The Bostonians; a novel

University of California • Berkeley
Gift of

MR. E. W. NASH

THE BOSTONIANS

THE

BOSTONIANS

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BY

HENRY JAMES

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MACMILLAN AND CO.
1886

COPYRIGHT

1886
BY HENRY JAMES

BOOK FIRST.

B

THE BOSTONIANS.

1 OLIVE will come down in about ten minutes j she told me
to tell you that About ten ; that is exactly like Olive.
Neither five nor fifteen, and yet not ten exactly, but either
nine or eleven. She didn't tell me to say she was glad to
see you, because she doesn't know whether she is or not,
and she wouldn't for the world expose herself to telling a
fib. She is very honest, is Olive Chancellor ; she is full of
rectitude. Nobody tells fibs in Boston; I don't know
what to make of them all. Well, I am very glad to see
you, at any rate.'

These words were spoken with much volubility by a fair,
plump, smiling woman who entered a narrow drawing-room in
which a visitor, kept waiting for a few moments, was already
absorbed in a book. The gentleman had not even needed
to sit down to become interested : apparently he had taken
up the volume from a table as soon as he came in, and,
standing there, after a single glance round the apartment,
had lost himself in its pages. He threw it down at the
approach of Mrs. Luna, laughed, shook hands with her, and
said in answer to her last remark, ' You imply that you do
tell fibs. Perhaps that is one.'

1 Oh no ; there is nothing wonderful in my being glad
to see you,' Mrs. Luna rejoined, ' when I tell you that I
have been three long weeks in this unprevaricating city.'

' That has an unflattering sound for me,' said the young
man. ' I pretend not to prevaricate.'

' Dear me, what's the good of being a Southerner ? ' the
lady asked. c Olive told me to tell you she hoped you will

THE BOSTONIANS.

stay to dinner. And if she said it, she does really hope it.
She is willing to risk that.'

' Just as I am ? ' the visitor inquired, presenting himself
with rather a wprk-a-day aspect.

Mrs. Luna glanced at him from head to foot, and gave
a little smiling sigh, as if he had been a long sum in
addition. And, indeed, he was very long, Basil Ransom,
and he even looked a little hard and discouraging, like a
column of figures, in spite of the friendly face which he
bent upon his hostess's deputy, and which, in its thinness,
had a deep dry line, a sort of premature wrinkle, on either
side of the mouth. He was tall and lean, and dressed
throughout in black ; his shirt-collar was low and wide, and
the triangle of linen, a little crumpled, exhibited by the
opening of his waistcoat, was adorned by a pin containing
a small red stone. In spite of this decoration the young
man looked poor — as poor as a young man could look who
had such a fine head and such magnificent eyes. Those of
Basil Ransom were dark, deep, and glowing ; his head had a
character of elevation which fairly added to his stature ; it
was a head to be seen above the level of a crowd, on some
judicial bench or political platform, or even on a bronze
medal. His forehead was high and broad, and his thick
black hair, perfectly straight and glossy, and without
any division, rolled back from it in a leonine manner.
These things, the eyes especially, with their smouldering
fire, might have indicated that he was to be a great
American statesman; or, on the other hand, they might
simply have proved that he came from Carolina or Alabama.
He came, in fact, from Mississippi, and he spoke very
perceptibly with the accent of that country. It is not in
my power to reproduce by any combination of characters
this charming dialect ; but the initiated reader will have no
difficulty in evoking the sound, which is to be associated in
the present instance with nothing vulgar or vain. This lean,
pale, sallow, shabby, striking young man, with his superior
head, his sedentary shoulders, his expression of bright
grimness and hard enthusiasm, his provincial, distinguished
appearance, is, as a representative of his sex, the most im-
portant personage in my narrative ; he played a very active

THE BOSTONIANS.

part in the events I have undertaken in some degree to set
forth. And yet the reader who likes a complete image, who
desires to read with the senses as well as with the reason, is
entreated not to forget that he prolonged his consonants
and swallowed his vowels, that he was guilty of elisions and
interpolations which were equally unexpected, and that his
discourse was pervaded by something sultry and vast, some-
thing almost African in its rich, basking tone, something
that suggested the teeming expanse of the cotton-field.
Mrs. Luna looked up at all this, but saw only a part of it ;
otherwise she would not have replied in a bantering manner,
in answer to his inquiry: 'Are you ever different from
this ? ' Mrs. Luna was familiar — intolerably familiar.

Basil Ransom coloured a little. Then he said : ' Oh
yes ; when I dine out I usually carry a six-shooter and a
bowie-knife.' And he took up his hat vaguely — a soft
black hat with a low crown and an immense straight brim.
Mrs. Luna wanted to know what he was doing. She made
him sit down; she assured him that her sister quite
expected him, would feel as sorry as she could ever feel for
anything — for she was a kind of fatalist, anyhow — if he
didn't stay to dinner. It was an immense pity — she herself
was going out; in Boston you must jump at invitations.
Olive, too, was going somewhere after dinner, but he
mustn't mind that ; perhaps he would like to go with her.
It wasn't a party — Olive didn't go to parties ; it was one of
those weird meetings she was so fond of.

' What kind of meetings do you refer to ? You speak
as if it were a rendezvous of witches on the Brocken.'

'Well, so it is; they are all witches and wizards,
mediums, and spirit-rappers, and roaring radicals/

Basil Ransom stared ; the yellow light in his brown eyes
deepened. ' Do you mean to say your sister's a roaring
radical ? '

'A radical? She's a female Jacobin — she's a nihilist.
Whatever is, is wrong, and all that sort of thing. If you
are going to dine with her, you had better know it.'

' Oh, murder ! ' murmured v the young man vaguely,
sinking back in his chair with his arms folded. He looked
at Mrs. Luna with intelligent incredulity. She was

THE BOSTONIANS.

sufficiently pretty; her hair was in clusters of curls, like
bunches of grapes ; her tight- bodice seemed to crack with
her vivacity ; and from beneath the stiff little plaits of her
petticoat a small fat foot protruded, resting upon a stilted
heel. She was attractive and impertinent, especially the
latter. He seemed to think it was a great pity, what she
had told him ; but he lost himself in this consideration, or,
at any rate, said nothing for some time, while his eyes
wandered over Mrs. Luna, and he probably wondered
what body of doctrine she represented, little as she might
partake of the nature of her sister. Many things were
strange to Basil Ransom; Boston especially was strewn
with surprises, and he was a man who liked to understand.
Mrs. Luna was drawing on her gloves ; Ransom had never
seen any that were so long ; they reminded him of stockings,
and he wondered how she managed without garters above
the elbow. ' Well, I suppose I might have known that,'
he continued, at last.

' You might have known what ? '

' Well, that Miss Chancellor would be all that you say.
She was brought up in the city of reform.'

1 Oh, it isn't the city ; it's just Olive Chancellor. She
would reform the solar system if she could get hold of it.
She'll reform you, if you don't look out. That's the way I
found her when I returned from Europe.'

* Have you been in Europe ? ' Ransom asked.

' Mercy, yes ! Haven't you ? '

' No, I haven't been anywhere. Has your sister ? '

' Yes ; but she stayed only an hour or two. She hates
it ; she would like to abolish it. Didn't you know I had
been to Europe?' Mrs. Luna went on, in the slightly
aggrieved tone of a woman who discovers the limits of her
reputation.

Ransom reflected he might answer her that until five
minutes ago he didn't know she existed ; but he re-
membered that this was not the way in which a Southern
gentleman spoke to ladies, and he contented himself with
saying that he must condone his Boeotian ignorance (he was
fond of an elegant phrase) ; that he lived in a part of the
country where they didn't think much about Europe, and

THE BOSTONIANS.

that he had always supposed she was domiciled in New
York. This last remark he made at a venture, for he had,
naturally, not devoted any supposition whatever to Mrs.
Luna. His dishonesty, however, only exposed him the
more.

' If you thought I lived in New York, why in the world
didn't you come and see me ? ' the lady inquired.

'Well, you see, I don't go out much, except to the
courts.'

' Do you mean the law-courts ? Every one has got some
profession over here ! Are you very ambitious ? You look
as if you were.'

' Yes, very,' Basil Ransom replied, with a smile, and the
curious feminine softness with which Southern gentlemen
enunciate that adverb.

Mrs. Luna explained that she had been living in Europe
for several years — ever since her husband died — but had
come home a month before, come home with her little boy,
the only thing she had in the world, and was paying a visit
to her sister, who, of course, was the nearest thing after the
child. ' But it isn't the same,' she said. ' Olive and I
disagree so much.'

' While you and your little boy don't,' the young man
remarked.

' Oh no, I never differ from Newton ! ' And Mrs.
Luna added that now she was back she didn't know what
she should do. That was the worst of coming back; it
was like being born again, at one's age — one had to begin
life afresh. One didn't even know what one had come
back for. There were people who wanted one to spend
the winter in Boston; but she couldn't stand that — she
knew, at least, what she had not come back for. Perhaps
she should take a house in Washington ; did he ever hear
of that little place ? They had invented it while she was
away. Besides, Olive didn't want her in Boston, and
didn't go through the form of saying so. That was
one comfort with Olive; she never went through any
forms.

Basil Ransom had got up just as Mrs. Luna made this
last declaration; for a young lady had glided into the

8 THE BOSTONIANS. I.

room, who stopped short as it fell upon her ears. She
stood there looking, consciously and rather seriously, at
Mr. Ransom ; a smile of exceeding faintness played about
her lips — it was just perceptible enough to light up the
native gravity of her face. It might have been likened
to a thin ray of moonlight resting upon the wall of a
prison.

' If that were true,' she said, ' I shouldn't tell you that
I am very sorry to have kept you waiting.'

Her voice was low and agreeable — a cultivated voice —
and she extended a slender white hand to her visitor, who
remarked with some solemnity (he felt a certain guilt of
participation in Mrs. Luna's indiscretion) that he was
intensely happy to make her acquaintance. He observed
that Miss Chancellor's hand was at once cold and limp ;
she merely placed it in his, without exerting the smallest
pressure. Mrs. Luna explained to her sister that her
freedom of speech was caused by his being a relation —
though, indeed, he didn't seem to know much about them.
She didn't believe he had ever heard of her, Mrs. Luna,
though he pretended, with his Southern chivalry, that he
had. She must be off to her dinner now, she saw the
carriage was there, and in her absence Olive might give
any version of her she chose.

* I have told him you are a radical, and you may tell
him, if you like, that I am a painted JezebeL Try to
reform him; a person from Mississippi is sure to be all
wrong. I shall be back very late ; we are going to a
theatre-party ; that's why we dine so early. Good-bye, Mr.
Ransom,' Mrs. Luna continued, gathering up the feathery
white shawl which added to the volume of her fairness.
' I hope you are going to stay a little, so that you may
judge us for yourself. I should like you to see Newton,
too ; he is a noble little nature, and I want some advice
about him. You only stay to-morrow ? Why, what's the
use of that ? Well, mind you come and see me in New
York ; I shall be sure to be part of the winter there. I
shall send you a card ; I won't let you off. Don't come
out ; my sister has the first claim. Olive, why don't you
take him to your female convention?' Mrs. Luna's famili-

THE BOSTONIANS.

arity extended even to her sister; she remarked to Miss
Chancellor that she looked as if she were got up for a sea-
voyage. ' I am glad I haven't opinions that prevent my
dressing in the evening ! ' she declared from the doorway.
'The amount of thought they give to their clothing, the
people who are afraid of looking frivolous 1 '

II.

WHETHER much or little consideration had been directed
to the result, Miss Chancellor certainly would not have
incurred this reproach. She was habited in a plain dark
dress, without any ornaments, and her smooth, colourless
hair was confined as carefully as that of her sister was
encouraged to stray. She had instantly seated herself, and
while Mrs. Luna talked she kept her eyes on the ground,
glancing even less toward Basil Ransom than toward that
woman of many words. The young man was therefore
free to look at her ; a contemplation which showed him
that she was agitated and trying to conceal it. He wondered
why she was agitated, not foreseeing that he was destined to
discover, later, that her nature was like a skiff in a stormy
sea. Even after her sister had passed out of the room
she sat there with her eyes turned away, as if there had
been a spell upon her which forbade her to raise them.
Miss Olive Chancellor, it may be confided to the reader,
to whom in the course of our history I shall be under the
necessity of imparting much occult information, was subject
to fits of tragic shyness, during which she was unable to
meet even her own eyes in the mirror. One of these fits
had suddenly seized her now, without any obvious cause,
though, indeed, Mrs. Luna had made it worse by becoming
instantly so personal. There was nothing in the world so
personal as Mrs. Luna; her sister could have hated her
for it if she had not forbidden herself this emotion as
directed to individuals. Basil Ransom was a young man
of first-rate intelligence, but conscious of the narrow range,
as yet, of his experience. He was on his guard against
generalisations which might be hasty ; but he had arrived

ii. THE BOSTONIANS. 11

at two or three that were of value to a gentleman lately
admitted to the New York bar and looking out for clients.
One of them was to the effect that the simplest division it
is possible to make of the human race is into the people
who take things hard and the people who take them easy.
He perceived very quickly that Miss Chancellor belonged
to the former class. This was written so intensely in her
delicate face that he felt an unformulated pity for her
before they had exchanged twenty words. He himself, by
nature, took things easy j if he had put on the screw of
late, it was after reflection, and because circumstances
pressed him close. But this pale girl, with her light-green
eyes, her pointed features and nervous manner, was visibly
morbid ; it was as plain as day that she was morbid. Poor
Ransom announced this fact to himself as if he had made
a great discovery ; but in "reality he had never been so
' Boeotian ' as at that moment. It proved nothing of any
importance, with regard to Miss Chancellor, to say that she
was morbid ; any sufficient account of her would lie very
much to the rear of that. Why was she morbid, and why
was her morbidness typical ? Ransom might have exulted if
he had gone back far enough to explain that mystery. The
women he had hitherto known had been mainly of his own
soft clime, and it was not often they exhibited the tendency
he detected (and cursorily deplored) in Mrs. Luna's sister.
That was the way he liked them — not to think too much,
not to feel any responsibility for the government of the
world, such as he was sure Miss Chancellor felt. If they
would only be private and passive, and have no feeling but
for that, and leave publicity to the sex of tougher hide !
Ransom was pleased with the vision of that remedy; it
must be repeated that he was very provincial.

These considerations were not present to him as definitely
as I have written them here ; they were summed up in the
vague compassion which his cousin's figure excited in his
mind, and which was yet accompanied with a sensible reluc-
tance to know her better, obvious as it was that with such
a face as that she must be remarkable. He was sorry for
her, but he saw in a flash that no one could help her : that
was what made her tragic. He had not, seeking his fortune,

12 THE BOSTON I ANS. n.

come away from the blighted South, which weighed upon
his heart, to look out for tragedies ; at least he didn't want
them outside of his office in Pine Street. He broke the
silence ensuing upon Mrs. Luna's departure by one of the
courteous speeches to which blighted regions may still
encourage a tendency, and presently found himself talking
comfortably enough with his hostess. Though he had said
to himself that no one could help her, the effect of his
tone was to dispel her shyness ; it was her great advantage
(for the career she had proposed to herself) that in certain
conditions she was liable suddenly to become bold. She
was reassured at finding that her visitor was peculiar ; the
way he spoke told her that it was no wonder he had fought
on the Southern side. She had never yet encountered a
personage so exotic, and she always felt more at her ease in
the presence of anything strange. It was the usual things
of life that filled her with silent rage ; which was natural
enough, inasmuch as, to her vision, almost everything that
was usual was iniquitous. She had no difficulty in asking
him now whether he would not stay to dinner — she hoped
Adeline had given him her message. It had been when
she was upstairs with Adeline, as his card was brought up, a
sudden and very abnormal inspiration to offer him this (for
her) really ultimate favour ; nothing could be further from
her common habit than to entertain alone, at any repast, a
gentleman she had never seen.

It was the same sort of impulse that had moved her to
write to Basil Ransom, in the spring, after hearing acci-
dentally that he had come to the North and intended, in
New York, to practise his profession. It was her nature to
look out for duties, to appeal to her conscience for tasks.
This attentive organ, earnestly consulted, had represented
to her that he was an offshoot of the old slave-holding
oligarchy which, within her own vivid remembrance, had
plunged the country into blood and tears, and that, as
associated with such abominations, he was not a worthy
object of patronage for a person whose two brothers — her
only ones — had given up life for the Northern cause. It
reminded her, however, on the other hand, that he too had
been much bereaved, and, moreover, that he had fought

II. THE BOSTONIANS. 13

and offered his own life, even if it had not been taken.
She could not defend herself against a rich admiration — a
kind of tenderness of envy — of any one who had been so
happy as to have that opportunity. The most secret, the
most sacred hope of her nature was that she might some
day have such a chance, that she might be a martyr and
die for something. Basil Ransom had lived, but she knew
he had lived to see bitter hours. His family was ruined ;
they had lost their slaves, their property, their friends and
relations, their home ; had tasted of all the cruelty of defeat.
He had tried for a while to carry on the plantation himself,
but he had a millstone of debt round his neck, and he
longed for some work which would transport him to the
haunts of men. The State of Mississippi seemed to him
the state of despair ; so he surrendered the remnants of his
patrimony to his mother and sisters, and, at nearly thirty
years of age, alighted for the first time in New York, in the
costume of his province, with fifty dollars in his pocket and
a gnawing hunger in his heart.

That this incident had revealed to the young man his
ignorance of many things — only, however, to make him say
to himself, after the first angry blush, that here he would
enter the game and here he would win it — so much Olive
Chancellor could not know; what was sufficient for her
was that he had rallied, as the French say, had accepted
the accomplished fact, had admitted that North and South
were a single, indivisible political organism. Their cousin-
ship — that of Chancellors and Ransoms — was not very
close ; it was the kind of thing that one might take up or
leave alone, as one pleased. It was 'in the female line,'
as Basil Ransom had written, in answering her letter with a
good deal of form and flourish ; he spoke as if they had
been royal houses. Her mother had wished to take it up ;
it was only the fear of seeming patronising to people in
misfortune that had prevented her from writing to Mississippi.
If it had been possible to send Mrs. Ransom money, or
even clothes, she would have liked that ; but she had no
means of ascertaining how such an offering would be taken.
By the time Basil came to the North — making advances, as
it were — Mrs. Chancellor had passed away ; so it was for

14 THE BOSTONIANS. II.

Olive, left alone in the little house in Charles Street (Adeline
being in Europe), to decide.

She knew what her mother would have done, and that
helped her decision ; for her mother always chose the
positive course. Olive had a fear of everything, but her
greatest fear was of being afraid. She wished immensely
to be generous, and how could one be generous unless one
ran a risk? She had erected it into a sort of rule of
conduct that whenever she saw a risk she was to take it ;
and she had frequent humiliations at finding herself safe
after all. She was perfectly safe after writing to Basil
Ransom ; and, indeed, it was difficult to see what he could
have done to her except thank her (he was only excep-
tionally superlative) for her letter, and assure her that he
would come and see her the first time his business (he was
beginning to get a little) should take him to Boston. He
had now come, in redemption of his grateful vow, and
even this did not make Miss Chancellor feel that she had
courted danger. She saw (when once she had looked at
him) that he would not put those worldly interpretations on
things which, with her, it was both an impulse and a
principle to defy. He was too simple — too Mississippian
— for that; she was almost disappointed. She certainly
had not hoped that she might have struck him as making
unwomanly overtures (Miss Chancellor hated this epithet
almost as much as she hated its opposite); but she had a
presentiment that he would be too good-natured, primitive
to that degree. Of all things in the world contention was
most sweet to her (though why it is hard to imagine, for it
always cost her tears, headaches, a day or two in bed, acute
emotion), and it was very possible Basil .Ransom would not
care to contend. Nothing could be more displeasing than
this indifference when people didn't agree with you. That
he should agree she did not in the least expect of him ; how
could a Mississippian agree? If she had supposed he
would agree, she would not have written to him.

III.

WHEN he had told her that if she would take him as he
was he should be very happy to dine with her, she excused
herself a moment and went to give an order in the dining-
room. The young man, left alone, looked about the
parlour — the two parlours which, in their prolonged, adjacent
narrowness, formed evidently one apartment — and wandered
to the windows at the back, where there was a view of the
water ; Miss Chancellor having the good fortune to dwell
on that side of Charles Street toward which, in the rear, the
afternoon sun slants redly, from an horizon indented at
empty intervals with wooden spires, the masts of lonely
boats, the chimneys of dirty * works,' over a brackish expanse
of anomalous character, which is too big for a river and too
small for a bay. The view seemed to him very picturesque,
though in the gathered dusk little was left of it save a cold
yellow streak in the west, a gleam of brown water, and the
reflection of the lights that had begun to show themselves
in a row of houses, impressive to Ransom in their extreme
modernness, which overlooked the same lagoon from a long
embankment on the left, constructed of stones roughly
piled. He thought this prospect, from a city -house,
almost romantic ; and he turned from it back to the interior
(illuminated now by a lamp which the parlour-maid had
placed on a table while he stood at the window) as to some-
thing still more genial and interesting. The artistic sense
in Basil Ransom had not been highly cultivated ; neither
(though he had passed his early years as the son of a rich
man) was his conception of material comfort very definite ;
it consisted mainly of the vision of plenty of cigars and
brandy and water and newspapers, and a cane-bottomed
arm-chair of the right inclination, from which he could

16 THE BOSTONIANS. in.

stretch his legs. Nevertheless it seemed to him he had
never seen an interior that was so much an interior as
this queer corridor-shaped drawing-room of his new-found
kinswoman ; he had never felt himself in the presence of so
much organised privacy or of so many objects that spoke
of habits and tastes. Most of the people he had hitherto
known had no tastes ; they had a few habits, but these were
not of a sort that required much upholstery. He had not
as yet been in many houses in New York, and he had
never before seen so many accessories. The general char-
acter of the place struck him as Bostonian ; this was, in
fact, very much what he had supposed Boston to be. He
had always heard Boston was a city of culture, and now
there was culture in Miss Chancellor's tables and sofas, in
the books that were everywhere, on little shelves like brackets
(as if a book were a statuette), in the photographs and water-
colours that covered the walls, in the curtains that were
festooned rather stiffly in the doorways. He looked at
some of the books and saw that his cousin read German ;
and his impression of the importance of this (as a symptom
of superiority) was not diminished by the fact that he him-
self had mastered the tongue (knowing it contained a large
literature of jurisprudence) during a long, empty, deadly
summer on the plantation. It is a curious proof of a
certain crude modesty inherent in Basil Ransom that the
main effect of his observing his cousin's German books was
to give him an idea of the natural energy of Northerners.
He had noticed it often before ; he had already told himself
that he must count with it. It was only after much experience
he made the discovery that few Northerners were, in their
secret soul, so energetic as he. Many other persons had
made it before that. He knew very little about Miss
Chancellor ; he had come to see her only because she wrote
to him ; he would never have thought of looking her up,
and since then there had been no one in New York he
might ask about her. Therefore he could only guess that
she was a rich young woman ; such a house, inhabited in
such a way by a quiet spinster, implied a considerable
income. How much? he asked himself; five thousand,
ten thousand, fifteen thousand a year ? There was richness

in. THE BOSTONIANS. 17

to our panting young man in the smallest of these figures.
He was not of a mercenary spirit, but he had an immense
desire for success, and he had more than once reflected
that a moderate capital was an aid to achievement. He
had seen in his younger years one of the biggest failures
that history commemorates, an immense national fiasco, and
it had implanted in his mind a deep aversion to the ineffec-
tual. It came over him, while he waited for his hostess to
reappear, that she was unmarried as well as rich, that she
was sociable (her letter answered for that) as well as single ;
and he had for a moment a whimsical vision of becoming a
partner in so flourishing a firm. He ground his teeth a
little as he thought of the contrasts of the human lot ; this
cushioned feminine nest made him feel unhoused and
underfed. Such a mood, however, could only be moment-
ary, for he was conscious at bottom of a bigger stomach
than all the culture of Charles Street could fill.

Afterwards, when his cousin had come back and they
had gone down to dinner together, where he sat facing her
at a little table decorated in the middle with flowers, a
position from which he had another view, through a window
where the curtain remained undrawn by her direction (she
called his attention to this — it was for his benefit), of the
dusky, empty river, spotted with points of light — at this
period, I say, it was very easy for him to remark to himself
that nothing would induce him to make love to such a type
as that. Several months later, in New York, in conversa-
tion with Mrs. Luna, of whom he was destined to see a
good deal, he alluded by chance to this repast, to the way
her sister had placed him at table, and to the remark with
which she had pointed out the advantage of his seat.

' That's what they call in Boston being very " thought-
ful,'" Mrs. Luna said, 'giving you the Back Bay (don't you
hate the name?) to look at, and then taking credit for it.'

This, however, was in the future ; what Basil Ransom
actually perceived was that Miss Chancellor was a signal
old maid. That was her quality, her destiny; nothing
could be more distinctly written. There are women who
are unmarried by accident, and others who are unmarried
by option ; but Olive Chancellor was unmarried by every

c

1 8 THE BOSTONIANS. in.

implication of her being. She was a spinster as Shelley was
a lyric poet, or as the month of August is sultry. She was
so essentially a celibate that Ransom found himself thinking
of her as old, though when he came to look at her (as
he said to himself) it was apparent that her years were
fewer than his own. He did not dislike her, she had been
so friendly ; but, little by little, she gave him an uneasy
feeling — the sense that you could never be safe with a
person who took things so hard. It came over him that
it was because she took things hard she had sought his
acquaintance ; it had been because she was strenuous, not
because she was genial ; she had had in her eye — and
what an extraordinary eye it was ! — not a pleasure, but a
duty. She would expect him to be strenuous in return ;
but he couldn't — in private life, he couldn't ; privacy for
Basil Ransom consisted entirely in what he called ' laying
off.' She was not so plain on further acquaintance as she
had seemed to him at first ; even the young Mississippian
had culture enough to see that she was refined. Her
white skin had a singular look of being drawn tightly
across her face ; but her features, though sharp and irregu-
lar, were delicate in a fashion that suggested good breeding.
Their line was perverse, but it was not poor. The curious
tint of her eyes was a living colour ; when she turned it
upon you, you thought vaguely of the glitter of green ice.
She had absolutely no figure, and presented a certain ap-
pearance of feeling cold. With all this, there was something
very modern and highly developed in her aspect ; she had
the advantages as well as the drawbacks of a nervous
organisation. She smiled constantly at her guest, but from
the beginning to the end of dinner, though he made
several remarks that he thought might prove amusing, she
never once laughed. Later, he saw that she was a woman
without laughter; exhilaration, if it ever visited her, was
dumb. Once only, in the course of his subsequent
acquaintance with her, did it find a voice; and then the
sound remained in Ransom's ear as one of the strangest
he had heard.

She asked him a great many questions, and made no
comment on his answers, which only served to suggest to

in. THE BOSTONIANS. 19

her fresh inquiries. Her shyness had quite left her, it did
not come back ; she had confidence enough to wish him
to see that she took a great interest in him. Why should
she ? he wondered. He couldn't believe he was one of
her kind ; he was conscious of much Bohemianism — he
drank beer, in New York, in cellars, knew no ladies, and
was familiar with a ' variety ' actress. Certainly, as she
knew him better, she would disapprove of him, though, of
course, he would never mention the actress, nor even, if
necessary, the beer. Ransom's conception of vice was
purely as a series of special cases, of explicable accidents.
Not that he cared ; if it were a part of the Boston character
to be inquiring, he would be to the last a courteous
Mississippian. He would tell her about Mississippi as
much as she liked ; he didn't care how much he told her
that the old ideas in the South were played out. She
would not understand him any the better for that ; she
would not know how little his own views could be gathered
from such a limited admission. What her sister imparted
to him about her mania for c reform ' had left in his mouth
a kind of unpleasant after-taste ; he felt, at any rate, that
if she had the religion of humanity — Basil Ransom had
read Comte, he had read everything — she would never
understand him. He, too, had a private vision of reform,
but the first principle of it was to reform the reformers.
As they drew to the close of a meal which, in spite of all
latent incompatibilities, .had gone off brilliantly, she said to
him that she should have to leave him after dinner, unless
perhaps he should be inclined to accompany her. She
was going to a small gathering at the house of a friend
who had asked a few people, ' interested in new ideas,' to
meet Mrs. Farrinder.

'Oh, thank you,' said Basil Ransom. ' Is it a party?
I haven't been to a party since Mississippi seceded.'

'No; Miss Birdseye doesn't give parties. She's an
ascetic.'

' Oh, well, we have had our dinner,' Ransom rejoined,
laughing.

His hostess sat silent a moment, with her eyes on the
ground ; she looked at such times as if she were hesitating

20 THE BOSTONIANS. in.

greatly between several things she might say, all so im-
portant that it was difficult to choose.

' I think it might interest you,' she remarked presently.
' You will hear some discussion, if you are fond of that.
Perhaps you wouldn't agree,' she added, resting her strange
eyes on him.

'Perhaps I shouldn't — I don't agree with everything,'
he said, smiling and stroking his leg.

'Don't you care for human progress?' Miss Chancellor
went on.

'I don't know — I never saw any. Are you going to
show me some?'

' I can show you an earnest effort towards it. That's
the most one can be sure of. But I am riot sure you are
worthy.'

' Is it something very Bostonian ? I should like to see
that,' said Basil Ransom.

' There are movements in other cities. Mrs. Farrinder
goes everywhere ; she may speak to-night.'

'Mrs. Farrinder, the celebrated ?'

' Yes, the celebrated ; the great apostle of the emanci-
pation of women. She is a great friend of Miss Birdseye.'

' And who is Miss Birdseye?'

; She is one of our celebrities. She is the woman in
the world, I suppose, who has laboured most for every wise
reform. I think I ought to tell you,' Miss Chancellor
went on in a moment, * she was one of the earliest, one of
the most passionate, of the old Abolitionists.'

She had thought, indeed, she ought to tell him that,
and it threw her into a little tremor of excitement to do so.
Yet, if she had been afraid he would show some irritation
at this news, she was disappointed at the geniality with
which he exclaimed :

' Why, poor old lady — she must be quite mature !'

It was therefore with some severity that she rejoined :

'She will never be old. She is the youngest spirit I
know. But if you are not in sympathy, perhaps you had
better not come,' she went on.

'In sympathy with what, dear madam?' Basil Ransom
asked, failing still, to her perception, to catch the tone of

in. THE BOSTONIANS. 21

real seriousness. ' If, as you say, there is to be a discussion,
there will be different sides, and of course one can't sym-
pathise with both,'

* Yes, but every one will, in his way — or in her way —
plead the cause of the new truths. If you don't care for
them, you won't go with us.'

' I tell you I haven't the least idea what they are ! I
have never yet encountered in the world any but old truths
— as old as the sun and moon. How can I know ? But
do take me ; it's such a chance to see Boston.'

'It isn't Boston — it's humanity!' \ Miss Chancellor, as
she made this remark, rose from her chair, and her move-
ment seemed to say that she consented. But before she
quitted her kinsman to get ready, she observed to him that
she was sure he knew what she meant ; he was only pre-
tending he didn't.

' Well, perhaps, after all, I have a general idea,' he con-
fessed ; ' but don't you see how this little reunion will give
me a chance to fix it?'

She lingered an instant, with her anxious face. ' Mrs.
Farrinder will fix it ! ' she said ; and she went to prepare
herself.

It was in this poor young lady's nature to be anxious, to
have scruple within scruple and to forecast the consequences
of things. She returned in ten minutes, in her bonnet,
which she had apparently assumed in recognition of Miss
Birdseye's asceticism. As she stood there drawing on her
gloves — her visitor had fortified himself against Mrs.
Farrinder by another glass of wine — she declared to him
that she quite repented of having proposed to him to go ;
something told her that he would be an unfavourable
element.

' Why, is it going to be a spiritual seance ?' Basil Ransom
asked.

' Well, I have heard at Miss Birdseye's some inspirational
speaking.' Olive Chancellor was determined to look him
straight in the face as she said this ; her sense of the way
it might strike him operated as a cogent, not as a deterrent,
reason.

'Why, Miss Olive, it's just got up on purpose for me !'

22 THE BOSTONIANS. m.

cried the young Mississippian, radiant, and clasping his
hands. She thought him very handsome as he said this,
but reflected that unfortunately men didn't care for the
truth, especially the new kinds, in proportion as they were
good-looking. She had, however, a moral resource that she
could always fall back upon ; it had already been a comfort
to her, on occasions of acute feeling, that she hated men,
as a class, anyway. ' And I want so much to see an old
Abolitionist ; I have never laid eyes on one,' Basil Ransom
added.

' Of course you couldn't see one in the South ; you were
too afraid of them to let them come there ! ' She was now
trying to think of something she might say that would be
sufficiently disagreeable to make him cease to insist on
accompanying her ; for, strange to record — if anything, in a
person of that intense sensibility, be stranger than any other
— her second thought with regard to having asked him had
deepened with the elapsing moments into an unreasoned
terror of the effect of his presence. ' Perhaps Miss Birds-
eye won't like you,' she went on, as they waited for the
carriage.

' I don't know ; I reckon she will,' said Basil Ransom
good-humouredly. He evidently had no intention of giving
up his opportunity.

From the window of the dining-room, at that moment,
they heard the carriage drive up. Miss Birdseye lived at
the South End ; the distance was considerable, and Miss
Chancellor had ordered a hackney-coach, it being one of the
advantages of living in Charles Street that stables were near.
The logic of her conduct was none of the clearest ; for if
she had been alone she would have proceeded to her
destination by the aid of the street-car ; not from economy
(for she had the good fortune not to be obliged to consult
it to that degree), and not from any love of wandering
about Boston at night (a kind of exposure she greatly dis-
liked), but by reason of a theory she devotedly nursed, a
theory which bade her put off invidious differences and
mingle in the common life. She would have gone on foot
to Boylston Street, and there she would have taken the
public conveyance (in her heart she loathed it) to the South

in. THE BOSTONIANS. 23

End. Boston was full of poor girls who had to walk about
at night and to squeeze into horse-cars in which every sense
was displeased ; and why should she hold herself superior
to these ? Olive Chancellor regulated her conduct on lofty
principles, and this is why, having to-night the advantage of a
gentleman's protection, she sent for a carriage to obliterate
that patronage. If they had gone together in the common
way she would have seemed to owe it to him that she
should be so daring, and he belonged to a sex to which she
wished to be under no obligations. Months before, when
she wrote to him, it had been with the sense, rather, of
putting him in debt. As they rolled toward the South End,
side by side, in a good deal of silence, bouncing and
bumping over the railway-tracks very little less, after all,
than if their wheels had been fitted to them, and looking
out on either side at rows of red houses, dusky in the lamp-
light, with protuberant fronts, approached by ladders of
stone ; as they proceeded, with these contemplative undula-
tions, Miss Chancellor said to her companion, with a con-
centrated desire to defy him, as a punishment for having
thrown her (she couldn't tell why) into such a tremor :

' Don't you believe, then, in the coming of a better day —
in its being possible to do something for the human race?'

Poor Ransom perceived the defiance, and he felt rather
bewildered ; he wondered what type, after all, he had got
hold of, and what game was being played with him. Why had
she made advances, if she wanted to pinch him this way ?
However, he was good for any game — that one as well as
another — and he saw that he was 'in' for something of
which he had long desired to have a nearer view. ' Well,
Miss Olive,' he answered, putting on again his big hat,
which he had been holding in his lap, 'what strikes me
most is that the human race has got to bear its troubles.'

' That's what men say to women, to make them patient
in the position they have made for them.'

' Oh, the position of women !' Basil Ransom exclaimed.
' The position of women is to make fools of men. I would
change my position for yours any day,' he went on.
' That's what I said to myself as I sat there in your elegant
home.'

24 THE BOSTONIANS. in.

He could not see, in the dimness of the carriage, that
she had flushed quickly, and he did not know that she dis-
liked to be reminded of certain things which, for her, were
mitigations of the hard feminine lot. But the passionate
quaver with which, a moment later, she answered him
sufficiently assured him that he had touched her at a
tender point.

' Do you make it a reproach to me that I happen to
have a little money ? The dearest wish of my heart is to
do something with it for others — for the miserable.'

Basil Ransom might have greeted this last declaration
with the sympathy it deserved, might have commended the
noble aspirations of his kinswoman. But what struck him,
rather, was the oddity of so sudden a sharpness of pitch in
an intercourse which, an hour or two before, had begun in
perfect amity, and he burst once more into an irrepressible
laugh. This made his companion feel, with intensity, how
little she was joking. ' I don't know why I should care
what you think,' she said.

' Don't care — don't care. What does it matter ? It is
not of the slightest importance.'

He might say that, but it was not true ; she felt that
there were reasons why she should care. She had brought
him into her life, and she should have to pay for it. But
she wished to know the worst at once. ' Are you against
our emancipation ?' she asked, turning a white face on him
in the momentary radiance of a street-lamp.

' Do you mean your voting and preaching and all that
sort of thing?' He made this inquiry, but seeing how
seriously she would take his answer, he was almost
frightened, and hung fire. *I will tell you when I have
heard Mrs. Farrinder.'

They had arrived at the address given by Miss Chan-
cellor to the coachman, and their vehicle stopped with a
lurch. Basil Ransom got out ; he stood at the door with
an extended hand, to assist the young lady. But she
seemed to hesitate; she sat there with her spectral face.
1 You hate it ! ' she exclaimed, in a low tone.

' Miss Birdseye will convert me,' said Ransom, with
intention ; for he had grown very curious, and he was afraid

in. THE BOSTONIANS. 25

that now, at the last, Miss Chancellor would prevent his
entering the house. She alighted without his help, and
behind her he ascended the high steps of Miss Birds-
eye's residence. He had grown very curious, and among
the things he wanted to know was why in the world this
ticklish spinster had written to him.

IV.

SHE had told him before they started that they should be
early ; she wished to see Miss Birdseye alone, before the
arrival of any one else. This was just for the pleasure of
seeing her — it was an opportunity ; she was always so taken
up with others. She received Miss Chancellor in the hall
of the mansion, which had a salient front, an enormous and
very high number — 756 — painted in gilt on the glass light
above the door, a tin sign bearing the name of a doctress
(Mary J. Prance) suspended from one of the windows of
the basement, and a peculiar look of being both new and
faded — a kind of modern fatigue — like certain articles of
commerce which are sold at a reduction as shop-worn.
The hall was very narrow ; a considerable part of it was
occupied by a large hat-tree, from which several coats and
shawls already depended ; the rest offered space for certain
lateral demonstrations on Miss Birdseye's part. She sidled
about her visitors, and at last went round to open for them
a door of further admission, which happened to be locked
inside. She was a little old lady, with an enormous head ;
that was the first thing Ransom noticed — the vast, fair,
protuberant, candid, ungarnished brow, surmounting a pair
of weak, kind, tired-looking eyes, and ineffectually balanced
in the rear by a cap which had the air of falling backward,
and which Miss Birdseye suddenly felt for while she talked,
with unsuccessful irrelevant movements. She had a sad,
soft, pale face, which (and it was the effect of her whole
head) looked as if it had been soaked, blurred, and made
vague by exposure to some slow dissolvent. The long
practice of philanthropy had not given accent to her features ;
it had rubbed out their transitions, their meanings. The
waves of sympathy, of enthusiasm, had wrought upon them

iv. THE BOSTONIANS. 27

in the same way in which the waves of time finally modify
the surface of old marble busts, gradually washing away
their sharpness, their details. In her large countenance her
dim little smile scarcely showed. It was a mere sketch of
a smile, a kind of instalment, or payment on account ; it
seemed to say that she would smile more if she had time,
but that you could see, without this, that she was gentle
and easy to beguile.

She always dressed in the same way : she wore a loose
black jacket, with deep pockets, which were stuffed with
papers, memoranda of a voluminous correspondence ; and
from beneath her jacket depended a short stuff dress. The
brevity of this simple garment was the one device by which
Miss Birdseye managed to suggest that she was a woman
of business, that she wished to be free for action. She
belonged to the Short-Skirts League, as a matter of course;
for she belonged to any and every league that had been
founded for almost any purpose whatever. This did not
prevent her being a confused, entangled, inconsequent,
discursive old woman, whose charity began at home and
ended nowhere, whose credulity kept pace with it, and who
knew less about her fellow-creatures, if possible, after fifty
years of humanitary zeal, than on the day she had gone
into the field to testify against the iniquity of most arrange-
ments. Basil Ransom knew very little about such a life as
hers, but she seemed to him a revelation of a class, and a
multitude of socialistic figures, of names and episodes that
he had heard of, grouped themselves behind her. She
looked as if she had spent her life on platforms, in audi-
ences, in conventions, in phalansteries, in seances ; in her
faded face there was a kind of reflection of ugly lecture-
lamps ; with its habit of an upward angle, it seemed turned
toward a public speaker, with an effort of respiration in the
thick air in which social reforms are usually discussed. She
talked continually, in a voice of which the spring seemed
broken, like that of an over-worked bell-wire ; and when
Miss Chancellor explained that she had brought Mr. Ran-
som because he was so anxious to meet Mrs. Farrinder,
she gave the young man a delicate, dirty, democratic little
hand, looking at him kindly, as she could not help doing,

28 THE BOSTONIANS. iv.

but without the smallest discrimination as against others
who might not have the good fortune (which involved,
possibly, an injustice) to be present on such an interesting
occasion. She struck him as very poor, but it was only
afterward that he learned she had never had a penny in her
life. No one had an idea how she lived; whenever
money was given her she gave it away to a negro or a
refugee. No woman could be less invidious, but on the
whole she preferred these two classes of the human race.
Since the Civil War much of her occupation was gone ; for
before that her best hours had been spent in fancying that
she was helping some Southern slave to escape. It would
have been a nice question whether, in her heart of hearts,
for the sake of this excitement, she did not sometimes wish
the blacks back in bondage. She had suffered in the same
way by the relaxation of many European despotisms, for in
former years much of the romance of her life had been in
smoothing the pillow of exile for banished conspirators.
Her refugees had been very precious to her ; she was always
trying to raise money for some cadaverous Pole, to obtain
lessons for some shirtless Italian. There was a legend that
an Hungarian had once possessed himself of her affections,
and had disappeared after robbing her of everything she
possessed. This, however, was very apocryphal, for she
had never possessed anything, and it was open to grave
doubt that she could have entertained a sentiment so
personal. She was in love, even in those days, only with
causes, and she languished only for emancipations. But
they had been the happiest days, for when causes were em-
bodied in foreigners (what else were the Africans?), they
were certainly more appealing.

She had just come down to see Doctor Prance — to see
whether she wouldn't like to come up. But she wasn't in
her room, and Miss Birdseye guessed she had gone out to
her supper ; she got her supper at a boarding-table about
two blocks off. Miss Birdseye expressed the hope that
Miss Chancellor had had hers ; she would have had plenty
of time to take it, for no one had come in yet ; she didn't
know what made them all so late. Ransom perceived that
the garments suspended to the hat-rack were not a sign

iv. THE BOSTONIANS. 29

that Miss Birdseye's friends had assembled; if he had gone a
little further still he would have recognised the house as one
of those in which mysterious articles of clothing are always
hooked to something in the hall. Miss Birdseye's visitors,
those of Doctor Prance, and of other tenants — for Number
756 was the common residence of several persons, among
whom there prevailed much vagueness of boundary — used
to leave things to be called for ; many of them went about
with satchels and reticules, for which they were always
looking for places of deposit. What completed the char-
acter of this interior was Miss Birdseye's own apartment,
into which her guests presently made their way, and where
they were joined by various other members of the good
lady's circle. Indeed, it completed Miss Birdseye herself,
if anything could be said to render that office to this essen-
tially formless old woman, who had no more outline than a
bundle of hay. But the bareness of her long, loose, empty
parlour (it was shaped exactly like Miss Chancellor's) told
that she had never had any needs but moral needs, and that
all her history had been that of her sympathies. The place
was lighted by a small hot glare of gas, which made it look
white and featureless. It struck even Basil Ransom with its
flatness, and he said to himself that his cousin must have a
very big bee in her bonnet to make her like such a house.
He did not know then, and he never knew, that she mortally
disliked it, and that in a career in which she was constantly
exposing herself to offence and laceration, her most poignant
suffering came from the injury of her taste. She had tried
to kill that nerve, to persuade herself that taste was only
frivolity in the disguise of knowledge ; but her susceptibility
was constantly blooming afresh and making her wonder
whether an absence of nice arrangements were a necessary
part of the enthusiasm of humanity. Miss Birdseye was
always trying to obtain employment, lessons in drawing,
orders for portraits, for poor foreign artists, as to the great-
ness of whose talent she pledged herself without reserve ;
but in point of fact she had not the faintest sense of the
scenic or plastic side of life.

Toward nine o'clock the light of her hissing burners
smote the majestic person of Mrs. Farrinder, who might

30 THE BOSTONIANS. iv.

have contributed to answer that question of Miss Chancellor's
in the negative. She was a copious, handsome woman, in
whom angularity had been corrected by the air of success ;
she had a rustling dress (it was evident what she thought
about taste), abundant hair of a glossy blackness, a pair of
folded arms, the expression of which seemed to say that rest,
in such a career as hers, was as sweet as it was brief, and a
terrible regularity of feature. I apply that adjective to her
fine placid mask because she seemed to face you with a
question of which the answer was preordained, to ask you
how a countenance could fail to be noble of which the
measurements were so correct. You could contest neither
the measurements nor the nobleness, and had to feel that
Mrs. Farrinder imposed herself. There was a lithographic
smoothness about her, and a mixture of the American
matron and the public character. There was something
public in her eye, which was large, cold, and quiet ; it had
acquired a sort of exposed reticence from the habit of
looking down from a lecture-desk, over a sea of heads, while
its distinguished owner was eulogised by a leading citizen.
Mrs. Farrinder, at almost any time, had the air of being
introduced by a few remarks. She talked with great slow-
ness and distinctness, and evidently a high sense of
responsibility; she pronounced every syllable of every
word and insisted on being explicit. If, in conversation
with her, you attempted to take anything for granted, or to
jump two or three steps at a time, she paused, looking at
you with a cold patience, as if she knew that trick, and
then went on at her own measured pace. She lectured on
temperance and the rights of women ; the ends she laboured
for were to give the ballot to every woman in the country
and to take the flowing bowl from every man. She was
held to have a very fine manner, and to embody the
domestic virtues and the graces of the drawing-room ; to
be a shining proof, in short, that the forum, for ladies, is
not necessarily hostile to the fireside. She had a husband,
and his name was Amariah.

Doctor Prance had come back from supper and made
her appearance in response to an invitation that Miss Birds-
eye's relaxed voice had tinkled down to her from the hall

iv. THE BOSTONIANS. 31

over the banisters, with much repetition, to secure attention.
She was a plain, spare young woman, with short hair and
an eye-glass ; she looked about her with a kind of near-
sighted deprecation, and seemed to hope that she should
not be expected to generalise in any way, or supposed to
have come up for any purpose more social than to see what
Miss Birdseye wanted this time. By nine o'clock twenty
other persons had arrived, and had placed themselves in
the chairs that were ranged along the sides of the long,
bald room, in which they ended by producing the similitude
of an enormous street-car. The apartment contained little
else but these chairs, many of which had a borrowed aspect,
an implication of bare bedrooms in the upper regions ; a
table or two with a discoloured marble top, a few books,
and a collection of newspapers piled up in corners. Ransom
could see for himself that the occasion was not crudely
festive; there was a want of convivial movement, and,
among most of the visitors, even of mutual recognition.
They sat there as if they were waiting for something ; they
looked obliquely and silently at Mrs. Farrinder, and were
plainly under the impression that, fortunately, they were not
there to amuse themselves. The ladies, who were much
the more numerous, wore their bonnets, like Miss Chan-
cellor j the men were in the garb of toil, many of them in
weary-looking overcoats. Two or three had retained their
overshoes, and as you approached them the odour of the
india-rubber was perceptible. It was not, however, that
Miss Birdseye ever noticed anything of that sort; she
neither knew what she smelled nor tasted what she ate.
Most of her friends had an anxious, haggard look, though
there were sundry exceptions — half a dozen placid, florid
faces. Basil Ransom wondered who they all were ; he had
a general idea they were mediums, communists, vege-
tarians. It was not, either, that Miss Birdseye failed to
wander about among them with repetitions of inquiry and
friendly absences of attention ; she sat down near most of
them in turn, saying 'Yes, yes,' vaguely and kindly, to
remarks they made to her, feeling for the papers in the
pockets of her loosened bodice, recovering her cap and
sacrificing her spectacles, wondering most of all what had

32 THE BOSTONIANS. iv.

been her idea in convoking these people. Then she re-
membered that it had been connected in some way with
Mrs. Farrinder ; that this eloquent woman had promised to
favour the company with a few reminiscences of her last
campaign ; to sketch even, perhaps, the lines on which she
intended to operate during the coming winter. This was
what Olive Chancellor had come to hear ; this would be
the attraction for the dark-eyed young man (he looked like
a genius) she had brought with her. Miss Birdseye made
her way back to the great lecturess, who was bending an
indulgent attention on Miss Chancellor; the latter com-
pressed into a small space, to be near her, and sitting with
clasped hands and a concentration of inquiry which by
contrast made Mrs. Farrinder's manner seem large and free.
In her transit, however, the hostess was checked by the
arrival of fresh pilgrims ; she had no idea she had mentioned
the occasion to so many people — she only remembered, as
it were, those she had forgotten — and it was certainly a
proof of the interest felt in Mrs. Farrinder's work. The
people who had just come in were Doctor and Mrs. Tarrant
and their daughter Verena ; he was a mesmeric healer and
she was of old Abolitionist stock. Miss Birdseye rested her
dim, dry smile upon the daughter, who was new to her,
and it floated before her that she would probably be remark-
able as a genius ; her parentage was an implication of that.
There was a genius for Miss Birdseye in every bush.
Selah Tarrant had effected wonderful cures ; she knew so
many people — if they would only try him. His wife was a
daughter of Abraham Greenstreet \ she had kept a runaway
slave in her house for thirty days. That was years before,
when this girl must have been a child ; but hadn't it
thrown a kind of rainbow over her cradle, and wouldn't
she naturally have some gift? The girl was very pretty,
though she had red hair.

V.

MRS. FARRINDER, meanwhile, was not eager to address the
assembly. She confessed as much to Olive Chancellor,
with a smile which asked that a temporary lapse of prompt-
ness might not be too harshly judged. She had addressed
so many assemblies, and she wanted to hear what other
people had to say. Miss Chancellor herself had thought
so much on the vital subject ; would not she make a few
remarks and give them some of her experiences ? How
did the ladies on Beacon Street feel about the ballot?
Perhaps she could speak for them more than for some
others. That was a branch of the question on which, it
might be, the leaders had not information enough ; but
they wanted to take in everything, and why shouldn't Miss
Chancellor just make that field her own? Mrs. Farrinder
spoke in the tone of one who took views so wide that they
might easily, at first, before you could see how she worked
round, look almost meretricious; she was conscious of a
scope that exceeded the first flight of your imagination.
She urged upon her companion the idea of labouring in
the world of fashion, appeared to attribute to her familiar
relations with that mysterious realm, and wanted to know
why she shouldn't stir up some of her friends down .there
on the Mill-dam ?

Olive Chancellor received this appeal with peculiar feel-
ings. With her immense sympathy for reform, she found
herself so often wishing that reformers were a little different.
There was something grand about Mrs. Farrinder ; it lifted
one up to be with her : but there was a false note when
she spoke to her young friend about the ladies in Beacon
Street. Olive hated to hear that fine avenue talked about
as if it were such a remarkable place, and to live there were

D

34 THE BOSTONIANS. v.

a proof of worldly glory. All sorts of inferior people lived
there, and so brilliant a woman as Mrs. Farrinder, who lived
at Roxbury, ought not to mix things up. It was, of course,
very wretched to be irritated by such mistakes ; but this
was not the first time Miss Chancellor had observed that
the possession of nerves was not by itself a reason for
embracing the new truths. She knew her place in the
Boston hierarchy, and it was not what Mrs. Farrinder
supposed ; so that there was a want of perspective in talking
to her as if she had been a representative of the aristocracy.
Nothing could be weaker, she knew very well, than (in the
United States) to apply that term too literally ; nevertheless,
it would represent a reality if one were to say that, by dis-
tinction, the Chancellors belonged to the bourgeoisie — the
oldest and best. They might care for such a position or
not (as it happened, they were very proud of it), but there
they were, and it made Mrs. Farrinder seem provincial
(there was something provincial, after all, in the way she
did her hair too) not to understand. When Miss Birdseye
spoke as if one were a 'leader of society,' Olive could
forgive her even that odious expression, because, of course,
one never pretended that she, poor dear, had the smallest
sense of the real. She was heroic, she was sublime, the
whole moral history of Boston was reflected in her displaced
spectacles ; but it was a part of her originality, as it were,
that she was deliciously provincial. Olive Chancellor
seemed to herself to have privileges enough without being
affiliated to the exclusive set and having invitations to the
smaller parties, which were the real test; it was a mercy
for her that she had not that added immorality on her
conscience. The ladies Mrs. Farrinder meant (it was to
be supposed she meant some particular ones) might speak
for themselves. She wished to work in another field ; she
had long been preoccupied with the romance of the people.
She had an immense desire to know intimately some very
poor girl. This might seem one of the most accessible of
pleasures \ but, in point of fact, she had not found it so.
There were two or three pale shop-maidens whose acquaint-
ance she had sought ; but they had seemed afraid of her,
and the attempt had come to nothing. She took them

v. THE BOSTONIANS. 35

more tragically than they took themselves ; they couldn't
make out what she wanted them to do, and they always
ended by being odiously mixed up with Charlie. Charlie
was a young man in a white overcoat and a paper collar ;
it was for him, in the last analysis, that they cared much
the most. They cared far more about Charlie than about
the ballot. Olive Chancellor wondered how Mrs. Farrinder
would treat that branch of the question. In her researches
among her young townswomen she had always found this
obtrusive swain planted in her path, and she grew at last to
dislike him extremely. It filled her with exasperation to
think that he should be necessary to the happiness of his
victims (she had learned that whatever they might talk
about with her, it was of him and him only that they dis-
coursed among themselves), and one of the main recom-
mendations of the evening club for her fatigued, underpaid
sisters, which it had long been her dream to establish, was
that it would in some degree undermine his position —
distinct as her prevision might be that he would be in
waiting at the door. She hardly knew what to say to
Mrs. Farrinder when this momentarily misdirected woman,
still preoccupied with the Mill-dam, returned to the
charge.

' We want labourers in that field, though I know two or
three lovely women — sweet home-women — moving in circles
that are for the most part closed to every new voice, who
are doing their best to help on the fight. I have several
names that might surprise you, names well known on State
Street. But we can't have too many recruits, especially
among those whose refinement is generally acknowledged.
If it be necessary, we are prepared to take certain steps to
conciliate the shrinking. Our movement is for all — it
appeals to the most delicate ladies. Raise the standard
among them, and bring me a thousand names. I know
several that I should like to have. I look after the details
as well as the big currents,' Mrs. Farrinder added, in a
tone as explanatory as could be expected of such a woman,
and with a smile of which the sweetness was thrilling to
her listener.

' I can't talk to those people, I can't 1' said Olive

36 THE BOSTON1ANS. V.

Chancellor, with a face which seemed to plead for a re-
mission of responsibility. * I want to give myself up to
others; I want to know everything that lies beneath and
out of sight, don't you know? I want to enter into the
lives of women who are lonely, who are piteous. I want
to be near to them — to help them. I want to do some-
thing— oh, I should like so to speak !'

' We should be glad to have you make a few remarks at
present,' Mrs. Farrinder declared, with a punctuality which
revealed the faculty of presiding.

' Oh dear, no, I can't speak ; I have none of that sort
of talent. I have no self-possession, no eloquence ; I can't
put three words together. But I do want to contribute.'

1 What have you got?' Mrs. Farrinder inquired, looking
at her interlocutress, up and down, with the eye of busi-
ness, in which there was a certain chill. ' Have you got
money?'

Olive was so agitated for the moment with the hope
that this great woman would approve of her on the financial
side that she took no time to reflect that some other quality
might, in courtesy, have been suggested. But she con-
fessed to possessing a certain capital, and the tone seemed
rich and deep in which Mrs. Farrinder said to her, ' Then
contribute that !' She was so good as to develop this
idea, and her picture of the part Miss Chancellor might
play by making liberal donations to a fund for the diffusion
among the women of America of a more adequate concep-
tion of their public and private rights — a fund her adviser
had herself lately inaugurated — this bold, rapid sketch
had the vividness which characterised the speaker's most
successful public efforts. It placed Olive under the spell ;
it made her feel almost inspired. If her life struck others
in that way — especially a woman like Mrs. Farrinder, whose
horizon was so full — then there must be something for her
to do. It was one thing to choose for herself, but now the
great representative of the enfranchisement of their sex (from
every form of bondage) had chosen for her.

The barren, gas-lighted room grew richer and richer to
her earnest eyes ; it seemed to expand, to open itself to the
great life of humanity. The serious, tired people, in their

v. THE BOSTONIANS. 37

bonnets and overcoats, began to glow like a company of
heroes. Yes, she would do something, Olive Chancellor
said to herself; she would do something to brighten the
darkness of that dreadful image that was always before her,
and against which it seemed to her at times that she had
been born to lead a crusade — the image of the unhappiness
of women. The unhappiness of women ! The voice of
their silent suffering was always in her ears, the ocean of
tears that they had shed from the beginning of time
seemed to pour through her own eyes. Ages of op-
pression had rolled over them; uncounted millions had
lived only to be tortured, to be crucified. They were her
sisters, they were her own, and the day of their delivery
had dawned. This was the only sacred cause; this was
the great, the just revolution. It must triumph, it must
sweep everything before it ; it must exact from the other,
the brutal, blood-stained, ravening race, the last particle of
expiation ! It would be the greatest change the world had
seen ; it would be a new era for the human family, and
the names of those who had helped to show the way and
lead the squadrons would be the brightest in the tables of
fame. They would be names of women weak, insulted,
persecuted, but devoted in every pulse of their being to
the cause, and asking no better fate than to die for it. It
was not clear to this interesting girl in what manner such a
sacrifice (as this last) would be required of her, but she
saw the matter through a kind of sunrise-mist of emotion
which made danger as rosy as success. When Miss Birds-
eye approached, it transfigured her familiar, her comical
shape, and made the poor little humanitary hack seem
already a martyr. Olive Chancellor looked at her with
love, remembered that she had never, in her long, unre-
warded, weary life, had a thought or an impulse for herself.
She had been consumed by the passion of sympathy; it
had crumpled her into as many creases as an old glazed,
distended glove. She had been laughed at, but she never
knew it ; she was treated as a bore, but she never cared.
She had nothing in the world but the clothes on her back,
and when she should go down into the grave she would
leave nothing behind her but her grotesque, undistinguished,

38 THE BOSTONIANS. v.

pathetic little name. And yet people said that women
were vain, that they were personal, that they were interested !
While Miss Birdseye stood there, asking Mrs. Farrinder
if she wouldn't say something, Olive Chancellor tenderly
fastened a small battered brooch which confined her collar
and which had half detached itself.

VI.

' OH, thank you,' said Miss Birdseye, ' I shouldn't like to
lose it; it was given me by Mirandola !' He had been
one of her refugees in the old time, when two or three of
her friends, acquainted with the limits of his resources,
wondered how he had come into possession of the trinket.
She had been diverted again, after her greeting with Doctor
and Mrs. Tarrant, by stopping to introduce the tall, dark
young man whom Miss Chancellor had brought with her to
Doctor Prance. She had become conscious of his some-
what sombre figure, uplifted against the wall, near the door ;
he was leaning there in solitude, unacquainted with oppor-
tunities which Miss Birdseye felt to be, collectively, of
value, and which were really, of course, what strangers
came to Boston for. It did not occur to her to ask herself
why Miss Chancellor didn't talk to him, since she had
brought him ; Miss Birdseye was incapable of a speculation
of this kind. Olive, in fact, had remained vividly conscious
of her kinsman's isolation until the moment when Mrs.
Farrinder lifted her, with a word, to a higher plane. She
watched him across the room ; she saw that he might be
bored. But she proposed to herself not to mind that ; she
had asked him, after all, not to come. Then he was no
worse off than others ; he was only waiting, like the rest j
and before they left she would introduce him to Mrs.
Farrinder. She might tell that lady who he was first ; it
was not every one that would care to know a person who had
borne such a part in the Southern disloyalty. It came
over our young lady that when she sought the acquaintance
of her distant kinsman she had indeed done a more com-
plicated thing than she suspected. The sudden uneasiness
that he flung over her in the carriage had not left her,

40 THE BOSTONIANS. vi.

though she felt it less now she was with others, and
especially that she was close to Mrs. Farrinder, who was
such a fountain of strength. At any rate, if he was bored,
he could speak to some one ; there were excellent people
near him, even if they were ardent reformers. He could
speak to that pretty girl who had just come in — the one
with red hair — if he liked ; Southerners were supposed to
be so chivalrous !

Miss Birdseye reasoned much less, and did not offer to
introduce him to Verena Tarrant, who was apparently being
presented by her parents to a group of friends at the other
end of the room. It came back to Miss Birdseye, in this
connection, that, sure enough, Verena had been away for a
long time — for nearly a year \ had been on a visit 'to friends
in the West, and would therefore naturally be a stranger to
most of the Boston circle. Doctor Prance was looking at
her — at Miss Birdseye — with little, sharp, fixed pupils ; and
the good lady wondered whether she were angry at having
been induced to come up. She had a general impression
that when genius was original its temper was high, and all
this would be the case with Doctor Prance. She wanted
to say to her that she could go down again if she liked ;
but even to Miss Birdseye's unsophisticated mind this
scarcely appeared, as regards a guest, an adequate formula
of dismissal. She tried to bring the young Southerner out ;
she said to him that she presumed they would have some
entertainment soon — Mrs. Farrinder could be interesting
when she tried ! And then she bethought herself to
introduce him to Doctor Prance; it might serve as a
reason for having brought her up. Moreover, it would do
her good to break up her work now and then ; she pursued
her medical studies far into the night, and Miss Birdseye,
who was nothing of a sleeper (Mary Prance, precisely, had
wanted to treat her for it), had heard her, in the stillness of
the small hours, with her open windows (she had fresh air
on the brain), sharpening instruments (it was Miss Birdseye's
mild belief that she dissected), in a little physiological
laboratory which she had set up in her back room, the
room which, if she hadn't been a doctor, might have been
her ' chamber,' and perhaps was, even with the dissecting,

vi. THE BOSTONIANS. 41

Miss Birdseye didn't know ! She explained her young
friends to each other, a trifle incoherently, perhaps, and
then went to stir up Mrs. Farrinder.

Basil Ransom had already noticed Doctor Prance ; he
had not been at all bored, and had observed every one in
the room, arriving at all sorts of ingenious inductions. The
little medical lady struck him as a perfect example of the
* Yankee female' — the figure which, in the unregenerate
imagination of the children of the cotton-States, was pro-
duced by the New England school-system, the Puritan
code, the ungenial climate, the absence of chivalry. Spare,
dry, hard, without a curve, an inflection or a grace, she
seemed to ask no odds in the battle of life and to be
prepared to give none. But Ransom could see that she
was not an enthusiast, and after his contact with his cousin's
enthusiasm this was rather a relief to him. She looked
like a boy, and not even like a good boy. It was evident
that if she had been a boy, she would have ' cut ' school, to
try private experiments in mechanics or to make researches
in natural history. It was true that if she had been a boy
she would have borne some relation to a girl, whereas
Doctor Prance appeared to bear none whatever. Except
her intelligent eye, she had no features to speak of.
Ransom asked her if she were acquainted with the lioness,
and on her staring at him, without response, explained that
he meant the renowned Mrs. Farrinder.

'Well, I don't know as I ought to say that I'm
acquainted with her; but I've heard her on the platform.
I have paid my half-dollar,' the doctor added, with a
certain grimness.

'Well, did she convince you?' Ransom inquired

' Convince me of what, sir ?'

' That women are so superior to men.'

* Oh, deary me !' said Doctor Prance, with a little
impatient sigh ; ' I guess I know more about women than
she does.'

'And that isn't your opinion, I hope,' said Ransom,
laughing.

'Men and women are all the same to me,' Doctor
Prance remarked. ' I don't see any difference. There is

42 THE BOSTONIANS. vi.

room for improvement in both sexes. Neither of them is
up to the standard.' And on Ransom's asking her what
the standard appeared to her to be, she said, ' Well, they
ought to live better ; that's what they ought to do.' And
she went on to declare, further, that she thought they all
talked too much. This had so long been Ransom's con-
viction that his heart quite warmed to Doctor Prance, and
he paid homage to her wisdom in the manner of Mississippi
— with a richness of compliment that made her turn her
acute, suspicious eye upon him. This checked him ; she
was capable of thinking that he talked too much — she
herself having, apparently, no general conversation. It was
german to the matter, at any rate, for him to observe that
he believed they were to have a lecture from Mrs. Farrinder
— he didn't know why she didn't begin. ' Yes/ said Doctor
Prance, rather drily, ' I suppose that's what Miss Birdseye
called me up for. She seemed to think I wouldn't want to
miss that.'

'Whereas, I infer, you could console yourself for the
loss of the oration,' Ransom suggested.

'Well, I've got some work. I don't want any one to
teach me what a woman can do ! ' Doctor Prance declared.
* She can find out some things, if she tries. Besides, I am
familiar with Mrs. Farrinder's system ; I know all she has
got to say.'

'Well, what is it, then, since she continues to remain
silent?'

' Well, what it amounts to is just that women want to
have a better time. That's what it comes to in the end.
I am aware of that, without her telling me.'

'And don't you sympathise with such an aspiration?'

' Well, I don't know as I cultivate the sentimental side,'
said Doctor Prance. ' There's plenty of sympathy without
mine. If they want to have a better time, I suppose it's
natural ; so do men too, I suppose. But I don't know as
it appeals to me — to make sacrifices for it ; it ain't such a
wonderful time — the best you can have !'

This little lady was tough and technical ; she evidently
didn't care for great movements ; she became more and
more interesting to Basil Ransom, who, it is to be feared,

vi. THE BOSTONIANS. 43

had a fund of cynicism. He asked her if she knew his
cousin, Miss Chancellor, whom he indicated, beside Mrs.
Farrinder; she believed, on the .contrary, in wonderful
times (she thought they were coming) ; she had plenty of
sympathy, and he was sure she was willing to make
sacrifices.

Doctor Prance looked at her across the room for a
moment ; then she said she didn't know her, but she
guessed she knew others like her — she went to see them
when they were sick. ' She's having a private lecture to
herself/ Ransom remarked; whereupon Doctor Prance
rejoined, ' Well, I guess she'll have to pay for it ! ' She
appeared to regret her own half-dollar, and to be vaguely
impatient of the behaviour of her sex. Ransom became
so sensible of this that he felt it was indelicate to allude
further to the cause of woman, and, for a change, en-
deavoured to elicit from his companion some information
about the gentlemen present. He had given her a chance,
vainly, to start some topic herself; but he could see that
she had no interests beyond the researches from which, this
evening, she had been torn, and was incapable of asking
him a personal question. She knew two or three of the
gentlemen ; she had seen them before at Miss Birdseye's.
Of course she knew principally ladies; the time hadn't
come when a lady-doctor was sent for by a gentleman, and
she hoped it never would, though some people seemed to
think that this was what lady- doctors were working for.
She knew Mr. Pardon ; that was the young man with the
'side -whiskers' and the white hair; he was a kind of
editor, and he wrote, too, 'over his signature' — perhaps
Basil had read some of his works ; he was under thirty, in
spite of his white hair. He was a great deal thought of in
magazine circles. She believed he was very bright — but
she hadn't read anything. She didn't read much — not for
amusement; only the 'Transcript.' She believed Mr.
Pardon sometimes wrote in the 'Transcript'; well, she
supposed he was very bright. The other that she knew —
only she didn't know him (she supposed Basil would think
that queer) — was the tall, pale gentleman, with the black
moustache and the eye-glass. She knew him because she

44 THE BOSTONIANS. vi.

had met him in society ; but she didn't know him — well,
because she didn't want to. If he should come and speak
to her — and he looked, as if he were going to work round
that way — she should just say to him, ' Yes, sir/ or ' No,
sir,' very coldly. She couldn't help it if he did think her
dry ; if he were a little more dry, it might be better for him.
What was the matter with him ? Oh, she thought she had
mentioned that; he was a mesmeric healer, he made
miraculous cures. She didn't believe in his system or
disbelieve in it, one way or the other ; she only knew that
she had been called to see ladies he had worked on, and
she found that he had made them lose a lot of valuable
time. He talked to them — well, as if he didn't know what
he was saying. She guessed he was quite ignorant of
physiology, and she didn't think he ought to go round
taking responsibilities. She didn't want to be narrow, but
she thought a person ought to know something. She sup-
posed Basil would think her very uplifted ; but he had put
the question to her, as she might say. All she could say
was she didn't want him to be laying his hands on any of
her folks; it was all done with the hands — what wasn't
done with the tongue ! Basil could see that Doctor Prance
was irritated ; that this extreme candour of allusion
to her neighbour was probably not habitual to her, as a
member of a society in which the casual expression of strong
opinion generally produced waves of silence. But he
blessed her irritation, for him it was so illuminating ; and
to draw further profit from it he asked her who the young
lady was with the red hair — the pretty one, whom he had
only noticed during the last ten minutes. She was Miss
Tarrant, the daughter of the healer ; hadn't she mentioned
his name ? Selah Tarrant ; if he wanted to send for him.
Doctor Prance wasn't acquainted with her, beyond knowing
that she was the mesmerist's only child, and having heard
something about her having some gift — she couldn't remem-
ber which it was. Oh, if she was his child, she would be

sure to have some gift — if it was only the gift of the g

well, she didn't mean to say that ; but a talent for conver-
sation. Perhaps she could die and come to life again;
perhaps she would show them her gift, as no one seemed

vi. THE BOSTONIANS. 45

inclined to do anything. Yes, she was pretty-appearing,
but there was a certain indication of anaemia, and Doctor
Prance would be surprised if she didn't eat too much candy.
Basil thought she had an engaging exterior; it was his
private reflection, coloured doubtless by ' sectional' prejudice,
that she was the first pretty girl he had seen in Boston.
She was talking with some ladies at the other end of the
room ; and she had a large red fan, which she kept con-
stantly in movement. She was not a quiet girl; she
fidgeted, was restless, while she talked, and had the air of
a person who, whatever she might be doing, would wish to
be doing something else. If people watched her a good
deal, she also returned their contemplation, and her charm-
ing eyes had several times encountered those of Basil
Ransom. But they wandered mainly in the direction of
Mrs. Farrinder — they lingered upon the serene solidity of
the great oratress. It was easy to see that the girl admired
this beneficent woman, and felt it a privilege to be near
her. It was apparent, indeed, that she was excited by the
company in which she found herself; a fact to be explained
by a reference to that recent period of exile in the West, of
which we have had a hint, and in consequence of which the
present occasion may have seemed to her a return to intel-
lectual life. Ransom secretly wished that his cousin —
since fate was to reserve for him a cousin in Boston — had
been more like that.

By this time a certain agitation was perceptible ; several
ladies, impatient of vain delay, had left their places, to
appeal personally to Mrs. Farrinder, who was presently sur-
rounded with sympathetic remonstrants. Miss Birdseye
had given her up ; it had been enough for Miss Birdseye
that she should have said, when pressed (so far as her
hostess, muffled in laxity, could press) on the subject of
the general expectation, that she could only deliver her
message to an audience which she felt to be partially hostile.
There was no hostility there ; they were all only too much
in sympathy. ' I don't require sympathy,' she said, with
a tranquil smile, to Olive Chancellor ; ' I am only myself,
I only rise to the occasion, when I see prejudice, when I
see bigotry, when I see injustice, when I see conservatism,

46 THE BOSTONIANS. VL

massed before me like an army. Then I feel — I feel as I
imagine Napoleon Bonaparte to have felt on the eve of one
of his great victories. I must have unfriendly elements —
I like to win them over.'

Olive thought of Basil Ransom, and wondered whether
he would do for an unfriendly element. She mentioned
him to Mrs. Farrinder, who expressed an earnest hope that
if he were opposed to the principles which were so dear to
the rest of them, he might be induced to take the floor and
testify on his own "account. ' I should be so happy to
answer him/ said Mrs. Farrinder, with supreme softness.
' I should be so glad, at any rate, to exchange ideas with
him.' Olive felt a deep alarm at the idea of a public
dispute between these two vigorous people (she had a per-
ception that Ransom would be vigorous), not because she
doubted of the happy issue, but because she herself would
be in a false position, as having brought the offensive young
man, and she had a horror of false positions. Miss Birds-
eye was incapable of resentment; she had invited forty
people to hear Mrs. Farrinder speak, and now Mrs.
Farrinder wouldn't speak. But she had such a beautiful
reason for it ! There was something martial and heroic in
her pretext, and, besides, it was so characteristic, so free,
that Miss Birdseye was quite consoled, and wandered away,
looking at her other guests vaguely, as if she didn't know
them from each other, while she mentioned to them, at a
venture, the excuse for their disappointment, confident,
evidently, that they would agree with her it was very fine.
' But we can't pretend to be on the other side, just to start
her up, can we?' she asked of Mr. Tarrant, who sat there
beside his wife with a rather conscious but by no means
complacent air of isolation from the rest of the company.

' Well, I don't know — I guess we are all solid here,' this
gentleman replied, looking round him with a slow, deliber-
ate smile, which made his mouth enormous, developed two
wrinkles, as long as the wings of a bat, on either side of it,
and showed a set of big, even, carnivorous teeth.

1 Selah,' said his wife, laying her hand on the sleeve of
his waterproof, ' I wonder whether Miss Birdseye would be
interested to hear Verena.'

vi. THE BOSTONIANS. 47

' Well, if you mean she sings, it's a shame I haven't got
a piano,' Miss Birdseye took upon herself to respond. It
came back to her that the girl had a gift.

' She doesn't want a piano — she doesn't want anything,'
Selah remarked, giving no apparent attention to his wife.
It was a part of his attitude in life never to appear to be
indebted to another person for a suggestion, never to be
surprised or unprepared.

' Well, I don't know that the interest in singing is so
general,' said Miss Birdseye, quite unconscious of any
slackness in preparing a substitute for the entertainment
that had failed her.

* It isn't singing, you'll see,' Mrs. Tarrant declared.

< What is it, then ?'

Mr. Tarrant unfurled his wrinkles, showed his back teeth.
* It's inspirational.'

Miss Birdseye gave a small, vague, unsceptical laugh.
' Well, if you can guarantee that '

'I think it would be acceptable,' said Mrs. Tarrant;
and putting up a half-gloved, familiar hand, she drew Miss
Birdseye down to her, and the pair explained in alternation
what it was their child could do.

Meanwhile, Basil Ransom confessed to Doctor Prance
that he was, after all, rather disappointed. He had ex-
pected more of a programme ; he wanted to hear some of
the new truths. Mrs. Farrinder, as he said, remained
within her tent, and he had hoped not only to see these
distinguished people but also to listen to them.

1 Well, / ain't disappointed,' the sturdy little doctress
replied. ' If any question had been opened, 1 suppose I
should have had to stay.'

' But I presume you don't propose to retire.'

'Well, I've got to pursue my studies some time. I
don't want the gentlemen-doctors to get ahead of me.'

' Oh, no one will ever get ahead of you, I'm very sure.
And there is that pretty young lady going over to speak to
Mrs. Farrinder. She's going to beg her for a speech —
Mrs. Farrinder can't resist that.'

'Well, then, I'll just trickle out before she begins.
Good-night, sir/ said Doctor Prance, who by this time had

48 THE BOSTONIANS. VL

begun to appear to Ransom more susceptible of domestica-
tion, as if she had been a small forest-creature, a catamount
or a ruffled doe, that had learned to stand still while you
stroked it, or even to extend a paw. She ministered to
health, and she was healthy herself; if his cousin could
have been even of this type Basil would have felt himself
more fortunate.

'Good-night, Doctor,' he replied. 'You haven't told
me, after all, your opinion of the capacity of the ladies.'

'Capacity for what?' said Doctor Prance. 'They've
got a capacity for making people waste time. All I know
is that I don't want any one to tell me what a lady can
do !' And she edged away from him softly, as if she had
been traversing a hospital-ward, and presently he saw her
reach the door, which, with the arrival of the later comers,
had remained open. She stood there an instant, turning
over the whole assembly a glance like the flash of a watch-
man's bull's-eye, and then quickly passed out. Ransom
could see that she was impatient of the general question
and bored with being reminded, even for the sake of her
rights, that she was a woman — a detail that she was in the
habit of forgetting, having as many rights as she had time
for. It was certain that whatever might become of the
movement at large, Doctor Prance's own little revolution
was a success.

VII.

SHE had no sooner left him than Olive Chancellor came
towards him with eyes that seemed to say, ' I don't care
whether you are here now or not — I'm all right ! ' But
what her lips said was much more gracious ; she asked him
if she mightn't have the pleasure of introducing him to Mrs.
Farrinder. Ransom consented, with a little of his Southern
flourish, and in a moment the lady got up to receive him
from the midst of the circle that now surrounded her. It
was an occasion for her to justify her reputation of an
elegant manner, and it must be impartially related that she
struck Ransom as having a dignity in conversation and a
command of the noble style which could not have been
surpassed by a daughter — one of the most acccomplished,
most far-descended daughters — of his own latitude. It was
as if she had known that he was not eager for the changes
she advocated, and wished to show him that, especially to a
Southerner who had bitten the dust, her sex could be mag-
nanimous. This knowledge of his secret heresy seemed to
him to be also in the faces of the other ladies, whose cir-
cumspect glances, however (for he had not been introduced),
treated it as a pity rather than as a shame. He was con-
scious of all these middle-aged feminine eyes, conscious of
curls, rather limp, that depended from dusky bonnets, of heads
poked forward,, as if with a waiting, listening, familiar habit,
of no one being very bright or gay — no one, at least, but
that girl he had noticed before, who had a brilliant head,
and who now hovered on the edge of the conclave. He
met her eye again ; she was watching him too. It had been
in his thought that Mrs. Farrinder, to whom his cousin
might have betrayed or misrepresented him, would perhaps
defy him to combat, and he wondered whether he could

So THE BOSTONIANS. vn.

pull himself together (he was extremely embarrassed)
sufficiently to do honour to such a challenge. If she would
fling down the glove on the temperance question, it seemed
to him that it would be in him to pick it up ; for the idea
of a meddling legislation on this subject filled him with
rage ; the taste of liquor being good to him, and his con-
viction strong that civilisation itself would be in danger if it
should fall into the power of a herd of vociferating women
(I am but the reporter of his angry formulce) to prevent a
gentleman from taking his glass. Mrs. Farrinder proved
to him that she had not the eagerness of insecurity ; she
asked him if he wouldn't like to give the company some
account of the social and political condition of the South.
He begged to be excused, expressing at the same time a
high sense of the honour done him by such a request, while
he smiled to himself at the idea of his extemporising a
lecture. He smiled even while he suspected the meaning
of the look Miss Chancellor gave him : ' Well, you are not
of much account after all!' To talk to those people about
the South — if they could have guessed how little he cared
to do it ! He had a passionate tenderness for his own
country, and a sense of intimate connection with it which
would have made it as impossible for him to take a room-
ful of Northern fanatics into his confidence as to read aloud
his mother's or his mistress's letters. To be quiet about
the Southern land, not to touch her with vulgar hands, to
leave her alone with her wounds and her memories, not
prating in the market-place either of her troubles or her
hopes, but waiting as a man should wait, for the slow
process, the sensible beneficence, of time — this was the
desire of Ransom's heart, and he was aware of how little it
could minister to the entertainment of Miss Birdseye's
guests.

' We know so little about the women of the South ; they
are very voiceless,' Mrs. Farrinder remarked. ' How much
can we count upon them? in what numbers would they
flock to our standard ? I have been recommended not to
lecture in the Southern cities.'

'Ah, madam, that was very cruel advice — for us!'
Basil Ransom exclaimed, with gallantry.

vii. THE BOSTONIANS. 51

* / had a magnificent audience last spring in St. Louis,'
a fresh young voice announced, over the heads of the
gathered group — a voice which, on Basil's turning, like
every one else, for an explanation, appeared to have pro-
ceeded from the pretty girl with red hair. She had
coloured a little with the effort of making this declaration,
and she stood there smiling at her listeners.

Mrs. Farrinder bent a benignant brow upon her, in spite
of her being, evidently, rather a surprise. ' Oh, indeed j
and your subject, my dear young lady ?'

' The past history, the present condition, and the future
prospects of our sex.'

'Oh, well, St. Louis — that's scarcely the South,' said
one of the ladies.

' I'm sure the young lady would have had equal success
at Charleston or New Orleans,' Basil Ransom interposed.

' Well, I wanted to go farther,' the girl continued, ' but
I had no friends. I have friends in St. Louis.'

'You oughtn't to want for them anywhere,' said Mrs.
Farrinder, in a manner which, by this time, had quite
explained her reputation. ' I am acquainted with the
loyalty of St. Louis.'

'Well, after that, you must let me introduce Miss
Tarrant; she's perfectly dying to know you, Mrs. Farrinder.'
These words emanated from one of the gentlemen, the
young man with white hair, who had been mentioned to
Ransom by Doctor Prance as a celebrated magazinist.
He, too, up to this moment, had hovered in the back-
ground, but he now gently clove the assembly (several of
the ladies made way for him), leading in the daughter of
the mesmerist.

She laughed and continued to blush — her blush was the
faintest pink ; she looked very young and slim and fair as
Mrs. Farrinder made way for her on the sofa which Olive
Chancellor had quitted. ' I have wanted to know you ; I
admire you so much ; I hoped so you would speak to-night.
It's too lovely to see you, Mrs. Farrinder.' So she ex-
pressed herself, while the company watched the encounter
with a look of refreshed inanition. ' You don't know who
I am, of course ; I'm just a girl who wants to thank you

52 THE BOSTONIANS. vn.

for all you have done for us. For you have spoken for us
girls, just as much as — just as much as ' She hesi-
tated now, looking about with enthusiastic eyes at the rest
of the group, and meeting once more the gaze of Basil
Ransom.

'Just as much as for the old women/ said Mrs.
Farrinder, genially. 'You seem very well able to speak
for yourself.'

' She speaks so beautifully — if she would only make a
little address,' the young man who had introduced her
remarked. ' It's a new style, quite original,' he added.
He stood there with folded arms, looking down at his work,
the conjunction of the two ladies, with a smile ; and Basil
Ransom, remembering what Miss Prance had told him, and
enlightened by his observation in New York of some of the
sources from which newspapers are fed, was immediately
touched by the conviction that he perceived in it the
material of a paragraph.

< My dear child, if you'll take the floor, I'll call the
meeting to order,' said Mrs. Farrinder.

The girl looked at her with extraordinary candour and
confidence. ' If I could only hear you first — just to give
me an atmosphere.'

' I've got no atmosphere ; there's very little of the
Indian summer about me I I deal with facts — hard facts,'
Mrs. Farrinder replied. 'Have you ever heard me? If
so, you know how crisp I am.'

' Heard you ? I've lived on you ! It's so much to me
to see you. Ask mother if it ain't ! ' She had expressed
herself, from the first word she uttered, with a promptness
and assurance which gave almost the impression of a lesson
rehearsed in advance. And yet there was a strange spon-
taneity in her manner, and an air of artless enthusiasm, of
personal purity. If she was theatrical, she was naturally
theatrical. She looked up at Mrs. Farrinder with all her
emotion in her smiling eyes. This lady had been the
object of many ovations ; it was familiar to her that the
collective heart of her sex had gone forth to her; but,
visibly, she was puzzled by this unforeseen embodiment of
gratitude and fluency, and her eyes wandered over the girl

vii. THE BOSTONIANS. 53

with a certain reserve, while, within the depth of her
eminently public manner, she asked herself whether Miss
Tarrant were a remarkable young woman or only a forward
minx. She found a response which committed her to
neither view ; she only said, * We want the young — of
course we want the young ! '

'Who is that charming creature ?' Basil Ransom heard
his cousin ask, in a grave, lowered tone, of Matthias Pardon,
the young man who had brought Miss Tarrant forward.
He didn't know whether Miss Chancellor knew him, or
whether her curiosity had pushed her to boldness. Ransom
was near the pair, and had the benefit of Mr. Pardon's
answer.

* The daughter of Doctor Tarrant, the mesmeric healer
— Miss Verena. She's a high-class speaker.'

' What do you mean ?' Olive asked. ' Does she give
public addresses?'

' Oh yes, she has had quite a career in the West. I
heard her last spring at Topeka. They call it inspirational.
I don't know what it is — only it's exquisite ; so fresh and
poetical. She has to have her father to start her up. It
seems to pass into her.' And Mr. Pardon indulged in a
gesture intended to signify the passage.

Olive Chancellor made no rejoinder save a low, im-
patient sigh ; she transferred her attention to the girl, who
now held Mrs. Farrinder's hand in both her own, and was
pleading with her just to prelude a little. ' I want a starting-
point — I want to know where I am,' she said. * Just two
or three of your grand old thoughts.'

Basil stepped nearer to his cousin ; he remarked to her
that Miss Verena was very pretty. She turned an instant,
glanced at him, and then said, 'Do you think so?' An
instant later she added, ' How you must hate this place !'

' Oh, not now, we are going to have some fun,' Ransom
replied good-humouredly, if a trifle coarsely ; and the de-
claration had a point, for Miss Birdseye at this moment
reappeared, followed by the mesmeric healer and his wife.

'Ah, well, I see you are drawing her out,' said Miss
Birdseye to Mrs. Farrinder ; and at the idea that this
process had been necessary Basil Ransom broke into a

54 THE BOSTONIANS. vn.

smothered hilarity, a spasm which indicated that, for him,
the fun had already begun, and procured him another grave
glance from Miss Chancellor. Miss Verena seemed to him
as far ' out ' as a young woman could be. ' Here's her
father, Doctor Tarrant — he has a wonderful gift — and her
mother — she was a daughter of Abraham Greenstreet'
Miss Birdseye presented her companion; she was sure
Mrs. Farrinder would be interested ; she wouldn't want to
lose an opportunity, even if for herself the conditions were
not favourable. And then Miss Birdseye addressed herself
to the company more at large, widening the circle so as to
take in the most scattered guests, and evidently feeling that
after all it was a relief that one happened to have an ob-
scurely inspired maiden on the premises when greater
celebrities had betrayed the whimsicality of genius. It was
a part of this whimsicality that Mrs. Farrinder — the reader
may find it difficult to keep pace with her variations —
appeared now to have decided to utter a few of her thoughts,
so that her hostess could elicit a general response to the
remark that it would be delightful to have both the old
school and the new.

' Well, perhaps you'll be disappointed in Verena,' said
Mrs. Tarrant, with an air of dolorous resignation to any
event, and seating herself, with her gathered mantle, on the
edge of a chair, as if she, at least, were ready, whoever else
might keep on talking.

' It isn't me, mother,' Verena rejoinded, with soft gravity,
rather detached now from Mrs. Farrinder, and sitting with
her eyes fixed thoughtfully on the ground. With deference
to Mrs. Tarrant, a little more talk was necessary, for the
young lady had as yet been insufficiently explained. Miss
Birdseye felt this, but she was rather helpless about it, and
delivered herself, with her universal familiarity, which em-
braced every one and everything, of a wandering, amiable
tale, in which Abraham Greenstreet kept reappearing, in
which Doctor Tarrant's miraculous cures were specified,
with all the facts wanting, and in which Verena's successes
in the West were related, not with emphasis or hyperbole,
in which Miss Birdseye never indulged, but as accepted
and recognised wonders, natural in an age of new revelations.

vii. THE BOSTONIANS. 55

She had heard of these things in detail only ten minutes
before, from the girl's parents, but her hospitable soul had
needed but a moment to swallow and assimilate them. If
her account of them was not very lucid, it should be said
in excuse for her that it was impossible to have any idea
of Verena Tarrant unless one had heard her, and therefore
still more impossible to give an idea to others. Mrs. Far-
rinder was perceptibly irritated ; she appeared to have
made up her mind, after her first hesitation, that the
Tarrant family were fantastical and compromising. She
had bent an eye of coldness on Selah and his wife — she
might have regarded them all as a company of mounte-
banks.

' Stand up and tell us what you have to say,' she re-
marked, with some sternness, to Verena, who only raised
her eyes to her, silently now, with the same sweetness, and
then rested them on her father. This gentleman seemed
to respond to an irresistible appeal ; he looked round at the
company with all his teeth, and said that these flattering
allusions were not so embarrassing as they might otherwise
be, inasmuch as any success that he and his daughter might
have had was so thoroughly impersonal : he insisted on
that word. They had just heard her say, ' It is not me,
mother,' and he and Mrs. Tarrant and the girl herself were
all equally aware it was not she. It was some power out-
side— it seemed to flow through her \ he couldn't pretend
to say why his daughter should be called, more than any
one else. But it seemed as if she was called. When he
just calmed her down by laying his hand on her a few
moments, it seemed to come. It so happened that in the
West it had taken the form of a considerable eloquence.
She had certainly spoken with great facility to cultivated
and high-minded audiences. She had long followed with
sympathy the movement for the liberation of her sex from
every sort of bondage ; it had been her principal interest
even as a child (he might mention that at the age of nine
she had christened her favourite doll Eliza P. Moseley, in
memory of a great precursor whom they all reverenced),
and now the inspiration, if he might call it so, seemed just
to flow in that channel. The voice that spoke from her

56 THE BOSTONIANS. vn.

lips seemed to want to take that form. It didn't seem as
if it could take any other. She let it come out just as it
would — she didn't pretend to have any control. They
could judge for themselves whether the whole thing was
not quite unique. That was why he was willing to talk
about his own child that way, before a gathering of ladies
and gentlemen ; it was because they took no credit — they
felt it was a power outside. If Verena felt she was going
to be stimulated that evening, he was pretty sure they would
be interested. Only he should have to request a few
moments' silence, while she listened for the voice.

Several of the ladies declared that they should be de-
lighted— they hoped that Miss Tarrant was in good trim •
whereupon they were corrected by others, who reminded
them that it wasn't her — she had nothing to do with it —
so her trim didn't matter ; and a gentleman added that he
guessed there were many present who had conversed with
Eliza P. Moseley. Meanwhile Verena, more and more
withdrawn into herself, but perfectly undisturbed by the
public discussion of her mystic faculty, turned yet again,
very prettily, to Mrs. Farrinder, and asked her if she wouldn't
strike out — just to give her courage. By this time Mrs.
Farrinder was in a condition of overhanging gloom; she
greeted the charming suppliant with the frown of Juno.
She disapproved completely of Doctor Tarrant's little speech,
and she had less and less disposition to be associated with
a miracle -monger. Abraham Greenstreet was very well, but
Abraham Greenstreet was in his grave ; and Eliza P. Mose-
ley, after all, had been very tepid. Basil Ransom wondered
whether it were effrontery or innocence that enabled Miss
Tarrant to meet with such complacency the aloofness of
the elder lady. At this moment he heard Olive Chancellor,
at his elbow, with the tremor of excitement in her tone,
suddenly exclaim : ' Please begin, please begin ! A voice,
a human voice, is what we want.'

' I'll speak after you, and if you're a humbug, I'll expose
you !' Mrs. Farrinder said. She was more majestic than
facetious.

' I'm sure we are all solid, as Doctor Tarrant says. I
suppose we want to be quiet,' Miss Birdseye remarked.

VIII

VERENA TARRANT got up and went to her father in the
middle of the room ; Olive Chancellor crossed and resumed
her place beside Mrs. Farrinder on the sofa the girl had
quitted ; and Miss Birdseye's visitors, for the rest, settled
themselves attentively in chairs or leaned against the bare
sides of the parlour. Verena took her father's hands, held
them for a moment, while she stood before him, not looking
at him, with her eyes towards the company ; then, after an
instant, her mother, rising, pushed forward, with an interesting
sigh, the chair on which she had been sitting. Mrs.
Tarrant was provided with another seat, and Verena, relin-
quishing her father's grasp, placed herself in the chair,
which Tarrant put in position for her. She sat there with
closed eyes, and her father now rested his long, lean hands
upon her head. Basil Ransom watched these proceedings
with much interest, for the girl amused and pleased him.
She had far more colour than any one there, for whatever
brightness was to be found in Miss Birdseye's rather faded
and dingy human collection had gathered itself into this
attractive but ambiguous young person. There was nothing
ambiguous, by the way, about her confederate; Ransom
simply loathed him, from the moment he opened his mouth ;
he was intensely familiar — that is, his type was; he was
simply the detested carpet-bagger. He was false, cunning,
vulgar, ignoble; the cheapest kind of human product.
That he should be the father of a delicate, pretty girl, who
was apparently clever too, whether she had a gift or no,
this was an annoying, disconcerting fact. The white, puffy
mother, with the high forehead, in the corner there, looked
more like a lady ; but if she were one, it was all the more
shame to her to have mated with such a varlet, Ransom

58 THE BOSTONIANS. vm.

said to himself, making use, as he did generally, of terms
of opprobrium extracted from the older English literature.
He had seen Tarrant, or his equivalent, often before ; he
had ' whipped ' him, as he believed, controversially, again
and again, at political meetings in blighted Southern towns,
during the horrible period of reconstruction. If Mrs.
Farrinder had looked at Verena Tarrant as if she were a
mountebank, there was some excuse for it, inasmuch as the
girl made much the same impression on Basil Ransom.
He had never seen such an odd mixture of elements ; she
had the sweetest, most unworldly face, and yet, with it, an
air of being on exhibition, of belonging to a troupe, of
living in the gaslight, which pervaded even the details of
her dress, fashioned evidently with an attempt at the
histrionic. If she had produced a pair of castanets or a
tambourine, he felt that such accessories would have been
quite in keeping.

Little Doctor Prance, with her hard good sense, had
noted that she was anaemic, and had intimated that she was
a deceiver. The value of her performance was yet to be
proved, but she was certainly very pale, white as women
are who have that shade of red hair ; they look as if their
blood had gone into it There was, however, something
rich in the fairness of this young lady ; she was strong and
supple, there was colour in her lips and eyes, and her tresses,
gathered into a complicated coil, seemed to glow with the
brightness of her nature. She had curious, radiant, liquid
eyes (their smile was a sort of reflection, like the glisten of
a gem), and though she was not tall, she appeared to spring
up, and carried her head as if it reached rather high.
Ransom would have thought she looked like an Oriental,
if it were not that Orientals are dark ; and if she had only
had a goat she would have resembled Esmeralda, though
he had but a vague recollection of who Esmeralda had been.
She wore a light-brown dress, of a shape that struck him as
fantastic, a yellow petticoat, and a large crimson sash
fastened at the side ; while round her neck, and falling low
upon her flat young chest, she had a double chain of amber
beads. It must be added that, in spite of her melodramatic
appearance, there was no symptom that her performance,

viii. THE BOSTONIANS. 59

whatever it was, would be of a melodramatic character. She
was very quiet now, at least (she had folded her big fan),
and her father continued the mysterious process of calming
her down. Ransom wondered whether he wouldn't put her
to sleep ; for some minutes her eyes had remained closed ;
he heard a lady near him, apparently familiar with pheno-
mena of this class, remark that she was going off. As yet
the exhibition was not exciting, though it was certainly
pleasant to have such a pretty girl placed there before one,
like a moving statue. Doctor Tarrant looked at no one
as he stroked and soothed his daughter ; his eyes wandered
round the cornice of the room, and he grinned upward, as
if at an imaginary gallery. ' Quietly — quietly/ he murmured,
from time to time. * It will come, my good child, it will
come. Just let it work — just let it gather. The spirit, you
know; you've got to let the spirit come out when it will.'
He threw up his arms at moments, to rid himself of the
wings of his long waterproof, which fell forward over his
hands. Basil Ransom noticed all these things, and noticed
also, opposite, the waiting face of his cousin, fixed, from
her sofa, upon the closed eyes of the young prophetess.
He grew more impatient at last, not of the delay of the
edifying voice (though some time had elapsed), but of
Tarrant's grotesque manipulations, which he resented as
much as if he himself had felt their touch, and which
seemed a dishonour to the passive maiden. They made
him nervous, they made him angry, and it was only after-
wards that he asked himself wherein they concerned him,
and whether even a carpet-bagger hadn't a right to do what
he pleased with his daughter. It was a relief to him when
Verena got up from her chair, with a movement which
made Tarrant drop into the background as if his part were
now over. She stood there with a quiet face, serious and
sightless ; then, after a short further delay, she began to
speak.

She began incoherently, almost inaudibly, as if she were
talking in a dream. Ransom could not understand her •
he thought it very queer, and wondered what Doctor
Prance would have said. ' She's just arranging her ideas,
and trying to get in report ; she'll come out all right.'

60 THE BOSTONIANS. VIIL

This remark he heard dropped in a low tone by the
mesmeric healer; 'in report' was apparently Tarrant's
version of en rapport. His prophecy was verified, and
Verena did come out, after a little ; she came out with a
great deal of sweetness — with a very quaint and peculiar
effect. She proceeded slowly, cautiously, as if she were
listening for the prompter, catching, one by one, certain
phrases that were whispered to her a great distance off,
behind the scenes of the world. Then memory, or inspira-
tion, returned to her, and presently she was in possession
of her part. She played it with extraordinary simplicity
and grace ; at the end of ten minutes Ransom became
aware that the whole audience — Mrs. Farrinder, Miss
Chancellor, and the tough subject from Mississippi — were
under the charm. I speak of ten minutes, but to tell the
truth the young man lost all sense of time. He wondered
afterwards how long she had spoken ; then he counted that
her strange, sweet, crude, absurd, enchanting improvisation
must have lasted half an hour. It was not what she said ;
he didn't care for that, he scarcely understood it ; he could
only see that it was all about the gentleness and goodness
of women, and how, during the long ages of history, they
had been trampled under the iron heel of man. It was
about their equality — perhaps even (he was not definitely
conscious) about their superiority. It was about their day
having come at last, about the universal sisterhood, about
their duty to themselves and to each other. It was about
such matters as these, and Basil Ransom was delighted to
observe that such matters as these didn't spoil it. The
effect was not in what she said, though she said some such
pretty things, but in the picture and figure of the half-
bedizened damsel (playing, now again, with her red fan),
the visible freshness and purity of the little effort. When
she had gained confidence she opened her eyes, and their
shining softness was half the effect of her discourse. It
was full of school-girl phrases, of patches of remembered
eloquence, of childish lapses of logic, of flights of fancy
which might indeed have had success at Topeka; but
Ransom thought that if it had been much worse it would
have been quite as good, for the argument, the doctrine,

viii. THE BOSTONIANS. 61

had absolutely nothing to do with it. It was simply an
intensely personal exhibition, and the person making it
happened to be fascinating. She might have offended the
taste of certain people — Ransom could imagine that there
were other Boston circles in which she would be thought
pert ; but for himself all he could feel was that to his starved
senses she irresistibly appealed He was the stiffest of
conservatives, and his mind was steeled against the inanities
she uttered — the rights and wrongs of women, the equality
of the sexes, the hysterics of conventions, the further
stultification of the suffrage, the prospect of conscript
mothers in the national Senate. It made no difference ;
she didn't mean it, she didn't know what she meant, she
had been stuffed with this trash by her father, and she
was neither more nor less willing to say it than to say
anything else ; for the necessity of her nature was not to
make converts to a ridiculous cause, but to emit those
charming notes of her voice, to stand in those free young
attitudes, to shake her braided locks like a naiad rising
from the waves, to please every one who came near her,
and to be happy that she pleased. I know not whether
Ransom was aware of the bearings of this interpretation,
which attributed to Miss Tarrant a singular hollowness of
character ; he contented himself with believing that she was
as innocent as she was lovely, and with regarding her as a
vocalist of exquisite faculty, condemned to sing bad music.
How prettily, indeed, she made some of it sound !

' Of course I only speak to women — to my own dear
sisters ; I don't speak to men, for I don't expect them to
like what I say. They pretend to admire us very much,
but I should like them to admire us a little less and to
trust us a little more. I don't know what we have ever
done to them that they should keep us out of everything.
We have trusted them too much, and I think the time has
come now for us to judge them, and say that by keeping
us out we don't think they have done so well. When I
look around me at the world, and at the state that men have
brought it to, I confess I say to myself, "Well, if women
had fixed it this way I should like to know what they would
think of it !" When I see the dreadful misery of mankind

62 THE BOSTONIANS.

and think of the suffering of which at any hour, at any
moment, the world is full, I say that if this is the best they
can do by themselves, they had better let us come in a
little and see what we can do. We couldn't possibly make
it worse, could we ? If we had done only this, we shouldn't
boast of it. Poverty, and ignorance, and crime ; disease,
and wickedness, and wars ! Wars, always more wars, and
always more and more. Blood, blood — the world is
drenched with blood ! To kill each other, with all sorts of
expensive and perfected instruments, that is the most
brilliant thing they have been able to invent. It seems to
me that we might stop it, we might invent something better.
The cruelty — the cruelty ; there is so much, so much !
Why shouldn't tenderness come in ? Why should our
woman's hearts be so full of it, and all so wasted and
withered, while armies and prisons and helpless miseries
grow greater all the while ? I am only a girl, a simple
American girl, and of course I haven't seen much, and
there is a great deal of life that I don't know anything
about. But there are some things I feel — it seems to me
as if I had been born to feel them ; they are in my ears in
the stillness of the night and before my face in the visions
of the darkness. It is what the great sisterhood of women
might do if they should all join hands, and lift up their
voices above the brutal uproar of the world, in which it is
so hard for the plea of mercy or of justice, the moan of
weakness and suffering, to be heard. We should quench it,
we should make it still, and the sound of our lips would
become the voice of universal peace ! For this we must
trust one another, we must be true and gentle and kind.
We must remember that the world is ours too, ours — little
as we have ever had to say about anything ! — and that the
question is not yet definitely settled whether it shall be a
place of injustice or a place of love !'

It was with this that the young lady finished her har-
angue, which was not followed by her sinking exhausted
into her chair or by any of the traces of a laboured climax.
She only turned away slowly towards her mother, smiling
over her shoulder at the whole room, as if it had been a
single person, without a flush in her whiteness, or the need

VHI. THE BOSTONIANS. 63

of drawing a longer breath. The performance had evi-
dently been very easy to her, and there might have been a
kind of impertinence in her air of not having suffered from
an exertion which had wrought so powerfully on every one
else. Ransom broke into a genial laugh, which he instantly
swallowed again, at the sweet grotesqueness of this virginal
creature's standing up before a company of middle-aged
people to talk to them about ( love,' the note on which she
had closed her harangue. It was the most charming touch
in the whole thing, and the most vivid proof of her in-
nocence. She had had immense success, and Mrs. Tarrant,
as she took her into her arms and kissed her, was certainly
able to feel that the audience was not disappointed. They
were exceedingly affected; they broke into exclamations
and murmurs. Selah Tarrant went on conversing ostenta-
tiously with his neighbours, slowly twirling his long thumbs
and looking up at the cornice again, as if there could be
nothing in the brilliant manner in which his daughter had
acquitted herself to surprise him, who had heard her when
she was still more remarkable, and who, moreover, re-
membered that the affair was so impersonal. Miss Birdseye
looked round at the company with dim exultation ; her
large mild cheeks were shining with unwiped tears.
Young Mr. Pardon remarked, in Ransom's hearing, that he
knew parties who, if they had been present, would want to
engage Miss Verena at a high figure for the winter
campaign. And Ransom heard him add in a lower tone :
' There's money for some one in that girl ; you see if she
don't have quite a run ! ' As for our Mississippian he kept
his agreeable sensation for himself, only wondering whether
he might not ask Miss Birdseye to present him to the
heroine of the evening. Not immediately, of course, for
the young man mingled with his Southern pride a shyness
which often served all the purpose of humility. He was
aware how much he was an outsider in such a house as
that, and he was ready to wait for his coveted satisfaction
till the others, who all hung together, should have given her
the assurance of an approval which she would value, natu-
rally, more than anything he could say to her. This
episode had imparted animation to the assembly ; a certain

64 THE BOSTONIANS. vin.

gaiety, even, expressed in a higher pitch of conversation,
seemed to float in the heated air. People circulated more
freely, and Verena Tarrant was presently hidden from
Ransom's sight by the close -pressed ranks of the new
friends she had made. 'Well, I never heard it put that
way !' Ransom heard one of the ladies exclaim; to which
another replied that she wondered one of their bright
women hadn't thought of it before. ' Well, it is a gift, and
no mistake,' and ' Well, they may call it what they please,
it's a pleasure to listen to it ' — these genial tributes fell from
the lips of a pair of ruminating gentlemen. It was affirmed
within Ransom's hearing that if they had a few more like
that the matter would soon be fixed ; and it was rejoined
that they couldn't expect to have a great many — the style
was so peculiar. It was generally admitted that the style
was peculiar, but Miss Tarrant's peculiarity was the ex-
planation of her success.

IX.

RANSOM approached Mrs. Farrinder again, who had
remained on her sofa with Olive Chancellor ; and as she
turned her face to him he saw that she had felt the universal
contagion. Her keen eye sparkled, there was a flush on
her matronly cheek, and she had evidently made up her
mind what line to take. Olive Chancellor sat motionless ;
her eyes were fixed on the floor with the rigid, alarmed
expression of her moments of nervous diffidence ; she gave
no sign of observing her kinsman's approach. He said
something to Mrs. Farrinder, something that imperfectly
represented his admiration of Verena ; and this lady replied
with dignity that it was no wonder the girl spoke so well
— she spoke in such a good cause. ' She is very grace-
ful, has a fine command of language ; her father says it's a
natural gift.' Ransom saw that he should not in the least
discover Mrs. Farrinder's real opinion, and her dissimula-
tion added to his impression that she was a woman with a
policy. It was none of his business whether in her heart
she thought Verena a parrot or a genius ; it was perceptible
to him that she saw she would be effective, would help the
cause. He stood almost appalled for a moment, as he said
to himself that she would take her up and the girl would
be ruined, would force her note and become a screamer.
But he quickly dodged this vision, taking refuge in a
mechanical appeal to his cousin, of whom he inquired how
she liked Miss Verena. Olive made no answer ; her head
remained averted, she bored the carpet with her conscious
eyes. Mrs. Farrinder glanced at her askance, and then
said to Ransom serenely :

' You praise the grace of your Southern ladies, but you
have had to come North to see a human gazelle. Miss

F

66 THE BOSTONIANS. ix.

Tarrant is of the best New England stock — what / call the
best!'

' Tm sure from what I have seen of the Boston ladies,
no manifestation of grace can excite my surprise,' Ransom
rejoined, looking, with his smile, at his cousin.

'She has been powerfully affected,' Mrs. Farrinder
explained, very slightly dropping her voice, as Olive,
apparently, still remained deaf.

Miss Birdseye drew near at this moment; she wanted
to know if Mrs. Farrinder didn't want to express some
acknowledgment, on the part of the company at large, for
the real stimulus Miss Tarrant had given them. Mrs.
Farrinder said : Oh yes, she would speak now with
pleasure ; only she must have a glass of water first. Miss
Birdseye replied that there was some coming in a moment;
one of the ladies had asked for it, and Mr. Pardon had
just stepped down to draw some. Basil took advantage of
this intermission to ask Miss Birdseye if she would give
him the great privilege of an introduction to Miss Verena.
' Mrs. Farrinder will thank her for the company,' he said,
laughing, 'bul she won't thank her for me.'

Miss Birdseye manifested the greatest disposition to
oblige him ; she was so glad he had been impressed. She
was proceeding to lead him toward Miss Tarrant when
Olive Chancellor rose abruptly from her chair and laid her
hand, with an arresting movement, on the arm of her
hostess. She explained to her that she must go, that she
was not very well, that her carriage was there ; also that
she hoped Miss Birdseye, if it was not asking too much,
would accompany her to the door.

' Well, you are impressed too,' said Miss Birdseye,
looking at her philosophically. * It seems as if no one
had escaped.'

Ransom was disappointed ; he saw he was going to be
taken away, and, before he could suppress it, an exclama-
tion burst from his lips — the first exclamation he could
think of that would perhaps check his cousin's retreat :
' Ah, Miss Olive, are you going to give up Mrs. Farrinder?'

At this Miss Olive looked at him, showed him an
extraordinary face, a face he scarcely understood or even

ix. THE BOSTONIANS. 67

recognised. It was portentously grave, the eyes were
enlarged, there was a red spot in each of the cheeks, and
as directed to him, a quick, piercing question, a kind of
leaping challenge, in the whole expression. He could only
answer this sudden gleam with a stare, and wonder afresh
what trick his Northern kinswoman was destined to play
him. Impressed too ? He should think he had been !
Mrs. Farrinder, who was decidedly a woman of the world,
came to his assistance, or to Miss Chancellor's, and said
she hoped very much Olive wouldn't stay — she felt these
things too much. 'If you stay, I won't speak,' she
added; 'I should upset you altogether.' And then she
continued, tenderly, for so preponderantly intellectual a
nature : ' When women feel as you do, how can I doubt
that we shall come^put all right?'

' Oh, we shall come out all right, I guess,' murmured
Miss Birdseye.

' But you must remember Beacon Street,' Mrs. Farrinder
subjoined. ' You must take advantage of your position —
you must wake up the Back Bay ! '

' I'm sick of the Back Bay ! ' said Olive fiercely ; and
she passed to the door with Miss Birdseye, bidding good-
bye to no one. She was so agitated that, evidently, she
could not trust herself, and there was nothing for Ransom
but to follow. At the door of the room, however, he was
checked by a sudden pause on the part of the two ladies :
Olive stopped and stood there hesitating. She looked
round the room and spied out Verena, where she sat with
her mother, the centre of a gratified group ; then, throwing
back her head with an air of decision, she crossed over to
her. Ransom said to himself that now, perhaps, was his
chance, and he quickly accompanied Miss Chancellor.
The little knot of reformers watched her as she arrived ;
their faces expressed a suspicion of her social importance,
mingled with conscientious scruples as to whether it were
right to recognise it. Verena Tarrant saw that she was
the object of this manifestation, and she got up to meet
the lady whose approach was so full of point. Ransom
perceived, however, or thought he perceived, that she
recognised nothing ; she had no suspicions of social import-

68 THE BOSTONIANS. ix.

ance. Yet she smiled with all her radiance, as she looked
from Miss Chancellor to him; smiled because she liked
to smile, to please, to feel her success — or was it because
she was a perfect little actress, and this was part of her
training? She took the hand that Olive put out to her;
the others, rather solemnly, sat looking up from their chairs.

' You don't know me, but I want to know you,' Olive
said. ' I can thank you now. Will you come and see me?'

'Oh yes; where do you live?' Verena answered, in
the tone of a girl for whom an invitation (she hadn't so
many) was always an invitation.

Miss Chancellor syllabled her address, and Mrs. Tarrant
came forward, smiling. 'I know about you, Miss Chan-
cellor. I guess your father knew my father — Mr. Green-
street. Verena will be very glad to visit you. We shall
be very happy to see you in our home.'

Basil Ransom, while the mother spoke, wanted to say
something to the daughter, who stood there so near him,
but he could think of nothing that would do; certain
words that came to him, his Mississippi phrases, seemed
patronising and ponderous. Besides, he didn't wish to
assent to what she had said ; he wished simply to tell her
she was delightful, and it was difficult to mark that differ-
ence. So he only smiled at her in silence, and she smiled
back at him — a smile that seemed to him quite for himself.

* Where do you live?' Olive asked; and Mrs. Tarrant
replied that they lived at Cambridge, and that the horse-
cars passed just near their door. Whereupon Olive insisted
' Will you come very soon ? ' and Verena said, Oh yes, she
would come very soon, and repeated the number in Charles
Street, to show that she had taken heed of it. This was
done with childlike good faith. Ransom saw that she
would come and see any one who would ask her like that,
and he regretted for a minute that he was not a Boston
lady, so that he might extend to her such an invitation.
Olive Chancellor held her hand a moment longer, looked
at her in farewell, and then, saying, ' Come, Mr. Ransom/
drew him out of the room. In the hall they met Mr.
Pardon, coming up from the lower regions with a jug of
water and a tumbler. Miss Chancellor's hackney-coach

ix. THE BOSTONIANS. 69

was there, and when Basil had put her into it she said to
him that she wouldn't trouble him to drive with her — his
hotel was not near Charles Street. He had so little desire
to sit by her side — he wanted to smoke — that it was only
after the vehicle had rolled off that he reflected upon her
coolness, and asked himself why the deuce she had brought
him away. She was a very odd cousin, was this Boston
cousin of his. He stood there a moment, looking at the
light in Miss Birdseye's windows and greatly minded to
re-enter the house, now he might speak to the girl. But
he contented himself with the memory of her smile, and
turned away with a sense of relief, after all, at having got
out of such wild company, as well as with (in a different
order) a vulgar consciousness of being very thirsty.

X.

VERENA TARRANT came in the very next day from Cam-
bridge to Charles Street; that quarter of Boston is in
direct communication with the academic suburb. It hardly
seemed direct to poor Verena, perhaps, who, in the crowded
street-car which deposited her finally at Miss Chancellor's
door, had to stand up all the way, half suspended by a
leathern strap from the glazed roof of the stifling vehicle,
like some blooming cluster dangling in a hothouse. She
was used, however, to these perpendicular journeys, and
though, as we have seen, she was not inclined to accept
without question the social arrangements of her time, it
never would have occurred to her to criticise the railways
of her native land. The promptness of her visit to Olive
Chancellor had been an idea of her mother's, and Verena
listened open-eyed while this lady, in the seclusion of the
little house in Cambridge, while Selah Tarrant was ' off,'
as they said, with his patients, sketched out a line of
conduct for her. The girl was both submissive and un-
worldly, and she listened to her mother's enumeration of
the possible advantages of an intimacy with Miss Chancellor
as she would have listened to any other fairy-tale. It was
still a part of the fairy-tale when this zealous parent put
on with her own hands Verena's smart hat and feather,
buttoned her little jacket (the buttons were immense and
gilt), and presented her with twenty cents to pay her car-
fare.

There was never any knowing in advance how Mrs.
Tarrant would take a thing, and even Verena, who, filially,
was much less argumentative than in her civic and, as it
were, public capacity, had a perception that her mother
was queer. She was queer, indeed — a flaccid, relaxed,

x. THE BOSTONIANS. 71

unhealthy, whimsical woman, who still had a capacity to
cling. What she clung to was ' society,' and a position in
the world which a secret whisper told her she had never
had and a voice more audible reminded her she was
in danger of losing. To keep it, to recover it, to recon-
secrate it, was the ambition of her heart ; this was one of
the many reasons why Providence had judged her worthy
of having so wonderful a child. Verena was born not only
to lead their common sex out of bondage, but to remodel
a visiting-list which bulged and contracted in the wrong
places, like a country-made garment. As the daughter of
Abraham Greenstreet, Mrs. Tarrant had passed her youth
in the first Abolitionist circles, and she was aware how
much such a prospect was clouded by her union with a
young man who had begun life as an itinerant vendor of
lead-pencils (he had called at Mr. Greenstreet's door in the
exercise of this function), had afterwards been for a while
a member of the celebrated Cayuga community, where
there were no wives, or no husbands, or something of that
sort (Mrs. Tarrant could never remember), and had still
later (though before the development of the healing
faculty) achieved distinction in the spiritualistic world.
(He was an extraordinarily favoured medium, only he had
had to stop for reasons of which Mrs. Tarrant possessed
her version.) Even in a society much occupied with the
effacement of prejudice there had been certain dim pre-
sumptions against this versatile being, who naturally had
not wanted arts to ingratiate himself with Miss Greenstreet,
her eyes, like his own, being fixed exclusively on the future.
The young couple (he was considerably her elder) had
gazed on the future together until they found that the past
had completely forsaken them and that the present offered
but a slender foothold. Mrs. Tarrant, in other words, in-
curred the displeasure of her family, who gave her husband
to understand that, much as they desired to remove the
shackles from the slave, there were kinds of behaviour
which struck them as too unfettered. These had prevailed,
to their thinking, at Cayuga, and they naturally felt it was
no use for him to say that his residence there had been
(for him — the community still existed) but a momentary

72 THE BOSTONIANS. x.

episode, inasmuch as there was little more to be urged for
the spiritual picnics and vegetarian camp-meetings in which
the discountenanced pair now sought consolation.

Such were the narrow views of people hitherto supposed
capable of opening their hearts to all salutary novelties, but
now put to a genuine test, as Mrs. Tarrant felt. Her
husband's tastes rubbed off on her soft, moist moral surface,
and the couple lived in an atmosphere of novelty, in which,
occasionally, the accommodating wife encountered the fresh
sensation of being in want of her dinner. Her father died,
leaving, after all, very little money; he had spent his
modest fortune upon the blacks. Selah Tarrant and his
companion had strange adventures; she found herself
completely enrolled in the great irregular army of nostrum-
mongers, domiciled in humanitary Bohemia. It absorbed
her like a social swamp ; she sank into it a little more every
day, without measuring the inches of her descent. Now
she stood there up to her chin ; it may probably be said of
her that she had touched bottom. When she went to Miss
Birdseye's it seemed to her that she re-entered society.
The door that admitted her was not the door that admitted
some of the others (she should never forget the tipped-up
nose of Mrs. Farrinder), and the superior portal remained
ajar, disclosing possible vistas. She had lived with long-
haired men and short-haired women, she had contributed a
flexible faith and an irremediable want of funds to a dozen
social experiments, she had partaken of the comfort of a
hundred religions, had followed innumerable dietary reforms,
chiefly of the negative order, and had gone of an evening to
a stance or a lecture as regularly as she had eaten her
supper. Her husband always had tickets for lectures; in
moments of irritation at the want of a certain sequence in
their career, she had remarked to him that it was the only
thing he did have. The memory of all the winter nights
they had tramped through the slush (the tickets, alas ! were
not car-tickets) to hear Mrs. Ada T. P. Foat discourse on
the * Summer-land,' came back to her with bitterness.
Selah was quite enthusiastic at one time about Mrs. Foat,
and it was his wife's belief that he had been ' associated '
with her (that was Selah's expression in referring to such

x. THE BOSTONIANS. 73

episodes) at Cayuga. The poor woman, matrimonially, had
a great deal to put up with ; it took, at moments, all her
belief in his genius to sustain her. She knew that he was
very magnetic (that, in fact, was his genius), and she felt
that it was his magnetism that held her to him. He had
carried her through things where she really didn't know
what to think; there were moments when she suspected
that she had lost the strong moral sense for which the
Greenstreets were always so celebrated.

Of course a woman who had had the bad taste to marry
Selah Tarrant would not have been likely under any cir-
cumstances to possess a very straight judgment ; but there
is no doubt that this poor lady had grown dreadfully limp.
She had blinked and. compromised and shuffled ; she asked
herself whether, after all, it was any more than natural that
she should have wanted to help her husband, in those
exciting days of his mediumship, when the table, some-
times, wouldn't rise from the ground, the sofa wouldn't float
through the air, and the soft hand of a lost loved one was
not so alert as it might have been to visit the circle. Mrs.
Tarrant's hand was soft enough for the most supernatural
effect, and she consoled her conscience on such occasions
by reflecting that she ministered to a belief in immortality.
She was glad, somehow, for Verena's sake, that they had
emerged from the phase of spirit-intercourse ; her ambition
for her daughter took another form than desiring that she,
too, should minister to a belief in immortality. Yet among
Mrs. Tarrant's multifarious memories these reminiscences of
the darkened room, the waiting circle, the little taps on
table and wall, the little touches on cheek and foot, the
music in the air, the rain of flowers, the sense of something
mysteriously flitting, were most tenderly cherished. She
hated her husband for having magnetised her so that she
consented to certain things, and even did them, the thought
of which to-day would suddenly make her face burn ; hated
him for the manner in which, somehow, as she felt, he had
lowered her social tone ; yet at the same time she admired
him for an impudence so consummate that it had ended (in
the face of mortifications, exposures, failures, all the misery
of a hand-to-mouth existence) by imposing itself on her as

74 THE BOSTONIANS. x.

a kind of infallibility. She knew he was an awful humbug,
and yet her knowledge had this imperfection, that he had
never confessed it — a fact that was really grand when one
thought of his opportunities for doing so. He had never
allowed that he wasn't straight ; the pair had so often been
in the position of the two augurs behind the altar, and yet
he had never given her a glance that the whole circle
mightn't have observed. Even in the privacy of domestic
intercourse he had phrases, excuses, explanations, ways of
putting things, which, as she felt, were too sublime for just
herself; they were pitched, as Selah's nature was pitched,
altogether in the key of public life.

So it had come to pass, in her distended and demoralised
conscience, that with all the things she despised in her life
and all the things she rather liked, between being worn out
with her husband's inability to earn a living and a kind of
terror of his consistency (he had a theory that they lived
delightfully), it happened, I say, that the only very definite
criticism she made of him to-day was that he didn't know
how to speak. That was where the shoe pinched — that
was where Selah was slim. He couldn't hold the attention
of an audience, he was not acceptable as a lecturer. He had
plenty of thoughts, but it seemed as if he couldn't fit them
into each other. Public speaking had been a Greenstreet
tradition, and if Mrs. Tarrant had been asked whether in
her younger years she had ever supposed she should marry
a mesmeric healer, she would have replied : ' Well, I never
thought I should marry a gentleman who would be silent
on the platform !' This was her most general humiliation ;
it included and exceeded every other, and it was a poor
consolation that Selah possessed as a substitute — his career
as a healer, to speak of none other, was there to prove it —
the eloquence of the hand. The Greenstreets had never
set much store on manual activity; they believed in the
influence of the lips. It may be imagined, therefore, with
what exultation, as time went on, Mrs. Tarrant found herself
the mother of an inspired maiden, a young lady from whose
lips eloquence flowed in streams. The Greenstreet tradi-
tion would not perish, and the dry places of her life would,
perhaps, be plentifully watered. It must be added that, of

x. THE BOSTONIANS. 75

late, this sandy surface had been irrigated, in moderation,
from another source. Since Selah had addicted himself to
the mesmeric mystery, their home had been a little more
what the home of a Greenstreet should be. He had ' con-
siderable many ' patients, he got about two dollars a sitting,
and he had effected some most gratifying cures. A lady
in Cambridge had been so much indebted to him that she
had recently persuaded them to take a house near her, in
order that Doctor Tarrant might drop in at any time. He
availed himself of this convenience — they had taken so
many houses that another, more or less, didn't matter — and
Mrs. Tarrant began to feel as if they really had * struck '
something.

Even to Verena, as we know, she was confused and
confusing; the girl had not yet had an opportunity to
ascertain the principles on which her mother's limpness
was liable suddenly to become rigid. This phenomenon
occurred when the vapours of social ambition mounted to
her brain, when she extended an arm from which a
crumpled dressing-gown fluttered back to seize the passing
occasion. Then she surprised her daughter by a volubility
of exhortation as to the duty of making acquaintances, and
by the apparent wealth of her knowledge of the mysteries of
good society. She had, in particular, a way of explaining
confidentially — and in her desire to be graphic she often
made up the oddest faces — the interpretation that you
must sometimes give to the manners of the best people,
and the delicate dignity with which you should meet them,
which made Verena wonder what secret sources of informa-
tion she possessed. Verena took life, as yet, very simply ;
she was not conscious of so many differences of social com-
plexion. She knew that some people were rich and others
poor, and that her father's house had never been visited by
such abundance as might make one ask one's self whether
it were right, in a world so full of the disinherited, to roll
in luxury. But except when her mother made her slightly
dizzy by a resentment of some slight that she herself had
never perceived, or a flutter over some opportunity that
appeared already to have passed (while Mrs. Tarrant was
looking for something to ' put on '), Verena had no vivid

76 THE BOSTONIANS.

sense that she was not as good as any one else, for no
authority appealing really to her imagination had fixed the
place of mesmeric healers in the scale of fashion. It was
impossible to know in advance how Mrs. Tarrant would
take things. Sometimes she was abjectly indifferent; at
others she thought that every one who looked at her
wished to insult her. At moments she was full of
suspicion of the ladies (they were mainly ladies) whom
Selah mesmerised ; then again she appeared to have given
up everything but her slippers and the evening-paper (from
this publication she derived inscrutable solace), so that if
Mrs. Foat in person had returned from the summer-land (to
which she had some time since taken her flight), she would not
have disturbed Mrs. Tarrant's almost cynical equanimity.

It was, however, in her social subtleties that she was
most beyond her daughter; it was when she discovered
extraordinary though latent longings on the part of people
they met to make their acquaintance, that the girl became
conscious of how much she herself had still to learn. All
her desire was to learn, and it must be added that she
regarded her mother, in perfect good faith, as a wonderful
teacher. She was perplexed sometimes by her worldliness ;
that, somehow, was not a part of the higher life which every
one in such a house as theirs must wish above all things to
lead ; and it was not involved in the reign of justice, which
they were all trying to bring about, that such a strict account
should be kept of every little snub. Her father seemed to
Verena to move more consecutively on the high plane;
though his indifference to old-fashioned standards, his
perpetual invocation of the brighter day, had not yet led
her to ask herself whether, after all, men are more dis-
interested than women. Was it interest that prompted her
mother to respond so warmly to Miss Chancellor, to say to
Verena, with an air of knowingness, that the thing to do
was to go in and see her immediately ? No italics can
represent the earnestness of Mrs. Tarrant's emphasis. Why
hadn't she said, as she had done in former cases, that if
people wanted to see them they could come out to their
home ; that she was not so low down in the world as not
to know there was such a ceremony as leaving cards ?

x. THE BOSTONIANS. 77

When Mrs. Tarrant began on the question of ceremonies
she was apt to go far ; but she had waived it in this case ; it
suited her more to hold that Miss Chancellor had been very
gracious, that she was a most desirable friend, that she had
been more affected than any one by Verena's beautiful out-
pouring ; that she would open to her the best saloons in
Boston ; that when she said ' Come soon ' she meant the
very next day, that this was the way to take it, anyhow (one
must know when to go forward gracefully); and that in
short she, Mrs. Tarrant, knew what she was talking about.

Verena accepted all this, for she was young enough to
enjoy any journey in a horse-car, and she was ever-curious
about the world ; she only wondered a little how her
mother knew so much about Miss Chancellor just from
looking at her once. What Verena had mainly observed in
the young lady who came up to her that way the night
before was that she was rather dolefully dressed, that she
looked as if she had been crying (Verena recognised that
look quickly, she had seen it so much), and that she was
in a hurry to get away. However, if she was as remarkable
as her mother said, one would very soon see it ; and mean-
while there was nothing in the girl's feeling about herself,
in her sense of her importance, to make it a painful effort
for her to run the risk of a mistake. She had no particular
feeling about herself; she only cared, as yet, for outside
things. Even the development of her ' gift ' had not made
her think herself too precious for mere experiments ; she
had neither a particle of diffidence nor a particle of vanity.
Though it would have seemed to you eminently natural
that a daughter of Selah Tarrant and his wife should be an
inspirational speaker, yet, as you knew Verena better, you
would have wondered immensely how she came to issue
from such a pair. Her ideas of enjoyment were very
simple ; she enjoyed putting on her new hat, with its re-
dundancy of feather, and twenty cents appeared to her a
very large sum.

XI.

' I WAS certain you would come — I have felt it all day —
something told me !' It was with these words that Olive
Chancellor greeted her young visitor, coming to her quickly
from the window, where she might have been waiting for
her arrival. Some weeks later she explained to Verena
how definite this prevision had been, how it had filled her
all day with a nervous agitation so violent as to be painful.
She told her that such forebodings were a peculiarity of her
organisation, that she didn't know what to make of them,
that she had to accept them ; and she mentioned, as another
example, the sudden dread that had come to her the evening
before in the carriage, after proposing to Mr. Ransom to go
with her to Miss Birdseye's. This had been as strange as
it had been instinctive, and the strangeness, of course, was
what must have struck Mr. Ransom ; for the idea that he
might come had been hers, and yet she suddenly veered
round. She couldn't help it ; her heart had begun to throb
with the conviction that if he crossed that threshold some
harm would come of it for her. She hadn't prevented him,
and now she didn't care, for now, as she intimated, she had
the interest of Verena, and that made her indifferent to
every danger, to every ordinary pleasure. By this time
Verena had learned how peculiarly her friend was constituted,
how nervous and serious she was, how personal, how ex-
clusive, what a force of will she had, what a concentration
of purpose. Olive had taken her up, in the literal sense of
the phrase, like a bird of the air, had spread an extra-
ordinary pair of wings, and carried her through the dizzying
void of space. Verena liked it, for the^most part; liked
to shoot upward without an effort of her own and look down
upon all creation, upon all history, from such a height.

xi. THE BOSTONIANS. 79

From this first interview she felt that she was seized, and
she gave herself up, only shutting her eyes a little, as we do
whenever a person in whom we have perfect confidence
proposes, with our assent, to subject us to some sensation.

* I want to know you,' Olive said, on this occasion ; ' I
felt that I must last night, as soon as I heard you speak.
You seem to me very wonderful. I don't know what to
make of you. I think we ought to be friends ; so I just
asked you to come to me straight off, without preliminaries,
and I believed you would come. It is so right that you
have come, and it proves how right I was.' These remarks
fell from Miss Chancellor's lips one by one, as she caught
her breath, with the tremor that was always in her voice,
even when she was the least excited, while she made Verena
sit down near her on the sofa, and looked at her all over in
a manner that caused the girl to rejoice at having put on
the jacket with the gilt buttons. It was this glance that
was the beginning ; it was with this quick survey, omitting
nothing, that Olive took possession of her. ' You are very
remarkable j I wonder if you know how remarkable ! ' she
went on, murmuring the words as if she were losing herself,
becoming inadvertent in admiration.

Verena sat there smiling, without a blush, but with a
pure, bright look which, for her, would always make protests
unnecessary. 'Oh, it isn't me, you know; it's something
outside !' She tossed this off lightly, as if she were in the
habit of saying it, and Olive wondered whether it were a
sincere disclaimer or only a phrase of the lips. The
question was not a criticism, for she might have been
satisfied that the girl was a mass of fluent catch-words and
yet scarcely have liked her the less. It was just as she
was that she liked her; she was so strange, so different
from the girls one usually met, seemed to belong to some
queer gipsy -land or transcendental Bohemia. With her
bright, vulgar clothes, her salient appearance, she might
have been a rope-dancer or a fortune-teller ; and this had
the immense merit, for Olive, that it appeared to make her
belong to the ' people,' threw her into the social dusk of
that mysterious democracy which Miss Chancellor held that
the fortunate classes know so little about, and with which (in a

8o THE BOSTONIANS. xi.

future possibly very near) they will have to count. More-
over, the girl had moved her as she had never been moved,
and the power to do that, from whatever source it came,
was a force that one must admire. Her emotion was still
acute, however much she might speak to her visitor as if
everything that had happened seemed to her natural ; and
what kept it, above all, from subsiding was her sense that
she found here what she had been looking for so long — a
friend of her own sex with whom she might have a union
of soul. It took a double consent to make a friendship,
but it was not possible that this intensely sympathetic girl
would refuse. Olive had the penetration to discover in a
moment that she was a creature of unlimited generosity. I
know not what may have been the reality of Miss Chan-
cellor's other premonitions, but there is no doubt that in
this respect she took Verena's measure on the spot. This
was what she wanted ; after that the rest didn't matter ;
Miss Tarrant might wear gilt buttons from head to foot,
her soul could not be vulgar.

'Mother told me I had better come right in,' said
Verena, looking now about the room, very glad to find
herself in so pleasant a place, and noticing a great many
things that she should like to see in detail.

'Your mother saw that I meant what I said; it isn't
everybody that does me the honour to perceive that. She
saw that I was shaken from head to foot. I could only say
three words — I couldn't have spoken more ! What a power
— what a power, Miss Tarrant !'

' Yes, I suppose it is a power. If it wasn't a power, it
couldn't do much with me ! '

f You are so simple — so much like a child,' Olive Chan-
cellor said. That was the truth, and she wanted to say it
because, quickly, without forms or circumlocutions, it made
them familiar. She wished to arrive at this ; her impati-
ence was such that before the girl had been five minutes
in the room she jumped to her point — inquired of her,
interrupting herself, interrupting everything : ' Will you be
my friend, my friend of friends, beyond every one, every-
thing, forever and forever?' Her face was full of eagerness
and tenderness.

xi. THE BOSTONIANS. 81

Verena gave a laugh of clear amusement, without a
shade of embarrassment or confusion. ' Perhaps you like
me too much.'

' Of course I like you too much ! When I like, I like
too much. But of course it's another thing, your liking
me,' Olive Chancellor added. * We must wait — we must
wait. When I care for anything, I can be patient.' She
put out her hand to Verena, and the movement was at
once so appealing and so confident that the girl instinctively
placed her own in it. So, hand in hand, for some moments,
these two young women sat looking at each other. ' There
is so much I want to ask you,' said Olive.

' Well, I can't say much except when father has worked
on me,' Verena answered, with an ingenuousness beside
which humility would have seemed pretentious.

' I don't care anything about your father/ Olive Chan-
cellor rejoined very gravely, with a great air of security.

' He is very good,' Verena said simply. ' And he's
wonderfully magnetic.'

' It isn't your father, and it isn't your mother ; I don't
think of them, and it's not them I want. It's only you —
just as you are.'

Verena dropped her eyes over the front of her dress.
' Just as she was ' seemed to her indeed very well.

'Do you want me to give up ?' she demanded,

smiling.

Olive Chancellor drew in her breath for an instant, like
a creature in pain ; then, with her quavering voice, touched
with a vibration of anguish, she said : ' Oh, how can I ask
you to give up? /will give up — I will give up everything !'

Filled with the impression of her hostess's agreeable in-
terior, and of what her mother had told her about Miss
Chancellor's wealth, her position in Boston society, Verena,
in her fresh, diverted scrutiny of the surrounding objects,
wondered what could be the need of this scheme of re-
nunciation. Oh no, indeed, she hoped she wouldn't give
up — at least not before she, Verena, had had a chance to
see. She felt, however, that for the present there would be
no answer for her save in the mere pressure of Miss Chan-
cellor's eager nature, that intensity of emotion which made

G

.82 THE BOSTONIANS. xi.

her suddenly exclaim, as if in a nervous ecstasy of
anticipation, ' But we must wait ! Why do we talk of this ?
We must wait ! All will be right,' she added more calmly,
with great sweetness.

Verena wondered afterward why she had not been more
afraid of her — why, indeed, she had not turned and saved
herself by darting out of the room. But it was not in this
young woman's nature to be either timid or cautious ; she
had as yet to make acquaintance with the sentiment of fear.
She knew too little of the world to have learned to mistrust
sudden enthusiasms, and if she had had a suspicion it
would have been (in accordance with common worldly
knowledge) the wrong one — the suspicion that such a
whimsical liking would burn itself out. She could not have
that one, for there was a light in Miss Chancellor's magni-
fied face which seemed to say that a sentiment, with her,
might consume its object, might consume Miss Chancellor,
but would never consume itself. Verena, as yet, had no
sense of being scorched ; she was only agreeably warmed.
She also had dreamed of a friendship, though it was not
what she had dreamed of most, and it came over her that
this was the one which fortune might have been keeping.
She never held back.

' Do you live here all alone ? ' she asked of Olive.

1 1 shouldn't if you would come and live with me !'

Even this really passionate rejoinder failed to make
Verena shrink; she thought it so possible that in the wealthy
class people made each other such easy proposals. It was
a part of the romance, the luxury, of wealth ; it belonged to
the world of invitations, in which she had had so little
share. But it seemed almost a mockery when she thought
of the little house in Cambridge, where the boards were
loose in the steps of the porch.

' I must stay with my father and mother,' she said.
' And then I have my work, you know. That's the way I
must live now.'

'Your work?' Olive repeated, not quite understanding.

' My gift,' said Verena, smiling.

' Oh yes, you must use it. That's what I mean ; you
must move the world with it; it's divine.'

xi. THE BOSTONIANS. 83

It was so much what she meant that she had lain awake
all night thinking of it, and the substance of her thought
was that if she could only rescue the girl from the danger
of vulgar exploitation, could only constitute herself her pro-
tectress and devotee, the two, between them, might achieve
the great result. Verena's genius was a mystery, and it
might remain a mystery ; it was impossible to see how this
charming, blooming, simple creature, all youth and grace
and innocence, got her extraordinary powers of reflection.
When her gift was not in exercise she appeared anything
but reflective, and as she sat there now, for instance, you
would never have dreamed that she had had a vivid revela-
tion. Olive had to content herself, provisionally, with
saying that her precious faculty had come to her just as
her beauty and distinction (to Olive she was full of that
quality) had come ; it had dropped straight from heaven,
without filtering through her parents, whom Miss Chancellor
decidedly did not fancy. Even among reformers she dis-
criminated ; she thought all wise people wanted great
changes, but the votaries of change were not necessarily
wise. She remained silent a little, after her last remark,
and then she repeated again, as if it were the solution of
everything, as if it represented with absolute certainty some
immense happiness in the future — ' We must wait, we must
wait !' Verena was perfectly willing to wait, though she
did not exactly know what they were to wait for, and the
aspiring frankness of her assent shone out of her face, and
seemed to pacify their mutual gaze. Olive asked her in-
numerable questions ; she wanted to enter into her life. It
was one of those talks which people remember afterwards,
in which every word has been given and taken, and in
which they see the signs of a beginning that was to be
justified. The more Olive learnt of her visitor's life the
more she wanted to enter into it, the more it took her out
of herself. Such strange lives are led in America, she
always knew that ; but this was queerer than anything she
had dreamed of, and the queerest part was that the girl
herself didn't appear to think it queer. She had been
nursed in darkened rooms, and suckled in the midst of
manifestations ; she had begun to c attend lectures,' as she

84 THE BOSTONIANS. xi.

said, when she was quite an infant, because her mother had
no one to leave her with at home. She had sat on the
knees of somnambulists, and had been passed from hand to
hand by trance-speakers ; she was familiar with every kind
of 'cure,' and had grown up among lady-editors of news-
papers advocating new religions, and people who disapproved
of the marriage-tie. Verena talked of the marriage-tie as
she would have talked of the last novel — as if she had
heard it as frequently discussed; and at certain times,
listening to the answers she made to her questions, Olive
Chancellor closed her eyes in the manner of a person
waiting till giddiness passed. Her young friend's revela-
tions actually gave her a vertigo ; they made her perceive
everything from which she should have rescued her. Verena
was perfectly uncontaminated, and she would never be
touched by evil ; but though Olive had no views about the
marriage-tie except that she should hate it for herself — that
particular reform she did not propose to consider — she
didn't like the ' atmosphere ' of circles in which such in-
stitutions were called into question. She had no wish now
to enter into an examination of that particular one;
nevertheless, to make sure, she would just ask Verena
whether she disapproved of it.

( Well, I must say,' said Miss Tarrant, 'I prefer free
unions.'

Olive held her breath an instant ; such an idea was so
disagreeable to her. Then, for all answer, she murmured,
irresolutely, ' I wish you would let me help you ! ' Yet it
seemed, at the same time, that Verena needed little help,
for it was more and more clear that her eloquence, when
she stood up that way before a roomful of people, was
literally inspiration. She answered all her friend's questions
with a good-nature which evidently took no pains to make
things plausible, an effort to oblige, not to please; but,
after all, she could give very little account of herself. This
was very visible when Olive asked her where she had got
her * intense realisation ' of the suffering of women ; for her
address at Miss Birdseye's showed that she, too (like Olive
herself), had had that vision in the watches of the night.
Verena thought a moment, as if to understand what her com-

xi. THE BOSTONIANS. 85

panion referred to, and then she inquired, always smiling,
where Joan of Arc had got her idea of the suffering of
France. This was so prettily said that Olive could scarcely
keep from kissing her ; she looked at the moment as if,
like Joan, she might have had visits from the saints. Olive,
of course, remembered afterwards that it had not literally
answered the question; and she also reflected on some-
thing that made an answer seem more difficult — the fact
that the girl had grown up among lady -doctors, lady-
mediums, lady-editors, lady-preachers, lady-healers, women
who, having rescued themselves from a passive existence,
could illustrate only partially the misery of the sex at large.
It was true that they might have illustrated it by their talk,
by all they had ' been through ' and all they could tell a
younger sister ; but Olive was sure that Verena's prophetic
impulse had not been stirred by the chatter of women
(Miss Chancellor knew that sound as well as any one); it
had proceeded rather out of their silence. She said to her
visitor that whether or no the angels came down to her in
glittering armour, she struck her as the only person she
had yet encountered who had exactly the same tenderness,
the same pity, for women that she herself had. Miss
Birdseye had something of it, but Miss Birdseye wanted
passion, wanted keenness, was capable of the weakest
concessions. Mrs. Farrinder was not weak, of course, and
she brought a great intellect to the matter ; but she was
not personal enough — she was too abstract. Verena was
not abstract; she seemed to have lived in imagination
through all the ages. Verena said she did think she had
a certain amount of imagination; she supposed she couldn't
be so effective on the platform if she hadn't a rich fancy.
Then Olive said to her, taking her hand again, that she
wanted her to assure her of this — that it was the only thing
in all the world she cared for, the redemption of women,
the thing she hoped under Providence to give her life to.
Verena flushed a little at this appeal, and the deeper glow
of her eyes was the first sign of exaltation she had offered.
'Oh yes — I want to give my life !' she exclaimed, with a
vibrating voice ; and then she added gravely, ' I want to
do something great !'

86 THE BOSTONIANS. XL

'You will, you will, we both will!' Olive Chancellor
cried, in rapture. But after a little she went on : 'I
wonder if you know what it means, young and lovely as
you are — giving your life ! '

Verena looked down for a moment in meditation.

'Well,' she replied, ' I guess I have thought more than
I appear.'

' Do you understand German ? Do you know "Faust"?'
said Olive. ' " Entsagen so list du, sollst entsagenf"

' I don't know German ; I should like so to study it ; I
want to know everything.'

' We will work at it together — we will study everything,'
Olive almost panted ; and while she spoke the peaceful
picture hung before her of still winter evenings under the
lamp, with falling snow outside, and tea on a little table,
and successful renderings, with a chosen companion, of
Goethe, almost the only foreign author she cared about ;
for she hated the writing of the French, in spite of the
importance they have given to women. Such a vision as
this was the highest indulgence she could offer herself; she
had it only at considerable intervals. It seemed as if
Verena caught a glimpse of it too, for her face kindled still
more, and she said she should like that ever so much. At
the same time she asked the meaning of the German
words.

' " Thou shalt renounce, refrain, abstain ! " That's the
way Bayard Taylor has translated them,' Olive answered.

' Oh, well, I guess I can abstain ! ' Verena exclaimed,
with a laugh. And she got up rather quickly, as if by
taking leave she might give a proof of what she meant.
Olive put out her hands to hold her, and at this moment
one of the portieres of the room was pushed aside, while a
gentleman was ushered in by Miss Chancellor's little
parlour-maid.

XII.

VERENA recognised him; she had seen him the night
before at Miss Birdseye's, and she said to her hostess,
'Now I must go — you have got another caller!' It was
Verena's belief that in the fashionable world (like Mrs.
Farrinder, she thought Miss Chancellor belonged to it —
thought that, in standing there, she herself was in it) — in
the highest social walks it was the custom of a prior guest
to depart when another friend arrived. She had been told
at people's doors that she could not be received because
the lady of the house had a visitor, and she had retired on
these occasions with a feeling of awe much more than a sense
of injury. They had not been the portals of fashion, but
in this respect, she deemed, they had emulated such bul-
warks. Olive Chancellor offered Basil Ransom a greeting
which she believed to be consummately lady-like, and which
the young man, narrating the scene several months later to
Mrs. Luna, whose susceptibilities he did not feel himself
obliged to consider (she considered his so little), described
by saying that she glared at him. Olive had thought it
very possible he would come that day if he was to leave
Boston; though she was perfectly mindful' that she had
given him no encouragement at the moment they separated.
If he should not come she should be annoyed, and if he
should come she should be furious ; she was also sufficiently
mindful of that. But she had a foreboding that, of the two
grievances, fortune would confer upon her only the less ;
the only one she had as yet was that he had responded to
her letter — a complaint rather wanting in richness. If he
came, at any rate, he would be likely to come shortly before
dinner, at the same hour as yesterday. He had now
anticipated this period considerably, and it seemed to Miss
Chancellor that he had taken a base advantage of her,

88 THE BOSTONIANS. xn.

stolen a march upon her privacy. She was startled, dis-
concerted, but as I have said, she was rigorously lady-like.
She was determined not again to be fantastic, as she had
been about his coming to Miss Birdseye's. The strange
dread associating itself with that was something which, she
devoutly trusted, she had felt once for all. She didn't
know what he could do to her ; he hadn't prevented, on
the spot though he was, one of the happiest things that had
befallen her for so long — this quick, confident visit of
Verena Tarrant It was only just at the last that he had
come in, and Verena must go now ; Olive's detaining hand
immediately relaxed itself,

It is to be feared there was no disguise of Ransom's
satisfaction at finding himself once more face to face with
the charming creature with whom he had exchanged that
final speechless smile the evening before. He was more
glad to see her than if she had been an old friend, for it
seemed to him that she had suddenly become a new one.
' The delightful girl,' he said to himself; ' she smiles at me
as if she liked me ! ' He could not know that this was
fatuous, that she smiled so at every one ; the first time she
saw people she treated them as if she recognised them.
Moreover, she did not seat herself again in his honour;
she let it be seen that she was still going. The three stood
there together in the middle of the long, characteristic
room, and, for the first time in her life, Olive Chancellor
chose not to introduce two persons who met under her
roof. She hated Europe, but she could be European if it
were necessary. Neither of her companions had an idea
that in leaving them simply planted face to face (the terror
of the American heart) she had so high a warrant ; and
presently Basil Ransom felt that he didn't care whether he
were introduced or not, for the greatness of an evil didn't
matter if the remedy were equally great

' Miss Tarrant won't be surprised if I recognise her — if
I take the liberty to speak to her. She is a public
character ; she must pay the penalty of her distinction.'
These words he boldly addressed to the girl, with his most
gallant Southern manner, saying to himself meanwhile that
she was prettier still by daylight.

XIT. THE BOSTONIANS. 89

'Oh, a great many gentlemen have spoken to me,'
Verena said. ' There were quite a number at Topeka — '
And her phrase lost itself in her look at Olive, as if she
were wondering what was the matter with her.

' Now, I am afraid you are going the very moment I
appear,' Ransom went on. ' Do you know that's very cruel
to me ? I know what your ideas are — you expressed them
last night in such beautiful language; of course you
convinced me. I am ashamed of being a man ; but I am,
and I can't help it, and I'll do penance any way you may
prescribe. Must she go, Miss Olive?' he asked of his
cousin. 'Do you flee before the individual male?' And
he turned again to Verena.

This young lady gave a laugh that resembled speech in
liquid fusion. c Oh no ; I like the individual ! '

As an incarnation of a ' movement,' Ransom thought
her more and more singular, and he wondered how she
came to be closeted so soon with his kinswoman, to whom,
only a few hours before, she had been a complete stranger.
These, however, were doubtless the normal proceedings of
women. He begged her to sit down again ; he was sure
Miss Chancellor would be sorry to part with her. Verena,
looking at her friend, not for permission, but for sympathy,
dropped again into a chair, and Ransom waited to see Miss
Chancellor do the same. She gratified him after a moment,
because she could not refuse without appearing to put a
hurt upon Verena ; but it went hard with her, and she was
altogether discomposed. She had never seen any one so
free in her own drawing-room as this loud Southerner,
to whom she had so rashly offered a footing ; he extended
invitations to her guests under her nose. That Verena
should do as he asked her was a signal sign of the absence
of that 'home-culture' (it was so that Miss Chancellor
expressed the missing quality) which she never supposed
the girl possessed : fortunately, as it would be supplied to
her in abundance in Charles Street. (Olive of course held
that home-culture was perfectly compatible with the widest
emancipation.) It was with a perfectly good conscience
that Verena complied with Basil Ransom's request ; but it
took her quick sensibility only a moment to discover that

90 THE BOSTONIANS. xn.

her friend was not pleased. She scarcely knew what had
ruffled her, but at the same instant there passed before her
the vision of the anxieties (of this sudden, unexplained sort,
for instance, and much worse) which intimate relations with
Miss Chancellor might entail.

'Now, I want you to tell me this,' Basil Ransom said,
leaning forward towards Verena, with his hands on his
knees, and completely oblivious to his hostess. ' Do you
really believe all that pretty moonshine you talked last
night? I could have listened to you for another hour;
but I never heard such monstrous sentiments. I must
protest — I must, as a calumniated, misrepresented man.
Confess you meant it as a kind of rednctio ad absurdum —
a satire on Mrs. Farrinder?' He spoke in a tone of
the freest pleasantry, with his familiar, friendly Southern
cadence.

Verena looked at him with eyes that grew large. ' Why,
you don't mean to say you don't believe in our cause ?'

'Oh, it won't do — it won't do!' Ransom went on,
laughing. ' You are on the wrong tack altogether. Do
you really take the ground that your sex has been without
influence ? Influence ? Why, you have led us all by the
nose to where we are now ! Wherever we are, it's all
you. You are at the bottom of everything.'

' Oh yes, and we want to be at the top,' said Verena.

' Ah, the bottom is a better place, depend on it, when
from there you move the whole mass ! Besides, you are
on the top as well ; you are everywhere, you are everything.
I am of the opinion of that historical character — wasn't he
some king ? — who thought there was a lady behind every-
thing. Whatever it was, he held, you have only to look
for her; she is the explanation. Well, I always look for
her, and I always find her ; of course, I am always delighted
to do so ; but it proves she is the universal cause. Now,
you don't mean to deny that power, the power of setting
men in motion. You are at the bottom of all the wars.'

' Well, I am like Mrs. Farrinder ; I like opposition,'
Verena exclaimed, with a happy smile.

' That proves, as I say, how in spite of your expressions
of horror you delight in the shock of battle. What do you

xii. THE BOSTONIANS. 91

say to Helen of Troy and the fearful carnage she excited ?
It is well known that the Empress of France was at the
bottom of the last war in that country. And as for our
four fearful years of slaughter, of course you won't deny
that there the ladies were the great motive power. The
Abolitionists brought it on, and were not the Abolitionists
principally females? Who was that celebrity that was
mentioned last night ? — Eliza P. Moseley. I regard Eliza
as the cause of the biggest war of which history preserves
the record.'

Basil Ransom enjoyed his humour the more because
Verena appeared to enjoy it; and the look with which
she replied to him, at the end of this little tirade, ' Why,
sir, you ought to take the platform too; we might go
round together as poison and antidote !' — this made him
feel that he had convinced her, for the moment, quite as
much as it was important he should. In Verena's face,
however, it lasted but an instant — an instant after she had
glanced at Olive Chancellor, who, with her eyes fixed
intently on the ground (a look she was to learn to know so
well), had a strange expression. The girl slowly got up ;
she felt that she must go. She guessed Miss Chancellor
didn't like this handsome joker (it was so that Basil Ransom
struck her); and it was impressed upon her ('in time,' as
she thought) that her new friend would be more serious
even than she about the woman -question, serious as she
had hitherto believed herself to be.

' I should like so much to have the pleasure of seeing
you again/ Ransom continued. ' I think I should be able
to interpret history for you by a new light.'

' Well, I should be very happy to see you in my home.'
These words had barely fallen from Verena's lips (her
mother told her they were, in general, the proper thing to
say when people expressed such a desire as that ; she must
not let it be assumed that she would come first to them) —
she had hardly uttered this hospitable speech when she felt
the hand of her hostess upon her arm and became aware
that a passionate appeal sat in Olive's eyes.

' You will just catch the Charles Street car,' that young
woman murmured, with muffled sweetness.

92 THE BOSTONIANS. xii.

Verena did not understand further than to see that she
ought already to have departed ; and the simplest response
was to kiss Miss Chancellor, an act which she briefly per-
formed. Basil Ransom understood still less, and it was a
melancholy commentary on his contention that men are
not inferior, that this meeting could not come, however
rapidly, to a close without his plunging into a blunder
which necessarily aggravated those he had already made.
He had been invited by the little prophetess, and yet he
had not been invited ; but he did not take that up, because
he must absolutely leave Boston on the morrow, and, be-
sides, Miss Chancellor appeared to have something to say
to it. But he put out his hand to Verena and said, ' Good-
bye, Miss Tarrant; are we not to have the pleasure of
hearing you in New York? I am afraid we are sadly
sunk.'

' Certainly, I should like to raise my voice in the biggest
city,' the girl replied.

' Well, try to come on. I won't refute you. It would
be a very stupid world, after all, if we always knew what
women were going to say.'

Verena was conscious of the approach of the Charles
Street car, as well as of the fact that Miss Chancellor was
in pain ; but she lingered long enough to remark that she
could see he had the old-fashioned ideas — he regarded
woman as the toy of man.

'Don't say the toy — say the joy!' Ransom exclaimed.
* There is one statement I will venture to advance j I am
quite as fond of you as you are of each other ! '

' Much he knows about that ! ' said Verena, with a side-
long smile at Olive Chancellor.

For Olive, it made her more beautiful than ever ; still,
there was no trace of this mere personal elation in the
splendid sententiousness with which, turning to Mr. Ransom,
she remarked : l What women may be, or may not be, to
each other, I won't attempt just now to say ; but what the
truth may be to a human soul, I think perhaps even a
woman may faintly suspect !'

* The truth ? My dear cousin, your truth is a most vain
thing!'

xn. THE BOSTONIANS. 93

' Gracious me ! ' cried Verena Tarrant ; and the gay
vibration of her voice as she uttered this simple ejaculation
was the last that Ransom heard of her. Miss Chancellor
swept her out of the room, leaving the young man to extract
a relish from the ineffable irony with which she uttered the
words 'even a woman.' It was to be supposed, on general
grounds, that she would reappear, but there was nothing in
the glance she gave him, as she turned her back, that was
an earnest of this. He stood there a moment, wondering ;
then his wonder spent itself on the page of a book which,
according to his habit at such times, he had mechanically
taken up, and in which he speedily became interested.
He read it for five minutes in an uncomfortable-looking
attitude, and quite forgot that he had been forsaken. He
was recalled to this fact by the entrance of Mrs. Luna,
arrayed as if for the street, and putting on her gloves again
— she seemed always to be putting on her gloves. She
wanted to know what in the world he was doing there alone
— whether her sister had not been notified.

' Oh yes,' said Ransom, ' she has just been with me, but
she has gone downstairs with Miss Tarrant.'

'And who in the world is Miss Tarrant?'

Ransom was surprised that Mrs. Luna should not know
of the intimacy of the two young ladies, in spite of the
brevity of their acquaintance, being already so great.
But, apparently, Miss Olive had not mentioned her new
friend. 'Well, she is an inspirational speaker — the most
charming creature in the world !'

Mrs. Luna paused in her manipulations, gave an amazed,
amused stare, then caused the room to ring with her
laughter. 'You don't mean to say you are converted —
already?'

* Converted to Miss Tarrant, decidedly.'

' You are not to belong to any Miss Tarrant ; you are
to belong to me,' Mrs. Luna said, having thought over her
Southern kinsman during the twenty-four hours, and made
up her mind that he would be a good man for a lone
woman to know. Then she added : ' Did you come here
to meet her — the inspirational speaker?'

' No ; I came to bid your sister good-bye.'

94 THE BOSTONIANS. xn.

* Are you really going ? I haven't made you promise
half the things I want yet. But we will settle that in New
York. How do you get on with Olive Chancellor?' Mrs.
Luna continued, making her points, as she always did, with
eagerness, though her roundness and her dimples had
hitherto prevented her from being accused of that vice.
It was her practice to speak of her sister by her whole
name, and you would have supposed, from her usual manner
of alluding to her, that Olive was much the older, instead
of having been born ten years later than Adeline. She
had as many ways as possible of marking the gulf that
divided them ; but she bridged it over lightly now by saying
to Basil Ransom : ' Isn't she a dear old thing ? '

This bridge, he saw, would not bear his weight, and her
question seemed to him to have more audacity than sense.
Why should she be so insincere ? She might know that a
man couldn't recognise Miss Chancellor in such a descrip-
tion as that. She was not old — she was sharply young ;
and it was inconceivable to him, though he had just seen
the little prophetess kiss her, that she should ever become
any one's 'dear.' Least of all was she a 'thing '; she was
intensely, fearfully, a person. He hesitated a moment, and
then he replied : ' She's a very remarkable woman.'

' Take care — don't be reckless 1' cried Mrs. Luna. ' Do
you think she is very dreadful?'

' Don't say anything against my cousin,' Basil answered ;
and at that moment Miss Chancellor re-entered the room.
She murmured some request that he would excuse her
absence, but her sister interrupted her with an inquiry about
Miss Tarrant.

' Mr. Ransom thinks her wonderfully charming. Why
didn't you show her to me ? Do you want to keep her all
to yourself?'

Olive rested her eyes for some moments upon Mrs. Luna,
without speaking. Then she said : ' Your veil is not put
on straight, Adeline.'

' I look like a monster — that, evidently, is what you
mean !' Adeline exclaimed, going to the mirror to rearrange
the peccant tissue.

Miss Chancellor did not again ask Ransom to be seated;

xii. THE BOSTONIANS. 95

she appeared to take it for granted that he would leave her
now. But instead of this he returned to the subject of
Verena ; he asked her whether she supposed the girl would
come out in public — would go about like Mrs. Farrinder ?

' Come out in public ! ' Olive repeated ; ' in public ?
Why, you don't imagine that pure voice is to be hushed?'

' Oh, hushed, no ! it's too sweet for that. But not raised
to a scream ; not forced and cracked and ruined. She
oughtn't to become like the others. She ought to remain
apart.'

'Apart — apart V said Miss Chancellor; 'when we shall
all be looking to her, gathering about her, praying for her !'
There was an exceeding scorn in her voice. ' If / can help
her, she shall be an immense power for good.'

' An immense power for quackery, my dear Miss Olive ! '
This broke from Basil Ransom's lips in spite of a vow he
had just taken not to say anything that should ' aggravate '
his hostess, who was in a state of tension it was not difficult
to detect. But he had lowered his tone to friendly pleading,
and the offensive word was mitigated by his smile.

She moved away from him, backwards, as if he had
given her a push. ' Ah, well, now you are reckless,' Mrs.
Luna remarked, drawing out her ribbons before the mirror.

' I don't think you would interfere if you knew how little
you understand us,' Miss Chancellor said to Ransom.

' Whom do you mean by " us " — your whole delightful
sex ? I don't understand you, Miss Olive.'

' Come away with me, and I'll explain her as we go,'
Mrs. Luna went on, having finished her toilet.

Ransom offered his hand in farewell to his hostess ; but
Olive found it impossible to do anything but ignore the
gesture. She could not have let him touch her. ' Well,
then, if you must exhibit her to the multitude, bring her on
to New York,' he said, with the same attempt at a light
treatment.

' You'll have me in New York — you don't want any one
else!' Mrs. Luna ejaculated, coquettishly. 'I have made
up my mind to winter there now.'

Olive Chancellor looked from one to the other of her
two relatives, one near and the other distant, but each so

96 THE BOSTONIANS. xii.

little in sympathy with her, and it came over her that there
might be a kind of protection for her in binding them to-
gether, entangling them with each other. She had never
had an idea of that kind in her life before, and that this
sudden subtlety should have gleamed upon her as a
momentary talisman gives the measure of her present
nervousness.

' If I could take her to New York, I would take her
farther,' she remarked, hoping she was enigmatical.

1 You talk about " taking " her, as if you were a lecture-
agent Are you going into that business ?' Mrs. Luna asked.

Ransom could not help noticing that Miss Chancellor
would not shake hands with him, and he felt, on the whole,
rather injured. He paused a moment before leaving the
room — standing there with his hand on the knob of the
door. ' Look here, Miss Olive, what did you write to me
to come and see you for?' He made this inquiry with a
countenance not destitute of gaiety, but his eyes showed
something of that yellow light — just momentarily lurid — of
which mention has been made. Mrs. Luna was on her way
downstairs, and her companions remained face to face.

' Ask my sister — I think she will tell you,' said Olive,
turning away from him and going to the window. She
remained there, looking out ; she heard the door of the
house close, and saw the two cross the street together. As
they passed out of sight her fingers played, softly, a little air
upon the pane; it seemed to her that she had had an
inspiration.

Basil Ransom, meanwhile, put the question to Mrs.
Luna. ' If she was not going to like me, why in the world
did she write to me?'

' Because she wanted you to know me — she thought /
would like you !' And apparently she had not been wrong ;
for Mrs. Luna, when they reached Beacon Street, would not
hear of his leaving her to go her way alone, would not in
the least admit his plea that he had only an hour or two
more in Boston (he was to travel, economically, by the boat)
and must devote the time to his business. She appealed
to his Southern chivalry, and not in vain ; practically, at
least, he admitted the rights of women.

XIII.

MRS. TARRANT was delighted, as may be imagined, with
her daughter's account of Miss Chancellor's interior, and
the reception the girl had found there ; and Verena, for the
next month, took her way very often to Charles Street.
' Just you be as nice to her as you know how/ Mrs Tarrant
had said to her ; and she reflected with some complacency
that her daughter did know — she knew how to do every-
thing of that sort. It was not that Verena had been taught ;
that branch of the education of young ladies which is known
as * manners and deportment ' had not figured, as a definite
head, in Miss Tarrant's curriculum. She had been told,
indeed, that she must not lie nor steal ; but she had been
told very little else about behaviour ; her only great advan-
tage, in short, had been the parental example. But her
mother liked to think that she was quick and graceful, and
she questioned her exhaustively as to the progress of this
interesting episode; she didn't see why, as she said, it
shouldn't be a permanent ' stand-by ' for Verena. In Mrs.
Tarrant's meditations upon the girl's future she had never
thought of a fine marriage as a reward of effort j she would
have deemed herself very immoral if she had endeavoured
to capture for her child a rich husband. She had not, in
fact, a very vivid sense of the existence of such agents of
fate ; all the rich men she had seen already had wives, and
the unmarried men, who were generally very young, were
distinguished from each other not so much by the figure of
their income, which came little into question, as by the
degree of their interest in regenerating ideas. She supposed
Verena would marry some one, some day, and she hoped
the personage would be connected with public life — which
meant, for Mrs. Tarrant, that his name would be visible, in

H

98 THE BOSTONIANS. xm.

the lamplight, on a coloured poster, in the doorway of
Tremont Temple. But she was not eager about this vision,
for the implications of matrimony were for the most part
wanting in brightness — consisted of a tired woman holding
a baby over a furnace-register that emitted lukewarm air.
A real lovely friendship with a young woman who had, as Mrs.
Tarrant expressed it, ' prop'ty,' would occupy agreeably such
an interval as might occur before Verena should meet her
sterner fate ; it would be a great thing for her to have a
place to run into when she wanted a change, and there was
no knowing but what it might end in her having two homes.
For the idea of the home, like most American women of
her quality, Mrs. Tarrant had an extreme reverence ; and
it was her candid faith that in all the vicissitudes of the
past twenty years she had preserved the spirit of this insti-
tution. If it should exist in duplicate for Verena, the girl
would be favoured indeed.

All this was as nothing, however, compared with the fact
that Miss Chancellor seemed to think her young friend's
gift was inspirational, or at any rate, as Selah had so often
said, quite unique. She couldn't make out very exactly,
by Verena, what she thought ; but if the way Miss Chan-
cellor had taken hold of her didn't show that she believed
she could rouse the people, Mrs. Tarrant didn't know what
it showed. It was a satisfaction to her that Verena
evidently responded freely; she didn't think anything of
what she spent in car-tickets, and indeed she had told her
that Miss Chancellor wanted to stuff her pockets with them.
At first she went in because her mother liked to have her ;
but now, evidently, she went because she was so much
drawn. She expressed the highest admiration of her new
friend ; she said it took her a little while to see into her,
but now that she did, well, she was perfectly splendid.
When Verena wanted to admire she went ahead of every
one, and it was delightful to see how she was stimulated
by the young lady in Charles Street. They thought every-
thing of each other — that was very plain; you could scarcely
tell which thought most. Each thought the other so noble,
and Mrs. Tarrant had a faith that between them they would
rouse the people. What Verena wanted was some one

xm. THE BOSTONIANS. 99

who would know how to handle her (her father hadn't
handled anything except the healing, up to this time, with
real success), and perhaps Miss Chancellor would take hold
better than some that made more of a profession.

' It's beautiful, the way she draws you out/ Verena had
said to her mother; f there's something so searching that
the first time I visited her it quite realised my idea of the
Day of Judgment. But she seems to show all that's in
herself at the same time, and then you see how lovely it is.
She's just as pure as she can live ; you see if she is not;
when you know her. She's so noble herself that she makes
you feel as if you wouldn't want to be less so. She doesn't
care for anything but the elevation of our sex ; if she can
work a little toward that, it's all she asks, I can tell you,
she kindles me ; she does, mother, really. She doesn't care
a speck what she wears — only to have an elegant parlour.
Well, she has got that ; it's a regular dream-like place to sit.
She's going to have a tree in, next week ; she says she
wants to see me sitting under a tree. I believe it's some
oriental idea ; it has lately been introduced in Paris. She
doesn't like French ideas as a general thing ; but she says
this has more nature than most. She has got so many of
her own that I shouldn't think she would require to borrow
any. I'd sit in a forest to hear her bring some of them
out,' Verena went on, with characteristic raciness. ' She
just quivers when she describes what our sex has been
through. It's so interesting to me to hear what I have
always felt. If she wasn't afraid of facing the public, she
would go far ahead of me. But she doesn't want to speak
herself; she only wants to call me out. Mother, if she
doesn't attract attention to me there isn't any attention to
be attracted. She says I have got the gift of expression
— it doesn't matter where it comes from. She says it's a
great advantage to a movement to be personified in a bright
young figure. Well, of course I'm young, and I feel bright
enough when once I get started. She says my serenity
while exposed to the gaze of hundreds is in itself a qualifi-
cation ; in fact, she seems to think my serenity is quite God-
given. She hasn't got much of it herself; she's the most
emotional woman I have met, up to now. She wants to

ioo THE BOSTONIANS. XIIT.

know how I can speak the way I do unless I feel ; and of
course I tell her I do feel, so far as I realise. She seems
to be realising all the time ; I never saw any one that took
so little rest. She says I ought to do something great, and
she makes me feel as if I should. She says I ought to
have a wide influence, if I can obtain the ear of the public ;
and I say to her that if I do it will be all her influence.'

Selah Tarrant looked at all this from a higher stand-
point than his wife ; at least such an altitude on his part
was to be inferred from his increased solemnity. He
committed himself to no precipitate elation at the idea of
his daughter's being taken up by a patroness of movements
who happened to have money ; he looked at his child only
from the point of view of the service she might render to
humanity. To keep her ideal pointing in the right direc-
tion, to guide and animate her moral life — this was a duty
more imperative for a parent so closely identified with
revelations and panaceas than seeing that she formed pro-
fitable worldly connections. He was ' off,' moreover, so
much of the time that he could keep little account of her
comings and goings, and he had an air of being but
vaguely aware of whom Miss "Chancellor, the object
now of his wife's perpetual reference, might be. Verena's
initial appearance in Boston, as he called her performance
at Miss Birdseye's, had been a great success; and this
reflection added, as I say, to his habitually sacerdotal
expression. He looked like the priest of a religion that
was passing through the stage of miracles ; he carried his
responsibility in the general elongation of his person, of
his gestures (his hands were now always in the air, as if he
were being photographed in postures), of his words and
sentences, as well as in his smile, as noiseless as a patent
hinge, and in the folds of his eternal waterproof. He was
incapable of giving an off-hand answer or opinion on the
simplest occasion, and his tone of high deliberation in-
creased in proportion as the subject was trivial or domestic.
If his wife asked him at dinner if the potatoes were good,
he replied that they were strikingly fine (he used to speak
of the newspaper as 'fine' — he applied this term to
objects the most dissimilar), and embarked on a parallel

xin. THE BOSTONIANS. 101

worthy of Plutarch, in which he compared them with other
specimens of the same vegetable. He produced, or would
have liked to produce, the impression of looking above
and beyond everything, of not caring for the immediate, of
reckoning only with the long run. In reality he had one
all-absorbing solicitude — the desire to get paragraphs put
into the newspapers, paragraphs of which he had hitherto
been the subject, but of which he was now to divide the
glory with his daughter. The newspapers were his world,
the richest expression, in his eyes, of human life ; and, for
him, if a diviner day was to come upon earth, it would be
brought about by copious advertisement in the daily prints.
He looked with longing for the moment when Verena
should be advertised among the 'personals/ and to his
mind the supremely happy people were those (and there
were a good many of them) of whom there was some
journalistic mention every day in the year. Nothing less
than this would really have satisfied Selah Tarrant ; his
ideal of bliss was to be as regularly and indispensably a
component part of the newspaper as the title and date, or
the list of fires, or the column of Western jokes. The
vision of that publicity haunted his dreams, and he would
gladly have sacrificed to it the innermost sanctities of home.
Human existence to him, indeed, was a huge publicity, in
which the only fault was that it was sometimes not suffi-
ciently effective. There had been a Spiritualist paper of
old which he used to pervade ; but he could not persuade
himself that through this medium his personality had at-
tracted general attention ; and, moreover, the sheet, as he
said, was played out anyway. Success was not success so
long as his daughter's physique, the rumour of her engage-
ment, were not included in the ' Jottings/ with the certainty
of being extensively copied.

The account of her exploits in the West had not made
their way to the seaboard with the promptitude that he
had looked for; the reason of this being, he supposed,
that the few addresses she had made had not been lectures,
announced in advance, to which tickets had been sold, but
incidents, of abrupt occurrence, of certain multitudinous
meetings, where there had been other performers better

102 THE BOSTONIANS. xin.

known to fame. They had brought in no money ; they
had been delivered only for the good of the cause. If it
could only be known that she spoke for nothing, that
might deepen the reverberation ; the only trouble was that
her speaking for nothing was not the way to remind him
that he had a remunerative daughter. It was not the way
to stand out so very much either, Selah Tarrant felt ; for
there were plenty of others that knew how to make as
little money as she would. To speak — that was the one
thing that most people were willing to do for nothing ; it
was not a line in which it was easy to appear conspicuously
disinterested. Disinterestedness, too, was incompatible with
receipts ; and receipts were what Selah Tarrant was, in his
own parlance, after. He wished to bring about the day
when they would flow in freely ; the reader perhaps sees
the gesture with which, in his colloquies with himself, he
accompanied this mental image.

It seemed to him at present that the fruitful time was
not far off; it had been brought appreciably nearer by that
fortunate evening at Miss Birdseye's. If Mrs. Farrinder
could be induced to write an ' open letter ' about Verena,
that would do more than anything else. Selah was not
remarkable for delicacy of perception, but he knew the
world he lived in well enough to be aware that Mrs.
Farrinder was liable to rear up, as they used to say down
in Pennsylvania, where he lived before he began to peddle
lead-pencils. She wouldn't always take things as you
might expect, and if it didn't meet her views to pay a
public tribute to Verena, there wasn't any way known to
Tarrant's ingenious mind of getting round her. If it was
a question of a favour from Mrs. Farrinder, you just had
to wait for it, as you would for a rise in the thermometer.
He had told Miss Birdseye what he would like, and she
seemed to think, from the way their celebrated friend had
been affected, that the idea might take her some day of
just letting the public know all she had felt. She was off
somewhere now (since that evening), but Miss Birdseye had
an idea that when she was back in Roxbury she would
send for Verena and give her a few points. Meanwhile,
at any rate, Selah was sure he had a card ; he felt there

xiii. THE BOSTONIANS. 103

was money in the air. It might already be said there
were receipts from Charles Street ; that rich, peculiar young
woman seemed to want to lavish herself. He pretended,
as I have intimated, not to notice this ; but he never saw
so much as when he had his eyes fixed on the cornice.
He had no doubt that if he should make up his mind to
take a hall some night, she would tell him where the bill
might be sent. That was what he was thinking of now,
whether he had better take a hall right away, so that
Verena might leap at a bound into renown, or wait till she
had made a few more appearances in private, so that
curiosity might be worked up.

These meditations accompanied him in his multifarious
wanderings through the streets and the suburbs of the New
England capital. As I have also mentioned, he was absent
for hours — long periods during which Mrs. Tarrant, sus-
taining nature with a hard-boiled egg and a doughnut,
wondered how in the world he stayed his stomach. He
never wanted anything but a piece of pie when he came
in ; the only thing about which he was particular was that
it should be served up hot. She had a private conviction
that he partook, at the houses of his lady patients, of little
lunches; she applied this term to any episodical repast,
at any hour of the twenty-four. It is but fair to add that
once, when she betrayed her suspicion, Selah remarked
that the only refreshment he ever wanted was the sense
that he was doing some good. This effort with him had
many forms ; it involved, among other things, a perpetual
perambulation of the streets, a haunting of horse-cars,
railway-stations, shops that were 'selling off.' But the
places that knew him best were the offices of the news-
papers and the vestibules of the hotels — the big marble-
paved chambers of informal reunion which offer to the
streets, through high glass plates, the sight of the American
citizen suspended by his heels. Here, amid the piled-up
luggage, the convenient spittoons, the elbowing loungers,
the disconsolate ' guests/ the truculent Irish porters, the
rows of shaggy-backed men in strange hats, writing letters
at a table inlaid with advertisements, Selah Tarrant made
innumerable contemplative stations. He could not have

104 THE BOSTONIANS. xin.

told you, at any particular moment, what he was doing ;
he only had a general sense that such places were national
nerve-centres, and that the more one looked in, the more
one was ' on the spot.' The penetralia of the daily press
were, however, still more fascinating, and the fact that they
were less accessible, that here he found barriers in his
path, only added to the zest of forcing an entrance. He
abounded in pretexts ; he even sometimes brought contri-
butions ; he was persistent and penetrating, he was known
as the irrepressible Tarrant. He hung about, sat too long,
took up the time of busy people, edged into the printing-
rooms when he had been eliminated from the office, talked
with the compositors till they set up his remarks by
mistake, and to the newsboys when the compositors had
turned their backs. He was always trying to find out
what was 'going in'; he would have liked to go in himself,
bodily, and, failing in this, he hoped to get advertisements
inserted gratis. The wish of his soul was that he might be
interviewed ; that made him hover at the editorial elbow.
Once he thought he had been, and the headings, five or
six deep, danced for days before his eyes ; but the report
never appeared. He expected his revenge for this the
day after Verena should have burst forth ; he saw the
attitude in which he should receive the emissaries who
would come after his daughter.

XIV.

' WE ought to have some one to meet her,' Mrs. Tarrant
said ; ' I presume she wouldn't care to come out just to see
us.' ' She,' between the mother and the daughter, at this
period, could refer only to Olive Chancellor, who was dis-
cussed in the little house at Cambridge at all hours and
from every possible point of view. It was never Verena
now who began, for she had grown rather weary of the
topic ; she had her own ways of thinking of it, which were
not her mother's, and if she lent herself to this lady's
extensive considerations it was because that was the best
way of keeping her thoughts to herself.

Mrs. Tarrant had an idea that she (Mrs. Tarrant) liked
to study people, and that she was now engaged in an
analysis of Miss Chancellor. It carried her far, and she
came out at unexpected times with her results. It was still
her purpose to interpret the world to the ingenuous mind
of her daughter, and she translated Miss Chancellor with a
confidence which made little account of the fact that she
had seen her but once, while Verena had this advantage
nearly every day. Verena felt that by this time she knew
Olive very well, and her mother's most complicated versions
of motive and temperament (Mrs. Tarrant, with the most
imperfect idea of the meaning of the term, was always
talking about people's temperament), rendered small justice
to the phenomena it was now her privilege to observe in
Charles Street Olive was much more remarkable than
Mrs. Tarrant suspected, remarkable as Mrs. Tarrant believed
her to be. She had opened Verena's eyes to extraordinary
pictures, made the girl believe that she had a heavenly
mission, given her, as we have seen, quite a new measure
of the interest of life. These were larger consequences

io6 THE BOSTONIANS. xiv.

than the possibility of meeting the leaders of society at
Olive's house. She had met no one, as yet, but Mrs.
Luna ; her new friend seemed to wish to keep her quite
for herself. This was the only reproach that Mrs. Tarrant
directed to the new friend as yet ; she was disappointed
that Verena had not obtained more insight into the world
of fashion. It was one of the prime articles of her faith
that the world of fashion was wicked and hollow, and,
moreover, Verena told her that Miss Chancellor loathed
and despised it. She could not have informed you wherein
it would profit her daughter (for the way those ladies shrank
from any new gospel was notorious) ; nevertheless she was
vexed that Verena shouldn't come back to her with a little
more of the fragrance of Beacon Street. The girl herself
would have been the most interested person in the world if
she had not been the most resigned ; she took all that was
given her and was grateful, and missed nothing that was
withheld ; she was the most extraordinary mixture of eager-
ness and docility. Mrs. Tarrant theorised about tempera-
ments and she loved her daughter; but she was only vaguely
aware of the fact that she had at her side the sweetest
flower of character (as one might say) that had ever bloomed
on earth. She was proud of Verena's brightness, and of
her special talent ; but the commonness of her own surface
was a non-conductor of the girl's quality. Therefore she
thought that it would add to her success in life to know a
few high-flyers, if only to put them to shame ; as if anything
could add to Verena's success, as if it were not supreme
success simply to have been made as she was made.

Mrs. Tarrant had gone into town to call upon Miss
Chancellor ; she carried out this resolve, on which she had
bestowed infinite consideration, independently of Verena.
She had decided that she had a pretext ; her dignity re-
quired one, for she felt that at present the antique pride of
the Greenstreets was terribly at the mercy of her curiosity.
She wished to see Miss Chancellor again, and to see her
among her charming appurtenances, which Verena had
described to her with great minuteness. The pretext that
she would have valued most was wanting — that of Olive's
having come out to Cambridge to pay the visit that had

xiv. THE BOSTONIANS. 107

been solicited from the first ; so she had to take the next
best — she had to say to herself that it was her duty to see
what she should think of a place where her daughter spent
so much time. To Miss Chancellor she would appear to
have come to thank her for her hospitality ; she knew, in
advance, just the air she should take (or she fancied she
knew it — Mrs. Tarrant's airs were not always what she sup-
posed), just the nuance (she had also an impression she
knew a little French) of her tone. Olive, after the lapse
of weeks, still showed no symptoms of presenting herself,
and Mrs. Tarrant rebuked Verena with some sternness for
not having made her feel that this attention was due to the
mother of her friend. Verena could scarcely say to her
she guessed Miss Chancellor didn't think much of that
personage, true as it was that the girl had discerned this
angular fact, which she attributed to Olive's extraordinary
comprehensiveness of view. Verena herself did not suppose
that her mother occupied a very important place in the
universe ; and Miss Chancellor never looked at anything
smaller than that. Nor was she free to report (she was
certainly now less frank at home, and, moreover, the sus-
picion was only just becoming distinct to her) that Olive
would like to detach her from her parents altogether, and
was therefore not interested in appearing to cultivate rela-
tions with them. Mrs. Tarrant, I may mention, had a
further motive : she was consumed with the desire to behold
Mrs. Luna. This circumstance may operate as a proof
that the aridity of her life was great, and if it should have
that effect I shall not be able to gainsay it. She had seen
all the people who went to lectures, but there were hours
when she desired, for a change, to see some who didn't go ;
and Mrs. Luna, from Verena's description of her, summed
up the characteristics of this eccentric class.

Verena had given great attention to Olive's brilliant
sister ; she had told her friend everything now — everything
but one little secret, namely, that if she could have chosen
at the beginning she would have liked to resemble Mrs.
Luna. This lady fascinated her, carried off her imagination
to strange lands ; she should enjoy so much a long evening
with her alone, when she might ask her ten thousand ques-

io8 THE BOSTONIANS. xiv.

tions. But she never saw her alone, never saw her at all
but in glimpses. Adeline flitted in and out, dressed for
dinners and concerts, always saying something worldly to
the young woman from Cambridge, and something to Olive
that had a freedom which she herself would probably never
arrive at (a failure of foresight on Verena's part). But
Miss Chancellor never detained her, never gave Verena a
chance to see her, never appeared to imagine that she could
have the least interest in such a person ; only took up the
subject again after Adeline had left them — the subject, of
course, which was always the same, the subject of what
they should do together for their suffering sex. It was not
that Verena was not interested in that — gracious, no ; it
opened up before her, in those wonderful colloquies with
Olive, in the most inspiring way ; but her fancy would make
a dart to right or left when other game crossed their path,
and her companion led her, intellectually, a dance in which
her feet — that is, her head — failed her at times for weari-
ness. Mrs. Tarrant found Miss Chancellor at home, but
she was not gratified by even the most transient glimpse of
Mrs. Luna ; a fact which, in her heart, Verena regarded as
fortunate, inasmuch as (she said to herself) if her mother,
returning from Charles Street, began to explain Miss Chan-
cellor to her with fresh energy, and as if she (Verena) had
never seen her, and up to this time they had had nothing
to say about her, to what developments (of the same sort)
would not an encounter with Adeline have given rise ?

When Verena at last said to her friend that she thought
she ought to come out to Cambridge — she didn't under-
stand why she didn't — Olive expressed her reasons very
frankly, admitted that she was jealous, that she didn't wish
to think of the girl's belonging to any one but herself. Mr.
and Mrs. Tarrant would have authority, opposed claims,
and she didn't wish to see them, to remember that they
existed. This was true, so far as it went ; but Olive could
not tell Verena everything — could not tell her that she
hated that dreadful pair at Cambridge. As we know, she
had forbidden herself this emotion as regards individuals ;
and she flattered herself that she considered the Tarrants
as a type, a deplorable one, a class that, with the public at

xiv. THE BOSTONIANS. 109

large, discredited the cause of the new truths. She had
talked them over with Miss Birdseye (Olive was always
looking after her now and giving her things — the good lady
appeared at this period in wonderful caps and shawls — for
she felt she couldn't thank her enough), and even Doctor
Prance's fellow-lodger, whose animosity to flourishing evils
lived in the happiest (though the most illicit) union with
the mania for finding excuses, even Miss Birdseye was
obliged to confess that if you came to examine his record,
poor Selah didn't amount to so very much. How little he
amounted to Olive perceived after she had made Verena
talk, as the girl did immensely, about her father and
mother — quite unconscious, meanwhile, of the conclusions
she suggested to Miss Chancellor. Tarrant was a moralist
without moral sense — that was very clear to Olive as she
listened to the history of his daughter's childhood and youth,
which Verena. related with an extraordinary artless vividness.
This narrative, tremendously fascinating to Miss Chancellor,
made her feel in all sorts of ways — prompted her to ask
herself whether the girl was also destitute of the perception of
right and wrong. No, she was only supremely innocent ; she
didn't understand, she didn't interpret nor see the portee of
what she described j she had no idea whatever of judging
her parents. Olive had wished to ' realise ' the conditions
in which her wonderful young friend (she thought her more
wonderful every day) had developed, and to this end, as I
have related, she prompted her to infinite discourse. But
now she was satisfied, the realisation was complete, and
what she would have liked to impose on the girl was an
effectual rupture with her past. That past she by no means
absolutely deplored, for it had the merit of having initiated
Verena (and her patroness, through her agency) into the
miseries and mysteries of the People. It was her theory
that Verena (in spite of the blood of the Greenstreets, and,
after all, who were they ?) was a flower of the great De-
mocracy, and that it was impossible to have had an origin
less distinguished than Tarrant himself. His birth, in some
unheard-of place in Pennsylvania, was quite inexpressibly
low, and Olive would have been much disappointed if it
had been wanting in this defect. She liked to think that

i io THE BOSTONIANS. xrv.

Verena, in her childhood, had known almost the extremity
of poverty, and there was a kind of ferocity in the joy with
which she reflected that there had been moments when this
delicate creature came near (if the pinch had only lasted a
little longer) to literally going without food. These things
added to her value for Olive ; they made that young lady
feel that their common undertaking would, in consequence,
be so much more serious. It is always supposed that
revolutionists have been goaded, and the goading would
have been rather deficient here were it not for such happy
accidents in Verena's past. When she conveyed from her
mother a summons to Cambridge for a particular occasion,
Olive perceived that the great effort must now be made.
Great efforts were nothing new to her — it was a great effort
to live at all — but this one appeared to her exceptionally
cruel. She determined, however, to make it, promising
herself that her first visit to Mrs. Tarrant should also be her
last. Her only consolation was that she expected to suffer
intensely; for the prospect of suffering was always, spiritually
speaking, so much cash in her pocket. It was arranged
that Olive should come to tea (the repast that Selah de-
signated as his supper), when Mrs. Tarrant, as we have
seen, desired to do her honour by inviting another guest.
This guest, after much deliberation between that lady and
Verena, was selected, and the first person Olive saw on
entering the little parlour in Cambridge was a young man
with hair prematurely, or, as one felt that one should say,
precociously white, whom she had a vague impression she
had encountered before, and who was introduced to her as
Mr. Matthias Pardon.

She suffered less than she had hoped — she was so taken
up with the consideration of Verena's interior. It was as
bad as she could have desired; desired in order to feel
that (to take her out of such a milieu as that) she should
have a right to draw her altogether to herself. Olive wished
more and more to extract some definite pledge from her ;
she could hardly say what it had best be as yet ; she only
felt that it must be something that would have an absolute
sanctity for Verena and would bind them together for life.
On this occasion it seemed to shape itself in her mind; she

xiv. THE BOSTONIANS. in

began to see what it ought to be, though she also saw that
she would perhaps have to wait awhile. Mrs. Tarrant, too,
in her own house, became now a complete figure ; there
was no manner of doubt left as to her being vulgar. Olive
Chancellor despised vulgarity, had a scent for it which she
followed up in her own family, so that often, with a rising
flush, she detected the taint even in Adeline. There were
times, indeed, when every one seemed to have it, every one
but Miss Birdseye (who had nothing to do with it — she
was an antique) and the poorest, humblest people. The
toilers and spinners, the very obscure, these were the only
persons who were safe from it. Miss Chancellor would
have been much happier if the movements she was inter-
ested in could have been carried on only by the people she
liked, and if revolutions, somehow, didn't always have to
begin with one's self — with internal convulsions, sacrifices,
executions. A common end, unfortunately, however fine
as regards a special result, does not make . community
impersonal.

Mrs. Tarrant, with her soft corpulence, looked to her
guest very bleached and tumid; her complexion had a
kind of withered glaze ; her hair, very scanty, was drawn
off her forehead ^ la Chinoise ; she had no eyebrows, and
her eyes seemed to stare, like those of a figure of wax.
When she talked and wished to insist, and she was always
insisting, she puckered and distorted her face, with an
effort to express the inexpressible, which turned out, after
all, to be nothing. She had a kind of doleful elegance,
tried to be confidential, lowered her voice and looked as if
she wished to establish a secret understanding, in order to
ask her visitor if she would venture on an apple-fritter. She
wore a flowing mantle, which resembled her husband's
waterproof — a garment which, when she turned to her
daughter or talked about her, might have passed for the
robe of a sort of priestess of maternity. She endeavoured
to keep the conversation in a channel which would enable
her to ask sudden incoherent questions of Olive, mainly as
to whether she knew the principal ladies (the expression
was Mrs. Tarrant's), not only in Boston, but in the other
cities which, in her nomadic course, she herself had visited.

H2 THE BOSTONIANS. xiv.

Olive knew some of them, and of some of them had never
heard; but she was irritated, and pretended a universal
ignorance (she was conscious that she had never told so
many fibs), by which her hostess was much disconcerted,
although her questions had apparently been questions pure
and simple, leading nowhither and without bearings on any
new truth.

XV,

TARRANT, however, kept an eye in that direction ; he was
solemnly civil to Miss Chancellor, handed her the dishes
at table over and over again, and ventured to intimate that
the apple-fritters were very fine ; but, save for this, alluded
to nothing more trivial than the regeneration of humanity
and the strong hope he felt that Miss Birdseye would again
have one of her delightful gatherings. With regard to this
latter point he explained that it was not in order that he
might again present his daughter to the company, but
simply because on such occasions there was a valuable
interchange of hopeful thought, a contact of mind with
mind. If Verena had anything suggestive to contribute to
the social problem, the opportunity would come — that was
part of their faith. They couldn't reach out for it and try
and push their way ; if they were wanted, their hour would
strike ; if they were not, they would just keep still and let
others press forward who seemed to be called. If they were
called, they would know it j and if they weren't, they could
just hold on to each other as they had always done.
Tarrant was very fond of alternatives, and he mentioned
several others ; it was never his fault if his listeners failed
to think him impartial. They hadn't much, as Miss Chan«
cellor could see ; she could tell by their manner of life that
they hadn't raked in the dollars ; but they had faith that,
whether one raised one's voice or simply worked on in
silence, the principal difficulties would straighten themselves
out ; and they had also a considerable experience of great
questions. Tarrant spoke as if, as a family, they were
prepared to take charge of them on moderate terms. He
always said ' ma'am ' in speaking to Olive, to whom, more-
over, the air had never been so filled with the sound of her

ii4 THE BOSTONIANS. xv.

own name. It was always in her ear, save when Mrs.
Tarrant and Verena conversed in prolonged and ingenuous
asides j this was still for her benefit, but the pronoun
sufficed them. She had wished to judge Doctor Tarrant
(not that she believed he had come honestly by his title),
to make up her mind. She had done these things now,
and she expressed to herself the kind of man she believed
him to be in reflecting that if she should offer him ten
thousand dollars to renounce all claim to Verena, keeping
— he and his wife — clear of her for the rest of time, he
would probably say, with his fearful smile, ( Make it twenty,
money down, and I'll do it.' Some image of this trans-
action, as one of the possibilities of the future, outlined
itself for Olive among the moral incisions of that evening.
It seemed implied in the very place, the bald bareness of
Tarrant's temporary lair, a wooden cottage, with a rough
front yard, a little naked piazza, which seemed rather to
expose than to protect, facing upon an unpaved road, in
which the footway was overlaid with a strip of planks.
These planks were embedded in ice or in liquid thaw,
according to the momentary mood of the weather, and the
advancing pedestrian traversed them in the attitude, and
with a good deal of the suspense, of a rope-dancer. There
was nothing in the house to speak of; nothing, to Olive's
sense, but a smell of kerosene; though she had a con-
sciousness of sitting down somewhere — the object creaked
and rocked beneath her — and of the table at tea being
covered with a cloth stamped in bright colours.

As regards the precuniary transaction with Selah, it was
strange how she should have seen it through the conviction
that Verena would never give up her parents. Olive was
sure that she would never turn her back upon them, would
always share with them. She would have despised her had
she thought her capable of another course ; yet it baffled
her to understand why, when parents were so trashy, this
natural law should not be suspended. Such a question
brought her back, however, to her perpetual enigma, the
mystery she had already turned over in her mind for hours
together — the wonder of such people being Verena's pro-
genitors at all. She had explained it, as we explain all

xv. THE BOSTONIANS. 115

exceptional things, by making the part, as the French say,
of the miraculous. She had come to consider the girl as a
wonder of wonders, to hold that no human origin, however
congruous it might superficially appear, would sufficiently
account for her ; that her springing up between Selah and
his wife was an exquisite whim of the creative force ; and
that in such a case a few shades more or less of the in-
explicable didn't matter. It was notorious that great
beauties, great geniuses, great characters, take their own
times and places for coming into the world, leaving the
gaping spectators to make them ' fit in/ and holding from
far-off ancestors, or even, perhaps, straight from the divine
generosity, much more than from their ugly or stupid pro-
genitors. They were incalculable phenomena, anyway, as
Selah would have said. Verena, for Olive, was the very
type and model of the ' gifted being ; ' her qualities had not
been bought and paid for; they were like some brilliant
birthday-present, left at the door by an unknown messenger,
to be delightful for ever as an inexhaustible legacy, and
amusing for ever from the obscurity of its source. They
were superabundantly crude as yet — happily for Olive, who
promised herself, as we know, to train and polish them —
but they were as genuine as fruit and flowers, as the glow
of the fire or the plash of water. For her scrutinising
friend Verena had the disposition of the artist, the spirit to
which all charming forms come easily and naturally. It
required an effort at first to imagine an artist so untaught,
so mistaught, so poor in experience ; but then it required
an effort also to imagine people like the old Tarrants, or a
life so full as her life had been of ugly things. Only an
exquisite creature could have resisted such associations,
only a girl who had some natural light, some divine spark
of taste. There were people like that, fresh from the hand
of Omnipotence; they were far from common, but their
existence was as incontestable as it was beneficent.

Tarrant's talk about his daughter, her prospects, her
enthusiasm, was terribly painful to Olive ; it brought back
to her what she had suffered already from the idea that he
laid his hands upon her to make her speak. That he
should be mixed up in any way with this exercise of her

ii6 THE BOSTONIANS. xv.

genius was a great injury to the cause, and Olive had
already determined that in future Verena should dispense
with his co-operation. The girl had virtually confessed
that she lent herself to it only because it gave him pleasure,
and that anything else would do as well, anything that
would make her quiet a little before she began to 'give
out.' Olive took upon herself to believe that she could
make her quiet, though, certainly, she had never had that
effect upon any one ; she would mount the platform with
Verena if necessary, and lay her hands upon her head.
Why in the world had a perverse fate decreed that Tarrant
should take an interest in the affairs of Woman — as if she
wanted his aid to arrive at her goal ; a charlatan of the
poor, lean, shabby sort, without the humour, brilliancy,
prestige, which sometimes throw a drapery over shallow-
ness ? Mr. Pardon evidently took an interest as well, and
there was something in his appearance that seemed to say
that his sympathy would not be dangerous. He was much
at his ease, plainly, beneath the root of the Tarrants, and
Olive reflected that though Verena had told her much
about him, she had not given her the idea that he was as
intimate as that. What she had mainly said was that he
sometimes took her to the theatre. Olive could enter, to a
certain extent, into that ; she herself had had a phase (some
time after her father's death — her mother's had preceded
his — when she bought the little house in Charles Street
and began to live alone), during which she accompanied
gentlemen to respectable places of amusement. She was
accordingly not shocked at the idea of such adventures on
Verena's part ; than which, indeed, judging from her own
experience, nothing could well have been less adventurous.
Her recollections of these expeditions were as of something
solemn and edifying — of the earnest interest in her welfare
exhibited by her companion (there were few occasions on
which the young Bostonian appeared to more advantage),
of the comfort of other friends sitting near, who were sure
to know whom she was with, of serious discussion between
the acts in regard to the behaviour of the characters in the
piece, and of the speech at the end with which, as the
young man quitted her at her door, she rewarded his

xv. THE BOSTONIANS. 117

civility — ' I must thank you for a very pleasant evening.'
She always felt that she made that too prim; her lips
stiffened themselves as she spoke. But the whole affair
had always a primness ; this was discernible even to Olive's
very limited sense of humour. It was not so religious as
going to evening-service at King's Chapel ; but it was the
next thing to it. Of course all girls didn't do it ; there
were families that viewed such a custom with disfavour.
But this was where the girls were of the romping sort;
there had to be some things they were known not to do.
As a general thing, moreover, the practice was confined to
the decorous; it was a sign of culture and quiet tastes.
All this made it innocent for Verena, whose life had
exposed her to much worse dangers ; but the thing referred
itself in Olive's mind to a danger which cast a perpetual
shadow there — the possibility of the girl's embarking with
some ingenuous youth on an expedition that would last
much longer than an evening. She was haunted, in a
word, with the fear that Verena would marry, a fate to
which she was altogether unprepared to surrender her;
and this made her look with suspicion upon all male
acquaintance.

Mr. Pardon was not the only one she knew ; she had an
example of the rest in the persons of two young Harvard
law- students, who presented themselves after tea on this
same occasion. As they sat there Olive wondered whether
Verena had kept something from her, whether she were,
after all (like so many other girls in Cambridge), a college-
' belle,' an object of frequentation to undergraduates. It
was natural that at the seat of a big university there should
be girls like that, with students dangling after them, but she
didn't want Verena to be one of them. There were some
that received the Seniors and Juniors; others that were
accessible to Sophomores and Freshmen. Certain young
ladies distinguished the professional students ; there was a
group, even, that was on the best terms with the young
men who were studying for the Unitarian ministry in that
queer little barrack at the end of Divinity Avenue. The
advent of the new visitors made Mrs. Tarrant bustle
immensely ; but after she had caused every one to change

ii8 THE BOSTONIANS. xv.

places two or three times with every one else the company
subsided into a circle which was occasionally broken by
wandering movements on the part of her husband, who, in
the absence of anything to say on any subject whatever,
placed himself at different points in listening attitudes,
shaking his head slowly up and down, and gazing at the
carpet with an air of supernatural attention. Mrs. Tarrant
asked the young men from the Law School about their
studies, and whether they meant to follow them up
seriously; said she thought some of the laws were very
unjust, and she hoped they meant to try and improve them.
She had suffered by the laws herself, at the time her father
died ; she hadn't got half the prop'ty she should have got
if they had been different. She thought they should be for
public matters, not for people's private affairs; the idea
always seemed to her to keep you down if you were down,
and to hedge you in with difficulties. Sometimes she
thought it was a wonder how she had developed in the
face of so many ; but it was a proof that freedom was
everywhere, if you only knew how to look for it.

The two young men were in the best humour; they
greeted these sallies with a merriment of which, though it
was courteous in form, Olive was by no means unable to
define the spirit. They talked naturally more with Verena
than with her mother; and while they were so engaged
Mrs. Tarrant explained to her who they were, and how one
of them, the smaller, who was not quite so spruce, had
brought the other, his particular friend, to introduce him.
This friend, Mr. Burrage, was from New York ; he was
very fashionable, he went out a great deal in Boston (' I
have no doubt you know some of the places,' said Mrs.
Tarrant) ; his " fam'ly " was very rich.

' Well, he knows plenty of that sort,' Mrs. Tarrant went
on, ' but he felt unsatisfied ; he didn't know any one like us.
He told Mr. Gracie (that's the little one) that he felt as if
he must ; it seemed as if he couldn't hold out. So we told
Mr. Gracie, of course, to bring him right round. Well, I
hope he'll get something from us, I'm sure. He has been
reported to be engaged to Miss Winkworth; I have no
doubt you know who I mean. But Mr. Gracie says he

xv. THE BOSTONIANS. 119

hasn't looked at her more than twice. That's the way
rumours fly round in that set, I presume. Well, I am glad
we are not in it, wherever we are ! Mr. Grade is very
different; he is intensely plain, but I believe he is very
learned. You don't think him plain ? Oh, you don't know ?
Well, I suppose you don't care, you must see so many.
But I must say, when a young man looks like that, I call
him painfully plain. I heard Doctor Tarrant make the
remark the last time he was here. I don't say but what
the plainest are the best. Well, I had no idea we were
going to have a party when I asked you. I wonder
whether Verena hadn't better hand the cake ; we generally
find the students enjoy it so much.'

This office was ultimately delegated to Selah, who, after
a considerable absence, reappeared with a dish of dainties,
which he presented successively to each member of the
company. Olive saw Verena lavish her smiles on Mr.
Gracie and Mr. Burrage ; the liveliest relation had estab-
lished itself, and the latter gentleman in especial abounded
in appreciative laughter. It might have been fancied, just
from looking at the group, that Verena's vocation was to
smile and talk with young men who bent towards her;
might have been fancied, that is, by a person less sure of
the contrary than Olive, who had reason to know that a
' gifted being ' is sent into the world for a very different
purpose, and that making the time pass pleasantly for con-
ceited young men is the last duty you are bound to think
of if you happen to have a talent for embodying a cause.
Olive tried to be glad that her friend had the richness of
nature that makes a woman gracious without latent pur-
poses ; she reflected that Verena was not in the smallest
degree a flirt, that she was only enchantingly and universally
genial, that nature had given her a beautiful smile, which
fell impartially on every one, man and woman, alike. Olive
may have been right, but it shall be confided to the reader
that in reality she never knew, by any sense of her own,
whether Verena were a flirt or not. This young lady could
not possibly have told her (even if she herself knew, which
she didn't), and Olive, destitute of the quality, had no
means of taking the measure in another of the subtle

120 THE BOSTONIANS. xv.

feminine desire to please. She could see the difference
between Mr. Gracie and Mr. Burrage ; her being bored by
Mrs. Tarrant's attempting to point it out is perhaps a proof
of that. It was a curious incident of her zeal for the
regeneration of her sex that manly things were, perhaps on
the whole, what she understood best. Mr. Burrage was
rather a handsome youth, with a laughing, clever face, a
certain sumptuosity of apparel, an air of belonging to the
'fast set' — a precocious, good-natured man of the world,
curious of new sensations and containing, perhaps, the
making of a dilettante. Being, doubtless, a little ambitious,
and liking to flatter himself that he appreciated worth in
lowly forms, he had associated himself with the ruder but
at the same time acuter personality of a genuine son of
New England, who had a harder head than his own and a
humour in reality more cynical, and who, having earlier
knowledge of the Tarrants, had undertaken to show him
something indigenous and curious, possibly even fascinating.
Mr. Gracie was short, with a big head ; he wore eye-glasses,
looked unkempt, almost rustic, and said good things with
his ugly lips. Verena had replies for a good many of them,
and a pretty colour came into her face as she talked. Olive
could see that she produced herself quite as well as one of
these gentlemen had foretold the other that she would.
Miss Chancellor knew what had passed between them as
well as if she had heard it ; Mr. Gracie had promised that
he would lead her on, that she should justify his description
and prove the raciest of her class. They would laugh about
her as they went away, lighting their cigars, and for many
days afterwards their discourse would be enlivened with
quotations from the 'women's rights girl.'

It was amazing how many ways men had of being anti-
pathetic ; these two were very different from Basil Ransom,
and different from each other, and yet the manner of each
conveyed an insult • to one's womanhood. The worst of
the case was that Verena would be sure not to perceive this
outrage — not to dislike them in consequence. There were
so many things that she hadn't yet learned to dislike, in
spite of her friend's earnest efforts to teach her. She had
the idea vividly (that was the marvel) of the cruelty of man,

xv. THE BOSTONIANS. 121

of his immemorial injustice ; but it remained abstract,
platonic ; she didn't detest him in consequence. What
was the use of her having that sharp, inspired vision of the
history of the sex (it was, as she had said herself, exactly
like Joan of Arc's absolutely supernatural apprehension of
the state of France), if she wasn't going to carry it out, if
she was going to behave as the ordinary pusillanimous,
conventional young lady ? It was all very well for her to
have said that first day that she would renounce : did she
look, at such a moment as this, like a young woman who
had renounced ? Suppose this glittering, laughing Burrage
youth, with his chains and rings and shining shoes, should
fall in love with her and try to bribe her, with his great
possessions, to practise renunciations of another kind — to
give up her holy work and to go with him to New York,
there to live as his wife, partly bullied, partly pampered, in
the accustomed Burrage manner? There was as little
comfort for Olive as there had been on the whole alarm in
the recollection of that off-hand speech of Verena's about
her preference for 'free unions.' This had been mere
maiden flippancy; she had not known the meaning of
what she said. Though she had grown up among people
who took for granted all sorts of queer laxities, she had
kept the consummate innocence of the American girl, that
innocence which was the greatest of all, for it had survived
the abolition of walls and locks ; and of the various remarks
that had dropped from Verena expressing this quality
that startling observation certainly expressed it most. It
implied, at any rate, that unions of some kind or other
had her approval, and did not exclude the dangers that
might arise from encounters with young men in search of
sensations.

XVL

MR. PARDON, as Olive observed, was a little out of this
combination ; but he was not a person to allow himself to
droop. He came and seated himself by Miss Chancellor
and broached a literary subject • he asked her if she were
following any of the current 'serials' in the magazines.
On her telling him that she never followed anything of that
sort, he undertook a defence of the serial system, which
she presently reminded him that she had not attacked.
He was not discouraged by this retort, but glided gracefully
off to the question of Mount Desert ; conversation on some
subject or other being evidently a necessity of his nature.
He talked very quickly and softly, with words, and even
sentences, imperfectly formed ; there was a certain amiable
flatness in his tone, and he abounded in exclamations —
' Goodness gracious ! ' and ' Mercy on us ! ' — not much in
use among the sex whose profanity is apt to be coarse.
He had small, fair features, remarkably neat, and pretty
eyes, and a moustache that he caressed, and an air of
juvenility much at variance with his grizzled locks, and the
free familiar reference in which he was apt to indulge to his
career as a journalist. His friends knew that in spite of
his delicacy and his prattle he was what they called a live
man ; his appearance was perfectly reconcilable with a large
degree of literary enterprise. It should be explained that
for the most part they attached to this idea the same
meaning as Selah Tarrant — a state of intimacy with the
newspapers, the cultivation of the great arts of publicity.
For this ingenuous son of his age all distinction between
the person and the artist had ceased to exist ; the writer
was personal, the person food for newsboys, and everything
and every one were every one's business. All things, with

xvi. THE BOSTONIANS. 123

him, referred themselves to print, and print meant simply
infinite reporting, a promptitude of announcement, abusive
when necessary, or even when not, about his fellow-citizens.
He poured contumely on their private life, on their personal
appearance, with the best conscience in the world. His
faith, again, was the faith of Selah Tarrant — that being in
the newspapers is a condition of bliss, and that it would be
fastidious to question the terms of the privilege. He was
an enfant de la balk, as the French say ; he had begun his
career, at the age of fourteen, by going the rounds of the
hotels, to cull flowers from the big, greasy registers which
lie on the marble counters; and he might flatter himself
that he had contributed in his measure, and on behalf of a
vigilant public opinion, the pride of a democratic State, to
the great end of preventing the American citizen from
attempting clandestine journeys. Since then he had
ascended other steps of the same ladder ; he was the most
brilliant young interviewer on the Boston press. He was
particularly successful in drawing out the ladies; he had
condensed into shorthand many of the most celebrated
women of his time — some of these daughters of fame were
very voluminous — and he was supposed to have a remark-
ably insinuating way of waiting upon prime donne and
actresses the morning after their arrival, or sometimes the
very evening, while their luggage was being brought up.
He was only twenty-eight years old, and, with his hoary
head, was a thoroughly modern young man ; he had no
idea of not taking advantage of all the modern con-
veniences. He regarded the mission of mankind upon
earth as a perpetual evolution of telegrams ; everything to
him was very much the same, he had no sense of proportion
or quality; but the newest thing was what came nearest
exciting in his mind the sentiment of respect. He was an
object of extreme admiration to Selah Tarrant, who believed
that he had mastered all the secrets of success, and who,
when Mrs. Tarrant remarked (as she had done more than
once) that it looked as if Mr. Pardon was really coming
after Verena, declared that if he was, he was one of the
few young men he should want to see in that connection,
one of the few he should be willing to allow to handle her.

124 THE BOSTONIANS. xvi.

It was Tarrant's conviction that if Matthias Pardon should
seek Verena in marriage, it would be with a view to pro-
ducing her in public; and the advantage for the girl of
having a husband who was at the same time reporter,
interviewer, manager, agent, who had the command of the
principal ' dailies,' would write her up and work her, as it
were, scientifically — the attraction of all this was too obvious
to be insisted on. " Matthias had a mean opinion of
Tarrant, thought him quite second-rate, a votary of played-
out causes. It was his impression that he himself was in
love with Verena, but his passion was not a jealous one,
and included a remarkable disposition to share the object
of his affection with the American people.

He talked some time to Olive about Mount Desert, told
her that in his letters he had described the company at the
different hotels. He remarked, however, that a corre-
spondent suffered a good deal to-day from the competition
of the ' lady-writers ' ; the sort of article they produced was
sometimes more acceptable to the papers. He supposed
she would be glad to hear that — he knew she was so
interested in woman's having a free field. They certainly
made lovely correspondents; they picked up something
bright before you could turn round ; there wasn't much
you could keep away from them ; you had to be lively if
you wanted to get there first. Of course, they were
naturally more chatty, and that was the style of literature
that seemed to take most to-day; only they didn't write
much but what ladies would want to read. Of course, he
knew there were millions of lady-readers, but he intimated
that he didn't address himself exclusively to the gynecseum;
he tried to put in something that would interest all parties.
If you read a lady's letter you knew pretty well in advance
what you would find. Now, what he tried for was that
you shouldn't have the least idea ; he always tried to have
something that would make you jump. Mr. Pardon was
not conceited more, at least, than is proper when youth
and success go hand in hand, and it was natural he should
not know in what spirit Miss Chancellor listened to him.
Being aware that she was a woman of culture his desire
was simply to supply her with the pabulum that she would

xvi. THE BOSTONIANS. 125

expect. She thought him very inferior ; she had heard he
was intensely bright, but there was probably some mistake ;
there couldn't be any danger for Verena from a mind that
took merely a gossip's view of great tendencies. Besides,
he wasn't half educated, and it was her belief, or at least
her hope, that an educative process was now going on for
Verena (under her own direction), which would enable her
to make such a discovery for herself. Olive had a standing
quarrel with the levity, the good-nature, of the judgments
of the day; many of them seemed to her weak to im-
becility, losing sight of all measures and standards, lavishing
superlatives, delighted to be fooled The age seemed to
her relaxed and demoralised, and I believe she looked to
the influx of the great feminine element to make it feel and
speak more sharply.

'Well, it's a privilege to hear you two talk together/
Mrs. Tarrant said to her ; l it's what I call real conversation.
It isn't often we have anything so fresh ; it makes me feel
as if I wanted to join in. I scarcely know whom to listen
to most ; Verena seems to be having such a time with those
gentlemen. First I catch one thing and then another; it
seems as if I couldn't take it all in. Perhaps I ought to
pay more attention to Mr. Burrage ; I don't want him to
think we are not so cordial as they are in New York.'

She decided to draw nearer to the trio on the other
side of the room, for she had perceived (as she devoutly
hoped Miss Chancellor had not), that Verena was endea-
vouring to persuade either of her companions to go and
talk to her dear friend, and that these unscrupulous young
men, after a glance over their shoulder, appeared to plead
for remission, to intimate that this was not what they had
come round for. Selah wandered out of the room again
with his collection of cakes, and Mr. Pardon began to talk
to Olive about Verena, to say that he felt as if he couldn't
say all he did feel with regard to the interest she had
shown in her. Olive could not imagine why he was called
upon to say or to feel anything, and she gave him short
answers ; while the poor young man, unconscious of his
doom, remarked that he hoped she wasn't going to exercise
any influence that would prevent Miss Tarrant from taking

126 THE BOSTONIANS. xvi.

the rank that belonged to her. He thought there was too
much hanging back ; he wanted to see her in a front seat ;
he wanted to see her name in the biggest kind of bills and
her portrait in the windows of the stores. She had genius,
there was no doubt of that, and she would take a new line
altogether. She had charm, and there was a great demand
for that nowadays in connection with new ideas. There
were so many that seemed to have fallen dead for want of
it. She ought to be carried straight ahead ; she ought to
walk right up to the top. There was a want of bold
action; he didn't see what they were waiting for. He
didn't suppose they were waiting till she was fifty years
old ; there were old ones enough in the field. He knew
that Miss Chancellor appreciated the advantage of her
girlhood, because Miss Verena had told him so. Her father
was dreadfully slack, and the winter was ebbing away.
Mr. Pardon went so far as to say that if Dr. Tarrant didn't
see his way to do something, he should feel as if he should
want to take hold himself. He expressed a hope at the
same time that Olive had not any views that would lead
her to bring her influence to bear to make Miss Verena
hold back ; also that she wouldn't consider that he pressed
in too much. He knew that was a charge that people
brought against newspaper-men — that they were rather apt
to cross the line. He only worried because he thought
those who were no doubt nearer to Miss Verena than he
could hope to be were not sufficiently alive. He knew
that she had appeared in two or three parlours since that
evening at Miss Birdseye's, and he had heard of the
delightful occasion at Miss Chancellor's own house, where
so many of the first families had been invited to meet her.
(This was an allusion to a small luncheon-party that Olive
had given, when Verena discoursed to a dozen matrons
and spinsters, selected by her hostess with infinite con-
sideration and many spiritual scruples ; a report of the
affair, presumably from the hand of the young Matthias,
who naturally had not been present, appeared with extra-
ordinary promptness in an evening-paper.) That was very
well so far as it went, but he wanted something on another
scale, something so big that people would have to go round

xvi. THE BOSTONIANS. 127

if they wanted to get past. Then lowering his voice a
little, he mentioned what it was : a lecture in the Music
Hall, at fifty cents a ticket, without her father, right there
on her own basis. He lowered his voice still more and
revealed to Miss Chancellor his innermost thought, having
first assured himself that Selah was still absent and that
Mrs. Tarrant was inquiring of Mr. Burrage whether he
visited much on the new land. The truth was, Miss
Verena wanted to ' shed ' her father altogether ; she didn't
want him pawing round her that way before she began ; it
didn't add in the least to the attraction. Mr. Pardon ex-
pressed the conviction that Miss Chancellor agreed with him
in this, and it required a great effort of mind on Olive's
part, so small was her desire to act in concert with Mr.
Pardon, to admit to herself that she did. She asked him,
with a certain lofty coldness — he didn't make her shy, now,
a bit — whether he took a great interest in the improvement
of the position of women. The question appeared to
strike the young man as abrupt and irrelevant, to come
down on him from a height with which he was not accus-
tomed to hold intercourse. He was used to quick opera-
tions, however, and he had only a moment of bright
blankness before replying :

' Oh, there is nothing I wouldn't do for the ladies ; just
give me a chance and you'll see.'

Olive was silent a moment. ' What I mean is — is your
sympathy a sympathy with our sex, or a particular interest
in Miss Tarrant?'

' Well, sympathy is just sympathy — that's all I can say.
It takes in Miss Verena and it takes in all others — except
the lady-correspondents,' the young man added, with a
jocosity which, as he perceived even at the moment, was
lost on Verena's friend. He was not more successful
when he went on : 'It takes in even you, Miss Chancellor!'

Olive rose to her feet, hesitating; she wanted to go
away, and yet she couldn't bear to leave Verena to be
exploited, as she felt that she would be after her departure,
that indeed she had already been, by those offensive young
men. She had a strange sense, too, that her friend had
neglected her for the last half-hour, had not been occupied

128 THE BOSTONIANS. xvr.

with her, had placed a barrier between them — a barrier of
broad male backs, of laughter that verged upon coarseness,
of glancing smiles directed across the room, directed to
Olive, which seemed rather to disconnect her with what
was going forward on that side than to invite her to take
part in it. If Verena recognised that Miss Chancellor was
not in report, as her father said, when jocose young men
ruled the scene, the discovery implied no great penetration ;
but the poor girl might have reflected further that to see it
taken for granted that she was unadapted for such company
could scarcely be more agreeable to Olive than to be
dragged into it. This young lady's worst apprehensions
were now justified by Mrs. Tarrant's crying to her that she
must not go, as Mr. Burrage and Mr. Gracie were trying
to persuade Verena to give them a little specimen of
inspirational speaking, and she was sure her daughter would
comply in a moment if Miss Chancellor would just tell her
to compose herself. They had got to own up to it, Miss
Chancellor could do more with her than any one else ; but
Mr. Gracie and Mr. Burrage had excited her so that she
was afraid it would be rather an unsuccessful effort. The
whole group had got up, and Verena came to Olive with
her hands outstretched and no signs of a bad conscience
in her bright face.

3 1 know you like me to speak so much — I'll try to say
something if you want me to. But I'm afraid there are
not enough people ; I can't do much with a small audience.'

'I wish we had brought some of our friends — they
would have been delighted to come if we had given them
a chance/ said Mr. Burrage. ' There is an immense desire
throughout the University to hear you, and there is no
such sympathetic audience as an audience of Harvard men.
OGracie and I are only two, but Gracie is a host in himself,
and I am sure he will say as much of me.' The young
man spoke these words freely and lightly, smiling at Verena,
and even a little at Olive, with the air of one to whom a
mastery of clever ' chaff ' was commonly attributed.

'Mr. Burrage listens even better than he talks/ his
companion declared. ' We have the habit of attention at
lectures, you know. To be lectured by you would be an

xvi. THE BOSTONIANS. 129

advantage indeed. We are sunk in ignorance and pre-
judice.'

' Ah, my prejudices/ Burrage went on ; 'if you could
see them — I assure you they are something monstrous ! '

'Give them a regular ducking and make them gasp,'
Matthias Pardon cried. ' If you want an opportunity to
act on Harvard College, now's your chance. These gentle-
men will carry the news j it will be the narrow end of the
wedge.'

* I can't tell what you like,' Verena said, still looking
into Olive's eyes.

' I'm sure Miss Chancellor likes everything here,' Mrs.
Tarrant remarked, with a noble confidence.

Selah had reappeared 'by this time ; his lofty, contem-
plative person was framed by the doorway. ' Want to try
a little inspiration?' he inquired, looking round on the
circle with an encouraging inflection.

' I'll do it alone, if you prefer,' Verena said, soothingly
to her friend. ' It might be a good chance to try without
father.'

'You don't mean to say you ain't going to be sup-
ported ? ' Mrs. Tarrant exclaimed, with dismay.

'Ah, I beseech you, give us the whole programme —
don't omit any leading feature ! ' Mr. Burrage was heard to
plead.

' My only interest is to draw her out,' said Selah, de-
fending his integrity. ' I will drop right out if I don't
seem to vitalise. I have no desire to draw attention to my
own poor gifts.' This declaration appeared to be addressed
to Miss Chancellor.

' Well, there will be more inspiration if you don't touch
her,' Matthias Pardon said to him. ' It will seem to come
right down from — well, wherever it does come from.'

'Yes, we don't pretend to say that,' Mrs. Tarrant
murmured.

This little discussion had brought the blood to Olive's
face ; she felt that every one present was looking at her —
Verena most of all — and that here was a chance to take a
more complete possession of the girl. Such chances were
agitating ; moreover, she didn't like, on any occasion, to be

130 THE BOSTONIANS. xvi.

so prominent. But everything that had been said was
benighted and vulgar ; the place seemed thick with the
very atmosphere out of which she wished to lift Verena.
They were treating her as a show, as a social resource, and
the two young men from the College were laughing at her
shamelessly. She was not meant for that, and Olive would
save her. Verena was so simple, she couldn't see herself;
she was the only pure spirit in the odious group.

'I want you to address audiences that are worth addressing
— to convince people who are serious and sincere.' Olive
herself, as she spoke, heard the great shake in her voice.
' Your mission is not to exhibit yourself as a pastime for
individuals, but to touch the heart of communities, of nations.'

' Dear madam, I'm sure Miss Tarrant will touch my
heart !' Mr. Burrage objected, gallantly.

'Well, I don't know but she judges you young men
fairly,' said Mrs. Tarrant, with a sigh.

Verena, diverted a moment from her communion with
her friend, considered Mr. Burrage with a smile. ' I
don't believe you have got any heart, and I shouldn't care
much if you had !'

'You have no idea how much the way you say that
increases my desire to hear you speak.'

' Do as you please, my dear,' said Olive, almost inaudibly.
' My carriage must be there — I must leave you, in any case.'

' I can see you don't want it,' said Verena, wondering.
' You would stay if you liked it, wouldn't you?'

' I don't know what I should do. Come out with me !'
Olive spoke almost with fierceness.

' Well, you'll send them away no better than they came,'
said Matthias Pardon.

' I guess you had better come round some other night,'
Selah suggested pacifically, but with a significance which
fell upon Olive's ear.

Mr. Gracie seemed inclined to make the sturdiest
protest. ' Look here, Miss Tarrant ; do you want to save
Harvard College, or do you not?' he demanded, with a
humorous frown.

4 1 didn't know you were Harvard College ! ' Verena
returned as humorously.

xvi. THE BOSTONIANS. 131

' I am afraid you are rather disappointed in your evening
if you expected to obtain some insight into our ideas,' said
Mrs. Tarrant, with an air of impotent sympathy, to Mr.
Gracie.

'Well, good-night, Miss Chancellor,' she went on ; 'I
hope you've got a warm wrap. I suppose you'll think we
go a good deal by what you say in this house. Well, most
people don't object to that. There's a little hole right
there in the porch ; it seems as if Doctor Tarrant couldn't
remember to go for the man to fix it. I am afraid you'll
think we're too much taken up with all these new hopes.
Well, we have enjoyed seeing you in our home ; it quite
raises my appetite for social intercourse. Did you come
out on wheels ? I can't stand a sleigh myself j it makes
me sick.'

This was her hostess's response to Miss Chancellor's
very summary farewell, uttered as the three ladies proceeded
together to the door of the house. Olive had got herself
out of the little parlour with a sort of blind, defiant dash ;
she had taken no perceptible leave of the rest of the
company. When she was calm she had very good manners,
but when she was agitated she was guilty of lapses, every
one of which came back to her, magnified, in the watches
of the night. Sometimes they excited remorse, and some-
times triumph ; in the latter case she felt that she could
not have been so justly vindictive in cold blood. Tarrant
wished to guide her down the steps, out of the little yard,
to her carriage ; he reminded her that they had had ashes
sprinkled on the planks on purpose. But she begged him
to let her alone, she almost pushed him back ; she drew
Verena out into the dark freshness, closing the door of the
house behind her. There was a splendid sky, all blue-black
and silver — a sparkling wintry vault, where the stars were
like a myriad points of ice. The air was silent and sharp,
and the vague snow looked cruel. Olive knew now very
definitely what the promise was that she wanted Verena to
make ; but it was too cold, she could keep her there bare-
headed but an instant. Mrs. Tarrant, meanwhile, in the
parlour, remarked that it seemed as if she couldn't trust
Verena with her own parents; and Selah intimated that,

132 THE BOSTONIANS. xvi.

with a proper invitation, his daughter would be very happy
to address Harvard College at large. Mr. Burrage and
Mr. Gracie said they would invite her on the spot, in the
name of the University ; and Matthias Pardon reflected
(and asserted) with glee that this would be the newest thing
yet. But he added that they would have a high time with
Miss Chancellor first, and this was evidently the conviction
of the company.

' I can see you are angry at something,' Verena said to
Olive, as the two stood there in the starlight. ' I hope it
isn't me. What have I done ?'

' I am not angry — I am anxious. I am so afraid I shall
lose you. Verena, don't fail me — don't fail me !' Olive
spoke low, with a kind of passion.

' Fail you ? How can I fail ?'

' You can't, of course you can't. Your star is above
you. But don't listen to them?

1 To whom do you mean, Olive ? To my parents ?'

' Oh no, not your parents/ Miss Chancellor replied,
with some sharpness. She paused a moment, and then she
said : * I don't care for your parents. I have told you that
before ; but now that I have seen them — as they wished,
as you wished, and I didn't — I don't care for them; I
must repeat it, Verena. I should be dishonest if I let you
think I did/

'Why, Olive Chancellor!' Verena murmured, as if she
were trying, in spite of the sadness produced by this declara-
tion, to do justice to her friend's impartiality.

1 Yes, I am hard ; perhaps I am cruel ; but we must be
hard if we wish to triumph. Don't listen to young men
when they try to mock and muddle you. They don't
care for you ; they don't care for us. They care only for
their pleasure, for what they believe to be the right of the
stronger. The stronger ? I am not so sure ! '

' Some of them care so much — are supposed to care too
much — for us,' Verena said, with a smile that looked dim
in the darkness.

' Yes, if we will give up everything. I have asked you
before — are you prepared to give up?'
' Do you mean, to give you up ?'

xvi. THE BOSTONIANS. 133

' No, all our wretched sisters — all our hopes and purposes
— all that we think sacred and worth living for !'

' Oh, they don't want that, Olive.' Verena's smile be-
came more distinct, and she added : ' They don't want so
much as that !'

'Well, then, go in and speak for them — and sing for
them — and dance for them !'

' Olive, you are cruel ! '

' Yes, I am. But promise me one thing, and I shall be
— oh, so tender !'

' What a strange place for promises,' said Verena, with
a shiver, looking about her into the night.

'Yes, I am dreadful; I know it. But promise.' And
Olive drew the girl nearer to her, flinging over her with one
hand the fold of a cloak that hung ample upon her own
meagre person, and holding her there with the other, while
she looked at her, suppliant but half hesitating. 'Promise!'
she repeated.

' Is it something terrible ?'

' Never to listen to one of them, never to be bribed '

At this moment the house-door was opened again, and
the light of the hall projected itself across the little piazza.
Matthias Pardon stood in the aperture, and Tarrant and
his wife, with the two other visitors, appeared to have come
forward as well, to see what detained Verena.

' You seem to have started a kind of lecture out here,'
Mr. Pardon said. 'You ladies had better look out, or
you'll freeze together ! '

Verena was reminded by her mother that she would
catch her death, but she had already heard sharply, low as
they were spoken, five last words from Olive, who now
abruptly released her and passed swiftly over the path from
the porch to her waiting carriage. Tarrant creaked along,
in pursuit, to assist Miss Chancellor; the others drew
Verena into the house. ' Promise me not to marry !' — that
was what echoed in her startled mind, and repeated itself
there when Mr. Burrage returned to the charge, asking
her if she wouldn't at least appoint some evening when they
might listen to her. She knew that Olive's injunction
ought not to have surprised her ; she had already felt it in the

BOSTONIANS. xvi.

air ; she would have said at any time, if she had been asked,
that she didn't suppose Miss Chancellor would want her to
marry. But the idea, uttered as her friend had uttered it,
had a new solemnity, and the effect of that quick, violent
colloquy was to make her nervous and impatient, as if she
had had a sudden glimpse of futurity. That was rather
awful, even if it represented the fate one would like.

When the two young men from the College pressed
their petition, she asked, with a laugh that surprised them,
whether they wished to 'mock and muddle' her. They
went away, assenting to Mrs. Tarrant's last remark : ' I am
afraid you'll feel that you don't quite understand us yet.'
Matthias Pardon remained; her father and mother, ex-
pressing their perfect confidence that he would excuse them,
went to bed and left him sitting there. He stayed a good
while longer, nearly an hour, and said things that made
Verena think that he, perhaps, would like to marry her.
But while she listened to him, more abstractedly than her
custom was, she remarked to herself that there could be no
difficulty in promising Olive so far as he was concerned.
He was very pleasant, and he knew an immense deal about
everything, or, rather, about every one, and he would take
her right into the midst of life. But she didn't wish to
marry him, all the same, and after he had gone she reflected
that, once she came to think of it, she didn't want to marry
any one. So it would be easy, after all, to make Olive that
promise, and it would give her so much pleasure !

XVII.

THE next time Verena saw Olive, she said to her that she
was ready to make the promise she had asked the other
night; but, to her great surprise, this young woman answered
her by a question intended to check such rashness. Miss
Chancellor raised a warning finger ; she had an air of dis-
suasion almost as solemn as her former pressure ; her
passionate impatience appeared to have given way to other
considerations, to be replaced by the resignation that comes
with deeper reflection. It was tinged in this case, indeed,
by such bitterness as might be permitted to a young lady
who cultivated the brightness of a great faith.

1 Don't you want any promise at present ?' Verena asked.
'Why, Olive, how you change !'

' My dear child, you are so young — so strangely young.
I am a thousand years old ; I have lived through generations
— through centuries. I know what I know by experience ;
you know it by imagination. That is consistent with your
being the fresh, bright creature that you are. I am
constantly forgetting the difference between us — that you
are a mere child as yet, though a child destined for great
things. I forgot it the other night, but I have remembered
it since. You must pass through a certain phase, and it
would be very wrong in me to pretend to suppress it.
That is all clear to me now ; I see it was my jealousy that
spoke — my restless, hungry jealousy. I have far too much
of that ; I oughtn't to give any one the right to say that
it's a woman's quality. I don't want your signature ; I only
want your confidence — only what springs from that. I
hope with all my soul that you won't marry; but if you
don't it must not be because you have promised me. You
know what I think — that there is something noble done

136 THE BOSTONIANS. xvn.

when one makes a sacrifice for a great good. Priests —
when they were real priests — never married, and what you
and I dream of doing demands of us a kind of priesthood.
It seems to me very poor, when friendship and faith and
charity and the most interesting occupation in the world —
when such a combination as this doesn't seem, by itself,
enough to live for. No man that I have ever seen cares a
straw in his heart for what we are trying to accomplish.
They hate it ; they scorn it ; they will try to stamp it out
whenever they can. Oh yes, I know there are men who
pretend to care for it ; but they are not really men, and I
wouldn't be sure even of them ! Any man that one would
look at — with him, as a matter of course, it is war upon us
to the knife. I don't mean to say there are not some male
beings who are willing to patronise us a little ; to pat us on
the back and recommend a few moderate concessions ; to
say that there are two or three little points in which society
has not been quite just to us. But any man who pretends
to accept our programme /// toto^ as you and I understand it,
of his own free will, before he is forced to — such a person
simply schemes to betray us. There are gentlemen in
plenty who would be glad to stop your mouth by kissing
you ! If you become dangerous some day to their selfish-
ness, to their vested interests, to their immorality — as I
pray heaven every day, my dear friend, that you may ! — it
will be a grand thing for one of them if he can persuade
you that he loves you. Then you will see what he will do
with you, and how far his love will take him ! It would be
a sad day for you and for me and for all of us, if you were to
believe something of that kind. You see I am very calm
now; I have thought it all out.'

Verena had listened with earnest eyes. 'Why, Olive,
you are quite a speaker yourself 1' she exclaimed. 'You
would far surpass me if you would let yourself go.'

Miss Chancellor shook her head with a melancholy that
was not devoid of sweetness. * I can speak to you ; but
that is no proof. The very stones of the street — all the
dumb things of nature — might find a voice to talk to you.
I have no facility; I am awkward and embarrassed and
dry.' When this young lady, after a struggle with the winds

xvil. THE BOSTONIANS. 137

and waves of emotion, emerged into the quiet stream of a
certain high reasonableness, she presented her most graceful
aspect ; she had a tone of softness and sympathy, a gentle
dignity, a serenity of wisdom, which sealed the appreciation
of those who knew her well enough to like her, and which
always impressed Verena as something almost august.
Such moods, however, were not often revealed to the
public at large ; they belonged to Miss Chancellor's very
private life. One of them had possession of her at present,
and she went on to explain the inconsequence which had
puzzled her friend with the same quiet clearness, the
detachment from error, of a woman whose self-scrutiny has
been as sharp as her deflection.

'Don't think me capricious if I say I would rather
trust you without a pledge. I owe you, I owe every one, an
apology for my rudeness and fierceness at your mother's.
It came over me — just seeing those young men — how ex-
posed you are ; and the idea made me (for the moment)
frantic. I see your danger still, but I see other things too,
and I have recovered my balance. You must be safe,
Verena — you must be saved; but your safety must not
come from your having tied your hands. It must come from
the growth of your perception ; from your seeing things, of
yourself, sincerely and with conviction, in the light in which
I see them ; from your feeling that for your work your free-
dom is essential, and that there is no freedom for you and
me save in religiously not doing what you will often be
asked to do — and I never!' Miss Chancellor brought out
these last words with a proud jerk which was not without
its pathos. ' Don't promise, don't promise ! ' she went on.
' I would far rather you didn't. But don't fail me — don't
fail me, or I shall die ! '

Her manner of repairing her inconsistency was altogether
feminine : she wished to extract a certainty at the same
time that she wished to deprecate a pledge, and she would
have been delighted to put Verena into the enjoyment of
that freedom which was so important for her by preventing
her exercising it in a particular direction. The girl was
now completely under her influence ; she had latent
curiosities and distractions — left to herself, she was not

138 THE BOSTONIANS. xvn.

always thinking of the unhappiness of women ; but the
touch of Olive's tone worked a spell, and she found some-
thing to which at least a portion of her nature turned with
eagerness in her companion's wider knowledge, her elevation
of view. Miss Chancellor was historic and philosophic ;
or, at any rate, she appeared so to Verena, who felt that
through such an association one might at last intellectually
command all life. And there was a simpler impulse ;
Verena wished to please her if only because she had such a
dread of displeasing her. Olive's displeasures, disappoint-
ments, disapprovals were tragic, truly memorable ; she grew
white under them, not shedding many tears, as a general
thing, like inferior women (she cried when she was angry,
not when she was hurt), but limping and panting, morally,
as if she had received a wound that she would carry for
life. On the other hand, her commendations, her satisfac-
tions were as soft as a west wind ; and she had this sign,
the rarest of all, of generosity, that she liked obligations of
gratitude when they were not laid upon her by men. Then,
indeed, she scarcely recognised them. She considered
men in general as so much in the debt of the opposite sex
that any individual woman had an unlimited credit with
them ; she could not possibly overdraw the general feminine
account. The unexpected temperance of her speech on
this subject of Verena's accessibility to matrimonial error
seemed to the girl to have an antique beauty, a wisdom
purged of worldly elements ; it reminded her of qualities
that she believed to have been proper to Electra or Anti-
gone. This made her wish the more to do something that
would gratify Olive ; and in spite of her friend's dissuasion
she declared that she should like to promise. 'I will
promise, at any rate, not to marry any of those gentlemen
that were at the house,' she said. ' Those seemed to be
the ones you were principally afraid of.'

' You will promise not to marry any one you don't like,'
said Olive. * That would be a great comfort ! '
' But I do like Mr. Burrage and Mr. Grade.'
1 And Mr. Matthias Pardon? What a name !'
' Well, he knows how to make himself agreeable. He
can tell you everything you want to know.'

xvii. THE BOSTONIANS. 139

' You mean everything you don't ! Well, if you like
every one, I haven't the least objection. It would only be
preferences that I should find alarming. I am not the
least afraid of your marrying a repulsive man ; your danger
would come from an attractive one.'

' I'm glad to hear you admit that some are attractive ! '
Verena exclaimed, with the light laugh which her reverence
for Miss Chancellor had not yet quenched. ' It sometimes
seems as if there weren't any you could like ! '

' I can imagine a man I should like very much/ Olive
replied, after a moment. ' But I don't like those I see.
They seem to me poor creatures.' And, indeed, her
uppermost feeling in regard to them was a kind of cold
scorn; she thought most of them palterers and bullies.
The end of the colloquy was that Verena, having assented,
with her usual docility, to her companion's optimistic con-
tention that it was a ' phase,' this taste for evening-calls
from collegians and newspaper-men, and would consequently
pass away with the growth of her mind, remarked that the
injustice of men might be an accident or might be a part
of their nature, but at any rate she should have to change
a good deal before she should want to marry.

About the middle of December, Miss Chancellor re-
ceived a visit from Matthias Pardon, who had come to ask
her what she meant to do about Verena. She had never
invited him to call upon her, and the appearance of a
gentleman whose desire to see her was so irrepressible as to
dispense with such* a preliminary was not in her career an
accident frequent enough to have taught her equanimity.
She thought Mr. Pardon's visit a liberty; but, if she ex-
pected to convey this idea to him by withholding any sug-
gestion that he should sit down, she was greatly mistaken,
inasmuch as he cut the ground from under her feet by
himself offering her a chair. His manner represented
hospitality enough for both of them, and she was obliged to
listen, on the edge of her sofa (she could at least seat her-
self where she liked), to his extraordinary inquiry. Of
course she was not obliged to answer it, and indeed she
scarcely understood it He explained that it was prompted
by the intense interest he felt in Miss Verena ; but that

140 THE BOSTONIANS. xvn.

scarcely made it more comprehensible, such a sentiment
(on his part) being such a curious mixture. He had a sort
of enamel of good humour which showed that his indelicacy
was his profession ; and he asked for revelations of the vie
intime of his victims with the bland confidence of a fashion-
able physician inquiring about symptoms. He wanted to
know what Miss Chancellor meant to do, because if she
didn't mean to do anything, he had an idea — which he
wouldn't conceal from her — of going into the enterprise
himself. ' You see, what I should like to know is this : do
you consider that she belongs to you, or that she belongs
to the people ? If she belongs to you, why don't you bring
her out?'

He had no purpose and no consciousness of being
impertinent ; he only wished to talk over the matter soci-
ably with Miss Chancellor. He knew, of course, that there
was a presumption she would not be sociable, but no
presumption had yet deterred him from presenting a surface
which he believed to be polished till it shone ; there was
always a larger one in favour of his power to penetrate and
of the majesty of the 'great dailies.' Indeed, he took so
many things for granted that Olive remained dumb while
she regarded them ; and he availed himself of what he
considered as a fortunate opening to be really very frank.
He reminded her that he had known Miss Verena a good
deal longer than she ; he had travelled out to Cambridge
the other winter (when he could get an off-night), with the
thermometer at ten below zero. He had always thought
her attractive, but it wasn't till this season that his eyes had
been fully opened. Her talent had matured, and now he
had no hesitation in calling her brilliant. Miss Chancellor
could imagine whether, as an old friend, he could watch
such a beautiful unfolding with indifference. She would
fascinate the people, just as she had fascinated her (Miss
Chancellor), and, he might be permitted to add, himself.
The fact was, she was a great card, and some one ought to
play it. There never had been a more attractive female
speaker before the American public ; she would walk right
past Mrs. Farrinder, and Mrs. Farrinder knew it. There
was room for both, no doubt, they had such a different

xvii. THE BOSTONIANS. 141

style ; anyhow, what he wanted to show was that there was
room for Miss Verena. She didn't want any more tuning-
up, she wanted to break right out. Moreover, he felt that
any gentleman who should lead her to success would win
her esteem ; he might even attract her more powerfully —
who could tell ? If Miss Chancellor wanted to attach her
permanently, she ought to push her right forward. He
gathered from what Miss Verena had told him that she
wanted to make her study up the subject a while longer —
follow some kind of course. Well, now, he could assure
her that there was no preparation so good as just seeing a
couple of thousand people down there before you who have
paid their money to have you tell them something. Miss
Verena was a natural genius, and he hoped very much she
wasn't going to take the nature out of her. She could
study up as she went along ; she had got the great thing
that you couldn't learn, a kind of divine afflatus, as the
ancients used to say, and she had better just begin on that.
He wouldn't deny what was the matter with him; he was quite
under the spell, and his admiration made him want to see
her where she belonged. He shouldn't care so much how
she got there, but it would certainly add to his pleasure if
he could show her up to her place. Therefore, would Miss
Chancellor just tell him this : How long did she expect to
hold her back • how long did she expect a humble admirer
to wait ? Of course he hadn't come there to cross-question
her ; there was one thing he trusted he always kept clear
of; when he was indiscreet he wanted to know it. He
had come with a proposal of his own, and he hoped it
would seem a sufficient warrant for his visit. Would Miss
Chancellor be willing to divide a — the — well, he might call
it the responsibilities? Couldn't they run Miss Verena
together ? In this case, every one would be satisfied. She
could travel round with her as her companion, and he would
see that the American people walked up. If Miss Chan-
cellor would just let her go a little, he would look after the
rest. He wanted no odds ; he only wanted her for about
an hour and a half three or four evenings a week.

Olive had time, in the course of this appeal, to make
her faculties converge, to ask herself what she could say to

142 THE BOSTONIANS. xvn.

this prodigious young man that would make him feel as
how base a thing she held his proposal that they should
constitute themselves into a company for drawing profit
from Verena. Unfortunately, the most sarcastic inquiry
that could occur to her as a response was also the most
obvious one, so that he hesitated but a moment with his
rejoinder after she had asked him how many thousands of
dollars he expected to make.

' For Miss Verena ? It depends upon the time. She'd
run for ten years, at least. I can't figure it up till all the
States have been heard from,' he said, smiling.

f I don't mean for Miss Tarrant, I mean for you/ Olive
returned, with the impression that she was looking him
straight in the eye.

' Oh, as many as you'll leave me !' Matthias Pardon
answered, with a laugh that contained all, and more than
all, the jocularity of the American press. 'To speak
seriously,' he added, ' I don't want to make money out
of it'

'What do you want to make, then ?'

' Well, I want to make history ! I want to help the
ladies.'

'The ladies?' Olive murmured. 'What do you know
about ladies?' she was on the point of adding, when his
promptness checked her.

' All over the world. I want to work for their eman-
cipation. I regard it as the great modern question.'

Miss Chancellor got up now ; this was rather too strong.
Whether, eventually, she was successful in what she
attempted, the reader of her history will judge ; but at this
moment she had not that promise of success which resides
in a willingness to make use of every aid that offers. Such
is the penalty of being of a fastidious, exclusive, uncompro-
mising nature ; of seeing things not simply and sharply, but
in perverse relations, in intertwisted strands. It seemed to
our young lady that nothing could be less attractive than to
owe her emancipation to such a one as Matthias Pardon ;
and it is curious that those qualities which he had in
common with Verena, and which in her seemed to Olive
romantic and touching — her having sprung from the

xvii. THE BOSTONIANS. 143

' people,' had an acquaintance with poverty, a hand-to-
mouth development, and an experience of the seamy side
of life — availed in no degree to conciliate Miss Chancellor.
I suppose it was because he was a man. She told him that
she was much obliged to him for his offer, but that he
evidently didn't understand Verena and herself. No, not
even Miss Tarrant, in spite of his long acquaintance with
her. They had no desire to be notorious ; they only
wanted to be useful. They had no wish to make money ;
there would always be plenty of money for Miss Tarrant.
Certainly, she should come before the public, and the
world would acclaim her and hang upon her words ; but
crude, precipitate action was what both of them least
desired. The change in the dreadful position of women
was not a question for to-day simply, or for to-morrow, but
for many years to come ; and there would be a great deal
to think of, to map out. One thing they were determined
upon — that men shouldn't taunt them with being superficial.
When Verena should appear it would be armed at all
points, like Joan of Arc (this analogy had lodged itself in
Olive's imagination); she should have facts and figures;
she should meet men on their own ground. 'What we
mean to do, we mean to do well,' Miss Chancellor said to
her visitor, with considerable sternness ; leaving "him to
make such an application to himself as his fancy might
suggest.

This announcement had little comfort for him ; he felt
baffled and disheartened — indeed, quite sick. Was it not
sickening to hear her talk of this dreary process of prepara-
tion?— as if any one cared about that, and would know
whether Verena were prepared or not ! Had Miss Chan-
cellor no faith in her girlhood ? didn't she know what a
card that would be? This was the last inquiry Olive
allowed him the opportunity of making. She remarked to
him that they might talk for ever without coming to an
agreement — their points of view were so far apart. Besides,
it was a woman's question; what they wanted was for
women, and it should be by women. It had happened to
the young Matthias more than once to be shown the way to
the door, but the path of retreat had never yet seemed to

144 THE BOSTONIANS. xvn.

him so unpleasant. He was naturally amiable, but it had
not hitherto befallen him to be made to feel that he was
not — and could not be — a factor in contemporary history :
here was a rapacious woman who proposed to keep that
tavourable setting for herself. He let her know that she
was right-down selfish, and that if she chose to sacrifice a
beautiful nature to her antediluvian theories and love of
power, a vigilant daily press — whose business it was to
expose wrong-doing — would demand an account from her.
She replied that, if the newspapers chose to insult her, that
was their own affair ; one outrage the more to the sex in
her person was of little account. And after he had left her
she seemed to see the glow of dawning success ; the battle
had begun, and something of the ecstasy of the martyr.

XVIII.

VERENA told her, a week after this, that Mr. Pardon wanted
so much she should say she would marry him ; and she
added, with evident pleasure at being able to give her so
agreeable a piece of news, that she had declined to say
anything of the sort. She thought that now, at least, Olive
must believe in her ; for the proposal was more attractive
than Miss Chancellor seemed able to understand. 'He
does place things in a very seductive light,' Verena said ;
' he says that if I become his wife I shall be carried straight
along by a force of excitement of which at present I have
no idea. I shall wake up famous, if I marry him ; I have
only got to give out my feelings, and he will take care of
the rest. He says every hour of my youth is precious to
me, and that we should have a lovely time travelling round
the country. I think you ought to allow that all that is
rather dazzling — for I am not naturally concentrated, like
you !'

' He promises you success. What do you call success?'
Olive inquired, looking at her friend with a kind of salutary
coldness — a suspension of sympathy — with which Verena
was now familiar (though she liked it no better than at
first), and which made approbation more gracious when
approbation came.

Verena reflected a moment, and then answered, smiling,
but with confidence : ' Producing a pressure that shall be
irresistible. Causing certain laws to be repealed by Con-
gress and by the State legislatures, and others to be enacted.'
She repeated the words as if they had been part of a
catechism committed to memory, while Olive saw that this
mechanical tone was in the nature of a joke that she could
not deny herself; they had had that definition so often

146 THE BOSTONIANS. xvm.

before, and Miss Chancellor had had occasion so often to
remind her what success really was. Of course it was easy
to prove to her now that Mr. Pardon's glittering bait was a
very different thing ; was a mere trap and lure, a bribe to
vanity and impatience, a device for making her give herself
away — let alone fill his pockets while she did so. Olive
was conscious enough of the girl's want of continuity ; she
had seen before how she could be passionately serious at
times, and then perversely, even if innocently, trivial — as
just now, when she seemed to wish to convert one of their
most sacred formulas into a pleasantry. She had already
quite recognised, however, that it was not of importance
that Verena should be just like herself; she was all of one
piece, and Verena was of many pieces, which had, where
they fitted together, little capricious chinks, through which
mocking inner lights seemed sometimes to gleam. It was
a part of Verena's being unlike her that she should feel Mr.
Pardon's promise of eternal excitement to be a brilliant
thing, should indeed consider Mr. Pardon with any toler-
ance at all. But Olive tried afresh to allow for such
aberrations, as a phase of youth and suburban culture ;
the more so that, even when she tried most, Verena
reproached her — so far as Verena's incurable softness could
reproach — with not allowing enough. Olive didn't appear
to understand that, while Matthias Pardon drew that
picture and tried to hold her hand (this image was unfor-
tunate), she had given one long, fixed, wistful look, through
the door he opened, at the bright tumult of the world, and
then had turned away, solely for her friend's sake, to an
austerer probation and a purer effort; solely for her friend's,
that is, and that of the whole enslaved sisterhood. The
fact remained, at any rate, that Verena had made a
sacrifice; and this thought, after a while, gave Olive a
greater sense of security. It seemed almost to seal the
future ; for Olive knew that the young interviewer would
not easily be shaken off, and yet she was sure that Verena
would never yield to him.

It was true that at present Mr. Burrage came a great
deal to the little house at Cambridge; Verena told her
about that, told her so much that it was almost as good as

xviii. THE BOSTONIANS. 147

if she had told her all. He came without Mr. Grade now;
he could find his way alone, and he seemed to wish that
there should be no one else. He had made himself so
pleasant to her mother that she almost always went out of
the room ; that was the highest proof Mrs. Tarrant could
give of her appreciation of a ' gentleman -caller.' They
knew everything about him by this time ; that his father
was dead, his mother very fashionable and prominent, and
he himself in possession of a handsome patrimony. They
thought ever so much of him in New York. He collected
beautiful things, pictures and antiques and objects that he
sent for to Europe on purpose, many of which were
arranged in his rooms at Cambridge. He had intaglios
and Spanish altar-cloths and drawings by the old masters.
He was different from most others ; he seemed to want so
much to enjoy life, and to think you easily could if you
would only let yourself go. Of course — judging by what
he had — he appeared to think you required a great many
things to keep you up. And then Verena told Olive — she
could see it was after a little delay — that he wanted her to
come round to his place and see his treasures. He wanted
to show them to her, he was so sure she would admire
them. Verena was sure also, but she wouldn't go alone,
and she wanted Olive to go with her. They would have
tea, and there would be other ladies, and Olive would tell
her what she thought of a life that was so crowded with
beauty. Miss Chancellor made her reflections on all this,
and the first of them was that it was happy for her that she
had determined for the present to accept these accidents,
for otherwise might she not now have had a deeper alarm ?
She wished to heaven that conceited young men with time
on their hands would leave Verena alone; but evidently
they wouldn't, and her best safety was in seeing as many as
should turn up. If the type should become frequent, she
would very soon judge it. If Olive had not been so grim,
she would have had a smile to spare for the frankness with
which the girl herself adopted this theory. She was eager
to explain that Mr. Burrage didn't seem at all to want what
poor Mr. Pardon had wanted ; he made her talk about her
views far more than that gentleman, but gave no sign of

148 THE BOSTONIANS. xvm.

offering himself either as a husband or as a lecture-agent.
The furthest he had gone as yet was to tell her that he
liked her for the same reason that he liked old enamels and
old embroideries ; and when she said that she didn't see
how she resembled such things, he had replied that it was
because she was so peculiar and so delicate. She might be
peculiar, but she had protested against the idea that she
was delicate ; it was the last thing that she wanted to be
thought ; and Olive could see from this how far she was
from falling in with everything he said. When Miss Chan
cellor asked if she respected Mr. Burrage (and how solemn
Olive could make that word she by this time knew), she
answered, with her sweet, vain laugh, but apparently with
perfect good faith, that it didn't matter whether she did or
not, for what was the whole thing but simply a phase — the
very one they had talked about? The sooner she got
through it the better, was it not? — and she seemed to
think that her transit would be materially quickened by
a visit to Mr. Burrage's rooms. As I say, Verena was
pleased to regard the phase as quite inevitable, and she
had said more than once to Olive that if their struggle was
to be with men, the more they knew about them the better.
Miss Chancellor asked her why her mother should not go
with her to see the curiosities, since she mentioned that
their possessor had not neglected to invite Mrs. Tarrant;
and Verena said that this, of course, would be very simple
— only her mother wouldn't be able to tell her so well as
Olive whether she ought to respect Mr. Burrage. This
decision as to whether Mr. Burrage should be respected
assumed in the life of these two remarkable young women,
pitched in so high a moral key, the proportions of a
momentous event. Olive shrank at first from facing it —
not, indeed, the decision — for we know that her own mind
had long since been made up in regard to the quantity of
esteem due to almost any member of the other sex — but
the incident itself, which, if Mr. Burrage should exasperate
her further, might expose her to the danger of appearing to
Verena to be unfair to him. It was her belief that he was
playing a deeper game than the young Matthias, and she
was very willing to watch him ; but she thought it prudent

xviii. THE BOSTONIANS. 149

not to attempt to cut short the phase (she adopted that
classification) prematurely — an imputation she should incur
if, without more delay, she were to ' shut down,' as Verena
said, on the young connoisseur.

It was settled, therefore, that Mrs. Tarrant should, with
her daughter, accept Mr. Burrage's invitation j and in a
few days these ladies paid a visit to his apartments.
Verena subsequently, of course, had much to say about it,
but she dilated even more upon her mother's impressions
than upon her own. Mrs. Tarrant had carried away a supply
which would last her all winter ; there had been some New
York ladies present who were ' on ' at that moment, and
with whom her intercourse was rich in emotions. She had
told them all that she should be happy to see them in her
home, but they had not yet picked their way along the little
planks of the front yard. Mr. Burrage, at all events, had
been quite lovely, and had talked about his collections,
which were wonderful, in the most interesting manner.
Verena inclined to think he was to be respected. He
admitted that he was not really studying law at all ; he had
only come to Cambridge for the form ; but she didn't see
why it wasn't enough when you made yourself as pleasant
as that. She went so far as to ask Olive whether taste and
art were not something, and her friend could see that she
was certainly very much involved in the phase. Miss
Chancellor, of course, had her answer ready. Taste and
art were good when they enlarged the mind, not when they
narrowed it. Verena assented to this, and said it remained
to be seen what effect they had had upon Mr. Burrage — a
remark which led Olive to fear that at such a rate much
would remain, especially when Verena told her, later, that
another visit to the young man's rooms was projected, and
that this time she must come, he having expressed the
greatest desire for the honour, and her own wish being
greater still that they should look at some of his beautiful
things together.

A day or two after this, Mr. Henry Burrage left a card
at Miss Chancellor's door, with a note in which he expressed
the hope that she would take tea with him on a certain
day on which he expected the company of his mother.

ISO THE BOSTONIANS. xvm.

Olive responded to this invitation, in conjunction with
Verena ; but in doing so she was in the position, singular
for her, of not quite understanding what she was about.
It seemed to her strange that Verena should urge her to
take such a step when she was free to go without her, and
it proved two things : first, that she was much interested
in Mr. Henry Burrage, and second, that her nature was
extraordinarily beautiful. Could anything, in effect, be
less underhand than such an indifference to what she sup-
posed to be the best opportunities for carrying on a flirta-
tion ? Verena wanted to know the truth, and it was clear
that by this time she believed Olive Chancellor to have it,
for the most part, in her keeping. Her insistence, there-
fore, proved, above all, that she cared more for her friend's
opinion of Henry Burrage than for her own — a reminder,
certainly, of the responsibility that Olive had incurred in
undertaking to form this generous young mind, and of the
exalted place that she now occupied in it. Such revela-
tions ought to have been satisfactory ; if they failed to be
completely so, it was only on account of the elder girl's
regret that the subject as to which her judgment was wanted
should be a young man destitute of the worst vices. Henry
Burrage had contributed to throw Miss Chancellor into a
' state,' as these young ladies called it, the night she met
him at Mrs. Tarrant's ; but it had none the. less been con-
veyed to Olive by the voices of the air that he was a gentle-
man and a good fellow.

This was painfully obvious when the visit to his rooms
took place ; he was so good-humoured, so amusing, so
friendly and considerate, so attentive to Miss Chancellor,
he did the honours of his bachelor-nest with so easy a
grace, that Olive, part of the time, sat dumbly shaking her
conscience, like a watch that wouldn't go, to make it tell
her some better reason why she shouldn't like him. She
saw' that there would be no difficulty in disliking his
mother ; but that, unfortunately, would not serve her
purpose nearly so well. Mrs. Burrage had come to spend
a few days near her son ; she was staying at an hotel in
Boston. It presented itself to Olive that after this enter-
tainment it would be an act of courtesy to call upon her ;

xviii. THE BOSTONIANS. 151

but here, at least, was the comfort that she could cover
herself with the general absolution extended to the Boston
temperament and leave her alone. It was slightly provoking,
indeed, that Mrs. Burrage should have so much the air of
a New Yorker who didn't particularly notice whether a
Bostonian called or not • but there is ever an imperfection,
I suppose, in even the sweetest revenge. She was a woman
of society, large and voluminous, fair (in complexion) and
regularly ugly, looking as if she ought to be slow and rather
heavy, but disappointing this expectation by a quick,
amused utterance, a short, bright, summary laugh, with
which she appeared to dispose of the joke (whatever it was)
for ever, and an air of recognising on the instant everything
she saw and heard. She was evidently accustomed to talk,
and even to listen, if not kept waiting too long for details
and parentheses ; she was not continuous, but frequent, as
it were, and you could see that she hated explanations,
though it was not to be supposed that she had anything to
fear from them. Her favours were general, not particular ;
she was civil enough to every one, but not in any case en-
dearing, and perfectly genial without being confiding, as
people were in Boston when (in moments of exaltation)
they wished to mark that they were not suspicious. There
was something in her whole manner which seemed to say
to Olive that she belonged to a larger world than hers ;
and our young lady was vexed at not hearing that she had
lived for a good many years in Europe, as this would have
made it easy to classify her as one of the corrupt. She
learned, almost with a sense of injury, that neither the
mother nor the son had been longer beyond the seas than
she herself ; and if they were to be judged as triflers they
must be dealt with individually. Was it an aid to such a
judgment to see that Mrs. Burrage was very much pleased
with Boston, with Harvard College, with her son's interior,
with her cup of tea (it was old Sevres), which was not half
so bad as she had expected, with the company he had
asked to meet her (there were three or four gentlemen, one
of whom was Mr. Grade), and, last, not least, with Verena
Tarrant, whom she addressed as a celebrity, kindly, cleverly,
but without maternal tenderness or anything to mark the

152 THE BOSTONIANS. xvin.

difference in their age ? She spoke to her as if they were
equals in that respect, as if Verena's genius and fame would
make up the disparity, and the girl had no need of encour-
agement and patronage. She made no direct allusion,
however, to her particular views, and asked her no question
about her 'gift' — an omission which Verena thought
strange, and, with the most speculative candour, spoke of
to Olive afterwards. Mrs. Burrage seemed to imply that
every one present had some distinction and some talent,
that they were all good company together. There was
nothing in her manner to indicate that she was afraid of
Verena on her son's account ; she didn't resemble a person
who would like him to marry the daughter of a mesmeric
healer, and yet she appeared to think it charming that he
should have such a young woman there to give gusto to
her hour at Cambridge. Poor Olive was, in the nature of
things, entangled in contradictions ; she had a horror of the
idea of Verena's marrying Mr. Burrage, and yet she was
angry when his mother demeaned herself as if the little girl
with red hair, whose freshness she enjoyed, could not be a
serious danger. She saw all this through the blur of her
shyness, the conscious, anxious silence to which she was so
much of the time condemned. It may therefore be ima-
gined how sharp her vision would have been could she only
have taken the situation more simply ; for she was intelli-
gent enough not to have needed to be morbid, even for
purposes of self-defence.

I must add, however, that there was a moment when
she came near being happy — or, at any rate, reflected that
it was a pity she could not be so. Mrs. Burrage asked her
son to play 'some little thing,' and he sat down to his
piano and revealed a talent that might well have gratified
that lady's pride. Olive was extremely susceptible to
music, and it was impossible to her not to be soothed and
beguiled by the young man's charming art. One 'little
thing' succeeded another; his selections were all very
happy. His guests sat scattered in the red firelight, listen-
ing, silent, in comfortable attitudes; there was a faint
fragrance from the burning logs, which mingled with the
perfume of Schubert and Mendelssohn ; the covered lamps

xviii. THE BOSTONIANS. 153

made a glow here and there, and the cabinets and brackets
produced brown shadows, out of which some precious
object gleamed — some ivory carving or cinque-cento cup.
It was given to Olive, under these circumstances, for half
an hour, to surrender herself, to enjoy the music, to admit
that Mr. Burrage played with exquisite taste, to feel as if
the situation were a kind of truce. Her nerves were
calmed, her problems — for the time — subsided. Civilisa-
tion, under such an influence, in such a setting, appeared
to have done its work ; harmony ruled the scene ; human
life ceased to be a battle. She went so far as to ask herself
why one should have a quarrel with it ; the relations of men
and women, in that picturesque grouping, had not the air of
being internecine. In short, she had an interval of un-
expected rest, during which she kept her eyes mainly on
Verena, who sat near Mrs. Burrage, letting herself go,
evidently, more completely than Olive. To her, too, music
was a delight, and her listening face turned itself to different
parts of the room, unconsciously, while her eyes vaguely
rested on the bibelots that emerged into the firelight At
moments Mrs. Burrage bent her countenance upon her and
smiled, at random, kindly ; and then Verena smiled back,
while her expression seemed to say that, oh yes, she was
giving up everything, all principles, all projects. Even
before it was time to go, Olive felt that they were both
(Verena and she) quite demoralised, and she only sum-
moned energy to take her companion away when she heard
Mrs. Burrage propose to her to come and spend a fortnight
in New York. Then Olive exclaimed to herself, ' Is it a
plot? Why in the world can't they let her alone?' and
prepared to throw a fold of her mantle, as she had done
before, over her young friend. Verena answered, somewhat
impetuously, that she should be delighted to visit Mrs.
Burrage; then checked her impetuosity, after a glance
from Olive, by adding that perhaps this lady wouldn't ask
her if she knew what strong ground she took on the
emancipation of women. Mrs. Burrage looked at her son
and laughed ; she said she was perfectly aware of Verena's
views, and that it was impossible to be more in sympathy
with them than she herself. She took the greatest interest

154 THE BOSTONIANS. xvm.

in the emancipation of women ; she thought there was so
much to be done. These were the only remarks that
passed in reference to the great subject ; and nothing more
was said to Verena, either by Henry Burrage or by his
friend Gracie, about her addressing the Harvard students.
Verena had told her father that Olive had put her veto
upon that, and Tarrant had said to the young men that it
seemed as if Miss Chancellor was going to put the thing
through in her own way. We know that he thought this
way very circuitous; but Miss Chancellor made him feel
that she was in earnest, and that idea frightened the resist-
ance out of him — it had such terrible associations. The
people he had ever seen who were most in earnest were a
committee of gentlemen who had investigated the pheno-
mena of the 'materialisation' of spirits, some ten years
before, and had bent the fierce light of the scientific
method upon him. To Olive it appeared that Mr. Burrage
and Mr. Gracie had ceased to be jocular ; but that did not
make them any less cynical. Henry Burrage said to
Verena, as she was going, that he hoped she would think
seriously of his mother's invitation ; and she replied that
she didn't know whether she should have much time in the
future to give to people who already approved of her views :
she expected to have her hands full with the others, who
didn't.

' Does your scheme of work exclude all distraction, all
recreation, then ?' the young man inquired ; and his look
expressed real suspense.

Verena referred the matter, as usual, with her air of
bright, ungrudging deference, to her companion. * Does it,
should you say — our scheme of work ?'

' I am afraid the distraction we have had this afternoon
must last us for a long time/ Olive said, without harshness,
but with considerable majesty.

* Well, now, is he to be respected ?' Verena demanded,
as the two young women took their way through the early
darkness, pacing quietly side by side, in their winter-robes,
like women consecrated to some holy office.

Olive turned it over a moment. ' Yes, very much — as
a pianist !'

xviii. THE BOSTONIANS. 155

Verena went into town with her in the horse-car — she
was staying in Charles Street for a few days — and that
evening she startled Olive by breaking out into a reflec-
tion very similar to the whimsical falterings of which she
herself had been conscious while they sat in Mr. Burrage's
pretty rooms, but against which she had now violently
reacted.

' It would be very nice to do that always — just to take
men as they are, and not to have to think about their bad-
ness. It would be very nice not to have so many questions,
but to think they were all comfortably answered, so that one
could sit there on an old Spanish leather chair, with the
curtains drawn and keeping out the cold, the darkness, all
the big, terrible, cruel world — sit there and listen for ever to
Schubert and Mendelssohn. They didn't care anything
about female suffrage ! And I didn't feel the want of a
vote to-day at all, did you?' Verena inquired, ending, as
she always ended in these few speculations, with an appeal
to Olive.

This young lady thought it necessary to give her a very
firm answer. 'I always feel it — everywhere — night and
day. I feel it here /' and Olive laid her hand solemnly on
her heart. ' I feel it as a deep, unforgetable wrong ; I feel
it as one feels a stain that is on one's honour.'

Verena gave a clear laugh, and after that a soft sigh,
and then said, ' Do you know, Olive, I sometimes wonder
whether, if it wasn't for you, I should feel it so very
much !'

'My own friend,' Olive replied, 'you have never yet
said anything to me which expressed so clearly the close-
ness and sanctity of our union.'

' You do keep me up,' Verena went on. ' You are my
conscience.'

' I should like to be able to say that you are my form —
my envelope. But you are too beautiful for that !' So
Olive returned her friend's compliment ; and later she said
that, of course, it would be far easier to give up everything
and draw the curtains to and pass one's life in an artificial
atmosphere, with rose-coloured lamps. It would be far
easier to abandon the struggle, to leave all the unhappy

156 THE BOSTONIANS. xvm.

women of the world to their immemorial misery, to lay
down one's burden, close one's eyes to the whole dark
picture, and, in short, simply expire. To this Verena
objected that it would not be easy for her to expire at all ;
that such an idea was darker than anything the world
contained ; that she had not done with life yet, and that
she didn't mean to allow her responsibilities to crush her.
And then the two young women concluded, as they had
concluded before, by rinding themselves completely, inspir-
ingly in agreement, full of the purpose to live indeed, and
with high success ; to become great, in order not to be
obscure, and powerful, in order not to be useless. Olive
had often declared before that her conception of life was as
something sublime or as nothing at all. The world was
full of evil, but she was glad to have been born before it
had been swept away, while it was still there to face, to
give one a task and a reward. When the great reforms
should be consummated, when the day of justice should
have dawned, would not life perhaps be rather poor and
pale ? She had never pretended to deny that the hope of
fame, of the very highest distinction, was one of her
strongest incitements ; and she held that the most effective
way of protesting against the state of bondage of women
was for an individual member of the sex to become illustri-
ous. A person who might have overheard some of the
talk of this possibly infatuated pair would have been
touched by their extreme familiarity with the idea of
earthly glory. Verena had not invented it, but she had
taken it eagerly from her friend, and she returned it with
interest. To Olive it appeared that just this partnership of
their two minds — each of them, by itself, lacking an im-
portant group of facets — made an organic whole which, for
the work in hand, could not fail to be brilliantly effective.
Verena was often far more irresponsive than she liked to
see her ; but the happy thing in her composition was that,
after a short contact with the divine idea — Olive was always
trying to flash it at her, like a jewel in an uncovered case —
she kindled, flamed up, took the words from her friend's
less persuasive lips, resolved herself into a magical voice,
became again the pure young sibyl. Then Olive perceived

xviii. THE BOSTONIANS. 157

how fatally, without Verena's tender notes, her crusade
would lack sweetness, what the Catholics call unction ; and,
on the other hand, how weak Verena would be on the
statistical and logical side if she herself should not bring up
the rear. Together, in short, they would be complete,
they would have everything, and together they would
triumph.

XIX.

THIS idea of their triumph, a triumph as yet ultimate and
remote, but preceded by the solemn vista of an effort so
religious as never to be wanting in ecstasy, became tre-
mendously familiar to the two friends, but especially to
Olive, during the winter of 187—, a season which ushered
in the most momentous period of Miss Chancellor's life.
About Christmas a step was taken which advanced her
affairs immensely, and put them, to her apprehension, on
a regular footing. This consisted in Verena's coming in
to Charles Street to stay with her, in pursuance of an
arrangement on Olive's part with Selah Tarrant and his
wife that she should remain for many months. The coast
was now perfectly clear. Mrs. Farrinder had started on
her annual grand tour ; she was rousing the people, from
Maine to Texas ; Matthias Pardon (it was to be supposed)
had received, temporarily at least, his quietus ; and Mrs.
Luna was established in New York, where she had taken
a house for a year, and whence she wrote to her sister that
she was going to engage Basil Ransom (with whom she was
in communication for this purpose) to do her law-business.
Olive wondered what law-business Adeline could have, and
hoped she would get into a pickle with her landlord or her
milliner, so that repeated interviews with Mr. Ransom
might become necessary. Mrs. Luna let her know very
soon that these interviews had begun ; the young Missis-
sippian had come to dine with her ; he hadn't got started
much, by what she could make out, and she was even
afraid that he didn't dine every day. But he wore a tall
hat now, like a Northern gentleman, and Adeline intimated
that she found him really attractive. He had been very
nice to Newton, told him all about the war (quite the

xix. THE BOSTONIANS. 159

Southern version, of course, but Mrs. Luna didn't care
anything about American politics, and she wanted her son
to know all sides), and Newton did nothing but talk about
him, calling him ' Rannie,' and imitating his pronunciation
of certain words. Adeline subsequently wrote that she
had made up her mind to put her affairs into his hands
(Olive sighed, not unmagnanimously, as she thought of her
sister's ' affairs '), and later still she mentioned that she was
thinking strongly of taking him to be Newton's tutor. She
wished this interesting child to be privately educated, and
it would be more agreeable to have in that relation a person
who was already, as it were, a member of the family. Mrs.
Luna wrote as if he were prepared to give up his profes-
sion to take charge of her son, and Olive was pretty
sure that this was only a part of her grandeur, of the
habit she had contracted, especially since living in
Europe, of speaking as if in every case she required
special arrangements.

In spite of the difference in their age, Olive had long
since judged her, and made up her mind that Adeline
lacked every quality that a person needed to be interesting
in her eyes. She was rich (or sufficiently so), she was
conventional and timid, very fond of attentions from men
(with whom indeed she was reputed bold, but Olive scorned
such boldness as that), given up to a merely personal, ego-
tistical, instinctive life, and as unconscious of the tendencies
of the age, the revenges of the future, the new truths and
the great social questions, as if she had been a mere bundle
of dress -trimmings, which she very nearly was. It was
perfectly observable that she had no conscience, and it
irritated Olive deeply to see how much trouble a woman
was spared when she was constructed on that system.
Adeline's ' affairs,' as I have intimated, her social relations,
her views of Newton's education, her practice and her
theory (for she had plenty of that, such as it was, heaven
save the mark !), her spasmodic disposition to marry again,
and her still sillier retreats in the presence of danger (for
she had not even the courage of her frivolity), these things
had been a subject of tragic consideration to Olive ever
since the return of the elder sister to America. The

160 THE BOSTONIANS. xix.

tragedy was not in any particular harm that Mrs. Luna
could do her (for she did her good, rather, that is, she
did her honour, by laughing at her), but in the spectacle
itself, the drama, guided by the hand of fate, of which the
small, ignoble scenes unrolled themselves so logically. The
denouement would of course be in keeping, and would
consist simply of the spiritual death of Mrs. Luna, who
would end by understanding no common speech of Olive's
at all, and would sink into mere worldly plumpness, into
the last complacency, the supreme imbecility, of petty,
genteel conservatism. As for Newton, he would be more
utterly odious, if possible, as he grew up, than he was
already; in fact, he would not grow up at all, but only
grow down, if his mother should continue her infatuated
system with him. He was insufferably forward and selfish ;
under the pretext of keeping him, at any cost, refined,
Adeline had coddled and caressed him, having him
always in her petticoats, remitting his lessons when he
pretended he had an earache, drawing him into the
conversation, letting him answer her back, with an im-
pertinence beyond his years, when she administered the
smallest check. The place for him, in Olive's eyes, was
one of the public schools, where the children of the people
would teach him his small importance, teach it, if necessary,
by the aid of an occasional drubbing ; and the two ladies
had a grand discussion on this point before Mrs. Luna left
Boston — a scene which ended in Adeline's clutching the
irrepressible Newton to her bosom (he came in at the
moment), and demanding of him a vow that he would
live and die in the principles of his mother. Mrs. Luna
declared that if she must be trampled upon — and very
likely it was her fate ! — she would rather be trampled upon
by men than by women, and that if Olive and her friends
should get possession of the government they would be
worse despots than those who were celebrated in history.
Newton took an infant oath that he would never be a
destructive, impious radical, and Olive felt that after this
she needn't trouble herself any more about her sister,
whom she simply committed to her fate. That fate might
very properly be to marry an enemy of her country, a man

xix. THE BOSTONIANS. 161

who, no doubt, desired to treat women with the lash and
manacles, as he and his people had formerly treated the
wretched coloured race. If she was so fond of the fine
old institutions of the past, he would supply them to her
in abundance ; and if she wanted so much to be a conserva-
tive, she could try first how she liked being a conservative's
wife. If Olive troubled herself little about Adeline, she
troubled herself more about Basil Ransom; she said to
herself that since he hated women who respected them-
selves (and each other), destiny would use him rightly in
hanging a person like Adeline round his neck. That
would be the way poetic justice ought to work, for him —
and the law that our prejudices, when they act themselves
out, punish us in doing so. Olive considered all this, as it
was her effort to consider everything, from a very high
point of view, and ended by feeling sure it was not for
the sake of any nervous personal security that she desired
to see her two relations in New York get mixed up together.
If such an event as their marriage would gratify her sense
of fitness, it would be simply as an illustration of certain
laws. Olive, thanks to the philosophic cast of her mind,
was exceedingly fond of illustrations of laws.

I hardly know, however, what illumination it was that
sprang from her consciousness (now a source of considerable
comfort), that Mrs. Farrinder was carrying the war into
distant territories, and would return to Boston only in
time to preside at a grand Female Convention, already
advertised to take place in Boston in the month of June.
It was agreeable to her that this imperial woman should be
away ; it made the field more free, the air more light ; it
suggested an exemption from official criticism. I have not
taken space to mention certain episodes of the more recent
intercourse of these ladies, and must content myself with
tracing them, lightly, in their consequences. These may
be summed up in the remark, which will doubtless startle
no one by its freshness, that two imperial women are
scarcely more likely to hit it off together, as the phrase is,
than two imperial men. Since that party at Miss Birds-
eye's, so important in its results for Olive, she had had
occasion to approach Mrs. Farrinder more nearly, and

M

162 THE BOSTONIANS. xix.

those overtures brought forth the knowledge that the
great leader of the feminine revolution was the one
person (in that part of the world) more concentrated,
more determined, than herself. Miss Chancellor's aspira-
tions, of late, had been immensely quickened; she had
begun to believe in herself to a livelier tune than she had
ever listened to before ; and she now perceived that when
spirit meets spirit there must either be mutual absorption or
a sharp concussion. It had long been familiar to her that
she should have to count with the obstinacy of the world
at large, but she now discovered that she should have to
count also with certain elements in the feminine camp. This
complicated the problem, and such a complication, naturally,
could not make Mrs. Farrinder appear more easy to as-
similate. If Olive's was a high nature and so was hers,
the fault was in neither ; it was only an admonition that
they were not needed as landmarks in the same part of the
field. If such perceptions are delicate as between men,
the reader need not be reminded of the exquisite form
they may assume in natures more refined. So it was that
Olive passed, in three months, from the stage of veneration
to that of competition ; and the process had been acceler-
ated by the introduction of Verena into the fold. Mrs.
Farrinder had behaved in the strangest way about Verena.
First she had been struck with her, and then she hadn't ;
first she had seemed to want to take her in, then she had
shied at her unmistakably — intimating to Olive that there
were enough of that kind already. Of ( that kind ' indeed !
— the phrase reverberated in Miss Chancellor's resentful
soul. Was it possible she didn't know the kind Verena
was of, and with what vulgar aspirants to notoriety did she
confound her? It had been Olive's original desire to
obtain Mrs. Farrinder's stamp for her protegee ; she wished
her to hold a commission from the commander-in-chief.
With this view the two young women had made more than
one pilgrimage to Roxbury, and on one of these occasions
the sibylline mood (in its most charming form) had de-
scended upon Verena. She had fallen into it, naturally
and gracefully, in the course of talk, and poured out a
stream of eloquence even more touching than her regular

xix. THE BOSTONIANS. 163

discourse at Miss Birdseye's. Mrs. Farrinder had taken it
rather drily, and certainly it didn't resemble her own style
of oratory, remarkable and cogent as this was. There had
been considerable question of her writing a letter to the
New York 'Tribune/ the effect of which should be to
launch Miss Tarrant into renown; but this beneficent
epistle never appeared, and now Olive saw that there was
no favour to come from the prophetess of Roxbury. There
had been primnesses, pruderies, small reserves, which ended
by staying her pen. If Olive didn't say at once that she
was jealous of Verena's more attractive manner, it was only
because such a declaration was destined to produce more
effect a little later. What she did say was that evidently
Mrs. Farrinder wanted to keep the movement in her own
hands — viewed with suspicion certain romantic, aesthetic
elements which Olive and Verena seemed to be trying to
introduce into it. They insisted so much, for instance, on
the historic unhappiness of women ; but Mrs. Farrinder
didn't appear to care anything for that, or indeed to know
much about history at all. She seemed to begin just to-
day, and she demanded their rights for them whether they
were unhappy or not. The upshot of this was that Olive
threw herself on Verena's neck with a movement which
was half indignation, half rapture ; she exclaimed that they
would have to fight the battle without human help, but,
after all, it was better so. If they were all in all to each
other, what more could they want? They would be iso-
lated, but they would be free ; and this view of the situation
brought with it a feeling that they had almost already begun
to be a force. It was not, indeed, that Olive's resentment
faded quite away ; for not only had she the sense, doubtless
very presumptuous, that Mrs. Farrinder was the only person
thereabouts of a stature to judge her (a sufficient cause of
antagonism in itself, for if we like to be praised by our
betters we prefer that censure should come from the other
sort), but the kind of opinion she had unexpectedly be-
trayed, after implying such esteem in the earlier phase of
their intercourse, made Olive's cheeks occasionally flush.
She prayed heaven that she might never become so personal,
so narrow. She was frivolous, worldly, an amateur, a

164 THE BOSTONIANS. xix.

trifler, a frequenter of Beacon Street ; her taking up Verena
Tarrant was only a kind of elderly, ridiculous doll-dressing :
this was the light in which Miss Chancellor had reason to
believe that it now suited Mrs. Farrinder to regard her !
It was fortunate, perhaps, that the misrepresentation was
so gross ; yet, none the less, tears of wrath rose more than
once to Olive's eyes when she reflected that this particular
wrong had been put upon her. Frivolous, worldly, Beacon
Street! She appealed to Verena to share in her pledge
that the world should know in due time how much of that
sort of thing there was about her. As I have already
hinted, Verena at such moments quite rose to the occasion ;
she had private pangs at committing herself to give the
cold shoulder to Beacon Street for ever ; but she was now
so completely in Olive's hands that there was no sacrifice
to which she would not have consented in order to prove
that her benefactress was not frivolous.

The matter of her coming to stay for so long in Charles
Street was arranged during a visit that Selah Tarrant paid
there at Miss Chancellor's request. This interview, which
had some curious features, would be worth describing, but
I am forbidden to do more than mention the most striking
of these. Olive wished to have an understanding with
him ; wished the situation to be clear, so that, disagreeable
as it would be to her to receive him, she sent him a sum-
mons for a certain hour — an hour at which she had planned
that Verena should be out of the house. She withheld
this incident from the girl's knowledge, reflecting with some
solemnity that it was the first deception (for Olive her
silence was a deception) that she had yet practised on her
friend, and wondering whether she should have to practise
others in the future. She then and there made up her
mind that she would not shrink from others should they be
necessary. She notified Tarrant that she should keep
Verena a long time, and Tarrant remarked that it was
certainly very pleasant to see her so happily located. But
he also intimated that he should like to know what Miss
Chancellor laid out to do with her ; and the tone of this
suggestion made Olive feel how right she had been to
foresee that their interview would have the stamp of

xix. THE BOSTONIANS. 165

business. It assumed that complexion very definitely when
she crossed over to her desk and wrote Mr. Tarrant a
cheque for a very considerable amount. ' Leave us alone
— entirely alone — for a year, and then I will write you
another :' it was with these words she handed him the little
strip of paper that meant so much, feeling, as she did so,
that surely Mrs. Farrinder herself could not "be less
amateurish than that. Selah looked at the cheque, at Miss
Chancellor, at the cheque again, at the ceiling, at the floor,
at the clock, and once more at his hostess ; then the docu-
ment disappeared beneath the folds of his waterproof, and
she saw that he was putting it into some queer place on
his queer person. 'Well, if I didn't believe you were
going to help her to develop,' he remarked; and he
stopped, while his hands continued to fumble, out of sight,
and he treated Olive to his large joyless smile. She
assured him that he need have no fear on that score;
Verena's development was the thing in the world in which
she took most interest ; she should have every opportunity
for a free expansion. ' Yes, that's the great thing,' Selah
said ; ' it's more important than attracting a crowd. That's
all we shall ask of you ; let her act out her nature. Don't
all the trouble of humanity come from our being pressed
back ? Don't shut down the cover, Miss Chancellor ; just
let her overflow !' And again Tarrant illuminated his
inquiry, his metaphor, by the strange and silent lateral
movement of his jaws. He added, presently, that he
supposed he should have to fix it with Mis' Tarrant ; but
Olive made no answer to that ; she only looked at him
with a face in which she intended to express that there was
nothing that need detain him longer. She knew it had
been fixed with Mrs. Tarrant ; she had been over all that
with Verena, who had told her that her mother was willing
to sacrifice her for her highest good. She had reason to
know (not through Verena, of course), that Mrs. Tarrant
had embraced, tenderly, the idea of a pecuniary compensa-
tion, and there was no fear of her making a scene when
Tarrant should come back with a cheque in his pocket.
'Well, I trust she may develop, richly, and that you may
accomplish what you desire ; it seems as if we had only a

166 THE BOSTONIANS. xix.

little way to go further,' that worthy observed, as he erected
himself for departure.

' It's not a little way ; it's a very long way,' Olive replied,
rather sternly.

Tarrant was on the threshold ; he lingered a little, em-
barrassed by her grimness, for he himself had always
inclined to rose-coloured views of progress, of the march of
truth. He had never met any one so much in earnest as
this definite, literal young woman, who had taken such an
unhoped-for fancy to his daughter • whose longing for the
new day had such perversities of pessimism, and who, in
the midst of something that appeared to be terribly search-
ing in her honesty, was willing to corrupt him, as a father,
with the most extravagant orders on her bank. He hardly
knew in what language to speak to her; it seemed as if
there was nothing soothing enough, when a lady adopted
that tone about a movement which was thought by some
of the brightest to be so promising. ' Oh, well, I guess
there's some kind of mysterious law . . .' he murmured,
almost timidly ; and so he passed from Miss Chancellor's
sight.

XX.

SHE hoped she should not soon see him again, and
there appeared to be no reason she should, if their inter-
course was to be conducted by means of cheques. The
understanding with Verena was, of course, complete; she
had promised to stay with her friend as long as her friend
should require it. She had said at first that she couldn't
give up her mother, but she had been made to feel that
there was no question of giving up. She should be as free
as air, to go and come ; she could spend hours and days
with her 'mother, whenever Mrs. Tarrant required her
attention ; all that Olive asked of her was that, for the time,
she should regard Charles Street as her home. There was
no struggle about this, for the simple reason that by the
time the question came to the front Verena was completely
under the charm. The idea of Olive's charm will perhaps
make the reader smile ; but I use the word not in its
derived, but in its literal sense. The fine web of authority,
of dependence, that her strenuous companion had woven
about her, was now as dense as a suit of golden mail ; and
Verena was thoroughly interested in their great undertaking ;
she saw it in the light of an active, enthusiastic faith. The
benefit that her father desired for her was now assured ;
she expanded, developed, on the most liberal scale. Olive
saw the difference, and you may imagine how she rejoiced
in it ; she had never known a greater pleasure. Verena's
former attitude had been girlish submission, grateful, curious
sympathy. She had given herself, in her young, amused
surprise, because Olive's stronger will and the incisive pro-
ceedings with which she pointed her purpose drew her on.
Besides, she was held by hospitality, the vision of new
social horizons, the sense of novelty, and the love of change.

168 THE BOSTONTANS. xx.

But now the girl was disinterestedly attached to the
precious things they were to do together ; she cared about
them for themselves, believed in them ardently, had them
constantly in mind. Her share in the union of the two
young women was no longer passive, purely appreciative ;
it was passionate, too, and it put forth a beautiful energy.
If Olive desired to get Verena into training, she could
flatter herself that the process had already begun, and that
her colleague enjoyed it almost as much as she. Therefore
she could say to herself, without the imputation of heart-
lessness, that when she left her mother it was for a noble,
a sacred use. In point of fact, she left her very little, and
she spent hours in jingling, aching, jostled journeys between
Charles Street and the stale suburban cottage. Mrs.
Tarrant sighed and grimaced, wrapped herself more than
ever in her mantle, said she didn't know as she was fit to
struggle alone, and that, half the time, if Verena was away,
she wouldn't have the nerve to answer the door-bell ; she
was incapable, of course, of neglecting such an opportunity
to posture as one who paid with her heart's blood for
leading the van of human progress. But Verena had an
inner sense (she judged her mother now, a little, for the
first time), that she would be sorry to be taken at her word,
and that she felt safe enough in trusting to her daughter's
generosity. She could not divest herself of the faith —
even now that Mrs. Luna was gone, leaving no trace, and
the gray walls of a sedentary winter were apparently closing
about the two young women — she could not renounce the
theory that a residence in Charles Street must at least
produce some contact with the brilliant classes. She was
vexed at her daughter's resignation to not going to parties
and to Miss Chancellor's not giving them ; but it was
nothing new for her to have to practise patience, and she
could feel, at least, that it was just as handy for Mr. Burrage
to call on the child in town, where he spent half his time,
sleeping constantly at Parker's.

It was a fact that this fortunate youth called very often,
and Verena saw him with Olive's full concurrence whenever
she was at home. It had now been quite agreed between
them that no artificial limits should be set to the famous

xx. THE BOSTONIANS. 169

phase; and Olive had, while it lasted, a sense of real
heroism in steeling herself against uneasiness. It seemed
to her, moreover, only justice that she should make some
concession ; if Verena made a great sacrifice of filial duty
in coming to live with her (this, of course, should be per-
manent— she would buy off the Tarrants from year to year),
she must not incur the imputation (the world would judge
her, in that case, ferociously) of keeping her from forming
common social ties. The friendship of a young man and
a young woman was, according to the pure code of New
England, a common social tie ; and as the weeks elapsed
Miss Chancellor saw no reason to repent of her temerity.
Verena was not falling in love ; she felt that she should
know it, should guess it on the spot. Verena was fond of
human intercourse; she was essentially a sociable creature;
she liked to shine and smile and talk and listen ; and so
far as Henry Burrage was concerned he introduced an
element of easy and convenient relaxation into a life now
a good deal stiffened (Olive was perfectly willing to own it)
by great civic purposes. But the girl was being saved,
without interference, by the simple operation of her interest
in those very designs. From this time there was no need
of putting pressure on her ; her own springs were working ;
the fire with which she glowed came from within. Sacredly,
brightly single she would remain ; her only espousals would
be at the altar of a great cause. Olive always absented
herself when Mr. Burrage was announced; and when
Verena afterwards attempted to give some account of his
conversation she checked her, said she would rather know
nothing about it — all with a very solemn mildness ; this
made her feel very superior, truly noble. She knew by
this time (I scarcely can tell how, since Verena could give
her no report), exactly what sort of a youth Mr. Burrage
was : he was weakly pretentious, softly original, cultivated
eccentricity, patronised progress, liked to have mysteries,
sudden appointments to keep, anonymous persons to visit,
the air of leading a double life, of being devoted to a girl
whom people didn't know, or at least didn't meet. Of
course he liked to make an impression on Verena; but
what he mainly liked was to play her off upon the other

170 THE BOSTONIANS. xx.

girls, the daughters of fashion, with whom he danced at
Papanti's. Such were the images that proceeded from
Olive's rich moral consciousness. 'Well, he is greatly
interested in our movement:' so much Verena once
managed to announce ; but the words rather irritated Miss
Chancellor, who, as we know, did not care to allow for
accidental exceptions in the great masculine conspiracy.

In the month of March Verena told her that Mr. Burrage
was offering matrimony — offering it with much insistence,
begging that she would at least wait and think of it before
giving him a final answer. Verena was evidently very glad
to be able to say to Olive that she had assured him she
couldn't think of it, and that if he expected this he had
better not come any more. He continued to come, and it
was therefore to he supposed that he had ceased to count
on such a concession ; it was now Olive's opinion that he
really didn't desire it. She had a theory that he proposed
to almost any girl who was not likely to accept him — did
it because he was making a collection of such episodes — a
mental album of declarations, blushes, hesitations, refusals
that just missed imposing themselves as acceptances, quite
as he collected enamels and Cremona violins. He would
be very sorry indeed to ally himself to the house of Tarrant ;
but such a fear didn't prevent him from holding it be-
coming in a man of taste to give that encouragement to
low-born girls who were pretty, for one looked out for the
special cases in which, for reasons (even the lowest might
have reasons), they wouldn't ' rise.' ' I told you I wouldn't
marry him, and I won't,' Verena said, delightedly, to her
friend ; her tone suggested that a certain credit belonged
to her for the way she carried out her assurance. ' I never
thought you would, if you didn't want to,' Olive replied to
this; and Verena could have no rejoinder but the good-
humour that sat in her eyes, unable as she was to say that
she had wanted to. They had a little discussion, however,
when she intimated that she pitied him for his discomfiture,
Olive's contention being that, selfish, conceited, pampered
and insincere, he might properly be left now to digest his
affront. Miss Chancellor felt none of the remorse now
that she would have felt six months before at standing in

xx. THE BOSTONIANS. 171

the way of such a chance for Verena, and she would have
been very angry if any one had asked her if she were not
afraid of taking too much upon herself. She would have
said, moreover, that she stood in no one's way, and that
even if she were not there Verena would never think
seriously of a frivolous little man who fiddled while Rome
was burning. This did not prevent Olive from making up
her mind that they had better go to Europe in the spring ;
a year's residence in that quarter of the globe would be
highly agreeable to Verena, and might even contribute to
the evolution of her genius. It cost Miss Chancellor an
effort to admit that any virtue still lingered in the elder
world, and that it could have any important lesson for two
such good Americans as her friend and herself; but it
suited her just then to make this assumption, which was
not altogether sincere. It was recommended by the idea
that it would get her companion out of the way — out of the
way of officious fellow-citizens — till she should be absolutely
firm on her feet, and would also give greater intensity
to their own long conversation. On that continent of
strangers they would cleave more closely still to each other.
This, of course, would be to fly before the inevitable
'phase,' much more than to face it; but Olive decided
that if they should reach unscathed the term of their delay
(the first of July) she should have faced it as much as
either justice or generosity demanded. I may as well say
at once that she traversed most of this period without
further serious alarms and with a great many little thrills of
bliss and hope.

Nothing happened to dissipate the good omens with
which her partnership with Verena Tarrant was at present
surrounded. They threw themselves into study ; they had
innumerable big books from the Athenaeum, and consumed
the midnight oil. Henry Burrage, after Verena had shaken
her head at him so sweetly and sadly, returned to New York,
giving no sign ; they only heard that he had taken refuge
under the ruffled maternal wing. (Olive, at least, took for
granted the wing was ruffled ; she could fancy how Mrs. .
Burrage would be affected by the knowledge that her son
had been refused by the daughter of a mesmeric healer.

172 THE BOSTONIANS. xx,

She would be almost as angry as if she had learnt that he
had been accepted.) Matthias Pardon had not yet taken
his revenge in the newspapers ; he was perhaps nursing
his thunderbolts ; at any rate, now that the operatic season
had begun, he was much occupied in interviewing the
principal singers, one of whom he described in one of the
leading journals (Olive, at least, was sure it was only he
who could write like that), as 'a dear little woman with
baby dimples and kittenish movements.' The Tarrants
were apparently given up to a measure of sensual ease with
which they had not hitherto been familiar, thanks to the
increase of income that they drew from their eccentric pro-
tectress. Mrs. Tarrant now enjoyed the ministrations of a
' girl ' ; it was partly her pride (at any rate, she chose to
give it this turn), that her house had for many years been
conducted without the element — so debasing on both sides
— of servile, mercenary labour. She wrote to Olive (she
was perpetually writing to her now, but Olive never answered),
that she was conscious of having fallen to a lower plane,
but she admitted that it was a prop to her wasted spirit to
have some one to converse with when Selah was off.
Verena, of course, perceived the difference, which was in-
adequately explained by the theory of a sudden increase of
her father's practice (nothing of her father's had ever
increased like that), and ended by guessing the cause of it
— a discovery which did not in the least disturb her equa-
nimity. She accepted the idea that her parents should
receive a pecuniary tribute from the extraordinary friend
whom she had encountered on the threshold of woman-
hood, just as she herself accepted that friend's irresistible
hospitality. She had no worldly pride, no traditions of
independence, no ideas of what was done and what was
not done ; but there was only one thing that equalled this
perfectly gentle and natural insensibility to favours —
namely, the inveteracy of her habit of not asking them.
Olive had had an apprehension that she would flush a little
at learning the terms on which they should now be able to
pursue their career together ; but Verena never changed
colour ; it was either not new or not disagreeable to her
that the authors of her being should be bought off, silenced

xx. THE BOSTONIANS. 173

by money, treated as the troublesome of the lower orders
are treated when they are not locked up ; so that her friend
had a perception, after this, that it would probably be im-
possible in any way ever to offend her. She was too
rancourless, too detached from conventional standards, too
free from private self-reference. It was too much to say of
her that she forgave injuries, since she was not conscious of
them ; there was in forgiveness a certain arrogance of which
she was incapable, and her bright mildness glided over the
many traps that life sets for our consistency. Olive had
always held that pride was necessary to character, but there
was no peculiarity of Verena's that could make her spirit
seem less pure. The added luxuries in the little house at
Cambridge, which even with their help was still such a
penal settlement, made her feel afresh that before she came
to the rescue the daughter of that house had traversed a
desert of sordid misery. She had cooked and washed and
swept and stitched ; she had worked harder than any of
Miss Chancellor's servants. These things had left no trace
upon her person or her mind ; everything fresh and fair
renewed itself in her with extraordinary facility, everything
ugly and tiresome evaporated as soon as it touched her ;
but Olive deemed that, being what she was, she had a right
to immense compensations. In the future she should have
exceeding luxury and ease, and Miss Chancellor had no
difficulty in persuading herself that persons doing the high
intellectual and moral work to which the two young ladies
in Charles Street were now committed owed it to them-
selves, owed it to the groaning sisterhood, to cultivate the
best material conditions. She herself was nothing of a
sybarite, and she had proved, visiting the alleys and slums
of Boston in the service of the Associated Charities, that
there was no foulness of disease or misery she feared to
look in the face ; but her house had always been thoroughly
well regulated, she was passionately clean, and she was an
excellent woman of business. Now, however, she elevated
daintiness to a religion ; her interior shone with superfluous
friction, with punctuality, with winter roses. Among these
soft influences Verena herself bloomed like the flower that
attains such perfection in Boston. Olive had always rated

174 THE BOSTONIANS. xx.

high the native refinement of her countrywomen, their
latent ' adaptability/ their talent for accommodating them-
selves at a glance to changed conditions ; but the way her
companion rose with the level of the civilisation that sur-
rounded her, the way she assimilated all delicacies and ab-
sorbed all traditions, left this friendly theory halting behind.
The winter days were still, indoors, in Charles Street, and
the winter nights secure from interruption. Our two young
women had plenty of duties, but Olive had never favoured
the custom of running in and out. Much conference on
social and reformatory topics went forward under her roof,
and she received her colleagues — she belonged to twenty
associations and committees — only at preappointed hours,
which she expected them to observe rigidly. Verena's
share in these proceedings was not active; she hovered
over them, smiling, listening, dropping occasionally a fanciful
though never an idle word, like some gently animated
image placed there for good omen. It was understood
that her part was before the scenes, not behind ; that she
was not a prompter, but (potentially, at least) a ' popular
favourite,' and that the work over which Miss Chancellor
presided so efficiently was a general preparation of the
platform on which, later, her companion would execute the
most striking steps.

The western windows of Olive's drawing-room, looking
over the water, took in the red sunsets of winter ; the long,
low bridge that crawled, on its staggering posts, across the
Charles ; the casual patches of ice and snow ; the desolate
suburban horizons, peeled and made bald by the rigour of
the season ; the general hard, cold void of the prospect ;
the extrusion, at Charlestown, at Cambridge, of a few
chimneys and steeples, straight, sordid tubes of factories
and engine-shops, or spare, heavenward finger of the New
England meeting-house. There was something inexorable
in the poverty of the scene, shameful in the meanness of
its details, which gave a collective impression of boards
and tin and frozen earth, sheds and rotting piles, railway-
lines striding flat across a thoroughfare of puddles, and
tracks of the humbler, the universal horse-car, traversing
obliquely this path of danger; loose fences, vacant lots,

xx. THE BOSTONIANS. 175

mounds of refuse, yards bestrewn with iron pipes, telegraph
poles, and bare wooden backs of places. Verena thought
such a view lovely, and she was by no means without
excuse when, as the afternoon closed, the ugly picture was
tinted with a clear, cold rosiness. The air, in its windless
chill, seemed to tinkle like a crystal, the faintest gradations
of tone were perceptible in the sky, the west became deep
and delicate, everything grew doubly distinct before taking
on the dimness of evening. There were pink flushes on
snow, 'tender' reflections in patches of stiffened marsh,
sounds of car-bells, no longer vulgar, but almost silvery, on
the long bridge, lonely outlines of distant dusky undulations
against the fading glow. These agreeable effects used to
light up that end of the drawing-room, and Olive often sat
at the window with her companion before it was time for
the lamp. They admired the sunsets, they rejoiced in the
ruddy spots projected upon the parlour-wall, they followed
the darkening perspective in fanciful excursions. They
watched the stellar points come out at last in a colder
heaven, and then, shuddering a little, arm in arm, they
turned away, with a sense that the winter night was even
more cruel than the tyranny of men — turned back to drawn
curtains and a brighter fire and a glittering tea-tray and
more and more talk about the long martyrdom of women,
a subject as to which Olive was inexhaustible and really
most interesting. There were some nights of deep snow-
fall, when Charles Street was white and muffled and the
door-bell foredoomed to silence, which seemed little islands
of lamplight, of enlarged and intensified vision. They read
a great deal of history together, and read it ever with the
same thought — that of finding confirmation in it for this
idea that their sex had suffered inexpressibly, and that at
any moment in the course of human affairs the state of the
world would have been so much less horrible (history
seemed to them in every way horrible), if women had been
able to press down the scale. Verena was full of sugges-
tions which stimulated discussions; it was she, oftenest,
who kept in view the fact that a good many women in the
past had been intrusted with power and had not always
used it amiably, who brought up the wicked queens, the

1 76 THE BOSTONIANS. xx.

profligate mistresses of kings. These ladies were easily
disposed of between the two, and the public crimes of
Bloody Mary, the private misdemeanours of Faustina, wife
of the pure Marcus Aurelius, were very satisfactorily classi-
fied. If the influence of women in the past accounted for
every act of virtue that men had happened to achieve, it
only made the matter balance properly that the influence
of men should explain the casual irregularities of the other
sex. Olive could see how few books had passed through
Verena's hands, and how little the home of the Tarrants
had been a house of reading ; but the girl now traversed
the fields of literature with her characteristic lightness of
step. Everything she turned to or took up became an
illustration of the facility, the ' giftedness,' which Olive, who
had so little of it, never ceased to wonder at and prize.
Nothing frightened her ; she always smiled at it, she could
do anything she tried. As she knew how to do other
things, she knew how to study ; she read quickly and
remembered infallibly ; could repeat, days afterward,
passages that she appeared only to have glanced at. Olive,
of course, was more and more happy to think that their
cause should have the services of an organisation so rare.

All this doubtless sounds rather dry, and I hasten to add
that our friends were not always shut up in Miss Chan-
cellor's strenuous parlour. In spite of Olive's desire to
keep her precious inmate to herself and to bend her atten-
tion upon their common studies, in spite of her constantly
reminding Verena that this winter was to be purely educa-
tive and that the platitudes of the satisfied and unregenerate
would have little to teach her, in spite, in short, of the
severe and constant duality of our young women, it must
not be supposed that their life had not many personal
confluents and tributaries. Individual and original as Miss
Chancellor was universally acknowledged to be, she was yet
a typical Bostonian, and as a typical Bostonian she could
not fail to belong in some degree to a ' set.' It had been
said of her that she was in it but not of it ; but she was of
it enough to go occasionally into other houses and to
receive their occupants in her own. It was her belief that
she filled her tea-pot with the spoon of hospitality, and

xx. THE BOSTONIANS. 177

made a good many select spirits feel that they were welcome
under her roof at convenient hours. She had a preference
for what she called real people, and there were several
whose reality she had tested by arts known to herself. This
little society was rather suburban and miscellaneous ; it was
prolific in ladies who trotted about, early and late, with
books from the Athenseum nursed behind their muff, or
little nosegays of exquisite flowers that they were carrying
as presents to each other. Verena, who, when Olive was
not with her, indulged in a good deal of desultory con-
templation at the window, saw them pass the house in
Charles Street, always apparently straining a little, as if
they might be too late for something. At almost any time,
for she envied their preoccupation, she would have taken
the chance with them. Very often, when she described
them to her mother, Mrs. Tarrant didn't know who they
were ; there were even days (she had so many discourage-
ments) when it seemed as if she didn't want to know. So
long as they were not some one else, it seemed to be no
use that they were themselves; whoever they were, they
were sure to have that defect. Even after all her mother's
disquisitions Verena had but vague ideas as to whom she
would have liked them to be ; and it was only when the
girl talked of the concerts, to all of which Olive subscribed
and conducted her inseparable friend, that Mrs. Tarrant
appeared to feel in any degree that her daughter was living
up to the standard formed for her in their Cambridge home.
As all the world knows, the opportunities in Boston for
hearing good music are numerous and excellent, and it
had long been Miss Chancellor's practice to cultivate the
best. She went in, as the phrase is, for the superior pro-
grammes, and that high, dim, dignified Music Hall, which
has echoed in its time to so much eloquence and so much
melody, and of which the very proportions and colour seem
to teach respect and attention, shed the protection of its
illuminated cornice, this winter, upon no faces more intelli-
gently upturned than those of the young women for whom
Bach and Beethoven only repeated, in a myriad forms, the
idea that was always with them. Symphonies and fugues
only stimulated their convictions, excited their revolutionary

N

1 78 THE BOSTONIANS. xx.

passion, led their imagination further in the direction in
which it was always pressing. It lifted them to immeasur-
able heights ; and as they sat looking at the great florid,
sombre organ, overhanging the bronze statue of Beethoven,
they felt that this was the only temple in which the votaries
of their creed could worship.

And yet their music was not their greatest joy, for they
had two others which they cultivated at least as zealously.
One of these was simply the society of old Miss Birdseye,
of whom Olive saw more this winter than she had ever seen
before. It had become apparent that her long and beauti-
ful career was drawing to a close, her earnest, unremitting
work was over, her old-fashioned weapons were broken and
dull. Olive would have liked to hang them up as venerable
relics of a patient fight, and this was what she seemed to do
when she made the poor lady relate her battles — never
glorious and brilliant, but obscure and wastefully heroic —
call back the figures of her companions in arms, exhibit her
medals and scars. Miss Birdseye knew that her uses were
ended ; she might pretend still to go about the business of
unpopular causes, might fumble for papers in her imme-
morial satchel and think she had important appointments,
might sign petitions, attend conventions, say to Doctor
Prance that if she would only make her sleep she should
live to see a great many improvements yet ; she ached and
was weary, growing almost as glad to look back (a great
anomaly for Miss Birdseye) as to look forward. She let
herself be coddled now by her friends of the new genera-
tion ; there were days when she seemed to want nothing
better than to sit by Olive's fire and ramble on about the
old struggles, with a vague, comfortable sense — no physical
rapture of Miss Birdseye's could be very acute — of im-
munity from wet feet, from the draughts that prevail at thin
meetings, of independence of street-cars that would probably
arrive overflowing ; and also a pleased perception, not that
she was an example to these fresh lives which began with
more advantages than hers, but that she was in some
degree an encouragement, as she helped them to measure
the way the new truths had advanced — being able to tell
them of such a different state of things when she was a

xx. THE BOSTONIANS. 179

young lady, the daughter of a very talented teacher (indeed
her mother had been a teacher too), down in Connecticut.
She had always had for Olive a kind of aroma of martyrdom,
and her battered, unremunerated, unpensioned old age
brought angry tears, springing from depths of outraged
theory, into Miss Chancellor's eyes. For Verena, too, she
was a picturesque humanitary figure. Verena had been in
the habit of meeting martyrs from her childhood up, but
she had seen none with so many reminiscences as Miss
Birdseye, or who had been so nearly scorched by penal
fires. She had had escapes, in the early days of abolition-
ism, which it was a marvel she could tell with so little
implication that she had shown courage. She had roamed
through certain parts of the South, carrying the Bible to
the slave ; and more than one of her companions, in the
course of these expeditions, had been tarred and feathered.
She herself, at one season, had spent a month in a Georgian
jail. She had preached temperance in Irish circles where
the doctrine was received with missiles ; she had interfered
between wives and husbands mad with drink; she had
taken filthy children, picked up in the street, to her own
poor rooms, and had removed their pestilent rags and
washed their sore bodies with slippery little hands. In her
own person she appeared to Olive and Verena a represent-
ative of suffering humanity ; the pity they felt for her was
part of their pity for all who were weakest and most hardly
used ; and it struck Miss Chancellor (more especially) that
this frumpy little missionary was the last link in a tradition,
and that when she should be called away the heroic age of
New England life — the age of plain living and high thinking,
of pure ideals and earnest effort, of moral passion and noble
experiment — would effectually be closed. It was the
perennial freshness of Miss Birdseye's faith that had had
such a contagion for these modern maidens, the unquenched
flame of her transcendentalism, the simplicity of her vision,
the way in which, in spite of mistakes, deceptions, the
changing fashions of reform, which make the remedies of a
previous generation look as ridiculous as their bonnets, the
only thing that was still actual for her was the elevation of
the species by the reading of Emerson and the frequentation

i8o THE BOSTONIANS. xx.

of Tremont Temple. Olive had been active enough, for
years, in the city-missions; she too had scoured dirty
children, and, in squalid lodging-houses, had gone into
rooms where the domestic situation was strained and the
noises made the neighbours turn pale. But she reflected
that after such exertions she had the refreshment of a pretty
house, a drawing-room full of flowers, a crackling hearth,
where she threw in pine-cones and made them snap, an
imported tea-service, a Chickering piano, and the Deutsche
Rundschau ; whereas Miss Birdseye had only a bare, vulgar
room, with a hideous flowered carpet (it looked like a
dentist's), a cold furnace, the evening-paper, and Doctor
Prance. Olive and Verena were present at another of her
gatherings before the winter ended ; it resembled the
occasion that we described at the beginning of this history,
with the difference that Mrs. Farrinder was not there to
oppress the company with her greatness, and that Verena
made a speech without the co-operation of her father. This
young lady had delivered herself with even finer effect than
before, and Olive could see how much she had gained, in
confidence and range of allusion, since the educative process
in Charles Street began. Her motif was now a kind of
unprepared tribute to Miss Birdseye, the fruit of the
occasion and of the unanimous tenderness of the younger
members of the circle, which made her a willing mouth-
piece. She pictured her laborious career, her early asso-
ciates (Eliza P. Moseley was not neglected as Verena
passed), her difficulties and dangers and triumphs, her
humanising effect upon so many, her serene and honoured
old age — expressed, in short, as one of the ladies said, just
the very way they all felt about her. Verena's face
brightened and grew triumphant as she spoke, but she
brought tears into the eyes of most of the others. It was
Olive's opinion that nothing could be more graceful and
touching, and she saw that the impression made was now
deeper than on the former evening. Miss Birdseye went
about with her eighty years of innocence, her undiscriminat-
ing spectacles, asking her friends if it wasn't perfectly
splendid ; she took none of it to herself, she regarded it
only as a brilliant expression of Verena's gift. Olive

xx. THE BOSTONIANS. 181

thought, afterwards, that if a collection could only be taken
up on the spot, the good lady would be made easy for the
rest of her days ; then she remembered that most of her
guests were as impecunious as herself.

I have intimated that our young friends had a source of
fortifying emotion which was distinct from the hours they
spent with Beethoven and Bach, or in hearing Miss Birds-
eye describe Concord as it used to be. This consisted in
the wonderful insight they had obtained into the history of
feminine anguish. They perused that chapter perpetually
and zealously, and they derived from it the purest part of
their mission. Olive had pored over it so long, so
earnestly, that she was now in complete possession of the
subject ; it was the one thing in life which she felt she had
really mastered. She was able to exhibit it to Verena with
the greatest authority and accuracy, to lead her up and
down, in and out, through all the darkest and most tortuous
passages. We know that she was without belief in her own
eloquence, but she was very eloquent when she reminded
Verena how the exquisite weakness of women had never
been their defence, but had only exposed them to sufferings
more acute than masculine grossness can conceive. Their
odious partner had trampled upon them from the beginning
of time, and their tenderness, their abnegation, had been
his opportunity. All the bullied wives, the stricken
mothers, the dishonoured, deserted maidens who have
lived on the earth and longed to leave it, passed and
repassed before her eyes, and the interminable dim proces-
sion seemed to stretch out a myriad hands to her. She
sat with them at their trembling vigils, listened for the
tread, the voice, at which they grew pale and sick, walked
with them by the dark waters that offered to wash away
misery and shame, took with them, even, when the vision
grew intense, the last shuddering leap. She had analysed
to an extraordinary fineness their susceptibility, their soft-
ness ; she knew (or she thought she knew) all the possible
tortures of anxiety, of suspense and dread ; and she had
made up her mind that it was women, in the end, who had
paid for everything. In the last resort the whole burden
of the human lot came upon them ; it pressed upon them

182 THE BOSTONIANS. xx.

far more than on the others, the intolerable load of fate.
It was they who sat cramped and chained to receive it ; it
was they who had done all the waiting and taken all the
wounds. The sacrifices, the blood, the tears, the terrors
were theirs. Their organism was in itself a challenge to
suffering, and men had practised upon it with an impudence
that knew no bounds. As they were the weakest most had
been wrung from them, and as they were the most generous
they had been most deceived Olive Chancellor would have
rested her case, had it been necessary, on those general
facts ; and her simple and comprehensive contention was
that the peculiar wretchedness which had been the very
essence of the feminine lot was a monstrous artificial im-
position, crying aloud for redress. She was willing to
admit that women, too, could be bad; that there were
many about the world who were false, immoral, vile. But
their errors were as nothing to their sufferings ; they had
expiated, in advance, an eternity, if need be, of misconduct.
Olive poured forth these views to her listening and respon-
sive friend ; she presented them again and again, and there
was no light in which they did not seem to palpitate with
truth. Verena was immensely wrought upon ; a subtle fire
passed into her; she was not so hungry for revenge as
Olive, but at the last, before they went to Europe (I shall
take no place to describe the manner in which she threw
herself into that project), she quite agreed with her com-
panion that after so many ages of wrong (it would also be
after the European journey) men must take their turn, men
must pay !

BOOK SECOND.

XXI.

BASIL RANSOM lived in New York, rather far to the east-
ward, and in the upper reaches of the town ; he occupied
two small shabby rooms in a somewhat decayed mansion
which stood next to the corner of the Second Avenue.
The corner itself was formed by a considerable grocer's
shop, the near neighbourhood of which was fatal to any
pretensions Ransom and his fellow-lodgers might have had
in regard to gentility of situation. The house had a red,
rusty face, and faded green shutters, of which the slats were
limp and at variance with each other. In one of the lower
windows was suspended a fly-blown card, with the words
{ Table Board ' affixed in letters cut (not very neatly) out
of coloured paper, of graduated tints, and surrounded with
a small band of stamped gilt. The two sides of the shop
were protected by an immense pent-house shed, which pro-
jected over a greasy pavement and was supported by wooden
posts fixed in the curbstone. Beneath it, on the dislocated
flags, barrels and baskets were freely and picturesquely
grouped ; an open cellarway yawned beneath the feet of
those who might pause to gaze too fondly on the savoury
wares displayed in the window ; a strong odour of smoked
fish, combined with a fragrance of molasses, hung about the
spot; the pavement, toward the gutters, was fringed with
dirty panniers, heaped with potatoes, carrots, and onions ;
and a smart, bright waggon, with the horse detached from
the shafts, drawn up on the edge of the abominable road
(it contained holes and ruts a foot deep, and immemorial
accumulations of stagnant mud), imparted an idle, rural,
pastoral air to a scene otherwise perhaps expressive of a
rank civilisation. The establishment was of the kind known
to New Yorkers as a Dutch grocery; and red-faced,

186 THE BOSTONIANS. xxi.

yellow -haired, bare -armed vendors might have been ob-
served to lounge in the doorway. I mention it not on
account of any particular influence it may have had on the
life or the thoughts of Basil Ransom, but for old acquaintance
sake and that of local colour; besides which, a figure is
nothing without a setting, and our young man came and
went every day, with rather an indifferent, unperceiving step,
it is true, among the objects I have briefly designated.
One of his rooms was directly above the street-door of the
house ; such a dormitory, when it is so exiguous, is called
in the nomenclature of New York a ' hall bedroom. ' The
sitting-room, beside it, was slightly larger, and they both
commanded a row of tenements no less degenerate than
Ransom's own habitation — houses built forty years before,
and already sere and superannuated. These were also
painted red, and the bricks were accentuated by a white
line ; they were garnished, on the first floor, with balconies
covered with small tin roofs, striped in different colours,
and with an elaborate iron lattice-work, which gave them a
repressive, cage-like appearance, and caused them slightly
to resemble the little boxes for peeping unseen into the
street, which are a feature of oriental towns. Such posts of
observation commanded a view of the grocery on the corner,
of the relaxed and disjointed roadway, enlivened at the
curbstone with an occasional ash-barrel or with gas-lamps
drooping from the perpendicular, and westward, at the end
of the truncated vista, of the fantastic skeleton of the Elevated
Railway, overhanging the transverse longitudinal street,
which it darkened and smothered with the immeasurable
spinal column and myriad clutching paws of an antediluvian
monster. If the opportunity were not denied me here, I
should like to give some account of Basil Ransom's interior,
of certain curious persons of both sexes, for the most part
not favourites of fortune, who had found an obscure asylum
there ; some picture of the crumpled little table d'hote^ at
two dollars and a half a week, where everything felt sticky,
which went forward in the low-ceiled basement, under the
conduct of a couple of shuffling negresses, who mingled in
the conversation and indulged in low, mysterious chuckles
when it took a facetious turn. But we need, in strictness,

xxi. THE BOSTONIANS. 187

concern ourselves with it no further than to gather the im-
plication that the young Mississippian, even a year and a
half after that momentous visit of his to Boston, had not
made his profession very lucrative.

He had been diligent, he had been ambitious, but he
had not yet been successful. During the few weeks pre-
ceding the moment at which we meet him again, he had
even begun to lose faith altogether in his earthly destiny.
It became much of a question with him whether success in
any form was written there ; whether for a hungry young
Mississippian, without means, without friends, wanting, too,
in the highest energy, the wisdom of the serpent, personal
arts and national prestige, the game of life was to be won
in New York. He had been on the point of giving it up
and returning to the home of his ancestors, where, as he
heard from his mother, there was still just a sufficient supply
of hot corn-cake to support existence. He had never believed
much in his luck, but during the last year it had been
guilty of aberrations surprising even to a constant, an imper-
turbable, victim of fate. Not only had he not extended his
connection, but he had lost most of the little business
which was an object of complacency to him a twelvemonth
before. He had had none but small jobs, and he had
made a mess of more than one of them. Such accidents
had not had a happy effect upon his reputation ; he had
been able to perceive that this fair flower may be nipped
when it is so tender a bud as scarcely to be palpable. He
had formed a partnership with a person who seemed likely
to repair some of his deficiencies — a young man from Rhode
Island, acquainted, according to his own expression, with
the inside track. But this gentleman himself, as it turned
out, would have been better for a good deal of remodelling,
and Ransom's principal deficiency, which was, after all, that
of cash, was not less apparent to him after his colleague,
prior to a sudden and unexplained departure for Europe,
had drawn the slender accumulations of the firm out of the
bank. Ransom sat for hours in his office, waiting for clients
who either did not come, or, if they did come, did not seem
to find him encouraging, as they usually left him with the re-
mark that they would think what they would do. They thought

188 THE BOSTONIANS. xxi.

to little purpose, and seldom reappeared, so that at last he
began to wonder whether there were not a prejudice against
his Southern complexion. Perhaps they didn't like the way
he spoke. If they could show him a better way, he was
willing to adopt it; but the manner of New York could not be
acquired by precept, and example, somehow, was not in this
case contagious. He wondered whether he were stupid and
unskilled, and he was finally obliged to confess to himself
that he was unpractical.

This confession was in itself a proof of the fact, for
nothing could be less fruitful than such a speculation,
terminating in such a way. He was perfectly aware that
he cared a great deal for the theory, and so his visitors
must have thought when they found him, with one of his
long legs twisted round the other, reading a volume of De
Tocqueville. That was the kind of reading he liked ; he
had thought a great deal about social and economical ques-
tions, forms of government and the happiness of peoples.
The convictions he had arrived at were not such as mix
gracefully with the time-honoured verities a young lawyer
looking out for business is in the habit of taking for granted ;
but he had to reflect that these doctrines would probably
not contribute any more to his prosperity in Mississippi
than in New York. Indeed, he scarcely could think of the
country where they would be a particular advantage to him.
It came home to him that his opinions were stiff, whereas
in comparison his effort was lax; and he accordingly
began to wonder whether he might not make a living by
his opinions. He had always had a desire for public life ;
to cause one's ideas to be embodied in national conduct
appeared to him the highest form of human enjoyment.
But there was little enough that was public in his solitary
studies, and he asked himself what was the use of his having
an office at all, and why he might not as well carry on his
profession at the Astor Library, where, in his spare hours
and on chance holidays, he did an immense deal of sugges-
tive reading. He took copious notes and memoranda, and
these things sometimes shaped themselves in a way that
might possibly commend them to the editors of periodicals.
Readers perhaps would come, if clients didn't; so he

xxi. THE BOSTONIANS. 189

produced, with a great deal of labour, half a dozen articles,
from which, when they were finished, it seemed to him that
he had omitted all the points he wished most to make, and
addressed them to the powers that preside over weekly and
monthly publications. They were all declined with thanks,
and he would have been forced to believe that the accent
of his languid clime brought him luck as little under the
pen as on the lips, had not another explanation been
suggested by one of the more explicit of his oracles, in
relation to a paper on the rights of minorities. This
gentleman pointed out that his doctrines were about three
hundred years behind the age; doubtless some magazine
of the sixteenth century would have been very happy to
print them. This threw light on his own suspicion that he
was attached to causes that could only, in the nature of
things, be unpopular. The disagreeable editor was right
about his being out of date, only he had got the time wrong.
He had come centuries too soon ; he was not too old, but
too new. Such an impression, however, would not have
prevented him from going into politics, if there had been
any other way to represent constituencies than by being
elected. People might be found eccentric enough to vote
for him in Mississippi, but meanwhile where should he find
the twenty-dollar greenbacks which it was his ambition to
transmit from time to time to his female relations, confined
so constantly to a farinaceous diet ? It came over him with
some force that his opinions would not yield interest, and
the evaporation of this pleasing hypothesis made him feel
like a man in an open boat, at sea, who should just have
parted with his last rag of canvas.

I shall not attempt a complete description of Ransom's
ill-starred views, being convinced that the reader will guess
them as he goes, for they had a frolicsome, ingenious way
of peeping out of the young man's conversation. I shall
do them sufficient justice in saying that he was by natural
disposition a good deal of a stoic, and that, as the result of a
considerable intellectual experience, he was, in social and
political matters, a reactionary. I suppose he was very
conceited, for he was much addicted to judging his age.
He thought it talkative, querulous, hysterical, maudlin, full

igo THE BOSTONIANS. xxi.

of false ideas, of unhealthy germs, of extravagant, dissipated
habits, for which a great reckoning was in store. He was
an immense admirer of the late Thomas Carlyle, and was
very suspicious of the encroachments of modern democracy.
I know not exactly how these queer heresies had planted
themselves, but he had a longish pedigree (it had flowered
at one time with English royalists and cavaliers), and he
seemed at moments to be inhabited by some transmitted
spirit of a robust but narrow ancestor, some broad-faced
wig-wearer or sword-bearer, with a more primitive conception
of manhood than our modern temperament appears to
require, and a programme of human felicity much less
varied. He liked his pedigree, he revered his forefathers,
and he rather pitied those who might come after him. In
saying so, however, I betray him a little, for he never men-
tioned such feelings as these. Though he thought the age
too talkative, as I have hinted, he liked to talk as well as
any one ; but he could hold his tongue, if that were more
expressive, and he usually did so when his perplexities were
greatest. He had been sitting for several evenings in a
beer-cellar, smoking his pipe with a profundity of reticence.
This attitude was so unbroken that it marked a crisis — the
complete, the acute consciousness of his personal situation.
It was the cheapest way he knew of spending an evening.
At this particular establishment the Schoppen were very tall
and the beer was very good ; and as the host and most of
the guests were German, and their colloquial tongue was
unknown to him, he was not drawn into any undue expendi-
ture of speech. He watched his smoke and he thought,
thought so hard that at last he appeared to himself to have
exhausted the thinkable. When this moment of combined
relief and dismay arrived (on the last of the evenings that
we are concerned with), he took his way down Third Ave-
nue and reached his humble dwelling. Till within a short
time there had been a resource for him at such an hour
and in such a mood ; a little variety-actress, who lived in
the house, and with whom he had established the most
cordial relations, was often having her supper (she took it
somewhere, every night, after the theatre), in the dim, close
dining-room, and he used to drop in and talk to her. But

xxi. THE BOSTONIANS. 191

she had lately married, to his great amusement, and her
husband had taken her on a wedding-tour, which was to be
at the same time professional. On this occasion he
mounted, with rather a heavy tread, to his rooms, where
(on the rickety writing-table in the parlour) he found a note
from Mrs. Luna. I need not reproduce it in extenso ; a
pale reflection of it will serve. She reproached him with
neglecting her, wanted to know what had become of him,
whether he had grown too fashionable for a person who
cared only for serious society. She accused him of having
changed, and inquired as to the reason of his coldness.
Was it too much to ask whether he could tell her at least
in what manner she had offended him ? She used to think
they were so much in sympathy — he expressed her own
ideas about everything so vividly. She liked intellectual
companionship, and she had none now. She hoped very
much he would come and see her — as he used to do six
months before — the following evening ; and however much
she might have sinned or he might have altered, she was at
least always his affectionate cousin Adeline.

'What the deuce does she want of me now?' It was
with this somewhat ungracious exclamation that he tossed
away his cousin Adeline's missive. The gesture might have
indicated that he meant to take no notice of her; never-
theless, after a day had elapsed, he presented himself before
her. He knew what she -wanted of old — that is, a year
ago ; she had wanted him to look after her property and to
be tutor to her son. He had lent himself, good-naturedly,
to this desire — he was touched by so much confidence — but
the experiment had speedily collapsed. Mrs. Luna's affairs
were in the hands of trustees, who had complete care of
them, and Ransom instantly perceived that his function
would be simply to meddle in things that didn't concern
him. The levity with which she had exposed him to the
derision of the lawful guardians of her fortune opened his
eyes to some of the dangers of cousinship ; nevertheless he
said to himself that he might turn an honest penny by
giving an hour or two every day to the education of her
little boy. But this, too, proved a brief illusion. Ransom
had to find his time in the afternoon ; he left his business

192 THE BOSTONIANS. xxi.

at five o'clock and remained with his young kinsman till
the hour of dinner. At the end of a few weeks he thought
himself lucky in retiring without broken shins. That
Newton's little nature was remarkable had often been insisted
on by his mother; but it was remarkable, Ransom saw, for
the absence of any of the qualities which attach a teacher
to a pupil. He was in truth an insufferable child, enter-
taining for the Latin language a personal, physical hostility,
which expressed itself in convulsions of rage. During these
paroxysms he kicked furiously at every one and everything
— at poor ' Rannie,' at his mother, at Messrs. Andrews and
Stoddard, at the illustrious men of Rome, at the universe
in general, to which, as he lay on his back on the carpet,
he presented a pair of singularly active little heels. Mrs.
Luna had a way of being present at his lessons, and when
they passed, as sooner or later they were sure to, into the
stage I have described, she interceded for her overwrought
darling, reminded Ransom that these were the signs of an
exquisite sensibility, begged that the child might be allowed
to rest a little, and spent the remainder of the time in con-
versation with the preceptor. It came to seem to him,
very soon, that he was not earning his fee ; besides which,
it was disagreeable to him to have pecuniary relations with
a lady who had not the art of concealing from him that she
liked to place him under obligations. He resigned his
tutorship, and drew a long breath, having a vague feeling
that he had escaped a danger. He could not have told
you exactly what it was, and he had a certain sentimental,
provincial respect for women which even prevented him from
attempting to give a name to it in his own thoughts. He
was addicted with the ladies to the old forms of address
and of gallantry ; he held that they were delicate, agreeable
creatures, whom Providence had placed under the protec-
tion of the bearded sex ; and it was not merely a humorous
idea with him that whatever might be the defects of South-
ern gentlemen, they were at any rate remarkable for their
chivalry. He was a man who still, in a slangy age, could
pronounce that word with a perfectly serious face.

This boldness did not prevent him from thinking that
women were essentially inferior to men, and infinitely tire-

xxi. THE BOSTONIANS. 193

some when they declined to accept the lot which men had
made for them. He had the most definite notions about
their place in nature, in society, and was perfectly easy in
his mind as to whether it excluded them from any proper
homage. The chivalrous man paid that tax with alacrity.
He admitted their rights; these consisted in a standing
claim to the generosity and tenderness of the stronger race.
The exercise of such feelings was full of advantage for both
sexes, and they flowed most freely, of course, when women
were gracious and grateful. It may be said that he had a
higher conception of politeness than most of the persons
who desired the advent of female law-makers. When I
have added that he hated to see women eager and argu-
mentative, and thought that their softness and docility were
the inspiration, the opportunity (the highest) of man, I shall
have sketched a state of mind which will doubtless strike
many readers as painfully crude. It had prevented Basil
Ransom, at any rate, from putting the dots on his *'s, as
the French say, in this gradual discovery that Mrs. Luna
was making love to him. The process went on a long time
before he became aware of it. He had perceived very soon
that she was a tremendously familiar little woman — that she
took, more rapidly than he had ever known, a high degree
of intimacy for granted. But as she had seemed to him
neither very fresh nor very beautiful, so he could not easily
have represented to himself why she should take it into her
head to marry (it would never have occurred to him to
doubt that she wanted marriage), an obscure and penniless
Mississippian, with womenkind of his own to provide for.
He could not guess that he answered to a certain secret
ideal of Mrs. Luna's, who loved the landed gentry even
when landless, who adored a Southerner under any circum-
stances, who thought her kinsman a fine, manly, melan-
choly, disinterested type, and who was sure that her views
of public matters, the questions of the age, the vulgar
character of modern life, would meet with a perfect response
in his mind. She could see by the way he talked that he
was a conservative, and this was the motto inscribed upon
her own silken banner. She took this unpopular line both
by temperament and by reaction from her sister's ' extreme '

o

194 THE BOSTONIANS. xxi.

views, the sight of the dreadful people that they brought
about her. In reality, Olive was distinguished and discrimi-
nating, and Adeline was the dupe of confusions in which
the worse was apt to be mistaken for the better. She talked
to Ransom about the inferiority of republics, the distressing
persons she had met abroad in the legations of the United
States, the bad manners of servants and shopkeepers in
that country, the hope she entertained that 'the good
old families ' would make a stand ; but he never suspected
that she cultivated these topics (her treatment of them
struck him as highly comical), for the purpose of leading
him to the altar, of beguiling the way. Least of all could
he suppose that she would be indifferent to his want of
income — a point in which he failed to do her justice ; for,
thinking the fact that he had remained poor a proof of
delicacy in that shopkeeping age, it gave her much pleasure
to reflect that, as Newton's little property was settled on
him (with safeguards which showed how long-headed poor
Mr. Luna had been, and large-hearted, too, since to what
he left her no disagreeable conditions, such as eternal
mourning, for instance, were attached) — that as Newton, I
say, enjoyed the pecuniary independence which befitted his
character, her own income was ample even for two, and she
might give herself the luxury of taking a husband who
should owe her something. Basil Ransom did not divine
all this, but he divined that it was not for nothing that Mrs.
Luna wrote him little notes every other day, that she pro-
posed to drive him in the Park at unnatural hours, and
that when he said he had his business to attend to, she
replied : ' Oh, a plague on your business 1 I am sick of
that word — one hears of nothing else in America. There
are ways of getting on without business, if you would only
take them !' He seldom answered her notes, and he dis-
liked extremely the way in which, in spite of her love of
form and order, she attempted to clamber in at the window
of one's house when one had locked the door ; so that he
began to interspace his visits considerably, and at last made
them very rare. When I reflect on his habits of almost
superstitious politeness to women, it comes over me that
some very strong motive must have operated to make him

xxi. THE BOSTONIANS. 195

give his friendly — his only too friendly — cousin the cold
shoulder. Nevertheless, when he received her reproachful
letter (after it had had time to work a little), he said to himself
that he had perhaps been unjust and even brutal, and as
he was easily touched by remorse of this kind, he took up
the broken thread.

XXII.

As he sat with Mrs. Luna, in her little back drawing-room,
under the lamp, he felt rather more tolerant than before of
the pressure she could not help putting upon him. Several
months had elapsed, and he was no nearer to the sort of
success he had hoped for. It stole over him gently that
there was another sort, pretty visibly open to him, not so
elevated nor so manly, it is true, but on which he should
after all, perhaps, be able to reconcile it with his honour to
fall back. Mrs. Luna had had an inspiration ; for once in
her life she had held her tongue. She had not made him
a scene, there had been no question of an explanation ; she
had received him as if he had been there the day before,
with the addition of a spice of mysterious melancholy. She
might have made up her mind that she had lost him as
what she had hoped, but that it was better than desolation
to try and keep him as a friend. It was as if she wished
him to see now how she tried. She was subdued and con-
solatory, she waited upon him, moved away a screen that
intercepted the fire, remarked that he looked very tired,
and rang for some tea. She made no inquiry about his
affairs, never asked if he had been busy and prosperous ;
and this reticence struck him as unexpectedly delicate and
discreet ; it was as if she had guessed, by a subtle feminine
faculty, that his professional career was nothing to boast of.
There was a simplicity in him which permitted him to
wonder whether she had not improved. The lamp-light
was soft, the fire crackled pleasantly, everything that
surrounded him betrayed a woman's taste and touch;
the place was decorated and cushioned in perfection,
delightfully private and personal, the picture of a well-
appointed home. Mrs. Luna had complained of the

xxn. THE BOSTONIANS. 197

difficulties of installing one's self in America, but Ransom
remembered that he had received an impression similar to
this in her sister's house in Boston, and reflected that these
ladies had, as a family-trait, the art of making themselves
comfortable. It was better for a winter's evening than the
German beer-cellar (Mrs. Luna's tea was excellent), and his
hostess herself appeared to-night almost as amiable as the
variety-actress.. At the end of an hour he felt, I will not
say almost marriageable, but almost married. Images of
leisure played before him, leisure in which he saw himself
covering foolscap paper with his views on several subjects,
and with favourable illustrations of Southern eloquence. It
became tolerably vivid to him that if editors wouldn't print
one's lucubrations, it would be a comfort to feel that one
was able to publish them at one's own expense.

He had a moment of almost complete illusion. Mrs.
Luna had taken up her bit of crochet; she was sitting
opposite to him, on the other side of the fire. Her white
hands moved with little jerks as she took her stitches, and
her rings flashed and twinkled in the light of the hearth.
Her head fell a little to one side, exhibiting the plumpness
of her chin and neck, and her dropped eyes (it gave her a
little modest air), rested quietly on her work. A silence of
a few moments had fallen upon their talk, and Adeline —
who decidedly had improved — appeared also to feel the
charm of it, not to wish to break it. Basil Ransom was
conscious of all this, and at the same time he was vaguely
engaged in a speculation. If it gave one time, if it gave
one leisure, was not that in itself a high motive ? Thorough
study of the question he cared for most — was not the
chance for that an infinitely desirable good ? He seemed
to see himself, to feel himself, in that very chair, in the
evenings of the future, reading some indispensable book
in the still lamp-light — Mrs. Luna knew where to get such
pretty mellowing shades. Should he not be able to act in
that way upon the public opinion of his time, to check
certain tendencies, to point out certain dangers, to indulge
in much salutary criticism ? Was it not one's duty to put
one's self in the best conditions for such action ? And as
the silence continued he almost fell to musing on his duty,

198 THE BOSTONIANS. xxn.

almost persuaded himself that the moral law commanded
him to marry Mrs. Luna. She looked up presently from
her work, their eyes met, and she smiled. He might have
believed she had guessed what he was thinking of. This idea
startled him, alarmed him a little, so that when Mrs. Luna
said, with her sociable manner, ' There is nothing I like so
much, of a winter's night, as a cosy tite-cl-tete by the fire.
It's quite like Darby and Joan ; what a pity the kettle has
ceased singing !' — when she uttered these insinuating words
he gave himself a little imperceptible shake, which was,
however, enough to break the spell, and made no response
more direct than to ask her, in a moment, in a tone of
cold, mild curiosity, whether she had lately heard from her
sister, and how long Miss Chancellor intended to remain in
Europe.

'Well, you have been living in your hole!' Mrs. Luna
exclaimed. ' Olive came home six weeks ago. How long
did you expect her to endure it?'

' I am sure I don't know ; I have never been there,'
Ransom replied.

' Yes, that's what I like you for/ Mrs. Luna remarked
sweetly. ' If a man is nice without it, it's such a pleasant
change.'

The young man started, then gave a natural laugh.
'Lord, how few reasons there must be !'

' Oh, I mention that one because I can tell it. I
shouldn't care to tell the others.'

' 1 am glad you have some to fall back upon, the day I
should go,' Ransom went on. ' I thought you thought so
much of Europe.'

'So I do ; but it isn't everything,' said Mrs. Luna,
philosophically. ' You had better go there with me/ she
added, with a certain inconsequence.

' One would go to the end of the world with so irresistible
a lady ! ' Ransom exclaimed, falling into the tone which
Mrs. Luna always found so unsatisfactory. It was a part
of his Southern gallantry — his accent always came out
strongly when he said anything of that sort — and it
committed him to nothing in particular. She had had
occasion to wish, more than once, that he wouldn't be so

xxn. THE BOSTON1ANS. 199

beastly polite, as she used to hear people say in England.
She answered that she didn't care about ends, she cared
about beginnings ; but he didn't take up the declaration ; he
returned to the subject of Olive, wanted to know what she
had done over there, whether she had worked them up much.

'Oh, of course, she fascinated every one,' said Mrs.
Luna. ' With her grace and beauty, her general style, how
could she help that?'

' But did she bring them round, did she swell the host
that is prepared to march under her banner?'

* I suppose she saw plenty of the strong-minded, plenty
of vicious old maids, and fanatics, and frumps. But I
haven't the least idea what she accomplished — what they
call " wonders," I suppose.'

'Didn't you see her when she returned?' Basil Ransom
asked.

How could I see her? I can see pretty far, but I
can't see all the way to Boston.' And then, in explaining
that it was at this port that her sister had disembarked,
Mrs. Luna further inquired whether he could imagine Olive
doing anything in a first-rate way, as long as there were
inferior ones. 'Of course she likes bad ships — Boston
steamers — just as she likes common people, and red-haired
hoydens, and preposterous doctrines.'

Ransom was silent a moment. ' Do you mean the — a
— rather striking young lady whom I met in Boston a year
ago last October ? What was her name ? — Miss Tarrant ?
Does Miss Chancellor like her as much as ever?'

' Mercy ! don't you know she took her to Europe ? It
was to form her mind she went. Didn't I tell you that
last summer? You used to come to see me then.'

'Oh yes, I remember,' Ransom said, rather musingly.
'And did she bring her back?'

' Gracious, you don't suppose she would leave her !
Olive thinks she's born to regenerate the world.'

' I remember you telling me that, too. It comes back
to me. Well, is her mind formed?'

' As I haven't seen it, I cannot tell you.'

' Aren't you going on there to see '

' To see whether Miss Tarrant's mind is formed ?' Mrs.

200 THE BOSTONIANS. xxn.

Luna broke in. ' I will go if you would like me to. I
remember your being immensely excited about her that
time you met her. Don't you recollect that?'

Ransom hesitated an instant. ' I can't say I do. It is
too long ago.'

'Yes, I have no doubt that's the way you change, about
women ! Poor Miss Tarrant, if she thinks she made an
impression on you !'

1 She won't think about such things as that, if her mind
has been formed by your sister,' Ransom said. ' It does
come back to me now, what you told me about the growth
of their intimacy. And do they mean to go on living to-
gether for ever?'

' I suppose so — unless some one should take it into his
head to marry Verena.'

'Verena — is that her name?' Ransom asked.

Mrs. Luna looked at him with a suspended needle.
' Well ! have you forgotten that too ? You told me
yourself you thought it so pretty, that time in Boston,
when you walked me up the hill.' Ransom declared that
he remembered that walk, but didn't remember everything
he had said to her ; and she suggested, very satirically, that
perhaps he would like to marry Verena himself — he seemed
so interested in her. Ransom shook his head sadly, and
said he was afraid he was not in a position to marry;
whereupon Mrs. Luna asked him what he meant — did he
mean (after a moment's hesitation) that he was too poor ?

'Never in the world — I am very rich; I make an
enormous income!' the young man exclaimed; so that,
remarking his tone, and the slight flush of annoyance that
rose to his face, Mrs. Luna was quick enough to judge that
she had overstepped the mark. She remembered (she
ought to have remembered before), that he had never taken
her in the least into his confidence about his affairs. That
was not the Southern way, and he was at least as proud as
he was poor. In this surmise she was just ; Basil Ransom
would have despised himself if he had been capable of
confessing to a woman that he couldn't make a living.
Such questions were none of their business (their business
was simply to be provided for, practise the domestic virtues,

xxn. THE BOSTONIANS. 201

and be charmingly grateful), and there was, to his sense,
something almost indecent in talking about them. Mrs.
Luna felt doubly sorry for him as she perceived that he
denied himself the luxury of sympathy (that is, of hers),
and the vague but comprehensive sigh that passed her lips
as she took up her crochet again was unusually expressive
of helplessness. She said that of course she knew how
great his talents were — he could do anything he wanted ;
and Basil Ransom wondered for a moment whether, if she
were to ask him point-blank to marry her, it would be con-
sistent with the high courtesy of a Southern gentleman to
refuse. After she should be his wife he might of course
confess to her that he was too poor to marry, for in that
relation even a Southern gentleman of the highest tone
must sometimes unbend. But he didn't in the least long
for this arrangement, and was conscious that the most
pertinent sequel to her conjecture would be for him to take
up his hat and walk away.

Within five minutes, however, he had come to desire to
do this almost as little as to marry Mrs. Luna. He wanted
to hear more about the girl who lived with Olive Chancel-
lor. Something had revived in him — an old curiosity, an
image half effaced — when he learned that she had come
back to America. He had taken a wrong impression from
what Mrs. Luna said, nearly a year before, about her
sister's visit to Europe ; he had supposed it was to be a
long absence, that Miss Chancellor wanted perhaps to get
the little prophetess away from her parents, possibly even
away from some amorous entanglement. Then, no doubt,
they wanted to study up the woman-question with the facili-
ties that Europe would offer ; he didn't know much about
Europe, but he had an idea that it was a great place for
facilities. His knowledge of Miss Chancellor's departure,
accompanied by her young companion, had checked at the
time, on Ransom's part, a certain habit of idle but none the
less entertaining retrospect. His life, on the whole, had
not been rich in episode, and that little chapter of his visit
to his queer, clever, capricious cousin, with his evening at
Miss Birdseye's, and his glimpse, repeated on the morrow,
of the strange, beautiful, ridiculous, red-haired young

202 THE BOSTONIANS. xxn.

improvisatrice, unrolled itself in his memory like a page of
interesting fiction. The page seemed to fade, however,
when he heard that the two girls had gone, for an indefinite
time, to unknown lands ; this carried them out of his range,
spoiled the perspective, diminished their actuality ; so that
for several months past, with his increase of anxiety about
his own affairs, and the low pitch of his spirits, he had not
thought at all about Verena Tarrant. The fact that she
was once more in Boston, with a certain contiguity that it
seemed to imply between Boston and New York, presented
itself now as important and agreeable. He was conscious
that this was rather an anomaly, and his consciousness
made him, had already made him, dissimulate slightly. He
did not pick up his hat to go ; he sat in his chair taking
his chance of the tax which Mrs. Luna might lay upon his
urbanity. He remembered that he had not made, as yet,
any very eager inquiry about Newton, who at this late hour
had succumbed to the only influence that tames the un-
tamable and was sleeping the sleep of childhood, if not of
innocence. Ransom repaired his neglect in a manner which
elicited the most copious response from his hostess. The
boy had had a good many tutors since Ransom gave him
up, and it could not be said that his education languished.
Mrs. Luna spoke with pride of the manner in which he
went through them ; if he did not master his lessons, he
mastered his teachers, and she had the happy conviction
that she gave him every advantage. Ransom's delay was
diplomatic, but at the end of ten minutes he returned to
the young ladies in Boston; he asked why, with their
aggressive programme, one hadn't begun to feel their onset,
why the echoes of Miss Tarrant's eloquence hadn't reached
his ears. Hadn't she come out yet in public ? was she not
coming to stir them up in New York? He hoped she
hadn't broken down.

'She didn't seem to break down last summer, at the
Female Convention,' Mrs. Luna replied. ' Have you for-
gotten that too? Didn't I tell you of the sensation she
produced there, and of what I heard from Boston about
it? Do you mean to say I didn't give you that 'Transcript,'
with the report of her great speech ? It was just before

xxn. THE BOSTONIANS. 203

they sailed for Europe ; she went off with flying colours, in
a blaze of fireworks.' Ransom protested that he had not
heard this affair mentioned till that moment, and then,
when they compared dates, they found it had taken place
just after his last visit to Mrs. Luna. This, of course, gave
her a chance to say that he had treated her even worse
than she supposed ; it had been her impression, at any rate,
that they had talked together about Verena's sudden bound
into fame. Apparently she confounded him with some one
else, that was very possible ; he was not to suppose that he
occupied such a distinct place in her mind, especially when
she might die twenty deaths before he came near her.
Ransom demurred to the implication that Miss Tarrant was
famous ; if she were famous, wouldn't she be in the New
York papers ? He hadn't seen her there, and he had no
recollection of having encountered any mention at the time
(last June, was it ?) of her exploits at the Female Conven-
tion. A local reputation doubtless she had, but that had
been the case a year and a half before, and what was
expected of her then was to become a first-class national
glory. He was willing to believe that she had created some
excitement in Boston, but he shouldn't attach much im-
portance to that till one began to see her photograph in the
stores. Of course, one must give her time, but he had
supposed Miss Chancellor was going to put her through
faster.

If he had taken a contradictious tone on purpose to
draw Mrs. Luna out, he could not have elicited more of the
information he desired. It was perfectly true that he had
seen no reference to Verena's performances in the preceding
June ; there were periods when the newspapers seemed to
him so idiotic that for weeks he never looked at one. He
learned from Mrs. Luna that it was not Olive who had sent
her the ' Transcript ' and in letters had added some private
account of the doings at the convention to the testimony of
that amiable sheet ; she had been indebted for this service
to a 'gentleman -friend,' who wrote her everything that
happened in Boston, and what every one had every day for
dinner. Not that it was necessary for her happiness to
know ; but the gentleman she spoke of didn't know what

204 THE BOSTONIANS. xxn.

to invent to please her. A Bostonian couldn't imagine
that one didn't want to know, and that was their idea of
ingratiating themselves, or, at any rate, it was his, poor
man. Olive would never have gone into particulars about
Verena ; she regarded her sister as quite too much one of
the profane, and knew Adeline couldn't understand why,
when she took to herself a bosom-friend, she should have
been at such pains to select her in just the most dreadful
class in the community. Verena was a perfect little
adventuress, and quite third-rate into the bargain ; but, of
course, she was a pretty girl enough, if one cared for hair
of the colour of cochineal. As for her people, they were
too absolutely awful ; it was exactly as if she, Mrs. Luna,
had struck up an intimacy with the daughter of her chiro-
podist. It took Olive to invent such monstrosities, and to
think she was doing something great for humanity when she
did so ; though, in spite of her wanting to turn everything
over, and put the lowest highest, she could be just as con-
temptuous and invidious, when it came to really mixing, as
if she were some grand old duchess. She must do her the
justice to say that she hated the Tarrants, the father and
mother ; but, all the same, she let Verena run to and fro
between Charles Street and the horrible hole they lived in,
and Adeline knew from that gentleman who wrote so
copiously that the girl now and then spent a week at a
time at Cambridge. Her mother, who had been ill for
some weeks, wanted her to sleep there. Mrs. Luna knew
further, by her correspondent, that Verena had — or had had
the winter before — a great deal of attention from gentlemen.
She didn't know how she worked that into the idea that
the female sex was sufficient to itself; but she had grounds
for saying that this was one reason why Olive had taken
her abroad. She was afraid Verena would give in to some
man, and she wanted to make a break. Of course, any
such giving in would be very awkward for a young woman
who shrieked out on platforms that old maids were the
highest type. Adeline guessed Olive had perfect control of
her now, unless indeed she used the expeditions to Cam-
bridge as a cover for meeting gentlemen. She was an artful
little minx, and cared as much for the rights of women as

xxn. THE BOSTONIANS. 205

she did for the Panama Canal j the only right of a woman
she wanted was to climb up on top of something, where
the men could look at her. She would stay with Olive as
long as it served her purpose, because Olive, with her great
respectability, could push her, and counteract the effect of
her low relations, to say nothing of paying all her expenses
and taking her the tour of Europe. ' But, mark my words,'
said Mrs. Luna, 'she will give Olive the greatest cut she
has ever had in her life. She will run off with some lion-
tamer; she will marry a circus-man!' And Mrs. Luna
added that it would serve Olive Chancellor right. But she
would take it hard ; look out for tantrums then !

Basil Ransom's emotions were peculiar while his hostess
delivered herself, in a manner at once casual and emphatic,
of these rather insidious remarks. He took them all in,
for they represented to him certain very interesting facts ;
but he perceived at the same time that Mrs. Luna didn't
know what she was talking about. He had seen Verena
Tarrant only twice in his life, but it was no use telling him
that she was an adventuress — though, certainly, it was
very likely she would end by giving Miss Chancellor a cut.
He chuckled, with a certain grimness, as this image passed
before him ; it was not unpleasing, the idea that he should
be avenged (for it would avenge him to know it), upon the
wanton young woman who had invited him to come and
see her in order simply to slap his face. But he had an
odd sense of having lost something in not knowing of the
other girl's appearance at the Women's Convention — a
vague feeling that he had been cheated and trifled with.
The complaint was idle, inasmuch as it was not probable
he could have gone to Boston to listen to her ; but it
represented to him that he had not shared, even dimly and
remotely, in an event which concerned her very closely.
Why should he share, and what was more natural than that
the things which concerned her closely should not concern
him at all ? This question came to him only as he walked
home that evening ; for the moment it remained quite in
abeyance : therefore he was free to feel also that his
imagination had been rather starved by his ignorance of
the fact that she was near him again (comparatively), that

206 THE BOSTONIANS. xxn.

she was in the dimness of the horizon (no longer beyond
the curve of the globe), and yet he had not perceived it.
This sense of personal loss, as I have called it, made him
feel, further, that he had something to make up, to recover.
He could scarcely have told you how he would go about
it; but the idea, formless though it was, led him in a
direction very different from the one he had been following
a quarter of an hour before. As he watched it dance before
him he fell into another silence, in the midst of which
Mrs. Luna gave him another mystic smile. The effect of
it was to make him rise to his feet ; the whole landscape
of his mind had suddenly been illuminated. Decidedly,
it was not his duty to marry Mrs. Luna, in order to have
means to pursue his studies ; he jerked himself back, as if
he had been on the point of it.

'You don't mean to say you are going already? I
haven't said half I wanted to ! ' she exclaimed.

He glanced at the clock, saw it was not yet late, took
a turn about the room, then sat down again in a different
place, while she followed him with her eyes, wondering
what was the matter with him. Ransom took good care
not to ask her what it was she had still to say, and perhaps
it was to prevent her telling him that he now began to
talk, freely, quickly, in quite a new tone. He stayed half
an hour longer, and made himself very agreeable. It
seemed to Mrs. Luna now that he had every distinction
(she had known he had most), that he was really a charming
man. He abounded in conversation, till at last he took
up his hat in earnest; he talked about the state of the
South, its social peculiarities, the ruin wrought by the war,
the dilapidated gentry, the queer types of superannuated
fire-eaters, ragged and unreconciled, all the pathos and all
the comedy of it, making her laugh at one moment, almost
cry at another, and say to herself throughout that when he
took it into his head there was no one who could make a
lady's evening pass so pleasantly. It was only afterwards that
she asked herself why he had not taken it into his head
till the last, so quickly. She delighted in the dilapidated
gentry ; her taste was completely different from her sister's,
who took an interest only in the lower class, as it struggled

xxn. THE BOSTONIANS. 207

to rise ; what Adeline cared for was the fallen aristocracy
(it seemed to be falling everywhere very much; was not
Basil Ransom an example of it ? was he not like a French
gentilhomme de province after the Revolution ? or an old
monarchical emigre from the Languedoc?), the despoiled
patriciate, I say, whose attitude was noble and touching,
and toward whom one might exercise a charity as discreet
as their pride was sensitive. In all Mrs. Luna's visions
of herself, her discretion was the leading feature. ' Are
you going to let ten years elapse again before you come ? '
she asked, as Basil Ransom bade her good-night. ' You
must let me know, because between this and your next visit
I shall have time to go to Europe and come back. I shall
take care to arrive the day before.'

Instead of answering this sally, Ransom said, ' Are you
not going one of these days to Boston? Are you not
going to pay your sister another visit ?'

Mrs. Luna stared. ' What good will that do you ?
Excuse my stupidity,' she added ; ' of course, it gets me
away. Thank you very much !'

* I don't want you to go away ; but I want to hear more
about Miss Olive.'

' Why in the world ? You know you loathe her ! '
Here, before Ransom could reply, Mrs. Luna again over-
took herself. ' I verily believe that by Miss Olive you
mean Miss Verena!' Her eyes charged him a moment
with this perverse intention; then she exclaimed, 'Basil
Ransom, are you in love with that creature?'

He gave a perfectly natural laugh, not pleading guilty,
in order to practise on Mrs. Luna, but expressing the
simple state of the case. 'How should I be? I have
seen her but twice in my life.'

' If you had seen her more, I shouldn't be afraid !
Fancy your wanting to pack me off to Boston ! ' his hostess
went on. ' I am in no hurry to stay with Olive again ;
besides, that girl takes up the whole house. You had
better go there yourself.'

' I should like nothing better,' said Ransom.

' Perhaps you would like me to ask Verena to spend a
month with me — it might be a way of attracting you

208 THE BOSTONIANS. xxn.

to the house,' Adeline went on, in the tone of exuberant
provocation.

Ransom was on the point of replying that it would be a
better way than any other, but he checked himself in time ;
he had never yet, even in joke, made so crude, so rude a
speech to a lady. You only knew when he was joking
with women by his superadded civility. 'I beg you to
believe there is nothing I would do for any woman in the
world that I wouldn't do for you,' he said, bending, for the
last time, over Mrs. Luna's plump hand.

'I shall remember that and keep you up to it!' she
cried after him, as he went. But even with this rather
lively exchange of vows he felt that he had got off rather
easily. He walked slowly up Fifth Avenue, into which,
out of Adeline's cross-street, he had turned, by the light of
a fine winter moon; and at every corner he stopped a
minute, lingered in meditation, while he exhaled a soft,
vague sigh. This was an unconscious, involuntary expres-
sion of relief, such as a man might utter who had seen
himself on the point of being run over and yet felt that he
was whole. He didn't trouble himself much to ask what
had saved him ; whatever it was it had produced a reaction,
so that he felt rather ashamed of having found his look-out
of late so blank. By the time he reached his lodgings, his
ambition, his resolution, had rekindled; he had remembered
that he formerly supposed he was a man of ability, that
nothing particular had occurred to make him doubt it (the
evidence was only negative, not positive), and that at any
rate he was young enough to have another try. He
whistled that night as he went to bed.

XXIII.

THREE weeks afterward he stood in front of Olive
Chancellor's house, looking up and down the street and
hesitating. He had told Mrs. Luna that he should like
nothing better than to make another journey to Boston ;
and it was not simply because he liked it that he had come.
I was on the point of saying that a happy chance had
favoured him, but it occurs to me that one is under no
obligation to call chances by flattering epithets when they
have been waited for so long. At any rate, the darkest
hour is before the dawn ; and a few days after that melan-
choly evening I have described, which Ransom spent in
his German beer-cellar, before a single glass, soon emptied,
staring at his future with an unremunerated eye, he found
that the world appeared to have need of him yet. The
1 party/ as he would have said (I cannot pretend that his
speech was too heroic for that), for whom he had transacted
business in Boston so many months before, and who had
expressed at the time but a limited appreciation of his
services (there had been between the lawyer and his client
a divergence of judgment), observing, apparently, that they
proved more fruitful than he expected, had reopened the
affair and presently requested Ransom to transport himself
again to the sister city. His errand demanded more time
than before, and for three days he gave it his constant
attention. On the fourth he found he was still detained >,
he should have to wait till the evening — some important
papers were to be prepared. He determined to treat the
interval as a holiday, and he wondered what one could do in
Boston to give one's morning a festive complexion. The
weather was brilliant enough to minister to any illusion,
and he strolled along the streets, taking it in. In front of

210 THE BOSTONIANS^ xxm.

the Music Hall and of Tremont Temple he stopped, look-
ing at the posters in the doorway ; for was it not possible
that Miss Chancellor's little friend might be just then
addressing her fellow-citizens? Her name was absent,
however, and this resource seemed to mock him. He
knew no one in the place but Olive Chancellor, so there
was no question of a visit to pay. He was perfectly re-
solved that he would never go near her again ; she was
doubtless a very superior being, but she had been too
rough with him to tempt him further. Politeness, even a
largely-interpreted 'chivalry,' required nothing more than
he had already done ; he had quitted her, the other year,
without telling her that she was a vixen, and that reticence
was chivalrous enough. There was also Verena Tarrant,
of course ; he saw no reason to dissemble when he spoke
of her to himself, and he allowed himself the entertainment
of feeling that he should like very much to see her again.
Very likely she wouldn't seem to him the same; the
impression she had made upon him was due to some acci-
dent of mood or circumstance ; and, at any rate, any charm
she might have exhibited then had probably been obliter-
ated by the coarsening effect of publicity and the tonic
influence of his kinswoman. It will be observed that in
this reasoning of Basil Ransom's the impression was freely
recognised, and recognised as a phenomenon still present.
The attraction might have vanished, as he said to himself,
but the mental picture of it was yet vivid. The greater
the pity that he couldn't call upon Verena (he called her
by her name in his thoughts, it was so pretty), without calling
upon Olive, and that Olive was so disagreeable as to place
that effort beyond his strength. There was another consider-
ation, with Ransom, which eminently belonged to the man;
he believed that Miss Chancellor had conceived, in the
course of those few hours, and in a manner that formed so
absurd a sequel to her having gone out of her way to make
his acquaintance, such a dislike to him that it would be
odious to her to see him again within her doors ; and he
would have felt indelicate in taking warrant from her original
invitation (before she had seen him), to inflict on her a
presence which he had no reason to suppose the lapse of

XXIIT. THE BOSTONIANS. 211

time had made less offensive. She had given him no
sign of pardon or penitence in any of the little ways that
are familiar to women — by sending him a message through
her sister, or even a book, a photograph, a Christmas card,
or a newspaper, by the post. He felt, in a word, not at
liberty to ring at her door ; he didn't know what kind of a
fit the sight of his long Mississippian person would give
her, and it was characteristic of him that he should wish so
to spare the sensibilities of a young lady whom he had not
found tender ; being ever as willing to let women off easily
in the particular case as he was fixed in the belief that the
sex in general requires watching.

Nevertheless, he found himself, at the end of half an
hour, standing on the only spot in Charles Street which had
any significance for him. It had occurred to him that if he
couldn't call upon Verena without calling upon Olive, he
should be exempt from that condition if he called upon
Mrs. Tarrant. It was not her mother, truly, who had asked
him, it was the girl herself; and he was conscious, as a
candid young American, that a mother is always less ac-
cessible, more guarded by social prejudice, than a daughter.
But he was at a pass in which it was permissible to strain
a point, and he took his way in the direction in which he
knew that Cambridge lay, remembering that Miss Tarrant's
invitation had reference to that quarter and that Mrs. Luna
had given him further evidence. Had she not said that
Verena often went back there for visits of several days —
that her mother had been ill and she gave her much care ?
There was nothing inconceivable in her being engaged at
that hour (it was getting to be one o'clock), in one of those
expeditions — nothing impossible in the chance that he
might find her in Cambridge. The chance, at any rate,
was worth taking ; Cambridge, moreover, was worth seeing,
and it was as good a way as another of keeping his holiday.
It occurred to him, indeed, that Cambridge was a big place,
and that he had no particular address. This reflection
overtook him just as he reached Olive's house, which, oddly
enough, he was obliged to pass on his way to the mysterious
suburb. That is partly why he paused there; he asked
himself for a moment why he shouldn't ring the bell and

212 THE BOSTONIANS. xxm.

obtain his needed information from the servant, who would
be sure to be able to give it to him. He had just dismissed
this method, as of questionable taste, when he heard the
door of the house open, within the deep embrasure in which,
in Charles Street, the main portals are set, and which are
partly occupied by a flight of steps protected at the bottom
by a second door, whose upper half, in either wing, consists
of a sheet of glass. It was a minute before he could see
who had come out, and in that minute he had time to turn
away and then to turn back again, and to wonder which of
the two inmates would appear to him, or whether he should
behold neither or both.

The person who had issued from the house descended
the steps very slowly, as if on purpose to give him time to
escape ; and when at last the glass doors were divided they
disclosed a little old lady. Ransom was disappointed;
such an apparition was so scantily to his purpose. But the
next minute his spirits rose again, for he was sure that he
had seen the little old lady before. She stopped on the
side-walk, and looked vaguely about her, in the manner of
a person waiting for an omnibus or a street-car ; she had a
dingy, loosely-habited air, as if she had worn her clothes
for many years and yet was even now imperfectly acquainted
with them ; a large, benignant face, caged in by the glass
of her spectacles, which seemed to cover it almost equally
everywhere, and a fat, rusty satchel, which hung low at her
side, as if it wearied her to carry it. This gave Ransom
time to recognise her ; he knew in Boston no such figure
as that save Miss Birdseye. Her party, her person, the
exalted account Miss Chancellor gave of her, had kept a
very distinct place in his mind ; and while she stood there
in dim circumspection she came back to him as a friend of
yesterday. His necessity gave a point to the reminiscences
she evoked ; it took him only a moment to reflect that she
would be able to tell him where Verena Tarrant was at that
particular time, and where, if need be, her parents lived.
Her eyes rested on him, and as she saw that he was looking
at her she didn't go through the ceremony (she had broken
so completely with all conventions), of removing them ; he
evidently represented nothing to her but a sentient fellow-

xxiii. THE BOSTONIANS. 213

citizen in the enjoyment of his rights, which included that
of staring. Miss Birdseye's modesty had never pretended
that it was not to be publicly challenged ; there were so
many bright new motives and ideas in the world that there
might even be reasons for looking at her. When Ransom
approached her and, raising his hat with a smile, said,
'Shall I stop this car for you, Miss Birdseye?' she only
looked at him more vaguely, in her complete failure to
seize the idea that this might be simply Fame. She had
trudged about the streets of Boston for fifty years, and at
no period had she received that amount of attention from
dark-eyed young men. She glanced, in an unprejudiced
way, at the big parti-coloured human van which now jingled
toward them from out of the Cambridge road. ' Well, I
should like to get into it, if it will take me home,' she
answered. * Is this a South End car?'

The vehicle had been stopped by the conductor, on his
perceiving Miss Birdseye ; he evidently recognised her as a
frequent passenger. He went, however, through none of
the forms of reassurance beyond remarking, * You want to
get right in here — quick,' but stood with his hand raised, in
a threatening way, to the cord of his signal-bell.

' You must allow me the honour of taking you home,
madam ; I will tell you who I am,' Basil Ransom said, in
obedience to a rapid reflection. He helped her into the
car, the conductor pressed a fraternal hand upon her back,
and in a moment the young man was seated beside her,
and the jingling had recommenced. At that hour of the
day the car was almost empty, and they had it virtually
to themselves.

* Well, I know you are some one ; I don't think you
belong round here/ Miss Birdseye declared, as they pro-
ceeded.

1 1 was once at your house — on a very interesting
occasion. Do you remember a party you gave, a year ago
last October, to which Miss Chancellor came, and another
young lady, who made a wonderful speech ?'

' Oh yes ! when Verena Tarrant moved us all so !
There were a good many there ; I don't remember all.'

' I was one of them,' Basil Ransom said ; ' I came with

214 THE BOSTONIANS. xxm.

Miss Chancellor, who is a kind of relation of mine, and you
were very good to me.'

'What did I do?' asked Miss Birdseye, candidly.
Then, before he could answer her, she recognised him. ' I
remember you now, and Olive bringing you ! You're a
Southern gentleman — she told me about you afterwards.
You don't approve of our great struggle — you want us to be
kept down.' The old lady spoke with perfect mildness, as
if she had long ago done with passion and resentment.
Then she added, 'Well, I presume we can't have the
sympathy of all.

' Doesn't it look as if you had my sympathy, when I
get into a car on purpose to see you home — one of the
principal agitators?' Ransom inquired, laughing.

'Did you get in on purpose?'

' Quite on purpose. I am not so bad as Miss Chancellor
thinks me.'

' Oh, I presume you have your ideas,' said Miss Birds-
eye. ' Of course, Southerners have peculiar views. I
suppose they retain more than one might think. I hope
you won't ride too far — I know my way round Boston.'

' Don't object to me, or think me officious,' Ransom
replied. ' I want to ask you something.'

Miss Birdseye looked at him again. ' Oh yes, I place
you now ; you conversed some with Doctor Prance.'

'To my great edification!' Ransom exclaimed. 'And
I hope Doctor Prance is well.'

'She looks after every one's health but her own,' said
Miss Birdseye, smiling. ' When I tell her that, she says she
hasn't got any to look after. She says she's the only
woman in Boston that hasn't got a doctor. She was
determined she wouldn't be a patient, and it seemed as if
the only way not to be one was to be a doctor. She is
trying to make me sleep ; that's her principal occupation.'

' Is it possible you don't sleep yet ? ' Ransom asked,
almost tenderly.

' Well, just a little. But by the time I get to sleep I
have to get up. I can't sleep when I want to live.'

'You ought to come down South,' the young man
suggested. ' In that languid air you would doze deliriously !>

xxiii. THE BOSTONIANS. 215

'Well, I don't want to be languid,' said Miss Birdseye.
' Besides, I have been down South, in the old times, and 1
can't say they let me sleep very much ; they were always
round after me !'

' Do you mean on account of the negroes ?'

' Yes, I couldn't think of anything else then. I carried
them the Bible.'

Ransom was silent a moment ; then he said, in a tone
which evidently was carefully considerate, ' I should like to
hear all about that !'

' Well, fortunately, we are not required now j we are
required for something else.' And Miss Birdseye looked
at him with a wandering, tentative humour, as if he would
know what she meant.

'You mean for the other slaves !' he exclaimed, with a
laugh. ' You can carry them all the Bibles you want.'

' I want to carry them the Statute-book • that must be
our Bible now.'

Ransom found himself liking Miss Birdseye very much,
and it was quite without hypocrisy or a tinge too much of
the local quality in his speech that he said : ' Wherever you
go, madam, it will matter little what you carry. You will
always carry your goodness.'

For a minute she made no response. Then she
murmured : ' That's the way Olive Chancellor told me you
talked.'

' I am afraid she has told you little good of me.'

' Well, I am sure she thinks she is right.'

' Thinks it ?' said Ransom. ' Why, she knows it, with
supreme certainty ! By the way, I hope she is well.'

Miss Birdseye stared again. ' Haven't you seen her ?
Are you not visiting ? '

' Oh no, I am not visiting ! I was literally passing her
house when I met you.'

' Perhaps you live here now,' said Miss Birdseye. And
when he had corrected this impression, she added, in a
tone which showed with what positive confidence he had
now inspired her, 'Hadn't you better drop in?'

' It would give Miss Chancellor no pleasure,' Basil Ran-
som rejoined. 'She regards me as an enemy in the camp.'

216 THE BOSTONIANS. xxm.

' Well, she is very brave.'

' Precisely. And I am very timid.'

' Didn't you fight once ? '

'Yes; but it was in such a good cause !'

Ransom meant this allusion to the great Secession and,
by comparison, to the attitude of the resisting male (laudable
even as that might be), to be decently jocular ; but Miss
Birdseye took it very seriously, and sat there for a good
while as speechless as if she meant to convey that she had
been going on too long now to be able to discuss the
propriety of the late rebellion. The young man felt that
he had silenced her, and he was very sorry ; for, with all
deference to the disinterested Southern attitude toward the
unprotected female, what he had got into the car with her
for was precisely to make her talk. He had wished for
general, as well as for particular, news of Verena Tarrant ;
it was a topic on which he had proposed to draw Miss
Birdseye out. He preferred not to broach it himself, and
he waited awhile for another opening. At last, when he
was on the point of exposing himself by a direct inquiry
(he reflected that the exposure would in any case not be
long averted), she anticipated him by saying, in a manner
which showed that her thoughts had continued in the same
train, ' I wonder very much that Miss Tarrant didn't affect
you that evening !'

'Ah, but she did!' Ransom said, with alacrity. 'I
thought her very charming ! '

' Didn't you think her very reasonable?'

' God forbid, madam ! I consider women have no
business to be reasonable.'

His companion turned upon him, slowly and mildly,
and each of her glasses, in her aspect of reproach, had the
glitter of an enormous tear. ' Do you regard us, then,
simply as lovely baubles ? '

The effect of this question, as coming from Miss Birds-
eye, and referring in some degree to her own venerable
identity, was such as to move him to irresistible laughter.
But he controlled himself quickly enough to say, with
genuine expression, ' I regard you as the dearest thing in
life, the only thing which makes it worth living ! '

xxiii. THE BOSTONIANS. 217

'Worth living for — you! But for us?' suggested Miss
Birdseye.

'It's worth any woman's while to be admired as I
admire you. Miss Tarrant, of whom we were speaking,
affected me, as you say, in this way — that I think more
highly still, if possible, of the sex which produced such a
delightful young lady.'

'Well, we think everything of her here,' said Miss
Birdseye. ' It seems as if it were a real gift'

'Does she speak often — is there any chance of my
hearing her now?'

' She raises her voice a good deal in the places round —
like Framingham and Billerica. It seems as if she were
gathering strength, just to break over Boston like a wave.
In fact she did break, last summer. She is a growing
power since her great success at the convention.'

'Ah! her success at the convention was very great?'
Ransom inquired, putting discretion into his voice.

Miss Birdseye hesitated a moment, in order to measure
her response by the bounds of righteousness. ' Well,' she
said, with the tenderness of a long retrospect, ' I have seen
nothing like it since I last listened to Eliza P. Moseley.'

'What a pity she isn't speaking somewhere to-night!'
Ransom exclaimed.

' Oh, to-night she's out in Cambridge. Olive Chancellor
mentioned that.'

' Is she making a speech there ?'

' No ; she's visiting her home.'

'I thought her home was in Charles Street?'

' Well, no ; that's her residence — her principal one —
since she became so united to your cousin. Isn't Miss
Chancellor your cousin?'

' We don't insist on the relationship,' said Ransom, smil-
ing. 'Are they very much united, the two young ladies?'

' You would say so if you were to see Miss Chancellor
when Verena rises to eloquence. It's as if the chords were
strung across her own heart ; she seems to vibrate, to echo
with every word. It's a very close and very beautiful tie,
and we think everything of it here. They will work
together for a great good !'

218 THE BOSTONIANS. xxm.

* I hope so,' Ransom remarked. ' But in spite of it
Miss Tarrant spends a part of her time with her father and
mother.'

' Yes, she seems to have something for every one. If
you were to see her at home, you would think she was
all the daughter. She leads a lovely life !' said Miss
Birdseye.

' See her at home ? That's exactly what I want ! '
Ransom rejoined, feeling that if he was to come to this he
needn't have had scruples at first. 'I haven't forgotten
that she invited me, when I met her.'

( Oh, of course she attracts many visitors,' said Miss
Birdseye, limiting her encouragement to this statement.

' Yes ; she must be used to admirers. And where, in
Cambridge, do her family live?'

' Oh, it's on one of those little streets that don't seem to
have very much of a name. But they do call it — they do
call it ' she meditated, audibly.

This process was interrupted by an abrupt allocution
from the conductor. ' I guess you change here for your
place. You want one of them blue cars.'

The good lady returned to a sense of the situation, and
Ransom helped her out of the vehicle, with the aid, as
before, of a certain amount of propulsion from the con-
ductor. Her road branched off to the right, and she had
to wait on the corner of a street, there being as yet no blue
car within hail. The corner was quiet and the day favour-
able to patience — a day of relaxed rigour and intense
brilliancy. It was as if the touch of the air itself were
gloved, and the street -colouring had the richness of a
superficial thaw. Ransom, of course, waited with his
philanthropic companion, though she now protested more
vigorously against the idea that a gentleman from the
South should pretend to teach an old abolitionist the
mysteries of Boston. He promised to leave her when he
should have consigned her to the blue car ; and meanwhile
they stood in the sun, with their backs against an apothe-
cary's window, and she tried again, at his suggestion, to
remember the name of Doctor Tarrant's street. ' I guess
if you ask for Doctor Tarrant, any one can tell you,' she

xxin. THE BOSTONIANS. 219

said; and then suddenly the address came to her — the
residence of the mesmeric healer was in Monadnoc Place.

' But you'll have to ask for that, so it comes to the same,'
she went on. After this she added, with a friendliness
more personal, 'Ain't you going to see your cousin too?'

'Not if I can help it!'

Miss Birdseye gave a little ineffectual sigh. 'Well, I
suppose every one must act out their ideal. That's what
Olive Chancellor does. She's a very noble character.'

' Oh yes, a glorious nature.'

' You know their opinions are just the same — hers and
Verena's,' Miss Birdseye placidly continued. ' So why
should you make a distinction?'

' My dear madam,' said Ransom, ' does a woman consist
of nothing but her opinions ? I like Miss Tarrant's lovely
face better, to begin with.'

'Well, she is pretty-looking.' And Miss Birdseye gave
another sigh, as if she had had a theory submitted to her —
that one about a lady's opinions — which, with all that was
unfamiliar and peculiar lying behind it, she was really too
old to look into much. It might have been the first time
she really felt her age. ' There's a blue car,' she said, in a
tone of mild relief.

' It will be some moments before it gets here. More-
over, I don't believe that at bottom they are Miss Tarrant's
opinions,' Ransom added.

' You mustn't think she hasn't a strong hold of them,'
his companion exclaimed, more briskly. ' If you think she
is not sincere, you are very much mistaken. Those views
are just her life.'

' Well, she may bring me round to them,' said Ransom,
smiling.

Miss Birdseye had been watching her blue car, the
advance of which was temporarily obstructed. At this,
she transferred her eyes to him, gazing at him solemnly out
of the pervasive window of her spectacles. 'Well, I
shouldn't wonder if she did ! Yes, that will be a good
thing. I don't see how you can help being a good deal
shaken by her. She has acted on so many.'

' I see ; no doubt she will act on me.' Then it occurred

220 THE BOSTONIANS. xxm.

to Ransom to add : ' By the way, Miss Birdseye, perhaps
you will be so kind as not to mention this meeting of ours
to my cousin, in case of your seeing her again. I have a
perfectly good conscience in not calling upon her, but I
shouldn't like her to think that I announced my slighting
intention all over the town. I don't want to offend her,
and she had better not know that I have been in Boston.
If you don't tell her, no one else will.'

'Do you wish me to conceal ?' murmured Miss

Birdseye, panting a little.

' No, I don't want you to conceal anything. I only
want you to let this incident pass — to say nothing.'

'Well, I never did anything of that kind.'

' Of what kind ?' Ransom was half vexed, half touched
by her inability to enter into his point of view, and her
resistance made him hold to his idea the more. ' It is
very simple, what I ask of you. You are under no obliga-
tion to tell Miss Chancellor everything that happens to you,
are you?'

His request seemed still something of a shock to the
poor old lady's candour. ' Well, I see her very often, and
we talk a great deal. And then — won't Verena tell her?'

'I have thought of that — but I hope not.'

' She tells her most everything. Their union is so close.'

'She won't want her to be wounded,' Ransom said,
ingeniously.

'Well, you are considerate.' And Miss Birdseye con-
tinued to gaze at him. ' It's a pity you can't sympathise.'

'As I tell you, perhaps Miss Tarrant will bring me
round. You have before you a possible convert,' Ransom
went on, without, I fear, putting up the least little prayer
to heaven that his dishonesty might be forgiven.

' I should be very happy to think that — after I have
told you her address in this secret way.' A smile of infinite
mildness glimmered in Miss Birdseye's face, and she added :
' Well, I guess that will be your fate. She has affected so
many. I would keep very quiet if I thought that. Yes,
she will bring you round.'

' I will let you know as soon as she does,' Basil Ransom
said. ' Here is your car at last'

xxin. THE BOSTONIANS. 221

1 Well, I believe in the victory of the truth. I won't
say anything.' And she suffered the young man to lead
her to the car, which had now stopped at their corner.

* I hope very much I shall see you again,' he remarked,
as they went.

1 Well, I am always round the streets, in Boston/ And
while, lifting and pushing, he was helping again to insert
her into the oblong receptacle, she turned a little and re-
peated, ' She will affect you ! If that's to be your secret, I
will keep it,' Ransom heard her subjoin. He raised his
hat and waved her a farewell, but she didn't see him ; she
was squeezing further into the car and making the discovery
that this time it was full and there was no seat for her.
Surely, however, he said to himself, every man in the place
would offer his own to such an innocent old dear.

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 sur-
prised 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

xxiv. THE BOSTONIANS. 223

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 in-
sincere. 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 fine-
ness ; 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

224 THE BOSTONIANS. xxiv.

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 after-
wards 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 delight-
ful.'

' 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.'

xxiv. THE BOSTONIANS. 225

'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 re-
joined.

'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 com-
prehensive, 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 move-
ment. Isn't that true ? I think you expressed some un-
favourable 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
Q

226 THE BOSTONIANS. xxiv.

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, encourag-
ingly.

' 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

xxiv. THE BOSTONIANS. 227

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.'

1 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 some-
thing 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 resent-
ment 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

228 THE BOSTONIANS. xxiv.

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

xxiv. THE BOSTONIANS. 229

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, inac-
cessible 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/1 the girl

230 THE BOSTONIANS. xxiv.

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.'

4 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

xxiv. THE BOSTONIANS. 231

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 con-
sequences. 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.'

c 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 reflection 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

232 THE BOSTONIANS. xxiv.

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 judgment 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.'

1 It's a pity you couldn't have a few more,' said Verena,
musingly.

xxiv. THE BOSTONIANS. 233

'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 friendli-
ness 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 reflection), 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 palpita-
tion. 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 pre-
vision 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

234 THE BOSTONIANS. \ xxiv.

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 with-
in 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 Tightness, 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 con-
structed 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 distinc-
tion of a wide pavement of neat red brick. The new paint
on the square detached houses shone afar off in the trans-
parent 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
nourishes. 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.

236 THE BOSTONIANS. xxv.

'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 con-
cerned 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 out-
siders, as it were ; of those who are prejudiced or thought-
less, 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 tremen-
dously to contradict you.'

4 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

xxv. THE BOSTONIANS. 237

thoughts and brilliant sayings flew round like darting fire-
flies. 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 tre-
mendously 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 reflection, 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 reflection 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.'

238 THE BOSTONIANS. xxv.

1 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 1 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 vague-
ness 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, in-
consequently, ' 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 conven-
tion. ' 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 con-

xxv. THE BOSTONIANS. 239

sciousness 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 inclosed (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 Iqcal
monuments. Basil Ransom, walking with her from point
to point, admired them all, and thought several of them
exceedingly quaint and venerable. The rectangular struc-
tures 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 Gottingen, or Padua. You would have been
in perfect sympathy with their spirit.'

240 THE BOSTONIANS. xxv.

'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 compre-
hensive 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,

xxv. THE BOSTONIANS. 241

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 more-
over 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, super-
scribed, 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 any-
thing 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

242 THE BOSTONIANS. xxv.

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 im-
possible 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 BOSTONIANS. 243

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 reflections about your neglect of herself?'

1 1 don't care for her reflections. 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 almost 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 ? '

1 1 tell her everything,' said the girl j 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

244 THE BOSTONIANS. xxv.

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 im-
plication 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 ;

xxv. THE BOSTONIANS. 245

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 j 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 ?'

4 Enough to make me terribly unhappy.'

She looked at him a moment, evidently not under-
standing ; 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 con-
sequence 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 consider-
able 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

xxvi. THE BOSTONIANS. 247

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 pro-
ducing 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 incom-
plete— 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 reflection 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

248 THE BOSTONIANS. xxvi.

near the door of the first room, and with whom the people
passing in before him were shaking hands. Ransom made
her a Mississippian 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 contempla-
tion, 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.'
1 That's not fair ; you have all the fun and none of the
responsibility.'

xxvi. THE BOSTONIANS. 249

1 Oh, the fun — 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 Gougen-
heim — 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, how-
ever, 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

250 THE BOSTONIANS. xxvi.

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.7

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 ?'

xxvi. THE BOSTONIANS. 251

' 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 ? Every-
thing is prepared.'

' I am going when I am notified — when I am invited. '

There was considerable majesty in her tone, and Ran-
som 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

252 THE BOSTONIANS. xxvi.

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?'

1 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

xxvi. THE BOSTONIANS. 253

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 reflection 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 disagree-
able cousin know that he had passed her over. ' Don't you
remember my hearing her speak that night at Miss Birds-
eye's?' he said, presently. 'And I met her the next day
at your house, you know.'

1 She has developed greatly since then/ Olive remarked
drily; 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 con-
stituted 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

254 THE BOSTONIANS. xxvi.

Tarrant he would have one of the greatest pleasures of his
life.

'Oh, Mr. Ransom only comes to ventilate his pre-
judices,' 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 Ran-
som 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

256 THE BOSTONIANS. xxvii.

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 some-
thing 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 Missis-
sippian 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 sup-
pose it's what those ladies were talking about,' Ransom said.

1 1 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

xxvii. THE BOSTONIANS. 257

hear a pin drop, in there. Is some one going to offer up a
prayer? How happy Olive must be, to be taken so seri-
ously ! 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 Cam-
bridge 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

s

258 THE BOSTONIANS. xxvu.

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 plat-
form ? 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 reflection, 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 oa'

' 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 super-
stition ; 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

xxvii. THE BOSTONIANS. 259

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 con-
versation 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.'

260 THE BOSTONIANS. xxvii.

' 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 perora-
tions !'

1 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.'

XXVII.

THE BOSTONIANS. 261

1 And pray what is it you suspect?'
' That you two have been in correspondence.'
' Tell her whatever you like, Mrs. Luna,7 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 gentle-
man 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

262 THE BOSTONIANS. xxvii.

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 isola-
tion, 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

264 THE BOSTONIANS. xxvin.

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 know that he had been missed and now was par-
ticularly 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

XXYIII. THE BOSTONIANS. 265

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 con-
fusion, 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

266 THE BOSTONIANS. xxvin.

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 ego-
tism, 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

xxviii. THE BOSTONIANS. 267

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, tender-
ness, 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, con-
venient 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 Ran-
som, 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

268 THE BOSTONIANS. XXVIIT.

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 reflections 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 import-
ance 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 reflection 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

xxvm. THE BOSTONIANS. 269

prevent its badness from being a cause of mortification to
her lover. The company — such of it as did not imme-
diately 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, per-
ceived 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

270 THE BOSTONIANS. xxvin.

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 com-
panion, 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 button-
hole. 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.

1 Moved the wrong way ! ' said Verena. l Never mind ;
you'll be left behind.'

f 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.

xxvui. THE BOSTONIANS. 271

' Oh, I call that presumptuous 1' 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 pre-
sumption brought by Mr Burrage.

'Why, he's crazy about our movement,' Verena re-
sponded. ' 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

272 THE BOSTONIANS. xxvm.

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 unde-
ceive 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/ Ran-
som 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

xxvin. THE BOSTONIANS. 273

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 exhibi-
tion, an entertainment of any kind, which held me more
completely under the charm.'

274 THE BOSTONIANS. xxvin.

'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 im-
portance. 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.

xxviii. THE BOSTONIANS. 275

' 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 beseeching-
ness, ' 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 Chan-
cellor 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 inter-
fere. 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,

276 THE BOSTONIANS. xxvin.

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.'

1 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, spring-
ing 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 Chan-
cellor 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

278 THE BOSTONIANS. xxix.

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 Missis-
sippian 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.'

I How do you know it was a mistake ? Mother would
have liked him, I dare say.'

' 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.'
4 Whom do you mean by " she " ?'

* Mrs. Burrage, of course.'

I 1 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.
4 Why in the world not — since she knows him ?'

xxix. THE BOSTONIANS. 279

' 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 with-,
drawn, 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-litho-
graphs 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

28o THE BOSTONIANS. xxix.

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 off-hand 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 spreta injuria format), 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

xxix. THE BOSTONIANS. 281

renounce it because you can't. Olive kept these reflections
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 con-
sideration 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 meet-
ings ? 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

282 THE BOSTONIANS. xxix.

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 con-
spiracy 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 engage-
ments 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, compla-
cently 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

284 THE BOSTONIANS.

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

xxx. THE BOSTONIANS. 285

occurred to his mother that she might convert Verena into
the animating principle of a big soire'e, 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 in-
sensible 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

286 THE BOSTONIANS. xxx.

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
farther 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

xxx. THE BOSTONIANS. 287

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.

288 THE BOSTONIANS. xxx.

* 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 every-
thing. 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 posi-
tive 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 reflections I note might have
appeared to permit, ' Well, if you can't tell from his appear-
ance ! 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

xxx. THE BOSTONIANS. 289

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 expres-
sion 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 re-
joined, 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 appoint-
ments, 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 —

290 THE BOSTONIANS.

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 sym-
pathisers 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. Cer-
tainly, 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.'

xxx. THE BOSTONIANS. 291

{ 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 con-
trary. ' 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 con-

292 THE BOSTONIANS. xxx.

tinued, laughing. 'He liked me the first time he saw
me.'

' Oh, that time ! ' Olive murmured.

'And still more the second.'

1 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, with-
out 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 for-

xxx. THE BOSTONIANS. % 293

getting 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 establish-
ment 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.

xxxi. THE BOSTONIANS. 295

1 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 unim-
portant.

'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?'

296 THE BOSTONIANS. xxxi.

' 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 any-
thing 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 reflection 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

xxxi. THE BOSTONIANS. 297

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 com-
parison 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.

4 1 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

298 THE BOSTONIANS. xxxi.

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 pre-
sented 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 agreat 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

xxxi. THE BOSTONIANS. 299

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 con-
sistency'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 con-
cession 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 :

300 THE BOSTONIANS. xxxi.

' Don't think / 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 melan-
choly, 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 :

1 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.

I Help to what ? '
'Help to help you?

I 1 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 manifesta-
tion of impatience — the first, literally, and the first note of
reproach — that had occurred in the course of their remark-
able 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

xxxi. THE BOSTONIANS. 301

is something unspeakably dear to me. But you begin again,
every time — you don't do me justice. I must take every-
thing 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 in-
justice 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 trie house if she should hear him coming out.
No sound, however, reached her ear; apparently he did

xxxn. THE BOSTONIANS. 303

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

304 THE BOSTONIANS. xxxn.

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 tremen-
dous 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.7 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 '), c 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.'

xxxii. THE BOSTONIANS. 305

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 under-
taken. 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 pro-

x

306 THE BOSTONIANS. xxxn.

tection 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 strange-
ness of such a woman's coming round to a positive desire
for a connection with the Tarrants. Mrs. Burrage had
indeed explained this partly by saying that her son's condi-
tion 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 favour-
able 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

xxxii. THE BOSTON1ANS. 307

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 per-
ceive how the wind was setting ; but yesterday we had a real
edairtissement. 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 pre-
sumption 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, fen 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 re-
nounced, 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

308 THE BOSTONIANS. xxxn.

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 judgment 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 'j it would be very clumsy to pick her out of her
generation only for the purpose of frustrating her. More-
over, 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

xxxn. THE BOSTONIANS. 309

bride, but rather that she might take too fond a possession
of her. It was a fear which may be described as a pre-
sentiment 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

3io THE BOSTONIANS. xxxn.

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 over-indulge 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 hec had been discriminatingly severe. She
had a hundred protests, objections, replies ; her only embar-
rassment 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 whatso-
ever of Vere:ia, 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 d jesn't live for that,' said Olive.

'What I mean is that she should deliver an address
every nig'it!' Mrs. Burrage returned, smiling.

xxxii. THE BOSTONIANS. 311

* 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 con-
siderably 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.

312 THE BOSTONIANS. xxxn.

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 par-
ticular ; 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 detest-
able 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

xxxii. THE BOSTONIANS. 313

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 de-
clared 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 in-
sufferable 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 grayness, 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 concep-
tion, 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

314 THE BOSTONIANS. xxxn.

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 oppor-
tunity. 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 dis-
cover 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,

xxxir. THE BOSTONIANS. 315

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 re-
mained 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 arrange-
ment which would deliver her from that. If the Burrages
were to take Verena they would take her from Olive im-
measurably 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.

1 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 per-
ceived 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 j but she was not sure now — after

xxxiii. THE BOSTONIANS. 317

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 Eng-
land 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

3i8 THE BOSTONIANS. xxxni.

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 any-
thing 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, laugh-
ing, 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

xxxiii. THE BOSTONIANS. 319

and strange ; and Basil Ransom's companion privately re-
marked how little men knew about women, or indeed about
what was really delicate, that he, without any cruel inten-
tion, 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 Chan-
cellor, 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 acci-
dent 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 per-
formers 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 hum-
bug ; 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

320 THE BOSTONIANS. xxxin.

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 ever-
more. 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 whicri 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 sur-
rounded 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.

4 A friend? — do you mean Mr. Burrage?' And Ran-

xxxm. THE BOSTONIANS. 321

som 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.

1 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 think-
ing, 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

322 THE BOSTONIANS. xxxm.

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 flirta-
tious, 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.

XXXIIT. THE BOSTONIANS. 323

' 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

324 THE BOSTONIANS. xxxm.

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 pre-
pared herself to go out.

They went up to the Central Park by the elevated
railway, and Verena reflected, as they proceeded, that any-
way 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 inclosure, 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

xxxni. THE BOSTONIANS. 325

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 compensa-
tion 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 noonday 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 com-
plete, and after having threaded the devious ways of the
Ramble, lost themselves in the Maze, and admired all the

326 THE BOSTONIANS. xxxni.

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 inge-
nious 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

xxxin. THE BOSTONIANS. 327

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 dis-
appointments 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 in-
stance, 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 de-
nouncing 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 educa-
tion 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 considera-
tion (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 reflections, 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

328 THE BOSTONIANS. xxxin.

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 con-
victions 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 im-
portant 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 j 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

330 THE BOSTONIANS. xxxiv.

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 re-
nounced, 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 im-
pression 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

xxxiv. THE BOSTONIANS. 331

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.'

332 THE BOSTONIANS. xxxiv.

' 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 under-
stood 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

xxxiv. THE BOSTONIANS. 333

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.

1 1 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.

1 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 woman 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

334 THE BOSTONIANS. xxxiv.

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 earnest-
ness, 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 dis-
posed 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.'

xxxiv. THE BOSTONIANS. 335

1 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 pro-
found, more durable.'

336 THE BOSTONIANS. xxxiv.

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 delight-
ful ; 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 com-
plimentary 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 vulgar-
ising 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 connection 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 ! '

xxxiv. THE BOSTONIANS. 337

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,

z

338 THE BOSTONIANS. xxxiv.

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 com-
mended 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 under-
stand, 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 affec-
tions '

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 splen-
did 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

XXXTV. THE BOSTONIANS. 339

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 pic-
turesque, 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.

1 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

340 THE BOSTONIANS. xxxiv.

him to put her into a car, she replied that she wished no
car; she wanted to walk. This image of her 'streaking
off7 by herself, as he figured it, did not mend the matter ;
but in the presence of ther 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 un-
expected 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 charm-
ing 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,

xxxiv. THE BOSTONIANS. 341

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 suffi-
ciently 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 assur-
ances '

'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?' Sud-
denly 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 Mississip-
pian 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 ring-
lets, 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 golden-rod 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

346 THE BOSTONIAtfS. xxxv.

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 pro-
tested 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 over-
laden 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 reflection 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 prefigure-

xxxv. THE BOSTONIANS. 347

ment 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 dis-
closed 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,
gray 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 in-
scribed, 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 j they had a kind of strong-
hold in the dining-room, which was kept locked at all but
sacramental hours. There was a tradition that a 'boy'

348 THE BOSTONIANS. xxxv.

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 de-
cided 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,

xxxv. THE BOSTONIANS. 349

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 j 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 un-
natural 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 star-
light, 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 else-
where, 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.

35° THE BOSTONIANS. xxxv.

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?'

1 1 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 ex-
claimed, feeling that he might have a friend in the camp.
* Then you can inform me where those ladies have their
house.'

xxxv. THE BOSTONIANS. 351

' 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 ap-
pearance 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.

4 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,

352 THE BOSTONIANS. xxxv.

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 per-
mission 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 sinu-
osity, 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 inhabit-
ants 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

xxxv. THE BOSTONIANS. 353

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 state-
ments.

' 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 acquisi-
tion/

Ransom could not but feel flattered at the idea that he
had been a subject of conversation — as this implied — ir
the little circle at Miss Chancellor's ; but he was at a ]'

2 A

354 THE BOSTONIANS. xxxv.

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 sup-
pose 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 im-
pression 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 ? '

xxxv. THE BOSTONIANS. 355

1 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 ; ' 1 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.

1 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 anima-
tion 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, involun-
tarily.

Doctor Prance's eye gleamed towards him a moment,
and she observed, humorously (she was relaxing im-
mensely), * Perhaps Miss Birdseye is right ! ' Then, as he
made no rejoinder, only listening to the vocal inflections
that floated out of the house, she went on — ' She's prac-
tising her speech.'

* Her speech? Is she going to deliver one here?'

4 No, as soon as they go back to town — at the Music
Hall.'

Ransom's attention was now transferred to his com-
panion. ' 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.'

356 THE BOSTONIANS. xxxv.

* 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 in-
teresting.

* 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 j 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 pro-
crastinator ; he knew nothing of the reception that awaited
him, but he took his way to the cottage designated to him
overnight by Doctor Prance, with the step of a man much
more conscious of his own purpose than of possible
obstacles. He made the reflection, 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

358 THE BOSTONIANS. xxxvi.

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, accord-
ing 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

xxxvi. THE BOSTONIANS. 359

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 Chan-
cellor'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

360 THE BOSTONIANS. xxxvi.

her, the incarnation of well-earned rest, of patient, sub-
missive 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?'

1 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.'

1 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 j she seemed to be considering. ' It's homoeo-
pathic,' 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.

1 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.

xxxvi. THE BOSTONIANS. 361

1 1 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 signific-
ance, 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

362 THE BOSTONIANS. xxxvi.

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.'

I 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 1 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 help-
ful, 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

xxxvi. THE BOSTONIANS. 363

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 — c 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, t 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.

1 Of course you are very much surprised to see me ; but
I hope to be able to induce you to regard me not absolutely

364 THE BOSTONIANS. xxxvi.

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 ex-
plained 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 ;

xxxvi. THE BOSTONIANS. 365

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.

f 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.

366 THE BOSTONIANS. xxxvi.

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 reas-
surance 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 inclosed
the further side of it. They passed into the ancient ship-
yard 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

xxxvi. THE BOSTONIANS. 367

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 ex-
pressive 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. •

c 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

368 THE BOSTONIANS. xxxvi.

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 j 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 Framing-
ham 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.

xxxvi. THE BOSTONIANS. 369

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 some-
thing 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 fore-
head 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 in-
truder. She remained as she had collapsed, quite pro-
strate; 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

2 B

370 THE BOSTONIANS. xxxvi.

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 deter-
mined 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

xxxvi. THE BOSTONIANS. 371

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 Cam-
bridge, before we went to New York?' The sense that
Verena had been perfidious there — perfidious in her reti-
cence— 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 con-
fronted, 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 ex-
pected 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,

372 THE BOSTONIANS. xxxvi.

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,
professsed 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 expedi-
tion 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

xxxvi. THE BOSTONIANS. 373

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 con-
tinued 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 extra-
ordinary 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. Doubt-
less, 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

xxxvii. THE BOSTONIANS. 375

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 extre-
mity 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,

376 THE BOSTONIANS. xxxvii.

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, some-
thing 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

xxxvn. THE BOSTONIANS. 377

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 pro-
fessional 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 de-
termined 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

378 THE BOSTONIANS. xxxvu.

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?'

c 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 tender-
ness that moved him — it was devilish malignity ; tenderness
would be incapable of requiring the horrible sacrifice that

xxxvii. THE BOSTONIANS. 379

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 pre-
destined 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 en-
tirely unnatural and overdone. If she was deceiving her-
self, 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 satis-
faction 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 sub-
ject, as if to encourage her friend, to show how she

38o THE BOSTONIANS. xxxvii.

kept possession of her judgment, 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 reflec-
tion 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 en-
joined 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

xxxvii. THE BOSTONIANS. 381

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 en-
force 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 j 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

382 THE BOSTONIANS. xxxvu.

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 j 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 re-
duced. 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 duratioa Here all the homely

xxxvii. THE BOSTONIANS. 383

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 court-
ship 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 ship-yard. 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 j
but the worst was really something she could not know,
inasmuch as up to this time Verena chose as little to con-
fide 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 effect-
ive 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 every-
thing she had burned. The extraordinary part of it was
that though she felt the situation to be, as I say, tremen-
dously serious, she was not ashamed of the treachery which
she — yes, decidedly, by this time she must admit it to her-
self— 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 im-

xxxvm. THE BOSTONIANS. 385

plication 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 respon-
sive 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,

2 C

386 THE BOSTONIANS. xxxvm.

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 happi-
ness 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 ex-
perience 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 disappoint-
ment. 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

xxxviii. THE BOSTONIANS. 3^7

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 move-
ment, he found means to deepen this illumination, to drag her
former standard in the dust. He was in a very odd situa-
tion 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

388 THE BOSTONIANS. xxxvm.

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

XXXVIIT. THE BOSTONIANS. 389

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 ac-
cepted 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 charm-
ing 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 plat-
form 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

390 THE BOSTONIANS. xxxvm.

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 j 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 irri-
gate, it will fertilise, it will brilliantly adorn your conversa-
tion. 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

xxxviii. THE BOSTONIANS. 391

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 per-
fectly good part Miss Chancellor's reflections 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 encour-
agement, 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

392 THE BOSTONIANS. xxxvin.

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 conse-
quence of Olive's influence she had read and studied so much
that it seemed now as if everything must take form before-
hand. 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

xxxviii. THE BOSTONIANS. 393

Hall), to the acclamations of the newspapers. He didn't
care for her engagements, her campaigns, or all the ex-
pectancy 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 pleasant-
ries, 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 bareheaded from the cottage,
and, shading her eyes from the red, declining sun, was
looking up and down the road. It was part of the regula-
tion 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

394 THE BOSTONIANS. xxxvm.

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 reflection 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 con-
fined her ancient hat hung loose, and the late afternoon-
light covered her octogenarian face and gave it a kind of

xxxvin. THE BOSTONIANS. 395

fairness, a double placidity. There was, to Ransom, some-
thing 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 connection 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

396 THE BOSTONIANS. xxxvm.

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 any-
thing 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 kins-
woman 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

xxxvni. THE BOSTONIANS. 397

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 satisfac-
tion 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 Chan-
cellor'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 be-
nignant 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 illu-
sion should be dear to Miss Birdseye j 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 throw-
ing 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 know-

398 THE BOSTONIANS. xxxvm.

ing 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 moire 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 —

xxxvin. THE BOSTONIANS. 399

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 drily 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 Ran-
som's eyes again, and speaking as if she were trying now to
stop herself, to tie herself by a vow.

1 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 pro-
tected,' 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.

400 THE BOSTONIANS. xxxvm.

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
1 frame -house' on Cape Cod. Ransom learned from
Doctor Prance that her mortal remains were to be com-
mitted 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

2 D

402 THE BOSTONIANS. xxxix.

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 neigh-
bourhood 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 im-
mediately 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

xxxix. THE BOSTONIANS. 403

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 intrust 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 j 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 j 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.'

1 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, goodbye,' 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

404 THE BOSTONIANS. xxxix.

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 con-
sciousness 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 that he must rush back to the margin of that mild
inlet ; the voices of the air whispered to him that in his

xxxix. THE BOSTONIANS. 405

absence he was being outwitted. Nevertheless he stayed the
time he had determined to stay ; quieting himself with the
reflection 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 drag-
ging 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 words she spoke.

406 THE BOSTONIANS. xxxix.

1 1 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.

1 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 sud-
denly 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

xxxix. THE BOSTONIANS. 407

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 ac-
counts, 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 should 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 with-
drawal 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

408 THE BOSTONIANS. xxxix.

that is why she pitied Verena now with an unspeakable pity,
regarded her as the victim of an atrocious spell, and re-
served 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 con-
viction 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

xxxix. THE BOSTONIANS. 409

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 water-
proof; 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

410 THE BOSTONIANS. xxxix.

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 sub-
mitted, 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

xxxix. THE BOSTONIANS. 411

now was dropped brought to her eyes slow, still tears, tears
that came one by one, neither easing her nerves nor lighten-
ing 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 pre-
visions 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 blind-
ness. The twilight had become thick by the time she

412 THE BOSTONIANS. xxxix.

reached Marmion and paused for an instant in front of her
house, over which the elms that stood on the grassy way-
side 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 dif-
ferent 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 j and Olive took her hand with an
irresistible impulse of compassion and reassurance. 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 wofulness 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

xxxix. THE BOSTONIANS. 413

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.

1 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 im-
portance 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

4i 4 THE BOSTONIANS. xxxix.

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.

' 1 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, un-
familiar, 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 recollec-
tion 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

416 THE BOSTONIANS. XL.

party, a sentiment of aversion which put an end to such
attentions. He didn't laugh, he was too worried and pre-
occupied ; but he replied, in a tone which apparently an-
noyed 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?'

6 1 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 crush-
ing, and when a man's crushed, it's all over.'

' Yes, you look as if you were in very small pieces ! I
am glad 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!'

XL. THE BOSTONIANS. 417

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 ascer-
tain is where Miss Tarrant may be found at the present
moment.'

'And do you think that's a delicate inquiry to make

.

' 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

2 E

418 THE BOSTONIANS. XL.

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 fruit-
less. 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,

XL. THE J30STONIANS. 419

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.

1 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.'

4 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 pre-
tended 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

420 THE BOSTONIANS. XL.

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?'

1 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

XL. THE BOSTONIANS. 421

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 ? // 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

422 THE BOSTONIANS. XL.

take seriously, yet who was none the less objectionable for
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 Rasil 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 reminis-
cences. 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

XL. THE BOSTONIANS. 423

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 j 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.

1 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
pepple 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 pro-
test?' And he was already feeling in a side -pocket for
his note-book.

' 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

424 THE BOSTONIANS. XL.

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 attract-
ive ! ) 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 con-
sequence of your disapproval of your sister's views?'

Mrs. Luna sprang up again, almost snatching the memo-
randa 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- note-book 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 news-
paper.'

' 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

XL. THE BOSTONIANS. 425

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 ran-
corous 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, ad-
dressing 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

426 THE BOSTONIANS. XL.

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 hypo-
critically, 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 porttire 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 col-
oured 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 West-
erners 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, scin-
tillating over the town. Boston seemed to him big and full
of nocturnal life, very much awake and preparing for an
evening of pleasure.

428 THE BOSTONIANS. XLI.

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 ap-
peared to Ransom, while at the same time he wished im-
mensely 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 inter-
vene 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. Ran-
som 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

XLI. THE.BOSTONIANS. 429

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 in-
creased 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

430 THE BOSTONIANS. XLI.

several of the arm-chairs, in the row behind the lecturer's
desk, were occupied, with gaps, and in a moment he re-
cognised, 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. Ap-
parently 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 connection
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

XLI. THE BOSTONIANS. 431

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 a 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

432 THE BOSTONIANS. XLI.

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, where-
ever 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. How-
ever, 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 :

XLI. THE BOSTONIANS. 433

1 1 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.

' 1 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.

1 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, reason-
able 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?'

2 F

434 THE BOSTONIANS. XLI.

* 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.'

1 She has sent her father, or perhaps even her mother.
They are in there too.'

' How do you know that ?' asked the policeman, con-
sideringly.

' 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 ben in Boston.'

4 Oh, Boston's a great place,' Ransom rejoined, inatten-
tively. 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 Ran-
som, ' 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 posses-
sion of him. that a drama in which he, though cut off, was

XLI. THE BOSTONIANS. 435

an actor, had been going on for some time in the apart-
ment 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 audi-
ence 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 sud-
denly 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 1'

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 newspaper-man 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

436 THE BOSTONIANS. XLI.

gentleman himself burst through the other door, in a state
of the liveliest agitation.

1 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 police-
man 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 '11 be sick ! ' cried the distressed reporter.
1 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"!'

4 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.

4 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 ap-
parently 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!'

4 Maybe he will. I'll let him in if he comes, but he's
the only one. She is on now,' the policeman added, with-
out 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, how-
ever, 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

XLI. THE BOSTONIANS. 437

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.'

1 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 reflection 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 dis-
cretion 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, dis-
passionately.

'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 police-
man, while Mr. Filer discharged at the door a volley of

438 THE BOSTONIANS. XLI.

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.

1 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 announce-
ment 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, per-
functory 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

440 THE BOSTONIANS. XLII.

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^// 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 be-
hind. ' 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 submis-
sive, helpless. What he wanted, in this light, flamed before

XLII. THE BOSTONIANS. 441

him and challenged all his manhood, tossing his determina-
tion 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.

1 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 ?'

442 THE BOSTONIANS. XLII.

1 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 plat-
form, 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 com-
parison to her own. c 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 objurga-

XLII. THE BOSTONIANS. 443

tions 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 irrita-
tion-;—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 sacri-
fice 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

444 THE BOSTONIANS. XLII.

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 com-
pensation 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

XLII. THE BOSTONIANS. 445

just as any plighted maiden might have asked any favour of
her lover. But it was the poor girl's misfortune that, what-
ever 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/

446 THE BOSTONIANS. XLII.

'I hope he is 1' Ransom exclaimed. 'If Miss Chan-
cellor ordered the policeman, she must have expected me.'

1 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 :

4 I don't understand — where shall we go ? Where will
you take me?'

4 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.
4 And what will the people do ? Listen, listen !'

' Your father is ceasing to interest them. They'll howl
and thump, according to their nature.'

4 Ah, their nature's fine !' Verena pleaded.

4 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

4 1 could soothe them with a word !'

4 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

XLII. THE BOSTONIANS. 447

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

448 THE BOSTONIANS. XLII.

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 revolu-
tions, 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 thunder-
storm. 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 per-
son 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

XLII. THE BOSTONIANS. 449

was hurrying her out, leaving Mrs. Tarrant to heave her-
self into the arms of Mrs. Burrage, who, he was sure,,
would, within the 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 pre-
vented 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.

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