Page:The Bostonians (London & New York, Macmillan & Co., 1886).djvu/33

 End. Boston was full of poor girls who had to walk about at night and to squeeze into horse-cars in which every sense was displeased; and why should she hold herself superior to these? Olive Chancellor regulated her conduct on lofty principles, and this is why, having to-night the advantage of a gentleman's protection, she sent for a carriage to obliterate that patronage. If they had gone together in the common way she would have seemed to owe it to him that she should be so daring, and he belonged to a sex to which she wished to be under no obligations. Months before, when she wrote to him, it had been with the sense, rather, of putting him in debt. As they rolled toward the South End, side by side, in a good deal of silence, bouncing and bumping over the railway-tracks very little less, after all, than if their wheels had been fitted to them, and looking out on either side at rows of red houses, dusky in the lamplight, with protuberant fronts, approached by ladders of stone; as they proceeded, with these contemplative undulations, Miss Chancellor said to her companion, with a concentrated desire to defy him, as a punishment for having thrown her (she couldn't tell why) into such a tremor:

'Don't you believe, then, in the coming of a better day—in its being possible to do something for the human race?'

Poor Ransom perceived the defiance, and he felt rather bewildered; he wondered what type, after all, he had got hold of, and what game was being played with him. Why had she made advances, if she wanted to pinch him this way? However, he was good for any game—that one as well as another—and he saw that he was 'in' for something of which he had long desired to have a nearer view. 'Well, Miss Olive,' he answered, putting on again his big hat, which he had been holding in his lap, 'what strikes me most is that the human race has got to bear its troubles.'

'That's what men say to women, to make them patient in the position they have made for them.'

'Oh, the position of women!' Basil Ransom exclaimed. 'The position of women is to make fools of men. I would change my position for yours any day,' he went on. 'That's what I said to myself as I sat there in your elegant home.'