for!"

"The use of a truly amiable woman is to make some honest man happy,"
Ransom said, with a sententiousness of which he was perfectly aware.

It was so marked that it caused her to stop short in the middle of the
broad walk, while she looked at him with shining eyes. "See here, Mr.
Ransom, do you know what strikes me?" she exclaimed. "The interest you
take in me isn't really controversial--a bit. It's quite personal!" She
was the most extraordinary girl; she could speak such words as those
without the smallest look of added consciousness coming into her face,
without the least supposable intention of coquetry, or any visible
purpose of challenging the young man to say more.

"My interest in you--my interest in you," he began. Then hesitating, he
broke off suddenly. "It is certain your discovery doesn't make it any
less!"

"Well, that's better," she went on; "for we needn't dispute."

He laughed at the way she arranged it, and they presently reached the
irregular group of heterogeneous buildings--chapels, dormitories,
libraries, halls--which, scattered among slender trees, over a space
reserved by means of a low rustic fence, rather than enclosed (for
Harvard knows nothing either of the jealousy or the dignity of high
walls and guarded gateways), constitutes the great university of
Massachusetts. The yard, or college-precinct, is traversed by a number
of straight little paths, over which, at certain hours of the day, a
thousand undergraduates, with books under their arm and youth in their
step, flit from one school to another. Verena Tarrant knew her way
round, as she said to her companion; it was not the first time she had
taken an admiring visitor to see the local monuments. Basil Ransom,
walking with her from point to point, admired them all, and thought
several of them exceedingly quaint and venerable. The rectangular
structures of old red brick especially gratified his eye; the afternoon
sun was yellow on their homely faces; their windows showed a peep of
flower-pots and bright-coloured curtains; they wore an expression of
scholastic quietude, and exhaled for the young Mississippian a
tradition, an antiquity. "This is the place where I ought to have been,"
he said to his charming guide. "I should have had a good time if I had
been able to study here."

"Yes; I presume you feel yourself drawn to any place where ancient
prejudices are garnered up," she answered, not without archness. "I know
by the stand yo