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She did not want you to know anything about it, but that ain't quite my way, so I came to explain." "Please, please, Aunt Sophy, don't be too angry," here came from Verena's lips. "Silence, Verena!" said her father. Surely there was quite a new note in his voice! He rose; his languor left him; he came up to Farmer King and held out his hand.
Pardon's promise of eternal excitement to be a brilliant thing, should indeed consider Mr. Pardon with any tolerance 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.
Nevertheless there was a certain part of her being which was numb and cold and half-dead. She was not frightened about anything; but she knew that she had behaved as no right-minded or honorable girl should have done. Verena's words that afternoon had roused her, and had given her a slight degree of pain. She lay down on her bed without undressing.
She left her seat, ran up to the girl, and took her hand. "Come and sit here here in the midst of our circle. We have such a lot to say to you!" "And I have a lot to say to you. But, dear me! how grand we are!" Nancy's twinkling black eyes looked with mock approval at Verena's plain but very neat gray dress, and at the equally neat costumes of the other girls.
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.
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, esthetic elements which Olive and Verena seemed to be trying to introduce into it.
Miss Birdseye felt this, but she was rather helpless about it, and delivered herself, with her universal familiarity, which embraced 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.
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.
Luna the night before about her having lost her head was near to the mark; for if she had not been blinded by her rancour she would have guessed the horror with which she inspired her sister when she spoke in that offhand way of Verena's lying and Mrs. Burrage's lying. Did people lie like that in Mrs. Luna's set?
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.
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