He had always heard
Boston was a city of culture, and now there was culture in Miss
Chancellor's tables and sofas, in the books that were everywhere, on
little shelves like brackets (as if a book were a statuette), in the
photographs and watercolours that covered the walls, in the curtains
that were festooned rather stiffly in the doorways. He looked at some of
the books and saw that his cousin read German; and his impression of the
importance of this (as a symptom of superiority) was not diminished by
the fact that he himself had mastered the tongue (knowing it contained a
large literature of jurisprudence) during a long, empty, deadly summer
on the plantation. It is a curious proof of a certain crude modesty
inherent in Basil Ransom that the main effect of his observing his
cousin's German books was to give him an idea of the natural energy of
Northerners. He had noticed it often before; he had already told himself
that he must count with it. It was only after much experience he made
the discovery that few Northerners were, in their secret soul, so
energetic as he. Many other persons had made it before that. He knew
very little about Miss Chancellor; he had come to see her only because
she wrote to him; he would never have thought of looking her up, and
since then there had been no one in New York he might ask about her.
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