'I don't listen to your ideas; I listen to your voice.'
'Ah, I told Olive!' said Verena, quickly, as if his words had confirmed an old fear; which was general, however, and did not relate particularly to him.
Ransom still had an impression that he was not making love to her, especially when he could observe, with all the superiority of a man—'I wonder whether you have understood ten words I have said to you?'
'I should think you had made it clear enough—you had rubbed it in!'
'What have you understood, then?'
'Why, that you want to put us back further than we have been at any period.'
'I have been joking; I have been piling it up,' Ransom said, making that concession unexpectedly to the girl. Every now and then he had an air of relaxing himself, becoming absent, ceasing to care to discuss.
She was capable of noticing this, and in a moment she asked—'Why don't you write out your ideas?'
This touched again upon the matter of his failure; it was curious how she couldn't keep off it, hit it every time. 'Do you mean for the public? I have written many things, but I can't get them printed.'
'Then it would seem that there are not so many people—so many as you said just now—who agree with you.'
'Well,' said Basil Ransom, 'editors are a mean, timorous lot, always saying they want something original, but deadly afraid of it when it comes.'
'Is it for papers, magazines?' As it sank into Verena's mind more deeply that the contributions of this remarkable young man had been rejected—contributions in which, apparently, everything she held dear was riddled with scorn—she felt a strange pity and sadness, a sense of injustice. 'I am very sorry you can't get published,' she said, so simply that he looked up at her, from the figure he was scratching on the asphalt with his stick, to see whether such a tone as that, in relation to such a fact, were not 'put on.' But it was evidently genuine, and Verena added that she supposed getting published was very difficult always; she remembered, though she didn't mention, how little success her father had when he tried. She hoped Mr. Ransom would keep on; he would be sure to succeed at last. Then she continued, smiling, with more irony: 'You may denounce me by name if you like. Only please don't say anything about Olive Chancellor.'
'How little you understand what I want to achieve!' Basil Ransom exclaimed. 'There you are—you women—all over; always meaning, yourselves, something personal, and always thinking it is meant by others!'
'Yes, that's the charge they make,' said Verena gaily.
'I don't want to touch you, or Miss Chancellor, or Mrs. Farrinder, or Miss Birdseye, or the shade of Eliza P. Moseley, or any other gifted and celebrated being on earth—or in heaven.'
'Oh, I suppose you want to destroy us by neglect, by silence!' Verena exclaimed, with the same brightness.
'No, I don't want to destroy you, any more than I want to save you. There has been far too much talk about you, and I want to leave you alone altogether. My interest is in my own sex; yours evidently can look after itself. That's what I want to save.'
Verena saw that he was more serious now than he had been before, that he was not piling it up satirically, but saying really and a trifle wearily, as if suddenly he were tired of much talk, what he meant. 'To save it from what?' she asked.
'From the most damnable feminisation! I am so far from thinking, as you set forth the other night, that there is not enough women in our general life, that it has long been pressed home to me that there is a great deal too much. The whole generation is womanised; the masculine tone is passing out of the world; it's a feminine, a nervous, hysterical, chattering, canting age, an age of hollow phrases and false delicacy and exaggerated solicitudes and coddled sensibilities, which, if we don't soon look out, will usher in the reign of mediocrity, of the feeblest and flattest and the most pretentious that has ever been. The masculine character, the ability to dare and endure, to know and yet not fear reality, to look the world in the face and take it for what it is—a very queer and partly very base mixture—that is what I want to preserve, or rather, as I may say, to recover; and I must tell you that I don't in the least care what becomes of you ladies while I make the attempt!'
The poor fellow delivered himself of these narrow notions (the rejection of which by leading periodicals was certainly not a matter for surprise) with low, soft earnestness, bending towards her so as to give out his whole idea, yet apparently forgetting for the moment how offensive it must be to her now that it was articulated in that calm, severe way, in which no allowance was to be made for hyperbole. Verena did not remind herself of this; she was too much impressed by his manner and by the novelty of a man taking that sort of religious tone about such a cause. It told her on the spot, from one minute to the other and once for all, that the man who could give her that impression would never come round. She felt cold, slightly sick, though she replied that now he summed up his creed in such a distinct, lucid way, it was much more comfortable—one knew with what one was dealing; a declaration much at variance with the fact, for Verena had never felt less gratified in her life. The ugliness of her companion's profession of faith made her shiver; it would have been difficult to her to imagine anything more crudely profane. She was determined, however, not to betray any shudder that could suggest weakness, and the best way she could think of to disguise her emotion was to remark in a tone which, although not assumed for that purpose, was really the most effective revenge, inasmuch as it always produced on Ransom's part (it was not peculiar, among women, to Verena) an angry helplessness—'Mr. Ransom, I assure you this is an age of conscience.'
'That's a part of your cant. It's an age of unspeakable shams, as Carlyle says.'
'Well,' returned Verena, 'it's all very comfortable for you to say that you wish to leave us alone. But you can't leave us alone. We are here, and we have got to be disposed of. You have got to put us somewhere. It's a remarkable social system that has no place for
'No place in public. My plan is to keep you at home and have a better time with you there than ever.'
'I'm glad it's to be better; there's room for it. Woe to American womanhood when you start a movement for being more—what you like to be—at home!'
'Lord, how you're perverted; you, the very genius!' Basil Ransom murmured, looking at her with the kindest eyes.
She paid no attention to this, she went on, 'And those who have got no home (there are millions, you know),
