Selah Tarrant and his wife had come, obtrusively, as she
thought, for they never had had very much intercourse with Miss
Birdseye; and if it was for Verena's sake, Verena was there to pay every
tribute herself. Mrs. Tarrant had evidently hoped Miss Chancellor would
ask her to stay on at Marmion, but Olive felt how little she was in a
state for such heroics of hospitality. It was precisely in order that
she should not have to do that sort of thing that she had given Selah
such considerable sums, on two occasions, at a year's interval. If the
Tarrants wanted a change of air they could travel all over the
country--their present means permitted it; they could go to Saratoga or
Newport if they liked. Their appearance showed that they could put their
hands into their pockets (or into hers); at least Mrs. Tarrant's did.
Selah still sported (on a hot day in August) his immemorial waterproof;
but his wife rustled over the low tombstones at Marmion in garments of
which (little as she was versed in such inquiries) Olive could see that
the cost had been large. Besides, after Doctor Prance had gone (when all
was over), she felt what a relief it was that Verena and she could be
just together--together with the monstrous wedge of a question that had
come up between them. That was company enough, great heaven! and she had
not got rid of such an inmate as Doctor Prance only to put Mrs. Tarrant
in her place.
Did Verena's strange aberration, on this particular day, suggest to
Olive that it was no use striving, that the world was all a great trap
or trick, of which women were ever the punctual dupes, so that it was
the worst of the curse that rested upon them that they must most
humiliate those who had most their cause at heart? Did she say to
herself that their weakness was not only lamentable but hideous--hideous
their predestined subjection to man's larger and grosser insistence? Did
she ask herself why she should give up her life to save a sex which,
after all, didn't wish to be saved, and which rejected the truth even
after it had bathed them with its auroral light and they had pretended
to be fed and fortified? These are mysteries into which I shall not
attempt to enter, speculations with which I have no concern; it is
sufficient for us to know that all human effort had never seemed to her
so barren and thankless as on that fatal afternoon.
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