Doctor Prance told him Miss Birdseye noticed
nothing; she had sunk, within a few days, into a kind of transfigured
torpor; she didn't seem to know whether Mr. Ransom were anywhere round
or not. She guessed she thought he had just come down for a day and gone
off again; she probably supposed he just wanted to get toned up a little
by Miss Tarrant. Sometimes, out in the boat, when she looked at him in
vague, sociable silence, while she waited for a bite (she delighted in a
bite), she had an expression of diabolical shrewdness. When Ransom was
not scorching there beside her (he didn't mind the sun of
Massachusetts), he lounged about in the pastoral land which hung (at a
very moderate elevation) above the shore. He always had a book in his
pocket, and he lay under whispering trees and kicked his heels and made
up his mind on what side he should take Verena the next time. At the end
of a fortnight he had succeeded (so he believed, at least) far better
than he had hoped, in this sense, that the girl had now the air of
making much more light of her "gift." He was indeed quite appalled at
the facility with which she threw it over, gave up the idea that it was
useful and precious. That had been what he wanted her to do, and the
fact of the sacrifice (once she had fairly looked at it) costing her so
little only proved his contention, only made it clear that it was not
necessary to her happiness to spend half her life ranting (no matter how
prettily) in public.
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