gh which her
chronicler knows to have been expressive of some embarrassment, though
Basil Ransom did not.

"You must remember that I have, on two different occasions, listened to
you for an hour, in speechless, submissive attention, and that I shall
probably do it a great many times more."

"Why should you ever listen to me again, when you loathe my ideas?"

"I don't listen to your ideas; I listen to your voice."

"Ah, I told Olive!" said Verena, quickly, as if his words had confirmed
an old fear; which was general, however, and did not relate particularly
to him.

Ransom still had an impression that he was not making love to her,
especially when he could observe, with all the superiority of a man--"I
wonder whether you have understood ten words I have said to you?"

"I should think you had made it clear enough--you had rubbed it in!"

"What have you understood, then?"

"Why, that you want to put us back further than we have been at any
period."

"I have been joking; I have been piling it up," Ransom said, making that
concession unexpectedly to the girl. Every now and then he had an air of
relaxing himself, becoming absent, ceasing to care to discuss.

She was capable of noticing this, and in a moment she asked--"Why don't
you write out your ideas?"

This touched again upon the matter of his failure; it was curious how
she couldn't keep off it, hit it every time. "Do you mean for the
public? I have written many things, but I can't get them printed."

"Then it would seem that there are not so many people--so many as you
said just now--who agree with you."

"Well," said Basil Ransom, "editors are a mean, timorous lot, always
saying they want something original, but deadly afraid of it when it
comes."

"Is it for papers, magazines?" As it sank into Verena's mind more deeply
that the contributions of this remarkable young man had been
rejected--contributions in which, apparently, everything she held dear
was riddled with scorn--she felt a strange pity and sadness, a sense of
injustice. "I am very sorry you can't get published," she said, so
simply that he looked up at her, from the figure he was scratching on
the asphalt with his stick, to see whether such a tone as that, in
relation to such a fact, were not "put on." But it was evidently
genuine, and Verena added that she supposed getting published was very
difficult always; she remembered, though she didn't mention, how little
success her father had when