o see her go out; but that was not sufficient, she would come
back quick enough; the place itself contained her, expressed her. For
to-day he wanted to take possession of Verena, to carry her to a
distance, to reproduce a little the happy conditions they had enjoyed
the day of his visit to Cambridge. And the fact that in the nature of
things it could only be for to-day made his desire more keen, more full
of purpose. He had thought over the whole question in the last
forty-eight hours, and it was his belief that he saw things in their
absolute reality. He took a greater interest in her than he had taken in
any one yet, but he proposed, after to-day, not to let that accident
make any difference. This was precisely what gave its high value to the
present limited occasion. He was too shamefully poor, too shabbily and
meagrely equipped, to have the right to talk of marriage to a girl in
Verena's very peculiar position. He understood now how good that
position was, from a worldly point of view; her address at Mrs.
Burrage's gave him something definite to go upon, showed him what she
could do, that people would flock in thousands to an exhibition so
charming (and small blame to them); that she might easily have a big
career, like that of a distinguished actress or singer, and that she
would make money in quantities only slightly smaller than performers of
that kind. Who wouldn't pay half a dollar for such an hour as he had
passed at Mrs. Burrage's? The sort of thing she was able to do, to say,
was an article for which there was more and more demand--fluent, pretty,
third-rate palaver, conscious or unconscious perfected humbug; the
stupid, gregarious, gullible public, the enlightened democracy of his
native land, could swallow unlimited draughts of it. He was sure she
could go, like that, for several years, with her portrait in the
druggists' windows and her posters on the fences, and during that time
would make a fortune sufficient to keep her in affluence for evermore. I
shall perhaps expose our young man to the contempt of superior minds if
I say that all this seemed to him an insuperable impediment to his
making up to Verena. His scruples were doubtless begotten of a false
pride, a sentiment in which there was a thread of moral tinsel, as there
was in the Southern idea of chivalry; but he felt ashamed of his own
poverty, the positive flatness of his situation, when he thought of the
gilded nimbus that surrounded the protegee