Read Online The Bostonians by Henry James - Free Book Online

acute feeling, that she hated men, as a class, anyway. “And I want so much to see an old Abolitionist; I have never laid eyes on one,” Basil Ransom added.
    “Of course you couldn’t see one in the South; you were too afraid of them to let them come there!” She was now trying to think of something she might say that would be sufficiently disagreeable to make him cease to insist on accompanying her; for, strange to record—if anything, in a person of that intense sensibility, be stranger than any other—her second thought with regard to having asked him had deepened with the elapsing moments into an un-reasoned terror of the effect of his presence. “Perhaps Miss Birdseye won’t like you,” she went on as they waited for the carriage.
    “I don’t know; I reckon she will,” said Basil Ransom good-humouredly. He evidently had no intention of giving up his opportunity.
    From the window of the dining-room, at that moment, they heard the carriage drive up. Miss Birdseye lived at the South End; i the distance was considerable, and Miss Chancellor had ordered a hackney-coach, j it being one of the advantages of living in Charles Street that stables were near. The logic of her conduct was none of the clearest; for if she had been alone she would have proceeded to her destination by the aid of the street-car; k not from economy (for she had the good fortune not to be obliged to consult it to that degree), and not from any love of wandering about Boston at night (a kind of exposure she greatly disliked), but by reason of a theory she devotedly nursed, a theory which bade her put off invidious differences and mingle in the common life. She would have gone on foot to Boylston Street, and there she would have taken the public conveyance (in her heart she loathed it) to the South 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