It was simply
that the truth had changed sides; that radiant image began to look at
her from Basil Ransom's expressive eyes. She loved, she was in love--she
felt it in every throb of her being. Instead of being constituted by
nature for entertaining that sentiment in an exceptionally small degree
(which had been the implication of her whole crusade, the warrant for
her offer of old to Olive to renounce), she was framed, apparently, to
allow it the largest range, the highest intensity. It was always
passion, in fact; but now the object was other. Formerly she had been
convinced that the fire of her spirit was a kind of double flame, one
half of which was responsive friendship for a most extraordinary person,
and the other pity for the sufferings of women in general. Verena gazed
aghast at the colourless dust into which, in three short months
(counting from the episode in New York), such a conviction as that could
crumble; she felt it must be a magical touch that could bring about such
a cataclysm. Why Basil Ransom had been deputed by fate to exercise this
spell was more than she could say--poor Verena, who up to so lately had
flattered herself that she had a wizard's wand in her own pocket.
When she saw him a little way off, about five o'clock--the hour she
usually went out to meet him--waiting for her at a bend of the road
which lost itself, after a winding, straggling mile or two, in the
indented, insulated "point," where the wandering bee droned through the
hot hours with a vague, misguided flight, she felt that his tall,
watching figure, with the low horizon behind, represented well the
importance, the towering eminence he had in her mind--the fact that he
was just now, to her vision, the most definite and upright, the most
incomparable, object in the world.
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