this is the way you're going to reinstate our
sex!" She passed rapidly through the room, followed by Amariah, who
remarked in his transit that it seemed as if there had been a want of
organisation, and the two retreated expeditiously, without the lady's
having taken the smallest notice of Verena, whose conflict with her
mother prolonged itself. Ransom, striving, with all needful
consideration for Mrs. Tarrant, to separate these two, addressed not a
word to Olive; it was the last of her, for him, and he neither saw how
her livid face suddenly glowed, as if Mrs. Farrinder's words had been a
lash, nor how, as if with a sudden inspiration, she rushed to the
approach to the platform. If he had observed her, it might have seemed
to him that she hoped to find the fierce expiation she sought for in
exposure to the thousands she had disappointed and deceived, in offering
herself to be trampled to death and torn to pieces. She might have
suggested to him some feminine firebrand of Paris revolutions, erect on
a barricade, or even the sacrificial figure of Hypatia, whirled through
the furious mob of Alexandria. She was arrested an instant by the
arrival of Mrs. Burrage and her son, who had quitted the stage on
observing the withdrawal of the Farrinders, and who swept into the room
in the manner of people seeking shelter from a thunderstorm. The
mother's face expressed the well-bred surprise of a person who should
have been asked out to dinner and seen the cloth pulled off the table;
the young man, who supported her on his arm, instantly lost himself in
the spectacle of Verena disengaging herself from Mrs. Tarrant, only to
be again overwhelmed, and in the unexpected presence of the
Mississippian. His handsome blue eyes turned from one to the other, and
he looked infinitely annoyed and bewildered. It even seemed to occur to
him that he might, perhaps, interpose with effect, and he evidently
would have liked to say that, without really bragging, _he_ would at
least have kept the affair from turning into a row. But Verena, muffled
and escaping, was deaf to him, and Ransom didn't look the right person
to address such a remark as that to. Mrs. Burrage and Olive, as the
latter shot past, exchanged a glance which represented quick irony on
one side and indiscriminating defiance on the other.

"Oh, are _you_ going to speak?" the lady from New York inquired, with
her cursory laugh.

Olive had already disappeared; but Ransom heard her answe