+and that such a course would be much more dignified than dodging it.
+This understanding passed from one to the other during that dumb embrace
+which I have described as taking place before they separated for the
+night. Shortly before noon, Olive, passing out of the house, looked into
+the big, sunny double parlour, where, in the morning, with all the
+husbands absent for the day and all the wives and spinsters launched
+upon the town, a young man desiring to hold a debate with a young lady
+might enjoy every advantage in the way of a clear field. Basil Ransom
+was still there; he and Verena, with the place to themselves, were
+standing in the recess of a window, their backs presented to the door.
+If he had got up, perhaps he was going, and Olive, softly closing the
+door again, waited a little in the hall, ready to pass into the back
+part of the house if she should hear him coming out. No sound, however,
+reached her ear; apparently he did mean to stay all day, and she should
+find him there on her return. She left the house, knowing they were
+looking at her from the window as she descended the steps, but feeling
+she could not bear to see Basil Ransom's face. As she walked, averting
+her own, towards the Fifth Avenue, on the sunny side, she was barely
+conscious of the loveliness of the day, the perfect weather, all
+suffused and tinted with spring, which sometimes descends upon New York
+when the winds of March have been stilled; she was given up only to the
+remembrance of that moment when she herself had stood at a window (the
+second time he came to see her in Boston), and watched Basil Ransom pass
+out with Adeline&mdash;with Adeline who had seemed capable then of getting
+such a hold on him but had proved as ineffectual in this respect as she
+was in every other. She recalled the vision she had allowed to dance
+before her as she saw the pair cross the street together, laughing and
+talking, and how it seemed to interpose itself against the fears which
+already then&mdash;so strangely&mdash;haunted her. Now that she saw it so
+fruitless&mdash;and that Verena, moreover, had turned out really so
+great&mdash;she was rather ashamed of it; she felt associated, however
+remotely, in the reasons which had made Mrs. Luna tell her so many fibs
+the day before, and there could be nothing elevating in that. As for the
+other reasons why her fidgety sister had failed and Mr. Ransom had held
+his own course, naturally Miss Chancellor didn't like to think of them.</p>
+
+<p>If she had wondered what Mrs. Burrage wished so particularly to talk
+about, she waited some time for the clearing-up of the mystery. During
+this interval she sat in a remarkably pretty boudoir, where there were
+flowers and faiences and little French pictures, and watched her hostess
+revolve round the subject in circles the vagueness of which she tried to
+dissimulate. Olive believed she was a person who never could enjoy
+asking a favour, especially of a votary of the new ideas; and that was
+evidently what was coming. She had asked one already, but that had been
+handsomely paid for; the note from Mrs. Burrage which Verena found
+awaiting her in Tenth Street, on her arrival, contained the largest
+cheque this young woman had ever received for an address. The request
+that hung fire had reference to Verena too, of course; and Olive needed
+no prompting to feel that her friend's being a young person who took
+money could not make Mrs. Burrage's present effort more agreeable. To
+this taking of money (for when it came to Verena it was as if it came to
+her as well) she herself was now completely inured; money was a
+tremendous force, and when one wanted to assault the wrong with every
+engine one was happy not to lack the sinews of war. She liked her
+hostess better this morning than she had liked her before; she had more
+than ever the air of taking all sorts of sentiments and views for
+granted between them; which could only be flattering to Olive so long as
+it was really Mrs. Burrage who made each advance, while her visitor sat
+watchful and motionless. She had a light, clever, familiar way of
+traversing an immense distance with a very few words, as when she
+remarked, "Well, then, it is settled that she will come, and will stay
+till she is tired."</p>
+
+<p>Nothing of the kind had been settled, but Olive helped Mrs. Burrage
+(this time) more than she knew by saying, "Why do you want her to visit
+you, Mrs. Burrage? why do you want her socially? Are you not aware that
+your son, a year ago, desired to marry her?"</p>
+
+<p>"My dear Miss Chancellor, that is just what I wish to talk to you about.
+I am aware of everything; I don't believe you ever met any one who is
+aware of more things than I." And Olive had to believe this, as Mrs.
+Burrage held up, smiling, her intelligent, proud, good-natured,
+successful head. "I knew a year ago that my son was in love with your
+friend, I know that he has been so ever since, and that in consequence
+he would like to marry her to-day. I daresay you don't like the idea of
+her marrying at all; it would break up a friendship which is so full of
+interest" (Olive wondered for a moment whether she had been going to say
+"so full of profit") "for you. This is why I hesitated; but since you
+are willing to talk about it, that is just what I want."</p>
+
+<p>"I don't see what good it will do," Olive said.</p>
+
+<p>"How can we tell till we try? I never give a thing up till I have turned
+it over in every sense."</p>
+
+<p>It was Mrs. Burrage, however, who did most of the talking; Olive only
+inserted from time to time an inquiry, a protest, a correction, an
+ejaculation tinged with irony. None of these things checked or diverted
+her hostess; Olive saw more and more that she wished to please her, to
+win her over, to smooth matters down, to place them in a new and
+original light. She was very clever and (little by little Olive said to
+herself) absolutely unscrupulous, but she didn't think she was clever
+enough for what she had undertaken. This was neither more nor less, in
+the first place, than to persuade Miss Chancellor that she and her son
+were consumed with sympathy for the movement to which Miss Chancellor
+had dedicated her life. But how could Olive believe that, when she saw
+the type to which Mrs. Burrage belonged&mdash;a type into which nature
+herself had inserted a face turned in the very opposite way from all
+earnest and improving things? People like Mrs. Burrage lived and
+fattened on abuses, prejudices, privileges, on the petrified, cruel
+fashions of the past. It must be added, however, that if her hostess was
+a humbug, Olive had never met one who provoked her less; she was such a
+brilliant, genial, artistic one, with such a recklessness of perfidy,
+such a willingness to bribe you if she couldn't deceive you. She seemed
+to be offering Olive all the kingdoms of the earth if she would only
+exert herself to bring about a state of feeling on Verena Tarrant's part
+which would lead the girl to accept Henry Burrage.</p>
+
+<p>"We know it's you&mdash;the whole business; that you can do what you please.
+You could decide it to-morrow with a word."</p>
+
+<p>She had hesitated at first, and spoken of her hesitation, and it might
+have appeared that she would need all her courage to say to Olive, that
+way, face to face, that Verena was in such subjection to her. But she
+didn't look afraid; she only looked as if it were an infinite pity Miss
+Chancellor couldn't understand what immense advantages and rewards there
+would be for her in striking an alliance with the house of Burrage.
+Olive was so impressed with this, so occupied, even, in wondering what
+these mystic benefits might be, and whether after all there might not be
+a protection in them (from something worse), a fund of some sort that
+she and Verena might convert to a large use, setting aside the mother
+and son when once they had got what they had to give&mdash;she was so
+arrested with the vague daze of this vision, the sense of Mrs. Burrage's
+full hands, her eagerness, her thinking it worth while to flatter and
+conciliate, whatever her pretexts and pretensions might be, that she was
+almost insensible, for the time, to the strangeness of such a woman's
+coming round to a positive desire for a connexion with the Tarrants.
+Mrs. Burrage had indeed explained this partly by saying that her son's
+condition was wearing her out, and that she would enter into anything
+that would make him happier, make him better. She was fonder of him than
+of the whole world beside, and it was an anguish to her to see him
+yearning for Miss Tarrant only to lose her. She made that charge about
+Olive's power in the matter in such a way that it seemed at the same
+time a tribute to her force of character.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't know on what terms you suppose me to be with my friend," Olive
+returned, with considerable majesty. "She will do exactly as she likes,
+in such a case as the one you allude to. She is absolutely free; you
+speak as if I were her keeper!"</p>
+
+<p>Then Mrs. Burrage explained that of course she didn't mean that Miss
+Chancellor exercised a conscious tyranny; but only that Verena had a
+boundless admiration for her, saw through her eyes, took the impress of
+all her opinions, preferences. She was sure that if Olive would only
+take a favourable view of her son Miss Tarrant would instantly throw
+herself into it. "It's very true that you may ask me," added Mrs.
+Burrage, smiling, "how you can take a favourable view of a young man who
+wants to marry the very person in the world you want most to keep
+unmarried!"</p>
+
+<p>This description of Verena was of course perfectly correct; but it was
+not agreeable to Olive to have the fact in question so clearly
+perceived, even by a person who expressed it with an air intimating that
+there was nothing in the world <i>she</i> couldn't understand.</p>
+
+<p>"Did your son know that you were going to speak to me about this?" Olive
+asked, rather coldly, waiving the question of her influence on Verena
+and the state in which she wished her to remain.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh yes, poor dear boy; we had a long talk yesterday, and I told him I
+would do what I could for him. Do you remember the little visit I paid
+to Cambridge last spring, when I saw you at his rooms? Then it was I
+began to perceive how the wind was setting; but yesterday we had a real
+<i>&eacute;claircissement</i>. I didn't like it at all, at first; I don't mind
+telling you that, now&mdash;now that I am really enthusiastic about it. When
+a girl is as charming, as original, as Miss Tarrant, it doesn't in the
+least matter who she is; she makes herself the standard by which you
+measure her; she makes her own position. And then Miss Tarrant has such
+a future!" Mrs. Burrage added, quickly, as if that were the last thing
+to be overlooked. "The whole question has come up again&mdash;the feeling
+that Henry tried to think dead, or at least dying, has revived, through
+the&mdash;I hardly know what to call it, but I really may say the
+unexpectedly great effect of her appearance here. She was really
+wonderful on Wednesday evening; prejudice, conventionality, every
+presumption there might be against her, had to fall to the ground. I
+expected a success, but I didn't expect what you gave us," Mrs. Burrage
+went on, smiling, while Olive noted her "you." "In short, my poor boy
+flamed up again; and now I see that he will never again care for any
+girl as he cares for that one. My dear Miss Chancellor, <i>j'en ai pris
+mon parti</i>, and perhaps you know my way of doing that sort of thing. I
+am not at all good at resigning myself, but I am excellent at taking up
+a craze. I haven't renounced, I have only changed sides. For or against,
+I must be a partisan. Don't you know that kind of nature? Henry has put
+the affair into my hands, and you see I put it into yours. Do help me;
+let us work together."</p>
+
+<p>This was a long, explicit speech for Mrs. Burrage, who dealt, usually,
+in the cursory and allusive; and she may very well have expected that
+Miss Chancellor would recognise its importance. What Olive did, in fact,
+was simply to inquire, by way of rejoinder: "Why did you ask us to come
+on?"</p>
+
+<p>If Mrs. Burrage hesitated now, it was only for twenty seconds. "Simply
+because we are so interested in your work."</p>
+
+<p>"That surprises me," said Olive thoughtfully.</p>
+
+<p>"I daresay you don't believe it; but such a judgement is superficial. I
+am sure we give proof in the offer we make," Mrs. Burrage remarked, with
+a good deal of point. "There are plenty of girls&mdash;without any views at
+all&mdash;who would be delighted to marry my son. He is very clever, and he
+has a large fortune. Add to that that he's an angel!"</p>
+
+<p>That was very true, and Olive felt all the more that the attitude of
+these fortunate people, for whom the world was so well arranged just as
+it was, was very curious. But as she sat there it came over her that the
+human spirit has many variations, that the influence of the truth is
+great, and that there are such things in life as happy surprises, quite
+as well as disagreeable ones. Nothing, certainly, forced such people to
+fix their affections on the daughter of a "healer"; it would be very
+clumsy to pick her out of her generation only for the purpose of
+frustrating her. Moreover, her observation of their young host at
+Delmonico's and in the spacious box at the Academy of Music, where they
+had privacy and ease, and murmured words could pass without making
+neighbours more given up to the stage turn their heads&mdash;her
+consideration of Henry Burrage's manner, suggested to her that she had
+measured him rather scantily the year before, that he was as much in
+love as the feebler passions of the age permitted (for though Miss
+Chancellor believed in the amelioration of humanity, she thought there
+was too much water in the blood of all of us), that he prized Verena for
+her rarity, which was her genius, her gift, and would therefore have an
+interest in promoting it, and that he was of so soft and fine a paste
+that his wife might do what she liked with him. Of course there would be
+the mother-in-law to count with; but unless she was perjuring herself
+shamelessly Mrs. Burrage really had the wish to project herself into the
+new atmosphere, or at least to be generous personally; so that, oddly
+enough, the fear that most glanced before Olive was not that this high,
+free matron, slightly irritable with cleverness and at the same time
+good-natured with prosperity, would bully her son's bride, but rather
+that she might take too fond a possession of her. It was a fear which
+may be described as a presentiment of jealousy. It occurred,
+accordingly, to Miss Chancellor's quick conscience that, possibly, the
+proposal which presented itself in circumstances so complicated and
+anomalous was simply a magnificent chance, an improvement on the very
+best, even, that she had dreamed of for Verena. It meant a large command
+of money&mdash;much larger than her own; the association of a couple of
+clever people who simulated conviction very well, whether they felt it
+or not, and who had a hundred useful worldly ramifications, and a kind
+of social pedestal from which she might really shine afar. The
+conscience I have spoken of grew positively sick as it thought of having
+such a problem as that to consider, such an ordeal to traverse. In the
+presence of such a contingency the poor girl felt grim and helpless; she
+could only vaguely wonder whether she were called upon in the name of
+duty to lend a hand to the torture of her own spirit.</p>
+
+<p>"And if she should marry him, how could I be sure that&mdash;afterwards&mdash;you
+would care so much about the question which has all our thoughts, hers
+and mine?" This inquiry evolved itself from Olive's rapid meditation;
+but even to herself it seemed a little rough.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Burrage took it admirably. "You think we are feigning an interest,
+only to get hold of her? That's not very nice of you, Miss Chancellor;
+but of course you have to be tremendously careful. I assure you my son
+tells me he firmly believes your movement is the great question of the
+immediate future, that it has entered into a new phase; into what does
+he call it? the domain of practical politics. As for me, you don't
+suppose I don't want everything we poor women can get, or that I would
+refuse any privilege or advantage that's offered me? I don't rant or
+rave about anything, but I have&mdash;as I told you just now&mdash;my own quiet
+way of being zealous. If you had no worse partisan than I, you would do
+very well. My son has talked to me immensely about your ideas; and even
+if I should enter into them only because he does, I should do so quite
+enough. You may say you don't see Henry dangling about after a wife who
+gives public addresses; but I am convinced that a great many things are
+coming to pass&mdash;very soon, too&mdash;that we don't see in advance. Henry is a
+gentleman to his finger-tips, and there is not a situation in which he
+will not conduct himself with tact."</p>
+
+<p>Olive could see that they really wanted Verena immensely, and it was
+impossible for her to believe that if they were to get her they would
+not treat her well. It came to her that they would even overindulge her,
+flatter her, spoil her; she was perfectly capable, for the moment, of
+assuming that Verena was susceptible of deterioration and that her own
+treatment of her had been discriminatingly severe. She had a hundred
+protests, objections, replies; her only embarrassment could be as to
+which she should use first.</p>
+
+<p>"I think you have never seen Doctor Tarrant and his wife," she remarked,
+with a calmness which she felt to be very pregnant.</p>
+
+<p>"You mean they are absolutely fearful? My son has told me they are quite
+impossible, and I am quite prepared for that. Do you ask how we should
+get on with them? My dear young lady, we should get on as you do!"</p>
+
+<p>If Olive had answers, so had Mrs. Burrage; she had still an answer when
+her visitor, taking up the supposition that it was in her power to
+dispose in any manner whatsoever of Verena, declared that she didn't
+know why Mrs. Burrage addressed herself to <i>her</i>, that Miss Tarrant was
+free as air, that her future was in her own hands, that such a matter as
+this was a kind of thing with which it could never occur to one to
+interfere. "Dear Miss Chancellor, we don't ask you to interfere. The
+only thing we ask of you is simply <i>not</i> to interfere."</p>
+
+<p>"And have you sent for me only for that?"</p>
+
+<p>"For that, and for what I hinted at in my note; that you would really
+exercise your influence with Miss Tarrant to induce her to come to us
+now for a week or two. That is really, after all, the main thing I ask.
+Lend her to us, here, for a little while, and we will take care of the
+rest. That sounds conceited&mdash;but she <i>would</i> have a good time."</p>
+
+<p>"She doesn't live for that," said Olive.</p>
+
+<p>"What I mean is that she should deliver an address every night!" Mrs.
+Burrage returned, smiling.</p>
+
+<p>"I think you try to prove too much. You do believe&mdash;though you pretend
+you don't&mdash;that I control her actions, and as far as possible her
+desires, and that I am jealous of any other relations she may possibly
+form. I can imagine that we may perhaps have that air, though it only
+proves how little such an association as ours is understood, and how
+superficial is still"&mdash;Olive felt that her "still" was really
+historical&mdash;"the interpretation of many of the elements in the activity
+of women, how much the public conscience with regard to them needs to be
+educated. Your conviction with respect to my attitude being what I
+believe it to be," Miss Chancellor went on, "I am surprised at your not
+perceiving how little it is in my interest to deliver my&mdash;my victim up
+to you."</p>
+
+<p>If we were at this moment to take, in a single glance, an inside view of
+Mrs. Burrage (a liberty we have not yet ventured on), I suspect we
+should find that she was considerably exasperated at her visitor's
+superior tone, at seeing herself regarded by this dry, shy, obstinate,
+provincial young woman as superficial. If she liked Verena very nearly
+as much as she tried to convince Miss Chancellor, she was conscious of
+disliking Miss Chancellor more than she should probably ever be able to
+reveal to Verena. It was doubtless partly her irritation that found a
+voice as she said, after a self-administered pinch of caution not to say
+too much, "Of course it would be absurd in us to assume that Miss
+Tarrant would find my son irresistible, especially as she has already
+refused him. But even if she should remain obdurate, should you consider
+yourself quite safe as regards others?"</p>
+
+<p>The manner in which Miss Chancellor rose from her chair on hearing these
+words showed her hostess that if she had wished to take a little revenge
+by frightening her, the experiment was successful. "What others do you
+mean?" Olive asked, standing very straight, and turning down her eyes as
+from a great height.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Burrage&mdash;since we have begun to look into her mind we may continue
+the process&mdash;had not meant any one in particular; but a train of
+association was suddenly kindled in her thought by the flash of the
+girl's resentment. She remembered the gentleman who had come up to her
+in the music-room, after Miss Tarrant's address, while she was talking
+with Olive, and to whom that young lady had given so cold a welcome. "I
+don't mean any one in particular; but, for instance, there is the young
+man to whom she asked me to send an invitation to my party, and who
+looked to me like a possible admirer." Mrs. Burrage also got up; then
+she stood a moment, closer to her visitor. "Don't you think it's a good
+deal to expect that, young, pretty, attractive, clever, charming as she
+is, you should be able to keep her always, to exclude other affections,
+to cut off a whole side of life, to defend her against dangers&mdash;if you
+call them dangers&mdash;to which every young woman who is not positively
+repulsive is exposed? My dear young lady, I wonder if I might give you
+three words of advice?" Mrs. Burrage did not wait till Olive had
+answered this inquiry; she went on quickly, with her air of knowing
+exactly what she wanted to say and feeling at the same time that, good
+as it might be, the manner of saying it, like the manner of saying most
+other things, was not worth troubling much about. "Don't attempt the
+impossible. You have got hold of a good thing; don't spoil it by trying
+to stretch it too far. If you don't take the better, perhaps you will
+have to take the worse; if it's safety you want I should think she was
+much safer with my son&mdash;for with us you know the worst&mdash;than as a
+possible prey to adventurers, to exploiters, or to people who, once they
+had got hold of her, would shut her up altogether."</p>
+
+<p>Olive dropped her eyes; she couldn't endure Mrs. Burrage's horrible
+expression of being near the mark, her look of worldly cleverness, of a
+confidence born of much experience. She felt that nothing would be
+spared her, that she should have to go to the end, that this ordeal also
+must be faced, and that, in particular, there was a detestable wisdom in
+her hostess's advice. She was conscious, however, of no obligation to
+recognise it then and there; she wanted to get off, and even to carry
+Mrs. Burrage's sapient words along with her&mdash;to hurry to some place
+where she might be alone and think. "I don't know why you have thought
+it right to send for me only to say this. I take no interest whatever in
+your son&mdash;in his settling in life." And she gathered her mantle more
+closely about her, turning away.</p>
+
+<p>"It is exceedingly kind of you to have come," said Mrs. Burrage
+imperturbably. "Think of what I have said; I am sure you won't feel that
+you have wasted your hour."</p>
+
+<p>"I have a great many things to think of!" Olive exclaimed insincerely;
+for she knew that Mrs. Burrage's ideas would haunt her.</p>
+
+<p>"And tell her that if she will make us the little visit, all New York
+shall sit at her feet!"</p>
+
+<p>That was what Olive wanted, and yet it seemed a mockery to hear Mrs.
+Burrage say it. Miss Chancellor retreated, making no response even when
+her hostess declared again that she was under great obligations to her
+for coming. When she reached the street she found she was deeply
+agitated, but not with a sense of weakness; she hurried along, excited
+and dismayed, feeling that her insufferable conscience was bristling
+like some irritated animal, that a magnificent offer had really been
+made to Verena, and that there was no way for her to persuade herself
+she might be silent about it. Of course, if Verena should be tempted by
+the idea of being made so much of by the Burrages, the danger of Basil
+Ransom getting any kind of hold on her would cease to be pressing. That
+was what was present to Olive as she walked along, and that was what
+made her nervous, conscious only of this problem that had suddenly
+turned the bright day to greyness, heedless of the sophisticated-looking
+people who passed her on the wide Fifth Avenue pavement. It had risen in
+her mind the day before, planted first by Mrs. Burrage's note; and then,
+as we know, she had vaguely entertained the conception, asking Verena
+whether she would make the visit if it were again to be pressed upon
+them. It had been pressed, certainly, and the terms of the problem were
+now so much sharper that they seemed cruel. What had been in her own
+mind was that if Verena should appear to lend herself to the Burrages
+Basil Ransom might be discouraged&mdash;might think that, shabby and poor,
+there was no chance for him as against people with every advantage of
+fortune and position. She didn't see him relax his purpose so easily;
+she knew she didn't believe he was of that pusillanimous fibre. Still,
+it was a chance, and any chance that might help her had been worth
+considering. At present she saw it was a question not of Verena's
+lending herself, but of a positive gift, or at least of a bargain in
+which the terms would be immensely liberal. It would be impossible to
+use the Burrages as a shelter on the assumption that they were not
+dangerous, for they became dangerous from the moment they set up as
+sympathisers, took the ground that what they offered the girl was simply
+a boundless opportunity. It came back to Olive, again and again, that
+this was, and could only be, fantastic and false; but it was always
+possible that Verena might not think it so, might trust them all the
+way. When Miss Chancellor had a pair of alternatives to consider, a
+question of duty to study, she put a kind of passion into it&mdash;felt,
+above all, that the matter must be settled that very hour, before
+anything in life could go on. It seemed to her at present that she
+couldn't re-enter the house in Tenth Street without having decided first
+whether she might trust the Burrages or not. By "trust" them, she meant
+trust them to fail in winning Verena over, while at the same time they
+put Basil Ransom on a false scent. Olive was able to say to herself that
+he probably wouldn't have the hardihood to push after her into those
+gilded saloons, which, in any event, would be closed to him as soon as
+the mother and son should discover what he wanted. She even asked
+herself whether Verena would not be still better defended from the young
+Southerner in New York, amid complicated hospitalities, than in Boston
+with a cousin of the enemy. She continued to walk down the Fifth Avenue,
+without noticing the cross-streets, and after a while became conscious
+that she was approaching Washington Square. By this time she had also
+definitely reasoned it out that Basil Ransom and Henry Burrage could not
+both capture Miss Tarrant, that therefore there could not be two
+dangers, but only one; that this was a good deal gained, and that it
+behoved her to determine which peril had most reality, in order that she
+might deal with that one only. She held her way to the Square, which, as
+all the world knows, is of great extent and open to the encircling
+street. The trees and grass-plats had begun to bud and sprout, the
+fountains plashed in the sunshine, the children of the quarter, both the
+dingier types from the south side, who played games that required much
+chalking of the paved walks, and much sprawling and crouching there,
+under the feet of passers, and the little curled and feathered people
+who drove their hoops under the eyes of French nursemaids&mdash;all the
+infant population filled the vernal air with small sounds which had a
+crude, tender quality, like the leaves and the thin herbage. Olive
+wandered through the place, and ended by sitting down on one of the
+continuous benches. It was a long time since she had done anything so
+vague, so wasteful. There were a dozen things which, as she was staying
+over in New York, she ought to do; but she forgot them, or, if she
+thought of them, felt that they were now of no moment. She remained in
+her place an hour, brooding, tremulous, turning over and over certain
+thoughts. It seemed to her that she was face to face with a crisis of
+her destiny, and that she must not shrink from seeing it exactly as it
+was. Before she rose to return to Tenth Street she had made up her mind
+that there was no menace so great as the menace of Basil Ransom; she had
+accepted in thought any arrangement which would deliver her from that.
+If the Burrages were to take Verena they would take her from Olive
+immeasurably less than he would do; it was from him, from him they would
+take her most. She walked back to her boarding-house, and the servant
+who admitted her said, in answer to her inquiry as to whether Verena
+were at home, that Miss Tarrant had gone out with the gentleman who
+called in the morning, and had not yet come in. Olive stood staring; the
+clock in the hall marked three.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="XXXIII" id="XXXIII"></a>XXXIII</h2>
+
+
+<p>"Come out with me, Miss Tarrant; come out with me. <i>Do</i> come out with
+me." That was what Basil Ransom had been saying to Verena when they
+stood where Olive perceived them, in the embrasure of the window. It had
+of course taken considerable talk to lead up to this; for the tone, even
+more than the words, indicated a large increase of intimacy. Verena was
+mindful of this when he spoke; and it frightened her a little, made her
+uneasy, which was one of the reasons why she got up from her chair and
+went to the window&mdash;an inconsequent movement, inasmuch as her wish was
+to impress upon him that it was impossible she should comply with his
+request. It would have served this end much better for her to sit, very
+firmly, in her place. He made her nervous and restless; she was
+beginning to perceive that he produced a peculiar effect upon her.
+Certainly, she had been out with him at home the very first time he
+called upon her; but it seemed to her to make an important difference
+that she herself should then have proposed the walk&mdash;simply because it
+was the easiest thing to do when a person came to see you in Monadnoc
+Place.</p>
+
+<p>They had gone out that time because she wanted to, not because he did.
+And then it was one thing for her to stroll with him round Cambridge,
+where she knew every step and had the confidence and freedom which came
+from being on her own ground, and the pretext, which was perfectly
+natural, of wanting to show him the colleges, and quite another thing to
+go wandering with him through the streets of this great strange city,
+which, attractive, delightful as it was, had not the suitableness even
+of being his home, not his real one. He wanted to show her something, he
+wanted to show her everything; but she was not sure now&mdash;after an hour's
+talk&mdash;that she particularly wanted to see anything more that he could
+show her. He had shown her a great deal while he sat there, especially
+what balderdash he thought it&mdash;the whole idea of women's being equal to
+men. He seemed to have come only for that, for he was all the while
+revolving round it; she couldn't speak of anything but what he brought
+it back to the question of some new truth like that. He didn't say so in
+so many words; on the contrary, he was tremendously insinuating and
+satirical, and pretended to think she had proved all and a great deal
+more than she wanted to prove; but his exaggeration, and the way he rung
+all the changes on two or three of the points she had made at Mrs.
+Burrage's, were just the sign that he was a scoffer of scoffers. He
+wouldn't do anything but laugh; he seemed to think that he might laugh
+at her all day without her taking offence. Well, he might if it amused
+him; but she didn't see why she should ramble round New York with him to
+give him his opportunity.</p>
+
+<p>She had told him, and she had told Olive, that she was determined to
+produce some effect on him; but now, suddenly, she felt differently
+about that&mdash;she ceased to care whether she produced any effect or not.
+She didn't see why she should take him so seriously, when he wouldn't
+take her so; that is, wouldn't take her ideas. She had guessed before
+that he didn't want to discuss them; this had been in her mind when she
+said to him at Cambridge that his interest in her was personal, not
+controversial. Then she had simply meant that, as an inquiring young
+Southerner, he had wanted to see what a bright New England girl was
+like; but since then it had become a little more clear to her&mdash;her short
+talk with Ransom at Mrs. Burrage's threw some light upon the
+question&mdash;what the personal interest of a young Southerner (however
+inquiring merely) might amount to. Did he too want to make love to her?
+This idea made Verena rather impatient, weary in advance. The thing she
+desired least in the world was to be put into the wrong with Olive; for
+she had certainly given her ground to believe (not only in their scene
+the night before, which was a simple repetition, but all along, from the
+very first) that she really had an interest which would transcend any
+attraction coming from such a source as that. If yesterday it seemed to
+her that she should like to struggle with Mr. Ransom, to refute and
+convince him, she had this morning gone into the parlour to receive him
+with the idea that, now they were alone together in a quiet, favourable
+place, he would perhaps take up the different points of her address one
+by one, as several gentlemen had done after hearing her on other
+occasions. There was nothing she liked so well as that, and Olive never
+had anything to say against it. But he hadn't taken up anything; he had
+simply laughed and chaffed, and unrolled a string of queer fancies about
+the delightful way women would fix things when, as she said in her
+address, they should get out of their box. He kept talking about the
+box; he seemed as if he wouldn't let go that simile. He said that he had
+come to look at her through the glass sides, and if he wasn't afraid of
+hurting her he would smash them in. He was determined to find the key
+that would open it, if he had to look for it all over the world; it was
+tantalising only to be able to talk to her through the keyhole. If he
+didn't want to take up the subject, he at least wanted to take <i>her</i>
+up&mdash;to keep his hand upon her as long as he could. Verena had had no
+such sensation since the first day she went in to see Olive Chancellor,
+when she felt herself plucked from the earth and borne aloft.</p>
+
+<p>"It's the most lovely day, and I should like so much to show you New
+York, as you showed me your beautiful Harvard," Basil Ransom went on,
+pressing her to accede to his proposal. "You said that was the only
+thing you could do for me then, and so this is the only thing I can do
+for you here. It would be odious to see you go away, giving me nothing
+but this stiff little talk in a boarding-house parlour."</p>
+
+<p>"Mercy, if you call this stiff!" Verena exclaimed, laughing, while at
+that moment Olive passed out of the house and descended the steps before
+her eyes.</p>
+
+<p>"My poor cousin's stiff; she won't turn her head a hair's breadth to
+look at us," said the young man. Olive's figure, as she went by, was,
+for Verena, full of a queer, touching, tragic expression, saying ever so
+many things, both familiar and strange; and Basil Ransom's companion
+privately remarked how little men knew about women, or indeed about what
+was really delicate, that he, without any cruel intention, should attach
+an idea of ridicule to such an incarnation of the pathetic, should speak
+rough, derisive words about it. Ransom, in truth, to-day, was not
+disposed to be very scrupulous, and he only wanted to get rid of Olive
+Chancellor, whose image, at last, decidedly bothered and bored him. He
+was glad to see her go out; but that was not sufficient, she would come
+back quick enough; the place itself contained her, expressed her. For
+to-day he wanted to take possession of Verena, to carry her to a
+distance, to reproduce a little the happy conditions they had enjoyed
+the day of his visit to Cambridge. And the fact that in the nature of
+things it could only be for to-day made his desire more keen, more full
+of purpose. He had thought over the whole question in the last
+forty-eight hours, and it was his belief that he saw things in their
+absolute reality. He took a greater interest in her than he had taken in
+any one yet, but he proposed, after to-day, not to let that accident
+make any difference. This was precisely what gave its high value to the
+present limited occasion. He was too shamefully poor, too shabbily and
+meagrely equipped, to have the right to talk of marriage to a girl in
+Verena's very peculiar position. He understood now how good that
+position was, from a worldly point of view; her address at Mrs.
+Burrage's gave him something definite to go upon, showed him what she
+could do, that people would flock in thousands to an exhibition so
+charming (and small blame to them); that she might easily have a big
+career, like that of a distinguished actress or singer, and that she
+would make money in quantities only slightly smaller than performers of
+that kind. Who wouldn't pay half a dollar for such an hour as he had
+passed at Mrs. Burrage's? The sort of thing she was able to do, to say,
+was an article for which there was more and more demand&mdash;fluent, pretty,
+third-rate palaver, conscious or unconscious perfected humbug; the
+stupid, gregarious, gullible public, the enlightened democracy of his
+native land, could swallow unlimited draughts of it. He was sure she
+could go, like that, for several years, with her portrait in the
+druggists' windows and her posters on the fences, and during that time
+would make a fortune sufficient to keep her in affluence for evermore. I
+shall perhaps expose our young man to the contempt of superior minds if
+I say that all this seemed to him an insuperable impediment to his
+making up to Verena. His scruples were doubtless begotten of a false
+pride, a sentiment in which there was a thread of moral tinsel, as there
+was in the Southern idea of chivalry; but he felt ashamed of his own
+poverty, the positive flatness of his situation, when he thought of the
+gilded nimbus that surrounded the prot&eacute;g&eacute;e of Mrs. Burrage. This shame
+was possible to him even while he was conscious of what a mean business
+it was to practise upon human imbecility, how much better it was even to
+be seedy and obscure, discouraged about one's self. He had been born to
+the prospect of a fortune, and in spite of the years of misery that
+followed the war had never rid himself of the belief that a gentleman
+who desired to unite himself to a charming girl couldn't yet ask her to
+come and live with him in sordid conditions. On the other hand it was no
+possible basis of matrimony that Verena should continue for his
+advantage the exercise of her remunerative profession; if he should
+become her husband he should know a way to strike her dumb. In the midst
+of this an irrepressible desire urged him on to taste, for once, deeply,
+all that he was condemned to lose, or at any rate forbidden to attempt
+to gain. To spend a day with her and not to see her again&mdash;that
+presented itself to him at once as the least and the most that was
+possible. He did not need even to remind himself that young Mr. Burrage
+was able to offer her everything <i>he</i> lacked, including the most amiable
+adhesion to her views.</p>
+
+<p>"It will be charming in the Park to-day. Why not take a stroll with me
+there as I did with you in the little park at Harvard?" he asked, when
+Olive had disappeared.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, I have seen it, very well, in every corner. A friend of mine kindly
+took me to drive there yesterday," Verena said.</p>
+
+<p>"A friend?&mdash;do you mean Mr. Burrage?" And Ransom stood looking at her
+with his extraordinary eyes. "Of course, I haven't a vehicle to drive
+you in; but we can sit on a bench and talk." She didn't say it was Mr.
+Burrage, but she was unable to say it was not, and something in her face
+showed him that he had guessed. So he went on: "Is it only with him you
+can go out? Won't he like it, and may you only do what he likes? Mrs.
+Luna told me he wants to marry you, and I saw at his mother's how he
+stuck to you. If you are going to marry him, you can drive with him
+every day in the year, and that's just a reason for your giving me an
+hour or two now, before it becomes impossible." He didn't mind much what
+he said&mdash;it had been his plan not to mind much to-day&mdash;and so long as he
+made her do what he wanted he didn't care much how he did it. But he saw
+that his words brought the colour to her face; she stared, surprised at
+his freedom and familiarity. He went on, dropping the hardness, the
+irony of which he was conscious, out of his tone. "I know it's no
+business of mine whom you marry, or even whom you drive with, and I beg
+your pardon if I seem indiscreet and obtrusive; but I would give
+anything just to detach you a little from your ties, your belongings,
+and feel for an hour or two, as if&mdash;as if&mdash;&mdash;" And he paused.</p>
+
+<p>"As if what?" she asked, very seriously.</p>
+
+<p>"As if there were no such person as Mr. Burrage&mdash;as Miss Chancellor&mdash;in
+the whole place." This had not been what he was going to say; he used
+different words.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't know what you mean, why you speak of other persons. I can do as
+I like, perfectly. But I don't know why you should take so for granted
+that <i>that</i> would be it!" Verena spoke these words not out of coquetry,
+or to make him beg her more for a favour, but because she was thinking,
+and she wanted to gain a moment. His allusion to Henry Burrage touched
+her, his belief that she had been in the Park under circumstances more
+agreeable than those he proposed. They were not; somehow, she wanted him
+to know that. To wander there with a companion, slowly stopping,
+lounging, looking at the animals as she had seen the people do the day
+before; to sit down in some out-of-the-way part where there were distant
+views, which she had noticed from her high perch beside Henry
+Burrage&mdash;she had to look down so, it made her feel unduly fine: that was
+much more to her taste, much more her idea of true enjoyment. It came
+over her that Mr. Ransom had given up his work to come to her at such an
+hour; people of his kind, in the morning, were always getting their
+living, and it was only for Mr. Burrage that it didn't matter, inasmuch
+as he had no profession. Mr. Ransom simply wanted to give up his whole
+day. That pressed upon her; she was, as the most good-natured girl in
+the world, too entirely tender not to feel any sacrifice that was made
+for her; she had always done everything that people asked. Then, if
+Olive should make that strange arrangement for her to go to Mrs.
+Burrage's he would take it as a proof that there was something serious
+between her and the gentleman of the house, in spite of anything she
+might say to the contrary; moreover, if she should go she wouldn't be
+able to receive Mr. Ransom there. Olive would trust her not to, and she
+must certainly, in future, not disappoint Olive nor keep anything back
+from her, whatever she might have done in the past. Besides, she didn't
+want to do that; she thought it much better not. It was this idea of the
+episode which was possibly in store for her in New York, and from which
+her present companion would be so completely excluded, that worked upon
+her now with a rapid transition, urging her to grant him what he asked,
+so that in advance she should have made up for what she might not do for
+him later. But most of all she disliked his thinking she was engaged to
+some one. She didn't know, it is true, why she should mind it; and
+indeed, at this moment, our young lady's feelings were not in any way
+clear to her. She did not see what was the use of letting her
+acquaintance with Mr. Ransom become much closer (since his interest did
+really seem personal); and yet she presently asked him why he wanted her
+to go out with him, and whether there was anything particular he wanted
+to say to her (there was no one like Verena for making speeches
+apparently flirtatious, with the best faith and the most innocent
+intention in the world); as if that would not be precisely a reason to
+make it well she should get rid of him altogether.</p>
+
+<p>"Of course I have something particular to say to you&mdash;I have a
+tremendous lot to say to you!" the young man exclaimed. "Far more than I
+can say in this stuck-up, confined room, which is public, too, so that
+any one may come in from one moment to another. Besides," he added
+sophistically, "it isn't proper for me to pay a visit of three hours."</p>
+
+<p>Verena did not take up the sophistry, nor ask him whether it would be
+more proper for her to ramble about the city with him for an equal
+period; she only said, "Is it something that I shall care to hear, or
+that will do me any good?"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, I hope it will do you good; but I don't suppose you will care
+much to hear it." Basil Ransom hesitated a moment, smiling at her; then
+he went on: "It's to tell you, once for all, how much I really do differ
+from you!" He said this at a venture, but it was a happy inspiration.</p>
+
+<p>If it was only that, Verena thought she might go, for that was not
+personal. "Well, I'm glad you care so much," she answered musingly. But
+she had another scruple still, and she expressed it in saying that she
+should like Olive very much to find her when she came in.</p>
+
+<p>"That's all very well," Ransom returned; "but does she think that she
+only has a right to go out? Does she expect you to keep the house
+because she's abroad? If she stays out long enough, she will find you
+when she comes in."</p>
+
+<p>"Her going out that way&mdash;it proves that she trusts me," Verena said,
+with a candour which alarmed her as soon as she had spoken.</p>
+
+<p>Her alarm was just, for Basil Ransom instantly caught up her words, with
+a great mocking amazement. "Trusts you? and why shouldn't she trust you?
+Are you a little girl of ten and she your governess? Haven't you any
+liberty at all, and is she always watching you and holding you to an
+account? Have you such vagabond instincts that you are only thought safe
+when you are between four walls?" Ransom was going on to speak, in the
+same tone, of her having felt it necessary to keep Olive in ignorance of
+his visit to Cambridge&mdash;a fact they had touched on, by implication, in
+their short talk at Mrs. Burrage's; but in a moment he saw that he had
+said enough. As for Verena, she had said more than she meant, and the
+simplest way to unsay it was to go and get her bonnet and jacket and let
+him take her where he liked. Five minutes later he was walking up and
+down the parlour, waiting while she prepared herself to go out.</p>
+
+<p>They went up to the Central Park by the elevated railway, and Verena
+reflected, as they proceeded, that anyway Olive was probably disposing
+of her somehow at Mrs. Burrage's, and that therefore there wasn't much
+harm in her just taking this little run on her own responsibility,
+especially as she should only be out an hour&mdash;which would be just the
+duration of Olive's absence. The beauty of the "elevated" was that it
+took you up to the Park and brought you back in a few minutes, and you
+had all the rest of the hour to walk about and see the place. It was so
+pleasant now that one was glad to see it twice over. The long, narrow
+enclosure, across which the houses in the streets that border it look at
+each other with their glittering windows, bristled with the raw delicacy
+of April, and, in spite of its rockwork grottoes and tunnels, its
+pavilions and statues, its too numerous paths and pavements, lakes too
+big for the landscape and bridges too big for the lakes, expressed all
+the fragrance and freshness of the most charming moment of the year.
+Once Verena was fairly launched the spirit of the day took possession of
+her; she was glad to have come, she forgot about Olive, enjoyed the
+sense of wandering in the great city with a remarkable young man who
+would take beautiful care of her, while no one else in the world knew
+where she was. It was very different from her drive yesterday with Mr.
+Burrage, but it was more free, more intense, more full of amusing
+incident and opportunity. She could stop and look at everything now, and
+indulge all her curiosities, even the most childish; she could feel as
+if she were out for the day, though she was not really&mdash;as she had not
+done since she was a little girl, when in the country, once or twice,
+when her father and mother had drifted into summer quarters, gone out of
+town like people of fashion, she had, with a chance companion, strayed
+far from home, spent hours in the woods and fields, looking for
+raspberries and playing she was a gipsy. Basil Ransom had begun with
+proposing, strenuously, that she should come somewhere and have
+luncheon; he had brought her out half an hour before that meal was
+served in West Tenth Street, and he maintained that he owed her the
+compensation of seeing that she was properly fed; he knew a very quiet,
+luxurious French restaurant, near the top of the Fifth Avenue: he didn't
+tell her that he knew it through having once lunched there in company
+with Mrs. Luna. Verena for the present declined his hospitality&mdash;said
+she was going to be out so short a time that it wasn't worth the
+trouble; she should not be hungry, luncheon to her was nothing, she
+would eat when she went home. When he pressed her she said she would see
+later, perhaps, if she should find she wanted something. She would have
+liked immensely to go with him to an eating-house, and yet, with this,
+she was afraid, just as she was rather afraid, at bottom, and in the
+intervals of her quick pulsations of amusement, of the whole expedition,
+not knowing why she had come, though it made her happy, and reflecting
+that there was really nothing Mr. Ransom could have to say to her that
+would concern her closely enough. He knew what he intended about her
+sharing the noon-day repast with him somehow; it had been part of his
+plan that she should sit opposite him at a little table, taking her
+napkin out of its curious folds&mdash;sit there smiling back at him while he
+said to her certain things that hummed, like memories of tunes, in his
+fancy, and they waited till something extremely good, and a little
+vague, chosen out of a French <i>carte</i>, was brought them. That was not at
+all compatible with her going home at the end of half an hour, as she
+seemed to expect to. They visited the animals in the little zoological
+garden which forms one of the attractions of the Central Park; they
+observed the swans in the ornamental water, and they even considered the
+question of taking a boat for half an hour, Ransom saying that they
+needed this to make their visit complete. Verena replied that she didn't
+see why it should be complete, and after having threaded the devious
+ways of the Ramble, lost themselves in the Maze, and admired all the
+statues and busts of great men with which the grounds are decorated,
+they contented themselves with resting on a sequestered bench, where,
+however, there was a pretty glimpse of the distance and an occasional
+stroller creaked by on the asphalt walk.</p>
+
+<p>They had had by this time a great deal of talk, none of which,
+nevertheless, had been serious to Verena's view. Mr. Ransom continued to
+joke about everything, including the emancipation of women; Verena, who
+had always lived with people who took the world very earnestly, had
+never encountered such a power of disparagement or heard so much sarcasm
+levelled at the institutions of her country and the tendencies of the
+age. At first she replied to him, contradicted, showed a high spirit of
+retort, turning his irreverence against himself; she was too quick and
+ingenious not to be able to think of something to oppose&mdash;talking in a
+fanciful strain&mdash;to almost everything he said. But little by little she
+grew weary and rather sad; brought up, as she had been, to admire new
+ideas, to criticise the social arrangements that one met almost
+everywhere, and to disapprove of a great many things, she had yet never
+dreamed of such a wholesale arraignment as Mr. Ransom's, so much
+bitterness as she saw lurking beneath his exaggerations, his
+misrepresentations. She knew he was an intense conservative, but she
+didn't know that being a conservative could make a person so aggressive
+and unmerciful. She thought conservatives were only smug and stubborn
+and self-complacent, satisfied with what actually existed; but Mr.
+Ransom didn't seem any more satisfied with what existed than with what
+she wanted to exist, and he was ready to say worse things about some of
+those whom she would have supposed to be on his own side than she
+thought it right to say about almost any one. She ceased after a while
+to care to argue with him, and wondered what could have happened to him
+to make him so perverse. Probably something had gone wrong in his
+life&mdash;he had had some misfortune that coloured his whole view of the
+world. He was a cynic; she had often heard about that state of mind,
+though she had never encountered it, for all the people she had seen
+only cared, if possible, too much. Of Basil Ransom's personal history
+she knew only what Olive had told her, and that was but a general
+outline, which left plenty of room for private dramas, secret
+disappointments and sufferings. As she sat there beside him she thought
+of some of these things, asked herself whether they were what he was
+thinking of when he said, for instance, that he was sick of all the
+modern cant about freedom and had no sympathy with those who wanted an
+extension of it. What was needed for the good of the world was that
+people should make a better use of the liberty they possessed. Such
+declarations as this took Verena's breath away; she didn't suppose you
+could hear any one say such a thing as that in the nineteenth century,
+even the least advanced. It was of a piece with his denouncing the
+spread of education; he thought the spread of education a gigantic
+farce&mdash;people stuffing their heads with a lot of empty catchwords that
+prevented them from doing their work quietly and honestly. You had a
+right to an education only if you had an intelligence, and if you looked
+at the matter with any desire to see things as they are you soon
+perceived that an intelligence was a very rare luxury, the attribute of
+one person in a hundred. He seemed to take a pretty low view of
+humanity, anyway. Verena hoped that something really bad had happened to
+him&mdash;not by way of gratifying any resentment he aroused in her nature,
+but to help herself to forgive him for so much contempt and brutality.
+She wanted to forgive him, for after they had sat on their bench half an
+hour and his jesting mood had abated a little, so that he talked with
+more consideration (as it seemed) and more sincerity, a strange feeling
+came over her, a perfect willingness not to keep insisting on her own
+side and a desire not to part from him with a mere accentuation of their
+differences. Strange I call the nature of her reflexions, for they
+softly battled with each other as she listened, in the warm, still air,
+touched with the far-away hum of the immense city, to his deep, sweet,
+distinct voice, expressing monstrous opinions with exotic cadences and
+mild, familiar laughs, which, as he leaned towards her, almost tickled
+her cheek and ear. It seemed to her strangely harsh, almost cruel, to
+have brought her out only to say to her things which, after all, free as
+she was to contradict them and tolerant as she always tried to be, could
+only give her pain; yet there was a spell upon her as she listened; it
+was in her nature to be easily submissive, to like being overborne. She
+could be silent when people insisted, and silent without acrimony. Her
+whole relation to Olive was a kind of tacit, tender assent to passionate
+insistence, and if this had ended by being easy and agreeable to her
+(and indeed had never been anything else), it may be supposed that the
+struggle of yielding to a will which she felt to be stronger even than
+Olive's was not of long duration. Ransom's will had the effect of making
+her linger even while she knew the afternoon was going on, that Olive
+would have come back and found her still absent, and would have been
+submerged again in the bitter waves of anxiety. She saw her, in fact, as
+she must be at that moment, posted at the window of her room in Tenth
+Street, watching for some sign of her return, listening for her step on
+the staircase, her voice in the hall. Verena looked at this image as at
+a painted picture, perceived all it represented, every detail. If it
+didn't move her more, make her start to her feet, dart away from Basil
+Ransom and hurry back to her friend, this was because the very torment
+to which she was conscious of subjecting that friend made her say to
+herself that it must be the very last. This was the last time she could
+ever sit by Mr. Ransom and hear him express himself in a manner that
+interfered so with her life; the ordeal had been so personal and so
+complete that she forgot, for the moment, it was also the first time it
+had occurred. It might have been going on for months. She was perfectly
+aware that it could bring them to nothing, for one must lead one's own
+life; it was impossible to lead the life of another, especially when
+that other was so different, so arbitrary and unscrupulous.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="XXXIV" id="XXXIV"></a>XXXIV</h2>
+
+
+<p>"I presume you are the only person in this country who feels as you do,"
+she observed at last.</p>
+
+<p>"Not the only person who feels so, but very possibly the only person who
+thinks so. I have an idea that my convictions exist in a vague,
+unformulated state in the minds of a great many of my fellow-citizens.
+If I should succeed some day in giving them adequate expression I should
+simply put into shape the slumbering instincts of an important
+minority."</p>
+
+<p>"I am glad you admit it's a minority!" Verena exclaimed. "That's
+fortunate for us poor creatures. And what do you call adequate
+expression? I presume you would like to be President of the United
+States?"</p>
+
+<p>"And breathe forth my views in glowing messages to a palpitating Senate?
+That is exactly what I should like to be; you read my aspirations
+wonderfully well."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, do you consider that you have advanced far in that direction, as
+yet?" Verena asked.</p>
+
+<p>This question, with the tone in which it happened to be uttered, seemed
+to the young man to project rather an ironical light upon his present
+beggarly condition, so that for a moment he said nothing; a moment
+during which if his neighbour had glanced round at his face she would
+have seen it ornamented by an incipient blush. Her words had for him the
+effect of a sudden, though, on the part of a young woman who had of
+course every right to defend herself, a perfectly legitimate taunt. They
+appeared only to repeat in another form (so at least his exaggerated
+Southern pride, his hot sensibility, interpreted the matter) the idea
+that a gentleman so dreadfully backward in the path of fortune had no
+right to take up the time of a brilliant, successful girl, even for the
+purpose of satisfying himself that he renounced her. But the reminder
+only sharpened his wish to make her feel that if he had renounced, it
+was simply on account of that same ugly, accidental, outside
+backwardness; and if he had not, he went so far as to flatter himself,
+he might triumph over the whole accumulation of her prejudices&mdash;over all
+the bribes of her notoriety. The deepest feeling in Ransom's bosom in
+relation to her was the conviction that she was made for love, as he had
+said to himself while he listened to her at Mrs. Burrage's. She was
+profoundly unconscious of it, and another ideal, crude and thin and
+artificial, had interposed itself; but in the presence of a man she
+should really care for, this false, flimsy structure would rattle to her
+feet, and the emancipation of Olive Chancellor's sex (what sex was it,
+great heaven? he used profanely to ask himself) would be relegated to
+the land of vapours, of dead phrases. The reader may imagine whether
+such an impression as this made it any more agreeable to Basil to have
+to believe it would be indelicate in him to try to woo her. He would
+have resented immensely the imputation that he had done anything of that
+sort yet. "Ah, Miss Tarrant, my success in life is one thing&mdash;my
+ambition is another!" he exclaimed presently, in answer to her inquiry.
+"Nothing is more possible than that I may be poor and unheard of all my
+days; and in that case no one but myself will know the visions of
+greatness I have stifled and buried."</p>
+
+<p>"Why do you talk of being poor and unheard of? Aren't you getting on
+quite well in this city?"</p>
+
+<p>This question of Verena's left him no time, or at least no coolness, to
+remember that to Mrs. Luna and to Olive he had put a fine face on his
+prospects, and that any impression the girl might have about them was
+but the natural echo of what these ladies believed. It had to his ear
+such a subtly mocking, defiant, unconsciously injurious quality, that
+the only answer he could make to it seemed to him for the moment to be
+an outstretched arm, which, passing round her waist, should draw her so
+close to him as to enable him to give her a concise account of his
+situation in the form of a deliberate kiss. If the moment I speak of had
+lasted a few seconds longer I know not what monstrous proceeding of this
+kind it would have been my difficult duty to describe; it was
+fortunately arrested by the arrival of a nursery-maid pushing a
+perambulator and accompanied by an infant who toddled in her wake. Both
+the nurse and her companion gazed fixedly, and it seemed to Ransom even
+sternly, at the striking couple on the bench; and meanwhile Verena,
+looking with a quickened eye at the children (she adored children), went
+on&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"It sounds too flat for you to talk about your remaining unheard of. Of
+course you are ambitious; any one can see that, to look at you. And once
+your ambition is excited in any particular direction, people had better
+look out. With your will!" she added, with a curious mocking candour.</p>
+
+<p>"What do you know about my will?" he asked, laughing a little awkwardly,
+as if he had really attempted to kiss her&mdash;in the course of the second
+independent interview he had ever had with her&mdash;and been rebuffed.</p>
+
+<p>"I know it's stronger than mine. It made me come out, when I thought I
+had much better not, and it keeps me sitting here long after I should
+have started for home."</p>
+
+<p>"Give me the day, dear Miss Tarrant, give me the day," Basil Ransom
+murmured; and as she turned her face upon him, moved by the expression
+of his voice, he added&mdash;"Come and dine with me, since you wouldn't
+lunch. Are you really not faint and weak?"</p>
+
+<p>"I am faint and weak at all the horrible things you have said; I have
+lunched on abominations. And now you want me to dine with you? Thank
+you; I think you're cool!" Verena cried, with a laugh which her
+chronicler knows to have been expressive of some embarrassment, though
+Basil Ransom did not.</p>
+
+<p>"You must remember that I have, on two different occasions, listened to
+you for an hour, in speechless, submissive attention, and that I shall
+probably do it a great many times more."</p>
+
+<p>"Why should you ever listen to me again, when you loathe my ideas?"</p>
+
+<p>"I don't listen to your ideas; I listen to your voice."</p>
+
+<p>"Ah, I told Olive!" said Verena, quickly, as if his words had confirmed
+an old fear; which was general, however, and did not relate particularly
+to him.</p>
+
+<p>Ransom still had an impression that he was not making love to her,
+especially when he could observe, with all the superiority of a man&mdash;"I
+wonder whether you have understood ten words I have said to you?"</p>
+
+<p>"I should think you had made it clear enough&mdash;you had rubbed it in!"</p>
+
+<p>"What have you understood, then?"</p>
+
+<p>"Why, that you want to put us back further than we have been at any
+period."</p>
+
+<p>"I have been joking; I have been piling it up," Ransom said, making that
+concession unexpectedly to the girl. Every now and then he had an air of
+relaxing himself, becoming absent, ceasing to care to discuss.</p>
+
+<p>She was capable of noticing this, and in a moment she asked&mdash;"Why don't
+you write out your ideas?"</p>
+
+<p>This touched again upon the matter of his failure; it was curious how
+she couldn't keep off it, hit it every time. "Do you mean for the
+public? I have written many things, but I can't get them printed."</p>
+
+<p>"Then it would seem that there are not so many people&mdash;so many as you
+said just now&mdash;who agree with you."</p>
+
+<p>"Well," said Basil Ransom, "editors are a mean, timorous lot, always
+saying they want something original, but deadly afraid of it when it
+comes."</p>
+
+<p>"Is it for papers, magazines?" As it sank into Verena's mind more deeply
+that the contributions of this remarkable young man had been
+rejected&mdash;contributions in which, apparently, everything she held dear
+was riddled with scorn&mdash;she felt a strange pity and sadness, a sense of
+injustice. "I am very sorry you can't get published," she said, so
+simply that he looked up at her, from the figure he was scratching on
+the asphalt with his stick, to see whether such a tone as that, in
+relation to such a fact, were not "put on." But it was evidently
+genuine, and Verena added that she supposed getting published was very
+difficult always; she remembered, though she didn't mention, how little
+success her father had when he tried. She hoped Mr. Ransom would keep
+on; he would be sure to succeed at last. Then she continued, smiling,
+with more irony: "You may denounce me by name if you like. Only please
+don't say anything about Olive Chancellor."</p>
+
+<p>"How little you understand what I want to achieve!" Basil Ransom
+exclaimed. "There you are&mdash;you women&mdash;all over; always meaning,
+yourselves, something personal, and always thinking it is meant by
+others!"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, that's the charge they make," said Verena gaily.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't want to touch you, or Miss Chancellor, or Mrs. Farrinder, or
+Miss Birdseye, or the shade of Eliza P. Moseley, or any other gifted and
+celebrated being on earth&mdash;or in heaven."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, I suppose you want to destroy us by neglect, by silence!" Verena
+exclaimed, with the same brightness.</p>
+
+<p>"No, I don't want to destroy you, any more than I want to save you.
+There has been far too much talk about you, and I want to leave you
+alone altogether. My interest is in my own sex; yours evidently can look
+after itself. That's what I want to save."</p>
+
+<p>Verena saw that he was more serious now than he had been before, that he
+was not piling it up satirically, but saying really and a trifle
+wearily, as if suddenly he were tired of much talk, what he meant. "To
+save it from what?" she asked.</p>
+
+<p>"From the most damnable feminisation! I am so far from thinking, as you
+set forth the other night, that there is not enough women in our general
+life, that it has long been pressed home to me that there is a great
+deal too much. The whole generation is womanised; the masculine tone is
+passing out of the world; it's a feminine, a nervous, hysterical,
+chattering, canting age, an age of hollow phrases and false delicacy and
+exaggerated solicitudes and coddled sensibilities, which, if we don't
+soon look out, will usher in the reign of mediocrity, of the feeblest
+and flattest and the most pretentious that has ever been. The masculine
+character, the ability to dare and endure, to know and yet not fear
+reality, to look the world in the face and take it for what it is&mdash;a
+very queer and partly very base mixture&mdash;that is what I want to
+preserve, or rather, as I may say, to recover; and I must tell you that
+I don't in the least care what becomes of you ladies while I make the
+attempt!"</p>
+
+<p>The poor fellow delivered himself of these narrow notions (the rejection
+of which by leading periodicals was certainly not a matter for surprise)
+with low, soft earnestness, bending towards her so as to give out his
+whole idea, yet apparently forgetting for the moment how offensive it
+must be to her now that it was articulated in that calm, severe way, in
+which no allowance was to be made for hyperbole. Verena did not remind
+herself of this; she was too much impressed by his manner and by the
+novelty of a man taking that sort of religious tone about such a cause.
+It told her on the spot, from one minute to the other and once for all,
+that the man who could give her that impression would never come round.
+She felt cold, slightly sick, though she replied that now he summed up
+his creed in such a distinct, lucid way, it was much more
+comfortable&mdash;one knew with what one was dealing; a declaration much at
+variance with the fact, for Verena had never felt less gratified in her
+life. The ugliness of her companion's profession of faith made her
+shiver; it would have been difficult to her to imagine anything more
+crudely profane. She was determined, however, not to betray any shudder
+that could suggest weakness, and the best way she could think of to
+disguise her emotion was to remark in a tone which, although not assumed
+for that purpose, was really the most effective revenge, inasmuch as it
+always produced on Ransom's part (it was not peculiar, among women, to
+Verena) an angry helplessness&mdash;"Mr. Ransom, I assure you this is an age
+of conscience."</p>
+
+<p>"That's a part of your cant. It's an age of unspeakable shams, as
+Carlyle says."</p>
+
+<p>"Well," returned Verena, "it's all very comfortable for you to say that
+you wish to leave us alone. But you can't leave us alone. We are here,
+and we have got to be disposed of. You have got to put us somewhere.
+It's a remarkable social system that has no place for <i>us</i>!" the girl
+went on, with her most charming laugh.</p>
+
+<p>"No place in public. My plan is to keep you at home and have a better
+time with you there than ever."</p>
+
+<p>"I'm glad it's to be better; there's room for it. Woe to American
+womanhood when you start a movement for being more&mdash;what you like to
+be&mdash;at home!"</p>
+
+<p>"Lord, how you're perverted; you, the very genius!" Basil Ransom
+murmured, looking at her with the kindest eyes.</p>
+
+<p>She paid no attention to this, she went on, "And those who have got no
+home (there are millions, you know), what are you going to do with
+<i>them</i>? You must remember that women marry&mdash;are given in marriage&mdash;less
+and less; that isn't their career, as a matter of course, any more. You
+can't tell them to go and mind their husband and children, when they
+have no husband and children to mind."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh," said Ransom, "that's a detail! And for myself, I confess, I have
+such a boundless appreciation of your sex in private life that I am
+perfectly ready to advocate a man's having a half-a-dozen wives."</p>
+
+<p>"The civilisation of the Turks, then, strikes you as the highest?"</p>
+
+<p>"The Turks have a second-rate religion; they are fatalists, and that
+keeps them down. Besides, their women are not nearly so charming as
+ours&mdash;or as ours would be if this modern pestilence were eradicated.
+Think what a confession you make when you say that women are less and
+less sought in marriage; what a testimony that is to the pernicious
+effect on their manners, their person, their nature, of this fatuous
+agitation."</p>
+
+<p>"That's very complimentary to me!" Verena broke in, lightly.</p>
+
+<p>But Ransom was carried over her interruption by the current of his
+argument. "There are a thousand ways in which any woman, all women,
+married or single, may find occupation. They may find it in making
+society agreeable."</p>
+
+<p>"Agreeable to men, of course."</p>
+
+<p>"To whom else, pray? Dear Miss Tarrant, what is most agreeable to women
+is to be agreeable to men! That is a truth as old as the human race, and
+don't let Olive Chancellor persuade you that she and Mrs. Farrinder have
+invented any that can take its place, or that is more profound, more
+durable."</p>
+
+<p>Verena waived this point of the discussion; she only said: "Well, I am
+glad to hear you are prepared to see the place all choked up with old
+maids!"</p>
+
+<p>"I don't object to the <i>old</i> old maids; they were delightful; they had
+always plenty to do, and didn't wander about the world crying out for a
+vocation. It is the new old maid that you have invented from whom I pray
+to be delivered." He didn't say he meant Olive Chancellor, but Verena
+looked at him as if she suspected him of doing so; and to put her off
+that scent he went on, taking up what she had said a moment before: "As
+for its not being complimentary to you, my remark about the effect on
+the women themselves of this pernicious craze, my dear Miss Tarrant, you
+may be quite at your ease. You stand apart, you are unique,
+extraordinary; you constitute a category by yourself. In you the
+elements have been mixed in a manner so felicitous that I regard you as
+quite incorruptible. I don't know where you come from nor how you come
+to be what you are, but you are outside and above all vulgarising
+influences. Besides, you ought to know," the young man proceeded, in the
+same cool, mild, deliberate tone, as if he were demonstrating a
+mathematical solution, "you ought to know that your connexion with all
+these rantings and ravings is the most unreal, accidental, illusory
+thing in the world. You think you care about them, but you don't at all.
+They were imposed upon you by circumstances, by unfortunate
+associations, and you accepted them as you would have accepted any other
+burden, on account of the sweetness of your nature. You always want to
+please some one, and now you go lecturing about the country, and trying
+to provoke demonstrations, in order to please Miss Chancellor, just as
+you did it before to please your father and mother. It isn't <i>you</i>, the
+least in the world, but an inflated little figure (very remarkable in
+its way too) whom you have invented and set on its feet, pulling
+strings, behind it, to make it move and speak, while you try to conceal
+and efface yourself there. Ah, Miss Tarrant, if it's a question of
+pleasing, how much you might please some one else by tipping your
+preposterous puppet over and standing forth in your freedom as well as
+in your loveliness!"</p>
+
+<p>While Basil Ransom spoke&mdash;and he had not spoken just that way
+yet&mdash;Verena sat there deeply attentive, with her eyes on the ground; but
+as soon as he ceased she sprang to her feet&mdash;something made her feel
+that their association had already lasted quite too long. She turned
+away from him as if she wished to leave him, and indeed were about to
+attempt to do so. She didn't desire to look at him now, or even to have
+much more conversation with him. "Something," I say, made her feel so,
+but it was partly his curious manner&mdash;so serene and explicit, as if he
+knew the whole thing to an absolute certainty&mdash;which partly scared her
+and partly made her feel angry. She began to move along the path to one
+of the gates, as if it were settled that they should immediately leave
+the place. He laid it all out so clearly; if he had had a revelation he
+couldn't speak otherwise. That description of herself as something
+different from what she was trying to be, the charge of want of reality,
+made her heart beat with pain; she was sure, at any rate, it was her
+real self that was there with him now, where she oughtn't to be. In a
+moment he was at her side again, going with her; and as they walked it
+came over her that some of the things he had said to her were far beyond
+what Olive could have imagined as the very worst possible. What would be
+her state now, poor forsaken friend, if some of them had been borne to
+her in the voices of the air? Verena had been affected by her
+companion's speech (his manner had changed so; it seemed to express
+something quite different) in a way that pushed her to throw up the
+discussion and determine that as soon as they should get out of the park
+she would go off by herself; but she still had her wits about her
+sufficiently to think it important she should give no sign of
+discomposure, of confessing that she was driven from the field. She
+appeared to herself to notice and reply to his extraordinary
+observations enough, without taking them up too much, when she said,
+tossing the words over her shoulder at Ransom, while she moved quickly:
+"I presume, from what you say, that you don't think I have much
+ability."</p>
+
+<p>He hesitated before answering, while his long legs easily kept pace with
+her rapid step&mdash;her charming, touching, hurrying step, which expressed
+all the trepidation she was anxious to conceal. "Immense ability, but
+not in the line in which you most try to have it. In a very different
+line, Miss Tarrant! Ability is no word for it; it's genius!"</p>
+
+<p>She felt his eyes on her face&mdash;ever so close and fixed there&mdash;after he
+had chosen to reply to her question that way. She was beginning to
+blush; if he had kept them longer, and on the part of any one else, she
+would have called such a stare impertinent. Verena had been commended of
+old by Olive for her serenity "while exposed to the gaze of hundreds";
+but a change had taken place, and she was now unable to endure the
+contemplation of an individual. She wished to detach him, to lead him
+off again into the general; and for this purpose, at the end of a
+moment, she made another inquiry: "I am to understand, then, as your
+last word that you regard us as quite inferior?"</p>
+
+<p>"For public, civic uses, absolutely&mdash;perfectly weak and second-rate. I
+know nothing more indicative of the muddled sentiment of the time than
+that any number of men should be found to pretend that they regard you
+in any other light. But privately, personally, it's another affair. In
+the realm of family life and the domestic affections&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>At this Verena broke in, with a nervous laugh, "Don't say that; it's
+only a phrase!"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, it's a better one than any of yours," said Basil Ransom, turning
+with her out of one of the smaller gates&mdash;the first they had come to.
+They emerged into the species of <i>plaza</i> formed by the numbered street
+which constitutes the southern extremity of the park and the termination
+of the Sixth Avenue. The glow of the splendid afternoon was over
+everything, and the day seemed to Ransom still in its youth. The bowers
+and boskages stretched behind them, the artificial lakes and cockneyfied
+landscapes, making all the region bright with the sense of air and
+space, and raw natural tints, and vegetation too diminutive to
+overshadow. The chocolate-coloured houses, in tall, new rows, surveyed
+the expanse; the street cars rattled in the foreground, changing horses
+while the horses steamed, and absorbing and emitting passengers; and the
+beer-saloons, with exposed shoulders and sides, which in New York do a
+good deal towards representing the picturesque, the "bit" appreciated by
+painters, announced themselves in signs of large lettering to the sky.
+Groups of the unemployed, the children of disappointment from beyond the
+seas, propped themselves against the low, sunny wall of the park; and on
+the other side the commercial vista of the Sixth Avenue stretched away
+with a remarkable absence of aerial perspective.</p>
+
+<p>"I must go home; good-bye," Verena said, abruptly, to her companion.</p>
+
+<p>"Go home? You won't come and dine, then?"</p>
+
+<p>Verena knew people who dined at midday and others who dined in the
+evening, and others still who never dined at all; but she knew no one
+who dined at half-past three. Ransom's attachment to this idea therefore
+struck her as queer and infelicitous, and she supposed it betrayed the
+habits of Mississippi. But that couldn't make it any more acceptable to
+her, in spite of his looking so disappointed&mdash;with his dimly-glowing
+eyes&mdash;that he was heedless for the moment that the main fact connected
+with her return to Tenth Street was that she wished to go alone.</p>
+
+<p>"I must leave you, right away," she said. "Please don't ask me to stay;
+you wouldn't if you knew how little I want to!" Her manner was different
+now, and her face as well, and though she smiled more than ever she had
+never seemed to him more serious.</p>
+
+<p>"Alone, do you mean? Really I can't let you do that," Ransom replied,
+extremely shocked at this sacrifice being asked of him. "I have brought
+you this immense distance, I am responsible for you, and I must place
+you where I found you."</p>
+
+<p>"Mr. Ransom, I must, I will!" she exclaimed, in a tone he had not yet
+heard her use; so that, a good deal amazed, puzzled and pained, he saw
+that he should make a mistake if he were to insist. He had known that
+their expedition must end in a separation which could not be sweet, but
+he had counted on making some of the terms of it himself. When he
+expressed the hope that she would at least allow him to put her into a
+car, she replied that she wished no car; she wanted to walk. This image
+of her "streaking off" by herself, as he figured it, did not mend the
+matter; but in the presence of her sudden nervous impatience he felt
+that here was a feminine mystery which must be allowed to take its
+course.</p>
+
+<p>"It costs me more than you probably suspect, but I submit. Heaven guard
+you and bless you, Miss Tarrant!"</p>
+
+<p>She turned her face away from him as if she were straining at a leash;
+then she rejoined, in the most unexpected manner: "I hope very much you
+<i>will</i> get printed."</p>
+
+<p>"Get my articles published?" He stared, and broke out: "Oh, you
+delightful being!"</p>
+
+<p>"Good-bye," she repeated; and now she gave him her hand. As he held it a
+moment, and asked her if she were really leaving the city so soon that
+she mightn't see him again, she answered: "If I stay it will be at a
+place to which you mustn't come. They wouldn't let you see me."</p>
+
+<p>He had not intended to put that question to her; he had set himself a
+limit. But the limit had suddenly moved on. "Do you mean at that house
+where I heard you speak?"</p>
+
+<p>"I may go there for a few days."</p>
+
+<p>"If it's forbidden to me to go and see you there, why did you send me a
+card?"</p>
+
+<p>"Because I wanted to convert you then."</p>
+
+<p>"And now you give me up?"</p>
+
+<p>"No, no; I want you to remain as you are!"</p>
+
+<p>She looked strange, with her more mechanical smile, as she said this,
+and he didn't know what idea was in her head. She had already left him,
+but he called after her, "If you do stay, I will come!" She neither
+turned nor made an answer, and all that was left to him was to watch her
+till she passed out of sight. Her back, with its charming young form,
+seemed to repeat that last puzzle, which was almost a challenge.</p>
+
+<p>For this, however, Verena Tarrant had not meant it. She wanted, in spite
+of the greater delay and the way Olive would wonder, to walk home,
+because it gave her time to think, and think again, how glad she was
+(really, positively, <i>now</i>) that Mr. Ransom was on the wrong side. If he
+had been on the right&mdash;&mdash;! She did not finish this proposition. She
+found Olive waiting for her in exactly the manner she had foreseen; she
+turned to her, as she came in, a face sufficiently terrible. Verena
+instantly explained herself, related exactly what she had been doing;
+then went on, without giving her friend time for question or comment:
+"And you&mdash;you paid your visit to Mrs. Burrage?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, I went through that."</p>
+
+<p>"And did she press the question of my coming there?"</p>
+
+<p>"Very much indeed."</p>
+
+<p>"And what did you say?"</p>
+
+<p>"I said very little, but she gave me such assurances&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"That you thought I ought to go?"</p>
+
+<p>Olive was silent a moment; then she said: "She declares they are devoted
+to the cause, and that New York will be at your feet."</p>
+
+<p>Verena took Miss Chancellor's shoulders in each of her hands, and gave
+her back, for an instant, her gaze, her silence. Then she broke out,
+with a kind of passion: "I don't care for her assurances&mdash;I don't care
+for New York! I won't go to them&mdash;I won't&mdash;do you understand?" Suddenly
+her voice changed, she passed her arms round her friend and buried her
+face in her neck. "Olive Chancellor, take me away, take me away!" she
+went on. In a moment Olive felt that she was sobbing and that the
+question was settled, the question she herself had debated in anguish a
+couple of hours before.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="BOOK_THIRD" id="BOOK_THIRD"></a>BOOK THIRD</h2>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="XXXV" id="XXXV"></a>XXXV</h2>
+
+
+<p>The August night had gathered by the time Basil Ransom, having finished
+his supper, stepped out upon the piazza of the little hotel. It was a
+very little hotel and of a very slight and loose construction; the tread
+of a tall Mississippian made the staircase groan and the windows rattle
+in their frames. He was very hungry when he arrived, having not had a
+moment, in Boston, on his way through, to eat even the frugal morsel
+with which he was accustomed to sustain nature between a breakfast that
+consisted of a cup of coffee and a dinner that consisted of a cup of
+tea. He had had his cup of tea now, and very bad it was, brought him by
+a pale, round-backed young lady, with auburn ringlets, a fancy belt, and
+an expression of limited tolerance for a gentleman who could not choose
+quickly between fried fish, fried steak, and baked beans. The train for
+Marmion left Boston at four o'clock in the afternoon, and rambled
+fitfully toward the southern cape, while the shadows grew long in the
+stony pastures and the slanting light gilded the straggling, shabby
+woods, and painted the ponds and marshes with yellow gleams. The
+ripeness of summer lay upon the land, and yet there was nothing in the
+country Basil Ransom traversed that seemed susceptible of maturity;
+nothing but the apples in the little tough, dense orchards, which gave a
+suggestion of sour fruition here and there, and the tall, bright
+goldenrod at the bottom of the bare stone dykes. There were no fields of
+yellow grain; only here and there a crop of brown hay. But there was a
+kind of soft scrubbiness in the landscape, and a sweetness begotten of
+low horizons, of mild air, with a possibility of summer haze, of
+unregarded inlets where on August mornings the water must be brightly
+blue. Ransom had heard that the Cape was the Italy, so to speak, of
+Massachusetts; it had been described to him as the drowsy Cape, the
+languid Cape, the Cape not of storms, but of eternal peace. He knew that
+the Bostonians had been drawn thither, for the hot weeks, by its
+sedative influence, by the conviction that its toneless air would
+minister to perfect rest. In a career in which there was so much nervous
+excitement as in theirs they had no wish to be wound up when they went
+out of town; they were sufficiently wound up at all times by the sense
+of all their sex had been through. They wanted to live idly, to unbend
+and lie in hammocks, and also to keep out of the crowd, the rush of the
+watering-place. Ransom could see there was no crowd at Marmion, as soon
+as he got there, though indeed there was a rush, which directed itself
+to the only vehicle in waiting outside of the small, lonely, hut-like
+station, so distant from the village that, as far as one looked along
+the sandy, sketchy road which was supposed to lead to it, one saw only
+an empty land on either side. Six or eight men in "dusters," carrying
+parcels and handbags, projected themselves upon the solitary, rickety
+carry-all, so that Ransom could read his own fate, while the ruminating
+conductor of the vehicle, a lean, shambling citizen, with a long neck
+and a tuft on his chin, guessed that if he wanted to get to the hotel
+before dusk he would have to strike out. His valise was attached in a
+precarious manner to the rear of the carry-all. "Well, I'll chance it,"
+the driver remarked sadly, when Ransom protested against its insecure
+position. He recognised the southern quality of that picturesque
+fatalism&mdash;judged that Miss Chancellor and Verena Tarrant must be pretty
+thoroughly relaxed if they had given themselves up to the genius of the
+place. This was what he hoped for and counted on, as he took his way,
+the sole pedestrian in the group that had quitted the train, in the wake
+of the overladen carry-all. It helped him to enjoy the first country
+walk he had had for many months, for more than months, for years, that
+the reflexion was forced upon him as he went (the mild, vague scenery,
+just beginning to be dim with twilight, suggested it at every step) that
+the two young women who constituted, at Marmion, his whole prefigurement
+of a social circle, must, in such a locality as that, be taking a
+regular holiday. The sense of all the wrongs they had still to redress
+must be lighter there than it was in Boston; the ardent young man had,
+for the hour, an ingenuous hope that they had left their opinions in the
+city. He liked the very smell of the soil as he wandered along; cool,
+soft whiffs of evening met him at bends of the road which disclosed very
+little more&mdash;unless it might be a band of straight-stemmed woodland,
+keeping, a little, the red glow from the west, or (as he went further)
+an old house, shingled all over, grey and slightly collapsing, which
+looked down at him from a steep bank, at the top of wooden steps. He was
+already refreshed; he had tasted the breath of nature, measured his long
+grind in New York, without a vacation, with the repetition of the daily
+movement up and down the long, straight, maddening city, like a bucket
+in a well or a shuttle in a loom.</p>
+
+<p>He lit his cigar in the office of the hotel&mdash;a small room on the right
+of the door, where a "register," meagrely inscribed, led a terribly
+public life on the little bare desk, and got its pages dogs'-eared
+before they were covered. Local worthies, of a vague identity, used to
+lounge there, as Ransom perceived the next day, by the hour. They tipped
+back their chairs against the wall, seldom spoke, and might have been
+supposed, with their converging vision, to be watching something out of
+the window, if there had been anything at Marmion to watch. Sometimes
+one of them got up and went to the desk, on which he leaned his elbows,
+hunching a pair of sloping shoulders to an uncollared neck. For the
+fiftieth time he perused the fly-blown page of the recording volume,
+where the names followed each other with such jumps of date. The others
+watched him while he did so&mdash;or contemplated in silence some "guest" of
+the hostelry, when such a personage entered the place with an air of
+appealing from the general irresponsibility of the establishment and
+found no one but the village-philosophers to address himself to. It was
+an establishment conducted by invisible, elusive agencies; they had a
+kind of stronghold in the dining-room, which was kept locked at all but
+sacramental hours. There was a tradition that a "boy" exercised some
+tutelary function as regards the crumpled register; but when he was
+inquired about, it was usually elicited from the impartial circle in the
+office either that he was somewhere round or that he had gone a-fishing.
+Except the haughty waitress who has just been mentioned as giving Ransom
+his supper, and who only emerged at meal-times from her mystic
+seclusion, this impalpable youth was the single person on the premises
+who represented domestic service. Anxious lady-boarders, wrapped in
+shawls, were seen waiting for him, as if he had been the doctor, on
+horse-hair rocking-chairs, in the little public parlour; others peered
+vaguely out of back doors and windows, thinking that if he were
+somewhere round they might see him. Sometimes people went to the door of
+the dining-room and tried it, shaking it a little, timidly, to see if it
+would yield; then, finding it fast, came away, looking, if they had been
+observed, shy and snubbed, at their fellows. Some of them went so far as
+to say that they didn't think it was a very good hotel.</p>
+
+<p>Ransom, however, didn't much care whether it were good or not; he hadn't
+come to Marmion for the love of the hotel. Now that he had got there,
+however, he didn't know exactly what to do; his course seemed rather
+less easy than it had done when, suddenly, the night before, tired, sick
+of the city-air, and hungry for a holiday, he decided to take the next
+morning's train to Boston, and there take another to the shores of
+Buzzard's Bay. The hotel itself offered few resources; the inmates were
+not numerous; they moved about a little outside, on the small piazza and
+in the rough yard which interposed between the house and the road, and
+then they dropped off into the unmitigated dusk. This element, touched
+only in two or three places by a far-away dim glimmer, presented itself
+to Ransom as his sole entertainment. Though it was pervaded by that
+curious, pure, earthy smell which in New England, in summer, hangs in
+the nocturnal air, Ransom bethought himself that the place might be a
+little dull for persons who had not come to it, as he had, to take
+possession of Verena Tarrant. The unfriendly inn, which suggested
+dreadfully to Ransom (he despised the practice) an early bed-time,
+seemed to have no relation to anything, not even to itself; but a
+fellow-tenant of whom he made an inquiry told him the village was
+sprinkled round. Basil presently walked along the road in search of it,
+under the stars, smoking one of the good cigars which constituted his
+only tribute to luxury. He reflected that it would hardly do to begin
+his attack that night; he ought to give the Bostonians a certain amount
+of notice of his appearance on the scene. He thought it very possible,
+indeed, that they might be addicted to the vile habit of "retiring" with
+the cocks and hens. He was sure that was one of the things Olive
+Chancellor would do so long as he should stay&mdash;on purpose to spite him;
+she would make Verena Tarrant go to bed at unnatural hours, just to
+deprive him of his evenings. He walked some distance without
+encountering a creature or discerning an habitation; but he enjoyed the
+splendid starlight, the stillness, the shrill melancholy of the
+crickets, which seemed to make all the vague forms of the country
+pulsate around him; the whole impression was a bath of freshness after
+the long strain of the preceding two years and his recent sweltering
+weeks in New York. At the end of ten minutes (his stroll had been slow)
+a figure drew near him, at first indistinct, but presently defining
+itself as that of a woman. She was walking apparently without purpose,
+like himself, or without other purpose than that of looking at the
+stars, which she paused for an instant, throwing back her head, to
+contemplate, as he drew nearer to her. In a moment he was very close; he
+saw her look at him, through the clear gloom, as they passed each other.
+She was small and slim; he made out her head and face, saw that her hair
+was cropped; had an impression of having seen her before. He noticed
+that as she went by she turned as well as himself, and that there was a
+sort of recognition in her movement. Then he felt sure that he had seen
+her elsewhere, and before she had added to the distance that separated
+them he stopped short, looking after her. She noticed his halt, paused
+equally, and for a moment they stood there face to face, at a certain
+interval, in the darkness.</p>
+
+<p>"I beg your pardon&mdash;is it Doctor Prance?" he found himself demanding.</p>
+
+<p>For a minute there was no answer; then came the voice of the little
+lady:</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, sir; I am Doctor Prance. Any one sick at the hotel?"</p>
+
+<p>"I hope not; I don't know," Ransom said, laughing.</p>
+
+<p>Then he took a few steps, mentioned his name, recalled his having met
+her at Miss Birdseye's, ever so long before (nearly two years), and
+expressed the hope that she had not forgotten that.</p>
+
+<p>She thought it over a little&mdash;she was evidently addicted neither to
+empty phrases nor to unconsidered assertions. "I presume you mean that
+night Miss Tarrant launched out so."</p>
+
+<p>"That very night. We had a very interesting conversation."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, I remember I lost a good deal," said Doctor Prance.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, I don't know; I have an idea you made it up in other ways,"
+Ransom returned, laughing still.</p>
+
+<p>He saw her bright little eyes engage with his own. Staying, apparently,
+in the village, she had come out, bare-headed, for an evening walk, and
+if it had been possible to imagine Doctor Prance bored and in want of
+recreation, the way she lingered there as if she were quite willing to
+have another talk might have suggested to Basil Ransom this condition.
+"Why, don't you consider her career very remarkable?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh yes; everything is remarkable nowadays; we live in an age of
+wonders!" the young man replied, much amused to find himself discussing
+the object of his adoration in this casual way, in the dark, on a lonely
+country-road, with a short-haired female physician. It was astonishing
+how quickly Doctor Prance and he had made friends again. "I suppose, by
+the way, you know Miss Tarrant and Miss Chancellor are staying down
+here?" he went on.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, yes, I suppose I know it. I am visiting Miss Chancellor," the dry
+little woman added.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh indeed? I am delighted to hear it!" Ransom exclaimed, feeling that
+he might have a friend in the camp. "Then you can inform me where those
+ladies have their house."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, I guess I can tell it in the dark. I will show you round now, if
+you like."</p>
+
+<p>"I shall be glad to see it, though I am not sure I shall go in
+immediately. I must reconnoitre a little first. That makes me so very
+happy to have met you. I think it's very wonderful&mdash;your knowing me."</p>
+
+<p>Doctor Prance did not repudiate this compliment, but she presently
+observed: "You didn't pass out of my mind entirely, because I have heard
+about you since, from Miss Birdseye."</p>
+
+<p>"Ah yes, I saw her in the spring. I hope she is in health and
+happiness."</p>
+
+<p>"She is always in happiness, but she can't be said to be in health. She
+is very weak; she is failing."</p>
+
+<p>"I am very sorry for that."</p>
+
+<p>"She is also visiting Miss Chancellor," Doctor Prance observed, after a
+pause which was an illustration of an appearance she had of thinking
+that certain things didn't at all imply some others.</p>
+
+<p>"Why, my cousin has got all the distinguished women!" Basil Ransom
+exclaimed.</p>
+
+<p>"Is Miss Chancellor your cousin? There isn't much family resemblance.
+Miss Birdseye came down for the benefit of the country air, and I came
+down to see if I could help her to get some good from it. She wouldn't
+much, if she were left to herself. Miss Birdseye has a very fine
+character, but she hasn't much idea of hygiene." Doctor Prance was
+evidently more and more disposed to be chatty. Ransom appreciated this
+fact, and said he hoped she, too, was getting some good from the
+country-air&mdash;he was afraid she was very much confined to her profession,
+in Boston; to which she replied&mdash;"Well, I was just taking a little
+exercise along the road. I presume you don't realise what it is to be
+one of four ladies grouped together in a small frame-house."</p>
+
+<p>Ransom remembered how he had liked her before, and he felt that, as the
+phrase was, he was going to like her again. He wanted to express his
+good-will to her, and would greatly have enjoyed being at liberty to
+offer her a cigar. He didn't know what to offer her or what to do,
+unless he should invite her to sit with him on a fence. He did realise
+perfectly what the situation in the small frame-house must be, and
+entered with instant sympathy into the feelings which had led Doctor
+Prance to detach herself from the circle and wander forth under the
+constellations, all of which he was sure she knew. He asked her
+permission to accompany her on her walk, but she said she was not going
+much further in that direction; she was going to turn round. He turned
+round with her, and they went back together to the village, in which he
+at last began to discover a certain consistency, signs of habitation,
+houses disposed with a rough resemblance to a plan. The road wandered
+among them with a kind of accommodating sinuosity, and there were even
+cross-streets, and an oil-lamp on a corner, and here and there the small
+sign of a closed shop, with an indistinctly countrified lettering. There
+were lights now in the windows of some of the houses, and Doctor Prance
+mentioned to her companion several of the inhabitants of the little
+town, who appeared all to rejoice in the prefix of captain. They were
+retired shipmasters; there was quite a little nest of these worthies,
+two or three of whom might be seen lingering in their dim doorways, as
+if they were conscious of a want of encouragement to sit up, and yet
+remembered the nights in far-away waters when they would not have
+thought of turning in at all. Marmion called itself a town, but it was a
+good deal shrunken since the decline in the shipbuilding interest; it
+turned out a good many vessels every year, in the palmy days, before the
+war. There were shipyards still, where you could almost pick up the old
+shavings, the old nails and rivets, but they were grass-grown now, and
+the water lapped them without anything to interfere. There was a kind of
+arm of the sea put in; it went up some way, it wasn't the real sea, but
+very quiet, like a river; that was more attractive to some. Doctor
+Prance didn't say the place was picturesque, or quaint, or weird; but he
+could see that was what she meant when she said it was mouldering away.
+Even under the mantle of night he himself gathered the impression that
+it had had a larger life, seen better days. Doctor Prance made no remark
+designed to elicit from him an account of his motives in coming to
+Marmion; she asked him neither when he had arrived nor how long he
+intended to stay. His allusion to his cousinship with Miss Chancellor
+might have served to her mind as a reason; yet, on the other hand, it
+would have been open to her to wonder why, if he had come to see the
+young ladies from Charles Street, he was not in more of a hurry to
+present himself. It was plain Doctor Prance didn't go into that kind of
+analysis. If Ransom had complained to her of a sore throat she would
+have inquired with precision about his symptoms; but she was incapable
+of asking him any question with a social bearing. Sociably enough,
+however, they continued to wander through the principal street of the
+little town, darkened in places by immense old elms, which made a
+blackness overhead. There was a salt smell in the air, as if they were
+nearer the water; Doctor Prance said that Olive's house was at the other
+end.</p>
+
+<p>"I shall take it as a kindness if, for this evening, you don't mention
+that you have happened to meet me," Ransom remarked, after a little. He
+had changed his mind about giving notice.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, I wouldn't," his companion replied; as if she didn't need any
+caution in regard to making vain statements.</p>
+
+<p>"I want to keep my arrival a little surprise for to-morrow. It will be a
+great pleasure to me to see Miss Birdseye," he went on, rather
+hypocritically, as if that at bottom had been to his mind the main
+attraction of Marmion.</p>
+
+<p>Doctor Prance did not reveal her private comment, whatever it was, on
+this intimation; she only said, after some hesitation&mdash;"Well, I presume
+the old lady will take quite an interest in your being here."</p>
+
+<p>"I have no doubt she is capable even of that degree of philanthropy."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, she has charity for all, but she does&mdash;even she&mdash;prefer her own
+side. She regards you as quite an acquisition."</p>
+
+<p>Ransom could not but feel flattered at the idea that he had been a
+subject of conversation&mdash;as this implied&mdash;in the little circle at Miss
+Chancellor's; but he was at a loss, for the moment, to perceive what he
+had done up to this time to gratify the senior member of the group. "I
+hope she will find me an acquisition after I have been here a few days,"
+he said, laughing.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, she thinks you are one of the most important converts yet,"
+Doctor Prance replied, in a colourless way, as if she would not have
+pretended to explain why.</p>
+
+<p>"A convert&mdash;me? Do you mean of Miss Tarrant's?" It had come over him
+that Miss Birdseye, in fact, when he was parting with her after their
+meeting in Boston, had assented to his request for secrecy (which at
+first had struck her as somewhat unholy) on the ground that Verena would
+bring him into the fold. He wondered whether that young lady had been
+telling her old friend that she had succeeded with him. He thought this
+improbable; but it didn't matter, and he said, gaily, "Well, I can
+easily let her suppose so!"</p>
+
+<p>It was evident that it would be no easier for Doctor Prance to subscribe
+to a deception than it had been for her venerable patient; but she went
+so far as to reply, "Well, I hope you won't let her suppose you are
+where you were that time I conversed with you. I could see where you
+were then!"</p>
+
+<p>"It was in about the same place you were, wasn't it?"</p>
+
+<p>"Well," said Doctor Prance, with a small sigh, "I am afraid I have moved
+back, if anything!" Her sigh told him a good deal; it seemed a thin,
+self-controlled protest against the tone of Miss Chancellor's interior,
+of which it was her present fortune to form a part: and the way she
+hovered round, indistinct in the gloom, as if she were rather loath to
+resume her place there, completed his impression that the little
+doctress had a line of her own.</p>
+
+<p>"That, at least, must distress Miss Birdseye," he said reproachfully.</p>
+
+<p>"Not much, because I am not of importance. They think women the equals
+of men; but they are a great deal more pleased when a man joins than
+when a woman does."</p>
+
+<p>Ransom complimented Doctor Prance on the lucidity of her mind, and then
+he said: "Is Miss Birdseye really sick? Is her condition very
+precarious?"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, she is very old, and very&mdash;very gentle," Doctor Prance answered,
+hesitating a moment for her adjective. "Under those circumstances a
+person may flicker out."</p>
+
+<p>"We must trim the lamp," said Ransom; "I will take my turn, with
+pleasure, in watching the sacred flame."</p>
+
+<p>"It will be a pity if she doesn't live to hear Miss Tarrant's great
+effort," his companion went on.</p>
+
+<p>"Miss Tarrant's? What's that?"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, it's the principal interest, in there." And Doctor Prance now
+vaguely indicated, with a movement of her head, a small white house,
+much detached from its neighbours, which stood on their left, with its
+back to the water, at a little distance from the road. It exhibited more
+signs of animation than any of its fellows; several windows, notably
+those of the ground floor, were open to the warm evening, and a large
+shaft of light was projected upon the grassy wayside in front of it.
+Ransom, in his determination to be discreet, checked the advance of his
+companion, who added presently, with a short, suppressed laugh&mdash;"You can
+see it is, from that!" He listened, to ascertain what she meant, and
+after an instant a sound came to his ear&mdash;a sound he knew already well,
+which carried the accents of Verena Tarrant, in ample periods and
+cadences, out into the stillness of the August night.</p>
+
+<p>"Murder, what a lovely voice!" he exclaimed involuntarily.</p>
+
+<p>Doctor Prance's eye gleamed towards him a moment, and she observed,
+humorously (she was relaxing immensely), "Perhaps Miss Birdseye is
+right!" Then, as he made no rejoinder, only listening to the vocal
+inflexions that floated out of the house, she went on&mdash;"She's practising
+her speech."</p>
+
+<p>"Her speech? Is she going to deliver one here?"</p>
+
+<p>"No, as soon as they go back to town&mdash;at the Music Hall."</p>
+
+<p>Ransom's attention was now transferred to his companion. "Is that why
+you call it her great effort?"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, so they think it, I believe. She practises that way every night;
+she reads portions of it aloud to Miss Chancellor and Miss Birdseye."</p>
+
+<p>"And that's the time you choose for your walk?" Ransom said, smiling.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, it's the time my old lady has least need of me; she's too
+absorbed."</p>
+
+<p>Doctor Prance dealt in facts; Ransom had already discovered that; and
+some of her facts were very interesting.</p>
+
+<p>"The Music Hall&mdash;isn't that your great building?" he asked.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, it's the biggest we've got; it's pretty big, but it isn't so big
+as Miss Chancellor's ideas," added Doctor Prance. "She has taken it to
+bring out Miss Tarrant before the general public&mdash;she has never appeared
+that way in Boston&mdash;on a great scale. She expects her to make a big
+sensation. It will be a great night, and they are preparing for it. They
+consider it her real beginning."</p>
+
+<p>"And this is the preparation?" Basil Ransom said.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes; as I say, it's their principal interest."</p>
+
+<p>Ransom listened, and while he listened he meditated. He had thought it
+possible Verena's principles might have been shaken by the profession of
+faith to which he treated her in New York; but this hardly looked like
+it. For some moments Doctor Prance and he stood together in silence.</p>
+
+<p>"You don't hear the words," the doctor remarked, with a smile which, in
+the dark, looked Mephistophelean.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, I know the words!" the young man exclaimed, with rather a groan, as
+he offered her his hand for good-night.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="XXXVI" id="XXXVI"></a>XXXVI</h2>
+
+
+<p>A certain prudence had determined him to put off his visit till the
+morning; he thought it more probable that at that time he should be able
+to see Verena alone, whereas in the evening the two young women would be
+sure to be sitting together. When the morrow dawned, however, Basil
+Ransom felt none of the trepidation of the procrastinator; he knew
+nothing of the reception that awaited him, but he took his way to the
+cottage designated to him over-night by Doctor Prance, with the step of
+a man much more conscious of his own purpose than of possible obstacles.
+He made the reflexion, as he went, that to see a place for the first
+time at night is like reading a foreign author in a translation. At the
+present hour&mdash;it was getting towards eleven o'clock&mdash;he felt that he was
+dealing with the original. The little straggling, loosely-clustered town
+lay along the edge of a blue inlet, on the other side of which was a
+low, wooded shore, with a gleam of white sand where it touched the
+water. The narrow bay carried the vision outward to a picture that
+seemed at once bright and dim&mdash;a shining, slumbering summer sea, and a
+far-off, circling line of coast, which, under the August sun, was hazy
+and delicate. Ransom regarded the place as a town because Doctor Prance
+had called it one; but it was a town where you smelt the breath of the
+hay in the streets and you might gather blackberries in the principal
+square. The houses looked at each other across the grass&mdash;low, rusty,
+crooked, distended houses, with dry, cracked faces and the dim eyes of
+small-paned, stiffly-sliding windows. Their little door-yards bristled
+with rank, old-fashioned flowers, mostly yellow; and on the quarter that
+stood back from the sea the fields sloped upward, and the woods in which
+they presently lost themselves looked down over the roofs. Bolts and
+bars were not a part of the domestic machinery of Marmion, and the
+responsive menial, receiving the visitor on the threshold, was a
+creature rather desired than definitely possessed; so that Basil Ransom
+found Miss Chancellor's house-door gaping wide (as he had seen it the
+night before), and destitute even of a knocker or a bell-handle. From
+where he stood in the porch he could see the whole of the little
+sitting-room on the left of the hall&mdash;see that it stretched straight
+through to the back windows; that it was garnished with photographs of
+foreign works of art, pinned upon the walls, and enriched with a piano
+and other little extemporised embellishments, such as ingenious women
+lavish upon the houses they hire for a few weeks. Verena told him
+afterwards that Olive had taken her cottage furnished, but that the
+paucity of chairs and tables and bedsteads was such that their little
+party used almost to sit down, to lie down, in turn. On the other hand
+they had all George Eliot's writings, and two photographs of the Sistine
+Madonna. Ransom rapped with his stick on the lintel of the door, but no
+one came to receive him; so he made his way into the parlour, where he
+observed that his cousin Olive had as many German books as ever lying
+about. He dipped into this literature, momentarily, according to his
+wont, and then remembered that this was not what he had come for and
+that as he waited at the door he had seen, through another door, opening
+at the opposite end of the hall, signs of a small verandah attached to
+the other face of the house. Thinking the ladies might be assembled
+there in the shade, he pushed aside the muslin curtain of the back
+window, and saw that the advantages of Miss Chancellor's summer
+residence were in this quarter. There was a verandah, in fact, to which
+a wide, horizontal trellis, covered with an ancient vine, formed a kind
+of extension. Beyond the trellis was a small, lonely garden; beyond the
+garden was a large, vague, woody space, where a few piles of old timber
+were disposed, and which he afterwards learned to be a relic of the
+shipbuilding era described to him by Doctor Prance; and still beyond
+this again was the charming lake-like estuary he had already admired.
+His eyes did not rest upon the distance; they were attracted by a figure
+seated under the trellis, where the chequers of sun, in the interstices
+of the vine leaves, fell upon a bright-coloured rug spread out on the
+ground. The floor of the roughly-constructed verandah was so low that
+there was virtually no difference in the level. It took Ransom only a
+moment to recognise Miss Birdseye, though her back was turned to the
+house. She was alone; she sat there motionless (she had a newspaper in
+her lap, but her attitude was not that of a reader), looking at the
+shimmering bay. She might be asleep; that was why Ransom moderated the
+process of his long legs as he came round through the house to join her.
+This precaution represented his only scruple. He stepped across the
+verandah and stood close to her, but she did not appear to notice him.
+Visibly, she was dozing, or presumably, rather, for her head was
+enveloped in an old faded straw hat, which concealed the upper part of
+her face. There were two or three other chairs near her, and a table on
+which were half-a-dozen books and periodicals, together with a glass
+containing a colourless liquid, on the top of which a spoon was laid.
+Ransom desired only to respect her repose, so he sat down in one of the
+chairs and waited till she should become aware of his presence. He
+thought Miss Chancellor's back-garden a delightful spot, and his jaded
+senses tasted the breeze&mdash;the idle, wandering summer wind&mdash;that stirred
+the vine leaves over his head. The hazy shores on the other side of the
+water, which had tints more delicate than the street vistas of New York
+(they seemed powdered with silver, a sort of midsummer light), suggested
+to him a land of dreams, a country in a picture. Basil Ransom had seen
+very few pictures, there were none in Mississippi; but he had a vision
+at times of something that would be more refined than the real world,
+and the situation in which he now found himself pleased him almost as
+much as if it had been a striking work of art. He was unable to see, as
+I have said, whether Miss Birdseye were taking in the prospect through
+open or only, imagination aiding (she had plenty of that), through
+closed, tired, dazzled eyes. She appeared to him, as the minutes elapsed
+and he sat beside her, the incarnation of well-earned rest, of patient,
+submissive superannuation. At the end of her long day's work she might
+have been placed there to enjoy this dim prevision of the peaceful
+river, the gleaming shores, of the paradise her unselfish life had
+certainly qualified her to enter, and which, apparently, would so soon
+be opened to her. After a while she said, placidly, without turning:</p>
+
+<p>"I suppose it's about time I should take my remedy again. It does seem
+as if she had found the right thing; don't you think so?"</p>
+
+<p>"Do you mean the contents of that tumbler? I shall be delighted to give
+it to you, and you must tell me how much you take." And Basil Ransom,
+getting up, possessed himself of the glass on the table.</p>
+
+<p>At the sound of his voice Miss Birdseye pushed back her straw hat by a
+movement that was familiar to her, and twisting about her muffled figure
+a little (even in August she felt the cold, and had to be much covered
+up to sit out), directed at him a speculative, unastonished gaze.</p>
+
+<p>"One spoonful&mdash;two?" Ransom asked, stirring the dose and smiling.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, I guess I'll take two this time."</p>
+
+<p>"Certainly, Doctor Prance couldn't help finding the right thing," Ransom
+said, as he administered the medicine; while the movement with which she
+extended her face to take it made her seem doubly childlike.</p>
+
+<p>He put down the glass, and she relapsed into her position; she seemed to
+be considering. "It's homeopathic," she remarked, in a moment.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, I have no doubt of that; I presume you wouldn't take anything
+else."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, it's generally admitted now to be the true system."</p>
+
+<p>Ransom moved closer to her, placed himself where she could see him
+better. "It's a great thing to have the true system," he said, bending
+towards her in a friendly way; "I'm sure you have it in everything." He
+was not often hypocritical; but when he was he went all lengths.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, I don't know that any one has a right to say that. I thought you
+were Verena," she added in a moment, taking him in again with her mild,
+deliberate vision.</p>
+
+<p>"I have been waiting for you to recognise me; of course you didn't know
+I was here&mdash;I only arrived last night."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, I'm glad you have come to see Olive now."</p>
+
+<p>"You remember that I wouldn't do that when I met you last?"</p>
+
+<p>"You asked me not to mention to her that I had met you; that's what I
+principally recall."</p>
+
+<p>"And don't you remember what I told you I wanted to do? I wanted to go
+out to Cambridge and see Miss Tarrant. Thanks to the information that
+you were so good as to give me, I was able to do so."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, she gave me quite a little description of your visit," said Miss
+Birdseye, with a smile and a vague sound in her throat&mdash;a sort of
+pensive, private reference to the idea of laughter&mdash;of which Ransom
+never learned the exact significance, though he retained for a long time
+afterwards a kindly memory of the old lady's manner at the moment.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't know how much she enjoyed it, but it was an immense pleasure to
+me; so great a one that, as you see, I have come to call upon her
+again."</p>
+
+<p>"Then, I presume, she <i>has</i> shaken you?"</p>
+
+<p>"She has shaken me tremendously!" said Ransom, laughing.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, you'll be a great addition," Miss Birdseye returned. "And this
+time your visit is also for Miss Chancellor?"</p>
+
+<p>"That depends on whether she will receive me."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, if she knows you are shaken, that will go a great way," said Miss
+Birdseye, a little musingly, as if even to her unsophisticated mind it
+had been manifested that one's relations with Miss Chancellor might be
+ticklish. "But she can't receive you now&mdash;can she?&mdash;because she's out.
+She has gone to the post office for the Boston letters, and they get so
+many every day that she had to take Verena with her to help her carry
+them home. One of them wanted to stay with me, because Doctor Prance has
+gone fishing, but I said I presumed I could be left alone for about
+seven minutes. I know how they love to be together; it seems as if one
+<i>couldn't</i> go out without the other. That's what they came down here
+for, because it's quiet, and it didn't look as if there was any one else
+they would be much drawn to. So it would be a pity for me to come down
+after them just to spoil it!"</p>
+
+<p>"I am afraid I shall spoil it, Miss Birdseye."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, well, a gentleman," murmured the ancient woman.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, what can you expect of a gentleman? I certainly shall spoil it if
+I can."</p>
+
+<p>"You had better go fishing with Doctor Prance," said Miss Birdseye, with
+a serenity which showed that she was far from measuring the sinister
+quality of the announcement he had just made.</p>
+
+<p>"I shan't object to that at all. The days here must be very long&mdash;very
+full of hours. Have you got the doctor with you?" Ransom inquired, as if
+he knew nothing at all about her.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, Miss Chancellor invited us both; she is very thoughtful. She is
+not merely a theoretic philanthropist&mdash;she goes into details," said Miss
+Birdseye, presenting her large person, in her chair, as if she herself
+were only an item. "It seems as if we were not so much wanted in Boston,
+just in August."</p>
+
+<p>"And here you sit and enjoy the breeze, and admire the view," the young
+man remarked, wondering when the two messengers, whose seven minutes
+must long since have expired, would return from the post office.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, I enjoy everything in this little old-world place; I didn't
+suppose I should be satisfied to be so passive. It's a great contrast to
+my former exertions. But somehow it doesn't seem as if there were any
+trouble, or any wrong round here; and if there should be, there are Miss
+Chancellor and Miss Tarrant to look after it. They seem to think I had
+better fold my hands. Besides, when helpful, generous minds begin to
+flock in from <i>your</i> part of the country," Miss Birdseye continued,
+looking at him from under the distorted and discoloured canopy of her
+hat with a benignity which completed the idea in any cheerful sense he
+chose.</p>
+
+<p>He felt by this time that he was committed to rather a dishonest part;
+he was pledged not to give a shock to her optimism. This might cost him,
+in the coming days, a good deal of dissimulation, but he was now saved
+from any further expenditure of ingenuity by certain warning sounds
+which admonished him that he must keep his wits about him for a purpose
+more urgent. There were voices in the hall of the house, voices he knew,
+which came nearer, quickly; so that before he had time to rise one of
+the speakers had come out with the exclamation&mdash;"Dear Miss Birdseye,
+here are seven letters for you!" The words fell to the ground, indeed,
+before they were fairly spoken, and when Ransom got up, turning, he saw
+Olive Chancellor standing there, with the parcel from the post office in
+her hand. She stared at him in sudden horror; for the moment her
+self-possession completely deserted her. There was so little of any
+greeting in her face save the greeting of dismay, that he felt there was
+nothing for him to say to her, nothing that could mitigate the odious
+fact of his being there. He could only let her take it in, let her
+divine that, this time, he was not to be got rid of. In an instant&mdash;to
+ease off the situation&mdash;he held out his hand for Miss Birdseye's
+letters, and it was a proof of Olive's having turned rather faint and
+weak that she gave them up to him. He delivered the packet to the old
+lady, and now Verena had appeared in the doorway of the house. As soon
+as she saw him, she blushed crimson; but she did not, like Olive, stand
+voiceless.</p>
+
+<p>"Why, Mr. Ransom," she cried out, "where in the world were <i>you</i> washed
+ashore?" Miss Birdseye, meanwhile, taking her letters, had no appearance
+of observing that the encounter between Olive and her visitor was a kind
+of concussion.</p>
+
+<p>It was Verena who eased off the situation; her gay challenge rose to her
+lips as promptly as if she had had no cause for embarrassment. She was
+not confused even when she blushed, and her alertness may perhaps be
+explained by the habit of public speaking. Ransom smiled at her while
+she came forward, but he spoke first to Olive, who had already turned
+her eyes away from him and gazed at the blue sea-view as if she were
+wondering what was going to happen to her at last.</p>
+
+<p>"Of course you are very much surprised to see me; but I hope to be able
+to induce you to regard me not absolutely in the light of an intruder. I
+found your door open, and I walked in, and Miss Birdseye seemed to think
+I might stay. Miss Birdseye, I put myself under your protection; I
+invoke you; I appeal to you," the young man went on. "Adopt me, answer
+for me, cover me with the mantle of your charity!"</p>
+
+<p>Miss Birdseye looked up from her letters, as if at first she had only
+faintly heard his appeal. She turned her eyes from Olive to Verena; then
+she said, "Doesn't it seem as if we had room for all? When I remember
+what I have seen in the South, Mr. Ransom's being here strikes me as a
+great triumph."</p>
+
+<p>Olive evidently failed to understand, and Verena broke in with
+eagerness, "It was by my letter, of course, that you knew we were here.
+The one I wrote just before we came, Olive," she went on. "Don't you
+remember I showed it to you?"</p>
+
+<p>At the mention of this act of submission on her friend's part Olive
+started, flashing her a strange look; then she said to Basil that she
+didn't see why he should explain so much about his coming; every one had
+a right to come. It was a very charming place; it ought to do any one
+good. "But it will have one defect for you," she added; "three-quarters
+of the summer residents are women!"</p>
+
+<p>This attempted pleasantry on Miss Chancellor's part, so unexpected, so
+incongruous, uttered with white lips and cold eyes, struck Ransom to
+that degree by its oddity that he could not resist exchanging a glance
+of wonder with Verena, who, if she had had the opportunity, could
+probably have explained to him the phenomenon. Olive had recovered
+herself, reminded herself that she was safe, that her companion in New
+York had repudiated, denounced her pursuer; and, as a proof to her own
+sense of her security, as well as a touching mark to Verena that now,
+after what had passed, she had no fear, she felt that a certain light
+mockery would be effective.</p>
+
+<p>"Ah, Miss Olive, don't pretend to think I love your sex so little, when
+you know that what you really object to in me is that I love it too
+much!" Ransom was not brazen, he was not impudent, he was really a very
+modest man; but he was aware that whatever he said or did he was
+condemned to seem impudent now, and he argued within himself that if he
+was to have the dishonour of being thought brazen he might as well have
+the comfort. He didn't care a straw, in truth, how he was judged or how
+he might offend; he had a purpose which swallowed up such inanities as
+that, and he was so full of it that it kept him firm, balanced him, gave
+him an assurance that might easily have been confounded with a cold
+detachment. "This place will do me good," he pursued; "I haven't had a
+holiday for more than two years, I couldn't have gone another day; I was
+finished. I would have written to you beforehand that I was coming, but
+I only started at a few hours' notice. It occurred to me that this would
+be just what I wanted; I remembered what Miss Tarrant had said in her
+note, that it was a place where people could lie on the ground and wear
+their old clothes. I delight to lie on the ground, and all my clothes
+are old. I hope to be able to stay three or four weeks."</p>
+
+<p>Olive listened till he had done speaking; she stood a single moment
+longer, and then, without a word, a glance, she rushed into the house.
+Ransom saw that Miss Birdseye was immersed in her letters; so he went
+straight to Verena and stood before her, looking far into her eyes. He
+was not smiling now, as he had been in speaking to Olive. "Will you come
+somewhere apart, where I can speak to you alone?"</p>
+
+<p>"Why have you done this? It was not right in you to come!" Verena looked
+still as if she were blushing, but Ransom perceived he must allow for
+her having been delicately scorched by the sun.</p>
+
+<p>"I have come because it is necessary&mdash;because I have something very
+important to say to you. A great number of things."</p>
+
+<p>"The same things you said in New York? I don't want to hear them
+again&mdash;they were horrible!"</p>
+
+<p>"No, not the same&mdash;different ones. I want you to come out with me, away
+from here."</p>
+
+<p>"You always want me to come out! We can't go out here; we <i>are</i> out, as
+much as we can be!" Verena laughed. She tried to turn it off&mdash;feeling
+that something really impended.</p>
+
+<p>"Come down into the garden, and out beyond there&mdash;to the water, where we
+can speak. It's what I have come for; it was not for what I told Miss
+Olive!"</p>
+
+<p>He had lowered his voice, as if Miss Olive might still hear them, and
+there was something strangely grave&mdash;altogether solemn, indeed&mdash;in its
+tone. Verena looked around her, at the splendid summer day, at the
+much-swathed, formless figure of Miss Birdseye, holding her letter
+inside her hat. "Mr. Ransom!" she articulated then, simply; and as her
+eyes met his again they showed him a couple of tears.</p>
+
+<p>"It's not to make you suffer, I honestly believe. I don't want to say
+anything that will hurt you. How can I possibly hurt you, when I feel to
+you as I do?" he went on, with suppressed force.</p>
+
+<p>She said no more, but all her face entreated him to let her off, to
+spare her; and as this look deepened, a quick sense of elation and
+success began to throb in his heart, for it told him exactly what he
+wanted to know. It told him that she was afraid of him, that she had
+ceased to trust herself, that the way he had read her nature was the
+right way (she was tremendously open to attack, she was meant for love,
+she was meant for him), and that his arriving at the point at which he
+wished to arrive was only a question of time. This happy consciousness
+made him extraordinarily tender to her; he couldn't put enough
+reassurance into his smile, his low murmur, as he said: "Only give me
+ten minutes; don't receive me by turning me away. It's my holiday&mdash;my
+poor little holiday; don't spoil it."</p>
+
+<p>Three minutes later Miss Birdseye, looking up from her letter, saw them
+move together through the bristling garden and traverse a gap in the old
+fence which enclosed the further side of it. They passed into the
+ancient shipyard which lay beyond, and which was now a mere vague,
+grass-grown approach to the waterside, bestrewn with a few remnants of
+supererogatory timber. She saw them stroll forward to the edge of the
+bay and stand there, taking the soft breeze in their faces. She watched
+them a little, and it warmed her heart to see the stiff-necked young
+Southerner led captive by a daughter of New England trained in the right
+school, who would impose her opinions in their integrity. Considering
+how prejudiced he must have been he was certainly behaving very well;
+even at that distance Miss Birdseye dimly made out that there was
+something positively humble in the way he invited Verena Tarrant to seat
+herself on a low pile of weather-blackened planks, which constituted the
+principal furniture of the place, and something, perhaps, just a trifle
+too expressive of righteous triumph in the manner in which the girl put
+the suggestion by and stood where she liked, a little proudly, turning a
+good deal away from him. Miss Birdseye could see as much as this, but
+she couldn't hear, so that she didn't know what it was that made Verena
+turn suddenly back to him, at something he said. If she had known,
+perhaps his observation would have struck her as less singular&mdash;under
+the circumstances in which these two young persons met&mdash;than it may
+appear to the reader.</p>
+
+<p>"They have accepted one of my articles; I think it's the best." These
+were the first words that passed Basil Ransom's lips after the pair had
+withdrawn as far as it was possible to withdraw (in that direction) from
+the house.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, is it printed&mdash;when does it appear?" Verena asked that question
+instantly; it sprang from her lips in a manner that completely belied
+the air of keeping herself at a distance from him which she had worn a
+few moments before.</p>
+
+<p>He didn't tell her again this time, as he had told her when, on the
+occasion of their walk together in New York, she expressed an
+inconsequent hope that his fortune as a rejected contributor would take
+a turn&mdash;he didn't remark to her once more that she was a delightful
+being; he only went on (as if her revulsion were a matter of course) to
+explain everything he could, so that she might as soon as possible know
+him better and see how completely she could trust him. "That was, at
+bottom, the reason I came here. The essay in question is the most
+important thing I have done in the way of a literary attempt, and I
+determined to give up the game or to persist, according as I should be
+able to bring it to the light or not. The other day I got a letter from
+the editor of the <i>Rational Review</i>, telling me that he should be very
+happy to print it, that he thought it very remarkable, and that he
+should be glad to hear from me again. He shall hear from me again&mdash;he
+needn't be afraid! It contained a good many of the opinions I have
+expressed to you, and a good many more besides. I really believe it will
+attract some attention. At any rate, the simple fact that it is to be
+published makes an era in my life. This will seem pitiful to you, no
+doubt, who publish yourself, have been before the world these several
+years, and are flushed with every kind of triumph; but to me it's simply
+a tremendous affair. It makes me believe I may do something; it has
+changed the whole way I look at my future. I have been building castles
+in the air, and I have put you in the biggest and fairest of them.
+That's a great change, and, as I say, it's really why I came on."</p>
+
+<p>Verena lost not a word of this gentle, conciliatory, explicit statement;
+it was full of surprises for her, and as soon as Ransom had stopped
+speaking she inquired: "Why, didn't you feel satisfied about your future
+before?"</p>
+
+<p>Her tone made him feel how little she had suspected he could have the
+weakness of a discouragement, how little of a question it must have
+seemed to her that he would one day triumph on his own erratic line. It
+was the sweetest tribute he had yet received to the idea that he might
+have ability; the letter of the editor of the <i>Rational Review</i> was
+nothing to it. "No, I felt very blue; it didn't seem to me at all clear
+that there was a place for me in the world."</p>
+
+<p>"Gracious!" said Verena Tarrant.</p>
+
+<p>A quarter of an hour later Miss Birdseye, who had returned to her
+letters (she had a correspondent at Framingham who usually wrote fifteen
+pages), became aware that Verena, who was now alone, was re-entering the
+house. She stopped her on her way, and said she hoped she hadn't pushed
+Mr. Ransom overboard.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh no; he has gone off&mdash;round the other way."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, I hope he is going to speak for us soon."</p>
+
+<p>Verena hesitated a moment. "He speaks with the pen. He has written a
+very fine article&mdash;for the <i>Rational Review</i>."</p>
+
+<p>Miss Birdseye gazed at her young friend complacently; the sheets of her
+interminable letter fluttered in the breeze. "Well, it's delightful to
+see the way it goes on, isn't it?"</p>
+
+<p>Verena scarcely knew what to say; then, remembering that Doctor Prance
+had told her that they might lose their dear old companion any day, and
+confronting it with something Basil Ransom had just said&mdash;that the
+<i>Rational Review</i> was a quarterly and the editor had notified him that
+his article would appear only in the number after the next&mdash;she
+reflected that perhaps Miss Birdseye wouldn't be there, so many months
+later, to see how it was her supposed consort had spoken. She might,
+therefore, be left to believe what she liked to believe, without fear of
+a day of reckoning. Verena committed herself to nothing more
+confirmatory than a kiss, however, which the old lady's displaced
+head-gear enabled her to imprint upon her forehead and which caused Miss
+Birdseye to exclaim, "Why, Verena Tarrant, how cold your lips are!" It
+was not surprising to Verena to hear that her lips were cold; a mortal
+chill had crept over her, for she knew that this time she should have a
+tremendous scene with Olive.</p>
+
+<p>She found her in her room, to which she had fled on quitting Mr.
+Ransom's presence; she sat in the window, having evidently sunk into a
+chair the moment she came in, a position from which she must have seen
+Verena walk through the garden and down to the water with the intruder.
+She remained as she had collapsed, quite prostrate; her attitude was the
+same as that other time Verena had found her waiting, in New York. What
+Olive was likely to say to her first the girl scarcely knew; her mind,
+at any rate, was full of an intention of her own. She went straight to
+her and fell on her knees before her, taking hold of the hands which
+were clasped together, with nervous intensity, in Miss Chancellor's lap.
+Verena remained a moment, looking up at her, and then said:</p>
+
+<p>"There is something I want to tell you now, without a moment's delay;
+something I didn't tell you at the time it happened, nor afterwards. Mr.
+Ransom came out to see me once, at Cambridge, a little while before we
+went to New York. He spent a couple of hours with me; we took a walk
+together and saw the colleges. It was after that that he wrote to
+me&mdash;when I answered his letter, as I told you in New York. I didn't tell
+you then of his visit. We had a great deal of talk about him, and I kept
+that back. I did so on purpose; I can't explain why, except that I
+didn't like to tell you, and that I thought it better. But now I want
+you to know everything; when you know that, you <i>will</i> know everything.
+It was only one visit&mdash;about two hours. I enjoyed it very much&mdash;he
+seemed so much interested. One reason I didn't tell you was that I
+didn't want you to know that he had come on to Boston, and called on me
+in Cambridge, without going to see you. I thought it might affect you
+disagreeably. I suppose you will think I deceived you; certainly I left
+you with a wrong impression. But now I want you to know all&mdash;all!"</p>
+
+<p>Verena spoke with breathless haste and eagerness; there was a kind of
+passion in the way she tried to expiate her former want of candour.
+Olive listened, staring; at first she seemed scarcely to understand. But
+Verena perceived that she understood sufficiently when she broke out:
+"You deceived me&mdash;you deceived me! Well, I must say I like your deceit
+better than such dreadful revelations! And what does anything matter
+when he has come after you now? What does he want&mdash;what has he come
+for?"</p>
+
+<p>"He has come to ask me to be his wife."</p>
+
+<p>Verena said this with the same eagerness, with as determined an air of
+not incurring any reproach this time. But as soon as she had spoken she
+buried her head in Olive's lap.</p>
+
+<p>Olive made no attempt to raise it again, and returned none of the
+pressure of her hands; she only sat silent for a time, during which
+Verena wondered that the idea of the episode at Cambridge, laid bare
+only after so many months, should not have struck her more deeply.
+Presently she saw it was because the horror of what had just happened
+drew her off from it. At last Olive asked: "Is that what he told you,
+off there by the water?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes"&mdash;and Verena looked up&mdash;"he wanted me to know it right away. He
+says it's only fair to you that he should give notice of his intentions.
+He wants to try and make me like him&mdash;so he says. He wants to see more
+of me, and he wants me to know him better."</p>
+
+<p>Olive lay back in her chair, with dilated eyes and parted lips. "Verena
+Tarrant, what <i>is</i> there between you? what <i>can</i> I hold on to, what
+<i>can</i> I believe? Two hours, in Cambridge, before we went to New York?"
+The sense that Verena had been perfidious there&mdash;perfidious in her
+reticence&mdash;now began to roll over her. "Mercy of heaven, how you did
+act!"</p>
+
+<p>"Olive, it was to spare you."</p>
+
+<p>"To spare me? If you really wished to spare me he wouldn't be here now!"</p>
+
+<p>Miss Chancellor flashed this out with a sudden violence, a spasm which
+threw Verena off and made her rise to her feet. For an instant the two
+young women stood confronted, and a person who had seen them at that
+moment might have taken them for enemies rather than friends. But any
+such opposition could last but a few seconds. Verena replied, with a
+tremor in her voice which was not that of passion, but of charity: "Do
+you mean that I expected him, that I brought him? I never in my life was
+more surprised at anything than when I saw him there."</p>
+
+<p>"Hasn't he the delicacy of one of his own slave-drivers? Doesn't he know
+you loathe him?"</p>
+
+<p>Verena looked at her friend with a degree of majesty which, with her,
+was rare. "I don't loathe him&mdash;I only dislike his opinions."</p>
+
+<p>"Dislike! Oh, misery!" And Olive turned away to the open window, leaning
+her forehead against the lifted sash.</p>
+
+<p>Verena hesitated, then went to her, passing her arm round her. "Don't
+scold me! help me&mdash;help me!" she murmured.</p>
+
+<p>Olive gave her a sidelong look; then, catching her up and facing her
+again&mdash;"Will you come away, now, by the next train?"</p>
+
+<p>"Flee from him again, as I did in New York? No, no, Olive Chancellor,
+that's not the way," Verena went on, reasoningly, as if all the wisdom
+of the ages were seated on her lips. "Then how can we leave Miss
+Birdseye, in her state? We must stay here&mdash;we must fight it out here."</p>
+
+<p>"Why not be honest, if you have been false&mdash;really honest, not only half
+so? Why not tell him plainly that you love him?"</p>
+
+<p>"Love him, Olive? why, I scarcely know him."</p>
+
+<p>"You'll have a chance, if he stays a month!"</p>
+
+<p>"I don't dislike him, certainly, as you do. But how can I love him when
+he tells me he wants me to give up everything, all our work, our faith,
+our future, never to give another address, to open my lips in public?
+How can I consent to that?" Verena went on, smiling strangely.</p>
+
+<p>"He asks you that, just that way?"</p>
+
+<p>"No; it's not that way. It's very kindly."</p>
+
+<p>"Kindly? Heaven help you, don't grovel! Doesn't he know it's my house?"
+Olive added, in a moment.</p>
+
+<p>"Of course he won't come into it, if you forbid him."</p>
+
+<p>"So that you may meet him in other places&mdash;on the shore, in the
+country?"</p>
+
+<p>"I certainly shan't avoid him, hide away from him," said Verena proudly.
+"I thought I made you believe, in New York, that I really cared for our
+aspirations. The way for me then is to meet him, feeling conscious of my
+strength. What if I do like him? what does it matter? I like my work in
+the world, I like everything I believe in, better."</p>
+
+<p>Olive listened to this, and the memory of how, in the house in Tenth
+Street, Verena had rebuked her doubts, professed her own faith anew,
+came back to her with a force which made the present situation appear
+slightly less terrific. Nevertheless, she gave no assent to the girl's
+logic; she only replied: "But you didn't meet him there; you hurried
+away from New York, after I was willing you should stay. He affected you
+very much there; you were not so calm when you came back to me from your
+expedition to the park as you pretend to be now. To get away from him
+you gave up all the rest."</p>
+
+<p>"I know I wasn't so calm. But now I have had three months to think about
+it&mdash;about the way he affected me there. I take it very quietly."</p>
+
+<p>"No, you don't; you are not calm now!"</p>
+
+<p>Verena was silent a moment, while Olive's eyes continued to search her,
+accuse her, condemn her. "It's all the more reason you shouldn't give me
+stab after stab," she replied, with a gentleness which was infinitely
+touching.</p>
+
+<p>It had an instant effect upon Olive; she burst into tears, threw herself
+on her friend's bosom. "Oh, don't desert me&mdash;don't desert me, or you'll
+kill me in torture," she moaned, shuddering.</p>
+
+<p>"You must help me&mdash;you must help me!" cried Verena, imploringly too.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="XXXVII" id="XXXVII"></a>XXXVII</h2>
+
+
+<p>Basil Ransom spent nearly a month at Marmion; in announcing this fact I
+am very conscious of its extraordinary character. Poor Olive may well
+have been thrown back into her alarms by his presenting himself there;
+for after her return from New York she took to her soul the conviction
+that she had really done with him. Not only did the impulse of revulsion
+under which Verena had demanded that their departure from Tenth Street
+should be immediate appear to her a proof that it had been sufficient
+for her young friend to touch Mr. Ransom's moral texture with her
+finger, as it were, in order to draw back for ever; but what she had
+learned from her companion of his own manifestations, his apparent
+disposition to throw up the game, added to her feeling of security. He
+had spoken to Verena of their little excursion as his last opportunity,
+let her know that he regarded it not as the beginning of a more intimate
+acquaintance but as the end even of such relations as already existed
+between them. He gave her up, for reasons best known to himself; if he
+wanted to frighten Olive he judged that he had frightened her enough:
+his Southern chivalry suggested to him perhaps that he ought to let her
+off before he had worried her to death. Doubtless, too, he had perceived
+how vain it was to hope to make Verena abjure a faith so solidly
+founded; and though he admired her enough to wish to possess her on his
+own terms, he shrank from the mortification which the future would have
+in keeping for him&mdash;that of finding that, after six months of courting
+and in spite of all her sympathy, her desire to do what people expected
+of her, she despised his opinions as much as the first day. Olive
+Chancellor was able to a certain extent to believe what she wished to
+believe, and that was one reason why she had twisted Verena's flight
+from New York, just after she let her friend see how much she should
+like to drink deeper of the cup, into a warrant for living in a fool's
+paradise. If she had been less afraid, she would have read things more
+clearly; she would have seen that we don't run away from people unless
+we fear them and that we don't fear them unless we know that we are
+unarmed. Verena feared Basil Ransom now (though this time she declined
+to run); but now she had taken up her weapons, she had told Olive she
+was exposed, she had asked <i>her</i> to be her defence. Poor Olive was
+stricken as she had never been before, but the extremity of her danger
+gave her a desperate energy. The only comfort in her situation was that
+this time Verena had confessed her peril, had thrown herself into her
+hands. "I like him&mdash;I can't help it&mdash;I do like him. I don't want to
+marry him, I don't want to embrace his ideas, which are unspeakably
+false and horrible; but I like him better than any gentleman I have
+seen." So much as this the girl announced to her friend as soon as the
+conversation of which I have just given a sketch was resumed, as it was
+very soon, you may be sure, and very often, in the course of the next
+few days. That was her way of saying that a great crisis had arrived in
+her life, and the statement needed very little amplification to stand as
+a shy avowal that she too had succumbed to the universal passion. Olive
+had had her suspicions, her terrors, before; but she perceived now how
+idle and foolish they had been, and that this was a different affair
+from any of the "phases" of which she had hitherto anxiously watched the
+development. As I say, she felt it to be a considerable mercy that
+Verena's attitude was frank, for it gave her something to take hold of;
+she could no longer be put off with sophistries about receiving visits
+from handsome and unscrupulous young men for the sake of the
+opportunities it gave one to convert them. She took hold, accordingly,
+with passion, with fury; after the shock of Ransom's arrival had passed
+away she determined that he should not find her chilled into dumb
+submission. Verena had told her that she wanted her to hold her tight,
+to rescue her; and there was no fear that, for an instant, she should
+sleep at her post.</p>
+
+<p>"I like him&mdash;I like him; but I want to hate&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"You want to hate him!" Olive broke in.</p>
+
+<p>"No, I want to hate my liking. I want you to keep before me all the
+reasons why I should&mdash;many of them so fearfully important. Don't let me
+lose sight of anything! Don't be afraid I shall not be grateful when you
+remind me."</p>
+
+<p>That was one of the singular speeches that Verena made in the course of
+their constant discussion of the terrible question, and it must be
+confessed that she made a great many. The strangest of all was when she
+protested, as she did again and again to Olive, against the idea of
+their seeking safety in retreat. She said there was a want of dignity in
+it&mdash;that she had been ashamed, afterwards, of what she had done in
+rushing away from New York. This care for her moral appearance was, on
+Verena's part, something new; inasmuch as, though she had struck that
+note on previous occasions&mdash;had insisted on its being her duty to face
+the accidents and alarms of life&mdash;she had never erected such a standard
+in the face of a disaster so sharply possible. It was not her habit
+either to talk or to think about her dignity, and when Olive found her
+taking that tone she felt more than ever that the dreadful, ominous,
+fatal part of the situation was simply that now, for the first time in
+all the history of their sacred friendship, Verena was not sincere. She
+was not sincere when she told her that she wanted to be helped against
+Mr. Ransom&mdash;when she exhorted her, that way, to keep everything that was
+salutary and fortifying before her eyes. Olive did not go so far as to
+believe that she was playing a part and putting her off with words
+which, glossing over her treachery, only made it more cruel; she would
+have admitted that that treachery was as yet unwitting, that Verena
+deceived herself first of all, thinking she really wished to be saved.
+Her phrases about her dignity were insincere, as well as her pretext
+that they must stay to look after Miss Birdseye: as if Doctor Prance
+were not abundantly able to discharge that function and would not be
+enchanted to get them out of the house! Olive had perfectly divined by
+this time that Doctor Prance had no sympathy with their movement, no
+general ideas; that she was simply shut up to petty questions of
+physiological science and of her own professional activity. She would
+never have invited her down if she had realised this in advance so much
+as the doctor's dry detachment from all their discussions, their
+readings and practisings, her constant expeditions to fish and botanise,
+subsequently enabled her to do. She was very narrow, but it did seem as
+if she knew more about Miss Birdseye's peculiar physical
+conditions&mdash;they were <i>very</i> peculiar&mdash;than any one else, and this was a
+comfort at a time when that admirable woman seemed to be suffering a
+loss of vitality.</p>
+
+<p>"The great point is that it must be met some time, and it will be a
+tremendous relief to have it over. He is determined to have it out with
+me, and if the battle doesn't come off to-day we shall have to fight it
+to-morrow. I don't see why this isn't as good a time as any other. My
+lecture for the Music Hall is as good as finished, and I haven't got
+anything else to do; so I can give all my attention to our personal
+struggle. It requires a good deal, you would admit, if you knew how
+wonderfully he can talk. If we should leave this place to-morrow he
+would come after us to the very next one. He would follow us everywhere.
+A little while ago we could have escaped him, because he says that then
+he had no money. He hasn't got much now, but he has got enough to pay
+his way. He is so encouraged by the reception of his article by the
+editor of the <i>Rational Review</i>, that he is sure that in future his pen
+will be a resource."</p>
+
+<p>These remarks were uttered by Verena after Basil Ransom had been three
+days at Marmion, and when she reached this point her companion
+interrupted her with the inquiry, "Is that what he proposes to support
+you with&mdash;his pen?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh yes; of course he admits we should be terribly poor."</p>
+
+<p>"And this vision of a literary career is based entirely upon an article
+that hasn't yet seen the light? I don't see how a man of any refinement
+can approach a woman with so beggarly an account of his position in
+life."</p>
+
+<p>"He says he wouldn't&mdash;he would have been ashamed&mdash;three months ago; that
+was why, when we were in New York, and he felt, even then&mdash;well (so he
+says) all he feels now, he made up his mind not to persist, to let me
+go. But just lately a change has taken place; his state of mind altered
+completely, in the course of a week, in consequence of the letter that
+editor wrote him about his contribution, and his paying for it right
+off. It was a remarkably flattering letter. He says he believes in his
+future now; he has before him a vision of distinction, of influence, and
+of fortune, not great, perhaps, but sufficient to make life tolerable.
+He doesn't think life is very delightful, in the nature of things; but
+one of the best things a man can do with it is to get hold of some woman
+(of course, she must please him very much, to make it worth while) whom
+he may draw close to him."</p>
+
+<p>"And couldn't he get hold of any one but you&mdash;among all the exposed
+millions of our sex?" poor Olive groaned. "Why must he pick you out,
+when everything he knew about you showed you to be, exactly, the very
+last?"</p>
+
+<p>"That's just what I have asked him, and he only remarks that there is no
+reasoning about such things. He fell in love with me that first evening,
+at Miss Birdseye's. So you see there was some ground for that mystic
+apprehension of yours. It seems as if I pleased him more than any one."</p>
+
+<p>Olive flung herself over on the couch, burying her face in the cushions,
+which she tumbled in her despair, and moaning out that he didn't love
+Verena, he never had loved her, it was only his hatred of their cause
+that made him pretend it; he wanted to do that an injury, to do it the
+worst he could think of. He didn't love her, he hated her, he only
+wanted to smother her, to crush her, to kill her&mdash;as she would
+infallibly see that he would if she listened to him. It was because he
+knew that her voice had magic in it, and from the moment he caught its
+first note he had determined to destroy it. It was not tenderness that
+moved him&mdash;it was devilish malignity; tenderness would be incapable of
+requiring the horrible sacrifice that he was not ashamed to ask, of
+requiring her to commit perjury and blasphemy, to desert a work, an
+interest, with which her very heart-strings were interlaced, to give the
+lie to her whole young past, to her purest, holiest ambitions. Olive put
+forward no claim of her own, breathed, at first, at least, not a word of
+remonstrance in the name of her personal loss, of their blighted union;
+she only dwelt upon the unspeakable tragedy of a defection from their
+standard, of a failure on Verena's part to carry out what she had
+undertaken, of the horror of seeing her bright career blotted out with
+darkness and tears, of the joy and elation that would fill the breast of
+all their adversaries at this illustrious, consummate proof of the
+fickleness, the futility, the predestined servility, of women. A man had
+only to whistle for her, and she who had pretended most was delighted to
+come and kneel at his feet. Olive's most passionate protest was summed
+up in her saying that if Verena were to forsake them it would put back
+the emancipation of women a hundred years. She did not, during these
+dreadful days, talk continuously; she had long periods of pale,
+intensely anxious, watchful silence, interrupted by outbreaks of
+passionate argument, entreaty, invocation. It was Verena who talked
+incessantly, Verena who was in a state entirely new to her, and, as any
+one could see, in an attitude entirely unnatural and overdone. If she
+was deceiving herself, as Olive said, there was something very affecting
+in her effort, her ingenuity. If she tried to appear to Olive impartial,
+coldly judicious, in her attitude with regard to Basil Ransom, and only
+anxious to see, for the moral satisfaction of the thing, how good a
+case, as a lover, he might make out for himself and how much he might
+touch her susceptibilities, she endeavoured, still more earnestly, to
+practise this fraud upon her own imagination. She abounded in every
+proof that she should be in despair if she should be overborne, and she
+thought of arguments even more convincing, if possible, than Olive's,
+why she should hold on to her old faith, why she should resist even at
+the cost of acute temporary suffering. She was voluble, fluent,
+feverish; she was perpetually bringing up the subject, as if to
+encourage her friend, to show how she kept possession of her judgement,
+how independent she remained.</p>
+
+<p>No stranger situation can be imagined than that of these extraordinary
+young women at this juncture; it was so singular on Verena's part, in
+particular, that I despair of presenting it to the reader with the air
+of reality. To understand it, one must bear in mind her peculiar
+frankness, natural and acquired, her habit of discussing questions,
+sentiments, moralities, her education, in the atmosphere of
+lecture-rooms, of <i>s&eacute;ances</i>, her familiarity with the vocabulary of
+emotion, the mysteries of "the spiritual life." She had learned to
+breathe and move in a rarefied air, as she would have learned to speak
+Chinese if her success in life had depended upon it; but this dazzling
+trick, and all her artlessly artful facilities, were not a part of her
+essence, an expression of her innermost preferences. What <i>was</i> a part
+of her essence was the extraordinary generosity with which she could
+expose herself, give herself away, turn herself inside out, for the
+satisfaction of a person who made demands of her. Olive, as we know, had
+made the reflexion that no one was naturally less preoccupied with the
+idea of her dignity, and though Verena put it forward as an excuse for
+remaining where they were, it must be admitted that in reality she was
+very deficient in the desire to be consistent with herself. Olive had
+contributed with all her zeal to the development of Verena's gift; but I
+scarcely venture to think now, what she may have said to herself, in the
+secrecy of deep meditation, about the consequences of cultivating an
+abundant eloquence. Did she say that Verena was attempting to smother
+her now in her own phrases? did she view with dismay the fatal effect of
+trying to have an answer for everything? From Olive's condition during
+these lamentable weeks there is a certain propriety&mdash;a delicacy enjoined
+by the respect for misfortune&mdash;in averting our head. She neither ate nor
+slept; she could scarcely speak without bursting into tears; she felt so
+implacably, insidiously baffled. She remembered the magnanimity with
+which she had declined (the winter before the last) to receive the vow
+of eternal maidenhood which she had at first demanded and then put by as
+too crude a test, but which Verena, for a precious hour, for ever flown,
+would <i>then</i> have been willing to take. She repented of it with
+bitterness and rage; and then she asked herself, more desperately still,
+whether even if she held that pledge she should be brave enough to
+enforce it in the face of actual complications. She believed that if it
+were in her power to say, "No, I won't let you off; I have your solemn
+word, and I won't!" Verena would bow to that decree and remain with her;
+but the magic would have passed out of her spirit for ever, the
+sweetness out of their friendship, the efficacy out of their work. She
+said to her again and again that she had utterly changed since that hour
+she came to her, in New York, after her morning with Mr. Ransom, and
+sobbed out that they must hurry away. Then she had been wounded,
+outraged, sickened, and in the interval nothing had happened, nothing
+but that one exchange of letters, which she knew about, to bring her
+round to a shameless tolerance. Shameless Verena admitted it to be; she
+assented over and over to this proposition, and explained, as eagerly
+each time as if it were the first, what it was that had come to pass,
+what it was that had brought her round. It had simply come over her that
+she liked him, that this was the true point of view, the only one from
+which one could consider the situation in a way that would lead to what
+she called a <i>real</i> solution&mdash;a permanent rest. On this particular point
+Verena never responded, in the liberal way I have mentioned, without
+asseverating at the same time that what she desired most in the world
+was to prove (the picture Olive had held up from the first) that a woman
+<i>could</i> live on persistently, clinging to a great, vivifying, redemptory
+idea, without the help of a man. To testify to the end against the stale
+superstition&mdash;mother of every misery&mdash;that those gentry were as
+indispensable as they had proclaimed themselves on the house-tops&mdash;that,
+she passionately protested, was as inspiring a thought in the present
+poignant crisis as it had ever been.</p>
+
+<p>The one grain of comfort that Olive extracted from the terrors that
+pressed upon her was that now she knew the worst; she knew it since
+Verena had told her, after so long and so ominous a reticence, of the
+detestable episode at Cambridge. That seemed to her the worst, because
+it had been thunder in a clear sky; the incident had sprung from a
+quarter from which, months before, all symptoms appeared to have
+vanished. Though Verena had now done all she could to make up for her
+perfidious silence by repeating everything that passed between them as
+she sat with Mr. Ransom in Monadnoc Place or strolled with him through
+the colleges, it imposed itself upon Olive that that occasion was the
+key of all that had happened since, that he had then obtained an
+irremediable hold upon her. If Verena had spoken at the time, she would
+never have let her go to New York; the sole compensation for that
+hideous mistake was that the girl, recognising it to the full, evidently
+deemed now that she couldn't be communicative enough. There were certain
+afternoons in August, long, beautiful and terrible, when one felt that
+the summer was rounding its curve, and the rustle of the full-leaved
+trees in the slanting golden light, in the breeze that ought to be
+delicious, seemed the voice of the coming autumn, of the warnings and
+dangers of life&mdash;portentous, insufferable hours when, as she sat under
+the softly swaying vine-leaves of the trellis with Miss Birdseye and
+tried, in order to still her nerves, to read something aloud to her
+guest, the sound of her own quavering voice made her think more of that
+baleful day at Cambridge than even of the fact that at that very moment
+Verena was "off" with Mr. Ransom&mdash;had gone to take the little daily walk
+with him to which it had been arranged that their enjoyment of each
+other's society should be reduced. Arranged, I say; but that is not
+exactly the word to describe the compromise arrived at by a kind of
+tacit exchange of tearful entreaty and tightened grasp, after Ransom had
+made it definite to Verena that he was indeed going to stay a month and
+she had promised that she would not resort to base evasions, to flight
+(which would avail her nothing, he notified her), but would give him a
+chance, would listen to him a few minutes every day. He had insisted
+that the few minutes should be an hour, and the way to spend it was
+obvious. They wandered along the waterside to a rocky, shrub-covered
+point, which made a walk of just the right duration. Here all the homely
+languor of the region, the mild, fragrant Cape-quality, the sweetness of
+white sands, quiet waters, low promontories where there were paths among
+the barberries and tidal pools gleamed in the sunset&mdash;here all the
+spirit of a ripe summer afternoon seemed to hang in the air. There were
+wood-walks too; they sometimes followed bosky uplands, where accident
+had grouped the trees with odd effects of "style," and where in grassy
+intervals and fragrant nooks of rest they came out upon sudden patches
+of Arcady. In such places Verena listened to her companion with her
+watch in her hand, and she wondered, very sincerely, how he could care
+for a girl who made the conditions of courtship so odious. He had
+recognised, of course, at the very first, that he could not inflict
+himself again upon Miss Chancellor, and after that awkward morning-call
+I have described he did not again, for the first three weeks of his stay
+at Marmion, penetrate into the cottage whose back windows overlooked the
+deserted shipyard. Olive, as may be imagined, made, on this occasion, no
+protest for the sake of being ladylike or of preventing him from putting
+her apparently in the wrong. The situation between them was too grim; it
+was war to the knife, it was a question of which should pull hardest. So
+Verena took a tryst with the young man as if she had been a maid-servant
+and Basil Ransom a "follower." They met a little way from the house;
+beyond it, outside the village.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="XXXVIII" id="XXXVIII"></a>XXXVIII</h2>
+
+
+<p>Olive thought she knew the worst, as we have perceived; but the worst
+was really something she could not know, inasmuch as up to this time
+Verena chose as little to confide to her on that one point as she was
+careful to expatiate with her on every other. The change that had taken
+place in the object of Basil Ransom's merciless devotion since the
+episode in New York was, briefly, just this change&mdash;that the words he
+had spoken to her there about her genuine vocation, as distinguished
+from the hollow and factitious ideal with which her family and her
+association with Olive Chancellor had saddled her&mdash;these words, the most
+effective and penetrating he had uttered, had sunk into her soul and
+worked and fermented there. She had come at last to believe them, and
+that was the alteration, the transformation. They had kindled a light in
+which she saw herself afresh and, strange to say, liked herself better
+than in the old exaggerated glamour of the lecture-lamps. She could not
+tell Olive this yet, for it struck at the root of everything, and the
+dreadful, delightful sensation filled her with a kind of awe at all that
+it implied and portended. She was to burn everything she had adored; she
+was to adore everything she had burned. The extraordinary part of it was
+that though she felt the situation to be, as I say, tremendously
+serious, she was not ashamed of the treachery which she&mdash;yes, decidedly,
+by this time she must admit it to herself&mdash;she meditated. It was simply
+that the truth had changed sides; that radiant image began to look at
+her from Basil Ransom's expressive eyes. She loved, she was in love&mdash;she
+felt it in every throb of her being. Instead of being constituted by
+nature for entertaining that sentiment in an exceptionally small degree
+(which had been the implication of her whole crusade, the warrant for
+her offer of old to Olive to renounce), she was framed, apparently, to
+allow it the largest range, the highest intensity. It was always
+passion, in fact; but now the object was other. Formerly she had been
+convinced that the fire of her spirit was a kind of double flame, one
+half of which was responsive friendship for a most extraordinary person,
+and the other pity for the sufferings of women in general. Verena gazed
+aghast at the colourless dust into which, in three short months
+(counting from the episode in New York), such a conviction as that could
+crumble; she felt it must be a magical touch that could bring about such
+a cataclysm. Why Basil Ransom had been deputed by fate to exercise this
+spell was more than she could say&mdash;poor Verena, who up to so lately had
+flattered herself that she had a wizard's wand in her own pocket.</p>
+
+<p>When she saw him a little way off, about five o'clock&mdash;the hour she
+usually went out to meet him&mdash;waiting for her at a bend of the road
+which lost itself, after a winding, straggling mile or two, in the
+indented, insulated "point," where the wandering bee droned through the
+hot hours with a vague, misguided flight, she felt that his tall,
+watching figure, with the low horizon behind, represented well the
+importance, the towering eminence he had in her mind&mdash;the fact that he
+was just now, to her vision, the most definite and upright, the most
+incomparable, object in the world. If he had not been at his post when
+she expected him she would have had to stop and lean against something,
+for weakness; her whole being would have throbbed more painfully than it
+throbbed at present, though finding him there made her nervous enough.
+And who was he, what was he? she asked herself. What did he offer her
+besides a chance (in which there was no compensation of brilliancy or
+fashion) to falsify, in a conspicuous manner, every hope and pledge she
+had hitherto given? He allowed her, certainly, no illusion on the
+subject of the fate she should meet as his wife; he flung over it no
+rosiness of promised ease; he let her know that she should be poor,
+withdrawn from view, a partner of his struggle, of his severe, hard,
+unique stoicism. When he spoke of such things as these, and bent his
+eyes on her, she could not keep the tears from her own; she felt that to
+throw herself into his life (bare and arid as for the time it was) was
+the condition of happiness for her, and yet that the obstacles were
+terrible, cruel. It must not be thought that the revolution which was
+taking place in her was unaccompanied with suffering. She suffered less
+than Olive certainly, for her bent was not, like her friend's, in that
+direction; but as the wheel of her experience went round she had the
+sensation of being ground very small indeed. With her light, bright
+texture, her complacent responsiveness, her genial, graceful, ornamental
+cast, her desire to keep on pleasing others at the time when a force she
+had never felt before was pushing her to please herself, poor Verena
+lived in these days in a state of moral tension&mdash;with a sense of being
+strained and aching&mdash;which she didn't betray more only because it was
+absolutely not in her power to look desperate. An immense pity for Olive
+sat in her heart, and she asked herself how far it was necessary to go
+in the path of self-sacrifice. Nothing was wanting to make the wrong she
+should do her complete; she had deceived her up to the very last; only
+three months earlier she had reasserted her vows, given her word, with
+every show of fidelity and enthusiasm. There were hours when it seemed
+to Verena that she must really push her inquiry no further, but content
+herself with the conclusion that she loved as deeply as a woman could
+love and that it didn't make any difference. She felt Olive's grasp too
+clinching, too terrible. She said to herself that she should never dare,
+that she might as well give up early as late; that the scene, at the
+end, would be something she couldn't face; that she had no right to
+blast the poor creature's whole future. She had a vision of those
+dreadful years; she knew that Olive would never get over the
+disappointment. It would touch her in the point where she felt
+everything most keenly; she would be incurably lonely and eternally
+humiliated. It was a very peculiar thing, their friendship; it had
+elements which made it probably as complete as any (between women) that
+had ever existed. Of course it had been more on Olive's side than on
+hers, she had always known that; but that, again, didn't make any
+difference. It was of no use for her to tell herself that Olive had
+begun it entirely and she had only responded out of a kind of charmed
+politeness, at first, to a tremendous appeal. She had lent herself,
+given herself, utterly, and she ought to have known better if she didn't
+mean to abide by it. At the end of three weeks she felt that her inquiry
+was complete, but that after all nothing was gained except an immense
+interest in Basil Ransom's views and the prospect of an eternal
+heartache. He had told her he wanted her to know him, and now she knew
+him pretty thoroughly. She knew him and she adored him, but it didn't
+make any difference. To give him up or to give Olive up&mdash;this effort
+would be the greater of the two.</p>
+
+<p>If Basil Ransom had the advantage, as far back as that day in New York,
+of having struck a note which was to reverberate, it may easily be
+imagined that he did not fail to follow it up. If he had projected a new
+light into Verena's mind, and made the idea of giving herself to a man
+more agreeable to her than that of giving herself to a movement, he
+found means to deepen this illumination, to drag her former standard in
+the dust. He was in a very odd situation indeed, carrying on his siege
+with his hands tied. As he had to do everything in an hour a day, he
+perceived that he must confine himself to the essential. The essential
+was to show her how much he loved her, and then to press, to press,
+always to press. His hovering about Miss Chancellor's habitation without
+going in was a strange regimen to be subjected to, and he was sorry not
+to see more of Miss Birdseye, besides often not knowing what to do with
+himself in the mornings and evenings. Fortunately he had brought plenty
+of books (volumes of rusty aspect, picked up at New York bookstalls),
+and in such an affair as this he could take the less when the more was
+forbidden him. For the mornings, sometimes, he had the resource of
+Doctor Prance, with whom he made a great many excursions on the water.
+She was devoted to boating and an ardent fisherwoman, and they used to
+pull out into the bay together, cast their lines, and talk a prodigious
+amount of heresy. She met him, as Verena met him, "in the environs," but
+in a different spirit. He was immensely amused at her attitude, and saw
+that nothing in the world could, as he expressed it, make her wink. She
+would never blench nor show surprise; she had an air of taking
+everything abnormal for granted; betrayed no consciousness of the oddity
+of Ransom's situation; said nothing to indicate she had noticed that
+Miss Chancellor was in a frenzy or that Verena had a daily appointment.
+You might have supposed from her manner that it was as natural for
+Ransom to sit on a fence half a mile off as in one of the red
+rocking-chairs, of the so-called "Shaker" species, which adorned Miss
+Chancellor's back verandah. The only thing our young man didn't like
+about Doctor Prance was the impression she gave him (out of the crevices
+of her reticence he hardly knew how it leaked) that she thought Verena
+rather slim. She took an ironical view of almost any kind of courtship,
+and he could see she didn't wonder women were such featherheads, so long
+as, whatever brittle follies they cultivated, they could get men to come
+and sit on fences for them. Doctor Prance told him Miss Birdseye noticed
+nothing; she had sunk, within a few days, into a kind of transfigured
+torpor; she didn't seem to know whether Mr. Ransom were anywhere round
+or not. She guessed she thought he had just come down for a day and gone
+off again; she probably supposed he just wanted to get toned up a little
+by Miss Tarrant. Sometimes, out in the boat, when she looked at him in
+vague, sociable silence, while she waited for a bite (she delighted in a
+bite), she had an expression of diabolical shrewdness. When Ransom was
+not scorching there beside her (he didn't mind the sun of
+Massachusetts), he lounged about in the pastoral land which hung (at a
+very moderate elevation) above the shore. He always had a book in his
+pocket, and he lay under whispering trees and kicked his heels and made
+up his mind on what side he should take Verena the next time. At the end
+of a fortnight he had succeeded (so he believed, at least) far better
+than he had hoped, in this sense, that the girl had now the air of
+making much more light of her "gift." He was indeed quite appalled at
+the facility with which she threw it over, gave up the idea that it was
+useful and precious. That had been what he wanted her to do, and the
+fact of the sacrifice (once she had fairly looked at it) costing her so
+little only proved his contention, only made it clear that it was not
+necessary to her happiness to spend half her life ranting (no matter how
+prettily) in public. All the same he said to himself that, to make up
+for the loss of whatever was sweet in the reputation of the thing, he
+should have to be tremendously nice to her in all the coming years.
+During the first week he was at Marmion she made of him an inquiry which
+touched on this point.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, if it's all a mere delusion, why should this facility have been
+given me&mdash;why should I have been saddled with a superfluous talent? I
+don't care much about it&mdash;I don't mind telling you that; but I confess I
+should like to know what is to become of all that part of me, if I
+retire into private life, and live, as you say, simply to be charming
+for you. I shall be like a singer with a beautiful voice (you have told
+me yourself my voice is beautiful) who has accepted some decree of never
+raising a note. Isn't that a great waste, a great violation of nature?
+Were not our talents given us to use, and have we any right to smother
+them and deprive our fellow-creatures of such pleasure as they may
+confer? In the arrangement you propose" (that was Verena's way of
+speaking of the question of their marriage) "I don't see what provision
+is made for the poor faithful, dismissed servant. It is all very well to
+be charming to you, but there are people who have told me that once I
+get on a platform I am charming to all the world. There is no harm in my
+speaking of that, because you have told me so yourself. Perhaps you
+intend to have a platform erected in our front parlour, where I can
+address you every evening, and put you to sleep after your work. I say
+our <i>front</i> parlour, as if it were certain we should have two! It
+doesn't look as if our means would permit that&mdash;and we must have some
+place to dine, if there is to be a platform in our sitting-room."</p>
+
+<p>"My dear young woman, it will be easy to solve the difficulty: the
+dining-table itself shall be our platform, and you shall mount on top of
+that." This was Basil Ransom's sportive reply to his companion's very
+natural appeal for light, and the reader will remark that if it led her
+to push her investigation no further, she was very easily satisfied.
+There was more reason, however, as well as more appreciation of a very
+considerable mystery, in what he went on to say. "Charming to me,
+charming to all the world? What will become of your charm?&mdash;is that what
+you want to know? It will be about five thousand times greater than it
+is now; that's what will become of it. We shall find plenty of room for
+your facility; it will lubricate our whole existence. Believe me, Miss
+Tarrant, these things will take care of themselves. You won't sing in
+the Music Hall, but you will sing to me; you will sing to every one who
+knows you and approaches you. Your gift is indestructible; don't talk as
+if I either wanted to wipe it out or should be able to make it a
+particle less divine. I want to give it another direction, certainly;
+but I don't want to stop your activity. Your gift is the gift of
+expression, and there is nothing I can do for you that will make you
+less expressive. It won't gush out at a fixed hour and on a fixed day,
+but it will irrigate, it will fertilise, it will brilliantly adorn your
+conversation. Think how delightful it will be when your influence
+becomes really social. Your facility, as you call it, will simply make
+you, in conversation, the most charming woman in America."</p>
+
+<p>It is to be feared, indeed, that Verena was easily satisfied (convinced,
+I mean, not that she ought to succumb to him, but that there were
+lovely, neglected, almost unsuspected truths on his side); and there is
+further evidence on the same head in the fact that after the first once
+or twice she found nothing to say to him (much as she was always saying
+to herself) about the cruel effect her apostasy would have upon Olive.
+She forbore to plead that reason after she had seen how angry it made
+him, and with how almost savage a contempt he denounced so flimsy a
+pretext. He wanted to know since when it was more becoming to take up
+with a morbid old maid than with an honourable young man; and when
+Verena pronounced the sacred name of friendship he inquired what
+fanatical sophistry excluded him from a similar privilege. She had told
+him, in a moment of expansion (Verena believed she was immensely on her
+guard, but her guard was very apt to be lowered), that his visits to
+Marmion cast in Olive's view a remarkable light upon his chivalry; she
+chose to regard his resolute pursuit of Verena as a covert persecution
+of herself. Verena repented, as soon as she had spoken, of having given
+further currency to this taunt; but she perceived the next moment no
+harm was done, Basil Ransom taking in perfectly good part Miss
+Chancellor's reflexions on his delicacy, and making them the subject of
+much free laughter. She could not know, for in the midst of his hilarity
+the young man did not compose himself to tell her, that he had made up
+his mind on this question before he left New York&mdash;as long ago as when
+he wrote her the note (subsequent to her departure from that city) to
+which allusion has already been made, and which was simply the fellow of
+the letter addressed to her after his visit to Cambridge: a friendly,
+respectful, yet rather pregnant sign that, decidedly, on second
+thoughts, separation didn't imply for him the intention of silence. We
+know a little about his second thoughts, as much as is essential, and
+especially how the occasion of their springing up had been the windfall
+of an editor's encouragement. The importance of that encouragement, to
+Basil's imagination, was doubtless much augmented by his desire for an
+excuse to take up again a line of behaviour which he had forsworn (small
+as had, as yet, been his opportunity to indulge in it) very much less
+than he supposed; still, it worked an appreciable revolution in his view
+of his case, and made him ask himself what amount of consideration he
+should (from the most refined Southern point of view) owe Miss
+Chancellor in the event of his deciding to go after Verena Tarrant in
+earnest. He was not slow to decide that he owed her none. Chivalry had
+to do with one's relations with people one hated, not with those one
+loved. He didn't hate poor Miss Olive, though she might make him yet;
+and even if he did, any chivalry was all moonshine which should require
+him to give up the girl he adored in order that his third cousin should
+see he could be gallant. Chivalry was forbearance and generosity with
+regard to the weak; and there was nothing weak about Miss Olive, she was
+a fighting woman, and she would fight him to the death, giving him not
+an inch of odds. He felt that she was fighting there all day long, in
+her cottage fortress; her resistance was in the air he breathed, and
+Verena came out to him sometimes quite limp and pale from the tussle.</p>
+
+<p>It was in the same jocose spirit with which he regarded Olive's view of
+the sort of standard a Mississippian should live up to that he talked to
+Verena about the lecture she was preparing for her great exhibition at
+the Music Hall. He learned from her that she was to take the field in
+the manner of Mrs. Farrinder, for a winter campaign, carrying with her a
+tremendous big gun. Her engagements were all made, her route was marked
+out; she expected to repeat her lecture in about fifty different places.
+It was to be called "A Woman's Reason," and both Olive and Miss Birdseye
+thought it, so far as they could tell in advance, her most promising
+effort. She wasn't going to trust to inspiration this time; she didn't
+want to meet a big Boston audience without knowing where she was.
+Inspiration, moreover, seemed rather to have faded away; in consequence
+of Olive's influence she had read and studied so much that it seemed now
+as if everything must take form beforehand. Olive was a splendid critic,
+whether he liked her or not, and she had made her go over every word of
+her lecture twenty times. There wasn't an intonation she hadn't made her
+practise; it was very different from the old system, when her father had
+worked her up. If Basil considered women superficial, it was a pity he
+couldn't see what Olive's standard of preparation was, or be present at
+their rehearsals, in the evening, in their little parlour. Ransom's
+state of mind in regard to the affair at the Music Hall was simply
+this&mdash;that he was determined to circumvent it if he could. He covered it
+with ridicule, in talking of it to Verena, and the shafts he levelled at
+it went so far that he could see she thought he exaggerated his dislike
+to it. In point of fact he could not have overstated that; so odious did
+the idea seem to him that she was soon to be launched in a more
+infatuated career. He vowed to himself that she should never take that
+fresh start which would commit her irretrievably if she should succeed
+(and she would succeed&mdash;he had not the slightest doubt of her power to
+produce a sensation in the Music Hall), to the acclamations of the
+newspapers. He didn't care for her engagements, her campaigns, or all
+the expectancy of her friends; to "squelch" all that, at a stroke, was
+the dearest wish of his heart. It would represent to him his own
+success, it would symbolise his victory. It became a fixed idea with
+him, and he warned her again and again. When she laughed and said she
+didn't see how he could stop her unless he kidnapped her, he really
+pitied her for not perceiving, beneath his ominous pleasantries, the
+firmness of his resolution. He felt almost capable of kidnapping her. It
+was palpably in the air that she would become "widely popular," and that
+idea simply sickened him. He felt as differently as possible about it
+from Mr. Matthias Pardon.</p>
+
+<p>One afternoon, as he returned with Verena from a walk which had been
+accomplished completely within the prescribed conditions, he saw, from a
+distance, Doctor Prance, who had emerged bare-headed from the cottage,
+and, shading her eyes from the red, declining sun, was looking up and
+down the road. It was part of the regulation that Ransom should separate
+from Verena before reaching the house, and they had just paused to
+exchange their last words (which every day promoted the situation more
+than any others), when Doctor Prance began to beckon to them with much
+animation. They hurried forward, Verena pressing her hand to her heart,
+for she had instantly guessed that something terrible had happened to
+Olive&mdash;she had given out, fainted away, perhaps fallen dead, with the
+cruelty of the strain. Doctor Prance watched them come, with a curious
+look in her face; it was not a smile, but a kind of exaggerated
+intimation that she noticed nothing. In an instant she had told them
+what was the matter. Miss Birdseye had had a sudden weakness; she had
+remarked abruptly that she was dying, and her pulse, sure enough, had
+fallen to nothing. She was down on the piazza with Miss Chancellor and
+herself, and they had tried to get her up to bed. But she wouldn't let
+them move her; she was passing away, and she wanted to pass away just
+there, in such a pleasant place, in her customary chair, looking at the
+sunset. She asked for Miss Tarrant, and Miss Chancellor told her she was
+out&mdash;walking with Mr. Ransom. Then she wanted to know if Mr. Ransom was
+still there&mdash;she supposed he had gone. (Basil knew, by Verena, apart
+from this, that his name had not been mentioned to the old lady since
+the morning he saw her.) She expressed a wish to see him&mdash;she had
+something to say to him; and Miss Chancellor told her that he would be
+back soon, with Verena, and that they would bring him in. Miss Birdseye
+said she hoped they wouldn't be long, because she was sinking; and
+Doctor Prance now added, like a person who knew what she was talking
+about, that it was, in fact, the end. She had darted out two or three
+times to look for them, and they must step right in. Verena had scarcely
+given her time to tell her story; she had already rushed into the house.
+Ransom followed with Doctor Prance, conscious that for him the occasion
+was doubly solemn; inasmuch as if he was to see poor Miss Birdseye yield
+up her philanthropic soul, he was on the other hand doubtless to receive
+from Miss Chancellor a reminder that <i>she</i> had no intention of quitting
+the game.</p>
+
+<p>By the time he had made this reflexion he stood in the presence of his
+kinswoman and her venerable guest, who was sitting just as he had seen
+her before, muffled and bonneted, on the back piazza of the cottage.
+Olive Chancellor was on one side of her holding one of her hands, and on
+the other was Verena, who had dropped on her knees, close to her,
+bending over those of the old lady. "Did you ask for me&mdash;did you want
+me?" the girl said tenderly. "I will never leave you again."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, I won't keep you long. I only wanted to see you once more." Miss
+Birdseye's voice was very low, like that of a person breathing with
+difficulty; but it had no painful nor querulous note&mdash;it expressed only
+the cheerful weariness which had marked all this last period of her
+life, and which seemed to make it now as blissful as it was suitable
+that she should pass away. Her head was thrown back against the top of
+the chair, the ribbon which confined her ancient hat hung loose, and the
+late afternoon light covered her octogenarian face and gave it a kind of
+fairness, a double placidity. There was, to Ransom, something almost
+august in the trustful renunciation of her countenance; something in it
+seemed to say that she had been ready long before, but as the time was
+not ripe she had waited, with her usual faith that all was for the best;
+only, at present, since the right conditions met, she couldn't help
+feeling that it was quite a luxury, the greatest she had ever tasted.
+Ransom knew why it was that Verena had tears in her eyes as she looked
+up at her patient old friend; she had spoken to him, often, during the
+last three weeks, of the stories Miss Birdseye had told her of the great
+work of her life, her mission, repeated year after year, among the
+Southern blacks. She had gone among them with every precaution, to teach
+them to read and write; she had carried them Bibles and told them of the
+friends they had in the North who prayed for their deliverance. Ransom
+knew that Verena didn't reproduce these legends with a view to making
+him ashamed of his Southern origin, his connexion with people who, in a
+past not yet remote, had made that kind of apostleship necessary; he
+knew this because she had heard what he thought of all that chapter
+himself; he had given her a kind of historical summary of the slavery
+question which left her no room to say that he was more tender to that
+particular example of human imbecility than he was to any other. But she
+had told him that this was what <i>she</i> would have liked to do&mdash;to wander,
+alone, with her life in her hand, on an errand of mercy, through a
+country in which society was arrayed against her; she would have liked
+it much better than simply talking about the right from the gas-lighted
+vantage of the New England platform. Ransom had replied simply
+"Balderdash!" it being his theory, as we have perceived, that he knew
+much more about Verena's native bent than the young lady herself. This
+did not, however, as he was perfectly aware, prevent her feeling that
+she had come too late for the heroic age of New England life, and
+regarding Miss Birdseye as a battered, immemorial monument of it. Ransom
+could share such an admiration as that, especially at this moment; he
+had said to Verena, more than once, that he wished he might have met the
+old lady in Carolina or Georgia before the war&mdash;shown her round among
+the negroes and talked over New England ideas with her; there were a
+good many he didn't care much about now, but at that time they would
+have been tremendously refreshing. Miss Birdseye had given herself away
+so lavishly all her life that it was rather odd there was anything left
+of her for the supreme surrender. When he looked at Olive he saw that
+she meant to ignore him; and during the few minutes he remained on the
+spot his kinswoman never met his eye. She turned away, indeed, as soon
+as Doctor Prance said, leaning over Miss Birdseye, "I have brought Mr.
+Ransom to you. Don't you remember you asked for him?"</p>
+
+<p>"I am very glad to see you again," Ransom remarked. "It was very good of
+you to think of me." At the sound of his voice Olive rose and left her
+place; she sank into a chair at the other end of the piazza, turning
+round to rest her arms on the back and bury her head in them.</p>
+
+<p>Miss Birdseye looked at the young man still more dimly than she had ever
+done before. "I thought you were gone. You never came back."</p>
+
+<p>"He spends all his time in long walks; he enjoys the country so much,"
+Verena said.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, it's very beautiful, what I see from here. I haven't been strong
+enough to move round since the first days. But I am going to move now."
+She smiled when Ransom made a gesture as if to help her, and added: "Oh,
+I don't mean I am going to move out of my chair."</p>
+
+<p>"Mr. Ransom has been out in a boat with me several times. I have been
+showing him how to cast a line," said Doctor Prance, who appeared to
+deprecate a sentimental tendency.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, well, then, you have been one of our party; there seems to be every
+reason why you should feel that you belong to us." Miss Birdseye looked
+at the visitor with a sort of misty earnestness, as if she wished to
+communicate with him further; then her glance turned slightly aside; she
+tried to see what had become of Olive. She perceived that Miss
+Chancellor had withdrawn herself, and, closing her eyes, she mused,
+ineffectually, on the mystery she had not grasped, the peculiarity of
+Basil Ransom's relations with her hostess. She was visibly too weak to
+concern herself with it very actively; she only felt, now that she
+seemed really to be going, a desire to reconcile and harmonise. But she
+presently exhaled a low, soft sigh&mdash;a kind of confession that it was too
+mixed, that she gave it up. Ransom had feared for a moment that she was
+about to indulge in some appeal to Olive, some attempt to make him join
+hands with that young lady, as a supreme satisfaction to herself. But he
+saw that her strength failed her, and that, besides, things were getting
+less clear to her; to his considerable relief, inasmuch as, though he
+would not have objected to joining hands, the expression of Miss
+Chancellor's figure and her averted face, with their desperate collapse,
+showed him well enough how <i>she</i> would have met such a proposal. What
+Miss Birdseye clung to, with benignant perversity, was the idea that, in
+spite of his exclusion from the house, which was perhaps only the result
+of a certain high-strung jealousy on Olive's part of her friend's other
+personal ties, Verena had drawn him in, had made him sympathise with the
+great reform and desire to work for it. Ransom saw no reason why such an
+illusion should be dear to Miss Birdseye; his contact with her in the
+past had been so momentary that he could not account for her taking an
+interest in his views, in his throwing his weight into the right scale.
+It was part of the general desire for justice that fermented within her,
+the passion for progress; and it was also in some degree her interest in
+Verena&mdash;a suspicion, innocent and idyllic, as any such suspicion on Miss
+Birdseye's part must be, that there was something between them, that the
+closest of all unions (as Miss Birdseye at least supposed it was) was
+preparing itself. Then his being a Southerner gave a point to the whole
+thing; to bring round a Southerner would be a real encouragement for one
+who had seen, even at a time when she was already an old woman, what was
+the tone of opinion in the cotton States. Ransom had no wish to
+discourage her, and he bore well in mind the caution Doctor Prance had
+given him about destroying her last theory. He only bowed his head very
+humbly, not knowing what he had done to earn the honour of being the
+subject of it. His eyes met Verena's as she looked up at him from her
+place at Miss Birdseye's feet, and he saw she was following his thought,
+throwing herself into it, and trying to communicate to him a wish. The
+wish touched him immensely; she was dreadfully afraid he would betray
+her to Miss Birdseye&mdash;let her know how she had cooled off. Verena was
+ashamed of that now, and trembled at the danger of exposure; her eyes
+adjured him to be careful of what he said. Her tremor made him glow a
+little in return, for it seemed to him the fullest confession of his
+influence she had yet made.</p>
+
+<p>"We have been a very happy little party," she said to the old lady. "It
+is delightful that you should have been able to be with us all these
+weeks."</p>
+
+<p>"It has been a great rest. I am very tired. I can't speak much. It has
+been a lovely time. I have done so much&mdash;so many things."</p>
+
+<p>"I guess I wouldn't talk much, Miss Birdseye," said Doctor Prance, who
+had now knelt down on the other side of her. "We know how much you have
+done. Don't you suppose every one knows <i>your</i> life?"</p>
+
+<p>"It isn't much&mdash;only I tried to take hold. When I look back from here,
+from where we've sat, I can measure the progress. That's what I wanted
+to say to you and Mr. Ransom&mdash;because I'm going fast. Hold on to me,
+that's right; but you can't keep me. I don't want to stay now; I presume
+I shall join some of the others that we lost long ago. Their faces come
+back to me now, quite fresh. It seems as if they might be waiting; as if
+they were all there; as if they wanted to hear. You mustn't think
+there's no progress because you don't see it all right off; that's what
+I wanted to say. It isn't till you have gone a long way that you can
+feel what's been done. That's what I see when I look back from here; I
+see that the community wasn't half waked up when I was young."</p>
+
+<p>"It is you that have waked it up more than any one else, and it's for
+that we honour you, Miss Birdseye!" Verena cried, with a sudden violence
+of emotion. "If you were to live for a thousand years, you would think
+only of others&mdash;you would think only of helping on humanity. You are our
+heroine, you are our saint, and there has never been any one like you!"
+Verena had no glance for Ransom now, and there was neither deprecation
+nor entreaty in her face. A wave of contrition, of shame, had swept over
+her&mdash;a quick desire to atone for her secret swerving by a renewed
+recognition of the nobleness of such a life as Miss Birdseye's.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, I haven't effected very much; I have only cared and hoped. You will
+do more than I have ever done&mdash;you and Olive Chancellor, because you are
+young and bright, brighter than I ever was; and besides, everything has
+got started."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, you've got started, Miss Birdseye," Doctor Prance remarked, with
+raised eyebrows, protesting dryly but kindly, and putting forward, with
+an air as if, after all, it didn't matter much, an authority that had
+been superseded. The manner in which this competent little woman
+indulged her patient showed sufficiently that the good lady was sinking
+fast.</p>
+
+<p>"We will think of you always, and your name will be sacred to us, and
+that will teach us singleness and devotion," Verena went on, in the same
+tone, still not meeting Ransom's eyes again, and speaking as if she were
+trying now to stop herself, to tie herself by a vow.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, it's the thing you and Olive have given your lives to that has
+absorbed me most, of late years. I did want to see justice done&mdash;to us.
+I haven't seen it, but you will. And Olive will. Where is she&mdash;why isn't
+she near me, to bid me farewell? And Mr. Ransom will&mdash;and he will be
+proud to have helped."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, mercy, mercy!" cried Verena, burying her head in Miss Birdseye's
+lap.</p>
+
+<p>"You are not mistaken if you think I desire above all things that your
+weakness, your generosity, should be protected," Ransom said, rather
+ambiguously, but with pointed respectfulness. "I shall remember you as
+an example of what women are capable of," he added; and he had no
+subsequent compunctions for the speech, for he thought poor Miss
+Birdseye, for all her absence of profile, essentially feminine.</p>
+
+<p>A kind of frantic moan from Olive Chancellor responded to these words,
+which had evidently struck her as an insolent sarcasm; and at the same
+moment Doctor Prance sent Ransom a glance which was an adjuration to
+depart.</p>
+
+<p>"Good-bye, Olive Chancellor," Miss Birdseye murmured. "I don't want to
+stay, though I should like to see what you will see."</p>
+
+<p>"I shall see nothing but shame and ruin!" Olive shrieked, rushing across
+to her old friend, while Ransom discreetly quitted the scene.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="XXXIX" id="XXXIX"></a>XXXIX</h2>
+
+
+<p>He met Doctor Prance in the village the next morning, and as soon as he
+looked at her he saw that the event which had been impending at Miss
+Chancellor's had taken place. It was not that her aspect was funereal;
+but it contained, somehow, an announcement that she had, for the
+present, no more thought to give to casting a line. Miss Birdseye had
+quietly passed away, in the evening, an hour or two after Ransom's
+visit. They had wheeled her chair into the house; there had been nothing
+to do but wait for complete extinction. Miss Chancellor and Miss Tarrant
+had sat by her there, without moving, each of her hands in theirs, and
+she had just melted away, towards eight o'clock. It was a lovely death;
+Doctor Prance intimated that she had never seen any that she thought
+more seasonable. She added that she was a good woman&mdash;one of the old
+sort; and that was the only funeral oration that Basil Ransom was
+destined to hear pronounced upon Miss Birdseye. The impression of the
+simplicity and humility of her end remained with him, and he reflected
+more than once, during the days that followed, that the absence of pomp
+and circumstance which had marked her career marked also the
+consecration of her memory. She had been almost celebrated, she had been
+active, earnest, ubiquitous beyond any one else, she had given herself
+utterly to charities and creeds and causes; and yet the only persons,
+apparently, to whom her death made a real difference were three young
+women in a small "frame-house" on Cape Cod. Ransom learned from Doctor
+Prance that her mortal remains were to be committed to their rest in the
+little cemetery at Marmion, in sight of the pretty sea-view she loved to
+gaze at, among old mossy headstones of mariners and fisher-folk. She had
+seen the place when she first came down, when she was able to drive out
+a little, and she had said she thought it must be pleasant to lie there.
+It was not an injunction, a definite request; it had not occurred to
+Miss Birdseye, at the end of her days, to take an exacting line or to
+make, for the first time in eighty years, a personal claim. But Olive
+Chancellor and Verena had put their construction on her appreciation of
+the quietest corner of the striving, suffering world so weary a pilgrim
+of philanthropy had ever beheld.</p>
+
+<p>In the course of the day Ransom received a note of five lines from
+Verena, the purport of which was to tell him that he must not expect to
+see her again for the present; she wished to be very quiet and think
+things over. She added the recommendation that he should leave the
+neighbourhood for three or four days; there were plenty of strange old
+places to see in that part of the country. Ransom meditated deeply on
+this missive, and perceived that he should be guilty of very bad taste
+in not immediately absenting himself. He knew that to Olive Chancellor's
+vision his conduct already wore that stain, and it was useless,
+therefore, for him to consider how he could displease her either less or
+more. But he wished to convey to Verena the impression that he would do
+anything in the wide world to gratify <i>her</i> except give her up, and as
+he packed his valise he had an idea that he was both behaving
+beautifully and showing the finest diplomatic sense. To go away proved
+to himself how secure he felt, what a conviction he had that however she
+might turn and twist in his grasp he held her fast. The emotion she had
+expressed as he stood there before poor Miss Birdseye was only one of
+her instinctive contortions; he had taken due note of that&mdash;said to
+himself that a good many more would probably occur before she would be
+quiet. A woman that listens is lost, the old proverb says; and what had
+Verena done for the last three weeks but listen?&mdash;not very long each
+day, but with a degree of attention of which her not withdrawing from
+Marmion was the measure. She had not told him that Olive wanted to whisk
+her away, but he had not needed this confidence to know that if she
+stayed on the field it was because she preferred to. She probably had an
+idea she was fighting, but if she should fight no harder than she had
+fought up to now he should continue to take the same view of his
+success. She meant her request that he should go away for a few days as
+something combative; but, decidedly, he scarcely felt the blow. He liked
+to think that he had great tact with women, and he was sure Verena would
+be struck with this quality in reading, in the note he presently
+addressed her in reply to her own, that he had determined to take a
+little run to Provincetown. As there was no one under the rather
+ineffectual roof which sheltered him to whose hand he could entrust the
+billet&mdash;at the Marmion hotel one had to be one's own messenger&mdash;he
+walked to the village post-office to request that his note should be put
+into Miss Chancellor's box. Here he met Doctor Prance, for a second time
+that day; she had come to deposit the letters by which Olive notified a
+few of Miss Birdseye's friends of the time and place of her obsequies.
+This young lady was shut up with Verena, and Doctor Prance was
+transacting all their business for them. Ransom felt that he made no
+admission that would impugn his estimate of the sex to which she in a
+manner belonged, in reflecting that she would acquit herself of these
+delegated duties with the greatest rapidity and accuracy. He told her he
+was going to absent himself for a few days, and expressed a friendly
+hope that he should find her at Marmion on his return.</p>
+
+<p>Her keen eye gauged him a moment, to see if he were joking; then she
+said, "Well, I presume you think I can do as I like. But I can't."</p>
+
+<p>"You mean you have got to go back to work?"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, yes; my place is empty in the city."</p>
+
+<p>"So is every other place. You had better remain till the end of the
+season."</p>
+
+<p>"It's all one season to me. I want to see my office-slate. I wouldn't
+have stayed so long for any one but her."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, then, good-bye," Ransom said. "I shall always remember our little
+expeditions. And I wish you every professional distinction."</p>
+
+<p>"That's why I want to go back," Doctor Prance replied, with her flat,
+limited manner. He kept her a moment; he wanted to ask her about Verena.
+While he was hesitating how to form his question she remarked, evidently
+wishing to leave him a little memento of her sympathy, "Well, I hope you
+will be able to follow up your views."</p>
+
+<p>"My views, Miss Prance? I am sure I have never mentioned them to you!"
+Then Ransom added, "How is Miss Tarrant to-day? is she more calm?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh no, she isn't calm at all," Doctor Prance answered, very definitely.</p>
+
+<p>"Do you mean she's excited, emotional?"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, she doesn't talk, she's perfectly still, and so is Miss
+Chancellor. They're as still as two watchers&mdash;they don't speak. But you
+can hear the silence vibrate."</p>
+
+<p>"Vibrate?"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, they are very nervous."</p>
+
+<p>Ransom was confident, as I say, yet the effort that he made to extract a
+good omen from this characterisation of the two ladies at the cottage
+was not altogether successful. He would have liked to ask Doctor Prance
+whether she didn't think he might count on Verena in the end; but he was
+too shy for this, the subject of his relations with Miss Tarrant never
+yet having been touched upon between them; and, besides, he didn't care
+to hear himself put a question which was more or less an implication of
+a doubt. So he compromised, with a sort of oblique and general inquiry
+about Olive; that might draw some light. "What do you think of Miss
+Chancellor&mdash;how does she strike you?"</p>
+
+<p>Doctor Prance reflected a little, with an apparent consciousness that he
+meant more than he asked. "Well, she's losing flesh," she presently
+replied; and Ransom turned away, not encouraged, and feeling that, no
+doubt, the little doctress had better go back to her office-slate.</p>
+
+<p>He did the thing handsomely, remained at Provincetown a week, inhaling
+the delicious air, smoking innumerable cigars, and lounging among the
+ancient wharves, where the grass grew thick and the impression of fallen
+greatness was still stronger than at Marmion. Like his friends the
+Bostonians he was very nervous; there were days when he felt he must
+rush back to the margin of that mild inlet; the voices of the air
+whispered to him that in his absence he was being outwitted.
+Nevertheless he stayed the time he had determined to stay; quieting
+himself with the reflexion that there was nothing they could do to elude
+him unless, perhaps, they should start again for Europe, which they were
+not likely to do. If Miss Olive tried to hide Verena away in the United
+States he would undertake to find her&mdash;though he was obliged to confess
+that a flight to Europe would baffle him, owing to his want of cash for
+pursuit. Nothing, however, was less probable than that they would cross
+the Atlantic on the eve of Verena's projected <i>d&eacute;but</i> at the Music Hall.
+Before he went back to Marmion he wrote to this young lady, to announce
+his reappearance there and let her know that he expected she would come
+out to meet him the morning after. This conveyed the assurance that he
+intended to take as much of the day as he could get; he had had enough
+of the system of dragging through all the hours till a mere fraction of
+time was left before night, and he couldn't wait so long, at any rate,
+the day after his return. It was the afternoon train that had brought
+him back from Provincetown, and in the evening he ascertained that the
+Bostonians had not deserted the field. There were lights in the windows
+of the house under the elms, and he stood where he had stood that
+evening with Doctor Prance and listened to the waves of Verena's voice,
+as she rehearsed her lecture. There were no waves this time, no sounds,
+and no sign of life but the lamps; the place had apparently not ceased
+to be given over to the conscious silence described by Doctor Prance.
+Ransom felt that he gave an immense proof of chivalry in not calling
+upon Verena to grant him an interview on the spot. She had not answered
+his last note, but the next day she kept the tryst, at the hour he had
+proposed; he saw her advance along the road, in a white dress, under a
+big parasol, and again he found himself liking immensely the way she
+walked. He was dismayed, however, at her face and what it portended;
+pale, with red eyes, graver than she had ever been before, she appeared
+to have spent the period of his absence in violent weeping. Yet that it
+was not for him she had been crying was proved by the very first word
+she spoke.</p>
+
+<p>"I only came out to tell you definitely it's impossible! I have thought
+over everything, taking plenty of time&mdash;over and over; and that is my
+answer, finally, positively. You must take it&mdash;you shall have no other."</p>
+
+<p>Basil Ransom gazed, frowning fearfully. "And why not, pray?"</p>
+
+<p>"Because I can't, I can't, I can't, I can't!" she repeated passionately,
+with her altered, distorted face.</p>
+
+<p>"Damnation!" murmured the young man. He seized her hand, drew it into
+his arm, forcing her to walk with him along the road.</p>
+
+<p>That afternoon Olive Chancellor came out of her house and wandered for a
+long time upon the shore. She looked up and down the bay, at the sails
+that gleamed on the blue water, shifting in the breeze and the light;
+they were a source of interest to her that they had never been before.
+It was a day she was destined never to forget; she felt it to be the
+saddest, the most wounding of her life. Unrest and haunting fear had not
+possession of her now, as they had held her in New York when Basil
+Ransom carried off Verena, to mark her for his own, in the park. But an
+immeasurable load of misery seemed to sit upon her soul; she ached with
+the bitterness of her melancholy, she was dumb and cold with despair.
+She had spent the violence of her terror, the eagerness of her grief,
+and now she was too weary to struggle with fate. She appeared to herself
+almost to have accepted it, as she wandered forth in the beautiful
+afternoon with the knowledge that the "ten minutes" which Verena had
+told her she meant to devote to Mr. Ransom that morning had developed
+suddenly into an embarkation for the day. They had gone out in a boat
+together; one of the village worthies, from whom small craft were to be
+hired, had, at Verena's request, sent his little son to Miss
+Chancellor's cottage with that information. She had not understood
+whether they had taken the boatman with them. Even when the information
+came (and it came at a moment of considerable reassurance), Olive's
+nerves were not ploughed up by it as they had been, for instance, by the
+other expedition, in New York; and she could measure the distance she
+had traversed since then. It had not driven her away on the instant to
+pace the shore in frenzy, to challenge every boat that passed, and beg
+that the young lady who was sailing somewhere in the bay with a dark
+gentleman with long hair should be entreated immediately to return. On
+the contrary, after the first quiver of pain inflicted by the news she
+had been able to occupy herself, to look after her house, to write her
+morning's letters, to go into her accounts, which she had had some time
+on her mind. She had wanted to put off thinking, for she knew to what
+hideous recognitions that would bring her round again. These were summed
+up in the fact that Verena was now not to be trusted for an hour. She
+had sworn to her the night before, with a face like a lacerated angel's,
+that her choice was made, that their union and their work were more to
+her than any other life could ever be, and that she deeply believed that
+should she forswear these holy things she would simply waste away, in
+the end, with remorse and shame. She would see Mr. Ransom just once
+more, for ten minutes, to utter one or two supreme truths to him, and
+then they would take up their old, happy, active, fruitful days again,
+would throw themselves more than ever into their splendid effort. Olive
+had seen how Verena was moved by Miss Birdseye's death, how at the sight
+of that unique woman's majestically simple withdrawal from a scene in
+which she had held every vulgar aspiration, every worldly standard and
+lure, so cheap, the girl had been touched again with the spirit of their
+most confident hours, had flamed up with the faith that no narrow
+personal joy could compare in sweetness with the idea of doing something
+for those who had always suffered and who waited still. This helped
+Olive to believe that she might begin to count upon her again, conscious
+as she was at the same time that Verena had been strangely weakened and
+strained by her odious ordeal. Oh, Olive knew that she loved him&mdash;knew
+what the passion was with which the wretched girl had to struggle; and
+she did her the justice to believe that her professions were sincere,
+her effort was real. Harassed and embittered as she was, Olive
+Chancellor still proposed to herself to be rigidly just, and that is why
+she pitied Verena now with an unspeakable pity, regarded her as the
+victim of an atrocious spell, and reserved all her execration and
+contempt for the author of their common misery. If Verena had stepped
+into a boat with him half an hour after declaring that she would give
+him his dismissal in twenty words, that was because he had ways, known
+to himself and other men, of creating situations without an issue, of
+forcing her to do things she could do only with sharp repugnance, under
+the menace of pain that would be sharper still. But all the same, what
+actually stared her in the face was that Verena was not to be trusted,
+even after rallying again as passionately as she had done during the
+days that followed Miss Birdseye's death. Olive would have liked to know
+the pang of penance that <i>she</i> would have been afraid, in her place, to
+incur; to see the locked door which <i>she</i> would not have managed to
+force open!</p>
+
+<p>This inexpressibly mournful sense that, after all, Verena, in her
+exquisite delicacy and generosity, was appointed only to show how women
+had from the beginning of time been the sport of men's selfishness and
+avidity, this dismal conviction accompanied Olive on her walk, which
+lasted all the afternoon, and in which she found a kind of tragic
+relief. She went very far, keeping in the lonely places, unveiling her
+face to the splendid light, which seemed to make a mock of the darkness
+and bitterness of her spirit. There were little sandy coves, where the
+rocks were clean, where she made long stations, sinking down in them as
+if she hoped she should never rise again. It was the first time she had
+been out since Miss Birdseye's death, except the hour when, with the
+dozen sympathisers who came from Boston, she stood by the tired old
+woman's grave. Since then, for three days, she had been writing letters,
+narrating, describing to those who hadn't come; there were some, she
+thought, who might have managed to do so, instead of despatching her
+pages of diffuse reminiscence and asking her for all particulars in
+return. Selah Tarrant and his wife had come, obtrusively, as she
+thought, for they never had had very much intercourse with Miss
+Birdseye; and if it was for Verena's sake, Verena was there to pay every
+tribute herself. Mrs. Tarrant had evidently hoped Miss Chancellor would
+ask her to stay on at Marmion, but Olive felt how little she was in a
+state for such heroics of hospitality. It was precisely in order that
+she should not have to do that sort of thing that she had given Selah
+such considerable sums, on two occasions, at a year's interval. If the
+Tarrants wanted a change of air they could travel all over the
+country&mdash;their present means permitted it; they could go to Saratoga or
+Newport if they liked. Their appearance showed that they could put their
+hands into their pockets (or into hers); at least Mrs. Tarrant's did.
+Selah still sported (on a hot day in August) his immemorial waterproof;
+but his wife rustled over the low tombstones at Marmion in garments of
+which (little as she was versed in such inquiries) Olive could see that
+the cost had been large. Besides, after Doctor Prance had gone (when all
+was over), she felt what a relief it was that Verena and she could be
+just together&mdash;together with the monstrous wedge of a question that had
+come up between them. That was company enough, great heaven! and she had
+not got rid of such an inmate as Doctor Prance only to put Mrs. Tarrant
+in her place.</p>
+
+<p>Did Verena's strange aberration, on this particular day, suggest to
+Olive that it was no use striving, that the world was all a great trap
+or trick, of which women were ever the punctual dupes, so that it was
+the worst of the curse that rested upon them that they must most
+humiliate those who had most their cause at heart? Did she say to
+herself that their weakness was not only lamentable but hideous&mdash;hideous
+their predestined subjection to man's larger and grosser insistence? Did
+she ask herself why she should give up her life to save a sex which,
+after all, didn't wish to be saved, and which rejected the truth even
+after it had bathed them with its auroral light and they had pretended
+to be fed and fortified? These are mysteries into which I shall not
+attempt to enter, speculations with which I have no concern; it is
+sufficient for us to know that all human effort had never seemed to her
+so barren and thankless as on that fatal afternoon. Her eyes rested on
+the boats she saw in the distance, and she wondered if in one of them
+Verena were floating to her fate; but so far from straining forward to
+beckon her home she almost wished that she might glide away for ever,
+that <i>she</i> might never see her again, never undergo the horrible details
+of a more deliberate separation. Olive lived over, in her miserable
+musings, her life for the last two years; she knew, again, how noble and
+beautiful her scheme had been, but how it had all rested on an illusion
+of which the very thought made her feel faint and sick. What was before
+her now was the reality, with the beautiful, indifferent sky pouring
+down its complacent rays upon it. The reality was simply that Verena had
+been more to her than she ever was to Verena, and that, with her
+exquisite natural art, the girl had cared for their cause only because,
+for the time, no interest, no fascination, was greater. Her talent, the
+talent which was to achieve such wonders, was nothing to her; it was too
+easy, she could leave it alone, as she might close her piano, for
+months; it was only to Olive that it was everything. Verena had
+submitted, she had responded, she had lent herself to Olive's incitement
+and exhortation, because she was sympathetic and young and abundant and
+fanciful; but it had been a kind of hothouse loyalty, the mere contagion
+of example, and a sentiment springing up from within had easily breathed
+a chill upon it. Did Olive ask herself whether, for so many months, her
+companion had been only the most unconscious and most successful of
+humbugs? Here again I must plead a certain incompetence to give an
+answer. Positive it is that she spared herself none of the inductions of
+a reverie that seemed to dry up the mists and ambiguities of life. These
+hours of backward clearness come to all men and women, once at least,
+when they read the past in the light of the present, with the reasons of
+things, like unobserved finger-posts, protruding where they never saw
+them before. The journey behind them is mapped out and figured, with its
+false steps, its wrong observations, all its infatuated, deluded
+geography. They understand as Olive understood, but it is probable that
+they rarely suffer as she suffered. The sense of regret for her baffled
+calculations burned within her like a fire, and the splendour of the
+vision over which the curtain of mourning now was dropped brought to her
+eyes slow, still tears, tears that came one by one, neither easing her
+nerves nor lightening her load of pain. She thought of her innumerable
+talks with Verena, of the pledges they had exchanged, of their earnest
+studies, their faithful work, their certain reward, the winter nights
+under the lamp, when they thrilled with previsions as just and a passion
+as high as had ever found shelter in a pair of human hearts. The pity of
+it, the misery of such a fall after such a flight, could express itself
+only, as the poor girl prolonged the vague pauses of her unnoticed
+ramble, in a low, inarticulate murmur of anguish.</p>
+
+<p>The afternoon waned, bringing with it the slight chill which, at the
+summer's end, begins to mark the shortening days. She turned her face
+homeward, and by this time became conscious that if Verena's companion
+had not yet brought her back there might be ground for uneasiness as to
+what had happened to them. It seemed to her that no sail-boat could have
+put into the town without passing more or less before her eyes and
+showing her whom it carried; she had seen a dozen, freighted only with
+the figures of men. An accident was perfectly possible (what could
+Ransom, with his plantation habits, know about the management of a
+sail?), and once that danger loomed before her&mdash;the signal loveliness of
+the weather had prevented its striking her before&mdash;Olive's imagination
+hurried, with a bound, to the worst. She saw the boat overturned and
+drifting out to sea, and (after a week of nameless horror) the body of
+an unknown young woman, defaced beyond recognition, but with long auburn
+hair and in a white dress, washed up in some far-away cove. An hour
+before, her mind had rested with a sort of relief on the idea that
+Verena should sink for ever beneath the horizon, so that their
+tremendous trouble might never be; but now, with the lateness of the
+hour, a sharp, immediate anxiety took the place of that intended
+resignation; and she quickened her step, with a heart that galloped too
+as she went. Then it was, above all, that she felt how <i>she</i> had
+understood friendship, and how never again to see the face of the
+creature she had taken to her soul would be for her as the stroke of
+blindness. The twilight had become thick by the time she reached Marmion
+and paused for an instant in front of her house, over which the elms
+that stood on the grassy wayside appeared to her to hang a blacker
+curtain than ever before.</p>
+
+<p>There was no candle in any window, and when she pushed in and stood in
+the hall, listening a moment, her step awakened no answering sound. Her
+heart failed her; Verena's staying out in a boat from ten o'clock in the
+morning till nightfall was too unnatural, and she gave a cry, as she
+rushed into the low, dim parlour (darkened on one side, at that hour, by
+the wide-armed foliage, and on the other by the veranda and trellis),
+which expressed only a wild personal passion, a desire to take her
+friend in her arms again on any terms, even the most cruel to herself.
+The next moment she started back, with another and a different
+exclamation, for Verena was in the room, motionless, in a corner&mdash;the
+first place in which she had seated herself on re-entering the
+house&mdash;looking at her with a silent face which seemed strange,
+unnatural, in the dusk. Olive stopped short, and for a minute the two
+women remained as they were, gazing at each other in the dimness. After
+that, too, Olive still said nothing; she only went to Verena and sat
+down beside her. She didn't know what to make of her manner; she had
+never been like that before. She was unwilling to speak; she seemed
+crushed and humbled. This was almost the worst&mdash;if anything could be
+worse than what had gone before; and Olive took her hand with an
+irresistible impulse of compassion and assurance. From the way it lay in
+her own she guessed her whole feeling&mdash;saw it was a kind of shame, shame
+for her weakness, her swift surrender, her insane gyration, in the
+morning. Verena expressed it by no protest and no explanation; she
+appeared not even to wish to hear the sound of her own voice. Her
+silence itself was an appeal&mdash;an appeal to Olive to ask no questions
+(she could trust her to inflict no spoken reproach); only to wait till
+she could lift up her head again. Olive understood, or thought she
+understood, and the woefulness of it all only seemed the deeper. She
+would just sit there and hold her hand; that was all she could do; they
+were beyond each other's help in any other way now. Verena leaned her
+head back and closed her eyes, and for an hour, as nightfall settled in
+the room, neither of the young women spoke. Distinctly, it was a kind of
+shame. After a while the parlour-maid, very casual, in the manner of the
+servants at Marmion, appeared on the threshold with a lamp; but Olive
+motioned her frantically away. She wished to keep the darkness. It was a
+kind of shame.</p>
+
+<p>The next morning Basil Ransom rapped loudly with his walking-stick on
+the lintel of Miss Chancellor's house-door, which, as usual on fine
+days, stood open. There was no need he should wait till the servant had
+answered his summons; for Olive, who had reason to believe he would
+come, and who had been lurking in the sitting-room for a purpose of her
+own, stepped forth into the little hall.</p>
+
+<p>"I am sorry to disturb you; I had the hope that&mdash;for a moment&mdash;I might
+see Miss Tarrant." That was the speech with which (and a measured
+salutation) he greeted his advancing kinswoman. She faced him an
+instant, and her strange green eyes caught the light.</p>
+
+<p>"It's impossible. You may believe that when I say it."</p>
+
+<p>"Why is it impossible?" he asked, smiling in spite of an inward
+displeasure. And as Olive gave him no answer, only gazing at him with a
+cold audacity which he had not hitherto observed in her, he added a
+little explanation. "It is simply to have seen her before I go&mdash;to have
+said five words to her. I want her to know that I have made up my
+mind&mdash;since yesterday&mdash;to leave this place; I shall take the train at
+noon."</p>
+
+<p>It was not to gratify Olive Chancellor that he had determined to go
+away, or even that he told her this; yet he was surprised that his words
+brought no expression of pleasure to her face. "I don't think it is of
+much importance whether you go away or not. Miss Tarrant herself has
+gone away."</p>
+
+<p>"Miss Tarrant&mdash;gone away?" This announcement was so much at variance
+with Verena's apparent intentions the night before that his ejaculation
+expressed chagrin as well as surprise, and in doing so it gave Olive a
+momentary advantage. It was the only one she had ever had, and the poor
+girl may be excused for having enjoyed it&mdash;so far as enjoyment was
+possible to her. Basil Ransom's visible discomfiture was more agreeable
+to her than anything had been for a long time.</p>
+
+<p>"I went with her myself to the early train; and I saw it leave the
+station." And Olive kept her eyes unaverted, for the satisfaction of
+seeing how he took it.</p>
+
+<p>It must be confessed that he took it rather ill. He had decided it was
+best he should retire, but Verena's retiring was another matter. "And
+where is she gone?" he asked, with a frown.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't think I am obliged to tell you."</p>
+
+<p>"Of course not! Excuse my asking. It is much better that I should find
+it out for myself, because if I owed the information to you I should
+perhaps feel a certain delicacy as regards profiting by it."</p>
+
+<p>"Gracious heaven!" cried Miss Chancellor, at the idea of Ransom's
+delicacy. Then she added more deliberately: "You will not find out for
+yourself."</p>
+
+<p>"You think not?"</p>
+
+<p>"I am sure of it!" And her enjoyment of the situation becoming acute,
+there broke from her lips a shrill, unfamiliar, troubled sound, which
+performed the office of a laugh, a laugh of triumph, but which, at a
+distance, might have passed almost as well for a wail of despair. It
+rang in Ransom's ears as he quickly turned away.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="XL" id="XL"></a>XL</h2>
+
+
+<p>It was Mrs. Luna who received him, as she had received him on the
+occasion of his first visit to Charles Street; by which I do not mean
+quite in the same way. She had known very little about him then, but she
+knew too much for her happiness to-day, and she had with him now a
+little invidious, contemptuous manner, as if everything he should say or
+do could be a proof only of abominable duplicity and perversity. She had
+a theory that he had treated her shamefully; and he knew it&mdash;I do not
+mean the fact, but the theory: which led him to reflect that her
+resentments were as shallow as her opinions, inasmuch as if she really
+believed in her grievance, or if it had had any dignity, she would not
+have consented to see him. He had not presented himself at Miss
+Chancellor's door without a very good reason, and having done so he
+could not turn away so long as there was any one in the house of whom he
+might have speech. He had sent up his name to Mrs. Luna, after being
+told that she was staying there, on the mere chance that she would see
+him; for he thought a refusal a very possible sequel to the letters she
+had written him during the past four or five months&mdash;letters he had
+scarcely read, full of allusions of the most cutting sort to proceedings
+of his, in the past, of which he had no recollection whatever. They
+bored him, for he had quite other matters in his mind.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't wonder you have the bad taste, the crudity," she said, as soon
+as he came into the room, looking at him more sternly than he would have
+believed possible to her.</p>
+
+<p>He saw that this was an allusion to his not having been to see her since
+the period of her sister's visit to New York; he having conceived for
+her, the evening of Mrs. Burrage's party, a sentiment of aversion which
+put an end to such attentions. He didn't laugh, he was too worried and
+preoccupied; but he replied, in a tone which apparently annoyed her as
+much as any indecent mirth: "I thought it very possible you wouldn't see
+me."</p>
+
+<p>"Why shouldn't I see you, if I should take it into my head? Do you
+suppose I care whether I see you or not?"</p>
+
+<p>"I supposed you wanted to, from your letters."</p>
+
+<p>"Then why did you think I would refuse?"</p>
+
+<p>"Because that's the sort of thing women do."</p>
+
+<p>"Women&mdash;women! You know much about them!"</p>
+
+<p>"I am learning something every day."</p>
+
+<p>"You haven't learned yet, apparently, to answer their letters. It's
+rather a surprise to me that you don't pretend not to have received
+mine."</p>
+
+<p>Ransom could smile now; the opportunity to vent the exasperation that
+had been consuming him almost restored his good humour. "What could I
+say? You overwhelmed me. Besides, I did answer one of them."</p>
+
+<p>"One of them? You speak as if I had written you a dozen!" Mrs. Luna
+cried.</p>
+
+<p>"I thought that was your contention&mdash;that you had done me the honour to
+address me so many. They were crushing, and when a man's crushed, it's
+all over."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, you look as if you were in very small pieces! I am glad that I
+shall never see you again."</p>
+
+<p>"I can see now why you received me&mdash;to tell me that," Ransom said.</p>
+
+<p>"It is a kind of pleasure. I am going back to Europe."</p>
+
+<p>"Really? for Newton's education?"</p>
+
+<p>"Ah, I wonder you can have the face to speak of that&mdash;after the way you
+deserted him!"</p>
+
+<p>"Let us abandon the subject, then, and I will tell you what I want."</p>
+
+<p>"I don't in the least care what you want," Mrs. Luna remarked. "And you
+haven't even the grace to ask me where I am going&mdash;over there."</p>
+
+<p>"What difference does that make to me&mdash;once you leave these shores?"</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Luna rose to her feet. "Ah, chivalry, chivalry!" she exclaimed. And
+she walked away to the window&mdash;one of the windows from which Ransom had
+first enjoyed, at Olive's solicitation, the view of the Back Bay. Mrs.
+Luna looked forth at it with little of the air of a person who was sorry
+to be about to lose it. "I am determined you shall know where I am
+going," she said in a moment. "I am going to Florence."</p>
+
+<p>"Don't be afraid!" he replied. "I shall go to Rome."</p>
+
+<p>"And you'll carry there more impertinence than has been seen there since
+the old emperors."</p>
+
+<p>"Were the emperors impertinent, in addition to their other vices? I am
+determined, on my side, that you shall know what I have come for,"
+Ransom said. "I wouldn't ask you if I could ask any one else; but I am
+very hard pressed, and I don't know who can help me."</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Luna turned on him a face of the frankest derision. "Help you? Do
+you remember the last time I asked you to help me?"</p>
+
+<p>"That evening at Mrs. Burrage's? Surely I wasn't wanting then; I
+remember urging on your acceptance a chair, so that you might stand on
+it, to see and to hear."</p>
+
+<p>"To see and to hear what, please? Your disgusting infatuation!"</p>
+
+<p>"It's just about that I want to speak to you," Ransom pursued. "As you
+already know all about it, you have no new shock to receive, and I
+therefore venture to ask you&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Where tickets for her lecture to-night can be obtained? Is it possible
+she hasn't sent you one?"</p>
+
+<p>"I assure you I didn't come to Boston to hear it," said Ransom, with a
+sadness which Mrs. Luna evidently regarded as a refinement of outrage.
+"What I should like to ascertain is where Miss Tarrant may be found at
+the present moment."</p>
+
+<p>"And do you think that's a delicate inquiry to make of <i>me</i>?"</p>
+
+<p>"I don't see why it shouldn't be, but I know you don't think it is, and
+that is why, as I say, I mention the matter to you only because I can
+imagine absolutely no one else who is in a position to assist me. I have
+been to the house of Miss Tarrant's parents, in Cambridge, but it is
+closed and empty, destitute of any sign of life. I went there first, on
+arriving this morning, and rang at this door only when my journey to
+Monadnoc Place had proved fruitless. Your sister's servant told me that
+Miss Tarrant was not staying here, but she added that Mrs. Luna was. No
+doubt you won't be pleased at having been spoken of as a sort of
+equivalent; and I didn't say to myself&mdash;or to the servant&mdash;that you
+would do as well; I only reflected that I could at least try you. I
+didn't even ask for Miss Chancellor, as I am sure she would give me no
+information whatever."</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Luna listened to this candid account of the young man's proceedings
+with her head turned a little over her shoulder at him, and her eyes
+fixed as unsympathetically as possible upon his own. "What you propose,
+then, as I understand it," she said in a moment, "is that I should
+betray my sister to you."</p>
+
+<p>"Worse than that; I propose that you should betray Miss Tarrant
+herself."</p>
+
+<p>"What do I care about Miss Tarrant? I don't know what you are talking
+about."</p>
+
+<p>"Haven't you really any idea where she is living? Haven't you seen her
+here? Are Miss Olive and she not constantly together?"</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Luna, at this, turned full round upon him, and, with folded arms
+and her head tossed back, exclaimed: "Look here, Basil Ransom, I never
+thought you were a fool, but it strikes me that since we last met you
+have lost your wits!"</p>
+
+<p>"There is no doubt of that," Ransom answered, smiling.</p>
+
+<p>"Do you mean to tell me you don't know everything about Miss Tarrant
+that can be known?"</p>
+
+<p>"I have neither seen her nor heard of her for the last ten weeks; Miss
+Chancellor has hidden her away."</p>
+
+<p>"Hidden her away, with all the walls and fences of Boston flaming to-day
+with her name?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh yes, I have noticed that, and I have no doubt that by waiting till
+this evening I shall be able to see her. But I don't want to wait till
+this evening; I want to see her now, and not in public&mdash;in private."</p>
+
+<p>"Do you indeed?&mdash;how interesting!" cried Mrs. Luna, with rippling
+laughter. "And pray what do you want to do with her?"</p>
+
+<p>Ransom hesitated a little. "I think I would rather not tell you."</p>
+
+<p>"Your charming frankness, then, has its limits! My poor cousin, you are
+really too <i>na&iuml;f</i>. Do you suppose it matters a straw to me?"</p>
+
+<p>Ransom made no answer to this appeal, but after an instant he broke out:
+"Honestly, Mrs. Luna, can you give me no clue?"</p>
+
+<p>"Lord, what terrible eyes you make, and what terrible words you use!
+'Honestly,' quoth he! Do you think I am so fond of the creature that I
+want to keep her all to myself?"</p>
+
+<p>"I don't know; I don't understand," said Ransom, slowly and softly, but
+still with his terrible eyes.</p>
+
+<p>"And do you think I understand any better? You are not a very edifying
+young man," Mrs. Luna went on; "but I really think you have deserved a
+better fate than to be jilted and thrown over by a girl of that class."</p>
+
+<p>"I haven't been jilted. I like her very much, but she never encouraged
+me."</p>
+
+<p>At this Mrs. Luna broke again into articulate scoffing. "It is very odd
+that at your age you should be so little a man of the world!"</p>
+
+<p>Ransom made her no other answer than to remark, thoughtfully and rather
+absently: "Your sister is really very clever."</p>
+
+<p>"By which you mean, I suppose, that I am not!" Mrs. Luna suddenly
+changed her tone, and said, with the greatest sweetness and humility:
+"God knows, I have never pretended to be!"</p>
+
+<p>Ransom looked at her a moment, and guessed the meaning of this altered
+note. It had suddenly come over her that with her portrait in half the
+shop-fronts, her advertisement on all the fences, and the great occasion
+on which she was to reveal herself to the country at large close at
+hand, Verena had become so conscious of high destinies that her dear
+friend's Southern kinsman really appeared to her very small game, and
+she might therefore be regarded as having cast him off. If this were the
+case, it would perhaps be well for Mrs. Luna still to hold on. Basil's
+induction was very rapid, but it gave him time to decide that the best
+thing to say to his interlocutress was: "On what day do you sail for
+Europe?"</p>
+
+<p>"Perhaps I shall not sail at all," Mrs. Luna replied, looking out of the
+window.</p>
+
+<p>"And in that case&mdash;poor Newton's education?"</p>
+
+<p>"I should try to content myself with a country which has given you
+yours."</p>
+
+<p>"Don't you want him, then, to be a man of the world?"</p>
+
+<p>"Ah, the world, the world!" she murmured, while she watched, in the
+deepening dusk, the lights of the town begin to reflect themselves in
+the Back Bay. "Has it been such a source of happiness to me that I
+belong to it?"</p>
+
+<p>"Perhaps, after all, I shall be able to go to Florence!" said Ransom,
+laughing.</p>
+
+<p>She faced him once more, this time slowly, and declared that she had
+never known anything so strange as his state of mind&mdash;she would be so
+glad to have an explanation of it. With the opinions he professed (it
+was for them she had liked him&mdash;she didn't like his character), why on
+earth should he be running after a little fifth-rate <i>poseuse</i>, and in
+such a frenzy to get hold of her? He might say it was none of her
+business, and of course she would have no answer to that; therefore she
+admitted that she asked simply out of intellectual curiosity, and
+because one always was tormented at the sight of a painful
+contradiction. With the things she had heard him say about his
+convictions and theories, his view of life and the great questions of
+the future, she should have thought he would find Miss Tarrant's
+attitudinising absolutely nauseous. Were not her views the same as
+Olive's and hadn't Olive and he signally failed to hit it off together?
+Mrs. Luna only asked because she was really quite puzzled. "Don't you
+know that some minds, when they see a mystery, can't rest till they
+clear it up?"</p>
+
+<p>"You can't be more puzzled than I am," said Ransom. "Apparently the
+explanation is to be found in a sort of reversal of the formula you were
+so good, just now, as to apply to me. You like my opinions, but you
+entertain a different sentiment for my character. I deplore Miss
+Tarrant's opinions, but her character&mdash;well, her character pleases me."</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Luna stared, as if she were waiting, the explanation surely not
+being complete. "But as much as that?" she inquired.</p>
+
+<p>"As much as what?" said Ransom, smiling. Then he added, "Your sister has
+beaten me."</p>
+
+<p>"I thought she had beaten some one of late; she has seemed so gay and
+happy. I didn't suppose it was <i>all</i> because I was going away."</p>
+
+<p>"Has she seemed very gay?" Ransom inquired, with a sinking of the heart.
+He wore such a long face, as he asked this question, that Mrs. Luna was
+again moved to audible mirth, after which she explained:</p>
+
+<p>"Of course I mean gay for her. Everything is relative. With her
+impatience for this lecture of her friend's to-night, she's in an
+unspeakable state! She can't sit still for three minutes, she goes out
+fifteen times a day, and there has been enough arranging and
+interviewing, and discussing and telegraphing and advertising, enough
+wire-pulling and rushing about, to put an army in the field. What is it
+they are always doing to the armies in Europe?&mdash;mobilising them? Well,
+Verena has been mobilised, and this has been headquarters."</p>
+
+<p>"And shall you go to the Music Hall to-night?"</p>
+
+<p>"For what do you take me? I have no desire to be shrieked at for an
+hour."</p>
+
+<p>"No doubt, no doubt, Miss Olive must be in a state," Ransom went on,
+rather absently. Then he said, with abruptness, in a different tone: "If
+this house has been, as you say, headquarters, how comes it you haven't
+seen her?"</p>
+
+<p>"Seen Olive? I have seen nothing else!"</p>
+
+<p>"I mean Miss Tarrant. She must be somewhere&mdash;in the place&mdash;if she's to
+speak to-night."</p>
+
+<p>"Should you like me to go out and look for her? <i>Il ne manquerait plus
+que cela!</i>" cried Mrs. Luna. "What's the matter with you, Basil Ransom,
+and what are you after?" she demanded, with considerable sharpness. She
+had tried haughtiness and she had tried humility, but they brought her
+equally face to face with a competitor whom she couldn't take seriously,
+yet who was none the less objectionable for all that.</p>
+
+<p>I know not whether Ransom would have attempted to answer her question
+had an obstacle not presented itself; at any rate, at the moment she
+spoke, the curtain in the doorway was pushed aside, and a visitor
+crossed the threshold. "Mercy! how provoking!" Mrs. Luna exclaimed,
+audibly enough; and without moving from her place she bent an
+uncharitable eye upon the invader, a gentleman whom Ransom had the sense
+of having met before. He was a young man with a fresh face and abundant
+locks, prematurely white; he stood smiling at Mrs. Luna, quite undaunted
+by the absence of any demonstration in his favour. She looked as if she
+didn't know him, while Ransom prepared to depart, leaving them to settle
+it together.</p>
+
+<p>"I'm afraid you don't remember me, though I have seen you before," said
+the young man, very amiably. "I was here a week ago, and Miss Chancellor
+presented me to you."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh yes; she's not at home now," Mrs. Luna returned vaguely.</p>
+
+<p>"So I was told&mdash;but I didn't let that prevent me." And the young man
+included Basil Ransom in the smile with which he made himself more
+welcome than Mrs. Luna appeared disposed to make him, and by which he
+seemed to call attention to his superiority. "There is a matter on which
+I want very much to obtain some information, and I have no doubt you
+will be so good as to give it to me."</p>
+
+<p>"It comes back to me&mdash;you have something to do with the newspapers,"
+said Mrs. Luna; and Ransom too, by this time, had placed the young man
+among his reminiscences. He had been at Miss Birdseye's famous party,
+and Doctor Prance had there described him as a brilliant journalist.</p>
+
+<p>It was quite with the air of such a personage that he accepted Mrs.
+Luna's definition, and he continued to radiate towards Ransom (as if, in
+return, he remembered <i>his</i> face), while he dropped, confidentially, the
+word that expressed everything&mdash;"The <i>Vesper</i>, don't you know?" Then he
+went on: "Now, Mrs. Luna, I don't care, I'm not going to let you off! We
+want the last news about Miss Verena, and it has got to come out of this
+house."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh murder!" Ransom muttered, beneath his breath, taking up his hat.</p>
+
+<p>"Miss Chancellor has hidden her away; I have been scouring the city in
+search of her, and her own father hasn't seen her for a week. We have
+got his ideas; they are very easy to get, but that isn't what we want."</p>
+
+<p>"And what do you want?" Ransom was now impelled to inquire, as Mr.
+Pardon (even the name at present came back to him) appeared sufficiently
+to have introduced himself.</p>
+
+<p>"We want to know how she feels about to-night; what report she makes of
+her nerves, her anticipations; how she looked, what she had on, up to
+six o'clock. Gracious! if I could see her I should know what I wanted,
+and so would she, I guess!" Mr. Pardon exclaimed. "You must know
+something, Mrs. Luna; it isn't natural you shouldn't. I won't inquire
+any further where she is, because that might seem a little pushing, if
+she does wish to withdraw herself&mdash;though I am bound to say I think she
+makes a mistake; we could work up these last hours for her! But can't
+you tell me any little personal items&mdash;the sort of thing the people
+like? What is she going to have for supper? or is she going to
+speak&mdash;a&mdash;without previous nourishment?"</p>
+
+<p>"Really, sir, I don't know, and I don't in the least care; I have
+nothing to do with the business!" Mrs. Luna cried angrily.</p>
+
+<p>The reporter stared; then, eagerly, "You have nothing to do with it&mdash;you
+take an unfavourable view, you protest?" And he was already feeling in a
+side-pocket for his notebook.</p>
+
+<p>"Mercy on us! are you going to put <i>that</i> in the paper?" Mrs. Luna
+exclaimed; and in spite of the sense, detestable to him, that everything
+he wished most to avert was fast closing over the girl, Ransom broke
+into cynical laughter.</p>
+
+<p>"Ah, but do protest, madam; let us at least have that fragment!" Mr.
+Pardon went on. "A protest from this house would be a charming note. We
+<i>must</i> have it&mdash;we've got nothing else! The public are almost as much
+interested in your sister as they are in Miss Verena; they know to what
+extent she has backed her: and I should be so delighted (I see the
+heading, from here, so attractive!) just to take down 'What Miss
+Chancellor's Family Think about It!'"</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Luna sank into the nearest chair, with a groan, covering her face
+with her hands. "Heaven help me, I am glad I am going to Europe!"</p>
+
+<p>"That is another little item&mdash;everything counts," said Matthias Pardon,
+making a rapid entry in his tablets. "May I inquire whether you are
+going to Europe in consequence of your disapproval of your sister's
+views?"</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Luna sprang up again, almost snatching the memoranda out of his
+hand. "If you have the impertinence to publish a word about me, or to
+mention my name in print, I will come to your office and make such a
+scene!"</p>
+
+<p>"Dearest lady, that would be a godsend!" Mr. Pardon cried
+enthusiastically; but he put his notebook back into his pocket.</p>
+
+<p>"Have you made an exhaustive search for Miss Tarrant?" Basil Ransom
+asked of him. Mr. Pardon, at this inquiry, eyed him with a sudden,
+familiar archness, expressive of the idea of competition; so that Ransom
+added: "You needn't be afraid, I'm not a reporter."</p>
+
+<p>"I didn't know but what you had come on from New York."</p>
+
+<p>"So I have&mdash;but not as the representative of a newspaper."</p>
+
+<p>"Fancy his taking you&mdash;&mdash;" Mrs. Luna murmured, with indignation.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, I have been everywhere I could think of," Mr. Pardon remarked. "I
+have been hunting round after your sister's agent, but I haven't been
+able to catch up with him; I suppose he has been hunting on his side.
+Miss Chancellor told me&mdash;Mrs. Luna may remember it&mdash;that she shouldn't
+be here at all during the week, and that she preferred not to tell me
+either where or how she was to spend her time until the momentous
+evening. Of course I let her know that I should find out if I could, and
+you may remember," he said to Mrs. Luna, "the conversation we had on the
+subject. I remarked, candidly, that if they didn't look out they would
+overdo the quietness. Doctor Tarrant has felt very low about it.
+However, I have done what I could with the material at my command, and
+the <i>Vesper</i> has let the public know that her whereabouts was the
+biggest mystery of the season. It's difficult to get round the
+<i>Vesper</i>."</p>
+
+<p>"I am almost afraid to open my lips in your presence," Mrs. Luna broke
+in, "but I must say that I think my sister was strangely communicative.
+She told you ever so much that I wouldn't have breathed."</p>
+
+<p>"I should like to try you with something you know!" Matthias Pardon
+returned imperturbably. "This isn't a fair trial, because you don't
+know. Miss Chancellor came round&mdash;came round considerably, there's no
+doubt of that; because a year or two ago she was terribly
+unapproachable. If I have mollified her, madam, why shouldn't I mollify
+you? She realises that I can help her now, and as I ain't rancorous I am
+willing to help her all she'll let me. The trouble is, she won't let me
+enough, yet; it seems as if she couldn't believe it of me. At any rate,"
+he pursued, addressing himself more particularly to Ransom, "half an
+hour ago, at the Hall, they knew nothing whatever about Miss Tarrant,
+beyond the fact that about a month ago she came there, with Miss
+Chancellor, to try her voice, which rang all over the place, like
+silver, and that Miss Chancellor guaranteed her absolute punctuality
+to-night."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, that's all that is required," said Ransom, at hazard; and he put
+out his hand, in farewell, to Mrs. Luna.</p>
+
+<p>"Do you desert me already?" she demanded, giving him a glance which
+would have embarrassed any spectator but a reporter of the <i>Vesper</i>.</p>
+
+<p>"I have fifty things to do; you must excuse me." He was nervous,
+restless, his heart was beating much faster than usual; he couldn't
+stand still, and he had no compunction whatever about leaving her to get
+rid, by herself, of Mr. Pardon.</p>
+
+<p>This gentleman continued to mix in the conversation, possibly from the
+hope that if he should linger either Miss Tarrant or Miss Chancellor
+would make her appearance. "Every seat in the Hall is sold; the crowd is
+expected to be immense. When our Boston public <i>does</i> take an idea!" Mr.
+Pardon exclaimed.</p>
+
+<p>Ransom only wanted to get away, and in order to facilitate his release
+by implying that in such a case he should see her again, he said to Mrs.
+Luna, rather hypocritically, from the threshold, "You had really better
+come to-night."</p>
+
+<p>"I am not like the Boston public&mdash;I don't take an idea!" she replied.</p>
+
+<p>"Do you mean to say you are not going?" cried Mr. Pardon, with widely
+open eyes, clapping his hand again to his pocket. "Don't you regard her
+as a wonderful genius?"</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Luna was sorely tried, and the vexation of seeing Ransom slip away
+from her with his thoughts visibly on Verena, leaving her face to face
+with the odious newspaper man, whose presence made passionate protest
+impossible&mdash;the annoyance of seeing everything and every one mock at her
+and fail to compensate her was such that she lost her head, while
+rashness leaped to her lips and jerked out the answer&mdash;"No indeed; I
+think her a vulgar idiot!"</p>
+
+<p>"Ah, madam, I should never permit myself to print that!" Ransom heard
+Mr. Pardon rejoin reproachfully, as he dropped the <i>porti&egrave;re</i> of the
+drawing-room.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="XLI" id="XLI"></a>XLI</h2>
+
+
+<p>He walked about for the next two hours, walked all over Boston, heedless
+of his course, and conscious only of an unwillingness to return to his
+hotel and an inability to eat his dinner or rest his weary legs. He had
+been roaming in very much the same desperate fashion, at once eager and
+purposeless, for many days before he left New York, and he knew that his
+agitation and suspense must wear themselves out. At present they pressed
+him more than ever; they had become tremendously acute. The early dusk
+of the last half of November had gathered thick, but the evening was
+fine and the lighted streets had the animation and variety of a winter
+that had begun with brilliancy. The shop-fronts glowed through frosty
+panes, the passers bustled on the pavement, the bells of the street-cars
+jangled in the cold air, the newsboys hawked the evening papers, the
+vestibules of the theatres, illuminated and flanked with coloured
+posters and the photographs of actresses, exhibited seductively their
+swinging doors of red leather or baize, spotted with little brass nails.
+Behind great plates of glass the interior of the hotels became visible,
+with marble-paved lobbies, white with electric lamps, and columns, and
+Westerners on divans stretching their legs, while behind a counter, set
+apart and covered with an array of periodicals and novels in paper
+covers, little boys, with the faces of old men, showing plans of the
+play-houses and offering librettos, sold orchestra-chairs at a premium.
+When from time to time Ransom paused at a corner, hesitating which way
+to drift, he looked up and saw the stars, sharp and near, scintillating
+over the town. Boston seemed to him big and full of nocturnal life, very
+much awake and preparing for an evening of pleasure.</p>
+
+<p>He passed and repassed the Music Hall, saw Verena immensely advertised,
+gazed down the vista, the approach for pedestrians, which leads out of
+School Street, and thought it looked expectant and ominous. People had
+not begun to enter yet, but the place was ready, lighted and open, and
+the interval would be only too short. So it appeared to Ransom, while at
+the same time he wished immensely the crisis were over. Everything that
+surrounded him referred itself to the idea with which his mind was
+palpitating, the question whether he might not still intervene as
+against the girl's jump into the abyss. He believed that all Boston was
+going to hear her, or that at least every one was whom he saw in the
+streets; and there was a kind of incentive and inspiration in this
+thought. The vision of wresting her from the mighty multitude set him
+off again, to stride through the population that would fight for her. It
+was not too late, for he felt strong; it would not be too late even if
+she should already stand there before thousands of converging eyes. He
+had had his ticket since the morning, and now the time was going on. He
+went back to his hotel at last for ten minutes, and refreshed himself by
+dressing a little and by drinking a glass of wine. Then he took his way
+once more to the Music Hall, and saw that people were beginning to go
+in&mdash;the first drops of the great stream, among whom there were many
+women. Since seven o'clock the minutes had moved fast&mdash;before that they
+had dragged&mdash;and now there was only half an hour. Ransom passed in with
+the others; he knew just where his seat was; he had chosen it, on
+reaching Boston, from the few that were left, with what he believed to
+be care. But now, as he stood beneath the far-away panelled roof,
+stretching above the line of little tongues of flame which marked its
+junction with the walls, he felt that this didn't matter much, since he
+certainly was not going to subside into his place. He was not one of the
+audience; he was apart, unique, and had come on a business altogether
+special. It wouldn't have mattered if, in advance, he had got no place
+at all and had just left himself to pay for standing-room at the last.
+The people came pouring in, and in a very short time there would only be
+standing-room left. Ransom had no definite plan; he had mainly wanted to
+get inside of the building, so that, on a view of the field, he might
+make up his mind. He had never been in the Music Hall before, and its
+lofty vaults and rows of overhanging balconies made it to his
+imagination immense and impressive. There were two or three moments
+during which he felt as he could imagine a young man to feel who,
+waiting in a public place, has made up his mind, for reasons of his own,
+to discharge a pistol at the king or the president.</p>
+
+<p>The place struck him with a kind of Roman vastness; the doors which
+opened out of the upper balconies, high aloft, and which were constantly
+swinging to and fro with the passage of spectators and ushers, reminded
+him of the <i>vomitoria</i> that he had read about in descriptions of the
+Colosseum. The huge organ, the background of the stage&mdash;a stage occupied
+with tiers of seats for choruses and civic worthies&mdash;lifted to the dome
+its shining pipes and sculptured pinnacles, and some genius of music or
+oratory erected himself in monumental bronze at the base. The hall was
+so capacious and serious, and the audience increased so rapidly without
+filling it, giving Ransom a sense of the numbers it would contain when
+it was packed, that the courage of the two young women, face to face
+with so tremendous an ordeal, hovered before him as really sublime,
+especially the conscious tension of poor Olive, who would have been
+spared none of the anxieties and tremors, none of the previsions of
+accident or calculations of failure. In the front of the stage was a
+slim, high desk, like a music-stand, with a cover of red velvet, and
+near it was a light ornamental chair, on which he was sure Verena would
+not seat herself, though he could fancy her leaning at moments on the
+back. Behind this was a kind of semicircle of a dozen arm-chairs, which
+had evidently been arranged for the friends of the speaker, her sponsors
+and patrons. The hall was more and more full of premonitory sounds;
+people making a noise as they unfolded, on hinges, their seats, and
+itinerant boys, whose voices as they cried out "Photographs of Miss
+Tarrant&mdash;sketch of her life!" or "Portraits of the Speaker&mdash;story of her
+career!" sounded small and piping in the general immensity. Before
+Ransom was aware of it several of the arm-chairs, in the row behind the
+lecturer's desk, were occupied, with gaps, and in a moment he
+recognised, even across the interval, three of the persons who had
+appeared. The straight-featured woman with bands of glossy hair and
+eyebrows that told at a distance, could only be Mrs. Farrinder, just as
+the gentleman beside her, in a white overcoat, with an umbrella and a
+vague face, was probably her husband Amariah. At the opposite end of the
+row were another pair, whom Ransom, unacquainted with certain chapters
+of Verena's history, perceived without surprise to be Mrs. Burrage and
+her insinuating son. Apparently their interest in Miss Tarrant was more
+than a momentary fad, since&mdash;like himself&mdash;they had made the journey
+from New York to hear her. There were other figures, unknown to our
+young man, here and there, in the semicircle; but several places were
+still empty (one of which was of course reserved for Olive), and it
+occurred to Ransom, even in his preoccupation, that one of them ought to
+remain so&mdash;ought to be left to symbolise the presence, in the spirit, of
+Miss Birdseye.</p>
+
+<p>He bought one of the photographs of Verena, and thought it shockingly
+bad, and bought also the sketch of her life, which many people seemed to
+be reading, but crumpled it up in his pocket for future consideration.
+Verena was not in the least present to him in connexion with this
+exhibition of enterprise and puffery; what he saw was Olive, struggling
+and yielding, making every sacrifice of taste for the sake of the
+largest hearing, and conforming herself to a great popular system.
+Whether she had struggled or not, there was a catch-penny effect about
+the whole thing which added to the fever in his cheek and made him wish
+he had money to buy up the stock of the vociferous little boys. Suddenly
+the notes of the organ rolled out into the hall, and he became aware
+that the overture or prelude had begun. This, too, seemed to him a piece
+of claptrap, but he didn't wait to think of it; he instantly edged out
+of his place, which he had chosen near the end of a row, and reached one
+of the numerous doors. If he had had no definite plan he now had at
+least an irresistible impulse, and he felt the prick of shame at having
+faltered for a moment. It had been his tacit calculation that Verena,
+still enshrined in mystery by her companion, would not have reached the
+scene of her performance till within a few minutes of the time at which
+she was to come forth; so that he had lost nothing by waiting, up to
+this moment, before the platform. But now he must overtake his
+opportunity. Before passing out of the hall into the lobby he paused,
+and with his back to the stage, gave a look at the gathered auditory. It
+had become densely numerous, and, suffused with the evenly distributed
+gaslight, which fell from a great elevation, and the thick atmosphere
+that hangs for ever in such places, it appeared to pile itself high and
+to look dimly expectant and formidable. He had a throb of uneasiness at
+his private purpose of balking it of its entertainment, its victim&mdash;a
+glimpse of the ferocity that lurks in a disappointed mob. But the
+thought of that danger only made him pass more quickly through the ugly
+corridors; he felt that his plan was definite enough now, and he found
+that he had no need even of asking the way to a certain small door (one
+or more of them), which he meant to push open. In taking his place in
+the morning he had assured himself as to the side of the house on which
+(with its approach to the platform) the withdrawing room of singers and
+speakers was situated; he had chosen his seat in that quarter, and he
+now had not far to go before he reached it. No one heeded or challenged
+him; Miss Tarrant's auditors were still pouring in (the occasion was
+evidently to have been an unprecedented success of curiosity), and had
+all the attention of the ushers. Ransom opened a door at the end of the
+passage, and it admitted him into a sort of vestibule, quite bare save
+that at a second door, opposite to him, stood a figure at the sight of
+which he paused for a moment in his advance.</p>
+
+<p>The figure was simply that of a robust policeman, in his helmet and
+brass buttons&mdash;a policeman who was expecting him&mdash;Ransom could see that
+in a twinkling. He judged in the same space of time that Olive
+Chancellor had heard of his having arrived and had applied for the
+protection of this functionary, who was now simply guarding the ingress
+and was prepared to defend it against all comers. There was a slight
+element of surprise in this, as he had reasoned that his nervous
+kinswoman was absent from her house for the day&mdash;had been spending it
+all in Verena's retreat, wherever that was. The surprise was not great
+enough, however, to interrupt his course for more than an instant, and
+he crossed the room and stood before the belted sentinel. For a moment
+neither spoke; they looked at each other very hard in the eyes, and
+Ransom heard the organ, beyond partitions, launching its waves of sound
+through the hall. They seemed to be very near it, and the whole place
+vibrated. The policeman was a tall, lean-faced, sallow man, with a stoop
+of the shoulders, a small, steady eye, and something in his mouth which
+made a protuberance in his cheek. Ransom could see that he was very
+strong, but he believed that he himself was not materially less so.
+However, he had not come there to show physical fight&mdash;a public tussle
+about Verena was not an attractive idea, except perhaps, after all, if
+he should get the worst of it, from the point of view of Olive's new
+system of advertising; and, moreover, it would not be in the least
+necessary. Still he said nothing, and still the policeman remained dumb,
+and there was something in the way the moments elapsed and in our young
+man's consciousness that Verena was separated from him only by a couple
+of thin planks, which made him feel that she too expected him, but in
+another sense; that she had nothing to do with this parade of
+resistance, that she would know in a moment, by quick intuition, that he
+was there, and that she was only praying to be rescued, to be saved.
+Face to face with Olive she hadn't the courage, but she would have it
+with her hand in his. It came to him that there was no one in the world
+less sure of her business just at that moment than Olive Chancellor; it
+was as if he could see, through the door, the terrible way her eyes were
+fixed on Verena while she held her watch in her hand and Verena looked
+away from her. Olive would have been so thankful that she should begin
+before the hour, but of course that was impossible. Ransom asked no
+questions&mdash;that seemed a waste of time; he only said, after a minute, to
+the policeman:</p>
+
+<p>"I should like very much to see Miss Tarrant, if you will be so good as
+to take in my card."</p>
+
+<p>The guardian of order, well planted just between him and the handle of
+the door, took from Ransom the morsel of pasteboard which he held out to
+him, read slowly the name inscribed on it, turned it over and looked at
+the back, then returned it to his interlocutor. "Well, I guess it ain't
+much use," he remarked.</p>
+
+<p>"How can you know that? You have no business to decline my request."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, I guess I have about as much business as you have to make it."
+Then he added, "You are just the very man she wants to keep out."</p>
+
+<p>"I don't think Miss Tarrant wants to keep me out," Ransom returned.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't know much about her, she hasn't hired the hall. It's the other
+one&mdash;Miss Chancellor; it's her that runs this lecture."</p>
+
+<p>"And she has asked you to keep me out? How absurd!" exclaimed Ransom
+ingeniously.</p>
+
+<p>"She tells me you're none too fit to be round alone; you have got this
+thing on the brain. I guess you'd better be quiet," said the policeman.</p>
+
+<p>"Quiet? Is it possible to be more quiet than I am?"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, I've seen crazy folks that were a good deal like you. If you want
+to see the speaker why don't you go and set round in the hall, with the
+rest of the public?" And the policeman waited, in an immovable,
+ruminating, reasonable manner, for an answer to this inquiry.</p>
+
+<p>Ransom had one, on the instant, at his service. "Because I don't want
+simply to see her; I want also to speak to her&mdash;in private."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes&mdash;it's always intensely private," said the policeman. "Now I
+wouldn't lose the lecture if I was you. I guess it will do you good."</p>
+
+<p>"The lecture?" Ransom repeated, laughing. "It won't take place."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes it will&mdash;as quick as the organ stops." Then the policeman added, as
+to himself, "Why the devil don't it?"</p>
+
+<p>"Because Miss Tarrant has sent up to the organist to tell him to keep
+on."</p>
+
+<p>"Who has she sent, do you s'pose?" And Ransom's new acquaintance entered
+into his humour. "I guess Miss Chancellor isn't her nigger."</p>
+
+<p>"She has sent her father, or perhaps even her mother. They are in there
+too."</p>
+
+<p>"How do you know that?" asked the policeman consideringly.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, I know everything," Ransom answered, smiling.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, I guess they didn't come here to listen to that organ. We'll hear
+something else before long, if he doesn't stop."</p>
+
+<p>"You will hear a good deal, very soon," Ransom remarked.</p>
+
+<p>The serenity of his self-confidence appeared at last to make an
+impression on his antagonist, who lowered his head a little, like some
+butting animal, and looked at the young man from beneath bushy eyebrows.
+"Well, I <i>have</i> heard a good deal, since I've been in Boston."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, Boston's a great place," Ransom rejoined inattentively. He was not
+listening to the policeman or to the organ now, for the sound of voices
+had reached him from the other side of the door. The policeman took no
+further notice of it than to lean back against the panels, with folded
+arms; and there was another pause, between them, during which the
+playing of the organ ceased.</p>
+
+<p>"I will just wait here, with your permission," said Ransom, "and
+presently I shall be called."</p>
+
+<p>"Who do you s'pose will call you?"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, Miss Tarrant, I hope."</p>
+
+<p>"She'll have to square the other one first."</p>
+
+<p>Ransom took out his watch, which he had adapted, on purpose, several
+hours before, to Boston time, and saw that the minutes had sped with
+increasing velocity during this interview, and that it now marked five
+minutes past eight. "Miss Chancellor will have to square the public," he
+said in a moment; and the words were far from being an empty profession
+of security, for the conviction already in possession of him, that a
+drama in which he, though cut off, was an actor, had been going on for
+some time in the apartment he was prevented from entering, that the
+situation was extraordinarily strained there, and that it could not come
+to an end without an appeal to him&mdash;this transcendental assumption
+acquired an infinitely greater force the instant he perceived that
+Verena was even now keeping her audience waiting. Why didn't she go on?
+Why, except that she knew he was there, and was gaining time?</p>
+
+<p>"Well, I guess she has shown herself," said the door-keeper, whose
+discussion with Ransom now appeared to have passed, on his own part, and
+without the slightest prejudice to his firmness, into a sociable,
+gossiping phase.</p>
+
+<p>"If she had shown herself, we should hear the reception, the applause."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, there they air; they are going to give it to her," the policeman
+announced.</p>
+
+<p>He had an odious appearance of being in the right, for there indeed they
+seemed to be&mdash;they were giving it to her. A general hubbub rose from the
+floor and the galleries of the hall&mdash;the sound of several thousand
+people stamping with their feet and rapping with their umbrellas and
+sticks. Ransom felt faint, and for a little while he stood with his gaze
+interlocked with that of the policeman. Then suddenly a wave of coolness
+seemed to break over him, and he exclaimed: "My dear fellow, that isn't
+applause&mdash;it's impatience. It isn't a reception, it's a call!"</p>
+
+<p>The policeman neither assented to this proposition nor denied it; he
+only transferred the protuberance in his cheek to the other side, and
+observed:</p>
+
+<p>"I guess she's sick."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, I hope not!" said Ransom, very gently. The stamping and rapping
+swelled and swelled for a minute, and then it subsided; but before it
+had done so Ransom's definition of it had plainly become the true one.
+The tone of the manifestation was good-humoured, but it was not
+gratulatory. He looked at his watch again, and saw that five minutes
+more had elapsed, and he remembered what the newspaperman in Charles
+Street had said about Olive's guaranteeing Verena's punctuality. Oddly
+enough, at the moment the image of this gentleman recurred to him, the
+gentleman himself burst through the other door, in a state of the
+liveliest agitation.</p>
+
+<p>"Why in the name of goodness don't she go on? If she wants to make them
+call her, they've done it about enough!" Mr. Pardon turned, pressingly,
+from Ransom to the policeman and back again, and in his preoccupation
+gave no sign of having met the Mississippian before.</p>
+
+<p>"I guess she's sick," said the policeman.</p>
+
+<p>"The public'll be sick!" cried the distressed reporter. "If she's sick,
+why doesn't she send for a doctor? All Boston is packed into this house,
+and she has got to talk to it. I want to go in and see."</p>
+
+<p>"You can't go in," said the policeman drily.</p>
+
+<p>"Why can't I go in, I should like to know? I want to go in for the
+<i>Vesper</i>"!</p>
+
+<p>"You can't go in for anything. I'm keeping this man out, too," the
+policeman added genially, as if to make Mr. Pardon's exclusion appear
+less invidious.</p>
+
+<p>"Why, they'd ought to let <i>you</i> in," said Matthias, staring a moment at
+Ransom.</p>
+
+<p>"May be they'd ought, but they won't," the policeman remarked.</p>
+
+<p>"Gracious me!" panted Mr. Pardon; "I knew from the first Miss Chancellor
+would make a mess of it! Where's Mr. Filer?" he went on eagerly,
+addressing himself apparently to either of the others, or to both.</p>
+
+<p>"I guess he's at the door, counting the money," said the policeman.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, he'll have to give it back if he don't look out!"</p>
+
+<p>"Maybe he will. I'll let <i>him</i> in if he comes, but he's the only one.
+She is on now," the policeman added, without emotion.</p>
+
+<p>His ear had caught the first faint murmur of another explosion of sound.
+This time, unmistakably, it was applause&mdash;the clapping of multitudinous
+hands, mingled with the noise of many throats. The demonstration,
+however, though considerable, was not what might have been expected, and
+it died away quickly. Mr. Pardon stood listening, with an expression of
+some alarm. "Merciful fathers! can't they give her more than that?" he
+cried. "I'll just fly round and see!"</p>
+
+<p>When he had hurried away again, Ransom said to the policeman&mdash;"Who is
+Mr. Filer?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, he's an old friend of mine. He's the man that runs Miss
+Chancellor."</p>
+
+<p>"That runs her?"</p>
+
+<p>"Just the same as she runs Miss Tarrant. He runs the pair, as you might
+say. He's in the lecture-business."</p>
+
+<p>"Then he had better talk to the public himself."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, <i>he</i> can't talk; he can only boss!"</p>
+
+<p>The opposite door at this moment was pushed open again, and a large,
+heated-looking man, with a little stiff beard on the end of his chin and
+his overcoat flying behind him, strode forward with an imprecation.
+"What the h&mdash;&mdash; are they doing in the parlour? This sort of thing's
+about played out!"</p>
+
+<p>"Ain't she up there now?" the policeman asked.</p>
+
+<p>"It's not Miss Tarrant," Ransom said, as if he knew all about it. He
+perceived in a moment that this was Mr. Filer, Olive Chancellor's agent;
+an inference instantly followed by the reflexion that such a personage
+would have been warned against him by his kinswoman and would doubtless
+attempt to hold him, or his influence, accountable for Verena's
+unexpected delay. Mr. Filer only glanced at him, however, and to
+Ransom's surprise appeared to have no theory of his identity; a fact
+implying that Miss Chancellor had considered that the greater discretion
+was (except to the policeman) to hold her tongue about him altogether.</p>
+
+<p>"Up there? It's her jackass of a father that's up there!" cried Mr.
+Filer, with his hand on the latch of the door, which the policeman had
+allowed him to approach.</p>
+
+<p>"Is he asking for a doctor?" the latter inquired dispassionately.</p>
+
+<p>"You're the sort of doctor he'll want, if he doesn't produce the girl!
+You don't mean to say they've locked themselves in? What the plague are
+they after?"</p>
+
+<p>"They've got the key on that side," said the policeman, while Mr. Filer
+discharged at the door a volley of sharp knocks, at the same time
+violently shaking the handle.</p>
+
+<p>"If the door was locked, what was the good of your standing before it?"
+Ransom inquired.</p>
+
+<p>"So as you couldn't do that"; and the policeman nodded at Mr. Filer.</p>
+
+<p>"You see your interference has done very little good."</p>
+
+<p>"I dunno; she has got to come out yet."</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Filer meanwhile had continued to thump and shake, demanding instant
+admission and inquiring if they were going to let the audience pull the
+house down. Another round of applause had broken out, directed
+perceptibly to some apology, some solemn circumlocution, of Selah
+Tarrant's; this covered the sound of the agent's voice, as well as that
+of a confused and divided response, proceeding from the parlour. For a
+minute nothing definite was audible; the door remained closed, and
+Matthias Pardon reappeared in the vestibule.</p>
+
+<p>"He says she's just a little faint&mdash;from nervousness. She'll be all
+ready in about three minutes." This announcement was Mr. Pardon's
+contribution to the crisis; and he added that the crowd was a lovely
+crowd, it was a real Boston crowd, it was perfectly good-humoured.</p>
+
+<p>"There's a lovely crowd, and a real Boston one too, I guess, in here!"
+cried Mr. Filer, now banging very hard. "I've handled prima donnas, and
+I've handled natural curiosities, but I've never seen anything up to
+this. Mind what I say, ladies; if you don't let me in, I'll smash down
+the door!"</p>
+
+<p>"Don't seem as if <i>you</i> could make it much worse, does it?" the
+policeman observed to Ransom, strolling aside a little, with the air of
+being superseded.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="XLII" id="XLII"></a>XLII</h2>
+
+
+<p>Ransom made no reply; he was watching the door, which at that moment
+gave way from within. Verena stood there&mdash;it was she, evidently, who had
+opened it&mdash;and her eyes went straight to his. She was dressed in white,
+and her face was whiter than her garment; above it her hair seemed to
+shine like fire. She took a step forward; but before she could take
+another he had come down to her, on the threshold of the room. Her face
+was full of suffering, and he did not attempt&mdash;before all those eyes&mdash;to
+take her hand; he only said in a low tone, "I have been waiting for
+you&mdash;a long time!"</p>
+
+<p>"I know it&mdash;I saw you in your seat&mdash;I want to speak to you."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, Miss Tarrant, don't you think you'd better be on the platform?"
+cried Mr. Filer, making with both his arms a movement as if to sweep her
+before him, through the waiting-room, up into the presence of the
+public.</p>
+
+<p>"In a moment I shall be ready. My father is making that all right." And,
+to Ransom's surprise, she smiled, with all her sweetness, at the
+irrepressible agent; appeared to wish genuinely to reassure him.</p>
+
+<p>The three had moved together into the waiting-room, and there at the
+farther end of it, beyond the vulgar, perfunctory chairs and tables,
+under the flaring gas, he saw Mrs. Tarrant sitting upright on a sofa,
+with immense rigidity, and a large flushed visage, full of suppressed
+distortion, and beside her prostrate, fallen over, her head buried in
+the lap of Verena's mother, the tragic figure of Olive Chancellor.
+Ransom could scarcely know how much Olive's having flung herself upon
+Mrs. Tarrant's bosom testified to the convulsive scene that had just
+taken place behind the locked door. He closed it again, sharply, in the
+face of the reporter and the policeman, and at the same moment Selah
+Tarrant descended, through the aperture leading to the platform, from
+his brief communion with the public. On seeing Ransom he stopped short,
+and, gathering his waterproof about him, measured the young man from
+head to foot.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, sir, perhaps <i>you</i> would like to go and explain our hitch," he
+remarked, indulging in a smile so comprehensive that the corners of his
+mouth seemed almost to meet behind. "I presume that you, better than any
+one else, can give them an insight into our difficulties!"</p>
+
+<p>"Father, be still; father, it will come out all right in a moment!"
+cried Verena, below her breath, panting like an emergent diver.</p>
+
+<p>"There's one thing I want to know: are we going to spend half an hour
+talking over our domestic affairs?" Mr. Filer demanded, wiping his
+indignant countenance. "Is Miss Tarrant going to lecture, or ain't she
+going to lecture? If she ain't, she'll please to show cause why. Is she
+aware that every quarter of a second, at the present instant, is worth
+about five hundred dollars?"</p>
+
+<p>"I know that&mdash;I know that, Mr. Filer; I will begin in a moment!" Verena
+went on. "I only want to speak to Mr. Ransom&mdash;just three words. They are
+perfectly quiet&mdash;don't you see how quiet they are? They trust me, they
+trust me, don't they, father? I only want to speak to Mr. Ransom."</p>
+
+<p>"Who the devil is Mr. Ransom?" cried the exasperated, bewildered Filer.</p>
+
+<p>Verena spoke to the others, but she looked at her lover, and the
+expression of her eyes was ineffably touching and beseeching. She
+trembled with nervous passion, there were sobs and supplications in her
+voice, and Ransom felt himself flushing with pure pity for her pain&mdash;her
+inevitable agony. But at the same moment he had another perception,
+which brushed aside remorse; he saw that he could do what he wanted,
+that she begged him, with all her being, to spare her, but that so long
+as he should protest she was submissive, helpless. What he wanted, in
+this light, flamed before him and challenged all his manhood, tossing
+his determination to a height from which not only Doctor Tarrant, and
+Mr. Filer, and Olive, over there, in her sightless, soundless shame, but
+the great expectant hall as well, and the mighty multitude, in suspense,
+keeping quiet from minute to minute and holding the breath of its
+anger&mdash;from which all these things looked small, surmountable, and of
+the moment only. He didn't quite understand, as yet, however; he saw
+that Verena had not refused, but temporised, that the spell upon
+her&mdash;thanks to which he should still be able to rescue her&mdash;had been the
+knowledge that he was near.</p>
+
+<p>"Come away, come away," he murmured quickly, putting out his two hands
+to her.</p>
+
+<p>She took one of them, as if to plead, not to consent. "Oh, let me off,
+let me off&mdash;for <i>her</i>, for the others! It's too terrible, it's
+impossible!"</p>
+
+<p>"What I want to know is why Mr. Ransom isn't in the hands of the
+police!" wailed Mrs. Tarrant, from her sofa.</p>
+
+<p>"I have been, madam, for the last quarter of an hour." Ransom felt more
+and more that he could manage it, if he only kept cool. He bent over
+Verena with a tenderness in which he was careless, now, of observation.
+"Dearest, I told you, I warned you. I left you alone for ten weeks; but
+could that make you doubt it was coming? Not for worlds, not for
+millions, shall you give yourself to that roaring crowd. Don't ask me to
+care for them, or for any one! What do they care for you but to gape and
+grin and babble? You are mine, you are not theirs."</p>
+
+<p>"What under the sun is the man talking about? With the most magnificent
+audience ever brought together! The city of Boston is under this roof!"
+Mr. Filer gaspingly interposed.</p>
+
+<p>"The city of Boston be damned!" said Ransom.</p>
+
+<p>"Mr. Ransom is very much interested in my daughter. He doesn't approve
+of our views," Selah Tarrant explained.</p>
+
+<p>"It's the most horrible, wicked, immoral selfishness I ever heard in my
+life!" roared Mrs. Tarrant.</p>
+
+<p>"Selfishness! Mrs. Tarrant, do you suppose I pretend not to be selfish?"</p>
+
+<p>"Do you want us all murdered by the mob, then?"</p>
+
+<p>"They can have their money&mdash;can't you give them back their money?" cried
+Verena, turning frantically round the circle.</p>
+
+<p>"Verena Tarrant, you don't mean to say you are going to back down?" her
+mother shrieked.</p>
+
+<p>"Good God! that I should make her suffer like this!" said Ransom to
+himself; and to put an end to the odious scene he would have seized
+Verena in his arms and broken away into the outer world, if Olive, who
+at Mrs. Tarrant's last loud challenge had sprung to her feet, had not at
+the same time thrown herself between them with a force which made the
+girl relinquish her grasp of Ransom's hand. To his astonishment, the
+eyes that looked at him out of her scared, haggard face were, like
+Verena's, eyes of tremendous entreaty. There was a moment during which
+she would have been ready to go down on her knees to him, in order that
+the lecture should go on.</p>
+
+<p>"If you don't agree with her, take her up on the platform, and have it
+out there; the public would like that, first-rate!" Mr. Filer said to
+Ransom, as if he thought this suggestion practical.</p>
+
+<p>"She had prepared a lovely address!" Selah remarked mournfully, as if to
+the company in general.</p>
+
+<p>No one appeared to heed the observation, but his wife broke out again.
+"Verena Tarrant, I should like to slap you! Do you call such a man as
+that a gentleman? I don't know where your father's spirit is, to let him
+stay!"</p>
+
+<p>Olive, meanwhile, was literally praying to her kinsman. "Let her appear
+this once, just this once: not to ruin, not to shame! Haven't you any
+pity; do you want me to be hooted? It's only for an hour. Haven't you
+any soul?"</p>
+
+<p>Her face and voice were terrible to Ransom; she had flung herself upon
+Verena and was holding her close, and he could see that her friend's
+suffering was faint in comparison to her own. "Why for an hour, when
+it's all false and damnable? An hour is as bad as ten years! She's mine
+or she isn't, and if she's mine, she's all mine!"</p>
+
+<p>"Yours! Yours! Verena, think, think what you're doing!" Olive moaned,
+bending over her.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Filer was now pouring forth his nature in objurgations and oaths,
+and brandishing before the culprits&mdash;Verena and Ransom&mdash;the extreme
+penalty of the law. Mrs. Tarrant had burst into violent hysterics, while
+Selah revolved vaguely about the room and declared that it seemed as if
+the better day was going to be put off for quite a while. "Don't you see
+how good, how sweet they are&mdash;giving us all this time? Don't you think
+that when they behave like that&mdash;without a sound, for five minutes&mdash;they
+ought to be rewarded?" Verena asked, smiling divinely, at Ransom.
+Nothing could have been more tender, more exquisite, than the way she
+put her appeal upon the ground of simple charity, kindness to the great
+good-natured, childish public.</p>
+
+<p>"Miss Chancellor may reward them in any way she likes. Give them back
+their money and a little present to each."</p>
+
+<p>"Money and presents? I should like to shoot you, sir!" yelled Mr. Filer.
+The audience had really been very patient, and up to this point deserved
+Verena's praise; but it was now long past eight o'clock, and symptoms of
+irritation&mdash;cries and groans and hisses&mdash;began again to proceed from the
+hall. Mr. Filer launched himself into the passage leading to the stage,
+and Selah rushed after him. Mrs. Tarrant extended herself, sobbing, on
+the sofa, and Olive, quivering in the storm, inquired of Ransom what he
+wanted her to do, what humiliation, what degradation, what sacrifice he
+imposed.</p>
+
+<p>"I'll do anything&mdash;I'll be abject&mdash;I'll be vile&mdash;I'll go down in the
+dust!"</p>
+
+<p>"I ask nothing of you, and I have nothing to do with you," Ransom said.
+"That is, I ask, at the most, that you shouldn't expect that, wishing to
+make Verena my wife, I should say to her, 'Oh yes, you can take an hour
+or two out of it!' Verena," he went on, "all this is out of
+it&mdash;dreadfully, odiously&mdash;and it's a great deal too much! Come, come as
+far away from here as possible, and we'll settle the rest!"</p>
+
+<p>The combined effort of Mr. Filer and Selah Tarrant to pacify the public
+had not, apparently, the success it deserved; the house continued in
+uproar and the volume of sound increased. "Leave us alone, leave us
+alone for a single minute!" cried Verena; "just let me speak to him, and
+it will be all right!" She rushed over to her mother, drew her, dragged
+her from the sofa, led her to the door of the room. Mrs. Tarrant, on the
+way, reunited herself with Olive (the horror of the situation had at
+least that compensation for her), and, clinging and staggering together,
+the distracted women, pushed by Verena, passed into the vestibule, now,
+as Ransom saw, deserted by the policeman and the reporter, who had
+rushed round to where the battle was thickest.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, why did you come&mdash;why, why?" And Verena, turning back, threw
+herself upon him with a protest which was all, and more than all, a
+surrender. She had never yet given herself to him so much as in that
+movement of reproach.</p>
+
+<p>"Didn't you expect me, and weren't you sure?" he asked, smiling at her
+and standing there till she arrived.</p>
+
+<p>"I didn't know&mdash;it was terrible&mdash;it's awful! I saw you in your place, in
+the house, when you came. As soon as we got here I went out to those
+steps that go up to the stage and I looked out, with my father&mdash;from
+behind him&mdash;and saw you in a minute. Then I felt too nervous to speak! I
+could never, never, if you were there! My father didn't know you, and I
+said nothing, but Olive guessed as soon as I came back. She rushed at
+me, and she looked at me&mdash;oh, how she looked! and she guessed. She
+didn't need to go out to see for herself, and when she saw how I was
+trembling she began to tremble herself, to believe, as I believed, we
+were lost. Listen to them, listen to them, in the house! Now I want you
+to go away&mdash;I will see you to-morrow, as long as you wish. That's all I
+want now; if you will only go away it's not too late, and everything
+will be all right!"</p>
+
+<p>Preoccupied as Ransom was with the simple purpose of getting her bodily
+out of the place, he could yet notice her strange, touching tone, and
+her air of believing that she might really persuade him. She had
+evidently given up everything now&mdash;every pretence of a different
+conviction and of loyalty to her cause; all this had fallen from her as
+soon as she felt him near, and she asked him to go away just as any
+plighted maiden might have asked any favour of her lover. But it was the
+poor girl's misfortune that whatever she did or said, or left unsaid,
+only had the effect of making her dearer to him and making the people
+who were clamouring for her seem more and more a raving rabble.</p>
+
+<p>He indulged not in the smallest recognition of her request, and simply
+said, "Surely Olive must have believed, must have known, I would come."</p>
+
+<p>"She would have been sure if you hadn't become so unexpectedly quiet
+after I left Marmion. You seemed to concur, to be willing to wait."</p>
+
+<p>"So I was, for a few weeks. But they ended yesterday. I was furious that
+morning, when I learned your flight, and during the week that followed I
+made two or three attempts to find you. Then I stopped&mdash;I thought it
+better. I saw you were very well hidden; I determined not even to write.
+I felt I <i>could</i> wait&mdash;with that last day at Marmion to think of.
+Besides, to leave you with her awhile, for the last, seemed more decent.
+Perhaps you'll tell me now where you were."</p>
+
+<p>"I was with father and mother. She sent me to them that morning, with a
+letter. I don't know what was in it. Perhaps there was money," said
+Verena, who evidently now would tell him everything.</p>
+
+<p>"And where did they take you?"</p>
+
+<p>"I don't know&mdash;to places. I was in Boston once, for a day; but only in a
+carriage. They were as frightened as Olive; they were bound to save me!"</p>
+
+<p>"They shouldn't have brought you here to-night then. How could you
+possibly doubt of my coming?"</p>
+
+<p>"I don't know what I thought, and I didn't know, till I saw you, that
+all the strength I had hoped for would leave me in a flash, and that if
+I attempted to speak&mdash;with you sitting there&mdash;I should make the most
+shameful failure. We had a sickening scene here&mdash;I begged for delay, for
+time to recover. We waited and waited, and when I heard you at the door
+talking to the policeman, it seemed to me everything was gone. But it
+will still come back, if you will leave me. They are quiet again&mdash;father
+must be interesting them."</p>
+
+<p>"I hope he is!" Ransom exclaimed. "If Miss Chancellor ordered the
+policeman, she must have expected me."</p>
+
+<p>"That was only after she knew you were in the house. She flew out into
+the lobby with father, and they seized him and posted him there. She
+locked the door; she seemed to think they would break it down. I didn't
+wait for that, but from the moment I knew you were on the other side of
+it I couldn't go on&mdash;I was paralysed. It has made me feel better to talk
+to you&mdash;and now I could appear," Verena added.</p>
+
+<p>"My darling child, haven't you a shawl or a mantle?" Ransom returned,
+for all answer, looking about him. He perceived, tossed upon a chair, a
+long, furred cloak, which he caught up and, before she could resist,
+threw over her. She even let him arrange it, and, standing there, draped
+from head to foot in it, contented herself with saying, after a moment:</p>
+
+<p>"I don't understand&mdash;where shall we go? Where will you take me?"</p>
+
+<p>"We shall catch the night-train for New York, and the first thing in the
+morning we shall be married."</p>
+
+<p>Verena remained gazing at him, with swimming eyes. "And what will the
+people do? Listen, listen!"</p>
+
+<p>"Your father is ceasing to interest them. They'll howl and thump,
+according to their nature."</p>
+
+<p>"Ah, their nature's fine!" Verena pleaded.</p>
+
+<p>"Dearest, that's one of the fallacies I shall have to woo you from. Hear
+them, the senseless brutes!" The storm was now raging in the hall, and
+it deepened, to such a point that Verena turned to him in a supreme
+appeal.</p>
+
+<p>"I could soothe them with a word!"</p>
+
+<p>"Keep your soothing words for me&mdash;you will have need of them all, in our
+coming time," Ransom said, laughing. He pulled open the door again,
+which led into the lobby, but he was driven back, with Verena, by a
+furious onset from Mrs. Tarrant. Seeing her daughter fairly arrayed for
+departure, she hurled herself upon her, half in indignation, half in a
+blind impulse to cling, and with an outpouring of tears, reproaches,
+prayers, strange scraps of argument and iterations of farewell, closed
+her about with an embrace which was partly a supreme caress, partly the
+salutary castigation she had, three minutes before, expressed the wish
+to administer, and altogether for the moment a check upon the girl's
+flight.</p>
+
+<p>"Mother, dearest, it's all for the best, I can't help it, I love you
+just the same; let me go, let me go!" Verena stammered, kissing her
+again, struggling to free herself, and holding out her hand to Ransom.
+He saw now that she only wanted to get away, to leave everything behind
+her. Olive was close at hand, on the threshold of the room, and as soon
+as Ransom looked at her he became aware that the weakness she had just
+shown had passed away. She had straightened herself again, and she was
+upright in her desolation. The expression of her face was a thing to
+remain with him for ever; it was impossible to imagine a more vivid
+presentment of blighted hope and wounded pride. Dry, desperate, rigid,
+she yet wavered and seemed uncertain; her pale, glittering eyes
+straining forward, as if they were looking for death. Ransom had a
+vision, even at that crowded moment, that if she could have met it there
+and then, bristling with steel or lurid with fire, she would have rushed
+on it without a tremor, like the heroine that she was. All this while
+the great agitation in the hall rose and fell, in waves and surges, as
+if Selah Tarrant and the agent were talking to the multitude, trying to
+calm them, succeeding for the moment, and then letting them loose again.
+Whirled down by one of the fitful gusts, a lady and a gentleman issued
+from the passage, and Ransom, glancing at them, recognised Mrs.
+Farrinder and her husband.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, Miss Chancellor," said that more successful woman, with
+considerable asperity, "if this is the way you're going to reinstate our
+sex!" She passed rapidly through the room, followed by Amariah, who
+remarked in his transit that it seemed as if there had been a want of
+organisation, and the two retreated expeditiously, without the lady's
+having taken the smallest notice of Verena, whose conflict with her
+mother prolonged itself. Ransom, striving, with all needful
+consideration for Mrs. Tarrant, to separate these two, addressed not a
+word to Olive; it was the last of her, for him, and he neither saw how
+her livid face suddenly glowed, as if Mrs. Farrinder's words had been a
+lash, nor how, as if with a sudden inspiration, she rushed to the
+approach to the platform. If he had observed her, it might have seemed
+to him that she hoped to find the fierce expiation she sought for in
+exposure to the thousands she had disappointed and deceived, in offering
+herself to be trampled to death and torn to pieces. She might have
+suggested to him some feminine firebrand of Paris revolutions, erect on
+a barricade, or even the sacrificial figure of Hypatia, whirled through
+the furious mob of Alexandria. She was arrested an instant by the
+arrival of Mrs. Burrage and her son, who had quitted the stage on
+observing the withdrawal of the Farrinders, and who swept into the room
+in the manner of people seeking shelter from a thunderstorm. The
+mother's face expressed the well-bred surprise of a person who should
+have been asked out to dinner and seen the cloth pulled off the table;
+the young man, who supported her on his arm, instantly lost himself in
+the spectacle of Verena disengaging herself from Mrs. Tarrant, only to
+be again overwhelmed, and in the unexpected presence of the
+Mississippian. His handsome blue eyes turned from one to the other, and
+he looked infinitely annoyed and bewildered. It even seemed to occur to
+him that he might, perhaps, interpose with effect, and he evidently
+would have liked to say that, without really bragging, <i>he</i> would at
+least have kept the affair from turning into a row. But Verena, muffled
+and escaping, was deaf to him, and Ransom didn't look the right person
+to address such a remark as that to. Mrs. Burrage and Olive, as the
+latter shot past, exchanged a glance which represented quick irony on
+one side and indiscriminating defiance on the other.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, are <i>you</i> going to speak?" the lady from New York inquired, with
+her cursory laugh.</p>
+
+<p>Olive had already disappeared; but Ransom heard her answer flung behind
+her into the room. "I am going to be hissed and hooted and insulted!"</p>
+
+<p>"Olive, Olive!" Verena suddenly shrieked; and her piercing cry might
+have reached the front. But Ransom had already, by muscular force,
+wrenched her away, and was hurrying her out, leaving Mrs. Tarrant to
+heave herself into the arms of Mrs. Burrage, who, he was sure, would,
+within a minute, loom upon her attractively through her tears, and
+supply her with a reminiscence, destined to be valuable, of aristocratic
+support and clever composure. In the outer labyrinth hasty groups, a
+little scared, were leaving the hall, giving up the game. Ransom, as he
+went, thrust the hood of Verena's long cloak over her head, to conceal
+her face and her identity. It quite prevented recognition, and as they
+mingled in the issuing crowd he perceived the quick, complete,
+tremendous silence which, in the hall, had greeted Olive Chancellor's
+rush to the front. Every sound instantly dropped, the hush was
+respectful, the great public waited, and whatever she should say to them
+(and he thought she might indeed be rather embarrassed) it was not
+apparent that they were likely to hurl the benches at her. Ransom,
+palpitating with his victory, felt now a little sorry for her, and was
+relieved to know that, even when exasperated, a Boston audience is not
+ungenerous. "Ah, now I am glad!" said Verena, when they reached the
+street. But though she was glad, he presently discovered that, beneath
+her hood, she was in tears. It is to be feared that with the union, so
+far from brilliant, into which she was about to enter, these were not
+the last she was destined to shed.</p>
+
+<p>THE END</p>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's The Bostonians, Vol. II (of II), by Henry James
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+Project Gutenberg's The Bostonians, Vol. II (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. II (of II)
+
+Author: Henry James
+
+Release Date: November 5, 2006 [EBook #19718]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE BOSTONIANS, VOL. II (OF II) ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Suzanne Lybarger, Mary Meehan and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+                             THE BOSTONIANS
+
+                                A NOVEL
+
+                             BY HENRY JAMES
+
+                             IN TWO VOLUMES
+
+                                VOL. II
+
+
+
+MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED
+ST. MARTIN'S STREET, LONDON
+1921
+
+_First published in 1886_
+
+
+
+
+BOOK SECOND (_Continued_)
+
+
+
+
+XXIV
+
+
+A little more than an hour after this he stood in the parlour of Doctor
+Tarrant's suburban residence, in Monadnoc Place. He had induced a
+juvenile maid-servant, by an appeal somewhat impassioned, to let the
+ladies know that he was there; and she had returned, after a long
+absence, to say that Miss Tarrant would come down to him in a little
+while. He possessed himself, according to his wont, of the nearest book
+(it lay on the table, with an old magazine and a little japanned tray
+containing Tarrant's professional cards--his denomination as a mesmeric
+healer), and spent ten minutes in turning it over. It was a biography of
+Mrs. Ada T. P. Foat, the celebrated trance-lecturer, and was embellished
+by a portrait representing the lady with a surprised expression and
+innumerable ringlets. Ransom said to himself, after reading a few pages,
+that much ridicule had been cast upon Southern literature; but if that
+was a fair specimen of Northern!--and he threw it back upon the table
+with a gesture almost as contemptuous as if he had not known perfectly,
+after so long a residence in the North, that it was not, while he
+wondered whether this was the sort of thing Miss Tarrant had been
+brought up on. There was no other book to be seen, and he remembered to
+have read the magazine; so there was finally nothing for him, as the
+occupants of the house failed still to appear, but to stare before him,
+into the bright, bare, common little room, which was so hot that he
+wished to open a window, and of which an ugly, undraped cross-light
+seemed to have taken upon itself to reveal the poverty. Ransom, as I
+have mentioned, had not a high standard of comfort and noticed little,
+usually, how people's houses were furnished--it was only when they were
+very pretty that he observed; but what he saw while he waited at Doctor
+Tarrant's made him say to himself that it was no wonder Verena liked
+better to live with Olive Chancellor. He even began to wonder whether it
+were for the sake of that superior softness she had cultivated Miss
+Chancellor's favour, and whether Mrs. Luna had been right about her
+being mercenary and insincere. So many minutes elapsed before she
+appeared that he had time to remember he really knew nothing to the
+contrary, as well as to consider the oddity (so great when one did
+consider it) of his coming out to Cambridge to see her, when he had only
+a few hours in Boston to spare, a year and a half after she had given
+him her very casual invitation. She had not refused to receive him, at
+any rate; she was free to, if it didn't please her. And not only this,
+but she was apparently making herself fine in his honour, inasmuch as he
+heard a rapid footstep move to and fro above his head, and even, through
+the slightness which in Monadnoc Place did service for an upper floor,
+the sound of drawers and presses opened and closed. Some one was "flying
+round," as they said in Mississippi. At last the stairs creaked under a
+light tread, and the next moment a brilliant person came into the room.
+
+His reminiscence of her had been very pretty; but now that she had
+developed and matured, the little prophetess was prettier still. Her
+splendid hair seemed to shine; her cheek and chin had a curve which
+struck him by its fineness; her eyes and lips were full of smiles and
+greetings. She had appeared to him before as a creature of brightness,
+but now she lighted up the place, she irradiated, she made everything
+that surrounded her of no consequence; dropping upon the shabby sofa
+with an effect as charming as if she had been a nymph sinking on a
+leopard-skin, and with the native sweetness of her voice forcing him to
+listen till she spoke again. It was not long before he perceived that
+this added lustre was simply success; she was young and tender still,
+but the sound of a great applauding audience had been in her ears; it
+formed an element in which she felt buoyant and floated. Still,
+however, her glance was as pure as it was direct, and that fantastic
+fairness hung about her which had made an impression on him of old,
+and which reminded him of unworldly places--he didn't know
+where--convent-cloisters or vales of Arcady. At that other time she had
+been parti-coloured and bedizened, and she had always an air of costume,
+only now her costume was richer and more chastened. It was her line, her
+condition, part of her expression. If at Miss Birdseye's, and afterwards
+in Charles Street, she might have been a rope-dancer, to-day she made a
+"scene" of the mean little room in Monadnoc Place, such a scene as a
+prima donna makes of daubed canvas and dusty boards. She addressed Basil
+Ransom as if she had seen him the other week and his merits were fresh
+to her, though she let him, while she sat smiling at him, explain in his
+own rather ceremonious way why it was he had presumed to call upon her
+on so slight an acquaintance--on an invitation which she herself had had
+more than time to forget. His explanation, as a finished and
+satisfactory thing, quite broke down; there was no more impressive
+reason than that he had simply wished to see her. He became aware that
+this motive loomed large, and that her listening smile, innocent as it
+was, in the Arcadian manner, of mockery, seemed to accuse him of not
+having the courage of his inclination. He had alluded especially to
+their meeting at Miss Chancellor's; there it was that she had told him
+she should be glad to see him in her home.
+
+"Oh yes, I remember perfectly, and I remember quite as well seeing you
+at Miss Birdseye's the night before. I made a speech--don't you
+remember? That was delightful."
+
+"It was delightful indeed," said Basil Ransom.
+
+"I don't mean my speech; I mean the whole thing. It was then I made Miss
+Chancellor's acquaintance. I don't know whether you know how we work
+together. She has done so much for me."
+
+"Do you still make speeches?" Ransom asked, conscious, as soon as he had
+uttered it, that the question was below the mark.
+
+"Still? Why, I should hope so; it's all I'm good for! It's my life--or
+it's going to be. And it's Miss Chancellor's too. We are determined to
+do something."
+
+"And does she make speeches too?"
+
+"Well, she makes mine--or the best part of them. She tells me what to
+say--the real things, the strong things. It's Miss Chancellor as much as
+me!" said the singular girl, with a generous complacency which was yet
+half ludicrous.
+
+"I should like to hear you again," Basil Ransom rejoined.
+
+"Well, you must come some night. You will have plenty of chances. We are
+going on from triumph to triumph."
+
+Her brightness, her self-possession, her air of being a public
+character, her mixture of the girlish and the comprehensive, startled
+and confounded her visitor, who felt that if he had come to gratify his
+curiosity he should be in danger of going away still more curious than
+satiated. She added in her gay, friendly, trustful tone--the tone of
+facile intercourse, the tone in which happy, flower-crowned maidens may
+have talked to sunburnt young men in the golden age--"I am very familiar
+with your name; Miss Chancellor has told me all about you."
+
+"All about me?" Ransom raised his black eyebrows. "How could she do
+that? She doesn't know anything about me!"
+
+"Well, she told me you are a great enemy to our movement. Isn't that
+true? I think you expressed some unfavourable idea that day I met you at
+her house."
+
+"If you regard me as an enemy, it's very kind of you to receive me."
+
+"Oh, a great many gentlemen call," Verena said, calmly and brightly.
+"Some call simply to inquire. Some call because they have heard of me,
+or been present on some occasion when I have moved them. Every one is so
+interested."
+
+"And you have been in Europe," Ransom remarked, in a moment.
+
+"Oh yes, we went over to see if they were in advance. We had a
+magnificent time--we saw all the leaders."
+
+"The leaders?" Ransom repeated.
+
+"Of the emancipation of our sex. There are gentlemen there, as well as
+ladies. Olive had splendid introductions in all countries, and we
+conversed with all the earnest people. We heard much that was
+suggestive. And as for Europe!"--and the young lady paused, smiling at
+him and ending in a happy sigh, as if there were more to say on the
+subject than she could attempt on such short notice.
+
+"I suppose it's very attractive," said Ransom encouragingly.
+
+"It's just a dream!"
+
+"And did you find that they were in advance?"
+
+"Well, Miss Chancellor thought they were. She was surprised at some
+things we observed, and concluded that perhaps she hadn't done the
+Europeans justice--she has got such an open mind, it's as wide as the
+sea!--while I incline to the opinion that on the whole _we_ make the
+better show. The state of the movement there reflects their general
+culture, and their general culture is higher than ours (I mean taking
+the term in its broadest sense). On the other hand, the _special_
+condition--moral, social, personal--of our sex seems to me to be
+superior in this country; I mean regarded in relation--in proportion as
+it were--to the social phase at large. I must add that we did see some
+noble specimens over there. In England we met some lovely women, highly
+cultivated, and of immense organising power. In France we saw some
+wonderful, contagious types; we passed a delightful evening with the
+celebrated Marie Verneuil; she was released from prison, you know, only
+a few weeks before. Our total impression was that it is only a question
+of time--the future is ours. But everywhere we heard one cry--'How long,
+O Lord, how long?'"
+
+Basil Ransom listened to this considerable statement with a feeling
+which, as the current of Miss Tarrant's facile utterance flowed on, took
+the form of an hilarity charmed into stillness by the fear of losing
+something. There was indeed a sweet comicality in seeing this pretty
+girl sit there and, in answer to a casual, civil inquiry, drop into
+oratory as a natural thing. Had she forgotten where she was, and did she
+take him for a full house? She had the same turns and cadences, almost
+the same gestures, as if she had been on the platform; and the great
+queerness of it was that, with such a manner, she should escape being
+odious. She was not odious, she was delightful; she was not dogmatic,
+she was genial. No wonder she was a success, if she speechified as a
+bird sings! Ransom could see, too, from her easy lapse, how the
+lecture-tone was the thing in the world with which, by education, by
+association, she was most familiar. He didn't know what to make of her;
+she was an astounding young phenomenon. The other time came back to him
+afresh, and how she had stood up at Miss Birdseye's; it occurred to him
+that an element, here, had been wanting. Several moments after she had
+ceased speaking he became conscious that the expression of his face
+presented a perceptible analogy to a broad grin. He changed his posture,
+saying the first thing that came into his head. "I presume you do
+without your father now."
+
+"Without my father?"
+
+"To set you going, as he did that time I heard you."
+
+"Oh, I see; you thought I had begun a lecture!" And she laughed, in
+perfect good humour. "They tell me I speak as I talk, so I suppose I
+talk as I speak. But you mustn't put me on what I saw and heard in
+Europe. That's to be the title of an address I am now preparing, by the
+way. Yes, I don't depend on father any more," she went on, while
+Ransom's sense of having said too sarcastic a thing was deepened by her
+perfect indifference to it. "He finds his patients draw off about
+enough, any way. But I owe him everything; if it hadn't been for him, no
+one would ever have known I had a gift--not even myself. He started me
+so, once for all, that I now go alone."
+
+"You go beautifully," said Ransom, wanting to say something agreeable,
+and even respectfully tender, to her, but troubled by the fact that
+there was nothing he could say that didn't sound rather like chaff.
+There was no resentment in her, however, for in a moment she said to
+him, as quickly as it occurred to her, in the manner of a person
+repairing an accidental omission, "It was very good of you to come so
+far."
+
+This was a sort of speech it was never safe to make to Ransom; there was
+no telling what retribution it might entail. "Do you suppose any journey
+is too great, too wearisome, when it's a question of so great a
+pleasure?" On this occasion it was not worse than that.
+
+"Well, people _have_ come from other cities," Verena answered, not with
+pretended humility, but with pretended pride. "Do you know Cambridge?"
+
+"This is the first time I have ever been here."
+
+"Well, I suppose you have heard of the university; it's so celebrated."
+
+"Yes--even in Mississippi. I suppose it's very fine."
+
+"I presume it is," said Verena; "but you can't expect me to speak with
+much admiration of an institution of which the doors are closed to our
+sex."
+
+"Do you then advocate a system of education in common?"
+
+"I advocate equal rights, equal opportunities, equal privileges. So does
+Miss Chancellor," Verena added, with just a perceptible air of feeling
+that her declaration needed support.
+
+"Oh, I thought what she wanted was simply a different inequality--simply
+to turn out the men altogether," Ransom said.
+
+"Well, she thinks we have great arrears to make up. I do tell her,
+sometimes, that what she desires is not only justice but vengeance. I
+think she admits that," Verena continued, with a certain solemnity. The
+subject, however, held her but an instant, and before Ransom had time to
+make any comment, she went on, in a different tone: "You don't mean to
+say you live in Mississippi _now_? Miss Chancellor told me when you were
+in Boston before, that you had located in New York." She persevered in
+this reference to himself, for when he had assented to her remark about
+New York, she asked him whether he had quite given up the South.
+
+"Given it up--the poor, dear, desolate old South? Heaven forbid!" Basil
+Ransom exclaimed.
+
+She looked at him for a moment with an added softness. "I presume it is
+natural you should love your home. But I am afraid you think I don't
+love mine much; I have been here--for so long--so little. Miss
+Chancellor _has_ absorbed me--there is no doubt about that. But it's a
+pity I wasn't with her to-day." Ransom made no answer to this; he was
+incapable of telling Miss Tarrant that if she had been he would not have
+called upon her. It was not, indeed, that he was not incapable of
+hypocrisy, for when she had asked him if he had seen his cousin the
+night before, and he had replied that he hadn't seen her at all, and she
+had exclaimed with a candour which the next minute made her blush, "Ah,
+you don't mean to say you haven't forgiven her!"--after this he put on a
+look of innocence sufficient to carry off the inquiry, "Forgiven her for
+what?"
+
+Verena coloured at the sound of her own words. "Well, I could see how
+much she felt, that time at her house."
+
+"What did she feel?" Basil Ransom asked, with the natural provokingness
+of a man.
+
+I know not whether Verena was provoked, but she answered with more
+spirit than sequence: "Well, you know you _did_ pour contempt on us,
+ever so much; I could see how it worked Olive up. Are you not going to
+see her at all?"
+
+"Well, I shall think about that; I am here only for three or four days,"
+said Ransom, smiling as men smile when they are perfectly
+unsatisfactory.
+
+It is very possible that Verena was provoked, inaccessible as she was,
+in a general way, to irritation; for she rejoined in a moment, with a
+little deliberate air: "Well, perhaps it's as well you shouldn't go, if
+you haven't changed at all."
+
+"I haven't changed at all," said the young man, smiling still, with his
+elbows on the arms of his chair, his shoulders pushed up a little, and
+his thin brown hands interlocked in front of him.
+
+"Well, I have had visitors who were quite opposed!" Verena announced, as
+if such news could not possibly alarm her. Then she added, "How then did
+you know I was out here?"
+
+"Miss Birdseye told me."
+
+"Oh, I am so glad you went to see _her_!" the girl cried, speaking again
+with the impetuosity of a moment before.
+
+"I didn't go to see her. I met her in the street, just as she was
+leaving Miss Chancellor's door. I spoke to her, and accompanied her some
+distance. I passed that way because I knew it was the direct way to
+Cambridge--from the Common--and I was coming out to see you any way--on
+the chance."
+
+"On the chance?" Verena repeated.
+
+"Yes; Mrs. Luna, in New York, told me you were sometimes here, and I
+wanted, at any rate, to make the attempt to find you."
+
+It may be communicated to the reader that it was very agreeable to
+Verena to learn that her visitor had made this arduous pilgrimage (for
+she knew well enough how people in Boston regarded a winter journey to
+the academic suburb) with only half the prospect of a reward; but her
+pleasure was mixed with other feelings, or at least with the
+consciousness that the whole situation was rather less simple than the
+elements of her life had been hitherto. There was the germ of disorder
+in this invidious distinction which Mr. Ransom had suddenly made between
+Olive Chancellor, who was related to him by blood, and herself, who had
+never been related to him in any way whatever. She knew Olive by this
+time well enough to wish not to reveal it to her, and yet it would be
+something quite new for her to undertake to conceal such an incident as
+her having spent an hour with Mr. Ransom during a flying visit he had
+made to Boston. She had spent hours with other gentlemen, whom Olive
+didn't see; but that was different, because her friend knew about her
+doing it and didn't care, in regard to the persons--didn't care, that
+is, as she would care in this case. It was vivid to Verena's mind that
+now Olive _would_ care. She had talked about Mr. Burrage, and Mr.
+Pardon, and even about some gentlemen in Europe, and she had not (after
+the first few days, a year and a half before) talked about Mr. Ransom.
+
+Nevertheless there were reasons, clear to Verena's view, for wishing
+either that he would go and see Olive or would keep away from _her_; and
+the responsibility of treating the fact that he had not so kept away as
+a secret seemed the greater, perhaps, in the light of this other fact,
+that so far as simply seeing Mr. Ransom went--why, she quite liked it.
+She had remembered him perfectly after their two former meetings,
+superficial as their contact then had been; she had thought of him at
+moments and wondered whether she should like him if she were to know him
+better. Now, at the end of twenty minutes, she did know him better, and
+found that he had rather a curious, but still a pleasant way. There he
+was, at any rate, and she didn't wish his call to be spoiled by any
+uncomfortable implication of consequences. So she glanced off, at the
+touch of Mrs. Luna's name; it seemed to afford relief. "Oh yes, Mrs.
+Luna--isn't she fascinating?"
+
+Ransom hesitated a little. "Well, no, I don't think she is."
+
+"You ought to like her--she hates our movement!" And Verena asked,
+further, numerous questions about the brilliant Adeline; whether he saw
+her often, whether she went out much, whether she was admired in New
+York, whether he thought her very handsome. He answered to the best of
+his ability, but soon made the reflexion that he had not come out to
+Monadnoc Place to talk about Mrs. Luna; in consequence of which, to
+change the subject (as well as to acquit himself of a social duty), he
+began to speak of Verena's parents, to express regret that Mrs. Tarrant
+had been sick, and fear that he was not to have the pleasure of seeing
+her. "She is a great deal better," Verena said; "but she's lying down;
+she lies down a great deal when she has got nothing else to do. Mother's
+very peculiar," she added in a moment; "she lies down when she feels
+well and happy, and when she's sick she walks about--she roams all round
+the house. If you hear her on the stairs a good deal, you can be pretty
+sure she's very bad. She'll be very much interested to hear about you
+after you have left."
+
+Ransom glanced at his watch. "I hope I am not staying too long--that I
+am not taking you away from her."
+
+"Oh no; she likes visitors, even when she can't see them. If it didn't
+take her so long to rise, she would have been down here by this time. I
+suppose you think she has missed me, since I have been so absorbed.
+Well, so she has, but she knows it's for my good. She would make any
+sacrifice for affection."
+
+The fancy suddenly struck Ransom of asking, in response to this, "And
+you? would you make any?"
+
+Verena gave him a bright natural stare. "Any sacrifice for affection?"
+She thought a moment, and then she said: "I don't think I have a right
+to say, because I have never been asked. I don't remember ever to have
+had to make a sacrifice--not an important one."
+
+"Lord! you must have had a happy life!"
+
+"I have been very fortunate, I know that. I don't know what to do when I
+think how some women--how most women--suffer. But I must not speak of
+that," she went on, with her smile coming back to her. "If you oppose
+our movement, you won't want to hear of the suffering of women!"
+
+"The suffering of women is the suffering of all humanity," Ransom
+returned. "Do you think any movement is going to stop that--or all the
+lectures from now to doomsday? We are born to suffer--and to bear it,
+like decent people."
+
+"Oh, I adore heroism!" Verena interposed.
+
+"And as for women," Ransom went on, "they have one source of happiness
+that is closed to us--the consciousness that their presence here below
+lifts half the load of _our_ suffering."
+
+Verena thought this very graceful, but she was not sure it was not
+rather sophistical; she would have liked to have Olive's judgement upon
+it. As that was not possible for the present, she abandoned the question
+(since learning that Mr. Ransom had passed over Olive, to come to her,
+she had become rather fidgety), and inquired of the young man,
+irrelevantly, whether he knew any one else in Cambridge.
+
+"Not a creature; as I tell you, I have never been here before. Your
+image alone attracted me; this charming interview will be henceforth my
+only association with the place."
+
+"It's a pity you couldn't have a few more," said Verena musingly.
+
+"A few more interviews? I should be unspeakably delighted!"
+
+"A few more associations. Did you see the colleges as you came?"
+
+"I had a glimpse of a large enclosure, with some big buildings. Perhaps
+I can look at them better as I go back to Boston."
+
+"Oh yes, you ought to see them--they have improved so much of late. The
+inner life, of course, is the greatest interest, but there is some fine
+architecture, if you are not familiar with Europe." She paused a moment,
+looking at him with an eye that seemed to brighten, and continued
+quickly, like a person who had collected herself for a little jump, "If
+you would like to walk round a little, I shall be very glad to show
+you."
+
+"To walk round--with you to show me?" Ransom repeated. "My dear Miss
+Tarrant, it would be the greatest privilege--the greatest happiness--of
+my life. What a delightful idea--what an ideal guide!"
+
+Verena got up; she would go and put on her hat; he must wait a little.
+Her offer had a frankness and friendliness which gave him a new
+sensation, and he could not know that as soon as she had made it (though
+she had hesitated too, with a moment of intense reflexion), she seemed
+to herself strangely reckless. An impulse pushed her; she obeyed it with
+her eyes open. She felt as a girl feels when she commits her first
+conscious indiscretion. She had done many things before which many
+people would have called indiscreet, but that quality had not even
+faintly belonged to them in her own mind; she had done them in perfect
+good faith and with a remarkable absence of palpitation. This
+superficially ingenuous proposal to walk around the colleges with Mr.
+Ransom had really another colour; it deepened the ambiguity of her
+position, by reason of a prevision which I shall presently mention. If
+Olive was not to know that she had seen him, this extension of their
+interview would double her secret. And yet, while she saw it grow--this
+monstrous little mystery--she couldn't feel sorry that she was going out
+with Olive's cousin. As I have already said, she had become nervous. She
+went to put on her hat, but at the door of the room she stopped, turned
+round, and presented herself to her visitor with a small spot in either
+cheek, which had appeared there within the instant. "I have suggested
+this, because it seems to me I ought to do something for you--in
+return," she said. "It's nothing, simply sitting there with me. And we
+haven't got anything else. This is our only hospitality. And the day
+seems so splendid."
+
+The modesty, the sweetness, of this little explanation, with a kind of
+intimated desire, constituting almost an appeal, for rightness, which
+seemed to pervade it, left a fragrance in the air after she had
+vanished. Ransom walked up and down the room, with his hands in his
+pockets, under the influence of it, without taking up even once the book
+about Mrs. Foat. He occupied the time in asking himself by what
+perversity of fate or of inclination such a charming creature was
+ranting upon platforms and living in Olive Chancellor's pocket, or how a
+ranter and sycophant could possibly be so engaging. And she was so
+disturbingly beautiful, too. This last fact was not less evident when
+she came down arranged for their walk. They left the house, and as they
+proceeded he remembered that he had asked himself earlier how he could
+do honour to such a combination of leisure and ethereal mildness as he
+had waked up to that morning--a mildness that seemed the very breath of
+his own latitude. This question was answered now; to do exactly what he
+was doing at that moment was an observance sufficiently festive.
+
+
+
+
+XXV
+
+
+They passed through two or three small, short streets, which, with their
+little wooden houses, with still more wooden door-yards, looked as if
+they had been constructed by the nearest carpenter and his boy--a
+sightless, soundless, interspaced, embryonic region--and entered a long
+avenue which, fringed on either side with fresh villas, offering
+themselves trustfully to the public, had the distinction of a wide
+pavement of neat red brick. The new paint on the square detached houses
+shone afar off in the transparent air: they had, on top, little cupolas
+and belvederes, in front a pillared piazza, made bare by the indoor life
+of winter, on either side a bow-window or two, and everywhere an
+embellishment of scallops, brackets, cornices, wooden flourishes. They
+stood, for the most part, on small eminences, lifted above the
+impertinence of hedge or paling, well up before the world, with all the
+good conscience which in many cases came, as Ransom saw (and he had
+noticed the same ornament when he traversed with Olive the quarter of
+Boston inhabited by Miss Birdseye), from a silvered number, affixed to
+the glass above the door, in figures huge enough to be read by the
+people who, in the periodic horse-cars, travelled along the middle of
+the avenue. It was to these glittering badges that many of the houses on
+either side owed their principal identity. One of the horse-cars now
+advanced in the straight, spacious distance; it was almost the only
+object that animated the prospect, which, in its large cleanness, its
+implication of strict business-habits on the part of all the people who
+were not there, Ransom thought very impressive. As he went on with
+Verena he asked her about the Women's Convention, the year before;
+whether it had accomplished much work and she had enjoyed it.
+
+"What do you care about the work it accomplished?" said the girl. "You
+don't take any interest in that."
+
+"You mistake my attitude. I don't like it, but I greatly fear it."
+
+In answer to this Verena gave a free laugh. "I don't believe you fear
+much!"
+
+"The bravest men have been afraid of women. Won't you even tell me
+whether you enjoyed it? I am told you made an immense sensation
+there--that you leaped into fame."
+
+Verena never waved off an allusion to her ability, her eloquence; she
+took it seriously, without any flutter or protest, and had no more
+manner about it than if it concerned the goddess Minerva. "I believe I
+attracted considerable attention; of course, that's what Olive wants--it
+paves the way for future work. I have no doubt I reached many that
+wouldn't have been reached otherwise. They think that's my great use--to
+take hold of the outsiders, as it were; of those who are prejudiced or
+thoughtless, or who don't care about anything unless it's amusing. I
+wake up the attention."
+
+"That's the class to which I belong," Ransom said. "Am I not an
+outsider? I wonder whether you would have reached me--or waked up my
+attention!"
+
+Verena was silent awhile, as they walked; he heard the light click of
+her boots on the smooth bricks. Then--"I think I _have_ waked it up a
+little," she replied, looking straight before her.
+
+"Most assuredly! You have made me wish tremendously to contradict you."
+
+"Well, that's a good sign."
+
+"I suppose it was very exciting--your convention," Ransom went on, in a
+moment; "the sort of thing you would miss very much if you were to
+return to the ancient fold."
+
+"The ancient fold, you say very well, where women were slaughtered like
+sheep! Oh, last June, for a week, we just quivered! There were delegates
+from every State and every city; we lived in a crowd of people and of
+ideas; the heat was intense, the weather magnificent, and great thoughts
+and brilliant sayings flew round like darting fireflies. Olive had six
+celebrated, high-minded women staying in her house--two in a room; and
+in the summer evenings we sat in the open windows, in her parlour,
+looking out on the bay, with the lights gleaming in the water, and
+talked over the doings of the morning, the speeches, the incidents, the
+fresh contributions to the cause. We had some tremendously earnest
+discussions, which it would have been a benefit to you to hear, or any
+man who doesn't think that we can rise to the highest point. Then we had
+some refreshment--we consumed quantities of ice-cream!" said Verena, in
+whom the note of gaiety alternated with that of earnestness, almost of
+exaltation, in a manner which seemed to Basil Ransom absolutely and
+fascinatingly original. "Those were great nights!" she added, between a
+laugh and a sigh.
+
+Her description of the convention put the scene before him vividly; he
+seemed to see the crowded, overheated hall, which he was sure was filled
+with carpet-baggers, to hear flushed women, with loosened
+bonnet-strings, forcing thin voices into ineffectual shrillness. It made
+him angry, and all the more angry, that he hadn't a reason, to think of
+the charming creature at his side being mixed up with such elements,
+pushed and elbowed by them, conjoined with them in emulation, in
+unsightly strainings and clappings and shoutings, in wordy, windy
+iteration of inanities. Worst of all was the idea that she should have
+expressed such a congregation to itself so acceptably, have been
+acclaimed and applauded by hoarse throats, have been lifted up, to all
+the vulgar multitude, as the queen of the occasion. He made the
+reflexion, afterwards, that he was singularly ill-grounded in his wrath,
+inasmuch as it was none of his business what use Miss Tarrant chose to
+make of her energies, and, in addition to this, nothing else was to have
+been expected of her. But that reflexion was absent now, and in its
+absence he saw only the fact that his companion had been odiously
+perverted. "Well, Miss Tarrant," he said, with a deeper seriousness than
+showed in his voice, "I am forced to the painful conclusion that you are
+simply ruined."
+
+"Ruined? Ruined yourself!"
+
+"Oh, I know the kind of women that Miss Chancellor had at her house, and
+what a group you must have made when you looked out at the Back Bay! It
+depresses me very much to think of it."
+
+"We made a lovely, interesting group, and if we had had a spare minute
+we would have been photographed," Verena said.
+
+This led him to ask her if she had ever subjected herself to the
+process; and she answered that a photographer had been after her as soon
+as she got back from Europe, and that she had sat for him, and that
+there were certain shops in Boston where her portrait could be obtained.
+She gave him this information very simply, without pretence of vagueness
+of knowledge, spoke of the matter rather respectfully, indeed, as if it
+might be of some importance; and when he said that he should go and buy
+one of the little pictures as soon as he returned to town, contented
+herself with replying, "Well, be sure you pick out a good one!" He had
+not been altogether without a hope that she would offer to give him one,
+with her name written beneath, which was a mode of acquisition he would
+greatly have preferred; but this, evidently, had not occurred to her,
+and now, as they went further, her thought was following a different
+train. That was proved by her remarking, at the end of a silence,
+inconsequently, "Well, it showed I have a great use!" As he stared,
+wondering what she meant, she explained that she referred to the
+brilliancy of her success at the convention. "It proved I have a great
+use," she repeated, "and that is all I care for!"
+
+"The use of a truly amiable woman is to make some honest man happy,"
+Ransom said, with a sententiousness of which he was perfectly aware.
+
+It was so marked that it caused her to stop short in the middle of the
+broad walk, while she looked at him with shining eyes. "See here, Mr.
+Ransom, do you know what strikes me?" she exclaimed. "The interest you
+take in me isn't really controversial--a bit. It's quite personal!" She
+was the most extraordinary girl; she could speak such words as those
+without the smallest look of added consciousness coming into her face,
+without the least supposable intention of coquetry, or any visible
+purpose of challenging the young man to say more.
+
+"My interest in you--my interest in you," he began. Then hesitating, he
+broke off suddenly. "It is certain your discovery doesn't make it any
+less!"
+
+"Well, that's better," she went on; "for we needn't dispute."
+
+He laughed at the way she arranged it, and they presently reached the
+irregular group of heterogeneous buildings--chapels, dormitories,
+libraries, halls--which, scattered among slender trees, over a space
+reserved by means of a low rustic fence, rather than enclosed (for
+Harvard knows nothing either of the jealousy or the dignity of high
+walls and guarded gateways), constitutes the great university of
+Massachusetts. The yard, or college-precinct, is traversed by a number
+of straight little paths, over which, at certain hours of the day, a
+thousand undergraduates, with books under their arm and youth in their
+step, flit from one school to another. Verena Tarrant knew her way
+round, as she said to her companion; it was not the first time she had
+taken an admiring visitor to see the local monuments. Basil Ransom,
+walking with her from point to point, admired them all, and thought
+several of them exceedingly quaint and venerable. The rectangular
+structures of old red brick especially gratified his eye; the afternoon
+sun was yellow on their homely faces; their windows showed a peep of
+flower-pots and bright-coloured curtains; they wore an expression of
+scholastic quietude, and exhaled for the young Mississippian a
+tradition, an antiquity. "This is the place where I ought to have been,"
+he said to his charming guide. "I should have had a good time if I had
+been able to study here."
+
+"Yes; I presume you feel yourself drawn to any place where ancient
+prejudices are garnered up," she answered, not without archness. "I know
+by the stand you take about our cause that you share the superstitions
+of the old bookmen. You ought to have been at one of those really
+mediaeval universities that we saw on the other side, at Oxford, or
+Goettingen, or Padua. You would have been in perfect sympathy with their
+spirit."
+
+"Well, I don't know much about those old haunts," Ransom rejoined. "I
+reckon this is good enough for me. And then it would have had the
+advantage that your residence isn't far, you know."
+
+"Oh, I guess we shouldn't have seen you much at my residence! As you
+live in New York, you come, but here you wouldn't; that is always the
+way." With this light philosophy Verena beguiled the transit to the
+library, into which she introduced her companion with the air of a
+person familiar with the sanctified spot. This edifice, a diminished
+copy of the chapel of King's College, at the greater Cambridge, is a
+rich and impressive institution; and as he stood there, in the bright,
+heated stillness, which seemed suffused with the odour of old print and
+old bindings, and looked up into the high, light vaults that hung over
+quiet book-laden galleries, alcoves and tables, and glazed cases where
+rarer treasures gleamed more vaguely, over busts of benefactors and
+portraits of worthies, bowed heads of working students and the gentle
+creak of passing messengers--as he took possession, in a comprehensive
+glance, of the wealth and wisdom of the place, he felt more than ever
+the soreness of an opportunity missed; but he abstained from expressing
+it (it was too deep for that), and in a moment Verena had introduced him
+to a young lady, a friend of hers, who, as she explained, was working on
+the catalogue, and whom she had asked for on entering the library, at a
+desk where another young lady was occupied. Miss Catching, the
+first-mentioned young lady, presented herself with promptness, offered
+Verena a low-toned but appreciative greeting, and, after a little,
+undertook to explain to Ransom the mysteries of the catalogue, which
+consisted of a myriad little cards, disposed alphabetically in immense
+chests of drawers. Ransom was deeply interested, and as, with Verena, he
+followed Miss Catching about (she was so good as to show them the
+establishment in all its ramifications), he considered with attention
+the young lady's fair ringlets and refined, anxious expression, saying
+to himself that this was in the highest degree a New England type.
+Verena found an opportunity to mention to him that she was wrapped up in
+the cause, and there was a moment during which he was afraid that his
+companion would expose him to her as one of its traducers; but there was
+that in Miss Catching's manner (and in the influence of the lofty halls)
+which deprecated loud pleasantry, and seemed to say, moreover, that if
+she were treated to such a revelation she should not know under what
+letter to range it.
+
+"Now there is one place where perhaps it would be indelicate to take a
+Mississippian," Verena said, after this episode. "I mean the great place
+that towers above the others--that big building with the beautiful
+pinnacles, which you see from every point." But Basil Ransom had heard
+of the great Memorial Hall; he knew what memories it enshrined, and the
+worst that he should have to suffer there; and the ornate, overtopping
+structure, which was the finest piece of architecture he had ever seen,
+had moreover solicited his enlarged curiosity for the last half-hour. He
+thought there was rather too much brick about it, but it was buttressed,
+cloistered, turreted, dedicated, superscribed, as he had never seen
+anything; though it didn't look old, it looked significant; it covered a
+large area, and it sprang majestic into the winter air. It was detached
+from the rest of the collegiate group, and stood in a grassy triangle of
+its own. As he approached it with Verena she suddenly stopped, to
+decline responsibility. "Now mind, if you don't like what's inside, it
+isn't my fault."
+
+He looked at her an instant, smiling. "Is there anything against
+Mississippi?"
+
+"Well, no, I don't think she is mentioned. But there is great praise of
+our young men in the war."
+
+"It says they were brave, I suppose."
+
+"Yes, it says so in Latin."
+
+"Well, so they were--I know something about that," Basil Ransom said. "I
+must be brave enough to face them--it isn't the first time." And they
+went up the low steps and passed into the tall doors. The Memorial Hall
+of Harvard consists of three main divisions: one of them a theatre, for
+academic ceremonies; another a vast refectory, covered with a timbered
+roof, hung about with portraits and lighted by stained windows, like the
+halls of the colleges of Oxford; and the third, the most interesting, a
+chamber high, dim, and severe, consecrated to the sons of the university
+who fell in the long Civil War. Ransom and his companion wandered from
+one part of the building to another, and stayed their steps at several
+impressive points; but they lingered longest in the presence of the
+white, ranged tablets, each of which, in its proud, sad clearness, is
+inscribed with the name of a student-soldier. The effect of the place is
+singularly noble and solemn, and it is impossible to feel it without a
+lifting of the heart. It stands there for duty and honour, it speaks of
+sacrifice and example, seems a kind of temple to youth, manhood,
+generosity. Most of them were young, all were in their prime, and all of
+them had fallen; this simple idea hovers before the visitor and makes
+him read with tenderness each name and place--names often without other
+history, and forgotten Southern battles. For Ransom these things were
+not a challenge nor a taunt; they touched him with respect, with the
+sentiment of beauty. He was capable of being a generous foeman, and he
+forgot, now, the whole question of sides and parties; the simple emotion
+of the old fighting-time came back to him, and the monument around him
+seemed an embodiment of that memory; it arched over friends as well as
+enemies, the victims of defeat as well as the sons of triumph.
+
+"It is very beautiful--but I think it is very dreadful!" This remark,
+from Verena, called him back to the present. "It's a real sin to put up
+such a building, just to glorify a lot of bloodshed. If it wasn't so
+majestic, I would have it pulled down."
+
+"That is delightful feminine logic!" Ransom answered. "If, when women
+have the conduct of affairs, they fight as well as they reason, surely
+for them too we shall have to set up memorials."
+
+Verena retorted that they would reason so well they would have no need
+to fight--they would usher in the reign of peace. "But this is very
+peaceful too," she added, looking about her; and she sat down on a low
+stone ledge, as if to enjoy the influence of the scene. Ransom left her
+alone for ten minutes; he wished to take another look at the inscribed
+tablets, and read again the names of the various engagements, at several
+of which he had been present. When he came back to her she greeted him
+abruptly, with a question which had no reference to the solemnity of the
+spot. "If Miss Birdseye knew you were coming out to see me, can't _she_
+easily tell Olive? Then won't Olive make her reflexions about your
+neglect of herself?"
+
+"I don't care for her reflexions. At any rate, I asked Miss Birdseye, as
+a favour, not to mention to her that she had met me," Ransom added.
+
+Verena was silent a moment. "Your logic is most as good as a woman's. Do
+change your mind and go to see her now," she went on. "She will probably
+be at home by the time you get to Charles Street. If she was a little
+strange, a little stiff with you before (I know just how she must have
+been), all that will be different to-day."
+
+"Why will it be different?"
+
+"Oh, she will be easier, more genial, much softer."
+
+"I don't believe it," said Ransom; and his scepticism seemed none the
+less complete because it was light and smiling.
+
+"She is much happier now--she can afford not to mind you."
+
+"Not to mind me? That's a nice inducement for a gentleman to go and see
+a lady!"
+
+"Well, she will be more gracious, because she feels now that she is more
+successful."
+
+"You mean because she has brought you out? Oh, I have no doubt that has
+cleared the air for her immensely, and you have improved her very much.
+But I have got a charming impression out here, and I have no wish to put
+another--which won't be charming, anyhow you arrange it--on top of it."
+
+"Well, she will be sure to know you have been round here, at any rate,"
+Verena rejoined.
+
+"How will she know, unless you tell her?"
+
+"I tell her everything," said the girl; and now as soon as she had
+spoken, she blushed. He stood before her, tracing a figure on the mosaic
+pavement with his cane, conscious that in a moment they had become more
+intimate. They were discussing their affairs, which had nothing to do
+with the heroic symbols that surrounded them; but their affairs had
+suddenly grown so serious that there was no want of decency in their
+lingering there for the purpose. The implication that his visit might
+remain as a secret between them made them both feel it differently. To
+ask her to keep it so would have been, as it seemed to Ransom, a
+liberty, and, moreover, he didn't care so much as that; but if she were
+to prefer to do so such a preference would only make him consider the
+more that his expedition had been a success.
+
+"Oh, then, you can tell her this!" he said in a moment.
+
+"If I shouldn't, it would be the first----" And Verena checked herself.
+
+"You must arrange that with your conscience," Ransom went on, laughing.
+
+They came out of the hall, passed down the steps, and emerged from the
+Delta, as that portion of the college precinct is called. The afternoon
+had begun to wane, but the air was filled with a pink brightness, and
+there was a cool, pure smell, a vague breath of spring.
+
+"Well, if I don't tell Olive, then you must leave me here," said Verena,
+stopping in the path and putting out a hand of farewell.
+
+"I don't understand. What has that to do with it? Besides I thought you
+said you _must_ tell," Ransom added. In playing with the subject this
+way, in enjoying her visible hesitation, he was slightly conscious of a
+man's brutality--of being pushed by an impulse to test her good-nature,
+which seemed to have no limit. It showed no sign of perturbation as she
+answered:
+
+"Well, I want to be free--to do as I think best. And, if there is a
+chance of my keeping it back, there mustn't be anything more--there must
+not, Mr. Ransom, really."
+
+"Anything more? Why, what are you afraid there will be--if I should
+simply walk home with you?"
+
+"I must go alone, I must hurry back to mother," she said, for all reply.
+And she again put out her hand, which he had not taken before.
+
+Of course he took it now, and even held it a moment; he didn't like
+being dismissed, and was thinking of pretexts to linger. "Miss Birdseye
+said you would convert me, but you haven't yet," it came into his head
+to say.
+
+"You can't tell yet; wait a little. My influence is peculiar; it
+sometimes comes out a long time afterwards!" This speech, on Verena's
+part, was evidently perfunctory, and the grandeur of her self-reference
+jocular; she was much more serious when she went on quickly, "Do you
+mean to say Miss Birdseye promised you that?"
+
+"Oh yes. Talk about influence! you should have seen the influence I
+obtained over her."
+
+"Well, what good will it do, if I'm going to tell Olive about your
+visit?"
+
+"Well, you see, I think she hopes you won't. She believes you are going
+to convert me privately--so that I shall blaze forth, suddenly, out of
+the darkness of Mississippi, as a first-class proselyte: very effective
+and dramatic."
+
+Verena struck Basil Ransom as constantly simple, but there were moments
+when her candour seemed to him preternatural. "If I thought that would
+be the effect, I might make an exception," she remarked, speaking as if
+such a result were, after all, possible.
+
+"Oh, Miss Tarrant, you will convert me enough, any way," said the young
+man.
+
+"Enough? What do you mean by enough?"
+
+"Enough to make me terribly unhappy."
+
+She looked at him a moment, evidently not understanding; but she tossed
+him a retort at a venture, turned away, and took her course homeward.
+The retort was that if he should be unhappy it would serve him right--a
+form of words that committed her to nothing. As he returned to Boston he
+saw how curious he should be to learn whether she had betrayed him, as
+it were, to Miss Chancellor. He might learn through Mrs. Luna; that
+would almost reconcile him to going to see her again. Olive would
+mention it in writing to her sister, and Adeline would repeat the
+complaint. Perhaps she herself would even make him a scene about it;
+that would be, for him, part of the unhappiness he had foretold to
+Verena Tarrant.
+
+
+
+
+XXVI
+
+
+"Mrs. Henry Burrage, at home Wednesday evening, March 26th, at half-past
+nine o'clock." It was in consequence of having received a card with
+these words inscribed upon it that Basil Ransom presented himself, on
+the evening she had designated, at the house of a lady he had never
+heard of before. The account of the relation of effect to cause is not
+complete, however, unless I mention that the card bore, furthermore, in
+the left-hand lower corner, the words: "An Address from Miss Verena
+Tarrant." He had an idea (it came mainly from the look and even the
+odour of the engraved pasteboard) that Mrs. Burrage was a member of the
+fashionable world, and it was with considerable surprise that he found
+himself in such an element. He wondered what had induced a denizen of
+that fine air to send him an invitation; then he said to himself that,
+obviously, Verena Tarrant had simply requested that this should be done.
+Mrs. Henry Burrage, whoever she might be, had asked her if she shouldn't
+like some of her own friends to be present, and she had said, Oh yes,
+and mentioned him in the happy group. She had been able to give Mrs.
+Burrage his address, for had it not been contained in the short letter
+he despatched to Monadnoc Place soon after his return from Boston, in
+which he thanked Miss Tarrant afresh for the charming hour she had
+enabled him to spend at Cambridge? She had not answered his letter at
+the time, but Mrs. Burrage's card was a very good answer. Such a missive
+deserved a rejoinder, and it was by way of rejoinder that he entered the
+street car which, on the evening of March 26th, was to deposit him at a
+corner adjacent to Mrs. Burrage's dwelling. He almost never went to
+evening parties (he knew scarcely any one who gave them, though Mrs.
+Luna had broken him in a little), and he was sure this occasion was of
+festive intention, would have nothing in common with the nocturnal
+"exercises" at Miss Birdseye's; but he would have exposed himself to
+almost any social discomfort in order to see Verena Tarrant on the
+platform. The platform it evidently was to be--private if not
+public--since one was admitted by a ticket given away if not sold. He
+took his in his pocket, quite ready to present it at the door. It would
+take some time for me to explain the contradiction to the reader; but
+Basil Ransom's desire to be present at one of Verena's regular
+performances was not diminished by the fact that he detested her views
+and thought the whole business a poor perversity. He understood her now
+very well (since his visit to Cambridge); he saw she was honest and
+natural; she had queer, bad lecture-blood in her veins, and a comically
+false idea of the aptitude of little girls for conducting movements; but
+her enthusiasm was of the purest, her illusions had a fragrance, and so
+far as the mania for producing herself personally was concerned, it had
+been distilled into her by people who worked her for ends which to Basil
+Ransom could only appear insane. She was a touching, ingenuous victim,
+unconscious of the pernicious forces which were hurrying her to her
+ruin. With this idea of ruin there had already associated itself in the
+young man's mind, the idea--a good deal more dim and incomplete--of
+rescue; and it was the disposition to confirm himself in the view that
+her charm was her own, and her fallacies, her absurdity, a mere
+reflexion of unlucky circumstance, that led him to make an effort to
+behold her in the position in which he could least bear to think of her.
+Such a glimpse was all that was wanted to prove to him that she was a
+person for whom he might open an unlimited credit of tender compassion.
+He expected to suffer--to suffer deliciously.
+
+By the time he had crossed Mrs. Burrage's threshold there was no doubt
+whatever in his mind that he was in the fashionable world. It was
+embodied strikingly in the stout, elderly, ugly lady, dressed in a
+brilliant colour, with a twinkle of jewels and a bosom much uncovered,
+who stood near the door of the first room, and with whom the people
+passing in before him were shaking hands. Ransom made her a Mississipian
+bow, and she said she was delighted to see him, while people behind him
+pressed him forward. He yielded to the impulsion, and found himself in a
+great saloon, amid lights and flowers, where the company was dense, and
+there were more twinkling, smiling ladies, with uncovered bosoms. It was
+certainly the fashionable world, for there was no one there whom he had
+ever seen before. The walls of the room were covered with pictures--the
+very ceiling was painted and framed. The people pushed each other a
+little, edged about, advanced and retreated, looking at each other with
+differing faces--sometimes blandly, unperceivingly, sometimes with a
+harshness of contemplation, a kind of cruelty, Ransom thought; sometimes
+with sudden nods and grimaces, inarticulate murmurs, followed by a quick
+reaction, a sort of gloom. He was now absolutely certain that he was in
+the best society. He was carried further and further forward, and saw
+that another room stretched beyond the one he had entered, in which
+there was a sort of little stage, covered with a red cloth, and an
+immense collection of chairs, arranged in rows. He became aware that
+people looked at him, as well as at each other, rather more, indeed,
+than at each other, and he wondered whether it were very visible in his
+appearance that his being there was a kind of exception. He didn't know
+how much his head looked over the heads of others, or that his brown
+complexion, fuliginous eye, and straight black hair, the leonine fall of
+which I mentioned in the first pages of this narrative, gave him that
+relief which, in the best society, has the great advantage of suggesting
+a topic. But there were other topics besides, as was proved by a
+fragment of conversation, between two ladies, which reached his ear
+while he stood rather wistfully wondering where Verena Tarrant might be.
+
+"Are you a member?" one of the ladies said to the other. "I didn't know
+you had joined."
+
+"Oh, I haven't; nothing would induce me."
+
+"That's not fair; you have all the fun and none of the responsibility."
+
+"Oh, the--the fun!" exclaimed the second lady.
+
+"You needn't abuse us, or I will never invite you," said the first.
+
+"Well, I thought it was meant to be improving; that's all I mean; very
+good for the mind. Now, this woman to-night; isn't she from Boston?"
+
+"Yes, I believe they have brought her on, just for this."
+
+"Well, you must be pretty desperate when you have got to go to Boston
+for your entertainment."
+
+"Well, there's a similar society there, and I never heard of their
+sending to New York."
+
+"Of course not, they think they have got everything. But doesn't it make
+your life a burden thinking what you can possibly have?"
+
+"Oh dear, no. I am going to have Professor Gougenheim--all about the
+Talmud. You must come."
+
+"Well, I'll come," said the second lady; "but nothing would induce me to
+be a regular member."
+
+Whatever the mystic circle might be, Ransom agreed with the second lady
+that regular membership must have terrors, and he admired her
+independence in such an artificial world. A considerable part of the
+company had now directed itself to the further apartment--people had
+begun to occupy the chairs, to confront the empty platform. He reached
+the wide doors, and saw that the place was a spacious music-room,
+decorated in white and gold, with a polished floor and marble busts of
+composers, on brackets attached to the delicate panels. He forbore to
+enter, however, being shy about taking a seat, and seeing that the
+ladies were arranging themselves first. He turned back into the first
+room, to wait till the audience had massed itself, conscious that even
+if he were behind every one he should be able to make a long neck; and
+here, suddenly, in a corner, his eyes rested upon Olive Chancellor. She
+was seated a little apart, in an angle of the room, and she was looking
+straight at him; but as soon as she perceived that he saw her she
+dropped her eyes, giving no sign of recognition. Ransom hesitated a
+moment, but the next he went straight over to her. It had been in his
+mind that if Verena Tarrant was there, _she_ would be there; an instinct
+told him that Miss Chancellor would not allow her dear friend to come to
+New York without her. It was very possible she meant to "cut"
+him--especially if she knew of his having cut her, the other week, in
+Boston; but it was his duty to take for granted she would speak to him,
+until the contrary should be definitely proved. Though he had seen her
+only twice he remembered well how acutely shy she was capable of being,
+and he thought it possible one of these spasms had seized her at the
+present time.
+
+When he stood before her he found his conjecture perfectly just; she was
+white with the intensity of her self-consciousness; she was altogether
+in a very uncomfortable state. She made no response to his offer to
+shake hands with her, and he saw that she would never go through that
+ceremony again. She looked up at him when he spoke to her, and her lips
+moved; but her face was intensely grave and her eye had almost a
+feverish light. She had evidently got into her corner to be out of the
+way; he recognised in her the air of an interloper, as he had felt it in
+himself. The small sofa on which she had placed herself had the form to
+which the French give the name of _causeuse_; there was room on it for
+just another person, and Ransom asked her, with a cheerful accent, if he
+might sit down beside her. She turned towards him when he had done so,
+turned everything but her eyes, and opened and shut her fan while she
+waited for her fit of diffidence to pass away. Ransom himself did not
+wait; he took a jocular tone about their encounter, asking her if she
+had come to New York to rouse the people. She glanced round the room;
+the backs of Mrs. Burrage's guests, mainly, were presented to them, and
+their position was partly masked by a pyramid of flowers which rose from
+a pedestal close to Olive's end of the sofa and diffused a fragrance in
+the air.
+
+"Do you call these 'the people'?" she asked.
+
+"I haven't the least idea. I don't know who any of them are, not even
+who Mrs. Henry Burrage is, I simply received an invitation."
+
+Miss Chancellor gave him no information on the point he had mentioned;
+she only said, in a moment: "Do you go wherever you are invited?"
+
+"Why, I go if I think I may find you there," the young man replied
+gallantly. "My card mentioned that Miss Tarrant would give an address,
+and I knew that wherever she is you are not far off. I have heard you
+are inseparable, from Mrs. Luna."
+
+"Yes, we are inseparable. That is exactly why I am here."
+
+"It's the fashionable world, then, you are going to stir up."
+
+Olive remained for some time with her eyes fastened to the floor; then
+she flashed them up at her interlocutor. "It's a part of our life to go
+anywhere--to carry our work where it seems most needed. We have taught
+ourselves to stifle repulsion, distaste."
+
+"Oh, I think this is very amusing," said Ransom. "It's a beautiful
+house, and there are some very pretty faces. We haven't anything so
+brilliant in Mississippi."
+
+To everything he said Olive offered at first a momentary silence, but
+the worst of her shyness was apparently leaving her.
+
+"Are you successful in New York? do you like it?" she presently asked,
+uttering the inquiry in a tone of infinite melancholy, as if the eternal
+sense of duty forced it from her lips.
+
+"Oh, successful! I am not successful as you and Miss Tarrant are; for
+(to my barbaric eyes) it is a great sign of prosperity to be the
+heroines of an occasion like this."
+
+"Do I look like the heroine of an occasion?" asked Olive Chancellor,
+without an intention of humour, but with an effect that was almost
+comical.
+
+"You would if you didn't hide yourself away. Are you not going into the
+other room to hear the speech? Everything is prepared."
+
+"I am going when I am notified--when I am invited."
+
+There was considerable majesty in her tone, and Ransom saw that
+something was wrong, that she felt neglected. To see that she was as
+ticklish with others as she had been with him made him feel forgiving,
+and there was in his manner a perfect disposition to forget their
+differences as he said, "Oh, there is plenty of time; the place isn't
+half full yet."
+
+She made no direct rejoinder to this, but she asked him about his mother
+and sisters, what news he received from the South. "Have they any
+happiness?" she inquired, rather as if she warned him to take care not
+to pretend they had. He neglected her warning to the point of saying
+that there was one happiness they always had--that of having learned not
+to think about it too much, and to make the best of their circumstances.
+She listened to this with an air of great reserve, and apparently
+thought he had wished to give her a lesson; for she suddenly broke out,
+"You mean that you have traced a certain line for them, and that that's
+all you know about it!"
+
+Ransom stared at her, surprised; he felt, now, that she would always
+surprise him. "Ah, don't be rough with me," he said, in his soft
+Southern voice; "don't you remember how you knocked me about when I
+called on you in Boston?"
+
+"You hold us in chains, and then, when we writhe in our agony, you say
+we don't behave prettily!" These words, which did not lessen Ransom's
+wonderment, were the young lady's answer to his deprecatory speech. She
+saw that he was honestly bewildered and that in a moment more he would
+laugh at her, as he had done a year and a half before (she remembered it
+as if it had been yesterday); and to stop that off, at any cost, she
+went on hurriedly--"If you listen to Miss Tarrant, you will know what I
+mean."
+
+"Oh, Miss Tarrant--Miss Tarrant!" And Basil Ransom's laughter came.
+
+She had not escaped that mockery, after all, and she looked at him
+sharply now, her embarrassment having quite cleared up. "What do you
+know about her? What observation have you had?"
+
+Ransom met her eye, and for a moment they scrutinised each other. Did
+she know of his interview with Verena a month before, and was her
+reserve simply the wish to place on him the burden of declaring that he
+had been to Boston since they last met, and yet had not called in
+Charles Street? He thought there was suspicion in her face; but in
+regard to Verena she would always be suspicious. If he had done at that
+moment just what would gratify him he would have said to her that he
+knew a great deal about Miss Tarrant, having lately had a long walk and
+talk with her; but he checked himself, with the reflexion that if Verena
+had not betrayed him it would be very wrong in him to betray her. The
+sweetness of the idea that she should have thought the episode of his
+visit to Monadnoc Place worth placing under the rose, was quenched for
+the moment in his regret at not being able to let his disagreeable
+cousin know that he had passed _her_ over. "Don't you remember my
+hearing her speak that night at Miss Birdseye's?" he said presently.
+"And I met her the next day at your house, you know."
+
+"She has developed greatly since then," Olive remarked dryly; and Ransom
+felt sure that Verena had held her tongue.
+
+At this moment a gentleman made his way through the clusters of Mrs.
+Burrage's guests and presented himself to Olive. "If you will do me the
+honour to take my arm I will find a good seat for you in the other room.
+It's getting to be time for Miss Tarrant to reveal herself. I have been
+taking her into the picture-room; there were some things she wanted to
+see. She is with my mother now," he added, as if Miss Chancellor's grave
+face constituted a sort of demand for an explanation of her friend's
+absence. "She said she was a little nervous; so I thought we would just
+move about."
+
+"It's the first time I have ever heard of that!" said Olive Chancellor,
+preparing to surrender herself to the young man's guidance. He told her
+that he had reserved the best seat for her; it was evidently his desire
+to conciliate her, to treat her as a person of importance. Before
+leading her away, he shook hands with Ransom and remarked that he was
+very glad to see him; and Ransom saw that he must be the master of the
+house, though he could scarcely be the son of the stout lady in the
+doorway. He was a fresh, pleasant, handsome young man, with a bright
+friendly manner; he recommended Ransom to take a seat in the other room,
+without delay; if he had never heard Miss Tarrant he would have one of
+the greatest pleasures of his life.
+
+"Oh, Mr. Ransom only comes to ventilate his prejudices," Miss Chancellor
+said, as she turned her back to her kinsman. He shrank from pushing into
+the front of the company, which was now rapidly filling the music-room,
+and contented himself with lingering in the doorway, where several
+gentlemen were stationed. The seats were all occupied; all, that is,
+save one, towards which he saw Miss Chancellor and her companion direct
+themselves, squeezing and edging past the people who were standing up
+against the walls. This was quite in front, close to the little
+platform; every one noticed Olive as she went, and Ransom heard a
+gentleman near him say to another--"I guess she's one of the same kind."
+He looked for Verena, but she was apparently keeping out of sight.
+Suddenly he felt himself smartly tapped on the back, and, turning round,
+perceived Mrs. Luna, who had been prodding him with her fan.
+
+
+
+
+XXVII
+
+
+"You won't speak to me in my own house--that I have almost grown used
+to; but if you are going to pass me over in public I think you might
+give me warning first." This was only her archness, and he knew what to
+make of that now; she was dressed in yellow and looked very plump and
+gay. He wondered at the unerring instinct by which she had discovered
+his exposed quarter. The outer room was completely empty; she had come
+in at the further door and found the field free for her operations. He
+offered to find her a place where she could see and hear Miss Tarrant,
+to get her a chair to stand on, even, if she wished to look over the
+heads of the gentlemen in the doorway; a proposal which she greeted with
+the inquiry--"Do you suppose I came here for the sake of that
+chatterbox? haven't I told you what I think of her?"
+
+"Well, you certainly did not come here for my sake," said Ransom,
+anticipating this insinuation; "for you couldn't possibly have known I
+was coming."
+
+"I guessed it--a presentiment told me!" Mrs. Luna declared; and she
+looked up at him with searching, accusing eyes. "I know what you have
+come for," she cried in a moment. "You never mentioned to me that you
+knew Mrs. Burrage!"
+
+"I don't--I never had heard of her till she asked me."
+
+"Then why in the world _did_ she ask you?"
+
+Ransom had spoken a trifle rashly; it came over him, quickly, that there
+were reasons why he had better not have said that. But almost as quickly
+he covered up his mistake. "I suppose your sister was so good as to ask
+for a card for me."
+
+"My sister? My grandmother! I know how Olive loves you. Mr. Ransom, you
+are very deep." She had drawn him well into the room, out of earshot of
+the group in the doorway, and he felt that if she should be able to
+compass her wish she would organise a little entertainment for herself,
+in the outer drawing-room, in opposition to Miss Tarrant's address.
+"Please come and sit down here a moment; we shall be quite undisturbed.
+I have something very particular to say to you." She led the way to the
+little sofa in the corner, where he had been talking with Olive a few
+minutes before, and he accompanied her, with extreme reluctance,
+grudging the moments that he should be obliged to give to her. He had
+quite forgotten that he once had a vision of spending his life in her
+society, and he looked at his watch as he made the observation:
+
+"I haven't the least idea of losing any of the sport in there, you
+know."
+
+He felt, the next instant, that he oughtn't to have said that either;
+but he was irritated, disconcerted, and he couldn't help it. It was in
+the nature of a gallant Mississippian to do everything a lady asked him,
+and he had never, remarkable as it may appear, been in the position of
+finding such a request so incompatible with his own desires as now. It
+was a new predicament, for Mrs. Luna evidently meant to keep him if she
+could. She looked round the room, more and more pleased at their having
+it to themselves, and for the moment said nothing more about the
+singularity of his being there. On the contrary, she became freshly
+jocular, remarked that now they had got hold of him they wouldn't easily
+let him go, they would make him entertain them, induce him to give a
+lecture--on the "Lights and Shadows of Southern Life," or the "Social
+Peculiarities of Mississippi"--before the Wednesday Club.
+
+"And what in the world is the Wednesday Club? I suppose it's what those
+ladies were talking about," Ransom said.
+
+"I don't know your ladies, but the Wednesday Club is this thing. I don't
+mean you and me here together, but all those deluded beings in the other
+room. It is New York trying to be like Boston. It is the culture, the
+good form, of the metropolis. You might not think it, but it is. It's
+the 'quiet set'; they _are_ quiet enough; you might hear a pin drop, in
+there. Is some one going to offer up a prayer? How happy Olive must be,
+to be taken so seriously! They form an association for meeting at each
+other's houses, every week, and having some performance, or some paper
+read, or some subject explained. The more dreary it is and the more
+fearful the subject, the more they think it is what it ought to be. They
+have an idea this is the way to make New York society intellectual.
+There's a sumptuary law--isn't that what you call it?--about suppers,
+and they restrict themselves to a kind of Spartan broth. When it's made
+by their French cooks it isn't bad. Mrs. Burrage is one of the principal
+members--one of the founders, I believe; and when her turn has come
+round, formerly--it comes only once in the winter for each--I am told
+she has usually had very good music. But that is thought rather a base
+evasion, a begging of the question; the vulgar set can easily keep up
+with them on music. So Mrs. Burrage conceived the extraordinary
+idea"--and it was wonderful to hear how Mrs. Luna pronounced that
+adjective--"of sending on to Boston for that girl. It was her son, of
+course, who put it into her head; he has been at Cambridge for some
+years--that's where Verena lived, you know--and he was as thick with her
+as you please out there. Now that he is no longer there it suits him
+very well to have her here. She is coming on a visit to his mother when
+Olive goes. I asked them to stay with me, but Olive declined,
+majestically; she said they wished to be in some place where they would
+be free to receive 'sympathising friends.' So they are staying at some
+extraordinary kind of New Jerusalem boarding-house, in Tenth Street;
+Olive thinks it's her duty to go to such places. I was greatly surprised
+that she should let Verena be drawn into such a worldly crowd as this;
+but she told me they had made up their minds not to let _any_ occasion
+slip, that they could sow the seed of truth in drawing-rooms as well as
+in workshops, and that if a single person was brought round to their
+ideas they should have been justified in coming on. That's what they are
+doing in there--sowing the seed; but you shall not be the one that's
+brought round, I shall take care of that. Have you seen my delightful
+sister yet? The way she _does_ arrange herself when she wants to protest
+against frills! She looks as if she thought it pretty barren ground
+round here, now she has come to see it. I don't think she thinks you can
+be saved in a French dress, anyhow. I must say I call it a _very_ base
+evasion of Mrs. Burrage's, producing Verena Tarrant; it's worse than the
+meretricious music. Why didn't she honestly send for a _ballerina_ from
+Niblo's--if she wanted a young woman capering about on a platform? They
+don't care a fig about poor Olive's ideas; it's only because Verena has
+strange hair, and shiny eyes, and gets herself up like a
+prestidigitator's assistant. I have never understood how Olive can
+reconcile herself to Verena's really low style of dress. I suppose it's
+only because her clothes are so fearfully made. You look as if you
+didn't believe me--but I assure you that the cut is revolutionary; and
+that's a salve to Olive's conscience."
+
+Ransom was surprised to hear that he looked as if he didn't believe her,
+for he had found himself, after his first uneasiness, listening with
+considerable interest to her account of the circumstances under which
+Miss Tarrant was visiting New York. After a moment, as the result of
+some private reflexion, he propounded this question: "Is the son of the
+lady of the house a handsome young man, very polite, in a white vest?"
+
+"I don't know the colour of his vest--but he has a kind of fawning
+manner. Verena judges from that that he is in love with her."
+
+"Perhaps he is," said Ransom. "You say it was his idea to get her to
+come on."
+
+"Oh, he likes to flirt; that is highly probable."
+
+"Perhaps she has brought him round."
+
+"Not to where she wants, I think. The property is very large; he will
+have it all one of these days."
+
+"Do you mean she wishes to impose on him the yoke of matrimony?" Ransom
+asked, with Southern languor.
+
+"I believe she thinks matrimony an exploded superstition; but there is
+here and there a case in which it is still the best thing; when the
+gentleman's name happens to be Burrage and the young lady's Tarrant. I
+don't admire 'Burrage' so much myself. But I think she would have
+captured this present scion if it hadn't been for Olive. Olive stands
+between them--she wants to keep her in the single sisterhood; to keep
+her, above all, for herself. Of course she won't listen to her marrying,
+and she has put a spoke in the wheel. She has brought her to New York;
+that may seem against what I say; but the girl pulls hard, she has to
+humour her, to give her her head sometimes, to throw something
+overboard, in short, to save the rest. You may say, as regards Mr.
+Burrage, that it's a queer taste in a gentleman; but there is no arguing
+about that. It's queer taste in a lady, too; for she is a lady, poor
+Olive. You can see that to-night. She is dressed like a book-agent, but
+she is more distinguished than any one here. Verena, beside her, looks
+like a walking advertisement."
+
+When Mrs. Luna paused, Basil Ransom became aware that, in the other
+room, Verena's address had begun; the sound of her clear, bright,
+ringing voice, an admirable voice for public uses, came to them from the
+distance. His eagerness to stand where he could hear her better, and see
+her into the bargain, made him start in his place, and this movement
+produced an outgush of mocking laughter on the part of his companion.
+But she didn't say--"Go, go, deluded man, I take pity on you!" she only
+remarked, with light impertinence, that he surely wouldn't be so wanting
+in gallantry as to leave a lady absolutely alone in a public place--it
+was so Mrs. Luna was pleased to qualify Mrs. Burrage's drawing-room--in
+the face of her entreaty that he would remain with her. She had the
+better of poor Ransom, thanks to the superstitions of Mississippi. It
+was in his simple code a gross rudeness to withdraw from conversation
+with a lady at a party before another gentleman should have come to take
+one's place; it was to inflict on the lady a kind of outrage. The other
+gentlemen, at Mrs. Burrage's, were all too well occupied; there was not
+the smallest chance of one of them coming to his rescue. He couldn't
+leave Mrs. Luna, and yet he couldn't stay with her and lose the only
+thing he had come so much out of his way for. "Let me at least find you
+a place over there, in the doorway. You can stand upon a chair--you can
+lean on me."
+
+"Thank you very much; I would much rather lean on this sofa. And I am
+much too tired to stand on chairs. Besides, I wouldn't for the world
+that either Verena or Olive should see me craning over the heads of the
+crowd--as if I attached the smallest importance to their perorations!"
+
+"It isn't time for the peroration yet," Ransom said, with savage
+dryness; and he sat forward, with his elbow on his knees, his eyes on
+the ground, a flush in his sallow cheek.
+
+"It's never time to say such things as those," Mrs. Luna remarked,
+arranging her laces.
+
+"How do you know what she is saying?"
+
+"I can tell by the way her voice goes up and down. It sounds so silly."
+
+Ransom sat there five minutes longer--minutes which, he felt, the
+recording angel ought to write down to his credit--and asked himself how
+Mrs. Luna could be such a goose as not to see that she was making him
+hate her. But she was goose enough for anything. He tried to appear
+indifferent, and it occurred to him to doubt whether the Mississippi
+system could be right, after all. It certainly hadn't foreseen such a
+case as this. "It's as plain as day that Mr. Burrage intends to marry
+her--if he can," he said in a minute; that remark being better
+calculated than any other he could think of to dissimulate his real
+state of mind.
+
+It drew no rejoinder from his companion, and after an instant he turned
+his head a little and glanced at her. The result of something that
+silently passed between them was to make her say, abruptly: "Mr. Ransom,
+my sister never sent you an invitation to this place. Didn't it come
+from Verena Tarrant?"
+
+"I haven't the least idea."
+
+"As you hadn't the least acquaintance with Mrs. Burrage, who else could
+it have come from?"
+
+"If it came from Miss Tarrant, I ought at least to recognise her
+courtesy by listening to her."
+
+"If you rise from this sofa I will tell Olive what I suspect. She will
+be perfectly capable of carrying Verena off to China--or anywhere out of
+your reach."
+
+"And pray what is it you suspect?"
+
+"That you two have been in correspondence."
+
+"Tell her whatever you like, Mrs. Luna," said the young man, with the
+grimness of resignation.
+
+"You are quite unable to deny it, I see."
+
+"I never contradict a lady."
+
+"We shall see if I can't make you tell a fib. Haven't you been seeing
+Miss Tarrant, too?"
+
+"Where should I have seen her? I can't see all the way to Boston, as you
+said the other day."
+
+"Haven't you been there--on secret visits?"
+
+Ransom started just perceptibly; but to conceal it, the next instant, he
+stood up.
+
+"They wouldn't be secret if I were to tell you."
+
+Looking down at her he saw that her words were a happy hit, not the
+result of definite knowledge. But she appeared to him vain, egotistical,
+grasping, odious.
+
+"Well, I shall give the alarm," she went on; "that is, I will if you
+leave me. Is that the way a Southern gentleman treats a lady? Do as I
+wish, and I will let you off!"
+
+"You won't let me off from staying with you."
+
+"Is it such a _corvee_? I never heard of such rudeness!" Mrs. Luna
+cried. "All the same, I am determined to keep you if I can!"
+
+Ransom felt that she must be in the wrong, and yet superficially she
+seemed (and it was quite intolerable) to have right on her side. All
+this while Verena's golden voice, with her words indistinct, solicited,
+tantalised his ear. The question had evidently got on Mrs. Luna's
+nerves; she had reached that point of feminine embroilment when a woman
+is perverse for the sake of perversity, and even with a clear vision of
+bad consequences.
+
+"You have lost your head," he relieved himself by saying, as he looked
+down at her.
+
+"I wish you would go and get me some tea."
+
+"You say that only to embarrass me." He had hardly spoken when a great
+sound of applause, the clapping of many hands, and the cry from fifty
+throats of "Brava, brava!" floated in and died away. All Ransom's pulses
+throbbed, he flung his scruples to the winds, and after remarking to
+Mrs. Luna--still with all due ceremony--that he feared he must resign
+himself to forfeiting her good opinion, turned his back upon her and
+strode away to the open door of the music-room. "Well, I have never been
+so insulted!" he heard her exclaim, with exceeding sharpness, as he left
+her; and, glancing back at her, as he took up his position, he saw her
+still seated on her sofa--alone in the lamp-lit desert--with her eyes
+making, across the empty space, little vindictive points. Well, she
+could come where he was, if she wanted him so much; he would support her
+on an ottoman, and make it easy for her to see. But Mrs. Luna was
+uncompromising; he became aware, after a minute, that she had withdrawn,
+majestically, from the place, and he did not see her again that evening.
+
+
+
+
+XXVIII
+
+
+He could command the music-room very well from where he stood, behind a
+thick outer fringe of intently listening men. Verena Tarrant was erect
+on her little platform, dressed in white, with flowers in her bosom. The
+red cloth beneath her feet looked rich in the light of lamps placed on
+high pedestals on either side of the stage; it gave her figure a setting
+of colour which made it more pure and salient. She moved freely in her
+exposed isolation, yet with great sobriety of gesture; there was no
+table in front of her, and she had no notes in her hand, but stood there
+like an actress before the footlights, or a singer spinning vocal sounds
+to a silver thread. There was such a risk that a slim provincial girl,
+pretending to fascinate a couple of hundred _blase_ New Yorkers by
+simply giving them her ideas, would fail of her effect, that at the end
+of a few moments Basil Ransom became aware that he was watching her in
+very much the same excited way as if she had been performing, high above
+his head, on the trapeze. Yet, as one listened, it was impossible not to
+perceive that she was in perfect possession of her faculties, her
+subject, her audience; and he remembered the other time at Miss
+Birdseye's well enough to be able to measure the ground she had
+travelled since then. This exhibition was much more complete, her manner
+much more assured; she seemed to speak and survey the whole place from a
+much greater height. Her voice, too, had developed; he had forgotten how
+beautiful it could be when she raised it to its full capacity. Such a
+tone as that, so pure and rich, and yet so young, so natural,
+constituted in itself a talent; he didn't wonder that they had made a
+fuss about her at the Female Convention, if she filled their hideous
+hall with such a music. He had read, of old, of the _improvisatrice_ of
+Italy, and this was a chastened, modern, American version of the type, a
+New England Corinna, with a mission instead of a lyre. The most graceful
+part of her was her earnestness, the way her delightful eyes, wandering
+over the "fashionable audience" (before which she was so perfectly
+unabashed), as if she wished to resolve it into a single sentient
+personality, seemed to say that the only thing in life she cared for was
+to put the truth into a form that would render conviction irresistible.
+She was as simple as she was charming, and there was not a glance or
+motion that did not seem part of the pure, still-burning passion that
+animated her. She had indeed--it was manifest--reduced the company to
+unanimity; their attention was anything but languid; they smiled back at
+her when she smiled; they were noiseless, motionless when she was
+solemn; and it was evident that the entertainment which Mrs. Burrage had
+had the happy thought of offering to her friends would be memorable in
+the annals of the Wednesday Club. It was agreeable to Basil Ransom to
+think that Verena noticed him in his corner; her eyes played over her
+listeners so freely that you couldn't say they rested in one place more
+than another; nevertheless, a single rapid ray, which, however, didn't
+in the least strike him as a deviation from her ridiculous, fantastic,
+delightful argument, let him now that he had been missed and now was
+particularly spoken to. This glance was a sufficient assurance that his
+invitation had come to him by the girl's request. He took for granted
+the matter of her speech was ridiculous; how could it help being, and
+what did it signify if it was? She was none the less charming for that,
+and the moonshine she had been plied with was none the less moonshine
+for her being charming. After he had stood there a quarter of an hour he
+became conscious that he should not be able to repeat a word she had
+said; he had not definitely heeded it, and yet he had not lost a
+vibration of her voice. He had discovered Olive Chancellor by this time;
+she was in the front row of chairs, at the end, on the left; her back
+was turned to him, but he could see half her sharp profile, bent down a
+little and absolutely motionless. Even across the wide interval her
+attitude expressed to him a kind of rapturous stillness, the
+concentration of triumph. There were several irrepressible effusions of
+applause, instantly self-checked, but Olive never looked up, at the
+loudest, and such a calmness as that could only be the result of
+passionate volition. Success was in the air, and she was tasting it; she
+tasted it, as she did everything, in a way of her own. Success for
+Verena was success for her, and Ransom was sure that the only thing
+wanting to her triumph was that he should have been placed in the line
+of her vision, so that she might enjoy his embarrassment and confusion,
+might say to him, in one of her dumb, cold flashes--"_Now_ do you think
+our movement is not a force--_now_ do you think that women are meant to
+be slaves?" Honestly, he was not conscious of any confusion; it
+subverted none of his heresies to perceive that Verena Tarrant had even
+more power to fix his attention than he had hitherto supposed. It was
+fixed in a way it had not been yet, however, by his at last
+understanding her speech, feeling it reach his inner sense through the
+impediment of mere dazzled vision. Certain phrases took on a meaning for
+him--an appeal she was making to those who still resisted the beneficent
+influence of the truth. They appeared to be mocking, cynical men,
+mainly; many of whom were such triflers and idlers, so heartless and
+brainless that it didn't matter much what they thought on any subject;
+if the old tyranny needed to be propped up by _them_ it showed it was in
+a pretty bad way. But there were others whose prejudice was stronger and
+more cultivated, pretended to rest upon study and argument. To those she
+wished particularly to address herself; she wanted to waylay them, to
+say, "Look here, you're all wrong; you'll be so much happier when I have
+convinced you. Just give me five minutes," she should like to say; "just
+sit down here and let me ask a simple question. Do you think any state
+of society can come to good that is based upon an organised wrong?" That
+was the simple question that Verena desired to propound, and Basil
+smiled across the room at her with an amused tenderness as he gathered
+that she conceived it to be a poser. He didn't think it would frighten
+him much if she were to ask him that, and he would sit down with her for
+as many minutes as she liked.
+
+He, of course, was one of the systematic scoffers, one of those to whom
+she said--"Do you know how you strike me? You strike me as men who are
+starving to death while they have a cupboard at home, all full of bread
+and meat and wine; or as blind, demented beings who let themselves be
+cast into a debtor's prison, while in their pocket they have the key of
+vaults and treasure-chests heaped up with gold and silver. The meat and
+wine, the gold and silver," Verena went on, "are simply the suppressed
+and wasted force, the precious sovereign remedy, of which society
+insanely deprives itself--the genius, the intelligence, the inspiration
+of women. It is dying, inch by inch, in the midst of old superstitions
+which it invokes in vain, and yet it has the elixir of life in its
+hands. Let it drink but a draught, and it will bloom once more; it will
+be refreshed, radiant; it will find its youth again. The heart, the
+heart is cold, and nothing but the touch of woman can warm it, make it
+act. We _are_ the Heart of humanity, and let us have the courage to
+insist on it! The public life of the world will move in the same barren,
+mechanical, vicious circle--the circle of egotism, cruelty, ferocity,
+jealousy, greed, of blind striving to do things only for _some_, at the
+cost of others, instead of trying to do everything for all. All, all?
+Who dares to say 'all' when we are not there? We are an equal, a
+splendid, an inestimable part. Try us and you'll see--you will wonder
+how, without us, society has ever dragged itself even this distance--so
+wretchedly small compared with what it might have been--on its painful
+earthly pilgrimage. That is what I should like above all to pour into
+the ears of those who still hold out, who stiffen their necks and repeat
+hard, empty formulas, which are as dry as a broken gourd that has been
+flung away in the desert. I would take them by their selfishness, their
+indolence, their interest. I am not here to recriminate, nor to deepen
+the gulf that already yawns between the sexes, and I don't accept the
+doctrine that they are natural enemies, since my plea is for a union far
+more intimate--provided it be equal--than any that the sages and
+philosophers of former times have ever dreamed of. Therefore I shall not
+touch upon the subject of men's being most easily influenced by
+considerations of what is most agreeable and profitable for _them_; I
+shall simply assume that they _are_ so influenced, and I shall say to
+them that our cause would long ago have been gained if their vision were
+not so dim, so veiled, even in matters in which their own interests are
+concerned. If they had the same quick sight as women, if they had the
+intelligence of the heart, the world would be very different now; and I
+assure you that half the bitterness of our lot is to see so clearly and
+not to be able to do! Good gentlemen all, if I could make you believe
+how much brighter and fairer and sweeter the garden of life would be for
+you, if you would only let us help you to keep it in order! You would
+like so much better to walk there, and you would find grass and trees
+and flowers that would make you think you were in Eden. That is what I
+should like to press home to each of you, personally, individually--to
+give him the vision of the world as it hangs perpetually before me,
+redeemed, transfigured, by a new moral tone. There would be generosity,
+tenderness, sympathy, where there is now only brute force and sordid
+rivalry. But you really do strike me as stupid even about your own
+welfare! Some of you say that we have already all the influence we can
+possibly require, and talk as if we ought to be grateful that we are
+allowed even to breathe. Pray, who shall judge what we require if not we
+ourselves? We require simply freedom; we require the lid to be taken off
+the box in which we have been kept for centuries. You say it's a very
+comfortable, cozy, convenient box, with nice glass sides, so that we can
+see out, and that all that's wanted is to give another quiet turn to the
+key. That is very easily answered. Good gentlemen, you have never been
+in the box, and you haven't the least idea how it feels!"
+
+The historian who has gathered these documents together does not deem it
+necessary to give a larger specimen of Verena's eloquence, especially as
+Basil Ransom, through whose ears we are listening to it, arrived, at
+this point, at a definite conclusion. He had taken her measure as a
+public speaker, judged her importance in the field of discussion, the
+cause of reform. Her speech, in itself, had about the value of a pretty
+essay, committed to memory and delivered by a bright girl at an
+"academy"; it was vague, thin, rambling, a tissue of generalities that
+glittered agreeably enough in Mrs. Burrage's veiled lamplight. From any
+serious point of view it was neither worth answering nor worth
+considering, and Basil Ransom made his reflexions on the crazy character
+of the age in which such a performance as that was treated as an
+intellectual effort, a contribution to a question. He asked himself what
+either he or any one else would think of it if Miss Chancellor--or even
+Mrs. Luna--had been on the platform instead of the actual declaimer.
+Nevertheless, its importance was high, and consisted precisely, in part,
+of the fact that the voice was not the voice of Olive or of Adeline. Its
+importance was that Verena was unspeakably attractive, and this was all
+the greater for him in the light of the fact, which quietly dawned upon
+him as he stood there, that he was falling in love with her. It had
+tapped at his heart for recognition, and before he could hesitate or
+challenge, the door had sprung open and the mansion was illuminated. He
+gave no outward sign; he stood gazing as at a picture; but the room
+wavered before his eyes, even Verena's figure danced a little. This did
+not make the sequel of her discourse more clear to him; her meaning
+faded again into the agreeable vague, and he simply felt her presence,
+tasted her voice. Yet the act of reflexion was not suspended; he found
+himself rejoicing that she was so weak in argument, so inevitably
+verbose. The idea that she was brilliant, that she counted as a factor
+only because the public mind was in a muddle, was not an humiliation but
+a delight to him; it was a proof that her apostleship was all nonsense,
+the most passing of fashions, the veriest of delusions, and that she was
+meant for something divinely different--for privacy, for him, for love.
+He took no measure of the duration of her talk; he only knew, when it
+was over and succeeded by a clapping of hands, an immense buzz of voices
+and shuffling of chairs, that it had been capitally bad, and that her
+personal success, wrapping it about with a glamour like the silver mist
+that surrounds a fountain, was such as to prevent its badness from being
+a cause of mortification to her lover. The company--such of it as did
+not immediately close together around Verena--filed away into the other
+rooms, bore him in its current into the neighbourhood of a table spread
+for supper, where he looked for signs of the sumptuary law mentioned to
+him by Mrs. Luna. It appeared to be embodied mainly in the glitter of
+crystal and silver, and the fresh tints of mysterious viands and
+jellies, which looked desirable in the soft circle projected by
+lace-fringed lamps. He heard the popping of corks, he felt a pressure of
+elbows, a thickening of the crowd, perceived that he was glowered at,
+squeezed against the table, by contending gentlemen who observed that he
+usurped space, was neither feeding himself nor helping others to feed.
+He had lost sight of Verena; she had been borne away in clouds of
+compliment; but he found himself thinking--almost paternally--that
+she must be hungry after so much chatter, and he hoped some one was
+getting her something to eat. After a moment, just as he was edging
+away, for his own opportunity to sup much better than usual was
+not what was uppermost in his mind, this little vision was suddenly
+embodied--embodied by the appearance of Miss Tarrant, who faced him, in
+the press, attached to the arm of a young man now recognisable to him as
+the son of the house--the smiling, fragrant youth who an hour before had
+interrupted his colloquy with Olive. He was leading her to the table,
+while people made way for them, covering Verena with gratulations of
+word and look. Ransom could see that, according to a phrase which came
+back to him just then, oddly, out of some novel or poem he had read of
+old, she was the cynosure of every eye. She looked beautiful, and they
+were a beautiful couple. As soon as she saw him, she put out her left
+hand to him--the other was in Mr. Burrage's arm--and said: "Well, don't
+you think it's all true?"
+
+"No, not a word of it!" Ransom answered, with a kind of joyous
+sincerity. "But it doesn't make any difference."
+
+"Oh, it makes a great deal of difference to me!" Verena cried.
+
+"I mean to me. I don't care in the least whether I agree with you,"
+Ransom said, looking askance at young Mr. Burrage, who had detached
+himself and was getting something for Verena to eat.
+
+"Ah, well, if you are so indifferent!"
+
+"It's not because I'm indifferent!" His eyes came back to her own, the
+expression of which had changed before they quitted them. She began to
+complain to her companion, who brought her something very dainty on a
+plate, that Mr. Ransom was "standing out," that he was about the hardest
+subject she had encountered yet. Henry Burrage smiled upon Ransom in a
+way that was meant to show he remembered having already spoken to him,
+while the Mississippian said to himself that there was nothing on the
+face of it to make it strange there should be between these fair,
+successful young persons some such question of love or marriage as Mrs.
+Luna had tattled about. Mr. Burrage was successful, he could see that in
+the turn of an eye; not perhaps as having a commanding intellect or a
+very strong character, but as being rich, polite, handsome, happy,
+amiable, and as wearing a splendid camellia in his buttonhole. And that
+_he_, at any rate, thought Verena had succeeded was proved by the
+casual, civil tone, and the contented distraction of eye, with which he
+exclaimed, "You don't mean to say you were not moved by that! It's my
+opinion that Miss Tarrant will carry everything before her." He was so
+pleased himself, and so safe in his conviction, that it didn't matter to
+him what any one else thought; which was, after all, just Basil Ransom's
+own state of mind.
+
+"Oh! I didn't say I wasn't moved," the Mississippian remarked.
+
+"Moved the wrong way!" said Verena. "Never mind; you'll be left behind."
+
+"If I am, you will come back to console me."
+
+"_Back?_ I shall never come back!" the girl replied gaily.
+
+"You'll be the very first!" Ransom went on, feeling himself now, and as
+if by a sudden clearing up of his spiritual atmosphere, no longer in the
+vein for making the concessions of chivalry, and yet conscious that his
+words were an expression of homage.
+
+"Oh, I call that presumptuous!" Mr. Burrage exclaimed, turning away to
+get a glass of water for Verena, who had refused to accept champagne,
+mentioning that she had never drunk any in her life and that she
+associated a kind of iniquity with it. Olive had no wine in her house
+(not that Verena gave this explanation) but her father's old madeira and
+a little claret; of the former of which liquors Basil Ransom had highly
+approved the day he dined with her.
+
+"Does he believe in all those lunacies?" he inquired, knowing perfectly
+what to think about the charge of presumption brought by Mr. Burrage.
+
+"Why, he's crazy about our movement," Verena responded. "He's one of my
+most gratifying converts."
+
+"And don't you despise him for it?"
+
+"Despise him? Why, you seem to think I swing round pretty often!"
+
+"Well, I have an idea that I shall see you swing round yet," Ransom
+remarked, in a tone in which it would have appeared to Henry Burrage,
+had he heard these words, that presumption was pushed to fatuity.
+
+On Verena, however, they produced no impression that prevented her from
+saying simply, without the least rancour, "Well, if you expect to draw
+me back five hundred years, I hope you won't tell Miss Birdseye." And as
+Ransom did not seize immediately the reason of her allusion, she went
+on, "You know she is convinced it will be just the other way. I went to
+see her after you had been at Cambridge--almost immediately."
+
+"Darling old lady--I hope she's well," the young man said.
+
+"Well, she's tremendously interested."
+
+"She's always interested in something, isn't she?"
+
+"Well, this time it's in our relations, yours and mine," Verena replied,
+in a tone in which only Verena could say a thing like that. "You ought
+to see how she throws herself into them. She is sure it will all work
+round for your good."
+
+"All what, Miss Tarrant?" Ransom asked.
+
+"Well, what I told her. She is sure you are going to become one of our
+leaders, that you are very gifted for treating great questions and
+acting on masses of people, that you will become quite enthusiastic
+about our uprising, and that when you go up to the top as one of our
+champions it will all have been through me."
+
+Ransom stood there, smiling at her; the dusky glow in his eyes expressed
+a softness representing no prevision of such laurels, but which
+testified none the less to Verena's influence. "And what you want is
+that I shouldn't undeceive her?"
+
+"Well, I don't want you to be hypocritical--if you shouldn't take our
+side; but I do think that it would be sweet if the dear old thing could
+just cling to her illusion. She won't live so very long, probably; she
+told me the other day she was ready for her final rest; so it wouldn't
+interfere much with your freedom. She feels quite romantic about
+it--your being a Southerner and all, and not naturally in sympathy with
+Boston ideas, and your meeting her that way in the street and making
+yourself known to her. She won't believe but what I shall move you."
+
+"Don't fear, Miss Tarrant, she shall be satisfied," Ransom said, with a
+laugh which he could see she but partially understood. He was prevented
+from making his meaning more clear by the return of Mr. Burrage,
+bringing not only Verena's glass of water but a smooth-faced, rosy,
+smiling old gentleman, who had a velvet waistcoat, and thin white hair,
+brushed effectively, and whom he introduced to Verena under a name which
+Ransom recognised as that of a rich and venerable citizen, conspicuous
+for his public spirit and his large almsgiving. Ransom had lived long
+enough in New York to know that a request from this ancient worthy to be
+made known to Miss Tarrant would mark her for the approval of the
+respectable, stamp her as a success of no vulgar sort; and as he turned
+away, a faint, inaudible sigh passed his lips, dictated by the sense
+that he himself belonged to a terribly small and obscure minority. He
+turned away because, as we know, he had been taught that a gentleman
+talking to a lady must always do that when a new gentleman is presented;
+though he observed, looking back, after a minute, that young Mr. Burrage
+evidently had no intention of abdicating in favour of the eminent
+philanthropist. He thought he had better go home; he didn't know what
+might happen at such a party as that, nor when the proceedings might be
+supposed to terminate; but after considering it a minute he dismissed
+the idea that there was a chance of Verena's speaking again. If he was a
+little vague about this, however, there was no doubt in his mind as to
+the obligation he was under to take leave first of Mrs. Burrage. He
+wished he knew where Verena was staying; he wanted to see her alone, not
+in a supper-room crowded with millionaires. As he looked about for the
+hostess it occurred to him that she would know, and that if he were able
+to quench a certain shyness sufficiently to ask her, she would tell him.
+Having satisfied himself presently that she was not in the supper-room,
+he made his way back to the parlours, where the company now was much
+diminished. He looked again into the music-room, tenanted only by
+half-a-dozen couples, who were cultivating privacy among the empty
+chairs, and here he perceived Mrs. Burrage sitting in conversation with
+Olive Chancellor (the latter, apparently, had not moved from her place),
+before the deserted scene of Verena's triumph. His search had been so
+little for Olive that at the sight of her he faltered a moment; then he
+pulled himself together, advancing with a consciousness of the
+Mississippi manner. He felt Olive's eyes receiving him; she looked at
+him as if it was just the hope that she shouldn't meet him again that
+had made her remain where she was. Mrs. Burrage got up, as he bade her
+good-night, and Olive followed her example.
+
+"So glad you were able to come. Wonderful creature, isn't she? She can
+do anything she wants."
+
+These words from the elder lady Ransom received at first with a reserve
+which, as he trusted, suggested extreme respect; and it was a fact that
+his silence had a kind of Southern solemnity in it. Then he said, in a
+tone equally expressive of great deliberation:
+
+"Yes, madam, I think I never was present at an exhibition, an
+entertainment of any kind, which held me more completely under the
+charm."
+
+"Delighted you liked it. I didn't know what in the world to have, and
+this has proved an inspiration--for me as well as for Miss Tarrant. Miss
+Chancellor has been telling me how they have worked together; it's
+really quite beautiful. Miss Chancellor is Miss Tarrant's great friend
+and colleague. Miss Tarrant assures me that she couldn't do anything
+without her." After which explanation, turning to Olive, Mrs. Burrage
+murmured: "Let me introduce Mr. ---- introduce Mr. ----"
+
+But she had forgotten poor Ransom's name, forgotten who had asked her
+for a card for him; and, perceiving it, he came to her rescue with the
+observation that he was a kind of cousin of Miss Olive's, if she didn't
+repudiate him, and that he knew what a tremendous partnership existed
+between the two young ladies. "When I applauded I was applauding the
+firm--that is, you too," he said, smiling, to his kinswoman.
+
+"Your applause? I confess I don't understand it," Olive replied, with
+much promptitude.
+
+"Well, to tell the truth, I didn't myself!"
+
+"Oh yes, of course, I know; that's why--that's why----" And this further
+speech of Mrs. Burrage's, in reference to the relationship between the
+young man and her companion, faded also into vagueness. She had been on
+the point of saying it was the reason why he was in her house; but she
+had bethought herself in time that this ought to pass as a matter of
+course. Basil Ransom could see she was a woman who could carry off an
+awkwardness like that, and he considered her with a sense of her
+importance. She had a brisk, familiar, slightly impatient way, and if
+she had not spoken so fast, and had more of the softness of the Southern
+matron, she would have reminded him of a certain type of woman he had
+seen of old, before the changes in his own part of the world--the
+clever, capable, hospitable proprietress, widowed or unmarried, of a big
+plantation carried on by herself. "If you are her cousin, do take Miss
+Chancellor to have some supper--instead of going away," she went on,
+with her infelicitous readiness.
+
+At this Olive instantly seated herself again.
+
+"I am much obliged to you; I never touch supper. I shall not leave this
+room--I like it."
+
+"Then let me send you something--or let Mr. ----, your cousin, remain
+with you."
+
+Olive looked at Mrs. Burrage with a strange beseechingness, "I am very
+tired, I must rest. These occasions leave me exhausted."
+
+"Ah yes, I can imagine that. Well, then, you shall be quite quiet--I
+shall come back to you." And with a smile of farewell for Basil Ransom,
+Mrs. Burrage moved away.
+
+Basil lingered a moment, though he saw that Olive wished to get rid of
+him. "I won't disturb you further than to ask you a single question," he
+said. "Where are you staying? I want to come and see Miss Tarrant. I
+don't say I want to come and see you, because I have an idea that it
+would give you no pleasure." It had occurred to him that he might obtain
+their address from Mrs. Luna--he only knew vaguely it was Tenth Street;
+much as he had displeased her she couldn't refuse him that; but suddenly
+the greater simplicity and frankness of applying directly to Olive, even
+at the risk of appearing to brave her, recommended itself. He couldn't,
+of course, call upon Verena without her knowing it, and she might as
+well make her protest (since he proposed to pay no heed to it) sooner as
+later. He had seen nothing, personally, of their life together, but it
+had come over him that what Miss Chancellor most disliked in him (had
+she not, on the very threshold of their acquaintance, had a sort of
+mystical foreboding of it?) was the possibility that he would interfere.
+It was quite on the cards that he might; yet it was decent, all the
+same, to ask her rather than any one else. It was better that his
+interference should be accompanied with all the forms of chivalry.
+
+Olive took no notice of his remark as to how she herself might be
+affected by his visit; but she asked in a moment why he should think it
+necessary to call on Miss Tarrant. "You know you are not in sympathy,"
+she added, in a tone which contained a really touching element of
+entreaty that he would not even pretend to prove he was.
+
+I know not whether Basil was touched, but he said, with every appearance
+of a conciliatory purpose--"I wish to thank her for all the interesting
+information she has given me this evening."
+
+"If you think it generous to come and scoff at her, of course she has no
+defence; you will be glad to know that."
+
+"Dear Miss Chancellor, if you are not a defence--a battery of many
+guns!" Ransom exclaimed.
+
+"Well, she at least is not mine!" Olive returned, springing to her feet.
+She looked round her as if she were really pressed too hard, panting
+like a hunted creature.
+
+"Your defence is your certain immunity from attack. Perhaps if you won't
+tell me where you are staying, you will kindly ask Miss Tarrant herself
+to do so. Would she send me a word on a card?"
+
+"We are in West Tenth Street," Olive said; and she gave the number. "Of
+course you are free to come."
+
+"Of course I am! Why shouldn't I be? But I am greatly obliged to you for
+the information. I will ask her to come out, so that you won't see us."
+And he turned away, with the sense that it was really insufferable, her
+attempt always to give him the air of being in the wrong. If that was
+the kind of spirit in which women were going to act when they had more
+power!
+
+
+
+
+XXIX
+
+
+Mrs. Luna was early in the field the next day, and her sister wondered
+to what she owed the honour of a visit from her at eleven o'clock in the
+morning. She very soon saw, when Adeline asked her whether it had been
+she who procured for Basil Ransom an invitation to Mrs. Burrage's.
+
+"Me--why in the world should it have been me?" Olive asked, feeling
+something of a pang at the implication that it had not been Adeline, as
+she supposed.
+
+"I didn't know--but you took him up so."
+
+"Why, Adeline Luna, when did I ever----?" Miss Chancellor exclaimed,
+staring and intensely grave.
+
+"You don't mean to say you have forgotten how you brought him on to see
+you, a year and a half ago!"
+
+"I didn't bring him on--I said if he happened to be there."
+
+"Yes, I remember how it was: he did happen, and then you happened to
+hate him, and tried to get out of it."
+
+Miss Chancellor saw, I say, why Adeline had come to her at the hour she
+knew she was always writing letters, after having given her all the
+attention that was necessary the day before; she had come simply to make
+herself disagreeable, as Olive knew, of old, the spirit sometimes moved
+her irresistibly to do. It seemed to her that Adeline had been
+disagreeable enough in not having beguiled Basil Ransom into a marriage,
+according to that memorable calculation of probabilities in which she
+indulged (with a licence that she scarcely liked definitely to recall)
+when the pair made acquaintance under her eyes in Charles Street, and
+Mrs. Luna seemed to take to him as much as she herself did little. She
+would gladly have accepted him as a brother-in-law, for the harm such a
+relation could do one was limited and definite; whereas in his general
+capacity of being at large in her life the ability of the young
+Mississippian to injure her seemed somehow immense. "I wrote to
+him--that time--for a perfectly definite reason," she said. "I thought
+mother would have liked us to know him. But it was a mistake."
+
+"How do you know it was a mistake? Mother would have liked him, I
+daresay."
+
+"I mean my acting as I did; it was a theory of duty which I allowed to
+press me too much. I always do. Duty should be obvious; one shouldn't
+hunt round for it."
+
+"Was it very obvious when it brought you on here?" asked Mrs. Luna, who
+was distinctly out of humour.
+
+Olive looked for a moment at the toe of her shoe. "I had an idea that
+you would have married him by this time," she presently remarked.
+
+"Marry him yourself, my dear! What put such an idea into your head?"
+
+"You wrote to me at first so much about him. You told me he was
+tremendously attentive, and that you liked him."
+
+"His state of mind is one thing and mine is another. How can I marry
+every man that hangs about me--that dogs my footsteps? I might as well
+become a Mormon at once!" Mrs. Luna delivered herself of this argument
+with a certain charitable air, as if her sister could not be expected to
+understand such a situation by her own light.
+
+Olive waived the discussion, and simply said: "I took for granted _you_
+had got him the invitation."
+
+"I, my dear? That would be quite at variance with my attitude of
+discouragement."
+
+"Then she simply sent it herself."
+
+"Whom do you mean by 'she'?"
+
+"Mrs. Burrage, of course."
+
+"I thought that you might mean Verena," said Mrs. Luna casually.
+
+"Verena--to him? Why in the world----?" And Olive gave the cold glare
+with which her sister was familiar.
+
+"Why in the world not--since she knows him?"
+
+"She had seen him twice in her life before last night, when she met him
+for the third time and spoke to him."
+
+"Did she tell you that?"
+
+"She tells me everything."
+
+"Are you very sure?"
+
+"Adeline Luna, what _do_ you mean?" Miss Chancellor murmured.
+
+"Are you very sure that last night was only the third time?" Mrs. Luna
+went on.
+
+Olive threw back her head and swept her sister from her bonnet to her
+lowest flounce. "You have no right to hint at such a thing as that
+unless you know!"
+
+"Oh, I know--I know, at any rate, more than you do!" And then Mrs. Luna,
+sitting with her sister, much withdrawn, in one of the windows of the
+big, hot, faded parlour of the boarding-house in Tenth Street, where
+there was a rug before the chimney representing a Newfoundland dog
+saving a child from drowning, and a row of chromo-lithographs on the
+walls, imparted to her the impression she had received the evening
+before--the impression of Basil Ransom's keen curiosity about Verena
+Tarrant. Verena must have asked Mrs. Burrage to send him a card, and
+asked it without mentioning the fact to Olive--for wouldn't Olive
+certainly have remembered it? It was no use her saying that Mrs. Burrage
+might have sent it of her own movement, because she wasn't aware of his
+existence, and why should she be? Basil Ransom himself had told her he
+didn't know Mrs. Burrage. Mrs. Luna knew whom he knew and whom he
+didn't, or at least the sort of people, and they were not the sort that
+belonged to the Wednesday Club. That was one reason why she didn't care
+about him for any intimate relation--that he didn't seem to have any
+taste for making nice friends. Olive would know what _her_ taste was in
+this respect, though it wasn't that young woman's own any more than his.
+It was positive that the suggestion about the card could only have come
+from Verena. At any rate Olive could easily ask, or if she was afraid of
+her telling a fib she could ask Mrs. Burrage. It was true Mrs. Burrage
+might have been put on her guard by Verena, and would perhaps invent
+some other account of the matter; therefore Olive had better just
+believe what _she_ believed, that Verena had secured his presence at the
+party and had had private reasons for doing so. It is to be feared that
+Ransom's remark to Mrs. Luna the night before about her having lost her
+head was near to the mark; for if she had not been blinded by her
+rancour she would have guessed the horror with which she inspired her
+sister when she spoke in that offhand way of Verena's lying and Mrs.
+Burrage's lying. Did people lie like that in Mrs. Luna's set? It was
+Olive's plan of life not to lie, and attributing a similar disposition
+to people she liked, it was impossible for her to believe that Verena
+had had the intention of deceiving her. Mrs. Luna, in a calmer hour,
+might also have divined that Olive would make her private comments on
+the strange story of Basil Ransom's having made up to Verena out of
+pique at Adeline's rebuff; for this was the account of the matter that
+she now offered to Miss Chancellor. Olive did two things: she listened
+intently and eagerly, judging there was distinct danger in the air
+(which, however, she had not wanted Mrs. Luna to tell her, having
+perceived it for herself the night before); and she saw that poor
+Adeline was fabricating fearfully, that the "rebuff" was altogether an
+invention. Mr. Ransom was evidently preoccupied with Verena, but he had
+not needed Mrs. Luna's cruelty to make him so. So Olive maintained an
+attitude of great reserve; she did not take upon herself to announce
+that her own version was that Adeline, for reasons absolutely
+imperceptible to others, had tried to catch Basil Ransom, had failed in
+her attempt, and, furious at seeing Verena preferred to a person of her
+importance (Olive remembered the _spretae injuria formae_), now wished
+to do both him and the girl an ill turn. This would be accomplished if
+she could induce Olive to interfere. Miss Chancellor was conscious of an
+abundant readiness to interfere, but it was not because she cared for
+Adeline's mortification. I am not sure, even, that she did not think her
+_fiasco_ but another illustration of her sister's general uselessness,
+and rather despise her for it; being perfectly able at once to hold that
+nothing is baser than the effort to entrap a man, and to think it very
+ignoble to have to renounce it because you can't. Olive kept these
+reflexions to herself, but she went so far as to say to her sister that
+she didn't see where the "pique" came in. How could it hurt Adeline that
+he should turn his attention to Verena? What was Verena to her?
+
+"Why, Olive Chancellor, how can you ask?" Mrs. Luna boldly responded.
+"Isn't Verena everything to you, and aren't you everything to me, and
+wouldn't an attempt--a successful one--to take Verena away from you
+knock you up fearfully, and shouldn't I suffer, as you know I suffer, by
+sympathy?"
+
+I have said that it was Miss Chancellor's plan of life not to lie, but
+such a plan was compatible with a kind of consideration for the truth
+which led her to shrink from producing it on poor occasions. So she
+didn't say, "Dear me, Adeline, what humbug! you know you hate Verena and
+would be very glad if she were drowned!" She only said, "Well, I see;
+but it's very roundabout." What she did see was that Mrs. Luna was eager
+to help her to stop off Basil Ransom from "making head," as the phrase
+was; and the fact that her motive was spite, and not tenderness for the
+Bostonians, would not make her assistance less welcome if the danger
+were real. She herself had a nervous dread, but she had that about
+everything; still, Adeline had perhaps seen something, and what in the
+world did she mean by her reference to Verena's having had secret
+meetings? When pressed on this point, Mrs. Luna could only say that she
+didn't pretend to give definite information, and she wasn't a spy
+anyway, but that the night before he had positively flaunted in her face
+his admiration for the girl, his enthusiasm for her way of standing up
+there. Of course he hated her ideas, but he was quite conceited enough
+to think she would give them up. Perhaps it was all directed at
+_her_--as if she cared! It would depend a good deal on the girl herself;
+certainly, if there was any likelihood of Verena's being affected, she
+should advise Olive to look out. She knew best what to do; it was only
+Adeline's duty to give her the benefit of her own impression, whether
+she was thanked for it or not. She only wished to put her on her guard,
+and it was just like Olive to receive such information so coldly; she
+was the most disappointing woman she knew.
+
+Miss Chancellor's coldness was not diminished by this rebuke; for it had
+come over her that, after all, she had never opened herself at that rate
+to Adeline, had never let her see the real intensity of her desire to
+keep the sort of danger there was now a question of away from Verena,
+had given her no warrant for regarding her as her friend's keeper; so
+that she was taken aback by the flatness of Mrs. Luna's assumption that
+she was ready to enter into a conspiracy to circumvent and frustrate the
+girl. Olive put on all her majesty to dispel this impression, and if she
+could not help being aware that she made Mrs. Luna still angrier, on the
+whole, than at first, she felt that she would much rather disappoint her
+than give herself away to her--especially as she was intensely eager to
+profit by her warning!
+
+
+
+
+XXX
+
+
+Mrs. Luna would have been still less satisfied with the manner in which
+Olive received her proffered assistance had she known how many
+confidences that reticent young woman might have made her in return.
+Olive's whole life now was a matter for whispered communications; she
+felt this herself, as she sought the privacy of her own apartment after
+her interview with her sister. She had for the moment time to think;
+Verena having gone out with Mr. Burrage, who had made an appointment the
+night before to call for her to drive at that early hour. They had other
+engagements in the afternoon--the principal of which was to meet a group
+of earnest people at the house of one of the great local promoters.
+Olive would whisk Verena off to these appointments directly after lunch;
+she flattered herself that she could arrange matters so that there would
+not be half an hour in the day during which Basil Ransom, complacently
+calling, would find the Bostonians in the house. She had had this well
+in mind when, at Mrs. Burrage's, she was driven to give him their
+address; and she had had it also in mind that she would ask Verena, as a
+special favour, to accompany her back to Boston on the next day but one,
+which was the morning of the morrow. There had been considerable talk of
+her staying a few days with Mrs. Burrage--staying on after her own
+departure; but Verena backed out of it spontaneously, seeing how the
+idea worried her friend. Olive had accepted the sacrifice, and their
+visit to New York was now cut down, in intention, to four days, one of
+which, the moment she perceived whither Basil Ransom was tending, Miss
+Chancellor promised herself also to suppress. She had not mentioned that
+to Verena yet; she hesitated a little, having a slightly bad conscience
+about the concessions she had already obtained from her friend. Verena
+made such concessions with a generosity which caused one's heart to ache
+for admiration, even while one asked for them; and never once had Olive
+known her to demand the smallest credit for any virtue she showed in
+this way, or to bargain for an instant about any effort she made to
+oblige. She had been delighted with the idea of spending a week under
+Mrs. Burrage's roof; she had said, too, that she believed her mother
+would die happy (not that there was the least prospect of Mrs. Tarrant's
+dying) if she could hear of her having such an experience as that; and
+yet, perceiving how solemn Olive looked about it, how she blanched and
+brooded at the prospect, she had offered to give it up, with a smile
+sweeter, if possible, than any that had ever sat in her eyes. Olive knew
+what that meant for her, knew what a power of enjoyment she still had,
+in spite of the tension of their common purpose, their vital work, which
+had now, as they equally felt, passed into the stage of realisation, of
+fruition; and that is why her conscience rather pricked her for
+consenting to this further act of renunciation, especially as their
+position seemed really so secure, on the part of one who had already
+given herself away so sublimely.
+
+Secure as their position might be, Olive called herself a blind idiot
+for having, in spite of all her first shrinkings, agreed to bring Verena
+to New York. Verena had jumped at the invitation, the very
+unexpectedness of which on Mrs. Burrage's part--it was such an odd idea
+to have come to a mere worldling--carried a kind of persuasion with it.
+Olive's immediate sentiment had been an instinctive general fear; but,
+later, she had dismissed that as unworthy; she had decided (and such a
+decision was nothing new) that where their mission was concerned they
+ought to face everything. Such an opportunity would contribute too much
+to Verena's reputation and authority to justify a refusal at the bidding
+of apprehensions which were after all only vague. Olive's specific
+terrors and dangers had by this time very much blown over; Basil Ransom
+had given no sign of life for ages, and Henry Burrage had certainly got
+his quietus before they went to Europe. If it had occurred to his mother
+that she might convert Verena into the animating principle of a big
+soiree, she was at least acting in good faith, for it could be no more
+her wish to-day that he should marry Selah Tarrant's daughter than it
+was her wish a year before. And then they should do some good to the
+benighted, the most benighted, the fashionable benighted; they should
+perhaps make them furious--there was always some good in that. Lastly,
+Olive was conscious of a personal temptation in the matter; she was not
+insensible to the pleasure of appearing in a distinguished New York
+circle as a representative woman, an important Bostonian, the prompter,
+colleague, associate of one of the most original girls of the time.
+Basil Ransom was the person she had least expected to meet at Mrs.
+Burrage's; it had been her belief that they might easily spend four days
+in a city of more than a million of inhabitants without that
+disagreeable accident. But it had occurred; nothing was wanting to make
+it seem serious; and, setting her teeth, she shook herself, morally,
+hard, for having fallen into the trap of fate. Well, she would scramble
+out, with only a scare, probably. Henry Burrage was very attentive, but
+somehow she didn't fear him now; and it was only natural he should feel
+that he couldn't be polite enough, after they had consented to be
+exploited in that worldly way by his mother. The other danger was the
+worst; the palpitation of her strange dread, the night of Miss
+Birdseye's party, came back to her. Mr. Burrage seemed, indeed, a
+protection; she reflected, with relief, that it had been arranged that
+after taking Verena to drive in the Park and see the Museum of Art in
+the morning, they should in the evening dine with him at Delmonico's (he
+was to invite another gentleman), and go afterwards to the German opera.
+Olive had kept all this to herself, as I have said; revealing to her
+sister neither the vividness of her prevision that Basil Ransom would
+look blank when he came down to Tenth Street and learned they had
+flitted, nor the eagerness of her desire just to find herself once more
+in the Boston train. It had been only this prevision that sustained her
+when she gave Mr. Ransom their number.
+
+Verena came to her room shortly before luncheon, to let her know she had
+returned; and while they sat there, waiting to stop their ears when the
+gong announcing the repast was beaten, at the foot of the stairs, by a
+negro in a white jacket, she narrated to her friend her adventures with
+Mr. Burrage--expatiated on the beauty of the park, the splendour and
+interest of the Museum, the wonder of the young man's acquaintance with
+everything it contained, the swiftness of his horses, the softness of
+his English cart, the pleasure of rolling at that pace over roads as
+firm as marble, the entertainment he promised them for the evening.
+Olive listened in serious silence; she saw Verena was quite carried
+away; of course she hadn't gone so far with her without knowing that
+phase.
+
+"Did Mr. Burrage try to make love to you?" Miss Chancellor inquired at
+last, without a smile.
+
+Verena had taken off her hat to arrange her feather, and as she placed
+it on her head again, her uplifted arms making a frame for her face, she
+said: "Yes, I suppose it was meant for love."
+
+Olive waited for her to tell more, to tell how she had treated him, kept
+him in his place, made him feel that that question was over long ago;
+but as Verena gave her no further information she did not insist,
+conscious as she always was that in such a relation as theirs there
+should be a great respect on either side for the liberty of each. She
+had never yet infringed on Verena's, and of course she wouldn't begin
+now. Moreover, with the request that she meant presently to make of her
+she felt that she must be discreet. She wondered whether Henry Burrage
+were really going to begin again; whether his mother had only been
+acting in his interest in getting them to come on. Certainly, the bright
+spot in such a prospect was that if she listened to him she couldn't
+listen to Basil Ransom; and he _had_ told Olive herself last night, when
+he put them into their carriage, that he hoped to prove to her yet that
+he had come round to her gospel. But the old sickness stole upon her
+again, the faintness of discouragement, as she asked herself why in the
+name of pity Verena should listen to any one at all but Olive
+Chancellor. Again it came over her, when she saw the brightness, the
+happy look, the girl brought back, as it had done in the earlier months,
+that the great trouble was that weak spot of Verena's, that sole
+infirmity and subtle flaw, which she had expressed to her very soon
+after they began to live together, in saying (she remembered it through
+the ineffaceable impression made by her friend's avowal), "I'll tell you
+what is the matter with you--you don't dislike men as a class!" Verena
+had replied on this occasion, "Well, no, I don't dislike them when they
+are pleasant!" As if organised atrociousness could ever be pleasant!
+Olive disliked them most when they were least unpleasant. After a
+little, at present, she remarked, referring to Henry Burrage: "It is not
+right of him, not decent, after your making him feel how, while he was
+at Cambridge, he wearied you, tormented you."
+
+"Oh, I didn't show anything," said Verena gaily. "I am learning to
+dissimulate," she added in a moment. "I suppose you have to as you go
+along. I pretend not to notice."
+
+At this moment the gong sounded for luncheon, and the two young women
+covered up their ears, face to face, Verena with her quick smile, Olive
+with her pale patience. When they could hear themselves speak, the
+latter said abruptly:
+
+"How did Mrs. Burrage come to invite Mr. Ransom to her party? He told
+Adeline he had never seen her before."
+
+"Oh, I asked her to send him an invitation--after she had written to me,
+to thank me, when it was definitely settled we should come on. She asked
+me in her letter if there were any friends of mine in the city to whom I
+should like her to send cards, and I mentioned Mr. Ransom."
+
+Verena spoke without a single instant's hesitation, and the only sign of
+embarrassment she gave was that she got up from her chair, passing in
+this manner a little out of Olive's scrutiny. It was easy for her not to
+falter, because she was glad of the chance. She wanted to be very simple
+in all her relations with her friend, and of course it was not simple so
+soon as she began to keep things back. She could at any rate keep back
+as little as possible, and she felt as if she were making up for a
+dereliction when she answered Olive's inquiry so promptly.
+
+"You never told me of that," Miss Chancellor remarked, in a low tone.
+
+"I didn't want to. I know you don't like him, and I thought it would
+give you pain. Yet I wanted him to be there--I wanted him to hear."
+
+"What does it matter--why should you care about him?"
+
+"Well, because he is so awfully opposed!"
+
+"How do you know that, Verena?"
+
+At this point Verena began to hesitate. It was not, after all, so easy
+to keep back only a little; it appeared rather as if one must either
+tell everything or hide everything. The former course had already
+presented itself to her as unduly harsh; it was because it seemed so
+that she had ended by keeping the incident of Basil Ransom's visit to
+Monadnoc Place buried in unspoken, in unspeakable, considerations, the
+only secret she had in the world--the only thing that was all her own.
+She was so glad to say what she could without betraying herself that it
+was only after she had spoken that she perceived there was a danger of
+Olive's pushing the inquiry to the point where, to defend herself as it
+were, she should be obliged to practise a positive deception; and she
+was conscious at the same time that the moment her secret was threatened
+it became dearer to her. She began to pray silently that Olive might not
+push; for it would be odious, it would be impossible, to defend herself
+by a lie. Meanwhile, however, she had to answer, and the way she
+answered was by exclaiming, much more quickly than the reflexions I note
+might have appeared to permit, "Well, if you can't tell from his
+appearance! He's the type of the reactionary."
+
+Verena went to the toilet-glass to see that she had put on her hat
+properly, and Olive slowly got up, in the manner of a person not in the
+least eager for food. "Let him react as he likes--for heaven's sake
+don't mind him!" That was Miss Chancellor's rejoinder, and Verena felt
+that it didn't say all that was in her mind. She wished she would come
+down to luncheon, for she, at least, was honestly hungry. She even
+suspected Olive had an idea she was afraid to express, such distress it
+would bring with it. "Well, you know, Verena, this isn't our _real_
+life--it isn't our work," Olive went on.
+
+"Well, no, it isn't, certainly," said Verena, not pretending at first
+that she did not know what Olive meant. In a moment, however, she added,
+"Do you refer to this social intercourse with Mr. Burrage?"
+
+"Not to that only." Then Olive asked abruptly, looking at her, "How did
+you know his address?"
+
+"His address?"
+
+"Mr. Ransom's--to enable Mrs. Burrage to invite him?"
+
+They stood for a moment interchanging a gaze. "It was in a letter I got
+from him."
+
+At these words there came into Olive's face an expression which made her
+companion cross over to her directly and take her by the hand. But the
+tone was different from what Verena expected, when she said, with cold
+surprise: "Oh, you are in correspondence!" It showed an immense effort
+of self-control.
+
+"He wrote to me once--I never told you," Verena rejoined, smiling. She
+felt that her friend's strange, uneasy eyes searched very far; a little
+more and they would go to the very bottom. Well, they might go if they
+would; she didn't, after all, care so much about her secret as that. For
+the moment, however, Verena did not learn what Olive had discovered,
+inasmuch as she only remarked presently that it was really time to go
+down. As they descended the staircase she put her arm into Miss
+Chancellor's and perceived that she was trembling.
+
+Of course there were plenty of people in New York interested in the
+uprising, and Olive had made appointments, in advance, which filled the
+whole afternoon. Everybody wanted to meet them, and wanted everybody
+else to do so, and Verena saw they could easily have quite a vogue, if
+they only chose to stay and work that vein. Very likely, as Olive said,
+it wasn't their real life, and people didn't seem to have such a grip of
+the movement as they had in Boston; but there was something in the air
+that carried one along, and a sense of vastness and variety, of the
+infinite possibilities of a great city, which--Verena hardly knew
+whether she ought to confess it to herself--might in the end make up for
+the want of the Boston earnestness. Certainly, the people seemed very
+much alive, and there was no other place where so many cheering reports
+could flow in, owing to the number of electric feelers that stretched
+away everywhere. The principal centre appeared to be Mrs. Croucher's, on
+Fifty-sixth Street, where there was an informal gathering of
+sympathisers who didn't seem as if they could forgive her when they
+learned that she had been speaking the night before in a circle in which
+none of them were acquainted. Certainly, they were very different from
+the group she had addressed at Mrs. Burrage's, and Verena heaved a thin,
+private sigh, expressive of some helplessness, as she thought what a
+big, complicated world it was, and how it evidently contained a little
+of everything. There was a general demand that she should repeat her
+address in a more congenial atmosphere; to which she replied that Olive
+made her engagements for her, and that as the address had been intended
+just to lead people on, perhaps she would think Mrs. Croucher's friends
+had reached a higher point. She was as cautious as this because she saw
+that Olive was now just straining to get out of the city; she didn't
+want to say anything that would tie them. When she felt her trembling
+that way before luncheon it made her quite sick to realise how much her
+friend was wrapped up in her--how terribly she would suffer from the
+least deviation. After they had started for their round of engagements
+the very first thing Verena spoke of in the carriage (Olive had taken
+one, in her liberal way, for the whole time) was the fact that her
+correspondence with Mr. Ransom, as her friend had called it, had
+consisted on his part of only one letter. It was a very short one, too;
+it had come to her a little more than a month before. Olive knew she got
+letters from gentlemen; she didn't see why she should attach such
+importance to this one. Miss Chancellor was leaning back in the
+carriage, very still, very grave, with her head against the cushioned
+surface, only turning her eyes towards the girl.
+
+"You attach importance yourself; otherwise you would have told me."
+
+"I knew you wouldn't like it--because you don't like _him_."
+
+"I don't think of him," said Olive; "he's nothing to me." Then she
+added, suddenly, "Have you noticed that I am afraid to face what I don't
+like?"
+
+Verena could not say that she had, and yet it was not just on Olive's
+part to speak as if she were an easy person to tell such a thing to: the
+way she lay there, white and weak, like a wounded creature, sufficiently
+proved the contrary. "You have such a fearful power of suffering," she
+replied in a moment.
+
+To this at first Miss Chancellor made no rejoinder; but after a little
+she said, in the same attitude, "Yes, _you_ could make me."
+
+Verena took her hand and held it awhile. "I never will, till I have been
+through everything myself."
+
+"_You_ were not made to suffer--you were made to enjoy," Olive said, in
+very much the same tone in which she had told her that what was the
+matter with her was that she didn't dislike men as a class--a tone which
+implied that the contrary would have been much more natural and perhaps
+rather higher. Perhaps it would; but Verena was unable to rebut the
+charge; she felt this, as she looked out of the window of the carriage
+at the bright, amusing city, where the elements seemed so numerous, the
+animation so immense, the shops so brilliant, the women so strikingly
+dressed, and knew that these things quickened her curiosity, all her
+pulses.
+
+"Well, I suppose I mustn't presume on it," she remarked, glancing back
+at Olive with her natural sweetness, her uncontradicting grace.
+
+That young lady lifted her hand to her lips--held it there a moment; the
+movement seemed to say, "When you are so divinely docile, how can I help
+the dread of losing you?" This idea, however, was unspoken, and Olive
+Chancellor's uttered words, as the carriage rolled on, were different.
+
+"Verena, I don't understand why he wrote to you."
+
+"He wrote to me because he likes me. Perhaps you'll say you don't
+understand why he likes me," the girl continued, laughing. "He liked me
+the first time he saw me."
+
+"Oh, that time!" Olive murmured.
+
+"And still more the second."
+
+"Did he tell you that in his letter?" Miss Chancellor inquired.
+
+"Yes, my dear, he told me that. Only he expressed it more gracefully."
+Verena was very happy to say that; a written phrase of Basil Ransom's
+sufficiently justified her.
+
+"It was my intuition--it was my foreboding!" Olive exclaimed, closing
+her eyes.
+
+"I thought you said you didn't dislike him."
+
+"It isn't dislike--it's simple dread. Is that all there is between you?"
+
+"Why, Olive Chancellor, what do you think?" Verena asked, feeling now
+distinctly like a coward. Five minutes afterwards she said to Olive that
+if it would give her pleasure they would leave New York on the morrow,
+without taking a fourth day; and as soon as she had done so she felt
+better, especially when she saw how gratefully Olive looked at her for
+the concession, how eagerly she rose to the offer in saying, "Well, if
+you _do_ feel that it isn't our own life--our very own!" It was with
+these words, and others besides, and with an unusually weak, indefinite
+kiss, as if she wished to protest that, after all, a single day didn't
+matter, and yet accepted the sacrifice and was a little ashamed of
+it--it was in this manner that the agreement as to an immediate retreat
+was sealed. Verena could not shut her eyes to the fact that for a month
+she had been less frank, and if she wished to do penance this
+abbreviation of their pleasure in New York, even if it made her almost
+completely miss Basil Ransom, was easier than to tell Olive just now
+that the letter was _not_ all, that there had been a long visit, a talk,
+and a walk besides, which she had been covering up for ever so many
+weeks. And of what consequence, anyway, was the missing? Was it such a
+pleasure to converse with a gentleman who only wanted to let you
+know--and why he should want it so much Verena couldn't guess--that he
+thought you quite preposterous? Olive took her from place to place, and
+she ended by forgetting everything but the present hour, and the bigness
+and variety of New York, and the entertainment of rolling about in a
+carriage with silk cushions, and meeting new faces, new expressions of
+curiosity and sympathy, assurances that one was watched and followed.
+Mingled with this was a bright consciousness, sufficient for the moment,
+that one was moreover to dine at Delmonico's and go to the German opera.
+There was enough of the epicurean in Verena's composition to make it
+easy for her in certain conditions to live only for the hour.
+
+
+
+
+XXXI
+
+
+When she returned with her companion to the establishment in Tenth
+Street she saw two notes lying on the table in the hall; one of which
+she perceived to be addressed to Miss Chancellor, the other to herself.
+The hand was different, but she recognised both. Olive was behind her on
+the steps, talking to the coachman about sending another carriage for
+them in half an hour (they had left themselves but just time to dress);
+so that she simply possessed herself of her own note and ascended to her
+room. As she did so she felt that all the while she had known it would
+be there, and was conscious of a kind of treachery, an unfriendly
+wilfulness, in not being more prepared for it. If she could roll about
+New York the whole afternoon and forget that there might be difficulties
+ahead, that didn't alter the fact that there _were_ difficulties, and
+that they might even become considerable--might not be settled by her
+simply going back to Boston. Half an hour later, as she drove up the
+Fifth Avenue with Olive (there seemed to be so much crowded into that
+one day), smoothing her light gloves, wishing her fan were a little
+nicer, and proving by the answering, familiar brightness with which she
+looked out on the lamp-lighted streets that, whatever theory might be
+entertained as to the genesis of her talent and her personal nature, the
+blood of the lecture-going, night-walking Tarrants did distinctly flow
+in her veins; as the pair proceeded, I say, to the celebrated
+restaurant, at the door of which Mr. Burrage had promised to be in
+vigilant expectancy of their carriage, Verena found a sufficiently gay
+and natural tone of voice for remarking to her friend that Mr. Ransom
+had called upon her while they were out, and had left a note in which
+there were many compliments for Miss Chancellor.
+
+"That's wholly your own affair, my dear," Olive replied, with a
+melancholy sigh, gazing down the vista of Fourteenth Street (which they
+happened just then to be traversing, with much agitation), toward the
+queer barrier of the elevated railway.
+
+It was nothing new to Verena that if the great striving of Olive's life
+was for justice she yet sometimes failed to arrive at it in particular
+cases; and she reflected that it was rather late for her to say, like
+that, that Basil Ransom's letters were only his correspondent's
+business. Had not his kinswoman quite made the subject her own during
+their drive that afternoon? Verena determined now that her companion
+should hear all there was to be heard about the letter; asking herself
+whether, if she told her at present more than she cared to know, it
+wouldn't make up for her hitherto having told her less. "He brought it
+with him, written, in case I should be out. He wants to see me
+to-morrow--he says he has ever so much to say to me. He proposes an
+hour--says he hopes it won't be inconvenient for me to see him about
+eleven in the morning; thinks I may have no other engagement so early as
+that. Of course our return to Boston settles it," Verena added, with
+serenity.
+
+Miss Chancellor said nothing for a moment; then she replied, "Yes,
+unless you invite him to come on with you in the train."
+
+"Why, Olive, how bitter you are!" Verena exclaimed, in genuine surprise.
+
+Olive could not justify her bitterness by saying that her companion had
+spoken as if she were disappointed, because Verena had not. So she
+simply remarked, "I don't see what he can have to say to you--that would
+be worth your hearing."
+
+"Well, of course, it's the other side. He has got it on the brain!" said
+Verena, with a laugh which seemed to relegate the whole matter to the
+category of the unimportant.
+
+"If we should stay, would you see him--at eleven o'clock?" Olive
+inquired.
+
+"Why do you ask that--when I have given it up?"
+
+"Do you consider it such a tremendous sacrifice?"
+
+"No," said Verena good-naturedly; "but I confess I am curious."
+
+"Curious--how do you mean?"
+
+"Well, to hear the other side."
+
+"Oh heaven!" Olive Chancellor murmured, turning her face upon her.
+
+"You must remember I have never heard it." And Verena smiled into her
+friend's wan gaze.
+
+"Do you want to hear all the infamy that is in the world?"
+
+"No, it isn't that; but the more he should talk the better chance he
+would give me. I guess I can meet him."
+
+"Life is too short. Leave him as he is."
+
+"Well," Verena went on, "there are many I haven't cared to move at all,
+whom I might have been more interested in than in him. But to make him
+give in just at two or three points--that I should like better than
+anything I have done."
+
+"You have no business to enter upon a contest that isn't equal; and it
+wouldn't be, with Mr. Ransom."
+
+"The inequality would be that I have right on my side."
+
+"What is that--for a man? For what was their brutality given them, but
+to make that up?"
+
+"I don't think he's brutal; I should like to see," said Verena gaily.
+
+Olive's eyes lingered a little on her own; then they turned away,
+vaguely, blindly, out of the carriage-window, and Verena made the
+reflexion that she looked strangely little like a person who was going
+to dine at Delmonico's. How terribly she worried about everything, and
+how tragical was her nature; how anxious, suspicious, exposed to subtle
+influences! In their long intimacy Verena had come to revere most of her
+friend's peculiarities; they were a proof of her depth and devotion, and
+were so bound up with what was noble in her that she was rarely provoked
+to criticise them separately. But at present, suddenly, Olive's
+earnestness began to appear as inharmonious with the scheme of the
+universe as if it had been a broken saw; and she was positively glad she
+had not told her about Basil Ransom's appearance in Monadnoc Place. If
+she worried so about what she knew, how much would she not have worried
+about the rest! Verena had by this time made up her mind that her
+acquaintance with Mr. Ransom was the most episodical, most superficial,
+most unimportant of all possible relations.
+
+Olive Chancellor watched Henry Burrage very closely that evening; she
+had a special reason for doing so, and her entertainment, during the
+successive hours, was derived much less from the delicate little feast
+over which this insinuating proselyte presided, in the brilliant public
+room of the establishment, where French waiters flitted about on deep
+carpets and parties at neighbouring tables excited curiosity and
+conjecture, or even from the magnificent music of _Lohengrin_, than from
+a secret process of comparison and verification, which shall presently
+be explained to the reader. As some discredit has possibly been thrown
+upon her impartiality it is a pleasure to be able to say that on her
+return from the opera she took a step dictated by an earnest
+consideration of justice--of the promptness with which Verena had told
+her of the note left by Basil Ransom in the afternoon. She drew Verena
+into her room with her. The girl, on the way back to Tenth Street, had
+spoken only of Wagner's music, of the singers, the orchestra, the
+immensity of the house, her tremendous pleasure. Olive could see how
+fond she might become of New York, where that kind of pleasure was so
+much more in the air.
+
+"Well, Mr. Burrage was certainly very kind to us--no one could have been
+more thoughtful," Olive said; and she coloured a little at the look with
+which Verena greeted this tribute of appreciation from Miss Chancellor
+to a single gentleman.
+
+"I am so glad you were struck with that, because I do think we have been
+a little rough to him." Verena's _we_ was angelic. "He was particularly
+attentive to you, my dear; he has got over me. He looked at you so
+sweetly. Dearest Olive, if you marry him----!" And Miss Tarrant, who was
+in high spirits, embraced her companion, to check her own silliness.
+
+"He wants you to stay there, all the same. They haven't given _that_
+up," Olive remarked, turning to a drawer, out of which she took a
+letter.
+
+"Did he tell you that, pray? He said nothing more about it to me."
+
+"When we came in this afternoon I found this note from Mrs. Burrage. You
+had better read it." And she presented the document, open, to Verena.
+
+The purpose of it was to say that Mrs. Burrage could really not
+reconcile herself to the loss of Verena's visit, on which both she and
+her son had counted so much. She was sure they would be able to make it
+as interesting to Miss Tarrant as it would be to themselves. She, Mrs.
+Burrage, moreover, felt as if she hadn't heard half she wanted about
+Miss Tarrant's views, and there were so many more who were present at
+the address, who had come to her that afternoon (losing not a minute, as
+Miss Chancellor could see) to ask how in the world they too could learn
+more--how they could get at the fair speaker and question her about
+certain details. She hoped so much, therefore, that even if the young
+ladies should be unable to alter their decision about the visit they
+might at least see their way to staying over long enough to allow her to
+arrange an informal meeting for some of these poor thirsty souls. Might
+she not at least talk over the question with Miss Chancellor? She gave
+her notice that she would attack her on the subject of the visit too.
+Might she not see her on the morrow, and might she ask of her the very
+great favour that the interview should be at Mrs. Burrage's own house?
+She had something very particular to say to her, as regards which
+perfect privacy was a great consideration, and Miss Chancellor would
+doubtless recognise that this would be best secured under Mrs. Burrage's
+roof. She would therefore send her carriage for Miss Chancellor at any
+hour that would be convenient to the latter. She really thought much
+good might come from their having a satisfactory talk.
+
+Verena read this epistle with much deliberation; it seemed to her
+mysterious, and confirmed the idea she had received the night
+before--the idea that she had not got quite a correct impression of this
+clever, worldly, curious woman on the occasion of her visit to
+Cambridge, when they met her at her son's rooms. As she gave the letter
+back to Olive she said, "That's why he didn't seem to believe we are
+really leaving to-morrow. He knows she had written that, and he thinks
+it will keep us."
+
+"Well, if I were to say it may--should you think me too miserably
+changeful?"
+
+Verena stared, with all her candour, and it was so very queer that Olive
+should now wish to linger that the sense of it, for the moment, almost
+covered the sense of its being pleasant. But that came out after an
+instant, and she said, with great honesty, "You needn't drag me away for
+consistency's sake. It would be absurd for me to pretend that I don't
+like being here."
+
+"I think perhaps I ought to see her." Olive was very thoughtful.
+
+"How lovely it must be to have a secret with Mrs. Burrage!" Verena
+exclaimed.
+
+"It won't be a secret from you."
+
+"Dearest, you needn't tell me unless you want," Verena went on, thinking
+of her own unimparted knowledge.
+
+"I thought it was our plan to divide everything. It was certainly mine."
+
+"Ah, don't talk about plans!" Verena exclaimed, rather ruefully. "You
+see, if we _are_ going to stay to-morrow, how foolish it was to have
+any. There is more in her letter than is expressed," she added, as Olive
+appeared to be studying in her face the reasons for and against making
+this concession to Mrs. Burrage, and that was rather embarrassing.
+
+"I thought it over all the evening--so that if now you will consent we
+will stay."
+
+"Darling--what a spirit you have got! All through all those dear little
+dishes--all through _Lohengrin_! As I haven't thought it over at all,
+you must settle it. You know I am not difficult."
+
+"And would you go and stay with Mrs. Burrage, after all, if she should
+say anything to me that seems to make it desirable?"
+
+Verena broke into a laugh. "You know it's not our real life!"
+
+Olive said nothing for a moment; then she replied: "Don't think _I_ can
+forget that. If I suggest a deviation, it's only because it sometimes
+seems to me that perhaps, after all, almost anything is better than the
+form reality _may_ take with us." This was slightly obscure, as well as
+very melancholy, and Verena was relieved when her companion remarked, in
+a moment, "You must think me strangely inconsequent"; for this gave her
+a chance to reply, soothingly:
+
+"Why, you don't suppose I expect you to keep always screwed up! I will
+stay a week with Mrs. Burrage, or a fortnight, or a month, or anything
+you like," she pursued; "anything it may seem to you best to tell her
+after you have seen her."
+
+"Do you leave it all to me? You don't give me much help," Olive said.
+
+"Help to what?"
+
+"Help to help _you_."
+
+"I don't want any help; I am quite strong enough!" Verena cried gaily.
+The next moment she inquired, in an appeal half comical, half touching,
+"My dear colleague, why do you make me say such conceited things?"
+
+"And if you do stay--just even to-morrow--shall you be--very much of the
+time--with Mr. Ransom?"
+
+As Verena for the moment appeared ironically-minded, she might have
+found a fresh subject for hilarity in the tremulous, tentative tone in
+which Olive made this inquiry. But it had not that effect; it produced
+the first manifestation of impatience--the first, literally, and the
+first note of reproach--that had occurred in the course of their
+remarkable intimacy. The colour rose to Verena's cheek, and her eye for
+an instant looked moist.
+
+"I don't know what you always think, Olive, nor why you don't seem able
+to trust me. You didn't, from the first, with gentlemen. Perhaps you
+were right then--I don't say; but surely it is very different now. I
+don't think I ought to be suspected so much. Why have you a manner as if
+I had to be watched, as if I wanted to run away with every man that
+speaks to me? I should think I had proved how little I care. I thought
+you had discovered by this time that I am serious; that I have dedicated
+my life; that there is something unspeakably dear to me. But you begin
+again, every time--you don't do me justice. I must take everything that
+comes. I mustn't be afraid. I thought we had agreed that we were to do
+our work in the midst of the world, facing everything, keeping straight
+on, always taking hold. And now that it all opens out so magnificently,
+and victory is really sitting on our banners, it is strange of you to
+doubt of me, to suppose I am not more wedded to all our old dreams than
+ever. I told you the first time I saw you that I could renounce, and
+knowing better to-day, perhaps, what that means, I am ready to say it
+again. That I can, that I will! Why, Olive Chancellor," Verena cried,
+panting, a moment, with her eloquence, and with the rush of a
+culminating idea, "haven't you discovered by this time that I _have_
+renounced?"
+
+The habit of public speaking, the training, the practice, in which she
+had been immersed, enabled Verena to unroll a coil of propositions
+dedicated even to a private interest with the most touching, most
+cumulative effect. Olive was completely aware of this, and she stilled
+herself, while the girl uttered one soft, pleading sentence after
+another, into the same rapt attention she was in the habit of sending up
+from the benches of an auditorium. She looked at Verena fixedly, felt
+that she was stirred to her depths, that she was exquisitely passionate
+and sincere, that she was a quivering, spotless, consecrated maiden,
+that she really had renounced, that they were both safe, and that her
+own injustice and indelicacy had been great. She came to her slowly,
+took her in her arms and held her long--giving her a silent kiss. From
+which Verena knew that she believed her.
+
+
+
+
+XXXII
+
+
+The hour that Olive proposed to Mrs. Burrage, in a note sent early the
+next morning, for the interview to which she consented to lend herself,
+was the stroke of noon; this period of the day being chosen in
+consequence of a prevision of many subsequent calls upon her time. She
+remarked in her note that she did not wish any carriage to be sent for
+her, and she surged and swayed up the Fifth Avenue on one of the
+convulsive, clattering omnibuses which circulate in that thoroughfare.
+One of her reasons for mentioning twelve o'clock had been that she knew
+Basil Ransom was to call at Tenth Street at eleven, and (as she supposed
+he didn't intend to stay all day) this would give her time to see him
+come and go. It had been tacitly agreed between them, the night before,
+that Verena was quite firm enough in her faith to submit to his visit,
+and that such a course would be much more dignified than dodging it.
+This understanding passed from one to the other during that dumb embrace
+which I have described as taking place before they separated for the
+night. Shortly before noon, Olive, passing out of the house, looked into
+the big, sunny double parlour, where, in the morning, with all the
+husbands absent for the day and all the wives and spinsters launched
+upon the town, a young man desiring to hold a debate with a young lady
+might enjoy every advantage in the way of a clear field. Basil Ransom
+was still there; he and Verena, with the place to themselves, were
+standing in the recess of a window, their backs presented to the door.
+If he had got up, perhaps he was going, and Olive, softly closing the
+door again, waited a little in the hall, ready to pass into the back
+part of the house if she should hear him coming out. No sound, however,
+reached her ear; apparently he did mean to stay all day, and she should
+find him there on her return. She left the house, knowing they were
+looking at her from the window as she descended the steps, but feeling
+she could not bear to see Basil Ransom's face. As she walked, averting
+her own, towards the Fifth Avenue, on the sunny side, she was barely
+conscious of the loveliness of the day, the perfect weather, all
+suffused and tinted with spring, which sometimes descends upon New York
+when the winds of March have been stilled; she was given up only to the
+remembrance of that moment when she herself had stood at a window (the
+second time he came to see her in Boston), and watched Basil Ransom pass
+out with Adeline--with Adeline who had seemed capable then of getting
+such a hold on him but had proved as ineffectual in this respect as she
+was in every other. She recalled the vision she had allowed to dance
+before her as she saw the pair cross the street together, laughing and
+talking, and how it seemed to interpose itself against the fears which
+already then--so strangely--haunted her. Now that she saw it so
+fruitless--and that Verena, moreover, had turned out really so
+great--she was rather ashamed of it; she felt associated, however
+remotely, in the reasons which had made Mrs. Luna tell her so many fibs
+the day before, and there could be nothing elevating in that. As for the
+other reasons why her fidgety sister had failed and Mr. Ransom had held
+his own course, naturally Miss Chancellor didn't like to think of them.
+
+If she had wondered what Mrs. Burrage wished so particularly to talk
+about, she waited some time for the clearing-up of the mystery. During
+this interval she sat in a remarkably pretty boudoir, where there were
+flowers and faiences and little French pictures, and watched her hostess
+revolve round the subject in circles the vagueness of which she tried to
+dissimulate. Olive believed she was a person who never could enjoy
+asking a favour, especially of a votary of the new ideas; and that was
+evidently what was coming. She had asked one already, but that had been
+handsomely paid for; the note from Mrs. Burrage which Verena found
+awaiting her in Tenth Street, on her arrival, contained the largest
+cheque this young woman had ever received for an address. The request
+that hung fire had reference to Verena too, of course; and Olive needed
+no prompting to feel that her friend's being a young person who took
+money could not make Mrs. Burrage's present effort more agreeable. To
+this taking of money (for when it came to Verena it was as if it came to
+her as well) she herself was now completely inured; money was a
+tremendous force, and when one wanted to assault the wrong with every
+engine one was happy not to lack the sinews of war. She liked her
+hostess better this morning than she had liked her before; she had more
+than ever the air of taking all sorts of sentiments and views for
+granted between them; which could only be flattering to Olive so long as
+it was really Mrs. Burrage who made each advance, while her visitor sat
+watchful and motionless. She had a light, clever, familiar way of
+traversing an immense distance with a very few words, as when she
+remarked, "Well, then, it is settled that she will come, and will stay
+till she is tired."
+
+Nothing of the kind had been settled, but Olive helped Mrs. Burrage
+(this time) more than she knew by saying, "Why do you want her to visit
+you, Mrs. Burrage? why do you want her socially? Are you not aware that
+your son, a year ago, desired to marry her?"
+
+"My dear Miss Chancellor, that is just what I wish to talk to you about.
+I am aware of everything; I don't believe you ever met any one who is
+aware of more things than I." And Olive had to believe this, as Mrs.
+Burrage held up, smiling, her intelligent, proud, good-natured,
+successful head. "I knew a year ago that my son was in love with your
+friend, I know that he has been so ever since, and that in consequence
+he would like to marry her to-day. I daresay you don't like the idea of
+her marrying at all; it would break up a friendship which is so full of
+interest" (Olive wondered for a moment whether she had been going to say
+"so full of profit") "for you. This is why I hesitated; but since you
+are willing to talk about it, that is just what I want."
+
+"I don't see what good it will do," Olive said.
+
+"How can we tell till we try? I never give a thing up till I have turned
+it over in every sense."
+
+It was Mrs. Burrage, however, who did most of the talking; Olive only
+inserted from time to time an inquiry, a protest, a correction, an
+ejaculation tinged with irony. None of these things checked or diverted
+her hostess; Olive saw more and more that she wished to please her, to
+win her over, to smooth matters down, to place them in a new and
+original light. She was very clever and (little by little Olive said to
+herself) absolutely unscrupulous, but she didn't think she was clever
+enough for what she had undertaken. This was neither more nor less, in
+the first place, than to persuade Miss Chancellor that she and her son
+were consumed with sympathy for the movement to which Miss Chancellor
+had dedicated her life. But how could Olive believe that, when she saw
+the type to which Mrs. Burrage belonged--a type into which nature
+herself had inserted a face turned in the very opposite way from all
+earnest and improving things? People like Mrs. Burrage lived and
+fattened on abuses, prejudices, privileges, on the petrified, cruel
+fashions of the past. It must be added, however, that if her hostess was
+a humbug, Olive had never met one who provoked her less; she was such a
+brilliant, genial, artistic one, with such a recklessness of perfidy,
+such a willingness to bribe you if she couldn't deceive you. She seemed
+to be offering Olive all the kingdoms of the earth if she would only
+exert herself to bring about a state of feeling on Verena Tarrant's part
+which would lead the girl to accept Henry Burrage.
+
+"We know it's you--the whole business; that you can do what you please.
+You could decide it to-morrow with a word."
+
+She had hesitated at first, and spoken of her hesitation, and it might
+have appeared that she would need all her courage to say to Olive, that
+way, face to face, that Verena was in such subjection to her. But she
+didn't look afraid; she only looked as if it were an infinite pity Miss
+Chancellor couldn't understand what immense advantages and rewards there
+would be for her in striking an alliance with the house of Burrage.
+Olive was so impressed with this, so occupied, even, in wondering what
+these mystic benefits might be, and whether after all there might not be
+a protection in them (from something worse), a fund of some sort that
+she and Verena might convert to a large use, setting aside the mother
+and son when once they had got what they had to give--she was so
+arrested with the vague daze of this vision, the sense of Mrs. Burrage's
+full hands, her eagerness, her thinking it worth while to flatter and
+conciliate, whatever her pretexts and pretensions might be, that she was
+almost insensible, for the time, to the strangeness of such a woman's
+coming round to a positive desire for a connexion with the Tarrants.
+Mrs. Burrage had indeed explained this partly by saying that her son's
+condition was wearing her out, and that she would enter into anything
+that would make him happier, make him better. She was fonder of him than
+of the whole world beside, and it was an anguish to her to see him
+yearning for Miss Tarrant only to lose her. She made that charge about
+Olive's power in the matter in such a way that it seemed at the same
+time a tribute to her force of character.
+
+"I don't know on what terms you suppose me to be with my friend," Olive
+returned, with considerable majesty. "She will do exactly as she likes,
+in such a case as the one you allude to. She is absolutely free; you
+speak as if I were her keeper!"
+
+Then Mrs. Burrage explained that of course she didn't mean that Miss
+Chancellor exercised a conscious tyranny; but only that Verena had a
+boundless admiration for her, saw through her eyes, took the impress of
+all her opinions, preferences. She was sure that if Olive would only
+take a favourable view of her son Miss Tarrant would instantly throw
+herself into it. "It's very true that you may ask me," added Mrs.
+Burrage, smiling, "how you can take a favourable view of a young man who
+wants to marry the very person in the world you want most to keep
+unmarried!"
+
+This description of Verena was of course perfectly correct; but it was
+not agreeable to Olive to have the fact in question so clearly
+perceived, even by a person who expressed it with an air intimating that
+there was nothing in the world _she_ couldn't understand.
+
+"Did your son know that you were going to speak to me about this?" Olive
+asked, rather coldly, waiving the question of her influence on Verena
+and the state in which she wished her to remain.
+
+"Oh yes, poor dear boy; we had a long talk yesterday, and I told him I
+would do what I could for him. Do you remember the little visit I paid
+to Cambridge last spring, when I saw you at his rooms? Then it was I
+began to perceive how the wind was setting; but yesterday we had a real
+_eclaircissement_. I didn't like it at all, at first; I don't mind
+telling you that, now--now that I am really enthusiastic about it. When
+a girl is as charming, as original, as Miss Tarrant, it doesn't in the
+least matter who she is; she makes herself the standard by which you
+measure her; she makes her own position. And then Miss Tarrant has such
+a future!" Mrs. Burrage added, quickly, as if that were the last thing
+to be overlooked. "The whole question has come up again--the feeling
+that Henry tried to think dead, or at least dying, has revived, through
+the--I hardly know what to call it, but I really may say the
+unexpectedly great effect of her appearance here. She was really
+wonderful on Wednesday evening; prejudice, conventionality, every
+presumption there might be against her, had to fall to the ground. I
+expected a success, but I didn't expect what you gave us," Mrs. Burrage
+went on, smiling, while Olive noted her "you." "In short, my poor boy
+flamed up again; and now I see that he will never again care for any
+girl as he cares for that one. My dear Miss Chancellor, _j'en ai pris
+mon parti_, and perhaps you know my way of doing that sort of thing. I
+am not at all good at resigning myself, but I am excellent at taking up
+a craze. I haven't renounced, I have only changed sides. For or against,
+I must be a partisan. Don't you know that kind of nature? Henry has put
+the affair into my hands, and you see I put it into yours. Do help me;
+let us work together."
+
+This was a long, explicit speech for Mrs. Burrage, who dealt, usually,
+in the cursory and allusive; and she may very well have expected that
+Miss Chancellor would recognise its importance. What Olive did, in fact,
+was simply to inquire, by way of rejoinder: "Why did you ask us to come
+on?"
+
+If Mrs. Burrage hesitated now, it was only for twenty seconds. "Simply
+because we are so interested in your work."
+
+"That surprises me," said Olive thoughtfully.
+
+"I daresay you don't believe it; but such a judgement is superficial. I
+am sure we give proof in the offer we make," Mrs. Burrage remarked, with
+a good deal of point. "There are plenty of girls--without any views at
+all--who would be delighted to marry my son. He is very clever, and he
+has a large fortune. Add to that that he's an angel!"
+
+That was very true, and Olive felt all the more that the attitude of
+these fortunate people, for whom the world was so well arranged just as
+it was, was very curious. But as she sat there it came over her that the
+human spirit has many variations, that the influence of the truth is
+great, and that there are such things in life as happy surprises, quite
+as well as disagreeable ones. Nothing, certainly, forced such people to
+fix their affections on the daughter of a "healer"; it would be very
+clumsy to pick her out of her generation only for the purpose of
+frustrating her. Moreover, her observation of their young host at
+Delmonico's and in the spacious box at the Academy of Music, where they
+had privacy and ease, and murmured words could pass without making
+neighbours more given up to the stage turn their heads--her
+consideration of Henry Burrage's manner, suggested to her that she had
+measured him rather scantily the year before, that he was as much in
+love as the feebler passions of the age permitted (for though Miss
+Chancellor believed in the amelioration of humanity, she thought there
+was too much water in the blood of all of us), that he prized Verena for
+her rarity, which was her genius, her gift, and would therefore have an
+interest in promoting it, and that he was of so soft and fine a paste
+that his wife might do what she liked with him. Of course there would be
+the mother-in-law to count with; but unless she was perjuring herself
+shamelessly Mrs. Burrage really had the wish to project herself into the
+new atmosphere, or at least to be generous personally; so that, oddly
+enough, the fear that most glanced before Olive was not that this high,
+free matron, slightly irritable with cleverness and at the same time
+good-natured with prosperity, would bully her son's bride, but rather
+that she might take too fond a possession of her. It was a fear which
+may be described as a presentiment of jealousy. It occurred,
+accordingly, to Miss Chancellor's quick conscience that, possibly, the
+proposal which presented itself in circumstances so complicated and
+anomalous was simply a magnificent chance, an improvement on the very
+best, even, that she had dreamed of for Verena. It meant a large command
+of money--much larger than her own; the association of a couple of
+clever people who simulated conviction very well, whether they felt it
+or not, and who had a hundred useful worldly ramifications, and a kind
+of social pedestal from which she might really shine afar. The
+conscience I have spoken of grew positively sick as it thought of having
+such a problem as that to consider, such an ordeal to traverse. In the
+presence of such a contingency the poor girl felt grim and helpless; she
+could only vaguely wonder whether she were called upon in the name of
+duty to lend a hand to the torture of her own spirit.
+
+"And if she should marry him, how could I be sure that--afterwards--you
+would care so much about the question which has all our thoughts, hers
+and mine?" This inquiry evolved itself from Olive's rapid meditation;
+but even to herself it seemed a little rough.
+
+Mrs. Burrage took it admirably. "You think we are feigning an interest,
+only to get hold of her? That's not very nice of you, Miss Chancellor;
+but of course you have to be tremendously careful. I assure you my son
+tells me he firmly believes your movement is the great question of the
+immediate future, that it has entered into a new phase; into what does
+he call it? the domain of practical politics. As for me, you don't
+suppose I don't want everything we poor women can get, or that I would
+refuse any privilege or advantage that's offered me? I don't rant or
+rave about anything, but I have--as I told you just now--my own quiet
+way of being zealous. If you had no worse partisan than I, you would do
+very well. My son has talked to me immensely about your ideas; and even
+if I should enter into them only because he does, I should do so quite
+enough. You may say you don't see Henry dangling about after a wife who
+gives public addresses; but I am convinced that a great many things are
+coming to pass--very soon, too--that we don't see in advance. Henry is a
+gentleman to his finger-tips, and there is not a situation in which he
+will not conduct himself with tact."
+
+Olive could see that they really wanted Verena immensely, and it was
+impossible for her to believe that if they were to get her they would
+not treat her well. It came to her that they would even overindulge her,
+flatter her, spoil her; she was perfectly capable, for the moment, of
+assuming that Verena was susceptible of deterioration and that her own
+treatment of her had been discriminatingly severe. She had a hundred
+protests, objections, replies; her only embarrassment could be as to
+which she should use first.
+
+"I think you have never seen Doctor Tarrant and his wife," she remarked,
+with a calmness which she felt to be very pregnant.
+
+"You mean they are absolutely fearful? My son has told me they are quite
+impossible, and I am quite prepared for that. Do you ask how we should
+get on with them? My dear young lady, we should get on as you do!"
+
+If Olive had answers, so had Mrs. Burrage; she had still an answer when
+her visitor, taking up the supposition that it was in her power to
+dispose in any manner whatsoever of Verena, declared that she didn't
+know why Mrs. Burrage addressed herself to _her_, that Miss Tarrant was
+free as air, that her future was in her own hands, that such a matter as
+this was a kind of thing with which it could never occur to one to
+interfere. "Dear Miss Chancellor, we don't ask you to interfere. The
+only thing we ask of you is simply _not_ to interfere."
+
+"And have you sent for me only for that?"
+
+"For that, and for what I hinted at in my note; that you would really
+exercise your influence with Miss Tarrant to induce her to come to us
+now for a week or two. That is really, after all, the main thing I ask.
+Lend her to us, here, for a little while, and we will take care of the
+rest. That sounds conceited--but she _would_ have a good time."
+
+"She doesn't live for that," said Olive.
+
+"What I mean is that she should deliver an address every night!" Mrs.
+Burrage returned, smiling.
+
+"I think you try to prove too much. You do believe--though you pretend
+you don't--that I control her actions, and as far as possible her
+desires, and that I am jealous of any other relations she may possibly
+form. I can imagine that we may perhaps have that air, though it only
+proves how little such an association as ours is understood, and how
+superficial is still"--Olive felt that her "still" was really
+historical--"the interpretation of many of the elements in the activity
+of women, how much the public conscience with regard to them needs to be
+educated. Your conviction with respect to my attitude being what I
+believe it to be," Miss Chancellor went on, "I am surprised at your not
+perceiving how little it is in my interest to deliver my--my victim up
+to you."
+
+If we were at this moment to take, in a single glance, an inside view of
+Mrs. Burrage (a liberty we have not yet ventured on), I suspect we
+should find that she was considerably exasperated at her visitor's
+superior tone, at seeing herself regarded by this dry, shy, obstinate,
+provincial young woman as superficial. If she liked Verena very nearly
+as much as she tried to convince Miss Chancellor, she was conscious of
+disliking Miss Chancellor more than she should probably ever be able to
+reveal to Verena. It was doubtless partly her irritation that found a
+voice as she said, after a self-administered pinch of caution not to say
+too much, "Of course it would be absurd in us to assume that Miss
+Tarrant would find my son irresistible, especially as she has already
+refused him. But even if she should remain obdurate, should you consider
+yourself quite safe as regards others?"
+
+The manner in which Miss Chancellor rose from her chair on hearing these
+words showed her hostess that if she had wished to take a little revenge
+by frightening her, the experiment was successful. "What others do you
+mean?" Olive asked, standing very straight, and turning down her eyes as
+from a great height.
+
+Mrs. Burrage--since we have begun to look into her mind we may continue
+the process--had not meant any one in particular; but a train of
+association was suddenly kindled in her thought by the flash of the
+girl's resentment. She remembered the gentleman who had come up to her
+in the music-room, after Miss Tarrant's address, while she was talking
+with Olive, and to whom that young lady had given so cold a welcome. "I
+don't mean any one in particular; but, for instance, there is the young
+man to whom she asked me to send an invitation to my party, and who
+looked to me like a possible admirer." Mrs. Burrage also got up; then
+she stood a moment, closer to her visitor. "Don't you think it's a good
+deal to expect that, young, pretty, attractive, clever, charming as she
+is, you should be able to keep her always, to exclude other affections,
+to cut off a whole side of life, to defend her against dangers--if you
+call them dangers--to which every young woman who is not positively
+repulsive is exposed? My dear young lady, I wonder if I might give you
+three words of advice?" Mrs. Burrage did not wait till Olive had
+answered this inquiry; she went on quickly, with her air of knowing
+exactly what she wanted to say and feeling at the same time that, good
+as it might be, the manner of saying it, like the manner of saying most
+other things, was not worth troubling much about. "Don't attempt the
+impossible. You have got hold of a good thing; don't spoil it by trying
+to stretch it too far. If you don't take the better, perhaps you will
+have to take the worse; if it's safety you want I should think she was
+much safer with my son--for with us you know the worst--than as a
+possible prey to adventurers, to exploiters, or to people who, once they
+had got hold of her, would shut her up altogether."
+
+Olive dropped her eyes; she couldn't endure Mrs. Burrage's horrible
+expression of being near the mark, her look of worldly cleverness, of a
+confidence born of much experience. She felt that nothing would be
+spared her, that she should have to go to the end, that this ordeal also
+must be faced, and that, in particular, there was a detestable wisdom in
+her hostess's advice. She was conscious, however, of no obligation to
+recognise it then and there; she wanted to get off, and even to carry
+Mrs. Burrage's sapient words along with her--to hurry to some place
+where she might be alone and think. "I don't know why you have thought
+it right to send for me only to say this. I take no interest whatever in
+your son--in his settling in life." And she gathered her mantle more
+closely about her, turning away.
+
+"It is exceedingly kind of you to have come," said Mrs. Burrage
+imperturbably. "Think of what I have said; I am sure you won't feel that
+you have wasted your hour."
+
+"I have a great many things to think of!" Olive exclaimed insincerely;
+for she knew that Mrs. Burrage's ideas would haunt her.
+
+"And tell her that if she will make us the little visit, all New York
+shall sit at her feet!"
+
+That was what Olive wanted, and yet it seemed a mockery to hear Mrs.
+Burrage say it. Miss Chancellor retreated, making no response even when
+her hostess declared again that she was under great obligations to her
+for coming. When she reached the street she found she was deeply
+agitated, but not with a sense of weakness; she hurried along, excited
+and dismayed, feeling that her insufferable conscience was bristling
+like some irritated animal, that a magnificent offer had really been
+made to Verena, and that there was no way for her to persuade herself
+she might be silent about it. Of course, if Verena should be tempted by
+the idea of being made so much of by the Burrages, the danger of Basil
+Ransom getting any kind of hold on her would cease to be pressing. That
+was what was present to Olive as she walked along, and that was what
+made her nervous, conscious only of this problem that had suddenly
+turned the bright day to greyness, heedless of the sophisticated-looking
+people who passed her on the wide Fifth Avenue pavement. It had risen in
+her mind the day before, planted first by Mrs. Burrage's note; and then,
+as we know, she had vaguely entertained the conception, asking Verena
+whether she would make the visit if it were again to be pressed upon
+them. It had been pressed, certainly, and the terms of the problem were
+now so much sharper that they seemed cruel. What had been in her own
+mind was that if Verena should appear to lend herself to the Burrages
+Basil Ransom might be discouraged--might think that, shabby and poor,
+there was no chance for him as against people with every advantage of
+fortune and position. She didn't see him relax his purpose so easily;
+she knew she didn't believe he was of that pusillanimous fibre. Still,
+it was a chance, and any chance that might help her had been worth
+considering. At present she saw it was a question not of Verena's
+lending herself, but of a positive gift, or at least of a bargain in
+which the terms would be immensely liberal. It would be impossible to
+use the Burrages as a shelter on the assumption that they were not
+dangerous, for they became dangerous from the moment they set up as
+sympathisers, took the ground that what they offered the girl was simply
+a boundless opportunity. It came back to Olive, again and again, that
+this was, and could only be, fantastic and false; but it was always
+possible that Verena might not think it so, might trust them all the
+way. When Miss Chancellor had a pair of alternatives to consider, a
+question of duty to study, she put a kind of passion into it--felt,
+above all, that the matter must be settled that very hour, before
+anything in life could go on. It seemed to her at present that she
+couldn't re-enter the house in Tenth Street without having decided first
+whether she might trust the Burrages or not. By "trust" them, she meant
+trust them to fail in winning Verena over, while at the same time they
+put Basil Ransom on a false scent. Olive was able to say to herself that
+he probably wouldn't have the hardihood to push after her into those
+gilded saloons, which, in any event, would be closed to him as soon as
+the mother and son should discover what he wanted. She even asked
+herself whether Verena would not be still better defended from the young
+Southerner in New York, amid complicated hospitalities, than in Boston
+with a cousin of the enemy. She continued to walk down the Fifth Avenue,
+without noticing the cross-streets, and after a while became conscious
+that she was approaching Washington Square. By this time she had also
+definitely reasoned it out that Basil Ransom and Henry Burrage could not
+both capture Miss Tarrant, that therefore there could not be two
+dangers, but only one; that this was a good deal gained, and that it
+behoved her to determine which peril had most reality, in order that she
+might deal with that one only. She held her way to the Square, which, as
+all the world knows, is of great extent and open to the encircling
+street. The trees and grass-plats had begun to bud and sprout, the
+fountains plashed in the sunshine, the children of the quarter, both the
+dingier types from the south side, who played games that required much
+chalking of the paved walks, and much sprawling and crouching there,
+under the feet of passers, and the little curled and feathered people
+who drove their hoops under the eyes of French nursemaids--all the
+infant population filled the vernal air with small sounds which had a
+crude, tender quality, like the leaves and the thin herbage. Olive
+wandered through the place, and ended by sitting down on one of the
+continuous benches. It was a long time since she had done anything so
+vague, so wasteful. There were a dozen things which, as she was staying
+over in New York, she ought to do; but she forgot them, or, if she
+thought of them, felt that they were now of no moment. She remained in
+her place an hour, brooding, tremulous, turning over and over certain
+thoughts. It seemed to her that she was face to face with a crisis of
+her destiny, and that she must not shrink from seeing it exactly as it
+was. Before she rose to return to Tenth Street she had made up her mind
+that there was no menace so great as the menace of Basil Ransom; she had
+accepted in thought any arrangement which would deliver her from that.
+If the Burrages were to take Verena they would take her from Olive
+immeasurably less than he would do; it was from him, from him they would
+take her most. She walked back to her boarding-house, and the servant
+who admitted her said, in answer to her inquiry as to whether Verena
+were at home, that Miss Tarrant had gone out with the gentleman who
+called in the morning, and had not yet come in. Olive stood staring; the
+clock in the hall marked three.
+
+
+
+
+XXXIII
+
+
+"Come out with me, Miss Tarrant; come out with me. _Do_ come out with
+me." That was what Basil Ransom had been saying to Verena when they
+stood where Olive perceived them, in the embrasure of the window. It had
+of course taken considerable talk to lead up to this; for the tone, even
+more than the words, indicated a large increase of intimacy. Verena was
+mindful of this when he spoke; and it frightened her a little, made her
+uneasy, which was one of the reasons why she got up from her chair and
+went to the window--an inconsequent movement, inasmuch as her wish was
+to impress upon him that it was impossible she should comply with his
+request. It would have served this end much better for her to sit, very
+firmly, in her place. He made her nervous and restless; she was
+beginning to perceive that he produced a peculiar effect upon her.
+Certainly, she had been out with him at home the very first time he
+called upon her; but it seemed to her to make an important difference
+that she herself should then have proposed the walk--simply because it
+was the easiest thing to do when a person came to see you in Monadnoc
+Place.
+
+They had gone out that time because she wanted to, not because he did.
+And then it was one thing for her to stroll with him round Cambridge,
+where she knew every step and had the confidence and freedom which came
+from being on her own ground, and the pretext, which was perfectly
+natural, of wanting to show him the colleges, and quite another thing to
+go wandering with him through the streets of this great strange city,
+which, attractive, delightful as it was, had not the suitableness even
+of being his home, not his real one. He wanted to show her something, he
+wanted to show her everything; but she was not sure now--after an hour's
+talk--that she particularly wanted to see anything more that he could
+show her. He had shown her a great deal while he sat there, especially
+what balderdash he thought it--the whole idea of women's being equal to
+men. He seemed to have come only for that, for he was all the while
+revolving round it; she couldn't speak of anything but what he brought
+it back to the question of some new truth like that. He didn't say so in
+so many words; on the contrary, he was tremendously insinuating and
+satirical, and pretended to think she had proved all and a great deal
+more than she wanted to prove; but his exaggeration, and the way he rung
+all the changes on two or three of the points she had made at Mrs.
+Burrage's, were just the sign that he was a scoffer of scoffers. He
+wouldn't do anything but laugh; he seemed to think that he might laugh
+at her all day without her taking offence. Well, he might if it amused
+him; but she didn't see why she should ramble round New York with him to
+give him his opportunity.
+
+She had told him, and she had told Olive, that she was determined to
+produce some effect on him; but now, suddenly, she felt differently
+about that--she ceased to care whether she produced any effect or not.
+She didn't see why she should take him so seriously, when he wouldn't
+take her so; that is, wouldn't take her ideas. She had guessed before
+that he didn't want to discuss them; this had been in her mind when she
+said to him at Cambridge that his interest in her was personal, not
+controversial. Then she had simply meant that, as an inquiring young
+Southerner, he had wanted to see what a bright New England girl was
+like; but since then it had become a little more clear to her--her short
+talk with Ransom at Mrs. Burrage's threw some light upon the
+question--what the personal interest of a young Southerner (however
+inquiring merely) might amount to. Did he too want to make love to her?
+This idea made Verena rather impatient, weary in advance. The thing she
+desired least in the world was to be put into the wrong with Olive; for
+she had certainly given her ground to believe (not only in their scene
+the night before, which was a simple repetition, but all along, from the
+very first) that she really had an interest which would transcend any
+attraction coming from such a source as that. If yesterday it seemed to
+her that she should like to struggle with Mr. Ransom, to refute and
+convince him, she had this morning gone into the parlour to receive him
+with the idea that, now they were alone together in a quiet, favourable
+place, he would perhaps take up the different points of her address one
+by one, as several gentlemen had done after hearing her on other
+occasions. There was nothing she liked so well as that, and Olive never
+had anything to say against it. But he hadn't taken up anything; he had
+simply laughed and chaffed, and unrolled a string of queer fancies about
+the delightful way women would fix things when, as she said in her
+address, they should get out of their box. He kept talking about the
+box; he seemed as if he wouldn't let go that simile. He said that he had
+come to look at her through the glass sides, and if he wasn't afraid of
+hurting her he would smash them in. He was determined to find the key
+that would open it, if he had to look for it all over the world; it was
+tantalising only to be able to talk to her through the keyhole. If he
+didn't want to take up the subject, he at least wanted to take _her_
+up--to keep his hand upon her as long as he could. Verena had had no
+such sensation since the first day she went in to see Olive Chancellor,
+when she felt herself plucked from the earth and borne aloft.
+
+"It's the most lovely day, and I should like so much to show you New
+York, as you showed me your beautiful Harvard," Basil Ransom went on,
+pressing her to accede to his proposal. "You said that was the only
+thing you could do for me then, and so this is the only thing I can do
+for you here. It would be odious to see you go away, giving me nothing
+but this stiff little talk in a boarding-house parlour."
+
+"Mercy, if you call this stiff!" Verena exclaimed, laughing, while at
+that moment Olive passed out of the house and descended the steps before
+her eyes.
+
+"My poor cousin's stiff; she won't turn her head a hair's breadth to
+look at us," said the young man. Olive's figure, as she went by, was,
+for Verena, full of a queer, touching, tragic expression, saying ever so
+many things, both familiar and strange; and Basil Ransom's companion
+privately remarked how little men knew about women, or indeed about what
+was really delicate, that he, without any cruel intention, should attach
+an idea of ridicule to such an incarnation of the pathetic, should speak
+rough, derisive words about it. Ransom, in truth, to-day, was not
+disposed to be very scrupulous, and he only wanted to get rid of Olive
+Chancellor, whose image, at last, decidedly bothered and bored him. He
+was glad to see her go out; but that was not sufficient, she would come
+back quick enough; the place itself contained her, expressed her. For
+to-day he wanted to take possession of Verena, to carry her to a
+distance, to reproduce a little the happy conditions they had enjoyed
+the day of his visit to Cambridge. And the fact that in the nature of
+things it could only be for to-day made his desire more keen, more full
+of purpose. He had thought over the whole question in the last
+forty-eight hours, and it was his belief that he saw things in their
+absolute reality. He took a greater interest in her than he had taken in
+any one yet, but he proposed, after to-day, not to let that accident
+make any difference. This was precisely what gave its high value to the
+present limited occasion. He was too shamefully poor, too shabbily and
+meagrely equipped, to have the right to talk of marriage to a girl in
+Verena's very peculiar position. He understood now how good that
+position was, from a worldly point of view; her address at Mrs.
+Burrage's gave him something definite to go upon, showed him what she
+could do, that people would flock in thousands to an exhibition so
+charming (and small blame to them); that she might easily have a big
+career, like that of a distinguished actress or singer, and that she
+would make money in quantities only slightly smaller than performers of
+that kind. Who wouldn't pay half a dollar for such an hour as he had
+passed at Mrs. Burrage's? The sort of thing she was able to do, to say,
+was an article for which there was more and more demand--fluent, pretty,
+third-rate palaver, conscious or unconscious perfected humbug; the
+stupid, gregarious, gullible public, the enlightened democracy of his
+native land, could swallow unlimited draughts of it. He was sure she
+could go, like that, for several years, with her portrait in the
+druggists' windows and her posters on the fences, and during that time
+would make a fortune sufficient to keep her in affluence for evermore. I
+shall perhaps expose our young man to the contempt of superior minds if
+I say that all this seemed to him an insuperable impediment to his
+making up to Verena. His scruples were doubtless begotten of a false
+pride, a sentiment in which there was a thread of moral tinsel, as there
+was in the Southern idea of chivalry; but he felt ashamed of his own
+poverty, the positive flatness of his situation, when he thought of the
+gilded nimbus that surrounded the protegee of Mrs. Burrage. This shame
+was possible to him even while he was conscious of what a mean business
+it was to practise upon human imbecility, how much better it was even to
+be seedy and obscure, discouraged about one's self. He had been born to
+the prospect of a fortune, and in spite of the years of misery that
+followed the war had never rid himself of the belief that a gentleman
+who desired to unite himself to a charming girl couldn't yet ask her to
+come and live with him in sordid conditions. On the other hand it was no
+possible basis of matrimony that Verena should continue for his
+advantage the exercise of her remunerative profession; if he should
+become her husband he should know a way to strike her dumb. In the midst
+of this an irrepressible desire urged him on to taste, for once, deeply,
+all that he was condemned to lose, or at any rate forbidden to attempt
+to gain. To spend a day with her and not to see her again--that
+presented itself to him at once as the least and the most that was
+possible. He did not need even to remind himself that young Mr. Burrage
+was able to offer her everything _he_ lacked, including the most amiable
+adhesion to her views.
+
+"It will be charming in the Park to-day. Why not take a stroll with me
+there as I did with you in the little park at Harvard?" he asked, when
+Olive had disappeared.
+
+"Oh, I have seen it, very well, in every corner. A friend of mine kindly
+took me to drive there yesterday," Verena said.
+
+"A friend?--do you mean Mr. Burrage?" And Ransom stood looking at her
+with his extraordinary eyes. "Of course, I haven't a vehicle to drive
+you in; but we can sit on a bench and talk." She didn't say it was Mr.
+Burrage, but she was unable to say it was not, and something in her face
+showed him that he had guessed. So he went on: "Is it only with him you
+can go out? Won't he like it, and may you only do what he likes? Mrs.
+Luna told me he wants to marry you, and I saw at his mother's how he
+stuck to you. If you are going to marry him, you can drive with him
+every day in the year, and that's just a reason for your giving me an
+hour or two now, before it becomes impossible." He didn't mind much what
+he said--it had been his plan not to mind much to-day--and so long as he
+made her do what he wanted he didn't care much how he did it. But he saw
+that his words brought the colour to her face; she stared, surprised at
+his freedom and familiarity. He went on, dropping the hardness, the
+irony of which he was conscious, out of his tone. "I know it's no
+business of mine whom you marry, or even whom you drive with, and I beg
+your pardon if I seem indiscreet and obtrusive; but I would give
+anything just to detach you a little from your ties, your belongings,
+and feel for an hour or two, as if--as if----" And he paused.
+
+"As if what?" she asked, very seriously.
+
+"As if there were no such person as Mr. Burrage--as Miss Chancellor--in
+the whole place." This had not been what he was going to say; he used
+different words.
+
+"I don't know what you mean, why you speak of other persons. I can do as
+I like, perfectly. But I don't know why you should take so for granted
+that _that_ would be it!" Verena spoke these words not out of coquetry,
+or to make him beg her more for a favour, but because she was thinking,
+and she wanted to gain a moment. His allusion to Henry Burrage touched
+her, his belief that she had been in the Park under circumstances more
+agreeable than those he proposed. They were not; somehow, she wanted him
+to know that. To wander there with a companion, slowly stopping,
+lounging, looking at the animals as she had seen the people do the day
+before; to sit down in some out-of-the-way part where there were distant
+views, which she had noticed from her high perch beside Henry
+Burrage--she had to look down so, it made her feel unduly fine: that was
+much more to her taste, much more her idea of true enjoyment. It came
+over her that Mr. Ransom had given up his work to come to her at such an
+hour; people of his kind, in the morning, were always getting their
+living, and it was only for Mr. Burrage that it didn't matter, inasmuch
+as he had no profession. Mr. Ransom simply wanted to give up his whole
+day. That pressed upon her; she was, as the most good-natured girl in
+the world, too entirely tender not to feel any sacrifice that was made
+for her; she had always done everything that people asked. Then, if
+Olive should make that strange arrangement for her to go to Mrs.
+Burrage's he would take it as a proof that there was something serious
+between her and the gentleman of the house, in spite of anything she
+might say to the contrary; moreover, if she should go she wouldn't be
+able to receive Mr. Ransom there. Olive would trust her not to, and she
+must certainly, in future, not disappoint Olive nor keep anything back
+from her, whatever she might have done in the past. Besides, she didn't
+want to do that; she thought it much better not. It was this idea of the
+episode which was possibly in store for her in New York, and from which
+her present companion would be so completely excluded, that worked upon
+her now with a rapid transition, urging her to grant him what he asked,
+so that in advance she should have made up for what she might not do for
+him later. But most of all she disliked his thinking she was engaged to
+some one. She didn't know, it is true, why she should mind it; and
+indeed, at this moment, our young lady's feelings were not in any way
+clear to her. She did not see what was the use of letting her
+acquaintance with Mr. Ransom become much closer (since his interest did
+really seem personal); and yet she presently asked him why he wanted her
+to go out with him, and whether there was anything particular he wanted
+to say to her (there was no one like Verena for making speeches
+apparently flirtatious, with the best faith and the most innocent
+intention in the world); as if that would not be precisely a reason to
+make it well she should get rid of him altogether.
+
+"Of course I have something particular to say to you--I have a
+tremendous lot to say to you!" the young man exclaimed. "Far more than I
+can say in this stuck-up, confined room, which is public, too, so that
+any one may come in from one moment to another. Besides," he added
+sophistically, "it isn't proper for me to pay a visit of three hours."
+
+Verena did not take up the sophistry, nor ask him whether it would be
+more proper for her to ramble about the city with him for an equal
+period; she only said, "Is it something that I shall care to hear, or
+that will do me any good?"
+
+"Well, I hope it will do you good; but I don't suppose you will care
+much to hear it." Basil Ransom hesitated a moment, smiling at her; then
+he went on: "It's to tell you, once for all, how much I really do differ
+from you!" He said this at a venture, but it was a happy inspiration.
+
+If it was only that, Verena thought she might go, for that was not
+personal. "Well, I'm glad you care so much," she answered musingly. But
+she had another scruple still, and she expressed it in saying that she
+should like Olive very much to find her when she came in.
+
+"That's all very well," Ransom returned; "but does she think that she
+only has a right to go out? Does she expect you to keep the house
+because she's abroad? If she stays out long enough, she will find you
+when she comes in."
+
+"Her going out that way--it proves that she trusts me," Verena said,
+with a candour which alarmed her as soon as she had spoken.
+
+Her alarm was just, for Basil Ransom instantly caught up her words, with
+a great mocking amazement. "Trusts you? and why shouldn't she trust you?
+Are you a little girl of ten and she your governess? Haven't you any
+liberty at all, and is she always watching you and holding you to an
+account? Have you such vagabond instincts that you are only thought safe
+when you are between four walls?" Ransom was going on to speak, in the
+same tone, of her having felt it necessary to keep Olive in ignorance of
+his visit to Cambridge--a fact they had touched on, by implication, in
+their short talk at Mrs. Burrage's; but in a moment he saw that he had
+said enough. As for Verena, she had said more than she meant, and the
+simplest way to unsay it was to go and get her bonnet and jacket and let
+him take her where he liked. Five minutes later he was walking up and
+down the parlour, waiting while she prepared herself to go out.
+
+They went up to the Central Park by the elevated railway, and Verena
+reflected, as they proceeded, that anyway Olive was probably disposing
+of her somehow at Mrs. Burrage's, and that therefore there wasn't much
+harm in her just taking this little run on her own responsibility,
+especially as she should only be out an hour--which would be just the
+duration of Olive's absence. The beauty of the "elevated" was that it
+took you up to the Park and brought you back in a few minutes, and you
+had all the rest of the hour to walk about and see the place. It was so
+pleasant now that one was glad to see it twice over. The long, narrow
+enclosure, across which the houses in the streets that border it look at
+each other with their glittering windows, bristled with the raw delicacy
+of April, and, in spite of its rockwork grottoes and tunnels, its
+pavilions and statues, its too numerous paths and pavements, lakes too
+big for the landscape and bridges too big for the lakes, expressed all
+the fragrance and freshness of the most charming moment of the year.
+Once Verena was fairly launched the spirit of the day took possession of
+her; she was glad to have come, she forgot about Olive, enjoyed the
+sense of wandering in the great city with a remarkable young man who
+would take beautiful care of her, while no one else in the world knew
+where she was. It was very different from her drive yesterday with Mr.
+Burrage, but it was more free, more intense, more full of amusing
+incident and opportunity. She could stop and look at everything now, and
+indulge all her curiosities, even the most childish; she could feel as
+if she were out for the day, though she was not really--as she had not
+done since she was a little girl, when in the country, once or twice,
+when her father and mother had drifted into summer quarters, gone out of
+town like people of fashion, she had, with a chance companion, strayed
+far from home, spent hours in the woods and fields, looking for
+raspberries and playing she was a gipsy. Basil Ransom had begun with
+proposing, strenuously, that she should come somewhere and have
+luncheon; he had brought her out half an hour before that meal was
+served in West Tenth Street, and he maintained that he owed her the
+compensation of seeing that she was properly fed; he knew a very quiet,
+luxurious French restaurant, near the top of the Fifth Avenue: he didn't
+tell her that he knew it through having once lunched there in company
+with Mrs. Luna. Verena for the present declined his hospitality--said
+she was going to be out so short a time that it wasn't worth the
+trouble; she should not be hungry, luncheon to her was nothing, she
+would eat when she went home. When he pressed her she said she would see
+later, perhaps, if she should find she wanted something. She would have
+liked immensely to go with him to an eating-house, and yet, with this,
+she was afraid, just as she was rather afraid, at bottom, and in the
+intervals of her quick pulsations of amusement, of the whole expedition,
+not knowing why she had come, though it made her happy, and reflecting
+that there was really nothing Mr. Ransom could have to say to her that
+would concern her closely enough. He knew what he intended about her
+sharing the noon-day repast with him somehow; it had been part of his
+plan that she should sit opposite him at a little table, taking her
+napkin out of its curious folds--sit there smiling back at him while he
+said to her certain things that hummed, like memories of tunes, in his
+fancy, and they waited till something extremely good, and a little
+vague, chosen out of a French _carte_, was brought them. That was not at
+all compatible with her going home at the end of half an hour, as she
+seemed to expect to. They visited the animals in the little zoological
+garden which forms one of the attractions of the Central Park; they
+observed the swans in the ornamental water, and they even considered the
+question of taking a boat for half an hour, Ransom saying that they
+needed this to make their visit complete. Verena replied that she didn't
+see why it should be complete, and after having threaded the devious
+ways of the Ramble, lost themselves in the Maze, and admired all the
+statues and busts of great men with which the grounds are decorated,
+they contented themselves with resting on a sequestered bench, where,
+however, there was a pretty glimpse of the distance and an occasional
+stroller creaked by on the asphalt walk.
+
+They had had by this time a great deal of talk, none of which,
+nevertheless, had been serious to Verena's view. Mr. Ransom continued to
+joke about everything, including the emancipation of women; Verena, who
+had always lived with people who took the world very earnestly, had
+never encountered such a power of disparagement or heard so much sarcasm
+levelled at the institutions of her country and the tendencies of the
+age. At first she replied to him, contradicted, showed a high spirit of
+retort, turning his irreverence against himself; she was too quick and
+ingenious not to be able to think of something to oppose--talking in a
+fanciful strain--to almost everything he said. But little by little she
+grew weary and rather sad; brought up, as she had been, to admire new
+ideas, to criticise the social arrangements that one met almost
+everywhere, and to disapprove of a great many things, she had yet never
+dreamed of such a wholesale arraignment as Mr. Ransom's, so much
+bitterness as she saw lurking beneath his exaggerations, his
+misrepresentations. She knew he was an intense conservative, but she
+didn't know that being a conservative could make a person so aggressive
+and unmerciful. She thought conservatives were only smug and stubborn
+and self-complacent, satisfied with what actually existed; but Mr.
+Ransom didn't seem any more satisfied with what existed than with what
+she wanted to exist, and he was ready to say worse things about some of
+those whom she would have supposed to be on his own side than she
+thought it right to say about almost any one. She ceased after a while
+to care to argue with him, and wondered what could have happened to him
+to make him so perverse. Probably something had gone wrong in his
+life--he had had some misfortune that coloured his whole view of the
+world. He was a cynic; she had often heard about that state of mind,
+though she had never encountered it, for all the people she had seen
+only cared, if possible, too much. Of Basil Ransom's personal history
+she knew only what Olive had told her, and that was but a general
+outline, which left plenty of room for private dramas, secret
+disappointments and sufferings. As she sat there beside him she thought
+of some of these things, asked herself whether they were what he was
+thinking of when he said, for instance, that he was sick of all the
+modern cant about freedom and had no sympathy with those who wanted an
+extension of it. What was needed for the good of the world was that
+people should make a better use of the liberty they possessed. Such
+declarations as this took Verena's breath away; she didn't suppose you
+could hear any one say such a thing as that in the nineteenth century,
+even the least advanced. It was of a piece with his denouncing the
+spread of education; he thought the spread of education a gigantic
+farce--people stuffing their heads with a lot of empty catchwords that
+prevented them from doing their work quietly and honestly. You had a
+right to an education only if you had an intelligence, and if you looked
+at the matter with any desire to see things as they are you soon
+perceived that an intelligence was a very rare luxury, the attribute of
+one person in a hundred. He seemed to take a pretty low view of
+humanity, anyway. Verena hoped that something really bad had happened to
+him--not by way of gratifying any resentment he aroused in her nature,
+but to help herself to forgive him for so much contempt and brutality.
+She wanted to forgive him, for after they had sat on their bench half an
+hour and his jesting mood had abated a little, so that he talked with
+more consideration (as it seemed) and more sincerity, a strange feeling
+came over her, a perfect willingness not to keep insisting on her own
+side and a desire not to part from him with a mere accentuation of their
+differences. Strange I call the nature of her reflexions, for they
+softly battled with each other as she listened, in the warm, still air,
+touched with the far-away hum of the immense city, to his deep, sweet,
+distinct voice, expressing monstrous opinions with exotic cadences and
+mild, familiar laughs, which, as he leaned towards her, almost tickled
+her cheek and ear. It seemed to her strangely harsh, almost cruel, to
+have brought her out only to say to her things which, after all, free as
+she was to contradict them and tolerant as she always tried to be, could
+only give her pain; yet there was a spell upon her as she listened; it
+was in her nature to be easily submissive, to like being overborne. She
+could be silent when people insisted, and silent without acrimony. Her
+whole relation to Olive was a kind of tacit, tender assent to passionate
+insistence, and if this had ended by being easy and agreeable to her
+(and indeed had never been anything else), it may be supposed that the
+struggle of yielding to a will which she felt to be stronger even than
+Olive's was not of long duration. Ransom's will had the effect of making
+her linger even while she knew the afternoon was going on, that Olive
+would have come back and found her still absent, and would have been
+submerged again in the bitter waves of anxiety. She saw her, in fact, as
+she must be at that moment, posted at the window of her room in Tenth
+Street, watching for some sign of her return, listening for her step on
+the staircase, her voice in the hall. Verena looked at this image as at
+a painted picture, perceived all it represented, every detail. If it
+didn't move her more, make her start to her feet, dart away from Basil
+Ransom and hurry back to her friend, this was because the very torment
+to which she was conscious of subjecting that friend made her say to
+herself that it must be the very last. This was the last time she could
+ever sit by Mr. Ransom and hear him express himself in a manner that
+interfered so with her life; the ordeal had been so personal and so
+complete that she forgot, for the moment, it was also the first time it
+had occurred. It might have been going on for months. She was perfectly
+aware that it could bring them to nothing, for one must lead one's own
+life; it was impossible to lead the life of another, especially when
+that other was so different, so arbitrary and unscrupulous.
+
+
+
+
+XXXIV
+
+
+"I presume you are the only person in this country who feels as you do,"
+she observed at last.
+
+"Not the only person who feels so, but very possibly the only person who
+thinks so. I have an idea that my convictions exist in a vague,
+unformulated state in the minds of a great many of my fellow-citizens.
+If I should succeed some day in giving them adequate expression I should
+simply put into shape the slumbering instincts of an important
+minority."
+
+"I am glad you admit it's a minority!" Verena exclaimed. "That's
+fortunate for us poor creatures. And what do you call adequate
+expression? I presume you would like to be President of the United
+States?"
+
+"And breathe forth my views in glowing messages to a palpitating Senate?
+That is exactly what I should like to be; you read my aspirations
+wonderfully well."
+
+"Well, do you consider that you have advanced far in that direction, as
+yet?" Verena asked.
+
+This question, with the tone in which it happened to be uttered, seemed
+to the young man to project rather an ironical light upon his present
+beggarly condition, so that for a moment he said nothing; a moment
+during which if his neighbour had glanced round at his face she would
+have seen it ornamented by an incipient blush. Her words had for him the
+effect of a sudden, though, on the part of a young woman who had of
+course every right to defend herself, a perfectly legitimate taunt. They
+appeared only to repeat in another form (so at least his exaggerated
+Southern pride, his hot sensibility, interpreted the matter) the idea
+that a gentleman so dreadfully backward in the path of fortune had no
+right to take up the time of a brilliant, successful girl, even for the
+purpose of satisfying himself that he renounced her. But the reminder
+only sharpened his wish to make her feel that if he had renounced, it
+was simply on account of that same ugly, accidental, outside
+backwardness; and if he had not, he went so far as to flatter himself,
+he might triumph over the whole accumulation of her prejudices--over all
+the bribes of her notoriety. The deepest feeling in Ransom's bosom in
+relation to her was the conviction that she was made for love, as he had
+said to himself while he listened to her at Mrs. Burrage's. She was
+profoundly unconscious of it, and another ideal, crude and thin and
+artificial, had interposed itself; but in the presence of a man she
+should really care for, this false, flimsy structure would rattle to her
+feet, and the emancipation of Olive Chancellor's sex (what sex was it,
+great heaven? he used profanely to ask himself) would be relegated to
+the land of vapours, of dead phrases. The reader may imagine whether
+such an impression as this made it any more agreeable to Basil to have
+to believe it would be indelicate in him to try to woo her. He would
+have resented immensely the imputation that he had done anything of that
+sort yet. "Ah, Miss Tarrant, my success in life is one thing--my
+ambition is another!" he exclaimed presently, in answer to her inquiry.
+"Nothing is more possible than that I may be poor and unheard of all my
+days; and in that case no one but myself will know the visions of
+greatness I have stifled and buried."
+
+"Why do you talk of being poor and unheard of? Aren't you getting on
+quite well in this city?"
+
+This question of Verena's left him no time, or at least no coolness, to
+remember that to Mrs. Luna and to Olive he had put a fine face on his
+prospects, and that any impression the girl might have about them was
+but the natural echo of what these ladies believed. It had to his ear
+such a subtly mocking, defiant, unconsciously injurious quality, that
+the only answer he could make to it seemed to him for the moment to be
+an outstretched arm, which, passing round her waist, should draw her so
+close to him as to enable him to give her a concise account of his
+situation in the form of a deliberate kiss. If the moment I speak of had
+lasted a few seconds longer I know not what monstrous proceeding of this
+kind it would have been my difficult duty to describe; it was
+fortunately arrested by the arrival of a nursery-maid pushing a
+perambulator and accompanied by an infant who toddled in her wake. Both
+the nurse and her companion gazed fixedly, and it seemed to Ransom even
+sternly, at the striking couple on the bench; and meanwhile Verena,
+looking with a quickened eye at the children (she adored children), went
+on--
+
+"It sounds too flat for you to talk about your remaining unheard of. Of
+course you are ambitious; any one can see that, to look at you. And once
+your ambition is excited in any particular direction, people had better
+look out. With your will!" she added, with a curious mocking candour.
+
+"What do you know about my will?" he asked, laughing a little awkwardly,
+as if he had really attempted to kiss her--in the course of the second
+independent interview he had ever had with her--and been rebuffed.
+
+"I know it's stronger than mine. It made me come out, when I thought I
+had much better not, and it keeps me sitting here long after I should
+have started for home."
+
+"Give me the day, dear Miss Tarrant, give me the day," Basil Ransom
+murmured; and as she turned her face upon him, moved by the expression
+of his voice, he added--"Come and dine with me, since you wouldn't
+lunch. Are you really not faint and weak?"
+
+"I am faint and weak at all the horrible things you have said; I have
+lunched on abominations. And now you want me to dine with you? Thank
+you; I think you're cool!" Verena cried, with a laugh which her
+chronicler knows to have been expressive of some embarrassment, though
+Basil Ransom did not.
+
+"You must remember that I have, on two different occasions, listened to
+you for an hour, in speechless, submissive attention, and that I shall
+probably do it a great many times more."
+
+"Why should you ever listen to me again, when you loathe my ideas?"
+
+"I don't listen to your ideas; I listen to your voice."
+
+"Ah, I told Olive!" said Verena, quickly, as if his words had confirmed
+an old fear; which was general, however, and did not relate particularly
+to him.
+
+Ransom still had an impression that he was not making love to her,
+especially when he could observe, with all the superiority of a man--"I
+wonder whether you have understood ten words I have said to you?"
+
+"I should think you had made it clear enough--you had rubbed it in!"
+
+"What have you understood, then?"
+
+"Why, that you want to put us back further than we have been at any
+period."
+
+"I have been joking; I have been piling it up," Ransom said, making that
+concession unexpectedly to the girl. Every now and then he had an air of
+relaxing himself, becoming absent, ceasing to care to discuss.
+
+She was capable of noticing this, and in a moment she asked--"Why don't
+you write out your ideas?"
+
+This touched again upon the matter of his failure; it was curious how
+she couldn't keep off it, hit it every time. "Do you mean for the
+public? I have written many things, but I can't get them printed."
+
+"Then it would seem that there are not so many people--so many as you
+said just now--who agree with you."
+
+"Well," said Basil Ransom, "editors are a mean, timorous lot, always
+saying they want something original, but deadly afraid of it when it
+comes."
+
+"Is it for papers, magazines?" As it sank into Verena's mind more deeply
+that the contributions of this remarkable young man had been
+rejected--contributions in which, apparently, everything she held dear
+was riddled with scorn--she felt a strange pity and sadness, a sense of
+injustice. "I am very sorry you can't get published," she said, so
+simply that he looked up at her, from the figure he was scratching on
+the asphalt with his stick, to see whether such a tone as that, in
+relation to such a fact, were not "put on." But it was evidently
+genuine, and Verena added that she supposed getting published was very
+difficult always; she remembered, though she didn't mention, how little
+success her father had when he tried. She hoped Mr. Ransom would keep
+on; he would be sure to succeed at last. Then she continued, smiling,
+with more irony: "You may denounce me by name if you like. Only please
+don't say anything about Olive Chancellor."
+
+"How little you understand what I want to achieve!" Basil Ransom
+exclaimed. "There you are--you women--all over; always meaning,
+yourselves, something personal, and always thinking it is meant by
+others!"
+
+"Yes, that's the charge they make," said Verena gaily.
+
+"I don't want to touch you, or Miss Chancellor, or Mrs. Farrinder, or
+Miss Birdseye, or the shade of Eliza P. Moseley, or any other gifted and
+celebrated being on earth--or in heaven."
+
+"Oh, I suppose you want to destroy us by neglect, by silence!" Verena
+exclaimed, with the same brightness.
+
+"No, I don't want to destroy you, any more than I want to save you.
+There has been far too much talk about you, and I want to leave you
+alone altogether. My interest is in my own sex; yours evidently can look
+after itself. That's what I want to save."
+
+Verena saw that he was more serious now than he had been before, that he
+was not piling it up satirically, but saying really and a trifle
+wearily, as if suddenly he were tired of much talk, what he meant. "To
+save it from what?" she asked.
+
+"From the most damnable feminisation! I am so far from thinking, as you
+set forth the other night, that there is not enough women in our general
+life, that it has long been pressed home to me that there is a great
+deal too much. The whole generation is womanised; the masculine tone is
+passing out of the world; it's a feminine, a nervous, hysterical,
+chattering, canting age, an age of hollow phrases and false delicacy and
+exaggerated solicitudes and coddled sensibilities, which, if we don't
+soon look out, will usher in the reign of mediocrity, of the feeblest
+and flattest and the most pretentious that has ever been. The masculine
+character, the ability to dare and endure, to know and yet not fear
+reality, to look the world in the face and take it for what it is--a
+very queer and partly very base mixture--that is what I want to
+preserve, or rather, as I may say, to recover; and I must tell you that
+I don't in the least care what becomes of you ladies while I make the
+attempt!"
+
+The poor fellow delivered himself of these narrow notions (the rejection
+of which by leading periodicals was certainly not a matter for surprise)
+with low, soft earnestness, bending towards her so as to give out his
+whole idea, yet apparently forgetting for the moment how offensive it
+must be to her now that it was articulated in that calm, severe way, in
+which no allowance was to be made for hyperbole. Verena did not remind
+herself of this; she was too much impressed by his manner and by the
+novelty of a man taking that sort of religious tone about such a cause.
+It told her on the spot, from one minute to the other and once for all,
+that the man who could give her that impression would never come round.
+She felt cold, slightly sick, though she replied that now he summed up
+his creed in such a distinct, lucid way, it was much more
+comfortable--one knew with what one was dealing; a declaration much at
+variance with the fact, for Verena had never felt less gratified in her
+life. The ugliness of her companion's profession of faith made her
+shiver; it would have been difficult to her to imagine anything more
+crudely profane. She was determined, however, not to betray any shudder
+that could suggest weakness, and the best way she could think of to
+disguise her emotion was to remark in a tone which, although not assumed
+for that purpose, was really the most effective revenge, inasmuch as it
+always produced on Ransom's part (it was not peculiar, among women, to
+Verena) an angry helplessness--"Mr. Ransom, I assure you this is an age
+of conscience."
+
+"That's a part of your cant. It's an age of unspeakable shams, as
+Carlyle says."
+
+"Well," returned Verena, "it's all very comfortable for you to say that
+you wish to leave us alone. But you can't leave us alone. We are here,
+and we have got to be disposed of. You have got to put us somewhere.
+It's a remarkable social system that has no place for _us_!" the girl
+went on, with her most charming laugh.
+
+"No place in public. My plan is to keep you at home and have a better
+time with you there than ever."
+
+"I'm glad it's to be better; there's room for it. Woe to American
+womanhood when you start a movement for being more--what you like to
+be--at home!"
+
+"Lord, how you're perverted; you, the very genius!" Basil Ransom
+murmured, looking at her with the kindest eyes.
+
+She paid no attention to this, she went on, "And those who have got no
+home (there are millions, you know), what are you going to do with
+_them_? You must remember that women marry--are given in marriage--less
+and less; that isn't their career, as a matter of course, any more. You
+can't tell them to go and mind their husband and children, when they
+have no husband and children to mind."
+
+"Oh," said Ransom, "that's a detail! And for myself, I confess, I have
+such a boundless appreciation of your sex in private life that I am
+perfectly ready to advocate a man's having a half-a-dozen wives."
+
+"The civilisation of the Turks, then, strikes you as the highest?"
+
+"The Turks have a second-rate religion; they are fatalists, and that
+keeps them down. Besides, their women are not nearly so charming as
+ours--or as ours would be if this modern pestilence were eradicated.
+Think what a confession you make when you say that women are less and
+less sought in marriage; what a testimony that is to the pernicious
+effect on their manners, their person, their nature, of this fatuous
+agitation."
+
+"That's very complimentary to me!" Verena broke in, lightly.
+
+But Ransom was carried over her interruption by the current of his
+argument. "There are a thousand ways in which any woman, all women,
+married or single, may find occupation. They may find it in making
+society agreeable."
+
+"Agreeable to men, of course."
+
+"To whom else, pray? Dear Miss Tarrant, what is most agreeable to women
+is to be agreeable to men! That is a truth as old as the human race, and
+don't let Olive Chancellor persuade you that she and Mrs. Farrinder have
+invented any that can take its place, or that is more profound, more
+durable."
+
+Verena waived this point of the discussion; she only said: "Well, I am
+glad to hear you are prepared to see the place all choked up with old
+maids!"
+
+"I don't object to the _old_ old maids; they were delightful; they had
+always plenty to do, and didn't wander about the world crying out for a
+vocation. It is the new old maid that you have invented from whom I pray
+to be delivered." He didn't say he meant Olive Chancellor, but Verena
+looked at him as if she suspected him of doing so; and to put her off
+that scent he went on, taking up what she had said a moment before: "As
+for its not being complimentary to you, my remark about the effect on
+the women themselves of this pernicious craze, my dear Miss Tarrant, you
+may be quite at your ease. You stand apart, you are unique,
+extraordinary; you constitute a category by yourself. In you the
+elements have been mixed in a manner so felicitous that I regard you as
+quite incorruptible. I don't know where you come from nor how you come
+to be what you are, but you are outside and above all vulgarising
+influences. Besides, you ought to know," the young man proceeded, in the
+same cool, mild, deliberate tone, as if he were demonstrating a
+mathematical solution, "you ought to know that your connexion with all
+these rantings and ravings is the most unreal, accidental, illusory
+thing in the world. You think you care about them, but you don't at all.
+They were imposed upon you by circumstances, by unfortunate
+associations, and you accepted them as you would have accepted any other
+burden, on account of the sweetness of your nature. You always want to
+please some one, and now you go lecturing about the country, and trying
+to provoke demonstrations, in order to please Miss Chancellor, just as
+you did it before to please your father and mother. It isn't _you_, the
+least in the world, but an inflated little figure (very remarkable in
+its way too) whom you have invented and set on its feet, pulling
+strings, behind it, to make it move and speak, while you try to conceal
+and efface yourself there. Ah, Miss Tarrant, if it's a question of
+pleasing, how much you might please some one else by tipping your
+preposterous puppet over and standing forth in your freedom as well as
+in your loveliness!"
+
+While Basil Ransom spoke--and he had not spoken just that way
+yet--Verena sat there deeply attentive, with her eyes on the ground; but
+as soon as he ceased she sprang to her feet--something made her feel
+that their association had already lasted quite too long. She turned
+away from him as if she wished to leave him, and indeed were about to
+attempt to do so. She didn't desire to look at him now, or even to have
+much more conversation with him. "Something," I say, made her feel so,
+but it was partly his curious manner--so serene and explicit, as if he
+knew the whole thing to an absolute certainty--which partly scared her
+and partly made her feel angry. She began to move along the path to one
+of the gates, as if it were settled that they should immediately leave
+the place. He laid it all out so clearly; if he had had a revelation he
+couldn't speak otherwise. That description of herself as something
+different from what she was trying to be, the charge of want of reality,
+made her heart beat with pain; she was sure, at any rate, it was her
+real self that was there with him now, where she oughtn't to be. In a
+moment he was at her side again, going with her; and as they walked it
+came over her that some of the things he had said to her were far beyond
+what Olive could have imagined as the very worst possible. What would be
+her state now, poor forsaken friend, if some of them had been borne to
+her in the voices of the air? Verena had been affected by her
+companion's speech (his manner had changed so; it seemed to express
+something quite different) in a way that pushed her to throw up the
+discussion and determine that as soon as they should get out of the park
+she would go off by herself; but she still had her wits about her
+sufficiently to think it important she should give no sign of
+discomposure, of confessing that she was driven from the field. She
+appeared to herself to notice and reply to his extraordinary
+observations enough, without taking them up too much, when she said,
+tossing the words over her shoulder at Ransom, while she moved quickly:
+"I presume, from what you say, that you don't think I have much
+ability."
+
+He hesitated before answering, while his long legs easily kept pace with
+her rapid step--her charming, touching, hurrying step, which expressed
+all the trepidation she was anxious to conceal. "Immense ability, but
+not in the line in which you most try to have it. In a very different
+line, Miss Tarrant! Ability is no word for it; it's genius!"
+
+She felt his eyes on her face--ever so close and fixed there--after he
+had chosen to reply to her question that way. She was beginning to
+blush; if he had kept them longer, and on the part of any one else, she
+would have called such a stare impertinent. Verena had been commended of
+old by Olive for her serenity "while exposed to the gaze of hundreds";
+but a change had taken place, and she was now unable to endure the
+contemplation of an individual. She wished to detach him, to lead him
+off again into the general; and for this purpose, at the end of a
+moment, she made another inquiry: "I am to understand, then, as your
+last word that you regard us as quite inferior?"
+
+"For public, civic uses, absolutely--perfectly weak and second-rate. I
+know nothing more indicative of the muddled sentiment of the time than
+that any number of men should be found to pretend that they regard you
+in any other light. But privately, personally, it's another affair. In
+the realm of family life and the domestic affections----"
+
+At this Verena broke in, with a nervous laugh, "Don't say that; it's
+only a phrase!"
+
+"Well, it's a better one than any of yours," said Basil Ransom, turning
+with her out of one of the smaller gates--the first they had come to.
+They emerged into the species of _plaza_ formed by the numbered street
+which constitutes the southern extremity of the park and the termination
+of the Sixth Avenue. The glow of the splendid afternoon was over
+everything, and the day seemed to Ransom still in its youth. The bowers
+and boskages stretched behind them, the artificial lakes and cockneyfied
+landscapes, making all the region bright with the sense of air and
+space, and raw natural tints, and vegetation too diminutive to
+overshadow. The chocolate-coloured houses, in tall, new rows, surveyed
+the expanse; the street cars rattled in the foreground, changing horses
+while the horses steamed, and absorbing and emitting passengers; and the
+beer-saloons, with exposed shoulders and sides, which in New York do a
+good deal towards representing the picturesque, the "bit" appreciated by
+painters, announced themselves in signs of large lettering to the sky.
+Groups of the unemployed, the children of disappointment from beyond the
+seas, propped themselves against the low, sunny wall of the park; and on
+the other side the commercial vista of the Sixth Avenue stretched away
+with a remarkable absence of aerial perspective.
+
+"I must go home; good-bye," Verena said, abruptly, to her companion.
+
+"Go home? You won't come and dine, then?"
+
+Verena knew people who dined at midday and others who dined in the
+evening, and others still who never dined at all; but she knew no one
+who dined at half-past three. Ransom's attachment to this idea therefore
+struck her as queer and infelicitous, and she supposed it betrayed the
+habits of Mississippi. But that couldn't make it any more acceptable to
+her, in spite of his looking so disappointed--with his dimly-glowing
+eyes--that he was heedless for the moment that the main fact connected
+with her return to Tenth Street was that she wished to go alone.
+
+"I must leave you, right away," she said. "Please don't ask me to stay;
+you wouldn't if you knew how little I want to!" Her manner was different
+now, and her face as well, and though she smiled more than ever she had
+never seemed to him more serious.
+
+"Alone, do you mean? Really I can't let you do that," Ransom replied,
+extremely shocked at this sacrifice being asked of him. "I have brought
+you this immense distance, I am responsible for you, and I must place
+you where I found you."
+
+"Mr. Ransom, I must, I will!" she exclaimed, in a tone he had not yet
+heard her use; so that, a good deal amazed, puzzled and pained, he saw
+that he should make a mistake if he were to insist. He had known that
+their expedition must end in a separation which could not be sweet, but
+he had counted on making some of the terms of it himself. When he
+expressed the hope that she would at least allow him to put her into a
+car, she replied that she wished no car; she wanted to walk. This image
+of her "streaking off" by herself, as he figured it, did not mend the
+matter; but in the presence of her sudden nervous impatience he felt
+that here was a feminine mystery which must be allowed to take its
+course.
+
+"It costs me more than you probably suspect, but I submit. Heaven guard
+you and bless you, Miss Tarrant!"
+
+She turned her face away from him as if she were straining at a leash;
+then she rejoined, in the most unexpected manner: "I hope very much you
+_will_ get printed."
+
+"Get my articles published?" He stared, and broke out: "Oh, you
+delightful being!"
+
+"Good-bye," she repeated; and now she gave him her hand. As he held it a
+moment, and asked her if she were really leaving the city so soon that
+she mightn't see him again, she answered: "If I stay it will be at a
+place to which you mustn't come. They wouldn't let you see me."
+
+He had not intended to put that question to her; he had set himself a
+limit. But the limit had suddenly moved on. "Do you mean at that house
+where I heard you speak?"
+
+"I may go there for a few days."
+
+"If it's forbidden to me to go and see you there, why did you send me a
+card?"
+
+"Because I wanted to convert you then."
+
+"And now you give me up?"
+
+"No, no; I want you to remain as you are!"
+
+She looked strange, with her more mechanical smile, as she said this,
+and he didn't know what idea was in her head. She had already left him,
+but he called after her, "If you do stay, I will come!" She neither
+turned nor made an answer, and all that was left to him was to watch her
+till she passed out of sight. Her back, with its charming young form,
+seemed to repeat that last puzzle, which was almost a challenge.
+
+For this, however, Verena Tarrant had not meant it. She wanted, in spite
+of the greater delay and the way Olive would wonder, to walk home,
+because it gave her time to think, and think again, how glad she was
+(really, positively, _now_) that Mr. Ransom was on the wrong side. If he
+had been on the right----! She did not finish this proposition. She
+found Olive waiting for her in exactly the manner she had foreseen; she
+turned to her, as she came in, a face sufficiently terrible. Verena
+instantly explained herself, related exactly what she had been doing;
+then went on, without giving her friend time for question or comment:
+"And you--you paid your visit to Mrs. Burrage?"
+
+"Yes, I went through that."
+
+"And did she press the question of my coming there?"
+
+"Very much indeed."
+
+"And what did you say?"
+
+"I said very little, but she gave me such assurances----"
+
+"That you thought I ought to go?"
+
+Olive was silent a moment; then she said: "She declares they are devoted
+to the cause, and that New York will be at your feet."
+
+Verena took Miss Chancellor's shoulders in each of her hands, and gave
+her back, for an instant, her gaze, her silence. Then she broke out,
+with a kind of passion: "I don't care for her assurances--I don't care
+for New York! I won't go to them--I won't--do you understand?" Suddenly
+her voice changed, she passed her arms round her friend and buried her
+face in her neck. "Olive Chancellor, take me away, take me away!" she
+went on. In a moment Olive felt that she was sobbing and that the
+question was settled, the question she herself had debated in anguish a
+couple of hours before.
+
+
+
+
+BOOK THIRD
+
+
+
+
+XXXV
+
+
+The August night had gathered by the time Basil Ransom, having finished
+his supper, stepped out upon the piazza of the little hotel. It was a
+very little hotel and of a very slight and loose construction; the tread
+of a tall Mississippian made the staircase groan and the windows rattle
+in their frames. He was very hungry when he arrived, having not had a
+moment, in Boston, on his way through, to eat even the frugal morsel
+with which he was accustomed to sustain nature between a breakfast that
+consisted of a cup of coffee and a dinner that consisted of a cup of
+tea. He had had his cup of tea now, and very bad it was, brought him by
+a pale, round-backed young lady, with auburn ringlets, a fancy belt, and
+an expression of limited tolerance for a gentleman who could not choose
+quickly between fried fish, fried steak, and baked beans. The train for
+Marmion left Boston at four o'clock in the afternoon, and rambled
+fitfully toward the southern cape, while the shadows grew long in the
+stony pastures and the slanting light gilded the straggling, shabby
+woods, and painted the ponds and marshes with yellow gleams. The
+ripeness of summer lay upon the land, and yet there was nothing in the
+country Basil Ransom traversed that seemed susceptible of maturity;
+nothing but the apples in the little tough, dense orchards, which gave a
+suggestion of sour fruition here and there, and the tall, bright
+goldenrod at the bottom of the bare stone dykes. There were no fields of
+yellow grain; only here and there a crop of brown hay. But there was a
+kind of soft scrubbiness in the landscape, and a sweetness begotten of
+low horizons, of mild air, with a possibility of summer haze, of
+unregarded inlets where on August mornings the water must be brightly
+blue. Ransom had heard that the Cape was the Italy, so to speak, of
+Massachusetts; it had been described to him as the drowsy Cape, the
+languid Cape, the Cape not of storms, but of eternal peace. He knew that
+the Bostonians had been drawn thither, for the hot weeks, by its
+sedative influence, by the conviction that its toneless air would
+minister to perfect rest. In a career in which there was so much nervous
+excitement as in theirs they had no wish to be wound up when they went
+out of town; they were sufficiently wound up at all times by the sense
+of all their sex had been through. They wanted to live idly, to unbend
+and lie in hammocks, and also to keep out of the crowd, the rush of the
+watering-place. Ransom could see there was no crowd at Marmion, as soon
+as he got there, though indeed there was a rush, which directed itself
+to the only vehicle in waiting outside of the small, lonely, hut-like
+station, so distant from the village that, as far as one looked along
+the sandy, sketchy road which was supposed to lead to it, one saw only
+an empty land on either side. Six or eight men in "dusters," carrying
+parcels and handbags, projected themselves upon the solitary, rickety
+carry-all, so that Ransom could read his own fate, while the ruminating
+conductor of the vehicle, a lean, shambling citizen, with a long neck
+and a tuft on his chin, guessed that if he wanted to get to the hotel
+before dusk he would have to strike out. His valise was attached in a
+precarious manner to the rear of the carry-all. "Well, I'll chance it,"
+the driver remarked sadly, when Ransom protested against its insecure
+position. He recognised the southern quality of that picturesque
+fatalism--judged that Miss Chancellor and Verena Tarrant must be pretty
+thoroughly relaxed if they had given themselves up to the genius of the
+place. This was what he hoped for and counted on, as he took his way,
+the sole pedestrian in the group that had quitted the train, in the wake
+of the overladen carry-all. It helped him to enjoy the first country
+walk he had had for many months, for more than months, for years, that
+the reflexion was forced upon him as he went (the mild, vague scenery,
+just beginning to be dim with twilight, suggested it at every step) that
+the two young women who constituted, at Marmion, his whole prefigurement
+of a social circle, must, in such a locality as that, be taking a
+regular holiday. The sense of all the wrongs they had still to redress
+must be lighter there than it was in Boston; the ardent young man had,
+for the hour, an ingenuous hope that they had left their opinions in the
+city. He liked the very smell of the soil as he wandered along; cool,
+soft whiffs of evening met him at bends of the road which disclosed very
+little more--unless it might be a band of straight-stemmed woodland,
+keeping, a little, the red glow from the west, or (as he went further)
+an old house, shingled all over, grey and slightly collapsing, which
+looked down at him from a steep bank, at the top of wooden steps. He was
+already refreshed; he had tasted the breath of nature, measured his long
+grind in New York, without a vacation, with the repetition of the daily
+movement up and down the long, straight, maddening city, like a bucket
+in a well or a shuttle in a loom.
+
+He lit his cigar in the office of the hotel--a small room on the right
+of the door, where a "register," meagrely inscribed, led a terribly
+public life on the little bare desk, and got its pages dogs'-eared
+before they were covered. Local worthies, of a vague identity, used to
+lounge there, as Ransom perceived the next day, by the hour. They tipped
+back their chairs against the wall, seldom spoke, and might have been
+supposed, with their converging vision, to be watching something out of
+the window, if there had been anything at Marmion to watch. Sometimes
+one of them got up and went to the desk, on which he leaned his elbows,
+hunching a pair of sloping shoulders to an uncollared neck. For the
+fiftieth time he perused the fly-blown page of the recording volume,
+where the names followed each other with such jumps of date. The others
+watched him while he did so--or contemplated in silence some "guest" of
+the hostelry, when such a personage entered the place with an air of
+appealing from the general irresponsibility of the establishment and
+found no one but the village-philosophers to address himself to. It was
+an establishment conducted by invisible, elusive agencies; they had a
+kind of stronghold in the dining-room, which was kept locked at all but
+sacramental hours. There was a tradition that a "boy" exercised some
+tutelary function as regards the crumpled register; but when he was
+inquired about, it was usually elicited from the impartial circle in the
+office either that he was somewhere round or that he had gone a-fishing.
+Except the haughty waitress who has just been mentioned as giving Ransom
+his supper, and who only emerged at meal-times from her mystic
+seclusion, this impalpable youth was the single person on the premises
+who represented domestic service. Anxious lady-boarders, wrapped in
+shawls, were seen waiting for him, as if he had been the doctor, on
+horse-hair rocking-chairs, in the little public parlour; others peered
+vaguely out of back doors and windows, thinking that if he were
+somewhere round they might see him. Sometimes people went to the door of
+the dining-room and tried it, shaking it a little, timidly, to see if it
+would yield; then, finding it fast, came away, looking, if they had been
+observed, shy and snubbed, at their fellows. Some of them went so far as
+to say that they didn't think it was a very good hotel.
+
+Ransom, however, didn't much care whether it were good or not; he hadn't
+come to Marmion for the love of the hotel. Now that he had got there,
+however, he didn't know exactly what to do; his course seemed rather
+less easy than it had done when, suddenly, the night before, tired, sick
+of the city-air, and hungry for a holiday, he decided to take the next
+morning's train to Boston, and there take another to the shores of
+Buzzard's Bay. The hotel itself offered few resources; the inmates were
+not numerous; they moved about a little outside, on the small piazza and
+in the rough yard which interposed between the house and the road, and
+then they dropped off into the unmitigated dusk. This element, touched
+only in two or three places by a far-away dim glimmer, presented itself
+to Ransom as his sole entertainment. Though it was pervaded by that
+curious, pure, earthy smell which in New England, in summer, hangs in
+the nocturnal air, Ransom bethought himself that the place might be a
+little dull for persons who had not come to it, as he had, to take
+possession of Verena Tarrant. The unfriendly inn, which suggested
+dreadfully to Ransom (he despised the practice) an early bed-time,
+seemed to have no relation to anything, not even to itself; but a
+fellow-tenant of whom he made an inquiry told him the village was
+sprinkled round. Basil presently walked along the road in search of it,
+under the stars, smoking one of the good cigars which constituted his
+only tribute to luxury. He reflected that it would hardly do to begin
+his attack that night; he ought to give the Bostonians a certain amount
+of notice of his appearance on the scene. He thought it very possible,
+indeed, that they might be addicted to the vile habit of "retiring" with
+the cocks and hens. He was sure that was one of the things Olive
+Chancellor would do so long as he should stay--on purpose to spite him;
+she would make Verena Tarrant go to bed at unnatural hours, just to
+deprive him of his evenings. He walked some distance without
+encountering a creature or discerning an habitation; but he enjoyed the
+splendid starlight, the stillness, the shrill melancholy of the
+crickets, which seemed to make all the vague forms of the country
+pulsate around him; the whole impression was a bath of freshness after
+the long strain of the preceding two years and his recent sweltering
+weeks in New York. At the end of ten minutes (his stroll had been slow)
+a figure drew near him, at first indistinct, but presently defining
+itself as that of a woman. She was walking apparently without purpose,
+like himself, or without other purpose than that of looking at the
+stars, which she paused for an instant, throwing back her head, to
+contemplate, as he drew nearer to her. In a moment he was very close; he
+saw her look at him, through the clear gloom, as they passed each other.
+She was small and slim; he made out her head and face, saw that her hair
+was cropped; had an impression of having seen her before. He noticed
+that as she went by she turned as well as himself, and that there was a
+sort of recognition in her movement. Then he felt sure that he had seen
+her elsewhere, and before she had added to the distance that separated
+them he stopped short, looking after her. She noticed his halt, paused
+equally, and for a moment they stood there face to face, at a certain
+interval, in the darkness.
+
+"I beg your pardon--is it Doctor Prance?" he found himself demanding.
+
+For a minute there was no answer; then came the voice of the little
+lady:
+
+"Yes, sir; I am Doctor Prance. Any one sick at the hotel?"
+
+"I hope not; I don't know," Ransom said, laughing.
+
+Then he took a few steps, mentioned his name, recalled his having met
+her at Miss Birdseye's, ever so long before (nearly two years), and
+expressed the hope that she had not forgotten that.
+
+She thought it over a little--she was evidently addicted neither to
+empty phrases nor to unconsidered assertions. "I presume you mean that
+night Miss Tarrant launched out so."
+
+"That very night. We had a very interesting conversation."
+
+"Well, I remember I lost a good deal," said Doctor Prance.
+
+"Well, I don't know; I have an idea you made it up in other ways,"
+Ransom returned, laughing still.
+
+He saw her bright little eyes engage with his own. Staying, apparently,
+in the village, she had come out, bare-headed, for an evening walk, and
+if it had been possible to imagine Doctor Prance bored and in want of
+recreation, the way she lingered there as if she were quite willing to
+have another talk might have suggested to Basil Ransom this condition.
+"Why, don't you consider her career very remarkable?"
+
+"Oh yes; everything is remarkable nowadays; we live in an age of
+wonders!" the young man replied, much amused to find himself discussing
+the object of his adoration in this casual way, in the dark, on a lonely
+country-road, with a short-haired female physician. It was astonishing
+how quickly Doctor Prance and he had made friends again. "I suppose, by
+the way, you know Miss Tarrant and Miss Chancellor are staying down
+here?" he went on.
+
+"Well, yes, I suppose I know it. I am visiting Miss Chancellor," the dry
+little woman added.
+
+"Oh indeed? I am delighted to hear it!" Ransom exclaimed, feeling that
+he might have a friend in the camp. "Then you can inform me where those
+ladies have their house."
+
+"Yes, I guess I can tell it in the dark. I will show you round now, if
+you like."
+
+"I shall be glad to see it, though I am not sure I shall go in
+immediately. I must reconnoitre a little first. That makes me so very
+happy to have met you. I think it's very wonderful--your knowing me."
+
+Doctor Prance did not repudiate this compliment, but she presently
+observed: "You didn't pass out of my mind entirely, because I have heard
+about you since, from Miss Birdseye."
+
+"Ah yes, I saw her in the spring. I hope she is in health and
+happiness."
+
+"She is always in happiness, but she can't be said to be in health. She
+is very weak; she is failing."
+
+"I am very sorry for that."
+
+"She is also visiting Miss Chancellor," Doctor Prance observed, after a
+pause which was an illustration of an appearance she had of thinking
+that certain things didn't at all imply some others.
+
+"Why, my cousin has got all the distinguished women!" Basil Ransom
+exclaimed.
+
+"Is Miss Chancellor your cousin? There isn't much family resemblance.
+Miss Birdseye came down for the benefit of the country air, and I came
+down to see if I could help her to get some good from it. She wouldn't
+much, if she were left to herself. Miss Birdseye has a very fine
+character, but she hasn't much idea of hygiene." Doctor Prance was
+evidently more and more disposed to be chatty. Ransom appreciated this
+fact, and said he hoped she, too, was getting some good from the
+country-air--he was afraid she was very much confined to her profession,
+in Boston; to which she replied--"Well, I was just taking a little
+exercise along the road. I presume you don't realise what it is to be
+one of four ladies grouped together in a small frame-house."
+
+Ransom remembered how he had liked her before, and he felt that, as the
+phrase was, he was going to like her again. He wanted to express his
+good-will to her, and would greatly have enjoyed being at liberty to
+offer her a cigar. He didn't know what to offer her or what to do,
+unless he should invite her to sit with him on a fence. He did realise
+perfectly what the situation in the small frame-house must be, and
+entered with instant sympathy into the feelings which had led Doctor
+Prance to detach herself from the circle and wander forth under the
+constellations, all of which he was sure she knew. He asked her
+permission to accompany her on her walk, but she said she was not going
+much further in that direction; she was going to turn round. He turned
+round with her, and they went back together to the village, in which he
+at last began to discover a certain consistency, signs of habitation,
+houses disposed with a rough resemblance to a plan. The road wandered
+among them with a kind of accommodating sinuosity, and there were even
+cross-streets, and an oil-lamp on a corner, and here and there the small
+sign of a closed shop, with an indistinctly countrified lettering. There
+were lights now in the windows of some of the houses, and Doctor Prance
+mentioned to her companion several of the inhabitants of the little
+town, who appeared all to rejoice in the prefix of captain. They were
+retired shipmasters; there was quite a little nest of these worthies,
+two or three of whom might be seen lingering in their dim doorways, as
+if they were conscious of a want of encouragement to sit up, and yet
+remembered the nights in far-away waters when they would not have
+thought of turning in at all. Marmion called itself a town, but it was a
+good deal shrunken since the decline in the shipbuilding interest; it
+turned out a good many vessels every year, in the palmy days, before the
+war. There were shipyards still, where you could almost pick up the old
+shavings, the old nails and rivets, but they were grass-grown now, and
+the water lapped them without anything to interfere. There was a kind of
+arm of the sea put in; it went up some way, it wasn't the real sea, but
+very quiet, like a river; that was more attractive to some. Doctor
+Prance didn't say the place was picturesque, or quaint, or weird; but he
+could see that was what she meant when she said it was mouldering away.
+Even under the mantle of night he himself gathered the impression that
+it had had a larger life, seen better days. Doctor Prance made no remark
+designed to elicit from him an account of his motives in coming to
+Marmion; she asked him neither when he had arrived nor how long he
+intended to stay. His allusion to his cousinship with Miss Chancellor
+might have served to her mind as a reason; yet, on the other hand, it
+would have been open to her to wonder why, if he had come to see the
+young ladies from Charles Street, he was not in more of a hurry to
+present himself. It was plain Doctor Prance didn't go into that kind of
+analysis. If Ransom had complained to her of a sore throat she would
+have inquired with precision about his symptoms; but she was incapable
+of asking him any question with a social bearing. Sociably enough,
+however, they continued to wander through the principal street of the
+little town, darkened in places by immense old elms, which made a
+blackness overhead. There was a salt smell in the air, as if they were
+nearer the water; Doctor Prance said that Olive's house was at the other
+end.
+
+"I shall take it as a kindness if, for this evening, you don't mention
+that you have happened to meet me," Ransom remarked, after a little. He
+had changed his mind about giving notice.
+
+"Well, I wouldn't," his companion replied; as if she didn't need any
+caution in regard to making vain statements.
+
+"I want to keep my arrival a little surprise for to-morrow. It will be a
+great pleasure to me to see Miss Birdseye," he went on, rather
+hypocritically, as if that at bottom had been to his mind the main
+attraction of Marmion.
+
+Doctor Prance did not reveal her private comment, whatever it was, on
+this intimation; she only said, after some hesitation--"Well, I presume
+the old lady will take quite an interest in your being here."
+
+"I have no doubt she is capable even of that degree of philanthropy."
+
+"Well, she has charity for all, but she does--even she--prefer her own
+side. She regards you as quite an acquisition."
+
+Ransom could not but feel flattered at the idea that he had been a
+subject of conversation--as this implied--in the little circle at Miss
+Chancellor's; but he was at a loss, for the moment, to perceive what he
+had done up to this time to gratify the senior member of the group. "I
+hope she will find me an acquisition after I have been here a few days,"
+he said, laughing.
+
+"Well, she thinks you are one of the most important converts yet,"
+Doctor Prance replied, in a colourless way, as if she would not have
+pretended to explain why.
+
+"A convert--me? Do you mean of Miss Tarrant's?" It had come over him
+that Miss Birdseye, in fact, when he was parting with her after their
+meeting in Boston, had assented to his request for secrecy (which at
+first had struck her as somewhat unholy) on the ground that Verena would
+bring him into the fold. He wondered whether that young lady had been
+telling her old friend that she had succeeded with him. He thought this
+improbable; but it didn't matter, and he said, gaily, "Well, I can
+easily let her suppose so!"
+
+It was evident that it would be no easier for Doctor Prance to subscribe
+to a deception than it had been for her venerable patient; but she went
+so far as to reply, "Well, I hope you won't let her suppose you are
+where you were that time I conversed with you. I could see where you
+were then!"
+
+"It was in about the same place you were, wasn't it?"
+
+"Well," said Doctor Prance, with a small sigh, "I am afraid I have moved
+back, if anything!" Her sigh told him a good deal; it seemed a thin,
+self-controlled protest against the tone of Miss Chancellor's interior,
+of which it was her present fortune to form a part: and the way she
+hovered round, indistinct in the gloom, as if she were rather loath to
+resume her place there, completed his impression that the little
+doctress had a line of her own.
+
+"That, at least, must distress Miss Birdseye," he said reproachfully.
+
+"Not much, because I am not of importance. They think women the equals
+of men; but they are a great deal more pleased when a man joins than
+when a woman does."
+
+Ransom complimented Doctor Prance on the lucidity of her mind, and then
+he said: "Is Miss Birdseye really sick? Is her condition very
+precarious?"
+
+"Well, she is very old, and very--very gentle," Doctor Prance answered,
+hesitating a moment for her adjective. "Under those circumstances a
+person may flicker out."
+
+"We must trim the lamp," said Ransom; "I will take my turn, with
+pleasure, in watching the sacred flame."
+
+"It will be a pity if she doesn't live to hear Miss Tarrant's great
+effort," his companion went on.
+
+"Miss Tarrant's? What's that?"
+
+"Well, it's the principal interest, in there." And Doctor Prance now
+vaguely indicated, with a movement of her head, a small white house,
+much detached from its neighbours, which stood on their left, with its
+back to the water, at a little distance from the road. It exhibited more
+signs of animation than any of its fellows; several windows, notably
+those of the ground floor, were open to the warm evening, and a large
+shaft of light was projected upon the grassy wayside in front of it.
+Ransom, in his determination to be discreet, checked the advance of his
+companion, who added presently, with a short, suppressed laugh--"You can
+see it is, from that!" He listened, to ascertain what she meant, and
+after an instant a sound came to his ear--a sound he knew already well,
+which carried the accents of Verena Tarrant, in ample periods and
+cadences, out into the stillness of the August night.
+
+"Murder, what a lovely voice!" he exclaimed involuntarily.
+
+Doctor Prance's eye gleamed towards him a moment, and she observed,
+humorously (she was relaxing immensely), "Perhaps Miss Birdseye is
+right!" Then, as he made no rejoinder, only listening to the vocal
+inflexions that floated out of the house, she went on--"She's practising
+her speech."
+
+"Her speech? Is she going to deliver one here?"
+
+"No, as soon as they go back to town--at the Music Hall."
+
+Ransom's attention was now transferred to his companion. "Is that why
+you call it her great effort?"
+
+"Well, so they think it, I believe. She practises that way every night;
+she reads portions of it aloud to Miss Chancellor and Miss Birdseye."
+
+"And that's the time you choose for your walk?" Ransom said, smiling.
+
+"Well, it's the time my old lady has least need of me; she's too
+absorbed."
+
+Doctor Prance dealt in facts; Ransom had already discovered that; and
+some of her facts were very interesting.
+
+"The Music Hall--isn't that your great building?" he asked.
+
+"Well, it's the biggest we've got; it's pretty big, but it isn't so big
+as Miss Chancellor's ideas," added Doctor Prance. "She has taken it to
+bring out Miss Tarrant before the general public--she has never appeared
+that way in Boston--on a great scale. She expects her to make a big
+sensation. It will be a great night, and they are preparing for it. They
+consider it her real beginning."
+
+"And this is the preparation?" Basil Ransom said.
+
+"Yes; as I say, it's their principal interest."
+
+Ransom listened, and while he listened he meditated. He had thought it
+possible Verena's principles might have been shaken by the profession of
+faith to which he treated her in New York; but this hardly looked like
+it. For some moments Doctor Prance and he stood together in silence.
+
+"You don't hear the words," the doctor remarked, with a smile which, in
+the dark, looked Mephistophelean.
+
+"Oh, I know the words!" the young man exclaimed, with rather a groan, as
+he offered her his hand for good-night.
+
+
+
+
+XXXVI
+
+
+A certain prudence had determined him to put off his visit till the
+morning; he thought it more probable that at that time he should be able
+to see Verena alone, whereas in the evening the two young women would be
+sure to be sitting together. When the morrow dawned, however, Basil
+Ransom felt none of the trepidation of the procrastinator; he knew
+nothing of the reception that awaited him, but he took his way to the
+cottage designated to him over-night by Doctor Prance, with the step of
+a man much more conscious of his own purpose than of possible obstacles.
+He made the reflexion, as he went, that to see a place for the first
+time at night is like reading a foreign author in a translation. At the
+present hour--it was getting towards eleven o'clock--he felt that he was
+dealing with the original. The little straggling, loosely-clustered town
+lay along the edge of a blue inlet, on the other side of which was a
+low, wooded shore, with a gleam of white sand where it touched the
+water. The narrow bay carried the vision outward to a picture that
+seemed at once bright and dim--a shining, slumbering summer sea, and a
+far-off, circling line of coast, which, under the August sun, was hazy
+and delicate. Ransom regarded the place as a town because Doctor Prance
+had called it one; but it was a town where you smelt the breath of the
+hay in the streets and you might gather blackberries in the principal
+square. The houses looked at each other across the grass--low, rusty,
+crooked, distended houses, with dry, cracked faces and the dim eyes of
+small-paned, stiffly-sliding windows. Their little door-yards bristled
+with rank, old-fashioned flowers, mostly yellow; and on the quarter that
+stood back from the sea the fields sloped upward, and the woods in which
+they presently lost themselves looked down over the roofs. Bolts and
+bars were not a part of the domestic machinery of Marmion, and the
+responsive menial, receiving the visitor on the threshold, was a
+creature rather desired than definitely possessed; so that Basil Ransom
+found Miss Chancellor's house-door gaping wide (as he had seen it the
+night before), and destitute even of a knocker or a bell-handle. From
+where he stood in the porch he could see the whole of the little
+sitting-room on the left of the hall--see that it stretched straight
+through to the back windows; that it was garnished with photographs of
+foreign works of art, pinned upon the walls, and enriched with a piano
+and other little extemporised embellishments, such as ingenious women
+lavish upon the houses they hire for a few weeks. Verena told him
+afterwards that Olive had taken her cottage furnished, but that the
+paucity of chairs and tables and bedsteads was such that their little
+party used almost to sit down, to lie down, in turn. On the other hand
+they had all George Eliot's writings, and two photographs of the Sistine
+Madonna. Ransom rapped with his stick on the lintel of the door, but no
+one came to receive him; so he made his way into the parlour, where he
+observed that his cousin Olive had as many German books as ever lying
+about. He dipped into this literature, momentarily, according to his
+wont, and then remembered that this was not what he had come for and
+that as he waited at the door he had seen, through another door, opening
+at the opposite end of the hall, signs of a small verandah attached to
+the other face of the house. Thinking the ladies might be assembled
+there in the shade, he pushed aside the muslin curtain of the back
+window, and saw that the advantages of Miss Chancellor's summer
+residence were in this quarter. There was a verandah, in fact, to which
+a wide, horizontal trellis, covered with an ancient vine, formed a kind
+of extension. Beyond the trellis was a small, lonely garden; beyond the
+garden was a large, vague, woody space, where a few piles of old timber
+were disposed, and which he afterwards learned to be a relic of the
+shipbuilding era described to him by Doctor Prance; and still beyond
+this again was the charming lake-like estuary he had already admired.
+His eyes did not rest upon the distance; they were attracted by a figure
+seated under the trellis, where the chequers of sun, in the interstices
+of the vine leaves, fell upon a bright-coloured rug spread out on the
+ground. The floor of the roughly-constructed verandah was so low that
+there was virtually no difference in the level. It took Ransom only a
+moment to recognise Miss Birdseye, though her back was turned to the
+house. She was alone; she sat there motionless (she had a newspaper in
+her lap, but her attitude was not that of a reader), looking at the
+shimmering bay. She might be asleep; that was why Ransom moderated the
+process of his long legs as he came round through the house to join her.
+This precaution represented his only scruple. He stepped across the
+verandah and stood close to her, but she did not appear to notice him.
+Visibly, she was dozing, or presumably, rather, for her head was
+enveloped in an old faded straw hat, which concealed the upper part of
+her face. There were two or three other chairs near her, and a table on
+which were half-a-dozen books and periodicals, together with a glass
+containing a colourless liquid, on the top of which a spoon was laid.
+Ransom desired only to respect her repose, so he sat down in one of the
+chairs and waited till she should become aware of his presence. He
+thought Miss Chancellor's back-garden a delightful spot, and his jaded
+senses tasted the breeze--the idle, wandering summer wind--that stirred
+the vine leaves over his head. The hazy shores on the other side of the
+water, which had tints more delicate than the street vistas of New York
+(they seemed powdered with silver, a sort of midsummer light), suggested
+to him a land of dreams, a country in a picture. Basil Ransom had seen
+very few pictures, there were none in Mississippi; but he had a vision
+at times of something that would be more refined than the real world,
+and the situation in which he now found himself pleased him almost as
+much as if it had been a striking work of art. He was unable to see, as
+I have said, whether Miss Birdseye were taking in the prospect through
+open or only, imagination aiding (she had plenty of that), through
+closed, tired, dazzled eyes. She appeared to him, as the minutes elapsed
+and he sat beside her, the incarnation of well-earned rest, of patient,
+submissive superannuation. At the end of her long day's work she might
+have been placed there to enjoy this dim prevision of the peaceful
+river, the gleaming shores, of the paradise her unselfish life had
+certainly qualified her to enter, and which, apparently, would so soon
+be opened to her. After a while she said, placidly, without turning:
+
+"I suppose it's about time I should take my remedy again. It does seem
+as if she had found the right thing; don't you think so?"
+
+"Do you mean the contents of that tumbler? I shall be delighted to give
+it to you, and you must tell me how much you take." And Basil Ransom,
+getting up, possessed himself of the glass on the table.
+
+At the sound of his voice Miss Birdseye pushed back her straw hat by a
+movement that was familiar to her, and twisting about her muffled figure
+a little (even in August she felt the cold, and had to be much covered
+up to sit out), directed at him a speculative, unastonished gaze.
+
+"One spoonful--two?" Ransom asked, stirring the dose and smiling.
+
+"Well, I guess I'll take two this time."
+
+"Certainly, Doctor Prance couldn't help finding the right thing," Ransom
+said, as he administered the medicine; while the movement with which she
+extended her face to take it made her seem doubly childlike.
+
+He put down the glass, and she relapsed into her position; she seemed to
+be considering. "It's homeopathic," she remarked, in a moment.
+
+"Oh, I have no doubt of that; I presume you wouldn't take anything
+else."
+
+"Well, it's generally admitted now to be the true system."
+
+Ransom moved closer to her, placed himself where she could see him
+better. "It's a great thing to have the true system," he said, bending
+towards her in a friendly way; "I'm sure you have it in everything." He
+was not often hypocritical; but when he was he went all lengths.
+
+"Well, I don't know that any one has a right to say that. I thought you
+were Verena," she added in a moment, taking him in again with her mild,
+deliberate vision.
+
+"I have been waiting for you to recognise me; of course you didn't know
+I was here--I only arrived last night."
+
+"Well, I'm glad you have come to see Olive now."
+
+"You remember that I wouldn't do that when I met you last?"
+
+"You asked me not to mention to her that I had met you; that's what I
+principally recall."
+
+"And don't you remember what I told you I wanted to do? I wanted to go
+out to Cambridge and see Miss Tarrant. Thanks to the information that
+you were so good as to give me, I was able to do so."
+
+"Yes, she gave me quite a little description of your visit," said Miss
+Birdseye, with a smile and a vague sound in her throat--a sort of
+pensive, private reference to the idea of laughter--of which Ransom
+never learned the exact significance, though he retained for a long time
+afterwards a kindly memory of the old lady's manner at the moment.
+
+"I don't know how much she enjoyed it, but it was an immense pleasure to
+me; so great a one that, as you see, I have come to call upon her
+again."
+
+"Then, I presume, she _has_ shaken you?"
+
+"She has shaken me tremendously!" said Ransom, laughing.
+
+"Well, you'll be a great addition," Miss Birdseye returned. "And this
+time your visit is also for Miss Chancellor?"
+
+"That depends on whether she will receive me."
+
+"Well, if she knows you are shaken, that will go a great way," said Miss
+Birdseye, a little musingly, as if even to her unsophisticated mind it
+had been manifested that one's relations with Miss Chancellor might be
+ticklish. "But she can't receive you now--can she?--because she's out.
+She has gone to the post office for the Boston letters, and they get so
+many every day that she had to take Verena with her to help her carry
+them home. One of them wanted to stay with me, because Doctor Prance has
+gone fishing, but I said I presumed I could be left alone for about
+seven minutes. I know how they love to be together; it seems as if one
+_couldn't_ go out without the other. That's what they came down here
+for, because it's quiet, and it didn't look as if there was any one else
+they would be much drawn to. So it would be a pity for me to come down
+after them just to spoil it!"
+
+"I am afraid I shall spoil it, Miss Birdseye."
+
+"Oh, well, a gentleman," murmured the ancient woman.
+
+"Yes, what can you expect of a gentleman? I certainly shall spoil it if
+I can."
+
+"You had better go fishing with Doctor Prance," said Miss Birdseye, with
+a serenity which showed that she was far from measuring the sinister
+quality of the announcement he had just made.
+
+"I shan't object to that at all. The days here must be very long--very
+full of hours. Have you got the doctor with you?" Ransom inquired, as if
+he knew nothing at all about her.
+
+"Yes, Miss Chancellor invited us both; she is very thoughtful. She is
+not merely a theoretic philanthropist--she goes into details," said Miss
+Birdseye, presenting her large person, in her chair, as if she herself
+were only an item. "It seems as if we were not so much wanted in Boston,
+just in August."
+
+"And here you sit and enjoy the breeze, and admire the view," the young
+man remarked, wondering when the two messengers, whose seven minutes
+must long since have expired, would return from the post office.
+
+"Yes, I enjoy everything in this little old-world place; I didn't
+suppose I should be satisfied to be so passive. It's a great contrast to
+my former exertions. But somehow it doesn't seem as if there were any
+trouble, or any wrong round here; and if there should be, there are Miss
+Chancellor and Miss Tarrant to look after it. They seem to think I had
+better fold my hands. Besides, when helpful, generous minds begin to
+flock in from _your_ part of the country," Miss Birdseye continued,
+looking at him from under the distorted and discoloured canopy of her
+hat with a benignity which completed the idea in any cheerful sense he
+chose.
+
+He felt by this time that he was committed to rather a dishonest part;
+he was pledged not to give a shock to her optimism. This might cost him,
+in the coming days, a good deal of dissimulation, but he was now saved
+from any further expenditure of ingenuity by certain warning sounds
+which admonished him that he must keep his wits about him for a purpose
+more urgent. There were voices in the hall of the house, voices he knew,
+which came nearer, quickly; so that before he had time to rise one of
+the speakers had come out with the exclamation--"Dear Miss Birdseye,
+here are seven letters for you!" The words fell to the ground, indeed,
+before they were fairly spoken, and when Ransom got up, turning, he saw
+Olive Chancellor standing there, with the parcel from the post office in
+her hand. She stared at him in sudden horror; for the moment her
+self-possession completely deserted her. There was so little of any
+greeting in her face save the greeting of dismay, that he felt there was
+nothing for him to say to her, nothing that could mitigate the odious
+fact of his being there. He could only let her take it in, let her
+divine that, this time, he was not to be got rid of. In an instant--to
+ease off the situation--he held out his hand for Miss Birdseye's
+letters, and it was a proof of Olive's having turned rather faint and
+weak that she gave them up to him. He delivered the packet to the old
+lady, and now Verena had appeared in the doorway of the house. As soon
+as she saw him, she blushed crimson; but she did not, like Olive, stand
+voiceless.
+
+"Why, Mr. Ransom," she cried out, "where in the world were _you_ washed
+ashore?" Miss Birdseye, meanwhile, taking her letters, had no appearance
+of observing that the encounter between Olive and her visitor was a kind
+of concussion.
+
+It was Verena who eased off the situation; her gay challenge rose to her
+lips as promptly as if she had had no cause for embarrassment. She was
+not confused even when she blushed, and her alertness may perhaps be
+explained by the habit of public speaking. Ransom smiled at her while
+she came forward, but he spoke first to Olive, who had already turned
+her eyes away from him and gazed at the blue sea-view as if she were
+wondering what was going to happen to her at last.
+
+"Of course you are very much surprised to see me; but I hope to be able
+to induce you to regard me not absolutely in the light of an intruder. I
+found your door open, and I walked in, and Miss Birdseye seemed to think
+I might stay. Miss Birdseye, I put myself under your protection; I
+invoke you; I appeal to you," the young man went on. "Adopt me, answer
+for me, cover me with the mantle of your charity!"
+
+Miss Birdseye looked up from her letters, as if at first she had only
+faintly heard his appeal. She turned her eyes from Olive to Verena; then
+she said, "Doesn't it seem as if we had room for all? When I remember
+what I have seen in the South, Mr. Ransom's being here strikes me as a
+great triumph."
+
+Olive evidently failed to understand, and Verena broke in with
+eagerness, "It was by my letter, of course, that you knew we were here.
+The one I wrote just before we came, Olive," she went on. "Don't you
+remember I showed it to you?"
+
+At the mention of this act of submission on her friend's part Olive
+started, flashing her a strange look; then she said to Basil that she
+didn't see why he should explain so much about his coming; every one had
+a right to come. It was a very charming place; it ought to do any one
+good. "But it will have one defect for you," she added; "three-quarters
+of the summer residents are women!"
+
+This attempted pleasantry on Miss Chancellor's part, so unexpected, so
+incongruous, uttered with white lips and cold eyes, struck Ransom to
+that degree by its oddity that he could not resist exchanging a glance
+of wonder with Verena, who, if she had had the opportunity, could
+probably have explained to him the phenomenon. Olive had recovered
+herself, reminded herself that she was safe, that her companion in New
+York had repudiated, denounced her pursuer; and, as a proof to her own
+sense of her security, as well as a touching mark to Verena that now,
+after what had passed, she had no fear, she felt that a certain light
+mockery would be effective.
+
+"Ah, Miss Olive, don't pretend to think I love your sex so little, when
+you know that what you really object to in me is that I love it too
+much!" Ransom was not brazen, he was not impudent, he was really a very
+modest man; but he was aware that whatever he said or did he was
+condemned to seem impudent now, and he argued within himself that if he
+was to have the dishonour of being thought brazen he might as well have
+the comfort. He didn't care a straw, in truth, how he was judged or how
+he might offend; he had a purpose which swallowed up such inanities as
+that, and he was so full of it that it kept him firm, balanced him, gave
+him an assurance that might easily have been confounded with a cold
+detachment. "This place will do me good," he pursued; "I haven't had a
+holiday for more than two years, I couldn't have gone another day; I was
+finished. I would have written to you beforehand that I was coming, but
+I only started at a few hours' notice. It occurred to me that this would
+be just what I wanted; I remembered what Miss Tarrant had said in her
+note, that it was a place where people could lie on the ground and wear
+their old clothes. I delight to lie on the ground, and all my clothes
+are old. I hope to be able to stay three or four weeks."
+
+Olive listened till he had done speaking; she stood a single moment
+longer, and then, without a word, a glance, she rushed into the house.
+Ransom saw that Miss Birdseye was immersed in her letters; so he went
+straight to Verena and stood before her, looking far into her eyes. He
+was not smiling now, as he had been in speaking to Olive. "Will you come
+somewhere apart, where I can speak to you alone?"
+
+"Why have you done this? It was not right in you to come!" Verena looked
+still as if she were blushing, but Ransom perceived he must allow for
+her having been delicately scorched by the sun.
+
+"I have come because it is necessary--because I have something very
+important to say to you. A great number of things."
+
+"The same things you said in New York? I don't want to hear them
+again--they were horrible!"
+
+"No, not the same--different ones. I want you to come out with me, away
+from here."
+
+"You always want me to come out! We can't go out here; we _are_ out, as
+much as we can be!" Verena laughed. She tried to turn it off--feeling
+that something really impended.
+
+"Come down into the garden, and out beyond there--to the water, where we
+can speak. It's what I have come for; it was not for what I told Miss
+Olive!"
+
+He had lowered his voice, as if Miss Olive might still hear them, and
+there was something strangely grave--altogether solemn, indeed--in its
+tone. Verena looked around her, at the splendid summer day, at the
+much-swathed, formless figure of Miss Birdseye, holding her letter
+inside her hat. "Mr. Ransom!" she articulated then, simply; and as her
+eyes met his again they showed him a couple of tears.
+
+"It's not to make you suffer, I honestly believe. I don't want to say
+anything that will hurt you. How can I possibly hurt you, when I feel to
+you as I do?" he went on, with suppressed force.
+
+She said no more, but all her face entreated him to let her off, to
+spare her; and as this look deepened, a quick sense of elation and
+success began to throb in his heart, for it told him exactly what he
+wanted to know. It told him that she was afraid of him, that she had
+ceased to trust herself, that the way he had read her nature was the
+right way (she was tremendously open to attack, she was meant for love,
+she was meant for him), and that his arriving at the point at which he
+wished to arrive was only a question of time. This happy consciousness
+made him extraordinarily tender to her; he couldn't put enough
+reassurance into his smile, his low murmur, as he said: "Only give me
+ten minutes; don't receive me by turning me away. It's my holiday--my
+poor little holiday; don't spoil it."
+
+Three minutes later Miss Birdseye, looking up from her letter, saw them
+move together through the bristling garden and traverse a gap in the old
+fence which enclosed the further side of it. They passed into the
+ancient shipyard which lay beyond, and which was now a mere vague,
+grass-grown approach to the waterside, bestrewn with a few remnants of
+supererogatory timber. She saw them stroll forward to the edge of the
+bay and stand there, taking the soft breeze in their faces. She watched
+them a little, and it warmed her heart to see the stiff-necked young
+Southerner led captive by a daughter of New England trained in the right
+school, who would impose her opinions in their integrity. Considering
+how prejudiced he must have been he was certainly behaving very well;
+even at that distance Miss Birdseye dimly made out that there was
+something positively humble in the way he invited Verena Tarrant to seat
+herself on a low pile of weather-blackened planks, which constituted the
+principal furniture of the place, and something, perhaps, just a trifle
+too expressive of righteous triumph in the manner in which the girl put
+the suggestion by and stood where she liked, a little proudly, turning a
+good deal away from him. Miss Birdseye could see as much as this, but
+she couldn't hear, so that she didn't know what it was that made Verena
+turn suddenly back to him, at something he said. If she had known,
+perhaps his observation would have struck her as less singular--under
+the circumstances in which these two young persons met--than it may
+appear to the reader.
+
+"They have accepted one of my articles; I think it's the best." These
+were the first words that passed Basil Ransom's lips after the pair had
+withdrawn as far as it was possible to withdraw (in that direction) from
+the house.
+
+"Oh, is it printed--when does it appear?" Verena asked that question
+instantly; it sprang from her lips in a manner that completely belied
+the air of keeping herself at a distance from him which she had worn a
+few moments before.
+
+He didn't tell her again this time, as he had told her when, on the
+occasion of their walk together in New York, she expressed an
+inconsequent hope that his fortune as a rejected contributor would take
+a turn--he didn't remark to her once more that she was a delightful
+being; he only went on (as if her revulsion were a matter of course) to
+explain everything he could, so that she might as soon as possible know
+him better and see how completely she could trust him. "That was, at
+bottom, the reason I came here. The essay in question is the most
+important thing I have done in the way of a literary attempt, and I
+determined to give up the game or to persist, according as I should be
+able to bring it to the light or not. The other day I got a letter from
+the editor of the _Rational Review_, telling me that he should be very
+happy to print it, that he thought it very remarkable, and that he
+should be glad to hear from me again. He shall hear from me again--he
+needn't be afraid! It contained a good many of the opinions I have
+expressed to you, and a good many more besides. I really believe it will
+attract some attention. At any rate, the simple fact that it is to be
+published makes an era in my life. This will seem pitiful to you, no
+doubt, who publish yourself, have been before the world these several
+years, and are flushed with every kind of triumph; but to me it's simply
+a tremendous affair. It makes me believe I may do something; it has
+changed the whole way I look at my future. I have been building castles
+in the air, and I have put you in the biggest and fairest of them.
+That's a great change, and, as I say, it's really why I came on."
+
+Verena lost not a word of this gentle, conciliatory, explicit statement;
+it was full of surprises for her, and as soon as Ransom had stopped
+speaking she inquired: "Why, didn't you feel satisfied about your future
+before?"
+
+Her tone made him feel how little she had suspected he could have the
+weakness of a discouragement, how little of a question it must have
+seemed to her that he would one day triumph on his own erratic line. It
+was the sweetest tribute he had yet received to the idea that he might
+have ability; the letter of the editor of the _Rational Review_ was
+nothing to it. "No, I felt very blue; it didn't seem to me at all clear
+that there was a place for me in the world."
+
+"Gracious!" said Verena Tarrant.
+
+A quarter of an hour later Miss Birdseye, who had returned to her
+letters (she had a correspondent at Framingham who usually wrote fifteen
+pages), became aware that Verena, who was now alone, was re-entering the
+house. She stopped her on her way, and said she hoped she hadn't pushed
+Mr. Ransom overboard.
+
+"Oh no; he has gone off--round the other way."
+
+"Well, I hope he is going to speak for us soon."
+
+Verena hesitated a moment. "He speaks with the pen. He has written a
+very fine article--for the _Rational Review_."
+
+Miss Birdseye gazed at her young friend complacently; the sheets of her
+interminable letter fluttered in the breeze. "Well, it's delightful to
+see the way it goes on, isn't it?"
+
+Verena scarcely knew what to say; then, remembering that Doctor Prance
+had told her that they might lose their dear old companion any day, and
+confronting it with something Basil Ransom had just said--that the
+_Rational Review_ was a quarterly and the editor had notified him that
+his article would appear only in the number after the next--she
+reflected that perhaps Miss Birdseye wouldn't be there, so many months
+later, to see how it was her supposed consort had spoken. She might,
+therefore, be left to believe what she liked to believe, without fear of
+a day of reckoning. Verena committed herself to nothing more
+confirmatory than a kiss, however, which the old lady's displaced
+head-gear enabled her to imprint upon her forehead and which caused Miss
+Birdseye to exclaim, "Why, Verena Tarrant, how cold your lips are!" It
+was not surprising to Verena to hear that her lips were cold; a mortal
+chill had crept over her, for she knew that this time she should have a
+tremendous scene with Olive.
+
+She found her in her room, to which she had fled on quitting Mr.
+Ransom's presence; she sat in the window, having evidently sunk into a
+chair the moment she came in, a position from which she must have seen
+Verena walk through the garden and down to the water with the intruder.
+She remained as she had collapsed, quite prostrate; her attitude was the
+same as that other time Verena had found her waiting, in New York. What
+Olive was likely to say to her first the girl scarcely knew; her mind,
+at any rate, was full of an intention of her own. She went straight to
+her and fell on her knees before her, taking hold of the hands which
+were clasped together, with nervous intensity, in Miss Chancellor's lap.
+Verena remained a moment, looking up at her, and then said:
+
+"There is something I want to tell you now, without a moment's delay;
+something I didn't tell you at the time it happened, nor afterwards. Mr.
+Ransom came out to see me once, at Cambridge, a little while before we
+went to New York. He spent a couple of hours with me; we took a walk
+together and saw the colleges. It was after that that he wrote to
+me--when I answered his letter, as I told you in New York. I didn't tell
+you then of his visit. We had a great deal of talk about him, and I kept
+that back. I did so on purpose; I can't explain why, except that I
+didn't like to tell you, and that I thought it better. But now I want
+you to know everything; when you know that, you _will_ know everything.
+It was only one visit--about two hours. I enjoyed it very much--he
+seemed so much interested. One reason I didn't tell you was that I
+didn't want you to know that he had come on to Boston, and called on me
+in Cambridge, without going to see you. I thought it might affect you
+disagreeably. I suppose you will think I deceived you; certainly I left
+you with a wrong impression. But now I want you to know all--all!"
+
+Verena spoke with breathless haste and eagerness; there was a kind of
+passion in the way she tried to expiate her former want of candour.
+Olive listened, staring; at first she seemed scarcely to understand. But
+Verena perceived that she understood sufficiently when she broke out:
+"You deceived me--you deceived me! Well, I must say I like your deceit
+better than such dreadful revelations! And what does anything matter
+when he has come after you now? What does he want--what has he come
+for?"
+
+"He has come to ask me to be his wife."
+
+Verena said this with the same eagerness, with as determined an air of
+not incurring any reproach this time. But as soon as she had spoken she
+buried her head in Olive's lap.
+
+Olive made no attempt to raise it again, and returned none of the
+pressure of her hands; she only sat silent for a time, during which
+Verena wondered that the idea of the episode at Cambridge, laid bare
+only after so many months, should not have struck her more deeply.
+Presently she saw it was because the horror of what had just happened
+drew her off from it. At last Olive asked: "Is that what he told you,
+off there by the water?"
+
+"Yes"--and Verena looked up--"he wanted me to know it right away. He
+says it's only fair to you that he should give notice of his intentions.
+He wants to try and make me like him--so he says. He wants to see more
+of me, and he wants me to know him better."
+
+Olive lay back in her chair, with dilated eyes and parted lips. "Verena
+Tarrant, what _is_ there between you? what _can_ I hold on to, what
+_can_ I believe? Two hours, in Cambridge, before we went to New York?"
+The sense that Verena had been perfidious there--perfidious in her
+reticence--now began to roll over her. "Mercy of heaven, how you did
+act!"
+
+"Olive, it was to spare you."
+
+"To spare me? If you really wished to spare me he wouldn't be here now!"
+
+Miss Chancellor flashed this out with a sudden violence, a spasm which
+threw Verena off and made her rise to her feet. For an instant the two
+young women stood confronted, and a person who had seen them at that
+moment might have taken them for enemies rather than friends. But any
+such opposition could last but a few seconds. Verena replied, with a
+tremor in her voice which was not that of passion, but of charity: "Do
+you mean that I expected him, that I brought him? I never in my life was
+more surprised at anything than when I saw him there."
+
+"Hasn't he the delicacy of one of his own slave-drivers? Doesn't he know
+you loathe him?"
+
+Verena looked at her friend with a degree of majesty which, with her,
+was rare. "I don't loathe him--I only dislike his opinions."
+
+"Dislike! Oh, misery!" And Olive turned away to the open window, leaning
+her forehead against the lifted sash.
+
+Verena hesitated, then went to her, passing her arm round her. "Don't
+scold me! help me--help me!" she murmured.
+
+Olive gave her a sidelong look; then, catching her up and facing her
+again--"Will you come away, now, by the next train?"
+
+"Flee from him again, as I did in New York? No, no, Olive Chancellor,
+that's not the way," Verena went on, reasoningly, as if all the wisdom
+of the ages were seated on her lips. "Then how can we leave Miss
+Birdseye, in her state? We must stay here--we must fight it out here."
+
+"Why not be honest, if you have been false--really honest, not only half
+so? Why not tell him plainly that you love him?"
+
+"Love him, Olive? why, I scarcely know him."
+
+"You'll have a chance, if he stays a month!"
+
+"I don't dislike him, certainly, as you do. But how can I love him when
+he tells me he wants me to give up everything, all our work, our faith,
+our future, never to give another address, to open my lips in public?
+How can I consent to that?" Verena went on, smiling strangely.
+
+"He asks you that, just that way?"
+
+"No; it's not that way. It's very kindly."
+
+"Kindly? Heaven help you, don't grovel! Doesn't he know it's my house?"
+Olive added, in a moment.
+
+"Of course he won't come into it, if you forbid him."
+
+"So that you may meet him in other places--on the shore, in the
+country?"
+
+"I certainly shan't avoid him, hide away from him," said Verena proudly.
+"I thought I made you believe, in New York, that I really cared for our
+aspirations. The way for me then is to meet him, feeling conscious of my
+strength. What if I do like him? what does it matter? I like my work in
+the world, I like everything I believe in, better."
+
+Olive listened to this, and the memory of how, in the house in Tenth
+Street, Verena had rebuked her doubts, professed her own faith anew,
+came back to her with a force which made the present situation appear
+slightly less terrific. Nevertheless, she gave no assent to the girl's
+logic; she only replied: "But you didn't meet him there; you hurried
+away from New York, after I was willing you should stay. He affected you
+very much there; you were not so calm when you came back to me from your
+expedition to the park as you pretend to be now. To get away from him
+you gave up all the rest."
+
+"I know I wasn't so calm. But now I have had three months to think about
+it--about the way he affected me there. I take it very quietly."
+
+"No, you don't; you are not calm now!"
+
+Verena was silent a moment, while Olive's eyes continued to search her,
+accuse her, condemn her. "It's all the more reason you shouldn't give me
+stab after stab," she replied, with a gentleness which was infinitely
+touching.
+
+It had an instant effect upon Olive; she burst into tears, threw herself
+on her friend's bosom. "Oh, don't desert me--don't desert me, or you'll
+kill me in torture," she moaned, shuddering.
+
+"You must help me--you must help me!" cried Verena, imploringly too.
+
+
+
+
+XXXVII
+
+
+Basil Ransom spent nearly a month at Marmion; in announcing this fact I
+am very conscious of its extraordinary character. Poor Olive may well
+have been thrown back into her alarms by his presenting himself there;
+for after her return from New York she took to her soul the conviction
+that she had really done with him. Not only did the impulse of revulsion
+under which Verena had demanded that their departure from Tenth Street
+should be immediate appear to her a proof that it had been sufficient
+for her young friend to touch Mr. Ransom's moral texture with her
+finger, as it were, in order to draw back for ever; but what she had
+learned from her companion of his own manifestations, his apparent
+disposition to throw up the game, added to her feeling of security. He
+had spoken to Verena of their little excursion as his last opportunity,
+let her know that he regarded it not as the beginning of a more intimate
+acquaintance but as the end even of such relations as already existed
+between them. He gave her up, for reasons best known to himself; if he
+wanted to frighten Olive he judged that he had frightened her enough:
+his Southern chivalry suggested to him perhaps that he ought to let her
+off before he had worried her to death. Doubtless, too, he had perceived
+how vain it was to hope to make Verena abjure a faith so solidly
+founded; and though he admired her enough to wish to possess her on his
+own terms, he shrank from the mortification which the future would have
+in keeping for him--that of finding that, after six months of courting
+and in spite of all her sympathy, her desire to do what people expected
+of her, she despised his opinions as much as the first day. Olive
+Chancellor was able to a certain extent to believe what she wished to
+believe, and that was one reason why she had twisted Verena's flight
+from New York, just after she let her friend see how much she should
+like to drink deeper of the cup, into a warrant for living in a fool's
+paradise. If she had been less afraid, she would have read things more
+clearly; she would have seen that we don't run away from people unless
+we fear them and that we don't fear them unless we know that we are
+unarmed. Verena feared Basil Ransom now (though this time she declined
+to run); but now she had taken up her weapons, she had told Olive she
+was exposed, she had asked _her_ to be her defence. Poor Olive was
+stricken as she had never been before, but the extremity of her danger
+gave her a desperate energy. The only comfort in her situation was that
+this time Verena had confessed her peril, had thrown herself into her
+hands. "I like him--I can't help it--I do like him. I don't want to
+marry him, I don't want to embrace his ideas, which are unspeakably
+false and horrible; but I like him better than any gentleman I have
+seen." So much as this the girl announced to her friend as soon as the
+conversation of which I have just given a sketch was resumed, as it was
+very soon, you may be sure, and very often, in the course of the next
+few days. That was her way of saying that a great crisis had arrived in
+her life, and the statement needed very little amplification to stand as
+a shy avowal that she too had succumbed to the universal passion. Olive
+had had her suspicions, her terrors, before; but she perceived now how
+idle and foolish they had been, and that this was a different affair
+from any of the "phases" of which she had hitherto anxiously watched the
+development. As I say, she felt it to be a considerable mercy that
+Verena's attitude was frank, for it gave her something to take hold of;
+she could no longer be put off with sophistries about receiving visits
+from handsome and unscrupulous young men for the sake of the
+opportunities it gave one to convert them. She took hold, accordingly,
+with passion, with fury; after the shock of Ransom's arrival had passed
+away she determined that he should not find her chilled into dumb
+submission. Verena had told her that she wanted her to hold her tight,
+to rescue her; and there was no fear that, for an instant, she should
+sleep at her post.
+
+"I like him--I like him; but I want to hate----"
+
+"You want to hate him!" Olive broke in.
+
+"No, I want to hate my liking. I want you to keep before me all the
+reasons why I should--many of them so fearfully important. Don't let me
+lose sight of anything! Don't be afraid I shall not be grateful when you
+remind me."
+
+That was one of the singular speeches that Verena made in the course of
+their constant discussion of the terrible question, and it must be
+confessed that she made a great many. The strangest of all was when she
+protested, as she did again and again to Olive, against the idea of
+their seeking safety in retreat. She said there was a want of dignity in
+it--that she had been ashamed, afterwards, of what she had done in
+rushing away from New York. This care for her moral appearance was, on
+Verena's part, something new; inasmuch as, though she had struck that
+note on previous occasions--had insisted on its being her duty to face
+the accidents and alarms of life--she had never erected such a standard
+in the face of a disaster so sharply possible. It was not her habit
+either to talk or to think about her dignity, and when Olive found her
+taking that tone she felt more than ever that the dreadful, ominous,
+fatal part of the situation was simply that now, for the first time in
+all the history of their sacred friendship, Verena was not sincere. She
+was not sincere when she told her that she wanted to be helped against
+Mr. Ransom--when she exhorted her, that way, to keep everything that was
+salutary and fortifying before her eyes. Olive did not go so far as to
+believe that she was playing a part and putting her off with words
+which, glossing over her treachery, only made it more cruel; she would
+have admitted that that treachery was as yet unwitting, that Verena
+deceived herself first of all, thinking she really wished to be saved.
+Her phrases about her dignity were insincere, as well as her pretext
+that they must stay to look after Miss Birdseye: as if Doctor Prance
+were not abundantly able to discharge that function and would not be
+enchanted to get them out of the house! Olive had perfectly divined by
+this time that Doctor Prance had no sympathy with their movement, no
+general ideas; that she was simply shut up to petty questions of
+physiological science and of her own professional activity. She would
+never have invited her down if she had realised this in advance so much
+as the doctor's dry detachment from all their discussions, their
+readings and practisings, her constant expeditions to fish and botanise,
+subsequently enabled her to do. She was very narrow, but it did seem as
+if she knew more about Miss Birdseye's peculiar physical
+conditions--they were _very_ peculiar--than any one else, and this was a
+comfort at a time when that admirable woman seemed to be suffering a
+loss of vitality.
+
+"The great point is that it must be met some time, and it will be a
+tremendous relief to have it over. He is determined to have it out with
+me, and if the battle doesn't come off to-day we shall have to fight it
+to-morrow. I don't see why this isn't as good a time as any other. My
+lecture for the Music Hall is as good as finished, and I haven't got
+anything else to do; so I can give all my attention to our personal
+struggle. It requires a good deal, you would admit, if you knew how
+wonderfully he can talk. If we should leave this place to-morrow he
+would come after us to the very next one. He would follow us everywhere.
+A little while ago we could have escaped him, because he says that then
+he had no money. He hasn't got much now, but he has got enough to pay
+his way. He is so encouraged by the reception of his article by the
+editor of the _Rational Review_, that he is sure that in future his pen
+will be a resource."
+
+These remarks were uttered by Verena after Basil Ransom had been three
+days at Marmion, and when she reached this point her companion
+interrupted her with the inquiry, "Is that what he proposes to support
+you with--his pen?"
+
+"Oh yes; of course he admits we should be terribly poor."
+
+"And this vision of a literary career is based entirely upon an article
+that hasn't yet seen the light? I don't see how a man of any refinement
+can approach a woman with so beggarly an account of his position in
+life."
+
+"He says he wouldn't--he would have been ashamed--three months ago; that
+was why, when we were in New York, and he felt, even then--well (so he
+says) all he feels now, he made up his mind not to persist, to let me
+go. But just lately a change has taken place; his state of mind altered
+completely, in the course of a week, in consequence of the letter that
+editor wrote him about his contribution, and his paying for it right
+off. It was a remarkably flattering letter. He says he believes in his
+future now; he has before him a vision of distinction, of influence, and
+of fortune, not great, perhaps, but sufficient to make life tolerable.
+He doesn't think life is very delightful, in the nature of things; but
+one of the best things a man can do with it is to get hold of some woman
+(of course, she must please him very much, to make it worth while) whom
+he may draw close to him."
+
+"And couldn't he get hold of any one but you--among all the exposed
+millions of our sex?" poor Olive groaned. "Why must he pick you out,
+when everything he knew about you showed you to be, exactly, the very
+last?"
+
+"That's just what I have asked him, and he only remarks that there is no
+reasoning about such things. He fell in love with me that first evening,
+at Miss Birdseye's. So you see there was some ground for that mystic
+apprehension of yours. It seems as if I pleased him more than any one."
+
+Olive flung herself over on the couch, burying her face in the cushions,
+which she tumbled in her despair, and moaning out that he didn't love
+Verena, he never had loved her, it was only his hatred of their cause
+that made him pretend it; he wanted to do that an injury, to do it the
+worst he could think of. He didn't love her, he hated her, he only
+wanted to smother her, to crush her, to kill her--as she would
+infallibly see that he would if she listened to him. It was because he
+knew that her voice had magic in it, and from the moment he caught its
+first note he had determined to destroy it. It was not tenderness that
+moved him--it was devilish malignity; tenderness would be incapable of
+requiring the horrible sacrifice that he was not ashamed to ask, of
+requiring her to commit perjury and blasphemy, to desert a work, an
+interest, with which her very heart-strings were interlaced, to give the
+lie to her whole young past, to her purest, holiest ambitions. Olive put
+forward no claim of her own, breathed, at first, at least, not a word of
+remonstrance in the name of her personal loss, of their blighted union;
+she only dwelt upon the unspeakable tragedy of a defection from their
+standard, of a failure on Verena's part to carry out what she had
+undertaken, of the horror of seeing her bright career blotted out with
+darkness and tears, of the joy and elation that would fill the breast of
+all their adversaries at this illustrious, consummate proof of the
+fickleness, the futility, the predestined servility, of women. A man had
+only to whistle for her, and she who had pretended most was delighted to
+come and kneel at his feet. Olive's most passionate protest was summed
+up in her saying that if Verena were to forsake them it would put back
+the emancipation of women a hundred years. She did not, during these
+dreadful days, talk continuously; she had long periods of pale,
+intensely anxious, watchful silence, interrupted by outbreaks of
+passionate argument, entreaty, invocation. It was Verena who talked
+incessantly, Verena who was in a state entirely new to her, and, as any
+one could see, in an attitude entirely unnatural and overdone. If she
+was deceiving herself, as Olive said, there was something very affecting
+in her effort, her ingenuity. If she tried to appear to Olive impartial,
+coldly judicious, in her attitude with regard to Basil Ransom, and only
+anxious to see, for the moral satisfaction of the thing, how good a
+case, as a lover, he might make out for himself and how much he might
+touch her susceptibilities, she endeavoured, still more earnestly, to
+practise this fraud upon her own imagination. She abounded in every
+proof that she should be in despair if she should be overborne, and she
+thought of arguments even more convincing, if possible, than Olive's,
+why she should hold on to her old faith, why she should resist even at
+the cost of acute temporary suffering. She was voluble, fluent,
+feverish; she was perpetually bringing up the subject, as if to
+encourage her friend, to show how she kept possession of her judgement,
+how independent she remained.
+
+No stranger situation can be imagined than that of these extraordinary
+young women at this juncture; it was so singular on Verena's part, in
+particular, that I despair of presenting it to the reader with the air
+of reality. To understand it, one must bear in mind her peculiar
+frankness, natural and acquired, her habit of discussing questions,
+sentiments, moralities, her education, in the atmosphere of
+lecture-rooms, of _seances_, her familiarity with the vocabulary of
+emotion, the mysteries of "the spiritual life." She had learned to
+breathe and move in a rarefied air, as she would have learned to speak
+Chinese if her success in life had depended upon it; but this dazzling
+trick, and all her artlessly artful facilities, were not a part of her
+essence, an expression of her innermost preferences. What _was_ a part
+of her essence was the extraordinary generosity with which she could
+expose herself, give herself away, turn herself inside out, for the
+satisfaction of a person who made demands of her. Olive, as we know, had
+made the reflexion that no one was naturally less preoccupied with the
+idea of her dignity, and though Verena put it forward as an excuse for
+remaining where they were, it must be admitted that in reality she was
+very deficient in the desire to be consistent with herself. Olive had
+contributed with all her zeal to the development of Verena's gift; but I
+scarcely venture to think now, what she may have said to herself, in the
+secrecy of deep meditation, about the consequences of cultivating an
+abundant eloquence. Did she say that Verena was attempting to smother
+her now in her own phrases? did she view with dismay the fatal effect of
+trying to have an answer for everything? From Olive's condition during
+these lamentable weeks there is a certain propriety--a delicacy enjoined
+by the respect for misfortune--in averting our head. She neither ate nor
+slept; she could scarcely speak without bursting into tears; she felt so
+implacably, insidiously baffled. She remembered the magnanimity with
+which she had declined (the winter before the last) to receive the vow
+of eternal maidenhood which she had at first demanded and then put by as
+too crude a test, but which Verena, for a precious hour, for ever flown,
+would _then_ have been willing to take. She repented of it with
+bitterness and rage; and then she asked herself, more desperately still,
+whether even if she held that pledge she should be brave enough to
+enforce it in the face of actual complications. She believed that if it
+were in her power to say, "No, I won't let you off; I have your solemn
+word, and I won't!" Verena would bow to that decree and remain with her;
+but the magic would have passed out of her spirit for ever, the
+sweetness out of their friendship, the efficacy out of their work. She
+said to her again and again that she had utterly changed since that hour
+she came to her, in New York, after her morning with Mr. Ransom, and
+sobbed out that they must hurry away. Then she had been wounded,
+outraged, sickened, and in the interval nothing had happened, nothing
+but that one exchange of letters, which she knew about, to bring her
+round to a shameless tolerance. Shameless Verena admitted it to be; she
+assented over and over to this proposition, and explained, as eagerly
+each time as if it were the first, what it was that had come to pass,
+what it was that had brought her round. It had simply come over her that
+she liked him, that this was the true point of view, the only one from
+which one could consider the situation in a way that would lead to what
+she called a _real_ solution--a permanent rest. On this particular point
+Verena never responded, in the liberal way I have mentioned, without
+asseverating at the same time that what she desired most in the world
+was to prove (the picture Olive had held up from the first) that a woman
+_could_ live on persistently, clinging to a great, vivifying, redemptory
+idea, without the help of a man. To testify to the end against the stale
+superstition--mother of every misery--that those gentry were as
+indispensable as they had proclaimed themselves on the house-tops--that,
+she passionately protested, was as inspiring a thought in the present
+poignant crisis as it had ever been.
+
+The one grain of comfort that Olive extracted from the terrors that
+pressed upon her was that now she knew the worst; she knew it since
+Verena had told her, after so long and so ominous a reticence, of the
+detestable episode at Cambridge. That seemed to her the worst, because
+it had been thunder in a clear sky; the incident had sprung from a
+quarter from which, months before, all symptoms appeared to have
+vanished. Though Verena had now done all she could to make up for her
+perfidious silence by repeating everything that passed between them as
+she sat with Mr. Ransom in Monadnoc Place or strolled with him through
+the colleges, it imposed itself upon Olive that that occasion was the
+key of all that had happened since, that he had then obtained an
+irremediable hold upon her. If Verena had spoken at the time, she would
+never have let her go to New York; the sole compensation for that
+hideous mistake was that the girl, recognising it to the full, evidently
+deemed now that she couldn't be communicative enough. There were certain
+afternoons in August, long, beautiful and terrible, when one felt that
+the summer was rounding its curve, and the rustle of the full-leaved
+trees in the slanting golden light, in the breeze that ought to be
+delicious, seemed the voice of the coming autumn, of the warnings and
+dangers of life--portentous, insufferable hours when, as she sat under
+the softly swaying vine-leaves of the trellis with Miss Birdseye and
+tried, in order to still her nerves, to read something aloud to her
+guest, the sound of her own quavering voice made her think more of that
+baleful day at Cambridge than even of the fact that at that very moment
+Verena was "off" with Mr. Ransom--had gone to take the little daily walk
+with him to which it had been arranged that their enjoyment of each
+other's society should be reduced. Arranged, I say; but that is not
+exactly the word to describe the compromise arrived at by a kind of
+tacit exchange of tearful entreaty and tightened grasp, after Ransom had
+made it definite to Verena that he was indeed going to stay a month and
+she had promised that she would not resort to base evasions, to flight
+(which would avail her nothing, he notified her), but would give him a
+chance, would listen to him a few minutes every day. He had insisted
+that the few minutes should be an hour, and the way to spend it was
+obvious. They wandered along the waterside to a rocky, shrub-covered
+point, which made a walk of just the right duration. Here all the homely
+languor of the region, the mild, fragrant Cape-quality, the sweetness of
+white sands, quiet waters, low promontories where there were paths among
+the barberries and tidal pools gleamed in the sunset--here all the
+spirit of a ripe summer afternoon seemed to hang in the air. There were
+wood-walks too; they sometimes followed bosky uplands, where accident
+had grouped the trees with odd effects of "style," and where in grassy
+intervals and fragrant nooks of rest they came out upon sudden patches
+of Arcady. In such places Verena listened to her companion with her
+watch in her hand, and she wondered, very sincerely, how he could care
+for a girl who made the conditions of courtship so odious. He had
+recognised, of course, at the very first, that he could not inflict
+himself again upon Miss Chancellor, and after that awkward morning-call
+I have described he did not again, for the first three weeks of his stay
+at Marmion, penetrate into the cottage whose back windows overlooked the
+deserted shipyard. Olive, as may be imagined, made, on this occasion, no
+protest for the sake of being ladylike or of preventing him from putting
+her apparently in the wrong. The situation between them was too grim; it
+was war to the knife, it was a question of which should pull hardest. So
+Verena took a tryst with the young man as if she had been a maid-servant
+and Basil Ransom a "follower." They met a little way from the house;
+beyond it, outside the village.
+
+
+
+
+XXXVIII
+
+
+Olive thought she knew the worst, as we have perceived; but the worst
+was really something she could not know, inasmuch as up to this time
+Verena chose as little to confide to her on that one point as she was
+careful to expatiate with her on every other. The change that had taken
+place in the object of Basil Ransom's merciless devotion since the
+episode in New York was, briefly, just this change--that the words he
+had spoken to her there about her genuine vocation, as distinguished
+from the hollow and factitious ideal with which her family and her
+association with Olive Chancellor had saddled her--these words, the most
+effective and penetrating he had uttered, had sunk into her soul and
+worked and fermented there. She had come at last to believe them, and
+that was the alteration, the transformation. They had kindled a light in
+which she saw herself afresh and, strange to say, liked herself better
+than in the old exaggerated glamour of the lecture-lamps. She could not
+tell Olive this yet, for it struck at the root of everything, and the
+dreadful, delightful sensation filled her with a kind of awe at all that
+it implied and portended. She was to burn everything she had adored; she
+was to adore everything she had burned. The extraordinary part of it was
+that though she felt the situation to be, as I say, tremendously
+serious, she was not ashamed of the treachery which she--yes, decidedly,
+by this time she must admit it to herself--she meditated. It was simply
+that the truth had changed sides; that radiant image began to look at
+her from Basil Ransom's expressive eyes. She loved, she was in love--she
+felt it in every throb of her being. Instead of being constituted by
+nature for entertaining that sentiment in an exceptionally small degree
+(which had been the implication of her whole crusade, the warrant for
+her offer of old to Olive to renounce), she was framed, apparently, to
+allow it the largest range, the highest intensity. It was always
+passion, in fact; but now the object was other. Formerly she had been
+convinced that the fire of her spirit was a kind of double flame, one
+half of which was responsive friendship for a most extraordinary person,
+and the other pity for the sufferings of women in general. Verena gazed
+aghast at the colourless dust into which, in three short months
+(counting from the episode in New York), such a conviction as that could
+crumble; she felt it must be a magical touch that could bring about such
+a cataclysm. Why Basil Ransom had been deputed by fate to exercise this
+spell was more than she could say--poor Verena, who up to so lately had
+flattered herself that she had a wizard's wand in her own pocket.
+
+When she saw him a little way off, about five o'clock--the hour she
+usually went out to meet him--waiting for her at a bend of the road
+which lost itself, after a winding, straggling mile or two, in the
+indented, insulated "point," where the wandering bee droned through the
+hot hours with a vague, misguided flight, she felt that his tall,
+watching figure, with the low horizon behind, represented well the
+importance, the towering eminence he had in her mind--the fact that he
+was just now, to her vision, the most definite and upright, the most
+incomparable, object in the world. If he had not been at his post when
+she expected him she would have had to stop and lean against something,
+for weakness; her whole being would have throbbed more painfully than it
+throbbed at present, though finding him there made her nervous enough.
+And who was he, what was he? she asked herself. What did he offer her
+besides a chance (in which there was no compensation of brilliancy or
+fashion) to falsify, in a conspicuous manner, every hope and pledge she
+had hitherto given? He allowed her, certainly, no illusion on the
+subject of the fate she should meet as his wife; he flung over it no
+rosiness of promised ease; he let her know that she should be poor,
+withdrawn from view, a partner of his struggle, of his severe, hard,
+unique stoicism. When he spoke of such things as these, and bent his
+eyes on her, she could not keep the tears from her own; she felt that to
+throw herself into his life (bare and arid as for the time it was) was
+the condition of happiness for her, and yet that the obstacles were
+terrible, cruel. It must not be thought that the revolution which was
+taking place in her was unaccompanied with suffering. She suffered less
+than Olive certainly, for her bent was not, like her friend's, in that
+direction; but as the wheel of her experience went round she had the
+sensation of being ground very small indeed. With her light, bright
+texture, her complacent responsiveness, her genial, graceful, ornamental
+cast, her desire to keep on pleasing others at the time when a force she
+had never felt before was pushing her to please herself, poor Verena
+lived in these days in a state of moral tension--with a sense of being
+strained and aching--which she didn't betray more only because it was
+absolutely not in her power to look desperate. An immense pity for Olive
+sat in her heart, and she asked herself how far it was necessary to go
+in the path of self-sacrifice. Nothing was wanting to make the wrong she
+should do her complete; she had deceived her up to the very last; only
+three months earlier she had reasserted her vows, given her word, with
+every show of fidelity and enthusiasm. There were hours when it seemed
+to Verena that she must really push her inquiry no further, but content
+herself with the conclusion that she loved as deeply as a woman could
+love and that it didn't make any difference. She felt Olive's grasp too
+clinching, too terrible. She said to herself that she should never dare,
+that she might as well give up early as late; that the scene, at the
+end, would be something she couldn't face; that she had no right to
+blast the poor creature's whole future. She had a vision of those
+dreadful years; she knew that Olive would never get over the
+disappointment. It would touch her in the point where she felt
+everything most keenly; she would be incurably lonely and eternally
+humiliated. It was a very peculiar thing, their friendship; it had
+elements which made it probably as complete as any (between women) that
+had ever existed. Of course it had been more on Olive's side than on
+hers, she had always known that; but that, again, didn't make any
+difference. It was of no use for her to tell herself that Olive had
+begun it entirely and she had only responded out of a kind of charmed
+politeness, at first, to a tremendous appeal. She had lent herself,
+given herself, utterly, and she ought to have known better if she didn't
+mean to abide by it. At the end of three weeks she felt that her inquiry
+was complete, but that after all nothing was gained except an immense
+interest in Basil Ransom's views and the prospect of an eternal
+heartache. He had told her he wanted her to know him, and now she knew
+him pretty thoroughly. She knew him and she adored him, but it didn't
+make any difference. To give him up or to give Olive up--this effort
+would be the greater of the two.
+
+If Basil Ransom had the advantage, as far back as that day in New York,
+of having struck a note which was to reverberate, it may easily be
+imagined that he did not fail to follow it up. If he had projected a new
+light into Verena's mind, and made the idea of giving herself to a man
+more agreeable to her than that of giving herself to a movement, he
+found means to deepen this illumination, to drag her former standard in
+the dust. He was in a very odd situation indeed, carrying on his siege
+with his hands tied. As he had to do everything in an hour a day, he
+perceived that he must confine himself to the essential. The essential
+was to show her how much he loved her, and then to press, to press,
+always to press. His hovering about Miss Chancellor's habitation without
+going in was a strange regimen to be subjected to, and he was sorry not
+to see more of Miss Birdseye, besides often not knowing what to do with
+himself in the mornings and evenings. Fortunately he had brought plenty
+of books (volumes of rusty aspect, picked up at New York bookstalls),
+and in such an affair as this he could take the less when the more was
+forbidden him. For the mornings, sometimes, he had the resource of
+Doctor Prance, with whom he made a great many excursions on the water.
+She was devoted to boating and an ardent fisherwoman, and they used to
+pull out into the bay together, cast their lines, and talk a prodigious
+amount of heresy. She met him, as Verena met him, "in the environs," but
+in a different spirit. He was immensely amused at her attitude, and saw
+that nothing in the world could, as he expressed it, make her wink. She
+would never blench nor show surprise; she had an air of taking
+everything abnormal for granted; betrayed no consciousness of the oddity
+of Ransom's situation; said nothing to indicate she had noticed that
+Miss Chancellor was in a frenzy or that Verena had a daily appointment.
+You might have supposed from her manner that it was as natural for
+Ransom to sit on a fence half a mile off as in one of the red
+rocking-chairs, of the so-called "Shaker" species, which adorned Miss
+Chancellor's back verandah. The only thing our young man didn't like
+about Doctor Prance was the impression she gave him (out of the crevices
+of her reticence he hardly knew how it leaked) that she thought Verena
+rather slim. She took an ironical view of almost any kind of courtship,
+and he could see she didn't wonder women were such featherheads, so long
+as, whatever brittle follies they cultivated, they could get men to come
+and sit on fences for them. Doctor Prance told him Miss Birdseye noticed
+nothing; she had sunk, within a few days, into a kind of transfigured
+torpor; she didn't seem to know whether Mr. Ransom were anywhere round
+or not. She guessed she thought he had just come down for a day and gone
+off again; she probably supposed he just wanted to get toned up a little
+by Miss Tarrant. Sometimes, out in the boat, when she looked at him in
+vague, sociable silence, while she waited for a bite (she delighted in a
+bite), she had an expression of diabolical shrewdness. When Ransom was
+not scorching there beside her (he didn't mind the sun of
+Massachusetts), he lounged about in the pastoral land which hung (at a
+very moderate elevation) above the shore. He always had a book in his
+pocket, and he lay under whispering trees and kicked his heels and made
+up his mind on what side he should take Verena the next time. At the end
+of a fortnight he had succeeded (so he believed, at least) far better
+than he had hoped, in this sense, that the girl had now the air of
+making much more light of her "gift." He was indeed quite appalled at
+the facility with which she threw it over, gave up the idea that it was
+useful and precious. That had been what he wanted her to do, and the
+fact of the sacrifice (once she had fairly looked at it) costing her so
+little only proved his contention, only made it clear that it was not
+necessary to her happiness to spend half her life ranting (no matter how
+prettily) in public. All the same he said to himself that, to make up
+for the loss of whatever was sweet in the reputation of the thing, he
+should have to be tremendously nice to her in all the coming years.
+During the first week he was at Marmion she made of him an inquiry which
+touched on this point.
+
+"Well, if it's all a mere delusion, why should this facility have been
+given me--why should I have been saddled with a superfluous talent? I
+don't care much about it--I don't mind telling you that; but I confess I
+should like to know what is to become of all that part of me, if I
+retire into private life, and live, as you say, simply to be charming
+for you. I shall be like a singer with a beautiful voice (you have told
+me yourself my voice is beautiful) who has accepted some decree of never
+raising a note. Isn't that a great waste, a great violation of nature?
+Were not our talents given us to use, and have we any right to smother
+them and deprive our fellow-creatures of such pleasure as they may
+confer? In the arrangement you propose" (that was Verena's way of
+speaking of the question of their marriage) "I don't see what provision
+is made for the poor faithful, dismissed servant. It is all very well to
+be charming to you, but there are people who have told me that once I
+get on a platform I am charming to all the world. There is no harm in my
+speaking of that, because you have told me so yourself. Perhaps you
+intend to have a platform erected in our front parlour, where I can
+address you every evening, and put you to sleep after your work. I say
+our _front_ parlour, as if it were certain we should have two! It
+doesn't look as if our means would permit that--and we must have some
+place to dine, if there is to be a platform in our sitting-room."
+
+"My dear young woman, it will be easy to solve the difficulty: the
+dining-table itself shall be our platform, and you shall mount on top of
+that." This was Basil Ransom's sportive reply to his companion's very
+natural appeal for light, and the reader will remark that if it led her
+to push her investigation no further, she was very easily satisfied.
+There was more reason, however, as well as more appreciation of a very
+considerable mystery, in what he went on to say. "Charming to me,
+charming to all the world? What will become of your charm?--is that what
+you want to know? It will be about five thousand times greater than it
+is now; that's what will become of it. We shall find plenty of room for
+your facility; it will lubricate our whole existence. Believe me, Miss
+Tarrant, these things will take care of themselves. You won't sing in
+the Music Hall, but you will sing to me; you will sing to every one who
+knows you and approaches you. Your gift is indestructible; don't talk as
+if I either wanted to wipe it out or should be able to make it a
+particle less divine. I want to give it another direction, certainly;
+but I don't want to stop your activity. Your gift is the gift of
+expression, and there is nothing I can do for you that will make you
+less expressive. It won't gush out at a fixed hour and on a fixed day,
+but it will irrigate, it will fertilise, it will brilliantly adorn your
+conversation. Think how delightful it will be when your influence
+becomes really social. Your facility, as you call it, will simply make
+you, in conversation, the most charming woman in America."
+
+It is to be feared, indeed, that Verena was easily satisfied (convinced,
+I mean, not that she ought to succumb to him, but that there were
+lovely, neglected, almost unsuspected truths on his side); and there is
+further evidence on the same head in the fact that after the first once
+or twice she found nothing to say to him (much as she was always saying
+to herself) about the cruel effect her apostasy would have upon Olive.
+She forbore to plead that reason after she had seen how angry it made
+him, and with how almost savage a contempt he denounced so flimsy a
+pretext. He wanted to know since when it was more becoming to take up
+with a morbid old maid than with an honourable young man; and when
+Verena pronounced the sacred name of friendship he inquired what
+fanatical sophistry excluded him from a similar privilege. She had told
+him, in a moment of expansion (Verena believed she was immensely on her
+guard, but her guard was very apt to be lowered), that his visits to
+Marmion cast in Olive's view a remarkable light upon his chivalry; she
+chose to regard his resolute pursuit of Verena as a covert persecution
+of herself. Verena repented, as soon as she had spoken, of having given
+further currency to this taunt; but she perceived the next moment no
+harm was done, Basil Ransom taking in perfectly good part Miss
+Chancellor's reflexions on his delicacy, and making them the subject of
+much free laughter. She could not know, for in the midst of his hilarity
+the young man did not compose himself to tell her, that he had made up
+his mind on this question before he left New York--as long ago as when
+he wrote her the note (subsequent to her departure from that city) to
+which allusion has already been made, and which was simply the fellow of
+the letter addressed to her after his visit to Cambridge: a friendly,
+respectful, yet rather pregnant sign that, decidedly, on second
+thoughts, separation didn't imply for him the intention of silence. We
+know a little about his second thoughts, as much as is essential, and
+especially how the occasion of their springing up had been the windfall
+of an editor's encouragement. The importance of that encouragement, to
+Basil's imagination, was doubtless much augmented by his desire for an
+excuse to take up again a line of behaviour which he had forsworn (small
+as had, as yet, been his opportunity to indulge in it) very much less
+than he supposed; still, it worked an appreciable revolution in his view
+of his case, and made him ask himself what amount of consideration he
+should (from the most refined Southern point of view) owe Miss
+Chancellor in the event of his deciding to go after Verena Tarrant in
+earnest. He was not slow to decide that he owed her none. Chivalry had
+to do with one's relations with people one hated, not with those one
+loved. He didn't hate poor Miss Olive, though she might make him yet;
+and even if he did, any chivalry was all moonshine which should require
+him to give up the girl he adored in order that his third cousin should
+see he could be gallant. Chivalry was forbearance and generosity with
+regard to the weak; and there was nothing weak about Miss Olive, she was
+a fighting woman, and she would fight him to the death, giving him not
+an inch of odds. He felt that she was fighting there all day long, in
+her cottage fortress; her resistance was in the air he breathed, and
+Verena came out to him sometimes quite limp and pale from the tussle.
+
+It was in the same jocose spirit with which he regarded Olive's view of
+the sort of standard a Mississippian should live up to that he talked to
+Verena about the lecture she was preparing for her great exhibition at
+the Music Hall. He learned from her that she was to take the field in
+the manner of Mrs. Farrinder, for a winter campaign, carrying with her a
+tremendous big gun. Her engagements were all made, her route was marked
+out; she expected to repeat her lecture in about fifty different places.
+It was to be called "A Woman's Reason," and both Olive and Miss Birdseye
+thought it, so far as they could tell in advance, her most promising
+effort. She wasn't going to trust to inspiration this time; she didn't
+want to meet a big Boston audience without knowing where she was.
+Inspiration, moreover, seemed rather to have faded away; in consequence
+of Olive's influence she had read and studied so much that it seemed now
+as if everything must take form beforehand. Olive was a splendid critic,
+whether he liked her or not, and she had made her go over every word of
+her lecture twenty times. There wasn't an intonation she hadn't made her
+practise; it was very different from the old system, when her father had
+worked her up. If Basil considered women superficial, it was a pity he
+couldn't see what Olive's standard of preparation was, or be present at
+their rehearsals, in the evening, in their little parlour. Ransom's
+state of mind in regard to the affair at the Music Hall was simply
+this--that he was determined to circumvent it if he could. He covered it
+with ridicule, in talking of it to Verena, and the shafts he levelled at
+it went so far that he could see she thought he exaggerated his dislike
+to it. In point of fact he could not have overstated that; so odious did
+the idea seem to him that she was soon to be launched in a more
+infatuated career. He vowed to himself that she should never take that
+fresh start which would commit her irretrievably if she should succeed
+(and she would succeed--he had not the slightest doubt of her power to
+produce a sensation in the Music Hall), to the acclamations of the
+newspapers. He didn't care for her engagements, her campaigns, or all
+the expectancy of her friends; to "squelch" all that, at a stroke, was
+the dearest wish of his heart. It would represent to him his own
+success, it would symbolise his victory. It became a fixed idea with
+him, and he warned her again and again. When she laughed and said she
+didn't see how he could stop her unless he kidnapped her, he really
+pitied her for not perceiving, beneath his ominous pleasantries, the
+firmness of his resolution. He felt almost capable of kidnapping her. It
+was palpably in the air that she would become "widely popular," and that
+idea simply sickened him. He felt as differently as possible about it
+from Mr. Matthias Pardon.
+
+One afternoon, as he returned with Verena from a walk which had been
+accomplished completely within the prescribed conditions, he saw, from a
+distance, Doctor Prance, who had emerged bare-headed from the cottage,
+and, shading her eyes from the red, declining sun, was looking up and
+down the road. It was part of the regulation that Ransom should separate
+from Verena before reaching the house, and they had just paused to
+exchange their last words (which every day promoted the situation more
+than any others), when Doctor Prance began to beckon to them with much
+animation. They hurried forward, Verena pressing her hand to her heart,
+for she had instantly guessed that something terrible had happened to
+Olive--she had given out, fainted away, perhaps fallen dead, with the
+cruelty of the strain. Doctor Prance watched them come, with a curious
+look in her face; it was not a smile, but a kind of exaggerated
+intimation that she noticed nothing. In an instant she had told them
+what was the matter. Miss Birdseye had had a sudden weakness; she had
+remarked abruptly that she was dying, and her pulse, sure enough, had
+fallen to nothing. She was down on the piazza with Miss Chancellor and
+herself, and they had tried to get her up to bed. But she wouldn't let
+them move her; she was passing away, and she wanted to pass away just
+there, in such a pleasant place, in her customary chair, looking at the
+sunset. She asked for Miss Tarrant, and Miss Chancellor told her she was
+out--walking with Mr. Ransom. Then she wanted to know if Mr. Ransom was
+still there--she supposed he had gone. (Basil knew, by Verena, apart
+from this, that his name had not been mentioned to the old lady since
+the morning he saw her.) She expressed a wish to see him--she had
+something to say to him; and Miss Chancellor told her that he would be
+back soon, with Verena, and that they would bring him in. Miss Birdseye
+said she hoped they wouldn't be long, because she was sinking; and
+Doctor Prance now added, like a person who knew what she was talking
+about, that it was, in fact, the end. She had darted out two or three
+times to look for them, and they must step right in. Verena had scarcely
+given her time to tell her story; she had already rushed into the house.
+Ransom followed with Doctor Prance, conscious that for him the occasion
+was doubly solemn; inasmuch as if he was to see poor Miss Birdseye yield
+up her philanthropic soul, he was on the other hand doubtless to receive
+from Miss Chancellor a reminder that _she_ had no intention of quitting
+the game.
+
+By the time he had made this reflexion he stood in the presence of his
+kinswoman and her venerable guest, who was sitting just as he had seen
+her before, muffled and bonneted, on the back piazza of the cottage.
+Olive Chancellor was on one side of her holding one of her hands, and on
+the other was Verena, who had dropped on her knees, close to her,
+bending over those of the old lady. "Did you ask for me--did you want
+me?" the girl said tenderly. "I will never leave you again."
+
+"Oh, I won't keep you long. I only wanted to see you once more." Miss
+Birdseye's voice was very low, like that of a person breathing with
+difficulty; but it had no painful nor querulous note--it expressed only
+the cheerful weariness which had marked all this last period of her
+life, and which seemed to make it now as blissful as it was suitable
+that she should pass away. Her head was thrown back against the top of
+the chair, the ribbon which confined her ancient hat hung loose, and the
+late afternoon light covered her octogenarian face and gave it a kind of
+fairness, a double placidity. There was, to Ransom, something almost
+august in the trustful renunciation of her countenance; something in it
+seemed to say that she had been ready long before, but as the time was
+not ripe she had waited, with her usual faith that all was for the best;
+only, at present, since the right conditions met, she couldn't help
+feeling that it was quite a luxury, the greatest she had ever tasted.
+Ransom knew why it was that Verena had tears in her eyes as she looked
+up at her patient old friend; she had spoken to him, often, during the
+last three weeks, of the stories Miss Birdseye had told her of the great
+work of her life, her mission, repeated year after year, among the
+Southern blacks. She had gone among them with every precaution, to teach
+them to read and write; she had carried them Bibles and told them of the
+friends they had in the North who prayed for their deliverance. Ransom
+knew that Verena didn't reproduce these legends with a view to making
+him ashamed of his Southern origin, his connexion with people who, in a
+past not yet remote, had made that kind of apostleship necessary; he
+knew this because she had heard what he thought of all that chapter
+himself; he had given her a kind of historical summary of the slavery
+question which left her no room to say that he was more tender to that
+particular example of human imbecility than he was to any other. But she
+had told him that this was what _she_ would have liked to do--to wander,
+alone, with her life in her hand, on an errand of mercy, through a
+country in which society was arrayed against her; she would have liked
+it much better than simply talking about the right from the gas-lighted
+vantage of the New England platform. Ransom had replied simply
+"Balderdash!" it being his theory, as we have perceived, that he knew
+much more about Verena's native bent than the young lady herself. This
+did not, however, as he was perfectly aware, prevent her feeling that
+she had come too late for the heroic age of New England life, and
+regarding Miss Birdseye as a battered, immemorial monument of it. Ransom
+could share such an admiration as that, especially at this moment; he
+had said to Verena, more than once, that he wished he might have met the
+old lady in Carolina or Georgia before the war--shown her round among
+the negroes and talked over New England ideas with her; there were a
+good many he didn't care much about now, but at that time they would
+have been tremendously refreshing. Miss Birdseye had given herself away
+so lavishly all her life that it was rather odd there was anything left
+of her for the supreme surrender. When he looked at Olive he saw that
+she meant to ignore him; and during the few minutes he remained on the
+spot his kinswoman never met his eye. She turned away, indeed, as soon
+as Doctor Prance said, leaning over Miss Birdseye, "I have brought Mr.
+Ransom to you. Don't you remember you asked for him?"
+
+"I am very glad to see you again," Ransom remarked. "It was very good of
+you to think of me." At the sound of his voice Olive rose and left her
+place; she sank into a chair at the other end of the piazza, turning
+round to rest her arms on the back and bury her head in them.
+
+Miss Birdseye looked at the young man still more dimly than she had ever
+done before. "I thought you were gone. You never came back."
+
+"He spends all his time in long walks; he enjoys the country so much,"
+Verena said.
+
+"Well, it's very beautiful, what I see from here. I haven't been strong
+enough to move round since the first days. But I am going to move now."
+She smiled when Ransom made a gesture as if to help her, and added: "Oh,
+I don't mean I am going to move out of my chair."
+
+"Mr. Ransom has been out in a boat with me several times. I have been
+showing him how to cast a line," said Doctor Prance, who appeared to
+deprecate a sentimental tendency.
+
+"Oh, well, then, you have been one of our party; there seems to be every
+reason why you should feel that you belong to us." Miss Birdseye looked
+at the visitor with a sort of misty earnestness, as if she wished to
+communicate with him further; then her glance turned slightly aside; she
+tried to see what had become of Olive. She perceived that Miss
+Chancellor had withdrawn herself, and, closing her eyes, she mused,
+ineffectually, on the mystery she had not grasped, the peculiarity of
+Basil Ransom's relations with her hostess. She was visibly too weak to
+concern herself with it very actively; she only felt, now that she
+seemed really to be going, a desire to reconcile and harmonise. But she
+presently exhaled a low, soft sigh--a kind of confession that it was too
+mixed, that she gave it up. Ransom had feared for a moment that she was
+about to indulge in some appeal to Olive, some attempt to make him join
+hands with that young lady, as a supreme satisfaction to herself. But he
+saw that her strength failed her, and that, besides, things were getting
+less clear to her; to his considerable relief, inasmuch as, though he
+would not have objected to joining hands, the expression of Miss
+Chancellor's figure and her averted face, with their desperate collapse,
+showed him well enough how _she_ would have met such a proposal. What
+Miss Birdseye clung to, with benignant perversity, was the idea that, in
+spite of his exclusion from the house, which was perhaps only the result
+of a certain high-strung jealousy on Olive's part of her friend's other
+personal ties, Verena had drawn him in, had made him sympathise with the
+great reform and desire to work for it. Ransom saw no reason why such an
+illusion should be dear to Miss Birdseye; his contact with her in the
+past had been so momentary that he could not account for her taking an
+interest in his views, in his throwing his weight into the right scale.
+It was part of the general desire for justice that fermented within her,
+the passion for progress; and it was also in some degree her interest in
+Verena--a suspicion, innocent and idyllic, as any such suspicion on Miss
+Birdseye's part must be, that there was something between them, that the
+closest of all unions (as Miss Birdseye at least supposed it was) was
+preparing itself. Then his being a Southerner gave a point to the whole
+thing; to bring round a Southerner would be a real encouragement for one
+who had seen, even at a time when she was already an old woman, what was
+the tone of opinion in the cotton States. Ransom had no wish to
+discourage her, and he bore well in mind the caution Doctor Prance had
+given him about destroying her last theory. He only bowed his head very
+humbly, not knowing what he had done to earn the honour of being the
+subject of it. His eyes met Verena's as she looked up at him from her
+place at Miss Birdseye's feet, and he saw she was following his thought,
+throwing herself into it, and trying to communicate to him a wish. The
+wish touched him immensely; she was dreadfully afraid he would betray
+her to Miss Birdseye--let her know how she had cooled off. Verena was
+ashamed of that now, and trembled at the danger of exposure; her eyes
+adjured him to be careful of what he said. Her tremor made him glow a
+little in return, for it seemed to him the fullest confession of his
+influence she had yet made.
+
+"We have been a very happy little party," she said to the old lady. "It
+is delightful that you should have been able to be with us all these
+weeks."
+
+"It has been a great rest. I am very tired. I can't speak much. It has
+been a lovely time. I have done so much--so many things."
+
+"I guess I wouldn't talk much, Miss Birdseye," said Doctor Prance, who
+had now knelt down on the other side of her. "We know how much you have
+done. Don't you suppose every one knows _your_ life?"
+
+"It isn't much--only I tried to take hold. When I look back from here,
+from where we've sat, I can measure the progress. That's what I wanted
+to say to you and Mr. Ransom--because I'm going fast. Hold on to me,
+that's right; but you can't keep me. I don't want to stay now; I presume
+I shall join some of the others that we lost long ago. Their faces come
+back to me now, quite fresh. It seems as if they might be waiting; as if
+they were all there; as if they wanted to hear. You mustn't think
+there's no progress because you don't see it all right off; that's what
+I wanted to say. It isn't till you have gone a long way that you can
+feel what's been done. That's what I see when I look back from here; I
+see that the community wasn't half waked up when I was young."
+
+"It is you that have waked it up more than any one else, and it's for
+that we honour you, Miss Birdseye!" Verena cried, with a sudden violence
+of emotion. "If you were to live for a thousand years, you would think
+only of others--you would think only of helping on humanity. You are our
+heroine, you are our saint, and there has never been any one like you!"
+Verena had no glance for Ransom now, and there was neither deprecation
+nor entreaty in her face. A wave of contrition, of shame, had swept over
+her--a quick desire to atone for her secret swerving by a renewed
+recognition of the nobleness of such a life as Miss Birdseye's.
+
+"Oh, I haven't effected very much; I have only cared and hoped. You will
+do more than I have ever done--you and Olive Chancellor, because you are
+young and bright, brighter than I ever was; and besides, everything has
+got started."
+
+"Well, you've got started, Miss Birdseye," Doctor Prance remarked, with
+raised eyebrows, protesting dryly but kindly, and putting forward, with
+an air as if, after all, it didn't matter much, an authority that had
+been superseded. The manner in which this competent little woman
+indulged her patient showed sufficiently that the good lady was sinking
+fast.
+
+"We will think of you always, and your name will be sacred to us, and
+that will teach us singleness and devotion," Verena went on, in the same
+tone, still not meeting Ransom's eyes again, and speaking as if she were
+trying now to stop herself, to tie herself by a vow.
+
+"Well, it's the thing you and Olive have given your lives to that has
+absorbed me most, of late years. I did want to see justice done--to us.
+I haven't seen it, but you will. And Olive will. Where is she--why isn't
+she near me, to bid me farewell? And Mr. Ransom will--and he will be
+proud to have helped."
+
+"Oh, mercy, mercy!" cried Verena, burying her head in Miss Birdseye's
+lap.
+
+"You are not mistaken if you think I desire above all things that your
+weakness, your generosity, should be protected," Ransom said, rather
+ambiguously, but with pointed respectfulness. "I shall remember you as
+an example of what women are capable of," he added; and he had no
+subsequent compunctions for the speech, for he thought poor Miss
+Birdseye, for all her absence of profile, essentially feminine.
+
+A kind of frantic moan from Olive Chancellor responded to these words,
+which had evidently struck her as an insolent sarcasm; and at the same
+moment Doctor Prance sent Ransom a glance which was an adjuration to
+depart.
+
+"Good-bye, Olive Chancellor," Miss Birdseye murmured. "I don't want to
+stay, though I should like to see what you will see."
+
+"I shall see nothing but shame and ruin!" Olive shrieked, rushing across
+to her old friend, while Ransom discreetly quitted the scene.
+
+
+
+
+XXXIX
+
+
+He met Doctor Prance in the village the next morning, and as soon as he
+looked at her he saw that the event which had been impending at Miss
+Chancellor's had taken place. It was not that her aspect was funereal;
+but it contained, somehow, an announcement that she had, for the
+present, no more thought to give to casting a line. Miss Birdseye had
+quietly passed away, in the evening, an hour or two after Ransom's
+visit. They had wheeled her chair into the house; there had been nothing
+to do but wait for complete extinction. Miss Chancellor and Miss Tarrant
+had sat by her there, without moving, each of her hands in theirs, and
+she had just melted away, towards eight o'clock. It was a lovely death;
+Doctor Prance intimated that she had never seen any that she thought
+more seasonable. She added that she was a good woman--one of the old
+sort; and that was the only funeral oration that Basil Ransom was
+destined to hear pronounced upon Miss Birdseye. The impression of the
+simplicity and humility of her end remained with him, and he reflected
+more than once, during the days that followed, that the absence of pomp
+and circumstance which had marked her career marked also the
+consecration of her memory. She had been almost celebrated, she had been
+active, earnest, ubiquitous beyond any one else, she had given herself
+utterly to charities and creeds and causes; and yet the only persons,
+apparently, to whom her death made a real difference were three young
+women in a small "frame-house" on Cape Cod. Ransom learned from Doctor
+Prance that her mortal remains were to be committed to their rest in the
+little cemetery at Marmion, in sight of the pretty sea-view she loved to
+gaze at, among old mossy headstones of mariners and fisher-folk. She had
+seen the place when she first came down, when she was able to drive out
+a little, and she had said she thought it must be pleasant to lie there.
+It was not an injunction, a definite request; it had not occurred to
+Miss Birdseye, at the end of her days, to take an exacting line or to
+make, for the first time in eighty years, a personal claim. But Olive
+Chancellor and Verena had put their construction on her appreciation of
+the quietest corner of the striving, suffering world so weary a pilgrim
+of philanthropy had ever beheld.
+
+In the course of the day Ransom received a note of five lines from
+Verena, the purport of which was to tell him that he must not expect to
+see her again for the present; she wished to be very quiet and think
+things over. She added the recommendation that he should leave the
+neighbourhood for three or four days; there were plenty of strange old
+places to see in that part of the country. Ransom meditated deeply on
+this missive, and perceived that he should be guilty of very bad taste
+in not immediately absenting himself. He knew that to Olive Chancellor's
+vision his conduct already wore that stain, and it was useless,
+therefore, for him to consider how he could displease her either less or
+more. But he wished to convey to Verena the impression that he would do
+anything in the wide world to gratify _her_ except give her up, and as
+he packed his valise he had an idea that he was both behaving
+beautifully and showing the finest diplomatic sense. To go away proved
+to himself how secure he felt, what a conviction he had that however she
+might turn and twist in his grasp he held her fast. The emotion she had
+expressed as he stood there before poor Miss Birdseye was only one of
+her instinctive contortions; he had taken due note of that--said to
+himself that a good many more would probably occur before she would be
+quiet. A woman that listens is lost, the old proverb says; and what had
+Verena done for the last three weeks but listen?--not very long each
+day, but with a degree of attention of which her not withdrawing from
+Marmion was the measure. She had not told him that Olive wanted to whisk
+her away, but he had not needed this confidence to know that if she
+stayed on the field it was because she preferred to. She probably had an
+idea she was fighting, but if she should fight no harder than she had
+fought up to now he should continue to take the same view of his
+success. She meant her request that he should go away for a few days as
+something combative; but, decidedly, he scarcely felt the blow. He liked
+to think that he had great tact with women, and he was sure Verena would
+be struck with this quality in reading, in the note he presently
+addressed her in reply to her own, that he had determined to take a
+little run to Provincetown. As there was no one under the rather
+ineffectual roof which sheltered him to whose hand he could entrust the
+billet--at the Marmion hotel one had to be one's own messenger--he
+walked to the village post-office to request that his note should be put
+into Miss Chancellor's box. Here he met Doctor Prance, for a second time
+that day; she had come to deposit the letters by which Olive notified a
+few of Miss Birdseye's friends of the time and place of her obsequies.
+This young lady was shut up with Verena, and Doctor Prance was
+transacting all their business for them. Ransom felt that he made no
+admission that would impugn his estimate of the sex to which she in a
+manner belonged, in reflecting that she would acquit herself of these
+delegated duties with the greatest rapidity and accuracy. He told her he
+was going to absent himself for a few days, and expressed a friendly
+hope that he should find her at Marmion on his return.
+
+Her keen eye gauged him a moment, to see if he were joking; then she
+said, "Well, I presume you think I can do as I like. But I can't."
+
+"You mean you have got to go back to work?"
+
+"Well, yes; my place is empty in the city."
+
+"So is every other place. You had better remain till the end of the
+season."
+
+"It's all one season to me. I want to see my office-slate. I wouldn't
+have stayed so long for any one but her."
+
+"Well, then, good-bye," Ransom said. "I shall always remember our little
+expeditions. And I wish you every professional distinction."
+
+"That's why I want to go back," Doctor Prance replied, with her flat,
+limited manner. He kept her a moment; he wanted to ask her about Verena.
+While he was hesitating how to form his question she remarked, evidently
+wishing to leave him a little memento of her sympathy, "Well, I hope you
+will be able to follow up your views."
+
+"My views, Miss Prance? I am sure I have never mentioned them to you!"
+Then Ransom added, "How is Miss Tarrant to-day? is she more calm?"
+
+"Oh no, she isn't calm at all," Doctor Prance answered, very definitely.
+
+"Do you mean she's excited, emotional?"
+
+"Well, she doesn't talk, she's perfectly still, and so is Miss
+Chancellor. They're as still as two watchers--they don't speak. But you
+can hear the silence vibrate."
+
+"Vibrate?"
+
+"Well, they are very nervous."
+
+Ransom was confident, as I say, yet the effort that he made to extract a
+good omen from this characterisation of the two ladies at the cottage
+was not altogether successful. He would have liked to ask Doctor Prance
+whether she didn't think he might count on Verena in the end; but he was
+too shy for this, the subject of his relations with Miss Tarrant never
+yet having been touched upon between them; and, besides, he didn't care
+to hear himself put a question which was more or less an implication of
+a doubt. So he compromised, with a sort of oblique and general inquiry
+about Olive; that might draw some light. "What do you think of Miss
+Chancellor--how does she strike you?"
+
+Doctor Prance reflected a little, with an apparent consciousness that he
+meant more than he asked. "Well, she's losing flesh," she presently
+replied; and Ransom turned away, not encouraged, and feeling that, no
+doubt, the little doctress had better go back to her office-slate.
+
+He did the thing handsomely, remained at Provincetown a week, inhaling
+the delicious air, smoking innumerable cigars, and lounging among the
+ancient wharves, where the grass grew thick and the impression of fallen
+greatness was still stronger than at Marmion. Like his friends the
+Bostonians he was very nervous; there were days when he felt he must
+rush back to the margin of that mild inlet; the voices of the air
+whispered to him that in his absence he was being outwitted.
+Nevertheless he stayed the time he had determined to stay; quieting
+himself with the reflexion that there was nothing they could do to elude
+him unless, perhaps, they should start again for Europe, which they were
+not likely to do. If Miss Olive tried to hide Verena away in the United
+States he would undertake to find her--though he was obliged to confess
+that a flight to Europe would baffle him, owing to his want of cash for
+pursuit. Nothing, however, was less probable than that they would cross
+the Atlantic on the eve of Verena's projected _debut_ at the Music Hall.
+Before he went back to Marmion he wrote to this young lady, to announce
+his reappearance there and let her know that he expected she would come
+out to meet him the morning after. This conveyed the assurance that he
+intended to take as much of the day as he could get; he had had enough
+of the system of dragging through all the hours till a mere fraction of
+time was left before night, and he couldn't wait so long, at any rate,
+the day after his return. It was the afternoon train that had brought
+him back from Provincetown, and in the evening he ascertained that the
+Bostonians had not deserted the field. There were lights in the windows
+of the house under the elms, and he stood where he had stood that
+evening with Doctor Prance and listened to the waves of Verena's voice,
+as she rehearsed her lecture. There were no waves this time, no sounds,
+and no sign of life but the lamps; the place had apparently not ceased
+to be given over to the conscious silence described by Doctor Prance.
+Ransom felt that he gave an immense proof of chivalry in not calling
+upon Verena to grant him an interview on the spot. She had not answered
+his last note, but the next day she kept the tryst, at the hour he had
+proposed; he saw her advance along the road, in a white dress, under a
+big parasol, and again he found himself liking immensely the way she
+walked. He was dismayed, however, at her face and what it portended;
+pale, with red eyes, graver than she had ever been before, she appeared
+to have spent the period of his absence in violent weeping. Yet that it
+was not for him she had been crying was proved by the very first word
+she spoke.
+
+"I only came out to tell you definitely it's impossible! I have thought
+over everything, taking plenty of time--over and over; and that is my
+answer, finally, positively. You must take it--you shall have no other."
+
+Basil Ransom gazed, frowning fearfully. "And why not, pray?"
+
+"Because I can't, I can't, I can't, I can't!" she repeated passionately,
+with her altered, distorted face.
+
+"Damnation!" murmured the young man. He seized her hand, drew it into
+his arm, forcing her to walk with him along the road.
+
+That afternoon Olive Chancellor came out of her house and wandered for a
+long time upon the shore. She looked up and down the bay, at the sails
+that gleamed on the blue water, shifting in the breeze and the light;
+they were a source of interest to her that they had never been before.
+It was a day she was destined never to forget; she felt it to be the
+saddest, the most wounding of her life. Unrest and haunting fear had not
+possession of her now, as they had held her in New York when Basil
+Ransom carried off Verena, to mark her for his own, in the park. But an
+immeasurable load of misery seemed to sit upon her soul; she ached with
+the bitterness of her melancholy, she was dumb and cold with despair.
+She had spent the violence of her terror, the eagerness of her grief,
+and now she was too weary to struggle with fate. She appeared to herself
+almost to have accepted it, as she wandered forth in the beautiful
+afternoon with the knowledge that the "ten minutes" which Verena had
+told her she meant to devote to Mr. Ransom that morning had developed
+suddenly into an embarkation for the day. They had gone out in a boat
+together; one of the village worthies, from whom small craft were to be
+hired, had, at Verena's request, sent his little son to Miss
+Chancellor's cottage with that information. She had not understood
+whether they had taken the boatman with them. Even when the information
+came (and it came at a moment of considerable reassurance), Olive's
+nerves were not ploughed up by it as they had been, for instance, by the
+other expedition, in New York; and she could measure the distance she
+had traversed since then. It had not driven her away on the instant to
+pace the shore in frenzy, to challenge every boat that passed, and beg
+that the young lady who was sailing somewhere in the bay with a dark
+gentleman with long hair should be entreated immediately to return. On
+the contrary, after the first quiver of pain inflicted by the news she
+had been able to occupy herself, to look after her house, to write her
+morning's letters, to go into her accounts, which she had had some time
+on her mind. She had wanted to put off thinking, for she knew to what
+hideous recognitions that would bring her round again. These were summed
+up in the fact that Verena was now not to be trusted for an hour. She
+had sworn to her the night before, with a face like a lacerated angel's,
+that her choice was made, that their union and their work were more to
+her than any other life could ever be, and that she deeply believed that
+should she forswear these holy things she would simply waste away, in
+the end, with remorse and shame. She would see Mr. Ransom just once
+more, for ten minutes, to utter one or two supreme truths to him, and
+then they would take up their old, happy, active, fruitful days again,
+would throw themselves more than ever into their splendid effort. Olive
+had seen how Verena was moved by Miss Birdseye's death, how at the sight
+of that unique woman's majestically simple withdrawal from a scene in
+which she had held every vulgar aspiration, every worldly standard and
+lure, so cheap, the girl had been touched again with the spirit of their
+most confident hours, had flamed up with the faith that no narrow
+personal joy could compare in sweetness with the idea of doing something
+for those who had always suffered and who waited still. This helped
+Olive to believe that she might begin to count upon her again, conscious
+as she was at the same time that Verena had been strangely weakened and
+strained by her odious ordeal. Oh, Olive knew that she loved him--knew
+what the passion was with which the wretched girl had to struggle; and
+she did her the justice to believe that her professions were sincere,
+her effort was real. Harassed and embittered as she was, Olive
+Chancellor still proposed to herself to be rigidly just, and that is why
+she pitied Verena now with an unspeakable pity, regarded her as the
+victim of an atrocious spell, and reserved all her execration and
+contempt for the author of their common misery. If Verena had stepped
+into a boat with him half an hour after declaring that she would give
+him his dismissal in twenty words, that was because he had ways, known
+to himself and other men, of creating situations without an issue, of
+forcing her to do things she could do only with sharp repugnance, under
+the menace of pain that would be sharper still. But all the same, what
+actually stared her in the face was that Verena was not to be trusted,
+even after rallying again as passionately as she had done during the
+days that followed Miss Birdseye's death. Olive would have liked to know
+the pang of penance that _she_ would have been afraid, in her place, to
+incur; to see the locked door which _she_ would not have managed to
+force open!
+
+This inexpressibly mournful sense that, after all, Verena, in her
+exquisite delicacy and generosity, was appointed only to show how women
+had from the beginning of time been the sport of men's selfishness and
+avidity, this dismal conviction accompanied Olive on her walk, which
+lasted all the afternoon, and in which she found a kind of tragic
+relief. She went very far, keeping in the lonely places, unveiling her
+face to the splendid light, which seemed to make a mock of the darkness
+and bitterness of her spirit. There were little sandy coves, where the
+rocks were clean, where she made long stations, sinking down in them as
+if she hoped she should never rise again. It was the first time she had
+been out since Miss Birdseye's death, except the hour when, with the
+dozen sympathisers who came from Boston, she stood by the tired old
+woman's grave. Since then, for three days, she had been writing letters,
+narrating, describing to those who hadn't come; there were some, she
+thought, who might have managed to do so, instead of despatching her
+pages of diffuse reminiscence and asking her for all particulars in
+return. Selah Tarrant and his wife had come, obtrusively, as she
+thought, for they never had had very much intercourse with Miss
+Birdseye; and if it was for Verena's sake, Verena was there to pay every
+tribute herself. Mrs. Tarrant had evidently hoped Miss Chancellor would
+ask her to stay on at Marmion, but Olive felt how little she was in a
+state for such heroics of hospitality. It was precisely in order that
+she should not have to do that sort of thing that she had given Selah
+such considerable sums, on two occasions, at a year's interval. If the
+Tarrants wanted a change of air they could travel all over the
+country--their present means permitted it; they could go to Saratoga or
+Newport if they liked. Their appearance showed that they could put their
+hands into their pockets (or into hers); at least Mrs. Tarrant's did.
+Selah still sported (on a hot day in August) his immemorial waterproof;
+but his wife rustled over the low tombstones at Marmion in garments of
+which (little as she was versed in such inquiries) Olive could see that
+the cost had been large. Besides, after Doctor Prance had gone (when all
+was over), she felt what a relief it was that Verena and she could be
+just together--together with the monstrous wedge of a question that had
+come up between them. That was company enough, great heaven! and she had
+not got rid of such an inmate as Doctor Prance only to put Mrs. Tarrant
+in her place.
+
+Did Verena's strange aberration, on this particular day, suggest to
+Olive that it was no use striving, that the world was all a great trap
+or trick, of which women were ever the punctual dupes, so that it was
+the worst of the curse that rested upon them that they must most
+humiliate those who had most their cause at heart? Did she say to
+herself that their weakness was not only lamentable but hideous--hideous
+their predestined subjection to man's larger and grosser insistence? Did
+she ask herself why she should give up her life to save a sex which,
+after all, didn't wish to be saved, and which rejected the truth even
+after it had bathed them with its auroral light and they had pretended
+to be fed and fortified? These are mysteries into which I shall not
+attempt to enter, speculations with which I have no concern; it is
+sufficient for us to know that all human effort had never seemed to her
+so barren and thankless as on that fatal afternoon. Her eyes rested on
+the boats she saw in the distance, and she wondered if in one of them
+Verena were floating to her fate; but so far from straining forward to
+beckon her home she almost wished that she might glide away for ever,
+that _she_ might never see her again, never undergo the horrible details
+of a more deliberate separation. Olive lived over, in her miserable
+musings, her life for the last two years; she knew, again, how noble and
+beautiful her scheme had been, but how it had all rested on an illusion
+of which the very thought made her feel faint and sick. What was before
+her now was the reality, with the beautiful, indifferent sky pouring
+down its complacent rays upon it. The reality was simply that Verena had
+been more to her than she ever was to Verena, and that, with her
+exquisite natural art, the girl had cared for their cause only because,
+for the time, no interest, no fascination, was greater. Her talent, the
+talent which was to achieve such wonders, was nothing to her; it was too
+easy, she could leave it alone, as she might close her piano, for
+months; it was only to Olive that it was everything. Verena had
+submitted, she had responded, she had lent herself to Olive's incitement
+and exhortation, because she was sympathetic and young and abundant and
+fanciful; but it had been a kind of hothouse loyalty, the mere contagion
+of example, and a sentiment springing up from within had easily breathed
+a chill upon it. Did Olive ask herself whether, for so many months, her
+companion had been only the most unconscious and most successful of
+humbugs? Here again I must plead a certain incompetence to give an
+answer. Positive it is that she spared herself none of the inductions of
+a reverie that seemed to dry up the mists and ambiguities of life. These
+hours of backward clearness come to all men and women, once at least,
+when they read the past in the light of the present, with the reasons of
+things, like unobserved finger-posts, protruding where they never saw
+them before. The journey behind them is mapped out and figured, with its
+false steps, its wrong observations, all its infatuated, deluded
+geography. They understand as Olive understood, but it is probable that
+they rarely suffer as she suffered. The sense of regret for her baffled
+calculations burned within her like a fire, and the splendour of the
+vision over which the curtain of mourning now was dropped brought to her
+eyes slow, still tears, tears that came one by one, neither easing her
+nerves nor lightening her load of pain. She thought of her innumerable
+talks with Verena, of the pledges they had exchanged, of their earnest
+studies, their faithful work, their certain reward, the winter nights
+under the lamp, when they thrilled with previsions as just and a passion
+as high as had ever found shelter in a pair of human hearts. The pity of
+it, the misery of such a fall after such a flight, could express itself
+only, as the poor girl prolonged the vague pauses of her unnoticed
+ramble, in a low, inarticulate murmur of anguish.
+
+The afternoon waned, bringing with it the slight chill which, at the
+summer's end, begins to mark the shortening days. She turned her face
+homeward, and by this time became conscious that if Verena's companion
+had not yet brought her back there might be ground for uneasiness as to
+what had happened to them. It seemed to her that no sail-boat could have
+put into the town without passing more or less before her eyes and
+showing her whom it carried; she had seen a dozen, freighted only with
+the figures of men. An accident was perfectly possible (what could
+Ransom, with his plantation habits, know about the management of a
+sail?), and once that danger loomed before her--the signal loveliness of
+the weather had prevented its striking her before--Olive's imagination
+hurried, with a bound, to the worst. She saw the boat overturned and
+drifting out to sea, and (after a week of nameless horror) the body of
+an unknown young woman, defaced beyond recognition, but with long auburn
+hair and in a white dress, washed up in some far-away cove. An hour
+before, her mind had rested with a sort of relief on the idea that
+Verena should sink for ever beneath the horizon, so that their
+tremendous trouble might never be; but now, with the lateness of the
+hour, a sharp, immediate anxiety took the place of that intended
+resignation; and she quickened her step, with a heart that galloped too
+as she went. Then it was, above all, that she felt how _she_ had
+understood friendship, and how never again to see the face of the
+creature she had taken to her soul would be for her as the stroke of
+blindness. The twilight had become thick by the time she reached Marmion
+and paused for an instant in front of her house, over which the elms
+that stood on the grassy wayside appeared to her to hang a blacker
+curtain than ever before.
+
+There was no candle in any window, and when she pushed in and stood in
+the hall, listening a moment, her step awakened no answering sound. Her
+heart failed her; Verena's staying out in a boat from ten o'clock in the
+morning till nightfall was too unnatural, and she gave a cry, as she
+rushed into the low, dim parlour (darkened on one side, at that hour, by
+the wide-armed foliage, and on the other by the veranda and trellis),
+which expressed only a wild personal passion, a desire to take her
+friend in her arms again on any terms, even the most cruel to herself.
+The next moment she started back, with another and a different
+exclamation, for Verena was in the room, motionless, in a corner--the
+first place in which she had seated herself on re-entering the
+house--looking at her with a silent face which seemed strange,
+unnatural, in the dusk. Olive stopped short, and for a minute the two
+women remained as they were, gazing at each other in the dimness. After
+that, too, Olive still said nothing; she only went to Verena and sat
+down beside her. She didn't know what to make of her manner; she had
+never been like that before. She was unwilling to speak; she seemed
+crushed and humbled. This was almost the worst--if anything could be
+worse than what had gone before; and Olive took her hand with an
+irresistible impulse of compassion and assurance. From the way it lay in
+her own she guessed her whole feeling--saw it was a kind of shame, shame
+for her weakness, her swift surrender, her insane gyration, in the
+morning. Verena expressed it by no protest and no explanation; she
+appeared not even to wish to hear the sound of her own voice. Her
+silence itself was an appeal--an appeal to Olive to ask no questions
+(she could trust her to inflict no spoken reproach); only to wait till
+she could lift up her head again. Olive understood, or thought she
+understood, and the woefulness of it all only seemed the deeper. She
+would just sit there and hold her hand; that was all she could do; they
+were beyond each other's help in any other way now. Verena leaned her
+head back and closed her eyes, and for an hour, as nightfall settled in
+the room, neither of the young women spoke. Distinctly, it was a kind of
+shame. After a while the parlour-maid, very casual, in the manner of the
+servants at Marmion, appeared on the threshold with a lamp; but Olive
+motioned her frantically away. She wished to keep the darkness. It was a
+kind of shame.
+
+The next morning Basil Ransom rapped loudly with his walking-stick on
+the lintel of Miss Chancellor's house-door, which, as usual on fine
+days, stood open. There was no need he should wait till the servant had
+answered his summons; for Olive, who had reason to believe he would
+come, and who had been lurking in the sitting-room for a purpose of her
+own, stepped forth into the little hall.
+
+"I am sorry to disturb you; I had the hope that--for a moment--I might
+see Miss Tarrant." That was the speech with which (and a measured
+salutation) he greeted his advancing kinswoman. She faced him an
+instant, and her strange green eyes caught the light.
+
+"It's impossible. You may believe that when I say it."
+
+"Why is it impossible?" he asked, smiling in spite of an inward
+displeasure. And as Olive gave him no answer, only gazing at him with a
+cold audacity which he had not hitherto observed in her, he added a
+little explanation. "It is simply to have seen her before I go--to have
+said five words to her. I want her to know that I have made up my
+mind--since yesterday--to leave this place; I shall take the train at
+noon."
+
+It was not to gratify Olive Chancellor that he had determined to go
+away, or even that he told her this; yet he was surprised that his words
+brought no expression of pleasure to her face. "I don't think it is of
+much importance whether you go away or not. Miss Tarrant herself has
+gone away."
+
+"Miss Tarrant--gone away?" This announcement was so much at variance
+with Verena's apparent intentions the night before that his ejaculation
+expressed chagrin as well as surprise, and in doing so it gave Olive a
+momentary advantage. It was the only one she had ever had, and the poor
+girl may be excused for having enjoyed it--so far as enjoyment was
+possible to her. Basil Ransom's visible discomfiture was more agreeable
+to her than anything had been for a long time.
+
+"I went with her myself to the early train; and I saw it leave the
+station." And Olive kept her eyes unaverted, for the satisfaction of
+seeing how he took it.
+
+It must be confessed that he took it rather ill. He had decided it was
+best he should retire, but Verena's retiring was another matter. "And
+where is she gone?" he asked, with a frown.
+
+"I don't think I am obliged to tell you."
+
+"Of course not! Excuse my asking. It is much better that I should find
+it out for myself, because if I owed the information to you I should
+perhaps feel a certain delicacy as regards profiting by it."
+
+"Gracious heaven!" cried Miss Chancellor, at the idea of Ransom's
+delicacy. Then she added more deliberately: "You will not find out for
+yourself."
+
+"You think not?"
+
+"I am sure of it!" And her enjoyment of the situation becoming acute,
+there broke from her lips a shrill, unfamiliar, troubled sound, which
+performed the office of a laugh, a laugh of triumph, but which, at a
+distance, might have passed almost as well for a wail of despair. It
+rang in Ransom's ears as he quickly turned away.
+
+
+
+
+XL
+
+
+It was Mrs. Luna who received him, as she had received him on the
+occasion of his first visit to Charles Street; by which I do not mean
+quite in the same way. She had known very little about him then, but she
+knew too much for her happiness to-day, and she had with him now a
+little invidious, contemptuous manner, as if everything he should say or
+do could be a proof only of abominable duplicity and perversity. She had
+a theory that he had treated her shamefully; and he knew it--I do not
+mean the fact, but the theory: which led him to reflect that her
+resentments were as shallow as her opinions, inasmuch as if she really
+believed in her grievance, or if it had had any dignity, she would not
+have consented to see him. He had not presented himself at Miss
+Chancellor's door without a very good reason, and having done so he
+could not turn away so long as there was any one in the house of whom he
+might have speech. He had sent up his name to Mrs. Luna, after being
+told that she was staying there, on the mere chance that she would see
+him; for he thought a refusal a very possible sequel to the letters she
+had written him during the past four or five months--letters he had
+scarcely read, full of allusions of the most cutting sort to proceedings
+of his, in the past, of which he had no recollection whatever. They
+bored him, for he had quite other matters in his mind.
+
+"I don't wonder you have the bad taste, the crudity," she said, as soon
+as he came into the room, looking at him more sternly than he would have
+believed possible to her.
+
+He saw that this was an allusion to his not having been to see her since
+the period of her sister's visit to New York; he having conceived for
+her, the evening of Mrs. Burrage's party, a sentiment of aversion which
+put an end to such attentions. He didn't laugh, he was too worried and
+preoccupied; but he replied, in a tone which apparently annoyed her as
+much as any indecent mirth: "I thought it very possible you wouldn't see
+me."
+
+"Why shouldn't I see you, if I should take it into my head? Do you
+suppose I care whether I see you or not?"
+
+"I supposed you wanted to, from your letters."
+
+"Then why did you think I would refuse?"
+
+"Because that's the sort of thing women do."
+
+"Women--women! You know much about them!"
+
+"I am learning something every day."
+
+"You haven't learned yet, apparently, to answer their letters. It's
+rather a surprise to me that you don't pretend not to have received
+mine."
+
+Ransom could smile now; the opportunity to vent the exasperation that
+had been consuming him almost restored his good humour. "What could I
+say? You overwhelmed me. Besides, I did answer one of them."
+
+"One of them? You speak as if I had written you a dozen!" Mrs. Luna
+cried.
+
+"I thought that was your contention--that you had done me the honour to
+address me so many. They were crushing, and when a man's crushed, it's
+all over."
+
+"Yes, you look as if you were in very small pieces! I am glad that I
+shall never see you again."
+
+"I can see now why you received me--to tell me that," Ransom said.
+
+"It is a kind of pleasure. I am going back to Europe."
+
+"Really? for Newton's education?"
+
+"Ah, I wonder you can have the face to speak of that--after the way you
+deserted him!"
+
+"Let us abandon the subject, then, and I will tell you what I want."
+
+"I don't in the least care what you want," Mrs. Luna remarked. "And you
+haven't even the grace to ask me where I am going--over there."
+
+"What difference does that make to me--once you leave these shores?"
+
+Mrs. Luna rose to her feet. "Ah, chivalry, chivalry!" she exclaimed. And
+she walked away to the window--one of the windows from which Ransom had
+first enjoyed, at Olive's solicitation, the view of the Back Bay. Mrs.
+Luna looked forth at it with little of the air of a person who was sorry
+to be about to lose it. "I am determined you shall know where I am
+going," she said in a moment. "I am going to Florence."
+
+"Don't be afraid!" he replied. "I shall go to Rome."
+
+"And you'll carry there more impertinence than has been seen there since
+the old emperors."
+
+"Were the emperors impertinent, in addition to their other vices? I am
+determined, on my side, that you shall know what I have come for,"
+Ransom said. "I wouldn't ask you if I could ask any one else; but I am
+very hard pressed, and I don't know who can help me."
+
+Mrs. Luna turned on him a face of the frankest derision. "Help you? Do
+you remember the last time I asked you to help me?"
+
+"That evening at Mrs. Burrage's? Surely I wasn't wanting then; I
+remember urging on your acceptance a chair, so that you might stand on
+it, to see and to hear."
+
+"To see and to hear what, please? Your disgusting infatuation!"
+
+"It's just about that I want to speak to you," Ransom pursued. "As you
+already know all about it, you have no new shock to receive, and I
+therefore venture to ask you----"
+
+"Where tickets for her lecture to-night can be obtained? Is it possible
+she hasn't sent you one?"
+
+"I assure you I didn't come to Boston to hear it," said Ransom, with a
+sadness which Mrs. Luna evidently regarded as a refinement of outrage.
+"What I should like to ascertain is where Miss Tarrant may be found at
+the present moment."
+
+"And do you think that's a delicate inquiry to make of _me_?"
+
+"I don't see why it shouldn't be, but I know you don't think it is, and
+that is why, as I say, I mention the matter to you only because I can
+imagine absolutely no one else who is in a position to assist me. I have
+been to the house of Miss Tarrant's parents, in Cambridge, but it is
+closed and empty, destitute of any sign of life. I went there first, on
+arriving this morning, and rang at this door only when my journey to
+Monadnoc Place had proved fruitless. Your sister's servant told me that
+Miss Tarrant was not staying here, but she added that Mrs. Luna was. No
+doubt you won't be pleased at having been spoken of as a sort of
+equivalent; and I didn't say to myself--or to the servant--that you
+would do as well; I only reflected that I could at least try you. I
+didn't even ask for Miss Chancellor, as I am sure she would give me no
+information whatever."
+
+Mrs. Luna listened to this candid account of the young man's proceedings
+with her head turned a little over her shoulder at him, and her eyes
+fixed as unsympathetically as possible upon his own. "What you propose,
+then, as I understand it," she said in a moment, "is that I should
+betray my sister to you."
+
+"Worse than that; I propose that you should betray Miss Tarrant
+herself."
+
+"What do I care about Miss Tarrant? I don't know what you are talking
+about."
+
+"Haven't you really any idea where she is living? Haven't you seen her
+here? Are Miss Olive and she not constantly together?"
+
+Mrs. Luna, at this, turned full round upon him, and, with folded arms
+and her head tossed back, exclaimed: "Look here, Basil Ransom, I never
+thought you were a fool, but it strikes me that since we last met you
+have lost your wits!"
+
+"There is no doubt of that," Ransom answered, smiling.
+
+"Do you mean to tell me you don't know everything about Miss Tarrant
+that can be known?"
+
+"I have neither seen her nor heard of her for the last ten weeks; Miss
+Chancellor has hidden her away."
+
+"Hidden her away, with all the walls and fences of Boston flaming to-day
+with her name?"
+
+"Oh yes, I have noticed that, and I have no doubt that by waiting till
+this evening I shall be able to see her. But I don't want to wait till
+this evening; I want to see her now, and not in public--in private."
+
+"Do you indeed?--how interesting!" cried Mrs. Luna, with rippling
+laughter. "And pray what do you want to do with her?"
+
+Ransom hesitated a little. "I think I would rather not tell you."
+
+"Your charming frankness, then, has its limits! My poor cousin, you are
+really too _naif_. Do you suppose it matters a straw to me?"
+
+Ransom made no answer to this appeal, but after an instant he broke out:
+"Honestly, Mrs. Luna, can you give me no clue?"
+
+"Lord, what terrible eyes you make, and what terrible words you use!
+'Honestly,' quoth he! Do you think I am so fond of the creature that I
+want to keep her all to myself?"
+
+"I don't know; I don't understand," said Ransom, slowly and softly, but
+still with his terrible eyes.
+
+"And do you think I understand any better? You are not a very edifying
+young man," Mrs. Luna went on; "but I really think you have deserved a
+better fate than to be jilted and thrown over by a girl of that class."
+
+"I haven't been jilted. I like her very much, but she never encouraged
+me."
+
+At this Mrs. Luna broke again into articulate scoffing. "It is very odd
+that at your age you should be so little a man of the world!"
+
+Ransom made her no other answer than to remark, thoughtfully and rather
+absently: "Your sister is really very clever."
+
+"By which you mean, I suppose, that I am not!" Mrs. Luna suddenly
+changed her tone, and said, with the greatest sweetness and humility:
+"God knows, I have never pretended to be!"
+
+Ransom looked at her a moment, and guessed the meaning of this altered
+note. It had suddenly come over her that with her portrait in half the
+shop-fronts, her advertisement on all the fences, and the great occasion
+on which she was to reveal herself to the country at large close at
+hand, Verena had become so conscious of high destinies that her dear
+friend's Southern kinsman really appeared to her very small game, and
+she might therefore be regarded as having cast him off. If this were the
+case, it would perhaps be well for Mrs. Luna still to hold on. Basil's
+induction was very rapid, but it gave him time to decide that the best
+thing to say to his interlocutress was: "On what day do you sail for
+Europe?"
+
+"Perhaps I shall not sail at all," Mrs. Luna replied, looking out of the
+window.
+
+"And in that case--poor Newton's education?"
+
+"I should try to content myself with a country which has given you
+yours."
+
+"Don't you want him, then, to be a man of the world?"
+
+"Ah, the world, the world!" she murmured, while she watched, in the
+deepening dusk, the lights of the town begin to reflect themselves in
+the Back Bay. "Has it been such a source of happiness to me that I
+belong to it?"
+
+"Perhaps, after all, I shall be able to go to Florence!" said Ransom,
+laughing.
+
+She faced him once more, this time slowly, and declared that she had
+never known anything so strange as his state of mind--she would be so
+glad to have an explanation of it. With the opinions he professed (it
+was for them she had liked him--she didn't like his character), why on
+earth should he be running after a little fifth-rate _poseuse_, and in
+such a frenzy to get hold of her? He might say it was none of her
+business, and of course she would have no answer to that; therefore she
+admitted that she asked simply out of intellectual curiosity, and
+because one always was tormented at the sight of a painful
+contradiction. With the things she had heard him say about his
+convictions and theories, his view of life and the great questions of
+the future, she should have thought he would find Miss Tarrant's
+attitudinising absolutely nauseous. Were not her views the same as
+Olive's and hadn't Olive and he signally failed to hit it off together?
+Mrs. Luna only asked because she was really quite puzzled. "Don't you
+know that some minds, when they see a mystery, can't rest till they
+clear it up?"
+
+"You can't be more puzzled than I am," said Ransom. "Apparently the
+explanation is to be found in a sort of reversal of the formula you were
+so good, just now, as to apply to me. You like my opinions, but you
+entertain a different sentiment for my character. I deplore Miss
+Tarrant's opinions, but her character--well, her character pleases me."
+
+Mrs. Luna stared, as if she were waiting, the explanation surely not
+being complete. "But as much as that?" she inquired.
+
+"As much as what?" said Ransom, smiling. Then he added, "Your sister has
+beaten me."
+
+"I thought she had beaten some one of late; she has seemed so gay and
+happy. I didn't suppose it was _all_ because I was going away."
+
+"Has she seemed very gay?" Ransom inquired, with a sinking of the heart.
+He wore such a long face, as he asked this question, that Mrs. Luna was
+again moved to audible mirth, after which she explained:
+
+"Of course I mean gay for her. Everything is relative. With her
+impatience for this lecture of her friend's to-night, she's in an
+unspeakable state! She can't sit still for three minutes, she goes out
+fifteen times a day, and there has been enough arranging and
+interviewing, and discussing and telegraphing and advertising, enough
+wire-pulling and rushing about, to put an army in the field. What is it
+they are always doing to the armies in Europe?--mobilising them? Well,
+Verena has been mobilised, and this has been headquarters."
+
+"And shall you go to the Music Hall to-night?"
+
+"For what do you take me? I have no desire to be shrieked at for an
+hour."
+
+"No doubt, no doubt, Miss Olive must be in a state," Ransom went on,
+rather absently. Then he said, with abruptness, in a different tone: "If
+this house has been, as you say, headquarters, how comes it you haven't
+seen her?"
+
+"Seen Olive? I have seen nothing else!"
+
+"I mean Miss Tarrant. She must be somewhere--in the place--if she's to
+speak to-night."
+
+"Should you like me to go out and look for her? _Il ne manquerait plus
+que cela!_" cried Mrs. Luna. "What's the matter with you, Basil Ransom,
+and what are you after?" she demanded, with considerable sharpness. She
+had tried haughtiness and she had tried humility, but they brought her
+equally face to face with a competitor whom she couldn't take seriously,
+yet who was none the less objectionable for all that.
+
+I know not whether Ransom would have attempted to answer her question
+had an obstacle not presented itself; at any rate, at the moment she
+spoke, the curtain in the doorway was pushed aside, and a visitor
+crossed the threshold. "Mercy! how provoking!" Mrs. Luna exclaimed,
+audibly enough; and without moving from her place she bent an
+uncharitable eye upon the invader, a gentleman whom Ransom had the sense
+of having met before. He was a young man with a fresh face and abundant
+locks, prematurely white; he stood smiling at Mrs. Luna, quite undaunted
+by the absence of any demonstration in his favour. She looked as if she
+didn't know him, while Ransom prepared to depart, leaving them to settle
+it together.
+
+"I'm afraid you don't remember me, though I have seen you before," said
+the young man, very amiably. "I was here a week ago, and Miss Chancellor
+presented me to you."
+
+"Oh yes; she's not at home now," Mrs. Luna returned vaguely.
+
+"So I was told--but I didn't let that prevent me." And the young man
+included Basil Ransom in the smile with which he made himself more
+welcome than Mrs. Luna appeared disposed to make him, and by which he
+seemed to call attention to his superiority. "There is a matter on which
+I want very much to obtain some information, and I have no doubt you
+will be so good as to give it to me."
+
+"It comes back to me--you have something to do with the newspapers,"
+said Mrs. Luna; and Ransom too, by this time, had placed the young man
+among his reminiscences. He had been at Miss Birdseye's famous party,
+and Doctor Prance had there described him as a brilliant journalist.
+
+It was quite with the air of such a personage that he accepted Mrs.
+Luna's definition, and he continued to radiate towards Ransom (as if, in
+return, he remembered _his_ face), while he dropped, confidentially, the
+word that expressed everything--"The _Vesper_, don't you know?" Then he
+went on: "Now, Mrs. Luna, I don't care, I'm not going to let you off! We
+want the last news about Miss Verena, and it has got to come out of this
+house."
+
+"Oh murder!" Ransom muttered, beneath his breath, taking up his hat.
+
+"Miss Chancellor has hidden her away; I have been scouring the city in
+search of her, and her own father hasn't seen her for a week. We have
+got his ideas; they are very easy to get, but that isn't what we want."
+
+"And what do you want?" Ransom was now impelled to inquire, as Mr.
+Pardon (even the name at present came back to him) appeared sufficiently
+to have introduced himself.
+
+"We want to know how she feels about to-night; what report she makes of
+her nerves, her anticipations; how she looked, what she had on, up to
+six o'clock. Gracious! if I could see her I should know what I wanted,
+and so would she, I guess!" Mr. Pardon exclaimed. "You must know
+something, Mrs. Luna; it isn't natural you shouldn't. I won't inquire
+any further where she is, because that might seem a little pushing, if
+she does wish to withdraw herself--though I am bound to say I think she
+makes a mistake; we could work up these last hours for her! But can't
+you tell me any little personal items--the sort of thing the people
+like? What is she going to have for supper? or is she going to
+speak--a--without previous nourishment?"
+
+"Really, sir, I don't know, and I don't in the least care; I have
+nothing to do with the business!" Mrs. Luna cried angrily.
+
+The reporter stared; then, eagerly, "You have nothing to do with it--you
+take an unfavourable view, you protest?" And he was already feeling in a
+side-pocket for his notebook.
+
+"Mercy on us! are you going to put _that_ in the paper?" Mrs. Luna
+exclaimed; and in spite of the sense, detestable to him, that everything
+he wished most to avert was fast closing over the girl, Ransom broke
+into cynical laughter.
+
+"Ah, but do protest, madam; let us at least have that fragment!" Mr.
+Pardon went on. "A protest from this house would be a charming note. We
+_must_ have it--we've got nothing else! The public are almost as much
+interested in your sister as they are in Miss Verena; they know to what
+extent she has backed her: and I should be so delighted (I see the
+heading, from here, so attractive!) just to take down 'What Miss
+Chancellor's Family Think about It!'"
+
+Mrs. Luna sank into the nearest chair, with a groan, covering her face
+with her hands. "Heaven help me, I am glad I am going to Europe!"
+
+"That is another little item--everything counts," said Matthias Pardon,
+making a rapid entry in his tablets. "May I inquire whether you are
+going to Europe in consequence of your disapproval of your sister's
+views?"
+
+Mrs. Luna sprang up again, almost snatching the memoranda out of his
+hand. "If you have the impertinence to publish a word about me, or to
+mention my name in print, I will come to your office and make such a
+scene!"
+
+"Dearest lady, that would be a godsend!" Mr. Pardon cried
+enthusiastically; but he put his notebook back into his pocket.
+
+"Have you made an exhaustive search for Miss Tarrant?" Basil Ransom
+asked of him. Mr. Pardon, at this inquiry, eyed him with a sudden,
+familiar archness, expressive of the idea of competition; so that Ransom
+added: "You needn't be afraid, I'm not a reporter."
+
+"I didn't know but what you had come on from New York."
+
+"So I have--but not as the representative of a newspaper."
+
+"Fancy his taking you----" Mrs. Luna murmured, with indignation.
+
+"Well, I have been everywhere I could think of," Mr. Pardon remarked. "I
+have been hunting round after your sister's agent, but I haven't been
+able to catch up with him; I suppose he has been hunting on his side.
+Miss Chancellor told me--Mrs. Luna may remember it--that she shouldn't
+be here at all during the week, and that she preferred not to tell me
+either where or how she was to spend her time until the momentous
+evening. Of course I let her know that I should find out if I could, and
+you may remember," he said to Mrs. Luna, "the conversation we had on the
+subject. I remarked, candidly, that if they didn't look out they would
+overdo the quietness. Doctor Tarrant has felt very low about it.
+However, I have done what I could with the material at my command, and
+the _Vesper_ has let the public know that her whereabouts was the
+biggest mystery of the season. It's difficult to get round the
+_Vesper_."
+
+"I am almost afraid to open my lips in your presence," Mrs. Luna broke
+in, "but I must say that I think my sister was strangely communicative.
+She told you ever so much that I wouldn't have breathed."
+
+"I should like to try you with something you know!" Matthias Pardon
+returned imperturbably. "This isn't a fair trial, because you don't
+know. Miss Chancellor came round--came round considerably, there's no
+doubt of that; because a year or two ago she was terribly
+unapproachable. If I have mollified her, madam, why shouldn't I mollify
+you? She realises that I can help her now, and as I ain't rancorous I am
+willing to help her all she'll let me. The trouble is, she won't let me
+enough, yet; it seems as if she couldn't believe it of me. At any rate,"
+he pursued, addressing himself more particularly to Ransom, "half an
+hour ago, at the Hall, they knew nothing whatever about Miss Tarrant,
+beyond the fact that about a month ago she came there, with Miss
+Chancellor, to try her voice, which rang all over the place, like
+silver, and that Miss Chancellor guaranteed her absolute punctuality
+to-night."
+
+"Well, that's all that is required," said Ransom, at hazard; and he put
+out his hand, in farewell, to Mrs. Luna.
+
+"Do you desert me already?" she demanded, giving him a glance which
+would have embarrassed any spectator but a reporter of the _Vesper_.
+
+"I have fifty things to do; you must excuse me." He was nervous,
+restless, his heart was beating much faster than usual; he couldn't
+stand still, and he had no compunction whatever about leaving her to get
+rid, by herself, of Mr. Pardon.
+
+This gentleman continued to mix in the conversation, possibly from the
+hope that if he should linger either Miss Tarrant or Miss Chancellor
+would make her appearance. "Every seat in the Hall is sold; the crowd is
+expected to be immense. When our Boston public _does_ take an idea!" Mr.
+Pardon exclaimed.
+
+Ransom only wanted to get away, and in order to facilitate his release
+by implying that in such a case he should see her again, he said to Mrs.
+Luna, rather hypocritically, from the threshold, "You had really better
+come to-night."
+
+"I am not like the Boston public--I don't take an idea!" she replied.
+
+"Do you mean to say you are not going?" cried Mr. Pardon, with widely
+open eyes, clapping his hand again to his pocket. "Don't you regard her
+as a wonderful genius?"
+
+Mrs. Luna was sorely tried, and the vexation of seeing Ransom slip away
+from her with his thoughts visibly on Verena, leaving her face to face
+with the odious newspaper man, whose presence made passionate protest
+impossible--the annoyance of seeing everything and every one mock at her
+and fail to compensate her was such that she lost her head, while
+rashness leaped to her lips and jerked out the answer--"No indeed; I
+think her a vulgar idiot!"
+
+"Ah, madam, I should never permit myself to print that!" Ransom heard
+Mr. Pardon rejoin reproachfully, as he dropped the _portiere_ of the
+drawing-room.
+
+
+
+
+XLI
+
+
+He walked about for the next two hours, walked all over Boston, heedless
+of his course, and conscious only of an unwillingness to return to his
+hotel and an inability to eat his dinner or rest his weary legs. He had
+been roaming in very much the same desperate fashion, at once eager and
+purposeless, for many days before he left New York, and he knew that his
+agitation and suspense must wear themselves out. At present they pressed
+him more than ever; they had become tremendously acute. The early dusk
+of the last half of November had gathered thick, but the evening was
+fine and the lighted streets had the animation and variety of a winter
+that had begun with brilliancy. The shop-fronts glowed through frosty
+panes, the passers bustled on the pavement, the bells of the street-cars
+jangled in the cold air, the newsboys hawked the evening papers, the
+vestibules of the theatres, illuminated and flanked with coloured
+posters and the photographs of actresses, exhibited seductively their
+swinging doors of red leather or baize, spotted with little brass nails.
+Behind great plates of glass the interior of the hotels became visible,
+with marble-paved lobbies, white with electric lamps, and columns, and
+Westerners on divans stretching their legs, while behind a counter, set
+apart and covered with an array of periodicals and novels in paper
+covers, little boys, with the faces of old men, showing plans of the
+play-houses and offering librettos, sold orchestra-chairs at a premium.
+When from time to time Ransom paused at a corner, hesitating which way
+to drift, he looked up and saw the stars, sharp and near, scintillating
+over the town. Boston seemed to him big and full of nocturnal life, very
+much awake and preparing for an evening of pleasure.
+
+He passed and repassed the Music Hall, saw Verena immensely advertised,
+gazed down the vista, the approach for pedestrians, which leads out of
+School Street, and thought it looked expectant and ominous. People had
+not begun to enter yet, but the place was ready, lighted and open, and
+the interval would be only too short. So it appeared to Ransom, while at
+the same time he wished immensely the crisis were over. Everything that
+surrounded him referred itself to the idea with which his mind was
+palpitating, the question whether he might not still intervene as
+against the girl's jump into the abyss. He believed that all Boston was
+going to hear her, or that at least every one was whom he saw in the
+streets; and there was a kind of incentive and inspiration in this
+thought. The vision of wresting her from the mighty multitude set him
+off again, to stride through the population that would fight for her. It
+was not too late, for he felt strong; it would not be too late even if
+she should already stand there before thousands of converging eyes. He
+had had his ticket since the morning, and now the time was going on. He
+went back to his hotel at last for ten minutes, and refreshed himself by
+dressing a little and by drinking a glass of wine. Then he took his way
+once more to the Music Hall, and saw that people were beginning to go
+in--the first drops of the great stream, among whom there were many
+women. Since seven o'clock the minutes had moved fast--before that they
+had dragged--and now there was only half an hour. Ransom passed in with
+the others; he knew just where his seat was; he had chosen it, on
+reaching Boston, from the few that were left, with what he believed to
+be care. But now, as he stood beneath the far-away panelled roof,
+stretching above the line of little tongues of flame which marked its
+junction with the walls, he felt that this didn't matter much, since he
+certainly was not going to subside into his place. He was not one of the
+audience; he was apart, unique, and had come on a business altogether
+special. It wouldn't have mattered if, in advance, he had got no place
+at all and had just left himself to pay for standing-room at the last.
+The people came pouring in, and in a very short time there would only be
+standing-room left. Ransom had no definite plan; he had mainly wanted to
+get inside of the building, so that, on a view of the field, he might
+make up his mind. He had never been in the Music Hall before, and its
+lofty vaults and rows of overhanging balconies made it to his
+imagination immense and impressive. There were two or three moments
+during which he felt as he could imagine a young man to feel who,
+waiting in a public place, has made up his mind, for reasons of his own,
+to discharge a pistol at the king or the president.
+
+The place struck him with a kind of Roman vastness; the doors which
+opened out of the upper balconies, high aloft, and which were constantly
+swinging to and fro with the passage of spectators and ushers, reminded
+him of the _vomitoria_ that he had read about in descriptions of the
+Colosseum. The huge organ, the background of the stage--a stage occupied
+with tiers of seats for choruses and civic worthies--lifted to the dome
+its shining pipes and sculptured pinnacles, and some genius of music or
+oratory erected himself in monumental bronze at the base. The hall was
+so capacious and serious, and the audience increased so rapidly without
+filling it, giving Ransom a sense of the numbers it would contain when
+it was packed, that the courage of the two young women, face to face
+with so tremendous an ordeal, hovered before him as really sublime,
+especially the conscious tension of poor Olive, who would have been
+spared none of the anxieties and tremors, none of the previsions of
+accident or calculations of failure. In the front of the stage was a
+slim, high desk, like a music-stand, with a cover of red velvet, and
+near it was a light ornamental chair, on which he was sure Verena would
+not seat herself, though he could fancy her leaning at moments on the
+back. Behind this was a kind of semicircle of a dozen arm-chairs, which
+had evidently been arranged for the friends of the speaker, her sponsors
+and patrons. The hall was more and more full of premonitory sounds;
+people making a noise as they unfolded, on hinges, their seats, and
+itinerant boys, whose voices as they cried out "Photographs of Miss
+Tarrant--sketch of her life!" or "Portraits of the Speaker--story of her
+career!" sounded small and piping in the general immensity. Before
+Ransom was aware of it several of the arm-chairs, in the row behind the
+lecturer's desk, were occupied, with gaps, and in a moment he
+recognised, even across the interval, three of the persons who had
+appeared. The straight-featured woman with bands of glossy hair and
+eyebrows that told at a distance, could only be Mrs. Farrinder, just as
+the gentleman beside her, in a white overcoat, with an umbrella and a
+vague face, was probably her husband Amariah. At the opposite end of the
+row were another pair, whom Ransom, unacquainted with certain chapters
+of Verena's history, perceived without surprise to be Mrs. Burrage and
+her insinuating son. Apparently their interest in Miss Tarrant was more
+than a momentary fad, since--like himself--they had made the journey
+from New York to hear her. There were other figures, unknown to our
+young man, here and there, in the semicircle; but several places were
+still empty (one of which was of course reserved for Olive), and it
+occurred to Ransom, even in his preoccupation, that one of them ought to
+remain so--ought to be left to symbolise the presence, in the spirit, of
+Miss Birdseye.
+
+He bought one of the photographs of Verena, and thought it shockingly
+bad, and bought also the sketch of her life, which many people seemed to
+be reading, but crumpled it up in his pocket for future consideration.
+Verena was not in the least present to him in connexion with this
+exhibition of enterprise and puffery; what he saw was Olive, struggling
+and yielding, making every sacrifice of taste for the sake of the
+largest hearing, and conforming herself to a great popular system.
+Whether she had struggled or not, there was a catch-penny effect about
+the whole thing which added to the fever in his cheek and made him wish
+he had money to buy up the stock of the vociferous little boys. Suddenly
+the notes of the organ rolled out into the hall, and he became aware
+that the overture or prelude had begun. This, too, seemed to him a piece
+of claptrap, but he didn't wait to think of it; he instantly edged out
+of his place, which he had chosen near the end of a row, and reached one
+of the numerous doors. If he had had no definite plan he now had at
+least an irresistible impulse, and he felt the prick of shame at having
+faltered for a moment. It had been his tacit calculation that Verena,
+still enshrined in mystery by her companion, would not have reached the
+scene of her performance till within a few minutes of the time at which
+she was to come forth; so that he had lost nothing by waiting, up to
+this moment, before the platform. But now he must overtake his
+opportunity. Before passing out of the hall into the lobby he paused,
+and with his back to the stage, gave a look at the gathered auditory. It
+had become densely numerous, and, suffused with the evenly distributed
+gaslight, which fell from a great elevation, and the thick atmosphere
+that hangs for ever in such places, it appeared to pile itself high and
+to look dimly expectant and formidable. He had a throb of uneasiness at
+his private purpose of balking it of its entertainment, its victim--a
+glimpse of the ferocity that lurks in a disappointed mob. But the
+thought of that danger only made him pass more quickly through the ugly
+corridors; he felt that his plan was definite enough now, and he found
+that he had no need even of asking the way to a certain small door (one
+or more of them), which he meant to push open. In taking his place in
+the morning he had assured himself as to the side of the house on which
+(with its approach to the platform) the withdrawing room of singers and
+speakers was situated; he had chosen his seat in that quarter, and he
+now had not far to go before he reached it. No one heeded or challenged
+him; Miss Tarrant's auditors were still pouring in (the occasion was
+evidently to have been an unprecedented success of curiosity), and had
+all the attention of the ushers. Ransom opened a door at the end of the
+passage, and it admitted him into a sort of vestibule, quite bare save
+that at a second door, opposite to him, stood a figure at the sight of
+which he paused for a moment in his advance.
+
+The figure was simply that of a robust policeman, in his helmet and
+brass buttons--a policeman who was expecting him--Ransom could see that
+in a twinkling. He judged in the same space of time that Olive
+Chancellor had heard of his having arrived and had applied for the
+protection of this functionary, who was now simply guarding the ingress
+and was prepared to defend it against all comers. There was a slight
+element of surprise in this, as he had reasoned that his nervous
+kinswoman was absent from her house for the day--had been spending it
+all in Verena's retreat, wherever that was. The surprise was not great
+enough, however, to interrupt his course for more than an instant, and
+he crossed the room and stood before the belted sentinel. For a moment
+neither spoke; they looked at each other very hard in the eyes, and
+Ransom heard the organ, beyond partitions, launching its waves of sound
+through the hall. They seemed to be very near it, and the whole place
+vibrated. The policeman was a tall, lean-faced, sallow man, with a stoop
+of the shoulders, a small, steady eye, and something in his mouth which
+made a protuberance in his cheek. Ransom could see that he was very
+strong, but he believed that he himself was not materially less so.
+However, he had not come there to show physical fight--a public tussle
+about Verena was not an attractive idea, except perhaps, after all, if
+he should get the worst of it, from the point of view of Olive's new
+system of advertising; and, moreover, it would not be in the least
+necessary. Still he said nothing, and still the policeman remained dumb,
+and there was something in the way the moments elapsed and in our young
+man's consciousness that Verena was separated from him only by a couple
+of thin planks, which made him feel that she too expected him, but in
+another sense; that she had nothing to do with this parade of
+resistance, that she would know in a moment, by quick intuition, that he
+was there, and that she was only praying to be rescued, to be saved.
+Face to face with Olive she hadn't the courage, but she would have it
+with her hand in his. It came to him that there was no one in the world
+less sure of her business just at that moment than Olive Chancellor; it
+was as if he could see, through the door, the terrible way her eyes were
+fixed on Verena while she held her watch in her hand and Verena looked
+away from her. Olive would have been so thankful that she should begin
+before the hour, but of course that was impossible. Ransom asked no
+questions--that seemed a waste of time; he only said, after a minute, to
+the policeman:
+
+"I should like very much to see Miss Tarrant, if you will be so good as
+to take in my card."
+
+The guardian of order, well planted just between him and the handle of
+the door, took from Ransom the morsel of pasteboard which he held out to
+him, read slowly the name inscribed on it, turned it over and looked at
+the back, then returned it to his interlocutor. "Well, I guess it ain't
+much use," he remarked.
+
+"How can you know that? You have no business to decline my request."
+
+"Well, I guess I have about as much business as you have to make it."
+Then he added, "You are just the very man she wants to keep out."
+
+"I don't think Miss Tarrant wants to keep me out," Ransom returned.
+
+"I don't know much about her, she hasn't hired the hall. It's the other
+one--Miss Chancellor; it's her that runs this lecture."
+
+"And she has asked you to keep me out? How absurd!" exclaimed Ransom
+ingeniously.
+
+"She tells me you're none too fit to be round alone; you have got this
+thing on the brain. I guess you'd better be quiet," said the policeman.
+
+"Quiet? Is it possible to be more quiet than I am?"
+
+"Well, I've seen crazy folks that were a good deal like you. If you want
+to see the speaker why don't you go and set round in the hall, with the
+rest of the public?" And the policeman waited, in an immovable,
+ruminating, reasonable manner, for an answer to this inquiry.
+
+Ransom had one, on the instant, at his service. "Because I don't want
+simply to see her; I want also to speak to her--in private."
+
+"Yes--it's always intensely private," said the policeman. "Now I
+wouldn't lose the lecture if I was you. I guess it will do you good."
+
+"The lecture?" Ransom repeated, laughing. "It won't take place."
+
+"Yes it will--as quick as the organ stops." Then the policeman added, as
+to himself, "Why the devil don't it?"
+
+"Because Miss Tarrant has sent up to the organist to tell him to keep
+on."
+
+"Who has she sent, do you s'pose?" And Ransom's new acquaintance entered
+into his humour. "I guess Miss Chancellor isn't her nigger."
+
+"She has sent her father, or perhaps even her mother. They are in there
+too."
+
+"How do you know that?" asked the policeman consideringly.
+
+"Oh, I know everything," Ransom answered, smiling.
+
+"Well, I guess they didn't come here to listen to that organ. We'll hear
+something else before long, if he doesn't stop."
+
+"You will hear a good deal, very soon," Ransom remarked.
+
+The serenity of his self-confidence appeared at last to make an
+impression on his antagonist, who lowered his head a little, like some
+butting animal, and looked at the young man from beneath bushy eyebrows.
+"Well, I _have_ heard a good deal, since I've been in Boston."
+
+"Oh, Boston's a great place," Ransom rejoined inattentively. He was not
+listening to the policeman or to the organ now, for the sound of voices
+had reached him from the other side of the door. The policeman took no
+further notice of it than to lean back against the panels, with folded
+arms; and there was another pause, between them, during which the
+playing of the organ ceased.
+
+"I will just wait here, with your permission," said Ransom, "and
+presently I shall be called."
+
+"Who do you s'pose will call you?"
+
+"Well, Miss Tarrant, I hope."
+
+"She'll have to square the other one first."
+
+Ransom took out his watch, which he had adapted, on purpose, several
+hours before, to Boston time, and saw that the minutes had sped with
+increasing velocity during this interview, and that it now marked five
+minutes past eight. "Miss Chancellor will have to square the public," he
+said in a moment; and the words were far from being an empty profession
+of security, for the conviction already in possession of him, that a
+drama in which he, though cut off, was an actor, had been going on for
+some time in the apartment he was prevented from entering, that the
+situation was extraordinarily strained there, and that it could not come
+to an end without an appeal to him--this transcendental assumption
+acquired an infinitely greater force the instant he perceived that
+Verena was even now keeping her audience waiting. Why didn't she go on?
+Why, except that she knew he was there, and was gaining time?
+
+"Well, I guess she has shown herself," said the door-keeper, whose
+discussion with Ransom now appeared to have passed, on his own part, and
+without the slightest prejudice to his firmness, into a sociable,
+gossiping phase.
+
+"If she had shown herself, we should hear the reception, the applause."
+
+"Well, there they air; they are going to give it to her," the policeman
+announced.
+
+He had an odious appearance of being in the right, for there indeed they
+seemed to be--they were giving it to her. A general hubbub rose from the
+floor and the galleries of the hall--the sound of several thousand
+people stamping with their feet and rapping with their umbrellas and
+sticks. Ransom felt faint, and for a little while he stood with his gaze
+interlocked with that of the policeman. Then suddenly a wave of coolness
+seemed to break over him, and he exclaimed: "My dear fellow, that isn't
+applause--it's impatience. It isn't a reception, it's a call!"
+
+The policeman neither assented to this proposition nor denied it; he
+only transferred the protuberance in his cheek to the other side, and
+observed:
+
+"I guess she's sick."
+
+"Oh, I hope not!" said Ransom, very gently. The stamping and rapping
+swelled and swelled for a minute, and then it subsided; but before it
+had done so Ransom's definition of it had plainly become the true one.
+The tone of the manifestation was good-humoured, but it was not
+gratulatory. He looked at his watch again, and saw that five minutes
+more had elapsed, and he remembered what the newspaperman in Charles
+Street had said about Olive's guaranteeing Verena's punctuality. Oddly
+enough, at the moment the image of this gentleman recurred to him, the
+gentleman himself burst through the other door, in a state of the
+liveliest agitation.
+
+"Why in the name of goodness don't she go on? If she wants to make them
+call her, they've done it about enough!" Mr. Pardon turned, pressingly,
+from Ransom to the policeman and back again, and in his preoccupation
+gave no sign of having met the Mississippian before.
+
+"I guess she's sick," said the policeman.
+
+"The public'll be sick!" cried the distressed reporter. "If she's sick,
+why doesn't she send for a doctor? All Boston is packed into this house,
+and she has got to talk to it. I want to go in and see."
+
+"You can't go in," said the policeman drily.
+
+"Why can't I go in, I should like to know? I want to go in for the
+_Vesper_"!
+
+"You can't go in for anything. I'm keeping this man out, too," the
+policeman added genially, as if to make Mr. Pardon's exclusion appear
+less invidious.
+
+"Why, they'd ought to let _you_ in," said Matthias, staring a moment at
+Ransom.
+
+"May be they'd ought, but they won't," the policeman remarked.
+
+"Gracious me!" panted Mr. Pardon; "I knew from the first Miss Chancellor
+would make a mess of it! Where's Mr. Filer?" he went on eagerly,
+addressing himself apparently to either of the others, or to both.
+
+"I guess he's at the door, counting the money," said the policeman.
+
+"Well, he'll have to give it back if he don't look out!"
+
+"Maybe he will. I'll let _him_ in if he comes, but he's the only one.
+She is on now," the policeman added, without emotion.
+
+His ear had caught the first faint murmur of another explosion of sound.
+This time, unmistakably, it was applause--the clapping of multitudinous
+hands, mingled with the noise of many throats. The demonstration,
+however, though considerable, was not what might have been expected, and
+it died away quickly. Mr. Pardon stood listening, with an expression of
+some alarm. "Merciful fathers! can't they give her more than that?" he
+cried. "I'll just fly round and see!"
+
+When he had hurried away again, Ransom said to the policeman--"Who is
+Mr. Filer?"
+
+"Oh, he's an old friend of mine. He's the man that runs Miss
+Chancellor."
+
+"That runs her?"
+
+"Just the same as she runs Miss Tarrant. He runs the pair, as you might
+say. He's in the lecture-business."
+
+"Then he had better talk to the public himself."
+
+"Oh, _he_ can't talk; he can only boss!"
+
+The opposite door at this moment was pushed open again, and a large,
+heated-looking man, with a little stiff beard on the end of his chin and
+his overcoat flying behind him, strode forward with an imprecation.
+"What the h---- are they doing in the parlour? This sort of thing's
+about played out!"
+
+"Ain't she up there now?" the policeman asked.
+
+"It's not Miss Tarrant," Ransom said, as if he knew all about it. He
+perceived in a moment that this was Mr. Filer, Olive Chancellor's agent;
+an inference instantly followed by the reflexion that such a personage
+would have been warned against him by his kinswoman and would doubtless
+attempt to hold him, or his influence, accountable for Verena's
+unexpected delay. Mr. Filer only glanced at him, however, and to
+Ransom's surprise appeared to have no theory of his identity; a fact
+implying that Miss Chancellor had considered that the greater discretion
+was (except to the policeman) to hold her tongue about him altogether.
+
+"Up there? It's her jackass of a father that's up there!" cried Mr.
+Filer, with his hand on the latch of the door, which the policeman had
+allowed him to approach.
+
+"Is he asking for a doctor?" the latter inquired dispassionately.
+
+"You're the sort of doctor he'll want, if he doesn't produce the girl!
+You don't mean to say they've locked themselves in? What the plague are
+they after?"
+
+"They've got the key on that side," said the policeman, while Mr. Filer
+discharged at the door a volley of sharp knocks, at the same time
+violently shaking the handle.
+
+"If the door was locked, what was the good of your standing before it?"
+Ransom inquired.
+
+"So as you couldn't do that"; and the policeman nodded at Mr. Filer.
+
+"You see your interference has done very little good."
+
+"I dunno; she has got to come out yet."
+
+Mr. Filer meanwhile had continued to thump and shake, demanding instant
+admission and inquiring if they were going to let the audience pull the
+house down. Another round of applause had broken out, directed
+perceptibly to some apology, some solemn circumlocution, of Selah
+Tarrant's; this covered the sound of the agent's voice, as well as that
+of a confused and divided response, proceeding from the parlour. For a
+minute nothing definite was audible; the door remained closed, and
+Matthias Pardon reappeared in the vestibule.
+
+"He says she's just a little faint--from nervousness. She'll be all
+ready in about three minutes." This announcement was Mr. Pardon's
+contribution to the crisis; and he added that the crowd was a lovely
+crowd, it was a real Boston crowd, it was perfectly good-humoured.
+
+"There's a lovely crowd, and a real Boston one too, I guess, in here!"
+cried Mr. Filer, now banging very hard. "I've handled prima donnas, and
+I've handled natural curiosities, but I've never seen anything up to
+this. Mind what I say, ladies; if you don't let me in, I'll smash down
+the door!"
+
+"Don't seem as if _you_ could make it much worse, does it?" the
+policeman observed to Ransom, strolling aside a little, with the air of
+being superseded.
+
+
+
+
+XLII
+
+
+Ransom made no reply; he was watching the door, which at that moment
+gave way from within. Verena stood there--it was she, evidently, who had
+opened it--and her eyes went straight to his. She was dressed in white,
+and her face was whiter than her garment; above it her hair seemed to
+shine like fire. She took a step forward; but before she could take
+another he had come down to her, on the threshold of the room. Her face
+was full of suffering, and he did not attempt--before all those eyes--to
+take her hand; he only said in a low tone, "I have been waiting for
+you--a long time!"
+
+"I know it--I saw you in your seat--I want to speak to you."
+
+"Well, Miss Tarrant, don't you think you'd better be on the platform?"
+cried Mr. Filer, making with both his arms a movement as if to sweep her
+before him, through the waiting-room, up into the presence of the
+public.
+
+"In a moment I shall be ready. My father is making that all right." And,
+to Ransom's surprise, she smiled, with all her sweetness, at the
+irrepressible agent; appeared to wish genuinely to reassure him.
+
+The three had moved together into the waiting-room, and there at the
+farther end of it, beyond the vulgar, perfunctory chairs and tables,
+under the flaring gas, he saw Mrs. Tarrant sitting upright on a sofa,
+with immense rigidity, and a large flushed visage, full of suppressed
+distortion, and beside her prostrate, fallen over, her head buried in
+the lap of Verena's mother, the tragic figure of Olive Chancellor.
+Ransom could scarcely know how much Olive's having flung herself upon
+Mrs. Tarrant's bosom testified to the convulsive scene that had just
+taken place behind the locked door. He closed it again, sharply, in the
+face of the reporter and the policeman, and at the same moment Selah
+Tarrant descended, through the aperture leading to the platform, from
+his brief communion with the public. On seeing Ransom he stopped short,
+and, gathering his waterproof about him, measured the young man from
+head to foot.
+
+"Well, sir, perhaps _you_ would like to go and explain our hitch," he
+remarked, indulging in a smile so comprehensive that the corners of his
+mouth seemed almost to meet behind. "I presume that you, better than any
+one else, can give them an insight into our difficulties!"
+
+"Father, be still; father, it will come out all right in a moment!"
+cried Verena, below her breath, panting like an emergent diver.
+
+"There's one thing I want to know: are we going to spend half an hour
+talking over our domestic affairs?" Mr. Filer demanded, wiping his
+indignant countenance. "Is Miss Tarrant going to lecture, or ain't she
+going to lecture? If she ain't, she'll please to show cause why. Is she
+aware that every quarter of a second, at the present instant, is worth
+about five hundred dollars?"
+
+"I know that--I know that, Mr. Filer; I will begin in a moment!" Verena
+went on. "I only want to speak to Mr. Ransom--just three words. They are
+perfectly quiet--don't you see how quiet they are? They trust me, they
+trust me, don't they, father? I only want to speak to Mr. Ransom."
+
+"Who the devil is Mr. Ransom?" cried the exasperated, bewildered Filer.
+
+Verena spoke to the others, but she looked at her lover, and the
+expression of her eyes was ineffably touching and beseeching. She
+trembled with nervous passion, there were sobs and supplications in her
+voice, and Ransom felt himself flushing with pure pity for her pain--her
+inevitable agony. But at the same moment he had another perception,
+which brushed aside remorse; he saw that he could do what he wanted,
+that she begged him, with all her being, to spare her, but that so long
+as he should protest she was submissive, helpless. What he wanted, in
+this light, flamed before him and challenged all his manhood, tossing
+his determination to a height from which not only Doctor Tarrant, and
+Mr. Filer, and Olive, over there, in her sightless, soundless shame, but
+the great expectant hall as well, and the mighty multitude, in suspense,
+keeping quiet from minute to minute and holding the breath of its
+anger--from which all these things looked small, surmountable, and of
+the moment only. He didn't quite understand, as yet, however; he saw
+that Verena had not refused, but temporised, that the spell upon
+her--thanks to which he should still be able to rescue her--had been the
+knowledge that he was near.
+
+"Come away, come away," he murmured quickly, putting out his two hands
+to her.
+
+She took one of them, as if to plead, not to consent. "Oh, let me off,
+let me off--for _her_, for the others! It's too terrible, it's
+impossible!"
+
+"What I want to know is why Mr. Ransom isn't in the hands of the
+police!" wailed Mrs. Tarrant, from her sofa.
+
+"I have been, madam, for the last quarter of an hour." Ransom felt more
+and more that he could manage it, if he only kept cool. He bent over
+Verena with a tenderness in which he was careless, now, of observation.
+"Dearest, I told you, I warned you. I left you alone for ten weeks; but
+could that make you doubt it was coming? Not for worlds, not for
+millions, shall you give yourself to that roaring crowd. Don't ask me to
+care for them, or for any one! What do they care for you but to gape and
+grin and babble? You are mine, you are not theirs."
+
+"What under the sun is the man talking about? With the most magnificent
+audience ever brought together! The city of Boston is under this roof!"
+Mr. Filer gaspingly interposed.
+
+"The city of Boston be damned!" said Ransom.
+
+"Mr. Ransom is very much interested in my daughter. He doesn't approve
+of our views," Selah Tarrant explained.
+
+"It's the most horrible, wicked, immoral selfishness I ever heard in my
+life!" roared Mrs. Tarrant.
+
+"Selfishness! Mrs. Tarrant, do you suppose I pretend not to be selfish?"
+
+"Do you want us all murdered by the mob, then?"
+
+"They can have their money--can't you give them back their money?" cried
+Verena, turning frantically round the circle.
+
+"Verena Tarrant, you don't mean to say you are going to back down?" her
+mother shrieked.
+
+"Good God! that I should make her suffer like this!" said Ransom to
+himself; and to put an end to the odious scene he would have seized
+Verena in his arms and broken away into the outer world, if Olive, who
+at Mrs. Tarrant's last loud challenge had sprung to her feet, had not at
+the same time thrown herself between them with a force which made the
+girl relinquish her grasp of Ransom's hand. To his astonishment, the
+eyes that looked at him out of her scared, haggard face were, like
+Verena's, eyes of tremendous entreaty. There was a moment during which
+she would have been ready to go down on her knees to him, in order that
+the lecture should go on.
+
+"If you don't agree with her, take her up on the platform, and have it
+out there; the public would like that, first-rate!" Mr. Filer said to
+Ransom, as if he thought this suggestion practical.
+
+"She had prepared a lovely address!" Selah remarked mournfully, as if to
+the company in general.
+
+No one appeared to heed the observation, but his wife broke out again.
+"Verena Tarrant, I should like to slap you! Do you call such a man as
+that a gentleman? I don't know where your father's spirit is, to let him
+stay!"
+
+Olive, meanwhile, was literally praying to her kinsman. "Let her appear
+this once, just this once: not to ruin, not to shame! Haven't you any
+pity; do you want me to be hooted? It's only for an hour. Haven't you
+any soul?"
+
+Her face and voice were terrible to Ransom; she had flung herself upon
+Verena and was holding her close, and he could see that her friend's
+suffering was faint in comparison to her own. "Why for an hour, when
+it's all false and damnable? An hour is as bad as ten years! She's mine
+or she isn't, and if she's mine, she's all mine!"
+
+"Yours! Yours! Verena, think, think what you're doing!" Olive moaned,
+bending over her.
+
+Mr. Filer was now pouring forth his nature in objurgations and oaths,
+and brandishing before the culprits--Verena and Ransom--the extreme
+penalty of the law. Mrs. Tarrant had burst into violent hysterics, while
+Selah revolved vaguely about the room and declared that it seemed as if
+the better day was going to be put off for quite a while. "Don't you see
+how good, how sweet they are--giving us all this time? Don't you think
+that when they behave like that--without a sound, for five minutes--they
+ought to be rewarded?" Verena asked, smiling divinely, at Ransom.
+Nothing could have been more tender, more exquisite, than the way she
+put her appeal upon the ground of simple charity, kindness to the great
+good-natured, childish public.
+
+"Miss Chancellor may reward them in any way she likes. Give them back
+their money and a little present to each."
+
+"Money and presents? I should like to shoot you, sir!" yelled Mr. Filer.
+The audience had really been very patient, and up to this point deserved
+Verena's praise; but it was now long past eight o'clock, and symptoms of
+irritation--cries and groans and hisses--began again to proceed from the
+hall. Mr. Filer launched himself into the passage leading to the stage,
+and Selah rushed after him. Mrs. Tarrant extended herself, sobbing, on
+the sofa, and Olive, quivering in the storm, inquired of Ransom what he
+wanted her to do, what humiliation, what degradation, what sacrifice he
+imposed.
+
+"I'll do anything--I'll be abject--I'll be vile--I'll go down in the
+dust!"
+
+"I ask nothing of you, and I have nothing to do with you," Ransom said.
+"That is, I ask, at the most, that you shouldn't expect that, wishing to
+make Verena my wife, I should say to her, 'Oh yes, you can take an hour
+or two out of it!' Verena," he went on, "all this is out of
+it--dreadfully, odiously--and it's a great deal too much! Come, come as
+far away from here as possible, and we'll settle the rest!"
+
+The combined effort of Mr. Filer and Selah Tarrant to pacify the public
+had not, apparently, the success it deserved; the house continued in
+uproar and the volume of sound increased. "Leave us alone, leave us
+alone for a single minute!" cried Verena; "just let me speak to him, and
+it will be all right!" She rushed over to her mother, drew her, dragged
+her from the sofa, led her to the door of the room. Mrs. Tarrant, on the
+way, reunited herself with Olive (the horror of the situation had at
+least that compensation for her), and, clinging and staggering together,
+the distracted women, pushed by Verena, passed into the vestibule, now,
+as Ransom saw, deserted by the policeman and the reporter, who had
+rushed round to where the battle was thickest.
+
+"Oh, why did you come--why, why?" And Verena, turning back, threw
+herself upon him with a protest which was all, and more than all, a
+surrender. She had never yet given herself to him so much as in that
+movement of reproach.
+
+"Didn't you expect me, and weren't you sure?" he asked, smiling at her
+and standing there till she arrived.
+
+"I didn't know--it was terrible--it's awful! I saw you in your place, in
+the house, when you came. As soon as we got here I went out to those
+steps that go up to the stage and I looked out, with my father--from
+behind him--and saw you in a minute. Then I felt too nervous to speak! I
+could never, never, if you were there! My father didn't know you, and I
+said nothing, but Olive guessed as soon as I came back. She rushed at
+me, and she looked at me--oh, how she looked! and she guessed. She
+didn't need to go out to see for herself, and when she saw how I was
+trembling she began to tremble herself, to believe, as I believed, we
+were lost. Listen to them, listen to them, in the house! Now I want you
+to go away--I will see you to-morrow, as long as you wish. That's all I
+want now; if you will only go away it's not too late, and everything
+will be all right!"
+
+Preoccupied as Ransom was with the simple purpose of getting her bodily
+out of the place, he could yet notice her strange, touching tone, and
+her air of believing that she might really persuade him. She had
+evidently given up everything now--every pretence of a different
+conviction and of loyalty to her cause; all this had fallen from her as
+soon as she felt him near, and she asked him to go away just as any
+plighted maiden might have asked any favour of her lover. But it was the
+poor girl's misfortune that whatever she did or said, or left unsaid,
+only had the effect of making her dearer to him and making the people
+who were clamouring for her seem more and more a raving rabble.
+
+He indulged not in the smallest recognition of her request, and simply
+said, "Surely Olive must have believed, must have known, I would come."
+
+"She would have been sure if you hadn't become so unexpectedly quiet
+after I left Marmion. You seemed to concur, to be willing to wait."
+
+"So I was, for a few weeks. But they ended yesterday. I was furious that
+morning, when I learned your flight, and during the week that followed I
+made two or three attempts to find you. Then I stopped--I thought it
+better. I saw you were very well hidden; I determined not even to write.
+I felt I _could_ wait--with that last day at Marmion to think of.
+Besides, to leave you with her awhile, for the last, seemed more decent.
+Perhaps you'll tell me now where you were."
+
+"I was with father and mother. She sent me to them that morning, with a
+letter. I don't know what was in it. Perhaps there was money," said
+Verena, who evidently now would tell him everything.
+
+"And where did they take you?"
+
+"I don't know--to places. I was in Boston once, for a day; but only in a
+carriage. They were as frightened as Olive; they were bound to save me!"
+
+"They shouldn't have brought you here to-night then. How could you
+possibly doubt of my coming?"
+
+"I don't know what I thought, and I didn't know, till I saw you, that
+all the strength I had hoped for would leave me in a flash, and that if
+I attempted to speak--with you sitting there--I should make the most
+shameful failure. We had a sickening scene here--I begged for delay, for
+time to recover. We waited and waited, and when I heard you at the door
+talking to the policeman, it seemed to me everything was gone. But it
+will still come back, if you will leave me. They are quiet again--father
+must be interesting them."
+
+"I hope he is!" Ransom exclaimed. "If Miss Chancellor ordered the
+policeman, she must have expected me."
+
+"That was only after she knew you were in the house. She flew out into
+the lobby with father, and they seized him and posted him there. She
+locked the door; she seemed to think they would break it down. I didn't
+wait for that, but from the moment I knew you were on the other side of
+it I couldn't go on--I was paralysed. It has made me feel better to talk
+to you--and now I could appear," Verena added.
+
+"My darling child, haven't you a shawl or a mantle?" Ransom returned,
+for all answer, looking about him. He perceived, tossed upon a chair, a
+long, furred cloak, which he caught up and, before she could resist,
+threw over her. She even let him arrange it, and, standing there, draped
+from head to foot in it, contented herself with saying, after a moment:
+
+"I don't understand--where shall we go? Where will you take me?"
+
+"We shall catch the night-train for New York, and the first thing in the
+morning we shall be married."
+
+Verena remained gazing at him, with swimming eyes. "And what will the
+people do? Listen, listen!"
+
+"Your father is ceasing to interest them. They'll howl and thump,
+according to their nature."
+
+"Ah, their nature's fine!" Verena pleaded.
+
+"Dearest, that's one of the fallacies I shall have to woo you from. Hear
+them, the senseless brutes!" The storm was now raging in the hall, and
+it deepened, to such a point that Verena turned to him in a supreme
+appeal.
+
+"I could soothe them with a word!"
+
+"Keep your soothing words for me--you will have need of them all, in our
+coming time," Ransom said, laughing. He pulled open the door again,
+which led into the lobby, but he was driven back, with Verena, by a
+furious onset from Mrs. Tarrant. Seeing her daughter fairly arrayed for
+departure, she hurled herself upon her, half in indignation, half in a
+blind impulse to cling, and with an outpouring of tears, reproaches,
+prayers, strange scraps of argument and iterations of farewell, closed
+her about with an embrace which was partly a supreme caress, partly the
+salutary castigation she had, three minutes before, expressed the wish
+to administer, and altogether for the moment a check upon the girl's
+flight.
+
+"Mother, dearest, it's all for the best, I can't help it, I love you
+just the same; let me go, let me go!" Verena stammered, kissing her
+again, struggling to free herself, and holding out her hand to Ransom.
+He saw now that she only wanted to get away, to leave everything behind
+her. Olive was close at hand, on the threshold of the room, and as soon
+as Ransom looked at her he became aware that the weakness she had just
+shown had passed away. She had straightened herself again, and she was
+upright in her desolation. The expression of her face was a thing to
+remain with him for ever; it was impossible to imagine a more vivid
+presentment of blighted hope and wounded pride. Dry, desperate, rigid,
+she yet wavered and seemed uncertain; her pale, glittering eyes
+straining forward, as if they were looking for death. Ransom had a
+vision, even at that crowded moment, that if she could have met it there
+and then, bristling with steel or lurid with fire, she would have rushed
+on it without a tremor, like the heroine that she was. All this while
+the great agitation in the hall rose and fell, in waves and surges, as
+if Selah Tarrant and the agent were talking to the multitude, trying to
+calm them, succeeding for the moment, and then letting them loose again.
+Whirled down by one of the fitful gusts, a lady and a gentleman issued
+from the passage, and Ransom, glancing at them, recognised Mrs.
+Farrinder and her husband.
+
+"Well, Miss Chancellor," said that more successful woman, with
+considerable asperity, "if this is the way you're going to reinstate our
+sex!" She passed rapidly through the room, followed by Amariah, who
+remarked in his transit that it seemed as if there had been a want of
+organisation, and the two retreated expeditiously, without the lady's
+having taken the smallest notice of Verena, whose conflict with her
+mother prolonged itself. Ransom, striving, with all needful
+consideration for Mrs. Tarrant, to separate these two, addressed not a
+word to Olive; it was the last of her, for him, and he neither saw how
+her livid face suddenly glowed, as if Mrs. Farrinder's words had been a
+lash, nor how, as if with a sudden inspiration, she rushed to the
+approach to the platform. If he had observed her, it might have seemed
+to him that she hoped to find the fierce expiation she sought for in
+exposure to the thousands she had disappointed and deceived, in offering
+herself to be trampled to death and torn to pieces. She might have
+suggested to him some feminine firebrand of Paris revolutions, erect on
+a barricade, or even the sacrificial figure of Hypatia, whirled through
+the furious mob of Alexandria. She was arrested an instant by the
+arrival of Mrs. Burrage and her son, who had quitted the stage on
+observing the withdrawal of the Farrinders, and who swept into the room
+in the manner of people seeking shelter from a thunderstorm. The
+mother's face expressed the well-bred surprise of a person who should
+have been asked out to dinner and seen the cloth pulled off the table;
+the young man, who supported her on his arm, instantly lost himself in
+the spectacle of Verena disengaging herself from Mrs. Tarrant, only to
+be again overwhelmed, and in the unexpected presence of the
+Mississippian. His handsome blue eyes turned from one to the other, and
+he looked infinitely annoyed and bewildered. It even seemed to occur to
+him that he might, perhaps, interpose with effect, and he evidently
+would have liked to say that, without really bragging, _he_ would at
+least have kept the affair from turning into a row. But Verena, muffled
+and escaping, was deaf to him, and Ransom didn't look the right person
+to address such a remark as that to. Mrs. Burrage and Olive, as the
+latter shot past, exchanged a glance which represented quick irony on
+one side and indiscriminating defiance on the other.
+
+"Oh, are _you_ going to speak?" the lady from New York inquired, with
+her cursory laugh.
+
+Olive had already disappeared; but Ransom heard her answer flung behind
+her into the room. "I am going to be hissed and hooted and insulted!"
+
+"Olive, Olive!" Verena suddenly shrieked; and her piercing cry might
+have reached the front. But Ransom had already, by muscular force,
+wrenched her away, and was hurrying her out, leaving Mrs. Tarrant to
+heave herself into the arms of Mrs. Burrage, who, he was sure, would,
+within a minute, loom upon her attractively through her tears, and
+supply her with a reminiscence, destined to be valuable, of aristocratic
+support and clever composure. In the outer labyrinth hasty groups, a
+little scared, were leaving the hall, giving up the game. Ransom, as he
+went, thrust the hood of Verena's long cloak over her head, to conceal
+her face and her identity. It quite prevented recognition, and as they
+mingled in the issuing crowd he perceived the quick, complete,
+tremendous silence which, in the hall, had greeted Olive Chancellor's
+rush to the front. Every sound instantly dropped, the hush was
+respectful, the great public waited, and whatever she should say to them
+(and he thought she might indeed be rather embarrassed) it was not
+apparent that they were likely to hurl the benches at her. Ransom,
+palpitating with his victory, felt now a little sorry for her, and was
+relieved to know that, even when exasperated, a Boston audience is not
+ungenerous. "Ah, now I am glad!" said Verena, when they reached the
+street. But though she was glad, he presently discovered that, beneath
+her hood, she was in tears. It is to be feared that with the union, so
+far from brilliant, into which she was about to enter, these were not
+the last she was destined to shed.
+
+THE END
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's The Bostonians, Vol. II (of II), by Henry James
+
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