n indeed, carrying on his siege
with his hands tied. As he had to do everything in an hour a day, he
perceived that he must confine himself to the essential. The essential
was to show her how much he loved her, and then to press, to press,
always to press. His hovering about Miss Chancellor's habitation without
going in was a strange regimen to be subjected to, and he was sorry not
to see more of Miss Birdseye, besides often not knowing what to do with
himself in the mornings and evenings. Fortunately he had brought plenty
of books (volumes of rusty aspect, picked up at New York bookstalls),
and in such an affair as this he could take the less when the more was
forbidden him. For the mornings, sometimes, he had the resource of
Doctor Prance, with whom he made a great many excursions on the water.
She was devoted to boating and an ardent fisherwoman, and they used to
pull out into the bay together, cast their lines, and talk a prodigious
amount of heresy. She met him, as Verena met him, "in the environs," but
in a different spirit. He was immensely amused at her attitude, and saw
that nothing in the world could, as he expressed it, make her wink. She
would never blench nor show surprise; she had an air of taking
everything abnormal for granted; betrayed no consciousness of the oddity
of Ransom's situation; said nothing to indicate she had noticed that
Miss Chancellor was in a frenzy or that Verena had a daily appointment.
You might have supposed from her manner that it was as natural for
Ransom to sit on a fence half a mile off as in one of the red
rocking-chairs, of the so-called "Shaker" species, which adorned Miss
Chancellor's back verandah. The only thing our young man didn't like
about Doctor Prance was the impression she gave him (out of the crevices
of her reticence he hardly knew how it leaked) that she thought Verena
rather slim. She took an ironical view of almost any kind of courtship,
and he could see she didn't wonder women were such featherheads, so long
as, whatever brittle follies they cultivated, they could get men to come
and sit on fences for them. Doctor Prance told him Miss Birdseye noticed
nothing; she had sunk, within a few days, into a kind of transfigured
torpor; she didn't seem to know whether Mr. Ransom were anywhere round
or not. She guessed she thought he had just come down for a day and gone
off again; she probably supposed he just wanted to get toned up a little
by Miss Tarrant. Sometimes, ou