The Bostonians, Vol. II | Page 8

women, with loosened
bonnet-strings, forcing thin voices into ineffectual shrillness. It made
him angry, and all the more angry, that he hadn't a reason, to think of
the charming creature at his side being mixed up with such elements,
pushed and elbowed by them, conjoined with them in emulation, in
unsightly strainings and clappings and shoutings, in wordy, windy
iteration of inanities. Worst of all was the idea that she should have
expressed such a congregation to itself so acceptably, have been
acclaimed and applauded by hoarse throats, have been lifted up, to all
the vulgar multitude, as the queen of the occasion. He made the
reflexion, afterwards, that he was singularly ill-grounded in his wrath,
inasmuch as it was none of his business what use Miss Tarrant chose to
make of her energies, and, in addition to this, nothing else was to have

been expected of her. But that reflexion was absent now, and in its
absence he saw only the fact that his companion had been odiously
perverted. "Well, Miss Tarrant," he said, with a deeper seriousness than
showed in his voice, "I am forced to the painful conclusion that you are
simply ruined."
"Ruined? Ruined yourself!"
"Oh, I know the kind of women that Miss Chancellor had at her house,
and what a group you must have made when you looked out at the
Back Bay! It depresses me very much to think of it."
"We made a lovely, interesting group, and if we had had a spare minute
we would have been photographed," Verena said.
This led him to ask her if she had ever subjected herself to the process;
and she answered that a photographer had been after her as soon as she
got back from Europe, and that she had sat for him, and that there were
certain shops in Boston where her portrait could be obtained. She gave
him this information very simply, without pretence of vagueness of
knowledge, spoke of the matter rather respectfully, indeed, as if it
might be of some importance; and when he said that he should go and
buy one of the little pictures as soon as he returned to town, contented
herself with replying, "Well, be sure you pick out a good one!" He had
not been altogether without a hope that she would offer to give him one,
with her name written beneath, which was a mode of acquisition he
would greatly have preferred; but this, evidently, had not occurred to
her, and now, as they went further, her thought was following a
different train. That was proved by her remarking, at the end of a
silence, inconsequently, "Well, it showed I have a great use!" As he
stared, wondering what she meant, she explained that she referred to
the brilliancy of her success at the convention. "It proved I have a great
use," she repeated, "and that is all I care 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