XX

She hoped she should not soon see him again, and there appeared to be no

reason she should, if their intercourse was to be conducted by means of

cheques. The understanding with Verena was, of course, complete; she had

promised to stay with her friend as long as her friend should require

it. She had said at first that she couldn't give up her mother, but she

had been made to feel that there was no question of giving up. She

should be as free as air, to go and come; she could spend hours and days

with her mother, whenever Mrs. Tarrant required her attention; all that

Olive asked of her was that, for the time, she should regard Charles

Street as her home. There was no struggle about this, for the simple

reason that by the time the question came to the front Verena was

completely under the charm. The idea of Olive's charm will perhaps make

the reader smile; but I use the word not in its derived, but in its

literal sense. The fine web of authority, of dependence, that her

strenuous companion had woven about her, was now as dense as a suit of

golden mail; and Verena was thoroughly interested in their great

undertaking; she saw it in the light of an active, enthusiastic faith.

The benefit that her father desired for her was now assured; she

expanded, developed, on the most liberal scale. Olive saw the

difference, and you may imagine how she rejoiced in it; she had never

known a greater pleasure. Verena's former attitude had been girlish

submission, grateful, curious sympathy. She had given herself, in her

young, amused surprise, because Olive's stronger will and the incisive

proceedings with which she pointed her purpose drew her on. Besides, she

was held by hospitality, the vision of new social horizons, the sense of

novelty, and the love of change. But now the girl was disinterestedly

attached to the precious things they were to do together; she cared

about them for themselves, believed in them ardently, had them

constantly in mind. Her share in the union of the two young women was no

longer passive, purely appreciative; it was passionate, too, and it put

forth a beautiful energy. If Olive desired to get Verena into training,

she could flatter herself that the process had already begun, and that

her colleague enjoyed it almost as much as she. Therefore she could say

to herself, without the imputation of heartlessness, that when she left

her mother it was for a noble, a sacred use. In point of fact, she left

her very little, and she spent hours in jingling, aching, jostled

journeys between Charles Street and the stale suburban cottage. Mrs.

Tarrant sighed and grimaced, wrapped herself more than ever in her

mantle, said she didn't know as she was fit to struggle alone, and that,

half the time, if Verena was away, she wouldn't have the nerve to answer

the door-bell; she was incapable, of course, of neglecting such an

opportunity to posture as one who paid with her heart's blood for

leading the van of human progress. But Verena had an inner sense (she

judged her mother now, a little, for the first time) that she would be

sorry to be taken at her word, and that she felt safe enough in trusting

to her daughter's generosity. She could not divest herself of the

faith--even now that Mrs. Luna was gone, leaving no trace, and the grey

walls of a sedentary winter were apparently closing about the two young

women--she could not renounce the theory that a residence in Charles

Street must at least produce some contact with the brilliant classes.

She was vexed at her daughter's resignation to not going to parties and

to Miss Chancellor's not giving them; but it was nothing new for her to

have to practise patience, and she could feel, at least, that it was

just as handy for Mr. Burrage to call on the child in town, where he

spent half his time, sleeping constantly at Parker's.

It was a fact that this fortunate youth called very often, and Verena

saw him with Olive's full concurrence whenever she was at home. It had

now been quite agreed between them that no artificial limits should be

set to the famous phase; and Olive had, while it lasted, a sense of real

heroism in steeling herself against uneasiness. It seemed to her,

moreover, only justice that she should make some concession; if Verena

made a great sacrifice of filial duty in coming to live with her (this,

of course, should be permanent--she would buy off the Tarrants from year

to year), she must not incur the imputation (the world would judge her,

in that case, ferociously) of keeping her from forming common social

ties. The friendship of a young man and a young woman was, according to

the pure code of New England, a common social tie; and as the weeks

elapsed Miss Chancellor saw no reason to repent of her temerity. Verena

was not falling in love; she felt that she should know it, should guess

it on the spot. Verena was fond of human intercourse; she was

essentially a sociable creature; she liked to shine and smile and talk

and listen; and so far as Henry Burrage was concerned he introduced an

element of easy and convenient relaxation into a life now a good deal

stiffened (Olive was perfectly willing to own it) by great civic

purposes. But the girl was being saved, without interference, by the

simple operation of her interest in those very designs. From this time

there was no need of putting pressure on her; her own springs were

working; the fire with which she glowed came from within. Sacredly,

brightly single she would remain; her only espousals would be at the

altar of a great cause. Olive always absented herself when Mr. Burrage

was announced; and when Verena afterwards attempted to give some account

of his conversation she checked her, said she would rather know nothing

about it--all with a very solemn mildness; this made her feel very

superior, truly noble. She knew by this time (I scarcely can tell how,

since Verena could give her no report) exactly what sort of a youth Mr.

Burrage was: he was weakly pretentious, softly original, cultivated

eccentricity, patronised progress, liked to have mysteries, sudden

appointments to keep, anonymous persons to visit, the air of leading a

double life, of being devoted to a girl whom people didn't know, or at

least didn't meet. Of course he liked to make an impression on Verena;

but what he mainly liked was to play her off upon the other girls, the

daughters of fashion, with whom he danced at Papanti's. Such were the

images that proceeded from Olive's rich moral consciousness. "Well, he

_is_ greatly interested in our movement": so much Verena once managed to

announce; but the words rather irritated Miss Chancellor, who, as we

know, did not care to allow for accidental exceptions in the great

masculine conspiracy.

In the month of March Verena told her that Mr. Burrage was offering

matrimony--offering it with much insistence, begging that she would at

least wait and think of it before giving him a final answer. Verena was

evidently very glad to be able to say to Olive that she had assured him

she couldn't think of it, and that if he expected this he had better not

come any more. He continued to come, and it was therefore to be supposed

that he had ceased to count on such a concession; it was now Olive's

opinion that he really didn't desire it. She had a theory that he

proposed to almost any girl who was not likely to accept him--did it

because he was making a collection of such episodes--a mental album of

declarations, blushes, hesitations, refusals that just missed imposing

themselves as acceptances, quite as he collected enamels and Cremona

violins. He would be very sorry indeed to ally himself to the house of

Tarrant; but such a fear didn't prevent him from holding it becoming in

a man of taste to give that encouragement to low-born girls who were

pretty, for one looked out for the special cases in which, for reasons

(even the lowest might have reasons), they wouldn't "rise." "I told you

I wouldn't marry him, and I won't," Verena said, delightedly, to her

friend; her tone suggested that a certain credit belonged to her for the

way she carried out her assurance. "I never thought you would, if you

didn't want to," Olive replied to this; and Verena could have no

rejoinder but the good-humour that sat in her eyes, unable as she was to

say that she had wanted to. They had a little discussion, however, when

she intimated that she pitied him for his discomfiture, Olive's

contention being that, selfish, conceited, pampered and insincere, he

might properly be left now to digest his affront. Miss Chancellor felt

none of the remorse now that she would have felt six months before at

standing in the way of such a chance for Verena, and she would have been

very angry if any one had asked her if she were not afraid of taking too

much upon herself. She would have said, moreover, that she stood in no

one's way, and that even if she were not there Verena would never think

seriously of a frivolous little man who fiddled while Rome was burning.

This did not prevent Olive from making up her mind that they had better

go to Europe in the spring; a year's residence in that quarter of the

globe would be highly agreeable to Verena, and might even contribute to

the evolution of her genius. It cost Miss Chancellor an effort to admit

that any virtue still lingered in the elder world, and that it could

have any important lesson for two such good Americans as her friend and

herself; but it suited her just then to make this assumption, which was

not altogether sincere. It was recommended by the idea that it would get

her companion out of the way--out of the way of officious

fellow-citizens--till she should be absolutely firm on her feet, and

would also give greater intensity to their own long conversation. On

that continent of strangers they would cleave more closely still to each

other. This, of course, would be to fly before the inevitable "phase,"

much more than to face it; but Olive decided that if they should reach

unscathed the term of their delay (the first of July) she should have

faced it as much as either justice or generosity demanded. I may as well

say at once that she traversed most of this period without further

serious alarms and with a great many little thrills of bliss and hope.

Nothing happened to dissipate the good omens with which her partnership

with Verena Tarrant was at present surrounded. They threw themselves

into study; they had innumerable big books from the Athenæum, and

consumed the midnight oil. Henry Burrage, after Verena had shaken her

head at him so sweetly and sadly, returned to New York, giving no sign;

they only heard that he had taken refuge under the ruffled maternal

wing. (Olive, at least, took for granted the wing was ruffled; she could

fancy how Mrs. Burrage would be affected by the knowledge that her son

had been refused by the daughter of a mesmeric healer. She would be

almost as angry as if she had learnt that he had been accepted.)

Matthias Pardon had not yet taken his revenge in the newspapers; he was

perhaps nursing his thunderbolts; at any rate, now that the operatic

season had begun, he was much occupied in interviewing the principal

singers, one of whom he described in one of the leading journals (Olive,

at least, was sure it was only he who could write like that) as "a dear

little woman with baby dimples and kittenish movements." The Tarrants

were apparently given up to a measure of sensual ease with which they

had not hitherto been familiar, thanks to the increase of income that

they drew from their eccentric protectress. Mrs. Tarrant now enjoyed the

ministrations of a "girl"; it was partly her pride (at any rate, she

chose to give it this turn) that her house had for many years been

conducted without the element--so debasing on both sides--of servile,

mercenary labour. She wrote to Olive (she was perpetually writing to her

now, but Olive never answered) that she was conscious of having fallen

to a lower plane, but she admitted that it was a prop to her wasted

spirit to have some one to converse with when Selah was off. Verena, of

course, perceived the difference, which was inadequately explained by

the theory of a sudden increase of her father's practice (nothing of her

father's had ever increased like that), and ended by guessing the cause

of it--a discovery which did not in the least disturb her equanimity.

She accepted the idea that her parents should receive a pecuniary

tribute from the extraordinary friend whom she had encountered on the

threshold of womanhood, just as she herself accepted that friend's

irresistible hospitality. She had no worldly pride, no traditions of

independence, no ideas of what was done and what was not done; but there

was only one thing that equalled this perfectly gentle and natural

insensibility to favours--namely, the inveteracy of her habit of not

asking them. Olive had had an apprehension that she would flush a little

at learning the terms on which they should now be able to pursue their

career together; but Verena never changed colour; it was either not new

or not disagreeable to her that the authors of her being should be

bought off, silenced by money, treated as the troublesome of the lower

orders are treated when they are not locked up; so that her friend had a

perception, after this, that it would probably be impossible in any way

ever to offend her. She was too rancourless, too detached from

conventional standards, too free from private self-reference. It was too

much to say of her that she forgave injuries, since she was not

conscious of them; there was in forgiveness a certain arrogance of which

she was incapable, and her bright mildness glided over the many traps

that life sets for our consistency. Olive had always held that pride was

necessary to character, but there was no peculiarity of Verena's that

could make her spirit seem less pure. The added luxuries in the little

house at Cambridge, which even with their help was still such a penal

settlement, made her feel afresh that before she came to the rescue the

daughter of that house had traversed a desert of sordid misery. She had

cooked and washed and swept and stitched; she had worked harder than any

of Miss Chancellor's servants. These things had left no trace upon her

person or her mind; everything fresh and fair renewed itself in her with

extraordinary facility, everything ugly and tiresome evaporated as soon

as it touched her; but Olive deemed that, being what she was, she had a

right to immense compensations. In the future she should have exceeding

luxury and ease, and Miss Chancellor had no difficulty in persuading

herself that persons doing the high intellectual and moral work to which

the two young ladies in Charles Street were now committed owed it to

themselves, owed it to the groaning sisterhood, to cultivate the best

material conditions. She herself was nothing of a sybarite, and she had

proved, visiting the alleys and slums of Boston in the service of the

Associated Charities, that there was no foulness of disease or misery

she feared to look in the face; but her house had always been thoroughly

well regulated, she was passionately clean, and she was an excellent

woman of business. Now, however, she elevated daintiness to a religion;

her interior shone with superfluous friction, with punctuality, with

winter roses. Among these soft influences Verena herself bloomed like

the flower that attains such perfection in Boston. Olive had always

rated high the native refinement of her country-women, their latent

"adaptability," their talent for accommodating themselves at a glance to

changed conditions; but the way her companion rose with the level of the

civilisation that surrounded her, the way she assimilated all delicacies

and absorbed all traditions, left this friendly theory halting behind.

The winter days were still, indoors, in Charles Street, and the winter

nights secure from interruption. Our two young women had plenty of

duties, but Olive had never favoured the custom of running in and out.

Much conference on social and reformatory topics went forward under her

roof, and she received her colleagues--she belonged to twenty

associations and committees--only at pre-appointed hours, which she

expected them to observe rigidly. 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. It was understood that her

part was before the scenes, not behind; that she was not a prompter, but

(potentially, at least) a "popular favourite," and that the work over

which Miss Chancellor presided so efficiently was a general preparation

of the platform on which, later, her companion would execute the most

striking steps.

The western windows of Olive's drawing-room, looking over the water,

took in the red sunsets of winter; the long, low bridge that crawled, on

its staggering posts, across the Charles; the casual patches of ice and

snow; the desolate suburban horizons, peeled and made bald by the rigour

of the season; the general hard, cold void of the prospect; the

extrusion, at Charlestown, at Cambridge, of a few chimneys and steeples,

straight, sordid tubes of factories and engine-shops, or spare,

heavenward finger of the New England meeting-house. There was something

inexorable in the poverty of the scene, shameful in the meanness of its

details, which gave a collective impression of boards and tin and frozen

earth, sheds and rotting piles, railway-lines striding flat across a

thoroughfare of puddles, and tracks of the humbler, the universal

horse-car, traversing obliquely this path of danger; loose fences,

vacant lots, mounds of refuse, yards bestrewn with iron pipes, telegraph

poles, and bare wooden backs of places. Verena thought such a view

lovely, and she was by no means without excuse when, as the afternoon

closed, the ugly picture was tinted with a clear, cold rosiness. The

air, in its windless chill, seemed to tinkle like a crystal, the

faintest gradations of tone were perceptible in the sky, the west became

deep and delicate, everything grew doubly distinct before taking on the

dimness of evening. There were pink flushes on snow, "tender" reflexions

in patches of stiffened marsh, sounds of car-bells, no longer vulgar,

but almost silvery, on the long bridge, lonely outlines of distant dusky

undulations against the fading glow. These agreeable effects used to

light up that end of the drawing-room, and Olive often sat at the window

with her companion before it was time for the lamp. They admired the

sunsets, they rejoiced in the ruddy spots projected upon the

parlour-wall, they followed the darkening perspective in fanciful

excursions. They watched the stellar points come out at last in a colder

heaven, and then, shuddering a little, arm in arm, they turned away,

with a sense that the winter night was even more cruel than the tyranny

of men--turned back to drawn curtains and a brighter fire and a

glittering tea-tray and more and more talk about the long martyrdom of

women, a subject as to which Olive was inexhaustible and really most

interesting. There were some nights of deep snowfall, when Charles

Street was white and muffled and the door-bell foredoomed to silence,

which seemed little islands of lamp-light, of enlarged and intensified

vision. They read a great deal of history together, and read it ever

with the same thought--that of finding confirmation in it for this idea

that their sex had suffered inexpressibly, and that at any moment in the

course of human affairs the state of the world would have been so much

less horrible (history seemed to them in every way horrible) if women

had been able to press down the scale. Verena was full of suggestions

which stimulated discussions; it was she, oftenest, who kept in view the

fact that a good many women in the past had been entrusted with power

and had not always used it amiably, who brought up the wicked queens,

the profligate mistresses of kings. These ladies were easily disposed of

between the two, and the public crimes of Bloody Mary, the private

misdemeanours of Faustina, wife of the pure Marcus Aurelius, were very

satisfactorily classified. If the influence of women in the past

accounted for every act of virtue that men had happened to achieve, it

only made the matter balance properly that the influence of men should

explain the casual irregularities of the other sex. Olive could see how

few books had passed through Verena's hands, and how little the home of

the Tarrants had been a house of reading; but the girl now traversed the

fields of literature with her characteristic lightness of step.

Everything she turned to or took up became an illustration of the

facility, the "giftedness," which Olive, who had so little of it, never

ceased to wonder at and prize. Nothing frightened her; she always smiled

at it, she could do anything she tried. As she knew how to do other

things, she knew how to study; she read quickly and remembered

infallibly; could repeat, days afterward, passages that she appeared

only to have glanced at. Olive, of course, was more and more happy to

think that their cause should have the services of an organisation so

rare.

All this doubtless sounds rather dry, and I hasten to add that our

friends were not always shut up in Miss Chancellor's strenuous parlour.

In spite of Olive's desire to keep her precious inmate to herself and to

bend her attention upon their common studies, in spite of her constantly

reminding Verena that this winter was to be purely educative and that

the platitudes of the satisfied and unregenerate would have little to

teach her, in spite, in short, of the severe and constant duality of our

young women, it must not be supposed that their life had not many

personal confluents and tributaries. Individual and original as Miss

Chancellor was universally acknowledged to be, she was yet a typical

Bostonian, and as a typical Bostonian she could not fail to belong in

some degree to a "set." It had been said of her that she was in it but

not of it; but she was of it enough to go occasionally into other houses

and to receive their occupants in her own. It was her belief that she

filled her tea-pot with the spoon of hospitality, and made a good many

select spirits feel that they were welcome under her roof at convenient

hours. She had a preference for what she called _real_ people, and there

were several whose reality she had tested by arts known to herself. This

little society was rather suburban and miscellaneous; it was prolific in

ladies who trotted about, early and late, with books from the Athenæum

nursed behind their muff, or little nosegays of exquisite flowers that

they were carrying as presents to each other. Verena, who, when Olive

was not with her, indulged in a good deal of desultory contemplation at

the window, saw them pass the house in Charles Street, always apparently

straining a little, as if they might be too late for something. At

almost any time, for she envied their preoccupation, she would have

taken the chance with them. Very often, when she described them to her

mother, Mrs. Tarrant didn't know who they were; there were even days

(she had so many discouragements) when it seemed as if she didn't want

to know. So long as they were not some one else, it seemed to be no use

that they were themselves; whoever they were, they were sure to have

that defect. Even after all her mother's disquisitions Verena had but

vague ideas as to whom she would have liked them to be; and it was only

when the girl talked of the concerts, to all of which Olive subscribed

and conducted her inseparable friend, that Mrs. Tarrant appeared to feel

in any degree that her daughter was living up to the standard formed for

her in their Cambridge home. As all the world knows, the opportunities

in Boston for hearing good music are numerous and excellent, and it had

long been Miss Chancellor's practice to cultivate the best. She went in,

as the phrase is, for the superior programmes, and that high, dim,

dignified Music Hall, which has echoed in its time to so much eloquence

and so much melody, and of which the very proportions and colour seem to

teach respect and attention, shed the protection of its illuminated

cornice, this winter, upon no faces more intelligently upturned than

those of the young women for whom Bach and Beethoven only repeated, in a

myriad forms, the idea that was always with them. Symphonies and fugues

only stimulated their convictions, excited their revolutionary passion,

led their imagination further in the direction in which it was always

pressing. It lifted them to immeasurable heights; and as they sat

looking at the great florid, sombre organ, overhanging the bronze statue

of Beethoven, they felt that this was the only temple in which the

votaries of their creed could worship.

And yet their music was not their greatest joy, for they had two others

which they cultivated at least as zealously. One of these was simply the

society of old Miss Birdseye, of whom Olive saw more this winter than

she had ever seen before. It had become apparent that her long and

beautiful career was drawing to a close, her earnest, unremitting work

was over, her old-fashioned weapons were broken and dull. Olive would

have liked to hang them up as venerable relics of a patient fight, and

this was what she seemed to do when she made the poor lady relate her

battles--never glorious and brilliant, but obscure and wastefully

heroic--call back the figures of her companions in arms, exhibit her

medals and scars. Miss Birdseye knew that her uses were ended; she might

pretend still to go about the business of unpopular causes, might fumble

for papers in her immemorial satchel and think she had important

appointments, might sign petitions, attend conventions, say to Doctor

Prance that if she would only make her sleep she should live to see a

great many improvements yet; she ached and was weary, growing almost as

glad to look back (a great anomaly for Miss Birdseye) as to look

forward. She let herself be coddled now by her friends of the new

generation; there were days when she seemed to want nothing better than

to sit by Olive's fire and ramble on about the old struggles, with a

vague, comfortable sense--no physical rapture of Miss Birdseye's could

be very acute--of immunity from wet feet, from the draughts that prevail

at thin meetings, of independence of street-cars that would probably

arrive overflowing; and also a pleased perception, not that she was an

example to these fresh lives which began with more advantages than hers,

but that she was in some degree an encouragement, as she helped them to

measure the way the new truths had advanced--being able to tell them of

such a different state of things when she was a young lady, the daughter

of a very talented teacher (indeed her mother had been a teacher too),

down in Connecticut. She had always had for Olive a kind of aroma of

martyrdom, and her battered, unremunerated, un-pensioned old age brought

angry tears, springing from depths of outraged theory, into Miss

Chancellor's eyes. For Verena, too, she was a picturesque humanitary

figure. Verena had been in the habit of meeting martyrs from her

childhood up, but she had seen none with so many reminiscences as Miss

Birdseye, or who had been so nearly scorched by penal fires. She had had

escapes, in the early days of abolitionism, which it was a marvel she

could tell with so little implication that she had shown courage. She

had roamed through certain parts of the South, carrying the Bible to the

slave; and more than one of her companions, in the course of these

expeditions, had been tarred and feathered. She herself, at one season,

had spent a month in a Georgian jail. She had preached temperance in

Irish circles where the doctrine was received with missiles; she had

interfered between wives and husbands mad with drink; she had taken

filthy children, picked up in the street, to her own poor rooms, and had

removed their pestilent rags and washed their sore bodies with slippery

little hands. In her own person she appeared to Olive and Verena a

representative of suffering humanity; the pity they felt for her was

part of their pity for all who were weakest and most hardly used; and it

struck Miss Chancellor (more especially) that this frumpy little

missionary was the last link in a tradition, and that when she should be

called away the heroic age of New England life--the age of plain living

and high thinking, of pure ideals and earnest effort, of moral passion

and noble experiment--would effectually be closed. It was the perennial

freshness of Miss Birdseye's faith that had had such a contagion for

these modern maidens, the unquenched flame of her transcendentalism, the

simplicity of her vision, the way in which, in spite of mistakes,

deceptions, the changing fashions of reform, which make the remedies of

a previous generation look as ridiculous as their bonnets, the only

thing that was still actual for her was the elevation of the species by

the reading of Emerson and the frequentation of Tremont Temple. Olive

had been active enough, for years, in the city-missions; she too had

scoured dirty children, and, in squalid lodging-houses, had gone into

rooms where the domestic situation was strained and the noises made the

neighbours turn pale. But she reflected that after such exertions she

had the refreshment of a pretty house, a drawing-room full of flowers, a

crackling hearth, where she threw in pine-cones and made them snap, an

imported tea-service, a Chickering piano, and the _Deutsche Rundschau_;

whereas Miss Birdseye had only a bare, vulgar room, with a hideous

flowered carpet (it looked like a dentist's), a cold furnace, the

evening paper, and Doctor Prance. Olive and Verena were present at

another of her gatherings before the winter ended; it resembled the

occasion that we described at the beginning of this history, with the

difference that Mrs. Farrinder was not there to oppress the company with

her greatness, and that Verena made a speech without the co-operation of

her father. This young lady had delivered herself with even finer effect

than before, and Olive could see how much she had gained, in confidence

and range of allusion, since the educative process in Charles Street

began. Her _motif_ was now a kind of unprepared tribute to Miss

Birdseye, the fruit of the occasion and of the unanimous tenderness of

the younger members of the circle, which made her a willing mouthpiece.

She pictured her laborious career, her early associates (Eliza P.

Moseley was not neglected as Verena passed), her difficulties and

dangers and triumphs, her humanising effect upon so many, her serene and

honoured old age--expressed, in short, as one of the ladies said, just

the very way they all felt about her. Verena's face brightened and grew

triumphant as she spoke, but she brought tears into the eyes of most of

the others. It was Olive's opinion that nothing could be more graceful

and touching, and she saw that the impression made was now deeper than

on the former evening. Miss Birdseye went about with her eighty years of

innocence, her undiscriminating spectacles, asking her friends if it

wasn't perfectly splendid; she took none of it to herself, she regarded

it only as a brilliant expression of Verena's gift. Olive thought,

afterwards, that if a collection could only be taken up on the spot, the

good lady would be made easy for the rest of her days; then she

remembered that most of her guests were as impecunious as herself.

I have intimated that our young friends had a source of fortifying

emotion which was distinct from the hours they spent with Beethoven and

Bach, or in hearing Miss Birdseye describe Concord as it used to be.

This consisted in the wonderful insight they had obtained into the

history of feminine anguish. They perused that chapter perpetually and

zealously, and they derived from it the purest part of their mission.

Olive had pored over it so long, so earnestly, that she was now in

complete possession of the subject; it was the one thing in life which

she felt she had really mastered. She was able to exhibit it to Verena

with the greatest authority and accuracy, to lead her up and down, in

and out, through all the darkest and most tortuous passages. We know

that she was without belief in her own eloquence, but she was very

eloquent when she reminded Verena how the exquisite weakness of women

had never been their defence, but had only exposed them to sufferings

more acute than masculine grossness can conceive. Their odious partner

had trampled upon them from the beginning of time, and their tenderness,

their abnegation, had been his opportunity. All the bullied wives, the

stricken mothers, the dishonoured, deserted maidens who have lived on

the earth and longed to leave it, passed and repassed before her eyes,

and the interminable dim procession seemed to stretch out a myriad hands

to her. She sat with them at their trembling vigils, listened for the

tread, the voice, at which they grew pale and sick, walked with them by

the dark waters that offered to wash away misery and shame, took with

them, even, when the vision grew intense, the last shuddering leap. She

had analysed to an extraordinary fineness their susceptibility, their

softness; she knew (or she thought she knew) all the possible tortures

of anxiety, of suspense and dread; and she had made up her mind that it

was women, in the end, who had paid for everything. In the last resort

the whole burden of the human lot came upon them; it pressed upon them

far more than on the others, the intolerable load of fate. It was they

who sat cramped and chained to receive it; it was they who had done all

the waiting and taken all the wounds. The sacrifices, the blood, the

tears, the terrors were theirs. Their organism was in itself a challenge

to suffering, and men had practised upon it with an impudence that knew

no bounds. As they were the weakest most had been wrung from them, and

as they were the most generous they had been most deceived. Olive

Chancellor would have rested her case, had it been necessary, on those

general facts; and her simple and comprehensive contention was that the

peculiar wretchedness which had been the very essence of the feminine

lot was a monstrous artificial imposition, crying aloud for redress. She

was willing to admit that women, too, could be bad; that there were many

about the world who were false, immoral, vile. But their errors were as

nothing to their sufferings; they had expiated, in advance, an eternity,

if need be, of misconduct. Olive poured forth these views to her

listening and responsive friend; she presented them again and again, and

there was no light in which they did not seem to palpitate with truth.

Verena was immensely wrought upon; a subtle fire passed into her; she

was not so hungry for revenge as Olive, but at the last, before they

went to Europe (I shall take no place to describe the manner in which

she threw herself into that project), she quite agreed with her

companion that after so many ages of wrong (it would also be after the

European journey) men must take _their_ turn, men must pay!