d like him to marry the daughter of a mesmeric healer, and yet she
appeared to think it charming that he should have such a young woman
there to give gusto to her hour at Cambridge. Poor Olive was, in the
nature of things, entangled in contradictions; she had a horror of the
idea of Verena's marrying Mr. Burrage, and yet she was angry when his
mother demeaned herself as if the little girl with red hair, whose
freshness she enjoyed, could not be a serious danger. She saw all this
through the blur of her shyness, the conscious, anxious silence to which
she was so much of the time condemned. It may therefore be imagined how
sharp her vision would have been could she only have taken the situation
more simply; for she was intelligent enough not to have needed to be
morbid, even for purposes of self-defence.

I must add, however, that there was a moment when she came near being
happy--or, at any rate, reflected that it was a pity she could not be
so. Mrs. Burrage asked her son to play "some little thing," and he sat
down to his piano and revealed a talent that might well have gratified
that lady's pride. Olive was extremely susceptible to music, and it was
impossible to her not to be soothed and beguiled by the young man's
charming art. One "little thing" succeeded another; his selections were
all very happy. His guests sat scattered in the red firelight,
listening, silent, in comfortable attitudes; there was a faint fragrance
from the burning logs, which mingled with the perfume of Schubert and
Mendelssohn; the covered lamps made a glow here and there, and the
cabinets and brackets produced brown shadows, out of which some precious
object gleamed--some ivory carving or cinque-cento cup. It was given to
Olive, under these circumstances, for half an hour, to surrender
herself, to enjoy the music, to admit that Mr. Burrage played with
exquisite taste, to feel as if the situation were a kind of truce. Her
nerves were calmed, her problems--for the time--subsided. Civilisation,
under such an influence, in such a setting, appeared to have done its
work; harmony ruled the scene; human life ceased to be a battle. She
went so far as to ask herself why one should have a quarrel with it; the
relations of men and women, in that picturesque grouping, had not the
air of being internecine. In short, she had an interval of unexpected
rest, during which she kept her eyes mainly on Verena, who sat near Mrs.
Burrage, letting herself go, evidentl