dea that, now they were alone together in a quiet, favourable
place, he would perhaps take up the different points of her address one
by one, as several gentlemen had done after hearing her on other
occasions. There was nothing she liked so well as that, and Olive never
had anything to say against it. But he hadn't taken up anything; he had
simply laughed and chaffed, and unrolled a string of queer fancies about
the delightful way women would fix things when, as she said in her
address, they should get out of their box. He kept talking about the
box; he seemed as if he wouldn't let go that simile. He said that he had
come to look at her through the glass sides, and if he wasn't afraid of
hurting her he would smash them in. He was determined to find the key
that would open it, if he had to look for it all over the world; it was
tantalising only to be able to talk to her through the keyhole. If he
didn't want to take up the subject, he at least wanted to take _her_
up--to keep his hand upon her as long as he could. Verena had had no
such sensation since the first day she went in to see Olive Chancellor,
when she felt herself plucked from the earth and borne aloft.

"It's the most lovely day, and I should like so much to show you New
York, as you showed me your beautiful Harvard," Basil Ransom went on,
pressing her to accede to his proposal. "You said that was the only
thing you could do for me then, and so this is the only thing I can do
for you here. It would be odious to see you go away, giving me nothing
but this stiff little talk in a boarding-house parlour."

"Mercy, if you call this stiff!" Verena exclaimed, laughing, while at
that moment Olive passed out of the house and descended the steps before
her eyes.

"My poor cousin's stiff; she won't turn her head a hair's breadth to
look at us," said the young man. Olive's figure, as she went by, was,
for Verena, full of a queer, touching, tragic expression, saying ever so
many things, both familiar and strange; and Basil Ransom's companion
privately remarked how little men knew about women, or indeed about what
was really delicate, that he, without any cruel intention, should attach
an idea of ridicule to such an incarnation of the pathetic, should speak
rough, derisive words about it. Ransom, in truth, to-day, was not
disposed to be very scrupulous, and he only wanted to get rid of Olive
Chancellor, whose image, at last, decidedly bothered and bored him. He
was glad t