and offered his own life, even if it had not been taken. She
could not defend herself against a rich admiration--a kind of tenderness
of envy--of any one who had been so happy as to have that opportunity.
The most secret, the most sacred hope of her nature was that she might
some day have such a chance, that she might be a martyr and die for
something. Basil Ransom had lived, but she knew he had lived to see
bitter hours. His family was ruined; they had lost their slaves, their
property, their friends and relations, their home; had tasted of all the
cruelty of defeat. He had tried for a while to carry on the plantation
himself, but he had a millstone of debt round his neck, and he longed
for some work which would transport him to the haunts of men. The State
of Mississippi seemed to him the state of despair; so he surrendered the
remnants of his patrimony to his mother and sisters, and, at nearly
thirty years of age, alighted for the first time in New York, in the
costume of his province, with fifty dollars in his pocket and a gnawing
hunger in his heart.

That this incident had revealed to the young man his ignorance of many
things--only, however, to make him say to himself, after the first angry
blush, that here he would enter the game and here he would win it--so
much Olive Chancellor could not know; what was sufficient for her was
that he had rallied, as the French say, had accepted the accomplished
fact, had admitted that North and South were a single, indivisible
political organism. Their cousinship--that of Chancellors and
Ransoms--was not very close; it was the kind of thing that one might
take up or leave alone, as one pleased. It was "in the female line," as
Basil Ransom had written, in answering her letter with a good deal of
form and flourish; he spoke as if they had been royal houses. Her mother
had wished to take it up; it was only the fear of seeming patronising to
people in misfortune that had prevented her from writing to Mississippi.
If it had been possible to send Mrs. Ransom money, or even clothes, she
would have liked that; but she had no means of ascertaining how such an
offering would be taken. By the time Basil came to the North--making
advances, as it were--Mrs. Chancellor had passed away; so it was for
Olive, left alone in the little house in Charles Street (Adeline being
in Europe), to decide.

She knew what her mother would have done, and that helped her decision;
for her mother always chos