“I was certain you would come — I have felt it all day — something told me!” It was with these words that Olive Chancellor greeted her young visitor, coming to her quickly from the window, where she might have been waiting for her arrival. Some weeks later she explained to Verena how definite this prevision had been, how it had filled her all day with a nervous agitation so violent as to be painful. She told her that such forebodings were a peculiarity of her organisation, that she didn’t know what to make of them, that she had to accept them; and she mentioned, as another example, the sudden dread that had come to her the evening before in the carriage, after proposing to Mr. Ransom to go with her to Miss Birdseye’s. This had been as strange as it had been instinctive, and the strangeness, of course, was what must have struck Mr. Ransom; for the idea that he might come had been hers, and yet she suddenly veered round. She couldn’t help it; her heart had begun to throb with the conviction that if he crossed that threshold some harm would come of of it for her. She hadn’t prevented him, and now she didn’t care, for now, as she intimated, she had the interest of Verena, and that made her indifferent to every danger, to every ordinary pleasure. By this time Verena had learned how peculiarly her friend was constituted, how nervous and serious she was, how personal, how exclusive, what a force of will she had, what a concentration of purpose. Olive had taken her up, in the literal sense of the phrase, like a bird of the air, had spread an extraordinary pair of wings, and carried her through the dizzying void of space. Verena liked it, for the most part; liked to shoot upward without an effort of her own and look down upon all creation, upon all history, from such a height. From this first interview she felt that she was seized, and she gave herself up, only shutting her eyes a little, as we do whenever a person in whom we have perfect confidence proposes, with our assent, to subject us to some sensation.
“I want to know you,” Olive said, on this occasion; “I felt that I must last night, as soon as I heard you speak. You seem to me very wonderful. I don’t know what to make of you. I think we ought to be friends; so I just asked you to come to me straight off, without preliminaries, and I believed you would come. It is so right that you have come, and it proves how right I was.” These remarks fell from Miss Chancellor’s lips one by one, as she caught her breath, with the tremor that was always in her voice, even when she was the least excited, while she made Verena sit down near her on the sofa, and looked at her all over in a manner that caused the girl to rejoice at having put on the jacket with the gilt buttons. It was this glance that was the beginning; it was with this quick survey, omitting nothing, that Olive took possession of her. “You are very remarkable; I wonder if you know how remarkable!” she went on, murmuring the words as if she were losing herself, becoming inadvertent in admiration.
Verena sat there smiling, without a blush, but with a pure, bright look which, for her, would always make protests unnecessary. “Oh, it isn’t me, you know; it’s something outside!” She tossed this off lightly, as if she were in the habit of saying it, and Olive wondered whether it were a sincere disclaimer or only a phrase of the lips. The question was not a criticism, for she might have been satisfied that the girl was a mass of fluent catch-words and yet scarcely have liked her the less. It was just as she was that she liked her; she was so strange, so different from the girls one usually met, seemed to belong to some queer gipsy-land or transcendental Bohemia. With her bright, vulgar clothes, her salient appearance, she might have been a rope-dancer or a fortune-teller; and this had the immense merit, for Olive, that it appeared to make her belong to the “people,” threw her into the social dusk of that mysterious democracy which Miss Chancellor held that the fortunate classes know so little about, and with which (in a future possibly very near) they will have to count. Moreover, the girl had moved her as she had never been moved, and the power to do that, from whatever source it came, was a force that one must admire. Her emotion was still acute, however much she might speak to her visitor as if everything that had happened seemed to her natural; and what kept it, above all, from subsiding was her sense that she found here what she had been looking for so long — a friend of her own sex with whom she might have a union of soul. It took a double consent to make a friendship, but it was not possible that this intensely sympathetic girl would refuse. Olive had the penetration to discover in a moment that she was a creature of unlimited generosity. I know not what may have been the reality of Miss Chancellor’s other premonitions, but there is no doubt that in this respect she took Verena’s measure on the spot. This was what she wanted; after that the rest didn’t matter; Miss Tarrant might wear gilt buttons from head to foot, her soul could not be vulgar.
“Mother told me I had better come right in,” said Verena, looking now about the room, very glad to find herself in so pleasant a place, and noticing a great many things that she should like to see in detail.
“Your mother saw that I meant what I said; it isn’t everybody that does me the honour to perceive that. She saw that I was shaken from head to foot. I could only say three words — I couldn’t have spoken more! What a power — what a power, Miss Tarrant!”
“Yes, I suppose it is a power. If it wasn’t a power, it couldn’t do much with me!”
“You are so simple — so much like a child,” Olive Chancellor said. That was the truth, and she wanted to say it because, quickly, without forms or circumlocutions, it made them familiar. She wished to arrive at this; her impatience was such that before the girl had been five minutes in the room she jumped to her point — inquired of her, interrupting herself, interrupting everything: “Will you be my friend, my friend of friends, beyond every one, everything, for ever and for ever?” Her face was full of eagerness and tenderness.
Verena gave a laugh of clear amusement, without a shade of embarrassment or confusion. “Perhaps you like me too much.”
“Of course I like you too much! When I like, I like too much. But of course it’s another thing, your liking me,” Olive Chancellor added. “We must wait — we must wait. When I care for anything, I can be patient.” She put out her hand to Verena, and the movement was at once so appealing and so confident that the girl instinctively placed her own in it. So, hand in hand, for some moments, these two young women sat looking at each other. “There is so much I want to ask you,” said Olive.
“Well, I can’t say much except when father has worked on me,” Verena answered with an ingenuousness beside which humility would have seemed pretentious.
“I don’t care anything about your father,” Olive Chancellor rejoined very gravely, with a great air of security.
“He is very good,” Verena said simply. “And he’s wonderfully magnetic.”
“It isn’t your father, and it isn’t your mother; I don’t think of them, and it’s not them I want. It’s only you — just as you are.”
Verena dropped her eyes over the front of her dress. “Just as she was” seemed to her indeed very well.
“Do you want me to give up ——?” she demanded, smiling.
Olive Chancellor drew in her breath for an instant, like a creature in pain; then, with her quavering voice, touched with a vibration of anguish, she said; “Oh, how can I ask you to give up? I will give up — I will give up everything!”
Filled with the impression of her hostess’s agreeable interior, and of what her mother had told her about Miss Chancellor’s wealth, her position in Boston society, Verena, in her fresh, diverted scrutiny of the surrounding objects, wondered what could be the need of this scheme of renunciation. Oh no, indeed, she hoped she wouldn’t give up — at least not before she, Verena, had had a chance to see. She felt, however, that for the present there would be no answer for her save in the mere pressure of Miss Chancellor’s eager nature, that intensity of emotion which made her suddenly exclaim, as if in a nervous ecstasy of anticipation, “But we must wait! Why do we talk of this? We must wait! All will be right,” she added more calmly, with great sweetness.
Verena wondered afterward why she had not been more afraid of her — why, indeed, she had not turned and saved herself by darting out of the room. But it was not in this young woman’s nature to be either timid or cautious; she had as yet to make acquaintance with the sentiment of fear. She knew too little of the world to have learned to mistrust sudden enthusiasms, and if she had had a suspicion it would have been (in accordance with common worldly knowledge) the wrong one — the suspicion that such a whimsical liking would burn itself out. She could not have that one, for there was a light in Miss Chancellor’s magnified face which seemed to say that a sentiment, with her, might consume its object, might consume Miss Chancellor, but would never consume itself. Verena, as yet, had no sense of being scorched; she was only agreeably warmed. She also had dreamed of a friendship, though it was not what she had dreamed of............