sume you would like to be President of the United
States?"

"And breathe forth my views in glowing messages to a palpitating Senate?
That is exactly what I should like to be; you read my aspirations
wonderfully well."

"Well, do you consider that you have advanced far in that direction, as
yet?" Verena asked.

This question, with the tone in which it happened to be uttered, seemed
to the young man to project rather an ironical light upon his present
beggarly condition, so that for a moment he said nothing; a moment
during which if his neighbour had glanced round at his face she would
have seen it ornamented by an incipient blush. Her words had for him the
effect of a sudden, though, on the part of a young woman who had of
course every right to defend herself, a perfectly legitimate taunt. They
appeared only to repeat in another form (so at least his exaggerated
Southern pride, his hot sensibility, interpreted the matter) the idea
that a gentleman so dreadfully backward in the path of fortune had no
right to take up the time of a brilliant, successful girl, even for the
purpose of satisfying himself that he renounced her. But the reminder
only sharpened his wish to make her feel that if he had renounced, it
was simply on account of that same ugly, accidental, outside
backwardness; and if he had not, he went so far as to flatter himself,
he might triumph over the whole accumulation of her prejudices--over all
the bribes of her notoriety. The deepest feeling in Ransom's bosom in
relation to her was the conviction that she was made for love, as he had
said to himself while he listened to her at Mrs. Burrage's. She was
profoundly unconscious of it, and another ideal, crude and thin and
artificial, had interposed itself; but in the presence of a man she
should really care for, this false, flimsy structure would rattle to her
feet, and the emancipation of Olive Chancellor's sex (what sex was it,
great heaven? he used profanely to ask himself) would be relegated to
the land of vapours, of dead phrases. The reader may imagine whether
such an impression as this made it any more agreeable to Basil to have
to believe it would be indelicate in him to try to woo her. He would
have resented immensely the imputation that he had done anything of that
sort yet. "Ah, Miss Tarrant, my success in life is one thing--my
ambition is another!" he exclaimed presently, in answer to her inquiry.
"Nothing is more possible than that I may be poor