ed by a bright girl at an
"academy"; it was vague, thin, rambling, a tissue of generalities that
glittered agreeably enough in Mrs. Burrage's veiled lamplight. From any
serious point of view it was neither worth answering nor worth
considering, and Basil Ransom made his reflexions on the crazy character
of the age in which such a performance as that was treated as an
intellectual effort, a contribution to a question. He asked himself what
either he or any one else would think of it if Miss Chancellor--or even
Mrs. Luna--had been on the platform instead of the actual declaimer.
Nevertheless, its importance was high, and consisted precisely, in part,
of the fact that the voice was not the voice of Olive or of Adeline. Its
importance was that Verena was unspeakably attractive, and this was all
the greater for him in the light of the fact, which quietly dawned upon
him as he stood there, that he was falling in love with her. It had
tapped at his heart for recognition, and before he could hesitate or
challenge, the door had sprung open and the mansion was illuminated. He
gave no outward sign; he stood gazing as at a picture; but the room
wavered before his eyes, even Verena's figure danced a little. This did
not make the sequel of her discourse more clear to him; her meaning
faded again into the agreeable vague, and he simply felt her presence,
tasted her voice. Yet the act of reflexion was not suspended; he found
himself rejoicing that she was so weak in argument, so inevitably
verbose. The idea that she was brilliant, that she counted as a factor
only because the public mind was in a muddle, was not an humiliation but
a delight to him; it was a proof that her apostleship was all nonsense,
the most passing of fashions, the veriest of delusions, and that she was
meant for something divinely different--for privacy, for him, for love.
He took no measure of the duration of her talk; he only knew, when it
was over and succeeded by a clapping of hands, an immense buzz of voices
and shuffling of chairs, that it had been capitally bad, and that her
personal success, wrapping it about with a glamour like the silver mist
that surrounds a fountain, was such as to prevent its badness from being
a cause of mortification to her lover. The company--such of it as did
not immediately close together around Verena--filed away into the other
rooms, bore him in its current into the neighbourhood of a table spread
for supper, where he looked for s