It came back to Olive, again and again, that
this was, and could only be, fantastic and false; but it was always
possible that Verena might not think it so, might trust them all the
way. When Miss Chancellor had a pair of alternatives to consider, a
question of duty to study, she put a kind of passion into it--felt,
above all, that the matter must be settled that very hour, before
anything in life could go on. It seemed to her at present that she
couldn't re-enter the house in Tenth Street without having decided first
whether she might trust the Burrages or not. By "trust" them, she meant
trust them to fail in winning Verena over, while at the same time they
put Basil Ransom on a false scent. Olive was able to say to herself that
he probably wouldn't have the hardihood to push after her into those
gilded saloons, which, in any event, would be closed to him as soon as
the mother and son should discover what he wanted. She even asked
herself whether Verena would not be still better defended from the young
Southerner in New York, amid complicated hospitalities, than in Boston
with a cousin of the enemy. She continued to walk down the Fifth Avenue,
without noticing the cross-streets, and after a while became conscious
that she was approaching Washington Square. By this time she had also
definitely reasoned it out that Basil Ransom and Henry Burrage could not
both capture Miss Tarrant, that therefore there could not be two
dangers, but only one; that this was a good deal gained, and that it
behoved her to determine which peril had most reality, in order that she
might deal with that one only.
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