xt morning, for the interview to which she consented to lend herself,
was the stroke of noon; this period of the day being chosen in
consequence of a prevision of many subsequent calls upon her time. She
remarked in her note that she did not wish any carriage to be sent for
her, and she surged and swayed up the Fifth Avenue on one of the
convulsive, clattering omnibuses which circulate in that thoroughfare.
One of her reasons for mentioning twelve o'clock had been that she knew
Basil Ransom was to call at Tenth Street at eleven, and (as she supposed
he didn't intend to stay all day) this would give her time to see him
come and go. It had been tacitly agreed between them, the night before,
that Verena was quite firm enough in her faith to submit to his visit,
and that such a course would be much more dignified than dodging it.
This understanding passed from one to the other during that dumb embrace
which I have described as taking place before they separated for the
night. Shortly before noon, Olive, passing out of the house, looked into
the big, sunny double parlour, where, in the morning, with all the
husbands absent for the day and all the wives and spinsters launched
upon the town, a young man desiring to hold a debate with a young lady
might enjoy every advantage in the way of a clear field. Basil Ransom
was still there; he and Verena, with the place to themselves, were
standing in the recess of a window, their backs presented to the door.
If he had got up, perhaps he was going, and Olive, softly closing the
door again, waited a little in the hall, ready to pass into the back
part of the house if she should hear him coming out. No sound, however,
reached her ear; apparently he did mean to stay all day, and she should
find him there on her return. She left the house, knowing they were
looking at her from the window as she descended the steps, but feeling
she could not bear to see Basil Ransom's face. As she walked, averting
her own, towards the Fifth Avenue, on the sunny side, she was barely
conscious of the loveliness of the day, the perfect weather, all
suffused and tinted with spring, which sometimes descends upon New York
when the winds of March have been stilled; she was given up only to the
remembrance of that moment when she herself had stood at a window (the
second time he came to see her in Boston), and watched Basil Ransom pass
out with Adeline--with Adeline who had seemed capable then of getting
such a hold