her own and look down upon all
creation, upon all history, from such a height. From this first
interview she felt that she was seized, and she gave herself up, only
shutting her eyes a little, as we do whenever a person in whom we have
perfect confidence proposes, with our assent, to subject us to some
sensation.

"I want to know you," Olive said, on this occasion; "I felt that I must
last night, as soon as I heard you speak. You seem to me very wonderful.
I don't know what to make of you. I think we ought to be friends; so I
just asked you to come to me straight off, without preliminaries, and I
believed you would come. It is so _right_ that you have come, and it
proves how right I was." These remarks fell from Miss Chancellor's lips
one by one, as she caught her breath, with the tremor that was always in
her voice, even when she was the least excited, while she made Verena
sit down near her on the sofa, and looked at her all over in a manner
that caused the girl to rejoice at having put on the jacket with the
gilt buttons. It was this glance that was the beginning; it was with
this quick survey, omitting nothing, that Olive took possession of her.
"You are very remarkable; I wonder if you know how remarkable!" she went
on, murmuring the words as if she were losing herself, becoming
inadvertent in admiration.

Verena sat there smiling, without a blush, but with a pure, bright look
which, for her, would always make protests unnecessary. "Oh, it isn't
me, you know; it's something outside!" She tossed this off lightly, as
if she were in the habit of saying it, and Olive wondered whether it
were a sincere disclaimer or only a phrase of the lips. The question was
not a criticism, for she might have been satisfied that the girl was a
mass of fluent catch-words and yet scarcely have liked her the less. It
was just as she was that she liked her; she was so strange, so different
from the girls one usually met, seemed to belong to some queer
gipsy-land or transcendental Bohemia. With her bright, vulgar clothes,
her salient appearance, she might have been a rope-dancer or a
fortune-teller; and this had the immense merit, for Olive, that it
appeared to make her belong to the "people," threw her into the social
dusk of that mysterious democracy which Miss Chancellor held that the
fortunate classes know so little about, and with which (in a future
possibly very near) they will have to count. Moreover, the girl had
moved her as sh