“I presume you are the only person in this country who feels as you do,” she observed at last.

“Not the only person who feels so, but very possibly the only person who thinks so. I have an idea that my convictions exist in a vague, unformulated state in the minds of a great many of my fellow-citizens. If I should succeed some day in giving them adequate expression I should simply put into shape the slumbering instincts of an important minority.”

“I am glad you admit it’s a minority!” Verena exclaimed. “That’s fortunate for us poor creatures. And what do you call adequate expression? I presume you would like to be President of the United States?”

“And breathe forth my views in glowing messages to a palpitating Senate? That is exactly what I should like to be; you read my aspirations wonderfully well.”

“Well, do you consider that you have advanced far in that direction, as yet?” Verena asked.

This question, with the tone in which it happened to be uttered, seemed to the young man to project rather an ironical light upon his present beggarly condition, so that for a moment he said nothing; a moment during which if his neighbour had glanced round at his face she would have seen it ornamented by an incipient blush. Her words had for him the effect of a sudden, though, on the part of a young woman who had of course every right to defend herself, a perfectly legitimate taunt. They appeared only to repeat in another form (so at least his exaggerated Southern pride, his hot sensibility, interpreted the matter) the idea that a gentleman so dreadfully backward in the path of fortune had no right to take up the time of a brilliant, successful girl, even for the purpose of satisfying himself that he renounced her. But the reminder only sharpened his wish to make her feel that if he had renounced, it was simply on account of that same ugly, accidental, outside backwardness; and if he had not, he went so far as to flatter himself, he might triumph over the whole accumulation of her prejudices — over all the bribes of her notoriety. The deepest feeling in Ransom’s bosom in relation to her was the conviction that she was made for love, as he had said to himself while he listened to her at Mrs. Burrage’s. She was profoundly unconscious of it, and another ideal, crude and thin and artificial, had interposed itself; but in the presence of a man she should really care for, this false, flimsy structure would rattle to her feet, and the emancipation of Olive Chancellor’s sex (what sex was it, great heaven? he used profanely to ask himself) would be relegated to the land of vapours, of dead phrases. The reader may imagine whether such an impression as this made it any more agreeable to Basil to have to believe it would be indelicate in him to try to woo her. He would have resented immensely the imputation that he had done anything of that sort yet. “Ah, Miss Tarrant, my success in life is one thing — my ambition is another!” he exclaimed presently, in answer to her inquiry. “Nothing is more possible than that I may be poor and unheard of all my days; and in that case no one but myself will know the visions of greatness I have stifled and buried.”

“Why do you talk of being poor and unheard of? Aren’t you getting on quite well in this city?”

This question of Verena’s left him no time, or at least no coolness, to remember that to Mrs. Luna and to Olive he had put a fine face on his prospects, and that any impression the girl might have about them was but the natural echo of what these ladies believed. It had to his ear such a subtly mocking, defiant, unconsciously injurious quality, that the only answer he could make to it seemed to him for the moment to be an outstretched arm, which, passing round her waist, should draw her so close to him as to enable him to give her a concise account of his situation in the form of a deliberate kiss. If the moment I speak of had lasted a few seconds longer I know not what monstrous proceeding of this kind it would have been my difficult duty to describe; it was fortunately arrested by the arrival of a nursery-maid pushing a perambulator and accompanied by an infant who toddled in her wake. Both the nurse and her companion gazed fixedly, and it seemed to Ransom even sternly, at the striking couple on the bench; and meanwhile Verena, looking with a quickened eye at the children (she adored children), went on —

“It sounds too flat for you to talk about your remaining unheard of. Of course you are ambitious; any one can see that, to look at you. And once your ambition is excited in any particular direction, people had better look out. With your will!” she added, with a curious mocking candour.

“What do you know about my will?” he asked, laughing a little awkwardly, as if he had really attempted to kiss her — in the course of the second independent interview he had ever had with her — and been rebuffed.

“I know it’s stronger than mine. It made me come out, when I thought I had much better not, and it keeps me sitting here long after I should have started for home.”

“Give me the day, dear Miss Tarrant, give me the day,” Basil Ransom murmured; and as she turned her face upon him, moved by the expression of his voice, he added —“Come and dine with me, since you wouldn’t lunch. Are you really not faint and weak?”

“I am faint and weak at all the horrible things you have said; I have lunched on abominations. And now you want me to dine with you? Thank you; I think you’re cool!” Verena cried, with a laugh which her chronicler knows to have been expressive of some embarrassment, though Basil Ransom did not.

“You must remember that I have, on two different occasions, listened to you for an hour, in speechless, submissive attention, and that I shall probably do it a great many times more.”

“Why should you ever listen to me again, when you loathe my ideas?”

“I don’t listen to your ideas; I listen to your voice.”

“Ah, I told Olive!” said Verena, quickly, as if his words had confirmed an old fear; which was general, however, and did not relate particularly to him.

Ransom still had an impression that he was not making love to her, especially when he could observe, with all the superiority of a man —“I wonder whether you have understood ten words I have said to you?”

“I should think you had made it clear enough — you had rubbed it in!”

“What have you understood, then?”

“Why, that you want to put us back further than we have been at any period.”

“I have been joking; I have been piling it up,” Ransom said, making that concession unexpectedly to the girl. Every now and then he had an air of relaxing himself, becoming absent, ceasing to care to discuss.

She was capable of noticing this, and in a moment she asked —“Why don’t you write out your ideas?”

This touched again upon the matter of his failure; it was curious how she couldn’t keep off it, hit it every time. “Do you mean for the public? I have written many things, but I can’t get them printed.”

“Then it would seem that there are not so many people — so many as you said just now — who agree with you.”

“Well,” said Basil Ransom, “editors are a mean, timorous lot, always saying they want something original, but deadly afraid of it when it comes.”

“Is it for papers, magazines?” As it sank into Verena’s mind more deeply that the contributions of this remarkable young man had been rejected — contributions in which, apparently, everything she held dear was riddled with scorn — she felt a strange pity and sadness, a sense of injustice. “I am very sorry you can’t get published,” she said, so simply that he looked up at her, from the figure he was scratching on the asphalt with his stick, to see whether such a tone as that, in relation to such a fact, were not “put on.” But it was evidently genuine, and Verena added that she supposed getting published was very difficult always; she remembered, though she didn’t mention, how little success her father had when he tried. She hoped Mr. Ransom would keep on; he would be sure to succeed at last. Then she continued, smiling, with more irony: “You may denounce me by name if you like. Only please don’t say anything about Olive Chancellor.”

“How little you understand what I want to achieve!” Basil Ransom exclaimed. “There you are — you women — all over; always meaning, yourselves, something personal, and always thinking it is meant by others!”

“Yes, that’s the charge they make,” said Verena gaily.

“I don’t want to touch you, or Miss Chancellor, or Mrs. Farrinder, or Miss Birdseye, or the shade of Eliza P. Moseley, or any other gifted and celebrated being on earth — or in heaven.”

“Oh, I suppose you want to destroy us by neglect, by silence!” Verena exclaimed, with the same brightness.

“No, I don’t want to destroy you, any more than I want to save you. There has been far too much talk about you, and I want to leave you alone altogether. My interest is in my own sex; yours evidently can look after itself. That’s what I want to save.”

Verena saw that he was more serious now than he had been before, that he was not piling it up satirically, but saying really and a trifle wearily, as if suddenly he were tired of much talk, what he meant. “To save it from what?” she asked.

“From the most damnable feminisation! I am so far from thinking, as you set forth the other night, that there is not enough women in our general life, that it has long been pressed home to me that there is a great deal too much. The whole generation is womanised; the masculine tone is passing out of the world; it’s a feminine, a nervous, hysterical, chattering, canting age, an age of hollow phrases and false delicacy and exaggerated solicitudes and coddled sensibilities, which, if we don’t soon look out, will usher in the reign of mediocrity, of the feeblest and flattest and the most pretentious that has ever been. The masculine character, the ability to dare and endure, to know and yet not fear reality, to look the world in the face and take it for what it is — a very queer and partly very base mixture — that is what I want to preserve, or rather, as I may say, to recover; and I must tell you that I don’t in the least care what becomes of you ladies while I make the attempt!”

The poor fellow delivered himself of these narrow notions (the rejection of which by leading periodicals was certainly not a matter for surprise) with low, soft earnestness, bending towards her so as to give out his whole idea, yet apparently forgetting for the moment how offensive it must be to her now that it was articulated in that calm, severe way, in which no allowance was to be made for hyperbole. Verena did not remind herself of this; she was too much impressed by his manner and by the novelty of a man taking that sort of religious tone about such a cause. It told her on the spot, from one minute to the other and once for all, that the man who could give her that impression would never come round. She felt cold, slightly sick, though she replied that now he summed up his creed in such a distinct, lucid way, it was much more comfortable — one knew with what one was dealing; a declaration much at variance with the fact, for Verena had never felt less gratified in her life. The ugliness of her companion’s profession of faith made her shiver; it would have been difficult to her to imagine anything more crudely profane. She was determined, however, not to betray any shudder that could suggest weakness, and the best way she could think of to disguise her emotion was to remark in a tone which, although not assumed for that purpose, was really the most effective revenge, inasmuch as it always produced on Ransom’s part (it was not peculiar, among women, to Verena) an angry helplessness —“Mr. Ransom, I assure you this is an age of conscience.”

“That’s a part of your cant. It’s an age of unspeakable shams, as Carlyle says.”

“Well,” returned Verena, “it’s all very comfortable for you to say that you wish to leave us alone. But you can’t leave us alone. We are here, and we have got to be disposed of. You have got to put us somewhere. It’s a remarkable social system that has no place for us!” the girl went on, with her most charming laugh.

“No place in public. My plan is to keep you at home and have a better time with you there than ever.”

“I’m glad it’s to be better; there’s room for it. Woe to American womanhood when you start a movement for being more — what you like to be — at home!”

“Lord, how you’re perverted; you, the very genius!” Basil Ransom murmured, looking at her with the kindest eyes.

She paid no attention to this, she went on, “And those who have got no home (there are millions, you know), what are you going to do with them? You must remember that women marry — are given in marriage — less and less; that isn’t their career, as a matter of course, any more. You can’t tell them to go and mind their husband and children, when they have no husband and children to mind.”

“Oh,” said Ransom, “that’s a detail! And for myself, I confess, I have such a boundless appreciation of your sex in private life that I am perfectly ready to advocate a man’s having a half-a-dozen wives.”