t? Did she say to
herself that their weakness was not only lamentable but hideous--hideous
their predestined subjection to man's larger and grosser insistence? Did
she ask herself why she should give up her life to save a sex which,
after all, didn't wish to be saved, and which rejected the truth even
after it had bathed them with its auroral light and they had pretended
to be fed and fortified? These are mysteries into which I shall not
attempt to enter, speculations with which I have no concern; it is
sufficient for us to know that all human effort had never seemed to her
so barren and thankless as on that fatal afternoon. Her eyes rested on
the boats she saw in the distance, and she wondered if in one of them
Verena were floating to her fate; but so far from straining forward to
beckon her home she almost wished that she might glide away for ever,
that _she_ might never see her again, never undergo the horrible details
of a more deliberate separation. Olive lived over, in her miserable
musings, her life for the last two years; she knew, again, how noble and
beautiful her scheme had been, but how it had all rested on an illusion
of which the very thought made her feel faint and sick. What was before
her now was the reality, with the beautiful, indifferent sky pouring
down its complacent rays upon it. The reality was simply that Verena had
been more to her than she ever was to Verena, and that, with her
exquisite natural art, the girl had cared for their cause only because,
for the time, no interest, no fascination, was greater. Her talent, the
talent which was to achieve such wonders, was nothing to her; it was too
easy, she could leave it alone, as she might close her piano, for
months; it was only to Olive that it was everything. Verena had
submitted, she had responded, she had lent herself to Olive's incitement
and exhortation, because she was sympathetic and young and abundant and
fanciful; but it had been a kind of hothouse loyalty, the mere contagion
of example, and a sentiment springing up from within had easily breathed
a chill upon it. Did Olive ask herself whether, for so many months, her
companion had been only the most unconscious and most successful of
humbugs? Here again I must plead a certain incompetence to give an
answer. Positive it is that she spared herself none of the inductions of
a reverie that seemed to dry up the mists and ambiguities of life. These
hours of backward clearness come to all men an