Page:The Bostonians (London & New York, Macmillan & Co., 1886).djvu/281

 'Oh, I call that presumptuous!' Mr. Burrage exclaimed, turning away to get a glass of water for Verena, who had refused to accept champagne, mentioning that she had never drunk any in her life and that she associated a kind of iniquity with it. Olive had no wine in her house (not that Verena gave this explanation), but her father's old madeira and a little claret; of the former of which liquors Basil Ransom had highly approved the day he dined with her.

'Does he believe in all those lunacies?' he inquired, knowing perfectly what to think about the charge of presumption brought by Mr Burrage.

'Why, he's crazy about our movement,' Verena responded. 'He's one of my most gratifying converts.'

'And don't you despise him for it?'

'Despise him? Why, you seem to think I swing round pretty often!'

'Well, I have an idea that I shall see you swing round yet,' Ransom remarked, in a tone in which it would have appeared to Henry Burrage, had he heard these words, that presumption was pushed to fatuity.

On Verena, however, they produced no impression that prevented her from saying simply, without the least rancour, 'Well, if you expect to draw me back five hundred years, I hope you won't tell Miss Birdseye.' And as Ransom did not seize immediately the reason of her allusion, she went on, 'You know she is convinced it will be just the other way. I went to see her after you had been at Cambridge—almost immediately.'

'Darling old lady—I hope she's well,' the young man said.

'Well, she's tremendously interested.'

'She's always interested in something, isn't she?'

'Well, this time it's in our relations, yours and mine,' Verena replied, in a tone in which only Verena could say a thing like that. 'You ought to see how she throws herself into them. She is sure it will all work round for your good.'

'All what, Miss Tarrant?' Ransom asked.

'Well, what I told her. She is sure you are going to