nd they even considered the
question of taking a boat for half an hour, Ransom saying that they
needed this to make their visit complete. Verena replied that she didn't
see why it should be complete, and after having threaded the devious
ways of the Ramble, lost themselves in the Maze, and admired all the
statues and busts of great men with which the grounds are decorated,
they contented themselves with resting on a sequestered bench, where,
however, there was a pretty glimpse of the distance and an occasional
stroller creaked by on the asphalt walk.

They had had by this time a great deal of talk, none of which,
nevertheless, had been serious to Verena's view. Mr. Ransom continued to
joke about everything, including the emancipation of women; Verena, who
had always lived with people who took the world very earnestly, had
never encountered such a power of disparagement or heard so much sarcasm
levelled at the institutions of her country and the tendencies of the
age. At first she replied to him, contradicted, showed a high spirit of
retort, turning his irreverence against himself; she was too quick and
ingenious not to be able to think of something to oppose--talking in a
fanciful strain--to almost everything he said. But little by little she
grew weary and rather sad; brought up, as she had been, to admire new
ideas, to criticise the social arrangements that one met almost
everywhere, and to disapprove of a great many things, she had yet never
dreamed of such a wholesale arraignment as Mr. Ransom's, so much
bitterness as she saw lurking beneath his exaggerations, his
misrepresentations. She knew he was an intense conservative, but she
didn't know that being a conservative could make a person so aggressive
and unmerciful. She thought conservatives were only smug and stubborn
and self-complacent, satisfied with what actually existed; but Mr.
Ransom didn't seem any more satisfied with what existed than with what
she wanted to exist, and he was ready to say worse things about some of
those whom she would have supposed to be on his own side than she
thought it right to say about almost any one. She ceased after a while
to care to argue with him, and wondered what could have happened to him
to make him so perverse. Probably something had gone wrong in his
life--he had had some misfortune that coloured his whole view of the
world. He was a cynic; she had often heard about that state of mind,
though she had never encountered i