Page:The Bostonians (London & New York, Macmillan & Co., 1886).djvu/248

 'Ruined? Ruined yourself!'

'Oh, I know the kind of women that Miss Chancellor had at her house, and what a group you must have made when you looked out at the Back Bay! It depresses me very much to think of it.'

'We made a lovely, interesting group, and, if we had had a spare minute we would have been photographed,' Verena said.

This led him to ask her if she had ever subjected herself to the process; and she answered that a photographer had been after her as soon as she got back from Europe, and that she had sat for him, and that there were certain shops in Boston where her portrait could be obtained. She gave him this information very simply, without pretence of vagueness of knowledge, spoke of the matter rather respectfully, indeed, as if it might be of some importance; and when he said that he should go and buy one of the little pictures as soon as he returned to town, contented herself with replying, 'Well, be sure you pick out a good one!' He had not been altogether without a hope that she would offer to give him one, with her name written beneath, which was a mode of acquisition he would greatly have preferred; but this, evidently, had not occurred to her, and now, as they went further, her thought was following a different train. That was proved by her remarking, at the end of a silence, inconsequently, 'Well, it showed I have a great use!' As he stared, wondering what she meant, she explained that she referred to the brilliancy of her success at the convention. 'It proved I have a great use,' she repeated, 'and that is all I care for!'

'The use of a truly amiable woman is to make some honest man happy,' Ransom said, with a sententiousness of which he was perfectly aware.

It was so marked that it caused her to stop short in the middle of the broad walk, while she looked at him with shining eyes. 'See here, Mr. Ransom, do you know what strikes me?' she exclaimed. 'The interest you take in me isn't really controversial—a bit. It's quite personal!' She was the most extraordinary girl; she could speak such words as those without the smallest look of added