ich should require
him to give up the girl he adored in order that his third cousin should
see he could be gallant. Chivalry was forbearance and generosity with
regard to the weak; and there was nothing weak about Miss Olive, she was
a fighting woman, and she would fight him to the death, giving him not
an inch of odds. He felt that she was fighting there all day long, in
her cottage fortress; her resistance was in the air he breathed, and
Verena came out to him sometimes quite limp and pale from the tussle.

It was in the same jocose spirit with which he regarded Olive's view of
the sort of standard a Mississippian should live up to that he talked to
Verena about the lecture she was preparing for her great exhibition at
the Music Hall. He learned from her that she was to take the field in
the manner of Mrs. Farrinder, for a winter campaign, carrying with her a
tremendous big gun. Her engagements were all made, her route was marked
out; she expected to repeat her lecture in about fifty different places.
It was to be called "A Woman's Reason," and both Olive and Miss Birdseye
thought it, so far as they could tell in advance, her most promising
effort. She wasn't going to trust to inspiration this time; she didn't
want to meet a big Boston audience without knowing where she was.
Inspiration, moreover, seemed rather to have faded away; in consequence
of Olive's influence she had read and studied so much that it seemed now
as if everything must take form beforehand. Olive was a splendid critic,
whether he liked her or not, and she had made her go over every word of
her lecture twenty times. There wasn't an intonation she hadn't made her
practise; it was very different from the old system, when her father had
worked her up. If Basil considered women superficial, it was a pity he
couldn't see what Olive's standard of preparation was, or be present at
their rehearsals, in the evening, in their little parlour. Ransom's
state of mind in regard to the affair at the Music Hall was simply
this--that he was determined to circumvent it if he could. He covered it
with ridicule, in talking of it to Verena, and the shafts he levelled at
it went so far that he could see she thought he exaggerated his dislike
to it. In point of fact he could not have overstated that; so odious did
the idea seem to him that she was soon to be launched in a more
infatuated career. He vowed to himself that she should never take that
fresh start which would co