e ladies were easily disposed of
between the two, and the public crimes of Bloody Mary, the private
misdemeanours of Faustina, wife of the pure Marcus Aurelius, were very
satisfactorily classified. If the influence of women in the past
accounted for every act of virtue that men had happened to achieve, it
only made the matter balance properly that the influence of men should
explain the casual irregularities of the other sex. Olive could see how
few books had passed through Verena's hands, and how little the home of
the Tarrants had been a house of reading; but the girl now traversed the
fields of literature with her characteristic lightness of step.
Everything she turned to or took up became an illustration of the
facility, the "giftedness," which Olive, who had so little of it, never
ceased to wonder at and prize. Nothing frightened her; she always smiled
at it, she could do anything she tried. As she knew how to do other
things, she knew how to study; she read quickly and remembered
infallibly; could repeat, days afterward, passages that she appeared
only to have glanced at. Olive, of course, was more and more happy to
think that their cause should have the services of an organisation so
rare.

All this doubtless sounds rather dry, and I hasten to add that our
friends were not always shut up in Miss Chancellor's strenuous parlour.
In spite of Olive's desire to keep her precious inmate to herself and to
bend her attention upon their common studies, in spite of her constantly
reminding Verena that this winter was to be purely educative and that
the platitudes of the satisfied and unregenerate would have little to
teach her, in spite, in short, of the severe and constant duality of our
young women, it must not be supposed that their life had not many
personal confluents and tributaries. Individual and original as Miss
Chancellor was universally acknowledged to be, she was yet a typical
Bostonian, and as a typical Bostonian she could not fail to belong in
some degree to a "set." It had been said of her that she was in it but
not of it; but she was of it enough to go occasionally into other houses
and to receive their occupants in her own. It was her belief that she
filled her tea-pot with the spoon of hospitality, and made a good many
select spirits feel that they were welcome under her roof at convenient
hours. She had a preference for what she called _real_ people, and there
were several whose reality she had tested by