he tried. She hoped Mr. Ransom would keep
on; he would be sure to succeed at last. Then she continued, smiling,
with more irony: "You may denounce me by name if you like. Only please
don't say anything about Olive Chancellor."

"How little you understand what I want to achieve!" Basil Ransom
exclaimed. "There you are--you women--all over; always meaning,
yourselves, something personal, and always thinking it is meant by
others!"

"Yes, that's the charge they make," said Verena gaily.

"I don't want to touch you, or Miss Chancellor, or Mrs. Farrinder, or
Miss Birdseye, or the shade of Eliza P. Moseley, or any other gifted and
celebrated being on earth--or in heaven."

"Oh, I suppose you want to destroy us by neglect, by silence!" Verena
exclaimed, with the same brightness.

"No, I don't want to destroy you, any more than I want to save you.
There has been far too much talk about you, and I want to leave you
alone altogether. My interest is in my own sex; yours evidently can look
after itself. That's what I want to save."

Verena saw that he was more serious now than he had been before, that he
was not piling it up satirically, but saying really and a trifle
wearily, as if suddenly he were tired of much talk, what he meant. "To
save it from what?" she asked.

"From the most damnable feminisation! I am so far from thinking, as you
set forth the other night, that there is not enough women in our general
life, that it has long been pressed home to me that there is a great
deal too much. The whole generation is womanised; the masculine tone is
passing out of the world; it's a feminine, a nervous, hysterical,
chattering, canting age, an age of hollow phrases and false delicacy and
exaggerated solicitudes and coddled sensibilities, which, if we don't
soon look out, will usher in the reign of mediocrity, of the feeblest
and flattest and the most pretentious that has ever been. The masculine
character, the ability to dare and endure, to know and yet not fear
reality, to look the world in the face and take it for what it is--a
very queer and partly very base mixture--that is what I want to
preserve, or rather, as I may say, to recover; and I must tell you that
I don't in the least care what becomes of you ladies while I make the
attempt!"

The poor fellow delivered himself of these narrow notions (the rejection
of which by leading periodicals was certainly not a matter for surprise)
with low, soft earnestness, bending t