He always said "ma'am" in
speaking to Olive, to whom, moreover, the air had never been so filled
with the sound of her own name. It was always in her ear, save when Mrs.
Tarrant and Verena conversed in prolonged and ingenuous asides; this was
still for her benefit, but the pronoun sufficed them. She had wished to
judge Doctor Tarrant (not that she believed he had come honestly by his
title), to make up her mind. She had done these things now, and she
expressed to herself the kind of man she believed him to be in
reflecting that if she should offer him ten thousand dollars to renounce
all claim to Verena, keeping--he and his wife--clear of her for the rest
of time, he would probably say, with his fearful smile, "Make it twenty,
money down, and I'll do it." Some image of this transaction, as one of
the possibilities of the future, outlined itself for Olive among the
moral incisions of that evening. It seemed implied in the very place,
the bald bareness of Tarrant's temporary lair, a wooden cottage, with a
rough front yard, a little naked piazza, which seemed rather to expose
than to protect, facing upon an unpaved road, in which the footway was
overlaid with a strip of planks. These planks were embedded in ice or in
liquid thaw, according to the momentary mood of the weather, and the
advancing pedestrian traversed them in the attitude, and with a good
deal of the suspense, of a rope-dancer.
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