The Bostonians
It was in the Back Bay, amid the newly paved streets and the uncompromising rectitude of brownstone fronts, that Olive Chancellor received her cousin from New York with a tension that fairly vibrated in the gaslit air. Basil Ransom, a lean Mississippian with a drawl that seemed to carry the scent of magnolias and defeat, had not come to Boston for the purposes of admiration. He had come, as Olive perceived with a chill of prophetic disgust, to offer opposition.
The cause was, of course, the emancipation of women. Olive had given her fortune, her fierce little heart, and her considerable powers of silent judgment to the swelling movement. She believed in the voice of woman, in the ballot, in the pulpit, in the platform. She believed with a passion so private and so consuming that it could only express itself in public meetings and the careful cultivation of young female speakers of genius. Chief among these was Verena Tarrant, a girl with copper hair and a mesmeric fluency, whose eloquence poured forth like a natural spring.
Into this carefully tended garden, Basil Ransom strode with the boots of a Confederate veteran. He found Verena's voice beautiful and her arguments detestable. He found Olive's devotion pathological. He did not argue with their principles so much as dismiss them with a wave of his large, ungrammatical hand. He preferred, he said, the ancient arrangement: the man at the plow, the woman at the hearth, the solid weight of nature unchallenged by the froth of reform.
The struggle that ensued was not between two ideologies but between two temperaments. Olive fought with the silent, suffocating pressure of devotion. Basil fought with the lazy, indomitable force of charm. Between them stood Verena, her heart a pendulum. She wished to save the world. She also wished, with a treachery that horrified her, to be saved from saving it. The drawing room became a battlefield, and no one would leave with their principles intact.