So
Verena took a tryst with the young man as if she had been a maid-servant
and Basil Ransom a "follower." They met a little way from the house;
beyond it, outside the village.
XXXVIII
Olive thought she knew the worst, as we have perceived; but the worst
was really something she could not know, inasmuch as up to this time
Verena chose as little to confide to her on that one point as she was
careful to expatiate with her on every other. The change that had taken
place in the object of Basil Ransom's merciless devotion since the
episode in New York was, briefly, just this change--that the words he
had spoken to her there about her genuine vocation, as distinguished
from the hollow and factitious ideal with which her family and her
association with Olive Chancellor had saddled her--these words, the most
effective and penetrating he had uttered, had sunk into her soul and
worked and fermented there. She had come at last to believe them, and
that was the alteration, the transformation. They had kindled a light in
which she saw herself afresh and, strange to say, liked herself better
than in the old exaggerated glamour of the lecture-lamps. She could not
tell Olive this yet, for it struck at the root of everything, and the
dreadful, delightful sensation filled her with a kind of awe at all that
it implied and portended. She was to burn everything she had adored; she
was to adore everything she had burned. The extraordinary part of it was
that though she felt the situation to be, as I say, tremendously
serious, she was not ashamed of the treachery which she--yes, decidedly,
by this time she must admit it to herself--she meditated.
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