"
"Curious--how do you mean?"
"Well, to hear the other side."
"Oh heaven!" Olive Chancellor murmured, turning her face upon her.
"You must remember I have never heard it." And Verena smiled into her
friend's wan gaze.
"Do you want to hear all the infamy that is in the world?"
"No, it isn't that; but the more he should talk the better chance he
would give me. I guess I can meet him."
"Life is too short. Leave him as he is."
"Well," Verena went on, "there are many I haven't cared to move at all,
whom I might have been more interested in than in him. But to make him
give in just at two or three points--that I should like better than
anything I have done."
"You have no business to enter upon a contest that isn't equal; and it
wouldn't be, with Mr. Ransom."
"The inequality would be that I have right on my side."
"What is that--for a man? For what was their brutality given them, but
to make that up?"
"I don't think he's brutal; I should like to see," said Verena gaily.
Olive's eyes lingered a little on her own; then they turned away,
vaguely, blindly, out of the carriage-window, and Verena made the
reflexion that she looked strangely little like a person who was going
to dine at Delmonico's. How terribly she worried about everything, and
how tragical was her nature; how anxious, suspicious, exposed to subtle
influences! In their long intimacy Verena had come to revere most of her
friend's peculiarities; they were a proof of her depth and devotion, and
were so bound up with what was noble in her that she was rarely provoked
to criticise them separately.
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