Ransom knew why it was that Verena had tears in her eyes as she looked
up at her patient old friend; she had spoken to him, often, during the
last three weeks, of the stories Miss Birdseye had told her of the great
work of her life, her mission, repeated year after year, among the
Southern blacks. She had gone among them with every precaution, to teach
them to read and write; she had carried them Bibles and told them of the
friends they had in the North who prayed for their deliverance. Ransom
knew that Verena didn't reproduce these legends with a view to making
him ashamed of his Southern origin, his connexion with people who, in a
past not yet remote, had made that kind of apostleship necessary; he
knew this because she had heard what he thought of all that chapter
himself; he had given her a kind of historical summary of the slavery
question which left her no room to say that he was more tender to that
particular example of human imbecility than he was to any other. But she
had told him that this was what _she_ would have liked to do--to wander,
alone, with her life in her hand, on an errand of mercy, through a
country in which society was arrayed against her; she would have liked
it much better than simply talking about the right from the gas-lighted
vantage of the New England platform. Ransom had replied simply
"Balderdash!" it being his theory, as we have perceived, that he knew
much more about Verena's native bent than the young lady herself.
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