It must be added, however, that if her hostess was
a humbug, Olive had never met one who provoked her less; she was such a
brilliant, genial, artistic one, with such a recklessness of perfidy,
such a willingness to bribe you if she couldn't deceive you. She seemed
to be offering Olive all the kingdoms of the earth if she would only
exert herself to bring about a state of feeling on Verena Tarrant's part
which would lead the girl to accept Henry Burrage.
"We know it's you--the whole business; that you can do what you please.
You could decide it to-morrow with a word."
She had hesitated at first, and spoken of her hesitation, and it might
have appeared that she would need all her courage to say to Olive, that
way, face to face, that Verena was in such subjection to her. But she
didn't look afraid; she only looked as if it were an infinite pity Miss
Chancellor couldn't understand what immense advantages and rewards there
would be for her in striking an alliance with the house of Burrage.
Olive was so impressed with this, so occupied, even, in wondering what
these mystic benefits might be, and whether after all there might not be
a protection in them (from something worse), a fund of some sort that
she and Verena might convert to a large use, setting aside the mother
and son when once they had got what they had to give--she was so
arrested with the vague daze of this vision, the sense of Mrs. Burrage's
full hands, her eagerness, her thinking it worth while to flatter and
conciliate, whatever her pretexts and pretensions might be, that she was
almost insensible, for the time, to the strangeness of such a woman's
coming round to a positive desire for a connexion with the Tarrants.
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