at, perhaps, but sufficient to make life tolerable.
He doesn't think life is very delightful, in the nature of things; but
one of the best things a man can do with it is to get hold of some woman
(of course, she must please him very much, to make it worth while) whom
he may draw close to him."

"And couldn't he get hold of any one but you--among all the exposed
millions of our sex?" poor Olive groaned. "Why must he pick you out,
when everything he knew about you showed you to be, exactly, the very
last?"

"That's just what I have asked him, and he only remarks that there is no
reasoning about such things. He fell in love with me that first evening,
at Miss Birdseye's. So you see there was some ground for that mystic
apprehension of yours. It seems as if I pleased him more than any one."

Olive flung herself over on the couch, burying her face in the cushions,
which she tumbled in her despair, and moaning out that he didn't love
Verena, he never had loved her, it was only his hatred of their cause
that made him pretend it; he wanted to do that an injury, to do it the
worst he could think of. He didn't love her, he hated her, he only
wanted to smother her, to crush her, to kill her--as she would
infallibly see that he would if she listened to him. It was because he
knew that her voice had magic in it, and from the moment he caught its
first note he had determined to destroy it. It was not tenderness that
moved him--it was devilish malignity; tenderness would be incapable of
requiring the horrible sacrifice that he was not ashamed to ask, of
requiring her to commit perjury and blasphemy, to desert a work, an
interest, with which her very heart-strings were interlaced, to give the
lie to her whole young past, to her purest, holiest ambitions. Olive put
forward no claim of her own, breathed, at first, at least, not a word of
remonstrance in the name of her personal loss, of their blighted union;
she only dwelt upon the unspeakable tragedy of a defection from their
standard, of a failure on Verena's part to carry out what she had
undertaken, of the horror of seeing her bright career blotted out with
darkness and tears, of the joy and elation that would fill the breast of
all their adversaries at this illustrious, consummate proof of the
fickleness, the futility, the predestined servility, of women. A man had
only to whistle for her, and she who had pretended most was delighted to
come and kneel at his feet. Olive's most pas