.
Ransom knew why it was that Verena had tears in her eyes as she looked
up at her patient old friend; she had spoken to him, often, during the
last three weeks, of the stories Miss Birdseye had told her of the great
work of her life, her mission, repeated year after year, among the
Southern blacks. She had gone among them with every precaution, to teach
them to read and write; she had carried them Bibles and told them of the
friends they had in the North who prayed for their deliverance. Ransom
knew that Verena didn't reproduce these legends with a view to making
him ashamed of his Southern origin, his connexion with people who, in a
past not yet remote, had made that kind of apostleship necessary; he
knew this because she had heard what he thought of all that chapter
himself; he had given her a kind of historical summary of the slavery
question which left her no room to say that he was more tender to that
particular example of human imbecility than he was to any other. But she
had told him that this was what _she_ would have liked to do--to wander,
alone, with her life in her hand, on an errand of mercy, through a
country in which society was arrayed against her; she would have liked
it much better than simply talking about the right from the gas-lighted
vantage of the New England platform. Ransom had replied simply
"Balderdash!" it being his theory, as we have perceived, that he knew
much more about Verena's native bent than the young lady herself. This
did not, however, as he was perfectly aware, prevent her feeling that
she had come too late for the heroic age of New England life, and
regarding Miss Birdseye as a battered, immemorial monument of it. Ransom
could share such an admiration as that, especially at this moment; he
had said to Verena, more than once, that he wished he might have met the
old lady in Carolina or Georgia before the war--shown her round among
the negroes and talked over New England ideas with her; there were a
good many he didn't care much about now, but at that time they would
have been tremendously refreshing. Miss Birdseye had given herself away
so lavishly all her life that it was rather odd there was anything left
of her for the supreme surrender. When he looked at Olive he saw that
she meant to ignore him; and during the few minutes he remained on the
spot his kinswoman never met his eye. She turned away, indeed, as soon
as Doctor Prance said, leaning over Miss Birdseye, "I have brought M