oung woman who had renounced? Suppose this glittering,
laughing Burrage youth, with his chains and rings and shining shoes,
should fall in love with her and try to bribe her, with his great
possessions, to practise renunciations of another kind--to give up her
holy work and to go with him to New York, there to live as his wife,
partly bullied, partly pampered, in the accustomed Burrage manner? There
was as little comfort for Olive as there had been on the whole alarm in
the recollection of that off-hand speech of Verena's about her
preference for "free unions." This had been mere maiden flippancy; she
had not known the meaning of what she said. Though she had grown up
among people who took for granted all sorts of queer laxities, she had
kept the consummate innocence of the American girl, that innocence which
was the greatest of all, for it had survived the abolition of walls and
locks; and of the various remarks that had dropped from Verena
expressing this quality that startling observation certainly expressed
it most. It implied, at any rate, that unions of some kind or other had
her approval, and did not exclude the dangers that might arise from
encounters with young men in search of sensations.

XVI

Mr. Pardon, as Olive observed, was a little out of this combination; but
he was not a person to allow himself to droop. He came and seated
himself by Miss Chancellor and broached a literary subject; he asked her
if she were following any of the current "serials" in the magazines. On
her telling him that she never followed anything of that sort, he
undertook a defence of the serial system, which she presently reminded
him that she had not attacked. He was not discouraged by this retort,
but glided gracefully off to the question of Mount Desert; conversation
on some subject or other being evidently a necessity of his nature. He
talked very quickly and softly, with words, and even sentences,
imperfectly formed; there was a certain amiable flatness in his tone,
and he abounded in exclamations--"Goodness gracious!" and "Mercy on
us!"--not much in use among the sex whose profanity is apt to be coarse.
He had small, fair features, remarkably neat, and pretty eyes, and a
moustache that he caressed, and an air of juvenility much at variance
with his grizzled locks, and the free familiar reference in which he was
apt to indulge to his career as a journalist. His friends knew that in
spite of his delicacy and his prattle