"Oh yes, you must use it. That's what I mean; you must move the world
with it; it's divine."
It was so much what she meant that she had lain awake all night thinking
of it, and the substance of her thought was that if she could only
rescue the girl from the danger of vulgar exploitation, could only
constitute herself her protectress and devotee, the two, between them,
might achieve the great result. Verena's genius was a mystery, and it
might remain a mystery; it was impossible to see how this charming,
blooming, simple creature, all youth and grace and innocence, got her
extraordinary powers of reflexion. When her gift was not in exercise she
appeared anything but reflective, and as she sat there now, for
instance, you would never have dreamed that she had had a vivid
revelation. Olive had to content herself, provisionally, with saying
that her precious faculty had come to her just as her beauty and
distinction (to Olive she was full of that quality) had come; it had
dropped straight from heaven, without filtering through her parents,
whom Miss Chancellor decidedly did not fancy. Even among reformers she
discriminated; she thought all wise people wanted great changes, but the
votaries of change were not necessarily wise. She remained silent a
little, after her last remark, and then she repeated again, as if it
were the solution of everything, as if it represented with absolute
certainty some immense happiness in the future--"We must wait, we must
wait!" Verena was perfectly willing to wait, though she did not exactly
know what they were to wait for, and the aspiring frankness of her
assent shone out of her face, and seemed to pacify their mutual gaze.
Olive asked her innumerable questions; she wanted to enter into her
life. It was one of those talks which people remember afterwards, in
which every word has been given and taken, and in which they see the
signs of a beginning that was to be justified. The more Olive learnt of
her visitor's life the more she wanted to enter into it, the more it
took her out of herself. Such strange lives are led in America, she
always knew that; but this was queerer than anything she had dreamed of,
and the queerest part was that the girl herself didn't appear to think
it queer. She had been nursed in darkened rooms, and suckled in the
midst of manifestations; she had begun to "attend lectures," as she
said, when she was quite an infant, because her mother had no one to
leave her with at home. She had sat on the knees of somnambulists, and
had been passed from hand to hand by trance-speakers; she was familiar
with every kind of "cure," and had grown up among lady-editors of
newspapers advocating new religions, and people who disapproved of the
marriage-tie. Verena talked of the marriage-tie as she would have talked
of the last novel--as if she had heard it as frequently discussed; and
at certain times, listening to the answers she made to her questions,
Olive Chancellor closed her eyes in the manner of a person waiting till
giddiness passed. Her young friend's revelations actually gave her a
vertigo; they made her perceive everything from which she should have
rescued her. Verena was perfectly uncontaminated, and she would never be
touched by evil; but though Olive had no views about the marriage-tie
except that she should hate it for herself--that particular reform she
did not propose to consider--she didn't like the "atmosphere" of circles
in which such institutions were called into question. She had no wish
now to enter into an examination of that particular one; nevertheless,
to make sure, she would just ask Verena whether she disapproved of it.
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