so disagreeable to
her. Then, for all answer, she murmured, irresolutely, "I wish you would
let me help you!" Yet it seemed, at the same time, that Verena needed
little help, for it was more and more clear that her eloquence, when she
stood up that way before a roomful of people, was literally inspiration.
She answered all her friend's questions with a good-nature which
evidently took no pains to make things plausible, an effort to oblige,
not to please; but, after all, she could give very little account of
herself. This was very visible when Olive asked her where she had got
her "intense realisation" of the suffering of women; for her address at
Miss Birdseye's showed that she, too (like Olive herself), had had that
vision in the watches of the night. Verena thought a moment, as if to
understand what her companion referred to, and then she inquired, always
smiling, where Joan of Arc had got her idea of the suffering of France.
This was so prettily said that Olive could scarcely keep from kissing
her; she looked at the moment as if, like Joan, she might have had
visits from the saints. Olive, of course, remembered afterwards that it
had not literally answered the question; and she also reflected on
something that made an answer seem more difficult--the fact that the
girl had grown up among lady-doctors, lady-mediums, lady-editors,
lady-preachers, lady-healers, women who, having rescued themselves from
a passive existence, could illustrate only partially the misery of the
sex at large. It was true that they might have illustrated it by their
talk, by all they had "been through" and all they could tell a younger
sister; but Olive was sure that Verena's prophetic impulse had not been
stirred by the chatter of women (Miss Chancellor knew that sound as well
as any one); it had proceeded rather out of their silence. She said to
her visitor that whether or no the angels came down to her in glittering
armour, she struck her as the only person she had yet encountered who
had exactly the same tenderness, the same pity, for women that she
herself had. Miss Birdseye had something of it, but Miss Birdseye wanted
passion, wanted keenness, was capable of the weakest concessions. Mrs.
Farrinder was not weak, of course, and she brought a great intellect to
the matter; but she was not personal enough--she was too abstract.
Verena was not abstract; she seemed to have lived in imagination through
all the ages. Verena said she _did_ think sh