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She spoke to her as if they were equals in that respect, as if Verena's genius and fame would make up the disparity, and the girl had no need of encouragement and patronage. She made no direct allusion, however, to her particular views, and asked her no question about her "gift" an omission which Verena thought strange, and, with the most speculative candour, spoke of to Olive afterwards. Mrs.
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.
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.
They had had by this time a great deal of talk, none of which, nevertheless, had been serious to Verena's view. Mr.
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.
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.
The tone of the manifestation was good-humoured, but it was not gratulatory. He looked at his watch again, and saw that five minutes more had elapsed, and he remembered what the newspaperman in Charles Street had said about Olive's guaranteeing Verena's punctuality.
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?
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.
She had never, so far as she could remember, told an actual and premeditated lie before. Now matters were so difficult, and there seemed such a certainty of there being no other way out, that she resolved to brave the consequences and add to her former sin by a desperate, downright black lie. Accordingly, just before dinner she ran into Verena's room. "Renny," she said, "I have made up my mind."
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