to remark, thoughtfully and rather
absently: "Your sister is really very clever."

"By which you mean, I suppose, that I am not!" Mrs. Luna suddenly
changed her tone, and said, with the greatest sweetness and humility:
"God knows, I have never pretended to be!"

Ransom looked at her a moment, and guessed the meaning of this altered
note. It had suddenly come over her that with her portrait in half the
shop-fronts, her advertisement on all the fences, and the great occasion
on which she was to reveal herself to the country at large close at
hand, Verena had become so conscious of high destinies that her dear
friend's Southern kinsman really appeared to her very small game, and
she might therefore be regarded as having cast him off. If this were the
case, it would perhaps be well for Mrs. Luna still to hold on. Basil's
induction was very rapid, but it gave him time to decide that the best
thing to say to his interlocutress was: "On what day do you sail for
Europe?"

"Perhaps I shall not sail at all," Mrs. Luna replied, looking out of the
window.

"And in that case--poor Newton's education?"

"I should try to content myself with a country which has given you
yours."

"Don't you want him, then, to be a man of the world?"

"Ah, the world, the world!" she murmured, while she watched, in the
deepening dusk, the lights of the town begin to reflect themselves in
the Back Bay. "Has it been such a source of happiness to me that I
belong to it?"

"Perhaps, after all, I shall be able to go to Florence!" said Ransom,
laughing.

She faced him once more, this time slowly, and declared that she had
never known anything so strange as his state of mind--she would be so
glad to have an explanation of it. With the opinions he professed (it
was for them she had liked him--she didn't like his character), why on
earth should he be running after a little fifth-rate _poseuse_, and in
such a frenzy to get hold of her? He might say it was none of her
business, and of course she would have no answer to that; therefore she
admitted that she asked simply out of intellectual curiosity, and
because one always was tormented at the sight of a painful
contradiction. With the things she had heard him say about his
convictions and theories, his view of life and the great questions of
the future, she should have thought he would find Miss Tarrant's
attitudinising absolutely nauseous. Were not her views the same as
Olive's and hadn't Olive and h