view, the only one from
which one could consider the situation in a way that would lead to what
she called a _real_ solution--a permanent rest. On this particular point
Verena never responded, in the liberal way I have mentioned, without
asseverating at the same time that what she desired most in the world
was to prove (the picture Olive had held up from the first) that a woman
_could_ live on persistently, clinging to a great, vivifying, redemptory
idea, without the help of a man. To testify to the end against the stale
superstition--mother of every misery--that those gentry were as
indispensable as they had proclaimed themselves on the house-tops--that,
she passionately protested, was as inspiring a thought in the present
poignant crisis as it had ever been.

The one grain of comfort that Olive extracted from the terrors that
pressed upon her was that now she knew the worst; she knew it since
Verena had told her, after so long and so ominous a reticence, of the
detestable episode at Cambridge. That seemed to her the worst, because
it had been thunder in a clear sky; the incident had sprung from a
quarter from which, months before, all symptoms appeared to have
vanished. Though Verena had now done all she could to make up for her
perfidious silence by repeating everything that passed between them as
she sat with Mr. Ransom in Monadnoc Place or strolled with him through
the colleges, it imposed itself upon Olive that that occasion was the
key of all that had happened since, that he had then obtained an
irremediable hold upon her. If Verena had spoken at the time, she would
never have let her go to New York; the sole compensation for that
hideous mistake was that the girl, recognising it to the full, evidently
deemed now that she couldn't be communicative enough. There were certain
afternoons in August, long, beautiful and terrible, when one felt that
the summer was rounding its curve, and the rustle of the full-leaved
trees in the slanting golden light, in the breeze that ought to be
delicious, seemed the voice of the coming autumn, of the warnings and
dangers of life--portentous, insufferable hours when, as she sat under
the softly swaying vine-leaves of the trellis with Miss Birdseye and
tried, in order to still her nerves, to read something aloud to her
guest, the sound of her own quavering voice made her think more of that
baleful day at Cambridge than even of the fact that at that very moment
Verena was "off" with