puddles, and tracks of the humbler, the universal
horse-car, traversing obliquely this path of danger; loose fences,
vacant lots, mounds of refuse, yards bestrewn with iron pipes, telegraph
poles, and bare wooden backs of places. Verena thought such a view
lovely, and she was by no means without excuse when, as the afternoon
closed, the ugly picture was tinted with a clear, cold rosiness. The
air, in its windless chill, seemed to tinkle like a crystal, the
faintest gradations of tone were perceptible in the sky, the west became
deep and delicate, everything grew doubly distinct before taking on the
dimness of evening. There were pink flushes on snow, "tender" reflexions
in patches of stiffened marsh, sounds of car-bells, no longer vulgar,
but almost silvery, on the long bridge, lonely outlines of distant dusky
undulations against the fading glow. These agreeable effects used to
light up that end of the drawing-room, and Olive often sat at the window
with her companion before it was time for the lamp. They admired the
sunsets, they rejoiced in the ruddy spots projected upon the
parlour-wall, they followed the darkening perspective in fanciful
excursions. They watched the stellar points come out at last in a colder
heaven, and then, shuddering a little, arm in arm, they turned away,
with a sense that the winter night was even more cruel than the tyranny
of men--turned back to drawn curtains and a brighter fire and a
glittering tea-tray and more and more talk about the long martyrdom of
women, a subject as to which Olive was inexhaustible and really most
interesting. There were some nights of deep snowfall, when Charles
Street was white and muffled and the door-bell foredoomed to silence,
which seemed little islands of lamp-light, of enlarged and intensified
vision. They read a great deal of history together, and read it ever
with the same thought--that of finding confirmation in it for this idea
that their sex had suffered inexpressibly, and that at any moment in the
course of human affairs the state of the world would have been so much
less horrible (history seemed to them in every way horrible) if women
had been able to press down the scale. Verena was full of suggestions
which stimulated discussions; it was she, oftenest, who kept in view the
fact that a good many women in the past had been entrusted with power
and had not always used it amiably, who brought up the wicked queens,
the profligate mistresses of kings. Thes