"Are you very sure that last night was only the third time?" Mrs. Luna
went on.
Olive threw back her head and swept her sister from her bonnet to her
lowest flounce. "You have no right to hint at such a thing as that
unless you know!"
"Oh, I know--I know, at any rate, more than you do!" And then Mrs. Luna,
sitting with her sister, much withdrawn, in one of the windows of the
big, hot, faded parlour of the boarding-house in Tenth Street, where
there was a rug before the chimney representing a Newfoundland dog
saving a child from drowning, and a row of chromo-lithographs on the
walls, imparted to her the impression she had received the evening
before--the impression of Basil Ransom's keen curiosity about Verena
Tarrant. Verena must have asked Mrs. Burrage to send him a card, and
asked it without mentioning the fact to Olive--for wouldn't Olive
certainly have remembered it? It was no use her saying that Mrs. Burrage
might have sent it of her own movement, because she wasn't aware of his
existence, and why should she be? Basil Ransom himself had told her he
didn't know Mrs. Burrage. Mrs. Luna knew whom he knew and whom he
didn't, or at least the sort of people, and they were not the sort that
belonged to the Wednesday Club. That was one reason why she didn't care
about him for any intimate relation--that he didn't seem to have any
taste for making nice friends. Olive would know what _her_ taste was in
this respect, though it wasn't that young woman's own any more than his.
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