They passed through two or three small, short streets, which, with their little wooden houses, with still more wooden door-yards, looked as if they had been constructed by the nearest carpenter and his boy — a sightless, soundless, interspaced, embryonic region — and entered a long avenue which, fringed on either side with fresh villas, offering themselves trustfully to the public, had the distinction of a wide pavement of neat red brick. The new paint on the square detached houses shone afar off in the transparent air: they had, on top, little cupolas and belvederes, in front a pillared piazza, made bare by the indoor life of winter, on either side a bow-window or two, and everywhere an embellishment of scallops, brackets, cornices, wooden flourishes. They stood, for the most part, on small eminences, lifted above the impertinence of hedge or paling, well up before the world, with all the good conscience which in many cases came, as Ransom saw (and he had noticed the same ornament when he traversed with Olive the quarter of Boston inhabited by Miss Birdseye), from a silvered number, affixed to the glass above the door, in figures huge enough to be read by the people who, in the periodic horse-cars, travelled along the middle of the avenue. It was to these glittering badges that many of the houses on either side owed their principal identity. One of the horse-cars now advanced in the straight, spacious distance; it was almost the only object that animated the prospect, which, in its large cleanness, its implication of strict business-habits on the part of all the people who were not there, Ransom thought very impressive. As he went on with Verena he asked her about the Women’s Convention, the year before; whether it had accomplished much work and she had enjoyed it.
“What do you care about the work it accomplished?” said the girl. “You don’t take any interest in that.”
“You mistake my attitude. I don’t like it, but I greatly fear it.”
In answer to this Verena gave a free laugh. “I don’t believe you fear much!”
“The bravest men have been afraid of women. Won’t you even tell me whether you enjoyed it? I am told you made an immense sensation there — that you leaped into fame.”
Verena never waved off an allusion to her ability, her eloquence; she took it seriously, without any flutter or protest, and had no more manner about it than if it concerned the goddess Minerva. “I believe I attracted considerable attention; of course, that’s what Olive wants — it paves the way for future work. I have no doubt I reached many that wouldn’t have been reached otherwise. They think that’s my great use — to take hold of the outsiders, as it were; of those who are prejudiced or thoughtless, or who don’t care about anything unless it’s amusing. I wake up the attention.”
“That’s the class to which I belong,” Ransom said. “Am I not an outsider? I wonder whether you would have reached me — or waked up my attention!”
Verena was silent awhile, as they walked; he heard the light click of her boots on the smooth bricks. Then —“I think I have waked it up a little,” she replied, looking straight before her.
“Most assuredly! You have made me wish tremendously to contradict you.”
“Well, that’s a good sign.”
“I suppose it was very exciting — your convention,” Ransom went on, in a moment; “the sort of thing you would miss very much if you were to return to the ancient fold.”
“The ancient fold, you say very well, where women were slaughtered like sheep! Oh, last June, for a week, we just quivered! There were delegates from every State and every city; we lived in a crowd of people and of ideas; the heat was intense, the weather magnificent, and great thoughts and brilliant sayings flew round like darting fireflies. Olive had six celebrated, high-minded women staying in her house — two in a room; and in the summer evenings we sat in the open windows, in her parlour, looking out on the bay, with the lights gleaming in the water, and talked over the doings of the morning, the speeches, the incidents, the fresh contributions to the cause. We had some tremendously earnest discussions, which it would have been a benefit to you to hear, or any man who doesn’t think that we can rise to the highest point. Then we had some refreshment — we consumed quantities of ice-cream!” said Verena, in whom the note of gaiety alternated with that of earnestness, almost of exaltation, in a manner which seemed to Basil Ransom absolutely and fascinatingly original. “Those were great nights!” she added, between a laugh and a sigh.
Her description of the convention put the scene before him vividly; he seemed to see the crowded, overheated hall, which he was sure was filled with carpet-baggers, to hear flushed women, with loosened bonnet-strings, forcing thin voices into ineffectual shrillness. It made him angry, and all the more angry, that he hadn’t a reason, to think of the charming creature at his side being mixed up with such elements, pushed and elbowed by them, conjoined with them in emulation, in unsightly strainings and clappings and shoutings, in wordy, windy iteration of inanities. Worst of all was the idea that she should have expressed such a congregation to itself so acceptably, have been acclaimed and applauded by hoarse throats, have been lifted up, to all the vulgar multitude, as the queen of the occasion. He made the reflexion, afterwards, that he was singularly ill-grounded in his wrath, inasmuch as it was none of his business what use Miss Tarrant chose to make of her energies, and, in addition to this, nothing else was to have been expected of her. But that reflexion was absent now, and in its absence he saw only the fact that his companion had been odiously perverted. “Well, Miss Tarrant,” he said, with a deeper seriousness than showed in his voice, “I am forced to the painful conclusion that you are simply ruined.”
“Ruined? Ruined yourself!”
“Oh, I know the kind of women that Miss Chancellor had at her house, and what a group you must have made when you looked out at the Back Bay! It depresses me very much to think of it.”
“We made a lovely, interesting group, and if we had had a spare minute we would have been photographed,” Verena said.
This led him to ask her if she had ever subjected herself to the process; and she answered that a photographer had been after her as soon as she got back from Europe, and that she had sat for him, and that there were certain shops in Boston where her portrait could be obtained. She gave him this information very simply, without pretence of vagueness of knowledge, spoke of the matter rather respectfully, indeed, as if it might be of some importance; and when he said that he should go and buy one of the little pictures as soon as he returned to town, contented herself with replying, “Well, be sure you pick out a good one!” He had not been altogether without a hope that she would offer to give him one, with her name written beneath, which was a mode of acquisition he would greatly have preferred; but this, evidently, had not occurred to her, and now, as they went further, her thought was following a different train. That was proved by her remarking, at the end of a silence, inconsequently, “Well, it showed I have a great use!” As he stared, wondering what she meant, she explained that she referred to the brilliancy of her success at the convention. “It proved I have a great use,” she repeated, “and that is all I care for!”
“The use of a truly amiable woman is to make some honest man happy,” Ransom said, with a sententiousness of which he was perfectly aware.
It was so marked that it caused her to stop short in the middle of the broad walk, while she looked at him with shining eyes. “See here, Mr. Ransom, do you know what strikes me?” she exclaimed. “The interest you take in me isn’t really controversial — a bit. It’s quite personal!” She was the most extraordinary girl; she could speak such words as those without the smallest look of added consciousness coming into her face, without the least supposable intention of coquetry, or any visible purpose of challenging the young man to say more.
“My interest in you — my interest in you,” he began. Then hesitating, he broke off suddenly. “It is certain your discovery doesn’t make it any less!”
“Well, that’s better,” she went on; “for we needn’t dispute.”
He laughed at the way she arranged it, and they presently reached the irregular group of heterogeneous buildings — chapels, dormitories, libraries, halls — which, scattered among slender trees, over a space reserved by means of a low rustic fence, rather than enclosed (for Harvard knows nothing either of the jealousy or the dignity of high walls and guarded gateways), constitutes the great university of Massachusetts. The yard, or college-precinct, is traversed by a number of straight little paths, over which, at certain hours of the day, a thousand undergraduates, with books under their arm and youth in their step, flit from one school to another. Verena Tarrant knew her way round, as she said to her companion; it was not the first time she had taken an admiring visitor to see the local monuments. Basil Ransom, walking with her from point to point, admired them all, and thought several of them exceedingly quaint and venerable. The rectangular structures of old red brick especially gratified his eye; the afternoon sun was yellow on their homely faces; their windows showed a peep of flower-pots and bright-coloured curtains; they wore an expression of scholastic quietude, and exhaled for the young Mississippian a tradition, an antiquity. “This is the place where I ought to have been,” he said to his charming guide. “I should have had a good time if I had been able to study here.”
“Yes; I presume you feel yourself drawn to any place where ancient prejudices are garnered up,” she answered, not without archness. “I know by the stand you take about our cause that you share the superstitions of the old bookmen. You ought to have been at one of those really medi?val universities that we saw on the other side, at Oxford, or G?ttingen, or Padua. You would have been in perfect sympathy with their spirit.”
“Well, I don’t know much about those old haunts,” Ransom rejoined. “I reckon this is good enough for me. And then it would have had the advantage that your residence isn’t far, you know.”
“Oh, I guess we shouldn’t have seen you much at my residence! As you live in New York, you come, but here you wouldn’t; that is always the way.” With this light philosophy Verena beguiled the transit to the library, into which she introduced her companion with the air of a person familiar with the sanctified spot. This edifice, a diminished copy of the chapel of King’s College, at the greater Cambridge, is a rich and impressive institution; and as he stood there, in the bright, heated stillness, which seemed suffused with the odour of old print and old bindings, and looked up into the high, light vaults that hung over quiet book-laden galleries, alcoves and tables, and glazed cases where rarer treasures gleamed more vaguely, over busts of benefactors and portraits of worthies, bowed heads of working students and the gentle creak of passing messengers — as he took possession, in a comprehensive glance, of the wealth and wisdom of the place, he felt more than ever the soreness of an opportunity missed; but he abstained from expressing it (it was too deep for that), and in a moment Verena had ............