as passionately clean, and she was an excellent
woman of business. Now, however, she elevated daintiness to a religion;
her interior shone with superfluous friction, with punctuality, with
winter roses. Among these soft influences Verena herself bloomed like
the flower that attains such perfection in Boston. Olive had always
rated high the native refinement of her country-women, their latent
"adaptability," their talent for accommodating themselves at a glance to
changed conditions; but the way her companion rose with the level of the
civilisation that surrounded her, the way she assimilated all delicacies
and absorbed all traditions, left this friendly theory halting behind.
The winter days were still, indoors, in Charles Street, and the winter
nights secure from interruption. Our two young women had plenty of
duties, but Olive had never favoured the custom of running in and out.
Much conference on social and reformatory topics went forward under her
roof, and she received her colleagues--she belonged to twenty
associations and committees--only at pre-appointed hours, which she
expected them to observe rigidly. Verena's share in these proceedings
was not active; she hovered over them, smiling, listening, dropping
occasionally a fanciful though never an idle word, like some gently
animated image placed there for good omen. It was understood that her
part was before the scenes, not behind; that she was not a prompter, but
(potentially, at least) a "popular favourite," and that the work over
which Miss Chancellor presided so efficiently was a general preparation
of the platform on which, later, her companion would execute the most
striking steps.

The western windows of Olive's drawing-room, looking over the water,
took in the red sunsets of winter; the long, low bridge that crawled, on
its staggering posts, across the Charles; the casual patches of ice and
snow; the desolate suburban horizons, peeled and made bald by the rigour
of the season; the general hard, cold void of the prospect; the
extrusion, at Charlestown, at Cambridge, of a few chimneys and steeples,
straight, sordid tubes of factories and engine-shops, or spare,
heavenward finger of the New England meeting-house. There was something
inexorable in the poverty of the scene, shameful in the meanness of its
details, which gave a collective impression of boards and tin and frozen
earth, sheds and rotting piles, railway-lines striding flat across a
thoroughfare of