sionate protest was summed
up in her saying that if Verena were to forsake them it would put back
the emancipation of women a hundred years. She did not, during these
dreadful days, talk continuously; she had long periods of pale,
intensely anxious, watchful silence, interrupted by outbreaks of
passionate argument, entreaty, invocation. It was Verena who talked
incessantly, Verena who was in a state entirely new to her, and, as any
one could see, in an attitude entirely unnatural and overdone. If she
was deceiving herself, as Olive said, there was something very affecting
in her effort, her ingenuity. If she tried to appear to Olive impartial,
coldly judicious, in her attitude with regard to Basil Ransom, and only
anxious to see, for the moral satisfaction of the thing, how good a
case, as a lover, he might make out for himself and how much he might
touch her susceptibilities, she endeavoured, still more earnestly, to
practise this fraud upon her own imagination. She abounded in every
proof that she should be in despair if she should be overborne, and she
thought of arguments even more convincing, if possible, than Olive's,
why she should hold on to her old faith, why she should resist even at
the cost of acute temporary suffering. She was voluble, fluent,
feverish; she was perpetually bringing up the subject, as if to
encourage her friend, to show how she kept possession of her judgement,
how independent she remained.

No stranger situation can be imagined than that of these extraordinary
young women at this juncture; it was so singular on Verena's part, in
particular, that I despair of presenting it to the reader with the air
of reality. To understand it, one must bear in mind her peculiar
frankness, natural and acquired, her habit of discussing questions,
sentiments, moralities, her education, in the atmosphere of
lecture-rooms, of _seances_, her familiarity with the vocabulary of
emotion, the mysteries of "the spiritual life." She had learned to
breathe and move in a rarefied air, as she would have learned to speak
Chinese if her success in life had depended upon it; but this dazzling
trick, and all her artlessly artful facilities, were not a part of her
essence, an expression of her innermost preferences. What _was_ a part
of her essence was the extraordinary generosity with which she could
expose herself, give herself away, turn herself inside out, for the
satisfaction of a person who made demands of her. Olive, a