The Bostonians, Vol. II | Page 4

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 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, inaccessible 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!" the girl 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."
"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