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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Spoils of Poynton, by Henry James
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Spoils of Poynton
+
+Author: Henry James
+
+Release Date: August 2, 2010 [EBook #33325]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE SPOILS OF POYNTON ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Brian Foley, Mary Meehan and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This
+file was produced from images generously made available
+by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)
+
+
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+
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+
+
+
+
+                       The Spoils of Poynton
+
+                          By Henry James
+
+
+BOSTON AND NEW YORK
+HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY
+The Riverside Press, Cambridge
+1897
+
+Copyright, 1896,
+By HENRY JAMES.
+
+_All rights reserved._
+
+_The Riverside Press, Cambridge, Mass., U.S.A._
+Electrotyped and Printed by H. O. Houghton & Company.
+
+
+
+
+THE SPOILS OF POYNTON
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+
+Mrs. Gereth had said she would go with the rest to church, but suddenly
+it seemed to her that she should not be able to wait even till
+church-time for relief: breakfast, at Waterbath, was a punctual meal,
+and she had still nearly an hour on her hands. Knowing the church to be
+near, she prepared in her room for the little rural walk, and on her way
+down again, passing through corridors and observing imbecilities of
+decoration, the æsthetic misery of the big commodious house, she felt a
+return of the tide of last night's irritation, a renewal of everything
+she could secretly suffer from ugliness and stupidity. Why did she
+consent to such contacts, why did she so rashly expose herself? She had
+had, heaven knew, her reasons, but the whole experience was to be
+sharper than she had feared. To get away from it and out into the air,
+into the presence of sky and trees, flowers and birds, was a necessity
+of every nerve. The flowers at Waterbath would probably go wrong in
+color and the nightingales sing out of tune; but she remembered to have
+heard the place described as possessing those advantages that are
+usually spoken of as natural. There were advantages enough it clearly
+didn't possess. It was hard for her to believe that a woman could look
+presentable who had been kept awake for hours by the wall-paper in her
+room; yet none the less, as in her fresh widow's weeds she rustled
+across the hall, she was sustained by the consciousness, which always
+added to the unction of her social Sundays, that she was, as usual, the
+only person in the house incapable of wearing in her preparation the
+horrible stamp of the same exceptional smartness that would be
+conspicuous in a grocer's wife. She would rather have perished than have
+looked _endimanchée_.
+
+She was fortunately not challenged, the hall being empty of the other
+women, who were engaged precisely in arraying themselves to that dire
+end. Once in the grounds, she recognized that, with a site, a view that
+struck the note, set an example to its inmates, Waterbath ought to have
+been charming. How she herself, with such elements to handle, would have
+taken the fine hint of nature! Suddenly, at the turn of a walk, she came
+on a member of the party, a young lady seated on a bench in deep and
+lonely meditation. She had observed the girl at dinner and afterwards:
+she was always looking at girls with an apprehensive or speculative
+reference to her son. Deep in her heart was a conviction that Owen
+would, in spite of all her spells, marry at last a frump; and this from
+no evidence that she could have represented as adequate, but simply from
+her deep uneasiness, her belief that such a special sensibility as her
+own could have been inflicted on a woman only as a source of anguish. It
+would be her fate, her discipline, her cross, to have a frump brought
+hideously home to her. This girl, one of the two Vetches, had no beauty,
+but Mrs. Gereth, scanning the dullness for a sign of life, had been
+straightway able to classify such a figure as the least, for the moment,
+of her afflictions. Fleda Vetch was dressed with an idea, though perhaps
+with not much else; and that made a bond when there was none other,
+especially as in this case the idea was real, not imitation. Mrs. Gereth
+had long ago generalized the truth that the temperament of the frump is
+amply consistent with a certain usual prettiness. There were five girls
+in the party, and the prettiness of this one, slim, pale, and
+black-haired, was less likely than that of the others ever to occasion
+an exchange of platitudes. The two less developed Brigstocks, daughters
+of the house, were in particular tiresomely "lovely." A second glance,
+this morning, at the young lady before her conveyed to Mrs. Gereth the
+soothing assurance that she also was guiltless of looking hot and fine.
+They had had no talk as yet, but this was a note that would effectually
+introduce them if the girl should show herself in the least conscious of
+their community. She got up from her seat with a smile that but partly
+dissipated the prostration Mrs. Gereth had recognized in her attitude.
+The elder woman drew her down again, and for a minute, as they sat
+together, their eyes met and sent out mutual soundings. "Are you safe?
+Can I utter it?" each of them said to the other, quickly recognizing,
+almost proclaiming, their common need to escape. The tremendous fancy,
+as it came to be called, that Mrs. Gereth was destined to take to Fleda
+Vetch virtually began with this discovery that the poor child had been
+moved to flight even more promptly than herself. That the poor child no
+less quickly perceived how far she could now go was proved by the
+immense friendliness with which she instantly broke out: "Isn't it too
+dreadful?"
+
+"Horrible--horrible!" cried Mrs. Gereth, with a laugh, "and it's really
+a comfort to be able to say it." She had an idea, for it was her
+ambition, that she successfully made a secret of that awkward oddity,
+her proneness to be rendered unhappy by the presence of the dreadful.
+Her passion for the exquisite was the cause of this, but it was a
+passion she considered that she never advertised nor gloried in,
+contenting herself with letting it regulate her steps and show quietly
+in her life, remembering at all times that there are few things more
+soundless than a deep devotion. She was therefore struck with the
+acuteness of the little girl who had already put a finger on her hidden
+spring. What was dreadful now, what was horrible, was the intimate
+ugliness of Waterbath, and it was of that phenomenon these ladies talked
+while they sat in the shade and drew refreshment from the great tranquil
+sky, from which no blue saucers were suspended. It was an ugliness
+fundamental and systematic, the result of the abnormal nature of the
+Brigstocks, from whose composition the principle of taste had been
+extravagantly omitted. In the arrangement of their home some other
+principle, remarkably active, but uncanny and obscure, had operated
+instead, with consequences depressing to behold, consequences that took
+the form of a universal futility. The house was bad in all conscience,
+but it might have passed if they had only let it alone. This saving
+mercy was beyond them; they had smothered it with trumpery ornament and
+scrapbook art, with strange excrescences and bunchy draperies, with
+gimcracks that might have been keepsakes for maid-servants and
+nondescript conveniences that might have been prizes for the blind. They
+had gone wildly astray over carpets and curtains; they had an infallible
+instinct for disaster, and were so cruelly doom-ridden that it rendered
+them almost tragic. Their drawing-room, Mrs. Gereth lowered her voice to
+mention, caused her face to burn, and each of the new friends confided
+to the other that in her own apartment she had given way to tears. There
+was in the elder lady's a set of comic water-colors, a family joke by a
+family genius, and in the younger's a souvenir from some centennial or
+other Exhibition, that they shudderingly alluded to. The house was
+perversely full of souvenirs of places even more ugly than itself and of
+things it would have been a pious duty to forget. The worst horror was
+the acres of varnish, something advertised and smelly, with which
+everything was smeared; it was Fleda Vetch's conviction that the
+application of it, by their own hands and hilariously shoving each
+other, was the amusement of the Brigstocks on rainy days.
+
+When, as criticism deepened, Fleda dropped the suggestion that some
+people would perhaps see something in Mona, Mrs. Gereth caught her up
+with a groan of protest, a smothered familiar cry of "Oh, my dear!" Mona
+was the eldest of the three, the one Mrs. Gereth most suspected. She
+confided to her young friend that it was her suspicion that had brought
+her to Waterbath; and this was going very far, for on the spot, as a
+refuge, a remedy, she had clutched at the idea that something might be
+done with the girl before her. It was her fancied exposure at any rate
+that had sharpened the shock; made her ask herself with a terrible chill
+if fate could really be plotting to saddle her with a daughter-in-law
+brought up in such a place. She had seen Mona in her appropriate setting
+and she had seen Owen, handsome and heavy, dangle beside her; but the
+effect of these first hours had happily not been to darken the prospect.
+It was clearer to her that she could never accept Mona, but it was after
+all by no means certain that Owen would ask her to. He had sat by
+somebody else at dinner, and afterwards he had talked to Mrs. Firmin,
+who was as dreadful as all the rest, but redeemingly married. His
+heaviness, which in her need of expansion she freely named, had two
+aspects: one of them his monstrous lack of taste, the other his
+exaggerated prudence. If it should come to a question of carrying Mona
+with a high hand there would be no need to worry, for that was rarely
+his manner of proceeding.
+
+Invited by her companion, who had asked if it weren't wonderful, Mrs.
+Gereth had begun to say a word about Poynton; but she heard a sound of
+voices that made her stop short. The next moment she rose to her feet,
+and Fleda could see that her alarm was by no means quenched. Behind the
+place where they had been sitting the ground dropped with a certain
+steepness, forming a long grassy bank, up which Owen Gereth and Mona
+Brigstock, dressed for church but making a familiar joke of it, were in
+the act of scrambling and helping each other. When they had reached the
+even ground Fleda was able to read the meaning of the exclamation in
+which Mrs. Gereth had expressed her reserves on the subject of Miss
+Brigstock's personality. Miss Brigstock had been laughing and even
+romping, but the circumstance hadn't contributed the ghost of an
+expression to her countenance. Tall, straight and fair, long-limbed and
+strangely festooned, she stood there without a look in her eye or any
+perceptible intention of any sort in any other feature. She belonged to
+the type in which speech is an unaided emission of sound and the secret
+of being is impenetrably and incorruptibly kept. Her expression would
+probably have been beautiful if she had had one, but whatever she
+communicated she communicated, in a manner best known to herself,
+without signs. This was not the case with Owen Gereth, who had plenty of
+them, and all very simple and immediate. Robust and artless, eminently
+natural, yet perfectly correct, he looked pointlessly active and
+pleasantly dull. Like his mother and like Fleda Vetch, but not for the
+same reason, this young pair had come out to take a turn before church.
+
+The meeting of the two couples was sensibly awkward, and Fleda, who was
+sagacious, took the measure of the shock inflicted on Mrs. Gereth. There
+had been intimacy--oh yes, intimacy as well as puerility--in the
+horse-play of which they had just had a glimpse. The party began to
+stroll together to the house, and Fleda had again a sense of Mrs.
+Gereth's quick management in the way the lovers, or whatever they were,
+found themselves separated. She strolled behind with Mona, the mother
+possessing herself of her son, her exchange of remarks with whom,
+however, remained, as they went, suggestively inaudible. That member of
+the party in whose intenser consciousness we shall most profitably seek
+a reflection of the little drama with which we are concerned received an
+even livelier impression of Mrs. Gereth's intervention from the fact
+that ten minutes later, on the way to church, still another pairing had
+been effected. Owen walked with Fleda, and it was an amusement to the
+girl to feel sure that this was by his mother's direction. Fleda had
+other amusements as well: such as noting that Mrs. Gereth was now with
+Mona Brigstock; such as observing that she was all affability to that
+young woman; such as reflecting that, masterful and clever, with a great
+bright spirit, she was one of those who impose themselves as an
+influence; such as feeling finally that Owen Gereth was absolutely
+beautiful and delightfully dense. This young person had even from
+herself wonderful secrets of delicacy and pride; but she came as near
+distinctness as in the consideration of such matters she had ever come
+at all in now surrendering herself to the idea that it was of a pleasant
+effect and rather remarkable to be stupid without offense--of a
+pleasanter effect and more remarkable indeed than to be clever and
+horrid. Owen Gereth at any rate, with his inches, his features, and his
+lapses, was neither of these latter things. She herself was prepared, if
+she should ever marry, to contribute all the cleverness, and she liked
+to think that her husband would be a force grateful for direction. She
+was in her small way a spirit of the same family as Mrs. Gereth. On that
+flushed and huddled Sunday a great matter occurred; her little life
+became aware of a singular quickening. Her meagre past fell away from
+her like a garment of the wrong fashion, and as she came up to town on
+the Monday what she stared at in the suburban fields from the train was
+a future full of the things she particularly loved.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+
+These were neither more nor less than the things with which she had had
+time to learn from Mrs. Gereth that Poynton overflowed. Poynton, in the
+south of England, was this lady's established, or rather her
+disestablished home, having recently passed into the possession of her
+son. The father of the boy, an only child, had died two years before,
+and in London, with his mother, Owen was occupying for May and June a
+house good-naturedly lent them by Colonel Gereth, their uncle and
+brother-in-law. His mother had laid her hand so engagingly on Fleda
+Vetch that in a very few days the girl knew it was possible they should
+suffer together in Cadogan Place almost as much as they had suffered
+together at Waterbath. The kind colonel's house was also an ordeal, but
+the two women, for the ensuing month, had at least the relief of their
+confessions. The great drawback of Mrs. Gereth's situation was that,
+thanks to the rare perfection of Poynton, she was condemned to wince
+wherever she turned. She had lived for a quarter of a century in such
+warm closeness with the beautiful that, as she frankly admitted, life
+had become for her a kind of fool's paradise. She couldn't leave her own
+house without peril of exposure. She didn't say it in so many words, but
+Fleda could see she held that there was nothing in England really to
+compare to Poynton. There were places much grander and richer, but there
+was no such complete work of art, nothing that would appeal so to those
+who were really informed. In putting such elements into her hand fortune
+had given her an inestimable chance; she knew how rarely well things had
+gone with her and that she had tasted a happiness altogether rare.
+
+There had been in the first place the exquisite old house itself, early
+Jacobean, supreme in every part: it was a provocation, an inspiration, a
+matchless canvas for the picture. Then there had been her husband's
+sympathy and generosity, his knowledge and love, their perfect accord
+and beautiful life together, twenty-six years of planning and seeking, a
+long, sunny harvest of taste and curiosity. Lastly, she never denied,
+there had been her personal gift, the genius, the passion, the patience
+of the collector--a patience, an almost infernal cunning, that had
+enabled her to do it all with a limited command of money. There wouldn't
+have been money enough for any one else, she said with pride, but there
+had been money enough for her. They had saved on lots of things in life,
+and there were lots of things they hadn't had, but they had had in every
+corner of Europe their swing among the Jews. It was fascinating to poor
+Fleda, who hadn't a penny in the world nor anything nice at home, and
+whose only treasure was her subtle mind, to hear this genuine English
+lady, fresh and fair, young in the fifties, declare with gayety and
+conviction that she was herself the greatest Jew who had ever tracked a
+victim. Fleda, with her mother dead, hadn't so much even as a home, and
+her nearest chance of one was that there was some appearance her sister
+would become engaged to a curate whose eldest brother was supposed to
+have property and would perhaps allow him something. Her father paid
+some of her bills, but he didn't like her to live with him; and she had
+lately, in Paris, with several hundred other young women, spent a year
+in a studio, arming herself for the battle of life by a course with an
+impressionist painter. She was determined to work, but her impressions,
+or somebody's else, were as yet her only material. Mrs. Gereth had told
+her she liked her because she had an extraordinary _flair_; but under
+the circumstances a _flair_ was a questionable boon: in the dry places
+in which she had mainly moved she could have borne a chronic catarrh.
+She was constantly summoned to Cadogan Place, and before the month was
+out was kept to stay, to pay a visit of which the end, it was agreed,
+should have nothing to do with the beginning. She had a sense, partly
+exultant and partly alarmed, of having quickly become necessary to her
+imperious friend, who indeed gave a reason quite sufficient for it in
+telling her there was nobody else who understood. From Mrs. Gereth there
+was in these days an immense deal to understand, though it might be
+freely summed up in the circumstance that she was wretched. She told
+Fleda that she couldn't completely know why till she should have seen
+the things at Poynton. Fleda could perfectly grasp this connection,
+which was exactly one of the matters that, in their inner mystery, were
+a blank to everybody else.
+
+The girl had a promise that the wonderful house should be shown her
+early in July, when Mrs. Gereth would return to it as to her home; but
+even before this initiation she put her finger on the spot that in the
+poor lady's troubled soul ached hardest. This was the misery that
+haunted her, the dread of the inevitable surrender. What Fleda had to
+sit up to was the confirmed appearance that Owen Gereth would marry Mona
+Brigstock, marry her in his mother's teeth, and that such an act would
+have incalculable bearings. They were present to Mrs. Gereth, her
+companion could see, with a vividness that at moments almost ceased to
+be that of sanity. She would have to give up Poynton, and give it up to
+a product of Waterbath--that was the wrong that rankled, the humiliation
+at which Fleda would be able adequately to shudder only when she should
+know the place. She did know Waterbath, and she despised it--she had
+that qualification for sympathy. Her sympathy was intelligent, for she
+read deep into the matter; she stared, aghast, as it came home to her
+for the first time, at the cruel English custom of the expropriation of
+the lonely mother. Mr. Gereth had apparently been a very amiable man,
+but Mr. Gereth had left things in a way that made the girl marvel. The
+house and its contents had been treated as a single splendid object;
+everything was to go straight to his son, and his widow was to have a
+maintenance and a cottage in another county. No account whatever had
+been taken of her relation to her treasures, of the passion with which
+she had waited for them, worked for them, picked them over, made them
+worthy of each other and the house, watched them, loved them, lived with
+them. He appeared to have assumed that she would settle questions with
+her son, that he could depend upon Owen's affection. And in truth, as
+poor Mrs. Gereth inquired, how could he possibly have had a
+prevision--he who turned his eyes instinctively from everything
+repulsive--of anything so abnormal as a Waterbath Brigstock? He had been
+in ugly houses enough, but had escaped that particular nightmare.
+Nothing so perverse could have been expected to happen as that the heir
+to the loveliest thing in England should be inspired to hand it over to
+a girl so exceptionally tainted. Mrs. Gereth spoke of poor Mona's taint
+as if to mention it were almost a violation of decency, and a person who
+had listened without enlightenment would have wondered of what fault the
+girl had been or had indeed not been guilty. But Owen had from a boy
+never cared, had never had the least pride or pleasure in his home.
+
+"Well, then, if he doesn't care!"--Fleda exclaimed, with some
+impetuosity; stopping short, however, before she completed her sentence.
+
+Mrs. Gereth looked at her rather hard. "If he doesn't care?"
+
+Fleda hesitated; she had not quite had a definite idea. "Well--he'll
+give them up."
+
+"Give what up?"
+
+"Why, those beautiful things."
+
+"Give them up to whom?" Mrs. Gereth more boldly stared.
+
+"To you, of course--to enjoy, to keep for yourself."
+
+"And leave his house as bare as your hand? There's nothing in it that
+isn't precious."
+
+Fleda considered; her friend had taken her up with a smothered ferocity
+by which she was slightly disconcerted. "I don't mean of course that he
+should surrender everything; but he might let you pick out the things to
+which you're most attached."
+
+"I think he would if he were free," said Mrs. Gereth.
+
+"And do you mean, as it is, that _she_'ll prevent him?" Mona Brigstock,
+between these ladies, was now nothing but "she."
+
+"By every means in her power."
+
+"But surely not because she understands and appreciates them?"
+
+"No," Mrs. Gereth replied, "but because they belong to the house and the
+house belongs to Owen. If I should wish to take anything, she would
+simply say, with that motionless mask: 'It goes with the house.' And day
+after day, in the face of every argument, of every consideration of
+generosity, she would repeat, without winking, in that voice like the
+squeeze of a doll's stomach: 'It goes with the house--it goes with the
+house.' In that attitude they'll shut themselves up."
+
+Fleda was struck, was even a little startled with the way Mrs. Gereth
+had turned this over--had faced, if indeed only to recognize its
+futility, the notion of a battle with her only son. These words led her
+to make an inquiry which she had not thought it discreet to make before;
+she brought out the idea of the possibility, after all, of her friend's
+continuing to live at Poynton. Would they really wish to proceed to
+extremities? Was no good-humored, graceful compromise to be imagined or
+brought about? Couldn't the same roof cover them? Was it so very
+inconceivable that a married son should, for the rest of her days, share
+with so charming a mother the home she had devoted more than a score of
+years to making beautiful for him? Mrs. Gereth hailed this question with
+a wan, compassionate smile; she replied that a common household, in such
+a case, was exactly so inconceivable that Fleda had only to glance over
+the fair face of the English land to see how few people had ever
+conceived it. It was always thought a wonder, a "mistake," a piece of
+overstrained sentiment; and she confessed that she was as little capable
+of a flight of that sort as Owen himself. Even if they both had been
+capable, they would still have Mona's hatred to reckon with. Fleda's
+breath was sometimes taken away by the great bounds and elisions which,
+on Mrs. Gereth's lips, the course of discussion could take. This was the
+first she had heard of Mona's hatred, though she certainly had not
+needed Mrs. Gereth to tell her that in close quarters that young lady
+would prove secretly mulish. Later Fleda perceived indeed that perhaps
+almost any girl would hate a person who should be so markedly averse to
+having anything to do with her. Before this, however, in conversation
+with her young friend, Mrs. Gereth furnished a more vivid motive for her
+despair by asking how she could possibly be expected to sit there with
+the new proprietors and accept--or call it, for a day, endure--the
+horrors they would perpetrate in the house. Fleda reasoned that they
+wouldn't after all smash things nor burn them up; and Mrs. Gereth
+admitted when pushed that she didn't quite suppose they would. What she
+meant was that they would neglect them, ignore them, leave them to
+clumsy servants (there wasn't an object of them all but should be
+handled with perfect love), and in many cases probably wish to replace
+them by pieces answerable to some vulgar modern notion of the
+convenient. Above all, she saw in advance, with dilated eyes, the
+abominations they would inevitably mix up with them--the maddening
+relics of Waterbath, the little brackets and pink vases, the sweepings
+of bazaars, the family photographs and illuminated texts, the "household
+art" and household piety of Mona's hideous home. Wasn't it enough simply
+to contend that Mona would approach Poynton in the spirit of a
+Brigstock, and that in the spirit of a Brigstock she would deal with her
+acquisition? Did Fleda really see _her_, Mrs. Gereth demanded, spending
+the remainder of her days with such a creature's elbow in her eye?
+
+Fleda had to declare that she certainly didn't, and that Waterbath had
+been a warning it would be frivolous to overlook. At the same time she
+privately reflected that they were taking a great deal for granted, and
+that, inasmuch as to her knowledge Owen Gereth had positively denied his
+betrothal, the ground of their speculations was by no means firm. It
+seemed to our young lady that in a difficult position Owen conducted
+himself with some natural art; treating this domesticated confidant of
+his mother's wrongs with a simple civility that almost troubled her
+conscience, so deeply she felt that she might have had for him the air
+of siding with that lady against him. She wondered if he would ever know
+how little really she did this, and that she was there, since Mrs.
+Gereth had insisted, not to betray, but essentially to confirm and
+protect. The fact that his mother disliked Mona Brigstock might have
+made him dislike the object of her preference, and it was detestable to
+Fleda to remember that she might have appeared to him to offer herself
+as an exemplary contrast. It was clear enough, however, that the happy
+youth had no more sense for a motive than a deaf man for a tune, a
+limitation by which, after all, she could gain as well as lose. He came
+and went very freely on the business with which London abundantly
+furnished him, but he found time more than once to say to her, "It's
+awfully nice of you to look after poor Mummy." As well as his quick
+speech, which shyness made obscure--it was usually as desperate as a
+"rush" at some violent game--his child's eyes in his man's face put it
+to her that, you know, this really meant a good deal for him and that he
+hoped she would stay on. With a person in the house who, like herself,
+was clever, poor Mummy was conveniently occupied; and Fleda found a
+beauty in the candor and even in the modesty which apparently kept him
+from suspecting that two such wiseheads could possibly be occupied with
+Owen Gereth.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+
+They went at last, the wiseheads, down to Poynton, where the palpitating
+girl had the full revelation. "_Now_ do you know how I feel?" Mrs.
+Gereth asked when in the wonderful hall, three minutes after their
+arrival, her pretty associate dropped on a seat with a soft gasp and a
+roll of dilated eyes. The answer came clearly enough, and in the rapture
+of that first walk through the house Fleda took a prodigious span. She
+perfectly understood how Mrs. Gereth felt--she had understood but
+meagrely before; and the two women embraced with tears over the
+tightening of their bond--tears which on the younger one's part were the
+natural and usual sign of her submission to perfect beauty. It was not
+the first time she had cried for the joy of admiration, but it was the
+first time the mistress of Poynton, often as she had shown her house,
+had been present at such an exhibition. She exulted in it; it quickened
+her own tears; she assured her companion that such an occasion made the
+poor old place fresh to her again and more precious than ever. Yes,
+nobody had ever, that way, felt what she had achieved: people were so
+grossly ignorant, and everybody, even the knowing ones, as they thought
+themselves, more or less dense. What Mrs. Gereth had achieved was indeed
+an exquisite work; and in such an art of the treasure-hunter, in
+selection and comparison refined to that point, there was an element of
+creation, of personality. She had commended Fleda's _flair_, and Fleda
+now gave herself up to satiety. Preoccupations and scruples fell away
+from her; she had never known a greater happiness than the week she
+passed in this initiation.
+
+Wandering through clear chambers where the general effect made
+preferences almost as impossible as if they had been shocks, pausing at
+open doors where vistas were long and bland, she would, even if she had
+not already known, have discovered for herself that Poynton was the
+record of a life. It was written in great syllables of color and form,
+the tongues of other countries and the hands of rare artists. It was all
+France and Italy, with their ages composed to rest. For England you
+looked out of old windows--it was England that was the wide embrace.
+While outside, on the low terraces, she contradicted gardeners and
+refined on nature, Mrs. Gereth left her guest to finger fondly the
+brasses that Louis Quinze might have thumbed, to sit with Venetian
+velvets just held in a loving palm, to hang over cases of enamels and
+pass and repass before cabinets. There were not many pictures--the
+panels and the stuffs were themselves the picture; and in all the great
+wainscoted house there was not an inch of pasted paper. What struck
+Fleda most in it was the high pride of her friend's taste, a fine
+arrogance, a sense of style which, however amused and amusing, never
+compromised nor stooped. She felt indeed, as this lady had intimated to
+her that she would, both a respect and a compassion that she had not
+known before; the vision of the coming surrender filled her with an
+equal pain. To give it all up, to die to it--that thought ached in her
+breast. She herself could imagine clinging there with a closeness
+separate from dignity. To have created such a place was to have had
+dignity enough; when there was a question of defending it the fiercest
+attitude was the right one. After so intense a taking of possession she
+too was to give it up; for she reflected that if Mrs. Gereth's remaining
+there would have offered her a sort of future--stretching away in safe
+years on the other side of a gulf--the advent of the others could only
+be, by the same law, a great vague menace, the ruffling of a still
+water. Such were the emotions of a hungry girl whose sensibility was
+almost as great as her opportunities for comparison had been small. The
+museums had done something for her, but nature had done more.
+
+If Owen had not come down with them nor joined them later, it was
+because he still found London jolly; yet the question remained of
+whether the jollity of London was not merely the only name his small
+vocabulary yielded for the jollity of Mona Brigstock. There was indeed
+in his conduct another ambiguity--something that required explaining so
+long as his motive didn't come to the surface. If he was in love, what
+was the matter? And what was the matter still more if he wasn't? The
+mystery was at last cleared up: this Fleda gathered from the tone in
+which, one morning at breakfast, a letter just opened made Mrs. Gereth
+cry out. Her dismay was almost a shriek: "Why, he's bringing her
+down--he wants her to see the house!" They flew, the two women, into
+each other's arms and, with their heads together, soon made out that the
+reason, the baffling reason why nothing had yet happened, was that Mona
+didn't know, or Owen didn't, whether Poynton would really please her.
+She was coming down to judge; and could anything in the world be more
+like poor Owen than the ponderous probity which had kept him from
+pressing her for a reply till she should have learned whether she
+approved what he had to offer her? That was a scruple it had naturally
+been impossible to impute. If only they might fondly hope, Mrs. Gereth
+wailed, that the girl's expectations would be dashed! There was a fine
+consistency, a sincerity quite affecting, in her arguing that the better
+the place should happen to look and to express the conceptions to which
+it owed its origin, the less it would speak to an intelligence so
+primitive. How could a Brigstock possibly understand what it was all
+about? How, really, could a Brigstock logically do anything but hate it?
+Mrs. Gereth, even as she whisked away linen shrouds, persuaded herself
+of the possibility on Mona's part of some bewildered blankness, some
+collapse of admiration that would prove disconcerting to her swain--a
+hope of which Fleda at least could see the absurdity and which gave the
+measure of the poor lady's strange, almost maniacal disposition to
+thrust in everywhere the question of "things," to read all behavior in
+the light of some fancied relation to them. "Things" were of course the
+sum of the world; only, for Mrs. Gereth, the sum of the world was rare
+French furniture and Oriental china. She could at a stretch imagine
+people's not having, but she couldn't imagine their not wanting and not
+missing.
+
+The young couple were to be accompanied by Mrs. Brigstock, and with a
+prevision of how fiercely they would be watched Fleda became conscious,
+before the party arrived, of an amused, diplomatic pity for them. Almost
+as much as Mrs. Gereth's her taste was her life, but her life was
+somehow the larger for it. Besides, she had another care now: there was
+some one she wouldn't have liked to see humiliated even in the form of a
+young lady who would contribute to his never suspecting so much
+delicacy. When this young lady appeared Fleda tried, so far as the wish
+to efface herself allowed, to be mainly the person to take her about,
+show her the house, and cover up her ignorance. Owen's announcement had
+been that, as trains made it convenient, they would present themselves
+for luncheon and depart before dinner; but Mrs. Gereth, true to her
+system of glaring civility, proposed and obtained an extension, a dining
+and spending of the night. She made her young friend wonder against what
+rebellion of fact she was sacrificing in advance so profusely to form.
+Fleda was appalled, after the first hour, by the rash innocence with
+which Mona had accepted the responsibility of observation, and indeed by
+the large levity with which, sitting there like a bored tourist in fine
+scenery, she exercised it. She felt in her nerves the effect of such a
+manner on her companion's, and it was this that made her want to entice
+the girl away, give her some merciful warning or some jocular cue. Mona
+met intense looks, however, with eyes that might have been blue beads,
+the only ones she had--eyes into which Fleda thought it strange Owen
+Gereth should have to plunge for his fate and his mother for a
+confession of whether Poynton was a success. She made no remark that
+helped to supply this light; her impression at any rate had nothing in
+common with the feeling that, as the beauty of the place throbbed out
+like music, had caused Fleda Vetch to burst into tears. She was as
+content to say nothing as if, Mrs. Gereth afterwards exclaimed, she had
+been keeping her mouth shut in a railway-tunnel. Mrs. Gereth contrived
+at the end of an hour to convey to Fleda that it was plain she was
+brutally ignorant; but Fleda more subtly discovered that her ignorance
+was obscurely active.
+
+She was not so stupid as not to see that something, though she scarcely
+knew what, was expected of her that she couldn't give; and the only mode
+her intelligence suggested of meeting the expectation was to plant her
+big feet and pull another way. Mrs. Gereth wanted her to rise, somehow
+or somewhere, and was prepared to hate her if she didn't: very well, she
+couldn't, she wouldn't rise; she already moved at the altitude that
+suited her, and was able to see that, since she was exposed to the
+hatred, she might at least enjoy the calm. The smallest trouble, for a
+girl with no nonsense about her, was to earn what she incurred; so that,
+a dim instinct teaching her she would earn it best by not being
+effusive, and combining with the conviction that she now held Owen, and
+therefore the place, she had the pleasure of her honesty as well as of
+her security. Didn't her very honesty lead her to be belligerently blank
+about Poynton, inasmuch as it was just Poynton that was forced upon her
+as a subject for effusiveness? Such subjects, to Mona Brigstock, had an
+air almost of indecency, and the house became uncanny to her through
+such an appeal--an appeal that, somewhere in the twilight of her being,
+as Fleda was sure, she thanked heaven she _was_ the girl stiffly to draw
+back from. She was a person whom pressure at a given point infallibly
+caused to expand in the wrong place instead of, as it is usually
+administered in the hope of doing, the right one. Her mother, to make up
+for this, broke out universally, pronounced everything "most striking,"
+and was visibly happy that Owen's captor should be so far on the way to
+strike: but she jarred upon Mrs. Gereth by her formula of admiration,
+which was that anything she looked at was "in the style" of something
+else. This was to show how much she had seen, but it only showed she had
+seen nothing; everything at Poynton was in the style of Poynton, and
+poor Mrs. Brigstock, who at least was determined to rise, and had
+brought with her a trophy of her journey, a "lady's magazine" purchased
+at the station, a horrible thing with patterns for antimacassars, which,
+as it was quite new, the first number, and seemed so clever, she kindly
+offered to leave for the house, was in the style of a vulgar old woman
+who wore silver jewelry and tried to pass off a gross avidity as a sense
+of the beautiful.
+
+By the day's end it was clear to Fleda Vetch that, however Mona judged,
+the day had been determinant; whether or no she felt the charm, she felt
+the challenge: at an early moment Owen Gereth would be able to tell his
+mother the worst. Nevertheless, when the elder lady, at bedtime, coming
+in a dressing-gown and a high fever to the younger one's room, cried
+out, "She hates it; but what will she do?" Fleda pretended vagueness,
+played at obscurity and assented disingenuously to the proposition that
+they at least had a respite. The future was dark to her, but there was a
+silken thread she could clutch in the gloom--she would never give Owen
+away. He might give himself--he even certainly would; but that was his
+own affair, and his blunders, his innocence, only added to the appeal he
+made to her. She would cover him, she would protect him, and beyond
+thinking her a cheerful inmate he would never guess her intention, any
+more than, beyond thinking her clever enough for anything, his acute
+mother would discover it. From this hour, with Mrs. Gereth, there was a
+flaw in her frankness: her admirable friend continued to know everything
+she did; what was to remain unknown was the general motive.
+
+From the window of her room, the next morning before breakfast, the girl
+saw Owen in the garden with Mona, who strolled beside him with a
+listening parasol, but without a visible look for the great florid
+picture that had been hung there by Mrs. Gereth's hand. Mona kept
+dropping her eyes, as she walked, to catch the sheen of her
+patent-leather shoes, which resembled a man's and which she kicked
+forward a little--it gave her an odd movement--to help her see what she
+thought of them. When Fleda came down Mrs. Gereth was in the
+breakfast-room; and at that moment Owen, through a long window, passed
+in alone from the terrace and very endearingly kissed his mother. It
+immediately struck the girl that she was in their way, for hadn't he
+been borne on a wave of joy exactly to announce, before the Brigstocks
+departed, that Mona had at last faltered out the sweet word he had been
+waiting for? He shook hands with his friendly violence, but Fleda
+contrived not to look into his face: what she liked most to see in it
+was not the reflection of Mona's big boot-toes. She could bear well
+enough that young lady herself, but she couldn't bear Owen's opinion of
+her. She was on the point of slipping into the garden when the movement
+was checked by Mrs. Gereth's suddenly drawing her close, as if for the
+morning embrace, and then, while she kept her there with the bravery of
+the night's repose, breaking out: "Well, my dear boy, what _does_ your
+young friend there make of our odds and ends?"
+
+"Oh, she thinks they're all right!"
+
+Fleda immediately guessed from his tone that he had not come in to say
+what she supposed; there was even something in it to confirm Mrs.
+Gereth's belief that their danger had dropped. She was sure, moreover,
+that his tribute to Mona's taste was a repetition of the eloquent words
+in which the girl had herself recorded it; she could indeed hear, with
+all vividness, the pretty passage between the pair. "Don't you think
+it's rather jolly, the old shop?" "Oh, it's all right!" Mona had
+graciously remarked; and then they had probably, with a slap on a back,
+run another race up or down a green bank. Fleda knew Mrs. Gereth had not
+yet uttered a word to her son that would have shown him how much she
+feared; but it was impossible to feel her friend's arm round her and not
+become aware that this friend was now throbbing with a strange
+intention. Owen's reply had scarcely been of a nature to usher in a
+discussion of Mona's sensibilities; but Mrs. Gereth went on, in a
+moment, with an innocence of which Fleda could measure the cold
+hypocrisy: "Has she any sort of feeling for nice old things?" The
+question was as fresh as the morning light.
+
+"Oh, of course she likes everything that's nice." And Owen, who
+constitutionally disliked questions--an answer was almost as hateful to
+him as a "trick" to a big dog--smiled kindly at Fleda and conveyed that
+she would understand what he meant even if his mother didn't. Fleda,
+however, mainly understood that Mrs. Gereth, with an odd, wild laugh,
+held her so hard that she hurt her.
+
+"I could give up everything without a pang, I think, to a person I could
+trust, I could respect." The girl heard her voice tremble under the
+effort to show nothing but what she wanted to show, and felt the
+sincerity of her implication that the piety most real to her was to be
+on one's knees before one's high standard. "The best things here, as you
+know, are the things your father and I collected, things all that we
+worked for and waited for and suffered for. Yes," cried Mrs. Gereth,
+with a fine freedom of fancy, "there are things in the house that we
+almost starved for! They were our religion, they were our life, they
+were _us_! And now they're only _me_--except that they're also _you_,
+thank God, a little, you dear!" she continued, suddenly inflicting on
+Fleda a kiss apparently intended to knock her into position. "There
+isn't one of them I don't know and love--yes, as one remembers and
+cherishes the happiest moments of one's life. Blindfold, in the dark,
+with the brush of a finger, I could tell one from another. They're
+living things to me; they know me, they return the touch of my hand. But
+I could let them all go, since I have to, so strangely, to another
+affection, another conscience. There's a care they want, there's a
+sympathy that draws out their beauty. Rather than make them over to a
+woman ignorant and vulgar, I think I'd deface them with my own hands.
+Can't you see me, Fleda, and wouldn't you do it yourself?"--she appealed
+to her companion with glittering eyes. "I couldn't bear the thought of
+such a woman here--I _couldn't_. I don't know what she'd do; she'd be
+sure to invent some deviltry, if it should be only to bring in her own
+little belongings and horrors. The world is full of cheap gimcracks, in
+this awful age, and they're thrust in at one at every turn. They'd be
+thrust in here, on top of my treasures, my own. Who would save _them_
+for me--I ask you who _would_?" and she turned again to Fleda with a
+dry, strained smile. Her handsome, high-nosed, excited face might have
+been that of Don Quixote tilting at a windmill. Drawn into the eddy of
+this outpouring, the girl, scared and embarrassed, laughed off her
+exposure; but only to feel herself more passionately caught up and, as
+it seemed to her, thrust down the fine open mouth (it showed such
+perfect teeth) with which poor Owen's slow cerebration gaped. "_You_
+would, of course--only you, in all the world, because you know, you
+feel, as I do myself, what's good and true and pure." No severity of the
+moral law could have taken a higher tone in this implication of the
+young lady who had not the only virtue Mrs. Gereth actively esteemed.
+"_You_ would replace me, _you_ would watch over them, _you_ would keep
+the place right," she austerely pursued, "and with you here--yes, with
+you, I believe I might rest, at last, in my grave!" She threw herself on
+Fleda's neck, and before Fleda, horribly shamed, could shake her off,
+had burst into tears which couldn't have been explained, but which might
+perhaps have been understood.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+
+A week later Owen Gereth came down to inform his mother that he had
+settled with Mona Brigstock; but it was not at all a joy to Fleda,
+conscious how much to himself it would be a surprise, that he should
+find her still in the house. That dreadful scene before breakfast had
+made her position false and odious; it had been followed, after they
+were left alone, by a scene of her own making with her extravagant
+friend. She notified Mrs. Gereth of her instant departure: she couldn't
+possibly remain after being offered to Owen, that way, before her very
+face, as his mother's candidate for the honor of his hand. That was all
+he could have seen in such an outbreak and in the indecency of her
+standing there to enjoy it. Fleda had on the prior occasion dashed out
+of the room by the shortest course and in her confusion had fallen upon
+Mona in the garden. She had taken an aimless turn with her, and they had
+had some talk, rendered at first difficult and almost disagreeable by
+Mona's apparent suspicion that she had been sent out to spy, as Mrs.
+Gereth had tried to spy, into her opinions. Fleda was sagacious enough
+to treat these opinions as a mystery almost awful; which had an effect
+so much more than reassuring that at the end of five minutes the young
+lady from Waterbath suddenly and perversely said: "Why has she never had
+a winter garden thrown out? If ever I have a place of my own I mean to
+have one." Fleda, dismayed, could see the thing--something glazed and
+piped, on iron pillars, with untidy plants and cane sofas; a shiny
+excrescence on the noble face of Poynton. She remembered at Waterbath a
+conservatory where she had caught a bad cold in the company of a stuffed
+cockatoo fastened to a tropical bough and a waterless fountain composed
+of shells stuck into some hardened paste. She asked Mona if her idea
+would be to make something like this conservatory; to which Mona
+replied: "Oh no, much finer; we haven't got a winter garden at
+Waterbath." Fleda wondered if she meant to convey that it was the only
+grandeur they lacked, and in a moment Mona went on: "But we have got a
+billiard-room--that I will say for us!" There was no billiard-room at
+Poynton, but there would evidently be one, and it would have, hung on
+its walls, framed at the "Stores," caricature-portraits of celebrities,
+taken from a "society-paper."
+
+When the two girls had gone in to breakfast it was for Fleda to see at a
+glance that there had been a further passage, of some high color,
+between Owen and his mother; and she had turned pale in guessing to what
+extremity, at her expense, Mrs. Gereth had found occasion to proceed.
+Hadn't she, after her clumsy flight, been pressed upon Owen in still
+clearer terms? Mrs. Gereth would practically have said to him: "If
+you'll take _her_, I'll move away without a sound. But if you take any
+one else, any one I'm not sure of, as I am of her--heaven help me, I'll
+fight to the death!" Breakfast, this morning, at Poynton, had been a
+meal singularly silent, in spite of the vague little cries with which
+Mrs. Brigstock turned up the underside of plates and the knowing but
+alarming raps administered by her big knuckles to porcelain cups. Some
+one had to respond to her, and the duty assigned itself to Fleda, who,
+while pretending to meet her on the ground of explanation, wondered what
+Owen thought of a girl still indelicately anxious, after she had been
+grossly hurled at him, to prove by exhibitions of her fine taste that
+she was really what his mother pretended. This time, at any rate, their
+fate was sealed: Owen, as soon as he should get out of the house, would
+describe to Mona that lady's extraordinary conduct, and if anything more
+had been wanted to "fetch" Mona, as he would call it, the deficiency was
+now made up. Mrs. Gereth in fact took care of that--took care of it by
+the way, at the last, on the threshold, she said to the younger of her
+departing guests, with an irony of which the sting was wholly in the
+sense, not at all in the sound: "We haven't had the talk we might have
+had, have we? You'll feel that I've neglected you, and you'll treasure
+it up against me. _Don't_, because really, you know, it has been quite
+an accident, and I've all sorts of information at your disposal. If you
+should come down again (only you won't, ever,--I feel that!) I should
+give you plenty of time to worry it out of me. Indeed there are some
+things I should quite insist on your learning; not permit you at all, in
+any settled way, _not_ to learn. Yes indeed, you'd put me through, and I
+should put you, my dear! We should have each other to reckon with, and
+you would see me as I really am. I'm not a bit the vague, mooning, easy
+creature I dare say you think. However, if you won't come, you won't;
+_n'en parlons plus_. It _is_ stupid here after what you're accustomed
+to. We can only, all round, do what we can, eh? For heaven's sake, don't
+let your mother forget her precious publication, the female magazine,
+with the what-do-you-call-'em?--the grease-catchers. There!"
+
+Mrs. Gereth, delivering herself from the doorstep, had tossed the
+periodical higher in air than was absolutely needful--tossed it toward
+the carriage the retreating party was about to enter. Mona, from the
+force of habit, the reflex action of the custom of sport, had popped
+out, with a little spring, a long arm and intercepted the missile as
+easily as she would have caused a tennis-ball to rebound from a racket.
+"Good catch!" Owen had cried, so genuinely pleased that practically no
+notice was taken of his mother's impressive remarks. It was to the
+accompaniment of romping laughter, as Mrs. Gereth afterwards said, that
+the carriage had rolled away; but it was while that laughter was still
+in the air that Fleda Vetch, white and terrible, had turned upon her
+hostess with her scorching "How _could_ you? Great God, how _could_
+you?" This lady's perfect blankness was from the first a sign of her
+serene conscience, and the fact that till indoctrinated she didn't even
+know what Fleda meant by resenting her late offense to every
+susceptibility gave our young woman a sore, scared perception that her
+own value in the house was just the value, as one might say, of a good
+agent. Mrs. Gereth was generously sorry, but she was still more
+surprised--surprised at Fleda's not having liked to be shown off to Owen
+as the right sort of wife for him. Why not, in the name of wonder, if
+she absolutely _was_ the right sort? She had admitted on explanation
+that she could see what her young friend meant by having been laid, as
+Fleda called it, at his feet; but it struck the girl that the admission
+was only made to please her, and that Mrs. Gereth was secretly surprised
+at her not being as happy to be sacrificed to the supremacy of a high
+standard as she was happy to sacrifice her. She had taken a tremendous
+fancy to her, but that was on account of the fancy--to Poynton of
+course--Fleda herself had taken. Wasn't this latter fancy then so great
+after all? Fleda felt that she could declare it to be great indeed when
+really for the sake of it she could forgive what she had suffered and,
+after reproaches and tears, asseverations and kisses, after learning
+that she was cared for only as a priestess of the altar and a view of
+her bruised dignity which left no alternative to flight, could accept
+the shame with the balm, consent not to depart, take refuge in the thin
+comfort of at least knowing the truth. The truth was simply that all
+Mrs. Gereth's scruples were on one side and that her ruling passion had
+in a manner despoiled her of her humanity. On the second day, after the
+tide of emotion had somewhat ebbed, she said soothingly to her
+companion: "But you _would_, after all, marry him, you know, darling,
+wouldn't you, if that girl were not there? I mean of course if he were
+to ask you," Mrs. Gereth had thoughtfully added.
+
+"Marry him if he were to ask me? Most distinctly not!"
+
+The question had not come up with this definiteness before, and Mrs.
+Gereth was clearly more surprised than ever. She marveled a moment. "Not
+even to have Poynton?"
+
+"Not even to have Poynton."
+
+"But why on earth?" Mrs. Gereth's sad eyes were fixed on her.
+
+Fleda colored; she hesitated. "Because he's too stupid!" Save on one
+other occasion, at which we shall in time arrive, little as the reader
+may believe it, she never came nearer to betraying to Mrs. Gereth that
+she was in love with Owen. She found a dim amusement in reflecting that
+if Mona had not been there and he had not been too stupid and he verily
+had asked her, she might, should she have wished to keep her secret,
+have found it possible to pass off the motive of her action as a mere
+passion for Poynton.
+
+Mrs. Gereth evidently thought in these days of little but things
+hymeneal; for she broke out with sudden rapture, in the middle of the
+week: "I know what they'll do: they _will_ marry, but they'll go and
+live at Waterbath!" There was positive joy in that form of the idea,
+which she embroidered and developed: it seemed so much the safest thing
+that could happen. "Yes, I'll have you, but I won't go _there_!" Mona
+would have said with a vicious nod at the southern horizon: "we'll leave
+your horrid mother alone there for life." It would be an ideal solution,
+this ingress the lively pair, with their spiritual need of a warmer
+medium, would playfully punch in the ribs of her ancestral home; for it
+would not only prevent recurring panic at Poynton--it would offer them,
+as in one of their gimcrack baskets or other vessels of ugliness, a
+definite daily felicity that Poynton could never give. Owen might manage
+his estate just as he managed it now, and Mrs. Gereth would manage
+everything else. When, in the hall, on the unforgettable day of his
+return, she had heard his voice ring out like a call to a terrier, she
+had still, as Fleda afterwards learned, clutched frantically at the
+conceit that he had come, at the worst, to announce some compromise; to
+tell her she would have to put up with the girl, yes, but that some way
+would be arrived at of leaving her in personal possession. Fleda Vetch,
+whom from the first hour no illusion had brushed with its wing, now held
+her breath, went on tiptoe, wandered in outlying parts of the house and
+through delicate, muffled rooms, while the mother and son faced each
+other below. From time to time she stopped to listen; but all was so
+quiet she was almost frightened: she had vaguely expected a sound of
+contention. It lasted longer than she would have supposed, whatever it
+was they were doing; and when finally, from a window, she saw Owen
+stroll out of the house, stop and light a cigarette and then pensively
+lose himself in the plantations, she found other matter for trepidation
+in the fact that Mrs. Gereth didn't immediately come rushing up into her
+arms. She wondered whether she oughtn't to go down to her, and measured
+the gravity of what had occurred by the circumstance, which she
+presently ascertained, that the poor lady had retired to her room and
+wished not to be disturbed. This admonition had been for her maid, with
+whom Fleda conferred as at the door of a death-chamber; but the girl,
+without either fatuity or resentment, judged that, since it could render
+Mrs. Gereth indifferent even to the ministrations of disinterested
+attachment, the scene had been tremendous.
+
+She was absent from luncheon, where indeed Fleda had enough to do to
+look Owen in the face; there would be so much to make that hateful in
+their common memory of the passage in which his last visit had
+terminated. This had been her apprehension at least; but as soon as he
+stood there she was constrained to wonder at the practical simplicity of
+the ordeal--a simplicity which was really just his own simplicity, the
+particular thing that, for Fleda Vetch, some other things of course
+aiding, made almost any direct relation with him pleasant. He had
+neither wit, nor tact, nor inspiration: all she could say was that when
+they were together the alienation these charms were usually depended on
+to allay didn't occur. On this occasion, for instance, he did so much
+better than "carry off" an awkward remembrance: he simply didn't have
+it. He had clean forgotten that she was the girl his mother would have
+fobbed off on him; he was conscious only that she was there in a manner
+for service--conscious of the dumb instinct that from the first had made
+him regard her not as complicating his intercourse with that personage,
+but as simplifying it. Fleda found beautiful that this theory should
+have survived the incident of the other day; found exquisite that
+whereas she was conscious, through faint reverberations, that for her
+kind little circle at large, whom it didn't concern, her tendency had
+begun to define itself as parasitical, this strong young man, who had a
+right to judge and even a reason to loathe her, didn't judge and didn't
+loathe, let her down gently, treated her as if she pleased him, and in
+fact evidently liked her to be just where she was. She asked herself
+what he did when Mona denounced her, and the only answer to the question
+was that perhaps Mona didn't denounce her. If Mona was inarticulate he
+wasn't such a fool, then, to marry her. That he was glad Fleda was there
+was at any rate sufficiently shown by the domestic familiarity with
+which he said to her: "I must tell you I've been having an awful row
+with my mother. I'm engaged to be married to Miss Brigstock."
+
+"Ah, really?" cried Fleda, achieving a radiance of which she was
+secretly proud. "How very exciting!"
+
+"Too exciting for poor Mummy. She won't hear of it. She has been slating
+her fearfully. She says she's a 'barbarian.'"
+
+"Why, she's lovely!" Fleda exclaimed.
+
+"Oh, she's all right. Mother must come round."
+
+"Only give her time," said Fleda. She had advanced to the threshold of
+the door thus thrown open to her and, without exactly crossing it, she
+threw in an appreciative glance. She asked Owen when his marriage would
+take place, and in the light of his reply read that Mrs. Gereth's
+wretched attitude would have no influence at all on the event,
+absolutely fixed when he came down, and distant by only three months. He
+liked Fleda's seeming to be on his side, though that was a secondary
+matter, for what really most concerned him now was the line his mother
+took about Poynton, her declared unwillingness to give it up.
+
+"Naturally I want my own house, you know," he said, "and my father made
+every arrangement for me to have it. But she may make it devilish
+awkward. What in the world's a fellow to do?" This it was that Owen
+wanted to know, and there could be no better proof of his friendliness
+than his air of depending on Fleda Vetch to tell him. She questioned
+him, they spent an hour together, and, as he gave her the scale of the
+concussion from which he had rebounded, she found herself saddened and
+frightened by the material he seemed to offer her to deal with. It _was_
+devilish awkward, and it was so in part because Owen had no imagination.
+It had lodged itself in that empty chamber that his mother hated the
+surrender because she hated Mona. He didn't of course understand why she
+hated Mona, but this belonged to an order of mysteries that never
+troubled him: there were lots of things, especially in people's minds,
+that a fellow didn't understand. Poor Owen went through life with a
+frank dread of people's minds: there were explanations he would have
+been almost as shy of receiving as of giving. There was therefore
+nothing that accounted for anything, though in its way it was vivid
+enough, in his picture to Fleda of his mother's virtual refusal to move.
+That was simply what it was; for didn't she refuse to move when she as
+good as declared that she would move only with the furniture? It was the
+furniture she wouldn't give up; and what was the good of Poynton without
+the furniture? Besides, the furniture happened to be his, just as
+everything else happened to be. The furniture--the word, on his lips,
+had somehow, for Fleda, the sound of washing-stands and copious bedding,
+and she could well imagine the note it might have struck for Mrs.
+Gereth. The girl, in this interview with him, spoke of the contents of
+the house only as "the works of art." It didn't, however, in the least
+matter to Owen what they were called; what did matter, she easily
+guessed, was that it had been laid upon him by Mona, been made in effect
+a condition of her consent, that he should hold his mother to the
+strictest accountability for them. Mona had already entered upon the
+enjoyment of her rights. She had made him feel that Mrs. Gereth had been
+liberally provided for, and had asked him cogently what room there would
+be at Ricks for the innumerable treasures of the big house. Ricks, the
+sweet little place offered to the mistress of Poynton as the refuge of
+her declining years, had been left to the late Mr. Gereth, a
+considerable time before his death, by an old maternal aunt, a good lady
+who had spent most of her life there. The house had in recent times been
+let, but it was amply furnished, it contained all the defunct aunt's
+possessions. Owen had lately inspected it, and he communicated to Fleda
+that he had quietly taken Mona to see it. It wasn't a place like
+Poynton--what dower-house ever was?--but it was an awfully jolly little
+place, and Mona had taken a tremendous fancy to it. If there were a few
+things at Poynton that were Mrs. Gereth's peculiar property, of course
+she must take them away with her; but one of the matters that became
+clear to Fleda was that this transfer would be immediately subject to
+Miss Brigstock's approval. The special business that she herself now
+became aware of being charged with was that of seeing Mrs. Gereth safely
+and singly off the premises.
+
+Her heart failed her, after Owen had returned to London, with the
+ugliness of this duty--with the ugliness, indeed, of the whole close
+conflict. She saw nothing of Mrs. Gereth that day; she spent it in
+roaming with sick sighs, in feeling, as she passed from room to room,
+that what was expected of her companion was really dreadful. It would
+have been better never to have had such a place than to have had it and
+lose it. It was odious to _her_ to have to look for solutions: what a
+strange relation between mother and son when there was no fundamental
+tenderness out of which a solution would irrepressibly spring! Was it
+Owen who was mainly responsible for that poverty? Fleda couldn't think
+so when she remembered that, so far as he was concerned, Mrs. Gereth
+would still have been welcome to have her seat by the Poynton fire. The
+fact that from the moment one accepted his marrying one saw no very
+different course for Owen to take made her all the rest of that aching
+day find her best relief in the mercy of not having yet to face her
+hostess. She dodged and dreamed and romanced away the time; instead of
+inventing a remedy or a compromise, instead of preparing a plan by which
+a scandal might be averted, she gave herself, in her sentient solitude,
+up to a mere fairy tale, up to the very taste of the beautiful peace
+with which she would have filled the air if only something might have
+been that could never have been.
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+
+"I'll give up the house if they'll let me take what I require!" That, on
+the morrow, was what Mrs. Gereth's stifled night had qualified her to
+say, with a tragic face, at breakfast. Fleda reflected that what she
+"required" was simply every object that surrounded them. The poor woman
+would have admitted this truth and accepted the conclusion to be drawn
+from it, the reduction to the absurd of her attitude, the exaltation of
+her revolt. The girl's dread of a scandal, of spectators and critics,
+diminished the more she saw how little vulgar avidity had to do with
+this rigor. It was not the crude love of possession; it was the need to
+be faithful to a trust and loyal to an idea. The idea was surely noble:
+it was that of the beauty Mrs. Gereth had so patiently and consummately
+wrought. Pale but radiant, with her back to the wall, she rose there
+like a heroine guarding a treasure. To give up the ship was to flinch
+from her duty; there was something in her eyes that declared she would
+die at her post. If their difference should become public the shame
+would be all for the others. If Waterbath thought it could afford to
+expose itself, then Waterbath was welcome to the folly. Her fanaticism
+gave her a new distinction, and Fleda perceived almost with awe that she
+had never carried herself so well. She trod the place like a reigning
+queen or a proud usurper; full as it was of splendid pieces, it could
+show in these days no ornament so effective as its menaced mistress.
+
+Our young lady's spirit was strangely divided; she had a tenderness for
+Owen which she deeply concealed, yet it left her occasion to marvel at
+the way a man was made who could care in any relation for a creature
+like Mona Brigstock when he had known in any relation a creature like
+Adela Gereth. With such a mother to give him the pitch, how could he
+take it so low? She wondered that she didn't despise him for this, but
+there was something that kept her from it. If there had been nothing
+else it would have sufficed that she really found herself from this
+moment the medium of communication with him.
+
+"He'll come back to assert himself," Mrs. Gereth had said; and the
+following week Owen in fact reappeared. He might merely have written,
+Fleda could see, but he had come in person because it was at once
+"nicer" for his mother and stronger for his cause. He didn't like the
+row, though Mona probably did; if he hadn't a sense of beauty he had
+after all a sense of justice; but it was inevitable he should clearly
+announce at Poynton the date at which he must look to find the house
+vacant. "You don't think I'm rough or hard, do you?" he asked of Fleda,
+his impatience shining in his idle eyes as the dining-hour shines in
+club-windows. "The place at Ricks stands there with open arms. And then
+I give her lots of time. Tell her she can remove everything that belongs
+to her." Fleda recognized the elements of what the newspapers call a
+deadlock in the circumstance that nothing at Poynton belonged to Mrs.
+Gereth either more or less than anything else. She must either take
+everything or nothing, and the girl's suggestion was that it might
+perhaps be an inspiration to do the latter and begin again on a clean
+page. What, however, was the poor woman, in that case, to begin with?
+What was she to do at all, on her meagre income, but make the best of
+the _objets d'art_ of Ricks, the treasures collected by Mr. Gereth's
+maiden aunt? She had never been near the place: for long years it had
+been let to strangers, and after that the foreboding that it would be
+her doom had kept her from the abasement of it. She had felt that she
+should see it soon enough, but Fleda (who was careful not to betray to
+her that Mona had seen it and had been gratified) knew her reasons for
+believing that the maiden aunt's principles had had much in common with
+the principles of Waterbath. The only thing, in short, that she would
+ever have to do with the objets d'art of Ricks would be to turn them out
+into the road. What belonged to her at Poynton, as Owen said, would
+conveniently mitigate the void resulting from that demonstration.
+
+The exchange of observations between the friends had grown very direct
+by the time Fleda asked Mrs. Gereth whether she literally meant to shut
+herself up and stand a siege, or whether it was her idea to expose
+herself, more informally, to be dragged out of the house by constables.
+"Oh, I prefer the constables and the dragging!" the heroine of Poynton
+had answered. "I want to make Owen and Mona do everything that will be
+most publicly odious." She gave it out that it was her one thought now
+to force them to a line that would dishonor them and dishonor the
+tradition they embodied, though Fleda was privately sure that she had
+visions of an alternative policy. The strange thing was that, proud and
+fastidious all her life, she now showed so little distaste for the
+world's hearing of the squabble. What had taken place in her above all
+was that a long resentment had ripened. She hated the effacement to
+which English usage reduced the widowed mother: she had discoursed of it
+passionately to Fleda; contrasted it with the beautiful homage paid in
+other countries to women in that position, women no better than herself,
+whom she had seen acclaimed and enthroned, whom she had known and
+envied; made in short as little as possible a secret of the injury, the
+bitterness she found in it. The great wrong Owen had done her was not
+his "taking up" with Mona--that was disgusting, but it was a detail, an
+accidental form: it was his failure from the first to understand what it
+was to have a mother at all, to appreciate the beauty and sanctity of
+the character. She was just his mother as his nose was just his nose,
+and he had never had the least imagination or tenderness or gallantry
+about her. One's mother, gracious heaven, if one were the kind of fine
+young man one ought to be, the only kind Mrs. Gereth cared for, was a
+subject for poetry, for idolatry. Hadn't she often told Fleda of her
+friend Madame de Jaume, the wittiest of women, but a small, black,
+crooked person, each of whose three boys, when absent, wrote to her
+every day of their lives? She had the house in Paris, she had the house
+in Poitou, she had more than in the lifetime of her husband (to whom, in
+spite of her appearance, she had afforded repeated cause for jealousy),
+because she had to the end of her days the supreme word about
+everything. It was easy to see that Mrs. Gereth would have given again
+and again her complexion, her figure, and even perhaps the spotless
+virtue she had still more successfully retained, to have been the
+consecrated Madame de Jaume. She wasn't, alas, and this was what she had
+at present a magnificent occasion to protest against. She was of course
+fully aware of Owen's concession, his willingness to let her take away
+with her the few things she liked best; but as yet she only declared
+that to meet him on this ground would be to give him a triumph, to put
+him impossibly in the right. "Liked best"? There wasn't a thing in the
+house that she didn't like best, and what she liked better still was to
+be left where she was. How could Owen use such an expression without
+being conscious of his hypocrisy? Mrs. Gereth, whose criticism was often
+gay, dilated with sardonic humor on the happy look a dozen objects from
+Poynton would wear and the charming effect they would conduce to when
+interspersed with the peculiar features of Ricks. What had her whole
+life been but an effort toward completeness and perfection? Better
+Waterbath at once, in its cynical unity, than the ignominy of such a
+mixture!
+
+All this was of no great help to Fleda, in so far as Fleda tried to rise
+to her mission of finding a way out. When at the end of a fortnight Owen
+came down once more, it was ostensibly to tackle a farmer whose
+proceedings had been irregular; the girl was sure, however, that he had
+really come, on the instance of Mona, to see what his mother was doing.
+He wished to satisfy himself that she was preparing her departure, and
+he wished to perform a duty, distinct but not less imperative, in regard
+to the question of the perquisites with which she would retreat. The
+tension between them was now such that he had to perpetrate these
+offenses without meeting his adversary. Mrs. Gereth was as willing as
+himself that he should address to Fleda Vetch whatever cruel remarks he
+might have to make: she only pitied her poor young friend for repeated
+encounters with a person as to whom she perfectly understood the girl's
+repulsion. Fleda thought it nice of Owen not to have expected her to
+write to him; he wouldn't have wished any more than herself that she
+should have the air of spying on his mother in his interest. What made
+it comfortable to deal with him in this more familiar way was the sense
+that she understood so perfectly how poor Mrs. Gereth suffered, and that
+she measured so adequately the sacrifice the other side did take rather
+monstrously for granted. She understood equally how Owen himself
+suffered, now that Mona had already begun to make him do things he
+didn't like. Vividly Fleda apprehended how _she_ would have first made
+him like anything she would have made him do; anything even as
+disagreeable as this appearing there to state, virtually on Mona's
+behalf, that of course there must be a definite limit to the number of
+articles appropriated. She took a longish stroll with him in order to
+talk the matter over; to say if she didn't think a dozen pieces, chosen
+absolutely at will, would be a handsome allowance; and above all to
+consider the very delicate question of whether the advantage enjoyed by
+Mrs. Gereth mightn't be left to her honor. To leave it so was what Owen
+wished; but there was plainly a young lady at Waterbath to whom, on his
+side, he already had to render an account. He was as touching in his
+offhand annoyance as his mother was tragic in her intensity; for if he
+couldn't help having a sense of propriety about the whole matter, so he
+could as little help hating it. It was for his hating it, Fleda
+reasoned, that she liked him so, and her insistence to his mother on the
+hatred perilously resembled, on one or two occasions, a revelation of
+the liking. There were moments when, in conscience, that revelation
+pressed her; inasmuch as it was just on the ground of her not liking him
+that Mrs. Gereth trusted her so much. Mrs. Gereth herself didn't in
+these days like him at all, and she was of course and always on Mrs.
+Gereth's side. He ended really, while the preparations for his marriage
+went on, by quite a little custom of coming and going; but on no one of
+these occasions would his mother receive him. He talked only with Fleda
+and strolled with Fleda; and when he asked her, in regard to the great
+matter, if Mrs. Gereth were really doing nothing, the girl usually
+replied: "She pretends not to be, if I may say so; but I think she's
+really thinking over what she'll take." When her friend asked her what
+Owen was doing, she could have but one answer: "He's waiting, dear lady,
+to see what _you_ do!"
+
+Mrs. Gereth, a month after she had received her great shock, did
+something abrupt and extraordinary: she caught up her companion and went
+to have a look at Ricks. They had come to London first and taken a train
+from Liverpool Street, and the least of the sufferings they were armed
+against was that of passing the night. Fleda's admirable dressing-bag
+had been given her by her friend. "Why, it's charming!" she exclaimed a
+few hours later, turning back again into the small prim parlor from a
+friendly advance to the single plate of the window. Mrs. Gereth hated
+such windows, the one flat glass, sliding up and down, especially when
+they enjoyed a view of four iron pots on pedestals, painted white and
+containing ugly geraniums, ranged on the edge of a gravel-path and doing
+their best to give it the air of a terrace. Fleda had instantly averted
+her eyes from these ornaments, but Mrs. Gereth grimly gazed, wondering
+of course how a place in the deepest depths of Essex and three miles
+from a small station could contrive to look so suburban. The room was
+practically a shallow box, with the junction of the walls and ceiling
+guiltless of curve or cornice and marked merely by the little band of
+crimson paper glued round the top of the other paper, a turbid gray
+sprigged with silver flowers. This decoration was rather new and quite
+fresh; and there was in the centre of the ceiling a big square beam
+papered over in white, as to which Fleda hesitated about venturing to
+remark that it was rather picturesque. She recognized in time that this
+remark would be weak and that, throughout, she should be able to say
+nothing either for the mantelpieces or for the doors, of which she saw
+her companion become sensible with a soundless moan. On the subject of
+doors especially Mrs. Gereth had the finest views: the thing in the
+world she most despised was the meanness of the single flap. From end to
+end, at Poynton, there were high double leaves. At Ricks the entrances
+to the rooms were like the holes of rabbit-hutches.
+
+It was all, none the less, not so bad as Fleda had feared; it was faded
+and melancholy, whereas there had been a danger that it would be
+contradictious and positive, cheerful and loud. The house was crowded
+with objects of which the aggregation somehow made a thinness and the
+futility a grace; things that told her they had been gathered as slowly
+and as lovingly as the golden flowers of Poynton. She too, for a home,
+could have lived with them: they made her fond of the old maiden-aunt;
+they made her even wonder if it didn't work more for happiness not to
+have tasted, as she herself had done, of knowledge. Without resources,
+without a stick, as she said, of her own, Fleda was moved, after all, to
+some secret surprise at the pretensions of a shipwrecked woman who could
+hold such an asylum cheap. The more she looked about the surer she felt
+of the character of the maiden-aunt, the sense of whose dim presence
+urged her to pacification: the maiden-aunt had been a dear; she would
+have adored the maiden-aunt. The poor lady had had some tender little
+story; she had been sensitive and ignorant and exquisite: that too was a
+sort of origin, a sort of atmosphere for relics and rarities, though
+different from the sorts most prized at Poynton. Mrs. Gereth had of
+course more than once said that one of the deepest mysteries of life was
+the way that, by certain natures, hideous objects could be loved; but it
+wasn't a question of love, now, for these: it was only a question of a
+certain practical patience. Perhaps some thought of that kind had stolen
+over Mrs. Gereth when, at the end of a brooding hour, she exclaimed,
+taking in the house with a strenuous sigh: "Well, something can be done
+with it!" Fleda had repeated to her more than once the indulgent fancy
+about the maiden-aunt--she was so sure she had deeply suffered. "I'm
+sure I hope she did!" was, however, all that Mrs. Gereth had replied.
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+
+It was a great relief to the girl at last to perceive that the dreadful
+move would really be made. What might happen if it shouldn't had been
+from the first indefinite. It was absurd to pretend that any violence
+was probable--a tussel, dishevelment, shrieks; yet Fleda had an
+imagination of a drama, a "great scene," a thing, somehow, of indignity
+and misery, of wounds inflicted and received, in which indeed, though
+Mrs. Gereth's presence, with movements and sounds, loomed large to her,
+Owen remained indistinct and on the whole unaggressive. He wouldn't be
+there with a cigarette in his teeth, very handsome and insolently quiet:
+that was only the way he would be in a novel, across whose interesting
+page some such figure, as she half closed her eyes, seemed to her to
+walk. Fleda had rather, and indeed with shame, a confused, pitying
+vision of Mrs. Gereth with her great scene left in a manner on her
+hands, Mrs. Gereth missing her effect and having to appear merely hot
+and injured and in the wrong. The symptoms that she would be spared even
+that spectacle resided not so much, through the chambers of Poynton, in
+an air of concentration as in the hum of buzzing alternatives. There was
+no common preparation, but one day, at the turn of a corridor, she found
+her hostess standing very still, with the hanging hands of an invalid
+and the active eyes of an adventurer. These eyes appeared to Fleda to
+meet her own with a strange, dim bravado, and there was a silence,
+almost awkward, before either of the friends spoke. The girl afterwards
+thought of the moment as one in which her hostess mutely accused her of
+an accusation, meeting it, however, at the same time, by a kind of
+defiant acceptance. Yet it was with mere melancholy candor that Mrs.
+Gereth at last sighingly exclaimed: "I'm thinking over what I had better
+take!" Fleda could have embraced her for this virtual promise of a
+concession, the announcement that she had finally accepted the problem
+of knocking together a shelter with the small salvage of the wreck.
+
+It was true that when after their return from Ricks they tried to
+lighten the ship, the great embarrassment was still immutably there, the
+odiousness of sacrificing the exquisite things one wouldn't take to the
+exquisite things one would. This immediately made the things one
+wouldn't take the very things one ought to, and, as Mrs. Gereth said,
+condemned one, in the whole business, to an eternal vicious circle. In
+such a circle, for days, she had been tormentedly moving, prowling up
+and down, comparing incomparables. It was for that one had to cling to
+them and their faces of supplication. Fleda herself could judge of these
+faces, so conscious of their race and their danger, and she had little
+enough to say when her companion asked her if the whole place,
+perversely fair on October afternoons, looked like a place to give up.
+It looked, to begin with, through some effect of season and light,
+larger than ever, immense, and it was filled with the hush of sorrow,
+which in turn was all charged with memories. Everything was in the
+air--every history of every find, every circumstance of every struggle.
+Mrs. Gereth had drawn back every curtain and removed every cover; she
+prolonged the vistas, opened wide the whole house, gave it an appearance
+of awaiting a royal visit. The shimmer of wrought substances spent
+itself in the brightness; the old golds and brasses, old ivories and
+bronzes, the fresh old tapestries and deep old damasks threw out a
+radiance in which the poor woman saw in solution all her old loves and
+patiences, all her old tricks and triumphs.
+
+Fleda had a depressed sense of not, after all, helping her much: this
+was lightened indeed by the fact that Mrs. Gereth, letting her off
+easily, didn't now seem to expect it. Her sympathy, her interest, her
+feeling for everything for which Mrs. Gereth felt, were a force that
+really worked to prolong the deadlock. "I only wish I bored you and my
+possessions bored you," that lady, with some humor, declared; "then
+you'd make short work with me, bundle me off, tell me just to pile
+certain things into a cart and have done." Fleda's sharpest difficulty
+was in having to act up to the character of thinking Owen a brute, or at
+least to carry off the inconsistency of seeing him when he came down. By
+good fortune it was her duty, her function, as well as a protection to
+Mrs. Gereth. She thought of him perpetually, and her eyes had come to
+rejoice in his manly magnificence more even than they rejoiced in the
+royal cabinets of the red saloon. She wondered, very faintly at first,
+why he came so often; but of course she knew nothing about the business
+he had in hand, over which, with men red-faced and leather-legged, he
+was sometimes closeted for an hour in a room of his own that was the one
+monstrosity of Poynton: all tobacco-pots and bootjacks, his mother had
+said--such an array of arms of aggression and castigation that he
+himself had confessed to eighteen rifles and forty whips. He was
+arranging for settlements on his wife, he was doing things that would
+meet the views of the Brigstocks. Considering the house was his own,
+Fleda thought it nice of him to keep himself in the background while his
+mother remained; making his visits, at some cost of ingenuity about
+trains from town, only between meals, doing everything to let it press
+lightly upon her that he was there. This was rather a stoppage to her
+meeting Mrs. Gereth on the ground of his being a brute; the most she
+really at last could do was not to contradict her when she repeated that
+he was watching--just insultingly watching. He _was_ watching, no doubt;
+but he watched somehow with his head turned away. He knew that Fleda
+knew at present what he wanted of her, so that it would be gross of him
+to say it over and over. It existed as a confidence between them, and
+made him sometimes, with his wandering stare, meet her eyes as if a
+silence so pleasant could only unite them the more. He had no great flow
+of speech, certainly, and at first the girl took for granted that this
+was all there was to be said about the matter. Little by little she
+speculated as to whether, with a person who, like herself, could put
+him, after all, at a sort of domestic ease, it was not supposable that
+he would have more conversation if he were not keeping some of it back
+for Mona.
+
+From the moment she suspected he might be thinking what Mona would say
+to his chattering so to an underhand "companion," who was all but paid,
+this young lady's repressed emotion began to require still more
+repression. She grew impatient of her situation at Poynton; she
+privately pronounced it false and horrid. She said to herself that she
+had let Owen know that she had, to the best of her power, directed his
+mother in the general sense he desired; that he quite understood it and
+that he also understood how unworthy it was of either of them to stand
+over the good lady with a notebook and a lash. Wasn't this practical
+unanimity just practical success? Fleda became aware of a sudden desire,
+as well as of pressing reasons, to bring her stay at Poynton to a close.
+She had not, on the one hand, like a minion of the law, undertaken to
+see Mrs. Gereth down to the train and locked, in sign of her abdication,
+into a compartment; neither had she on the other committed herself to
+hold Owen indefinitely in dalliance while his mother gained time or dug
+a counter-mine. Besides, people _were_ saying that she fastened like a
+leech on other people--people who had houses where something was to be
+picked up: this revelation was frankly made her by her sister, now
+distinctly doomed to the curate and in view of whose nuptials she had
+almost finished, as a present, a wonderful piece of embroidery,
+suggested, at Poynton, by an old Spanish altar-cloth. She would have to
+exert herself still further for the intended recipient of this offering,
+turn her out for her marriage with more than that drapery. She would go
+up to town, in short, to dress Maggie; and their father, in lodgings at
+West Kensington, would stretch a point and take them in. He, to do him
+justice, never reproached her with profitable devotions; so far as they
+existed he consciously profited by them. Mrs. Gereth gave her up as
+heroically as if she had been a great bargain, and Fleda knew that she
+wouldn't at present miss any visit of Owen's, for Owen was shooting at
+Waterbath. Owen shooting was Owen lost, and there was scant sport at
+Poynton.
+
+The first news she had from Mrs. Gereth was news of that lady's having
+accomplished, in form at least, her migration. The letter was dated from
+Ricks, to which place she had been transported by an impulse apparently
+as sudden as the inspiration she had obeyed before. "Yes, I've literally
+come," she wrote, "with a bandbox and a kitchen-maid; I've crossed the
+Rubicon, I've taken possession. It has been like plumping into cold
+water: I saw the only thing was to do it, not to stand shivering. I
+shall have warmed the place a little by simply being here for a week;
+when I come back the ice will have been broken. I didn't write to you to
+meet me on my way through town, because I know how busy you are and
+because, besides, I'm too savage and odious to be fit company even for
+you. You'd say I really go too far, and there's no doubt whatever I do.
+I'm here, at any rate, just to look round once more, to see that certain
+things are done before I enter in force. I shall probably be at Poynton
+all next week. There's more room than I quite measured the other day,
+and a rather good set of old Worcester. But what are space and time,
+what's even old Worcester, to your wretched and affectionate A. G.?"
+
+The day after Fleda received this letter she had occasion to go into a
+big shop in Oxford Street--a journey that she achieved circuitously,
+first on foot and then by the aid of two omnibuses. The second of these
+vehicles put her down on the side of the street opposite her shop, and
+while, on the curbstone, she humbly waited, with a parcel, an umbrella,
+and a tucked-up frock, to cross in security, she became aware that,
+close beside her, a hansom had pulled up short, in obedience to the
+brandished stick of a demonstrative occupant. This occupant was Owen
+Gereth, who had caught sight of her as he rattled along and who, with an
+exhibition of white teeth that, from under the hood of the cab, had
+almost flashed through the fog, now alighted to ask her if he couldn't
+give her a lift. On finding that her destination was only over the way
+he dismissed his vehicle and joined her, not only piloting her to the
+shop, but taking her in; with the assurance that his errands didn't
+matter, that it amused him to be concerned with hers. She told him she
+had come to buy a trimming for her sister's frock, and he expressed an
+hilarious interest in the purchase. His hilarity was almost always out
+of proportion to the case, but it struck her at present as more so than
+ever; especially when she had suggested that he might find it a good
+time to buy a garnishment of some sort for Mona. After wondering an
+instant whether he gave the full satiric meaning, such as it was, to
+this remark, Fleda dismissed the possibility as inconceivable. He
+stammered out that it was for _her_ he would like to buy something,
+something "ripping," and that she must give him the pleasure of telling
+him what would best please her: he couldn't have a better opportunity
+for making her a present--the present, in recognition of all she had
+done for Mummy, that he had had in his head for weeks.
+
+Fleda had more than one small errand in the big bazaar, and he went up
+and down with her, pointedly patient, pretending to be interested in
+questions of tape and of change. She had now not the least hesitation in
+wondering what Mona would think of such proceedings. But they were not
+her doing--they were Owen's; and Owen, inconsequent and even
+extravagant, was unlike anything she had ever seen him before. He broke
+off, he came back, he repeated questions without heeding answers, he
+made vague, abrupt remarks about the resemblances of shopgirls and the
+uses of chiffon. He unduly prolonged their business together, giving
+Fleda a sense that he was putting off something particular that he had
+to face. If she had ever dreamed of Owen Gereth as nervous she would
+have seen him with some such manner as this. But why should he be
+nervous? Even at the height of the crisis his mother hadn't made him so,
+and at present he was satisfied about his mother. The one idea he stuck
+to was that Fleda should mention something she would let him give her:
+there was everything in the world in the wonderful place, and he made
+her incongruous offers--a traveling-rug, a massive clock, a table for
+breakfast in bed, and above all, in a resplendent binding, a set of
+somebody's "works." His notion was a testimonial, a tribute, and the
+"works" would be a graceful intimation that it was her cleverness he
+wished above all to commemorate. He was immensely in earnest, but the
+articles he pressed upon her betrayed a delicacy that went to her heart:
+what he would really have liked, as he saw them tumbled about, was one
+of the splendid stuffs for a gown--a choice proscribed by his fear of
+seeming to patronize her, to refer to her small means and her
+deficiencies. Fleda found it easy to chaff him about his exaggeration of
+her deserts; she gave the just measure of them in consenting to accept a
+small pin-cushion, costing sixpence, in which the letter F was marked
+out with pins. A sense of loyalty to Mona was not needed to enforce this
+discretion, and after that first allusion to her she never sounded her
+name. She noticed on this occasion more things in Owen Gereth than she
+had ever noticed before, but what she noticed most was that he said no
+word of his intended. She asked herself what he had done, in so long a
+parenthesis, with his loyalty or at least his "form;" and then reflected
+that even if he had done something very good with them the situation in
+which such a question could come up was already a little strange. Of
+course he wasn't doing anything so vulgar as making love to her; but
+there was a kind of punctilio for a man who was engaged.
+
+That punctilio didn't prevent Owen from remaining with her after they
+had left the shop, from hoping she had a lot more to do, and from
+pressing her to look with him, for a possible glimpse of something she
+might really let him give her, into the windows of other establishments.
+There was a moment when, under this pressure, she made up her mind that
+his tribute would be, if analyzed, a tribute to her insignificance. But
+all the same he wanted her to come somewhere and have luncheon with him:
+what was that a tribute to? She must have counted very little if she
+didn't count too much for a romp in a restaurant. She had to get home
+with her trimming, and the most, in his company, she was amenable to was
+a retracing of her steps to the Marble Arch and then, after a discussion
+when they had reached it, a walk with him across the Park. She knew Mona
+would have considered that she ought to take the omnibus again; but she
+had now to think for Owen as well as for herself--she couldn't think for
+Mona. Even in the Park the autumn air was thick, and as they moved
+westward over the grass, which was what Owen preferred, the cool
+grayness made their words soft, made them at last rare and everything
+else dim. He wanted to stay with her--he wanted not to leave her: he had
+dropped into complete silence, but that was what his silence said. What
+was it he had postponed? What was it he wanted still to postpone? She
+grew a little scared as they strolled together and she thought. It was
+too confused to be believed, but it was as if somehow he felt
+differently. Fleda Vetch didn't suspect him at first of feeling
+differently to _her_, but only of feeling differently to Mona; yet she
+was not unconscious that this latter difference would have had something
+to do with his being on the grass beside her. She had read in novels
+about gentlemen who on the eve of marriage, winding up the past, had
+surrendered themselves for the occasion to the influence of a former
+tie; and there was something in Owen's behavior now, something in his
+very face, that suggested a resemblance to one of those gentlemen. But
+whom and what, in that case, would Fleda herself resemble? She wasn't a
+former tie, she wasn't any tie at all; she was only a deep little person
+for whom happiness was a kind of pearl-diving plunge. It was down at the
+very bottom of all that had lately happened; for all that had lately
+happened was that Owen Gereth had come and gone at Poynton. That was the
+small sum of her experience, and what it had made for her was her own
+affair, quite consistent with her not having dreamed it had made a
+tie--at least what _she_ called one--for Owen. The old one, at any rate,
+was Mona--Mona whom he had known so very much longer.
+
+They walked far, to the southwest corner of the great Gardens, where, by
+the old round pond and the old red palace, when she had put out her hand
+to him in farewell, declaring that from the gate she must positively
+take a conveyance, it seemed suddenly to rise between them that this was
+a real separation. She was on his mother's side, she belonged to his
+mother's life, and his mother, in the future, would never come to
+Poynton. After what had passed she wouldn't even be at his wedding, and
+it was not possible now that Mrs. Gereth should mention that ceremony to
+the girl, much less express a wish that the girl should be present at
+it. Mona, from decorum and with reference less to the bridegroom than to
+the bridegroom's mother, would of course not invite any such girl as
+Fleda. Everything therefore was ended; they would go their different
+ways; this was the last time they would stand face to face. They looked
+at each other with the fuller sense of it and, on Owen's part, with an
+expression of dumb trouble, the intensification of his usual appeal to
+any interlocutor to add the right thing to what he said. To Fleda, at
+this moment, it appeared that the right thing might easily be the wrong.
+He only said, at any rate: "I want you to understand, you know--I want
+you to understand."
+
+What did he want her to understand? He seemed unable to bring it out,
+and this understanding was moreover exactly what she wished not to
+arrive at. Bewildered as she was, she had already taken in as much as
+she should know what to do with; the blood also was rushing into her
+face. He liked her--it was stupefying--more than he really ought: that
+was what was the matter with him and what he desired her to assimilate;
+so that she was suddenly as frightened as some thoughtless girl who
+finds herself the object of an overture from a married man.
+
+"Good-bye, Mr. Gereth--I _must_ get on!" she declared with a
+cheerfulness that she felt to be an unnatural grimace. She broke away
+from him sharply, smiling, backing across the grass and then turning
+altogether and moving as fast as she could. "Good-bye, good-bye!" she
+threw off again as she went, wondering if he would overtake her before
+she reached the gate; conscious with a red disgust that her movement was
+almost a run; conscious too of just the confused, handsome face with
+which he would look after her. She felt as if she had answered a
+kindness with a great flouncing snub, but at any rate she had got away,
+though the distance to the gate, her ugly gallop down the Broad Walk,
+every graceless jerk of which hurt her, seemed endless. She signed from
+afar to a cab on the stand in the Kensington Road and scrambled into it,
+glad of the encompassment of the four-wheeler that had officiously
+obeyed her summons and that, at the end of twenty yards, when she had
+violently pulled up a glass, permitted her to recognize the fact that
+she was on the point of bursting into tears.
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+
+As soon as her sister was married she went down to Mrs. Gereth at
+Ricks--a promise to this effect having been promptly exacted and given;
+and her inner vision was much more fixed on the alterations there,
+complete now, as she understood, than on the success of her plotting and
+pinching for Maggie's happiness. Her imagination, in the interval, had
+indeed had plenty to do and numerous scenes to visit; for when on the
+summons just mentioned it had taken a flight from West Kensington to
+Ricks, it had hung but an hour over the terrace of painted pots and then
+yielded to a current of the upper air that swept it straight off to
+Poynton and to Waterbath. Not a sound had reached her of any supreme
+clash, and Mrs. Gereth had communicated next to nothing; giving out
+that, as was easily conceivable, she was too busy, too bitter, and too
+tired for vain civilities. All she had written was that she had got the
+new place well in hand and that Fleda would be surprised at the way it
+was turning out. Everything was even yet upside down; nevertheless, in
+the sense of having passed the threshold of Poynton for the last time,
+the amputation, as she called it, had been performed. Her leg had come
+off--she had now begun to stump along with the lovely wooden substitute;
+she would stump for life, and what her young friend was to come and
+admire was the beauty of her movement and the noise she made about the
+house. The reserve of Poynton and Waterbath had been matched by the
+austerity of Fleda's own secret, under the discipline of which she had
+repeated to herself a hundred times a day that she rejoiced at having
+cares that excluded all thought of it. She had lavished herself, in act,
+on Maggie and the curate, and had opposed to her father's selfishness a
+sweetness quite ecstatic. The young couple wondered why they had waited
+so long, since everything was after all so easy. She had thought of
+everything, even to how the "quietness" of the wedding should be
+relieved by champagne and her father kept brilliant on a single bottle.
+Fleda knew, in short, and liked the knowledge, that for several weeks
+she had appeared exemplary in every relation of life.
+
+She had been perfectly prepared to be surprised at Ricks, for Mrs.
+Gereth was a wonder-working wizard, with a command, when all was said,
+of good material; but the impression in wait for her on the threshold
+made her catch her breath and falter. Dusk had fallen when she arrived,
+and in the plain square hall, one of the few good features, the glow of
+a Venetian lamp just showed, on either wall, the richness of an
+admirable tapestry. This instant perception that the place had been
+dressed at the expense of Poynton was a shock: it was as if she had
+abruptly seen herself in the light of an accomplice. The next moment,
+folded in Mrs. Gereth's arms, her eyes were diverted; but she had
+already had, in a flash, the vision of the great gaps in the other
+house. The two tapestries, not the largest, but those most splendidly
+toned by time, had been on the whole its most uplifted pride. When she
+could really see again she was on a sofa in the drawing-room, staring
+with intensity at an object soon distinct as the great Italian cabinet
+that, at Poynton, had been in the red saloon. Without looking, she was
+sure the room was occupied with other objects like it, stuffed with as
+many as it could hold of the trophies of her friend's struggle. By this
+time the very fingers of her glove, resting on the seat of the sofa, had
+thrilled at the touch of an old velvet brocade, a wondrous texture that
+she could recognize, would have recognized among a thousand, without
+dropping her eyes on it. They stuck to the cabinet with a kind of
+dissimulated dread, while she painfully asked herself whether she should
+notice it, notice everything, or just pretend not to be affected. How
+could she pretend not to be affected, with the very pendants of the
+lustres tinkling at her and with Mrs. Gereth, beside her and staring at
+her even as she herself stared at the cabinet, hunching up a back like
+Atlas under his globe? She was appalled at this image of what Mrs.
+Gereth had on her shoulders. That lady was waiting and watching her,
+bracing herself, and preparing the same face of confession and defiance
+she had shown the day, at Poynton, she had been surprised in the
+corridor. It was farcical not to speak; and yet to exclaim, to
+participate, would give one a bad sense of being mixed up with a theft.
+This ugly word sounded, for herself, in Fleda's silence, and the very
+violence of it jarred her into a scared glance, as of a creature
+detected, to right and left. But what again the full picture most showed
+her was the far-away empty sockets, a scandal of nakedness in high, bare
+walls. She at last uttered something formal and incoherent--she didn't
+know what: it had no relation to either house. Then she felt Mrs.
+Gereth's hand once more on her arm. "I've arranged a charming room for
+you--it's really lovely. You'll be very happy there." This was spoken
+with extraordinary sweetness and with a smile that meant, "Oh, I know
+what you're thinking; but what does it matter when you're so loyally on
+my side?" It had come indeed to a question of "sides," Fleda thought,
+for the whole place was in battle array. In the soft lamplight, with one
+fine feature after another looming up into sombre richness, it defied
+her not to pronounce it a triumph of taste. Her passion for beauty
+leaped back into life; and was not what now most appealed to it a
+certain gorgeous audacity? Mrs. Gereth's high hand was, as mere great
+effect, the climax of the impression.
+
+"It's too wonderful, what you've done with the house!"--the visitor met
+her friend's eyes. They lighted up with joy--that friend herself so
+pleased with what she had done. This was not at all, in its accidental
+air of enthusiasm, what Fleda wanted to have said: it offered her as
+stupidly announcing from the first minute on whose side she was. Such
+was clearly the way Mrs. Gereth took it: she threw herself upon the
+delightful girl and tenderly embraced her again; so that Fleda soon went
+on, with a studied difference and a cooler inspection: "Why, you brought
+away absolutely everything!"
+
+"Oh no, not everything; I saw how little I could get into this scrap of
+a house. I only brought away what I required."
+
+Fleda had got up; she took a turn round the room. "You 'required' the
+very best pieces--the _morceaux de musée_, the individual gems!"
+
+"I certainly didn't want the rubbish, if that's what you mean." Mrs.
+Gereth, on the sofa, followed the direction of her companion's eyes;
+with the light of her satisfaction still in her face, she slowly rubbed
+her large, handsome hands. Wherever she was, she was herself the great
+piece in the gallery. It was the first Fleda had heard of there being
+"rubbish" at Poynton, but she didn't for the moment take up this
+insincerity; she only, from where she stood in the room, called out, one
+after the other, as if she had had a list in her hand, the pieces that
+in the great house had been scattered and that now, if they had a fault,
+were too much like a minuet danced on a hearth-rug. She knew them each,
+in every chink and charm--knew them by the personal name their
+distinctive sign or story had given them; and a second time she felt
+how, against her intention, this uttered knowledge struck her hostess as
+so much free approval. Mrs. Gereth was never indifferent to approval,
+and there was nothing she could so love you for as for doing justice to
+her deep morality. There was a particular gleam in her eyes when Fleda
+exclaimed at last, dazzled by the display: "And even the Maltese cross!"
+That description, though technically incorrect, had always been applied,
+at Poynton, to a small but marvelous crucifix of ivory, a masterpiece of
+delicacy, of expression, and of the great Spanish period, the existence
+and precarious accessibility of which she had heard of at Malta, years
+before, by an odd and romantic chance--a clue followed through mazes of
+secrecy till the treasure was at last unearthed.
+
+"'Even' the Maltese cross?" Mrs. Gereth rose as she sharply echoed the
+words. "My dear child, you don't suppose I'd have sacrificed _that_! For
+what in the world would you have taken me?"
+
+"A _bibelot_ the more or the less," Fleda said, "could have made little
+difference in this grand general view of you. I take you simply for the
+greatest of all conjurers. You've operated with a quickness--and with a
+quietness!" Her voice trembled a little as she spoke, for the plain
+meaning of her words was that what her friend had achieved belonged to
+the class of operation essentially involving the protection of darkness.
+Fleda felt she really could say nothing at all if she couldn't say that
+she knew what the danger had been. She completed her thought by a
+resolute and perfectly candid question: "How in the world did you get
+off with them?"
+
+Mrs. Gereth confessed to the fact of danger with a cynicism that
+surprised the girl. "By calculating, by choosing my time. I _was_ quiet,
+and I _was_ quick. I manoeuvred; then at the last rushed!" Fleda drew
+a long breath: she saw in the poor woman something much better than
+sophistical ease, a crude elation that was a comparatively simple state
+to deal with. Her elation, it was true, was not so much from what she
+had done as from the way she had done it--by as brilliant a stroke as
+any commemorated in the annals of crime. "I succeeded because I had
+thought it all out and left nothing to chance: the whole process was
+organized in advance, so that the mere carrying it into effect took but
+a few hours. It was largely a matter of money: oh, I was horribly
+extravagant--I had to turn on so many people. But they were all to be
+had--a little army of workers, the packers, the porters, the helpers of
+every sort, the men with the mighty vans. It was a question of arranging
+in Tottenham Court Road and of paying the price. I haven't paid it yet;
+there'll be a horrid bill; but at least the thing's done! Expedition
+pure and simple was the essence of the bargain. 'I can give you two
+days,' I said; 'I can't give you another second.' They undertook the
+job, and the two days saw them through. The people came down on a
+Tuesday morning; they were off on the Thursday. I admit that some of
+them worked all Wednesday night. I had thought it all out; I stood over
+them; I showed them how. Yes, I coaxed them, I made love to them. Oh, I
+was inspired--they found me wonderful. I neither ate nor slept, but I
+was as calm as I am now. I didn't know what was in me; it was worth
+finding out. I'm very remarkable, my dear: I lifted tons with my own
+arms. I'm tired, very, very tired; but there's neither a scratch nor a
+nick, there isn't a teacup missing." Magnificent both in her exhaustion
+and in her triumph, Mrs. Gereth sank on the sofa again, the sweep of her
+eyes a rich synthesis and the restless friction of her hands a clear
+betrayal. "Upon my word," she laughed, "they really look better here!"
+
+Fleda had listened in awe. "And no one at Poynton said anything? There
+was no alarm?"
+
+"What alarm should there have been? Owen left me almost defiantly alone:
+I had taken a time that I had reason to believe was safe from a
+descent." Fleda had another wonder, which she hesitated to express: it
+would scarcely do to ask Mrs. Gereth if she hadn't stood in fear of her
+servants. She knew, moreover, some of the secrets of her humorous
+household rule, all made up of shocks to shyness and provocations to
+curiosity--a diplomacy so artful that several of the maids quite yearned
+to accompany her to Ricks. Mrs. Gereth, reading sharply the whole of her
+visitor's thought, caught it up with fine frankness. "You mean that I
+was watched--that he had his myrmidons, pledged to wire him if they
+should see what I was 'up to'? Precisely. I know the three persons you
+have in mind: I had them in mind myself. Well, I took a line with
+them--I settled them."
+
+Fleda had had no one in particular in mind; she had never believed in
+the myrmidons; but the tone in which Mrs. Gereth spoke added to her
+suspense. "What did you do to them?"
+
+"I took hold of them hard--I put them in the forefront. I made them
+work."
+
+"To move the furniture?"
+
+"To help, and to help so as to please me. That was the way to take them;
+it was what they had least expected. I marched up to them and looked
+each straight in the eye, giving him the chance to choose if he'd
+gratify me or gratify my son. He gratified _me_. They were too stupid!"
+
+Mrs. Gereth massed herself there more and more as an immoral woman, but
+Fleda had to recognize that she too would have been stupid and she too
+would have gratified her. "And when did all this take place?"
+
+"Only last week; it seems a hundred years. We've worked here as fast as
+we worked there, but I'm not settled yet: you'll see in the rest of the
+house. However, the worst is over."
+
+"Do you really think so?" Fleda presently inquired. "I mean, does he,
+after the fact, as it were, accept it?"
+
+"Owen--what I've done? I haven't the least idea," said Mrs. Gereth.
+
+"Does Mona?"
+
+"You mean that she'll be the soul of the row?"
+
+"I hardly see Mona as the 'soul' of anything," the girl replied. "But
+have they made no sound? Have you heard nothing at all?"
+
+"Not a whisper, not a step, in all the eight days. Perhaps they don't
+know. Perhaps they're crouching for a leap."
+
+"But wouldn't they have gone down as soon as you left?"
+
+"They may not have known of my leaving." Fleda wondered afresh; it
+struck her as scarcely supposable that some sign shouldn't have flashed
+from Poynton to London. If the storm was taking this term of silence to
+gather, even in Mona's breast, it would probably discharge itself in
+some startling form. The great hush of every one concerned was strange;
+but when she pressed Mrs. Gereth for some explanation of it, that lady
+only replied, with her brave irony: "Oh, I took their breath away!" She
+had no illusions, however; she was still prepared to fight. What indeed
+was her spoliation of Poynton but the first engagement of a campaign?
+
+All this was exciting, but Fleda's spirit dropped, at bedtime, in the
+chamber embellished for her pleasure, where she found several of the
+objects that in her earlier room she had most admired. These had been
+reinforced by other pieces from other rooms, so that the quiet air of it
+was a harmony without a break, the finished picture of a maiden's bower.
+It was the sweetest Louis Seize, all assorted and combined--old
+chastened, figured, faded France. Fleda was impressed anew with her
+friend's genius for composition. She could say to herself that no girl
+in England, that night, went to rest with so picked a guard; but there
+was no joy for her in her privilege, no sleep even for the tired hours
+that made the place, in the embers of the fire and the winter dawn, look
+gray, somehow, and loveless. She couldn't care for such things when they
+came to her in such ways; there was a wrong about them all that turned
+them to ugliness. In the watches of the night she saw Poynton
+dishonored; she had cared for it as a happy whole, she reasoned, and the
+parts of it now around her seemed to suffer like chopped limbs. Before
+going to bed she had walked about with Mrs. Gereth and seen at whose
+expense the whole house had been furnished. At poor Owen's, from top to
+bottom--there wasn't a chair he hadn't sat upon. The maiden aunt had
+been exterminated--no trace of her to tell her tale. Fleda tried to
+think of some of the things at Poynton still unappropriated, but her
+memory was a blank about them, and in trying to focus the old
+combinations she saw again nothing but gaps and scars, a vacancy that
+gathered at moments into something worse. This concrete image was her
+greatest trouble, for it was Owen Gereth's face, his sad, strange eyes,
+fixed upon her now as they had never been. They stared at her out of the
+darkness, and their expression was more than she could bear: it seemed
+to say that he was in pain and that it was somehow her fault. He had
+looked to her to help him, and this was what her help had been. He had
+done her the honor to ask her to exert herself in his interest,
+confiding to her a task of difficulty, but of the highest delicacy.
+Hadn't that been exactly the sort of service she longed to render him?
+Well, her way of rendering it had been simply to betray him and hand him
+over to his enemy. Shame, pity, resentment oppressed her in turn; in the
+last of these feelings the others were quickly submerged. Mrs. Gereth
+had imprisoned her in that torment of taste; but it was clear to her for
+an hour at least that she might hate Mrs. Gereth.
+
+Something else, however, when morning came, was even more intensely
+definite: the most odious thing in the world for her would be ever again
+to meet Owen. She took on the spot a resolve to neglect no precaution
+that could lead to her going through life without that accident. After
+this, while she dressed, she took still another. Her position had
+become, in a few hours, intolerably false; in as few more hours as
+possible she would therefore put an end to it. The way to put an end to
+it would be to inform Mrs. Gereth that, to her great regret, she
+couldn't be with her now, couldn't cleave to her to the point that
+everything about her so plainly urged. She dressed with a sort of
+violence, a symbol of the manner in which this purpose was precipitated.
+The more they parted company the less likely she was to come across
+Owen; for Owen would be drawn closer to his mother now by the very
+necessity of bringing her down. Fleda, in the inconsequence of distress,
+wished to have nothing to do with her fall; she had had too much to do
+with everything. She was well aware of the importance, before breakfast
+and in view of any light they might shed on the question of motive, of
+not suffering her invidious expression of a difference to be accompanied
+by the traces of tears; but it none the less came to pass, downstairs,
+that after she had subtly put her back to the window, to make a mystery
+of the state of her eyes, she stupidly let a rich sob escape her before
+she could properly meet the consequences of being asked if she wasn't
+delighted with her room. This accident struck her on the spot as so
+grave that she felt the only refuge to be instant hypocrisy, some
+graceful impulse that would charge her emotion to the quickened sense of
+her friend's generosity--a demonstration entailing a flutter round the
+table and a renewed embrace, and not so successfully improvised but that
+Fleda fancied Mrs. Gereth to have been only half reassured. She had been
+startled, at any rate, and she might remain suspicious: this reflection
+interposed by the time, after breakfast, the girl had recovered
+sufficiently to say what was in her heart. She accordingly didn't say it
+that morning at all: she had absurdly veered about; she had encountered
+the shock of the fear that Mrs. Gereth, with sharpened eyes, might
+wonder why the deuce (she often wondered in that phrase) she had grown
+so warm about Owen's rights. She would doubtless, at a pinch, be able to
+defend them on abstract grounds, but that would involve a discussion,
+and the idea of a discussion made her nervous for her secret. Until in
+some way Poynton should return the blow and give her a cue, she must
+keep nervousness down; and she called herself a fool for having
+forgotten, however briefly, that her one safety was in silence.
+
+Directly after luncheon Mrs. Gereth took her into the garden for a
+glimpse of the revolution--or at least, said the mistress of Ricks, of
+the great row--that had been decreed there; but the ladies had scarcely
+placed themselves for this view before the younger one found herself
+embracing a prospect that opened in quite another quarter. Her attention
+was called to it, oddly, by the streamers of the parlor-maid's cap,
+which, flying straight behind the neat young woman who unexpectedly
+burst from the house and showed a long red face as she ambled over the
+grass, seemed to articulate in their flutter the name that Fleda lived
+at present only to catch. "Poynton--Poynton!" said the morsels of
+muslin; so that the parlor-maid became on the instant an actress in the
+drama, and Fleda, assuming pusillanimously that she herself was only a
+spectator, looked across the footlights at the exponent of the principal
+part. The manner in which this artist returned her look showed that she
+was equally preoccupied. Both were haunted alike by possibilities, but
+the apprehension of neither, before the announcement was made, took the
+form of the arrival at Ricks, in the flesh, of Mrs. Gereth's victim.
+When the messenger informed them that Mr. Gereth was in the
+drawing-room, the blank "Oh!" emitted by Fleda was quite as precipitate
+as the sound on her hostess's lips, besides being, as she felt, much
+less pertinent. "I thought it would be somebody," that lady afterwards
+said; "but I expected on the whole a solicitor's clerk." Fleda didn't
+mention that she herself had expected on the whole a pair of constables.
+She was surprised by Mrs. Gereth's question to the parlor-maid.
+
+"For whom did he ask?"
+
+"Why, for _you_, of course, dearest friend!" Fleda interjected, falling
+instinctively into the address that embodied the intensest pressure. She
+wanted to put Mrs. Gereth between her and her danger.
+
+"He asked for Miss Vetch, mum," the girl replied, with a face that
+brought startlingly to Fleda's ear the muffled chorus of the kitchen.
+
+"Quite proper," said Mrs. Gereth austerely. Then to Fleda: "Please go to
+him."
+
+"But what to do?"
+
+"What you always do--to see what he wants." Mrs. Gereth dismissed the
+maid. "Tell him Miss Vetch will come." Fleda saw that nothing was in the
+mother's imagination at this moment but the desire not to meet her son.
+She had completely broken with him, and there was little in what had
+just happened to repair the rupture. It would now take more to do so
+than his presenting himself uninvited at her door. "He's right in asking
+for you--he's aware that you're still our communicator; nothing has
+occurred to alter that. To what he wishes to transmit through you I'm
+ready, as I've been ready before, to listen. As far as _I_'m concerned,
+if I couldn't meet him a month ago, how am I to meet him to-day? If he
+has come to say, 'My dear mother, you're here, in the hovel into which
+I've flung you, with consolations that give me pleasure,' I'll listen to
+him; but on no other footing. That's what you're to ascertain, please.
+You'll oblige me as you've obliged me before. There!" Mrs. Gereth turned
+her back and, with a fine imitation of superiority, began to redress the
+miseries immediately before her. Fleda meanwhile hesitated, lingered for
+some minutes where she had been left, feeling secretly that her fate
+still had her in hand. It had put her face to face with Owen Gereth, and
+it evidently meant to keep her so. She was reminded afresh of two
+things: one of which was that, though she judged her friend's rigor, she
+had never really had the story of the scene enacted in the great
+awestricken house between the mother and the son weeks before--the day
+the former took to her bed in her over-throw; the other was, that at
+Ricks as at Poynton, it was before all things her place to accept
+thankfully a usefulness not, she must remember, universally
+acknowledged. What determined her at the last, while Mrs. Gereth
+disappeared in the shrubbery, was that, though she was at a distance
+from the house and the drawing-room was turned the other way, she could
+absolutely see the young man alone there with the sources of his pain.
+She saw his simple stare at his tapestries, heard his heavy tread on his
+carpets and the hard breath of his sense of unfairness. At this she went
+to him fast.
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+
+"I asked for you," he said when she stood there, "because I heard from
+the flyman who drove me from the station to the inn that he had brought
+you here yesterday. We had some talk, and he mentioned it."
+
+"You didn't know I was here?"
+
+"No. I knew only that you had had, in London, all that you told me, that
+day, to do; and it was Mona's idea that after your sister's marriage you
+were staying on with your father. So I thought you were with him still."
+
+"I am," Fleda replied, idealizing a little the fact. "I'm here only for
+a moment. But do you mean," she went on, "that if you had known I was
+with your mother you wouldn't have come down?"
+
+The way Owen hung fire at this question made it sound more playful than
+she had intended. She had, in fact, no consciousness of any intention
+but that of confining herself rigidly to her function. She could already
+see that, in whatever he had now braced himself for, she was an element
+he had not reckoned with. His preparation had been of a different
+sort--the sort congruous with his having been careful to go first and
+lunch solidly at the inn. He had not been forced to ask for her, but she
+became aware, in his presence, of a particular desire to make him feel
+that no harm could really come to him. She might upset him, as people
+called it, but she would take no advantage of having done so. She had
+never seen a person with whom she wished more to be light and easy, to
+be exceptionally human. The account he presently gave of the matter was
+that he indeed wouldn't have come if he had known she was on the spot;
+because then, didn't she see? he could have written to her. He would
+have had her there to let fly at his mother.
+
+"That would have saved me--well, it would have saved me a lot. Of course
+I would rather see you than her," he somewhat awkwardly added. "When the
+fellow spoke of you, I assure you I quite jumped at you. In fact I've no
+real desire to see Mummy at all. If she thinks I _like_ it--!" He sighed
+disgustedly. "I only came down because it seemed better than any other
+way. I didn't want her to be able to say I hadn't been all right. I dare
+say you know she has taken everything; or if not quite everything, why,
+a lot more than one ever dreamed. You can see for yourself--she has got
+half the place down. She has got them crammed--you can see for
+yourself!" He had his old trick of artless repetition, his helpless
+iteration of the obvious; but he was sensibly different, for Fleda, if
+only by the difference of his clear face, mottled over and almost
+disfigured by little points of pain. He might have been a fine young man
+with a bad toothache; with the first even of his life. What ailed him
+above all, she felt, was that trouble was new to him: he had never known
+a difficulty; he had taken all his fences, his world wholly the world of
+the personally possible, rounded indeed by a gray suburb into which he
+had never had occasion to stray. In this vulgar and ill-lighted region
+he had evidently now lost himself. "We left it quite to her honor, you
+know," he said ruefully.
+
+"Perhaps you've a right to say that you left it a little to mine." Mixed
+up with the spoils there, rising before him as if she were in a manner
+their keeper, she felt that she must absolutely dissociate herself. Mrs.
+Gereth had made it impossible to do anything but give her away. "I can
+only tell you that, on my side, I left it to her. I never dreamed either
+that she would pick out so many things."
+
+"And you don't really think it's fair, do you? You _don't_!" He spoke
+very quickly; he really seemed to plead.
+
+Fleda faltered a moment. "I think she has gone too far." Then she added:
+"I shall immediately tell her that I've said that to you."
+
+He appeared puzzled by this statement, but he presently rejoined: "You
+haven't then said to mamma what you think?"
+
+"Not yet; remember that I only got here last night." She appeared to
+herself ignobly weak. "I had had no idea what she was doing; I was taken
+completely by surprise. She managed it wonderfully."
+
+"It's the sharpest thing I ever saw in _my_ life!" They looked at each
+other with intelligence, in appreciation of the sharpness, and Owen
+quickly broke into a loud laugh. The laugh was in itself natural, but
+the occasion of it strange; and stranger still, to Fleda, so that she
+too almost laughed, the inconsequent charity with which he added: "Poor
+dear old Mummy! That's one of the reasons I asked for you," he went
+on--"to see if you'd back her up."
+
+Whatever he said or did, she somehow liked him the better for it. "How
+can I back her up, Mr. Gereth, when I think, as I tell you, that she has
+made a great mistake?"
+
+"A great mistake! That's all right." He spoke--it wasn't clear to her
+why--as if this declaration were a great point gained.
+
+"Of course there are many things she hasn't taken," Fleda continued.
+
+"Oh yes, a lot of things. But you wouldn't know the place, all the
+same." He looked about the room with his discolored, swindled face,
+which deepened Fleda's compassion for him, conjuring away any smile at
+so candid an image of the dupe. "You'd know this one soon enough,
+wouldn't you? These are just the things she ought to have left. Is the
+whole house full of them?"
+
+"The whole house," said Fleda uncompromisingly. She thought of her
+lovely room.
+
+"I never knew how much I cared for them. They're awfully valuable,
+aren't they?" Owen's manner mystified her; she was conscious of a return
+of the agitation he had produced in her on that last bewildering day,
+and she reminded herself that, now she was warned, it would be
+inexcusable of her to allow him to justify the fear that had dropped on
+her. "Mother thinks I never took any notice, but I assure you I was
+awfully proud of everything. Upon my honor, I _was_ proud, Miss Vetch."
+
+There was an oddity in his helplessness; he appeared to wish to persuade
+her and to satisfy himself that she sincerely felt how worthy he really
+was to treat what had happened as an injury. She could only exclaim,
+almost as helplessly as himself: "Of course you did justice! It's all
+most painful. I shall instantly let your mother know," she again
+declared, "the way I've spoken of her to you." She clung to that idea as
+to the sign of her straightness.
+
+"You'll tell her what you think she ought to do?" he asked with some
+eagerness.
+
+"What she ought to do?"
+
+"_Don't_ you think it--I mean that she ought to give them up?"
+
+"To give them up?" Fleda hesitated again.
+
+"To send them back--to keep it quiet." The girl had not felt the impulse
+to ask him to sit down among the monuments of his wrong, so that,
+nervously, awkwardly, he fidgeted about the room with his hands in his
+pockets and an effect of returning a little into possession through the
+formulation of his view. "To have them packed and dispatched again,
+since she knows so well how. She does it beautifully"--he looked close
+at two or three precious pieces. "What's sauce for the goose is sauce
+for the gander!"
+
+He had laughed at his way of putting it, but Fleda remained grave. "Is
+that what you came to say to her?"
+
+"Not exactly those words. But I did come to say"--he stammered, then
+brought it out--"I did come to say we must have them right back."
+
+"And did you think your mother would see you?"
+
+"I wasn't sure, but I thought it right to try--to put it to her kindly,
+don't you see? If she won't see me, then she has herself to thank. The
+only other way would have been to set the lawyers at her."
+
+"I'm glad you didn't do that."
+
+"I'm dashed if I want to!" Owen honestly declared. "But what's a fellow
+to do if she won't meet a fellow?"
+
+"What do you call meeting a fellow?" Fleda asked, with a smile.
+
+"Why, letting _me_ tell her a dozen things she can have."
+
+This was a transaction that Fleda, after a moment, had to give up trying
+to represent to herself. "If she won't do that--?" she went on.
+
+"I'll leave it all to my solicitor. _He_ won't let her off: by Jove, I
+know the fellow!"
+
+"That's horrible!" said Fleda, looking at him in woe.
+
+"It's utterly beastly!"
+
+His want of logic as well as his vehemence startled her; and with her
+eyes still on his she considered before asking him the question these
+things suggested. At last she asked it. "Is Mona very angry?"
+
+"Oh dear, yes!" said Owen.
+
+She had perceived that he wouldn't speak of Mona without her beginning.
+After waiting fruitlessly now for him to say more, she continued: "She
+has been there again? She has seen the state of the house?"
+
+"Oh dear, yes!" Owen repeated.
+
+Fleda disliked to appear not to take account of his brevity, but it was
+just because she was struck by it that she felt the pressure of the
+desire to know more. What it suggested was simply what her intelligence
+supplied, for he was incapable of any art of insinuation. Wasn't it at
+all events the rule of communication with him to say for him what he
+couldn't say? This truth was present to the girl as she inquired if Mona
+greatly resented what Mrs. Gereth had done. He satisfied her promptly;
+he was standing before the fire, his back to it, his long legs apart,
+his hands, behind him, rather violently jiggling his gloves. "She hates
+it awfully. In fact, she refuses to put up with it at all. Don't you
+see?--she saw the place with all the things."
+
+"So that of course she misses them."
+
+"Misses them--rather! She was awfully sweet on them." Fleda remembered
+how sweet Mona had been, and reflected that if that was the sort of plea
+he had prepared it was indeed as well he shouldn't see his mother. This
+was not all she wanted to know, but it came over her that it was all she
+needed. "You see it puts me in the position of not carrying out what I
+promised," Owen said. "As she says herself"--he hesitated an
+instant--"it's just as if I had obtained her under false pretenses."
+Just before, when he spoke with more drollery than he knew, it had left
+Fleda serious; but now his own clear gravity had the effect of exciting
+her mirth. She laughed out, and he looked surprised, but went on: "She
+regards it as a regular sell."
+
+Fleda was silent; but finally, as he added nothing, she exclaimed: "Of
+course it makes a great difference!" She knew all she needed, but none
+the less she risked, after another pause, an interrogative remark. "I
+forget when it is that your marriage takes place?"
+
+Owen came away from the fire and, apparently at a loss where to turn,
+ended by directing himself to one of the windows. "It's a little
+uncertain; the date isn't quite fixed."
+
+"Oh, I thought I remembered that at Poynton you had told me a day, and
+that it was near at hand."
+
+"I dare say I did; it was for the 19th. But we've altered that--she
+wants to shift it." He looked out of the window; then he said: "In fact,
+it won't come off till Mummy has come round."
+
+"Come round?"
+
+"Put the place as it was." In his offhand way he added: "You know what I
+mean!"
+
+He spoke not impatiently, but with a kind of intimate familiarity, the
+sweetness of which made her feel a pang for having forced him to tell
+her what was embarrassing to him, what was even humiliating. Yes indeed,
+she knew all she needed: all she needed was that Mona had proved apt at
+putting down that wonderful patent-leather foot. Her type was misleading
+only to the superficial, and no one in the world was less superficial
+than Fleda. She had guessed the truth at Waterbath and she had suffered
+from it at Poynton; at Ricks the only thing she could do was to accept
+it with the dumb exaltation that she felt rising. Mona had been prompt
+with her exercise of the member in question, for it might be called
+prompt to do that sort of thing before marriage. That she had indeed
+been premature who should say save those who should have read the matter
+in the full light of results? Neither at Waterbath nor at Poynton had
+even Fleda's thoroughness discovered all that there was--or rather, all
+that there was not--in Owen Gereth. "Of course it makes all the
+difference!" she said in answer to his last words. She pursued, after
+considering: "What you wish me to say from you then to your mother is
+that you demand immediate and practically complete restitution?"
+
+"Yes, please. It's tremendously good of you."
+
+"Very well, then. Will you wait?"
+
+"For Mummy's answer?" Owen stared and looked perplexed; he was more and
+more fevered with so much vivid expression of his case. "Don't you think
+that if I'm here she may hate it worse--think I may want to make her
+reply bang off?"
+
+Fleda thought. "You don't, then?"
+
+"I want to take her in the right way, don't you know?--treat her as if I
+gave her more than just an hour or two."
+
+"I see," said Fleda. "Then, if you don't wait--good-bye."
+
+This again seemed not what he wanted. "Must _you_ do it bang off?"
+
+"I'm only thinking she'll be impatient--I mean, you know, to learn what
+will have passed between us."
+
+"I see," said Owen, looking at his gloves. "I can give her a day or two,
+you know. Of course I didn't come down to sleep," he went on. "The inn
+seems a horrid hole. I know all about the trains--having no idea you
+were here." Almost as soon as his interlocutress he was struck with the
+absence of the visible, in this, as between effect and cause. "I mean
+because in that case I should have felt I could stop over. I should have
+felt I could talk with you a blessed sight longer than with Mummy."
+
+"We've already talked a long time," smiled Fleda.
+
+"Awfully, haven't we?" He spoke with the stupidity she didn't object to.
+Inarticulate as he was, he had more to say; he lingered perhaps because
+he was vaguely aware of the want of sincerity in her encouragement to
+him to go. "There's one thing, please," he mentioned, as if there might
+be a great many others too. "Please don't say anything about Mona."
+
+She didn't understand. "About Mona?"
+
+"About its being _her_ that thinks she has gone too far." This was still
+slightly obscure, but now Fleda understood. "It mustn't seem to come
+from _her_ at all, don't you know? That would only make Mummy worse."
+
+Fleda knew exactly how much worse, but she felt a delicacy about
+explicitly assenting: she was already immersed moreover in the deep
+consideration of what might make "Mummy" better. She couldn't see as yet
+at all; she could only clutch at the hope of some inspiration after he
+should go. Oh, there was a remedy, to be sure, but it was out of the
+question; in spite of which, in the strong light of Owen's troubled
+presence, of his anxious face and restless step, it hung there before
+her for some minutes. She felt that, remarkably, beneath the decent
+rigor of his errand, the poor young man, for reasons, for weariness, for
+disgust, would have been ready not to insist. His fitness to fight his
+mother had left him--he wasn't in fighting trim. He had no natural
+avidity and even no special wrath; he had none that had not been taught
+him, and it was doing his best to learn the lesson that had made him so
+sick. He had his delicacies, but he hid them away like presents before
+Christmas. He was hollow, perfunctory, pathetic; he had been girded by
+another hand. That hand had naturally been Mona's, and it was heavy even
+now on his strong, broad back. Why then had he originally rejoiced so in
+its touch? Fleda dashed aside this question, for it had nothing to do
+with her problem. Her problem was to help him to live as a gentleman and
+carry through what he had undertaken; her problem was to reinstate him
+in his rights. It was quite irrelevant that Mona had no intelligence of
+what she had lost--quite irrelevant that she was moved not by the
+privation, but by the insult: she had every reason to be moved, though
+she was so much more movable, in the vindictive way, at any rate, than
+one might have supposed--assuredly more than Owen himself had imagined.
+
+"Certainly I shall not mention Mona," Fleda said, "and there won't be
+the slightest necessity for it. The wrong's quite sufficiently yours,
+and the demand you make is perfectly justified by it."
+
+"I can't tell you what it is to me to feel you on my side!" Owen
+exclaimed.
+
+"Up to this time," said Fleda, after a pause, "your mother has had no
+doubt of my being on hers."
+
+"Then of course she won't like your changing."
+
+"I dare say she won't like it at all."
+
+"Do you mean to say you'll have a regular kick-up with her?"
+
+"I don't exactly know what you mean by a regular kick-up. We shall
+naturally have a great deal of discussion--if she consents to discuss
+the matter at all. That's why you must decidedly give her two or three
+days."
+
+"I see you think she _may_ refuse to discuss it at all," said Owen.
+
+"I'm only trying to be prepared for the worst. You must remember that to
+have to withdraw from the ground she has taken, to make a public
+surrender of what she has publicly appropriated, will go uncommonly hard
+with her pride."
+
+Owen considered; his face seemed to broaden, but not into a smile. "I
+suppose she's tremendously proud, isn't she?" This might have been the
+first time it had occurred to him.
+
+"You know better than I," said Fleda, speaking with high extravagance.
+
+"I don't know anything in the world half so well as you. If I were as
+clever as you I might hope to get round her." Owen hesitated; then he
+went on: "In fact I don't quite see what even you can say or do that
+will really fetch her."
+
+"Neither do I, as yet. I must think--I must pray!" the girl pursued,
+smiling. "I can only say to you that I'll try. I _want_ to try, you
+know--I want to help you." He stood looking at her so long on this that
+she added with much distinctness: "So you must leave me, please, quite
+alone with her. You must go straight back."
+
+"Back to the inn?"
+
+"Oh no, back to town. I'll write to you to-morrow."
+
+He turned about vaguely for his hat.
+
+"There's the chance, of course, that she may be afraid."
+
+"Afraid, you mean, of the legal steps you may take?"
+
+"I've got a perfect case--I could have her up. The Brigstocks say it's
+simple stealing."
+
+"I can easily fancy what the Brigstocks say!" Fleda permitted herself to
+remark without solemnity.
+
+"It's none of their business, is it?" was Owen's unexpected rejoinder.
+Fleda had already noted that no one so slow could ever have had such
+rapid transitions.
+
+She showed her amusement. "They've a much better right to say it's none
+of mine."
+
+"Well, at any rate, you don't call her names."
+
+Fleda wondered whether Mona did; and this made it all the finer of her
+to exclaim in a moment: "You don't know what I shall call her if she
+holds out!"
+
+Owen gave her a gloomy glance; then he blew a speck off the crown of his
+hat. "But if you do have a set-to with her?"
+
+He paused so long for a reply that Fleda said: "I don't think I know
+what you mean by a set-to."
+
+"Well, if she calls _you_ names."
+
+"I don't think she'll do that."
+
+"What I mean to say is, if she's angry at your backing me up--what will
+you do then? She can't possibly like it, you know."
+
+"She may very well not like it; but everything depends. I must see what
+I shall do. You mustn't worry about me."
+
+She spoke with decision, but Owen seemed still unsatisfied. "You won't
+go away, I hope?"
+
+"Go away?"
+
+"If she does take it ill of you."
+
+Fleda moved to the door and opened it. "I'm not prepared to say. You
+must have patience and see."
+
+"Of course I must," said Owen--"of course, of course." But he took no
+more advantage of the open door than to say: "You want me to be off, and
+I'm off in a minute. Only, before I go, please answer me a question. If
+you _should_ leave my mother, where would you go?"
+
+Fleda smiled again. "I haven't the least idea."
+
+"I suppose you'd go back to London."
+
+"I haven't the least idea," Fleda repeated.
+
+"You don't--a--live anywhere in particular, do you?" the young man went
+on. He looked conscious as soon as he had spoken; she could see that he
+felt himself to have alluded more grossly than he meant to the
+circumstance of her having, if one were plain about it, no home of her
+own. He had meant it as an allusion of a tender sort to all that she
+would sacrifice in the case of a quarrel with his mother; but there was
+indeed no graceful way of touching on that. One just couldn't be plain
+about it.
+
+Fleda, wound up as she was, shrank from any treatment at all of the
+matter, and she made no answer to his question. "I _won't_ leave your
+mother," she said. "I'll produce an effect on her; I'll convince her
+absolutely."
+
+"I believe you will, if you look at her like that!"
+
+She was wound up to such a height that there might well be a light in
+her pale, fine little face--a light that, while, for all return, at
+first, she simply shone back at him, was intensely reflected in his own.
+"I'll make her see it--I'll make her see it!" She rang out like a silver
+bell. She had at that moment a perfect faith that she should succeed;
+but it passed into something else when, the next instant, she became
+aware that Owen, quickly getting between her and the door she had
+opened, was sharply closing it, as might be said, in her face. He had
+done this before she could stop him, and he stood there with his hand on
+the knob and smiled at her strangely. Clearer than he could have spoken
+it was the sense of those seconds of silence.
+
+"When I got into this I didn't know you, and now that I know you how can
+I tell you the difference? And _she_'s so different, so ugly and vulgar,
+in the light of this squabble. No, like _you_ I've never known one. It's
+another thing, it's a new thing altogether. Listen to me a little: can't
+something be done?" It was what had been in the air in those moments at
+Kensington, and it only wanted words to be a committed act. The more
+reason, to the girl's excited mind, why it shouldn't have words; her one
+thought was not to hear, to keep the act uncommitted. She would do this
+if she had to be horrid.
+
+"Please let me out, Mr. Gereth," she said; on which he opened the door
+with an hesitation so very brief that in thinking of these things
+afterwards--for she was to think of them forever--she wondered in what
+tone she could have spoken. They went into the hall, where she
+encountered the parlor-maid, of whom she inquired whether Mrs. Gereth
+had come in.
+
+"No, miss; and I think she has left the garden. She has gone up the back
+road." In other words, they had the whole place to themselves. It would
+have been a pleasure, in a different mood, to converse with that
+parlor-maid.
+
+"Please open the house-door," said Fleda.
+
+Owen, as if in quest of his umbrella, looked vaguely about the
+hall--looked even wistfully up the staircase--while the neat young woman
+complied with Fleda's request. Owen's eyes then wandered out of the open
+door. "I think it's awfully nice here," he observed; "I assure you I
+could do with it myself."
+
+"I should think you might, with half your things here! It's Poynton
+itself--almost. Good-bye, Mr. Gereth," Fleda added. Her intention had
+naturally been that the neat young woman, opening the front door, should
+remain to close it on the departing guest. That functionary, however,
+had acutely vanished behind a stiff flap of green baize which Mrs.
+Gereth had not yet had time to abolish. Fleda put out her hand, but Owen
+turned away--he couldn't find his umbrella. She passed into the open
+air--she was determined to get him out; and in a moment he joined her in
+the little plastered portico which had small resemblance to any feature
+of Poynton. It was, as Mrs. Gereth had said, like the portico of a house
+in Brompton.
+
+"Oh, I don't mean with all the things here," he explained in regard to
+the opinion he had just expressed. "I mean I could put up with it just
+as it was; it had a lot of good things, don't you think? I mean if
+everything was back at Poynton, if everything was all right." He brought
+out these last words with a sort of smothered sigh. Fleda didn't
+understand his explanation unless it had reference to another and more
+wonderful exchange--the restoration to the great house not only of its
+tables and chairs, but of its alienated mistress. This would imply the
+installation of his own life at Ricks, and obviously that of another
+person. Such another person could scarcely be Mona Brigstock. He put out
+his hand now; and once more she heard his unsounded words: "With
+everything patched up at the other place, I could live here with _you_.
+Don't you see what I mean?"
+
+Fleda saw perfectly, and, with a face in which she flattered herself
+that nothing of this vision appeared, gave him her hand and said:
+"Good-bye, good-bye."
+
+Owen held her hand very firmly and kept it even after an effort made by
+her to recover it--an effort not repeated, as she felt it best not to
+show she was flurried. That solution--of her living with him at
+Ricks--disposed of him beautifully, and disposed not less so of herself;
+it disposed admirably too of Mrs. Gereth. Fleda could only vainly wonder
+how it provided for poor Mona. While he looked at her, grasping her
+hand, she felt that now indeed she was paying for his mother's
+extravagance at Poynton--the vividness of that lady's public plea that
+little Fleda Vetch was the person to insure the general peace. It was to
+that vividness poor Owen had come back, and if Mrs. Gereth had had more
+discretion little Fleda Vetch wouldn't have been in a predicament. She
+saw that Owen had at this moment his sharpest necessity of speech, and
+so long as he didn't release her hand she could only submit to him. Her
+defense would be perhaps to look blank and hard; so she looked as blank
+and as hard as she could, with the reward of an immediate sense that
+this was not a bit what he wanted. It even made him hang fire, as if he
+were suddenly ashamed of himself, were recalled to some idea of duty and
+of honor. Yet he none the less brought it out. "There's one thing I dare
+say I ought to tell you, if you're going so kindly to act for me; though
+of course you'll see for yourself it's a thing it won't do to tell
+_her_." What was it? He made her wait for it again, and while she
+waited, under firm coercion, she had the extraordinary impression that
+Owen's simplicity was in eclipse. His natural honesty was like the scent
+of a flower, and she felt at this moment as if her nose had been brushed
+by the bloom without the odor. The allusion was undoubtedly to his
+mother; and was not what he meant about the matter in question the
+opposite of what he said--that it just _would_ do to tell her? It would
+have been the first time he had said the opposite of what he meant, and
+there was certainly a fascination in the phenomenon, as well as a
+challenge to suspense in the ambiguity. "It's just that I understand
+from Mona, you know," he stammered; "it's just that she has made no
+bones about bringing home to me--" He tried to laugh, and in the effort
+he faltered again.
+
+"About bringing home to you?"--Fleda encouraged him.
+
+He was sensible of it, he achieved his performance. "Why, that if I
+don't get the things back--every blessed one of them except a few
+_she_'ll pick out--she won't have anything more to say to me."
+
+Fleda, after an instant, encouraged him again. "To say to you?"
+
+"Why, she simply won't marry me, don't you see?"
+
+Owen's legs, not to mention his voice, had wavered while he spoke, and
+she felt his possession of her hand loosen so that she was free again.
+Her stare of perception broke into a lively laugh. "Oh, you're all
+right, for you _will_ get them. You will; you're quite safe; don't
+worry!" She fell back into the house with her hand on the door.
+"Good-bye, good-bye." She repeated it several times, laughing bravely,
+quite waving him away and, as he didn't move and save that he was on the
+other side of it, closing the door in his face quite as he had closed
+that of the drawing-room in hers. Never had a face, never at least had
+such a handsome one, been so presented to that offense. She even held
+the door a minute, lest he should try to come in again. At last, as she
+heard nothing, she made a dash for the stairs and ran up.
+
+
+
+
+IX
+
+
+In knowing a while before all she needed, Fleda had been far from
+knowing as much as that; so that once upstairs, where, in her room, with
+her sense of danger and trouble, the age of Louis Seize suddenly struck
+her as wanting in taste and point, she felt that she now for the first
+time knew her temptation. Owen had put it before her with an art beyond
+his own dream. Mona would cast him off if he didn't proceed to
+extremities; if his negotiation with his mother should fail he would be
+completely free. That negotiation depended on a young lady to whom he
+had pressingly suggested the condition of his freedom; and as if to
+aggravate the young lady's predicament designing fate had sent Mrs.
+Gereth, as the parlor-maid said, "up the back road." This would give the
+young lady more time to make up her mind that nothing should come of the
+negotiation. There would be different ways of putting the question to
+Mrs. Gereth, and Fleda might profitably devote the moments before her
+return to a selection of the way that would most surely be tantamount to
+failure. This selection indeed required no great adroitness; it was so
+conspicuous that failure would be the reward of an effective
+introduction of Mona. If that abhorred name should be properly invoked
+Mrs. Gereth would resist to the death, and before envenomed resistance
+Owen would certainly retire. His retirement would be into single life,
+and Fleda reflected that he had now gone away conscious of having
+practically told her so. She could only say, as she waited for the back
+road to disgorge, that she hoped it was a consciousness he enjoyed.
+There was something _she_ enjoyed; but that was a very different matter.
+To know that she had become to him an object of desire gave her wings
+that she felt herself flutter in the air: it was like the rush of a
+flood into her own accumulations. These stored depths had been
+fathomless and still, but now, for half an hour, in the empty house,
+they spread till they overflowed. He seemed to have made it right for
+her to confess to herself her secret. Strange then there should be for
+him in return nothing that such a confession could make right! How could
+it make right that he should give up Mona for another woman? His
+attitude was a sorry appeal to Fleda to legitimate that. But he didn't
+believe it himself, and he had none of the courage of his suggestion.
+She could easily see how wrong everything must be when a man so made to
+be manly was wanting in courage. She had upset him, as people called it,
+and he had spoken out from the force of the jar of finding her there. He
+had upset her too, heaven knew, but she was one of those who could pick
+themselves up. She had the real advantage, she considered, of having
+kept him from seeing that she had been overthrown.
+
+She had moreover at present completely recovered her feet, though there
+was in the intensity of the effort required to do so a vibration which
+throbbed away into an immense allowance for the young man. How could she
+after all know what, in the disturbance wrought by his mother, Mona's
+relations with him might have become? If he had been able to keep his
+wits, such as they were, more about him he would probably have felt--as
+sharply as she felt on his behalf--that so long as those relations were
+not ended he had no right to say even the little he had said. He had no
+right to appear to wish to draw in another girl to help him to an
+escape. If he was in a plight he must get out of the plight himself, he
+must get out of it first, and anything he should have to say to any one
+else must be deferred and detached. She herself, at any rate--it was her
+own case that was in question--couldn't dream of assisting him save in
+the sense of their common honor. She could never be the girl to be drawn
+in, she could never lift her finger against Mona. There was something in
+her that would make it a shame to her forever to have owed her happiness
+to an interference. It would seem intolerably vulgar to her to have
+"ousted" the daughter of the Brigstocks; and merely to have abstained
+even wouldn't assure her that she had been straight. Nothing was really
+straight but to justify her little pensioned presence by her use; and
+now, won over as she was to heroism, she could see her use only as some
+high and delicate deed. She couldn't do anything at all, in short,
+unless she could do it with a kind of pride, and there would be nothing
+to be proud of in having arranged for poor Owen to get off easily.
+Nobody had a right to get off easily from pledges so deep, so sacred.
+How could Fleda doubt they had been tremendous when she knew so well
+what any pledge of her own would be? If Mona was so formed that she
+could hold such vows light, that was Mona's peculiar business. To have
+loved Owen apparently, and yet to have loved him only so much, only to
+the extent of a few tables and chairs, was not a thing she could so much
+as try to grasp. Of a different way of loving him she was herself ready
+to give an instance, an instance of which the beauty indeed would not be
+generally known. It would not perhaps if revealed be generally
+understood, inasmuch as the effect of the particular pressure she
+proposed to exercise would be, should success attend it, to keep him
+tied to an affection that had died a sudden and violent death. Even in
+the ardor of her meditation Fleda remained in sight of the truth that it
+would be an odd result of her magnanimity to prevent her friend's
+shaking off a woman he disliked. If he didn't dislike Mona, what was the
+matter with him? And if he did, Fleda asked, what was the matter with
+her own silly self?
+
+Our young lady met this branch of the temptation it pleased her frankly
+to recognize by declaring that to encourage any such cruelty would be
+tortuous and base. She had nothing to do with his dislikes; she had only
+to do with his good-nature and his good name. She had joy of him just as
+he was, but it was of these things she had the greatest. The worst
+aversion and the liveliest reaction moreover wouldn't alter the
+fact--since one was facing facts--that but the other day his strong arms
+must have clasped a remarkably handsome girl as close as she had
+permitted. Fleda's emotion at this time was a wondrous mixture, in which
+Mona's permissions and Mona's beauty figured powerfully as aids to
+reflection. She herself had no beauty, and _her_ permissions were the
+stony stares she had just practiced in the drawing-room--a consciousness
+of a kind appreciably to add to the particular sense of triumph that
+made her generous. I may not perhaps too much diminish the merit of that
+generosity if I mention that it could take the flight we are considering
+just because really, with the telescope of her long thought, Fleda saw
+what might bring her out of the wood. Mona herself would bring her out;
+at the least Mona possibly might. Deep down plunged the idea that even
+should she achieve what she had promised Owen, there was still the
+contingency of Mona's independent action. She might by that time, under
+stress of temper or of whatever it was that was now moving her, have
+said or done the things there is no patching up. If the rupture should
+come from Waterbath they might all be happy yet. This was a calculation
+that Fleda wouldn't have committed to paper, but it affected the total
+of her sentiments. She was meanwhile so remarkably constituted that
+while she refused to profit by Owen's mistake, even while she judged it
+and hastened to cover it up, she could drink a sweetness from it that
+consorted little with her wishing it mightn't have been made. There was
+no harm done, because he had instinctively known, poor dear, with whom
+to make it, and it was a compensation for seeing him worried that he
+hadn't made it with some horrid mean girl who would immediately have
+dished him by making a still bigger one. Their protected error (for she
+indulged a fancy that it was hers too) was like some dangerous, lovely
+living thing that she had caught and could keep--keep vivid and helpless
+in the cage of her own passion and look at and talk to all day long. She
+had got it well locked up there by the time that, from an upper window,
+she saw Mrs. Gereth again in the garden. At this she went down to meet
+her.
+
+
+
+
+X
+
+
+Fleda's line had been taken, her word was quite ready; on the terrace of
+the painted pots she broke out before her interlocutress could put a
+question. "His errand was perfectly simple: he came to demand that you
+shall pack everything straight up again and send it back as fast as the
+railway will carry it."
+
+The back road had apparently been fatiguing to Mrs. Gereth; she rose
+there rather white and wan with her walk. A certain sharp thinness was
+in her ejaculation of "Oh!"--after which she glanced about her for a
+place to sit down. The movement was a criticism of the order of events
+that offered such a piece of news to a lady coming in tired; but Fleda
+could see that in turning over the possibilities this particular peril
+was the one that during the last hour her friend had turned up oftenest.
+At the end of the short, gray day, which had been moist and mild, the
+sun was out; the terrace looked to the south, and a bench, formed as to
+legs and arms of iron representing knotted boughs, stood against the
+warmest wall of the house. The mistress of Ricks sank upon it and
+presented to her companion the handsome face she had composed to hear
+everything. Strangely enough, it was just this fine vessel of her
+attention that made the girl most nervous about what she must drop in.
+"Quite a 'demand,' dear, is it?" asked Mrs. Gereth, drawing in her
+cloak.
+
+"Oh, that's what I should call it!" Fleda laughed, to her own surprise.
+
+"I mean with the threat of enforcement and that sort of thing."
+
+"Distinctly with the threat of enforcement--what would be called, I
+suppose, coercion."
+
+"What sort of coercion?" said Mrs. Gereth.
+
+"Why, legal, don't you know?--what he calls setting the lawyers at you."
+
+"Is that what he calls it?" She seemed to speak with disinterested
+curiosity.
+
+"That's what he calls it," said Fleda.
+
+Mrs. Gereth considered an instant. "Oh, the lawyers!" she exclaimed
+lightly. Seated there almost cosily in the reddening winter sunset, only
+with her shoulders raised a little and her mantle tightened as if from a
+slight chill, she had never yet looked to Fleda so much in possession
+nor so far from meeting unsuspectedness halfway. "Is he going to send
+them down here?"
+
+"I dare say he thinks it may come to that."
+
+"The lawyers can scarcely do the packing," Mrs. Gereth humorously
+remarked.
+
+"I suppose he means them--in the first place, at least--to try to talk
+you over."
+
+"In the first place, eh? And what does he mean in the second?"
+
+Fleda hesitated; she had not foreseen that so simple an inquiry could
+disconcert her. "I'm afraid I don't know."
+
+"Didn't you ask?" Mrs. Gereth spoke as if she might have said, "What
+then were you doing all the while?"
+
+"I didn't ask very much," said her companion. "He has been gone some
+time. The great thing seemed to be to understand clearly that he
+wouldn't be content with anything less than what he mentioned."
+
+"My just giving everything back?"
+
+"Your just giving everything back."
+
+"Well, darling, what did you tell him?" Mrs. Gereth blandly inquired.
+
+Fleda faltered again, wincing at the term of endearment, at what the
+words took for granted, charged with the confidence she had now
+committed herself to betray. "I told him I would tell you!" She smiled,
+but she felt that her smile was rather hollow and even that Mrs. Gereth
+had begun to look at her with some fixedness.
+
+"Did he seem very angry?"
+
+"He seemed very sad. He takes it very hard," Fleda added.
+
+"And how does _she_ take it?"
+
+"Ah, that--that I felt a delicacy about asking."
+
+"So you didn't ask?" The words had the note of surprise.
+
+Fleda was embarrassed; she had not made up her mind definitely to lie.
+"I didn't think you'd care." That small untruth she would risk.
+
+"Well--I don't!" Mrs. Gereth declared; and Fleda felt less guilty to
+hear her, for the statement was as inexact as her own. "Didn't you say
+anything in return?" Mrs. Gereth presently continued.
+
+"Do you mean in the way of justifying you?"
+
+"I didn't mean to trouble you to do that. My justification," said Mrs.
+Gereth, sitting there warmly and, in the lucidity of her thought, which
+nevertheless hung back a little, dropping her eyes on the gravel--"my
+justification was all the past. My justification was the cruelty--" But
+at this, with a short, sharp gesture, she checked herself. "It's too
+good of me to talk--now." She produced these sentences with a cold
+patience, as if addressing Fleda in the girl's virtual and actual
+character of Owen's representative. Our young lady crept to and fro
+before the bench, combating the sense that it was occupied by a judge,
+looking at her boot-toes, reminding herself in doing so of Mona, and
+lightly crunching the pebbles as she walked. She moved about because she
+was afraid, putting off from moment to moment the exercise of the
+courage she had been sure she possessed. That courage would all come to
+her if she could only be equally sure that what she should be called
+upon to do for Owen would be to suffer. She had wondered, while Mrs.
+Gereth spoke, how that lady would describe her justification. She had
+described it as if to be irreproachably fair, give her adversary the
+benefit of every doubt, and then dismiss the question forever. "Of
+course," Mrs. Gereth went on, "if we didn't succeed in showing him at
+Poynton the ground we took, it's simply that he shuts his eyes. What I
+supposed was that you would have given him your opinion that if I was
+the woman so signally to assert myself, I'm also the woman to rest upon
+it imperturbably enough."
+
+Fleda stopped in front of her hostess. "I gave him my opinion that
+you're very logical, very obstinate, and very proud."
+
+"Quite right, my dear: I'm a rank bigot--about that sort of thing!" and
+Mrs. Gereth jerked her head at the contents of the house. "I've never
+denied it. I'd kidnap--to save them, to convert them--the children of
+heretics. When I know I'm right I go to the stake. Oh, he may burn me
+alive!" she cried with a happy face. "Did he abuse me?" she then
+demanded.
+
+Fleda had remained there, gathering in her purpose. "How little you know
+him!"
+
+Mrs. Gereth stared, then broke into a laugh that her companion had not
+expected. "Ah, my dear, certainly not so well as you!" The girl, at
+this, turned away again--she felt she looked too conscious; and she was
+aware that, during a pause, Mrs. Gereth's eyes watched her as she went.
+She faced about afresh to meet them, but what she met was a question
+that reinforced them. "Why had you a 'delicacy' as to speaking of Mona?"
+
+She stopped again before the bench, and an inspiration came to her. "I
+should think _you_ would know," she said with proper dignity.
+
+Blankness was for a moment on Mrs. Gereth's brow; then light broke--she
+visibly remembered the scene in the breakfast-room after Mona's night at
+Poynton. "Because I contrasted you--told him _you_ were the one?" Her
+eyes looked deep. "You were--you are still!"
+
+Fleda gave a bold dramatic laugh. "Thank you, my love--with all the best
+things at Ricks!"
+
+Mrs. Gereth considered, trying to penetrate, as it seemed; but at last
+she brought out roundly: "For you, you know, I'd send them back!"
+
+The girl's heart gave a tremendous bound; the right way dawned upon her
+in a flash. Obscurity indeed the next moment engulfed this course, but
+for a few thrilled seconds she had understood. To send the things back
+"for her" meant of course to send them back if there were even a dim
+chance that she might become mistress of them. Fleda's palpitation was
+not allayed as she asked herself what portent Mrs. Gereth had suddenly
+perceived of such a chance: that perception could come only from a
+sudden suspicion of her secret. This suspicion, in turn, was a tolerably
+straight consequence of that implied view of the propriety of surrender
+from which, she was well aware, she could say nothing to dissociate
+herself. What she first felt was that if she wished to rescue the spoils
+she wished also to rescue her secret. So she looked as innocent as she
+could and said as quickly as possible: "For me? Why in the world for
+me?"
+
+"Because you're so awfully keen."
+
+"Am I? Do I strike you so? You know I hate him," Fleda went on.
+
+She had the sense for a while of Mrs. Gereth's regarding her with the
+detachment of some stern, clever stranger. "Then what's the matter with
+you? Why do you want me to give in?"
+
+Fleda hesitated; she felt herself reddening. "I've only said your son
+wants it. I haven't said _I_ do."
+
+"Then say it and have done with it!"
+
+This was more peremptory than any word her friend, though often speaking
+in her presence with much point, had ever yet directly addressed to her.
+It affected her like the crack of a whip, but she confined herself, with
+an effort, to taking it as a reminder that she must keep her head. "I
+know he has his engagement to carry out."
+
+"His engagement to marry? Why, it's just that engagement we loathe!"
+
+"Why should _I_ loathe it?" Fleda asked with a strained smile. Then,
+before Mrs. Gereth could reply, she pursued: "I'm thinking of his
+general undertaking--to give her the house as she originally saw it."
+
+"To give her the house!" Mrs. Gereth brought up the words from the depth
+of the unspeakable. The effort was like the moan of an autumn wind; it
+was in the power of such an image to make her turn pale.
+
+"I'm thinking," Fleda continued, "of the simple question of his keeping
+faith on an important clause of his contract: it doesn't matter whether
+it's with a stupid girl or with a monster of cleverness. I'm thinking of
+his honor and his good name."
+
+"The honor and good name of a man you hate?"
+
+"Certainly," the girl resolutely answered. "I don't see why you should
+talk as if one had a petty mind. You don't think so. It's not on that
+assumption you've ever dealt with me. I can do your son justice, as he
+put his case to me."
+
+"Ah, then he did put his case to you!" Mrs. Gereth exclaimed, with an
+accent of triumph. "You seemed to speak just now as if really nothing of
+any consequence had passed between you."
+
+"Something always passes when one has a little imagination," our young
+lady declared.
+
+"I take it you don't mean that Owen has any!" Mrs. Gereth cried with her
+large laugh.
+
+Fleda was silent a moment. "No, I don't mean that Owen has any," she
+returned at last.
+
+"Why is it you hate him so?" her hostess abruptly inquired.
+
+"Should I love him for all he has made you suffer?"
+
+Mrs. Gereth slowly rose at this and, coming across the walk, took her
+young friend in her arms and kissed her. She then passed into one of
+Fleda's an arm perversely and imperiously sociable. "Let us move a
+little," she said, holding her close and giving a slight shiver. They
+strolled along the terrace, and she brought out another question. "He
+_was_ eloquent, then, poor dear--he poured forth the story of his
+wrongs?"
+
+Fleda smiled down at her companion, who, cloaked and perceptibly bowed,
+leaned on her heavily and gave her an odd, unwonted sense of age and
+cunning. She took refuge in an evasion. "He couldn't tell me anything
+that I didn't know pretty well already."
+
+"It's very true that you know everything. No, dear, you haven't a petty
+mind; you've a lovely imagination and you're the nicest creature in the
+world. If you were inane, like most girls--like every one, in fact--I
+would have insulted you, I would have outraged you, and then you would
+have fled from me in terror. No, now that I think of it," Mrs. Gereth
+went on, "you wouldn't have fled from me; nothing, on the contrary,
+would have made you budge. You would have cuddled into your warm corner,
+but you would have been wounded and weeping and martyrized, and you
+would have taken every opportunity to tell people I'm a brute--as indeed
+I should have been!" They went to and fro, and she would not allow
+Fleda, who laughed and protested, to attenuate with any light civility
+this spirited picture. She praised her cleverness and her patience; then
+she said it was getting cold and dark and they must go in to tea. She
+delayed quitting the place, however, and reverted instead to Owen's
+ultimatum, about which she asked another question or two; in particular
+whether it had struck Fleda that he really believed she would comply
+with such a summons.
+
+"I think he really believes that if I try hard enough I can make you:"
+after uttering which words our young lady stopped short and emulated the
+embrace she had received a few moments before.
+
+"And you've promised to try: I see. You didn't tell me that, either,"
+Mrs. Gereth added as they went on. "But you're rascal enough for
+anything!" While Fleda was occupied in thinking in what terms she could
+explain why she had indeed been rascal enough for the reticence thus
+denounced, her companion broke out with an inquiry somewhat irrelevant
+and even in form somewhat profane. "Why the devil, at any rate, doesn't
+it come off?"
+
+Fleda hesitated. "You mean their marriage?"
+
+"Of course I mean their marriage!" Fleda hesitated again. "I haven't the
+least idea."
+
+"You didn't ask him?"
+
+"Oh, how in the world can you fancy?" She spoke in a shocked tone.
+
+"Fancy your putting a question so indelicate? _I_ should have put it--I
+mean in your place; but I'm quite coarse, thank God!" Fleda felt
+privately that she herself was coarse, or at any rate would presently
+have to be; and Mrs. Gereth, with a purpose that struck the girl as
+increasing, continued: "What, then, _was_ the day to be? Wasn't it just
+one of these?"
+
+"I'm sure I don't remember."
+
+It was part of the great rupture and an effect of Mrs. Gereth's
+character that up to this moment she had been completely and haughtily
+indifferent to that detail. Now, however, she had a visible reason for
+being clear about it. She bethought herself and she broke out--"Isn't
+the day past?" Then, stopping short, she added: "Upon my word, they must
+have put it off!" As Fleda made no answer to this she sharply went on:
+"_Have_ they put it off?"
+
+"I haven't the least idea," said the girl.
+
+Her hostess was looking at her hard again. "Didn't he tell you--didn't
+he say anything about it?"
+
+Fleda, meanwhile, had had time to make her reflections, which were
+moreover the continued throb of those that had occupied the interval
+between Owen's departure and his mother's return. If she should now
+repeat his words, this wouldn't at all play the game of her definite
+vow; it would only play the game of her little gagged and blinded
+desire. She could calculate well enough the effect of telling Mrs.
+Gereth how she had had it from Owen's troubled lips that Mona was only
+waiting for the restitution and would do nothing without it. The thing
+was to obtain the restitution without imparting that knowledge. The only
+way, also, not to impart it was not to tell any truth at all about it;
+and the only way to meet this last condition was to reply to her
+companion, as she presently did: "He told me nothing whatever: he didn't
+touch on the subject."
+
+"Not in any way?"
+
+"Not in any way."
+
+Mrs. Gereth watched Fleda and considered. "You haven't any idea if they
+are waiting for the things?"
+
+"How should I have? I'm not in their counsels."
+
+"I dare say they are--or that Mona is." Mrs. Gereth reflected again; she
+had a bright idea. "If I don't give in, I'll be hanged if she'll not
+break off."
+
+"She'll never, never break off!" said Fleda.
+
+"Are you sure?"
+
+"I can't be sure, but it's my belief."
+
+"Derived from _him_?"
+
+The girl hung fire a few seconds. "Derived from him."
+
+Mrs. Gereth gave her a long last look, then turned abruptly away. "It's
+an awful bore you didn't really get it out of him! Well, come to tea,"
+she added rather dryly, passing straight into the house.
+
+
+
+
+XI
+
+
+The sense of her adversary's dryness, which was ominous of something she
+couldn't read, made Fleda, before complying, linger a little on the
+terrace; she felt the need moreover of taking breath after such a flight
+into the cold air of denial. When at last she rejoined Mrs. Gereth she
+found her erect before the drawing-room fire. Their tea had been set out
+in the same quarter, and the mistress of the house, for whom the
+preparation of it was in general a high and undelegated function, was in
+an attitude to which the hissing urn made no appeal. This omission, for
+Fleda, was such a further sign of something to come that, to disguise
+her apprehension, she immediately and without an apology took the duty
+in hand; only, however, to be promptly reminded that she was performing
+it confusedly and not counting the journeys of the little silver shovel
+she emptied into the pot. "Not _five_, my dear--the usual three," said
+her hostess, with the same dryness; watching her then in silence while
+she clumsily corrected her mistake. The tea took some minutes to draw,
+and Mrs. Gereth availed herself of them suddenly to exclaim: "You
+haven't yet told me, you know, how it is you propose to 'make' me!"
+
+"Give everything back?" Fleda looked into the pot again and uttered her
+question with a briskness that she felt to be a little overdone. "Why,
+by putting the question well before you; by being so eloquent that I
+shall persuade you, shall act upon you; by making you sorry for having
+gone so far," she said boldly; "by simply and earnestly asking it of
+you, in short; and by reminding you at the same time that it's the first
+thing I ever have so asked. Oh, you've done things for me--endless and
+beautiful things," she exclaimed; "but you've done them all from your
+own generous impulse. I've never so much as hinted to you to lend me a
+postage-stamp."
+
+"Give me a cup of tea," said Mrs. Gereth. A moment later, taking the
+cup, she replied: "No, you've never asked me for a postage-stamp."
+
+"That gives me a pull!" Fleda returned, smiling.
+
+"Puts you in the situation of expecting that I shall do this thing just
+simply to oblige you?"
+
+The girl hesitated. "You said a while ago that for me you _would_ do
+it."
+
+"For you, but not for your eloquence. Do you understand what I mean by
+the difference?" Mrs. Gereth asked as she stood stirring her tea.
+
+Fleda, to postpone answering, looked round, while she drank it, at the
+beautiful room. "I don't in the least like, you know, your having taken
+so much. It was a great shock to me, on my arrival here, to find you had
+done so."
+
+"Give me some more tea," said Mrs. Gereth; and there was a moment's
+silence as Fleda poured out another cup. "If you were shocked, my dear,
+I'm bound to say you concealed your shock."
+
+"I know I did. I was afraid to show it."
+
+Mrs. Gereth drank off her second cup. "And you're not afraid now?"
+
+"No, I'm not afraid now."
+
+"What has made the difference?"
+
+"I've pulled myself together." Fleda paused; then she added: "And I've
+seen Mr. Owen."
+
+"You've seen Mr. Owen"--Mrs. Gereth concurred. She put down her cup and
+sank into a chair, in which she leaned back, resting her head and gazing
+at her young friend. "Yes, I did tell you a while ago that for you I'd
+do it. But you haven't told me yet what you'll do in return."
+
+Fleda thought an instant. "Anything in the wide world you may require."
+
+"Oh, 'anything' is nothing at all! That's too easily said." Mrs. Gereth,
+reclining more completely, closed her eyes with an air of disgust, an
+air indeed of inviting slumber.
+
+Fleda looked at her quiet face, which the appearance of slumber always
+made particularly handsome; she noted how much the ordeal of the last
+few weeks had added to its indications of age. "Well then, try me with
+something. What is it you demand?"
+
+At this, opening her eyes, Mrs. Gereth sprang straight up. "Get him away
+from her!"
+
+Fleda marveled: her companion had in an instant become young again.
+"Away from Mona? How in the world--?"
+
+"By not looking like a fool!" cried Mrs. Gereth very sharply. She kissed
+her, however, on the spot, to make up for this roughness, and summarily
+took off her hat, which, on coming into the house, our young lady had
+not removed. She applied a friendly touch to the girl's hair and gave a
+businesslike pull to her jacket. "I say don't look like an idiot,
+because you happen not to be one, not the least bit. _I_'m idiotic; I've
+been so, I've just discovered, ever since our first days together. I've
+been a precious donkey; but that's another affair."
+
+Fleda, as if she humbly assented, went through no form of controverting
+this; she simply stood passive to her companion's sudden refreshment of
+her appearance. "How _can_ I get him away from her?" she presently
+demanded.
+
+"By letting yourself go."
+
+"By letting myself go?" She spoke mechanically, still more like an
+idiot, and felt as if her face flamed out the insincerity of her
+question. It was vividly back again, the vision of the real way to act
+upon Mrs. Gereth. This lady's movements were now rapid; she turned off
+from her as quickly as she had seized her, and Fleda sat down to steady
+herself for full responsibility.
+
+Her hostess, without taking up her ejaculation, gave a violent poke at
+the fire and then faced her again. "You've done two things, then,
+to-day--haven't you?--that you've never done before. One has been asking
+me the service, or favor, or concession--whatever you call it--that you
+just mentioned; the other has been telling me--certainly too for the
+first time--an immense little fib."
+
+"An immense little fib?" Fleda felt weak; she was glad of the support of
+her seat.
+
+"An immense big one, then!" said Mrs. Gereth irritatedly. "You don't in
+the least 'hate' Owen, my darling. You care for him very much. In fact,
+my own, you're in love with him--there! Don't tell me any more lies!"
+cried Mrs. Gereth with a voice and a face in the presence of which Fleda
+recognized that there was nothing for her but to hold herself and take
+them. When once the truth was out, it was out, and she could see more
+and more every instant that it would be the only way. She accepted
+therefore what had to come; she leaned back her head and closed her eyes
+as her companion had done just before. She would have covered her face
+with her hands but for the still greater shame. "Oh, you're a wonder, a
+wonder," said Mrs. Gereth; "you're magnificent, and I was right, as soon
+as I saw you, to pick you out and trust you!" Fleda closed her eyes
+tighter at this last word, but her friend kept it up. "I never dreamed
+of it till a while ago, when, after he had come and gone, we were face
+to face. Then something stuck out of you; it strongly impressed me, and
+I didn't know at first quite what to make of it. It was that you had
+just been with him and that you were not natural. Not natural to _me_,"
+she added with a smile. "I pricked up my ears, and all that this might
+mean dawned upon me when you said you had asked nothing about Mona. It
+put me on the scent, but I didn't show you, did I? I felt it was _in_
+you, deep down, and that I must draw it out. Well, I _have_ drawn it,
+and it's a blessing. Yesterday, when you shed tears at breakfast, I was
+awfully puzzled. What has been the matter with you all the while? Why,
+Fleda, it isn't a crime, don't you know that?" cried the delighted
+woman. "When I was a girl I was always in love, and not always with such
+nice people as Owen. I didn't behave as well as you; compared with you I
+think I must have been horrid. But if you're proud and reserved, it's
+your own affair; I'm proud too, though I'm not reserved--that's what
+spoils it. I'm stupid, above all--that's what I am; so dense that I
+really blush for it. However, no one but you could have deceived me. If
+I trusted you, moreover, it was exactly to be cleverer than myself. You
+must be so now more than ever!" Suddenly Fleda felt her hands grasped:
+Mrs. Gereth had plumped down at her feet and was leaning on her knees.
+"Save him--save him: you _can_!" she passionately pleaded. "How could
+you _not_ like him, when he's such a dear? He _is_ a dear, darling;
+there's no harm in my own boy! You can do what you will with him--you
+know you can! What else does he give us all this time for? Get him away
+from her; it's as if he besought you to, poor wretch! Don't abandon him
+to such a fate, and I'll never abandon _you_. Think of him with that
+creature, that future! If you'll take him I'll give up everything.
+There, it's a solemn promise, the most sacred of my life! Get the better
+of her, and he shall have every stick I removed. Give me your word, and
+I'll accept it. I'll write for the packers to-night!"
+
+Fleda, before this, had fallen forward on her companion's neck, and the
+two women, clinging together, had got up while the younger wailed on the
+other's bosom. "You smooth it down because you see more in it than there
+can ever be; but after my hideous double game how will you be able to
+believe in me again?"
+
+"I see in it simply what _must_ be, if you've a single spark of pity.
+Where on earth was the double game, when you've behaved like such a
+saint? You've been beautiful, you've been exquisite, and all our trouble
+is over."
+
+Fleda, drying her eyes, shook her head ever so sadly. "No, Mrs. Gereth,
+it isn't over. I can't do what you ask--I can't meet your condition."
+
+Mrs. Gereth stared; the cloud gathered in her face again. "Why, in the
+name of goodness, when you adore him? I know what you see in him," she
+declared in another tone. "You're right!"
+
+Fleda gave a faint, stubborn smile. "He cares for her too much."
+
+"Then why doesn't he marry her? He's giving you an extraordinary
+chance."
+
+"He doesn't dream I've ever thought of him," said Fleda. "Why should he,
+if you didn't?"
+
+"It wasn't with me you were in love, my duck." Then Mrs. Gereth added:
+"I'll go and tell him."
+
+"If you do any such thing, you shall never see me again,--absolutely,
+literally never!"
+
+Mrs. Gereth looked hard at her young friend, showing she saw she must
+believe her. "Then you're perverse, you're wicked. Will you swear he
+doesn't know?"
+
+"Of course he doesn't know!" cried Fleda indignantly.
+
+Her interlocutress was silent a little. "And that he has no feeling on
+_his_ side?"
+
+"For me?" Fleda stared. "Before he has even married her?"
+
+Mrs. Gereth gave a sharp laugh at this. "He ought at least to appreciate
+your wit. Oh, my dear, you _are_ a treasure! Doesn't he appreciate
+anything? Has he given you absolutely no symptom--not looked a look, not
+breathed a sigh?"
+
+"The case," said Fleda coldly, "is as I've had the honor to state it."
+
+"Then he's as big a donkey as his mother! But you know you must account
+for their delay," Mrs. Gereth remarked.
+
+"Why must I?" Fleda asked after a moment.
+
+"Because you were closeted with him here so long. You can't pretend at
+present, you know, not to have any art."
+
+The girl hesitated an instant; she was conscious that she must choose
+between two risks. She had had a secret and the secret was gone. Owen
+had one, which was still unbruised, and the greater risk now was that
+his mother should lay her formidable hand upon it. All Fleda's
+tenderness for him moved her to protect it; so she faced the smaller
+peril. "Their delay," she brought herself to reply, "may perhaps be
+Mona's doing. I mean because he has lost her the things."
+
+Mrs. Gereth jumped at this. "So that she'll break altogether if I keep
+them?"
+
+Fleda winced. "I've told you what I believe about that. She'll make
+scenes and conditions; she'll worry him. But she'll hold him fast;
+she'll never give him up."
+
+Mrs. Gereth turned it over. "Well, I'll keep them, to try her," she
+finally pronounced; at which Fleda felt quite sick, as if she had given
+everything and got nothing.
+
+
+
+
+XII
+
+
+"I must in common decency let him know that I've talked of the matter
+with you," she said to her hostess that evening. "What answer do you
+wish me to write to him?"
+
+"Write to him that you must see him again," said Mrs. Gereth.
+
+Fleda looked very blank. "What on earth am I to see him for?"
+
+"For anything you like."
+
+The girl would have been struck with the levity of this had she not
+already, in an hour, felt the extent of the change suddenly wrought in
+her commerce with her friend--wrought above all, to that friend's view,
+in her relation to the great issue. The effect of what had followed
+Owen's visit was to make that relation the very key of the crisis.
+Pressed upon her, goodness knew, the crisis had been, but it now seemed
+to put forth big, encircling arms--arms that squeezed till they hurt and
+she must cry out. It was as if everything at Ricks had been poured into
+a common receptacle, a public ferment of emotion and zeal, out of which
+it was ladled up to be tasted and talked about; everything at least but
+the one little treasure of knowledge that she kept back. She ought to
+have liked this, she reflected, because it meant sympathy, meant a
+closer union with the source of so much in her life that had been
+beautiful and renovating; but there were fine instincts in her that
+stood off. She had had--and it was not merely at this time--to recognize
+that there were things for which Mrs. Gereth's _flair_ was not so happy
+as for bargains and "marks." It wouldn't be happy now as to the best
+action on the knowledge she had just gained; yet as from this moment
+they were still more intimately together, so a person deeply in her debt
+would simply have to stand and meet what was to come. There were ways in
+which she could sharply incommode such a person, and not only with the
+best conscience in the world, but with a sort of brutality of good
+intentions. One of the straightest of these strokes, Fleda saw, would be
+the dance of delight over the mystery Mrs. Gereth had laid bare--the
+loud, lawful, tactless joy of the explorer leaping upon the strand. Like
+any other lucky discoverer, she would take possession of the fortunate
+island. She was nothing if not practical: almost the only thing she took
+account of in her young friend's soft secret was the excellent use she
+could make of it--a use so much to her taste that she refused to feel a
+hindrance in the quality of the material. Fleda put into Mrs. Gereth's
+answer to her question a good deal more meaning than it would have
+occurred to her a few hours before that she was prepared to put, but she
+had on the spot a foreboding that even so broad a hint would live to be
+bettered.
+
+"Do you suggest that I shall propose to him to come down here again?"
+she presently inquired.
+
+"Dear, no; say that you'll go up to town and meet him." It _was_
+bettered, the broad hint; and Fleda felt this to be still more the case
+when, returning to the subject before they went to bed, her companion
+said: "I make him over to you wholly, you know--to do what you please
+with. Deal with him in your own clever way--I ask no questions. All I
+ask is that you succeed."
+
+"That's charming," Fleda replied, "but it doesn't tell me a bit, you'll
+be so good as to consider, in what terms to write to him. It's not an
+answer from you to the message I was to give you."
+
+"The answer to his message is perfectly distinct: he shall have
+everything in the place the minute he'll say he'll marry you."
+
+"You really pretend," Fleda asked, "to think me capable of transmitting
+him that news?"
+
+"What else can I really pretend when you threaten so to cast me off if I
+speak the word myself?"
+
+"Oh, if _you_ speak the word!" the girl murmured very gravely, but happy
+at least to know that in this direction Mrs. Gereth confessed herself
+warned and helpless. Then she added: "How can I go on living with you on
+a footing of which I so deeply disapprove? Thinking as I do that you've
+despoiled him far more than is just or merciful--for if I expected you
+to take something, I didn't in the least expect you to take
+everything--how can I stay here without a sense that I'm backing you up
+in your cruelty and participating in your ill-gotten gains?" Fleda was
+determined that if she had the chill of her exposed and investigated
+state she would also have the convenience of it, and that if Mrs. Gereth
+popped in and out of the chamber of her soul she would at least return
+the freedom. "I shall quite hate, you know, in a day or two, every
+object that surrounds you--become blind to all the beauty and rarity
+that I formerly delighted in. Don't think me harsh; there's no use in my
+not being frank now. If I leave you, everything's at an end."
+
+Mrs. Gereth, however, was imperturbable: Fleda had to recognize that her
+advantage had become too real. "It's too beautiful, the way you care for
+him; it's music in my ears. Nothing else but such a passion could make
+you say such things; that's the way I should have been too, my dear. Why
+didn't you tell me sooner? I'd have gone right in for you; I never would
+have moved a candlestick. Don't stay with me if it torments you; don't,
+if you suffer, be where you see the old rubbish. Go up to town--go back
+for a little to your father's. It need be only for a little; two or
+three weeks will see us through. Your father will take you and be glad,
+if you only will make him understand what it's a question of--of your
+getting yourself off his hands forever. _I_'ll make him understand, you
+know, if you feel shy. I'd take you up myself, I'd go with you, to spare
+your being bored; we'd put up at an hotel and we might amuse ourselves a
+bit. We haven't had much pleasure since we met, have we? But of course
+that wouldn't suit our book. I should be a bugaboo to Owen--I should be
+fatally in the way. Your chance is there--your chance is to be alone;
+for God's sake, use it to the right end. If you're in want of money I've
+a little I can give you. But I ask no questions--not a question as small
+as your shoe!"
+
+She asked no questions, but she took the most extraordinary things for
+granted. Fleda felt this still more at the end of a couple of days. On
+the second of these our young lady wrote to Owen; her emotion had to a
+certain degree cleared itself--there was something she could say
+briefly. If she had given everything to Mrs. Gereth and as yet got
+nothing, so she had on the other hand quickly reacted--it took but a
+night--against the discouragement of her first check. Her desire to
+serve him was too passionate, the sense that he counted upon her too
+sweet: these things caught her up again and gave her a new patience and
+a new subtlety. It shouldn't really be for nothing that she had given so
+much; deep within her burned again the resolve to get something back. So
+what she wrote to Owen was simply that she had had a great scene with
+his mother, but that he must be patient and give her time. It was
+difficult, as they both had expected, but she was working her hardest
+for him. She had made an impression--she would do everything to follow
+it up. Meanwhile he must keep intensely quiet and take no other steps;
+he must only trust her and pray for her and believe in her perfect
+loyalty. She made no allusion whatever to Mona's attitude, nor to his
+not being, as regarded that young lady, master of the situation; but she
+said in a postscript, in reference to his mother, "Of course she wonders
+a good deal why your marriage doesn't take place." After the letter had
+gone she regretted having used the word "loyalty;" there were two or
+three milder terms which she might as well have employed. The answer she
+immediately received from Owen was a little note of which she met all
+the deficiencies by describing it to herself as pathetically simple, but
+which, to prove that Mrs. Gereth might ask as many questions as she
+liked, she at once made his mother read. He had no art with his pen, he
+had not even a good hand, and his letter, a short profession of friendly
+confidence, consisted of but a few familiar and colorless words of
+acknowledgment and assent. The gist of it was that he would certainly,
+since Miss Vetch recommended it, not hurry mamma too much. He would not
+for the present cause her to be approached by any one else, but he would
+nevertheless continue to hope that she would see she _must_ come round.
+"Of course, you know," he added, "she can't keep me waiting
+indefinitely. Please give her my love and tell her that. If it can be
+done peaceably I know you're just the one to do it."
+
+Fleda had awaited his rejoinder in deep suspense; such was her
+imagination of the possibility of his having, as she tacitly phrased it,
+let himself go on paper that when it arrived she was at first almost
+afraid to open it. There was indeed a distinct danger, for if he should
+take it into his head to write her love-letters the whole chance of
+aiding him would drop: she would have to return them, she would have to
+decline all further communication with him: it would be quite the end of
+the business. This imagination of Fleda's was a faculty that easily
+embraced all the heights and depths and extremities of things; that made
+a single mouthful, in particular, of any tragic or desperate necessity.
+She was perhaps at first just a trifle disappointed not to find in the
+note in question a syllable that strayed from the text; but the next
+moment she had risen to a point of view from which it presented itself
+as a production almost inspired in its simplicity. It was simple even
+for Owen, and she wondered what had given him the cue to be more so than
+usual. Then she saw how natures that are right just do the things that
+are right. He wasn't clever--his manner of writing showed it; but the
+cleverest man in England couldn't have had more the instinct that, under
+the circumstances, was the supremely happy one, the instinct of giving
+her something that would do beautifully to be shown to Mrs. Gereth. This
+was a kind of divination, for naturally he couldn't know the line Mrs.
+Gereth was taking. It was furthermore explained--and that was the most
+touching part of all--by his wish that she herself should notice how
+awfully well he was behaving. His very bareness called her attention to
+his virtue; and these were the exact fruits of her beautiful and
+terrible admonition. He was cleaving to Mona; he was doing his duty; he
+was making tremendously sure he should be without reproach.
+
+If Fleda handed this communication to her friend as a triumphant gage of
+the innocence of the young man's heart, her elation lived but a moment
+after Mrs. Gereth had pounced upon the tell-tale spot in it. "Why in the
+world, then," that lady cried, "does he still not breathe a breath about
+the day, the _day_, the day?" She repeated the word with a crescendo of
+superior acuteness; she proclaimed that nothing could be more marked
+than its absence--an absence that simply spoke volumes. What did it
+prove in fine but that she was producing the effect she had toiled
+for--that she had settled or was rapidly settling Mona?
+
+Such a challenge Fleda was obliged in some manner to take up. "You may
+be settling Mona," she returned with a smile, "but I can hardly regard
+it as sufficient evidence that you're settling Mona's lover."
+
+"Why not, with such a studied omission on his part to gloss over in any
+manner the painful tension existing between them--the painful tension
+that, under providence, I've been the means of bringing about? He gives
+you by his silence clear notice that his marriage is practically off."
+
+"He speaks to me of the only thing that concerns me. He gives me clear
+notice that he abates not one jot of his demand."
+
+"Well, then, let him take the only way to get it satisfied."
+
+Fleda had no need to ask again what such a way might be, nor was her
+support removed by the fine assurance with which Mrs. Gereth could make
+her argument wait upon her wish. These days, which dragged their length
+into a strange, uncomfortable fortnight, had already borne more
+testimony to that element than all the other time the two women had
+passed together. Our young lady had been at first far from measuring the
+whole of a feature that Owen himself would probably have described as
+her companion's "cheek." She lived now in a kind of bath of boldness,
+felt as if a fierce light poured in upon her from windows opened wide;
+and the singular part of the ordeal was that she couldn't protest
+against it fully without incurring, even to her own mind, some reproach
+of ingratitude, some charge of smallness. If Mrs. Gereth's apparent
+determination to hustle her into Owen's arms was accompanied with an air
+of holding her dignity rather cheap, this was after all only as a
+consequence of her being held in respect to some other attributes rather
+dear. It was a new version of the old story of being kicked upstairs.
+The wonderful woman was the same woman who, in the summer, at Poynton,
+had been so puzzled to conceive why a good-natured girl shouldn't have
+contributed more to the personal rout of the Brigstocks--shouldn't have
+been grateful even for the handsome puff of Fleda Vetch. Only her
+passion was keener now and her scruple more absent; the fight made a
+demand upon her, and her pugnacity had become one with her constant
+habit of using such weapons as she could pick up. She had no imagination
+about anybody's life save on the side she bumped against. Fleda was
+quite aware that she would have otherwise been a rare creature; but a
+rare creature was originally just what she had struck her as being. Mrs.
+Gereth had really no perception of anybody's nature--had only one
+question about persons: were they clever or stupid? To be clever meant
+to know the marks. Fleda knew them by direct inspiration, and a warm
+recognition of this had been her friend's tribute to her character. The
+girl had hours, now, of sombre wishing that she might never see anything
+good again: that kind of experience was evidently not an infallible
+source of peace. She would be more at peace in some vulgar little place
+that should owe its _cachet_ to Tottenham Court Road. There were nice
+strong horrors in West Kensington; it was as if they beckoned her and
+wooed her back to them. She had a relaxed recollection of Waterbath; and
+of her reasons for staying on at Ricks the force was rapidly ebbing. One
+of these was her pledge to Owen--her vow to press his mother close; the
+other was the fact that of the two discomforts, that of being prodded by
+Mrs. Gereth and that of appearing to run after somebody else, the former
+remained for a while the more endurable.
+
+As the days passed, however, it became plainer to Fleda that her only
+chance of success would be in lending herself to this low appearance.
+Then, moreover, at last, her nerves settling the question, the choice
+was simply imposed by the violence done to her taste--to whatever was
+left of that high principle, at least, after the free and reckless
+meeting, for months, of great drafts and appeals. It was all very well
+to try to evade discussion: Owen Gereth was looking to her for a
+struggle, and it wasn't a bit of a struggle to be disgusted and dumb.
+She was on too strange a footing--that of having presented an ultimatum
+and having had it torn up in her face. In such a case as that the envoy
+always departed; he never sat gaping and dawdling before the city. Mrs.
+Gereth, every morning, looked publicly into "The Morning Post," the only
+newspaper she received; and every morning she treated the blankness of
+that journal as fresh evidence that everything was "off." What did the
+Post exist for but to tell you your children were wretchedly
+married?--so that if such a source of misery was dry, what could you do
+but infer that for once you had miraculously escaped? She almost taunted
+Fleda with supineness in not getting something out of somebody--in the
+same breath indeed in which she drenched her with a kind of appreciation
+more onerous to the girl than blame. Mrs. Gereth herself had of course
+washed her hands of the matter; but Fleda knew people who knew Mona and
+would be sure to be in her confidence--inconceivable people who admired
+her and had the privilege of Waterbath. What was the use therefore of
+being the most natural and the easiest of letter-writers, if no sort of
+side-light--in some pretext for correspondence--was, by a brilliant
+creature, to be got out of such barbarians? Fleda was not only a
+brilliant creature, but she heard herself commended in these days for
+new and strange attractions; she figured suddenly, in the queer
+conversations of Ricks, as a distinguished, almost as a dangerous
+beauty. That retouching of her hair and dress in which her friend had
+impulsively indulged on a first glimpse of her secret was by implication
+very frequently repeated. She had the sense not only of being advertised
+and offered, but of being counseled and enlightened in ways that she
+scarcely understood--arts obscure even to a poor girl who had had, in
+good society and motherless poverty, to look straight at realities and
+fill out blanks.
+
+These arts, when Mrs. Gereth's spirits were high, were handled with a
+brave and cynical humor with which Fleda's fancy could keep no step:
+they left our young lady wondering what on earth her companion wanted
+her to do. "I want you to cut in!"--that was Mrs. Gereth's familiar and
+comprehensive phrase for the course she prescribed. She challenged again
+and again Fleda's picture, as she called it (though the sketch was too
+slight to deserve the name), of the indifference to which a prior
+attachment had committed the proprietor of Poynton. "Do you mean to say
+that, Mona or no Mona, he could see you that way, day after day, and not
+have the ordinary feelings of a man?" This was the sort of interrogation
+to which Fleda was fitfully and irrelevantly treated. She had grown
+almost used to the refrain. "Do you mean to say that when, the other
+day, one had quite made you over to him, the great gawk, and he was, on
+this very spot, utterly alone with you--?" The poor girl at this point
+never left any doubt of what she meant to say, but Mrs. Gereth could be
+trusted to break out in another place and at another time. At last Fleda
+wrote to her father that he must take her in for a while; and when, to
+her companion's delight, she returned to London, that lady went with her
+to the station and wafted her on her way. "The Morning Post" had been
+delivered as they left the house, and Mrs. Gereth had brought it with
+her for the traveler, who never spent a penny on a newspaper. On the
+platform, however, when this young person was ticketed, labeled, and
+seated, she opened it at the window of the carriage, exclaiming as
+usual, after looking into it a moment: "Nothing--nothing--nothing: don't
+tell _me_!" Every day that there was nothing was a nail in the coffin of
+the marriage. An instant later the train was off, but, moving quickly
+beside it, while Fleda leaned inscrutably forth, Mrs. Gereth grasped her
+friend's hand and looked up with wonderful eyes. "Only let yourself go,
+darling--only let yourself go!"
+
+
+
+
+XIII
+
+
+That she desired to ask no questions Mrs. Gereth conscientiously proved
+by closing her lips tight after Fleda had gone to London. No letter from
+Ricks arrived at West Kensington, and Fleda, with nothing to communicate
+that could be to the taste of either party, forbore to open a
+correspondence. If her heart had been less heavy she might have been
+amused to perceive how much rope this reticence of Ricks seemed to
+signify to her that she could take. She had at all events no good news
+for her friend save in the sense that her silence was not bad news. She
+was not yet in a position to write that she had "cut in;" but neither,
+on the other hand, had she gathered material for announcing that Mona
+was undisseverable from her prey. She had made no use of the pen so
+glorified by Mrs. Gereth to wake up the echoes of Waterbath; she had
+sedulously abstained from inquiring what in any quarter, far or near,
+was said or suggested or supposed. She only spent a matutinal penny on
+"The Morning Post;" she only saw, on each occasion, that that inspired
+sheet had as little to say about the imminence as about the abandonment
+of certain nuptials. It was at the same time obvious that Mrs. Gereth
+triumphed on these occasions much more than she trembled, and that with
+a few such triumphs repeated she would cease to tremble at all. What was
+most manifest, however, was that she had had a rare preconception of the
+circumstances that would have ministered, had Fleda been disposed, to
+the girl's cutting in. It was brought home to Fleda that these
+circumstances would have particularly favored intervention; she was
+quickly forced to do them a secret justice. One of the effects of her
+intimacy with Mrs. Gereth was that she had quite lost all sense of
+intimacy with any one else. The lady of Ricks had made a desert around
+her, possessing and absorbing her so utterly that other partakers had
+fallen away. Hadn't she been admonished, months before, that people
+considered they had lost her and were reconciled on the whole to the
+privation? Her present position in the great unconscious town defined
+itself as obscure: she regarded it at any rate with eyes suspicious of
+that lesson. She neither wrote notes nor received them; she indulged in
+no reminders nor knocked at any doors; she wandered vaguely in the
+western wilderness or cultivated shy forms of that "household art" for
+which she had had a respect before tasting the bitter tree of knowledge.
+Her only plan was to be as quiet as a mouse, and when she failed in the
+attempt to lose herself in the flat suburb she felt like a lonely fly
+crawling over a dusty chart.
+
+How had Mrs. Gereth known in advance that if she had chosen to be "vile"
+(that was what Fleda called it) everything would happen to help
+her?--especially the way her poor father, after breakfast, doddered off
+to his club, showing seventy when he was really fifty-seven, and leaving
+her richly alone for the day. He came back about midnight, looking at
+her very hard and not risking long words--only making her feel by
+inimitable touches that the presence of his family compelled him to
+alter all his hours. She had in their common sitting-room the company of
+the objects he was fond of saying that he had collected--objects, shabby
+and battered, of a sort that appealed little to his daughter: old
+brandy-flasks and match-boxes, old calendars and hand-books, intermixed
+with an assortment of pen-wipers and ash-trays, a harvest he had
+gathered in from penny bazaars. He was blandly unconscious of that side
+of Fleda's nature which had endeared her to Mrs. Gereth, and she had
+often heard him wish to goodness there was something striking she cared
+for. Why didn't she try collecting something?--it didn't matter what.
+She would find it gave an interest to life, and there was no end of
+little curiosities one could easily pick up. He was conscious of having
+a taste for fine things which his children had unfortunately not
+inherited. This indicated the limits of their acquaintance with
+him--limits which, as Fleda was now sharply aware, could only leave him
+to wonder what the mischief she was there for. As she herself echoed
+this question to the letter she was not in a position to clear up the
+mystery. She couldn't have given a name to her errand in town or
+explained it save by saying that she had had to get away from Ricks. It
+was intensely provisional, but what was to come next? Nothing could come
+next but a deeper anxiety. She had neither a home nor an
+outlook--nothing in all the wide world but a feeling of suspense.
+
+Of course she had her duty--her duty to Owen--a definite undertaking,
+reaffirmed, after his visit to Ricks, under her hand and seal; but there
+was no sense of possession attached to that; there was only a horrible
+sense of privation. She had quite moved from under Mrs. Gereth's wide
+wing; and now that she was really among the pen-wipers and ash-trays she
+was swept, at the thought of all the beauty she had forsworn, by short,
+wild gusts of despair. If her friend should really keep the spoils she
+would never return to her. If that friend should on the other hand part
+with them, what on earth would there be to return to? The chill struck
+deep as Fleda thought of the mistress of Ricks reduced, in vulgar
+parlance, to what she had on her back: there was nothing to which she
+could compare such an image but her idea of Marie Antoinette in the
+Conciergerie, or perhaps the vision of some tropical bird, the creature
+of hot, dense forests, dropped on a frozen moor to pick up a living. The
+mind's eye could see Mrs. Gereth, indeed, only in her thick, colored
+air; it took all the light of her treasures to make her concrete and
+distinct. She loomed for a moment, in any mere house, gaunt and
+unnatural; then she vanished as if she had suddenly sunk into a
+quicksand. Fleda lost herself in the rich fancy of how, if _she_ were
+mistress of Poynton, a whole province, as an abode, should be assigned
+there to the august queen-mother. She would have returned from her
+campaign with her baggage-train and her loot, and the palace would unbar
+its shutters and the morning flash back from its halls. In the event of
+a surrender the poor woman would never again be able to begin to
+collect: she was now too old and too moneyless, and times were altered
+and good things impossibly dear. A surrender, furthermore, to any
+daughter-in-law save an oddity like Mona needn't at all be an abdication
+in fact; any other fairly nice girl whom Owen should have taken it into
+his head to marry would have been positively glad to have, for the
+museum, a custodian who was a walking catalogue and who understood
+beyond any one in England the hygiene and temperament of rare pieces. A
+fairly nice girl would somehow be away a good deal and would at such
+times count it a blessing to feel Mrs. Gereth at her post.
+
+Fleda had fully recognized, the first days, that, quite apart from any
+question of letting Owen know where she was, it would be a charity to
+give him some sign: it would be weak, it would be ugly, to be diverted
+from that kindness by the fact that Mrs. Gereth had attached a tinkling
+bell to it. A frank relation with him was only superficially
+discredited: she ought for his own sake to send him a word of cheer. So
+she repeatedly reasoned, but she as repeatedly delayed performance: if
+her general plan had been to be as still as a mouse, an interview like
+the interview at Ricks would be an odd contribution to that ideal.
+Therefore with a confused preference of practice to theory she let the
+days go by; she felt that nothing was so imperative as the gain of
+precious time. She shouldn't be able to stay with her father forever,
+but she might now reap the benefit of having married her sister.
+Maggie's union had been built up round a small spare room. Concealed in
+this apartment she might try to paint again, and abetted by the grateful
+Maggie--for Maggie at least was grateful--she might try to dispose of
+her work. She had not indeed struggled with a brush since her visit to
+Waterbath, where the sight of the family splotches had put her immensely
+on her guard. Poynton moreover had been an impossible place for
+producing; no active art could flourish there but a Buddhistic
+contemplation. It had stripped its mistress clean of all feeble
+accomplishments; her hands were imbrued neither with ink nor with
+water-color. Close to Fleda's present abode was the little shop of a man
+who mounted and framed pictures and desolately dealt in artists'
+materials. She sometimes paused before it to look at a couple of shy
+experiments for which its dull window constituted publicity, small
+studies placed there for sale and full of warning to a young lady
+without fortune and without talent. Some such young lady had brought
+them forth in sorrow; some such young lady, to see if they had been
+snapped up, had passed and repassed as helplessly as she herself was
+doing. They never had been, they never would be, snapped up; yet they
+were quite above the actual attainment of some other young ladies. It
+was a matter of discipline with Fleda to take an occasional lesson from
+them; besides which, when she now quitted the house, she had to look for
+reasons after she was out. The only place to find them was in the
+shop-windows. They made her feel like a servant-girl taking her
+"afternoon," but that didn't signify: perhaps some day she would
+resemble such a person still more closely. This continued a fortnight,
+at the end of which the feeling was suddenly dissipated. She had stopped
+as usual in the presence of the little pictures; then, as she turned
+away, she had found herself face to face with Owen Gereth.
+
+At the sight of him two fresh waves passed quickly across her heart, one
+at the heels of the other. The first was an instant perception that this
+encounter was not an accident; the second a consciousness as prompt that
+the best place for it was the street. She knew before he told her that
+he had been to see her, and the next thing she knew was that he had had
+information from his mother. Her mind grasped these things while he said
+with a smile: "I saw only your back, but I was sure. I was over the way.
+I've been at your house."
+
+"How came you to know my house?" Fleda asked.
+
+"I like that!" he laughed. "How came you not to let me know that you
+were there?"
+
+Fleda, at this, thought it best also to laugh. "Since I didn't let you
+know, why did you come?"
+
+"Oh, I say!" cried Owen. "Don't add insult to injury. Why in the world
+didn't you let me know? I came because I want awfully to see you." He
+hesitated, then he added: "I got the tip from mother: she has written to
+me--fancy!"
+
+They still stood where they had met. Fleda's instinct was to keep him
+there; the more so that she could already see him take for granted that
+they would immediately proceed together to her door. He rose before her
+with a different air: he looked less ruffled and bruised than he had
+done at Ricks, he showed a recovered freshness. Perhaps, however, this
+was only because she had scarcely seen him at all as yet in London form,
+as he would have called it--"turned out" as he was turned out in town.
+In the country, heated with the chase and splashed with the mire, he had
+always rather reminded her of a picturesque peasant in national costume.
+This costume, as Owen wore it, varied from day to day; it was as copious
+as the wardrobe of an actor; but it never failed of suggestions of the
+earth and the weather, the hedges and the ditches, the beasts and the
+birds. There had been days when it struck her as all nature in one pair
+of boots. It didn't make him now another person that he was delicately
+dressed, shining and splendid--that he had a higher hat and light gloves
+with black seams, and a spearlike umbrella; but it made him, she soon
+decided, really handsomer, and that in turn gave him--for she never
+could think of him, or indeed of some other things, without the aid of
+his vocabulary--a tremendous pull. Yes, this was for the moment, as he
+looked at her, the great fact of their situation--his pull was
+tremendous. She tried to keep the acknowledgement of it from trembling
+in her voice as she said to him with more surprise than she really felt:
+"You've then reopened relations with her?"
+
+"It's she who has reopened them with me. I got her letter this morning.
+She told me you were here and that she wished me to know it. She didn't
+say much; she just gave me your address. I wrote her back, you know,
+'Thanks no end. Shall go to-day.' So we _are_ in correspondence again,
+aren't we? She means of course that you've something to tell me from
+her, eh? But if you have, why haven't you let a fellow know?" He waited
+for no answer to this, he had so much to say. "At your house, just now,
+they told me how long you've been here. Haven't you known all the while
+that I'm counting the hours? I left a word for you--that I would be back
+at six; but I'm awfully glad to have caught you so much sooner. You
+don't mean to say you're not going home!" he exclaimed in dismay. "The
+young woman there told me you went out early."
+
+"I've been out a very short time," said Fleda, who had hung back with
+the general purpose of making things difficult for him. The street would
+make them difficult; she could trust the street. She reflected in time,
+however, that to betray to him she was afraid to admit him would give
+him more a feeling of facility than of anything else. She moved on with
+him after a moment, letting him direct their course to her door, which
+was only round a corner: she considered as they went that it might not
+prove such a stroke to have been in London so long and yet not to have
+called him. She desired he should feel she was perfectly simple with
+him, and there was no simplicity in that. None the less, on the steps of
+the house, though she had a key, she rang the bell; and while they
+waited together and she averted her face she looked straight into the
+depths of what Mrs. Gereth had meant by giving him the "tip." This had
+been perfidious, had been monstrous of Mrs. Gereth, and Fleda wondered
+if her letter had contained only what Owen repeated.
+
+
+
+
+XIV
+
+
+When Owen and Fleda were in her father's little place and, among the
+brandy-flasks and pen-wipers, still more disconcerted and divided, the
+girl--to do something, though it would make him stay--had ordered tea,
+he put the letter before her quite as if he had guessed her thought.
+"She's still a bit nasty--fancy!" He handed her the scrap of a note
+which he had pulled out of his pocket and from its envelope. "Fleda
+Vetch," it ran, "is at 10 Raphael Road, West Kensington. Go to see her,
+and try, for God's sake, to cultivate a glimmer of intelligence." When
+in handing it back to him she took in his face she saw that its
+heightened color was the effect of his watching her read such an
+allusion to his want of wit. Fleda knew what it was an allusion to, and
+his pathetic air of having received this buffet, tall and fine and kind
+as he stood there, made her conscious of not quite concealing her
+knowledge. For a minute she was kept silent by an angered sense of the
+trick that had been played her. It was a trick because Fleda considered
+there had been a covenant; and the trick consisted of Mrs. Gereth's
+having broken the spirit of their agreement while conforming in a
+fashion to the letter. Under the girl's menace of a complete rupture she
+had been afraid to make of her secret the use she itched to make; but in
+the course of these days of separation she had gathered pluck to hazard
+an indirect betrayal. Fleda measured her hesitations and the impulse
+which she had finally obeyed and which the continued procrastination of
+Waterbath had encouraged, had at last made irresistible. If in her
+high-handed manner of playing their game she had not named the thing
+hidden, she had named the hiding-place. It was over the sense of this
+wrong that Fleda's lips closed tight: she was afraid of aggravating her
+case by some ejaculation that would make Owen prick up his ears. A
+great, quick effort, however, helped her to avoid the danger; with her
+constant idea of keeping cool and repressing a visible flutter, she
+found herself able to choose her words. Meanwhile he had exclaimed with
+his uncomfortable laugh: "That's a good one for me, Miss Vetch, isn't
+it?"
+
+"Of course you know by this time that your mother's very sharp," said
+Fleda.
+
+"I think I can understand well enough when I know what's to be
+understood," the young man asserted. "But I hope you won't mind my
+saying that you've kept me pretty well in the dark about that. I've been
+waiting, waiting, waiting; so much has depended on your news. If you've
+been working for me I'm afraid it has been a thankless job. Can't she
+say what she'll do, one way or the other? I can't tell in the least
+where I am, you know. I haven't really learnt from you, since I saw you
+there, where _she_ is. You wrote me to be patient, and upon my soul I
+have been. But I'm afraid you don't quite realize what I'm to be patient
+with. At Waterbath, don't you know? I've simply to account and answer
+for the damned things. Mona looks at me and waits, and I, hang it, I
+look at you and do the same." Fleda had gathered fuller confidence as he
+continued; so plain was it that she had succeeded in not dropping into
+his mind the spark that might produce the glimmer invoked by his mother.
+But even this fine assurance gave a start when, after an appealing
+pause, he went on: "I hope, you know, that after all you're not keeping
+anything back from me."
+
+In the full face of what she was keeping back such a hope could only
+make her wince; but she was prompt with her explanations in proportion
+as she felt they failed to meet him. The smutty maid came in with
+tea-things, and Fleda, moving several objects, eagerly accepted the
+diversion of arranging a place for them on one of the tables. "I've been
+trying to break your mother down because it has seemed there may be some
+chance of it. That's why I've let you go on expecting it. She's too
+proud to veer round all at once, but I think I speak correctly in saying
+that I've made an impression."
+
+In spite of ordering tea she had not invited him to sit down; she
+herself made a point of standing. He hovered by the window that looked
+into Raphael Road; she kept at the other side of the room; the stunted
+slavey, gazing wide-eyed at the beautiful gentleman and either stupidly
+or cunningly bringing but one thing at a time, came and went between the
+tea-tray and the open door.
+
+"You pegged at her so hard?" Owen asked.
+
+"I explained to her fully your position and put before her much more
+strongly than she liked what seemed to me her absolute duty."
+
+Owen waited a little. "And having done that, you departed?"
+
+Fleda felt the full need of giving a reason for her departure; but at
+first she only said with cheerful frankness: "I departed."
+
+Her companion again looked at her in silence. "I thought you had gone to
+her for several months."
+
+"Well," Fleda replied, "I couldn't stay. I didn't like it. I didn't like
+it at all--I couldn't bear it," she went on. "In the midst of those
+trophies of Poynton, living with them, touching them, using them, I felt
+as if I were backing her up. As I was not a bit of an accomplice, as I
+hate what she has done, I didn't want to be, even to the extent of the
+mere look of it--what is it you call such people?--an accessory after
+the fact." There was something she kept back so rigidly that the joy of
+uttering the rest was double. She felt the sharpest need of giving him
+all the other truth. There was a matter as to which she had deceived
+him, and there was a matter as to which she had deceived Mrs. Gereth,
+but her lack of pleasure in deception as such came home to her now. She
+busied herself with the tea and, to extend the occupation, cleared the
+table still more, spreading out the coarse cups and saucers and the
+vulgar little plates. She was aware that she produced more confusion
+than symmetry, but she was also aware that she was violently nervous.
+Owen tried to help her with something: this made rather for disorder.
+"My reason for not writing to you," she pursued, "was simply that I was
+hoping to hear more from Ricks. I've waited from day to day for that."
+
+"But you've heard nothing?"
+
+"Not a word."
+
+"Then what I understand," said Owen, "is that, practically, you and
+Mummy have quarreled. And you've done it--I mean you personally--for
+_me_."
+
+"Oh no, we haven't quarreled a bit!" Then with a smile: "We've only
+diverged."
+
+"You've diverged uncommonly far!"--Owen laughed back. Fleda, with her
+hideous crockery and her father's collections, could conceive that these
+objects, to her visitor's perception even more strongly than to her own,
+measured the length of the swing from Poynton and Ricks; she was aware
+too that her high standards figured vividly enough even to Owen's
+simplicity to make him reflect that West Kensington was a tremendous
+fall. If she had fallen it was because she had acted for him. She was
+all the more content he should thus see she _had_ acted, as the cost of
+it, in his eyes, was none of her own showing. "What seems to have
+happened," he exclaimed, "is that you've had a row with her and yet not
+moved her!"
+
+Fleda considered a moment; she was full of the impression that,
+notwithstanding her scant help, he saw his way clearer than he had seen
+it at Ricks. He might mean many things; and what if the many should mean
+in their turn only one? "The difficulty is, you understand, that she
+doesn't really see into your situation." She hesitated. "She doesn't
+comprehend why your marriage hasn't yet taken place."
+
+Owen stared. "Why, for the reason I told you: that Mona won't take
+another step till mother has given full satisfaction. Everything must be
+there. You see, everything _was_ there the day of that fatal visit."
+
+"Yes, that's what I understood from you at Ricks," said Fleda; "but I
+haven't repeated it to your mother." She had hated, at Ricks, to talk
+with him about Mona, but now that scruple was swept away. If he could
+speak of Mona's visit as fatal, she need at least not pretend not to
+notice it. It made all the difference that she had tried to assist him
+and had failed: to give him any faith in her service she must give him
+all her reasons but one. She must give him, in other words, with a
+corresponding omission, all Mrs. Gereth's. "You can easily see that, as
+she dislikes your marriage, anything that may seem to make it less
+certain works in her favor. Without my telling her, she has suspicions
+and views that are simply suggested by your delay. Therefore it didn't
+seem to me right to make them worse. By holding off long enough, she
+thinks she may put an end to your engagement. If Mona's waiting, she
+believes she may at last tire Mona out." That, in all conscience, Fleda
+felt was lucid enough.
+
+So the young man, following her attentively, appeared equally to feel.
+"So far as that goes," he promptly declared, "she _has_ at last tired
+Mona out." He uttered the words with a strange approach to hilarity.
+
+Fleda's surprise at this aberration left her a moment looking at him.
+"Do you mean your marriage is off?"
+
+Owen answered with a kind of gay despair. "God knows, Miss Vetch, where
+or when or what my marriage is! If it isn't 'off,' it certainly, at the
+point things have reached, isn't _on_. I haven't seen Mona for ten days,
+and for a week I haven't heard from her. She used to write me every
+week, don't you know? She won't budge from Waterbath, and I haven't
+budged from town." Then he suddenly broke out: "If she _does_ chuck me,
+will mother come round?"
+
+Fleda, at this, felt that her heroism had come to its real test--felt
+that in telling him the truth she should effectively raise a hand to
+push his impediment out of the way. Was the knowledge that such a motion
+would probably dispose forever of Mona capable of yielding to the
+conception of still giving her every chance she was entitled to? That
+conception was heroic, but at the same moment it reminded Fleda of the
+place it had held in her plan, she was also reminded of the not less
+urgent claim of the truth. Ah, the truth--there was a limit to the
+impunity with which one could juggle with it! Wasn't what she had most
+to remember the fact that Owen had a right to his property and that he
+had also her vow to stand by him in the effort to recover it? How did
+she stand by him if she hid from him the single way to recover it of
+which she was quite sure? For an instant that seemed to her the fullest
+of her life she debated. "Yes," she said at last, "if your marriage is
+really abandoned, she will give up everything she has taken."
+
+"That's just what makes Mona hesitate!" Owen honestly exclaimed. "I mean
+the idea that I shall get back the things only if she gives me up."
+
+Fleda thought an instant. "You mean makes her hesitate to keep you--not
+hesitate to renounce you?"
+
+Owen looked a trifle bewildered. "She doesn't see the use of hanging on,
+as I haven't even yet put the matter into legal hands. She's awfully
+keen about that, and awfully disgusted that I don't. She says it's the
+only real way, and she thinks I'm afraid to take it. She has given me
+time and then has given me again more. She says I give Mummy too much.
+She says I'm a muff to go pottering on. That's why she's drawing off so
+hard, don't you see?"
+
+"I don't see very clearly. Of course you must give her what you offered
+her; of course you must keep your word. There must be no mistake about
+_that_!" the girl declared.
+
+Owen's bewilderment visibly increased. "You think, then, as she does,
+that I _must_ send down the police?"
+
+The mixture of reluctance and dependence in this made her feel how much
+she was failing him. She had the sense of "chucking" him too. "No, no,
+not yet!" she said, though she had really no other and no better course
+to prescribe. "Doesn't it occur to you," she asked in a moment, "that if
+Mona is, as you say, drawing away, she may have, in doing so, a very
+high motive? She knows the immense value of all the objects detained by
+your mother, and to restore the spoils of Poynton she is ready--is that
+it!--to make a sacrifice. The sacrifice is that of an engagement she had
+entered upon with joy."
+
+Owen had been blank a moment before, but he followed this argument with
+success--a success so immediate that it enabled him to produce with
+decision: "Ah, she's not that sort! She wants them herself," he added;
+"she wants to feel they're hers; she doesn't care whether I have them or
+not! And if she can't get them she doesn't want _me_. If she can't get
+them she doesn't want anything at all."
+
+This was categoric; Fleda drank it in. "She takes such an interest in
+them?"
+
+"So it appears."
+
+"So much that they're _all_, and that she can let everything else
+absolutely depend upon them?"
+
+Owen weighed her question as if he felt the responsibility of his
+answer. But that answer came in a moment, and, as Fleda could see, out
+of a wealth of memory. "She never wanted them particularly till they
+seemed to be in danger. Now she has an idea about them; and when she
+gets hold of an idea--Oh dear me!" He broke off, pausing and looking
+away as with a sense of the futility of expression: it was the first
+time Fleda had ever heard him explain a matter so pointedly or embark at
+all on a generalization. It was striking, it was touching to her, as he
+faltered, that he appeared but half capable of floating his
+generalization to the end. The girl, however, was so far competent to
+fill up his blank as that she had divined, on the occasion of Mona's
+visit to Poynton, what would happen in the event of the accident at
+which he glanced. She had there with her own eyes seen Owen's betrothed
+get hold of an idea. "I say, you know, _do_ give me some tea!" he went
+on irrelevantly and familiarly.
+
+Her profuse preparations had all this time had no sequel, and, with a
+laugh that she felt to be awkward, she hastily complied with his
+request. "It's sure to be horrid," she said; "we don't have at all good
+things." She offered him also bread and butter, of which he partook,
+holding his cup and saucer in his other hand and moving slowly about the
+room. She poured herself a cup, but not to take it; after which, without
+wanting it, she began to eat a small stale biscuit. She was struck with
+the extinction of the unwillingness she had felt at Ricks to contribute
+to the bandying between them of poor Mona's name; and under this
+influence she presently resumed: "Am I to understand that she engaged
+herself to marry you without caring for you?"
+
+Owen looked out into Raphael Road. "She _did_ care for me awfully. But
+she can't stand the strain."
+
+"The strain of what?"
+
+"Why, of the whole wretched thing."
+
+"The whole thing has indeed been wretched, and I can easily conceive its
+effect upon her," Fleda said.
+
+Her visitor turned sharp round. "You _can_?" There was a light in his
+strong stare. "You can understand it's spoiling her temper and making
+her come down on _me_? She behaves as if I were of no use to her at
+all!"
+
+Fleda hesitated. "She's rankling under the sense of her wrong."
+
+"Well, was it _I_, pray, who perpetrated the wrong? Ain't I doing what I
+can to get the thing arranged?"
+
+The ring of his question made his anger at Mona almost resemble for a
+minute an anger at Fleda; and this resemblance in turn caused our young
+lady to observe how handsome he looked when he spoke, for the first time
+in her hearing, with that degree of heat, and used, also for the first
+time, such a term as "perpetrated." In addition, his challenge rendered
+still more vivid to her the mere flimsiness of her own aid. "Yes, you've
+been perfect," she said. "You've had a most difficult part. You've _had_
+to show tact and patience, as well as firmness, with your mother, and
+you've strikingly shown them. It's I who, quite unintentionally, have
+deceived you. I haven't helped you at all to your remedy."
+
+"Well, you wouldn't at all events have ceased to like me, would you?"
+Owen demanded. It evidently mattered to him to know if she really
+justified Mona. "I mean of course if you _had_ liked me--liked me as
+_she_ liked me," he explained.
+
+Fleda looked this inquiry in the face only long enough to recognize
+that, in her embarrassment, she must take instant refuge in a superior
+one. "I can answer that better if I know how kind to her you've been.
+_Have_ you been kind to her?" she asked as simply as she could.
+
+"Why, rather, Miss Vetch!" Owen declared. "I've done every blessed thing
+she wished. I rushed down to Ricks, as you saw, with fire and sword, and
+the day after that I went to see her at Waterbath." At this point he
+checked himself, though it was just the point at which her interest
+deepened. A different look had come into his face as he put down his
+empty teacup. "But why should I tell you such things, for any good it
+does me? I gather that you've no suggestion to make me now except that I
+shall request my solicitor to act. _Shall_ I request him to act?"
+
+Fleda scarcely heard his words; something new had suddenly come into her
+mind. "When you went to Waterbath after seeing me," she asked, "did you
+tell her all about that?"
+
+Owen looked conscious. "All about it?"
+
+"That you had had a long talk with me, without seeing your mother at
+all?"
+
+"Oh yes, I told her exactly, and that you had been most awfully kind,
+and that I had placed the whole thing in your hands."
+
+Fleda was silent a moment. "Perhaps that displeased her," she at last
+suggested.
+
+"It displeased her fearfully," said Owen, looking very queer.
+
+"Fearfully?" broke from the girl. Somehow, at the word, she was
+startled.
+
+"She wanted to know what right you had to meddle. She said you were not
+honest."
+
+"Oh!" Fleda cried, with a long wail. Then she controlled herself. "I
+see."
+
+"She abused you, and I defended you. She denounced you--"
+
+She checked him with a gesture. "Don't tell me what she did!" She had
+colored up to her eyes, where, as with the effect of a blow in the face,
+she quickly felt the tears gathering. It was a sudden drop in her great
+flight, a shock to her attempt to watch over what Mona was entitled to.
+While she had been straining her very soul in this attempt, the object
+of her magnanimity had been pronouncing her "not honest." She took it
+all in, however, and after an instant was able to speak with a smile.
+She would not have been surprised to learn, indeed, that her smile was
+strange. "You had said a while ago that your mother and I quarreled
+about you. It's much more true that you and Mona have quarreled about
+_me_."
+
+Owen hesitated, but at last he brought it out. "What I mean to say is,
+don't you know, that Mona, if you don't mind my saying so, has taken it
+into her head to be jealous."
+
+"I see," said Fleda. "Well, I dare say our conferences have looked very
+odd."
+
+"They've looked very beautiful, and they've been very beautiful. Oh,
+I've told her the sort you are!" the young man pursued.
+
+"That of course hasn't made her love me better."
+
+"No, nor love me," said Owen. "Of course, you know, she says she loves
+me."
+
+"And do you say you love her?"
+
+"I say nothing else--I say it all the while. I said it the other day a
+dozen times." Fleda made no immediate rejoinder to this, and before she
+could choose one he repeated his question of a moment before. "_Am_ I to
+tell my solicitor to act?"
+
+She had at that moment turned away from this solution, precisely because
+she saw in it the great chance of her secret. If she should determine
+him to adopt it she might put out her hand and take him. It would shut
+in Mrs. Gereth's face the open door of surrender: she would flare up and
+fight, flying the flag of a passionate, an heroic defense. The case
+would obviously go against her, but the proceedings would last longer
+than Mona's patience or Owen's propriety. With a formal rupture he would
+be at large; and she had only to tighten her fingers round the string
+that would raise the curtain on that scene. "You tell me you 'say' you
+love her, but is there nothing more in it than your saying so? You
+wouldn't say so, would you, if it's not true? What in the world has
+become, in so short a time, of the affection that led to your
+engagement?"
+
+"The deuce knows what has become of it, Miss Vetch!" Owen cried. "It
+seemed all to go to pot as this horrid struggle came on." He was close
+to her now, and, with his face lighted again by the relief of it, he
+looked all his helpless history into her eyes. "As I saw you and noticed
+you more, as I knew you better and better, I felt less and less--I
+couldn't help it--about anything or any one else. I wished I had known
+you sooner--I knew I should have liked you better than any one in the
+world. But it wasn't you who made the difference," he eagerly continued,
+"and I was awfully determined to stick to Mona to the death. It was she
+herself who made it, upon my soul, by the state she got into, the way
+she sulked, the way she took things, and the way she let me have it! She
+destroyed our prospects and our happiness, upon my honor. She made just
+the same smash of them as if she had kicked over that tea-table. She
+wanted to know all the while what was passing between us, between you
+and me; and she wouldn't take my solemn assurance that nothing was
+passing but what might have directly passed between me and old Mummy.
+She said a pretty girl like you was a nice old Mummy for me, and, if
+you'll believe it, she never called you anything else but that. I'll be
+hanged if I haven't been good, haven't I? I haven't breathed a breath of
+any sort to you, have I? You'd have been down on me hard if I had,
+wouldn't you? You're down on me pretty hard as it is, I think, aren't
+you? But I don't care what you say now, or what Mona says, either, or a
+single rap what any one says: she has given me at last, by her
+confounded behavior, a right to speak out, to utter the way I feel about
+it. The way I feel about it, don't you know, is that it had all better
+come to an end. You ask me if I don't love her, and I suppose it's
+natural enough you should. But you ask it at the very moment I'm half
+mad to say to you that there's only one person on the whole earth I
+_really_ love, and that that person--" Here Owen pulled up short, and
+Fleda wondered if it was from the effect of his perceiving, through the
+closed door, the sound of steps and voices on the landing of the stairs.
+She had caught this sound herself with surprise and a vague uneasiness:
+it was not an hour at which her father ever came in, and there was no
+present reason why she should have a visitor. She had a fear, which
+after a few seconds deepened: a visitor was at hand; the visitor would
+be simply Mrs. Gereth. That lady wished for a near view of the
+consequence of her note to Owen. Fleda straightened herself with the
+instant thought that if this was what Mrs. Gereth desired Mrs. Gereth
+should have it in a form not to be mistaken. Owen's pause was the matter
+of a moment, but during that moment our young couple stood with their
+eyes holding each other's eyes and their ears catching the suggestion,
+still through the door, of a murmured conference in the hall. Fleda had
+begun to make the movement to cut it short when Owen stopped her with a
+grasp of her arm. "You're surely able to guess," he said, with his voice
+dropped and her arm pressed as she had never known such a drop or such a
+pressure--"you're surely able to guess the one person on earth I love?"
+
+The handle of the door turned, and Fleda had only time to jerk at him:
+"Your mother!"
+
+The door opened, and the smutty maid, edging in, announced "Mrs.
+Brigstock!"
+
+
+
+
+XV
+
+
+Mrs. Brigstock, in the doorway, stood looking from one of the occupants
+of the room to the other; then they saw her eyes attach themselves to a
+small object that had lain hitherto unnoticed on the carpet. This was
+the biscuit of which, on giving Owen his tea, Fleda had taken a
+perfunctory nibble: she had immediately laid it on the table, and that
+subsequently, in some precipitate movement, she should have brushed it
+off was doubtless a sign of the agitation that possessed her. For Mrs.
+Brigstock there was apparently more in it than met the eye. Owen at any
+rate picked it up, and Fleda felt as if he were removing the traces of
+some scene that the newspapers would have characterized as lively. Mrs.
+Brigstock clearly took in also the sprawling tea-things and the mark as
+of high water in the full faces of her young friends. These elements
+made the little place a vivid picture of intimacy. A minute was filled
+by Fleda's relief at finding her visitor not to be Mrs. Gereth, and a
+longer space by the ensuing sense of what was really more compromising
+in the actual apparition. It dimly occurred to her that the lady of
+Ricks had also written to Waterbath. Not only had Mrs. Brigstock never
+paid her a call, but Fleda would have been unable to figure her so
+employed. A year before the girl had spent a day under her roof, but
+never feeling that Mrs. Brigstock regarded this as constituting a bond.
+She had never stayed in any house but Poynton where the imagination of a
+bond, one way or the other, prevailed. After the first astonishment she
+dashed gayly at her guest, emphasizing her welcome and wondering how her
+whereabouts had become known at Waterbath. Had not Mrs. Brigstock
+quitted that residence for the very purpose of laying her hand on the
+associate of Mrs. Gereth's misconduct? The spirit in which this hand was
+to be laid our young lady was yet to ascertain; but she was a person who
+could think ten thoughts at once--a circumstance which, even putting her
+present plight at its worst, gave her a great advantage over a person
+who required easy conditions for dealing even with one. The very
+vibration of the air, however, told her that whatever Mrs. Brigstock's
+spirit might originally have been, it had been sharply affected by the
+sight of Owen. He was essentially a surprise: she had reckoned with
+everything that concerned him but his presence. With that, in awkward
+silence, she was reckoning now, as Fleda could see, while she effected
+with friendly aid an embarrassed transit to the sofa. Owen would be
+useless, would be deplorable: that aspect of the case Fleda had taken in
+as well. Another aspect was that he would admire her, adore her, exactly
+in proportion as she herself should rise gracefully superior. Fleda felt
+for the first time free to let herself "go," as Mrs. Gereth had said,
+and she was full of the sense that to "go" meant now to aim straight at
+the effect of moving Owen to rapture at her simplicity and tact. It was
+her impression that he had no positive dislike of Mona's mother; but she
+couldn't entertain that notion without a glimpse of the implication that
+he had a positive dislike of Mrs. Brigstock's daughter. Mona's mother
+declined tea, declined a better seat, declined a cushion, declined to
+remove her boa: Fleda guessed that she had not come on purpose to be
+dry, but that the voice of the invaded room had itself given her the
+hint.
+
+"I just came on the mere chance," she said. "Mona found yesterday,
+somewhere, the card of invitation to your sister's marriage that you
+sent us, or your father sent us, some time ago. We couldn't be
+present--it was impossible; but as it had this address on it I said to
+myself that I might find you here."
+
+"I'm very glad to be at home," Fleda responded.
+
+"Yes, that doesn't happen very often, does it?" Mrs. Brigstock looked
+round afresh at Fleda's home.
+
+"Oh, I came back from Ricks last week. I shall be here now till I don't
+know when."
+
+"We thought it very likely you would have come back. We knew of course
+of your having been at Ricks. If I didn't find you I thought I might
+perhaps find Mr. Vetch," Mrs. Brigstock went on.
+
+"I'm sorry he's out. He's always out--all day long."
+
+Mrs. Brigstock's round eyes grew rounder. "All day long?"
+
+"All day long," Fleda smiled.
+
+"Leaving you quite to yourself?"
+
+"A good deal to myself, but a little, to-day, as you see, to Mr.
+Gereth,--" and the girl looked at Owen to draw him into their
+sociability. For Mrs. Brigstock he had immediately sat down; but the
+movement had not corrected the sombre stiffness taking possession of him
+at the sight of her. Before he found a response to the appeal addressed
+to him Fleda turned again to her other visitor. "Is there any purpose
+for which you would like my father to call on you?"
+
+Mrs. Brigstock received this question as if it were not to be
+unguardedly answered; upon which Owen intervened with pale irrelevance:
+"I wrote to Mona this morning of Miss Vetch's being in town; but of
+course the letter hadn't arrived when you left home."
+
+"No, it hadn't arrived. I came up for the night--I've several matters to
+attend to." Then looking with an intention of fixedness from one of her
+companions to the other, "I'm afraid I've interrupted your
+conversation," Mrs. Brigstock said. She spoke without effectual point,
+had the air of merely announcing the fact. Fleda had not yet been
+confronted with the question of the sort of person Mrs. Brigstock was;
+she had only been confronted with the question of the sort of person
+Mrs. Gereth scorned her for being. She was really, somehow, no sort of
+person at all, and it came home to Fleda that if Mrs. Gereth could see
+her at this moment she would scorn her more than ever. She had a face of
+which it was impossible to say anything but that it was pink, and a mind
+that it would be possible to describe only if one had been able to mark
+it in a similar fashion. As nature had made this organ neither green nor
+blue nor yellow, there was nothing to know it by: it strayed and bleated
+like an unbranded sheep. Fleda felt for it at this moment much of the
+kindness of compassion, since Mrs. Brigstock had brought it with her to
+do something for her that she regarded as delicate. Fleda was quite
+prepared to help it to perform, if she should be able to gather what it
+wanted to do. What she gathered, however, more and more, was that it
+wanted to do something different from what it had wanted to do in
+leaving Waterbath. There was still nothing to enlighten her more
+specifically in the way her visitor continued: "You must be very much
+taken up. I believe you quite espouse his dreadful quarrel."
+
+Fleda vaguely demurred. "His dreadful quarrel?"
+
+"About the contents of the house. Aren't you looking after them for
+him?"
+
+"She knows how awfully kind you've been to me," Owen said. He showed
+such discomfiture that he really gave away their situation; and Fleda
+found herself divided between the hope that he would take leave and the
+wish that he should see the whole of what the occasion might enable her
+to bring to pass for him.
+
+She explained to Mrs. Brigstock. "Mrs. Gereth, at Ricks, the other day,
+asked me particularly to see him for her."
+
+"And did she ask you also particularly to see him here in town?" Mrs.
+Brigstock's hideous bonnet seemed to argue for the unsophisticated
+truth; and it was on Fleda's lips to reply that such had indeed been
+Mrs. Gereth's request. But she checked herself, and before she could say
+anything else Owen had addressed their companion.
+
+"I made a point of letting Mona know that I should be here, don't you
+see? That's exactly what I wrote her this morning."
+
+"She would have had no doubt you would be here, if you had a chance,"
+Mrs. Brigstock returned. "If your letter had arrived it might have
+prepared me for finding you here at tea. In that case I certainly
+wouldn't have come."
+
+"I'm glad, then, it didn't arrive. Shouldn't you like him to go?" Fleda
+asked.
+
+Mrs. Brigstock looked at Owen and considered: nothing showed in her face
+but that it turned a deeper pink. "I should like him to go with _me_."
+There was no menace in her tone, but she evidently knew what she wanted.
+As Owen made no response to this Fleda glanced at him to invite him to
+assent; then, for fear that he wouldn't, and would thereby make his case
+worse, she took upon herself to declare that she was sure he would be
+very glad to meet such a wish. She had no sooner spoken than she felt
+that the words had a bad effect of intimacy: she had answered for him as
+if she had been his wife. Mrs. Brigstock continued to regard him as if
+she had observed nothing, and she continued to address Fleda: "I've not
+seen him for a long time--I've particular things to say to him."
+
+"So have I things to say to you, Mrs. Brigstock!" Owen interjected. With
+this he took up his hat as if for an immediate departure.
+
+The other visitor meanwhile turned to Fleda. "What is Mrs. Gereth going
+to do?"
+
+"Is that what you came to ask me?" Fleda demanded.
+
+"That and several other things."
+
+"Then you had much better let Mr. Gereth go, and stay by yourself and
+make me a pleasant visit. You can talk with him when you like, but it is
+the first time you've been to see me."
+
+This appeal had evidently a certain effect; Mrs. Brigstock visibly
+wavered. "I can't talk with him whenever I like," she returned; "he
+hasn't been near us since I don't know when. But there are things that
+have brought me here."
+
+"They are not things of any importance," Owen, to Fleda's surprise,
+suddenly asserted. He had not at first taken up Mrs. Brigstock's
+expression of a wish to carry him off: Fleda could see that the instinct
+at the bottom of this was that of standing by her, of seeming not to
+abandon her. But abruptly, all his soreness working within him, it had
+struck him that he should abandon her still more if he should leave her
+to be dealt with by her other visitor. "You must allow me to say, you
+know, Mrs. Brigstock, that I don't think you should come down on Miss
+Vetch about anything. It's very good of her to take the smallest
+interest in us and our horrid little squabble. If you want to talk about
+it, talk about it with _me_." He was flushed with the idea of protecting
+Fleda, of exhibiting his consideration for her. "I don't like your
+cross-questioning her, don't you see? She's as straight as a die: _I_'ll
+tell you all about her!" he declared with an excited laugh. "Please come
+off with me and let her alone."
+
+Mrs. Brigstock, at this, became vivid at once; Fleda thought she looked
+most peculiar. She stood straight up, with a queer distention of her
+whole person and of everything in her face but her mouth, which she
+gathered into a small, tight orifice. Fleda was painfully divided; her
+joy was deep within, but it was more relevant to the situation that she
+should not appear to associate herself with the tone of familiarity in
+which Owen addressed a lady who had been, and was perhaps still, about
+to become his mother-in-law. She laid on Mrs. Brigstock's arm a
+repressive hand. Mrs. Brigstock, however, had already exclaimed on her
+having so wonderful a defender. "He speaks, upon my word, as if I had
+come here to be rude to you!"
+
+At this, grasping her hard, Fleda laughed; then she achieved the exploit
+of delicately kissing her. "I'm not in the least afraid to be alone with
+you, or of your tearing me to pieces. I'll answer any question that you
+can possibly dream of putting to me."
+
+"I'm the proper person to answer Mrs. Brigstock's questions," Owen broke
+in again, "and I'm not a bit less ready to meet them than you are." He
+was firmer than she had ever seen him: it was as if she had not known he
+could be so firm.
+
+"But she'll only have been here a few minutes. What sort of a visit is
+that?" Fleda cried.
+
+"It has lasted long enough for my purpose. There was something I wanted
+to know, but I think I know it now."
+
+"Anything you don't know I dare say I can tell you!" Owen observed as he
+impatiently smoothed his hat with the cuff of his coat.
+
+Fleda by this time desired immensely to keep his companion, but she saw
+she could do so only at the cost of provoking on his part a further
+exhibition of the sheltering attitude, which he exaggerated precisely
+because it was the first thing, since he had begun to "like" her, that
+he had been able frankly to do for her. It was not in her interest that
+Mrs. Brigstock should be more struck than she already was with that
+benevolence. "There may be things you know that I don't," she presently
+said to her, with a smile. "But I've a sort of sense that you're
+laboring under some great mistake."
+
+Mrs. Brigstock, at this, looked into her eyes more deeply and yearningly
+than she had supposed Mrs. Brigstock could look; it was the flicker of a
+certain willingness to give her a chance. Owen, however, quickly spoiled
+everything. "Nothing is more probable than that Mrs. Brigstock is doing
+what you say; but there's no one in the world to whom you owe an
+explanation. I may owe somebody one--I dare say I do; but not you, no!"
+
+"But what if there's one that it's no difficulty at all for me to give?"
+Fleda inquired. "I'm sure that's the only one Mrs. Brigstock came to
+ask, if she came to ask any at all."
+
+Again the good lady looked hard at her young hostess. "I came, I
+believe, Fleda, just, you know, to plead with you."
+
+Fleda, with a bright face, hesitated a moment. "As if I were one of
+those bad women in a play?"
+
+The remark was disastrous. Mrs. Brigstock, on whom her brightness was
+lost, evidently thought it singularly free. She turned away, as from a
+presence that had really defined itself as objectionable, and Fleda had
+a vain sense that her good humor, in which there was an idea, was taken
+for impertinence, or at least for levity. Her allusion was improper,
+even if she herself wasn't; Mrs. Brigstock's emotion simplified: it came
+to the same thing. "I'm quite ready," that lady said to Owen rather
+mildly and woundedly. "I do want to speak to you very much."
+
+"I'm completely at your service." Owen held out his hand to Fleda.
+"Good-bye, Miss Vetch. I hope to see you again to-morrow." He opened the
+door for Mrs. Brigstock, who passed before the girl with an oblique,
+averted salutation. Owen and Fleda, while he stood at the door, then
+faced each other darkly and without speaking. Their eyes met once more
+for a long moment, and she was conscious there was something in hers
+that the darkness didn't quench, that he had never seen before and that
+he was perhaps never to see again. He stayed long enough to take it--to
+take it with a sombre stare that just showed the dawn of wonder; then he
+followed Mrs. Brigstock out of the house.
+
+
+
+
+XVI
+
+
+He had uttered the hope that he should see her the next day, but Fleda
+could easily reflect that he wouldn't see her if she were not there to
+be seen. If there was a thing in the world she desired at that moment,
+it was that the next day should have no point of resemblance with the
+day that had just elapsed. She accordingly aspired to an absence: she
+would go immediately down to Maggie. She ran out that evening and
+telegraphed to her sister, and in the morning she quitted London by an
+early train. She required for this step no reason but the sense of
+necessity. It was a strong personal need; she wished to interpose
+something, and there was nothing she could interpose but distance, but
+time. If Mrs. Brigstock had to deal with Owen she would allow Mrs.
+Brigstock the chance. To be there, to be in the midst of it, was the
+reverse of what she craved: she had already been more in the midst of it
+than had ever entered into her plan. At any rate she had renounced her
+plan; she had no plan now but the plan of separation. This was to
+abandon Owen, to give up the fine office of helping him back to his own;
+but when she had undertaken that office she had not foreseen that Mrs.
+Gereth would defeat it by a manoeuvre so simple. The scene at her
+father's rooms had extinguished all offices, and the scene at her
+father's rooms was of Mrs. Gereth's producing. Owen, at all events, must
+now act for himself: he had obligations to meet, he had satisfactions to
+give, and Fleda fairly ached with the wish that he might be equal to
+them. She never knew the extent of her tenderness for him till she
+became conscious of the present force of her desire that he should be
+superior, be perhaps even sublime. She obscurely made out that
+superiority, that sublimity, mightn't after all be fatal. She closed her
+eyes and lived for a day or two in the mere beauty of confidence. It was
+with her on the short journey; it was with her at Maggie's; it glorified
+the mean little house in the stupid little town. Owen had grown larger
+to her: he would do, like a man, whatever he should have to do. He
+wouldn't be weak--not as she was: she herself was weak exceedingly.
+
+Arranging her few possessions in Maggie's fewer receptacles, she caught
+a glimpse of the bright side of the fact that her old things were not
+such a problem as Mrs. Gereth's. Picking her way with Maggie through the
+local puddles, diving with her into smelly cottages and supporting her,
+at smellier shops, in firmness over the weight of joints and the taste
+of cheese, it was still her own secret that was universally inter-woven
+In the puddles, the cottages, the shops she was comfortably alone with
+it; that comfort prevailed even while, at the evening meal, her
+brother-in-law invited her attention to a diagram, drawn with a fork on
+too soiled a tablecloth, of the scandalous drains of the Convalescent
+Home. To be alone with it she had come away from Ricks; and now she knew
+that to be alone with it she had come away from London. This advantage
+was of course menaced, but not immediately destroyed, by the arrival, on
+the second day, of the note she had been sure she should receive from
+Owen. He had gone to West Kensington and found her flown, but he had got
+her address from the little maid and then hurried to a club and written
+to her. "Why have you left me just when I want you most?" he demanded.
+The next words, it was true, were more reassuring on the question of his
+steadiness. "I don't know what your reason may be," they went on, "nor
+why you've not left a line for me; but I don't think you can feel that I
+did anything yesterday that it wasn't right for me to do. As regards
+Mrs. Brigstock, certainly, I just felt what was right and I did it. She
+had no business whatever to attack you that way, and I should have been
+ashamed if I had left her there to worry you. I won't have you worried
+by any one; no one shall be disagreeable to you but me. I didn't mean to
+be so yesterday, and I don't to-day; but I'm perfectly free now to want
+you, and I want you much more than you've allowed me to explain. You'll
+see if I'm not all right, if you'll let me come to you. Don't be
+afraid--I'll not hurt you nor trouble you. I give you my honor I'll not
+hurt any one. Only I _must_ see you, on what I had to say to Mrs. B. She
+was nastier than I thought she could be, but I'm behaving like an angel.
+I assure you I'm all right--that's exactly what I want you to see. You
+owe me something, you know, for what you said you would do and haven't
+done; what your departure without a word gives me to understand--doesn't
+it?--that you definitely can't do. Don't simply forsake me. See me, if
+you only see me once. I shan't wait for any leave--I shall come down
+to-morrow. I've been looking into trains and find there's something that
+will bring me down just after lunch and something very good for getting
+me back. I won't stop long. For God's sake, be there."
+
+This communication arrived in the morning, but Fleda would still have
+had time to wire a protest. She debated on that alternative; then she
+read the note over and found in one phrase an exact statement of her
+duty. Owen's simplicity had expressed it, and her subtlety had nothing
+to answer. She owed him something for her obvious failure, and what she
+owed him was to receive him. If indeed she had known he would make this
+attempt she might have been held to have gained nothing by her flight.
+Well, she had gained what she had gained--she had gained the interval.
+She had no compunction for the greater trouble she should give the young
+man; it was now doubtless right that he should have as much trouble as
+possible. Maggie, who thought she was in her confidence, but was
+immensely not, had reproached her for having left Mrs. Gereth, and
+Maggie was just in this proportion gratified to hear of the visitor with
+whom, early in the afternoon, she would have to ask to be left alone.
+Maggie liked to see far, and now she could sit upstairs and rake the
+whole future. She had known that, as she familiarly said, there was
+something the matter with Fleda, and the value of that knowledge was
+augmented by the fact that there was apparently also something the
+matter with Mr. Gereth.
+
+Fleda, downstairs, learned soon enough what this was. It was simply
+that, as he announced the moment he stood before her, he was now all
+right. When she asked him what he meant by that state he replied that he
+meant he could practically regard himself henceforth as a free man: he
+had had at West Kensington, as soon as they got into the street, such a
+horrid scene with Mrs. Brigstock.
+
+"I knew what she wanted to say to me: that's why I was determined to get
+her off. I knew I shouldn't like it, but I was perfectly prepared," said
+Owen. "She brought it out as soon as we got round the corner; she asked
+me point-blank if I was in love with you."
+
+"And what did you say to that?"
+
+"That it was none of her business."
+
+"Ah," said Fleda, "I'm not so sure!"
+
+"Well, _I_ am, and I'm the person most concerned. Of course I didn't use
+just those words: I was perfectly civil, quite as civil as she. But I
+told her I didn't consider she had a right to put me any such question.
+I said I wasn't sure that even Mona had, with the extraordinary line,
+you know, that Mona has taken. At any rate the whole thing, the way _I_
+put it, was between Mona and me; and between Mona and me, if she didn't
+mind, it would just have to remain."
+
+Fleda was silent a little. "All that didn't answer her question."
+
+"Then you think I ought to have told her?"
+
+Again our young lady reflected. "I think I'm rather glad you didn't."
+
+"I knew what I was about," said Owen. "It didn't strike me that she had
+the least right to come down on us that way and ask for explanations."
+
+Fleda looked very grave, weighing the whole matter. "I dare say that
+when she started, when she arrived, she didn't mean to 'come down.'"
+
+"What then did she mean to do?"
+
+"What she said to me just before she went: she meant to plead with me."
+
+"Oh, I heard her!" said Owen. "But plead with you for what?"
+
+"For you, of course--to entreat me to give you up. She thinks me awfully
+designing--that I've taken some sort of possession of you."
+
+Owen stared. "You haven't lifted a finger! It's I who have taken
+possession."
+
+"Very true, you've done it all yourself." Fleda spoke gravely and
+gently, without a breath of coquetry. "But those are shades between
+which she's probably not obliged to distinguish. It's enough for her
+that we're singularly intimate."
+
+"I am, but you're not!" Owen exclaimed.
+
+Fleda gave a dim smile. "You make me at least feel that I'm learning to
+know you very well when I hear you say such a thing as that. Mrs.
+Brigstock came to get round me, to supplicate me," she went on; "but to
+find you there, looking so much at home, paying me a friendly call and
+shoving the tea-things about--that was too much for her patience. She
+doesn't know, you see, that I'm after all a decent girl. She simply made
+up her mind on the spot that I'm a very bad case."
+
+"I couldn't stand the way she treated you, and that was what I had to
+say to her," Owen returned.
+
+"She's simple and slow, but she's not a fool: I think she treated me, on
+the whole, very well." Fleda remembered how Mrs. Gereth had treated Mona
+when the Brigstocks came down to Poynton.
+
+Owen evidently thought her painfully perverse. "It was you who carried
+it off; you behaved like a brick. And so did I, I consider. If you only
+knew the difficulty I had! I told her you were the noblest and
+straightest of women."
+
+"That can hardly have removed her impression that there are things I put
+you up to."
+
+"It didn't," Owen replied with candor. "She said our relation, yours and
+mine, isn't innocent."
+
+"What did she mean by that?"
+
+"As you may suppose, I particularly inquired. Do you know what she had
+the cheek to tell me?" Owen asked. "She didn't better it much: she said
+she meant that it's excessively unnatural."
+
+Fleda considered afresh. "Well, it is!" she brought out at last.
+
+"Then, upon my honor, it's only you who make it so!" Her perversity was
+distinctly too much for him. "I mean you make it so by the way you keep
+me off."
+
+"Have I kept you off to-day?" Fleda sadly shook her head, raising her
+arms a little and dropping them.
+
+Her gesture of resignation gave him a pretext for catching at her hand,
+but before he could take it she had put it behind her. They had been
+seated together on Maggie's single sofa, and her movement brought her to
+her feet, while Owen, looking at her reproachfully, leaned back in
+discouragement. "What good does it do me to be here when I find you only
+a stone?"
+
+She met his eyes with all the tenderness she had not yet uttered, and
+she had not known till this moment how great was the accumulation.
+"Perhaps, after all," she risked, "there may be even in a stone still
+some little help for you."
+
+Owen sat there a minute staring at her. "Ah, you're beautiful, more
+beautiful than any one," he broke out, "but I'll be hanged if I can ever
+understand you! On Tuesday, at your father's, you were beautiful--as
+beautiful, just before I left, as you are at this instant. But the next
+day, when I went back, I found it had apparently meant nothing; and now,
+again, that you let me come here and you shine at me like an angel, it
+doesn't bring you an inch nearer to saying what I want you to say." He
+remained a moment longer in the same position; then he jerked himself
+up. "What I want you to say is that you like me--what I want you to say
+is that you pity me." He sprang up and came to her. "What I want you to
+say is that you'll _save_ me!"
+
+Fleda hesitated. "Why do you need saving, when you announced to me just
+now that you're a free man?"
+
+He too hesitated, but he was not checked. "It's just for the reason that
+I'm free. Don't you know what I mean, Miss Vetch? I want you to marry
+me."
+
+Fleda, at this, put out her hand in charity; she held his own, which
+quickly grasped it a moment, and if he had described her as shining at
+him it may be assumed that she shone all the more in her deep, still
+smile. "Let me hear a little more about your freedom first," she said.
+"I gather that Mrs. Brigstock was not wholly satisfied with the way you
+disposed of her question."
+
+"I dare say she wasn't. But the less she's satisfied the more I'm free."
+
+"What bearing have _her_ feelings, pray?" Fleda asked.
+
+"Why, Mona's much worse than her mother. She wants much more to give me
+up."
+
+"Then why doesn't she do it?"
+
+"She will, as soon as her mother gets home and tells her."
+
+"Tells her what?" Fleda inquired.
+
+"Why, that I'm in love with _you_!"
+
+Fleda debated. "Are you so very sure she will?"
+
+"Certainly I'm sure, with all the evidence I already have. That will
+finish her!" Owen declared.
+
+This made his companion thoughtful again. "Can you take such pleasure in
+her being 'finished'--a poor girl you've once loved?"
+
+Owen waited long enough to take in the question; then with a serenity
+startling even to her knowledge of his nature, "I don't think I can have
+_really_ loved her, you know," he replied.
+
+Fleda broke into a laugh which gave him a surprise as visible as the
+emotion it testified to. "Then how am I to know that you 'really'
+love--anybody else?"
+
+"Oh, I'll show you that!" said Owen.
+
+"I must take it on trust," the girl pursued. "And what if Mona doesn't
+give you up?" she added.
+
+Owen was baffled but a few seconds; he had thought of everything. "Why,
+that's just where you come in."
+
+"To save you? I see. You mean I must get rid of her for you." His
+blankness showed for a little that he felt the chill of her cold logic;
+but as she waited for his rejoinder she knew to which of them it cost
+most. He gasped a minute, and that gave her time to say: "You see, Mr.
+Owen, how impossible it is to talk of such things yet!"
+
+Like lightning he had grasped her arm. "You mean you _will_ talk of
+them?" Then as he began to take the flood of assent from her eyes: "You
+_will_ listen to me? Oh, you dear, you dear--when, when?"
+
+"Ah, when it isn't mere misery!" The words had broken from her in a
+sudden loud cry, and what next happened was that the very sound of her
+pain upset her. She heard her own true note; she turned short away from
+him; in a moment she had burst into sobs; in another his arms were round
+her; the next she had let herself go so far that even Mrs. Gereth might
+have seen it. He clasped her, and she gave herself--she poured out her
+tears on his breast; something prisoned and pent throbbed and gushed;
+something deep and sweet surged up--something that came from far within
+and far off, that had begun with the sight of him in his indifference
+and had never had rest since then. The surrender was short, but the
+relief was long: she felt his lips upon her face and his arms tighten
+with his full divination. What she did, what she _had_ done, she
+scarcely knew: she only was aware, as she broke from him again, of what
+had taken place in his own quick breast. What had taken place was that,
+with the click of a spring, he saw. He had cleared the high wall at a
+bound; they were together without a veil. She had not a shred of a
+secret left; it was as if a whirlwind had come and gone, laying low the
+great false front that she had built up stone by stone. The strangest
+thing of all was the momentary sense of desolation.
+
+"Ah, all the while you _cared_?" Owen read the truth with a wonder so
+great that it was visibly almost a sadness, a terror caused by his
+sudden perception of where the impossibility was not. That made it all
+perhaps elsewhere.
+
+"I cared, I cared, I cared!" Fleda moaned it as defiantly as if she were
+confessing a misdeed. "How couldn't I care? But you mustn't, you must
+never, never ask! It isn't for us to talk about!" she insisted. "Don't
+speak of it, don't speak!"
+
+It was easy indeed not to speak when the difficulty was to find words.
+He clasped his hands before her as he might have clasped them at an
+altar; his pressed palms shook together while he held his breath and
+while she stilled herself in the effort to come round again to the real
+and the right. He helped this effort, soothing her into a seat with a
+touch as light as if she had really been something sacred. She sank into
+a chair and he dropped before her on his knees; she fell back with
+closed eyes and he buried his face in her lap. There was no way to thank
+her but this act of prostration, which lasted, in silence, till she laid
+consenting hands on him, touched his head and stroked it, held it in her
+tenderness till he acknowledged his long density. He made the avowal
+seem only his--made her, when she rose again, raise him at last, softly,
+as if from the abasement of shame. If in each other's eyes now, however,
+they saw the truth, this truth, to Fleda, looked harder even than
+before--all the harder that when, at the very moment she recognized it,
+he murmured to her ecstatically, in fresh possession of her hands, which
+he drew up to his breast, holding them tight there with both his own:
+"I'm saved, I'm saved,--I _am_! I'm ready for anything. I have your
+word. Come!" he cried, as if from the sight of a response slower than he
+needed, and in the tone he so often had of a great boy at a great game.
+
+She had once more disengaged herself, with the private vow that he
+shouldn't yet touch her again. It was all too horribly soon--her sense
+of this was rapidly surging back. "We mustn't talk, we mustn't talk; we
+must _wait_!" she intensely insisted. "I don't know what you mean by
+your freedom; I don't see it, I don't feel it. Where is it yet, where,
+your freedom? If it's real there's plenty of time, and if it isn't
+there's more than enough. I hate myself," she protested, "for having
+anything to say about her: it's like waiting for dead men's shoes! What
+business is it of mine what she does? She has her own trouble and her
+own plan. It's too hideous to watch her and count on her!"
+
+Owen's face, at this, showed a reviving dread, the fear of some darksome
+process of her mind. "If you speak for yourself I can understand, but
+why is it hideous for _me_?"
+
+"Oh, I mean for myself!" Fleda said impatiently.
+
+"_I_ watch her, _I_ count on her: how can I do anything else? If I count
+on her to let me definitely know how we stand, I do nothing in life but
+what she herself has led straight up to. I never thought of asking you
+to 'get rid of her' for me, and I never would have spoken to you if I
+hadn't held that I _am_ rid of her, that she has backed out of the whole
+thing. Didn't she do so from the moment she began to put it off? I had
+already applied for the license; the very invitations were half
+addressed. Who but she, all of a sudden, demanded an unnatural wait? It
+was none of _my_ doing; I had never dreamed of anything but coming up to
+the scratch." Owen grew more and more lucid, and more confident of the
+effect of his lucidity. "She called it 'taking a stand,' to see what
+mother would do. I told her mother would do what I would make her do;
+and to that she replied that she would like to see me make her first. I
+said I would arrange that everything should be all right, and she said
+she really preferred to arrange it herself. It was a flat refusal to
+trust me in the smallest degree. Why then had she pretended so
+tremendously to care for me? And of course, at present," said Owen, "she
+trusts me, if possible, still less."
+
+Fleda paid this statement the homage of a minute's muteness. "As to
+that, naturally, she has reason."
+
+"Why on earth has she reason?" Then, as his companion, moving away,
+simply threw up her hands, "I never looked at you--not to call
+looking--till she had regularly driven me to it," he went on. "I know
+what I'm about. I do assure you I'm all right!"
+
+"You're not all right--you're all wrong!" Fleda cried in despair. "You
+mustn't stay here, you mustn't!" she repeated with clear decision. "You
+make me say dreadful things, and I feel as if I made _you_ say them."
+But before he could reply she took it up in another tone. "Why in the
+world, if everything had changed, didn't you break off?"
+
+"I?--" The inquiry seemed to have moved him to stupefaction. "Can you
+ask me that question when I only wanted to please you? Didn't you seem
+to show me, in your wonderful way, that that was exactly how? I didn't
+break off just on purpose to leave it to _her_. I didn't break off so
+that there shouldn't be a thing to be said against me."
+
+The instant after her challenge Fleda had faced him again in
+self-reproof. "There _isn't_ a thing to be said against you, and I don't
+know what nonsense you make me talk! You _have_ pleased me, and you've
+been right and good, and it's the only comfort, and you must go.
+Everything must come from Mona, and if it doesn't come we've said
+entirely too much. You must leave me alone--forever."
+
+"Forever?" Owen gasped.
+
+"I mean unless everything is different."
+
+"Everything _is_ different--when I _know_!"
+
+Fleda winced at what he knew; she made a wild gesture which seemed to
+whirl it out of the room. The mere allusion was like another embrace.
+"You know nothing--and you must go and wait! You mustn't break down at
+this point."
+
+He looked about him and took up his hat: it was as if, in spite of
+frustration, he had got the essence of what he wanted and could afford
+to agree with her to the extent of keeping up the forms. He covered her
+with his fine, simple smile, but made no other approach. "Oh, I'm so
+awfully happy!" he exclaimed.
+
+She hesitated: she would only be impeccable even though she should have
+to be sententious. "You'll be happy if you're perfect!" she risked.
+
+He laughed out at this, and she wondered if, with a new-born acuteness,
+he saw the absurdity of her speech, and that no one was happy just
+because no one could be what she so lightly prescribed. "I don't pretend
+to be perfect, but I shall find a letter to-night!"
+
+"So much the better, if it's the kind of one you desire." That was the
+most she could say, and having made it sound as dry as possible she
+lapsed into a silence so pointed as to deprive him of all pretext for
+not leaving her. Still, nevertheless, he stood there, playing with his
+hat and filling the long pause with a strained and anxious smile. He
+wished to obey her thoroughly, to appear not to presume on any advantage
+he had won from her; but there was clearly something he longed for
+beside. While he showed this by hanging on she thought of two other
+things. One of these was that his countenance, after all, failed to bear
+out his description of his bliss. As for the other, it had no sooner
+come into her head than she found it seated, in spite of her resolution,
+on her lips. It took the form of an inconsequent question. "When did you
+say Mrs. Brigstock was to have gone back?"
+
+Owen stared. "To Waterbath? She was to have spent the night in town,
+don't you know? But when she left me, after our talk, I said to myself
+that she would take an evening train. I know I made her want to get
+home."
+
+"Where did you separate?" Fleda asked.
+
+"At the West Kensington station--she was going to Victoria. I had walked
+with her there, and our talk was all on the way."
+
+Fleda pondered a moment. "If she did go back that night you would have
+heard from Waterbath by this time."
+
+"I don't know," said Owen. "I thought I might hear this morning."
+
+"She can't have gone back," Fleda declared. "Mona would have written on
+the spot."
+
+"Oh yes, she _will_ have written bang off!" Owen cheerfully conceded.
+
+Fleda thought again. "Then, even in the event of her mother's not having
+got home till the morning, you would have had your letter at the latest
+to-day. You see she has had plenty of time."
+
+Owen hesitated; then, "Oh, she's all right!" he laughed. "I go by Mrs.
+Brigstock's certain effect on her--the effect of the temper the old lady
+showed when we parted. Do you know what she asked me?" he sociably
+continued. "She asked me in a kind of nasty manner if I supposed you
+'really' cared anything about me. Of course I told her I supposed you
+didn't--not a solitary rap. How could I suppose you _do_, with your
+extraordinary ways? It doesn't matter; I could see she thought I lied."
+
+"You should have told her, you know, that I had seen you in town only
+that one time," Fleda observed.
+
+"By Jove, I did--for _you_! It was only for you."
+
+Something in this touched the girl so that for a moment she could not
+trust herself to speak. "You're an honest man," she said at last. She
+had gone to the door and opened it. "Good-bye."
+
+Even yet, however, he hung back; and she remembered how, at the end of
+his hour at Ricks, she had been put to it to get him out of the house.
+He had in general a sort of cheerful slowness which helped him at such
+times, though she could now see his strong fist crumple his big, stiff
+gloves as if they had been paper. "But even if there's no letter--" he
+began. He began, but there he left it.
+
+"You mean, even if she doesn't let you off? Ah, you ask me too much!"
+Fleda spoke from the tiny hall, where she had taken refuge between the
+old barometer and the old mackintosh. "There are things too utterly for
+yourselves alone. How can I tell? What do I know? Good-bye, good-bye! If
+she doesn't let you off, it will be because she _is_ attached to you."
+
+"She's not, she's not: there's nothing in it! Doesn't a fellow
+know?--except with _you_!" Owen ruefully added. With this he came out of
+the room, lowering his voice to secret supplication, pleading with her
+really to meet him on the ground of the negation of Mona. It was this
+betrayal of his need of support and sanction that made her
+retreat--harden herself in the effort to save what might remain of all
+she had given, given probably for nothing. The very vision of him as he
+thus morally clung to her was the vision of a weakness somewhere in the
+core of his bloom, a blessed manly weakness of which, if she had only
+the valid right, it would be all a sweetness to take care. She faintly
+sickened, however, with the sense that there was as yet no valid right
+poor Owen could give. "You can take it from my honor, you know," he
+whispered, "that she loathes me."
+
+Fleda had stood clutching the knob of Maggie's little painted
+stair-rail; she took, on the stairs, a step backward. "Why then doesn't
+she prove it in the only clear way?"
+
+"She _has_ proved it. Will you believe it if you see the letter?"
+
+"I don't want to see any letter," said Fleda. "You'll miss your train."
+
+Facing him, waving him away, she had taken another upward step; but he
+sprang to the side of the stairs and brought his hand, above the
+banister, down hard on her wrist. "Do you mean to tell me that I must
+marry a woman I hate?"
+
+From her step she looked down into his raised face. "Ah, you see it's
+not true that you're free!" She seemed almost to exult. "It's not
+true--it's not true!"
+
+He only, at this, like a buffeting swimmer, gave a shake of his head and
+repeated his question. "Do you mean to tell me I must marry such a
+woman?"
+
+Fleda hesitated; he held her fast. "No. Anything is better than that."
+
+"Then, in God's name, what must I do?"
+
+"You must settle that with her. You mustn't break faith. Anything is
+better than that. You must at any rate be utterly sure. She _must_ love
+you--how can she help it? _I_ wouldn't give you up!" said Fleda. She
+spoke in broken bits, panting out her words. "The great thing is to keep
+faith. Where _is_ a man if he doesn't? If he doesn't he may be so cruel.
+So cruel, so cruel, so cruel!" Fleda repeated. "I couldn't have a hand
+in _that_, you know: that's my position--that's mine. You offered her
+marriage: it's a tremendous thing for her." Then looking at him another
+moment, "_I_ wouldn't give you up!" she said again. He still had hold of
+her arm; she took in his blank alarm. With a quick dip of her face she
+reached his hand with her lips, pressing them to the back of it with a
+force that doubled the force of her words. "Never, never, never!" she
+cried; and before he could succeed in seizing her she had turned and,
+scrambling up the stairs, got away from him even faster than she had got
+away from him at Ricks.
+
+
+
+
+XVII
+
+
+Ten days after his visit she received a communication from Mrs.
+Gereth--a telegram of eight words, exclusive of signature and date.
+"Come up immediately and stay with me here"--it was characteristically
+sharp, as Maggie said; but, as Maggie added, it was also
+characteristically kind. "Here" was an hotel in London, and Maggie had
+embraced a condition of life which already began to produce in her some
+yearning for hotels in London. She would have responded in an instant,
+and she was surprised that her sister seemed to hesitate. Fleda's
+hesitation, which lasted but an hour, was expressed in that young lady's
+own mind by the reflection that in obeying her friend's summons she
+shouldn't know what she should be "in for." Her friend's summons,
+however, was but another name for her friend's appeal; and Mrs. Gereth's
+bounty had laid her under obligations more sensible than any reluctance.
+In the event--that is at the end of her hour--she testified to her
+gratitude by taking the train and to her mistrust by leaving her
+luggage. She went as if she had gone up for the day. In the train,
+however, she had another thoughtful hour, during which it was her
+mistrust that mainly deepened. She felt as if for ten days she had sat
+in darkness, looking to the east for a dawn that had not yet glimmered.
+Her mind had lately been less occupied with Mrs. Gereth; it had been so
+exceptionally occupied with Mona. If the sequel was to justify Owen's
+prevision of Mrs. Brigstock's action upon her daughter, this action was
+at the end of a week as much a mystery as ever. The stillness, all
+round, had been exactly what Fleda desired, but it gave her for the time
+a deep sense of failure, the sense of a sudden drop from a height at
+which she had all things beneath her. She had nothing beneath her now;
+she herself was at the bottom of the heap. No sign had reached her from
+Owen--poor Owen, who had clearly no news to give about his precious
+letter from Waterbath. If Mrs. Brigstock had hurried back to obtain that
+this letter should be written, Mrs. Brigstock might then have spared
+herself so great an inconvenience. Owen had been silent for the best of
+all reasons--the reason that he had had nothing in life to say. If the
+letter had not been written he would simply have had to introduce some
+large qualification into his account of his freedom. He had left his
+young friend under her refusal to listen to him until he should be able,
+on the contrary, to extend that picture; and his present submission was
+all in keeping with the rigid honesty that his young friend had
+prescribed.
+
+It was this that formed the element through which Mona loomed large;
+Fleda had enough imagination, a fine enough feeling for life, to be
+impressed with such an image of successful immobility. The massive
+maiden at Waterbath _was_ successful from the moment she could entertain
+her resentments as if they had been poor relations who needn't put her
+to expense. She was a magnificent dead weight; there was something
+positive and portentous in her quietude. "What game are they all
+playing?" poor Fleda could only ask; for she had an intimate conviction
+that Owen was now under the roof of his betrothed. That was stupefying
+if he really hated Mona; and if he didn't really hate her what had
+brought him to Raphael Road and to Maggie's? Fleda had no real light,
+but she felt that to account for the absence of any result of their last
+meeting would take a supposition of the full sacrifice to charity that
+she had held up before him. If he had gone to Waterbath it had been
+simply because he had to go. She had as good as told him that he would
+have to go; that this was an inevitable incident of his keeping perfect
+faith--faith so literal that the smallest subterfuge would always be a
+reproach to him. When she tried to remember that it was for herself he
+was taking his risk, she felt how weak a way that was of expressing
+Mona's supremacy. There would be no need of keeping him up if there were
+nothing to keep him up to. Her eyes grew wan as she discerned in the
+impenetrable air that Mona's thick outline never wavered an inch. She
+wondered fitfully what Mrs. Gereth had by this time made of it, and
+reflected with a strange elation that the sand on which the mistress of
+Ricks had built a momentary triumph was quaking beneath the surface. As
+The Morning Post still held its peace, she would be, of course, more
+confident; but the hour was at hand at which Owen would have absolutely
+to do either one thing or the other. To keep perfect faith was to inform
+against his mother, and to hear the police at her door would be Mrs.
+Gereth's awakening. How much she was beguiled Fleda could see from her
+having been for a whole month quite as deep and dark as Mona. She had
+let her young friend alone because of the certitude, cultivated at
+Ricks, that Owen had done the opposite. He had done the opposite indeed,
+but much good had that brought forth! To have sent for her now, Fleda
+felt, was from this point of view wholly natural: she had sent for her
+to show at last how much she had scored. If, however, Owen was really at
+Waterbath the refutation of that boast was easy.
+
+Fleda found Mrs. Gereth in modest apartments and with an air of fatigue
+in her distinguished face--a sign, as she privately remarked, of the
+strain of that effort to be discreet of which she herself had been
+having the benefit. It was a constant feature of their relation that
+this lady could make Fleda blench a little, and that the effect
+proceeded from the intense pressure of her confidence. If the confidence
+had been heavy even when the girl, in the early flush of devotion, had
+been able to feel herself most responsive, it drew her heart into her
+mouth now that she had reserves and conditions, now that she couldn't
+simplify with the same bold hand as her protectress. In the very
+brightening of the tired look, and at the moment of their embrace, Fleda
+felt on her shoulders the return of the load, so that her spirit frankly
+quailed as she asked herself what she had brought up from her trusted
+seclusion to support it. Mrs. Gereth's free manner always made a joke of
+weakness, and there was in such a welcome a richness, a kind of familiar
+nobleness, that suggested shame to a harried conscience. Something had
+happened, she could see, and she could also see, in the bravery that
+seemed to announce it had changed everything, a formidable assumption
+that what had happened was what a healthy young woman must like. The
+absence of luggage had made this young woman feel meagre even before her
+companion, taking in the bareness at a second glance, exclaimed upon it
+and roundly rebuked her. Of course she had expected her to stay.
+
+Fleda thought best to show bravery too, and to show it from the first.
+"What you expected, dear Mrs. Gereth, is exactly what I came up to
+ascertain. It struck me as right to do that first. I mean to ascertain,
+without making preparations."
+
+"Then you'll be so good as to make them on the spot!" Mrs. Gereth was
+most emphatic. "You're going abroad with me."
+
+Fleda wondered, but she also smiled. "To-night--to-morrow?"
+
+"In as few days as possible. That's all that's left for me now." Fleda's
+heart, at this, gave a bound; she wondered to what particular difference
+in Mrs. Gereth's situation as last known to her it was an allusion.
+"I've made my plan," her friend continued: "I go for at least a year. We
+shall go straight to Florence; we can manage there. I of course don't
+look to you, however," she added, "to stay with me all that time. That
+will require to be settled. Owen will have to join us as soon as
+possible; he may not be quite ready to get off with us. But I'm
+convinced it's quite the right thing to go. It will make a good change;
+it will put in a decent interval."
+
+Fleda listened; she was deeply mystified. "How kind you are to me!" she
+presently said. The picture suggested so many questions that she
+scarcely knew which to ask first. She took one at a venture. "You really
+have it from Mr. Gereth that he'll give us his company?"
+
+If Mr. Gereth's mother smiled in response to this, Fleda knew that her
+smile was a tacit criticism of such a form of reference to her son.
+Fleda habitually spoke of him as Mr. Owen, and it was a part of her
+present vigilance to appear to have relinquished that right. Mrs.
+Gereth's manner confirmed a certain impression of her pretending to more
+than she felt; her very first words had conveyed it, and it reminded
+Fleda of the conscious courage with which, weeks before, the lady had
+met her visitor's first startled stare at the clustered spoils of
+Poynton. It was her practice to take immensely for granted whatever she
+wished. "Oh, if you'll answer for him, it will do quite as well!" she
+said. Then she put her hands on the girl's shoulders and held them at
+arm's length, as if to shake them a little, while in the depths of her
+shining eyes Fleda discovered something obscure and unquiet. "You bad,
+false thing, why didn't you tell me?" Her tone softened her harshness,
+and her visitor had never had such a sense of her indulgence. Mrs.
+Gereth could show patience; it was a part of the general bribe, but it
+was also like the handing in of a heavy bill before which Fleda could
+only fumble in a penniless pocket. "You must perfectly have known at
+Ricks, and yet you practically denied it. That's why I call you bad and
+false!" It was apparently also why she again almost roughly kissed her.
+
+"I think that before I answer you I had better know what you're talking
+about," Fleda said.
+
+Mrs. Gereth looked at her with a slight increase of hardness. "You've
+done everything you need for modesty, my dear! If he's sick with love of
+you, you haven't had to wait for me to inform you."
+
+Fleda hesitated. "Has he informed _you_, dear Mrs. Gereth?"
+
+Dear Mrs. Gereth smiled sweetly. "How could he, when our situation is
+such that he communicates with me only through you, and that you are so
+tortuous you conceal everything?"
+
+"Didn't he answer the note in which you let him know that I was in
+town?" Fleda asked.
+
+"He answered it sufficiently by rushing off on the spot to see you."
+
+Mrs. Gereth met that allusion with a prompt firmness that made almost
+insolently light of any ground of complaint, and Fleda's own sense of
+responsibility was now so vivid that all resentments turned
+comparatively pale. She had no heart to produce a grievance; she could
+only, left as she was with the little mystery on her hands, produce,
+after a moment, a question. "How then do you come to know that your son
+has ever thought--"
+
+"That he would give his ears to get you?" Mrs. Gereth broke in. "I had a
+visit from Mrs. Brigstock."
+
+Fleda opened her eyes. "She went down to Ricks?"
+
+"The day after she had found Owen at your feet. She knows everything."
+
+Fleda shook her head sadly; she was more startled than she cared to
+show. This odd journey of Mrs. Brigstock's, which, with a simplicity
+equal for once to Owen's, she had not divined, now struck her as having
+produced the hush of the last ten days. "There are things she doesn't
+know!" she presently exclaimed.
+
+"She knows he would do anything to marry you."
+
+"He hasn't told her so," Fleda said.
+
+"No, but he has told you. That's better still!" laughed Mrs. Gereth. "My
+dear child," she went on with an air that affected the girl as a sort of
+blind profanity, "don't try to make yourself out better than you are.
+_I_ know what you are. I haven't lived with you so much for nothing.
+You're not quite a saint in heaven yet. Lord, what a creature you'd have
+thought me in my good time! But you do like it, fortunately, you idiot.
+You're pale with your passion, you sweet thing. That's exactly what I
+wanted to see. I can't for the life of me think where the shame comes
+in." Then with a finer significance, a look that seemed to Fleda
+strange, she added: "It's all right."
+
+"I've seen him but twice," said Fleda.
+
+"But twice?" Mrs. Gereth still smiled.
+
+"On the occasion, at papa's, that Mrs. Brigstock told you of, and one
+day, since then, down at Maggie's."
+
+"Well, those things are between yourselves, and you seem to me both poor
+creatures at best." Mrs. Gereth spoke with a rich humor which tipped
+with light for an instant a real conviction. "I don't know what you've
+got in your veins: you absurdly exaggerated the difficulties. But enough
+is as good as a feast, and when once I get you abroad together--!" She
+checked herself as if from excess of meaning; what might happen when she
+should get them abroad together was to be gathered only from the way she
+slowly rubbed her hands.
+
+The gesture, however, made the promise so definite that for a moment her
+companion was almost beguiled. But there was nothing to account, as yet,
+for the wealth of Mrs. Gereth's certitude: the visit of the lady of
+Waterbath appeared but half to explain it. "Is it permitted to be
+surprised," Fleda deferentially asked, "at Mrs. Brigstock's thinking it
+would help her to see you?"
+
+"It's never permitted to be surprised at the aberrations of born fools,"
+said Mrs. Gereth. "If a cow should try to calculate, that's the kind of
+happy thought she'd have. Mrs. Brigstock came down to plead with me."
+
+Fleda mused a moment. "That's what she came to do with _me_," she then
+honestly returned. "But what did she expect to get of you, with your
+opposition so marked from the first?"
+
+"She didn't know I want _you_, my dear. It's a wonder, with all my
+violence--the gross publicity I've given my desires. But she's as stupid
+as an owl--she doesn't feel your charm."
+
+Fleda felt herself flush slightly, but she tried to smile. "Did you tell
+her all about it? Did you make her understand you want me?"
+
+"For what do you take me? I wasn't such a donkey."
+
+"So as not to aggravate Mona?" Fleda suggested.
+
+"So as not to aggravate Mona, naturally. We've had a narrow course to
+steer, but thank God we're at last in the open!"
+
+"What do you call the open, Mrs. Gereth?" Fleda demanded. Then as the
+other faltered: "Do you know where Mr. Owen is to-day?"
+
+Mrs. Gereth stared. "Do you mean he's at Waterbath? Well, that's your
+own affair. I can bear it if _you_ can."
+
+"Wherever he is, I can bear it," Fleda said. "But I haven't the least
+idea where he is."
+
+"Then you ought to be ashamed of yourself!" Mrs. Gereth broke out with a
+change of note that showed how deep a passion underlay everything she
+had said. The poor woman, catching her companion's hand, however, the
+next moment, as if to retract something of this harshness, spoke more
+patiently. "Don't you understand, Fleda, how immensely, how devotedly,
+I've trusted you?" Her tone was indeed a supplication.
+
+Fleda was infinitely shaken; she was silent a little. "Yes, I
+understand. Did she go to you to complain of me?"
+
+"She came to see what she could do. She had been tremendously upset, the
+day before, by what had taken place at your father's, and she had posted
+down to Ricks on the inspiration of the moment. She hadn't meant it on
+leaving home; it was the sight of you closeted there with Owen that had
+suddenly determined her. The whole story, she said, was written in your
+two faces: she spoke as if she had never seen such an exhibition. Owen
+was on the brink, but there might still be time to save him, and it was
+with this idea she had bearded me in my den. 'What won't a mother do,
+you know?'--that was one of the things she said. What wouldn't a mother
+do indeed? I thought I had sufficiently shown her what! She tried to
+break me down by an appeal to my good nature, as she called it, and from
+the moment she opened on _you_, from the moment she denounced Owen's
+falsity, I was as good-natured as she could wish. I understood that it
+was a plea for mere mercy, that you and he between you were killing her
+child. Of course I was delighted that Mona should be killed, but I was
+studiously kind to Mrs. Brigstock. At the same time I was honest, I
+didn't pretend to anything I couldn't feel. I asked her why the marriage
+hadn't taken place months ago, when Owen was perfectly ready; and I
+showed her how completely that fatuous mistake on Mona's part cleared
+his responsibility. It was she who had killed _him_--it was she who had
+destroyed his affection, his illusions. Did she want him now when he was
+estranged, when he was disgusted, when he had a sore grievance? She
+reminded me that Mona had a sore grievance too, but she admitted that
+she hadn't come to me to speak of that. What she had come to me for was
+not to get the old things back, but simply to get Owen. What she wanted
+was that I would, in simple pity, see fair play. Owen had been awfully
+bedeviled--she didn't call it that, she called it 'misled'--but it was
+simply you who had bedeviled him. He would be all right still if I would
+see that you were out of the way. She asked me point-blank if it was
+possible I could want him to marry you."
+
+Fleda had listened in unbearable pain and growing terror, as if her
+interlocutress, stone by stone, were piling some fatal mass upon her
+breast. She had the sense of being buried alive, smothered in the mere
+expansion of another will; and now there was but one gap left to the
+air. A single word, she felt, might close it, and with the question that
+came to her lips as Mrs. Gereth paused she seemed to herself to ask, in
+cold dread, for her doom. "What did you say to that?" she inquired.
+
+"I was embarrassed, for I saw my danger--the danger of her going home
+and saying to Mona that I was backing you up. It had been a bliss to
+learn that Owen had really turned to you, but my joy didn't put me off
+my guard. I reflected intensely for a few seconds; then I saw my issue."
+
+"Your issue?" Fleda murmured.
+
+"I remembered how you had tied my hands about saying a word to Owen."
+
+Fleda wondered. "And did you remember the little letter that, with your
+hands tied, you still succeeded in writing to him?"
+
+"Perfectly; my little letter was a model of reticence. What I remembered
+was all that in those few words I forbade myself to say. I had been an
+angel of delicacy--I had effaced myself like a saint. It was not for me
+to have done all that and then figure to such a woman as having done the
+opposite. Besides, it was none of her business."
+
+"Is that what you said to her?" Fleda asked.
+
+"I said to her that her question revealed a total misconception of the
+nature of my present relations with my son. I said to her that I had no
+relations with him at all, and that nothing had passed between us for
+months. I said to her that my hands were spotlessly clean of any attempt
+to make him make up to you. I said to her that I had taken from Poynton
+what I had a right to take, but had done nothing else in the world. I
+was determined that if I had bit my tongue off to oblige you I would at
+least have the righteousness that my sacrifice gave me."
+
+"And was Mrs. Brigstock satisfied with your answer?"
+
+"She was visibly relieved."
+
+"It was fortunate for you," said Fleda, "that she's apparently not aware
+of the manner in which, almost under her nose, you advertised me to him
+at Poynton."
+
+Mrs. Gereth appeared to recall that scene; she smiled with a serenity
+remarkably effective as showing how cheerfully used she had grown to
+invidious allusions to it. "How should she be aware of it?"
+
+"She would if Owen had described your outbreak to Mona."
+
+"Yes, but he didn't describe it. All his instinct was to conceal it from
+Mona. He wasn't conscious, but he was already in love with you!" Mrs.
+Gereth declared.
+
+Fleda shook her head wearily. "No--I was only in love with him!"
+
+Here was a faint illumination with which Mrs. Gereth instantly mingled
+her fire. "You dear old wretch!" she exclaimed; and she again, with
+ferocity, embraced her young friend.
+
+Fleda submitted like a sick animal: she would submit to everything now.
+"Then what further passed?"
+
+"Only that she left me thinking she had got something."
+
+"And what had she got?"
+
+"Nothing but her luncheon. But _I_ got everything!"
+
+"Everything?" Fleda quavered.
+
+Mrs. Gereth, struck apparently by something in her tone, looked at her
+from a tremendous height. "Don't fail me now!"
+
+It sounded so like a menace that, with a full divination at last, the
+poor girl fell weakly into a chair. "What on earth have you done?"
+
+Mrs. Gereth stood there in all the glory of a great stroke. "I've
+settled you." She filled the room, to Fleda's scared vision, with the
+glare of her magnificence. "I've sent everything back."
+
+"Everything?" Fleda gasped.
+
+"To the smallest snuff-box. The last load went yesterday. The same
+people did it. Poor little Ricks is empty." Then as if, for a crowning
+splendor, to check all deprecation, "They're yours, you goose!" Mrs.
+Gereth concluded, holding up her handsome head and rubbing her white
+hands. Fleda saw that there were tears in her deep eyes.
+
+
+
+
+XVIII
+
+
+She was slow to take in the announcement, but when she had done so she
+felt it to be more than her cup of bitterness would hold. Her bitterness
+was her anxiety, the taste of which suddenly sickened her. What had she
+become, on the spot, but a traitress to her friend? The treachery
+increased with the view of the friend's motive, a motive magnificent as
+a tribute to her value. Mrs. Gereth had wished to make sure of her and
+had reasoned that there would be no such way as by a large appeal to her
+honor. If it be true, as men have declared, that the sense of honor is
+weak in women, some of the bearings of this stroke might have thrown a
+light on the question. What was now, at all events, put before Fleda was
+that she had been made sure of, for the greatness of the surrender
+imposed an obligation as great. There was an expression she had heard
+used by young men with whom she danced: the only word to fit Mrs.
+Gereth's intention was that Mrs. Gereth had designed to "fetch" her. It
+was a calculated, it was a crushing bribe; it looked her in the eyes and
+said simply: "That's what I do for you!" What Fleda was to do in return
+required no pointing out. The sense, at present, of how little she had
+done made her almost cry aloud with pain; but her first endeavor, in the
+face of the fact, was to keep such a cry from reaching her companion.
+How little she had done Mrs. Gereth didn't yet know, and possibly there
+would be still some way of turning round before the discovery. On her
+own side too Fleda had almost made one: she had known she was wanted,
+but she had not after all conceived how magnificently much. She had been
+treated by her friend's act as a conscious prize, but what made her a
+conscious prize was only the power the act itself imputed to her. As
+high, bold diplomacy it dazzled and carried her off her feet. She
+admired the noble risk of it, a risk Mrs. Gereth had faced for the
+utterly poor creature that the girl now felt herself. The change it
+instantly wrought in her was, moreover, extraordinary: it transformed at
+a touch her emotion on the subject of concessions. A few weeks earlier
+she had jumped at the duty of pleading for them, practically quarreling
+with the lady of Ricks for her refusal to restore what she had taken.
+She had been sore with the wrong to Owen, she had bled with the wounds
+of Poynton; now however, as she heard of the replenishment of the void
+that had so haunted her, she came as near sounding an alarm as if from
+the deck of a ship she had seen a person she loved jump into the sea.
+Mrs. Gereth had become in a flash the victim; poor little Ricks had been
+laid bare in a night. If Fleda's feeling about the old things had taken
+precipitate form the form would have been a frantic command. It was
+indeed for mere want of breath that she didn't shout: "Oh, stop
+them--it's no use; bring them back--it's too late!" And what most kept
+her breathless was her companion's very grandeur. Fleda distinguished as
+never before the purity of such a passion; it made Mrs. Gereth august
+and almost sublime. It was absolutely unselfish--she cared nothing for
+mere possession. She thought solely and incorruptibly of what was best
+for the things; she had surrendered them to the presumptive care of the
+one person of her acquaintance who felt about them as she felt herself,
+and whose long lease of the future would be the nearest approach that
+could be compassed to committing them to a museum. Now it was indeed
+that Fleda knew what rested on her; now it was also that she measured as
+if for the first time Mrs. Gereth's view of the natural influence of a
+fine acquisition. She had adopted the idea of blowing away the last
+doubt of what her young friend would gain, of making good still more
+than she was obliged to make it the promise of weeks before. It was one
+thing for the girl to have heard that in a certain event restitution
+would be made; it was another for her to see the condition, with a noble
+trust, treated in advance as performed, and to be able to feel that she
+should have only to open a door to find every old piece in every old
+corner. To have played such a card was therefore, practically, for Mrs.
+Gereth, to have won the game. Fleda had certainly to recognize that, so
+far as the theory of the matter went, the game had been won. Oh, she had
+been made sure of!
+
+She couldn't, however, succeed for so very many minutes in deferring her
+exposure. "Why didn't you wait, dearest? Ah, why didn't you wait?"--if
+that inconsequent appeal kept rising to her lips to be cut short before
+it was spoken, this was only because at first the humility of gratitude
+helped her to gain time, enabled her to present herself very honestly as
+too overcome to be clear. She kissed her companion's hands, she did
+homage at her feet, she murmured soft snatches of praise, and yet in the
+midst of it all was conscious that what she really showed most was the
+wan despair at her heart. She saw Mrs. Gereth's glimpse of this despair
+suddenly widen, heard the quick chill of her voice pierce through the
+false courage of endearments. "Do you mean to tell me at such an hour as
+this that you've really lost him?"
+
+The tone of the question made the idea a possibility for which Fleda had
+nothing from this moment but terror. "I don't know, Mrs. Gereth; how can
+I say?" she asked. "I've not seen him for so long; as I told you just
+now, I don't even know where he is. That's by no fault of his," she
+hurried on: "he would have been with me every day if I had consented.
+But I made him understand, the last time, that I'll receive him again
+only when he's able to show me that his release has been complete and
+definite. Oh, he can't yet, don't you see, and that's why he hasn't been
+back. It's far better than his coming only that we should both be
+miserable. When he does come he'll be in a better position. He'll be
+tremendously moved by the splendid thing you've done. I know you wish me
+to feel that you've done it as much for me as for Owen, but your having
+done it for me is just what will delight him most! When he hears of it,"
+said Fleda, in desperate optimism, "when he hears of it--" There indeed,
+regretting her advance, she quite broke down. She was wholly powerless
+to say what Owen would do when he heard of it. "I don't know what he
+won't make of you and how he won't hug you!" she had to content herself
+with lamely declaring. She had drawn Mrs. Gereth to a sofa with a vague
+instinct of pacifying her and still, after all, gaining time; but it was
+a position in which her great duped benefactress, portentously patient
+again during this demonstration, looked far from inviting a "hug." Fleda
+found herself tricking out the situation with artificial flowers, trying
+to talk even herself into the fancy that Owen, whose name she now made
+simple and sweet, might come in upon them at any moment. She felt an
+immense need to be understood and justified; she averted her face in
+dread from all that she might have to be forgiven. She pressed on her
+companion's arm as if to keep her quiet till she should really know, and
+then, after a minute, she poured out the clear essence of what in
+happier days had been her "secret." "You mustn't think I don't adore him
+when I've told him so to his face. I love him so that I'd die for him--I
+love him so that it's horrible. Don't look at me therefore as if I had
+not been kind, as if I had not been as tender as if he were dying and my
+tenderness were what would save him. Look at me as if you believe me, as
+if you feel what I've been through. Darling Mrs. Gereth, I could kiss
+the ground he walks on. I haven't a rag of pride; I used to have, but
+it's gone. I used to have a secret, but every one knows it now, and any
+one who looks at me can say, I think, what's the matter with me. It's
+not so very fine, my secret, and the less one really says about it the
+better; but I want you to have it from me because I was stiff before. I
+want you to see for yourself that I've been brought as low as a girl can
+very well be. It serves me right," Fleda laughed, "if I was ever proud
+and horrid to you! I don't know what you wanted me, in those days at
+Ricks, to do, but I don't think you can have wanted much more than what
+I've done. The other day at Maggie's I did things that made me,
+afterwards, think of you! I don't know what girls may do; but if he
+doesn't know that there isn't an inch of me that isn't his--!" Fleda
+sighed as if she couldn't express it; she piled it up, as she would have
+said; holding Mrs. Gereth with dilated eyes, she seemed to sound her for
+the effect of these words. "It's idiotic," she wearily smiled; "it's so
+strange that I'm almost angry for it, and the strangest part of all is
+that it isn't even happiness. It's anguish--it was from the first; from
+the first there was a bitterness and a kind of dread. But I owe you
+every word of the truth. You don't do him justice, either: he's a dear,
+I assure you he's a dear. I'd trust him to the last breath; I don't
+think you really know him. He's ever so much cleverer than he makes a
+show of; he's remarkable in his own shy way. You told me at Ricks that
+you wanted me to let myself go, and I've 'gone' quite far enough to
+discover as much as that, as well as all sorts of other delightful
+things about him. You'll tell me I make myself out worse than I am,"
+said the girl, feeling more and more in her companion's attitude a
+quality that treated her speech as a desperate rigmarole and even
+perhaps as a piece of cold immodesty. She wanted to make herself out
+"bad"--it was a part of her justification; but it suddenly occurred to
+her that such a picture of her extravagance imputed a want of gallantry
+to the young man. "I don't care for anything you think," she declared,
+"because Owen, don't you know, sees me as I am. He's so kind that it
+makes up for everything!"
+
+This attempt at gayety was futile; the silence with which, for a minute,
+her adversary greeted her troubled plea brought home to her afresh that
+she was on the bare defensive. "Is it a part of his kindness never to
+come near you?" Mrs. Gereth inquired at last. "Is it a part of his
+kindness to leave you without an inkling of where he is?" She rose again
+from where Fleda had kept her down; she seemed to tower there in the
+majesty of her gathered wrong. "Is it a part of his kindness that, after
+I've toiled as I've done for six days, and with my own weak hands, which
+I haven't spared, to denude myself, in your interest, to that point that
+I've nothing left, as I may say, but what I have on my back--is it a
+part of his kindness that you're not even able to produce him for me?"
+
+There was a high contempt in this which was for Owen quite as much, and
+in the light of which Fleda felt that her effort at plausibility had
+been mere groveling. She rose from the sofa with an humiliated sense of
+rising from ineffectual knees. That discomfort, however, lived but an
+instant: it was swept away in a rush of loyalty to the absent. She
+herself could bear his mother's scorn; but to avert it from his sweet
+innocence she broke out with a quickness that was like the raising of an
+arm. "Don't blame him--don't blame him: he'd do anything on earth for
+me! It was I," said Fleda, eagerly, "who sent him back to her; I made
+him go; I pushed him out of the house; I declined to have anything to
+say to him except on another footing."
+
+Mrs. Gereth stared as at some gross material ravage. "Another footing?
+What other footing?"
+
+"The one I've already made so clear to you: my having it in black and
+white, as you may say, from her that she freely gives him up."
+
+"Then you think he lies when he tells you that he has recovered his
+liberty?"
+
+Fleda hesitated a moment; after which she exclaimed with a certain hard
+pride: "He's enough in love with me for anything!"
+
+"For anything, apparently, except to act like a man and impose his
+reason and his will on your incredible folly. For anything except to put
+an end, as any man worthy of the name would have put it, to your
+systematic, to your idiotic perversity. What are you, after all, my
+dear, I should like to know, that a gentleman who offers you what Owen
+offers should have to meet such wonderful exactions, to take such
+extraordinary precautions about your sweet little scruples?" Her
+resentment rose to a strange insolence which Fleda took full in the face
+and which, for the moment at least, had the horrible force to present to
+her vengefully a showy side of the truth. It gave her a blinding glimpse
+of lost alternatives. "I don't know what to think of him," Mrs. Gereth
+went on; "I don't know what to call him: I'm so ashamed of him that I
+can scarcely speak of him even to _you_. But indeed I'm so ashamed of
+you both together that I scarcely know in common decency where to look."
+She paused to give Fleda the full benefit of this remarkable statement;
+then she exclaimed: "Any one but a jackass would have tucked you under
+his arm and marched you off to the Registrar!"
+
+Fleda wondered; with her free imagination she could wonder even while
+her cheek stung from a slap. "To the Registrar?"
+
+"That would have been the sane, sound, immediate course to adopt. With a
+grain of gumption you'd both instantly have felt it. _I_ should have
+found a way to take you, you know, if I'd been what Owen's supposed to
+be. _I_ should have got the business over first; the rest could come
+when you liked! Good God, girl, your place was to stand before me as a
+woman honestly married. One doesn't know what one has hold of in
+touching you, and you must excuse my saying that you're literally
+unpleasant to me to meet as you are. Then at least we could have talked,
+and Owen, if he had the ghost of a sense of humor, could have snapped
+his fingers at your refinements."
+
+This stirring speech affected our young lady as if it had been the shake
+of a tambourine borne towards her from a gypsy dance: her head seemed to
+go round and she felt a sudden passion in her feet. The emotion,
+however, was but meagrely expressed in the flatness with which she heard
+herself presently say: "I'll go to the Registrar now."
+
+"Now?" Magnificent was the sound Mrs. Gereth threw into this
+monosyllable. "And pray who's to take you?" Fleda gave a colorless
+smile, and her companion continued: "Do you literally mean that you
+can't put your hand upon him?" Fleda's wan grimace appeared to irritate
+her; she made a short, imperious gesture. "Find him for me, you
+fool--_find_ him for me!"
+
+"What do you want of him," Fleda sadly asked, "feeling as you do to both
+of us?"
+
+"Never mind how I feel, and never mind what I say when I'm furious!"
+Mrs. Gereth still more incisively added. "Of course I cling to you, you
+wretches, or I shouldn't suffer as I do. What I want of him is to see
+that he takes you; what I want of him is to go with you myself to the
+place." She looked round the room as if, in feverish haste, for a mantle
+to catch up; she bustled to the window as if to spy out a cab: she would
+allow half an hour for the job. Already in her bonnet, she had snatched
+from the sofa a garment for the street: she jerked it on as she came
+back. "Find him, find him," she repeated; "come straight out with me, to
+try, at least, to get at him!"
+
+"How can I get at him? He'll come when he's ready," Fleda replied.
+
+Mrs. Gereth turned on her sharply. "Ready for what? Ready to see me
+ruined without a reason or a reward?"
+
+Fleda was silent; the worst of it all was that there was something
+unspoken between them. Neither of them dared to utter it, but the
+influence of it was in the girl's tone when she returned at last, with
+great gentleness: "Don't be harsh to me--I'm very unhappy." The words
+produced a visible impression on Mrs. Gereth, who held her face averted
+and sent off through the window a gaze that kept pace with the long
+caravan of her treasures. Fleda knew she was watching it wind up the
+avenue of Poynton--Fleda participated indeed fully in the vision; so
+that after a little the most consoling thing seemed to her to add: "I
+don't see why in the world you take so for granted that he's, as you
+say, 'lost.'"
+
+Mrs. Gereth continued to stare out of the window, and her stillness
+denoted some success in controlling herself. "If he's not lost, why are
+you unhappy?"
+
+"I'm unhappy because I torment you, and you don't understand me."
+
+"No, Fleda, I don't understand you," said Mrs. Gereth, finally facing
+her again. "I don't understand you at all, and it's as if you and Owen
+were of quite another race and another flesh. You make me feel very
+old-fashioned and simple and bad. But you must take me as I am, since
+you take so much else _with_ me!" She spoke now with the drop of her
+resentment, with a dry and weary calm. "It would have been better for me
+if I had never known you," she pursued, "and certainly better if I
+hadn't taken such an extraordinary fancy to you. But that too was
+inevitable: everything, I suppose, is inevitable. It was all my own
+doing--you didn't run after me: I pounced on you and caught you up.
+You're a stiff little beggar, in spite of your pretty manners: yes,
+you're hideously misleading. I hope you feel how handsome it is of me to
+recognize the independence of your character. It was your clever
+sympathy that did it--your extraordinary feeling for those accursed
+vanities. You were sharper about them than any one I had ever known, and
+that was a thing I simply couldn't resist. Well," the poor lady
+concluded after a pause, "you see where it has landed us!"
+
+"If you'll go for him yourself, I'll wait here," said Fleda.
+
+Mrs. Gereth, holding her mantle together, appeared for a while to
+consider.
+
+"To his club, do you mean?"
+
+"Isn't it there, when he's in town, that he has a room? He has at
+present no other London address," Fleda said: "it's there one writes to
+him."
+
+"How do _I_ know, with my wretched relations with him?" Mrs. Gereth
+asked.
+
+"Mine have not been quite so bad as that," Fleda desperately smiled.
+Then she added: "His silence, _her_ silence, our hearing nothing at
+all--what are these but the very things on which, at Poynton and at
+Ricks, you rested your assurance that everything is at an end between
+them?"
+
+Mrs. Gereth looked dark and void. "Yes, but I hadn't heard from you then
+that you could invent nothing better than, as you call it, to send him
+back to her."
+
+"Ah, but, on the other hand, you've learned from them what you didn't
+know--you've learned by Mrs. Brigstock's visit that he cares for me."
+Fleda found herself in the position of availing herself of optimistic
+arguments that she formerly had repudiated; her refutation of her
+companion had completely changed its ground.
+
+She was in a fever of ingenuity and painfully conscious, on behalf of
+her success, that her fever was visible. She could herself see the
+reflection of it glitter in Mrs. Gereth's sombre eyes.
+
+"You plunge me in stupefaction," that lady answered, "and at the same
+time you terrify me. Your account of Owen is inconceivable, and yet I
+don't know what to hold on by. He cares for you, it does appear, and yet
+in the same breath you inform me that nothing is more possible than that
+he's spending these days at Waterbath. Excuse me if I'm so dull as not
+to see my way in such darkness. If he's at Waterbath he doesn't care for
+you. If he cares for you he's not at Waterbath."
+
+"Then where is he?" poor Fleda helplessly wailed. She caught herself up,
+however; she did her best to be brave and clear. Before Mrs. Gereth
+could reply, with due obviousness, that this was a question for her not
+to ask, but to answer, she found an air of assurance to say: "You
+simplify far too much. You always did and you always will. The tangle of
+life is much more intricate than you've ever, I think, felt it to be.
+You slash into it," cried Fleda finely, "with a great pair of shears,
+you nip at it as if you were one of the Fates! If Owen's at Waterbath
+he's there to wind everything up."
+
+Mrs. Gereth shook her head with slow austerity. "You don't believe a
+word you're saying. I've frightened you, as you've frightened me: you're
+whistling in the dark to keep up our courage. I do simplify, doubtless,
+if to simplify is to fail to comprehend the insanity of a passion that
+bewilders a young blockhead with bugaboo barriers, with hideous and
+monstrous sacrifices. I can only repeat that you're beyond me. Your
+perversity's a thing to howl over. However," the poor woman continued
+with a break in her voice, a long hesitation and then the dry triumph of
+her will, "I'll never mention it to you again! Owen I can just make out;
+for Owen _is_ a blockhead. Owen's a blockhead," she repeated with a
+quiet, tragic finality, looking straight into Fleda's eyes. "I don't
+know why you dress up so the fact that he's disgustingly weak."
+
+Fleda hesitated; at last, before her companion's, she lowered her look.
+"Because I love him. It's because he's weak that he needs me," she
+added.
+
+"That was why his father, whom he exactly resembles, needed _me_. And I
+didn't fail his father," said Mrs. Gereth. She gave Fleda a moment to
+appreciate the remark; after which she pursued: "Mona Brigstock isn't
+weak; she's stronger than you!"
+
+"I never thought she was weak," Fleda answered. She looked vaguely round
+the room with a new purpose: she had lost sight of her umbrella.
+
+"I did tell you to let yourself go, but it's clear enough that you
+really haven't," Mrs. Gereth declared. "If Mona has got him--"
+
+Fleda had accomplished her search; her interlocutress paused. "If Mona
+has got him?" the girl inquired, tightening the umbrella.
+
+"Well," said Mrs. Gereth profoundly, "it will be clear enough that Mona
+_has_."
+
+"Has let herself go?"
+
+"Has let herself go." Mrs. Gereth spoke as if she saw it in every
+detail.
+
+Fleda felt the tone and finished her preparation; then she went and
+opened the door. "We'll look for him together," she said to her friend,
+who stood a moment taking in her face. "They may know something about
+him at the Colonel's."
+
+"We'll go there." Mrs. Gereth had picked up her gloves and her purse.
+"But the first thing," she went on, "will be to wire to Poynton."
+
+"Why not to Waterbath at once?" Fleda asked.
+
+Her companion hesitated. "In _your_ name?"
+
+"In my name. I noticed a place at the corner."
+
+While Fleda held the door open Mrs. Gereth drew on her gloves. "Forgive
+me," she presently said. "Kiss me," she added.
+
+Fleda, on the threshold, kissed her; then they went out.
+
+
+
+
+XIX
+
+
+In the place at the corner, on the chance of its saving time, Fleda
+wrote her telegram--wrote it in silence under Mrs. Gereth's eye and then
+in silence handed it to her. "I send this to Waterbath, on the
+possibility of your being there, to ask you to come to me." Mrs. Gereth
+held it a moment, read it more than once; then keeping it, and with her
+eyes on her companion, seemed to consider. There was the dawn of a
+kindness in her look; Fleda perceived in it, as if as the reward of
+complete submission, a slight relaxation of her rigor.
+
+"Wouldn't it perhaps after all be better," she asked, "before doing
+this, to see if we can make his whereabouts certain?"
+
+"Why so? It will be always so much done," said Fleda. "Though I'm poor,"
+she added with a smile, "I don't mind the shilling."
+
+"The shilling's _my_ shilling," said Mrs. Gereth.
+
+Fleda stayed her hand. "No, no--I'm superstitious."
+
+"Superstitious?"
+
+"To succeed, it must be all me!"
+
+"Well, if that will make it succeed!" Mrs. Gereth took back her
+shilling, but she still kept the telegram. "As he's most probably not
+there--"
+
+"If he shouldn't be there," Fleda interrupted, "there will be no harm
+done."
+
+"If he 'shouldn't be' there!" Mrs. Gereth ejaculated. "Heaven help us,
+how you assume it!"
+
+"I'm only prepared for the worst. The Brigstocks will simply send any
+telegram on."
+
+"Where will they send it?"
+
+"Presumably to Poynton."
+
+"They'll read it first," said Mrs. Gereth.
+
+"Read it?"
+
+"Yes, Mona will. She'll open it under the pretext of having it repeated;
+and then she'll probably do nothing. She'll keep it as a proof of your
+immodesty."
+
+"What of that?" asked Fleda.
+
+"You don't mind her seeing it?"
+
+Rather musingly and absently Fleda shook her head. "I don't mind
+anything."
+
+"Well, then, that's all right," said Mrs. Gereth as if she had only
+wanted to feel that she had been irreproachably considerate. After this
+she was gentler still, but she had another point to clear up. "Why have
+you given, for a reply, your sister's address?"
+
+"Because if he _does_ come to me he must come to me there. If that
+telegram goes," said Fleda, "I return to Maggie's to-night."
+
+Mrs. Gereth seemed to wonder at this. "You won't receive him here with
+me?"
+
+"No, I won't receive him here with you. Only where I received him
+last--only there again." She showed her companion that as to that she
+was firm.
+
+But Mrs. Gereth had obviously now had some practice in following queer
+movements prompted by queer feelings. She resigned herself, though she
+fingered the paper a moment longer. She appeared to hesitate; then she
+brought out: "You couldn't then, if I release you, make your message a
+little stronger?"
+
+Fleda gave her a faint smile. "He'll come if he can."
+
+Mrs. Gereth met fully what this conveyed; with decision she pushed in
+the telegram. But she laid her hand quickly upon another form and with
+still greater decision wrote another message. "From _me_, this," she
+said to Fleda when she had finished: "to catch him possibly at Poynton.
+Will you read it?"
+
+Fleda turned away. "Thank you."
+
+"It's stronger than yours."
+
+"I don't care," said Fleda, moving to the door. Mrs. Gereth, having paid
+for the second missive, rejoined her, and they drove together to Owen's
+club, where the elder lady alone got out. Fleda, from the hansom,
+watched through the glass doors her brief conversation with the
+hall-porter and then met in silence her return with the news that he had
+not seen Owen for a fortnight and was keeping his letters till called
+for. These had been the last orders; there were a dozen letters lying
+there. He had no more information to give, but they would see what they
+could find at Colonel Gereth's. To any connection with this inquiry,
+however, Fleda now roused herself to object, and her friend had indeed
+to recognize that on second thoughts it couldn't be quite to the taste
+of either of them to advertise in the remoter reaches of the family that
+they had forfeited the confidence of the master of Poynton. The letters
+lying at the club proved effectively that he was not in London, and this
+was the question that immediately concerned them. Nothing could concern
+them further till the answers to their telegrams should have had time to
+arrive. Mrs. Gereth had got back into the cab, and, still at the door of
+the club, they sat staring at their need of patience. Fleda's eyes
+rested, in the great hard street, on passing figures that struck her as
+puppets pulled by strings. After a little the driver challenged them
+through the hole in the top. "Anywhere in particular, ladies?"
+
+Fleda decided. "Drive to Euston, please."
+
+"You won't wait for what we may hear?" Mrs. Gereth asked.
+
+"Whatever we hear, I must go." As the cab went on she added: "But I
+needn't drag _you_ to the station."
+
+Mrs. Gereth was silent a moment; then "Nonsense!" she sharply replied.
+
+In spite of this sharpness they were now almost equally and almost
+tremulously mild; though their mildness took mainly the form of an
+inevitable sense of nothing left to say. It was the unsaid that occupied
+them--the thing that for more than an hour they had been going round and
+round without naming it. Much too early for Fleda's train, they
+encountered at the station a long half-hour to wait. Fleda made no
+further allusion to Mrs. Gereth's leaving her; their dumbness, with the
+elapsing minutes, grew to be in itself a reconstituted bond. They slowly
+paced the great gray platform, and presently Mrs. Gereth took the girl's
+arm and leaned on it with a hard demand for support. It seemed to Fleda
+not difficult for each to know of what the other was thinking--to know
+indeed that they had in common two alternating visions, one of which, at
+moments, brought them as by a common impulse to a pause. This was the
+one that was fixed; the other filled at times the whole space and then
+was shouldered away. Owen and Mona glared together out of the gloom and
+disappeared, but the replenishment of Poynton made a shining, steady
+light. The old splendor was there again, the old things were in their
+places. Our friends looked at them with an equal yearning; face to face,
+on the platform, they counted them in each other's eyes. Fleda had come
+back to them by a road as strange as the road they themselves had
+followed. The wonder of their great journeys, the prodigy of this second
+one, was the question that made her occasionally stop. Several times she
+uttered it, asked how this and that difficulty had been met. Mrs. Gereth
+replied with pale lucidity--was naturally the person most familiar with
+the truth that what she undertook was always somehow achieved. To do it
+was to do it--she had more than one kind of magnificence. She confessed
+there, audaciously enough, to a sort of arrogance of energy, and Fleda,
+going on again, her inquiry more than answered and her arm rendering
+service, flushed, in her diminished identity, with the sense that such a
+woman was great.
+
+"You do mean literally everything, to the last little miniature on the
+last little screen?"
+
+"I mean literally everything. Go over them with the catalogue!"
+
+Fleda went over them while they walked again; she had no need of the
+catalogue. At last she spoke once more: "Even the Maltese cross?"
+
+"Even the Maltese cross. Why not that as well as everything
+else?--especially as I remembered how you like it."
+
+Finally, after an interval, the girl exclaimed: "But the mere fatigue of
+it, the exhaustion of such a feat! I drag you to and fro here while you
+must be ready to drop."
+
+"I'm very, very tired." Mrs. Gereth's slow head-shake was tragic. "I
+couldn't do it again."
+
+"I doubt if they'd bear it again!"
+
+"That's another matter: they'd bear it if I could. There won't have
+been, this time either, a shake or a scratch. But I'm too tired--I very
+nearly don't care."
+
+"You must sit down, then, till I go," said Fleda. "We must find a
+bench."
+
+"No. I'm tired of _them_: I'm not tired of you. This is the way for you
+to feel most how much I rest on you." Fleda had a compunction, wondering
+as they continued to stroll whether it was right after all to leave her.
+She believed, however, that if the flame might for the moment burn low,
+it was far from dying out; an impression presently confirmed by the way
+Mrs. Gereth went on: "But one's fatigue is nothing. The idea under which
+one worked kept one up. For you I _could_--I can still. Nothing will
+have mattered if _she's_ not there."
+
+There was a question that this imposed, but Fleda at first found no
+voice to utter it: it was the thing that, between them, since her
+arrival, had been so consciously and vividly unsaid. Finally she was
+able to breathe: "And if she _is_ there--if she's there already?"
+
+Mrs. Gereth's rejoinder too hung back; then when it came--from sad eyes
+as well as from lips barely moved--it was unexpectedly merciful. "It
+will be very hard." That was all, now; and it was poignantly simple. The
+train Fleda was to take had drawn up; the girl kissed her as if in
+farewell. Mrs. Gereth submitted, then after a little brought out: "If we
+_have_ lost--"
+
+"If we have lost?" Fleda repeated as she paused again.
+
+"You'll all the same come abroad with me?"
+
+"It will seem very strange to me if you want me. But whatever you ask,
+whatever you need, that I will always do."
+
+"I shall need your company," said Mrs. Gereth. Fleda wondered an instant
+if this were not practically a demand for penal submission--for a
+surrender that, in its complete humility, would be a long expiation. But
+there was none of the latent chill of the vindictive in the way Mrs.
+Gereth pursued: "We can always, as time goes on, talk of them together."
+
+"Of the old things?" Fleda had selected a third-class compartment: she
+stood a moment looking into it and at a fat woman with a basket who had
+already taken possession. "Always?" she said, turning again to her
+companion. "Never!" she exclaimed. She got into the carriage, and two
+men with bags and boxes immediately followed, blocking up door and
+window so long that when she was able to look out again Mrs. Gereth had
+gone.
+
+
+
+
+XX
+
+
+There came to her at her sister's no telegram in answer to her own: the
+rest of that day and the whole of the next elapsed without a word either
+from Owen or from his mother. She was free, however, to her infinite
+relief, from any direct dealing with suspense, and conscious, to her
+surprise, of nothing that could show her, or could show Maggie and her
+brother-in-law, that she was excited. Her excitement was composed of
+pulses as swift and fine as the revolutions of a spinning top: she
+supposed she was going round, but she went round so fast that she
+couldn't even feel herself move. Her emotion occupied some quarter of
+her soul that had closed its doors for the day and shut out even her own
+sense of it; she might perhaps have heard something if she had pressed
+her ear to a partition. Instead of that she sat with her patience in a
+cold, still chamber from which she could look out in quite another
+direction. This was to have achieved an equilibrium to which she
+couldn't have given a name: indifference, resignation, despair were the
+terms of a forgotten tongue. The time even seemed not long, for the
+stages of the journey were the items of Mrs. Gereth's surrender. The
+detail of that performance, which filled the scene, was what Fleda had
+now before her eyes. The part of her loss that she could think of was
+the reconstituted splendor of Poynton. It was the beauty she was most
+touched by that, in tons, she had lost--the beauty that, charged upon
+big wagons, had safely crept back to its home. But the loss was a gain
+to memory and love; it was to her too, at last, that, in condonation of
+her treachery, the old things had crept back. She greeted them with open
+arms; she thought of them hour after hour; they made a company with
+which solitude was warm and a picture that, at this crisis, overlaid
+poor Maggie's scant mahogany. It was really her obliterated passion that
+had revived, and with it an immense assent to Mrs. Gereth's early
+judgment of her. She too, she felt, was of the religion, and like any
+other of the passionately pious she could worship now even in the
+desert. Yes, it was all for her; far round as she had gone she had been
+strong enough: her love had gathered in the spoils. She wanted indeed no
+catalogue to count them over; the array of them, miles away, was
+complete; each piece, in its turn, was perfect to her; she could have
+drawn up a catalogue from memory. Thus again she lived with them, and
+she thought of them without a question of any personal right. That they
+might have been, that they might still be hers, that they were perhaps
+already another's, were ideas that had too little to say to her. They
+were nobody's at all--too proud, unlike base animals and humans, to be
+reducible to anything so narrow. It was Poynton that was theirs; they
+had simply recovered their own. The joy of that for them was the source
+of the strange peace in which the girl found herself floating.
+
+It was broken on the third day by a telegram from Mrs. Gereth. "Shall be
+with you at 11.30--don't meet me at station." Fleda turned this over,
+but was sufficiently expert not to disobey the injunction. She had only
+an hour to take in its meaning, but that hour was longer than all the
+previous time. If Maggie had studied her convenience the day Owen came,
+Maggie was also at the present juncture a miracle of refinement.
+Increasingly and resentfully mystified, in spite of all reassurance, by
+the impression that Fleda suffered more than she gained from the
+grandeur of the Gereths, she had it at heart to exemplify the perhaps
+truer distinction of nature that characterized the house of Vetch. She
+was not, like poor Fleda, at every one's beck, and the visitor was to
+see no more of her than what the arrangement of luncheon might
+tantalizingly show. Maggie described herself to her sister as intending
+for a just provocation even the understanding she had had with her
+husband that he also should remain invisible. Fleda accordingly awaited
+alone the subject of so many manoeuvres--a period that was slightly
+prolonged even after the drawing-room door, at 11.30, was thrown open.
+Mrs. Gereth stood there with a face that spoke plain, but no sound fell
+from her till the withdrawal of the maid, whose attention had
+immediately attached itself to the rearrangement of a window-blind and
+who seemed, while she bustled at it, to contribute to the pregnant
+silence; before the duration of which, however, she retreated with a
+sudden stare.
+
+"He has done it," said Mrs. Gereth, turning her eyes avoidingly but not
+unperceivingly about her and in spite of herself dropping an opinion
+upon the few objects in the room. Fleda, on her side, in her silence,
+observed how characteristically she looked at Maggie's possessions
+before looking at Maggie's sister. The girl understood and at first had
+nothing to say; she was still dumb while Mrs. Gereth selected, with
+hesitation, a seat less distasteful than the one that happened to be
+nearest. On the sofa near the window the poor woman finally showed what
+the two past days had done for the age of her face. Her eyes at last met
+Fleda's. "It's the end."
+
+"They're married?"
+
+"They're married."
+
+Fleda came to the sofa in obedience to the impulse to sit down by her;
+then paused before her while Mrs. Gereth turned up a dead gray mask. A
+tired old woman sat there with empty hands in her lap. "I've heard
+nothing," said Fleda. "No answer came."
+
+"That's the only answer. It's the answer to everything." So Fleda saw;
+for a minute she looked over her companion's head and far away. "He
+wasn't at Waterbath; Mrs. Brigstock must have read your telegram and
+kept it. But mine, the one to Poynton, brought something. 'We are
+here--what do you want?'" Mrs. Gereth stopped as if with a failure of
+voice; on which Fleda sank upon the sofa and made a movement to take her
+hand. It met no response; there could be no attenuation. Fleda waited;
+they sat facing each other like strangers. "I wanted to go down," Mrs.
+Gereth presently continued. "Well, I went."
+
+All the girl's effort tended for the time to a single aim--that of
+taking the thing with outward detachment, speaking of it as having
+happened to Owen and to his mother and not in any degree to herself.
+Something at least of this was in the encouraging way she said:
+"Yesterday morning?"
+
+"Yesterday morning. I saw him."
+
+Fleda hesitated. "Did you see _her_?"
+
+"Thank God, no!"
+
+Fleda laid on her arm a hand of vague comfort, of which Mrs. Gereth took
+no notice. "You've been capable, just to tell me, of this wretched
+journey, of this consideration that I don't deserve?"
+
+"We're together, we're together," said Mrs. Gereth. She looked helpless
+as she sat there, her eyes, unseeingly enough, on a tall Dutch clock,
+old but rather poor, that Maggie had had as a wedding-gift and that eked
+out the bareness of the room.
+
+To Fleda, in the face of the event, it appeared that this was exactly
+what they were not: the last inch of common ground, the ground of their
+past intercourse, had fallen from under them. Yet what was still there
+was the grand style of her companion's treatment of her. Mrs. Gereth
+couldn't stand upon small questions, couldn't, in conduct, make small
+differences. "You're magnificent!" her young friend exclaimed. "There's
+a rare greatness in your generosity."
+
+"We're together, we're together," Mrs. Gereth lifelessly repeated.
+"That's all we _are_ now; it's all we have." The words brought to Fleda
+a sudden vision of the empty little house at Ricks; such a vision might
+also have been what her companion found in the face of the stopped Dutch
+clock. Yet with this it was clear that she would now show no bitterness:
+she had done with that, had given the last drop to those horrible hours
+in London. No passion even was left to her, and her forbearance only
+added to the force with which she represented the final vanity of
+everything.
+
+Fleda was so far from a wish to triumph that she was absolutely ashamed
+of having anything to say for herself; but there was one thing, all the
+same, that not to say was impossible. "That he has done it, that he
+couldn't _not_ do it, shows how right I was." It settled forever her
+attitude, and she spoke as if for her own mind; then after a little she
+added very gently, for Mrs. Gereth's: "That's to say, it shows that he
+was bound to her by an obligation that, however much he may have wanted
+to, he couldn't in any sort of honor break."
+
+Blanched and bleak, Mrs. Gereth looked at her. "What sort of an
+obligation do you call that? No such obligation exists for an hour
+between any man and any woman who have hatred on one side. He had ended
+by hating her, and now he hates her more than ever."
+
+"Did he tell you so?" Fleda asked.
+
+"No. He told me nothing but the great gawk of a fact. I saw him but for
+three minutes." She was silent again, and Fleda, as before some lurid
+image of this interview, sat without speaking. "Do you wish to appear as
+if you don't care?" Mrs. Gereth presently demanded.
+
+"I'm trying not to think of myself."
+
+"Then if you're thinking of Owen, how can you _bear_ to think?"
+
+Sadly and submissively Fleda shook her head; the slow tears had come
+into her eyes. "I can't. I don't understand--I don't understand!" she
+broke out.
+
+"_I_ do, then." Mrs. Gereth looked hard at the floor. "There was no
+obligation at the time you saw him last--when you sent him, hating her
+as he did, back to her."
+
+"If he went," Fleda asked, "doesn't that exactly prove that he
+recognized one?"
+
+"He recognized rot! You know what _I_ think of him." Fleda knew; she had
+no wish to challenge a fresh statement. Mrs. Gereth made one--it was her
+sole, faint flicker of passion--to the extent of declaring that he was
+too abjectly weak to deserve the name of a man. For all Fleda cared!--it
+was his weakness she loved in him. "He took strange ways of pleasing
+you!" her friend went on. "There was no obligation till suddenly, the
+other day, the situation changed."
+
+Fleda wondered. "The other day?"
+
+"It came to Mona's knowledge--I can't tell you how, but it came--that
+the things I was sending back had begun to arrive at Poynton. I had sent
+them for you, but it was _her_ I touched." Mrs. Gereth paused; Fleda was
+too absorbed in her explanation to do anything but take blankly the
+full, cold breath of this. "They were there, and that determined her."
+
+"Determined her to what?"
+
+"To act, to take means."
+
+"To take means?" Fleda repeated.
+
+"I can't tell you what they were, but they were powerful. She knew how,"
+said Mrs. Gereth.
+
+Fleda received with the same stoicism the quiet immensity of this
+allusion to the person who had not known how. But it made her think a
+little, and the thought found utterance, with unconscious irony, in the
+simple interrogation: "Mona?"
+
+"Why not? She's a brute."
+
+"But if he knew that so well, what chance was there in it for her?"
+
+"How can I tell you? How can I talk of such horrors? I can only give
+you, of the situation, what I see. He knew it, yes. But as she couldn't
+make him forget it, she tried to make him like it. She tried and she
+succeeded: that's what she did. She's after all so much less of a fool
+than he. And what _else_ had he originally liked?" Mrs. Gereth shrugged
+her shoulders. "She did what you wouldn't!" Fleda's face had grown dark
+with her wonder, but her friend's empty hands offered no balm to the
+pain in it. "It was that if it was anything. Nothing else meets the
+misery of it. Then there was quick work. Before he could turn round he
+was married."
+
+Fleda, as if she had been holding her breath, gave the sigh of a
+listening child. "At that place you spoke of in town?"
+
+"At the Registrar's, like a pair of low atheists."
+
+The girl hesitated. "What do people say of that? I mean the 'world.'"
+
+"Nothing, because nobody knows. They're to be married on the 17th, at
+Waterbath church. If anything else comes out, everybody is a little
+prepared. It will pass for some stroke of diplomacy, some move in the
+game, some outwitting of _me_. It's known there has been a row with me."
+
+Fleda was mystified. "People surely knew at Poynton," she objected, "if,
+as you say, she's there."
+
+"She was there, day before yesterday, only for a few hours. She met him
+in London and went down to see the things."
+
+Fleda remembered that she had seen them only once. "Did _you_ see them?"
+she then ventured to ask.
+
+"Everything."
+
+"Are they right?"
+
+"Quite right. There's nothing like them," said Mrs. Gereth. At this her
+companion took up one of her hands again and kissed it as she had done
+in London. "Mona went back that night; she was not there yesterday. Owen
+stayed on," she added.
+
+Fleda stared. "Then she's not to live there?"
+
+"Rather! But not till after the public marriage." Mrs. Gereth seemed to
+muse; then she brought out: "She'll live there alone."
+
+"Alone?"
+
+"She'll have it to herself."
+
+"He won't live with her?"
+
+"Never! But she's none the less his wife, and you're not," said Mrs.
+Gereth, getting up. "Our only chance is the chance she may die."
+
+Fleda appeared to consider: she appreciated her visitor's magnanimous
+use of the plural. "Mona won't die," she replied.
+
+"Well, _I_ shall, thank God! Till then"--and with this, for the first
+time, Mrs. Gereth put out her hand--"don't desert me."
+
+Fleda took her hand, and her clasp of it was a reiteration of a promise
+already given. She said nothing, but her silence was an acceptance as
+responsible as the vow of a nun. The next moment something occurred to
+her. "I mustn't put myself in your son's way."
+
+Mrs. Gereth gave a dry, flat laugh. "You're prodigious! But how shall
+you possibly be more out of it? Owen and I--" She didn't finish her
+sentence.
+
+"That's your great feeling about _him_," Fleda said; "but how, after
+what has happened, can it be his about you?"
+
+Mrs. Gereth hesitated. "How do you know what has happened? You don't
+know what I said to him."
+
+"Yesterday?"
+
+"Yesterday."
+
+They looked at each other with a long, deep gaze. Then, as Mrs. Gereth
+seemed again about to speak, the girl, closing her eyes, made a gesture
+of strong prohibition. "Don't tell me!"
+
+"Merciful powers, how you worship him!" Mrs. Gereth wonderingly moaned.
+It was, for Fleda, the shake that made the cup overflow. She had a
+pause, that of the child who takes time to know that he responds to an
+accident with pain; then, dropping again on the sofa, she broke into
+tears. They were beyond control, they came in long sobs, which for a
+moment Mrs. Gereth, almost with an air of indifference, stood hearing
+and watching. At last Mrs. Gereth too sank down again. Mrs. Gereth
+soundlessly, wearily wept.
+
+
+
+
+XXI
+
+
+"It looks just like Waterbath; but, after all, we bore _that_ together:"
+these words formed part of a letter in which, before the 17th, Mrs.
+Gereth, writing from disfigured Ricks, named to Fleda the day on which
+she would be expected to arrive there on a second visit. "I sha'n't, for
+a long time to come," the missive continued, "be able to receive any one
+who may _like_ it, who would try to smooth it down, and me with it; but
+there are always things you and I can comfortably hate together, for
+you're the only person who comfortably understands. You don't understand
+quite everything, but of all my acquaintance you're far away the least
+stupid. For action you're no good at all; but action is over, for me,
+forever, and you will have the great merit of knowing, when I'm brutally
+silent, what I shall be thinking about. Without setting myself up for
+your equal, I dare say I shall also know what are your own thoughts.
+Moreover, with nothing else but my four walls, you'll at any rate be a
+bit of furniture. For that, you know, a little, I've always taken
+you--quite one of my best finds. So come, if possible, on the 15th."
+
+The position of a bit of furniture was one that Fleda could
+conscientiously accept, and she by no means insisted on so high a place
+in the list. This communication made her easier, if only by its
+acknowledgment that her friend had some thing left: it still implied
+recognition of the principle of property. Something to hate, and to hate
+"comfortably," was at least not the utter destitution to which, after
+their last interview, she had helplessly seemed to see Mrs. Gereth go
+forth. She remembered indeed that, in the state in which they first saw
+it, she herself had "liked" the blessed refuge of Ricks; and she now
+wondered if the tact for which she was commended had then operated to
+make her keep her kindness out of sight. She was at present ashamed of
+such obliquity, and made up her mind that if this happy impression,
+quenched in the spoils of Poynton, should revive on the spot, she would
+utter it to her companion without reserve. Yes, she was capable of as
+much "action" as that: all the more that the spirit of her hostess
+seemed, for the time at least, wholly to have failed. Mrs. Gereth's
+three minutes with Owen had been a blow to all talk of travel, and after
+her woeful hour at Maggie's she had, like some great moaning, wounded
+bird, made her way, with wings of anguish, back to the nest she knew she
+should find empty. Fleda, on that dire day, could neither keep her nor
+give her up; she had pressingly offered to return with her, but Mrs.
+Gereth, in spite of the theory that their common grief was a bond, had
+even declined all escort to the station, conscious apparently of
+something abject in her collapse and almost fiercely eager, as with a
+personal shame, to be unwatched. All she had said to Fleda was that she
+would go back to Ricks that night, and the girl had lived for days after
+with a dreadful image of her position and her misery there. She had had
+a vision of her now lying prone on some unmade bed, now pacing a bare
+floor like a lioness deprived of her cubs. There had been moments when
+her mind's ear was strained to listen for some sound of grief wild
+enough to be wafted from afar. But the first sound, at the end of a
+week, had been a note announcing, without reflections, that the plan of
+going abroad had been abandoned. "It has come to me indirectly, but with
+much appearance of truth, that _they_ are going--for an indefinite time.
+That quite settles it; I shall stay where I am, and as soon as I've
+turned round again I shall look for you." The second letter had come a
+week later, and on the 15th Fleda was on her way to Ricks.
+
+Her arrival took the form of a surprise very nearly as violent as that
+of the other time. The elements were different, but the effect, like the
+other, arrested her on the threshold: she stood there stupefied and
+delighted at the magic of a passion of which such a picture represented
+the low-water mark. Wound up but sincere, and passing quickly from room
+to room, Fleda broke out before she even sat down. "If you turn me out
+of the house for it, my dear, there isn't a woman in England for whom it
+wouldn't be a privilege to live here." Mrs. Gereth was as honestly
+bewildered as she had of old been falsely calm. She looked about at the
+few sticks that, as she afterwards phrased it, she had gathered in, and
+then hard at her guest, as if to protect herself against a joke
+sufficiently cruel. The girl's heart gave a leap, for this stare was the
+sign of an opportunity. Mrs. Gereth was all unwitting; she didn't in the
+least know what she had done, and as Fleda could tell her Fleda suddenly
+became the one who knew most. That counted for the moment as a
+magnificent position; it almost made all the difference. Yet what
+contradicted it was the vivid presence of the artist's idea. "Where on
+earth did you put your hand on such beautiful things?"
+
+"Beautiful things?" Mrs. Gereth turned again to the little worn,
+bleached stuffs and the sweet spindle-legs. "They're the wretched things
+that were here--that stupid, starved old woman's."
+
+"The maiden aunt's, the nicest, the dearest old woman that ever lived? I
+thought you had got rid of the maiden aunt."
+
+"She was stored in an empty barn--stuck away for a sale; a matter that,
+fortunately, I've had neither time nor freedom of mind to arrange. I've
+simply, in my extremity, fished her out again."
+
+"You've simply, in your extremity, made a delight of her." Fleda took
+the highest line and the upper hand, and as Mrs. Gereth, challenging her
+cheerfulness, turned again a lustreless eye over the contents of the
+place, she broke into a rapture that was unforced, but that she was
+conscious of an advantage in being able to feel. She moved, as she had
+done on the previous occasion, from one piece to another, with looks of
+recognition and hands that lightly lingered, but she was as feverishly
+jubilant now as she had formerly been anxious and mute. "Ah, the little
+melancholy, tender, tell-tale things: how can they _not_ speak to you
+and find a way to your heart? It's not the great chorus of Poynton; but
+you're not, I'm sure, either so proud or so broken as to be reached by
+nothing but that. This is a voice so gentle, so human, so feminine--a
+faint, far-away voice with the little quaver of a heart-break. You've
+listened to it unawares; for the arrangement and effect of
+everything--when I compare them with what we found the first day we came
+down--shows, even if mechanically and disdainfully exercised, your
+admirable, infallible hand. It's your extraordinary genius; you make
+things 'compose' in spite of yourself. You've only to be a day or two in
+a place with four sticks for something to come of it!"
+
+"Then if anything has come of it here, it has come precisely of just
+four. That's literally, by the inventory, all there are!" said Mrs.
+Gereth.
+
+"If there were more there would be too many to convey the impression in
+which half the beauty resides--the impression, somehow, of something
+dreamed and missed, something reduced, relinquished, resigned: the
+poetry, as it were, of something sensibly _gone_." Fleda ingeniously and
+triumphantly worked it out. "Ah, there's something here that will never
+be in the inventory!"
+
+"Does it happen to be in your power to give it a name?" Mrs. Gereth's
+face showed the dim dawn of an amusement at finding herself seated at
+the feet of her pupil.
+
+"I can give it a dozen. It's a kind of fourth dimension. It's a
+presence, a perfume, a touch. It's a soul, a story, a life. There's ever
+so much more here than you and I. We're in fact just three!"
+
+"Oh, if you count the ghosts!"
+
+"Of course I count the ghosts. It seems to me ghosts count double--for
+what they were and for what they are. Somehow there were no ghosts at
+Poynton," Fleda went on. "That was the only fault."
+
+Mrs. Gereth, considering, appeared to fall in with the girl's fine
+humor. "Poynton was too splendidly happy."
+
+"Poynton was too splendidly happy," Fleda promptly echoed.
+
+"But it's cured of that now," her companion added.
+
+"Yes, henceforth there'll be a ghost or two."
+
+Mrs. Gereth thought again: she found her young friend suggestive. "Only
+_she_ won't see them."
+
+"No, 'she' won't see them." Then Fleda said, "What I mean is, for this
+dear one of ours, that if she had (as I _know_ she did; it's in the very
+taste of the air!) a great accepted pain--"
+
+She had paused an instant, and Mrs. Gereth took her up. "Well, if she
+had?"
+
+Fleda still hesitated. "Why, it was worse than yours."
+
+Mrs. Gereth reflected. "Very likely." Then she too hesitated. "The
+question is if it was worse than yours."
+
+"Mine?" Fleda looked vague.
+
+"Precisely. Yours."
+
+At this our young lady smiled. "Yes, because it was a disappointment.
+She had been so sure."
+
+"I see. And you were never sure."
+
+"Never. Besides, I'm happy," said Fleda.
+
+Mrs. Gereth met her eyes awhile. "Goose!" she quietly remarked as she
+turned away. There was a curtness in it; nevertheless it represented a
+considerable part of the basis of their new life.
+
+On the 18th The Morning Post had at last its clear message, a brief
+account of the marriage, from the residence of the bride's mother, of
+Mr. Owen Gereth of Poynton Park to Miss Mona Brigstock of Waterbath.
+There were two ecclesiastics and six bridesmaids and, as Mrs. Gereth
+subsequently said, a hundred frumps, as well as a special train from
+town: the scale of the affair sufficiently showed that the preparations
+had been complete for weeks. The happy pair were described as having
+taken their departure for Mr. Gereth's own seat, famous for its unique
+collection of artistic curiosities. The newspapers and letters, the
+fruits of the first London post, had been brought to the mistress of
+Ricks in the garden; and she lingered there alone a long time after
+receiving them. Fleda kept at a distance; she knew what must have
+happened, for from one of the windows she saw her rigid in a chair, her
+eyes strange and fixed, the newspaper open on the ground and the letters
+untouched in her lap. Before the morning's end she had disappeared, and
+the rest of that day she remained in her room: it recalled to Fleda, who
+had picked up the newspaper, the day, months before, on which Owen had
+come down to Poynton to make his engagement known. The hush of the house
+was at least the same, and the girl's own waiting, her soft wandering,
+through the hours: there was a difference indeed sufficiently great, of
+which her companion's absence might in some degree have represented a
+considerate recognition. That was at any rate the meaning Fleda,
+devoutly glad to be alone, attached to her opportunity. Mrs. Gereth's
+sole allusion, the next day, to the subject of their thoughts, has
+already been mentioned: it was a dazzled glance at the fact that Mona's
+quiet pace had really never slackened.
+
+Fleda fully assented. "I said of our disembodied friend here that she
+had suffered in proportion as she had been sure. But that's not always a
+source of suffering. It's Mona who must have been sure!"
+
+"She was sure of _you_!" Mrs. Gereth returned. But this didn't diminish
+the satisfaction taken by Fleda in showing how serenely and lucidly she
+could talk.
+
+
+
+
+XXII
+
+
+Her relation with her wonderful friend had, however, in becoming a new
+one, begun to shape itself almost wholly on breaches and omissions.
+Something had dropped out altogether, and the question between them,
+which time would answer, was whether the change had made them strangers
+or yokefellows. It was as if at last, for better or worse, they were, in
+a clearer, cruder air, really to know each other. Fleda wondered how
+Mrs. Gereth had escaped hating her: there were hours when it seemed that
+such a feat might leave after all a scant margin for future accidents.
+The thing indeed that now came out in its simplicity was that even in
+her shrunken state the lady of Ricks was larger than her wrongs. As for
+the girl herself, she had made up her mind that her feelings had no
+connection with the case. It was her pretension that they had never yet
+emerged from the seclusion into which, after her friend's visit to her
+at her sister's, we saw them precipitately retire: if she should
+suddenly meet them in straggling procession on the road it would be time
+enough to deal with them. They were all bundled there together, likes
+with dislikes and memories with fears; and she had for not thinking of
+them the excellent reason that she was too occupied with the actual. The
+actual was not that Owen Gereth had seen his necessity where she had
+pointed it out; it was that his mother's bare spaces demanded all the
+tapestry that the recipient of her bounty could furnish. There were
+moments during the month that followed when Mrs. Gereth struck her as
+still older and feebler, and as likely to become quite easily amused.
+
+At the end of it, one day, the London paper had another piece of news:
+"Mr. and Mrs. Owen Gereth, who arrived in town last week, proceed this
+morning to Paris." They exchanged no word about it till the evening, and
+none indeed would then have been uttered had not Mrs. Gereth
+irrelevantly broken out: "I dare say you wonder why I declared the other
+day with such assurance that he wouldn't live with her. He apparently
+_is_ living with her."
+
+"Surely it's the only proper thing for him to do."
+
+"They're beyond me--I give it up," said Mrs. Gereth.
+
+"I don't give it up--I never did," Fleda returned.
+
+"Then what do you make of his aversion to her?"
+
+"Oh, she has dispelled it."
+
+Mrs. Gereth said nothing for a minute. "You're prodigious in your choice
+of terms!" she then simply ejaculated.
+
+But Fleda went luminously on; she once more enjoyed her great command of
+her subject: "I think that when you came to see me at Maggie's you saw
+too many things, you had too many ideas."
+
+"You had none," said Mrs. Gereth: "you were completely bewildered."
+
+"Yes, I didn't quite understand--but I think I understand now. The case
+is simple and logical enough. She's a person who's upset by failure and
+who blooms and expands with success. There was something she had set her
+heart upon, set her teeth about--the house exactly as she had seen it."
+
+"She never saw it at all, she never looked at it!" cried Mrs. Gereth.
+
+"She doesn't look with her eyes; she looks with her ears. In her own way
+she had taken it in; she knew, she felt when it had been touched. That
+probably made her take an attitude that was extremely disagreeable. But
+the attitude lasted only while the reason for it lasted."
+
+"Go on--I can bear it now," said Mrs. Gereth. Her companion had just
+perceptibly paused.
+
+"I know you can, or I shouldn't dream of speaking. When the pressure was
+removed she came up again. From the moment the house was once more what
+it had to be, her natural charm reasserted itself."
+
+"Her natural charm!" Mrs. Gereth could barely articulate.
+
+"It's very great; everybody thinks so; there must be something in it. It
+operated as it had operated before. There's no need of imagining
+anything very monstrous. Her restored good humor, her splendid beauty,
+and Mr. Owen's impressibility and generosity sufficiently cover the
+ground. His great bright sun came out!"
+
+"And his great bright passion for another person went in. Your
+explanation would doubtless be perfection if he didn't love you."
+
+Fleda was silent a little. "What do you know about his 'loving' me?"
+
+"I know what Mrs. Brigstock herself told me."
+
+"You never in your life took her word for any other matter."
+
+"Then won't yours do?" Mrs. Gereth demanded. "Haven't I had it from your
+own mouth that he cares for you?"
+
+Fleda turned pale, but she faced her companion and smiled. "You
+confound, Mrs. Gereth, you mix things up. You've only had it from my own
+mouth that I care for _him_!"
+
+It was doubtless in contradictious allusion to this (which at the time
+had made her simply drop her head as in a strange, vain reverie) that
+Mrs. Gereth, a day or two later, said to Fleda: "Don't think I shall be
+a bit affected if I'm here to see it when he comes again to make up to
+you."
+
+"He won't do that," the girl replied. Then she added, smiling: "But if
+he should be guilty of such bad taste, it wouldn't be nice of you not to
+be disgusted."
+
+"I'm not talking of disgust; I'm talking of its opposite," said Mrs.
+Gereth.
+
+"Of its opposite?"
+
+"Why, of any reviving pleasure that one might feel in such an
+exhibition. I shall feel none at all. You may personally take it as you
+like; but what conceivable good will it do?"
+
+Fleda wondered. "To me, do you mean?"
+
+"Deuce take you, no! To what we don't, you know, by your wish, ever talk
+about."
+
+"The old things?" Fleda considered again. "It will do no good of any
+sort to anything or any one. That's another question I would rather we
+shouldn't discuss, please," she gently added.
+
+Mrs. Gereth shrugged her shoulders.
+
+"It certainly isn't worth it!"
+
+Something in her manner prompted her companion, with a certain
+inconsequence, to speak again. "That was partly why I came back to you,
+you know--that there should be the less possibility of anything
+painful."
+
+"Painful?" Mrs. Gereth stared. "What pain can I ever feel again?"
+
+"I meant painful to myself," Fleda, with a slight impatience, explained.
+
+"Oh, I see." Her friend was silent a minute. "You use sometimes such odd
+expressions. Well, I shall last a little, but I sha'n't last forever."
+
+"You'll last quite as long--" Here Fleda suddenly hesitated.
+
+Mrs. Gereth took her up with a cold smile that seemed the warning of
+experience against hyperbole. "As long as what, please?"
+
+The girl thought an instant; then met the difficulty by adopting, as an
+amendment, the same tone. "As any danger of the ridiculous."
+
+That did for the time, and she had moreover, as the months went on, the
+protection of suspended allusions. This protection was marked when, in
+the following November, she received a letter directed in a hand at
+which a quick glance sufficed to make her hesitate to open it. She said
+nothing, then or afterwards; but she opened it, for reasons that had
+come to her, on the morrow. It consisted of a page and a half from Owen
+Gereth, dated from Florence, but with no other preliminary. She knew
+that during the summer he had returned to England with his wife, and
+that after a couple of months they had again gone abroad. She also knew,
+without communication, that Mrs. Gereth, round whom Ricks had grown
+submissively and indescribably sweet, had her own interpretation of her
+daughter-in-law's share in this second migration. It was a piece of
+calculated insolence--a stroke odiously directed at showing whom it
+might concern that now she had Poynton fast she was perfectly
+indifferent to living there. The Morning Post, at Ricks, had again been
+a resource: it was stated in that journal that Mr. and Mrs. Owen Gereth
+proposed to spend the winter in India. There was a person to whom it was
+clear that she led her wretched husband by the nose. Such was the light
+in which contemporary history was offered to Fleda until, in her own
+room, late at night, she broke the seal of her letter.
+
+"I want you, inexpressibly, to have, as a remembrance, something of
+mine--something of real value. Something from Poynton is what I mean and
+what I should prefer. You know everything there, and far better than I
+what's best and what isn't. There are a lot of differences, but aren't
+some of the smaller things the most remarkable? I mean for judges, and
+for what they'd bring. What I want you to take from me, and to choose
+for yourself, is the thing in the whole house that's most beautiful and
+precious. I mean the 'gem of the collection,' don't you know? If it
+happens to be of such a sort that you can take immediate possession of
+it--carry it right away with you--so much the better. You're to have it
+on the spot, whatever it is. I humbly beg of you to go down there and
+see. The people have complete instructions: they'll act for you in every
+possible way and put the whole place at your service. There's a thing
+mamma used to call the Maltese cross and that I think I've heard her say
+is very wonderful. Is _that_ the gem of the collection? Perhaps you
+would take it, or anything equally convenient. Only I do want you
+awfully to let it be the very pick of the place. Let me feel that I can
+trust you for this. You won't refuse if you will think a little what it
+must be that makes me ask."
+
+Fleda read that last sentence over more times even than the rest; she
+was baffled--she couldn't think at all of what it might be. This was
+indeed because it might be one of so many things. She made for the
+present no answer; she merely, little by little, fashioned for herself
+the form that her answer should eventually wear. There was only one form
+that was possible--the form of doing, at her time, what he wished. She
+would go down to Poynton as a pilgrim might go to a shrine, and as to
+this she must look out for her chance. She lived with her letter, before
+any chance came, a month, and even after a month it had mysteries for
+her that she couldn't meet. What did it mean, what did it represent, to
+what did it correspond in his imagination or his soul? What was behind
+it, what was beyond it, what was, in the deepest depth, within it? She
+said to herself that with these questions she was under no obligation to
+deal. There was an explanation of them that, for practical purposes,
+would do as well as another: he had found in his marriage a happiness so
+much greater than, in the distress of his dilemma, he had been able to
+take heart to believe, that he now felt he owed her a token of gratitude
+for having kept him in the straight path. That explanation, I say, she
+could throw off; but no explanation in the least mattered: what
+determined her was the simple strength of her impulse to respond. The
+passion for which what had happened had made no difference, the passion
+that had taken this into account before as well as after, found here an
+issue that there was nothing whatever to choke. It found even a relief
+to which her imagination immensely contributed. Would she act upon his
+offer? She would act with secret rapture. To have as her own something
+splendid that he had given her, of which the gift had been his signed
+desire, would be a greater joy than the greatest she had supposed to be
+left to her, and she felt that till the sense of this came home she had
+even herself not known what burned in her successful stillness. It was
+an hour to dream of and watch for; to be patient was to draw out the
+sweetness. She was capable of feeling it as an hour of triumph, the
+triumph of everything in her recent life that had not held up its head.
+She moved there in thought--in the great rooms she knew; she should be
+able to say to herself that, for once at least, her possession was as
+complete as that of either of the others whom it had filled only with
+bitterness. And a thousand times yes--her choice should know no scruple:
+the thing she should go down to take would be up to the height of her
+privilege. The whole place was in her eyes, and she spent for weeks her
+private hours in a luxury of comparison and debate. It should be one of
+the smallest things because it should be one she could have close to
+her; and it should be one of the finest because it was in the finest he
+saw his symbol. She said to herself that of what it would symbolize she
+was content to know nothing more than just what her having it would tell
+her. At bottom she inclined to the Maltese cross--with the added reason
+that he had named it. But she would look again and judge afresh; she
+would on the spot so handle and ponder that there shouldn't be the shade
+of a mistake.
+
+Before Christmas she had a natural opportunity to go to London; there
+was her periodical call upon her father to pay as well as a promise to
+Maggie to redeem. She spent her first night in West Kensington, with the
+idea of carrying out on the morrow the purpose that had most of a
+motive. Her father's affection was not inquisitive, but when she
+mentioned to him that she had business in the country that would oblige
+her to catch an early train, he deprecated her excursion in view of the
+menace of the weather. It was spoiling for a storm; all the signs of a
+winter gale were in the air. She replied that she would see what the
+morning might bring; and it brought, in fact, what seemed in London an
+amendment. She was to go to Maggie the next day, and now that she had
+started her eagerness had become suddenly a pain. She pictured her
+return that evening with her trophy under her cloak; so that after
+looking, from the doorstep, up and down the dark street, she decided,
+with a new nervousness, and sallied forth to the nearest place of access
+to the "Underground." The December dawn was dolorous, but there was
+neither rain nor snow; it was not even cold, and the atmosphere of West
+Kensington, purified by the wind, was like a dirty old coat that had
+been bettered by a dirty brush. At the end of almost an hour, in the
+larger station, she had taken her place in a third-class compartment;
+the prospect before her was the run of eighty minutes to Poynton. The
+train was a fast one, and she was familiar with the moderate measure of
+the walk to the park from the spot at which it would drop her.
+
+Once in the country, indeed, she saw that her father was right: the
+breath of December was abroad with a force from which the London
+labyrinth had protected her. The green fields were black, the sky was
+all alive with the wind; she had, in her anxious sense of the elements,
+her wonder at what might happen, a reminder of the surmises, in the old
+days of going to the Continent, that used to worry her on the way, at
+night, to the horrid cheap crossings by long sea. Something, in a dire
+degree, at this last hour, had begun to press on her heart: it was the
+sudden imagination of a disaster, or at least of a check, before her
+errand was achieved. When she said to herself that something might
+happen she wanted to go faster than the train. But nothing could happen
+save a dismayed discovery that, by some altogether unlikely chance, the
+master and mistress of the house had already come back. In that case she
+must have had a warning, and the fear was but the excess of her hope. It
+was every one's being exactly where every one was that lent the quality
+to her visit. Beyond lands and seas and alienated forever, they in their
+different ways gave her the impression to take as she had never taken
+it. At last it was already there, though the darkness of the day had
+deepened; they had whizzed past Chater--Chater, which was the station
+before the right one. Off in that quarter was an air of wild rain, but
+there shimmered straight across it a brightness that was the color of
+the great interior she had been haunting. That vision settled before
+her--in the house the house was all; and as the train drew up she rose,
+in her mean compartment, quite proudly erect with the thought that all
+for Fleda Vetch then the house was standing there.
+
+But with the opening of the door she encountered a shock, though for an
+instant she couldn't have named it; the next moment she saw it was given
+her by the face of the man advancing to let her out, an old lame porter
+of the station, who had been there in Mrs. Gereth's time and who now
+recognized her. He looked up at her so hard that she took an alarm and
+before alighting broke out to him: "They've come back?" She had a
+confused, absurd sense that even he would know that in this case she
+mustn't be there. He hesitated, and in the few seconds her alarm had
+completely changed its ground: it seemed to leap, with her quick jump
+from the carriage, to the ground that was that of his stare at her.
+"Smoke?" She was on the platform with her frightened sniff: it had taken
+her a minute to become aware of an extraordinary smell. The air was full
+of it, and there were already heads at the window of the train, looking
+out at something she couldn't see. Some one, the only other passenger,
+had got out of another carriage, and the old porter hobbled off to close
+his door. The smoke was in her eyes, but she saw the station-master,
+from the end of the platform, recognize her too and come straight to
+her. He brought her a finer shade of surprise than the porter, and while
+he was coming she heard a voice at a window of the train say that
+something was "a good bit off--a mile from the town." That was just what
+Poynton was. Then her heart stood still at the white wonder in the
+station-master's face.
+
+"You've come down to it, miss, already?"
+
+At this she knew. "Poynton's on fire?"
+
+"Gone, miss--with this awful gale. You weren't wired? Look out!" he
+cried in the next breath, seizing her; the train was going on, and she
+had given a lurch that almost made it catch her as it passed. When it
+had drawn away she became more conscious of the pervading smoke, which
+the wind seemed to hurl in her face.
+
+"_Gone?_" She was in the man's hands; she clung to him.
+
+"Burning still, miss. Ain't it quite too dreadful? Took early this
+morning--the whole place is up there."
+
+In her bewildered horror she tried to think. "Have they come back?"
+
+"Back? They'll be there all day!"
+
+"Not Mr. Gereth, I mean--nor his wife?"
+
+"Nor his mother, miss--not a soul of _them_ back. A pack o' servants in
+charge--not the old lady's lot, eh? A nice job for care-takers! Some
+rotten chimley or one of them portable lamps set down in the wrong
+place. What has done it is this cruel, cruel night." Then as a great
+wave of smoke half choked them, he drew her with force to the little
+waiting room. "Awkward for you, miss--I see!"
+
+She felt sick; she sank upon a seat, staring up at him. "Do you mean
+that great house is _lost_?"
+
+"It was near it, I was told, an hour ago--the fury of the flames had got
+such a start. I was there myself at six, the very first I heard of it.
+They were fighting it then, but you couldn't quite say they had got it
+down."
+
+Fleda jerked herself up. "Were they saving the things?"
+
+"That's just where it was, miss--to get _at_ the blessed things. And the
+want of right help--it maddened me to stand and see 'em muff it. This
+ain't a place, like, for anything organized. They don't come up to a
+_reel_ emergency."
+
+She passed out of the door that opened toward the village and met a
+great acrid gust. She heard a far-off windy roar which, in her dismay,
+she took for that of flames a mile away, and which, the first instant,
+acted upon her as a wild solicitation. "I must go there." She had
+scarcely spoken before the same omen had changed into an appalling
+check.
+
+Her vivid friend, moreover, had got before her; he clearly suffered from
+the nature of the control he had to exercise. "Don't do that, miss--you
+won't care for it at all." Then as she waveringly stood her ground,
+"It's not a place for a young lady, nor, if you'll believe me, a sight
+for them as are in any way affected."
+
+Fleda by this time knew in what way she was affected: she became limp
+and weak again; she felt herself give everything up. Mixed with the
+horror, with the kindness of the station-master, with the smell of
+cinders and the riot of sound, was the raw bitterness of a hope that she
+might never again in life have to give up so much at such short notice.
+She heard herself repeat mechanically, yet as if asking it for the first
+time: "Poynton's _gone_?"
+
+The man hesitated. "What can you call it, miss, if it ain't really
+saved?"
+
+A minute later she had returned with him to the waiting-room, where, in
+the thick swim of things, she saw something like the disk of a clock.
+"Is there an up-train?" she asked.
+
+"In seven minutes."
+
+She came out on the platform: everywhere she met the smoke. She covered
+her face with her hands. "I'll go back."
+
+
+
+
+Henry James's Books.
+
+
+A PASSIONATE PILGRIM, AND OTHER TALES.
+
+TRANSATLANTIC SKETCHES.
+
+RODERICK HUDSON. A Novel.
+
+THE AMERICAN. A Novel.
+
+THE EUROPEANS. A Novel.
+
+CONFIDENCE. A Novel.
+
+THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY.
+
+THE AUTHOR OF BELTRAFFIO. Including also Pandora; Georgina's Reasons;
+The Path of Duty; Four Meetings.
+
+THE SIEGE OF LONDON. Including also The Pension Beaurepas; The Point of
+View.
+
+TALES OF THREE CITIES. Including The Impressions of a Cousin; Lady
+Barberina; A New England Winter.
+
+A LITTLE TOUR IN FRANCE.
+
+PORTRAITS OF PLACES.
+
+DAISY MILLER. A Comedy.
+
+THE TRAGIC MUSE. 2 vols.
+
+WATCH AND WARD. A Novel.
+
+THE SPOILS OF POYNTON. A Novel.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Spoils of Poynton, by Henry James
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+<pre>
+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Spoils of Poynton, by Henry James
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Spoils of Poynton
+
+Author: Henry James
+
+Release Date: August 2, 2010 [EBook #33325]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE SPOILS OF POYNTON ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Brian Foley, Mary Meehan and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This
+file was produced from images generously made available
+by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+
+
+
+<h1>The Spoils of Poynton</h1>
+
+<h2>By Henry James</h2>
+
+
+<h3>BOSTON AND NEW YORK<br />
+HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY<br />
+The Riverside Press, Cambridge<br />
+1897</h3>
+
+<h3>Copyright, 1896,<br />
+By HENRY JAMES.</h3>
+
+<h3><i>All rights reserved.</i></h3>
+
+<h3><i>The Riverside Press, Cambridge, Mass., U.S.A.</i><br />
+Electrotyped and Printed by H. O. Houghton &amp; Company.</h3>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<h2>CONTENTS</h2>
+
+<!-- Autogenerated TOC. Modify or delete as required. -->
+<p>
+<a href="#I">I</a><br />
+<a href="#II">II</a><br />
+<a href="#III">III</a><br />
+<a href="#IV">IV</a><br />
+<a href="#V">V</a><br />
+<a href="#VI">VI</a><br />
+<a href="#VII">VII</a><br />
+<a href="#VIII">VIII</a><br />
+<a href="#IX">IX</a><br />
+<a href="#X">X</a><br />
+<a href="#XI">XI</a><br />
+<a href="#XII">XII</a><br />
+<a href="#XIII">XIII</a><br />
+<a href="#XIV">XIV</a><br />
+<a href="#XV">XV</a><br />
+<a href="#XVI">XVI</a><br />
+<a href="#XVII">XVII</a><br />
+<a href="#XVIII">XVIII</a><br />
+<a href="#XIX">XIX</a><br />
+<a href="#XX">XX</a><br />
+<a href="#XXI">XXI</a><br />
+<a href="#XXII">XXII</a><br /><br />
+<a href="#Henry_Jamess_Books">Henry James's Books.</a><br />
+</p>
+<!-- End Autogenerated TOC. -->
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<h1>THE SPOILS OF POYNTON</h1>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="I" id="I"></a>I</h2>
+
+
+<p>Mrs. Gereth had said she would go with the rest to church, but suddenly
+it seemed to her that she should not be able to wait even till
+church-time for relief: breakfast, at Waterbath, was a punctual meal,
+and she had still nearly an hour on her hands. Knowing the church to be
+near, she prepared in her room for the little rural walk, and on her way
+down again, passing through corridors and observing imbecilities of
+decoration, the æsthetic misery of the big commodious house, she felt a
+return of the tide of last night's irritation, a renewal of everything
+she could secretly suffer from ugliness and stupidity. Why did she
+consent to such contacts, why did she so rashly expose herself? She had
+had, heaven knew, her reasons, but the whole experience was to be
+sharper than she had feared. To get away from it and out into the air,
+into the presence of sky and trees, flowers and birds, was a necessity
+of every nerve. The flowers at Waterbath would probably go wrong in
+color and the nightingales sing out of tune; but she remembered to have
+heard the place described as possessing those advantages that are
+usually spoken of as natural. There were advantages enough it clearly
+didn't possess. It was hard for her to believe that a woman could look
+presentable who had been kept awake for hours by the wall-paper in her
+room; yet none the less, as in her fresh widow's weeds she rustled
+across the hall, she was sustained by the consciousness, which always
+added to the unction of her social Sundays, that she was, as usual, the
+only person in the house incapable of wearing in her preparation the
+horrible stamp of the same exceptional smartness that would be
+conspicuous in a grocer's wife. She would rather have perished than have
+looked <i>endimanchée</i>.</p>
+
+<p>She was fortunately not challenged, the hall being empty of the other
+women, who were engaged precisely in arraying themselves to that dire
+end. Once in the grounds, she recognized that, with a site, a view that
+struck the note, set an example to its inmates, Waterbath ought to have
+been charming. How she herself, with such elements to handle, would have
+taken the fine hint of nature! Suddenly, at the turn of a walk, she came
+on a member of the party, a young lady seated on a bench in deep and
+lonely meditation. She had observed the girl at dinner and afterwards:
+she was always looking at girls with an apprehensive or speculative
+reference to her son. Deep in her heart was a conviction that Owen
+would, in spite of all her spells, marry at last a frump; and this from
+no evidence that she could have represented as adequate, but simply from
+her deep uneasiness, her belief that such a special sensibility as her
+own could have been inflicted on a woman only as a source of anguish. It
+would be her fate, her discipline, her cross, to have a frump brought
+hideously home to her. This girl, one of the two Vetches, had no beauty,
+but Mrs. Gereth, scanning the dullness for a sign of life, had been
+straightway able to classify such a figure as the least, for the moment,
+of her afflictions. Fleda Vetch was dressed with an idea, though perhaps
+with not much else; and that made a bond when there was none other,
+especially as in this case the idea was real, not imitation. Mrs. Gereth
+had long ago generalized the truth that the temperament of the frump is
+amply consistent with a certain usual prettiness. There were five girls
+in the party, and the prettiness of this one, slim, pale, and
+black-haired, was less likely than that of the others ever to occasion
+an exchange of platitudes. The two less developed Brigstocks, daughters
+of the house, were in particular tiresomely "lovely." A second glance,
+this morning, at the young lady before her conveyed to Mrs. Gereth the
+soothing assurance that she also was guiltless of looking hot and fine.
+They had had no talk as yet, but this was a note that would effectually
+introduce them if the girl should show herself in the least conscious of
+their community. She got up from her seat with a smile that but partly
+dissipated the prostration Mrs. Gereth had recognized in her attitude.
+The elder woman drew her down again, and for a minute, as they sat
+together, their eyes met and sent out mutual soundings. "Are you safe?
+Can I utter it?" each of them said to the other, quickly recognizing,
+almost proclaiming, their common need to escape. The tremendous fancy,
+as it came to be called, that Mrs. Gereth was destined to take to Fleda
+Vetch virtually began with this discovery that the poor child had been
+moved to flight even more promptly than herself. That the poor child no
+less quickly perceived how far she could now go was proved by the
+immense friendliness with which she instantly broke out: "Isn't it too
+dreadful?"</p>
+
+<p>"Horrible&mdash;horrible!" cried Mrs. Gereth, with a laugh, "and it's really
+a comfort to be able to say it." She had an idea, for it was her
+ambition, that she successfully made a secret of that awkward oddity,
+her proneness to be rendered unhappy by the presence of the dreadful.
+Her passion for the exquisite was the cause of this, but it was a
+passion she considered that she never advertised nor gloried in,
+contenting herself with letting it regulate her steps and show quietly
+in her life, remembering at all times that there are few things more
+soundless than a deep devotion. She was therefore struck with the
+acuteness of the little girl who had already put a finger on her hidden
+spring. What was dreadful now, what was horrible, was the intimate
+ugliness of Waterbath, and it was of that phenomenon these ladies talked
+while they sat in the shade and drew refreshment from the great tranquil
+sky, from which no blue saucers were suspended. It was an ugliness
+fundamental and systematic, the result of the abnormal nature of the
+Brigstocks, from whose composition the principle of taste had been
+extravagantly omitted. In the arrangement of their home some other
+principle, remarkably active, but uncanny and obscure, had operated
+instead, with consequences depressing to behold, consequences that took
+the form of a universal futility. The house was bad in all conscience,
+but it might have passed if they had only let it alone. This saving
+mercy was beyond them; they had smothered it with trumpery ornament and
+scrapbook art, with strange excrescences and bunchy draperies, with
+gimcracks that might have been keepsakes for maid-servants and
+nondescript conveniences that might have been prizes for the blind. They
+had gone wildly astray over carpets and curtains; they had an infallible
+instinct for disaster, and were so cruelly doom-ridden that it rendered
+them almost tragic. Their drawing-room, Mrs. Gereth lowered her voice to
+mention, caused her face to burn, and each of the new friends confided
+to the other that in her own apartment she had given way to tears. There
+was in the elder lady's a set of comic water-colors, a family joke by a
+family genius, and in the younger's a souvenir from some centennial or
+other Exhibition, that they shudderingly alluded to. The house was
+perversely full of souvenirs of places even more ugly than itself and of
+things it would have been a pious duty to forget. The worst horror was
+the acres of varnish, something advertised and smelly, with which
+everything was smeared; it was Fleda Vetch's conviction that the
+application of it, by their own hands and hilariously shoving each
+other, was the amusement of the Brigstocks on rainy days.</p>
+
+<p>When, as criticism deepened, Fleda dropped the suggestion that some
+people would perhaps see something in Mona, Mrs. Gereth caught her up
+with a groan of protest, a smothered familiar cry of "Oh, my dear!" Mona
+was the eldest of the three, the one Mrs. Gereth most suspected. She
+confided to her young friend that it was her suspicion that had brought
+her to Waterbath; and this was going very far, for on the spot, as a
+refuge, a remedy, she had clutched at the idea that something might be
+done with the girl before her. It was her fancied exposure at any rate
+that had sharpened the shock; made her ask herself with a terrible chill
+if fate could really be plotting to saddle her with a daughter-in-law
+brought up in such a place. She had seen Mona in her appropriate setting
+and she had seen Owen, handsome and heavy, dangle beside her; but the
+effect of these first hours had happily not been to darken the prospect.
+It was clearer to her that she could never accept Mona, but it was after
+all by no means certain that Owen would ask her to. He had sat by
+somebody else at dinner, and afterwards he had talked to Mrs. Firmin,
+who was as dreadful as all the rest, but redeemingly married. His
+heaviness, which in her need of expansion she freely named, had two
+aspects: one of them his monstrous lack of taste, the other his
+exaggerated prudence. If it should come to a question of carrying Mona
+with a high hand there would be no need to worry, for that was rarely
+his manner of proceeding.</p>
+
+<p>Invited by her companion, who had asked if it weren't wonderful, Mrs.
+Gereth had begun to say a word about Poynton; but she heard a sound of
+voices that made her stop short. The next moment she rose to her feet,
+and Fleda could see that her alarm was by no means quenched. Behind the
+place where they had been sitting the ground dropped with a certain
+steepness, forming a long grassy bank, up which Owen Gereth and Mona
+Brigstock, dressed for church but making a familiar joke of it, were in
+the act of scrambling and helping each other. When they had reached the
+even ground Fleda was able to read the meaning of the exclamation in
+which Mrs. Gereth had expressed her reserves on the subject of Miss
+Brigstock's personality. Miss Brigstock had been laughing and even
+romping, but the circumstance hadn't contributed the ghost of an
+expression to her countenance. Tall, straight and fair, long-limbed and
+strangely festooned, she stood there without a look in her eye or any
+perceptible intention of any sort in any other feature. She belonged to
+the type in which speech is an unaided emission of sound and the secret
+of being is impenetrably and incorruptibly kept. Her expression would
+probably have been beautiful if she had had one, but whatever she
+communicated she communicated, in a manner best known to herself,
+without signs. This was not the case with Owen Gereth, who had plenty of
+them, and all very simple and immediate. Robust and artless, eminently
+natural, yet perfectly correct, he looked pointlessly active and
+pleasantly dull. Like his mother and like Fleda Vetch, but not for the
+same reason, this young pair had come out to take a turn before church.</p>
+
+<p>The meeting of the two couples was sensibly awkward, and Fleda, who was
+sagacious, took the measure of the shock inflicted on Mrs. Gereth. There
+had been intimacy&mdash;oh yes, intimacy as well as puerility&mdash;in the
+horse-play of which they had just had a glimpse. The party began to
+stroll together to the house, and Fleda had again a sense of Mrs.
+Gereth's quick management in the way the lovers, or whatever they were,
+found themselves separated. She strolled behind with Mona, the mother
+possessing herself of her son, her exchange of remarks with whom,
+however, remained, as they went, suggestively inaudible. That member of
+the party in whose intenser consciousness we shall most profitably seek
+a reflection of the little drama with which we are concerned received an
+even livelier impression of Mrs. Gereth's intervention from the fact
+that ten minutes later, on the way to church, still another pairing had
+been effected. Owen walked with Fleda, and it was an amusement to the
+girl to feel sure that this was by his mother's direction. Fleda had
+other amusements as well: such as noting that Mrs. Gereth was now with
+Mona Brigstock; such as observing that she was all affability to that
+young woman; such as reflecting that, masterful and clever, with a great
+bright spirit, she was one of those who impose themselves as an
+influence; such as feeling finally that Owen Gereth was absolutely
+beautiful and delightfully dense. This young person had even from
+herself wonderful secrets of delicacy and pride; but she came as near
+distinctness as in the consideration of such matters she had ever come
+at all in now surrendering herself to the idea that it was of a pleasant
+effect and rather remarkable to be stupid without offense&mdash;of a
+pleasanter effect and more remarkable indeed than to be clever and
+horrid. Owen Gereth at any rate, with his inches, his features, and his
+lapses, was neither of these latter things. She herself was prepared, if
+she should ever marry, to contribute all the cleverness, and she liked
+to think that her husband would be a force grateful for direction. She
+was in her small way a spirit of the same family as Mrs. Gereth. On that
+flushed and huddled Sunday a great matter occurred; her little life
+became aware of a singular quickening. Her meagre past fell away from
+her like a garment of the wrong fashion, and as she came up to town on
+the Monday what she stared at in the suburban fields from the train was
+a future full of the things she particularly loved.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="II" id="II"></a>II</h2>
+
+
+<p>These were neither more nor less than the things with which she had had
+time to learn from Mrs. Gereth that Poynton overflowed. Poynton, in the
+south of England, was this lady's established, or rather her
+disestablished home, having recently passed into the possession of her
+son. The father of the boy, an only child, had died two years before,
+and in London, with his mother, Owen was occupying for May and June a
+house good-naturedly lent them by Colonel Gereth, their uncle and
+brother-in-law. His mother had laid her hand so engagingly on Fleda
+Vetch that in a very few days the girl knew it was possible they should
+suffer together in Cadogan Place almost as much as they had suffered
+together at Waterbath. The kind colonel's house was also an ordeal, but
+the two women, for the ensuing month, had at least the relief of their
+confessions. The great drawback of Mrs. Gereth's situation was that,
+thanks to the rare perfection of Poynton, she was condemned to wince
+wherever she turned. She had lived for a quarter of a century in such
+warm closeness with the beautiful that, as she frankly admitted, life
+had become for her a kind of fool's paradise. She couldn't leave her own
+house without peril of exposure. She didn't say it in so many words, but
+Fleda could see she held that there was nothing in England really to
+compare to Poynton. There were places much grander and richer, but there
+was no such complete work of art, nothing that would appeal so to those
+who were really informed. In putting such elements into her hand fortune
+had given her an inestimable chance; she knew how rarely well things had
+gone with her and that she had tasted a happiness altogether rare.</p>
+
+<p>There had been in the first place the exquisite old house itself, early
+Jacobean, supreme in every part: it was a provocation, an inspiration, a
+matchless canvas for the picture. Then there had been her husband's
+sympathy and generosity, his knowledge and love, their perfect accord
+and beautiful life together, twenty-six years of planning and seeking, a
+long, sunny harvest of taste and curiosity. Lastly, she never denied,
+there had been her personal gift, the genius, the passion, the patience
+of the collector&mdash;a patience, an almost infernal cunning, that had
+enabled her to do it all with a limited command of money. There wouldn't
+have been money enough for any one else, she said with pride, but there
+had been money enough for her. They had saved on lots of things in life,
+and there were lots of things they hadn't had, but they had had in every
+corner of Europe their swing among the Jews. It was fascinating to poor
+Fleda, who hadn't a penny in the world nor anything nice at home, and
+whose only treasure was her subtle mind, to hear this genuine English
+lady, fresh and fair, young in the fifties, declare with gayety and
+conviction that she was herself the greatest Jew who had ever tracked a
+victim. Fleda, with her mother dead, hadn't so much even as a home, and
+her nearest chance of one was that there was some appearance her sister
+would become engaged to a curate whose eldest brother was supposed to
+have property and would perhaps allow him something. Her father paid
+some of her bills, but he didn't like her to live with him; and she had
+lately, in Paris, with several hundred other young women, spent a year
+in a studio, arming herself for the battle of life by a course with an
+impressionist painter. She was determined to work, but her impressions,
+or somebody's else, were as yet her only material. Mrs. Gereth had told
+her she liked her because she had an extraordinary <i>flair</i>; but under
+the circumstances a <i>flair</i> was a questionable boon: in the dry places
+in which she had mainly moved she could have borne a chronic catarrh.
+She was constantly summoned to Cadogan Place, and before the month was
+out was kept to stay, to pay a visit of which the end, it was agreed,
+should have nothing to do with the beginning. She had a sense, partly
+exultant and partly alarmed, of having quickly become necessary to her
+imperious friend, who indeed gave a reason quite sufficient for it in
+telling her there was nobody else who understood. From Mrs. Gereth there
+was in these days an immense deal to understand, though it might be
+freely summed up in the circumstance that she was wretched. She told
+Fleda that she couldn't completely know why till she should have seen
+the things at Poynton. Fleda could perfectly grasp this connection,
+which was exactly one of the matters that, in their inner mystery, were
+a blank to everybody else.</p>
+
+<p>The girl had a promise that the wonderful house should be shown her
+early in July, when Mrs. Gereth would return to it as to her home; but
+even before this initiation she put her finger on the spot that in the
+poor lady's troubled soul ached hardest. This was the misery that
+haunted her, the dread of the inevitable surrender. What Fleda had to
+sit up to was the confirmed appearance that Owen Gereth would marry Mona
+Brigstock, marry her in his mother's teeth, and that such an act would
+have incalculable bearings. They were present to Mrs. Gereth, her
+companion could see, with a vividness that at moments almost ceased to
+be that of sanity. She would have to give up Poynton, and give it up to
+a product of Waterbath&mdash;that was the wrong that rankled, the humiliation
+at which Fleda would be able adequately to shudder only when she should
+know the place. She did know Waterbath, and she despised it&mdash;she had
+that qualification for sympathy. Her sympathy was intelligent, for she
+read deep into the matter; she stared, aghast, as it came home to her
+for the first time, at the cruel English custom of the expropriation of
+the lonely mother. Mr. Gereth had apparently been a very amiable man,
+but Mr. Gereth had left things in a way that made the girl marvel. The
+house and its contents had been treated as a single splendid object;
+everything was to go straight to his son, and his widow was to have a
+maintenance and a cottage in another county. No account whatever had
+been taken of her relation to her treasures, of the passion with which
+she had waited for them, worked for them, picked them over, made them
+worthy of each other and the house, watched them, loved them, lived with
+them. He appeared to have assumed that she would settle questions with
+her son, that he could depend upon Owen's affection. And in truth, as
+poor Mrs. Gereth inquired, how could he possibly have had a
+prevision&mdash;he who turned his eyes instinctively from everything
+repulsive&mdash;of anything so abnormal as a Waterbath Brigstock? He had been
+in ugly houses enough, but had escaped that particular nightmare.
+Nothing so perverse could have been expected to happen as that the heir
+to the loveliest thing in England should be inspired to hand it over to
+a girl so exceptionally tainted. Mrs. Gereth spoke of poor Mona's taint
+as if to mention it were almost a violation of decency, and a person who
+had listened without enlightenment would have wondered of what fault the
+girl had been or had indeed not been guilty. But Owen had from a boy
+never cared, had never had the least pride or pleasure in his home.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, then, if he doesn't care!"&mdash;Fleda exclaimed, with some
+impetuosity; stopping short, however, before she completed her sentence.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Gereth looked at her rather hard. "If he doesn't care?"</p>
+
+<p>Fleda hesitated; she had not quite had a definite idea. "Well&mdash;he'll
+give them up."</p>
+
+<p>"Give what up?"</p>
+
+<p>"Why, those beautiful things."</p>
+
+<p>"Give them up to whom?" Mrs. Gereth more boldly stared.</p>
+
+<p>"To you, of course&mdash;to enjoy, to keep for yourself."</p>
+
+<p>"And leave his house as bare as your hand? There's nothing in it that
+isn't precious."</p>
+
+<p>Fleda considered; her friend had taken her up with a smothered ferocity
+by which she was slightly disconcerted. "I don't mean of course that he
+should surrender everything; but he might let you pick out the things to
+which you're most attached."</p>
+
+<p>"I think he would if he were free," said Mrs. Gereth.</p>
+
+<p>"And do you mean, as it is, that <i>she</i>'ll prevent him?" Mona Brigstock,
+between these ladies, was now nothing but "she."</p>
+
+<p>"By every means in her power."</p>
+
+<p>"But surely not because she understands and appreciates them?"</p>
+
+<p>"No," Mrs. Gereth replied, "but because they belong to the house and the
+house belongs to Owen. If I should wish to take anything, she would
+simply say, with that motionless mask: 'It goes with the house.' And day
+after day, in the face of every argument, of every consideration of
+generosity, she would repeat, without winking, in that voice like the
+squeeze of a doll's stomach: 'It goes with the house&mdash;it goes with the
+house.' In that attitude they'll shut themselves up."</p>
+
+<p>Fleda was struck, was even a little startled with the way Mrs. Gereth
+had turned this over&mdash;had faced, if indeed only to recognize its
+futility, the notion of a battle with her only son. These words led her
+to make an inquiry which she had not thought it discreet to make before;
+she brought out the idea of the possibility, after all, of her friend's
+continuing to live at Poynton. Would they really wish to proceed to
+extremities? Was no good-humored, graceful compromise to be imagined or
+brought about? Couldn't the same roof cover them? Was it so very
+inconceivable that a married son should, for the rest of her days, share
+with so charming a mother the home she had devoted more than a score of
+years to making beautiful for him? Mrs. Gereth hailed this question with
+a wan, compassionate smile; she replied that a common household, in such
+a case, was exactly so inconceivable that Fleda had only to glance over
+the fair face of the English land to see how few people had ever
+conceived it. It was always thought a wonder, a "mistake," a piece of
+overstrained sentiment; and she confessed that she was as little capable
+of a flight of that sort as Owen himself. Even if they both had been
+capable, they would still have Mona's hatred to reckon with. Fleda's
+breath was sometimes taken away by the great bounds and elisions which,
+on Mrs. Gereth's lips, the course of discussion could take. This was the
+first she had heard of Mona's hatred, though she certainly had not
+needed Mrs. Gereth to tell her that in close quarters that young lady
+would prove secretly mulish. Later Fleda perceived indeed that perhaps
+almost any girl would hate a person who should be so markedly averse to
+having anything to do with her. Before this, however, in conversation
+with her young friend, Mrs. Gereth furnished a more vivid motive for her
+despair by asking how she could possibly be expected to sit there with
+the new proprietors and accept&mdash;or call it, for a day, endure&mdash;the
+horrors they would perpetrate in the house. Fleda reasoned that they
+wouldn't after all smash things nor burn them up; and Mrs. Gereth
+admitted when pushed that she didn't quite suppose they would. What she
+meant was that they would neglect them, ignore them, leave them to
+clumsy servants (there wasn't an object of them all but should be
+handled with perfect love), and in many cases probably wish to replace
+them by pieces answerable to some vulgar modern notion of the
+convenient. Above all, she saw in advance, with dilated eyes, the
+abominations they would inevitably mix up with them&mdash;the maddening
+relics of Waterbath, the little brackets and pink vases, the sweepings
+of bazaars, the family photographs and illuminated texts, the "household
+art" and household piety of Mona's hideous home. Wasn't it enough simply
+to contend that Mona would approach Poynton in the spirit of a
+Brigstock, and that in the spirit of a Brigstock she would deal with her
+acquisition? Did Fleda really see <i>her</i>, Mrs. Gereth demanded, spending
+the remainder of her days with such a creature's elbow in her eye?</p>
+
+<p>Fleda had to declare that she certainly didn't, and that Waterbath had
+been a warning it would be frivolous to overlook. At the same time she
+privately reflected that they were taking a great deal for granted, and
+that, inasmuch as to her knowledge Owen Gereth had positively denied his
+betrothal, the ground of their speculations was by no means firm. It
+seemed to our young lady that in a difficult position Owen conducted
+himself with some natural art; treating this domesticated confidant of
+his mother's wrongs with a simple civility that almost troubled her
+conscience, so deeply she felt that she might have had for him the air
+of siding with that lady against him. She wondered if he would ever know
+how little really she did this, and that she was there, since Mrs.
+Gereth had insisted, not to betray, but essentially to confirm and
+protect. The fact that his mother disliked Mona Brigstock might have
+made him dislike the object of her preference, and it was detestable to
+Fleda to remember that she might have appeared to him to offer herself
+as an exemplary contrast. It was clear enough, however, that the happy
+youth had no more sense for a motive than a deaf man for a tune, a
+limitation by which, after all, she could gain as well as lose. He came
+and went very freely on the business with which London abundantly
+furnished him, but he found time more than once to say to her, "It's
+awfully nice of you to look after poor Mummy." As well as his quick
+speech, which shyness made obscure&mdash;it was usually as desperate as a
+"rush" at some violent game&mdash;his child's eyes in his man's face put it
+to her that, you know, this really meant a good deal for him and that he
+hoped she would stay on. With a person in the house who, like herself,
+was clever, poor Mummy was conveniently occupied; and Fleda found a
+beauty in the candor and even in the modesty which apparently kept him
+from suspecting that two such wiseheads could possibly be occupied with
+Owen Gereth.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="III" id="III"></a>III</h2>
+
+
+<p>They went at last, the wiseheads, down to Poynton, where the palpitating
+girl had the full revelation. "<i>Now</i> do you know how I feel?" Mrs.
+Gereth asked when in the wonderful hall, three minutes after their
+arrival, her pretty associate dropped on a seat with a soft gasp and a
+roll of dilated eyes. The answer came clearly enough, and in the rapture
+of that first walk through the house Fleda took a prodigious span. She
+perfectly understood how Mrs. Gereth felt&mdash;she had understood but
+meagrely before; and the two women embraced with tears over the
+tightening of their bond&mdash;tears which on the younger one's part were the
+natural and usual sign of her submission to perfect beauty. It was not
+the first time she had cried for the joy of admiration, but it was the
+first time the mistress of Poynton, often as she had shown her house,
+had been present at such an exhibition. She exulted in it; it quickened
+her own tears; she assured her companion that such an occasion made the
+poor old place fresh to her again and more precious than ever. Yes,
+nobody had ever, that way, felt what she had achieved: people were so
+grossly ignorant, and everybody, even the knowing ones, as they thought
+themselves, more or less dense. What Mrs. Gereth had achieved was indeed
+an exquisite work; and in such an art of the treasure-hunter, in
+selection and comparison refined to that point, there was an element of
+creation, of personality. She had commended Fleda's <i>flair</i>, and Fleda
+now gave herself up to satiety. Preoccupations and scruples fell away
+from her; she had never known a greater happiness than the week she
+passed in this initiation.</p>
+
+<p>Wandering through clear chambers where the general effect made
+preferences almost as impossible as if they had been shocks, pausing at
+open doors where vistas were long and bland, she would, even if she had
+not already known, have discovered for herself that Poynton was the
+record of a life. It was written in great syllables of color and form,
+the tongues of other countries and the hands of rare artists. It was all
+France and Italy, with their ages composed to rest. For England you
+looked out of old windows&mdash;it was England that was the wide embrace.
+While outside, on the low terraces, she contradicted gardeners and
+refined on nature, Mrs. Gereth left her guest to finger fondly the
+brasses that Louis Quinze might have thumbed, to sit with Venetian
+velvets just held in a loving palm, to hang over cases of enamels and
+pass and repass before cabinets. There were not many pictures&mdash;the
+panels and the stuffs were themselves the picture; and in all the great
+wainscoted house there was not an inch of pasted paper. What struck
+Fleda most in it was the high pride of her friend's taste, a fine
+arrogance, a sense of style which, however amused and amusing, never
+compromised nor stooped. She felt indeed, as this lady had intimated to
+her that she would, both a respect and a compassion that she had not
+known before; the vision of the coming surrender filled her with an
+equal pain. To give it all up, to die to it&mdash;that thought ached in her
+breast. She herself could imagine clinging there with a closeness
+separate from dignity. To have created such a place was to have had
+dignity enough; when there was a question of defending it the fiercest
+attitude was the right one. After so intense a taking of possession she
+too was to give it up; for she reflected that if Mrs. Gereth's remaining
+there would have offered her a sort of future&mdash;stretching away in safe
+years on the other side of a gulf&mdash;the advent of the others could only
+be, by the same law, a great vague menace, the ruffling of a still
+water. Such were the emotions of a hungry girl whose sensibility was
+almost as great as her opportunities for comparison had been small. The
+museums had done something for her, but nature had done more.</p>
+
+<p>If Owen had not come down with them nor joined them later, it was
+because he still found London jolly; yet the question remained of
+whether the jollity of London was not merely the only name his small
+vocabulary yielded for the jollity of Mona Brigstock. There was indeed
+in his conduct another ambiguity&mdash;something that required explaining so
+long as his motive didn't come to the surface. If he was in love, what
+was the matter? And what was the matter still more if he wasn't? The
+mystery was at last cleared up: this Fleda gathered from the tone in
+which, one morning at breakfast, a letter just opened made Mrs. Gereth
+cry out. Her dismay was almost a shriek: "Why, he's bringing her
+down&mdash;he wants her to see the house!" They flew, the two women, into
+each other's arms and, with their heads together, soon made out that the
+reason, the baffling reason why nothing had yet happened, was that Mona
+didn't know, or Owen didn't, whether Poynton would really please her.
+She was coming down to judge; and could anything in the world be more
+like poor Owen than the ponderous probity which had kept him from
+pressing her for a reply till she should have learned whether she
+approved what he had to offer her? That was a scruple it had naturally
+been impossible to impute. If only they might fondly hope, Mrs. Gereth
+wailed, that the girl's expectations would be dashed! There was a fine
+consistency, a sincerity quite affecting, in her arguing that the better
+the place should happen to look and to express the conceptions to which
+it owed its origin, the less it would speak to an intelligence so
+primitive. How could a Brigstock possibly understand what it was all
+about? How, really, could a Brigstock logically do anything but hate it?
+Mrs. Gereth, even as she whisked away linen shrouds, persuaded herself
+of the possibility on Mona's part of some bewildered blankness, some
+collapse of admiration that would prove disconcerting to her swain&mdash;a
+hope of which Fleda at least could see the absurdity and which gave the
+measure of the poor lady's strange, almost maniacal disposition to
+thrust in everywhere the question of "things," to read all behavior in
+the light of some fancied relation to them. "Things" were of course the
+sum of the world; only, for Mrs. Gereth, the sum of the world was rare
+French furniture and Oriental china. She could at a stretch imagine
+people's not having, but she couldn't imagine their not wanting and not
+missing.</p>
+
+<p>The young couple were to be accompanied by Mrs. Brigstock, and with a
+prevision of how fiercely they would be watched Fleda became conscious,
+before the party arrived, of an amused, diplomatic pity for them. Almost
+as much as Mrs. Gereth's her taste was her life, but her life was
+somehow the larger for it. Besides, she had another care now: there was
+some one she wouldn't have liked to see humiliated even in the form of a
+young lady who would contribute to his never suspecting so much
+delicacy. When this young lady appeared Fleda tried, so far as the wish
+to efface herself allowed, to be mainly the person to take her about,
+show her the house, and cover up her ignorance. Owen's announcement had
+been that, as trains made it convenient, they would present themselves
+for luncheon and depart before dinner; but Mrs. Gereth, true to her
+system of glaring civility, proposed and obtained an extension, a dining
+and spending of the night. She made her young friend wonder against what
+rebellion of fact she was sacrificing in advance so profusely to form.
+Fleda was appalled, after the first hour, by the rash innocence with
+which Mona had accepted the responsibility of observation, and indeed by
+the large levity with which, sitting there like a bored tourist in fine
+scenery, she exercised it. She felt in her nerves the effect of such a
+manner on her companion's, and it was this that made her want to entice
+the girl away, give her some merciful warning or some jocular cue. Mona
+met intense looks, however, with eyes that might have been blue beads,
+the only ones she had&mdash;eyes into which Fleda thought it strange Owen
+Gereth should have to plunge for his fate and his mother for a
+confession of whether Poynton was a success. She made no remark that
+helped to supply this light; her impression at any rate had nothing in
+common with the feeling that, as the beauty of the place throbbed out
+like music, had caused Fleda Vetch to burst into tears. She was as
+content to say nothing as if, Mrs. Gereth afterwards exclaimed, she had
+been keeping her mouth shut in a railway-tunnel. Mrs. Gereth contrived
+at the end of an hour to convey to Fleda that it was plain she was
+brutally ignorant; but Fleda more subtly discovered that her ignorance
+was obscurely active.</p>
+
+<p>She was not so stupid as not to see that something, though she scarcely
+knew what, was expected of her that she couldn't give; and the only mode
+her intelligence suggested of meeting the expectation was to plant her
+big feet and pull another way. Mrs. Gereth wanted her to rise, somehow
+or somewhere, and was prepared to hate her if she didn't: very well, she
+couldn't, she wouldn't rise; she already moved at the altitude that
+suited her, and was able to see that, since she was exposed to the
+hatred, she might at least enjoy the calm. The smallest trouble, for a
+girl with no nonsense about her, was to earn what she incurred; so that,
+a dim instinct teaching her she would earn it best by not being
+effusive, and combining with the conviction that she now held Owen, and
+therefore the place, she had the pleasure of her honesty as well as of
+her security. Didn't her very honesty lead her to be belligerently blank
+about Poynton, inasmuch as it was just Poynton that was forced upon her
+as a subject for effusiveness? Such subjects, to Mona Brigstock, had an
+air almost of indecency, and the house became uncanny to her through
+such an appeal&mdash;an appeal that, somewhere in the twilight of her being,
+as Fleda was sure, she thanked heaven she <i>was</i> the girl stiffly to draw
+back from. She was a person whom pressure at a given point infallibly
+caused to expand in the wrong place instead of, as it is usually
+administered in the hope of doing, the right one. Her mother, to make up
+for this, broke out universally, pronounced everything "most striking,"
+and was visibly happy that Owen's captor should be so far on the way to
+strike: but she jarred upon Mrs. Gereth by her formula of admiration,
+which was that anything she looked at was "in the style" of something
+else. This was to show how much she had seen, but it only showed she had
+seen nothing; everything at Poynton was in the style of Poynton, and
+poor Mrs. Brigstock, who at least was determined to rise, and had
+brought with her a trophy of her journey, a "lady's magazine" purchased
+at the station, a horrible thing with patterns for antimacassars, which,
+as it was quite new, the first number, and seemed so clever, she kindly
+offered to leave for the house, was in the style of a vulgar old woman
+who wore silver jewelry and tried to pass off a gross avidity as a sense
+of the beautiful.</p>
+
+<p>By the day's end it was clear to Fleda Vetch that, however Mona judged,
+the day had been determinant; whether or no she felt the charm, she felt
+the challenge: at an early moment Owen Gereth would be able to tell his
+mother the worst. Nevertheless, when the elder lady, at bedtime, coming
+in a dressing-gown and a high fever to the younger one's room, cried
+out, "She hates it; but what will she do?" Fleda pretended vagueness,
+played at obscurity and assented disingenuously to the proposition that
+they at least had a respite. The future was dark to her, but there was a
+silken thread she could clutch in the gloom&mdash;she would never give Owen
+away. He might give himself&mdash;he even certainly would; but that was his
+own affair, and his blunders, his innocence, only added to the appeal he
+made to her. She would cover him, she would protect him, and beyond
+thinking her a cheerful inmate he would never guess her intention, any
+more than, beyond thinking her clever enough for anything, his acute
+mother would discover it. From this hour, with Mrs. Gereth, there was a
+flaw in her frankness: her admirable friend continued to know everything
+she did; what was to remain unknown was the general motive.</p>
+
+<p>From the window of her room, the next morning before breakfast, the girl
+saw Owen in the garden with Mona, who strolled beside him with a
+listening parasol, but without a visible look for the great florid
+picture that had been hung there by Mrs. Gereth's hand. Mona kept
+dropping her eyes, as she walked, to catch the sheen of her
+patent-leather shoes, which resembled a man's and which she kicked
+forward a little&mdash;it gave her an odd movement&mdash;to help her see what she
+thought of them. When Fleda came down Mrs. Gereth was in the
+breakfast-room; and at that moment Owen, through a long window, passed
+in alone from the terrace and very endearingly kissed his mother. It
+immediately struck the girl that she was in their way, for hadn't he
+been borne on a wave of joy exactly to announce, before the Brigstocks
+departed, that Mona had at last faltered out the sweet word he had been
+waiting for? He shook hands with his friendly violence, but Fleda
+contrived not to look into his face: what she liked most to see in it
+was not the reflection of Mona's big boot-toes. She could bear well
+enough that young lady herself, but she couldn't bear Owen's opinion of
+her. She was on the point of slipping into the garden when the movement
+was checked by Mrs. Gereth's suddenly drawing her close, as if for the
+morning embrace, and then, while she kept her there with the bravery of
+the night's repose, breaking out: "Well, my dear boy, what <i>does</i> your
+young friend there make of our odds and ends?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, she thinks they're all right!"</p>
+
+<p>Fleda immediately guessed from his tone that he had not come in to say
+what she supposed; there was even something in it to confirm Mrs.
+Gereth's belief that their danger had dropped. She was sure, moreover,
+that his tribute to Mona's taste was a repetition of the eloquent words
+in which the girl had herself recorded it; she could indeed hear, with
+all vividness, the pretty passage between the pair. "Don't you think
+it's rather jolly, the old shop?" "Oh, it's all right!" Mona had
+graciously remarked; and then they had probably, with a slap on a back,
+run another race up or down a green bank. Fleda knew Mrs. Gereth had not
+yet uttered a word to her son that would have shown him how much she
+feared; but it was impossible to feel her friend's arm round her and not
+become aware that this friend was now throbbing with a strange
+intention. Owen's reply had scarcely been of a nature to usher in a
+discussion of Mona's sensibilities; but Mrs. Gereth went on, in a
+moment, with an innocence of which Fleda could measure the cold
+hypocrisy: "Has she any sort of feeling for nice old things?" The
+question was as fresh as the morning light.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, of course she likes everything that's nice." And Owen, who
+constitutionally disliked questions&mdash;an answer was almost as hateful to
+him as a "trick" to a big dog&mdash;smiled kindly at Fleda and conveyed that
+she would understand what he meant even if his mother didn't. Fleda,
+however, mainly understood that Mrs. Gereth, with an odd, wild laugh,
+held her so hard that she hurt her.</p>
+
+<p>"I could give up everything without a pang, I think, to a person I could
+trust, I could respect." The girl heard her voice tremble under the
+effort to show nothing but what she wanted to show, and felt the
+sincerity of her implication that the piety most real to her was to be
+on one's knees before one's high standard. "The best things here, as you
+know, are the things your father and I collected, things all that we
+worked for and waited for and suffered for. Yes," cried Mrs. Gereth,
+with a fine freedom of fancy, "there are things in the house that we
+almost starved for! They were our religion, they were our life, they
+were <i>us</i>! And now they're only <i>me</i>&mdash;except that they're also <i>you</i>,
+thank God, a little, you dear!" she continued, suddenly inflicting on
+Fleda a kiss apparently intended to knock her into position. "There
+isn't one of them I don't know and love&mdash;yes, as one remembers and
+cherishes the happiest moments of one's life. Blindfold, in the dark,
+with the brush of a finger, I could tell one from another. They're
+living things to me; they know me, they return the touch of my hand. But
+I could let them all go, since I have to, so strangely, to another
+affection, another conscience. There's a care they want, there's a
+sympathy that draws out their beauty. Rather than make them over to a
+woman ignorant and vulgar, I think I'd deface them with my own hands.
+Can't you see me, Fleda, and wouldn't you do it yourself?"&mdash;she appealed
+to her companion with glittering eyes. "I couldn't bear the thought of
+such a woman here&mdash;I <i>couldn't</i>. I don't know what she'd do; she'd be
+sure to invent some deviltry, if it should be only to bring in her own
+little belongings and horrors. The world is full of cheap gimcracks, in
+this awful age, and they're thrust in at one at every turn. They'd be
+thrust in here, on top of my treasures, my own. Who would save <i>them</i>
+for me&mdash;I ask you who <i>would</i>?" and she turned again to Fleda with a
+dry, strained smile. Her handsome, high-nosed, excited face might have
+been that of Don Quixote tilting at a windmill. Drawn into the eddy of
+this outpouring, the girl, scared and embarrassed, laughed off her
+exposure; but only to feel herself more passionately caught up and, as
+it seemed to her, thrust down the fine open mouth (it showed such
+perfect teeth) with which poor Owen's slow cerebration gaped. "<i>You</i>
+would, of course&mdash;only you, in all the world, because you know, you
+feel, as I do myself, what's good and true and pure." No severity of the
+moral law could have taken a higher tone in this implication of the
+young lady who had not the only virtue Mrs. Gereth actively esteemed.
+"<i>You</i> would replace me, <i>you</i> would watch over them, <i>you</i> would keep
+the place right," she austerely pursued, "and with you here&mdash;yes, with
+you, I believe I might rest, at last, in my grave!" She threw herself on
+Fleda's neck, and before Fleda, horribly shamed, could shake her off,
+had burst into tears which couldn't have been explained, but which might
+perhaps have been understood.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="IV" id="IV"></a>IV</h2>
+
+
+<p>A week later Owen Gereth came down to inform his mother that he had
+settled with Mona Brigstock; but it was not at all a joy to Fleda,
+conscious how much to himself it would be a surprise, that he should
+find her still in the house. That dreadful scene before breakfast had
+made her position false and odious; it had been followed, after they
+were left alone, by a scene of her own making with her extravagant
+friend. She notified Mrs. Gereth of her instant departure: she couldn't
+possibly remain after being offered to Owen, that way, before her very
+face, as his mother's candidate for the honor of his hand. That was all
+he could have seen in such an outbreak and in the indecency of her
+standing there to enjoy it. Fleda had on the prior occasion dashed out
+of the room by the shortest course and in her confusion had fallen upon
+Mona in the garden. She had taken an aimless turn with her, and they had
+had some talk, rendered at first difficult and almost disagreeable by
+Mona's apparent suspicion that she had been sent out to spy, as Mrs.
+Gereth had tried to spy, into her opinions. Fleda was sagacious enough
+to treat these opinions as a mystery almost awful; which had an effect
+so much more than reassuring that at the end of five minutes the young
+lady from Waterbath suddenly and perversely said: "Why has she never had
+a winter garden thrown out? If ever I have a place of my own I mean to
+have one." Fleda, dismayed, could see the thing&mdash;something glazed and
+piped, on iron pillars, with untidy plants and cane sofas; a shiny
+excrescence on the noble face of Poynton. She remembered at Waterbath a
+conservatory where she had caught a bad cold in the company of a stuffed
+cockatoo fastened to a tropical bough and a waterless fountain composed
+of shells stuck into some hardened paste. She asked Mona if her idea
+would be to make something like this conservatory; to which Mona
+replied: "Oh no, much finer; we haven't got a winter garden at
+Waterbath." Fleda wondered if she meant to convey that it was the only
+grandeur they lacked, and in a moment Mona went on: "But we have got a
+billiard-room&mdash;that I will say for us!" There was no billiard-room at
+Poynton, but there would evidently be one, and it would have, hung on
+its walls, framed at the "Stores," caricature-portraits of celebrities,
+taken from a "society-paper."</p>
+
+<p>When the two girls had gone in to breakfast it was for Fleda to see at a
+glance that there had been a further passage, of some high color,
+between Owen and his mother; and she had turned pale in guessing to what
+extremity, at her expense, Mrs. Gereth had found occasion to proceed.
+Hadn't she, after her clumsy flight, been pressed upon Owen in still
+clearer terms? Mrs. Gereth would practically have said to him: "If
+you'll take <i>her</i>, I'll move away without a sound. But if you take any
+one else, any one I'm not sure of, as I am of her&mdash;heaven help me, I'll
+fight to the death!" Breakfast, this morning, at Poynton, had been a
+meal singularly silent, in spite of the vague little cries with which
+Mrs. Brigstock turned up the underside of plates and the knowing but
+alarming raps administered by her big knuckles to porcelain cups. Some
+one had to respond to her, and the duty assigned itself to Fleda, who,
+while pretending to meet her on the ground of explanation, wondered what
+Owen thought of a girl still indelicately anxious, after she had been
+grossly hurled at him, to prove by exhibitions of her fine taste that
+she was really what his mother pretended. This time, at any rate, their
+fate was sealed: Owen, as soon as he should get out of the house, would
+describe to Mona that lady's extraordinary conduct, and if anything more
+had been wanted to "fetch" Mona, as he would call it, the deficiency was
+now made up. Mrs. Gereth in fact took care of that&mdash;took care of it by
+the way, at the last, on the threshold, she said to the younger of her
+departing guests, with an irony of which the sting was wholly in the
+sense, not at all in the sound: "We haven't had the talk we might have
+had, have we? You'll feel that I've neglected you, and you'll treasure
+it up against me. <i>Don't</i>, because really, you know, it has been quite
+an accident, and I've all sorts of information at your disposal. If you
+should come down again (only you won't, ever,&mdash;I feel that!) I should
+give you plenty of time to worry it out of me. Indeed there are some
+things I should quite insist on your learning; not permit you at all, in
+any settled way, <i>not</i> to learn. Yes indeed, you'd put me through, and I
+should put you, my dear! We should have each other to reckon with, and
+you would see me as I really am. I'm not a bit the vague, mooning, easy
+creature I dare say you think. However, if you won't come, you won't;
+<i>n'en parlons plus</i>. It <i>is</i> stupid here after what you're accustomed
+to. We can only, all round, do what we can, eh? For heaven's sake, don't
+let your mother forget her precious publication, the female magazine,
+with the what-do-you-call-'em?&mdash;the grease-catchers. There!"</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Gereth, delivering herself from the doorstep, had tossed the
+periodical higher in air than was absolutely needful&mdash;tossed it toward
+the carriage the retreating party was about to enter. Mona, from the
+force of habit, the reflex action of the custom of sport, had popped
+out, with a little spring, a long arm and intercepted the missile as
+easily as she would have caused a tennis-ball to rebound from a racket.
+"Good catch!" Owen had cried, so genuinely pleased that practically no
+notice was taken of his mother's impressive remarks. It was to the
+accompaniment of romping laughter, as Mrs. Gereth afterwards said, that
+the carriage had rolled away; but it was while that laughter was still
+in the air that Fleda Vetch, white and terrible, had turned upon her
+hostess with her scorching "How <i>could</i> you? Great God, how <i>could</i>
+you?" This lady's perfect blankness was from the first a sign of her
+serene conscience, and the fact that till indoctrinated she didn't even
+know what Fleda meant by resenting her late offense to every
+susceptibility gave our young woman a sore, scared perception that her
+own value in the house was just the value, as one might say, of a good
+agent. Mrs. Gereth was generously sorry, but she was still more
+surprised&mdash;surprised at Fleda's not having liked to be shown off to Owen
+as the right sort of wife for him. Why not, in the name of wonder, if
+she absolutely <i>was</i> the right sort? She had admitted on explanation
+that she could see what her young friend meant by having been laid, as
+Fleda called it, at his feet; but it struck the girl that the admission
+was only made to please her, and that Mrs. Gereth was secretly surprised
+at her not being as happy to be sacrificed to the supremacy of a high
+standard as she was happy to sacrifice her. She had taken a tremendous
+fancy to her, but that was on account of the fancy&mdash;to Poynton of
+course&mdash;Fleda herself had taken. Wasn't this latter fancy then so great
+after all? Fleda felt that she could declare it to be great indeed when
+really for the sake of it she could forgive what she had suffered and,
+after reproaches and tears, asseverations and kisses, after learning
+that she was cared for only as a priestess of the altar and a view of
+her bruised dignity which left no alternative to flight, could accept
+the shame with the balm, consent not to depart, take refuge in the thin
+comfort of at least knowing the truth. The truth was simply that all
+Mrs. Gereth's scruples were on one side and that her ruling passion had
+in a manner despoiled her of her humanity. On the second day, after the
+tide of emotion had somewhat ebbed, she said soothingly to her
+companion: "But you <i>would</i>, after all, marry him, you know, darling,
+wouldn't you, if that girl were not there? I mean of course if he were
+to ask you," Mrs. Gereth had thoughtfully added.</p>
+
+<p>"Marry him if he were to ask me? Most distinctly not!"</p>
+
+<p>The question had not come up with this definiteness before, and Mrs.
+Gereth was clearly more surprised than ever. She marveled a moment. "Not
+even to have Poynton?"</p>
+
+<p>"Not even to have Poynton."</p>
+
+<p>"But why on earth?" Mrs. Gereth's sad eyes were fixed on her.</p>
+
+<p>Fleda colored; she hesitated. "Because he's too stupid!" Save on one
+other occasion, at which we shall in time arrive, little as the reader
+may believe it, she never came nearer to betraying to Mrs. Gereth that
+she was in love with Owen. She found a dim amusement in reflecting that
+if Mona had not been there and he had not been too stupid and he verily
+had asked her, she might, should she have wished to keep her secret,
+have found it possible to pass off the motive of her action as a mere
+passion for Poynton.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Gereth evidently thought in these days of little but things
+hymeneal; for she broke out with sudden rapture, in the middle of the
+week: "I know what they'll do: they <i>will</i> marry, but they'll go and
+live at Waterbath!" There was positive joy in that form of the idea,
+which she embroidered and developed: it seemed so much the safest thing
+that could happen. "Yes, I'll have you, but I won't go <i>there</i>!" Mona
+would have said with a vicious nod at the southern horizon: "we'll leave
+your horrid mother alone there for life." It would be an ideal solution,
+this ingress the lively pair, with their spiritual need of a warmer
+medium, would playfully punch in the ribs of her ancestral home; for it
+would not only prevent recurring panic at Poynton&mdash;it would offer them,
+as in one of their gimcrack baskets or other vessels of ugliness, a
+definite daily felicity that Poynton could never give. Owen might manage
+his estate just as he managed it now, and Mrs. Gereth would manage
+everything else. When, in the hall, on the unforgettable day of his
+return, she had heard his voice ring out like a call to a terrier, she
+had still, as Fleda afterwards learned, clutched frantically at the
+conceit that he had come, at the worst, to announce some compromise; to
+tell her she would have to put up with the girl, yes, but that some way
+would be arrived at of leaving her in personal possession. Fleda Vetch,
+whom from the first hour no illusion had brushed with its wing, now held
+her breath, went on tiptoe, wandered in outlying parts of the house and
+through delicate, muffled rooms, while the mother and son faced each
+other below. From time to time she stopped to listen; but all was so
+quiet she was almost frightened: she had vaguely expected a sound of
+contention. It lasted longer than she would have supposed, whatever it
+was they were doing; and when finally, from a window, she saw Owen
+stroll out of the house, stop and light a cigarette and then pensively
+lose himself in the plantations, she found other matter for trepidation
+in the fact that Mrs. Gereth didn't immediately come rushing up into her
+arms. She wondered whether she oughtn't to go down to her, and measured
+the gravity of what had occurred by the circumstance, which she
+presently ascertained, that the poor lady had retired to her room and
+wished not to be disturbed. This admonition had been for her maid, with
+whom Fleda conferred as at the door of a death-chamber; but the girl,
+without either fatuity or resentment, judged that, since it could render
+Mrs. Gereth indifferent even to the ministrations of disinterested
+attachment, the scene had been tremendous.</p>
+
+<p>She was absent from luncheon, where indeed Fleda had enough to do to
+look Owen in the face; there would be so much to make that hateful in
+their common memory of the passage in which his last visit had
+terminated. This had been her apprehension at least; but as soon as he
+stood there she was constrained to wonder at the practical simplicity of
+the ordeal&mdash;a simplicity which was really just his own simplicity, the
+particular thing that, for Fleda Vetch, some other things of course
+aiding, made almost any direct relation with him pleasant. He had
+neither wit, nor tact, nor inspiration: all she could say was that when
+they were together the alienation these charms were usually depended on
+to allay didn't occur. On this occasion, for instance, he did so much
+better than "carry off" an awkward remembrance: he simply didn't have
+it. He had clean forgotten that she was the girl his mother would have
+fobbed off on him; he was conscious only that she was there in a manner
+for service&mdash;conscious of the dumb instinct that from the first had made
+him regard her not as complicating his intercourse with that personage,
+but as simplifying it. Fleda found beautiful that this theory should
+have survived the incident of the other day; found exquisite that
+whereas she was conscious, through faint reverberations, that for her
+kind little circle at large, whom it didn't concern, her tendency had
+begun to define itself as parasitical, this strong young man, who had a
+right to judge and even a reason to loathe her, didn't judge and didn't
+loathe, let her down gently, treated her as if she pleased him, and in
+fact evidently liked her to be just where she was. She asked herself
+what he did when Mona denounced her, and the only answer to the question
+was that perhaps Mona didn't denounce her. If Mona was inarticulate he
+wasn't such a fool, then, to marry her. That he was glad Fleda was there
+was at any rate sufficiently shown by the domestic familiarity with
+which he said to her: "I must tell you I've been having an awful row
+with my mother. I'm engaged to be married to Miss Brigstock."</p>
+
+<p>"Ah, really?" cried Fleda, achieving a radiance of which she was
+secretly proud. "How very exciting!"</p>
+
+<p>"Too exciting for poor Mummy. She won't hear of it. She has been slating
+her fearfully. She says she's a 'barbarian.'"</p>
+
+<p>"Why, she's lovely!" Fleda exclaimed.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, she's all right. Mother must come round."</p>
+
+<p>"Only give her time," said Fleda. She had advanced to the threshold of
+the door thus thrown open to her and, without exactly crossing it, she
+threw in an appreciative glance. She asked Owen when his marriage would
+take place, and in the light of his reply read that Mrs. Gereth's
+wretched attitude would have no influence at all on the event,
+absolutely fixed when he came down, and distant by only three months. He
+liked Fleda's seeming to be on his side, though that was a secondary
+matter, for what really most concerned him now was the line his mother
+took about Poynton, her declared unwillingness to give it up.</p>
+
+<p>"Naturally I want my own house, you know," he said, "and my father made
+every arrangement for me to have it. But she may make it devilish
+awkward. What in the world's a fellow to do?" This it was that Owen
+wanted to know, and there could be no better proof of his friendliness
+than his air of depending on Fleda Vetch to tell him. She questioned
+him, they spent an hour together, and, as he gave her the scale of the
+concussion from which he had rebounded, she found herself saddened and
+frightened by the material he seemed to offer her to deal with. It <i>was</i>
+devilish awkward, and it was so in part because Owen had no imagination.
+It had lodged itself in that empty chamber that his mother hated the
+surrender because she hated Mona. He didn't of course understand why she
+hated Mona, but this belonged to an order of mysteries that never
+troubled him: there were lots of things, especially in people's minds,
+that a fellow didn't understand. Poor Owen went through life with a
+frank dread of people's minds: there were explanations he would have
+been almost as shy of receiving as of giving. There was therefore
+nothing that accounted for anything, though in its way it was vivid
+enough, in his picture to Fleda of his mother's virtual refusal to move.
+That was simply what it was; for didn't she refuse to move when she as
+good as declared that she would move only with the furniture? It was the
+furniture she wouldn't give up; and what was the good of Poynton without
+the furniture? Besides, the furniture happened to be his, just as
+everything else happened to be. The furniture&mdash;the word, on his lips,
+had somehow, for Fleda, the sound of washing-stands and copious bedding,
+and she could well imagine the note it might have struck for Mrs.
+Gereth. The girl, in this interview with him, spoke of the contents of
+the house only as "the works of art." It didn't, however, in the least
+matter to Owen what they were called; what did matter, she easily
+guessed, was that it had been laid upon him by Mona, been made in effect
+a condition of her consent, that he should hold his mother to the
+strictest accountability for them. Mona had already entered upon the
+enjoyment of her rights. She had made him feel that Mrs. Gereth had been
+liberally provided for, and had asked him cogently what room there would
+be at Ricks for the innumerable treasures of the big house. Ricks, the
+sweet little place offered to the mistress of Poynton as the refuge of
+her declining years, had been left to the late Mr. Gereth, a
+considerable time before his death, by an old maternal aunt, a good lady
+who had spent most of her life there. The house had in recent times been
+let, but it was amply furnished, it contained all the defunct aunt's
+possessions. Owen had lately inspected it, and he communicated to Fleda
+that he had quietly taken Mona to see it. It wasn't a place like
+Poynton&mdash;what dower-house ever was?&mdash;but it was an awfully jolly little
+place, and Mona had taken a tremendous fancy to it. If there were a few
+things at Poynton that were Mrs. Gereth's peculiar property, of course
+she must take them away with her; but one of the matters that became
+clear to Fleda was that this transfer would be immediately subject to
+Miss Brigstock's approval. The special business that she herself now
+became aware of being charged with was that of seeing Mrs. Gereth safely
+and singly off the premises.</p>
+
+<p>Her heart failed her, after Owen had returned to London, with the
+ugliness of this duty&mdash;with the ugliness, indeed, of the whole close
+conflict. She saw nothing of Mrs. Gereth that day; she spent it in
+roaming with sick sighs, in feeling, as she passed from room to room,
+that what was expected of her companion was really dreadful. It would
+have been better never to have had such a place than to have had it and
+lose it. It was odious to <i>her</i> to have to look for solutions: what a
+strange relation between mother and son when there was no fundamental
+tenderness out of which a solution would irrepressibly spring! Was it
+Owen who was mainly responsible for that poverty? Fleda couldn't think
+so when she remembered that, so far as he was concerned, Mrs. Gereth
+would still have been welcome to have her seat by the Poynton fire. The
+fact that from the moment one accepted his marrying one saw no very
+different course for Owen to take made her all the rest of that aching
+day find her best relief in the mercy of not having yet to face her
+hostess. She dodged and dreamed and romanced away the time; instead of
+inventing a remedy or a compromise, instead of preparing a plan by which
+a scandal might be averted, she gave herself, in her sentient solitude,
+up to a mere fairy tale, up to the very taste of the beautiful peace
+with which she would have filled the air if only something might have
+been that could never have been.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="V" id="V"></a>V</h2>
+
+
+<p>"I'll give up the house if they'll let me take what I require!" That, on
+the morrow, was what Mrs. Gereth's stifled night had qualified her to
+say, with a tragic face, at breakfast. Fleda reflected that what she
+"required" was simply every object that surrounded them. The poor woman
+would have admitted this truth and accepted the conclusion to be drawn
+from it, the reduction to the absurd of her attitude, the exaltation of
+her revolt. The girl's dread of a scandal, of spectators and critics,
+diminished the more she saw how little vulgar avidity had to do with
+this rigor. It was not the crude love of possession; it was the need to
+be faithful to a trust and loyal to an idea. The idea was surely noble:
+it was that of the beauty Mrs. Gereth had so patiently and consummately
+wrought. Pale but radiant, with her back to the wall, she rose there
+like a heroine guarding a treasure. To give up the ship was to flinch
+from her duty; there was something in her eyes that declared she would
+die at her post. If their difference should become public the shame
+would be all for the others. If Waterbath thought it could afford to
+expose itself, then Waterbath was welcome to the folly. Her fanaticism
+gave her a new distinction, and Fleda perceived almost with awe that she
+had never carried herself so well. She trod the place like a reigning
+queen or a proud usurper; full as it was of splendid pieces, it could
+show in these days no ornament so effective as its menaced mistress.</p>
+
+<p>Our young lady's spirit was strangely divided; she had a tenderness for
+Owen which she deeply concealed, yet it left her occasion to marvel at
+the way a man was made who could care in any relation for a creature
+like Mona Brigstock when he had known in any relation a creature like
+Adela Gereth. With such a mother to give him the pitch, how could he
+take it so low? She wondered that she didn't despise him for this, but
+there was something that kept her from it. If there had been nothing
+else it would have sufficed that she really found herself from this
+moment the medium of communication with him.</p>
+
+<p>"He'll come back to assert himself," Mrs. Gereth had said; and the
+following week Owen in fact reappeared. He might merely have written,
+Fleda could see, but he had come in person because it was at once
+"nicer" for his mother and stronger for his cause. He didn't like the
+row, though Mona probably did; if he hadn't a sense of beauty he had
+after all a sense of justice; but it was inevitable he should clearly
+announce at Poynton the date at which he must look to find the house
+vacant. "You don't think I'm rough or hard, do you?" he asked of Fleda,
+his impatience shining in his idle eyes as the dining-hour shines in
+club-windows. "The place at Ricks stands there with open arms. And then
+I give her lots of time. Tell her she can remove everything that belongs
+to her." Fleda recognized the elements of what the newspapers call a
+deadlock in the circumstance that nothing at Poynton belonged to Mrs.
+Gereth either more or less than anything else. She must either take
+everything or nothing, and the girl's suggestion was that it might
+perhaps be an inspiration to do the latter and begin again on a clean
+page. What, however, was the poor woman, in that case, to begin with?
+What was she to do at all, on her meagre income, but make the best of
+the <i>objets d'art</i> of Ricks, the treasures collected by Mr. Gereth's
+maiden aunt? She had never been near the place: for long years it had
+been let to strangers, and after that the foreboding that it would be
+her doom had kept her from the abasement of it. She had felt that she
+should see it soon enough, but Fleda (who was careful not to betray to
+her that Mona had seen it and had been gratified) knew her reasons for
+believing that the maiden aunt's principles had had much in common with
+the principles of Waterbath. The only thing, in short, that she would
+ever have to do with the objets d'art of Ricks would be to turn them out
+into the road. What belonged to her at Poynton, as Owen said, would
+conveniently mitigate the void resulting from that demonstration.</p>
+
+<p>The exchange of observations between the friends had grown very direct
+by the time Fleda asked Mrs. Gereth whether she literally meant to shut
+herself up and stand a siege, or whether it was her idea to expose
+herself, more informally, to be dragged out of the house by constables.
+"Oh, I prefer the constables and the dragging!" the heroine of Poynton
+had answered. "I want to make Owen and Mona do everything that will be
+most publicly odious." She gave it out that it was her one thought now
+to force them to a line that would dishonor them and dishonor the
+tradition they embodied, though Fleda was privately sure that she had
+visions of an alternative policy. The strange thing was that, proud and
+fastidious all her life, she now showed so little distaste for the
+world's hearing of the squabble. What had taken place in her above all
+was that a long resentment had ripened. She hated the effacement to
+which English usage reduced the widowed mother: she had discoursed of it
+passionately to Fleda; contrasted it with the beautiful homage paid in
+other countries to women in that position, women no better than herself,
+whom she had seen acclaimed and enthroned, whom she had known and
+envied; made in short as little as possible a secret of the injury, the
+bitterness she found in it. The great wrong Owen had done her was not
+his "taking up" with Mona&mdash;that was disgusting, but it was a detail, an
+accidental form: it was his failure from the first to understand what it
+was to have a mother at all, to appreciate the beauty and sanctity of
+the character. She was just his mother as his nose was just his nose,
+and he had never had the least imagination or tenderness or gallantry
+about her. One's mother, gracious heaven, if one were the kind of fine
+young man one ought to be, the only kind Mrs. Gereth cared for, was a
+subject for poetry, for idolatry. Hadn't she often told Fleda of her
+friend Madame de Jaume, the wittiest of women, but a small, black,
+crooked person, each of whose three boys, when absent, wrote to her
+every day of their lives? She had the house in Paris, she had the house
+in Poitou, she had more than in the lifetime of her husband (to whom, in
+spite of her appearance, she had afforded repeated cause for jealousy),
+because she had to the end of her days the supreme word about
+everything. It was easy to see that Mrs. Gereth would have given again
+and again her complexion, her figure, and even perhaps the spotless
+virtue she had still more successfully retained, to have been the
+consecrated Madame de Jaume. She wasn't, alas, and this was what she had
+at present a magnificent occasion to protest against. She was of course
+fully aware of Owen's concession, his willingness to let her take away
+with her the few things she liked best; but as yet she only declared
+that to meet him on this ground would be to give him a triumph, to put
+him impossibly in the right. "Liked best"? There wasn't a thing in the
+house that she didn't like best, and what she liked better still was to
+be left where she was. How could Owen use such an expression without
+being conscious of his hypocrisy? Mrs. Gereth, whose criticism was often
+gay, dilated with sardonic humor on the happy look a dozen objects from
+Poynton would wear and the charming effect they would conduce to when
+interspersed with the peculiar features of Ricks. What had her whole
+life been but an effort toward completeness and perfection? Better
+Waterbath at once, in its cynical unity, than the ignominy of such a
+mixture!</p>
+
+<p>All this was of no great help to Fleda, in so far as Fleda tried to rise
+to her mission of finding a way out. When at the end of a fortnight Owen
+came down once more, it was ostensibly to tackle a farmer whose
+proceedings had been irregular; the girl was sure, however, that he had
+really come, on the instance of Mona, to see what his mother was doing.
+He wished to satisfy himself that she was preparing her departure, and
+he wished to perform a duty, distinct but not less imperative, in regard
+to the question of the perquisites with which she would retreat. The
+tension between them was now such that he had to perpetrate these
+offenses without meeting his adversary. Mrs. Gereth was as willing as
+himself that he should address to Fleda Vetch whatever cruel remarks he
+might have to make: she only pitied her poor young friend for repeated
+encounters with a person as to whom she perfectly understood the girl's
+repulsion. Fleda thought it nice of Owen not to have expected her to
+write to him; he wouldn't have wished any more than herself that she
+should have the air of spying on his mother in his interest. What made
+it comfortable to deal with him in this more familiar way was the sense
+that she understood so perfectly how poor Mrs. Gereth suffered, and that
+she measured so adequately the sacrifice the other side did take rather
+monstrously for granted. She understood equally how Owen himself
+suffered, now that Mona had already begun to make him do things he
+didn't like. Vividly Fleda apprehended how <i>she</i> would have first made
+him like anything she would have made him do; anything even as
+disagreeable as this appearing there to state, virtually on Mona's
+behalf, that of course there must be a definite limit to the number of
+articles appropriated. She took a longish stroll with him in order to
+talk the matter over; to say if she didn't think a dozen pieces, chosen
+absolutely at will, would be a handsome allowance; and above all to
+consider the very delicate question of whether the advantage enjoyed by
+Mrs. Gereth mightn't be left to her honor. To leave it so was what Owen
+wished; but there was plainly a young lady at Waterbath to whom, on his
+side, he already had to render an account. He was as touching in his
+offhand annoyance as his mother was tragic in her intensity; for if he
+couldn't help having a sense of propriety about the whole matter, so he
+could as little help hating it. It was for his hating it, Fleda
+reasoned, that she liked him so, and her insistence to his mother on the
+hatred perilously resembled, on one or two occasions, a revelation of
+the liking. There were moments when, in conscience, that revelation
+pressed her; inasmuch as it was just on the ground of her not liking him
+that Mrs. Gereth trusted her so much. Mrs. Gereth herself didn't in
+these days like him at all, and she was of course and always on Mrs.
+Gereth's side. He ended really, while the preparations for his marriage
+went on, by quite a little custom of coming and going; but on no one of
+these occasions would his mother receive him. He talked only with Fleda
+and strolled with Fleda; and when he asked her, in regard to the great
+matter, if Mrs. Gereth were really doing nothing, the girl usually
+replied: "She pretends not to be, if I may say so; but I think she's
+really thinking over what she'll take." When her friend asked her what
+Owen was doing, she could have but one answer: "He's waiting, dear lady,
+to see what <i>you</i> do!"</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Gereth, a month after she had received her great shock, did
+something abrupt and extraordinary: she caught up her companion and went
+to have a look at Ricks. They had come to London first and taken a train
+from Liverpool Street, and the least of the sufferings they were armed
+against was that of passing the night. Fleda's admirable dressing-bag
+had been given her by her friend. "Why, it's charming!" she exclaimed a
+few hours later, turning back again into the small prim parlor from a
+friendly advance to the single plate of the window. Mrs. Gereth hated
+such windows, the one flat glass, sliding up and down, especially when
+they enjoyed a view of four iron pots on pedestals, painted white and
+containing ugly geraniums, ranged on the edge of a gravel-path and doing
+their best to give it the air of a terrace. Fleda had instantly averted
+her eyes from these ornaments, but Mrs. Gereth grimly gazed, wondering
+of course how a place in the deepest depths of Essex and three miles
+from a small station could contrive to look so suburban. The room was
+practically a shallow box, with the junction of the walls and ceiling
+guiltless of curve or cornice and marked merely by the little band of
+crimson paper glued round the top of the other paper, a turbid gray
+sprigged with silver flowers. This decoration was rather new and quite
+fresh; and there was in the centre of the ceiling a big square beam
+papered over in white, as to which Fleda hesitated about venturing to
+remark that it was rather picturesque. She recognized in time that this
+remark would be weak and that, throughout, she should be able to say
+nothing either for the mantelpieces or for the doors, of which she saw
+her companion become sensible with a soundless moan. On the subject of
+doors especially Mrs. Gereth had the finest views: the thing in the
+world she most despised was the meanness of the single flap. From end to
+end, at Poynton, there were high double leaves. At Ricks the entrances
+to the rooms were like the holes of rabbit-hutches.</p>
+
+<p>It was all, none the less, not so bad as Fleda had feared; it was faded
+and melancholy, whereas there had been a danger that it would be
+contradictious and positive, cheerful and loud. The house was crowded
+with objects of which the aggregation somehow made a thinness and the
+futility a grace; things that told her they had been gathered as slowly
+and as lovingly as the golden flowers of Poynton. She too, for a home,
+could have lived with them: they made her fond of the old maiden-aunt;
+they made her even wonder if it didn't work more for happiness not to
+have tasted, as she herself had done, of knowledge. Without resources,
+without a stick, as she said, of her own, Fleda was moved, after all, to
+some secret surprise at the pretensions of a shipwrecked woman who could
+hold such an asylum cheap. The more she looked about the surer she felt
+of the character of the maiden-aunt, the sense of whose dim presence
+urged her to pacification: the maiden-aunt had been a dear; she would
+have adored the maiden-aunt. The poor lady had had some tender little
+story; she had been sensitive and ignorant and exquisite: that too was a
+sort of origin, a sort of atmosphere for relics and rarities, though
+different from the sorts most prized at Poynton. Mrs. Gereth had of
+course more than once said that one of the deepest mysteries of life was
+the way that, by certain natures, hideous objects could be loved; but it
+wasn't a question of love, now, for these: it was only a question of a
+certain practical patience. Perhaps some thought of that kind had stolen
+over Mrs. Gereth when, at the end of a brooding hour, she exclaimed,
+taking in the house with a strenuous sigh: "Well, something can be done
+with it!" Fleda had repeated to her more than once the indulgent fancy
+about the maiden-aunt&mdash;she was so sure she had deeply suffered. "I'm
+sure I hope she did!" was, however, all that Mrs. Gereth had replied.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="VI" id="VI"></a>VI</h2>
+
+
+<p>It was a great relief to the girl at last to perceive that the dreadful
+move would really be made. What might happen if it shouldn't had been
+from the first indefinite. It was absurd to pretend that any violence
+was probable&mdash;a tussel, dishevelment, shrieks; yet Fleda had an
+imagination of a drama, a "great scene," a thing, somehow, of indignity
+and misery, of wounds inflicted and received, in which indeed, though
+Mrs. Gereth's presence, with movements and sounds, loomed large to her,
+Owen remained indistinct and on the whole unaggressive. He wouldn't be
+there with a cigarette in his teeth, very handsome and insolently quiet:
+that was only the way he would be in a novel, across whose interesting
+page some such figure, as she half closed her eyes, seemed to her to
+walk. Fleda had rather, and indeed with shame, a confused, pitying
+vision of Mrs. Gereth with her great scene left in a manner on her
+hands, Mrs. Gereth missing her effect and having to appear merely hot
+and injured and in the wrong. The symptoms that she would be spared even
+that spectacle resided not so much, through the chambers of Poynton, in
+an air of concentration as in the hum of buzzing alternatives. There was
+no common preparation, but one day, at the turn of a corridor, she found
+her hostess standing very still, with the hanging hands of an invalid
+and the active eyes of an adventurer. These eyes appeared to Fleda to
+meet her own with a strange, dim bravado, and there was a silence,
+almost awkward, before either of the friends spoke. The girl afterwards
+thought of the moment as one in which her hostess mutely accused her of
+an accusation, meeting it, however, at the same time, by a kind of
+defiant acceptance. Yet it was with mere melancholy candor that Mrs.
+Gereth at last sighingly exclaimed: "I'm thinking over what I had better
+take!" Fleda could have embraced her for this virtual promise of a
+concession, the announcement that she had finally accepted the problem
+of knocking together a shelter with the small salvage of the wreck.</p>
+
+<p>It was true that when after their return from Ricks they tried to
+lighten the ship, the great embarrassment was still immutably there, the
+odiousness of sacrificing the exquisite things one wouldn't take to the
+exquisite things one would. This immediately made the things one
+wouldn't take the very things one ought to, and, as Mrs. Gereth said,
+condemned one, in the whole business, to an eternal vicious circle. In
+such a circle, for days, she had been tormentedly moving, prowling up
+and down, comparing incomparables. It was for that one had to cling to
+them and their faces of supplication. Fleda herself could judge of these
+faces, so conscious of their race and their danger, and she had little
+enough to say when her companion asked her if the whole place,
+perversely fair on October afternoons, looked like a place to give up.
+It looked, to begin with, through some effect of season and light,
+larger than ever, immense, and it was filled with the hush of sorrow,
+which in turn was all charged with memories. Everything was in the
+air&mdash;every history of every find, every circumstance of every struggle.
+Mrs. Gereth had drawn back every curtain and removed every cover; she
+prolonged the vistas, opened wide the whole house, gave it an appearance
+of awaiting a royal visit. The shimmer of wrought substances spent
+itself in the brightness; the old golds and brasses, old ivories and
+bronzes, the fresh old tapestries and deep old damasks threw out a
+radiance in which the poor woman saw in solution all her old loves and
+patiences, all her old tricks and triumphs.</p>
+
+<p>Fleda had a depressed sense of not, after all, helping her much: this
+was lightened indeed by the fact that Mrs. Gereth, letting her off
+easily, didn't now seem to expect it. Her sympathy, her interest, her
+feeling for everything for which Mrs. Gereth felt, were a force that
+really worked to prolong the deadlock. "I only wish I bored you and my
+possessions bored you," that lady, with some humor, declared; "then
+you'd make short work with me, bundle me off, tell me just to pile
+certain things into a cart and have done." Fleda's sharpest difficulty
+was in having to act up to the character of thinking Owen a brute, or at
+least to carry off the inconsistency of seeing him when he came down. By
+good fortune it was her duty, her function, as well as a protection to
+Mrs. Gereth. She thought of him perpetually, and her eyes had come to
+rejoice in his manly magnificence more even than they rejoiced in the
+royal cabinets of the red saloon. She wondered, very faintly at first,
+why he came so often; but of course she knew nothing about the business
+he had in hand, over which, with men red-faced and leather-legged, he
+was sometimes closeted for an hour in a room of his own that was the one
+monstrosity of Poynton: all tobacco-pots and bootjacks, his mother had
+said&mdash;such an array of arms of aggression and castigation that he
+himself had confessed to eighteen rifles and forty whips. He was
+arranging for settlements on his wife, he was doing things that would
+meet the views of the Brigstocks. Considering the house was his own,
+Fleda thought it nice of him to keep himself in the background while his
+mother remained; making his visits, at some cost of ingenuity about
+trains from town, only between meals, doing everything to let it press
+lightly upon her that he was there. This was rather a stoppage to her
+meeting Mrs. Gereth on the ground of his being a brute; the most she
+really at last could do was not to contradict her when she repeated that
+he was watching&mdash;just insultingly watching. He <i>was</i> watching, no doubt;
+but he watched somehow with his head turned away. He knew that Fleda
+knew at present what he wanted of her, so that it would be gross of him
+to say it over and over. It existed as a confidence between them, and
+made him sometimes, with his wandering stare, meet her eyes as if a
+silence so pleasant could only unite them the more. He had no great flow
+of speech, certainly, and at first the girl took for granted that this
+was all there was to be said about the matter. Little by little she
+speculated as to whether, with a person who, like herself, could put
+him, after all, at a sort of domestic ease, it was not supposable that
+he would have more conversation if he were not keeping some of it back
+for Mona.</p>
+
+<p>From the moment she suspected he might be thinking what Mona would say
+to his chattering so to an underhand "companion," who was all but paid,
+this young lady's repressed emotion began to require still more
+repression. She grew impatient of her situation at Poynton; she
+privately pronounced it false and horrid. She said to herself that she
+had let Owen know that she had, to the best of her power, directed his
+mother in the general sense he desired; that he quite understood it and
+that he also understood how unworthy it was of either of them to stand
+over the good lady with a notebook and a lash. Wasn't this practical
+unanimity just practical success? Fleda became aware of a sudden desire,
+as well as of pressing reasons, to bring her stay at Poynton to a close.
+She had not, on the one hand, like a minion of the law, undertaken to
+see Mrs. Gereth down to the train and locked, in sign of her abdication,
+into a compartment; neither had she on the other committed herself to
+hold Owen indefinitely in dalliance while his mother gained time or dug
+a counter-mine. Besides, people <i>were</i> saying that she fastened like a
+leech on other people&mdash;people who had houses where something was to be
+picked up: this revelation was frankly made her by her sister, now
+distinctly doomed to the curate and in view of whose nuptials she had
+almost finished, as a present, a wonderful piece of embroidery,
+suggested, at Poynton, by an old Spanish altar-cloth. She would have to
+exert herself still further for the intended recipient of this offering,
+turn her out for her marriage with more than that drapery. She would go
+up to town, in short, to dress Maggie; and their father, in lodgings at
+West Kensington, would stretch a point and take them in. He, to do him
+justice, never reproached her with profitable devotions; so far as they
+existed he consciously profited by them. Mrs. Gereth gave her up as
+heroically as if she had been a great bargain, and Fleda knew that she
+wouldn't at present miss any visit of Owen's, for Owen was shooting at
+Waterbath. Owen shooting was Owen lost, and there was scant sport at
+Poynton.</p>
+
+<p>The first news she had from Mrs. Gereth was news of that lady's having
+accomplished, in form at least, her migration. The letter was dated from
+Ricks, to which place she had been transported by an impulse apparently
+as sudden as the inspiration she had obeyed before. "Yes, I've literally
+come," she wrote, "with a bandbox and a kitchen-maid; I've crossed the
+Rubicon, I've taken possession. It has been like plumping into cold
+water: I saw the only thing was to do it, not to stand shivering. I
+shall have warmed the place a little by simply being here for a week;
+when I come back the ice will have been broken. I didn't write to you to
+meet me on my way through town, because I know how busy you are and
+because, besides, I'm too savage and odious to be fit company even for
+you. You'd say I really go too far, and there's no doubt whatever I do.
+I'm here, at any rate, just to look round once more, to see that certain
+things are done before I enter in force. I shall probably be at Poynton
+all next week. There's more room than I quite measured the other day,
+and a rather good set of old Worcester. But what are space and time,
+what's even old Worcester, to your wretched and affectionate A. G.?"</p>
+
+<p>The day after Fleda received this letter she had occasion to go into a
+big shop in Oxford Street&mdash;a journey that she achieved circuitously,
+first on foot and then by the aid of two omnibuses. The second of these
+vehicles put her down on the side of the street opposite her shop, and
+while, on the curbstone, she humbly waited, with a parcel, an umbrella,
+and a tucked-up frock, to cross in security, she became aware that,
+close beside her, a hansom had pulled up short, in obedience to the
+brandished stick of a demonstrative occupant. This occupant was Owen
+Gereth, who had caught sight of her as he rattled along and who, with an
+exhibition of white teeth that, from under the hood of the cab, had
+almost flashed through the fog, now alighted to ask her if he couldn't
+give her a lift. On finding that her destination was only over the way
+he dismissed his vehicle and joined her, not only piloting her to the
+shop, but taking her in; with the assurance that his errands didn't
+matter, that it amused him to be concerned with hers. She told him she
+had come to buy a trimming for her sister's frock, and he expressed an
+hilarious interest in the purchase. His hilarity was almost always out
+of proportion to the case, but it struck her at present as more so than
+ever; especially when she had suggested that he might find it a good
+time to buy a garnishment of some sort for Mona. After wondering an
+instant whether he gave the full satiric meaning, such as it was, to
+this remark, Fleda dismissed the possibility as inconceivable. He
+stammered out that it was for <i>her</i> he would like to buy something,
+something "ripping," and that she must give him the pleasure of telling
+him what would best please her: he couldn't have a better opportunity
+for making her a present&mdash;the present, in recognition of all she had
+done for Mummy, that he had had in his head for weeks.</p>
+
+<p>Fleda had more than one small errand in the big bazaar, and he went up
+and down with her, pointedly patient, pretending to be interested in
+questions of tape and of change. She had now not the least hesitation in
+wondering what Mona would think of such proceedings. But they were not
+her doing&mdash;they were Owen's; and Owen, inconsequent and even
+extravagant, was unlike anything she had ever seen him before. He broke
+off, he came back, he repeated questions without heeding answers, he
+made vague, abrupt remarks about the resemblances of shopgirls and the
+uses of chiffon. He unduly prolonged their business together, giving
+Fleda a sense that he was putting off something particular that he had
+to face. If she had ever dreamed of Owen Gereth as nervous she would
+have seen him with some such manner as this. But why should he be
+nervous? Even at the height of the crisis his mother hadn't made him so,
+and at present he was satisfied about his mother. The one idea he stuck
+to was that Fleda should mention something she would let him give her:
+there was everything in the world in the wonderful place, and he made
+her incongruous offers&mdash;a traveling-rug, a massive clock, a table for
+breakfast in bed, and above all, in a resplendent binding, a set of
+somebody's "works." His notion was a testimonial, a tribute, and the
+"works" would be a graceful intimation that it was her cleverness he
+wished above all to commemorate. He was immensely in earnest, but the
+articles he pressed upon her betrayed a delicacy that went to her heart:
+what he would really have liked, as he saw them tumbled about, was one
+of the splendid stuffs for a gown&mdash;a choice proscribed by his fear of
+seeming to patronize her, to refer to her small means and her
+deficiencies. Fleda found it easy to chaff him about his exaggeration of
+her deserts; she gave the just measure of them in consenting to accept a
+small pin-cushion, costing sixpence, in which the letter F was marked
+out with pins. A sense of loyalty to Mona was not needed to enforce this
+discretion, and after that first allusion to her she never sounded her
+name. She noticed on this occasion more things in Owen Gereth than she
+had ever noticed before, but what she noticed most was that he said no
+word of his intended. She asked herself what he had done, in so long a
+parenthesis, with his loyalty or at least his "form;" and then reflected
+that even if he had done something very good with them the situation in
+which such a question could come up was already a little strange. Of
+course he wasn't doing anything so vulgar as making love to her; but
+there was a kind of punctilio for a man who was engaged.</p>
+
+<p>That punctilio didn't prevent Owen from remaining with her after they
+had left the shop, from hoping she had a lot more to do, and from
+pressing her to look with him, for a possible glimpse of something she
+might really let him give her, into the windows of other establishments.
+There was a moment when, under this pressure, she made up her mind that
+his tribute would be, if analyzed, a tribute to her insignificance. But
+all the same he wanted her to come somewhere and have luncheon with him:
+what was that a tribute to? She must have counted very little if she
+didn't count too much for a romp in a restaurant. She had to get home
+with her trimming, and the most, in his company, she was amenable to was
+a retracing of her steps to the Marble Arch and then, after a discussion
+when they had reached it, a walk with him across the Park. She knew Mona
+would have considered that she ought to take the omnibus again; but she
+had now to think for Owen as well as for herself&mdash;she couldn't think for
+Mona. Even in the Park the autumn air was thick, and as they moved
+westward over the grass, which was what Owen preferred, the cool
+grayness made their words soft, made them at last rare and everything
+else dim. He wanted to stay with her&mdash;he wanted not to leave her: he had
+dropped into complete silence, but that was what his silence said. What
+was it he had postponed? What was it he wanted still to postpone? She
+grew a little scared as they strolled together and she thought. It was
+too confused to be believed, but it was as if somehow he felt
+differently. Fleda Vetch didn't suspect him at first of feeling
+differently to <i>her</i>, but only of feeling differently to Mona; yet she
+was not unconscious that this latter difference would have had something
+to do with his being on the grass beside her. She had read in novels
+about gentlemen who on the eve of marriage, winding up the past, had
+surrendered themselves for the occasion to the influence of a former
+tie; and there was something in Owen's behavior now, something in his
+very face, that suggested a resemblance to one of those gentlemen. But
+whom and what, in that case, would Fleda herself resemble? She wasn't a
+former tie, she wasn't any tie at all; she was only a deep little person
+for whom happiness was a kind of pearl-diving plunge. It was down at the
+very bottom of all that had lately happened; for all that had lately
+happened was that Owen Gereth had come and gone at Poynton. That was the
+small sum of her experience, and what it had made for her was her own
+affair, quite consistent with her not having dreamed it had made a
+tie&mdash;at least what <i>she</i> called one&mdash;for Owen. The old one, at any rate,
+was Mona&mdash;Mona whom he had known so very much longer.</p>
+
+<p>They walked far, to the southwest corner of the great Gardens, where, by
+the old round pond and the old red palace, when she had put out her hand
+to him in farewell, declaring that from the gate she must positively
+take a conveyance, it seemed suddenly to rise between them that this was
+a real separation. She was on his mother's side, she belonged to his
+mother's life, and his mother, in the future, would never come to
+Poynton. After what had passed she wouldn't even be at his wedding, and
+it was not possible now that Mrs. Gereth should mention that ceremony to
+the girl, much less express a wish that the girl should be present at
+it. Mona, from decorum and with reference less to the bridegroom than to
+the bridegroom's mother, would of course not invite any such girl as
+Fleda. Everything therefore was ended; they would go their different
+ways; this was the last time they would stand face to face. They looked
+at each other with the fuller sense of it and, on Owen's part, with an
+expression of dumb trouble, the intensification of his usual appeal to
+any interlocutor to add the right thing to what he said. To Fleda, at
+this moment, it appeared that the right thing might easily be the wrong.
+He only said, at any rate: "I want you to understand, you know&mdash;I want
+you to understand."</p>
+
+<p>What did he want her to understand? He seemed unable to bring it out,
+and this understanding was moreover exactly what she wished not to
+arrive at. Bewildered as she was, she had already taken in as much as
+she should know what to do with; the blood also was rushing into her
+face. He liked her&mdash;it was stupefying&mdash;more than he really ought: that
+was what was the matter with him and what he desired her to assimilate;
+so that she was suddenly as frightened as some thoughtless girl who
+finds herself the object of an overture from a married man.</p>
+
+<p>"Good-bye, Mr. Gereth&mdash;I <i>must</i> get on!" she declared with a
+cheerfulness that she felt to be an unnatural grimace. She broke away
+from him sharply, smiling, backing across the grass and then turning
+altogether and moving as fast as she could. "Good-bye, good-bye!" she
+threw off again as she went, wondering if he would overtake her before
+she reached the gate; conscious with a red disgust that her movement was
+almost a run; conscious too of just the confused, handsome face with
+which he would look after her. She felt as if she had answered a
+kindness with a great flouncing snub, but at any rate she had got away,
+though the distance to the gate, her ugly gallop down the Broad Walk,
+every graceless jerk of which hurt her, seemed endless. She signed from
+afar to a cab on the stand in the Kensington Road and scrambled into it,
+glad of the encompassment of the four-wheeler that had officiously
+obeyed her summons and that, at the end of twenty yards, when she had
+violently pulled up a glass, permitted her to recognize the fact that
+she was on the point of bursting into tears.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="VII" id="VII"></a>VII</h2>
+
+
+<p>As soon as her sister was married she went down to Mrs. Gereth at
+Ricks&mdash;a promise to this effect having been promptly exacted and given;
+and her inner vision was much more fixed on the alterations there,
+complete now, as she understood, than on the success of her plotting and
+pinching for Maggie's happiness. Her imagination, in the interval, had
+indeed had plenty to do and numerous scenes to visit; for when on the
+summons just mentioned it had taken a flight from West Kensington to
+Ricks, it had hung but an hour over the terrace of painted pots and then
+yielded to a current of the upper air that swept it straight off to
+Poynton and to Waterbath. Not a sound had reached her of any supreme
+clash, and Mrs. Gereth had communicated next to nothing; giving out
+that, as was easily conceivable, she was too busy, too bitter, and too
+tired for vain civilities. All she had written was that she had got the
+new place well in hand and that Fleda would be surprised at the way it
+was turning out. Everything was even yet upside down; nevertheless, in
+the sense of having passed the threshold of Poynton for the last time,
+the amputation, as she called it, had been performed. Her leg had come
+off&mdash;she had now begun to stump along with the lovely wooden substitute;
+she would stump for life, and what her young friend was to come and
+admire was the beauty of her movement and the noise she made about the
+house. The reserve of Poynton and Waterbath had been matched by the
+austerity of Fleda's own secret, under the discipline of which she had
+repeated to herself a hundred times a day that she rejoiced at having
+cares that excluded all thought of it. She had lavished herself, in act,
+on Maggie and the curate, and had opposed to her father's selfishness a
+sweetness quite ecstatic. The young couple wondered why they had waited
+so long, since everything was after all so easy. She had thought of
+everything, even to how the "quietness" of the wedding should be
+relieved by champagne and her father kept brilliant on a single bottle.
+Fleda knew, in short, and liked the knowledge, that for several weeks
+she had appeared exemplary in every relation of life.</p>
+
+<p>She had been perfectly prepared to be surprised at Ricks, for Mrs.
+Gereth was a wonder-working wizard, with a command, when all was said,
+of good material; but the impression in wait for her on the threshold
+made her catch her breath and falter. Dusk had fallen when she arrived,
+and in the plain square hall, one of the few good features, the glow of
+a Venetian lamp just showed, on either wall, the richness of an
+admirable tapestry. This instant perception that the place had been
+dressed at the expense of Poynton was a shock: it was as if she had
+abruptly seen herself in the light of an accomplice. The next moment,
+folded in Mrs. Gereth's arms, her eyes were diverted; but she had
+already had, in a flash, the vision of the great gaps in the other
+house. The two tapestries, not the largest, but those most splendidly
+toned by time, had been on the whole its most uplifted pride. When she
+could really see again she was on a sofa in the drawing-room, staring
+with intensity at an object soon distinct as the great Italian cabinet
+that, at Poynton, had been in the red saloon. Without looking, she was
+sure the room was occupied with other objects like it, stuffed with as
+many as it could hold of the trophies of her friend's struggle. By this
+time the very fingers of her glove, resting on the seat of the sofa, had
+thrilled at the touch of an old velvet brocade, a wondrous texture that
+she could recognize, would have recognized among a thousand, without
+dropping her eyes on it. They stuck to the cabinet with a kind of
+dissimulated dread, while she painfully asked herself whether she should
+notice it, notice everything, or just pretend not to be affected. How
+could she pretend not to be affected, with the very pendants of the
+lustres tinkling at her and with Mrs. Gereth, beside her and staring at
+her even as she herself stared at the cabinet, hunching up a back like
+Atlas under his globe? She was appalled at this image of what Mrs.
+Gereth had on her shoulders. That lady was waiting and watching her,
+bracing herself, and preparing the same face of confession and defiance
+she had shown the day, at Poynton, she had been surprised in the
+corridor. It was farcical not to speak; and yet to exclaim, to
+participate, would give one a bad sense of being mixed up with a theft.
+This ugly word sounded, for herself, in Fleda's silence, and the very
+violence of it jarred her into a scared glance, as of a creature
+detected, to right and left. But what again the full picture most showed
+her was the far-away empty sockets, a scandal of nakedness in high, bare
+walls. She at last uttered something formal and incoherent&mdash;she didn't
+know what: it had no relation to either house. Then she felt Mrs.
+Gereth's hand once more on her arm. "I've arranged a charming room for
+you&mdash;it's really lovely. You'll be very happy there." This was spoken
+with extraordinary sweetness and with a smile that meant, "Oh, I know
+what you're thinking; but what does it matter when you're so loyally on
+my side?" It had come indeed to a question of "sides," Fleda thought,
+for the whole place was in battle array. In the soft lamplight, with one
+fine feature after another looming up into sombre richness, it defied
+her not to pronounce it a triumph of taste. Her passion for beauty
+leaped back into life; and was not what now most appealed to it a
+certain gorgeous audacity? Mrs. Gereth's high hand was, as mere great
+effect, the climax of the impression.</p>
+
+<p>"It's too wonderful, what you've done with the house!"&mdash;the visitor met
+her friend's eyes. They lighted up with joy&mdash;that friend herself so
+pleased with what she had done. This was not at all, in its accidental
+air of enthusiasm, what Fleda wanted to have said: it offered her as
+stupidly announcing from the first minute on whose side she was. Such
+was clearly the way Mrs. Gereth took it: she threw herself upon the
+delightful girl and tenderly embraced her again; so that Fleda soon went
+on, with a studied difference and a cooler inspection: "Why, you brought
+away absolutely everything!"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh no, not everything; I saw how little I could get into this scrap of
+a house. I only brought away what I required."</p>
+
+<p>Fleda had got up; she took a turn round the room. "You 'required' the
+very best pieces&mdash;the <i>morceaux de musée</i>, the individual gems!"</p>
+
+<p>"I certainly didn't want the rubbish, if that's what you mean." Mrs.
+Gereth, on the sofa, followed the direction of her companion's eyes;
+with the light of her satisfaction still in her face, she slowly rubbed
+her large, handsome hands. Wherever she was, she was herself the great
+piece in the gallery. It was the first Fleda had heard of there being
+"rubbish" at Poynton, but she didn't for the moment take up this
+insincerity; she only, from where she stood in the room, called out, one
+after the other, as if she had had a list in her hand, the pieces that
+in the great house had been scattered and that now, if they had a fault,
+were too much like a minuet danced on a hearth-rug. She knew them each,
+in every chink and charm&mdash;knew them by the personal name their
+distinctive sign or story had given them; and a second time she felt
+how, against her intention, this uttered knowledge struck her hostess as
+so much free approval. Mrs. Gereth was never indifferent to approval,
+and there was nothing she could so love you for as for doing justice to
+her deep morality. There was a particular gleam in her eyes when Fleda
+exclaimed at last, dazzled by the display: "And even the Maltese cross!"
+That description, though technically incorrect, had always been applied,
+at Poynton, to a small but marvelous crucifix of ivory, a masterpiece of
+delicacy, of expression, and of the great Spanish period, the existence
+and precarious accessibility of which she had heard of at Malta, years
+before, by an odd and romantic chance&mdash;a clue followed through mazes of
+secrecy till the treasure was at last unearthed.</p>
+
+<p>"'Even' the Maltese cross?" Mrs. Gereth rose as she sharply echoed the
+words. "My dear child, you don't suppose I'd have sacrificed <i>that</i>! For
+what in the world would you have taken me?"</p>
+
+<p>"A <i>bibelot</i> the more or the less," Fleda said, "could have made little
+difference in this grand general view of you. I take you simply for the
+greatest of all conjurers. You've operated with a quickness&mdash;and with a
+quietness!" Her voice trembled a little as she spoke, for the plain
+meaning of her words was that what her friend had achieved belonged to
+the class of operation essentially involving the protection of darkness.
+Fleda felt she really could say nothing at all if she couldn't say that
+she knew what the danger had been. She completed her thought by a
+resolute and perfectly candid question: "How in the world did you get
+off with them?"</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Gereth confessed to the fact of danger with a cynicism that
+surprised the girl. "By calculating, by choosing my time. I <i>was</i> quiet,
+and I <i>was</i> quick. I man&oelig;uvred; then at the last rushed!" Fleda drew
+a long breath: she saw in the poor woman something much better than
+sophistical ease, a crude elation that was a comparatively simple state
+to deal with. Her elation, it was true, was not so much from what she
+had done as from the way she had done it&mdash;by as brilliant a stroke as
+any commemorated in the annals of crime. "I succeeded because I had
+thought it all out and left nothing to chance: the whole process was
+organized in advance, so that the mere carrying it into effect took but
+a few hours. It was largely a matter of money: oh, I was horribly
+extravagant&mdash;I had to turn on so many people. But they were all to be
+had&mdash;a little army of workers, the packers, the porters, the helpers of
+every sort, the men with the mighty vans. It was a question of arranging
+in Tottenham Court Road and of paying the price. I haven't paid it yet;
+there'll be a horrid bill; but at least the thing's done! Expedition
+pure and simple was the essence of the bargain. 'I can give you two
+days,' I said; 'I can't give you another second.' They undertook the
+job, and the two days saw them through. The people came down on a
+Tuesday morning; they were off on the Thursday. I admit that some of
+them worked all Wednesday night. I had thought it all out; I stood over
+them; I showed them how. Yes, I coaxed them, I made love to them. Oh, I
+was inspired&mdash;they found me wonderful. I neither ate nor slept, but I
+was as calm as I am now. I didn't know what was in me; it was worth
+finding out. I'm very remarkable, my dear: I lifted tons with my own
+arms. I'm tired, very, very tired; but there's neither a scratch nor a
+nick, there isn't a teacup missing." Magnificent both in her exhaustion
+and in her triumph, Mrs. Gereth sank on the sofa again, the sweep of her
+eyes a rich synthesis and the restless friction of her hands a clear
+betrayal. "Upon my word," she laughed, "they really look better here!"</p>
+
+<p>Fleda had listened in awe. "And no one at Poynton said anything? There
+was no alarm?"</p>
+
+<p>"What alarm should there have been? Owen left me almost defiantly alone:
+I had taken a time that I had reason to believe was safe from a
+descent." Fleda had another wonder, which she hesitated to express: it
+would scarcely do to ask Mrs. Gereth if she hadn't stood in fear of her
+servants. She knew, moreover, some of the secrets of her humorous
+household rule, all made up of shocks to shyness and provocations to
+curiosity&mdash;a diplomacy so artful that several of the maids quite yearned
+to accompany her to Ricks. Mrs. Gereth, reading sharply the whole of her
+visitor's thought, caught it up with fine frankness. "You mean that I
+was watched&mdash;that he had his myrmidons, pledged to wire him if they
+should see what I was 'up to'? Precisely. I know the three persons you
+have in mind: I had them in mind myself. Well, I took a line with
+them&mdash;I settled them."</p>
+
+<p>Fleda had had no one in particular in mind; she had never believed in
+the myrmidons; but the tone in which Mrs. Gereth spoke added to her
+suspense. "What did you do to them?"</p>
+
+<p>"I took hold of them hard&mdash;I put them in the forefront. I made them
+work."</p>
+
+<p>"To move the furniture?"</p>
+
+<p>"To help, and to help so as to please me. That was the way to take them;
+it was what they had least expected. I marched up to them and looked
+each straight in the eye, giving him the chance to choose if he'd
+gratify me or gratify my son. He gratified <i>me</i>. They were too stupid!"</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Gereth massed herself there more and more as an immoral woman, but
+Fleda had to recognize that she too would have been stupid and she too
+would have gratified her. "And when did all this take place?"</p>
+
+<p>"Only last week; it seems a hundred years. We've worked here as fast as
+we worked there, but I'm not settled yet: you'll see in the rest of the
+house. However, the worst is over."</p>
+
+<p>"Do you really think so?" Fleda presently inquired. "I mean, does he,
+after the fact, as it were, accept it?"</p>
+
+<p>"Owen&mdash;what I've done? I haven't the least idea," said Mrs. Gereth.</p>
+
+<p>"Does Mona?"</p>
+
+<p>"You mean that she'll be the soul of the row?"</p>
+
+<p>"I hardly see Mona as the 'soul' of anything," the girl replied. "But
+have they made no sound? Have you heard nothing at all?"</p>
+
+<p>"Not a whisper, not a step, in all the eight days. Perhaps they don't
+know. Perhaps they're crouching for a leap."</p>
+
+<p>"But wouldn't they have gone down as soon as you left?"</p>
+
+<p>"They may not have known of my leaving." Fleda wondered afresh; it
+struck her as scarcely supposable that some sign shouldn't have flashed
+from Poynton to London. If the storm was taking this term of silence to
+gather, even in Mona's breast, it would probably discharge itself in
+some startling form. The great hush of every one concerned was strange;
+but when she pressed Mrs. Gereth for some explanation of it, that lady
+only replied, with her brave irony: "Oh, I took their breath away!" She
+had no illusions, however; she was still prepared to fight. What indeed
+was her spoliation of Poynton but the first engagement of a campaign?</p>
+
+<p>All this was exciting, but Fleda's spirit dropped, at bedtime, in the
+chamber embellished for her pleasure, where she found several of the
+objects that in her earlier room she had most admired. These had been
+reinforced by other pieces from other rooms, so that the quiet air of it
+was a harmony without a break, the finished picture of a maiden's bower.
+It was the sweetest Louis Seize, all assorted and combined&mdash;old
+chastened, figured, faded France. Fleda was impressed anew with her
+friend's genius for composition. She could say to herself that no girl
+in England, that night, went to rest with so picked a guard; but there
+was no joy for her in her privilege, no sleep even for the tired hours
+that made the place, in the embers of the fire and the winter dawn, look
+gray, somehow, and loveless. She couldn't care for such things when they
+came to her in such ways; there was a wrong about them all that turned
+them to ugliness. In the watches of the night she saw Poynton
+dishonored; she had cared for it as a happy whole, she reasoned, and the
+parts of it now around her seemed to suffer like chopped limbs. Before
+going to bed she had walked about with Mrs. Gereth and seen at whose
+expense the whole house had been furnished. At poor Owen's, from top to
+bottom&mdash;there wasn't a chair he hadn't sat upon. The maiden aunt had
+been exterminated&mdash;no trace of her to tell her tale. Fleda tried to
+think of some of the things at Poynton still unappropriated, but her
+memory was a blank about them, and in trying to focus the old
+combinations she saw again nothing but gaps and scars, a vacancy that
+gathered at moments into something worse. This concrete image was her
+greatest trouble, for it was Owen Gereth's face, his sad, strange eyes,
+fixed upon her now as they had never been. They stared at her out of the
+darkness, and their expression was more than she could bear: it seemed
+to say that he was in pain and that it was somehow her fault. He had
+looked to her to help him, and this was what her help had been. He had
+done her the honor to ask her to exert herself in his interest,
+confiding to her a task of difficulty, but of the highest delicacy.
+Hadn't that been exactly the sort of service she longed to render him?
+Well, her way of rendering it had been simply to betray him and hand him
+over to his enemy. Shame, pity, resentment oppressed her in turn; in the
+last of these feelings the others were quickly submerged. Mrs. Gereth
+had imprisoned her in that torment of taste; but it was clear to her for
+an hour at least that she might hate Mrs. Gereth.</p>
+
+<p>Something else, however, when morning came, was even more intensely
+definite: the most odious thing in the world for her would be ever again
+to meet Owen. She took on the spot a resolve to neglect no precaution
+that could lead to her going through life without that accident. After
+this, while she dressed, she took still another. Her position had
+become, in a few hours, intolerably false; in as few more hours as
+possible she would therefore put an end to it. The way to put an end to
+it would be to inform Mrs. Gereth that, to her great regret, she
+couldn't be with her now, couldn't cleave to her to the point that
+everything about her so plainly urged. She dressed with a sort of
+violence, a symbol of the manner in which this purpose was precipitated.
+The more they parted company the less likely she was to come across
+Owen; for Owen would be drawn closer to his mother now by the very
+necessity of bringing her down. Fleda, in the inconsequence of distress,
+wished to have nothing to do with her fall; she had had too much to do
+with everything. She was well aware of the importance, before breakfast
+and in view of any light they might shed on the question of motive, of
+not suffering her invidious expression of a difference to be accompanied
+by the traces of tears; but it none the less came to pass, downstairs,
+that after she had subtly put her back to the window, to make a mystery
+of the state of her eyes, she stupidly let a rich sob escape her before
+she could properly meet the consequences of being asked if she wasn't
+delighted with her room. This accident struck her on the spot as so
+grave that she felt the only refuge to be instant hypocrisy, some
+graceful impulse that would charge her emotion to the quickened sense of
+her friend's generosity&mdash;a demonstration entailing a flutter round the
+table and a renewed embrace, and not so successfully improvised but that
+Fleda fancied Mrs. Gereth to have been only half reassured. She had been
+startled, at any rate, and she might remain suspicious: this reflection
+interposed by the time, after breakfast, the girl had recovered
+sufficiently to say what was in her heart. She accordingly didn't say it
+that morning at all: she had absurdly veered about; she had encountered
+the shock of the fear that Mrs. Gereth, with sharpened eyes, might
+wonder why the deuce (she often wondered in that phrase) she had grown
+so warm about Owen's rights. She would doubtless, at a pinch, be able to
+defend them on abstract grounds, but that would involve a discussion,
+and the idea of a discussion made her nervous for her secret. Until in
+some way Poynton should return the blow and give her a cue, she must
+keep nervousness down; and she called herself a fool for having
+forgotten, however briefly, that her one safety was in silence.</p>
+
+<p>Directly after luncheon Mrs. Gereth took her into the garden for a
+glimpse of the revolution&mdash;or at least, said the mistress of Ricks, of
+the great row&mdash;that had been decreed there; but the ladies had scarcely
+placed themselves for this view before the younger one found herself
+embracing a prospect that opened in quite another quarter. Her attention
+was called to it, oddly, by the streamers of the parlor-maid's cap,
+which, flying straight behind the neat young woman who unexpectedly
+burst from the house and showed a long red face as she ambled over the
+grass, seemed to articulate in their flutter the name that Fleda lived
+at present only to catch. "Poynton&mdash;Poynton!" said the morsels of
+muslin; so that the parlor-maid became on the instant an actress in the
+drama, and Fleda, assuming pusillanimously that she herself was only a
+spectator, looked across the footlights at the exponent of the principal
+part. The manner in which this artist returned her look showed that she
+was equally preoccupied. Both were haunted alike by possibilities, but
+the apprehension of neither, before the announcement was made, took the
+form of the arrival at Ricks, in the flesh, of Mrs. Gereth's victim.
+When the messenger informed them that Mr. Gereth was in the
+drawing-room, the blank "Oh!" emitted by Fleda was quite as precipitate
+as the sound on her hostess's lips, besides being, as she felt, much
+less pertinent. "I thought it would be somebody," that lady afterwards
+said; "but I expected on the whole a solicitor's clerk." Fleda didn't
+mention that she herself had expected on the whole a pair of constables.
+She was surprised by Mrs. Gereth's question to the parlor-maid.</p>
+
+<p>"For whom did he ask?"</p>
+
+<p>"Why, for <i>you</i>, of course, dearest friend!" Fleda interjected, falling
+instinctively into the address that embodied the intensest pressure. She
+wanted to put Mrs. Gereth between her and her danger.</p>
+
+<p>"He asked for Miss Vetch, mum," the girl replied, with a face that
+brought startlingly to Fleda's ear the muffled chorus of the kitchen.</p>
+
+<p>"Quite proper," said Mrs. Gereth austerely. Then to Fleda: "Please go to
+him."</p>
+
+<p>"But what to do?"</p>
+
+<p>"What you always do&mdash;to see what he wants." Mrs. Gereth dismissed the
+maid. "Tell him Miss Vetch will come." Fleda saw that nothing was in the
+mother's imagination at this moment but the desire not to meet her son.
+She had completely broken with him, and there was little in what had
+just happened to repair the rupture. It would now take more to do so
+than his presenting himself uninvited at her door. "He's right in asking
+for you&mdash;he's aware that you're still our communicator; nothing has
+occurred to alter that. To what he wishes to transmit through you I'm
+ready, as I've been ready before, to listen. As far as <i>I</i>'m concerned,
+if I couldn't meet him a month ago, how am I to meet him to-day? If he
+has come to say, 'My dear mother, you're here, in the hovel into which
+I've flung you, with consolations that give me pleasure,' I'll listen to
+him; but on no other footing. That's what you're to ascertain, please.
+You'll oblige me as you've obliged me before. There!" Mrs. Gereth turned
+her back and, with a fine imitation of superiority, began to redress the
+miseries immediately before her. Fleda meanwhile hesitated, lingered for
+some minutes where she had been left, feeling secretly that her fate
+still had her in hand. It had put her face to face with Owen Gereth, and
+it evidently meant to keep her so. She was reminded afresh of two
+things: one of which was that, though she judged her friend's rigor, she
+had never really had the story of the scene enacted in the great
+awestricken house between the mother and the son weeks before&mdash;the day
+the former took to her bed in her over-throw; the other was, that at
+Ricks as at Poynton, it was before all things her place to accept
+thankfully a usefulness not, she must remember, universally
+acknowledged. What determined her at the last, while Mrs. Gereth
+disappeared in the shrubbery, was that, though she was at a distance
+from the house and the drawing-room was turned the other way, she could
+absolutely see the young man alone there with the sources of his pain.
+She saw his simple stare at his tapestries, heard his heavy tread on his
+carpets and the hard breath of his sense of unfairness. At this she went
+to him fast.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="VIII" id="VIII"></a>VIII</h2>
+
+
+<p>"I asked for you," he said when she stood there, "because I heard from
+the flyman who drove me from the station to the inn that he had brought
+you here yesterday. We had some talk, and he mentioned it."</p>
+
+<p>"You didn't know I was here?"</p>
+
+<p>"No. I knew only that you had had, in London, all that you told me, that
+day, to do; and it was Mona's idea that after your sister's marriage you
+were staying on with your father. So I thought you were with him still."</p>
+
+<p>"I am," Fleda replied, idealizing a little the fact. "I'm here only for
+a moment. But do you mean," she went on, "that if you had known I was
+with your mother you wouldn't have come down?"</p>
+
+<p>The way Owen hung fire at this question made it sound more playful than
+she had intended. She had, in fact, no consciousness of any intention
+but that of confining herself rigidly to her function. She could already
+see that, in whatever he had now braced himself for, she was an element
+he had not reckoned with. His preparation had been of a different
+sort&mdash;the sort congruous with his having been careful to go first and
+lunch solidly at the inn. He had not been forced to ask for her, but she
+became aware, in his presence, of a particular desire to make him feel
+that no harm could really come to him. She might upset him, as people
+called it, but she would take no advantage of having done so. She had
+never seen a person with whom she wished more to be light and easy, to
+be exceptionally human. The account he presently gave of the matter was
+that he indeed wouldn't have come if he had known she was on the spot;
+because then, didn't she see? he could have written to her. He would
+have had her there to let fly at his mother.</p>
+
+<p>"That would have saved me&mdash;well, it would have saved me a lot. Of course
+I would rather see you than her," he somewhat awkwardly added. "When the
+fellow spoke of you, I assure you I quite jumped at you. In fact I've no
+real desire to see Mummy at all. If she thinks I <i>like</i> it&mdash;!" He sighed
+disgustedly. "I only came down because it seemed better than any other
+way. I didn't want her to be able to say I hadn't been all right. I dare
+say you know she has taken everything; or if not quite everything, why,
+a lot more than one ever dreamed. You can see for yourself&mdash;she has got
+half the place down. She has got them crammed&mdash;you can see for
+yourself!" He had his old trick of artless repetition, his helpless
+iteration of the obvious; but he was sensibly different, for Fleda, if
+only by the difference of his clear face, mottled over and almost
+disfigured by little points of pain. He might have been a fine young man
+with a bad toothache; with the first even of his life. What ailed him
+above all, she felt, was that trouble was new to him: he had never known
+a difficulty; he had taken all his fences, his world wholly the world of
+the personally possible, rounded indeed by a gray suburb into which he
+had never had occasion to stray. In this vulgar and ill-lighted region
+he had evidently now lost himself. "We left it quite to her honor, you
+know," he said ruefully.</p>
+
+<p>"Perhaps you've a right to say that you left it a little to mine." Mixed
+up with the spoils there, rising before him as if she were in a manner
+their keeper, she felt that she must absolutely dissociate herself. Mrs.
+Gereth had made it impossible to do anything but give her away. "I can
+only tell you that, on my side, I left it to her. I never dreamed either
+that she would pick out so many things."</p>
+
+<p>"And you don't really think it's fair, do you? You <i>don't</i>!" He spoke
+very quickly; he really seemed to plead.</p>
+
+<p>Fleda faltered a moment. "I think she has gone too far." Then she added:
+"I shall immediately tell her that I've said that to you."</p>
+
+<p>He appeared puzzled by this statement, but he presently rejoined: "You
+haven't then said to mamma what you think?"</p>
+
+<p>"Not yet; remember that I only got here last night." She appeared to
+herself ignobly weak. "I had had no idea what she was doing; I was taken
+completely by surprise. She managed it wonderfully."</p>
+
+<p>"It's the sharpest thing I ever saw in <i>my</i> life!" They looked at each
+other with intelligence, in appreciation of the sharpness, and Owen
+quickly broke into a loud laugh. The laugh was in itself natural, but
+the occasion of it strange; and stranger still, to Fleda, so that she
+too almost laughed, the inconsequent charity with which he added: "Poor
+dear old Mummy! That's one of the reasons I asked for you," he went
+on&mdash;"to see if you'd back her up."</p>
+
+<p>Whatever he said or did, she somehow liked him the better for it. "How
+can I back her up, Mr. Gereth, when I think, as I tell you, that she has
+made a great mistake?"</p>
+
+<p>"A great mistake! That's all right." He spoke&mdash;it wasn't clear to her
+why&mdash;as if this declaration were a great point gained.</p>
+
+<p>"Of course there are many things she hasn't taken," Fleda continued.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh yes, a lot of things. But you wouldn't know the place, all the
+same." He looked about the room with his discolored, swindled face,
+which deepened Fleda's compassion for him, conjuring away any smile at
+so candid an image of the dupe. "You'd know this one soon enough,
+wouldn't you? These are just the things she ought to have left. Is the
+whole house full of them?"</p>
+
+<p>"The whole house," said Fleda uncompromisingly. She thought of her
+lovely room.</p>
+
+<p>"I never knew how much I cared for them. They're awfully valuable,
+aren't they?" Owen's manner mystified her; she was conscious of a return
+of the agitation he had produced in her on that last bewildering day,
+and she reminded herself that, now she was warned, it would be
+inexcusable of her to allow him to justify the fear that had dropped on
+her. "Mother thinks I never took any notice, but I assure you I was
+awfully proud of everything. Upon my honor, I <i>was</i> proud, Miss Vetch."</p>
+
+<p>There was an oddity in his helplessness; he appeared to wish to persuade
+her and to satisfy himself that she sincerely felt how worthy he really
+was to treat what had happened as an injury. She could only exclaim,
+almost as helplessly as himself: "Of course you did justice! It's all
+most painful. I shall instantly let your mother know," she again
+declared, "the way I've spoken of her to you." She clung to that idea as
+to the sign of her straightness.</p>
+
+<p>"You'll tell her what you think she ought to do?" he asked with some
+eagerness.</p>
+
+<p>"What she ought to do?"</p>
+
+<p>"<i>Don't</i> you think it&mdash;I mean that she ought to give them up?"</p>
+
+<p>"To give them up?" Fleda hesitated again.</p>
+
+<p>"To send them back&mdash;to keep it quiet." The girl had not felt the impulse
+to ask him to sit down among the monuments of his wrong, so that,
+nervously, awkwardly, he fidgeted about the room with his hands in his
+pockets and an effect of returning a little into possession through the
+formulation of his view. "To have them packed and dispatched again,
+since she knows so well how. She does it beautifully"&mdash;he looked close
+at two or three precious pieces. "What's sauce for the goose is sauce
+for the gander!"</p>
+
+<p>He had laughed at his way of putting it, but Fleda remained grave. "Is
+that what you came to say to her?"</p>
+
+<p>"Not exactly those words. But I did come to say"&mdash;he stammered, then
+brought it out&mdash;"I did come to say we must have them right back."</p>
+
+<p>"And did you think your mother would see you?"</p>
+
+<p>"I wasn't sure, but I thought it right to try&mdash;to put it to her kindly,
+don't you see? If she won't see me, then she has herself to thank. The
+only other way would have been to set the lawyers at her."</p>
+
+<p>"I'm glad you didn't do that."</p>
+
+<p>"I'm dashed if I want to!" Owen honestly declared. "But what's a fellow
+to do if she won't meet a fellow?"</p>
+
+<p>"What do you call meeting a fellow?" Fleda asked, with a smile.</p>
+
+<p>"Why, letting <i>me</i> tell her a dozen things she can have."</p>
+
+<p>This was a transaction that Fleda, after a moment, had to give up trying
+to represent to herself. "If she won't do that&mdash;?" she went on.</p>
+
+<p>"I'll leave it all to my solicitor. <i>He</i> won't let her off: by Jove, I
+know the fellow!"</p>
+
+<p>"That's horrible!" said Fleda, looking at him in woe.</p>
+
+<p>"It's utterly beastly!"</p>
+
+<p>His want of logic as well as his vehemence startled her; and with her
+eyes still on his she considered before asking him the question these
+things suggested. At last she asked it. "Is Mona very angry?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh dear, yes!" said Owen.</p>
+
+<p>She had perceived that he wouldn't speak of Mona without her beginning.
+After waiting fruitlessly now for him to say more, she continued: "She
+has been there again? She has seen the state of the house?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh dear, yes!" Owen repeated.</p>
+
+<p>Fleda disliked to appear not to take account of his brevity, but it was
+just because she was struck by it that she felt the pressure of the
+desire to know more. What it suggested was simply what her intelligence
+supplied, for he was incapable of any art of insinuation. Wasn't it at
+all events the rule of communication with him to say for him what he
+couldn't say? This truth was present to the girl as she inquired if Mona
+greatly resented what Mrs. Gereth had done. He satisfied her promptly;
+he was standing before the fire, his back to it, his long legs apart,
+his hands, behind him, rather violently jiggling his gloves. "She hates
+it awfully. In fact, she refuses to put up with it at all. Don't you
+see?&mdash;she saw the place with all the things."</p>
+
+<p>"So that of course she misses them."</p>
+
+<p>"Misses them&mdash;rather! She was awfully sweet on them." Fleda remembered
+how sweet Mona had been, and reflected that if that was the sort of plea
+he had prepared it was indeed as well he shouldn't see his mother. This
+was not all she wanted to know, but it came over her that it was all she
+needed. "You see it puts me in the position of not carrying out what I
+promised," Owen said. "As she says herself"&mdash;he hesitated an
+instant&mdash;"it's just as if I had obtained her under false pretenses."
+Just before, when he spoke with more drollery than he knew, it had left
+Fleda serious; but now his own clear gravity had the effect of exciting
+her mirth. She laughed out, and he looked surprised, but went on: "She
+regards it as a regular sell."</p>
+
+<p>Fleda was silent; but finally, as he added nothing, she exclaimed: "Of
+course it makes a great difference!" She knew all she needed, but none
+the less she risked, after another pause, an interrogative remark. "I
+forget when it is that your marriage takes place?"</p>
+
+<p>Owen came away from the fire and, apparently at a loss where to turn,
+ended by directing himself to one of the windows. "It's a little
+uncertain; the date isn't quite fixed."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, I thought I remembered that at Poynton you had told me a day, and
+that it was near at hand."</p>
+
+<p>"I dare say I did; it was for the 19th. But we've altered that&mdash;she
+wants to shift it." He looked out of the window; then he said: "In fact,
+it won't come off till Mummy has come round."</p>
+
+<p>"Come round?"</p>
+
+<p>"Put the place as it was." In his offhand way he added: "You know what I
+mean!"</p>
+
+<p>He spoke not impatiently, but with a kind of intimate familiarity, the
+sweetness of which made her feel a pang for having forced him to tell
+her what was embarrassing to him, what was even humiliating. Yes indeed,
+she knew all she needed: all she needed was that Mona had proved apt at
+putting down that wonderful patent-leather foot. Her type was misleading
+only to the superficial, and no one in the world was less superficial
+than Fleda. She had guessed the truth at Waterbath and she had suffered
+from it at Poynton; at Ricks the only thing she could do was to accept
+it with the dumb exaltation that she felt rising. Mona had been prompt
+with her exercise of the member in question, for it might be called
+prompt to do that sort of thing before marriage. That she had indeed
+been premature who should say save those who should have read the matter
+in the full light of results? Neither at Waterbath nor at Poynton had
+even Fleda's thoroughness discovered all that there was&mdash;or rather, all
+that there was not&mdash;in Owen Gereth. "Of course it makes all the
+difference!" she said in answer to his last words. She pursued, after
+considering: "What you wish me to say from you then to your mother is
+that you demand immediate and practically complete restitution?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, please. It's tremendously good of you."</p>
+
+<p>"Very well, then. Will you wait?"</p>
+
+<p>"For Mummy's answer?" Owen stared and looked perplexed; he was more and
+more fevered with so much vivid expression of his case. "Don't you think
+that if I'm here she may hate it worse&mdash;think I may want to make her
+reply bang off?"</p>
+
+<p>Fleda thought. "You don't, then?"</p>
+
+<p>"I want to take her in the right way, don't you know?&mdash;treat her as if I
+gave her more than just an hour or two."</p>
+
+<p>"I see," said Fleda. "Then, if you don't wait&mdash;good-bye."</p>
+
+<p>This again seemed not what he wanted. "Must <i>you</i> do it bang off?"</p>
+
+<p>"I'm only thinking she'll be impatient&mdash;I mean, you know, to learn what
+will have passed between us."</p>
+
+<p>"I see," said Owen, looking at his gloves. "I can give her a day or two,
+you know. Of course I didn't come down to sleep," he went on. "The inn
+seems a horrid hole. I know all about the trains&mdash;having no idea you
+were here." Almost as soon as his interlocutress he was struck with the
+absence of the visible, in this, as between effect and cause. "I mean
+because in that case I should have felt I could stop over. I should have
+felt I could talk with you a blessed sight longer than with Mummy."</p>
+
+<p>"We've already talked a long time," smiled Fleda.</p>
+
+<p>"Awfully, haven't we?" He spoke with the stupidity she didn't object to.
+Inarticulate as he was, he had more to say; he lingered perhaps because
+he was vaguely aware of the want of sincerity in her encouragement to
+him to go. "There's one thing, please," he mentioned, as if there might
+be a great many others too. "Please don't say anything about Mona."</p>
+
+<p>She didn't understand. "About Mona?"</p>
+
+<p>"About its being <i>her</i> that thinks she has gone too far." This was still
+slightly obscure, but now Fleda understood. "It mustn't seem to come
+from <i>her</i> at all, don't you know? That would only make Mummy worse."</p>
+
+<p>Fleda knew exactly how much worse, but she felt a delicacy about
+explicitly assenting: she was already immersed moreover in the deep
+consideration of what might make "Mummy" better. She couldn't see as yet
+at all; she could only clutch at the hope of some inspiration after he
+should go. Oh, there was a remedy, to be sure, but it was out of the
+question; in spite of which, in the strong light of Owen's troubled
+presence, of his anxious face and restless step, it hung there before
+her for some minutes. She felt that, remarkably, beneath the decent
+rigor of his errand, the poor young man, for reasons, for weariness, for
+disgust, would have been ready not to insist. His fitness to fight his
+mother had left him&mdash;he wasn't in fighting trim. He had no natural
+avidity and even no special wrath; he had none that had not been taught
+him, and it was doing his best to learn the lesson that had made him so
+sick. He had his delicacies, but he hid them away like presents before
+Christmas. He was hollow, perfunctory, pathetic; he had been girded by
+another hand. That hand had naturally been Mona's, and it was heavy even
+now on his strong, broad back. Why then had he originally rejoiced so in
+its touch? Fleda dashed aside this question, for it had nothing to do
+with her problem. Her problem was to help him to live as a gentleman and
+carry through what he had undertaken; her problem was to reinstate him
+in his rights. It was quite irrelevant that Mona had no intelligence of
+what she had lost&mdash;quite irrelevant that she was moved not by the
+privation, but by the insult: she had every reason to be moved, though
+she was so much more movable, in the vindictive way, at any rate, than
+one might have supposed&mdash;assuredly more than Owen himself had imagined.</p>
+
+<p>"Certainly I shall not mention Mona," Fleda said, "and there won't be
+the slightest necessity for it. The wrong's quite sufficiently yours,
+and the demand you make is perfectly justified by it."</p>
+
+<p>"I can't tell you what it is to me to feel you on my side!" Owen
+exclaimed.</p>
+
+<p>"Up to this time," said Fleda, after a pause, "your mother has had no
+doubt of my being on hers."</p>
+
+<p>"Then of course she won't like your changing."</p>
+
+<p>"I dare say she won't like it at all."</p>
+
+<p>"Do you mean to say you'll have a regular kick-up with her?"</p>
+
+<p>"I don't exactly know what you mean by a regular kick-up. We shall
+naturally have a great deal of discussion&mdash;if she consents to discuss
+the matter at all. That's why you must decidedly give her two or three
+days."</p>
+
+<p>"I see you think she <i>may</i> refuse to discuss it at all," said Owen.</p>
+
+<p>"I'm only trying to be prepared for the worst. You must remember that to
+have to withdraw from the ground she has taken, to make a public
+surrender of what she has publicly appropriated, will go uncommonly hard
+with her pride."</p>
+
+<p>Owen considered; his face seemed to broaden, but not into a smile. "I
+suppose she's tremendously proud, isn't she?" This might have been the
+first time it had occurred to him.</p>
+
+<p>"You know better than I," said Fleda, speaking with high extravagance.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't know anything in the world half so well as you. If I were as
+clever as you I might hope to get round her." Owen hesitated; then he
+went on: "In fact I don't quite see what even you can say or do that
+will really fetch her."</p>
+
+<p>"Neither do I, as yet. I must think&mdash;I must pray!" the girl pursued,
+smiling. "I can only say to you that I'll try. I <i>want</i> to try, you
+know&mdash;I want to help you." He stood looking at her so long on this that
+she added with much distinctness: "So you must leave me, please, quite
+alone with her. You must go straight back."</p>
+
+<p>"Back to the inn?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh no, back to town. I'll write to you to-morrow."</p>
+
+<p>He turned about vaguely for his hat.</p>
+
+<p>"There's the chance, of course, that she may be afraid."</p>
+
+<p>"Afraid, you mean, of the legal steps you may take?"</p>
+
+<p>"I've got a perfect case&mdash;I could have her up. The Brigstocks say it's
+simple stealing."</p>
+
+<p>"I can easily fancy what the Brigstocks say!" Fleda permitted herself to
+remark without solemnity.</p>
+
+<p>"It's none of their business, is it?" was Owen's unexpected rejoinder.
+Fleda had already noted that no one so slow could ever have had such
+rapid transitions.</p>
+
+<p>She showed her amusement. "They've a much better right to say it's none
+of mine."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, at any rate, you don't call her names."</p>
+
+<p>Fleda wondered whether Mona did; and this made it all the finer of her
+to exclaim in a moment: "You don't know what I shall call her if she
+holds out!"</p>
+
+<p>Owen gave her a gloomy glance; then he blew a speck off the crown of his
+hat. "But if you do have a set-to with her?"</p>
+
+<p>He paused so long for a reply that Fleda said: "I don't think I know
+what you mean by a set-to."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, if she calls <i>you</i> names."</p>
+
+<p>"I don't think she'll do that."</p>
+
+<p>"What I mean to say is, if she's angry at your backing me up&mdash;what will
+you do then? She can't possibly like it, you know."</p>
+
+<p>"She may very well not like it; but everything depends. I must see what
+I shall do. You mustn't worry about me."</p>
+
+<p>She spoke with decision, but Owen seemed still unsatisfied. "You won't
+go away, I hope?"</p>
+
+<p>"Go away?"</p>
+
+<p>"If she does take it ill of you."</p>
+
+<p>Fleda moved to the door and opened it. "I'm not prepared to say. You
+must have patience and see."</p>
+
+<p>"Of course I must," said Owen&mdash;"of course, of course." But he took no
+more advantage of the open door than to say: "You want me to be off, and
+I'm off in a minute. Only, before I go, please answer me a question. If
+you <i>should</i> leave my mother, where would you go?"</p>
+
+<p>Fleda smiled again. "I haven't the least idea."</p>
+
+<p>"I suppose you'd go back to London."</p>
+
+<p>"I haven't the least idea," Fleda repeated.</p>
+
+<p>"You don't&mdash;a&mdash;live anywhere in particular, do you?" the young man went
+on. He looked conscious as soon as he had spoken; she could see that he
+felt himself to have alluded more grossly than he meant to the
+circumstance of her having, if one were plain about it, no home of her
+own. He had meant it as an allusion of a tender sort to all that she
+would sacrifice in the case of a quarrel with his mother; but there was
+indeed no graceful way of touching on that. One just couldn't be plain
+about it.</p>
+
+<p>Fleda, wound up as she was, shrank from any treatment at all of the
+matter, and she made no answer to his question. "I <i>won't</i> leave your
+mother," she said. "I'll produce an effect on her; I'll convince her
+absolutely."</p>
+
+<p>"I believe you will, if you look at her like that!"</p>
+
+<p>She was wound up to such a height that there might well be a light in
+her pale, fine little face&mdash;a light that, while, for all return, at
+first, she simply shone back at him, was intensely reflected in his own.
+"I'll make her see it&mdash;I'll make her see it!" She rang out like a silver
+bell. She had at that moment a perfect faith that she should succeed;
+but it passed into something else when, the next instant, she became
+aware that Owen, quickly getting between her and the door she had
+opened, was sharply closing it, as might be said, in her face. He had
+done this before she could stop him, and he stood there with his hand on
+the knob and smiled at her strangely. Clearer than he could have spoken
+it was the sense of those seconds of silence.</p>
+
+<p>"When I got into this I didn't know you, and now that I know you how can
+I tell you the difference? And <i>she</i>'s so different, so ugly and vulgar,
+in the light of this squabble. No, like <i>you</i> I've never known one. It's
+another thing, it's a new thing altogether. Listen to me a little: can't
+something be done?" It was what had been in the air in those moments at
+Kensington, and it only wanted words to be a committed act. The more
+reason, to the girl's excited mind, why it shouldn't have words; her one
+thought was not to hear, to keep the act uncommitted. She would do this
+if she had to be horrid.</p>
+
+<p>"Please let me out, Mr. Gereth," she said; on which he opened the door
+with an hesitation so very brief that in thinking of these things
+afterwards&mdash;for she was to think of them forever&mdash;she wondered in what
+tone she could have spoken. They went into the hall, where she
+encountered the parlor-maid, of whom she inquired whether Mrs. Gereth
+had come in.</p>
+
+<p>"No, miss; and I think she has left the garden. She has gone up the back
+road." In other words, they had the whole place to themselves. It would
+have been a pleasure, in a different mood, to converse with that
+parlor-maid.</p>
+
+<p>"Please open the house-door," said Fleda.</p>
+
+<p>Owen, as if in quest of his umbrella, looked vaguely about the
+hall&mdash;looked even wistfully up the staircase&mdash;while the neat young woman
+complied with Fleda's request. Owen's eyes then wandered out of the open
+door. "I think it's awfully nice here," he observed; "I assure you I
+could do with it myself."</p>
+
+<p>"I should think you might, with half your things here! It's Poynton
+itself&mdash;almost. Good-bye, Mr. Gereth," Fleda added. Her intention had
+naturally been that the neat young woman, opening the front door, should
+remain to close it on the departing guest. That functionary, however,
+had acutely vanished behind a stiff flap of green baize which Mrs.
+Gereth had not yet had time to abolish. Fleda put out her hand, but Owen
+turned away&mdash;he couldn't find his umbrella. She passed into the open
+air&mdash;she was determined to get him out; and in a moment he joined her in
+the little plastered portico which had small resemblance to any feature
+of Poynton. It was, as Mrs. Gereth had said, like the portico of a house
+in Brompton.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, I don't mean with all the things here," he explained in regard to
+the opinion he had just expressed. "I mean I could put up with it just
+as it was; it had a lot of good things, don't you think? I mean if
+everything was back at Poynton, if everything was all right." He brought
+out these last words with a sort of smothered sigh. Fleda didn't
+understand his explanation unless it had reference to another and more
+wonderful exchange&mdash;the restoration to the great house not only of its
+tables and chairs, but of its alienated mistress. This would imply the
+installation of his own life at Ricks, and obviously that of another
+person. Such another person could scarcely be Mona Brigstock. He put out
+his hand now; and once more she heard his unsounded words: "With
+everything patched up at the other place, I could live here with <i>you</i>.
+Don't you see what I mean?"</p>
+
+<p>Fleda saw perfectly, and, with a face in which she flattered herself
+that nothing of this vision appeared, gave him her hand and said:
+"Good-bye, good-bye."</p>
+
+<p>Owen held her hand very firmly and kept it even after an effort made by
+her to recover it&mdash;an effort not repeated, as she felt it best not to
+show she was flurried. That solution&mdash;of her living with him at
+Ricks&mdash;disposed of him beautifully, and disposed not less so of herself;
+it disposed admirably too of Mrs. Gereth. Fleda could only vainly wonder
+how it provided for poor Mona. While he looked at her, grasping her
+hand, she felt that now indeed she was paying for his mother's
+extravagance at Poynton&mdash;the vividness of that lady's public plea that
+little Fleda Vetch was the person to insure the general peace. It was to
+that vividness poor Owen had come back, and if Mrs. Gereth had had more
+discretion little Fleda Vetch wouldn't have been in a predicament. She
+saw that Owen had at this moment his sharpest necessity of speech, and
+so long as he didn't release her hand she could only submit to him. Her
+defense would be perhaps to look blank and hard; so she looked as blank
+and as hard as she could, with the reward of an immediate sense that
+this was not a bit what he wanted. It even made him hang fire, as if he
+were suddenly ashamed of himself, were recalled to some idea of duty and
+of honor. Yet he none the less brought it out. "There's one thing I dare
+say I ought to tell you, if you're going so kindly to act for me; though
+of course you'll see for yourself it's a thing it won't do to tell
+<i>her</i>." What was it? He made her wait for it again, and while she
+waited, under firm coercion, she had the extraordinary impression that
+Owen's simplicity was in eclipse. His natural honesty was like the scent
+of a flower, and she felt at this moment as if her nose had been brushed
+by the bloom without the odor. The allusion was undoubtedly to his
+mother; and was not what he meant about the matter in question the
+opposite of what he said&mdash;that it just <i>would</i> do to tell her? It would
+have been the first time he had said the opposite of what he meant, and
+there was certainly a fascination in the phenomenon, as well as a
+challenge to suspense in the ambiguity. "It's just that I understand
+from Mona, you know," he stammered; "it's just that she has made no
+bones about bringing home to me&mdash;" He tried to laugh, and in the effort
+he faltered again.</p>
+
+<p>"About bringing home to you?"&mdash;Fleda encouraged him.</p>
+
+<p>He was sensible of it, he achieved his performance. "Why, that if I
+don't get the things back&mdash;every blessed one of them except a few
+<i>she</i>'ll pick out&mdash;she won't have anything more to say to me."</p>
+
+<p>Fleda, after an instant, encouraged him again. "To say to you?"</p>
+
+<p>"Why, she simply won't marry me, don't you see?"</p>
+
+<p>Owen's legs, not to mention his voice, had wavered while he spoke, and
+she felt his possession of her hand loosen so that she was free again.
+Her stare of perception broke into a lively laugh. "Oh, you're all
+right, for you <i>will</i> get them. You will; you're quite safe; don't
+worry!" She fell back into the house with her hand on the door.
+"Good-bye, good-bye." She repeated it several times, laughing bravely,
+quite waving him away and, as he didn't move and save that he was on the
+other side of it, closing the door in his face quite as he had closed
+that of the drawing-room in hers. Never had a face, never at least had
+such a handsome one, been so presented to that offense. She even held
+the door a minute, lest he should try to come in again. At last, as she
+heard nothing, she made a dash for the stairs and ran up.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="IX" id="IX"></a>IX</h2>
+
+
+<p>In knowing a while before all she needed, Fleda had been far from
+knowing as much as that; so that once upstairs, where, in her room, with
+her sense of danger and trouble, the age of Louis Seize suddenly struck
+her as wanting in taste and point, she felt that she now for the first
+time knew her temptation. Owen had put it before her with an art beyond
+his own dream. Mona would cast him off if he didn't proceed to
+extremities; if his negotiation with his mother should fail he would be
+completely free. That negotiation depended on a young lady to whom he
+had pressingly suggested the condition of his freedom; and as if to
+aggravate the young lady's predicament designing fate had sent Mrs.
+Gereth, as the parlor-maid said, "up the back road." This would give the
+young lady more time to make up her mind that nothing should come of the
+negotiation. There would be different ways of putting the question to
+Mrs. Gereth, and Fleda might profitably devote the moments before her
+return to a selection of the way that would most surely be tantamount to
+failure. This selection indeed required no great adroitness; it was so
+conspicuous that failure would be the reward of an effective
+introduction of Mona. If that abhorred name should be properly invoked
+Mrs. Gereth would resist to the death, and before envenomed resistance
+Owen would certainly retire. His retirement would be into single life,
+and Fleda reflected that he had now gone away conscious of having
+practically told her so. She could only say, as she waited for the back
+road to disgorge, that she hoped it was a consciousness he enjoyed.
+There was something <i>she</i> enjoyed; but that was a very different matter.
+To know that she had become to him an object of desire gave her wings
+that she felt herself flutter in the air: it was like the rush of a
+flood into her own accumulations. These stored depths had been
+fathomless and still, but now, for half an hour, in the empty house,
+they spread till they overflowed. He seemed to have made it right for
+her to confess to herself her secret. Strange then there should be for
+him in return nothing that such a confession could make right! How could
+it make right that he should give up Mona for another woman? His
+attitude was a sorry appeal to Fleda to legitimate that. But he didn't
+believe it himself, and he had none of the courage of his suggestion.
+She could easily see how wrong everything must be when a man so made to
+be manly was wanting in courage. She had upset him, as people called it,
+and he had spoken out from the force of the jar of finding her there. He
+had upset her too, heaven knew, but she was one of those who could pick
+themselves up. She had the real advantage, she considered, of having
+kept him from seeing that she had been overthrown.</p>
+
+<p>She had moreover at present completely recovered her feet, though there
+was in the intensity of the effort required to do so a vibration which
+throbbed away into an immense allowance for the young man. How could she
+after all know what, in the disturbance wrought by his mother, Mona's
+relations with him might have become? If he had been able to keep his
+wits, such as they were, more about him he would probably have felt&mdash;as
+sharply as she felt on his behalf&mdash;that so long as those relations were
+not ended he had no right to say even the little he had said. He had no
+right to appear to wish to draw in another girl to help him to an
+escape. If he was in a plight he must get out of the plight himself, he
+must get out of it first, and anything he should have to say to any one
+else must be deferred and detached. She herself, at any rate&mdash;it was her
+own case that was in question&mdash;couldn't dream of assisting him save in
+the sense of their common honor. She could never be the girl to be drawn
+in, she could never lift her finger against Mona. There was something in
+her that would make it a shame to her forever to have owed her happiness
+to an interference. It would seem intolerably vulgar to her to have
+"ousted" the daughter of the Brigstocks; and merely to have abstained
+even wouldn't assure her that she had been straight. Nothing was really
+straight but to justify her little pensioned presence by her use; and
+now, won over as she was to heroism, she could see her use only as some
+high and delicate deed. She couldn't do anything at all, in short,
+unless she could do it with a kind of pride, and there would be nothing
+to be proud of in having arranged for poor Owen to get off easily.
+Nobody had a right to get off easily from pledges so deep, so sacred.
+How could Fleda doubt they had been tremendous when she knew so well
+what any pledge of her own would be? If Mona was so formed that she
+could hold such vows light, that was Mona's peculiar business. To have
+loved Owen apparently, and yet to have loved him only so much, only to
+the extent of a few tables and chairs, was not a thing she could so much
+as try to grasp. Of a different way of loving him she was herself ready
+to give an instance, an instance of which the beauty indeed would not be
+generally known. It would not perhaps if revealed be generally
+understood, inasmuch as the effect of the particular pressure she
+proposed to exercise would be, should success attend it, to keep him
+tied to an affection that had died a sudden and violent death. Even in
+the ardor of her meditation Fleda remained in sight of the truth that it
+would be an odd result of her magnanimity to prevent her friend's
+shaking off a woman he disliked. If he didn't dislike Mona, what was the
+matter with him? And if he did, Fleda asked, what was the matter with
+her own silly self?</p>
+
+<p>Our young lady met this branch of the temptation it pleased her frankly
+to recognize by declaring that to encourage any such cruelty would be
+tortuous and base. She had nothing to do with his dislikes; she had only
+to do with his good-nature and his good name. She had joy of him just as
+he was, but it was of these things she had the greatest. The worst
+aversion and the liveliest reaction moreover wouldn't alter the
+fact&mdash;since one was facing facts&mdash;that but the other day his strong arms
+must have clasped a remarkably handsome girl as close as she had
+permitted. Fleda's emotion at this time was a wondrous mixture, in which
+Mona's permissions and Mona's beauty figured powerfully as aids to
+reflection. She herself had no beauty, and <i>her</i> permissions were the
+stony stares she had just practiced in the drawing-room&mdash;a consciousness
+of a kind appreciably to add to the particular sense of triumph that
+made her generous. I may not perhaps too much diminish the merit of that
+generosity if I mention that it could take the flight we are considering
+just because really, with the telescope of her long thought, Fleda saw
+what might bring her out of the wood. Mona herself would bring her out;
+at the least Mona possibly might. Deep down plunged the idea that even
+should she achieve what she had promised Owen, there was still the
+contingency of Mona's independent action. She might by that time, under
+stress of temper or of whatever it was that was now moving her, have
+said or done the things there is no patching up. If the rupture should
+come from Waterbath they might all be happy yet. This was a calculation
+that Fleda wouldn't have committed to paper, but it affected the total
+of her sentiments. She was meanwhile so remarkably constituted that
+while she refused to profit by Owen's mistake, even while she judged it
+and hastened to cover it up, she could drink a sweetness from it that
+consorted little with her wishing it mightn't have been made. There was
+no harm done, because he had instinctively known, poor dear, with whom
+to make it, and it was a compensation for seeing him worried that he
+hadn't made it with some horrid mean girl who would immediately have
+dished him by making a still bigger one. Their protected error (for she
+indulged a fancy that it was hers too) was like some dangerous, lovely
+living thing that she had caught and could keep&mdash;keep vivid and helpless
+in the cage of her own passion and look at and talk to all day long. She
+had got it well locked up there by the time that, from an upper window,
+she saw Mrs. Gereth again in the garden. At this she went down to meet
+her.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="X" id="X"></a>X</h2>
+
+
+<p>Fleda's line had been taken, her word was quite ready; on the terrace of
+the painted pots she broke out before her interlocutress could put a
+question. "His errand was perfectly simple: he came to demand that you
+shall pack everything straight up again and send it back as fast as the
+railway will carry it."</p>
+
+<p>The back road had apparently been fatiguing to Mrs. Gereth; she rose
+there rather white and wan with her walk. A certain sharp thinness was
+in her ejaculation of "Oh!"&mdash;after which she glanced about her for a
+place to sit down. The movement was a criticism of the order of events
+that offered such a piece of news to a lady coming in tired; but Fleda
+could see that in turning over the possibilities this particular peril
+was the one that during the last hour her friend had turned up oftenest.
+At the end of the short, gray day, which had been moist and mild, the
+sun was out; the terrace looked to the south, and a bench, formed as to
+legs and arms of iron representing knotted boughs, stood against the
+warmest wall of the house. The mistress of Ricks sank upon it and
+presented to her companion the handsome face she had composed to hear
+everything. Strangely enough, it was just this fine vessel of her
+attention that made the girl most nervous about what she must drop in.
+"Quite a 'demand,' dear, is it?" asked Mrs. Gereth, drawing in her
+cloak.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, that's what I should call it!" Fleda laughed, to her own surprise.</p>
+
+<p>"I mean with the threat of enforcement and that sort of thing."</p>
+
+<p>"Distinctly with the threat of enforcement&mdash;what would be called, I
+suppose, coercion."</p>
+
+<p>"What sort of coercion?" said Mrs. Gereth.</p>
+
+<p>"Why, legal, don't you know?&mdash;what he calls setting the lawyers at you."</p>
+
+<p>"Is that what he calls it?" She seemed to speak with disinterested
+curiosity.</p>
+
+<p>"That's what he calls it," said Fleda.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Gereth considered an instant. "Oh, the lawyers!" she exclaimed
+lightly. Seated there almost cosily in the reddening winter sunset, only
+with her shoulders raised a little and her mantle tightened as if from a
+slight chill, she had never yet looked to Fleda so much in possession
+nor so far from meeting unsuspectedness halfway. "Is he going to send
+them down here?"</p>
+
+<p>"I dare say he thinks it may come to that."</p>
+
+<p>"The lawyers can scarcely do the packing," Mrs. Gereth humorously
+remarked.</p>
+
+<p>"I suppose he means them&mdash;in the first place, at least&mdash;to try to talk
+you over."</p>
+
+<p>"In the first place, eh? And what does he mean in the second?"</p>
+
+<p>Fleda hesitated; she had not foreseen that so simple an inquiry could
+disconcert her. "I'm afraid I don't know."</p>
+
+<p>"Didn't you ask?" Mrs. Gereth spoke as if she might have said, "What
+then were you doing all the while?"</p>
+
+<p>"I didn't ask very much," said her companion. "He has been gone some
+time. The great thing seemed to be to understand clearly that he
+wouldn't be content with anything less than what he mentioned."</p>
+
+<p>"My just giving everything back?"</p>
+
+<p>"Your just giving everything back."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, darling, what did you tell him?" Mrs. Gereth blandly inquired.</p>
+
+<p>Fleda faltered again, wincing at the term of endearment, at what the
+words took for granted, charged with the confidence she had now
+committed herself to betray. "I told him I would tell you!" She smiled,
+but she felt that her smile was rather hollow and even that Mrs. Gereth
+had begun to look at her with some fixedness.</p>
+
+<p>"Did he seem very angry?"</p>
+
+<p>"He seemed very sad. He takes it very hard," Fleda added.</p>
+
+<p>"And how does <i>she</i> take it?"</p>
+
+<p>"Ah, that&mdash;that I felt a delicacy about asking."</p>
+
+<p>"So you didn't ask?" The words had the note of surprise.</p>
+
+<p>Fleda was embarrassed; she had not made up her mind definitely to lie.
+"I didn't think you'd care." That small untruth she would risk.</p>
+
+<p>"Well&mdash;I don't!" Mrs. Gereth declared; and Fleda felt less guilty to
+hear her, for the statement was as inexact as her own. "Didn't you say
+anything in return?" Mrs. Gereth presently continued.</p>
+
+<p>"Do you mean in the way of justifying you?"</p>
+
+<p>"I didn't mean to trouble you to do that. My justification," said Mrs.
+Gereth, sitting there warmly and, in the lucidity of her thought, which
+nevertheless hung back a little, dropping her eyes on the gravel&mdash;"my
+justification was all the past. My justification was the cruelty&mdash;" But
+at this, with a short, sharp gesture, she checked herself. "It's too
+good of me to talk&mdash;now." She produced these sentences with a cold
+patience, as if addressing Fleda in the girl's virtual and actual
+character of Owen's representative. Our young lady crept to and fro
+before the bench, combating the sense that it was occupied by a judge,
+looking at her boot-toes, reminding herself in doing so of Mona, and
+lightly crunching the pebbles as she walked. She moved about because she
+was afraid, putting off from moment to moment the exercise of the
+courage she had been sure she possessed. That courage would all come to
+her if she could only be equally sure that what she should be called
+upon to do for Owen would be to suffer. She had wondered, while Mrs.
+Gereth spoke, how that lady would describe her justification. She had
+described it as if to be irreproachably fair, give her adversary the
+benefit of every doubt, and then dismiss the question forever. "Of
+course," Mrs. Gereth went on, "if we didn't succeed in showing him at
+Poynton the ground we took, it's simply that he shuts his eyes. What I
+supposed was that you would have given him your opinion that if I was
+the woman so signally to assert myself, I'm also the woman to rest upon
+it imperturbably enough."</p>
+
+<p>Fleda stopped in front of her hostess. "I gave him my opinion that
+you're very logical, very obstinate, and very proud."</p>
+
+<p>"Quite right, my dear: I'm a rank bigot&mdash;about that sort of thing!" and
+Mrs. Gereth jerked her head at the contents of the house. "I've never
+denied it. I'd kidnap&mdash;to save them, to convert them&mdash;the children of
+heretics. When I know I'm right I go to the stake. Oh, he may burn me
+alive!" she cried with a happy face. "Did he abuse me?" she then
+demanded.</p>
+
+<p>Fleda had remained there, gathering in her purpose. "How little you know
+him!"</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Gereth stared, then broke into a laugh that her companion had not
+expected. "Ah, my dear, certainly not so well as you!" The girl, at
+this, turned away again&mdash;she felt she looked too conscious; and she was
+aware that, during a pause, Mrs. Gereth's eyes watched her as she went.
+She faced about afresh to meet them, but what she met was a question
+that reinforced them. "Why had you a 'delicacy' as to speaking of Mona?"</p>
+
+<p>She stopped again before the bench, and an inspiration came to her. "I
+should think <i>you</i> would know," she said with proper dignity.</p>
+
+<p>Blankness was for a moment on Mrs. Gereth's brow; then light broke&mdash;she
+visibly remembered the scene in the breakfast-room after Mona's night at
+Poynton. "Because I contrasted you&mdash;told him <i>you</i> were the one?" Her
+eyes looked deep. "You were&mdash;you are still!"</p>
+
+<p>Fleda gave a bold dramatic laugh. "Thank you, my love&mdash;with all the best
+things at Ricks!"</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Gereth considered, trying to penetrate, as it seemed; but at last
+she brought out roundly: "For you, you know, I'd send them back!"</p>
+
+<p>The girl's heart gave a tremendous bound; the right way dawned upon her
+in a flash. Obscurity indeed the next moment engulfed this course, but
+for a few thrilled seconds she had understood. To send the things back
+"for her" meant of course to send them back if there were even a dim
+chance that she might become mistress of them. Fleda's palpitation was
+not allayed as she asked herself what portent Mrs. Gereth had suddenly
+perceived of such a chance: that perception could come only from a
+sudden suspicion of her secret. This suspicion, in turn, was a tolerably
+straight consequence of that implied view of the propriety of surrender
+from which, she was well aware, she could say nothing to dissociate
+herself. What she first felt was that if she wished to rescue the spoils
+she wished also to rescue her secret. So she looked as innocent as she
+could and said as quickly as possible: "For me? Why in the world for
+me?"</p>
+
+<p>"Because you're so awfully keen."</p>
+
+<p>"Am I? Do I strike you so? You know I hate him," Fleda went on.</p>
+
+<p>She had the sense for a while of Mrs. Gereth's regarding her with the
+detachment of some stern, clever stranger. "Then what's the matter with
+you? Why do you want me to give in?"</p>
+
+<p>Fleda hesitated; she felt herself reddening. "I've only said your son
+wants it. I haven't said <i>I</i> do."</p>
+
+<p>"Then say it and have done with it!"</p>
+
+<p>This was more peremptory than any word her friend, though often speaking
+in her presence with much point, had ever yet directly addressed to her.
+It affected her like the crack of a whip, but she confined herself, with
+an effort, to taking it as a reminder that she must keep her head. "I
+know he has his engagement to carry out."</p>
+
+<p>"His engagement to marry? Why, it's just that engagement we loathe!"</p>
+
+<p>"Why should <i>I</i> loathe it?" Fleda asked with a strained smile. Then,
+before Mrs. Gereth could reply, she pursued: "I'm thinking of his
+general undertaking&mdash;to give her the house as she originally saw it."</p>
+
+<p>"To give her the house!" Mrs. Gereth brought up the words from the depth
+of the unspeakable. The effort was like the moan of an autumn wind; it
+was in the power of such an image to make her turn pale.</p>
+
+<p>"I'm thinking," Fleda continued, "of the simple question of his keeping
+faith on an important clause of his contract: it doesn't matter whether
+it's with a stupid girl or with a monster of cleverness. I'm thinking of
+his honor and his good name."</p>
+
+<p>"The honor and good name of a man you hate?"</p>
+
+<p>"Certainly," the girl resolutely answered. "I don't see why you should
+talk as if one had a petty mind. You don't think so. It's not on that
+assumption you've ever dealt with me. I can do your son justice, as he
+put his case to me."</p>
+
+<p>"Ah, then he did put his case to you!" Mrs. Gereth exclaimed, with an
+accent of triumph. "You seemed to speak just now as if really nothing of
+any consequence had passed between you."</p>
+
+<p>"Something always passes when one has a little imagination," our young
+lady declared.</p>
+
+<p>"I take it you don't mean that Owen has any!" Mrs. Gereth cried with her
+large laugh.</p>
+
+<p>Fleda was silent a moment. "No, I don't mean that Owen has any," she
+returned at last.</p>
+
+<p>"Why is it you hate him so?" her hostess abruptly inquired.</p>
+
+<p>"Should I love him for all he has made you suffer?"</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Gereth slowly rose at this and, coming across the walk, took her
+young friend in her arms and kissed her. She then passed into one of
+Fleda's an arm perversely and imperiously sociable. "Let us move a
+little," she said, holding her close and giving a slight shiver. They
+strolled along the terrace, and she brought out another question. "He
+<i>was</i> eloquent, then, poor dear&mdash;he poured forth the story of his
+wrongs?"</p>
+
+<p>Fleda smiled down at her companion, who, cloaked and perceptibly bowed,
+leaned on her heavily and gave her an odd, unwonted sense of age and
+cunning. She took refuge in an evasion. "He couldn't tell me anything
+that I didn't know pretty well already."</p>
+
+<p>"It's very true that you know everything. No, dear, you haven't a petty
+mind; you've a lovely imagination and you're the nicest creature in the
+world. If you were inane, like most girls&mdash;like every one, in fact&mdash;I
+would have insulted you, I would have outraged you, and then you would
+have fled from me in terror. No, now that I think of it," Mrs. Gereth
+went on, "you wouldn't have fled from me; nothing, on the contrary,
+would have made you budge. You would have cuddled into your warm corner,
+but you would have been wounded and weeping and martyrized, and you
+would have taken every opportunity to tell people I'm a brute&mdash;as indeed
+I should have been!" They went to and fro, and she would not allow
+Fleda, who laughed and protested, to attenuate with any light civility
+this spirited picture. She praised her cleverness and her patience; then
+she said it was getting cold and dark and they must go in to tea. She
+delayed quitting the place, however, and reverted instead to Owen's
+ultimatum, about which she asked another question or two; in particular
+whether it had struck Fleda that he really believed she would comply
+with such a summons.</p>
+
+<p>"I think he really believes that if I try hard enough I can make you:"
+after uttering which words our young lady stopped short and emulated the
+embrace she had received a few moments before.</p>
+
+<p>"And you've promised to try: I see. You didn't tell me that, either,"
+Mrs. Gereth added as they went on. "But you're rascal enough for
+anything!" While Fleda was occupied in thinking in what terms she could
+explain why she had indeed been rascal enough for the reticence thus
+denounced, her companion broke out with an inquiry somewhat irrelevant
+and even in form somewhat profane. "Why the devil, at any rate, doesn't
+it come off?"</p>
+
+<p>Fleda hesitated. "You mean their marriage?"</p>
+
+<p>"Of course I mean their marriage!" Fleda hesitated again. "I haven't the
+least idea."</p>
+
+<p>"You didn't ask him?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, how in the world can you fancy?" She spoke in a shocked tone.</p>
+
+<p>"Fancy your putting a question so indelicate? <i>I</i> should have put it&mdash;I
+mean in your place; but I'm quite coarse, thank God!" Fleda felt
+privately that she herself was coarse, or at any rate would presently
+have to be; and Mrs. Gereth, with a purpose that struck the girl as
+increasing, continued: "What, then, <i>was</i> the day to be? Wasn't it just
+one of these?"</p>
+
+<p>"I'm sure I don't remember."</p>
+
+<p>It was part of the great rupture and an effect of Mrs. Gereth's
+character that up to this moment she had been completely and haughtily
+indifferent to that detail. Now, however, she had a visible reason for
+being clear about it. She bethought herself and she broke out&mdash;"Isn't
+the day past?" Then, stopping short, she added: "Upon my word, they must
+have put it off!" As Fleda made no answer to this she sharply went on:
+"<i>Have</i> they put it off?"</p>
+
+<p>"I haven't the least idea," said the girl.</p>
+
+<p>Her hostess was looking at her hard again. "Didn't he tell you&mdash;didn't
+he say anything about it?"</p>
+
+<p>Fleda, meanwhile, had had time to make her reflections, which were
+moreover the continued throb of those that had occupied the interval
+between Owen's departure and his mother's return. If she should now
+repeat his words, this wouldn't at all play the game of her definite
+vow; it would only play the game of her little gagged and blinded
+desire. She could calculate well enough the effect of telling Mrs.
+Gereth how she had had it from Owen's troubled lips that Mona was only
+waiting for the restitution and would do nothing without it. The thing
+was to obtain the restitution without imparting that knowledge. The only
+way, also, not to impart it was not to tell any truth at all about it;
+and the only way to meet this last condition was to reply to her
+companion, as she presently did: "He told me nothing whatever: he didn't
+touch on the subject."</p>
+
+<p>"Not in any way?"</p>
+
+<p>"Not in any way."</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Gereth watched Fleda and considered. "You haven't any idea if they
+are waiting for the things?"</p>
+
+<p>"How should I have? I'm not in their counsels."</p>
+
+<p>"I dare say they are&mdash;or that Mona is." Mrs. Gereth reflected again; she
+had a bright idea. "If I don't give in, I'll be hanged if she'll not
+break off."</p>
+
+<p>"She'll never, never break off!" said Fleda.</p>
+
+<p>"Are you sure?"</p>
+
+<p>"I can't be sure, but it's my belief."</p>
+
+<p>"Derived from <i>him</i>?"</p>
+
+<p>The girl hung fire a few seconds. "Derived from him."</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Gereth gave her a long last look, then turned abruptly away. "It's
+an awful bore you didn't really get it out of him! Well, come to tea,"
+she added rather dryly, passing straight into the house.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="XI" id="XI"></a>XI</h2>
+
+
+<p>The sense of her adversary's dryness, which was ominous of something she
+couldn't read, made Fleda, before complying, linger a little on the
+terrace; she felt the need moreover of taking breath after such a flight
+into the cold air of denial. When at last she rejoined Mrs. Gereth she
+found her erect before the drawing-room fire. Their tea had been set out
+in the same quarter, and the mistress of the house, for whom the
+preparation of it was in general a high and undelegated function, was in
+an attitude to which the hissing urn made no appeal. This omission, for
+Fleda, was such a further sign of something to come that, to disguise
+her apprehension, she immediately and without an apology took the duty
+in hand; only, however, to be promptly reminded that she was performing
+it confusedly and not counting the journeys of the little silver shovel
+she emptied into the pot. "Not <i>five</i>, my dear&mdash;the usual three," said
+her hostess, with the same dryness; watching her then in silence while
+she clumsily corrected her mistake. The tea took some minutes to draw,
+and Mrs. Gereth availed herself of them suddenly to exclaim: "You
+haven't yet told me, you know, how it is you propose to 'make' me!"</p>
+
+<p>"Give everything back?" Fleda looked into the pot again and uttered her
+question with a briskness that she felt to be a little overdone. "Why,
+by putting the question well before you; by being so eloquent that I
+shall persuade you, shall act upon you; by making you sorry for having
+gone so far," she said boldly; "by simply and earnestly asking it of
+you, in short; and by reminding you at the same time that it's the first
+thing I ever have so asked. Oh, you've done things for me&mdash;endless and
+beautiful things," she exclaimed; "but you've done them all from your
+own generous impulse. I've never so much as hinted to you to lend me a
+postage-stamp."</p>
+
+<p>"Give me a cup of tea," said Mrs. Gereth. A moment later, taking the
+cup, she replied: "No, you've never asked me for a postage-stamp."</p>
+
+<p>"That gives me a pull!" Fleda returned, smiling.</p>
+
+<p>"Puts you in the situation of expecting that I shall do this thing just
+simply to oblige you?"</p>
+
+<p>The girl hesitated. "You said a while ago that for me you <i>would</i> do
+it."</p>
+
+<p>"For you, but not for your eloquence. Do you understand what I mean by
+the difference?" Mrs. Gereth asked as she stood stirring her tea.</p>
+
+<p>Fleda, to postpone answering, looked round, while she drank it, at the
+beautiful room. "I don't in the least like, you know, your having taken
+so much. It was a great shock to me, on my arrival here, to find you had
+done so."</p>
+
+<p>"Give me some more tea," said Mrs. Gereth; and there was a moment's
+silence as Fleda poured out another cup. "If you were shocked, my dear,
+I'm bound to say you concealed your shock."</p>
+
+<p>"I know I did. I was afraid to show it."</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Gereth drank off her second cup. "And you're not afraid now?"</p>
+
+<p>"No, I'm not afraid now."</p>
+
+<p>"What has made the difference?"</p>
+
+<p>"I've pulled myself together." Fleda paused; then she added: "And I've
+seen Mr. Owen."</p>
+
+<p>"You've seen Mr. Owen"&mdash;Mrs. Gereth concurred. She put down her cup and
+sank into a chair, in which she leaned back, resting her head and gazing
+at her young friend. "Yes, I did tell you a while ago that for you I'd
+do it. But you haven't told me yet what you'll do in return."</p>
+
+<p>Fleda thought an instant. "Anything in the wide world you may require."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, 'anything' is nothing at all! That's too easily said." Mrs. Gereth,
+reclining more completely, closed her eyes with an air of disgust, an
+air indeed of inviting slumber.</p>
+
+<p>Fleda looked at her quiet face, which the appearance of slumber always
+made particularly handsome; she noted how much the ordeal of the last
+few weeks had added to its indications of age. "Well then, try me with
+something. What is it you demand?"</p>
+
+<p>At this, opening her eyes, Mrs. Gereth sprang straight up. "Get him away
+from her!"</p>
+
+<p>Fleda marveled: her companion had in an instant become young again.
+"Away from Mona? How in the world&mdash;?"</p>
+
+<p>"By not looking like a fool!" cried Mrs. Gereth very sharply. She kissed
+her, however, on the spot, to make up for this roughness, and summarily
+took off her hat, which, on coming into the house, our young lady had
+not removed. She applied a friendly touch to the girl's hair and gave a
+businesslike pull to her jacket. "I say don't look like an idiot,
+because you happen not to be one, not the least bit. <i>I</i>'m idiotic; I've
+been so, I've just discovered, ever since our first days together. I've
+been a precious donkey; but that's another affair."</p>
+
+<p>Fleda, as if she humbly assented, went through no form of controverting
+this; she simply stood passive to her companion's sudden refreshment of
+her appearance. "How <i>can</i> I get him away from her?" she presently
+demanded.</p>
+
+<p>"By letting yourself go."</p>
+
+<p>"By letting myself go?" She spoke mechanically, still more like an
+idiot, and felt as if her face flamed out the insincerity of her
+question. It was vividly back again, the vision of the real way to act
+upon Mrs. Gereth. This lady's movements were now rapid; she turned off
+from her as quickly as she had seized her, and Fleda sat down to steady
+herself for full responsibility.</p>
+
+<p>Her hostess, without taking up her ejaculation, gave a violent poke at
+the fire and then faced her again. "You've done two things, then,
+to-day&mdash;haven't you?&mdash;that you've never done before. One has been asking
+me the service, or favor, or concession&mdash;whatever you call it&mdash;that you
+just mentioned; the other has been telling me&mdash;certainly too for the
+first time&mdash;an immense little fib."</p>
+
+<p>"An immense little fib?" Fleda felt weak; she was glad of the support of
+her seat.</p>
+
+<p>"An immense big one, then!" said Mrs. Gereth irritatedly. "You don't in
+the least 'hate' Owen, my darling. You care for him very much. In fact,
+my own, you're in love with him&mdash;there! Don't tell me any more lies!"
+cried Mrs. Gereth with a voice and a face in the presence of which Fleda
+recognized that there was nothing for her but to hold herself and take
+them. When once the truth was out, it was out, and she could see more
+and more every instant that it would be the only way. She accepted
+therefore what had to come; she leaned back her head and closed her eyes
+as her companion had done just before. She would have covered her face
+with her hands but for the still greater shame. "Oh, you're a wonder, a
+wonder," said Mrs. Gereth; "you're magnificent, and I was right, as soon
+as I saw you, to pick you out and trust you!" Fleda closed her eyes
+tighter at this last word, but her friend kept it up. "I never dreamed
+of it till a while ago, when, after he had come and gone, we were face
+to face. Then something stuck out of you; it strongly impressed me, and
+I didn't know at first quite what to make of it. It was that you had
+just been with him and that you were not natural. Not natural to <i>me</i>,"
+she added with a smile. "I pricked up my ears, and all that this might
+mean dawned upon me when you said you had asked nothing about Mona. It
+put me on the scent, but I didn't show you, did I? I felt it was <i>in</i>
+you, deep down, and that I must draw it out. Well, I <i>have</i> drawn it,
+and it's a blessing. Yesterday, when you shed tears at breakfast, I was
+awfully puzzled. What has been the matter with you all the while? Why,
+Fleda, it isn't a crime, don't you know that?" cried the delighted
+woman. "When I was a girl I was always in love, and not always with such
+nice people as Owen. I didn't behave as well as you; compared with you I
+think I must have been horrid. But if you're proud and reserved, it's
+your own affair; I'm proud too, though I'm not reserved&mdash;that's what
+spoils it. I'm stupid, above all&mdash;that's what I am; so dense that I
+really blush for it. However, no one but you could have deceived me. If
+I trusted you, moreover, it was exactly to be cleverer than myself. You
+must be so now more than ever!" Suddenly Fleda felt her hands grasped:
+Mrs. Gereth had plumped down at her feet and was leaning on her knees.
+"Save him&mdash;save him: you <i>can</i>!" she passionately pleaded. "How could
+you <i>not</i> like him, when he's such a dear? He <i>is</i> a dear, darling;
+there's no harm in my own boy! You can do what you will with him&mdash;you
+know you can! What else does he give us all this time for? Get him away
+from her; it's as if he besought you to, poor wretch! Don't abandon him
+to such a fate, and I'll never abandon <i>you</i>. Think of him with that
+creature, that future! If you'll take him I'll give up everything.
+There, it's a solemn promise, the most sacred of my life! Get the better
+of her, and he shall have every stick I removed. Give me your word, and
+I'll accept it. I'll write for the packers to-night!"</p>
+
+<p>Fleda, before this, had fallen forward on her companion's neck, and the
+two women, clinging together, had got up while the younger wailed on the
+other's bosom. "You smooth it down because you see more in it than there
+can ever be; but after my hideous double game how will you be able to
+believe in me again?"</p>
+
+<p>"I see in it simply what <i>must</i> be, if you've a single spark of pity.
+Where on earth was the double game, when you've behaved like such a
+saint? You've been beautiful, you've been exquisite, and all our trouble
+is over."</p>
+
+<p>Fleda, drying her eyes, shook her head ever so sadly. "No, Mrs. Gereth,
+it isn't over. I can't do what you ask&mdash;I can't meet your condition."</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Gereth stared; the cloud gathered in her face again. "Why, in the
+name of goodness, when you adore him? I know what you see in him," she
+declared in another tone. "You're right!"</p>
+
+<p>Fleda gave a faint, stubborn smile. "He cares for her too much."</p>
+
+<p>"Then why doesn't he marry her? He's giving you an extraordinary
+chance."</p>
+
+<p>"He doesn't dream I've ever thought of him," said Fleda. "Why should he,
+if you didn't?"</p>
+
+<p>"It wasn't with me you were in love, my duck." Then Mrs. Gereth added:
+"I'll go and tell him."</p>
+
+<p>"If you do any such thing, you shall never see me again,&mdash;absolutely,
+literally never!"</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Gereth looked hard at her young friend, showing she saw she must
+believe her. "Then you're perverse, you're wicked. Will you swear he
+doesn't know?"</p>
+
+<p>"Of course he doesn't know!" cried Fleda indignantly.</p>
+
+<p>Her interlocutress was silent a little. "And that he has no feeling on
+<i>his</i> side?"</p>
+
+<p>"For me?" Fleda stared. "Before he has even married her?"</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Gereth gave a sharp laugh at this. "He ought at least to appreciate
+your wit. Oh, my dear, you <i>are</i> a treasure! Doesn't he appreciate
+anything? Has he given you absolutely no symptom&mdash;not looked a look, not
+breathed a sigh?"</p>
+
+<p>"The case," said Fleda coldly, "is as I've had the honor to state it."</p>
+
+<p>"Then he's as big a donkey as his mother! But you know you must account
+for their delay," Mrs. Gereth remarked.</p>
+
+<p>"Why must I?" Fleda asked after a moment.</p>
+
+<p>"Because you were closeted with him here so long. You can't pretend at
+present, you know, not to have any art."</p>
+
+<p>The girl hesitated an instant; she was conscious that she must choose
+between two risks. She had had a secret and the secret was gone. Owen
+had one, which was still unbruised, and the greater risk now was that
+his mother should lay her formidable hand upon it. All Fleda's
+tenderness for him moved her to protect it; so she faced the smaller
+peril. "Their delay," she brought herself to reply, "may perhaps be
+Mona's doing. I mean because he has lost her the things."</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Gereth jumped at this. "So that she'll break altogether if I keep
+them?"</p>
+
+<p>Fleda winced. "I've told you what I believe about that. She'll make
+scenes and conditions; she'll worry him. But she'll hold him fast;
+she'll never give him up."</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Gereth turned it over. "Well, I'll keep them, to try her," she
+finally pronounced; at which Fleda felt quite sick, as if she had given
+everything and got nothing.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="XII" id="XII"></a>XII</h2>
+
+
+<p>"I must in common decency let him know that I've talked of the matter
+with you," she said to her hostess that evening. "What answer do you
+wish me to write to him?"</p>
+
+<p>"Write to him that you must see him again," said Mrs. Gereth.</p>
+
+<p>Fleda looked very blank. "What on earth am I to see him for?"</p>
+
+<p>"For anything you like."</p>
+
+<p>The girl would have been struck with the levity of this had she not
+already, in an hour, felt the extent of the change suddenly wrought in
+her commerce with her friend&mdash;wrought above all, to that friend's view,
+in her relation to the great issue. The effect of what had followed
+Owen's visit was to make that relation the very key of the crisis.
+Pressed upon her, goodness knew, the crisis had been, but it now seemed
+to put forth big, encircling arms&mdash;arms that squeezed till they hurt and
+she must cry out. It was as if everything at Ricks had been poured into
+a common receptacle, a public ferment of emotion and zeal, out of which
+it was ladled up to be tasted and talked about; everything at least but
+the one little treasure of knowledge that she kept back. She ought to
+have liked this, she reflected, because it meant sympathy, meant a
+closer union with the source of so much in her life that had been
+beautiful and renovating; but there were fine instincts in her that
+stood off. She had had&mdash;and it was not merely at this time&mdash;to recognize
+that there were things for which Mrs. Gereth's <i>flair</i> was not so happy
+as for bargains and "marks." It wouldn't be happy now as to the best
+action on the knowledge she had just gained; yet as from this moment
+they were still more intimately together, so a person deeply in her debt
+would simply have to stand and meet what was to come. There were ways in
+which she could sharply incommode such a person, and not only with the
+best conscience in the world, but with a sort of brutality of good
+intentions. One of the straightest of these strokes, Fleda saw, would be
+the dance of delight over the mystery Mrs. Gereth had laid bare&mdash;the
+loud, lawful, tactless joy of the explorer leaping upon the strand. Like
+any other lucky discoverer, she would take possession of the fortunate
+island. She was nothing if not practical: almost the only thing she took
+account of in her young friend's soft secret was the excellent use she
+could make of it&mdash;a use so much to her taste that she refused to feel a
+hindrance in the quality of the material. Fleda put into Mrs. Gereth's
+answer to her question a good deal more meaning than it would have
+occurred to her a few hours before that she was prepared to put, but she
+had on the spot a foreboding that even so broad a hint would live to be
+bettered.</p>
+
+<p>"Do you suggest that I shall propose to him to come down here again?"
+she presently inquired.</p>
+
+<p>"Dear, no; say that you'll go up to town and meet him." It <i>was</i>
+bettered, the broad hint; and Fleda felt this to be still more the case
+when, returning to the subject before they went to bed, her companion
+said: "I make him over to you wholly, you know&mdash;to do what you please
+with. Deal with him in your own clever way&mdash;I ask no questions. All I
+ask is that you succeed."</p>
+
+<p>"That's charming," Fleda replied, "but it doesn't tell me a bit, you'll
+be so good as to consider, in what terms to write to him. It's not an
+answer from you to the message I was to give you."</p>
+
+<p>"The answer to his message is perfectly distinct: he shall have
+everything in the place the minute he'll say he'll marry you."</p>
+
+<p>"You really pretend," Fleda asked, "to think me capable of transmitting
+him that news?"</p>
+
+<p>"What else can I really pretend when you threaten so to cast me off if I
+speak the word myself?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, if <i>you</i> speak the word!" the girl murmured very gravely, but happy
+at least to know that in this direction Mrs. Gereth confessed herself
+warned and helpless. Then she added: "How can I go on living with you on
+a footing of which I so deeply disapprove? Thinking as I do that you've
+despoiled him far more than is just or merciful&mdash;for if I expected you
+to take something, I didn't in the least expect you to take
+everything&mdash;how can I stay here without a sense that I'm backing you up
+in your cruelty and participating in your ill-gotten gains?" Fleda was
+determined that if she had the chill of her exposed and investigated
+state she would also have the convenience of it, and that if Mrs. Gereth
+popped in and out of the chamber of her soul she would at least return
+the freedom. "I shall quite hate, you know, in a day or two, every
+object that surrounds you&mdash;become blind to all the beauty and rarity
+that I formerly delighted in. Don't think me harsh; there's no use in my
+not being frank now. If I leave you, everything's at an end."</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Gereth, however, was imperturbable: Fleda had to recognize that her
+advantage had become too real. "It's too beautiful, the way you care for
+him; it's music in my ears. Nothing else but such a passion could make
+you say such things; that's the way I should have been too, my dear. Why
+didn't you tell me sooner? I'd have gone right in for you; I never would
+have moved a candlestick. Don't stay with me if it torments you; don't,
+if you suffer, be where you see the old rubbish. Go up to town&mdash;go back
+for a little to your father's. It need be only for a little; two or
+three weeks will see us through. Your father will take you and be glad,
+if you only will make him understand what it's a question of&mdash;of your
+getting yourself off his hands forever. <i>I</i>'ll make him understand, you
+know, if you feel shy. I'd take you up myself, I'd go with you, to spare
+your being bored; we'd put up at an hotel and we might amuse ourselves a
+bit. We haven't had much pleasure since we met, have we? But of course
+that wouldn't suit our book. I should be a bugaboo to Owen&mdash;I should be
+fatally in the way. Your chance is there&mdash;your chance is to be alone;
+for God's sake, use it to the right end. If you're in want of money I've
+a little I can give you. But I ask no questions&mdash;not a question as small
+as your shoe!"</p>
+
+<p>She asked no questions, but she took the most extraordinary things for
+granted. Fleda felt this still more at the end of a couple of days. On
+the second of these our young lady wrote to Owen; her emotion had to a
+certain degree cleared itself&mdash;there was something she could say
+briefly. If she had given everything to Mrs. Gereth and as yet got
+nothing, so she had on the other hand quickly reacted&mdash;it took but a
+night&mdash;against the discouragement of her first check. Her desire to
+serve him was too passionate, the sense that he counted upon her too
+sweet: these things caught her up again and gave her a new patience and
+a new subtlety. It shouldn't really be for nothing that she had given so
+much; deep within her burned again the resolve to get something back. So
+what she wrote to Owen was simply that she had had a great scene with
+his mother, but that he must be patient and give her time. It was
+difficult, as they both had expected, but she was working her hardest
+for him. She had made an impression&mdash;she would do everything to follow
+it up. Meanwhile he must keep intensely quiet and take no other steps;
+he must only trust her and pray for her and believe in her perfect
+loyalty. She made no allusion whatever to Mona's attitude, nor to his
+not being, as regarded that young lady, master of the situation; but she
+said in a postscript, in reference to his mother, "Of course she wonders
+a good deal why your marriage doesn't take place." After the letter had
+gone she regretted having used the word "loyalty;" there were two or
+three milder terms which she might as well have employed. The answer she
+immediately received from Owen was a little note of which she met all
+the deficiencies by describing it to herself as pathetically simple, but
+which, to prove that Mrs. Gereth might ask as many questions as she
+liked, she at once made his mother read. He had no art with his pen, he
+had not even a good hand, and his letter, a short profession of friendly
+confidence, consisted of but a few familiar and colorless words of
+acknowledgment and assent. The gist of it was that he would certainly,
+since Miss Vetch recommended it, not hurry mamma too much. He would not
+for the present cause her to be approached by any one else, but he would
+nevertheless continue to hope that she would see she <i>must</i> come round.
+"Of course, you know," he added, "she can't keep me waiting
+indefinitely. Please give her my love and tell her that. If it can be
+done peaceably I know you're just the one to do it."</p>
+
+<p>Fleda had awaited his rejoinder in deep suspense; such was her
+imagination of the possibility of his having, as she tacitly phrased it,
+let himself go on paper that when it arrived she was at first almost
+afraid to open it. There was indeed a distinct danger, for if he should
+take it into his head to write her love-letters the whole chance of
+aiding him would drop: she would have to return them, she would have to
+decline all further communication with him: it would be quite the end of
+the business. This imagination of Fleda's was a faculty that easily
+embraced all the heights and depths and extremities of things; that made
+a single mouthful, in particular, of any tragic or desperate necessity.
+She was perhaps at first just a trifle disappointed not to find in the
+note in question a syllable that strayed from the text; but the next
+moment she had risen to a point of view from which it presented itself
+as a production almost inspired in its simplicity. It was simple even
+for Owen, and she wondered what had given him the cue to be more so than
+usual. Then she saw how natures that are right just do the things that
+are right. He wasn't clever&mdash;his manner of writing showed it; but the
+cleverest man in England couldn't have had more the instinct that, under
+the circumstances, was the supremely happy one, the instinct of giving
+her something that would do beautifully to be shown to Mrs. Gereth. This
+was a kind of divination, for naturally he couldn't know the line Mrs.
+Gereth was taking. It was furthermore explained&mdash;and that was the most
+touching part of all&mdash;by his wish that she herself should notice how
+awfully well he was behaving. His very bareness called her attention to
+his virtue; and these were the exact fruits of her beautiful and
+terrible admonition. He was cleaving to Mona; he was doing his duty; he
+was making tremendously sure he should be without reproach.</p>
+
+<p>If Fleda handed this communication to her friend as a triumphant gage of
+the innocence of the young man's heart, her elation lived but a moment
+after Mrs. Gereth had pounced upon the tell-tale spot in it. "Why in the
+world, then," that lady cried, "does he still not breathe a breath about
+the day, the <i>day</i>, the day?" She repeated the word with a crescendo of
+superior acuteness; she proclaimed that nothing could be more marked
+than its absence&mdash;an absence that simply spoke volumes. What did it
+prove in fine but that she was producing the effect she had toiled
+for&mdash;that she had settled or was rapidly settling Mona?</p>
+
+<p>Such a challenge Fleda was obliged in some manner to take up. "You may
+be settling Mona," she returned with a smile, "but I can hardly regard
+it as sufficient evidence that you're settling Mona's lover."</p>
+
+<p>"Why not, with such a studied omission on his part to gloss over in any
+manner the painful tension existing between them&mdash;the painful tension
+that, under providence, I've been the means of bringing about? He gives
+you by his silence clear notice that his marriage is practically off."</p>
+
+<p>"He speaks to me of the only thing that concerns me. He gives me clear
+notice that he abates not one jot of his demand."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, then, let him take the only way to get it satisfied."</p>
+
+<p>Fleda had no need to ask again what such a way might be, nor was her
+support removed by the fine assurance with which Mrs. Gereth could make
+her argument wait upon her wish. These days, which dragged their length
+into a strange, uncomfortable fortnight, had already borne more
+testimony to that element than all the other time the two women had
+passed together. Our young lady had been at first far from measuring the
+whole of a feature that Owen himself would probably have described as
+her companion's "cheek." She lived now in a kind of bath of boldness,
+felt as if a fierce light poured in upon her from windows opened wide;
+and the singular part of the ordeal was that she couldn't protest
+against it fully without incurring, even to her own mind, some reproach
+of ingratitude, some charge of smallness. If Mrs. Gereth's apparent
+determination to hustle her into Owen's arms was accompanied with an air
+of holding her dignity rather cheap, this was after all only as a
+consequence of her being held in respect to some other attributes rather
+dear. It was a new version of the old story of being kicked upstairs.
+The wonderful woman was the same woman who, in the summer, at Poynton,
+had been so puzzled to conceive why a good-natured girl shouldn't have
+contributed more to the personal rout of the Brigstocks&mdash;shouldn't have
+been grateful even for the handsome puff of Fleda Vetch. Only her
+passion was keener now and her scruple more absent; the fight made a
+demand upon her, and her pugnacity had become one with her constant
+habit of using such weapons as she could pick up. She had no imagination
+about anybody's life save on the side she bumped against. Fleda was
+quite aware that she would have otherwise been a rare creature; but a
+rare creature was originally just what she had struck her as being. Mrs.
+Gereth had really no perception of anybody's nature&mdash;had only one
+question about persons: were they clever or stupid? To be clever meant
+to know the marks. Fleda knew them by direct inspiration, and a warm
+recognition of this had been her friend's tribute to her character. The
+girl had hours, now, of sombre wishing that she might never see anything
+good again: that kind of experience was evidently not an infallible
+source of peace. She would be more at peace in some vulgar little place
+that should owe its <i>cachet</i> to Tottenham Court Road. There were nice
+strong horrors in West Kensington; it was as if they beckoned her and
+wooed her back to them. She had a relaxed recollection of Waterbath; and
+of her reasons for staying on at Ricks the force was rapidly ebbing. One
+of these was her pledge to Owen&mdash;her vow to press his mother close; the
+other was the fact that of the two discomforts, that of being prodded by
+Mrs. Gereth and that of appearing to run after somebody else, the former
+remained for a while the more endurable.</p>
+
+<p>As the days passed, however, it became plainer to Fleda that her only
+chance of success would be in lending herself to this low appearance.
+Then, moreover, at last, her nerves settling the question, the choice
+was simply imposed by the violence done to her taste&mdash;to whatever was
+left of that high principle, at least, after the free and reckless
+meeting, for months, of great drafts and appeals. It was all very well
+to try to evade discussion: Owen Gereth was looking to her for a
+struggle, and it wasn't a bit of a struggle to be disgusted and dumb.
+She was on too strange a footing&mdash;that of having presented an ultimatum
+and having had it torn up in her face. In such a case as that the envoy
+always departed; he never sat gaping and dawdling before the city. Mrs.
+Gereth, every morning, looked publicly into "The Morning Post," the only
+newspaper she received; and every morning she treated the blankness of
+that journal as fresh evidence that everything was "off." What did the
+Post exist for but to tell you your children were wretchedly
+married?&mdash;so that if such a source of misery was dry, what could you do
+but infer that for once you had miraculously escaped? She almost taunted
+Fleda with supineness in not getting something out of somebody&mdash;in the
+same breath indeed in which she drenched her with a kind of appreciation
+more onerous to the girl than blame. Mrs. Gereth herself had of course
+washed her hands of the matter; but Fleda knew people who knew Mona and
+would be sure to be in her confidence&mdash;inconceivable people who admired
+her and had the privilege of Waterbath. What was the use therefore of
+being the most natural and the easiest of letter-writers, if no sort of
+side-light&mdash;in some pretext for correspondence&mdash;was, by a brilliant
+creature, to be got out of such barbarians? Fleda was not only a
+brilliant creature, but she heard herself commended in these days for
+new and strange attractions; she figured suddenly, in the queer
+conversations of Ricks, as a distinguished, almost as a dangerous
+beauty. That retouching of her hair and dress in which her friend had
+impulsively indulged on a first glimpse of her secret was by implication
+very frequently repeated. She had the sense not only of being advertised
+and offered, but of being counseled and enlightened in ways that she
+scarcely understood&mdash;arts obscure even to a poor girl who had had, in
+good society and motherless poverty, to look straight at realities and
+fill out blanks.</p>
+
+<p>These arts, when Mrs. Gereth's spirits were high, were handled with a
+brave and cynical humor with which Fleda's fancy could keep no step:
+they left our young lady wondering what on earth her companion wanted
+her to do. "I want you to cut in!"&mdash;that was Mrs. Gereth's familiar and
+comprehensive phrase for the course she prescribed. She challenged again
+and again Fleda's picture, as she called it (though the sketch was too
+slight to deserve the name), of the indifference to which a prior
+attachment had committed the proprietor of Poynton. "Do you mean to say
+that, Mona or no Mona, he could see you that way, day after day, and not
+have the ordinary feelings of a man?" This was the sort of interrogation
+to which Fleda was fitfully and irrelevantly treated. She had grown
+almost used to the refrain. "Do you mean to say that when, the other
+day, one had quite made you over to him, the great gawk, and he was, on
+this very spot, utterly alone with you&mdash;?" The poor girl at this point
+never left any doubt of what she meant to say, but Mrs. Gereth could be
+trusted to break out in another place and at another time. At last Fleda
+wrote to her father that he must take her in for a while; and when, to
+her companion's delight, she returned to London, that lady went with her
+to the station and wafted her on her way. "The Morning Post" had been
+delivered as they left the house, and Mrs. Gereth had brought it with
+her for the traveler, who never spent a penny on a newspaper. On the
+platform, however, when this young person was ticketed, labeled, and
+seated, she opened it at the window of the carriage, exclaiming as
+usual, after looking into it a moment: "Nothing&mdash;nothing&mdash;nothing: don't
+tell <i>me</i>!" Every day that there was nothing was a nail in the coffin of
+the marriage. An instant later the train was off, but, moving quickly
+beside it, while Fleda leaned inscrutably forth, Mrs. Gereth grasped her
+friend's hand and looked up with wonderful eyes. "Only let yourself go,
+darling&mdash;only let yourself go!"</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="XIII" id="XIII"></a>XIII</h2>
+
+
+<p>That she desired to ask no questions Mrs. Gereth conscientiously proved
+by closing her lips tight after Fleda had gone to London. No letter from
+Ricks arrived at West Kensington, and Fleda, with nothing to communicate
+that could be to the taste of either party, forbore to open a
+correspondence. If her heart had been less heavy she might have been
+amused to perceive how much rope this reticence of Ricks seemed to
+signify to her that she could take. She had at all events no good news
+for her friend save in the sense that her silence was not bad news. She
+was not yet in a position to write that she had "cut in;" but neither,
+on the other hand, had she gathered material for announcing that Mona
+was undisseverable from her prey. She had made no use of the pen so
+glorified by Mrs. Gereth to wake up the echoes of Waterbath; she had
+sedulously abstained from inquiring what in any quarter, far or near,
+was said or suggested or supposed. She only spent a matutinal penny on
+"The Morning Post;" she only saw, on each occasion, that that inspired
+sheet had as little to say about the imminence as about the abandonment
+of certain nuptials. It was at the same time obvious that Mrs. Gereth
+triumphed on these occasions much more than she trembled, and that with
+a few such triumphs repeated she would cease to tremble at all. What was
+most manifest, however, was that she had had a rare preconception of the
+circumstances that would have ministered, had Fleda been disposed, to
+the girl's cutting in. It was brought home to Fleda that these
+circumstances would have particularly favored intervention; she was
+quickly forced to do them a secret justice. One of the effects of her
+intimacy with Mrs. Gereth was that she had quite lost all sense of
+intimacy with any one else. The lady of Ricks had made a desert around
+her, possessing and absorbing her so utterly that other partakers had
+fallen away. Hadn't she been admonished, months before, that people
+considered they had lost her and were reconciled on the whole to the
+privation? Her present position in the great unconscious town defined
+itself as obscure: she regarded it at any rate with eyes suspicious of
+that lesson. She neither wrote notes nor received them; she indulged in
+no reminders nor knocked at any doors; she wandered vaguely in the
+western wilderness or cultivated shy forms of that "household art" for
+which she had had a respect before tasting the bitter tree of knowledge.
+Her only plan was to be as quiet as a mouse, and when she failed in the
+attempt to lose herself in the flat suburb she felt like a lonely fly
+crawling over a dusty chart.</p>
+
+<p>How had Mrs. Gereth known in advance that if she had chosen to be "vile"
+(that was what Fleda called it) everything would happen to help
+her?&mdash;especially the way her poor father, after breakfast, doddered off
+to his club, showing seventy when he was really fifty-seven, and leaving
+her richly alone for the day. He came back about midnight, looking at
+her very hard and not risking long words&mdash;only making her feel by
+inimitable touches that the presence of his family compelled him to
+alter all his hours. She had in their common sitting-room the company of
+the objects he was fond of saying that he had collected&mdash;objects, shabby
+and battered, of a sort that appealed little to his daughter: old
+brandy-flasks and match-boxes, old calendars and hand-books, intermixed
+with an assortment of pen-wipers and ash-trays, a harvest he had
+gathered in from penny bazaars. He was blandly unconscious of that side
+of Fleda's nature which had endeared her to Mrs. Gereth, and she had
+often heard him wish to goodness there was something striking she cared
+for. Why didn't she try collecting something?&mdash;it didn't matter what.
+She would find it gave an interest to life, and there was no end of
+little curiosities one could easily pick up. He was conscious of having
+a taste for fine things which his children had unfortunately not
+inherited. This indicated the limits of their acquaintance with
+him&mdash;limits which, as Fleda was now sharply aware, could only leave him
+to wonder what the mischief she was there for. As she herself echoed
+this question to the letter she was not in a position to clear up the
+mystery. She couldn't have given a name to her errand in town or
+explained it save by saying that she had had to get away from Ricks. It
+was intensely provisional, but what was to come next? Nothing could come
+next but a deeper anxiety. She had neither a home nor an
+outlook&mdash;nothing in all the wide world but a feeling of suspense.</p>
+
+<p>Of course she had her duty&mdash;her duty to Owen&mdash;a definite undertaking,
+reaffirmed, after his visit to Ricks, under her hand and seal; but there
+was no sense of possession attached to that; there was only a horrible
+sense of privation. She had quite moved from under Mrs. Gereth's wide
+wing; and now that she was really among the pen-wipers and ash-trays she
+was swept, at the thought of all the beauty she had forsworn, by short,
+wild gusts of despair. If her friend should really keep the spoils she
+would never return to her. If that friend should on the other hand part
+with them, what on earth would there be to return to? The chill struck
+deep as Fleda thought of the mistress of Ricks reduced, in vulgar
+parlance, to what she had on her back: there was nothing to which she
+could compare such an image but her idea of Marie Antoinette in the
+Conciergerie, or perhaps the vision of some tropical bird, the creature
+of hot, dense forests, dropped on a frozen moor to pick up a living. The
+mind's eye could see Mrs. Gereth, indeed, only in her thick, colored
+air; it took all the light of her treasures to make her concrete and
+distinct. She loomed for a moment, in any mere house, gaunt and
+unnatural; then she vanished as if she had suddenly sunk into a
+quicksand. Fleda lost herself in the rich fancy of how, if <i>she</i> were
+mistress of Poynton, a whole province, as an abode, should be assigned
+there to the august queen-mother. She would have returned from her
+campaign with her baggage-train and her loot, and the palace would unbar
+its shutters and the morning flash back from its halls. In the event of
+a surrender the poor woman would never again be able to begin to
+collect: she was now too old and too moneyless, and times were altered
+and good things impossibly dear. A surrender, furthermore, to any
+daughter-in-law save an oddity like Mona needn't at all be an abdication
+in fact; any other fairly nice girl whom Owen should have taken it into
+his head to marry would have been positively glad to have, for the
+museum, a custodian who was a walking catalogue and who understood
+beyond any one in England the hygiene and temperament of rare pieces. A
+fairly nice girl would somehow be away a good deal and would at such
+times count it a blessing to feel Mrs. Gereth at her post.</p>
+
+<p>Fleda had fully recognized, the first days, that, quite apart from any
+question of letting Owen know where she was, it would be a charity to
+give him some sign: it would be weak, it would be ugly, to be diverted
+from that kindness by the fact that Mrs. Gereth had attached a tinkling
+bell to it. A frank relation with him was only superficially
+discredited: she ought for his own sake to send him a word of cheer. So
+she repeatedly reasoned, but she as repeatedly delayed performance: if
+her general plan had been to be as still as a mouse, an interview like
+the interview at Ricks would be an odd contribution to that ideal.
+Therefore with a confused preference of practice to theory she let the
+days go by; she felt that nothing was so imperative as the gain of
+precious time. She shouldn't be able to stay with her father forever,
+but she might now reap the benefit of having married her sister.
+Maggie's union had been built up round a small spare room. Concealed in
+this apartment she might try to paint again, and abetted by the grateful
+Maggie&mdash;for Maggie at least was grateful&mdash;she might try to dispose of
+her work. She had not indeed struggled with a brush since her visit to
+Waterbath, where the sight of the family splotches had put her immensely
+on her guard. Poynton moreover had been an impossible place for
+producing; no active art could flourish there but a Buddhistic
+contemplation. It had stripped its mistress clean of all feeble
+accomplishments; her hands were imbrued neither with ink nor with
+water-color. Close to Fleda's present abode was the little shop of a man
+who mounted and framed pictures and desolately dealt in artists'
+materials. She sometimes paused before it to look at a couple of shy
+experiments for which its dull window constituted publicity, small
+studies placed there for sale and full of warning to a young lady
+without fortune and without talent. Some such young lady had brought
+them forth in sorrow; some such young lady, to see if they had been
+snapped up, had passed and repassed as helplessly as she herself was
+doing. They never had been, they never would be, snapped up; yet they
+were quite above the actual attainment of some other young ladies. It
+was a matter of discipline with Fleda to take an occasional lesson from
+them; besides which, when she now quitted the house, she had to look for
+reasons after she was out. The only place to find them was in the
+shop-windows. They made her feel like a servant-girl taking her
+"afternoon," but that didn't signify: perhaps some day she would
+resemble such a person still more closely. This continued a fortnight,
+at the end of which the feeling was suddenly dissipated. She had stopped
+as usual in the presence of the little pictures; then, as she turned
+away, she had found herself face to face with Owen Gereth.</p>
+
+<p>At the sight of him two fresh waves passed quickly across her heart, one
+at the heels of the other. The first was an instant perception that this
+encounter was not an accident; the second a consciousness as prompt that
+the best place for it was the street. She knew before he told her that
+he had been to see her, and the next thing she knew was that he had had
+information from his mother. Her mind grasped these things while he said
+with a smile: "I saw only your back, but I was sure. I was over the way.
+I've been at your house."</p>
+
+<p>"How came you to know my house?" Fleda asked.</p>
+
+<p>"I like that!" he laughed. "How came you not to let me know that you
+were there?"</p>
+
+<p>Fleda, at this, thought it best also to laugh. "Since I didn't let you
+know, why did you come?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, I say!" cried Owen. "Don't add insult to injury. Why in the world
+didn't you let me know? I came because I want awfully to see you." He
+hesitated, then he added: "I got the tip from mother: she has written to
+me&mdash;fancy!"</p>
+
+<p>They still stood where they had met. Fleda's instinct was to keep him
+there; the more so that she could already see him take for granted that
+they would immediately proceed together to her door. He rose before her
+with a different air: he looked less ruffled and bruised than he had
+done at Ricks, he showed a recovered freshness. Perhaps, however, this
+was only because she had scarcely seen him at all as yet in London form,
+as he would have called it&mdash;"turned out" as he was turned out in town.
+In the country, heated with the chase and splashed with the mire, he had
+always rather reminded her of a picturesque peasant in national costume.
+This costume, as Owen wore it, varied from day to day; it was as copious
+as the wardrobe of an actor; but it never failed of suggestions of the
+earth and the weather, the hedges and the ditches, the beasts and the
+birds. There had been days when it struck her as all nature in one pair
+of boots. It didn't make him now another person that he was delicately
+dressed, shining and splendid&mdash;that he had a higher hat and light gloves
+with black seams, and a spearlike umbrella; but it made him, she soon
+decided, really handsomer, and that in turn gave him&mdash;for she never
+could think of him, or indeed of some other things, without the aid of
+his vocabulary&mdash;a tremendous pull. Yes, this was for the moment, as he
+looked at her, the great fact of their situation&mdash;his pull was
+tremendous. She tried to keep the acknowledgement of it from trembling
+in her voice as she said to him with more surprise than she really felt:
+"You've then reopened relations with her?"</p>
+
+<p>"It's she who has reopened them with me. I got her letter this morning.
+She told me you were here and that she wished me to know it. She didn't
+say much; she just gave me your address. I wrote her back, you know,
+'Thanks no end. Shall go to-day.' So we <i>are</i> in correspondence again,
+aren't we? She means of course that you've something to tell me from
+her, eh? But if you have, why haven't you let a fellow know?" He waited
+for no answer to this, he had so much to say. "At your house, just now,
+they told me how long you've been here. Haven't you known all the while
+that I'm counting the hours? I left a word for you&mdash;that I would be back
+at six; but I'm awfully glad to have caught you so much sooner. You
+don't mean to say you're not going home!" he exclaimed in dismay. "The
+young woman there told me you went out early."</p>
+
+<p>"I've been out a very short time," said Fleda, who had hung back with
+the general purpose of making things difficult for him. The street would
+make them difficult; she could trust the street. She reflected in time,
+however, that to betray to him she was afraid to admit him would give
+him more a feeling of facility than of anything else. She moved on with
+him after a moment, letting him direct their course to her door, which
+was only round a corner: she considered as they went that it might not
+prove such a stroke to have been in London so long and yet not to have
+called him. She desired he should feel she was perfectly simple with
+him, and there was no simplicity in that. None the less, on the steps of
+the house, though she had a key, she rang the bell; and while they
+waited together and she averted her face she looked straight into the
+depths of what Mrs. Gereth had meant by giving him the "tip." This had
+been perfidious, had been monstrous of Mrs. Gereth, and Fleda wondered
+if her letter had contained only what Owen repeated.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="XIV" id="XIV"></a>XIV</h2>
+
+
+<p>When Owen and Fleda were in her father's little place and, among the
+brandy-flasks and pen-wipers, still more disconcerted and divided, the
+girl&mdash;to do something, though it would make him stay&mdash;had ordered tea,
+he put the letter before her quite as if he had guessed her thought.
+"She's still a bit nasty&mdash;fancy!" He handed her the scrap of a note
+which he had pulled out of his pocket and from its envelope. "Fleda
+Vetch," it ran, "is at 10 Raphael Road, West Kensington. Go to see her,
+and try, for God's sake, to cultivate a glimmer of intelligence." When
+in handing it back to him she took in his face she saw that its
+heightened color was the effect of his watching her read such an
+allusion to his want of wit. Fleda knew what it was an allusion to, and
+his pathetic air of having received this buffet, tall and fine and kind
+as he stood there, made her conscious of not quite concealing her
+knowledge. For a minute she was kept silent by an angered sense of the
+trick that had been played her. It was a trick because Fleda considered
+there had been a covenant; and the trick consisted of Mrs. Gereth's
+having broken the spirit of their agreement while conforming in a
+fashion to the letter. Under the girl's menace of a complete rupture she
+had been afraid to make of her secret the use she itched to make; but in
+the course of these days of separation she had gathered pluck to hazard
+an indirect betrayal. Fleda measured her hesitations and the impulse
+which she had finally obeyed and which the continued procrastination of
+Waterbath had encouraged, had at last made irresistible. If in her
+high-handed manner of playing their game she had not named the thing
+hidden, she had named the hiding-place. It was over the sense of this
+wrong that Fleda's lips closed tight: she was afraid of aggravating her
+case by some ejaculation that would make Owen prick up his ears. A
+great, quick effort, however, helped her to avoid the danger; with her
+constant idea of keeping cool and repressing a visible flutter, she
+found herself able to choose her words. Meanwhile he had exclaimed with
+his uncomfortable laugh: "That's a good one for me, Miss Vetch, isn't
+it?"</p>
+
+<p>"Of course you know by this time that your mother's very sharp," said
+Fleda.</p>
+
+<p>"I think I can understand well enough when I know what's to be
+understood," the young man asserted. "But I hope you won't mind my
+saying that you've kept me pretty well in the dark about that. I've been
+waiting, waiting, waiting; so much has depended on your news. If you've
+been working for me I'm afraid it has been a thankless job. Can't she
+say what she'll do, one way or the other? I can't tell in the least
+where I am, you know. I haven't really learnt from you, since I saw you
+there, where <i>she</i> is. You wrote me to be patient, and upon my soul I
+have been. But I'm afraid you don't quite realize what I'm to be patient
+with. At Waterbath, don't you know? I've simply to account and answer
+for the damned things. Mona looks at me and waits, and I, hang it, I
+look at you and do the same." Fleda had gathered fuller confidence as he
+continued; so plain was it that she had succeeded in not dropping into
+his mind the spark that might produce the glimmer invoked by his mother.
+But even this fine assurance gave a start when, after an appealing
+pause, he went on: "I hope, you know, that after all you're not keeping
+anything back from me."</p>
+
+<p>In the full face of what she was keeping back such a hope could only
+make her wince; but she was prompt with her explanations in proportion
+as she felt they failed to meet him. The smutty maid came in with
+tea-things, and Fleda, moving several objects, eagerly accepted the
+diversion of arranging a place for them on one of the tables. "I've been
+trying to break your mother down because it has seemed there may be some
+chance of it. That's why I've let you go on expecting it. She's too
+proud to veer round all at once, but I think I speak correctly in saying
+that I've made an impression."</p>
+
+<p>In spite of ordering tea she had not invited him to sit down; she
+herself made a point of standing. He hovered by the window that looked
+into Raphael Road; she kept at the other side of the room; the stunted
+slavey, gazing wide-eyed at the beautiful gentleman and either stupidly
+or cunningly bringing but one thing at a time, came and went between the
+tea-tray and the open door.</p>
+
+<p>"You pegged at her so hard?" Owen asked.</p>
+
+<p>"I explained to her fully your position and put before her much more
+strongly than she liked what seemed to me her absolute duty."</p>
+
+<p>Owen waited a little. "And having done that, you departed?"</p>
+
+<p>Fleda felt the full need of giving a reason for her departure; but at
+first she only said with cheerful frankness: "I departed."</p>
+
+<p>Her companion again looked at her in silence. "I thought you had gone to
+her for several months."</p>
+
+<p>"Well," Fleda replied, "I couldn't stay. I didn't like it. I didn't like
+it at all&mdash;I couldn't bear it," she went on. "In the midst of those
+trophies of Poynton, living with them, touching them, using them, I felt
+as if I were backing her up. As I was not a bit of an accomplice, as I
+hate what she has done, I didn't want to be, even to the extent of the
+mere look of it&mdash;what is it you call such people?&mdash;an accessory after
+the fact." There was something she kept back so rigidly that the joy of
+uttering the rest was double. She felt the sharpest need of giving him
+all the other truth. There was a matter as to which she had deceived
+him, and there was a matter as to which she had deceived Mrs. Gereth,
+but her lack of pleasure in deception as such came home to her now. She
+busied herself with the tea and, to extend the occupation, cleared the
+table still more, spreading out the coarse cups and saucers and the
+vulgar little plates. She was aware that she produced more confusion
+than symmetry, but she was also aware that she was violently nervous.
+Owen tried to help her with something: this made rather for disorder.
+"My reason for not writing to you," she pursued, "was simply that I was
+hoping to hear more from Ricks. I've waited from day to day for that."</p>
+
+<p>"But you've heard nothing?"</p>
+
+<p>"Not a word."</p>
+
+<p>"Then what I understand," said Owen, "is that, practically, you and
+Mummy have quarreled. And you've done it&mdash;I mean you personally&mdash;for
+<i>me</i>."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh no, we haven't quarreled a bit!" Then with a smile: "We've only
+diverged."</p>
+
+<p>"You've diverged uncommonly far!"&mdash;Owen laughed back. Fleda, with her
+hideous crockery and her father's collections, could conceive that these
+objects, to her visitor's perception even more strongly than to her own,
+measured the length of the swing from Poynton and Ricks; she was aware
+too that her high standards figured vividly enough even to Owen's
+simplicity to make him reflect that West Kensington was a tremendous
+fall. If she had fallen it was because she had acted for him. She was
+all the more content he should thus see she <i>had</i> acted, as the cost of
+it, in his eyes, was none of her own showing. "What seems to have
+happened," he exclaimed, "is that you've had a row with her and yet not
+moved her!"</p>
+
+<p>Fleda considered a moment; she was full of the impression that,
+notwithstanding her scant help, he saw his way clearer than he had seen
+it at Ricks. He might mean many things; and what if the many should mean
+in their turn only one? "The difficulty is, you understand, that she
+doesn't really see into your situation." She hesitated. "She doesn't
+comprehend why your marriage hasn't yet taken place."</p>
+
+<p>Owen stared. "Why, for the reason I told you: that Mona won't take
+another step till mother has given full satisfaction. Everything must be
+there. You see, everything <i>was</i> there the day of that fatal visit."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, that's what I understood from you at Ricks," said Fleda; "but I
+haven't repeated it to your mother." She had hated, at Ricks, to talk
+with him about Mona, but now that scruple was swept away. If he could
+speak of Mona's visit as fatal, she need at least not pretend not to
+notice it. It made all the difference that she had tried to assist him
+and had failed: to give him any faith in her service she must give him
+all her reasons but one. She must give him, in other words, with a
+corresponding omission, all Mrs. Gereth's. "You can easily see that, as
+she dislikes your marriage, anything that may seem to make it less
+certain works in her favor. Without my telling her, she has suspicions
+and views that are simply suggested by your delay. Therefore it didn't
+seem to me right to make them worse. By holding off long enough, she
+thinks she may put an end to your engagement. If Mona's waiting, she
+believes she may at last tire Mona out." That, in all conscience, Fleda
+felt was lucid enough.</p>
+
+<p>So the young man, following her attentively, appeared equally to feel.
+"So far as that goes," he promptly declared, "she <i>has</i> at last tired
+Mona out." He uttered the words with a strange approach to hilarity.</p>
+
+<p>Fleda's surprise at this aberration left her a moment looking at him.
+"Do you mean your marriage is off?"</p>
+
+<p>Owen answered with a kind of gay despair. "God knows, Miss Vetch, where
+or when or what my marriage is! If it isn't 'off,' it certainly, at the
+point things have reached, isn't <i>on</i>. I haven't seen Mona for ten days,
+and for a week I haven't heard from her. She used to write me every
+week, don't you know? She won't budge from Waterbath, and I haven't
+budged from town." Then he suddenly broke out: "If she <i>does</i> chuck me,
+will mother come round?"</p>
+
+<p>Fleda, at this, felt that her heroism had come to its real test&mdash;felt
+that in telling him the truth she should effectively raise a hand to
+push his impediment out of the way. Was the knowledge that such a motion
+would probably dispose forever of Mona capable of yielding to the
+conception of still giving her every chance she was entitled to? That
+conception was heroic, but at the same moment it reminded Fleda of the
+place it had held in her plan, she was also reminded of the not less
+urgent claim of the truth. Ah, the truth&mdash;there was a limit to the
+impunity with which one could juggle with it! Wasn't what she had most
+to remember the fact that Owen had a right to his property and that he
+had also her vow to stand by him in the effort to recover it? How did
+she stand by him if she hid from him the single way to recover it of
+which she was quite sure? For an instant that seemed to her the fullest
+of her life she debated. "Yes," she said at last, "if your marriage is
+really abandoned, she will give up everything she has taken."</p>
+
+<p>"That's just what makes Mona hesitate!" Owen honestly exclaimed. "I mean
+the idea that I shall get back the things only if she gives me up."</p>
+
+<p>Fleda thought an instant. "You mean makes her hesitate to keep you&mdash;not
+hesitate to renounce you?"</p>
+
+<p>Owen looked a trifle bewildered. "She doesn't see the use of hanging on,
+as I haven't even yet put the matter into legal hands. She's awfully
+keen about that, and awfully disgusted that I don't. She says it's the
+only real way, and she thinks I'm afraid to take it. She has given me
+time and then has given me again more. She says I give Mummy too much.
+She says I'm a muff to go pottering on. That's why she's drawing off so
+hard, don't you see?"</p>
+
+<p>"I don't see very clearly. Of course you must give her what you offered
+her; of course you must keep your word. There must be no mistake about
+<i>that</i>!" the girl declared.</p>
+
+<p>Owen's bewilderment visibly increased. "You think, then, as she does,
+that I <i>must</i> send down the police?"</p>
+
+<p>The mixture of reluctance and dependence in this made her feel how much
+she was failing him. She had the sense of "chucking" him too. "No, no,
+not yet!" she said, though she had really no other and no better course
+to prescribe. "Doesn't it occur to you," she asked in a moment, "that if
+Mona is, as you say, drawing away, she may have, in doing so, a very
+high motive? She knows the immense value of all the objects detained by
+your mother, and to restore the spoils of Poynton she is ready&mdash;is that
+it!&mdash;to make a sacrifice. The sacrifice is that of an engagement she had
+entered upon with joy."</p>
+
+<p>Owen had been blank a moment before, but he followed this argument with
+success&mdash;a success so immediate that it enabled him to produce with
+decision: "Ah, she's not that sort! She wants them herself," he added;
+"she wants to feel they're hers; she doesn't care whether I have them or
+not! And if she can't get them she doesn't want <i>me</i>. If she can't get
+them she doesn't want anything at all."</p>
+
+<p>This was categoric; Fleda drank it in. "She takes such an interest in
+them?"</p>
+
+<p>"So it appears."</p>
+
+<p>"So much that they're <i>all</i>, and that she can let everything else
+absolutely depend upon them?"</p>
+
+<p>Owen weighed her question as if he felt the responsibility of his
+answer. But that answer came in a moment, and, as Fleda could see, out
+of a wealth of memory. "She never wanted them particularly till they
+seemed to be in danger. Now she has an idea about them; and when she
+gets hold of an idea&mdash;Oh dear me!" He broke off, pausing and looking
+away as with a sense of the futility of expression: it was the first
+time Fleda had ever heard him explain a matter so pointedly or embark at
+all on a generalization. It was striking, it was touching to her, as he
+faltered, that he appeared but half capable of floating his
+generalization to the end. The girl, however, was so far competent to
+fill up his blank as that she had divined, on the occasion of Mona's
+visit to Poynton, what would happen in the event of the accident at
+which he glanced. She had there with her own eyes seen Owen's betrothed
+get hold of an idea. "I say, you know, <i>do</i> give me some tea!" he went
+on irrelevantly and familiarly.</p>
+
+<p>Her profuse preparations had all this time had no sequel, and, with a
+laugh that she felt to be awkward, she hastily complied with his
+request. "It's sure to be horrid," she said; "we don't have at all good
+things." She offered him also bread and butter, of which he partook,
+holding his cup and saucer in his other hand and moving slowly about the
+room. She poured herself a cup, but not to take it; after which, without
+wanting it, she began to eat a small stale biscuit. She was struck with
+the extinction of the unwillingness she had felt at Ricks to contribute
+to the bandying between them of poor Mona's name; and under this
+influence she presently resumed: "Am I to understand that she engaged
+herself to marry you without caring for you?"</p>
+
+<p>Owen looked out into Raphael Road. "She <i>did</i> care for me awfully. But
+she can't stand the strain."</p>
+
+<p>"The strain of what?"</p>
+
+<p>"Why, of the whole wretched thing."</p>
+
+<p>"The whole thing has indeed been wretched, and I can easily conceive its
+effect upon her," Fleda said.</p>
+
+<p>Her visitor turned sharp round. "You <i>can</i>?" There was a light in his
+strong stare. "You can understand it's spoiling her temper and making
+her come down on <i>me</i>? She behaves as if I were of no use to her at
+all!"</p>
+
+<p>Fleda hesitated. "She's rankling under the sense of her wrong."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, was it <i>I</i>, pray, who perpetrated the wrong? Ain't I doing what I
+can to get the thing arranged?"</p>
+
+<p>The ring of his question made his anger at Mona almost resemble for a
+minute an anger at Fleda; and this resemblance in turn caused our young
+lady to observe how handsome he looked when he spoke, for the first time
+in her hearing, with that degree of heat, and used, also for the first
+time, such a term as "perpetrated." In addition, his challenge rendered
+still more vivid to her the mere flimsiness of her own aid. "Yes, you've
+been perfect," she said. "You've had a most difficult part. You've <i>had</i>
+to show tact and patience, as well as firmness, with your mother, and
+you've strikingly shown them. It's I who, quite unintentionally, have
+deceived you. I haven't helped you at all to your remedy."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, you wouldn't at all events have ceased to like me, would you?"
+Owen demanded. It evidently mattered to him to know if she really
+justified Mona. "I mean of course if you <i>had</i> liked me&mdash;liked me as
+<i>she</i> liked me," he explained.</p>
+
+<p>Fleda looked this inquiry in the face only long enough to recognize
+that, in her embarrassment, she must take instant refuge in a superior
+one. "I can answer that better if I know how kind to her you've been.
+<i>Have</i> you been kind to her?" she asked as simply as she could.</p>
+
+<p>"Why, rather, Miss Vetch!" Owen declared. "I've done every blessed thing
+she wished. I rushed down to Ricks, as you saw, with fire and sword, and
+the day after that I went to see her at Waterbath." At this point he
+checked himself, though it was just the point at which her interest
+deepened. A different look had come into his face as he put down his
+empty teacup. "But why should I tell you such things, for any good it
+does me? I gather that you've no suggestion to make me now except that I
+shall request my solicitor to act. <i>Shall</i> I request him to act?"</p>
+
+<p>Fleda scarcely heard his words; something new had suddenly come into her
+mind. "When you went to Waterbath after seeing me," she asked, "did you
+tell her all about that?"</p>
+
+<p>Owen looked conscious. "All about it?"</p>
+
+<p>"That you had had a long talk with me, without seeing your mother at
+all?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh yes, I told her exactly, and that you had been most awfully kind,
+and that I had placed the whole thing in your hands."</p>
+
+<p>Fleda was silent a moment. "Perhaps that displeased her," she at last
+suggested.</p>
+
+<p>"It displeased her fearfully," said Owen, looking very queer.</p>
+
+<p>"Fearfully?" broke from the girl. Somehow, at the word, she was
+startled.</p>
+
+<p>"She wanted to know what right you had to meddle. She said you were not
+honest."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh!" Fleda cried, with a long wail. Then she controlled herself. "I
+see."</p>
+
+<p>"She abused you, and I defended you. She denounced you&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>She checked him with a gesture. "Don't tell me what she did!" She had
+colored up to her eyes, where, as with the effect of a blow in the face,
+she quickly felt the tears gathering. It was a sudden drop in her great
+flight, a shock to her attempt to watch over what Mona was entitled to.
+While she had been straining her very soul in this attempt, the object
+of her magnanimity had been pronouncing her "not honest." She took it
+all in, however, and after an instant was able to speak with a smile.
+She would not have been surprised to learn, indeed, that her smile was
+strange. "You had said a while ago that your mother and I quarreled
+about you. It's much more true that you and Mona have quarreled about
+<i>me</i>."</p>
+
+<p>Owen hesitated, but at last he brought it out. "What I mean to say is,
+don't you know, that Mona, if you don't mind my saying so, has taken it
+into her head to be jealous."</p>
+
+<p>"I see," said Fleda. "Well, I dare say our conferences have looked very
+odd."</p>
+
+<p>"They've looked very beautiful, and they've been very beautiful. Oh,
+I've told her the sort you are!" the young man pursued.</p>
+
+<p>"That of course hasn't made her love me better."</p>
+
+<p>"No, nor love me," said Owen. "Of course, you know, she says she loves
+me."</p>
+
+<p>"And do you say you love her?"</p>
+
+<p>"I say nothing else&mdash;I say it all the while. I said it the other day a
+dozen times." Fleda made no immediate rejoinder to this, and before she
+could choose one he repeated his question of a moment before. "<i>Am</i> I to
+tell my solicitor to act?"</p>
+
+<p>She had at that moment turned away from this solution, precisely because
+she saw in it the great chance of her secret. If she should determine
+him to adopt it she might put out her hand and take him. It would shut
+in Mrs. Gereth's face the open door of surrender: she would flare up and
+fight, flying the flag of a passionate, an heroic defense. The case
+would obviously go against her, but the proceedings would last longer
+than Mona's patience or Owen's propriety. With a formal rupture he would
+be at large; and she had only to tighten her fingers round the string
+that would raise the curtain on that scene. "You tell me you 'say' you
+love her, but is there nothing more in it than your saying so? You
+wouldn't say so, would you, if it's not true? What in the world has
+become, in so short a time, of the affection that led to your
+engagement?"</p>
+
+<p>"The deuce knows what has become of it, Miss Vetch!" Owen cried. "It
+seemed all to go to pot as this horrid struggle came on." He was close
+to her now, and, with his face lighted again by the relief of it, he
+looked all his helpless history into her eyes. "As I saw you and noticed
+you more, as I knew you better and better, I felt less and less&mdash;I
+couldn't help it&mdash;about anything or any one else. I wished I had known
+you sooner&mdash;I knew I should have liked you better than any one in the
+world. But it wasn't you who made the difference," he eagerly continued,
+"and I was awfully determined to stick to Mona to the death. It was she
+herself who made it, upon my soul, by the state she got into, the way
+she sulked, the way she took things, and the way she let me have it! She
+destroyed our prospects and our happiness, upon my honor. She made just
+the same smash of them as if she had kicked over that tea-table. She
+wanted to know all the while what was passing between us, between you
+and me; and she wouldn't take my solemn assurance that nothing was
+passing but what might have directly passed between me and old Mummy.
+She said a pretty girl like you was a nice old Mummy for me, and, if
+you'll believe it, she never called you anything else but that. I'll be
+hanged if I haven't been good, haven't I? I haven't breathed a breath of
+any sort to you, have I? You'd have been down on me hard if I had,
+wouldn't you? You're down on me pretty hard as it is, I think, aren't
+you? But I don't care what you say now, or what Mona says, either, or a
+single rap what any one says: she has given me at last, by her
+confounded behavior, a right to speak out, to utter the way I feel about
+it. The way I feel about it, don't you know, is that it had all better
+come to an end. You ask me if I don't love her, and I suppose it's
+natural enough you should. But you ask it at the very moment I'm half
+mad to say to you that there's only one person on the whole earth I
+<i>really</i> love, and that that person&mdash;" Here Owen pulled up short, and
+Fleda wondered if it was from the effect of his perceiving, through the
+closed door, the sound of steps and voices on the landing of the stairs.
+She had caught this sound herself with surprise and a vague uneasiness:
+it was not an hour at which her father ever came in, and there was no
+present reason why she should have a visitor. She had a fear, which
+after a few seconds deepened: a visitor was at hand; the visitor would
+be simply Mrs. Gereth. That lady wished for a near view of the
+consequence of her note to Owen. Fleda straightened herself with the
+instant thought that if this was what Mrs. Gereth desired Mrs. Gereth
+should have it in a form not to be mistaken. Owen's pause was the matter
+of a moment, but during that moment our young couple stood with their
+eyes holding each other's eyes and their ears catching the suggestion,
+still through the door, of a murmured conference in the hall. Fleda had
+begun to make the movement to cut it short when Owen stopped her with a
+grasp of her arm. "You're surely able to guess," he said, with his voice
+dropped and her arm pressed as she had never known such a drop or such a
+pressure&mdash;"you're surely able to guess the one person on earth I love?"</p>
+
+<p>The handle of the door turned, and Fleda had only time to jerk at him:
+"Your mother!"</p>
+
+<p>The door opened, and the smutty maid, edging in, announced "Mrs.
+Brigstock!"</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="XV" id="XV"></a>XV</h2>
+
+
+<p>Mrs. Brigstock, in the doorway, stood looking from one of the occupants
+of the room to the other; then they saw her eyes attach themselves to a
+small object that had lain hitherto unnoticed on the carpet. This was
+the biscuit of which, on giving Owen his tea, Fleda had taken a
+perfunctory nibble: she had immediately laid it on the table, and that
+subsequently, in some precipitate movement, she should have brushed it
+off was doubtless a sign of the agitation that possessed her. For Mrs.
+Brigstock there was apparently more in it than met the eye. Owen at any
+rate picked it up, and Fleda felt as if he were removing the traces of
+some scene that the newspapers would have characterized as lively. Mrs.
+Brigstock clearly took in also the sprawling tea-things and the mark as
+of high water in the full faces of her young friends. These elements
+made the little place a vivid picture of intimacy. A minute was filled
+by Fleda's relief at finding her visitor not to be Mrs. Gereth, and a
+longer space by the ensuing sense of what was really more compromising
+in the actual apparition. It dimly occurred to her that the lady of
+Ricks had also written to Waterbath. Not only had Mrs. Brigstock never
+paid her a call, but Fleda would have been unable to figure her so
+employed. A year before the girl had spent a day under her roof, but
+never feeling that Mrs. Brigstock regarded this as constituting a bond.
+She had never stayed in any house but Poynton where the imagination of a
+bond, one way or the other, prevailed. After the first astonishment she
+dashed gayly at her guest, emphasizing her welcome and wondering how her
+whereabouts had become known at Waterbath. Had not Mrs. Brigstock
+quitted that residence for the very purpose of laying her hand on the
+associate of Mrs. Gereth's misconduct? The spirit in which this hand was
+to be laid our young lady was yet to ascertain; but she was a person who
+could think ten thoughts at once&mdash;a circumstance which, even putting her
+present plight at its worst, gave her a great advantage over a person
+who required easy conditions for dealing even with one. The very
+vibration of the air, however, told her that whatever Mrs. Brigstock's
+spirit might originally have been, it had been sharply affected by the
+sight of Owen. He was essentially a surprise: she had reckoned with
+everything that concerned him but his presence. With that, in awkward
+silence, she was reckoning now, as Fleda could see, while she effected
+with friendly aid an embarrassed transit to the sofa. Owen would be
+useless, would be deplorable: that aspect of the case Fleda had taken in
+as well. Another aspect was that he would admire her, adore her, exactly
+in proportion as she herself should rise gracefully superior. Fleda felt
+for the first time free to let herself "go," as Mrs. Gereth had said,
+and she was full of the sense that to "go" meant now to aim straight at
+the effect of moving Owen to rapture at her simplicity and tact. It was
+her impression that he had no positive dislike of Mona's mother; but she
+couldn't entertain that notion without a glimpse of the implication that
+he had a positive dislike of Mrs. Brigstock's daughter. Mona's mother
+declined tea, declined a better seat, declined a cushion, declined to
+remove her boa: Fleda guessed that she had not come on purpose to be
+dry, but that the voice of the invaded room had itself given her the
+hint.</p>
+
+<p>"I just came on the mere chance," she said. "Mona found yesterday,
+somewhere, the card of invitation to your sister's marriage that you
+sent us, or your father sent us, some time ago. We couldn't be
+present&mdash;it was impossible; but as it had this address on it I said to
+myself that I might find you here."</p>
+
+<p>"I'm very glad to be at home," Fleda responded.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, that doesn't happen very often, does it?" Mrs. Brigstock looked
+round afresh at Fleda's home.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, I came back from Ricks last week. I shall be here now till I don't
+know when."</p>
+
+<p>"We thought it very likely you would have come back. We knew of course
+of your having been at Ricks. If I didn't find you I thought I might
+perhaps find Mr. Vetch," Mrs. Brigstock went on.</p>
+
+<p>"I'm sorry he's out. He's always out&mdash;all day long."</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Brigstock's round eyes grew rounder. "All day long?"</p>
+
+<p>"All day long," Fleda smiled.</p>
+
+<p>"Leaving you quite to yourself?"</p>
+
+<p>"A good deal to myself, but a little, to-day, as you see, to Mr.
+Gereth,&mdash;" and the girl looked at Owen to draw him into their
+sociability. For Mrs. Brigstock he had immediately sat down; but the
+movement had not corrected the sombre stiffness taking possession of him
+at the sight of her. Before he found a response to the appeal addressed
+to him Fleda turned again to her other visitor. "Is there any purpose
+for which you would like my father to call on you?"</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Brigstock received this question as if it were not to be
+unguardedly answered; upon which Owen intervened with pale irrelevance:
+"I wrote to Mona this morning of Miss Vetch's being in town; but of
+course the letter hadn't arrived when you left home."</p>
+
+<p>"No, it hadn't arrived. I came up for the night&mdash;I've several matters to
+attend to." Then looking with an intention of fixedness from one of her
+companions to the other, "I'm afraid I've interrupted your
+conversation," Mrs. Brigstock said. She spoke without effectual point,
+had the air of merely announcing the fact. Fleda had not yet been
+confronted with the question of the sort of person Mrs. Brigstock was;
+she had only been confronted with the question of the sort of person
+Mrs. Gereth scorned her for being. She was really, somehow, no sort of
+person at all, and it came home to Fleda that if Mrs. Gereth could see
+her at this moment she would scorn her more than ever. She had a face of
+which it was impossible to say anything but that it was pink, and a mind
+that it would be possible to describe only if one had been able to mark
+it in a similar fashion. As nature had made this organ neither green nor
+blue nor yellow, there was nothing to know it by: it strayed and bleated
+like an unbranded sheep. Fleda felt for it at this moment much of the
+kindness of compassion, since Mrs. Brigstock had brought it with her to
+do something for her that she regarded as delicate. Fleda was quite
+prepared to help it to perform, if she should be able to gather what it
+wanted to do. What she gathered, however, more and more, was that it
+wanted to do something different from what it had wanted to do in
+leaving Waterbath. There was still nothing to enlighten her more
+specifically in the way her visitor continued: "You must be very much
+taken up. I believe you quite espouse his dreadful quarrel."</p>
+
+<p>Fleda vaguely demurred. "His dreadful quarrel?"</p>
+
+<p>"About the contents of the house. Aren't you looking after them for
+him?"</p>
+
+<p>"She knows how awfully kind you've been to me," Owen said. He showed
+such discomfiture that he really gave away their situation; and Fleda
+found herself divided between the hope that he would take leave and the
+wish that he should see the whole of what the occasion might enable her
+to bring to pass for him.</p>
+
+<p>She explained to Mrs. Brigstock. "Mrs. Gereth, at Ricks, the other day,
+asked me particularly to see him for her."</p>
+
+<p>"And did she ask you also particularly to see him here in town?" Mrs.
+Brigstock's hideous bonnet seemed to argue for the unsophisticated
+truth; and it was on Fleda's lips to reply that such had indeed been
+Mrs. Gereth's request. But she checked herself, and before she could say
+anything else Owen had addressed their companion.</p>
+
+<p>"I made a point of letting Mona know that I should be here, don't you
+see? That's exactly what I wrote her this morning."</p>
+
+<p>"She would have had no doubt you would be here, if you had a chance,"
+Mrs. Brigstock returned. "If your letter had arrived it might have
+prepared me for finding you here at tea. In that case I certainly
+wouldn't have come."</p>
+
+<p>"I'm glad, then, it didn't arrive. Shouldn't you like him to go?" Fleda
+asked.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Brigstock looked at Owen and considered: nothing showed in her face
+but that it turned a deeper pink. "I should like him to go with <i>me</i>."
+There was no menace in her tone, but she evidently knew what she wanted.
+As Owen made no response to this Fleda glanced at him to invite him to
+assent; then, for fear that he wouldn't, and would thereby make his case
+worse, she took upon herself to declare that she was sure he would be
+very glad to meet such a wish. She had no sooner spoken than she felt
+that the words had a bad effect of intimacy: she had answered for him as
+if she had been his wife. Mrs. Brigstock continued to regard him as if
+she had observed nothing, and she continued to address Fleda: "I've not
+seen him for a long time&mdash;I've particular things to say to him."</p>
+
+<p>"So have I things to say to you, Mrs. Brigstock!" Owen interjected. With
+this he took up his hat as if for an immediate departure.</p>
+
+<p>The other visitor meanwhile turned to Fleda. "What is Mrs. Gereth going
+to do?"</p>
+
+<p>"Is that what you came to ask me?" Fleda demanded.</p>
+
+<p>"That and several other things."</p>
+
+<p>"Then you had much better let Mr. Gereth go, and stay by yourself and
+make me a pleasant visit. You can talk with him when you like, but it is
+the first time you've been to see me."</p>
+
+<p>This appeal had evidently a certain effect; Mrs. Brigstock visibly
+wavered. "I can't talk with him whenever I like," she returned; "he
+hasn't been near us since I don't know when. But there are things that
+have brought me here."</p>
+
+<p>"They are not things of any importance," Owen, to Fleda's surprise,
+suddenly asserted. He had not at first taken up Mrs. Brigstock's
+expression of a wish to carry him off: Fleda could see that the instinct
+at the bottom of this was that of standing by her, of seeming not to
+abandon her. But abruptly, all his soreness working within him, it had
+struck him that he should abandon her still more if he should leave her
+to be dealt with by her other visitor. "You must allow me to say, you
+know, Mrs. Brigstock, that I don't think you should come down on Miss
+Vetch about anything. It's very good of her to take the smallest
+interest in us and our horrid little squabble. If you want to talk about
+it, talk about it with <i>me</i>." He was flushed with the idea of protecting
+Fleda, of exhibiting his consideration for her. "I don't like your
+cross-questioning her, don't you see? She's as straight as a die: <i>I</i>'ll
+tell you all about her!" he declared with an excited laugh. "Please come
+off with me and let her alone."</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Brigstock, at this, became vivid at once; Fleda thought she looked
+most peculiar. She stood straight up, with a queer distention of her
+whole person and of everything in her face but her mouth, which she
+gathered into a small, tight orifice. Fleda was painfully divided; her
+joy was deep within, but it was more relevant to the situation that she
+should not appear to associate herself with the tone of familiarity in
+which Owen addressed a lady who had been, and was perhaps still, about
+to become his mother-in-law. She laid on Mrs. Brigstock's arm a
+repressive hand. Mrs. Brigstock, however, had already exclaimed on her
+having so wonderful a defender. "He speaks, upon my word, as if I had
+come here to be rude to you!"</p>
+
+<p>At this, grasping her hard, Fleda laughed; then she achieved the exploit
+of delicately kissing her. "I'm not in the least afraid to be alone with
+you, or of your tearing me to pieces. I'll answer any question that you
+can possibly dream of putting to me."</p>
+
+<p>"I'm the proper person to answer Mrs. Brigstock's questions," Owen broke
+in again, "and I'm not a bit less ready to meet them than you are." He
+was firmer than she had ever seen him: it was as if she had not known he
+could be so firm.</p>
+
+<p>"But she'll only have been here a few minutes. What sort of a visit is
+that?" Fleda cried.</p>
+
+<p>"It has lasted long enough for my purpose. There was something I wanted
+to know, but I think I know it now."</p>
+
+<p>"Anything you don't know I dare say I can tell you!" Owen observed as he
+impatiently smoothed his hat with the cuff of his coat.</p>
+
+<p>Fleda by this time desired immensely to keep his companion, but she saw
+she could do so only at the cost of provoking on his part a further
+exhibition of the sheltering attitude, which he exaggerated precisely
+because it was the first thing, since he had begun to "like" her, that
+he had been able frankly to do for her. It was not in her interest that
+Mrs. Brigstock should be more struck than she already was with that
+benevolence. "There may be things you know that I don't," she presently
+said to her, with a smile. "But I've a sort of sense that you're
+laboring under some great mistake."</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Brigstock, at this, looked into her eyes more deeply and yearningly
+than she had supposed Mrs. Brigstock could look; it was the flicker of a
+certain willingness to give her a chance. Owen, however, quickly spoiled
+everything. "Nothing is more probable than that Mrs. Brigstock is doing
+what you say; but there's no one in the world to whom you owe an
+explanation. I may owe somebody one&mdash;I dare say I do; but not you, no!"</p>
+
+<p>"But what if there's one that it's no difficulty at all for me to give?"
+Fleda inquired. "I'm sure that's the only one Mrs. Brigstock came to
+ask, if she came to ask any at all."</p>
+
+<p>Again the good lady looked hard at her young hostess. "I came, I
+believe, Fleda, just, you know, to plead with you."</p>
+
+<p>Fleda, with a bright face, hesitated a moment. "As if I were one of
+those bad women in a play?"</p>
+
+<p>The remark was disastrous. Mrs. Brigstock, on whom her brightness was
+lost, evidently thought it singularly free. She turned away, as from a
+presence that had really defined itself as objectionable, and Fleda had
+a vain sense that her good humor, in which there was an idea, was taken
+for impertinence, or at least for levity. Her allusion was improper,
+even if she herself wasn't; Mrs. Brigstock's emotion simplified: it came
+to the same thing. "I'm quite ready," that lady said to Owen rather
+mildly and woundedly. "I do want to speak to you very much."</p>
+
+<p>"I'm completely at your service." Owen held out his hand to Fleda.
+"Good-bye, Miss Vetch. I hope to see you again to-morrow." He opened the
+door for Mrs. Brigstock, who passed before the girl with an oblique,
+averted salutation. Owen and Fleda, while he stood at the door, then
+faced each other darkly and without speaking. Their eyes met once more
+for a long moment, and she was conscious there was something in hers
+that the darkness didn't quench, that he had never seen before and that
+he was perhaps never to see again. He stayed long enough to take it&mdash;to
+take it with a sombre stare that just showed the dawn of wonder; then he
+followed Mrs. Brigstock out of the house.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="XVI" id="XVI"></a>XVI</h2>
+
+
+<p>He had uttered the hope that he should see her the next day, but Fleda
+could easily reflect that he wouldn't see her if she were not there to
+be seen. If there was a thing in the world she desired at that moment,
+it was that the next day should have no point of resemblance with the
+day that had just elapsed. She accordingly aspired to an absence: she
+would go immediately down to Maggie. She ran out that evening and
+telegraphed to her sister, and in the morning she quitted London by an
+early train. She required for this step no reason but the sense of
+necessity. It was a strong personal need; she wished to interpose
+something, and there was nothing she could interpose but distance, but
+time. If Mrs. Brigstock had to deal with Owen she would allow Mrs.
+Brigstock the chance. To be there, to be in the midst of it, was the
+reverse of what she craved: she had already been more in the midst of it
+than had ever entered into her plan. At any rate she had renounced her
+plan; she had no plan now but the plan of separation. This was to
+abandon Owen, to give up the fine office of helping him back to his own;
+but when she had undertaken that office she had not foreseen that Mrs.
+Gereth would defeat it by a man&oelig;uvre so simple. The scene at her
+father's rooms had extinguished all offices, and the scene at her
+father's rooms was of Mrs. Gereth's producing. Owen, at all events, must
+now act for himself: he had obligations to meet, he had satisfactions to
+give, and Fleda fairly ached with the wish that he might be equal to
+them. She never knew the extent of her tenderness for him till she
+became conscious of the present force of her desire that he should be
+superior, be perhaps even sublime. She obscurely made out that
+superiority, that sublimity, mightn't after all be fatal. She closed her
+eyes and lived for a day or two in the mere beauty of confidence. It was
+with her on the short journey; it was with her at Maggie's; it glorified
+the mean little house in the stupid little town. Owen had grown larger
+to her: he would do, like a man, whatever he should have to do. He
+wouldn't be weak&mdash;not as she was: she herself was weak exceedingly.</p>
+
+<p>Arranging her few possessions in Maggie's fewer receptacles, she caught
+a glimpse of the bright side of the fact that her old things were not
+such a problem as Mrs. Gereth's. Picking her way with Maggie through the
+local puddles, diving with her into smelly cottages and supporting her,
+at smellier shops, in firmness over the weight of joints and the taste
+of cheese, it was still her own secret that was universally inter-woven
+In the puddles, the cottages, the shops she was comfortably alone with
+it; that comfort prevailed even while, at the evening meal, her
+brother-in-law invited her attention to a diagram, drawn with a fork on
+too soiled a tablecloth, of the scandalous drains of the Convalescent
+Home. To be alone with it she had come away from Ricks; and now she knew
+that to be alone with it she had come away from London. This advantage
+was of course menaced, but not immediately destroyed, by the arrival, on
+the second day, of the note she had been sure she should receive from
+Owen. He had gone to West Kensington and found her flown, but he had got
+her address from the little maid and then hurried to a club and written
+to her. "Why have you left me just when I want you most?" he demanded.
+The next words, it was true, were more reassuring on the question of his
+steadiness. "I don't know what your reason may be," they went on, "nor
+why you've not left a line for me; but I don't think you can feel that I
+did anything yesterday that it wasn't right for me to do. As regards
+Mrs. Brigstock, certainly, I just felt what was right and I did it. She
+had no business whatever to attack you that way, and I should have been
+ashamed if I had left her there to worry you. I won't have you worried
+by any one; no one shall be disagreeable to you but me. I didn't mean to
+be so yesterday, and I don't to-day; but I'm perfectly free now to want
+you, and I want you much more than you've allowed me to explain. You'll
+see if I'm not all right, if you'll let me come to you. Don't be
+afraid&mdash;I'll not hurt you nor trouble you. I give you my honor I'll not
+hurt any one. Only I <i>must</i> see you, on what I had to say to Mrs. B. She
+was nastier than I thought she could be, but I'm behaving like an angel.
+I assure you I'm all right&mdash;that's exactly what I want you to see. You
+owe me something, you know, for what you said you would do and haven't
+done; what your departure without a word gives me to understand&mdash;doesn't
+it?&mdash;that you definitely can't do. Don't simply forsake me. See me, if
+you only see me once. I shan't wait for any leave&mdash;I shall come down
+to-morrow. I've been looking into trains and find there's something that
+will bring me down just after lunch and something very good for getting
+me back. I won't stop long. For God's sake, be there."</p>
+
+<p>This communication arrived in the morning, but Fleda would still have
+had time to wire a protest. She debated on that alternative; then she
+read the note over and found in one phrase an exact statement of her
+duty. Owen's simplicity had expressed it, and her subtlety had nothing
+to answer. She owed him something for her obvious failure, and what she
+owed him was to receive him. If indeed she had known he would make this
+attempt she might have been held to have gained nothing by her flight.
+Well, she had gained what she had gained&mdash;she had gained the interval.
+She had no compunction for the greater trouble she should give the young
+man; it was now doubtless right that he should have as much trouble as
+possible. Maggie, who thought she was in her confidence, but was
+immensely not, had reproached her for having left Mrs. Gereth, and
+Maggie was just in this proportion gratified to hear of the visitor with
+whom, early in the afternoon, she would have to ask to be left alone.
+Maggie liked to see far, and now she could sit upstairs and rake the
+whole future. She had known that, as she familiarly said, there was
+something the matter with Fleda, and the value of that knowledge was
+augmented by the fact that there was apparently also something the
+matter with Mr. Gereth.</p>
+
+<p>Fleda, downstairs, learned soon enough what this was. It was simply
+that, as he announced the moment he stood before her, he was now all
+right. When she asked him what he meant by that state he replied that he
+meant he could practically regard himself henceforth as a free man: he
+had had at West Kensington, as soon as they got into the street, such a
+horrid scene with Mrs. Brigstock.</p>
+
+<p>"I knew what she wanted to say to me: that's why I was determined to get
+her off. I knew I shouldn't like it, but I was perfectly prepared," said
+Owen. "She brought it out as soon as we got round the corner; she asked
+me point-blank if I was in love with you."</p>
+
+<p>"And what did you say to that?"</p>
+
+<p>"That it was none of her business."</p>
+
+<p>"Ah," said Fleda, "I'm not so sure!"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, <i>I</i> am, and I'm the person most concerned. Of course I didn't use
+just those words: I was perfectly civil, quite as civil as she. But I
+told her I didn't consider she had a right to put me any such question.
+I said I wasn't sure that even Mona had, with the extraordinary line,
+you know, that Mona has taken. At any rate the whole thing, the way <i>I</i>
+put it, was between Mona and me; and between Mona and me, if she didn't
+mind, it would just have to remain."</p>
+
+<p>Fleda was silent a little. "All that didn't answer her question."</p>
+
+<p>"Then you think I ought to have told her?"</p>
+
+<p>Again our young lady reflected. "I think I'm rather glad you didn't."</p>
+
+<p>"I knew what I was about," said Owen. "It didn't strike me that she had
+the least right to come down on us that way and ask for explanations."</p>
+
+<p>Fleda looked very grave, weighing the whole matter. "I dare say that
+when she started, when she arrived, she didn't mean to 'come down.'"</p>
+
+<p>"What then did she mean to do?"</p>
+
+<p>"What she said to me just before she went: she meant to plead with me."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, I heard her!" said Owen. "But plead with you for what?"</p>
+
+<p>"For you, of course&mdash;to entreat me to give you up. She thinks me awfully
+designing&mdash;that I've taken some sort of possession of you."</p>
+
+<p>Owen stared. "You haven't lifted a finger! It's I who have taken
+possession."</p>
+
+<p>"Very true, you've done it all yourself." Fleda spoke gravely and
+gently, without a breath of coquetry. "But those are shades between
+which she's probably not obliged to distinguish. It's enough for her
+that we're singularly intimate."</p>
+
+<p>"I am, but you're not!" Owen exclaimed.</p>
+
+<p>Fleda gave a dim smile. "You make me at least feel that I'm learning to
+know you very well when I hear you say such a thing as that. Mrs.
+Brigstock came to get round me, to supplicate me," she went on; "but to
+find you there, looking so much at home, paying me a friendly call and
+shoving the tea-things about&mdash;that was too much for her patience. She
+doesn't know, you see, that I'm after all a decent girl. She simply made
+up her mind on the spot that I'm a very bad case."</p>
+
+<p>"I couldn't stand the way she treated you, and that was what I had to
+say to her," Owen returned.</p>
+
+<p>"She's simple and slow, but she's not a fool: I think she treated me, on
+the whole, very well." Fleda remembered how Mrs. Gereth had treated Mona
+when the Brigstocks came down to Poynton.</p>
+
+<p>Owen evidently thought her painfully perverse. "It was you who carried
+it off; you behaved like a brick. And so did I, I consider. If you only
+knew the difficulty I had! I told her you were the noblest and
+straightest of women."</p>
+
+<p>"That can hardly have removed her impression that there are things I put
+you up to."</p>
+
+<p>"It didn't," Owen replied with candor. "She said our relation, yours and
+mine, isn't innocent."</p>
+
+<p>"What did she mean by that?"</p>
+
+<p>"As you may suppose, I particularly inquired. Do you know what she had
+the cheek to tell me?" Owen asked. "She didn't better it much: she said
+she meant that it's excessively unnatural."</p>
+
+<p>Fleda considered afresh. "Well, it is!" she brought out at last.</p>
+
+<p>"Then, upon my honor, it's only you who make it so!" Her perversity was
+distinctly too much for him. "I mean you make it so by the way you keep
+me off."</p>
+
+<p>"Have I kept you off to-day?" Fleda sadly shook her head, raising her
+arms a little and dropping them.</p>
+
+<p>Her gesture of resignation gave him a pretext for catching at her hand,
+but before he could take it she had put it behind her. They had been
+seated together on Maggie's single sofa, and her movement brought her to
+her feet, while Owen, looking at her reproachfully, leaned back in
+discouragement. "What good does it do me to be here when I find you only
+a stone?"</p>
+
+<p>She met his eyes with all the tenderness she had not yet uttered, and
+she had not known till this moment how great was the accumulation.
+"Perhaps, after all," she risked, "there may be even in a stone still
+some little help for you."</p>
+
+<p>Owen sat there a minute staring at her. "Ah, you're beautiful, more
+beautiful than any one," he broke out, "but I'll be hanged if I can ever
+understand you! On Tuesday, at your father's, you were beautiful&mdash;as
+beautiful, just before I left, as you are at this instant. But the next
+day, when I went back, I found it had apparently meant nothing; and now,
+again, that you let me come here and you shine at me like an angel, it
+doesn't bring you an inch nearer to saying what I want you to say." He
+remained a moment longer in the same position; then he jerked himself
+up. "What I want you to say is that you like me&mdash;what I want you to say
+is that you pity me." He sprang up and came to her. "What I want you to
+say is that you'll <i>save</i> me!"</p>
+
+<p>Fleda hesitated. "Why do you need saving, when you announced to me just
+now that you're a free man?"</p>
+
+<p>He too hesitated, but he was not checked. "It's just for the reason that
+I'm free. Don't you know what I mean, Miss Vetch? I want you to marry
+me."</p>
+
+<p>Fleda, at this, put out her hand in charity; she held his own, which
+quickly grasped it a moment, and if he had described her as shining at
+him it may be assumed that she shone all the more in her deep, still
+smile. "Let me hear a little more about your freedom first," she said.
+"I gather that Mrs. Brigstock was not wholly satisfied with the way you
+disposed of her question."</p>
+
+<p>"I dare say she wasn't. But the less she's satisfied the more I'm free."</p>
+
+<p>"What bearing have <i>her</i> feelings, pray?" Fleda asked.</p>
+
+<p>"Why, Mona's much worse than her mother. She wants much more to give me
+up."</p>
+
+<p>"Then why doesn't she do it?"</p>
+
+<p>"She will, as soon as her mother gets home and tells her."</p>
+
+<p>"Tells her what?" Fleda inquired.</p>
+
+<p>"Why, that I'm in love with <i>you</i>!"</p>
+
+<p>Fleda debated. "Are you so very sure she will?"</p>
+
+<p>"Certainly I'm sure, with all the evidence I already have. That will
+finish her!" Owen declared.</p>
+
+<p>This made his companion thoughtful again. "Can you take such pleasure in
+her being 'finished'&mdash;a poor girl you've once loved?"</p>
+
+<p>Owen waited long enough to take in the question; then with a serenity
+startling even to her knowledge of his nature, "I don't think I can have
+<i>really</i> loved her, you know," he replied.</p>
+
+<p>Fleda broke into a laugh which gave him a surprise as visible as the
+emotion it testified to. "Then how am I to know that you 'really'
+love&mdash;anybody else?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, I'll show you that!" said Owen.</p>
+
+<p>"I must take it on trust," the girl pursued. "And what if Mona doesn't
+give you up?" she added.</p>
+
+<p>Owen was baffled but a few seconds; he had thought of everything. "Why,
+that's just where you come in."</p>
+
+<p>"To save you? I see. You mean I must get rid of her for you." His
+blankness showed for a little that he felt the chill of her cold logic;
+but as she waited for his rejoinder she knew to which of them it cost
+most. He gasped a minute, and that gave her time to say: "You see, Mr.
+Owen, how impossible it is to talk of such things yet!"</p>
+
+<p>Like lightning he had grasped her arm. "You mean you <i>will</i> talk of
+them?" Then as he began to take the flood of assent from her eyes: "You
+<i>will</i> listen to me? Oh, you dear, you dear&mdash;when, when?"</p>
+
+<p>"Ah, when it isn't mere misery!" The words had broken from her in a
+sudden loud cry, and what next happened was that the very sound of her
+pain upset her. She heard her own true note; she turned short away from
+him; in a moment she had burst into sobs; in another his arms were round
+her; the next she had let herself go so far that even Mrs. Gereth might
+have seen it. He clasped her, and she gave herself&mdash;she poured out her
+tears on his breast; something prisoned and pent throbbed and gushed;
+something deep and sweet surged up&mdash;something that came from far within
+and far off, that had begun with the sight of him in his indifference
+and had never had rest since then. The surrender was short, but the
+relief was long: she felt his lips upon her face and his arms tighten
+with his full divination. What she did, what she <i>had</i> done, she
+scarcely knew: she only was aware, as she broke from him again, of what
+had taken place in his own quick breast. What had taken place was that,
+with the click of a spring, he saw. He had cleared the high wall at a
+bound; they were together without a veil. She had not a shred of a
+secret left; it was as if a whirlwind had come and gone, laying low the
+great false front that she had built up stone by stone. The strangest
+thing of all was the momentary sense of desolation.</p>
+
+<p>"Ah, all the while you <i>cared</i>?" Owen read the truth with a wonder so
+great that it was visibly almost a sadness, a terror caused by his
+sudden perception of where the impossibility was not. That made it all
+perhaps elsewhere.</p>
+
+<p>"I cared, I cared, I cared!" Fleda moaned it as defiantly as if she were
+confessing a misdeed. "How couldn't I care? But you mustn't, you must
+never, never ask! It isn't for us to talk about!" she insisted. "Don't
+speak of it, don't speak!"</p>
+
+<p>It was easy indeed not to speak when the difficulty was to find words.
+He clasped his hands before her as he might have clasped them at an
+altar; his pressed palms shook together while he held his breath and
+while she stilled herself in the effort to come round again to the real
+and the right. He helped this effort, soothing her into a seat with a
+touch as light as if she had really been something sacred. She sank into
+a chair and he dropped before her on his knees; she fell back with
+closed eyes and he buried his face in her lap. There was no way to thank
+her but this act of prostration, which lasted, in silence, till she laid
+consenting hands on him, touched his head and stroked it, held it in her
+tenderness till he acknowledged his long density. He made the avowal
+seem only his&mdash;made her, when she rose again, raise him at last, softly,
+as if from the abasement of shame. If in each other's eyes now, however,
+they saw the truth, this truth, to Fleda, looked harder even than
+before&mdash;all the harder that when, at the very moment she recognized it,
+he murmured to her ecstatically, in fresh possession of her hands, which
+he drew up to his breast, holding them tight there with both his own:
+"I'm saved, I'm saved,&mdash;I <i>am</i>! I'm ready for anything. I have your
+word. Come!" he cried, as if from the sight of a response slower than he
+needed, and in the tone he so often had of a great boy at a great game.</p>
+
+<p>She had once more disengaged herself, with the private vow that he
+shouldn't yet touch her again. It was all too horribly soon&mdash;her sense
+of this was rapidly surging back. "We mustn't talk, we mustn't talk; we
+must <i>wait</i>!" she intensely insisted. "I don't know what you mean by
+your freedom; I don't see it, I don't feel it. Where is it yet, where,
+your freedom? If it's real there's plenty of time, and if it isn't
+there's more than enough. I hate myself," she protested, "for having
+anything to say about her: it's like waiting for dead men's shoes! What
+business is it of mine what she does? She has her own trouble and her
+own plan. It's too hideous to watch her and count on her!"</p>
+
+<p>Owen's face, at this, showed a reviving dread, the fear of some darksome
+process of her mind. "If you speak for yourself I can understand, but
+why is it hideous for <i>me</i>?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, I mean for myself!" Fleda said impatiently.</p>
+
+<p>"<i>I</i> watch her, <i>I</i> count on her: how can I do anything else? If I count
+on her to let me definitely know how we stand, I do nothing in life but
+what she herself has led straight up to. I never thought of asking you
+to 'get rid of her' for me, and I never would have spoken to you if I
+hadn't held that I <i>am</i> rid of her, that she has backed out of the whole
+thing. Didn't she do so from the moment she began to put it off? I had
+already applied for the license; the very invitations were half
+addressed. Who but she, all of a sudden, demanded an unnatural wait? It
+was none of <i>my</i> doing; I had never dreamed of anything but coming up to
+the scratch." Owen grew more and more lucid, and more confident of the
+effect of his lucidity. "She called it 'taking a stand,' to see what
+mother would do. I told her mother would do what I would make her do;
+and to that she replied that she would like to see me make her first. I
+said I would arrange that everything should be all right, and she said
+she really preferred to arrange it herself. It was a flat refusal to
+trust me in the smallest degree. Why then had she pretended so
+tremendously to care for me? And of course, at present," said Owen, "she
+trusts me, if possible, still less."</p>
+
+<p>Fleda paid this statement the homage of a minute's muteness. "As to
+that, naturally, she has reason."</p>
+
+<p>"Why on earth has she reason?" Then, as his companion, moving away,
+simply threw up her hands, "I never looked at you&mdash;not to call
+looking&mdash;till she had regularly driven me to it," he went on. "I know
+what I'm about. I do assure you I'm all right!"</p>
+
+<p>"You're not all right&mdash;you're all wrong!" Fleda cried in despair. "You
+mustn't stay here, you mustn't!" she repeated with clear decision. "You
+make me say dreadful things, and I feel as if I made <i>you</i> say them."
+But before he could reply she took it up in another tone. "Why in the
+world, if everything had changed, didn't you break off?"</p>
+
+<p>"I?&mdash;" The inquiry seemed to have moved him to stupefaction. "Can you
+ask me that question when I only wanted to please you? Didn't you seem
+to show me, in your wonderful way, that that was exactly how? I didn't
+break off just on purpose to leave it to <i>her</i>. I didn't break off so
+that there shouldn't be a thing to be said against me."</p>
+
+<p>The instant after her challenge Fleda had faced him again in
+self-reproof. "There <i>isn't</i> a thing to be said against you, and I don't
+know what nonsense you make me talk! You <i>have</i> pleased me, and you've
+been right and good, and it's the only comfort, and you must go.
+Everything must come from Mona, and if it doesn't come we've said
+entirely too much. You must leave me alone&mdash;forever."</p>
+
+<p>"Forever?" Owen gasped.</p>
+
+<p>"I mean unless everything is different."</p>
+
+<p>"Everything <i>is</i> different&mdash;when I <i>know</i>!"</p>
+
+<p>Fleda winced at what he knew; she made a wild gesture which seemed to
+whirl it out of the room. The mere allusion was like another embrace.
+"You know nothing&mdash;and you must go and wait! You mustn't break down at
+this point."</p>
+
+<p>He looked about him and took up his hat: it was as if, in spite of
+frustration, he had got the essence of what he wanted and could afford
+to agree with her to the extent of keeping up the forms. He covered her
+with his fine, simple smile, but made no other approach. "Oh, I'm so
+awfully happy!" he exclaimed.</p>
+
+<p>She hesitated: she would only be impeccable even though she should have
+to be sententious. "You'll be happy if you're perfect!" she risked.</p>
+
+<p>He laughed out at this, and she wondered if, with a new-born acuteness,
+he saw the absurdity of her speech, and that no one was happy just
+because no one could be what she so lightly prescribed. "I don't pretend
+to be perfect, but I shall find a letter to-night!"</p>
+
+<p>"So much the better, if it's the kind of one you desire." That was the
+most she could say, and having made it sound as dry as possible she
+lapsed into a silence so pointed as to deprive him of all pretext for
+not leaving her. Still, nevertheless, he stood there, playing with his
+hat and filling the long pause with a strained and anxious smile. He
+wished to obey her thoroughly, to appear not to presume on any advantage
+he had won from her; but there was clearly something he longed for
+beside. While he showed this by hanging on she thought of two other
+things. One of these was that his countenance, after all, failed to bear
+out his description of his bliss. As for the other, it had no sooner
+come into her head than she found it seated, in spite of her resolution,
+on her lips. It took the form of an inconsequent question. "When did you
+say Mrs. Brigstock was to have gone back?"</p>
+
+<p>Owen stared. "To Waterbath? She was to have spent the night in town,
+don't you know? But when she left me, after our talk, I said to myself
+that she would take an evening train. I know I made her want to get
+home."</p>
+
+<p>"Where did you separate?" Fleda asked.</p>
+
+<p>"At the West Kensington station&mdash;she was going to Victoria. I had walked
+with her there, and our talk was all on the way."</p>
+
+<p>Fleda pondered a moment. "If she did go back that night you would have
+heard from Waterbath by this time."</p>
+
+<p>"I don't know," said Owen. "I thought I might hear this morning."</p>
+
+<p>"She can't have gone back," Fleda declared. "Mona would have written on
+the spot."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh yes, she <i>will</i> have written bang off!" Owen cheerfully conceded.</p>
+
+<p>Fleda thought again. "Then, even in the event of her mother's not having
+got home till the morning, you would have had your letter at the latest
+to-day. You see she has had plenty of time."</p>
+
+<p>Owen hesitated; then, "Oh, she's all right!" he laughed. "I go by Mrs.
+Brigstock's certain effect on her&mdash;the effect of the temper the old lady
+showed when we parted. Do you know what she asked me?" he sociably
+continued. "She asked me in a kind of nasty manner if I supposed you
+'really' cared anything about me. Of course I told her I supposed you
+didn't&mdash;not a solitary rap. How could I suppose you <i>do</i>, with your
+extraordinary ways? It doesn't matter; I could see she thought I lied."</p>
+
+<p>"You should have told her, you know, that I had seen you in town only
+that one time," Fleda observed.</p>
+
+<p>"By Jove, I did&mdash;for <i>you</i>! It was only for you."</p>
+
+<p>Something in this touched the girl so that for a moment she could not
+trust herself to speak. "You're an honest man," she said at last. She
+had gone to the door and opened it. "Good-bye."</p>
+
+<p>Even yet, however, he hung back; and she remembered how, at the end of
+his hour at Ricks, she had been put to it to get him out of the house.
+He had in general a sort of cheerful slowness which helped him at such
+times, though she could now see his strong fist crumple his big, stiff
+gloves as if they had been paper. "But even if there's no letter&mdash;" he
+began. He began, but there he left it.</p>
+
+<p>"You mean, even if she doesn't let you off? Ah, you ask me too much!"
+Fleda spoke from the tiny hall, where she had taken refuge between the
+old barometer and the old mackintosh. "There are things too utterly for
+yourselves alone. How can I tell? What do I know? Good-bye, good-bye! If
+she doesn't let you off, it will be because she <i>is</i> attached to you."</p>
+
+<p>"She's not, she's not: there's nothing in it! Doesn't a fellow
+know?&mdash;except with <i>you</i>!" Owen ruefully added. With this he came out of
+the room, lowering his voice to secret supplication, pleading with her
+really to meet him on the ground of the negation of Mona. It was this
+betrayal of his need of support and sanction that made her
+retreat&mdash;harden herself in the effort to save what might remain of all
+she had given, given probably for nothing. The very vision of him as he
+thus morally clung to her was the vision of a weakness somewhere in the
+core of his bloom, a blessed manly weakness of which, if she had only
+the valid right, it would be all a sweetness to take care. She faintly
+sickened, however, with the sense that there was as yet no valid right
+poor Owen could give. "You can take it from my honor, you know," he
+whispered, "that she loathes me."</p>
+
+<p>Fleda had stood clutching the knob of Maggie's little painted
+stair-rail; she took, on the stairs, a step backward. "Why then doesn't
+she prove it in the only clear way?"</p>
+
+<p>"She <i>has</i> proved it. Will you believe it if you see the letter?"</p>
+
+<p>"I don't want to see any letter," said Fleda. "You'll miss your train."</p>
+
+<p>Facing him, waving him away, she had taken another upward step; but he
+sprang to the side of the stairs and brought his hand, above the
+banister, down hard on her wrist. "Do you mean to tell me that I must
+marry a woman I hate?"</p>
+
+<p>From her step she looked down into his raised face. "Ah, you see it's
+not true that you're free!" She seemed almost to exult. "It's not
+true&mdash;it's not true!"</p>
+
+<p>He only, at this, like a buffeting swimmer, gave a shake of his head and
+repeated his question. "Do you mean to tell me I must marry such a
+woman?"</p>
+
+<p>Fleda hesitated; he held her fast. "No. Anything is better than that."</p>
+
+<p>"Then, in God's name, what must I do?"</p>
+
+<p>"You must settle that with her. You mustn't break faith. Anything is
+better than that. You must at any rate be utterly sure. She <i>must</i> love
+you&mdash;how can she help it? <i>I</i> wouldn't give you up!" said Fleda. She
+spoke in broken bits, panting out her words. "The great thing is to keep
+faith. Where <i>is</i> a man if he doesn't? If he doesn't he may be so cruel.
+So cruel, so cruel, so cruel!" Fleda repeated. "I couldn't have a hand
+in <i>that</i>, you know: that's my position&mdash;that's mine. You offered her
+marriage: it's a tremendous thing for her." Then looking at him another
+moment, "<i>I</i> wouldn't give you up!" she said again. He still had hold of
+her arm; she took in his blank alarm. With a quick dip of her face she
+reached his hand with her lips, pressing them to the back of it with a
+force that doubled the force of her words. "Never, never, never!" she
+cried; and before he could succeed in seizing her she had turned and,
+scrambling up the stairs, got away from him even faster than she had got
+away from him at Ricks.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="XVII" id="XVII"></a>XVII</h2>
+
+
+<p>Ten days after his visit she received a communication from Mrs.
+Gereth&mdash;a telegram of eight words, exclusive of signature and date.
+"Come up immediately and stay with me here"&mdash;it was characteristically
+sharp, as Maggie said; but, as Maggie added, it was also
+characteristically kind. "Here" was an hotel in London, and Maggie had
+embraced a condition of life which already began to produce in her some
+yearning for hotels in London. She would have responded in an instant,
+and she was surprised that her sister seemed to hesitate. Fleda's
+hesitation, which lasted but an hour, was expressed in that young lady's
+own mind by the reflection that in obeying her friend's summons she
+shouldn't know what she should be "in for." Her friend's summons,
+however, was but another name for her friend's appeal; and Mrs. Gereth's
+bounty had laid her under obligations more sensible than any reluctance.
+In the event&mdash;that is at the end of her hour&mdash;she testified to her
+gratitude by taking the train and to her mistrust by leaving her
+luggage. She went as if she had gone up for the day. In the train,
+however, she had another thoughtful hour, during which it was her
+mistrust that mainly deepened. She felt as if for ten days she had sat
+in darkness, looking to the east for a dawn that had not yet glimmered.
+Her mind had lately been less occupied with Mrs. Gereth; it had been so
+exceptionally occupied with Mona. If the sequel was to justify Owen's
+prevision of Mrs. Brigstock's action upon her daughter, this action was
+at the end of a week as much a mystery as ever. The stillness, all
+round, had been exactly what Fleda desired, but it gave her for the time
+a deep sense of failure, the sense of a sudden drop from a height at
+which she had all things beneath her. She had nothing beneath her now;
+she herself was at the bottom of the heap. No sign had reached her from
+Owen&mdash;poor Owen, who had clearly no news to give about his precious
+letter from Waterbath. If Mrs. Brigstock had hurried back to obtain that
+this letter should be written, Mrs. Brigstock might then have spared
+herself so great an inconvenience. Owen had been silent for the best of
+all reasons&mdash;the reason that he had had nothing in life to say. If the
+letter had not been written he would simply have had to introduce some
+large qualification into his account of his freedom. He had left his
+young friend under her refusal to listen to him until he should be able,
+on the contrary, to extend that picture; and his present submission was
+all in keeping with the rigid honesty that his young friend had
+prescribed.</p>
+
+<p>It was this that formed the element through which Mona loomed large;
+Fleda had enough imagination, a fine enough feeling for life, to be
+impressed with such an image of successful immobility. The massive
+maiden at Waterbath <i>was</i> successful from the moment she could entertain
+her resentments as if they had been poor relations who needn't put her
+to expense. She was a magnificent dead weight; there was something
+positive and portentous in her quietude. "What game are they all
+playing?" poor Fleda could only ask; for she had an intimate conviction
+that Owen was now under the roof of his betrothed. That was stupefying
+if he really hated Mona; and if he didn't really hate her what had
+brought him to Raphael Road and to Maggie's? Fleda had no real light,
+but she felt that to account for the absence of any result of their last
+meeting would take a supposition of the full sacrifice to charity that
+she had held up before him. If he had gone to Waterbath it had been
+simply because he had to go. She had as good as told him that he would
+have to go; that this was an inevitable incident of his keeping perfect
+faith&mdash;faith so literal that the smallest subterfuge would always be a
+reproach to him. When she tried to remember that it was for herself he
+was taking his risk, she felt how weak a way that was of expressing
+Mona's supremacy. There would be no need of keeping him up if there were
+nothing to keep him up to. Her eyes grew wan as she discerned in the
+impenetrable air that Mona's thick outline never wavered an inch. She
+wondered fitfully what Mrs. Gereth had by this time made of it, and
+reflected with a strange elation that the sand on which the mistress of
+Ricks had built a momentary triumph was quaking beneath the surface. As
+The Morning Post still held its peace, she would be, of course, more
+confident; but the hour was at hand at which Owen would have absolutely
+to do either one thing or the other. To keep perfect faith was to inform
+against his mother, and to hear the police at her door would be Mrs.
+Gereth's awakening. How much she was beguiled Fleda could see from her
+having been for a whole month quite as deep and dark as Mona. She had
+let her young friend alone because of the certitude, cultivated at
+Ricks, that Owen had done the opposite. He had done the opposite indeed,
+but much good had that brought forth! To have sent for her now, Fleda
+felt, was from this point of view wholly natural: she had sent for her
+to show at last how much she had scored. If, however, Owen was really at
+Waterbath the refutation of that boast was easy.</p>
+
+<p>Fleda found Mrs. Gereth in modest apartments and with an air of fatigue
+in her distinguished face&mdash;a sign, as she privately remarked, of the
+strain of that effort to be discreet of which she herself had been
+having the benefit. It was a constant feature of their relation that
+this lady could make Fleda blench a little, and that the effect
+proceeded from the intense pressure of her confidence. If the confidence
+had been heavy even when the girl, in the early flush of devotion, had
+been able to feel herself most responsive, it drew her heart into her
+mouth now that she had reserves and conditions, now that she couldn't
+simplify with the same bold hand as her protectress. In the very
+brightening of the tired look, and at the moment of their embrace, Fleda
+felt on her shoulders the return of the load, so that her spirit frankly
+quailed as she asked herself what she had brought up from her trusted
+seclusion to support it. Mrs. Gereth's free manner always made a joke of
+weakness, and there was in such a welcome a richness, a kind of familiar
+nobleness, that suggested shame to a harried conscience. Something had
+happened, she could see, and she could also see, in the bravery that
+seemed to announce it had changed everything, a formidable assumption
+that what had happened was what a healthy young woman must like. The
+absence of luggage had made this young woman feel meagre even before her
+companion, taking in the bareness at a second glance, exclaimed upon it
+and roundly rebuked her. Of course she had expected her to stay.</p>
+
+<p>Fleda thought best to show bravery too, and to show it from the first.
+"What you expected, dear Mrs. Gereth, is exactly what I came up to
+ascertain. It struck me as right to do that first. I mean to ascertain,
+without making preparations."</p>
+
+<p>"Then you'll be so good as to make them on the spot!" Mrs. Gereth was
+most emphatic. "You're going abroad with me."</p>
+
+<p>Fleda wondered, but she also smiled. "To-night&mdash;to-morrow?"</p>
+
+<p>"In as few days as possible. That's all that's left for me now." Fleda's
+heart, at this, gave a bound; she wondered to what particular difference
+in Mrs. Gereth's situation as last known to her it was an allusion.
+"I've made my plan," her friend continued: "I go for at least a year. We
+shall go straight to Florence; we can manage there. I of course don't
+look to you, however," she added, "to stay with me all that time. That
+will require to be settled. Owen will have to join us as soon as
+possible; he may not be quite ready to get off with us. But I'm
+convinced it's quite the right thing to go. It will make a good change;
+it will put in a decent interval."</p>
+
+<p>Fleda listened; she was deeply mystified. "How kind you are to me!" she
+presently said. The picture suggested so many questions that she
+scarcely knew which to ask first. She took one at a venture. "You really
+have it from Mr. Gereth that he'll give us his company?"</p>
+
+<p>If Mr. Gereth's mother smiled in response to this, Fleda knew that her
+smile was a tacit criticism of such a form of reference to her son.
+Fleda habitually spoke of him as Mr. Owen, and it was a part of her
+present vigilance to appear to have relinquished that right. Mrs.
+Gereth's manner confirmed a certain impression of her pretending to more
+than she felt; her very first words had conveyed it, and it reminded
+Fleda of the conscious courage with which, weeks before, the lady had
+met her visitor's first startled stare at the clustered spoils of
+Poynton. It was her practice to take immensely for granted whatever she
+wished. "Oh, if you'll answer for him, it will do quite as well!" she
+said. Then she put her hands on the girl's shoulders and held them at
+arm's length, as if to shake them a little, while in the depths of her
+shining eyes Fleda discovered something obscure and unquiet. "You bad,
+false thing, why didn't you tell me?" Her tone softened her harshness,
+and her visitor had never had such a sense of her indulgence. Mrs.
+Gereth could show patience; it was a part of the general bribe, but it
+was also like the handing in of a heavy bill before which Fleda could
+only fumble in a penniless pocket. "You must perfectly have known at
+Ricks, and yet you practically denied it. That's why I call you bad and
+false!" It was apparently also why she again almost roughly kissed her.</p>
+
+<p>"I think that before I answer you I had better know what you're talking
+about," Fleda said.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Gereth looked at her with a slight increase of hardness. "You've
+done everything you need for modesty, my dear! If he's sick with love of
+you, you haven't had to wait for me to inform you."</p>
+
+<p>Fleda hesitated. "Has he informed <i>you</i>, dear Mrs. Gereth?"</p>
+
+<p>Dear Mrs. Gereth smiled sweetly. "How could he, when our situation is
+such that he communicates with me only through you, and that you are so
+tortuous you conceal everything?"</p>
+
+<p>"Didn't he answer the note in which you let him know that I was in
+town?" Fleda asked.</p>
+
+<p>"He answered it sufficiently by rushing off on the spot to see you."</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Gereth met that allusion with a prompt firmness that made almost
+insolently light of any ground of complaint, and Fleda's own sense of
+responsibility was now so vivid that all resentments turned
+comparatively pale. She had no heart to produce a grievance; she could
+only, left as she was with the little mystery on her hands, produce,
+after a moment, a question. "How then do you come to know that your son
+has ever thought&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"That he would give his ears to get you?" Mrs. Gereth broke in. "I had a
+visit from Mrs. Brigstock."</p>
+
+<p>Fleda opened her eyes. "She went down to Ricks?"</p>
+
+<p>"The day after she had found Owen at your feet. She knows everything."</p>
+
+<p>Fleda shook her head sadly; she was more startled than she cared to
+show. This odd journey of Mrs. Brigstock's, which, with a simplicity
+equal for once to Owen's, she had not divined, now struck her as having
+produced the hush of the last ten days. "There are things she doesn't
+know!" she presently exclaimed.</p>
+
+<p>"She knows he would do anything to marry you."</p>
+
+<p>"He hasn't told her so," Fleda said.</p>
+
+<p>"No, but he has told you. That's better still!" laughed Mrs. Gereth. "My
+dear child," she went on with an air that affected the girl as a sort of
+blind profanity, "don't try to make yourself out better than you are.
+<i>I</i> know what you are. I haven't lived with you so much for nothing.
+You're not quite a saint in heaven yet. Lord, what a creature you'd have
+thought me in my good time! But you do like it, fortunately, you idiot.
+You're pale with your passion, you sweet thing. That's exactly what I
+wanted to see. I can't for the life of me think where the shame comes
+in." Then with a finer significance, a look that seemed to Fleda
+strange, she added: "It's all right."</p>
+
+<p>"I've seen him but twice," said Fleda.</p>
+
+<p>"But twice?" Mrs. Gereth still smiled.</p>
+
+<p>"On the occasion, at papa's, that Mrs. Brigstock told you of, and one
+day, since then, down at Maggie's."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, those things are between yourselves, and you seem to me both poor
+creatures at best." Mrs. Gereth spoke with a rich humor which tipped
+with light for an instant a real conviction. "I don't know what you've
+got in your veins: you absurdly exaggerated the difficulties. But enough
+is as good as a feast, and when once I get you abroad together&mdash;!" She
+checked herself as if from excess of meaning; what might happen when she
+should get them abroad together was to be gathered only from the way she
+slowly rubbed her hands.</p>
+
+<p>The gesture, however, made the promise so definite that for a moment her
+companion was almost beguiled. But there was nothing to account, as yet,
+for the wealth of Mrs. Gereth's certitude: the visit of the lady of
+Waterbath appeared but half to explain it. "Is it permitted to be
+surprised," Fleda deferentially asked, "at Mrs. Brigstock's thinking it
+would help her to see you?"</p>
+
+<p>"It's never permitted to be surprised at the aberrations of born fools,"
+said Mrs. Gereth. "If a cow should try to calculate, that's the kind of
+happy thought she'd have. Mrs. Brigstock came down to plead with me."</p>
+
+<p>Fleda mused a moment. "That's what she came to do with <i>me</i>," she then
+honestly returned. "But what did she expect to get of you, with your
+opposition so marked from the first?"</p>
+
+<p>"She didn't know I want <i>you</i>, my dear. It's a wonder, with all my
+violence&mdash;the gross publicity I've given my desires. But she's as stupid
+as an owl&mdash;she doesn't feel your charm."</p>
+
+<p>Fleda felt herself flush slightly, but she tried to smile. "Did you tell
+her all about it? Did you make her understand you want me?"</p>
+
+<p>"For what do you take me? I wasn't such a donkey."</p>
+
+<p>"So as not to aggravate Mona?" Fleda suggested.</p>
+
+<p>"So as not to aggravate Mona, naturally. We've had a narrow course to
+steer, but thank God we're at last in the open!"</p>
+
+<p>"What do you call the open, Mrs. Gereth?" Fleda demanded. Then as the
+other faltered: "Do you know where Mr. Owen is to-day?"</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Gereth stared. "Do you mean he's at Waterbath? Well, that's your
+own affair. I can bear it if <i>you</i> can."</p>
+
+<p>"Wherever he is, I can bear it," Fleda said. "But I haven't the least
+idea where he is."</p>
+
+<p>"Then you ought to be ashamed of yourself!" Mrs. Gereth broke out with a
+change of note that showed how deep a passion underlay everything she
+had said. The poor woman, catching her companion's hand, however, the
+next moment, as if to retract something of this harshness, spoke more
+patiently. "Don't you understand, Fleda, how immensely, how devotedly,
+I've trusted you?" Her tone was indeed a supplication.</p>
+
+<p>Fleda was infinitely shaken; she was silent a little. "Yes, I
+understand. Did she go to you to complain of me?"</p>
+
+<p>"She came to see what she could do. She had been tremendously upset, the
+day before, by what had taken place at your father's, and she had posted
+down to Ricks on the inspiration of the moment. She hadn't meant it on
+leaving home; it was the sight of you closeted there with Owen that had
+suddenly determined her. The whole story, she said, was written in your
+two faces: she spoke as if she had never seen such an exhibition. Owen
+was on the brink, but there might still be time to save him, and it was
+with this idea she had bearded me in my den. 'What won't a mother do,
+you know?'&mdash;that was one of the things she said. What wouldn't a mother
+do indeed? I thought I had sufficiently shown her what! She tried to
+break me down by an appeal to my good nature, as she called it, and from
+the moment she opened on <i>you</i>, from the moment she denounced Owen's
+falsity, I was as good-natured as she could wish. I understood that it
+was a plea for mere mercy, that you and he between you were killing her
+child. Of course I was delighted that Mona should be killed, but I was
+studiously kind to Mrs. Brigstock. At the same time I was honest, I
+didn't pretend to anything I couldn't feel. I asked her why the marriage
+hadn't taken place months ago, when Owen was perfectly ready; and I
+showed her how completely that fatuous mistake on Mona's part cleared
+his responsibility. It was she who had killed <i>him</i>&mdash;it was she who had
+destroyed his affection, his illusions. Did she want him now when he was
+estranged, when he was disgusted, when he had a sore grievance? She
+reminded me that Mona had a sore grievance too, but she admitted that
+she hadn't come to me to speak of that. What she had come to me for was
+not to get the old things back, but simply to get Owen. What she wanted
+was that I would, in simple pity, see fair play. Owen had been awfully
+bedeviled&mdash;she didn't call it that, she called it 'misled'&mdash;but it was
+simply you who had bedeviled him. He would be all right still if I would
+see that you were out of the way. She asked me point-blank if it was
+possible I could want him to marry you."</p>
+
+<p>Fleda had listened in unbearable pain and growing terror, as if her
+interlocutress, stone by stone, were piling some fatal mass upon her
+breast. She had the sense of being buried alive, smothered in the mere
+expansion of another will; and now there was but one gap left to the
+air. A single word, she felt, might close it, and with the question that
+came to her lips as Mrs. Gereth paused she seemed to herself to ask, in
+cold dread, for her doom. "What did you say to that?" she inquired.</p>
+
+<p>"I was embarrassed, for I saw my danger&mdash;the danger of her going home
+and saying to Mona that I was backing you up. It had been a bliss to
+learn that Owen had really turned to you, but my joy didn't put me off
+my guard. I reflected intensely for a few seconds; then I saw my issue."</p>
+
+<p>"Your issue?" Fleda murmured.</p>
+
+<p>"I remembered how you had tied my hands about saying a word to Owen."</p>
+
+<p>Fleda wondered. "And did you remember the little letter that, with your
+hands tied, you still succeeded in writing to him?"</p>
+
+<p>"Perfectly; my little letter was a model of reticence. What I remembered
+was all that in those few words I forbade myself to say. I had been an
+angel of delicacy&mdash;I had effaced myself like a saint. It was not for me
+to have done all that and then figure to such a woman as having done the
+opposite. Besides, it was none of her business."</p>
+
+<p>"Is that what you said to her?" Fleda asked.</p>
+
+<p>"I said to her that her question revealed a total misconception of the
+nature of my present relations with my son. I said to her that I had no
+relations with him at all, and that nothing had passed between us for
+months. I said to her that my hands were spotlessly clean of any attempt
+to make him make up to you. I said to her that I had taken from Poynton
+what I had a right to take, but had done nothing else in the world. I
+was determined that if I had bit my tongue off to oblige you I would at
+least have the righteousness that my sacrifice gave me."</p>
+
+<p>"And was Mrs. Brigstock satisfied with your answer?"</p>
+
+<p>"She was visibly relieved."</p>
+
+<p>"It was fortunate for you," said Fleda, "that she's apparently not aware
+of the manner in which, almost under her nose, you advertised me to him
+at Poynton."</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Gereth appeared to recall that scene; she smiled with a serenity
+remarkably effective as showing how cheerfully used she had grown to
+invidious allusions to it. "How should she be aware of it?"</p>
+
+<p>"She would if Owen had described your outbreak to Mona."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, but he didn't describe it. All his instinct was to conceal it from
+Mona. He wasn't conscious, but he was already in love with you!" Mrs.
+Gereth declared.</p>
+
+<p>Fleda shook her head wearily. "No&mdash;I was only in love with him!"</p>
+
+<p>Here was a faint illumination with which Mrs. Gereth instantly mingled
+her fire. "You dear old wretch!" she exclaimed; and she again, with
+ferocity, embraced her young friend.</p>
+
+<p>Fleda submitted like a sick animal: she would submit to everything now.
+"Then what further passed?"</p>
+
+<p>"Only that she left me thinking she had got something."</p>
+
+<p>"And what had she got?"</p>
+
+<p>"Nothing but her luncheon. But <i>I</i> got everything!"</p>
+
+<p>"Everything?" Fleda quavered.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Gereth, struck apparently by something in her tone, looked at her
+from a tremendous height. "Don't fail me now!"</p>
+
+<p>It sounded so like a menace that, with a full divination at last, the
+poor girl fell weakly into a chair. "What on earth have you done?"</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Gereth stood there in all the glory of a great stroke. "I've
+settled you." She filled the room, to Fleda's scared vision, with the
+glare of her magnificence. "I've sent everything back."</p>
+
+<p>"Everything?" Fleda gasped.</p>
+
+<p>"To the smallest snuff-box. The last load went yesterday. The same
+people did it. Poor little Ricks is empty." Then as if, for a crowning
+splendor, to check all deprecation, "They're yours, you goose!" Mrs.
+Gereth concluded, holding up her handsome head and rubbing her white
+hands. Fleda saw that there were tears in her deep eyes.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="XVIII" id="XVIII"></a>XVIII</h2>
+
+
+<p>She was slow to take in the announcement, but when she had done so she
+felt it to be more than her cup of bitterness would hold. Her bitterness
+was her anxiety, the taste of which suddenly sickened her. What had she
+become, on the spot, but a traitress to her friend? The treachery
+increased with the view of the friend's motive, a motive magnificent as
+a tribute to her value. Mrs. Gereth had wished to make sure of her and
+had reasoned that there would be no such way as by a large appeal to her
+honor. If it be true, as men have declared, that the sense of honor is
+weak in women, some of the bearings of this stroke might have thrown a
+light on the question. What was now, at all events, put before Fleda was
+that she had been made sure of, for the greatness of the surrender
+imposed an obligation as great. There was an expression she had heard
+used by young men with whom she danced: the only word to fit Mrs.
+Gereth's intention was that Mrs. Gereth had designed to "fetch" her. It
+was a calculated, it was a crushing bribe; it looked her in the eyes and
+said simply: "That's what I do for you!" What Fleda was to do in return
+required no pointing out. The sense, at present, of how little she had
+done made her almost cry aloud with pain; but her first endeavor, in the
+face of the fact, was to keep such a cry from reaching her companion.
+How little she had done Mrs. Gereth didn't yet know, and possibly there
+would be still some way of turning round before the discovery. On her
+own side too Fleda had almost made one: she had known she was wanted,
+but she had not after all conceived how magnificently much. She had been
+treated by her friend's act as a conscious prize, but what made her a
+conscious prize was only the power the act itself imputed to her. As
+high, bold diplomacy it dazzled and carried her off her feet. She
+admired the noble risk of it, a risk Mrs. Gereth had faced for the
+utterly poor creature that the girl now felt herself. The change it
+instantly wrought in her was, moreover, extraordinary: it transformed at
+a touch her emotion on the subject of concessions. A few weeks earlier
+she had jumped at the duty of pleading for them, practically quarreling
+with the lady of Ricks for her refusal to restore what she had taken.
+She had been sore with the wrong to Owen, she had bled with the wounds
+of Poynton; now however, as she heard of the replenishment of the void
+that had so haunted her, she came as near sounding an alarm as if from
+the deck of a ship she had seen a person she loved jump into the sea.
+Mrs. Gereth had become in a flash the victim; poor little Ricks had been
+laid bare in a night. If Fleda's feeling about the old things had taken
+precipitate form the form would have been a frantic command. It was
+indeed for mere want of breath that she didn't shout: "Oh, stop
+them&mdash;it's no use; bring them back&mdash;it's too late!" And what most kept
+her breathless was her companion's very grandeur. Fleda distinguished as
+never before the purity of such a passion; it made Mrs. Gereth august
+and almost sublime. It was absolutely unselfish&mdash;she cared nothing for
+mere possession. She thought solely and incorruptibly of what was best
+for the things; she had surrendered them to the presumptive care of the
+one person of her acquaintance who felt about them as she felt herself,
+and whose long lease of the future would be the nearest approach that
+could be compassed to committing them to a museum. Now it was indeed
+that Fleda knew what rested on her; now it was also that she measured as
+if for the first time Mrs. Gereth's view of the natural influence of a
+fine acquisition. She had adopted the idea of blowing away the last
+doubt of what her young friend would gain, of making good still more
+than she was obliged to make it the promise of weeks before. It was one
+thing for the girl to have heard that in a certain event restitution
+would be made; it was another for her to see the condition, with a noble
+trust, treated in advance as performed, and to be able to feel that she
+should have only to open a door to find every old piece in every old
+corner. To have played such a card was therefore, practically, for Mrs.
+Gereth, to have won the game. Fleda had certainly to recognize that, so
+far as the theory of the matter went, the game had been won. Oh, she had
+been made sure of!</p>
+
+<p>She couldn't, however, succeed for so very many minutes in deferring her
+exposure. "Why didn't you wait, dearest? Ah, why didn't you wait?"&mdash;if
+that inconsequent appeal kept rising to her lips to be cut short before
+it was spoken, this was only because at first the humility of gratitude
+helped her to gain time, enabled her to present herself very honestly as
+too overcome to be clear. She kissed her companion's hands, she did
+homage at her feet, she murmured soft snatches of praise, and yet in the
+midst of it all was conscious that what she really showed most was the
+wan despair at her heart. She saw Mrs. Gereth's glimpse of this despair
+suddenly widen, heard the quick chill of her voice pierce through the
+false courage of endearments. "Do you mean to tell me at such an hour as
+this that you've really lost him?"</p>
+
+<p>The tone of the question made the idea a possibility for which Fleda had
+nothing from this moment but terror. "I don't know, Mrs. Gereth; how can
+I say?" she asked. "I've not seen him for so long; as I told you just
+now, I don't even know where he is. That's by no fault of his," she
+hurried on: "he would have been with me every day if I had consented.
+But I made him understand, the last time, that I'll receive him again
+only when he's able to show me that his release has been complete and
+definite. Oh, he can't yet, don't you see, and that's why he hasn't been
+back. It's far better than his coming only that we should both be
+miserable. When he does come he'll be in a better position. He'll be
+tremendously moved by the splendid thing you've done. I know you wish me
+to feel that you've done it as much for me as for Owen, but your having
+done it for me is just what will delight him most! When he hears of it,"
+said Fleda, in desperate optimism, "when he hears of it&mdash;" There indeed,
+regretting her advance, she quite broke down. She was wholly powerless
+to say what Owen would do when he heard of it. "I don't know what he
+won't make of you and how he won't hug you!" she had to content herself
+with lamely declaring. She had drawn Mrs. Gereth to a sofa with a vague
+instinct of pacifying her and still, after all, gaining time; but it was
+a position in which her great duped benefactress, portentously patient
+again during this demonstration, looked far from inviting a "hug." Fleda
+found herself tricking out the situation with artificial flowers, trying
+to talk even herself into the fancy that Owen, whose name she now made
+simple and sweet, might come in upon them at any moment. She felt an
+immense need to be understood and justified; she averted her face in
+dread from all that she might have to be forgiven. She pressed on her
+companion's arm as if to keep her quiet till she should really know, and
+then, after a minute, she poured out the clear essence of what in
+happier days had been her "secret." "You mustn't think I don't adore him
+when I've told him so to his face. I love him so that I'd die for him&mdash;I
+love him so that it's horrible. Don't look at me therefore as if I had
+not been kind, as if I had not been as tender as if he were dying and my
+tenderness were what would save him. Look at me as if you believe me, as
+if you feel what I've been through. Darling Mrs. Gereth, I could kiss
+the ground he walks on. I haven't a rag of pride; I used to have, but
+it's gone. I used to have a secret, but every one knows it now, and any
+one who looks at me can say, I think, what's the matter with me. It's
+not so very fine, my secret, and the less one really says about it the
+better; but I want you to have it from me because I was stiff before. I
+want you to see for yourself that I've been brought as low as a girl can
+very well be. It serves me right," Fleda laughed, "if I was ever proud
+and horrid to you! I don't know what you wanted me, in those days at
+Ricks, to do, but I don't think you can have wanted much more than what
+I've done. The other day at Maggie's I did things that made me,
+afterwards, think of you! I don't know what girls may do; but if he
+doesn't know that there isn't an inch of me that isn't his&mdash;!" Fleda
+sighed as if she couldn't express it; she piled it up, as she would have
+said; holding Mrs. Gereth with dilated eyes, she seemed to sound her for
+the effect of these words. "It's idiotic," she wearily smiled; "it's so
+strange that I'm almost angry for it, and the strangest part of all is
+that it isn't even happiness. It's anguish&mdash;it was from the first; from
+the first there was a bitterness and a kind of dread. But I owe you
+every word of the truth. You don't do him justice, either: he's a dear,
+I assure you he's a dear. I'd trust him to the last breath; I don't
+think you really know him. He's ever so much cleverer than he makes a
+show of; he's remarkable in his own shy way. You told me at Ricks that
+you wanted me to let myself go, and I've 'gone' quite far enough to
+discover as much as that, as well as all sorts of other delightful
+things about him. You'll tell me I make myself out worse than I am,"
+said the girl, feeling more and more in her companion's attitude a
+quality that treated her speech as a desperate rigmarole and even
+perhaps as a piece of cold immodesty. She wanted to make herself out
+"bad"&mdash;it was a part of her justification; but it suddenly occurred to
+her that such a picture of her extravagance imputed a want of gallantry
+to the young man. "I don't care for anything you think," she declared,
+"because Owen, don't you know, sees me as I am. He's so kind that it
+makes up for everything!"</p>
+
+<p>This attempt at gayety was futile; the silence with which, for a minute,
+her adversary greeted her troubled plea brought home to her afresh that
+she was on the bare defensive. "Is it a part of his kindness never to
+come near you?" Mrs. Gereth inquired at last. "Is it a part of his
+kindness to leave you without an inkling of where he is?" She rose again
+from where Fleda had kept her down; she seemed to tower there in the
+majesty of her gathered wrong. "Is it a part of his kindness that, after
+I've toiled as I've done for six days, and with my own weak hands, which
+I haven't spared, to denude myself, in your interest, to that point that
+I've nothing left, as I may say, but what I have on my back&mdash;is it a
+part of his kindness that you're not even able to produce him for me?"</p>
+
+<p>There was a high contempt in this which was for Owen quite as much, and
+in the light of which Fleda felt that her effort at plausibility had
+been mere groveling. She rose from the sofa with an humiliated sense of
+rising from ineffectual knees. That discomfort, however, lived but an
+instant: it was swept away in a rush of loyalty to the absent. She
+herself could bear his mother's scorn; but to avert it from his sweet
+innocence she broke out with a quickness that was like the raising of an
+arm. "Don't blame him&mdash;don't blame him: he'd do anything on earth for
+me! It was I," said Fleda, eagerly, "who sent him back to her; I made
+him go; I pushed him out of the house; I declined to have anything to
+say to him except on another footing."</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Gereth stared as at some gross material ravage. "Another footing?
+What other footing?"</p>
+
+<p>"The one I've already made so clear to you: my having it in black and
+white, as you may say, from her that she freely gives him up."</p>
+
+<p>"Then you think he lies when he tells you that he has recovered his
+liberty?"</p>
+
+<p>Fleda hesitated a moment; after which she exclaimed with a certain hard
+pride: "He's enough in love with me for anything!"</p>
+
+<p>"For anything, apparently, except to act like a man and impose his
+reason and his will on your incredible folly. For anything except to put
+an end, as any man worthy of the name would have put it, to your
+systematic, to your idiotic perversity. What are you, after all, my
+dear, I should like to know, that a gentleman who offers you what Owen
+offers should have to meet such wonderful exactions, to take such
+extraordinary precautions about your sweet little scruples?" Her
+resentment rose to a strange insolence which Fleda took full in the face
+and which, for the moment at least, had the horrible force to present to
+her vengefully a showy side of the truth. It gave her a blinding glimpse
+of lost alternatives. "I don't know what to think of him," Mrs. Gereth
+went on; "I don't know what to call him: I'm so ashamed of him that I
+can scarcely speak of him even to <i>you</i>. But indeed I'm so ashamed of
+you both together that I scarcely know in common decency where to look."
+She paused to give Fleda the full benefit of this remarkable statement;
+then she exclaimed: "Any one but a jackass would have tucked you under
+his arm and marched you off to the Registrar!"</p>
+
+<p>Fleda wondered; with her free imagination she could wonder even while
+her cheek stung from a slap. "To the Registrar?"</p>
+
+<p>"That would have been the sane, sound, immediate course to adopt. With a
+grain of gumption you'd both instantly have felt it. <i>I</i> should have
+found a way to take you, you know, if I'd been what Owen's supposed to
+be. <i>I</i> should have got the business over first; the rest could come
+when you liked! Good God, girl, your place was to stand before me as a
+woman honestly married. One doesn't know what one has hold of in
+touching you, and you must excuse my saying that you're literally
+unpleasant to me to meet as you are. Then at least we could have talked,
+and Owen, if he had the ghost of a sense of humor, could have snapped
+his fingers at your refinements."</p>
+
+<p>This stirring speech affected our young lady as if it had been the shake
+of a tambourine borne towards her from a gypsy dance: her head seemed to
+go round and she felt a sudden passion in her feet. The emotion,
+however, was but meagrely expressed in the flatness with which she heard
+herself presently say: "I'll go to the Registrar now."</p>
+
+<p>"Now?" Magnificent was the sound Mrs. Gereth threw into this
+monosyllable. "And pray who's to take you?" Fleda gave a colorless
+smile, and her companion continued: "Do you literally mean that you
+can't put your hand upon him?" Fleda's wan grimace appeared to irritate
+her; she made a short, imperious gesture. "Find him for me, you
+fool&mdash;<i>find</i> him for me!"</p>
+
+<p>"What do you want of him," Fleda sadly asked, "feeling as you do to both
+of us?"</p>
+
+<p>"Never mind how I feel, and never mind what I say when I'm furious!"
+Mrs. Gereth still more incisively added. "Of course I cling to you, you
+wretches, or I shouldn't suffer as I do. What I want of him is to see
+that he takes you; what I want of him is to go with you myself to the
+place." She looked round the room as if, in feverish haste, for a mantle
+to catch up; she bustled to the window as if to spy out a cab: she would
+allow half an hour for the job. Already in her bonnet, she had snatched
+from the sofa a garment for the street: she jerked it on as she came
+back. "Find him, find him," she repeated; "come straight out with me, to
+try, at least, to get at him!"</p>
+
+<p>"How can I get at him? He'll come when he's ready," Fleda replied.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Gereth turned on her sharply. "Ready for what? Ready to see me
+ruined without a reason or a reward?"</p>
+
+<p>Fleda was silent; the worst of it all was that there was something
+unspoken between them. Neither of them dared to utter it, but the
+influence of it was in the girl's tone when she returned at last, with
+great gentleness: "Don't be harsh to me&mdash;I'm very unhappy." The words
+produced a visible impression on Mrs. Gereth, who held her face averted
+and sent off through the window a gaze that kept pace with the long
+caravan of her treasures. Fleda knew she was watching it wind up the
+avenue of Poynton&mdash;Fleda participated indeed fully in the vision; so
+that after a little the most consoling thing seemed to her to add: "I
+don't see why in the world you take so for granted that he's, as you
+say, 'lost.'"</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Gereth continued to stare out of the window, and her stillness
+denoted some success in controlling herself. "If he's not lost, why are
+you unhappy?"</p>
+
+<p>"I'm unhappy because I torment you, and you don't understand me."</p>
+
+<p>"No, Fleda, I don't understand you," said Mrs. Gereth, finally facing
+her again. "I don't understand you at all, and it's as if you and Owen
+were of quite another race and another flesh. You make me feel very
+old-fashioned and simple and bad. But you must take me as I am, since
+you take so much else <i>with</i> me!" She spoke now with the drop of her
+resentment, with a dry and weary calm. "It would have been better for me
+if I had never known you," she pursued, "and certainly better if I
+hadn't taken such an extraordinary fancy to you. But that too was
+inevitable: everything, I suppose, is inevitable. It was all my own
+doing&mdash;you didn't run after me: I pounced on you and caught you up.
+You're a stiff little beggar, in spite of your pretty manners: yes,
+you're hideously misleading. I hope you feel how handsome it is of me to
+recognize the independence of your character. It was your clever
+sympathy that did it&mdash;your extraordinary feeling for those accursed
+vanities. You were sharper about them than any one I had ever known, and
+that was a thing I simply couldn't resist. Well," the poor lady
+concluded after a pause, "you see where it has landed us!"</p>
+
+<p>"If you'll go for him yourself, I'll wait here," said Fleda.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Gereth, holding her mantle together, appeared for a while to
+consider.</p>
+
+<p>"To his club, do you mean?"</p>
+
+<p>"Isn't it there, when he's in town, that he has a room? He has at
+present no other London address," Fleda said: "it's there one writes to
+him."</p>
+
+<p>"How do <i>I</i> know, with my wretched relations with him?" Mrs. Gereth
+asked.</p>
+
+<p>"Mine have not been quite so bad as that," Fleda desperately smiled.
+Then she added: "His silence, <i>her</i> silence, our hearing nothing at
+all&mdash;what are these but the very things on which, at Poynton and at
+Ricks, you rested your assurance that everything is at an end between
+them?"</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Gereth looked dark and void. "Yes, but I hadn't heard from you then
+that you could invent nothing better than, as you call it, to send him
+back to her."</p>
+
+<p>"Ah, but, on the other hand, you've learned from them what you didn't
+know&mdash;you've learned by Mrs. Brigstock's visit that he cares for me."
+Fleda found herself in the position of availing herself of optimistic
+arguments that she formerly had repudiated; her refutation of her
+companion had completely changed its ground.</p>
+
+<p>She was in a fever of ingenuity and painfully conscious, on behalf of
+her success, that her fever was visible. She could herself see the
+reflection of it glitter in Mrs. Gereth's sombre eyes.</p>
+
+<p>"You plunge me in stupefaction," that lady answered, "and at the same
+time you terrify me. Your account of Owen is inconceivable, and yet I
+don't know what to hold on by. He cares for you, it does appear, and yet
+in the same breath you inform me that nothing is more possible than that
+he's spending these days at Waterbath. Excuse me if I'm so dull as not
+to see my way in such darkness. If he's at Waterbath he doesn't care for
+you. If he cares for you he's not at Waterbath."</p>
+
+<p>"Then where is he?" poor Fleda helplessly wailed. She caught herself up,
+however; she did her best to be brave and clear. Before Mrs. Gereth
+could reply, with due obviousness, that this was a question for her not
+to ask, but to answer, she found an air of assurance to say: "You
+simplify far too much. You always did and you always will. The tangle of
+life is much more intricate than you've ever, I think, felt it to be.
+You slash into it," cried Fleda finely, "with a great pair of shears,
+you nip at it as if you were one of the Fates! If Owen's at Waterbath
+he's there to wind everything up."</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Gereth shook her head with slow austerity. "You don't believe a
+word you're saying. I've frightened you, as you've frightened me: you're
+whistling in the dark to keep up our courage. I do simplify, doubtless,
+if to simplify is to fail to comprehend the insanity of a passion that
+bewilders a young blockhead with bugaboo barriers, with hideous and
+monstrous sacrifices. I can only repeat that you're beyond me. Your
+perversity's a thing to howl over. However," the poor woman continued
+with a break in her voice, a long hesitation and then the dry triumph of
+her will, "I'll never mention it to you again! Owen I can just make out;
+for Owen <i>is</i> a blockhead. Owen's a blockhead," she repeated with a
+quiet, tragic finality, looking straight into Fleda's eyes. "I don't
+know why you dress up so the fact that he's disgustingly weak."</p>
+
+<p>Fleda hesitated; at last, before her companion's, she lowered her look.
+"Because I love him. It's because he's weak that he needs me," she
+added.</p>
+
+<p>"That was why his father, whom he exactly resembles, needed <i>me</i>. And I
+didn't fail his father," said Mrs. Gereth. She gave Fleda a moment to
+appreciate the remark; after which she pursued: "Mona Brigstock isn't
+weak; she's stronger than you!"</p>
+
+<p>"I never thought she was weak," Fleda answered. She looked vaguely round
+the room with a new purpose: she had lost sight of her umbrella.</p>
+
+<p>"I did tell you to let yourself go, but it's clear enough that you
+really haven't," Mrs. Gereth declared. "If Mona has got him&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>Fleda had accomplished her search; her interlocutress paused. "If Mona
+has got him?" the girl inquired, tightening the umbrella.</p>
+
+<p>"Well," said Mrs. Gereth profoundly, "it will be clear enough that Mona
+<i>has</i>."</p>
+
+<p>"Has let herself go?"</p>
+
+<p>"Has let herself go." Mrs. Gereth spoke as if she saw it in every
+detail.</p>
+
+<p>Fleda felt the tone and finished her preparation; then she went and
+opened the door. "We'll look for him together," she said to her friend,
+who stood a moment taking in her face. "They may know something about
+him at the Colonel's."</p>
+
+<p>"We'll go there." Mrs. Gereth had picked up her gloves and her purse.
+"But the first thing," she went on, "will be to wire to Poynton."</p>
+
+<p>"Why not to Waterbath at once?" Fleda asked.</p>
+
+<p>Her companion hesitated. "In <i>your</i> name?"</p>
+
+<p>"In my name. I noticed a place at the corner."</p>
+
+<p>While Fleda held the door open Mrs. Gereth drew on her gloves. "Forgive
+me," she presently said. "Kiss me," she added.</p>
+
+<p>Fleda, on the threshold, kissed her; then they went out.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="XIX" id="XIX"></a>XIX</h2>
+
+
+<p>In the place at the corner, on the chance of its saving time, Fleda
+wrote her telegram&mdash;wrote it in silence under Mrs. Gereth's eye and then
+in silence handed it to her. "I send this to Waterbath, on the
+possibility of your being there, to ask you to come to me." Mrs. Gereth
+held it a moment, read it more than once; then keeping it, and with her
+eyes on her companion, seemed to consider. There was the dawn of a
+kindness in her look; Fleda perceived in it, as if as the reward of
+complete submission, a slight relaxation of her rigor.</p>
+
+<p>"Wouldn't it perhaps after all be better," she asked, "before doing
+this, to see if we can make his whereabouts certain?"</p>
+
+<p>"Why so? It will be always so much done," said Fleda. "Though I'm poor,"
+she added with a smile, "I don't mind the shilling."</p>
+
+<p>"The shilling's <i>my</i> shilling," said Mrs. Gereth.</p>
+
+<p>Fleda stayed her hand. "No, no&mdash;I'm superstitious."</p>
+
+<p>"Superstitious?"</p>
+
+<p>"To succeed, it must be all me!"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, if that will make it succeed!" Mrs. Gereth took back her
+shilling, but she still kept the telegram. "As he's most probably not
+there&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"If he shouldn't be there," Fleda interrupted, "there will be no harm
+done."</p>
+
+<p>"If he 'shouldn't be' there!" Mrs. Gereth ejaculated. "Heaven help us,
+how you assume it!"</p>
+
+<p>"I'm only prepared for the worst. The Brigstocks will simply send any
+telegram on."</p>
+
+<p>"Where will they send it?"</p>
+
+<p>"Presumably to Poynton."</p>
+
+<p>"They'll read it first," said Mrs. Gereth.</p>
+
+<p>"Read it?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, Mona will. She'll open it under the pretext of having it repeated;
+and then she'll probably do nothing. She'll keep it as a proof of your
+immodesty."</p>
+
+<p>"What of that?" asked Fleda.</p>
+
+<p>"You don't mind her seeing it?"</p>
+
+<p>Rather musingly and absently Fleda shook her head. "I don't mind
+anything."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, then, that's all right," said Mrs. Gereth as if she had only
+wanted to feel that she had been irreproachably considerate. After this
+she was gentler still, but she had another point to clear up. "Why have
+you given, for a reply, your sister's address?"</p>
+
+<p>"Because if he <i>does</i> come to me he must come to me there. If that
+telegram goes," said Fleda, "I return to Maggie's to-night."</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Gereth seemed to wonder at this. "You won't receive him here with
+me?"</p>
+
+<p>"No, I won't receive him here with you. Only where I received him
+last&mdash;only there again." She showed her companion that as to that she
+was firm.</p>
+
+<p>But Mrs. Gereth had obviously now had some practice in following queer
+movements prompted by queer feelings. She resigned herself, though she
+fingered the paper a moment longer. She appeared to hesitate; then she
+brought out: "You couldn't then, if I release you, make your message a
+little stronger?"</p>
+
+<p>Fleda gave her a faint smile. "He'll come if he can."</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Gereth met fully what this conveyed; with decision she pushed in
+the telegram. But she laid her hand quickly upon another form and with
+still greater decision wrote another message. "From <i>me</i>, this," she
+said to Fleda when she had finished: "to catch him possibly at Poynton.
+Will you read it?"</p>
+
+<p>Fleda turned away. "Thank you."</p>
+
+<p>"It's stronger than yours."</p>
+
+<p>"I don't care," said Fleda, moving to the door. Mrs. Gereth, having paid
+for the second missive, rejoined her, and they drove together to Owen's
+club, where the elder lady alone got out. Fleda, from the hansom,
+watched through the glass doors her brief conversation with the
+hall-porter and then met in silence her return with the news that he had
+not seen Owen for a fortnight and was keeping his letters till called
+for. These had been the last orders; there were a dozen letters lying
+there. He had no more information to give, but they would see what they
+could find at Colonel Gereth's. To any connection with this inquiry,
+however, Fleda now roused herself to object, and her friend had indeed
+to recognize that on second thoughts it couldn't be quite to the taste
+of either of them to advertise in the remoter reaches of the family that
+they had forfeited the confidence of the master of Poynton. The letters
+lying at the club proved effectively that he was not in London, and this
+was the question that immediately concerned them. Nothing could concern
+them further till the answers to their telegrams should have had time to
+arrive. Mrs. Gereth had got back into the cab, and, still at the door of
+the club, they sat staring at their need of patience. Fleda's eyes
+rested, in the great hard street, on passing figures that struck her as
+puppets pulled by strings. After a little the driver challenged them
+through the hole in the top. "Anywhere in particular, ladies?"</p>
+
+<p>Fleda decided. "Drive to Euston, please."</p>
+
+<p>"You won't wait for what we may hear?" Mrs. Gereth asked.</p>
+
+<p>"Whatever we hear, I must go." As the cab went on she added: "But I
+needn't drag <i>you</i> to the station."</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Gereth was silent a moment; then "Nonsense!" she sharply replied.</p>
+
+<p>In spite of this sharpness they were now almost equally and almost
+tremulously mild; though their mildness took mainly the form of an
+inevitable sense of nothing left to say. It was the unsaid that occupied
+them&mdash;the thing that for more than an hour they had been going round and
+round without naming it. Much too early for Fleda's train, they
+encountered at the station a long half-hour to wait. Fleda made no
+further allusion to Mrs. Gereth's leaving her; their dumbness, with the
+elapsing minutes, grew to be in itself a reconstituted bond. They slowly
+paced the great gray platform, and presently Mrs. Gereth took the girl's
+arm and leaned on it with a hard demand for support. It seemed to Fleda
+not difficult for each to know of what the other was thinking&mdash;to know
+indeed that they had in common two alternating visions, one of which, at
+moments, brought them as by a common impulse to a pause. This was the
+one that was fixed; the other filled at times the whole space and then
+was shouldered away. Owen and Mona glared together out of the gloom and
+disappeared, but the replenishment of Poynton made a shining, steady
+light. The old splendor was there again, the old things were in their
+places. Our friends looked at them with an equal yearning; face to face,
+on the platform, they counted them in each other's eyes. Fleda had come
+back to them by a road as strange as the road they themselves had
+followed. The wonder of their great journeys, the prodigy of this second
+one, was the question that made her occasionally stop. Several times she
+uttered it, asked how this and that difficulty had been met. Mrs. Gereth
+replied with pale lucidity&mdash;was naturally the person most familiar with
+the truth that what she undertook was always somehow achieved. To do it
+was to do it&mdash;she had more than one kind of magnificence. She confessed
+there, audaciously enough, to a sort of arrogance of energy, and Fleda,
+going on again, her inquiry more than answered and her arm rendering
+service, flushed, in her diminished identity, with the sense that such a
+woman was great.</p>
+
+<p>"You do mean literally everything, to the last little miniature on the
+last little screen?"</p>
+
+<p>"I mean literally everything. Go over them with the catalogue!"</p>
+
+<p>Fleda went over them while they walked again; she had no need of the
+catalogue. At last she spoke once more: "Even the Maltese cross?"</p>
+
+<p>"Even the Maltese cross. Why not that as well as everything
+else?&mdash;especially as I remembered how you like it."</p>
+
+<p>Finally, after an interval, the girl exclaimed: "But the mere fatigue of
+it, the exhaustion of such a feat! I drag you to and fro here while you
+must be ready to drop."</p>
+
+<p>"I'm very, very tired." Mrs. Gereth's slow head-shake was tragic. "I
+couldn't do it again."</p>
+
+<p>"I doubt if they'd bear it again!"</p>
+
+<p>"That's another matter: they'd bear it if I could. There won't have
+been, this time either, a shake or a scratch. But I'm too tired&mdash;I very
+nearly don't care."</p>
+
+<p>"You must sit down, then, till I go," said Fleda. "We must find a
+bench."</p>
+
+<p>"No. I'm tired of <i>them</i>: I'm not tired of you. This is the way for you
+to feel most how much I rest on you." Fleda had a compunction, wondering
+as they continued to stroll whether it was right after all to leave her.
+She believed, however, that if the flame might for the moment burn low,
+it was far from dying out; an impression presently confirmed by the way
+Mrs. Gereth went on: "But one's fatigue is nothing. The idea under which
+one worked kept one up. For you I <i>could</i>&mdash;I can still. Nothing will
+have mattered if <i>she's</i> not there."</p>
+
+<p>There was a question that this imposed, but Fleda at first found no
+voice to utter it: it was the thing that, between them, since her
+arrival, had been so consciously and vividly unsaid. Finally she was
+able to breathe: "And if she <i>is</i> there&mdash;if she's there already?"</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Gereth's rejoinder too hung back; then when it came&mdash;from sad eyes
+as well as from lips barely moved&mdash;it was unexpectedly merciful. "It
+will be very hard." That was all, now; and it was poignantly simple. The
+train Fleda was to take had drawn up; the girl kissed her as if in
+farewell. Mrs. Gereth submitted, then after a little brought out: "If we
+<i>have</i> lost&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"If we have lost?" Fleda repeated as she paused again.</p>
+
+<p>"You'll all the same come abroad with me?"</p>
+
+<p>"It will seem very strange to me if you want me. But whatever you ask,
+whatever you need, that I will always do."</p>
+
+<p>"I shall need your company," said Mrs. Gereth. Fleda wondered an instant
+if this were not practically a demand for penal submission&mdash;for a
+surrender that, in its complete humility, would be a long expiation. But
+there was none of the latent chill of the vindictive in the way Mrs.
+Gereth pursued: "We can always, as time goes on, talk of them together."</p>
+
+<p>"Of the old things?" Fleda had selected a third-class compartment: she
+stood a moment looking into it and at a fat woman with a basket who had
+already taken possession. "Always?" she said, turning again to her
+companion. "Never!" she exclaimed. She got into the carriage, and two
+men with bags and boxes immediately followed, blocking up door and
+window so long that when she was able to look out again Mrs. Gereth had
+gone.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="XX" id="XX"></a>XX</h2>
+
+
+<p>There came to her at her sister's no telegram in answer to her own: the
+rest of that day and the whole of the next elapsed without a word either
+from Owen or from his mother. She was free, however, to her infinite
+relief, from any direct dealing with suspense, and conscious, to her
+surprise, of nothing that could show her, or could show Maggie and her
+brother-in-law, that she was excited. Her excitement was composed of
+pulses as swift and fine as the revolutions of a spinning top: she
+supposed she was going round, but she went round so fast that she
+couldn't even feel herself move. Her emotion occupied some quarter of
+her soul that had closed its doors for the day and shut out even her own
+sense of it; she might perhaps have heard something if she had pressed
+her ear to a partition. Instead of that she sat with her patience in a
+cold, still chamber from which she could look out in quite another
+direction. This was to have achieved an equilibrium to which she
+couldn't have given a name: indifference, resignation, despair were the
+terms of a forgotten tongue. The time even seemed not long, for the
+stages of the journey were the items of Mrs. Gereth's surrender. The
+detail of that performance, which filled the scene, was what Fleda had
+now before her eyes. The part of her loss that she could think of was
+the reconstituted splendor of Poynton. It was the beauty she was most
+touched by that, in tons, she had lost&mdash;the beauty that, charged upon
+big wagons, had safely crept back to its home. But the loss was a gain
+to memory and love; it was to her too, at last, that, in condonation of
+her treachery, the old things had crept back. She greeted them with open
+arms; she thought of them hour after hour; they made a company with
+which solitude was warm and a picture that, at this crisis, overlaid
+poor Maggie's scant mahogany. It was really her obliterated passion that
+had revived, and with it an immense assent to Mrs. Gereth's early
+judgment of her. She too, she felt, was of the religion, and like any
+other of the passionately pious she could worship now even in the
+desert. Yes, it was all for her; far round as she had gone she had been
+strong enough: her love had gathered in the spoils. She wanted indeed no
+catalogue to count them over; the array of them, miles away, was
+complete; each piece, in its turn, was perfect to her; she could have
+drawn up a catalogue from memory. Thus again she lived with them, and
+she thought of them without a question of any personal right. That they
+might have been, that they might still be hers, that they were perhaps
+already another's, were ideas that had too little to say to her. They
+were nobody's at all&mdash;too proud, unlike base animals and humans, to be
+reducible to anything so narrow. It was Poynton that was theirs; they
+had simply recovered their own. The joy of that for them was the source
+of the strange peace in which the girl found herself floating.</p>
+
+<p>It was broken on the third day by a telegram from Mrs. Gereth. "Shall be
+with you at 11.30&mdash;don't meet me at station." Fleda turned this over,
+but was sufficiently expert not to disobey the injunction. She had only
+an hour to take in its meaning, but that hour was longer than all the
+previous time. If Maggie had studied her convenience the day Owen came,
+Maggie was also at the present juncture a miracle of refinement.
+Increasingly and resentfully mystified, in spite of all reassurance, by
+the impression that Fleda suffered more than she gained from the
+grandeur of the Gereths, she had it at heart to exemplify the perhaps
+truer distinction of nature that characterized the house of Vetch. She
+was not, like poor Fleda, at every one's beck, and the visitor was to
+see no more of her than what the arrangement of luncheon might
+tantalizingly show. Maggie described herself to her sister as intending
+for a just provocation even the understanding she had had with her
+husband that he also should remain invisible. Fleda accordingly awaited
+alone the subject of so many man&oelig;uvres&mdash;a period that was slightly
+prolonged even after the drawing-room door, at 11.30, was thrown open.
+Mrs. Gereth stood there with a face that spoke plain, but no sound fell
+from her till the withdrawal of the maid, whose attention had
+immediately attached itself to the rearrangement of a window-blind and
+who seemed, while she bustled at it, to contribute to the pregnant
+silence; before the duration of which, however, she retreated with a
+sudden stare.</p>
+
+<p>"He has done it," said Mrs. Gereth, turning her eyes avoidingly but not
+unperceivingly about her and in spite of herself dropping an opinion
+upon the few objects in the room. Fleda, on her side, in her silence,
+observed how characteristically she looked at Maggie's possessions
+before looking at Maggie's sister. The girl understood and at first had
+nothing to say; she was still dumb while Mrs. Gereth selected, with
+hesitation, a seat less distasteful than the one that happened to be
+nearest. On the sofa near the window the poor woman finally showed what
+the two past days had done for the age of her face. Her eyes at last met
+Fleda's. "It's the end."</p>
+
+<p>"They're married?"</p>
+
+<p>"They're married."</p>
+
+<p>Fleda came to the sofa in obedience to the impulse to sit down by her;
+then paused before her while Mrs. Gereth turned up a dead gray mask. A
+tired old woman sat there with empty hands in her lap. "I've heard
+nothing," said Fleda. "No answer came."</p>
+
+<p>"That's the only answer. It's the answer to everything." So Fleda saw;
+for a minute she looked over her companion's head and far away. "He
+wasn't at Waterbath; Mrs. Brigstock must have read your telegram and
+kept it. But mine, the one to Poynton, brought something. 'We are
+here&mdash;what do you want?'" Mrs. Gereth stopped as if with a failure of
+voice; on which Fleda sank upon the sofa and made a movement to take her
+hand. It met no response; there could be no attenuation. Fleda waited;
+they sat facing each other like strangers. "I wanted to go down," Mrs.
+Gereth presently continued. "Well, I went."</p>
+
+<p>All the girl's effort tended for the time to a single aim&mdash;that of
+taking the thing with outward detachment, speaking of it as having
+happened to Owen and to his mother and not in any degree to herself.
+Something at least of this was in the encouraging way she said:
+"Yesterday morning?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yesterday morning. I saw him."</p>
+
+<p>Fleda hesitated. "Did you see <i>her</i>?"</p>
+
+<p>"Thank God, no!"</p>
+
+<p>Fleda laid on her arm a hand of vague comfort, of which Mrs. Gereth took
+no notice. "You've been capable, just to tell me, of this wretched
+journey, of this consideration that I don't deserve?"</p>
+
+<p>"We're together, we're together," said Mrs. Gereth. She looked helpless
+as she sat there, her eyes, unseeingly enough, on a tall Dutch clock,
+old but rather poor, that Maggie had had as a wedding-gift and that eked
+out the bareness of the room.</p>
+
+<p>To Fleda, in the face of the event, it appeared that this was exactly
+what they were not: the last inch of common ground, the ground of their
+past intercourse, had fallen from under them. Yet what was still there
+was the grand style of her companion's treatment of her. Mrs. Gereth
+couldn't stand upon small questions, couldn't, in conduct, make small
+differences. "You're magnificent!" her young friend exclaimed. "There's
+a rare greatness in your generosity."</p>
+
+<p>"We're together, we're together," Mrs. Gereth lifelessly repeated.
+"That's all we <i>are</i> now; it's all we have." The words brought to Fleda
+a sudden vision of the empty little house at Ricks; such a vision might
+also have been what her companion found in the face of the stopped Dutch
+clock. Yet with this it was clear that she would now show no bitterness:
+she had done with that, had given the last drop to those horrible hours
+in London. No passion even was left to her, and her forbearance only
+added to the force with which she represented the final vanity of
+everything.</p>
+
+<p>Fleda was so far from a wish to triumph that she was absolutely ashamed
+of having anything to say for herself; but there was one thing, all the
+same, that not to say was impossible. "That he has done it, that he
+couldn't <i>not</i> do it, shows how right I was." It settled forever her
+attitude, and she spoke as if for her own mind; then after a little she
+added very gently, for Mrs. Gereth's: "That's to say, it shows that he
+was bound to her by an obligation that, however much he may have wanted
+to, he couldn't in any sort of honor break."</p>
+
+<p>Blanched and bleak, Mrs. Gereth looked at her. "What sort of an
+obligation do you call that? No such obligation exists for an hour
+between any man and any woman who have hatred on one side. He had ended
+by hating her, and now he hates her more than ever."</p>
+
+<p>"Did he tell you so?" Fleda asked.</p>
+
+<p>"No. He told me nothing but the great gawk of a fact. I saw him but for
+three minutes." She was silent again, and Fleda, as before some lurid
+image of this interview, sat without speaking. "Do you wish to appear as
+if you don't care?" Mrs. Gereth presently demanded.</p>
+
+<p>"I'm trying not to think of myself."</p>
+
+<p>"Then if you're thinking of Owen, how can you <i>bear</i> to think?"</p>
+
+<p>Sadly and submissively Fleda shook her head; the slow tears had come
+into her eyes. "I can't. I don't understand&mdash;I don't understand!" she
+broke out.</p>
+
+<p>"<i>I</i> do, then." Mrs. Gereth looked hard at the floor. "There was no
+obligation at the time you saw him last&mdash;when you sent him, hating her
+as he did, back to her."</p>
+
+<p>"If he went," Fleda asked, "doesn't that exactly prove that he
+recognized one?"</p>
+
+<p>"He recognized rot! You know what <i>I</i> think of him." Fleda knew; she had
+no wish to challenge a fresh statement. Mrs. Gereth made one&mdash;it was her
+sole, faint flicker of passion&mdash;to the extent of declaring that he was
+too abjectly weak to deserve the name of a man. For all Fleda cared!&mdash;it
+was his weakness she loved in him. "He took strange ways of pleasing
+you!" her friend went on. "There was no obligation till suddenly, the
+other day, the situation changed."</p>
+
+<p>Fleda wondered. "The other day?"</p>
+
+<p>"It came to Mona's knowledge&mdash;I can't tell you how, but it came&mdash;that
+the things I was sending back had begun to arrive at Poynton. I had sent
+them for you, but it was <i>her</i> I touched." Mrs. Gereth paused; Fleda was
+too absorbed in her explanation to do anything but take blankly the
+full, cold breath of this. "They were there, and that determined her."</p>
+
+<p>"Determined her to what?"</p>
+
+<p>"To act, to take means."</p>
+
+<p>"To take means?" Fleda repeated.</p>
+
+<p>"I can't tell you what they were, but they were powerful. She knew how,"
+said Mrs. Gereth.</p>
+
+<p>Fleda received with the same stoicism the quiet immensity of this
+allusion to the person who had not known how. But it made her think a
+little, and the thought found utterance, with unconscious irony, in the
+simple interrogation: "Mona?"</p>
+
+<p>"Why not? She's a brute."</p>
+
+<p>"But if he knew that so well, what chance was there in it for her?"</p>
+
+<p>"How can I tell you? How can I talk of such horrors? I can only give
+you, of the situation, what I see. He knew it, yes. But as she couldn't
+make him forget it, she tried to make him like it. She tried and she
+succeeded: that's what she did. She's after all so much less of a fool
+than he. And what <i>else</i> had he originally liked?" Mrs. Gereth shrugged
+her shoulders. "She did what you wouldn't!" Fleda's face had grown dark
+with her wonder, but her friend's empty hands offered no balm to the
+pain in it. "It was that if it was anything. Nothing else meets the
+misery of it. Then there was quick work. Before he could turn round he
+was married."</p>
+
+<p>Fleda, as if she had been holding her breath, gave the sigh of a
+listening child. "At that place you spoke of in town?"</p>
+
+<p>"At the Registrar's, like a pair of low atheists."</p>
+
+<p>The girl hesitated. "What do people say of that? I mean the 'world.'"</p>
+
+<p>"Nothing, because nobody knows. They're to be married on the 17th, at
+Waterbath church. If anything else comes out, everybody is a little
+prepared. It will pass for some stroke of diplomacy, some move in the
+game, some outwitting of <i>me</i>. It's known there has been a row with me."</p>
+
+<p>Fleda was mystified. "People surely knew at Poynton," she objected, "if,
+as you say, she's there."</p>
+
+<p>"She was there, day before yesterday, only for a few hours. She met him
+in London and went down to see the things."</p>
+
+<p>Fleda remembered that she had seen them only once. "Did <i>you</i> see them?"
+she then ventured to ask.</p>
+
+<p>"Everything."</p>
+
+<p>"Are they right?"</p>
+
+<p>"Quite right. There's nothing like them," said Mrs. Gereth. At this her
+companion took up one of her hands again and kissed it as she had done
+in London. "Mona went back that night; she was not there yesterday. Owen
+stayed on," she added.</p>
+
+<p>Fleda stared. "Then she's not to live there?"</p>
+
+<p>"Rather! But not till after the public marriage." Mrs. Gereth seemed to
+muse; then she brought out: "She'll live there alone."</p>
+
+<p>"Alone?"</p>
+
+<p>"She'll have it to herself."</p>
+
+<p>"He won't live with her?"</p>
+
+<p>"Never! But she's none the less his wife, and you're not," said Mrs.
+Gereth, getting up. "Our only chance is the chance she may die."</p>
+
+<p>Fleda appeared to consider: she appreciated her visitor's magnanimous
+use of the plural. "Mona won't die," she replied.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, <i>I</i> shall, thank God! Till then"&mdash;and with this, for the first
+time, Mrs. Gereth put out her hand&mdash;"don't desert me."</p>
+
+<p>Fleda took her hand, and her clasp of it was a reiteration of a promise
+already given. She said nothing, but her silence was an acceptance as
+responsible as the vow of a nun. The next moment something occurred to
+her. "I mustn't put myself in your son's way."</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Gereth gave a dry, flat laugh. "You're prodigious! But how shall
+you possibly be more out of it? Owen and I&mdash;" She didn't finish her
+sentence.</p>
+
+<p>"That's your great feeling about <i>him</i>," Fleda said; "but how, after
+what has happened, can it be his about you?"</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Gereth hesitated. "How do you know what has happened? You don't
+know what I said to him."</p>
+
+<p>"Yesterday?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yesterday."</p>
+
+<p>They looked at each other with a long, deep gaze. Then, as Mrs. Gereth
+seemed again about to speak, the girl, closing her eyes, made a gesture
+of strong prohibition. "Don't tell me!"</p>
+
+<p>"Merciful powers, how you worship him!" Mrs. Gereth wonderingly moaned.
+It was, for Fleda, the shake that made the cup overflow. She had a
+pause, that of the child who takes time to know that he responds to an
+accident with pain; then, dropping again on the sofa, she broke into
+tears. They were beyond control, they came in long sobs, which for a
+moment Mrs. Gereth, almost with an air of indifference, stood hearing
+and watching. At last Mrs. Gereth too sank down again. Mrs. Gereth
+soundlessly, wearily wept.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="XXI" id="XXI"></a>XXI</h2>
+
+
+<p>"It looks just like Waterbath; but, after all, we bore <i>that</i> together:"
+these words formed part of a letter in which, before the 17th, Mrs.
+Gereth, writing from disfigured Ricks, named to Fleda the day on which
+she would be expected to arrive there on a second visit. "I sha'n't, for
+a long time to come," the missive continued, "be able to receive any one
+who may <i>like</i> it, who would try to smooth it down, and me with it; but
+there are always things you and I can comfortably hate together, for
+you're the only person who comfortably understands. You don't understand
+quite everything, but of all my acquaintance you're far away the least
+stupid. For action you're no good at all; but action is over, for me,
+forever, and you will have the great merit of knowing, when I'm brutally
+silent, what I shall be thinking about. Without setting myself up for
+your equal, I dare say I shall also know what are your own thoughts.
+Moreover, with nothing else but my four walls, you'll at any rate be a
+bit of furniture. For that, you know, a little, I've always taken
+you&mdash;quite one of my best finds. So come, if possible, on the 15th."</p>
+
+<p>The position of a bit of furniture was one that Fleda could
+conscientiously accept, and she by no means insisted on so high a place
+in the list. This communication made her easier, if only by its
+acknowledgment that her friend had some thing left: it still implied
+recognition of the principle of property. Something to hate, and to hate
+"comfortably," was at least not the utter destitution to which, after
+their last interview, she had helplessly seemed to see Mrs. Gereth go
+forth. She remembered indeed that, in the state in which they first saw
+it, she herself had "liked" the blessed refuge of Ricks; and she now
+wondered if the tact for which she was commended had then operated to
+make her keep her kindness out of sight. She was at present ashamed of
+such obliquity, and made up her mind that if this happy impression,
+quenched in the spoils of Poynton, should revive on the spot, she would
+utter it to her companion without reserve. Yes, she was capable of as
+much "action" as that: all the more that the spirit of her hostess
+seemed, for the time at least, wholly to have failed. Mrs. Gereth's
+three minutes with Owen had been a blow to all talk of travel, and after
+her woeful hour at Maggie's she had, like some great moaning, wounded
+bird, made her way, with wings of anguish, back to the nest she knew she
+should find empty. Fleda, on that dire day, could neither keep her nor
+give her up; she had pressingly offered to return with her, but Mrs.
+Gereth, in spite of the theory that their common grief was a bond, had
+even declined all escort to the station, conscious apparently of
+something abject in her collapse and almost fiercely eager, as with a
+personal shame, to be unwatched. All she had said to Fleda was that she
+would go back to Ricks that night, and the girl had lived for days after
+with a dreadful image of her position and her misery there. She had had
+a vision of her now lying prone on some unmade bed, now pacing a bare
+floor like a lioness deprived of her cubs. There had been moments when
+her mind's ear was strained to listen for some sound of grief wild
+enough to be wafted from afar. But the first sound, at the end of a
+week, had been a note announcing, without reflections, that the plan of
+going abroad had been abandoned. "It has come to me indirectly, but with
+much appearance of truth, that <i>they</i> are going&mdash;for an indefinite time.
+That quite settles it; I shall stay where I am, and as soon as I've
+turned round again I shall look for you." The second letter had come a
+week later, and on the 15th Fleda was on her way to Ricks.</p>
+
+<p>Her arrival took the form of a surprise very nearly as violent as that
+of the other time. The elements were different, but the effect, like the
+other, arrested her on the threshold: she stood there stupefied and
+delighted at the magic of a passion of which such a picture represented
+the low-water mark. Wound up but sincere, and passing quickly from room
+to room, Fleda broke out before she even sat down. "If you turn me out
+of the house for it, my dear, there isn't a woman in England for whom it
+wouldn't be a privilege to live here." Mrs. Gereth was as honestly
+bewildered as she had of old been falsely calm. She looked about at the
+few sticks that, as she afterwards phrased it, she had gathered in, and
+then hard at her guest, as if to protect herself against a joke
+sufficiently cruel. The girl's heart gave a leap, for this stare was the
+sign of an opportunity. Mrs. Gereth was all unwitting; she didn't in the
+least know what she had done, and as Fleda could tell her Fleda suddenly
+became the one who knew most. That counted for the moment as a
+magnificent position; it almost made all the difference. Yet what
+contradicted it was the vivid presence of the artist's idea. "Where on
+earth did you put your hand on such beautiful things?"</p>
+
+<p>"Beautiful things?" Mrs. Gereth turned again to the little worn,
+bleached stuffs and the sweet spindle-legs. "They're the wretched things
+that were here&mdash;that stupid, starved old woman's."</p>
+
+<p>"The maiden aunt's, the nicest, the dearest old woman that ever lived? I
+thought you had got rid of the maiden aunt."</p>
+
+<p>"She was stored in an empty barn&mdash;stuck away for a sale; a matter that,
+fortunately, I've had neither time nor freedom of mind to arrange. I've
+simply, in my extremity, fished her out again."</p>
+
+<p>"You've simply, in your extremity, made a delight of her." Fleda took
+the highest line and the upper hand, and as Mrs. Gereth, challenging her
+cheerfulness, turned again a lustreless eye over the contents of the
+place, she broke into a rapture that was unforced, but that she was
+conscious of an advantage in being able to feel. She moved, as she had
+done on the previous occasion, from one piece to another, with looks of
+recognition and hands that lightly lingered, but she was as feverishly
+jubilant now as she had formerly been anxious and mute. "Ah, the little
+melancholy, tender, tell-tale things: how can they <i>not</i> speak to you
+and find a way to your heart? It's not the great chorus of Poynton; but
+you're not, I'm sure, either so proud or so broken as to be reached by
+nothing but that. This is a voice so gentle, so human, so feminine&mdash;a
+faint, far-away voice with the little quaver of a heart-break. You've
+listened to it unawares; for the arrangement and effect of
+everything&mdash;when I compare them with what we found the first day we came
+down&mdash;shows, even if mechanically and disdainfully exercised, your
+admirable, infallible hand. It's your extraordinary genius; you make
+things 'compose' in spite of yourself. You've only to be a day or two in
+a place with four sticks for something to come of it!"</p>
+
+<p>"Then if anything has come of it here, it has come precisely of just
+four. That's literally, by the inventory, all there are!" said Mrs.
+Gereth.</p>
+
+<p>"If there were more there would be too many to convey the impression in
+which half the beauty resides&mdash;the impression, somehow, of something
+dreamed and missed, something reduced, relinquished, resigned: the
+poetry, as it were, of something sensibly <i>gone</i>." Fleda ingeniously and
+triumphantly worked it out. "Ah, there's something here that will never
+be in the inventory!"</p>
+
+<p>"Does it happen to be in your power to give it a name?" Mrs. Gereth's
+face showed the dim dawn of an amusement at finding herself seated at
+the feet of her pupil.</p>
+
+<p>"I can give it a dozen. It's a kind of fourth dimension. It's a
+presence, a perfume, a touch. It's a soul, a story, a life. There's ever
+so much more here than you and I. We're in fact just three!"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, if you count the ghosts!"</p>
+
+<p>"Of course I count the ghosts. It seems to me ghosts count double&mdash;for
+what they were and for what they are. Somehow there were no ghosts at
+Poynton," Fleda went on. "That was the only fault."</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Gereth, considering, appeared to fall in with the girl's fine
+humor. "Poynton was too splendidly happy."</p>
+
+<p>"Poynton was too splendidly happy," Fleda promptly echoed.</p>
+
+<p>"But it's cured of that now," her companion added.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, henceforth there'll be a ghost or two."</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Gereth thought again: she found her young friend suggestive. "Only
+<i>she</i> won't see them."</p>
+
+<p>"No, 'she' won't see them." Then Fleda said, "What I mean is, for this
+dear one of ours, that if she had (as I <i>know</i> she did; it's in the very
+taste of the air!) a great accepted pain&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>She had paused an instant, and Mrs. Gereth took her up. "Well, if she
+had?"</p>
+
+<p>Fleda still hesitated. "Why, it was worse than yours."</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Gereth reflected. "Very likely." Then she too hesitated. "The
+question is if it was worse than yours."</p>
+
+<p>"Mine?" Fleda looked vague.</p>
+
+<p>"Precisely. Yours."</p>
+
+<p>At this our young lady smiled. "Yes, because it was a disappointment.
+She had been so sure."</p>
+
+<p>"I see. And you were never sure."</p>
+
+<p>"Never. Besides, I'm happy," said Fleda.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Gereth met her eyes awhile. "Goose!" she quietly remarked as she
+turned away. There was a curtness in it; nevertheless it represented a
+considerable part of the basis of their new life.</p>
+
+<p>On the 18th The Morning Post had at last its clear message, a brief
+account of the marriage, from the residence of the bride's mother, of
+Mr. Owen Gereth of Poynton Park to Miss Mona Brigstock of Waterbath.
+There were two ecclesiastics and six bridesmaids and, as Mrs. Gereth
+subsequently said, a hundred frumps, as well as a special train from
+town: the scale of the affair sufficiently showed that the preparations
+had been complete for weeks. The happy pair were described as having
+taken their departure for Mr. Gereth's own seat, famous for its unique
+collection of artistic curiosities. The newspapers and letters, the
+fruits of the first London post, had been brought to the mistress of
+Ricks in the garden; and she lingered there alone a long time after
+receiving them. Fleda kept at a distance; she knew what must have
+happened, for from one of the windows she saw her rigid in a chair, her
+eyes strange and fixed, the newspaper open on the ground and the letters
+untouched in her lap. Before the morning's end she had disappeared, and
+the rest of that day she remained in her room: it recalled to Fleda, who
+had picked up the newspaper, the day, months before, on which Owen had
+come down to Poynton to make his engagement known. The hush of the house
+was at least the same, and the girl's own waiting, her soft wandering,
+through the hours: there was a difference indeed sufficiently great, of
+which her companion's absence might in some degree have represented a
+considerate recognition. That was at any rate the meaning Fleda,
+devoutly glad to be alone, attached to her opportunity. Mrs. Gereth's
+sole allusion, the next day, to the subject of their thoughts, has
+already been mentioned: it was a dazzled glance at the fact that Mona's
+quiet pace had really never slackened.</p>
+
+<p>Fleda fully assented. "I said of our disembodied friend here that she
+had suffered in proportion as she had been sure. But that's not always a
+source of suffering. It's Mona who must have been sure!"</p>
+
+<p>"She was sure of <i>you</i>!" Mrs. Gereth returned. But this didn't diminish
+the satisfaction taken by Fleda in showing how serenely and lucidly she
+could talk.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="XXII" id="XXII"></a>XXII</h2>
+
+
+<p>Her relation with her wonderful friend had, however, in becoming a new
+one, begun to shape itself almost wholly on breaches and omissions.
+Something had dropped out altogether, and the question between them,
+which time would answer, was whether the change had made them strangers
+or yokefellows. It was as if at last, for better or worse, they were, in
+a clearer, cruder air, really to know each other. Fleda wondered how
+Mrs. Gereth had escaped hating her: there were hours when it seemed that
+such a feat might leave after all a scant margin for future accidents.
+The thing indeed that now came out in its simplicity was that even in
+her shrunken state the lady of Ricks was larger than her wrongs. As for
+the girl herself, she had made up her mind that her feelings had no
+connection with the case. It was her pretension that they had never yet
+emerged from the seclusion into which, after her friend's visit to her
+at her sister's, we saw them precipitately retire: if she should
+suddenly meet them in straggling procession on the road it would be time
+enough to deal with them. They were all bundled there together, likes
+with dislikes and memories with fears; and she had for not thinking of
+them the excellent reason that she was too occupied with the actual. The
+actual was not that Owen Gereth had seen his necessity where she had
+pointed it out; it was that his mother's bare spaces demanded all the
+tapestry that the recipient of her bounty could furnish. There were
+moments during the month that followed when Mrs. Gereth struck her as
+still older and feebler, and as likely to become quite easily amused.</p>
+
+<p>At the end of it, one day, the London paper had another piece of news:
+"Mr. and Mrs. Owen Gereth, who arrived in town last week, proceed this
+morning to Paris." They exchanged no word about it till the evening, and
+none indeed would then have been uttered had not Mrs. Gereth
+irrelevantly broken out: "I dare say you wonder why I declared the other
+day with such assurance that he wouldn't live with her. He apparently
+<i>is</i> living with her."</p>
+
+<p>"Surely it's the only proper thing for him to do."</p>
+
+<p>"They're beyond me&mdash;I give it up," said Mrs. Gereth.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't give it up&mdash;I never did," Fleda returned.</p>
+
+<p>"Then what do you make of his aversion to her?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, she has dispelled it."</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Gereth said nothing for a minute. "You're prodigious in your choice
+of terms!" she then simply ejaculated.</p>
+
+<p>But Fleda went luminously on; she once more enjoyed her great command of
+her subject: "I think that when you came to see me at Maggie's you saw
+too many things, you had too many ideas."</p>
+
+<p>"You had none," said Mrs. Gereth: "you were completely bewildered."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, I didn't quite understand&mdash;but I think I understand now. The case
+is simple and logical enough. She's a person who's upset by failure and
+who blooms and expands with success. There was something she had set her
+heart upon, set her teeth about&mdash;the house exactly as she had seen it."</p>
+
+<p>"She never saw it at all, she never looked at it!" cried Mrs. Gereth.</p>
+
+<p>"She doesn't look with her eyes; she looks with her ears. In her own way
+she had taken it in; she knew, she felt when it had been touched. That
+probably made her take an attitude that was extremely disagreeable. But
+the attitude lasted only while the reason for it lasted."</p>
+
+<p>"Go on&mdash;I can bear it now," said Mrs. Gereth. Her companion had just
+perceptibly paused.</p>
+
+<p>"I know you can, or I shouldn't dream of speaking. When the pressure was
+removed she came up again. From the moment the house was once more what
+it had to be, her natural charm reasserted itself."</p>
+
+<p>"Her natural charm!" Mrs. Gereth could barely articulate.</p>
+
+<p>"It's very great; everybody thinks so; there must be something in it. It
+operated as it had operated before. There's no need of imagining
+anything very monstrous. Her restored good humor, her splendid beauty,
+and Mr. Owen's impressibility and generosity sufficiently cover the
+ground. His great bright sun came out!"</p>
+
+<p>"And his great bright passion for another person went in. Your
+explanation would doubtless be perfection if he didn't love you."</p>
+
+<p>Fleda was silent a little. "What do you know about his 'loving' me?"</p>
+
+<p>"I know what Mrs. Brigstock herself told me."</p>
+
+<p>"You never in your life took her word for any other matter."</p>
+
+<p>"Then won't yours do?" Mrs. Gereth demanded. "Haven't I had it from your
+own mouth that he cares for you?"</p>
+
+<p>Fleda turned pale, but she faced her companion and smiled. "You
+confound, Mrs. Gereth, you mix things up. You've only had it from my own
+mouth that I care for <i>him</i>!"</p>
+
+<p>It was doubtless in contradictious allusion to this (which at the time
+had made her simply drop her head as in a strange, vain reverie) that
+Mrs. Gereth, a day or two later, said to Fleda: "Don't think I shall be
+a bit affected if I'm here to see it when he comes again to make up to
+you."</p>
+
+<p>"He won't do that," the girl replied. Then she added, smiling: "But if
+he should be guilty of such bad taste, it wouldn't be nice of you not to
+be disgusted."</p>
+
+<p>"I'm not talking of disgust; I'm talking of its opposite," said Mrs.
+Gereth.</p>
+
+<p>"Of its opposite?"</p>
+
+<p>"Why, of any reviving pleasure that one might feel in such an
+exhibition. I shall feel none at all. You may personally take it as you
+like; but what conceivable good will it do?"</p>
+
+<p>Fleda wondered. "To me, do you mean?"</p>
+
+<p>"Deuce take you, no! To what we don't, you know, by your wish, ever talk
+about."</p>
+
+<p>"The old things?" Fleda considered again. "It will do no good of any
+sort to anything or any one. That's another question I would rather we
+shouldn't discuss, please," she gently added.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Gereth shrugged her shoulders.</p>
+
+<p>"It certainly isn't worth it!"</p>
+
+<p>Something in her manner prompted her companion, with a certain
+inconsequence, to speak again. "That was partly why I came back to you,
+you know&mdash;that there should be the less possibility of anything
+painful."</p>
+
+<p>"Painful?" Mrs. Gereth stared. "What pain can I ever feel again?"</p>
+
+<p>"I meant painful to myself," Fleda, with a slight impatience, explained.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, I see." Her friend was silent a minute. "You use sometimes such odd
+expressions. Well, I shall last a little, but I sha'n't last forever."</p>
+
+<p>"You'll last quite as long&mdash;" Here Fleda suddenly hesitated.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Gereth took her up with a cold smile that seemed the warning of
+experience against hyperbole. "As long as what, please?"</p>
+
+<p>The girl thought an instant; then met the difficulty by adopting, as an
+amendment, the same tone. "As any danger of the ridiculous."</p>
+
+<p>That did for the time, and she had moreover, as the months went on, the
+protection of suspended allusions. This protection was marked when, in
+the following November, she received a letter directed in a hand at
+which a quick glance sufficed to make her hesitate to open it. She said
+nothing, then or afterwards; but she opened it, for reasons that had
+come to her, on the morrow. It consisted of a page and a half from Owen
+Gereth, dated from Florence, but with no other preliminary. She knew
+that during the summer he had returned to England with his wife, and
+that after a couple of months they had again gone abroad. She also knew,
+without communication, that Mrs. Gereth, round whom Ricks had grown
+submissively and indescribably sweet, had her own interpretation of her
+daughter-in-law's share in this second migration. It was a piece of
+calculated insolence&mdash;a stroke odiously directed at showing whom it
+might concern that now she had Poynton fast she was perfectly
+indifferent to living there. The Morning Post, at Ricks, had again been
+a resource: it was stated in that journal that Mr. and Mrs. Owen Gereth
+proposed to spend the winter in India. There was a person to whom it was
+clear that she led her wretched husband by the nose. Such was the light
+in which contemporary history was offered to Fleda until, in her own
+room, late at night, she broke the seal of her letter.</p>
+
+<p>"I want you, inexpressibly, to have, as a remembrance, something of
+mine&mdash;something of real value. Something from Poynton is what I mean and
+what I should prefer. You know everything there, and far better than I
+what's best and what isn't. There are a lot of differences, but aren't
+some of the smaller things the most remarkable? I mean for judges, and
+for what they'd bring. What I want you to take from me, and to choose
+for yourself, is the thing in the whole house that's most beautiful and
+precious. I mean the 'gem of the collection,' don't you know? If it
+happens to be of such a sort that you can take immediate possession of
+it&mdash;carry it right away with you&mdash;so much the better. You're to have it
+on the spot, whatever it is. I humbly beg of you to go down there and
+see. The people have complete instructions: they'll act for you in every
+possible way and put the whole place at your service. There's a thing
+mamma used to call the Maltese cross and that I think I've heard her say
+is very wonderful. Is <i>that</i> the gem of the collection? Perhaps you
+would take it, or anything equally convenient. Only I do want you
+awfully to let it be the very pick of the place. Let me feel that I can
+trust you for this. You won't refuse if you will think a little what it
+must be that makes me ask."</p>
+
+<p>Fleda read that last sentence over more times even than the rest; she
+was baffled&mdash;she couldn't think at all of what it might be. This was
+indeed because it might be one of so many things. She made for the
+present no answer; she merely, little by little, fashioned for herself
+the form that her answer should eventually wear. There was only one form
+that was possible&mdash;the form of doing, at her time, what he wished. She
+would go down to Poynton as a pilgrim might go to a shrine, and as to
+this she must look out for her chance. She lived with her letter, before
+any chance came, a month, and even after a month it had mysteries for
+her that she couldn't meet. What did it mean, what did it represent, to
+what did it correspond in his imagination or his soul? What was behind
+it, what was beyond it, what was, in the deepest depth, within it? She
+said to herself that with these questions she was under no obligation to
+deal. There was an explanation of them that, for practical purposes,
+would do as well as another: he had found in his marriage a happiness so
+much greater than, in the distress of his dilemma, he had been able to
+take heart to believe, that he now felt he owed her a token of gratitude
+for having kept him in the straight path. That explanation, I say, she
+could throw off; but no explanation in the least mattered: what
+determined her was the simple strength of her impulse to respond. The
+passion for which what had happened had made no difference, the passion
+that had taken this into account before as well as after, found here an
+issue that there was nothing whatever to choke. It found even a relief
+to which her imagination immensely contributed. Would she act upon his
+offer? She would act with secret rapture. To have as her own something
+splendid that he had given her, of which the gift had been his signed
+desire, would be a greater joy than the greatest she had supposed to be
+left to her, and she felt that till the sense of this came home she had
+even herself not known what burned in her successful stillness. It was
+an hour to dream of and watch for; to be patient was to draw out the
+sweetness. She was capable of feeling it as an hour of triumph, the
+triumph of everything in her recent life that had not held up its head.
+She moved there in thought&mdash;in the great rooms she knew; she should be
+able to say to herself that, for once at least, her possession was as
+complete as that of either of the others whom it had filled only with
+bitterness. And a thousand times yes&mdash;her choice should know no scruple:
+the thing she should go down to take would be up to the height of her
+privilege. The whole place was in her eyes, and she spent for weeks her
+private hours in a luxury of comparison and debate. It should be one of
+the smallest things because it should be one she could have close to
+her; and it should be one of the finest because it was in the finest he
+saw his symbol. She said to herself that of what it would symbolize she
+was content to know nothing more than just what her having it would tell
+her. At bottom she inclined to the Maltese cross&mdash;with the added reason
+that he had named it. But she would look again and judge afresh; she
+would on the spot so handle and ponder that there shouldn't be the shade
+of a mistake.</p>
+
+<p>Before Christmas she had a natural opportunity to go to London; there
+was her periodical call upon her father to pay as well as a promise to
+Maggie to redeem. She spent her first night in West Kensington, with the
+idea of carrying out on the morrow the purpose that had most of a
+motive. Her father's affection was not inquisitive, but when she
+mentioned to him that she had business in the country that would oblige
+her to catch an early train, he deprecated her excursion in view of the
+menace of the weather. It was spoiling for a storm; all the signs of a
+winter gale were in the air. She replied that she would see what the
+morning might bring; and it brought, in fact, what seemed in London an
+amendment. She was to go to Maggie the next day, and now that she had
+started her eagerness had become suddenly a pain. She pictured her
+return that evening with her trophy under her cloak; so that after
+looking, from the doorstep, up and down the dark street, she decided,
+with a new nervousness, and sallied forth to the nearest place of access
+to the "Underground." The December dawn was dolorous, but there was
+neither rain nor snow; it was not even cold, and the atmosphere of West
+Kensington, purified by the wind, was like a dirty old coat that had
+been bettered by a dirty brush. At the end of almost an hour, in the
+larger station, she had taken her place in a third-class compartment;
+the prospect before her was the run of eighty minutes to Poynton. The
+train was a fast one, and she was familiar with the moderate measure of
+the walk to the park from the spot at which it would drop her.</p>
+
+<p>Once in the country, indeed, she saw that her father was right: the
+breath of December was abroad with a force from which the London
+labyrinth had protected her. The green fields were black, the sky was
+all alive with the wind; she had, in her anxious sense of the elements,
+her wonder at what might happen, a reminder of the surmises, in the old
+days of going to the Continent, that used to worry her on the way, at
+night, to the horrid cheap crossings by long sea. Something, in a dire
+degree, at this last hour, had begun to press on her heart: it was the
+sudden imagination of a disaster, or at least of a check, before her
+errand was achieved. When she said to herself that something might
+happen she wanted to go faster than the train. But nothing could happen
+save a dismayed discovery that, by some altogether unlikely chance, the
+master and mistress of the house had already come back. In that case she
+must have had a warning, and the fear was but the excess of her hope. It
+was every one's being exactly where every one was that lent the quality
+to her visit. Beyond lands and seas and alienated forever, they in their
+different ways gave her the impression to take as she had never taken
+it. At last it was already there, though the darkness of the day had
+deepened; they had whizzed past Chater&mdash;Chater, which was the station
+before the right one. Off in that quarter was an air of wild rain, but
+there shimmered straight across it a brightness that was the color of
+the great interior she had been haunting. That vision settled before
+her&mdash;in the house the house was all; and as the train drew up she rose,
+in her mean compartment, quite proudly erect with the thought that all
+for Fleda Vetch then the house was standing there.</p>
+
+<p>But with the opening of the door she encountered a shock, though for an
+instant she couldn't have named it; the next moment she saw it was given
+her by the face of the man advancing to let her out, an old lame porter
+of the station, who had been there in Mrs. Gereth's time and who now
+recognized her. He looked up at her so hard that she took an alarm and
+before alighting broke out to him: "They've come back?" She had a
+confused, absurd sense that even he would know that in this case she
+mustn't be there. He hesitated, and in the few seconds her alarm had
+completely changed its ground: it seemed to leap, with her quick jump
+from the carriage, to the ground that was that of his stare at her.
+"Smoke?" She was on the platform with her frightened sniff: it had taken
+her a minute to become aware of an extraordinary smell. The air was full
+of it, and there were already heads at the window of the train, looking
+out at something she couldn't see. Some one, the only other passenger,
+had got out of another carriage, and the old porter hobbled off to close
+his door. The smoke was in her eyes, but she saw the station-master,
+from the end of the platform, recognize her too and come straight to
+her. He brought her a finer shade of surprise than the porter, and while
+he was coming she heard a voice at a window of the train say that
+something was "a good bit off&mdash;a mile from the town." That was just what
+Poynton was. Then her heart stood still at the white wonder in the
+station-master's face.</p>
+
+<p>"You've come down to it, miss, already?"</p>
+
+<p>At this she knew. "Poynton's on fire?"</p>
+
+<p>"Gone, miss&mdash;with this awful gale. You weren't wired? Look out!" he
+cried in the next breath, seizing her; the train was going on, and she
+had given a lurch that almost made it catch her as it passed. When it
+had drawn away she became more conscious of the pervading smoke, which
+the wind seemed to hurl in her face.</p>
+
+<p>"<i>Gone?</i>" She was in the man's hands; she clung to him.</p>
+
+<p>"Burning still, miss. Ain't it quite too dreadful? Took early this
+morning&mdash;the whole place is up there."</p>
+
+<p>In her bewildered horror she tried to think. "Have they come back?"</p>
+
+<p>"Back? They'll be there all day!"</p>
+
+<p>"Not Mr. Gereth, I mean&mdash;nor his wife?"</p>
+
+<p>"Nor his mother, miss&mdash;not a soul of <i>them</i> back. A pack o' servants in
+charge&mdash;not the old lady's lot, eh? A nice job for care-takers! Some
+rotten chimley or one of them portable lamps set down in the wrong
+place. What has done it is this cruel, cruel night." Then as a great
+wave of smoke half choked them, he drew her with force to the little
+waiting room. "Awkward for you, miss&mdash;I see!"</p>
+
+<p>She felt sick; she sank upon a seat, staring up at him. "Do you mean
+that great house is <i>lost</i>?"</p>
+
+<p>"It was near it, I was told, an hour ago&mdash;the fury of the flames had got
+such a start. I was there myself at six, the very first I heard of it.
+They were fighting it then, but you couldn't quite say they had got it
+down."</p>
+
+<p>Fleda jerked herself up. "Were they saving the things?"</p>
+
+<p>"That's just where it was, miss&mdash;to get <i>at</i> the blessed things. And the
+want of right help&mdash;it maddened me to stand and see 'em muff it. This
+ain't a place, like, for anything organized. They don't come up to a
+<i>reel</i> emergency."</p>
+
+<p>She passed out of the door that opened toward the village and met a
+great acrid gust. She heard a far-off windy roar which, in her dismay,
+she took for that of flames a mile away, and which, the first instant,
+acted upon her as a wild solicitation. "I must go there." She had
+scarcely spoken before the same omen had changed into an appalling
+check.</p>
+
+<p>Her vivid friend, moreover, had got before her; he clearly suffered from
+the nature of the control he had to exercise. "Don't do that, miss&mdash;you
+won't care for it at all." Then as she waveringly stood her ground,
+"It's not a place for a young lady, nor, if you'll believe me, a sight
+for them as are in any way affected."</p>
+
+<p>Fleda by this time knew in what way she was affected: she became limp
+and weak again; she felt herself give everything up. Mixed with the
+horror, with the kindness of the station-master, with the smell of
+cinders and the riot of sound, was the raw bitterness of a hope that she
+might never again in life have to give up so much at such short notice.
+She heard herself repeat mechanically, yet as if asking it for the first
+time: "Poynton's <i>gone</i>?"</p>
+
+<p>The man hesitated. "What can you call it, miss, if it ain't really
+saved?"</p>
+
+<p>A minute later she had returned with him to the waiting-room, where, in
+the thick swim of things, she saw something like the disk of a clock.
+"Is there an up-train?" she asked.</p>
+
+<p>"In seven minutes."</p>
+
+<p>She came out on the platform: everywhere she met the smoke. She covered
+her face with her hands. "I'll go back."</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="Henry_Jamess_Books" id="Henry_Jamess_Books"></a>Henry James's Books.</h2>
+
+
+<p>A PASSIONATE PILGRIM, AND OTHER TALES.</p>
+
+<p>TRANSATLANTIC SKETCHES.</p>
+
+<p>RODERICK HUDSON. A Novel.</p>
+
+<p>THE AMERICAN. A Novel.</p>
+
+<p>THE EUROPEANS. A Novel.</p>
+
+<p>CONFIDENCE. A Novel.</p>
+
+<p>THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY.</p>
+
+<p>THE AUTHOR OF BELTRAFFIO. Including also Pandora; Georgina's Reasons;
+The Path of Duty; Four Meetings.</p>
+
+<p>THE SIEGE OF LONDON. Including also The Pension Beaurepas; The Point of
+View.</p>
+
+<p>TALES OF THREE CITIES. Including The Impressions of a Cousin; Lady
+Barberina; A New England Winter.</p>
+
+<p>A LITTLE TOUR IN FRANCE.</p>
+
+<p>PORTRAITS OF PLACES.</p>
+
+<p>DAISY MILLER. A Comedy.</p>
+
+<p>THE TRAGIC MUSE. 2 vols.</p>
+
+<p>WATCH AND WARD. A Novel.</p>
+
+<p>THE SPOILS OF POYNTON. A Novel.</p>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Spoils of Poynton, by Henry James
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Spoils of Poynton, by Henry James
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Spoils of Poynton
+
+Author: Henry James
+
+Release Date: August 2, 2010 [EBook #33325]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE SPOILS OF POYNTON ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Brian Foley, Mary Meehan and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This
+file was produced from images generously made available
+by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)
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+
+
+
+
+
+
+                       The Spoils of Poynton
+
+                          By Henry James
+
+
+BOSTON AND NEW YORK
+HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY
+The Riverside Press, Cambridge
+1897
+
+Copyright, 1896,
+By HENRY JAMES.
+
+_All rights reserved._
+
+_The Riverside Press, Cambridge, Mass., U.S.A._
+Electrotyped and Printed by H. O. Houghton & Company.
+
+
+
+
+THE SPOILS OF POYNTON
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+
+Mrs. Gereth had said she would go with the rest to church, but suddenly
+it seemed to her that she should not be able to wait even till
+church-time for relief: breakfast, at Waterbath, was a punctual meal,
+and she had still nearly an hour on her hands. Knowing the church to be
+near, she prepared in her room for the little rural walk, and on her way
+down again, passing through corridors and observing imbecilities of
+decoration, the aesthetic misery of the big commodious house, she felt a
+return of the tide of last night's irritation, a renewal of everything
+she could secretly suffer from ugliness and stupidity. Why did she
+consent to such contacts, why did she so rashly expose herself? She had
+had, heaven knew, her reasons, but the whole experience was to be
+sharper than she had feared. To get away from it and out into the air,
+into the presence of sky and trees, flowers and birds, was a necessity
+of every nerve. The flowers at Waterbath would probably go wrong in
+color and the nightingales sing out of tune; but she remembered to have
+heard the place described as possessing those advantages that are
+usually spoken of as natural. There were advantages enough it clearly
+didn't possess. It was hard for her to believe that a woman could look
+presentable who had been kept awake for hours by the wall-paper in her
+room; yet none the less, as in her fresh widow's weeds she rustled
+across the hall, she was sustained by the consciousness, which always
+added to the unction of her social Sundays, that she was, as usual, the
+only person in the house incapable of wearing in her preparation the
+horrible stamp of the same exceptional smartness that would be
+conspicuous in a grocer's wife. She would rather have perished than have
+looked _endimanchee_.
+
+She was fortunately not challenged, the hall being empty of the other
+women, who were engaged precisely in arraying themselves to that dire
+end. Once in the grounds, she recognized that, with a site, a view that
+struck the note, set an example to its inmates, Waterbath ought to have
+been charming. How she herself, with such elements to handle, would have
+taken the fine hint of nature! Suddenly, at the turn of a walk, she came
+on a member of the party, a young lady seated on a bench in deep and
+lonely meditation. She had observed the girl at dinner and afterwards:
+she was always looking at girls with an apprehensive or speculative
+reference to her son. Deep in her heart was a conviction that Owen
+would, in spite of all her spells, marry at last a frump; and this from
+no evidence that she could have represented as adequate, but simply from
+her deep uneasiness, her belief that such a special sensibility as her
+own could have been inflicted on a woman only as a source of anguish. It
+would be her fate, her discipline, her cross, to have a frump brought
+hideously home to her. This girl, one of the two Vetches, had no beauty,
+but Mrs. Gereth, scanning the dullness for a sign of life, had been
+straightway able to classify such a figure as the least, for the moment,
+of her afflictions. Fleda Vetch was dressed with an idea, though perhaps
+with not much else; and that made a bond when there was none other,
+especially as in this case the idea was real, not imitation. Mrs. Gereth
+had long ago generalized the truth that the temperament of the frump is
+amply consistent with a certain usual prettiness. There were five girls
+in the party, and the prettiness of this one, slim, pale, and
+black-haired, was less likely than that of the others ever to occasion
+an exchange of platitudes. The two less developed Brigstocks, daughters
+of the house, were in particular tiresomely "lovely." A second glance,
+this morning, at the young lady before her conveyed to Mrs. Gereth the
+soothing assurance that she also was guiltless of looking hot and fine.
+They had had no talk as yet, but this was a note that would effectually
+introduce them if the girl should show herself in the least conscious of
+their community. She got up from her seat with a smile that but partly
+dissipated the prostration Mrs. Gereth had recognized in her attitude.
+The elder woman drew her down again, and for a minute, as they sat
+together, their eyes met and sent out mutual soundings. "Are you safe?
+Can I utter it?" each of them said to the other, quickly recognizing,
+almost proclaiming, their common need to escape. The tremendous fancy,
+as it came to be called, that Mrs. Gereth was destined to take to Fleda
+Vetch virtually began with this discovery that the poor child had been
+moved to flight even more promptly than herself. That the poor child no
+less quickly perceived how far she could now go was proved by the
+immense friendliness with which she instantly broke out: "Isn't it too
+dreadful?"
+
+"Horrible--horrible!" cried Mrs. Gereth, with a laugh, "and it's really
+a comfort to be able to say it." She had an idea, for it was her
+ambition, that she successfully made a secret of that awkward oddity,
+her proneness to be rendered unhappy by the presence of the dreadful.
+Her passion for the exquisite was the cause of this, but it was a
+passion she considered that she never advertised nor gloried in,
+contenting herself with letting it regulate her steps and show quietly
+in her life, remembering at all times that there are few things more
+soundless than a deep devotion. She was therefore struck with the
+acuteness of the little girl who had already put a finger on her hidden
+spring. What was dreadful now, what was horrible, was the intimate
+ugliness of Waterbath, and it was of that phenomenon these ladies talked
+while they sat in the shade and drew refreshment from the great tranquil
+sky, from which no blue saucers were suspended. It was an ugliness
+fundamental and systematic, the result of the abnormal nature of the
+Brigstocks, from whose composition the principle of taste had been
+extravagantly omitted. In the arrangement of their home some other
+principle, remarkably active, but uncanny and obscure, had operated
+instead, with consequences depressing to behold, consequences that took
+the form of a universal futility. The house was bad in all conscience,
+but it might have passed if they had only let it alone. This saving
+mercy was beyond them; they had smothered it with trumpery ornament and
+scrapbook art, with strange excrescences and bunchy draperies, with
+gimcracks that might have been keepsakes for maid-servants and
+nondescript conveniences that might have been prizes for the blind. They
+had gone wildly astray over carpets and curtains; they had an infallible
+instinct for disaster, and were so cruelly doom-ridden that it rendered
+them almost tragic. Their drawing-room, Mrs. Gereth lowered her voice to
+mention, caused her face to burn, and each of the new friends confided
+to the other that in her own apartment she had given way to tears. There
+was in the elder lady's a set of comic water-colors, a family joke by a
+family genius, and in the younger's a souvenir from some centennial or
+other Exhibition, that they shudderingly alluded to. The house was
+perversely full of souvenirs of places even more ugly than itself and of
+things it would have been a pious duty to forget. The worst horror was
+the acres of varnish, something advertised and smelly, with which
+everything was smeared; it was Fleda Vetch's conviction that the
+application of it, by their own hands and hilariously shoving each
+other, was the amusement of the Brigstocks on rainy days.
+
+When, as criticism deepened, Fleda dropped the suggestion that some
+people would perhaps see something in Mona, Mrs. Gereth caught her up
+with a groan of protest, a smothered familiar cry of "Oh, my dear!" Mona
+was the eldest of the three, the one Mrs. Gereth most suspected. She
+confided to her young friend that it was her suspicion that had brought
+her to Waterbath; and this was going very far, for on the spot, as a
+refuge, a remedy, she had clutched at the idea that something might be
+done with the girl before her. It was her fancied exposure at any rate
+that had sharpened the shock; made her ask herself with a terrible chill
+if fate could really be plotting to saddle her with a daughter-in-law
+brought up in such a place. She had seen Mona in her appropriate setting
+and she had seen Owen, handsome and heavy, dangle beside her; but the
+effect of these first hours had happily not been to darken the prospect.
+It was clearer to her that she could never accept Mona, but it was after
+all by no means certain that Owen would ask her to. He had sat by
+somebody else at dinner, and afterwards he had talked to Mrs. Firmin,
+who was as dreadful as all the rest, but redeemingly married. His
+heaviness, which in her need of expansion she freely named, had two
+aspects: one of them his monstrous lack of taste, the other his
+exaggerated prudence. If it should come to a question of carrying Mona
+with a high hand there would be no need to worry, for that was rarely
+his manner of proceeding.
+
+Invited by her companion, who had asked if it weren't wonderful, Mrs.
+Gereth had begun to say a word about Poynton; but she heard a sound of
+voices that made her stop short. The next moment she rose to her feet,
+and Fleda could see that her alarm was by no means quenched. Behind the
+place where they had been sitting the ground dropped with a certain
+steepness, forming a long grassy bank, up which Owen Gereth and Mona
+Brigstock, dressed for church but making a familiar joke of it, were in
+the act of scrambling and helping each other. When they had reached the
+even ground Fleda was able to read the meaning of the exclamation in
+which Mrs. Gereth had expressed her reserves on the subject of Miss
+Brigstock's personality. Miss Brigstock had been laughing and even
+romping, but the circumstance hadn't contributed the ghost of an
+expression to her countenance. Tall, straight and fair, long-limbed and
+strangely festooned, she stood there without a look in her eye or any
+perceptible intention of any sort in any other feature. She belonged to
+the type in which speech is an unaided emission of sound and the secret
+of being is impenetrably and incorruptibly kept. Her expression would
+probably have been beautiful if she had had one, but whatever she
+communicated she communicated, in a manner best known to herself,
+without signs. This was not the case with Owen Gereth, who had plenty of
+them, and all very simple and immediate. Robust and artless, eminently
+natural, yet perfectly correct, he looked pointlessly active and
+pleasantly dull. Like his mother and like Fleda Vetch, but not for the
+same reason, this young pair had come out to take a turn before church.
+
+The meeting of the two couples was sensibly awkward, and Fleda, who was
+sagacious, took the measure of the shock inflicted on Mrs. Gereth. There
+had been intimacy--oh yes, intimacy as well as puerility--in the
+horse-play of which they had just had a glimpse. The party began to
+stroll together to the house, and Fleda had again a sense of Mrs.
+Gereth's quick management in the way the lovers, or whatever they were,
+found themselves separated. She strolled behind with Mona, the mother
+possessing herself of her son, her exchange of remarks with whom,
+however, remained, as they went, suggestively inaudible. That member of
+the party in whose intenser consciousness we shall most profitably seek
+a reflection of the little drama with which we are concerned received an
+even livelier impression of Mrs. Gereth's intervention from the fact
+that ten minutes later, on the way to church, still another pairing had
+been effected. Owen walked with Fleda, and it was an amusement to the
+girl to feel sure that this was by his mother's direction. Fleda had
+other amusements as well: such as noting that Mrs. Gereth was now with
+Mona Brigstock; such as observing that she was all affability to that
+young woman; such as reflecting that, masterful and clever, with a great
+bright spirit, she was one of those who impose themselves as an
+influence; such as feeling finally that Owen Gereth was absolutely
+beautiful and delightfully dense. This young person had even from
+herself wonderful secrets of delicacy and pride; but she came as near
+distinctness as in the consideration of such matters she had ever come
+at all in now surrendering herself to the idea that it was of a pleasant
+effect and rather remarkable to be stupid without offense--of a
+pleasanter effect and more remarkable indeed than to be clever and
+horrid. Owen Gereth at any rate, with his inches, his features, and his
+lapses, was neither of these latter things. She herself was prepared, if
+she should ever marry, to contribute all the cleverness, and she liked
+to think that her husband would be a force grateful for direction. She
+was in her small way a spirit of the same family as Mrs. Gereth. On that
+flushed and huddled Sunday a great matter occurred; her little life
+became aware of a singular quickening. Her meagre past fell away from
+her like a garment of the wrong fashion, and as she came up to town on
+the Monday what she stared at in the suburban fields from the train was
+a future full of the things she particularly loved.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+
+These were neither more nor less than the things with which she had had
+time to learn from Mrs. Gereth that Poynton overflowed. Poynton, in the
+south of England, was this lady's established, or rather her
+disestablished home, having recently passed into the possession of her
+son. The father of the boy, an only child, had died two years before,
+and in London, with his mother, Owen was occupying for May and June a
+house good-naturedly lent them by Colonel Gereth, their uncle and
+brother-in-law. His mother had laid her hand so engagingly on Fleda
+Vetch that in a very few days the girl knew it was possible they should
+suffer together in Cadogan Place almost as much as they had suffered
+together at Waterbath. The kind colonel's house was also an ordeal, but
+the two women, for the ensuing month, had at least the relief of their
+confessions. The great drawback of Mrs. Gereth's situation was that,
+thanks to the rare perfection of Poynton, she was condemned to wince
+wherever she turned. She had lived for a quarter of a century in such
+warm closeness with the beautiful that, as she frankly admitted, life
+had become for her a kind of fool's paradise. She couldn't leave her own
+house without peril of exposure. She didn't say it in so many words, but
+Fleda could see she held that there was nothing in England really to
+compare to Poynton. There were places much grander and richer, but there
+was no such complete work of art, nothing that would appeal so to those
+who were really informed. In putting such elements into her hand fortune
+had given her an inestimable chance; she knew how rarely well things had
+gone with her and that she had tasted a happiness altogether rare.
+
+There had been in the first place the exquisite old house itself, early
+Jacobean, supreme in every part: it was a provocation, an inspiration, a
+matchless canvas for the picture. Then there had been her husband's
+sympathy and generosity, his knowledge and love, their perfect accord
+and beautiful life together, twenty-six years of planning and seeking, a
+long, sunny harvest of taste and curiosity. Lastly, she never denied,
+there had been her personal gift, the genius, the passion, the patience
+of the collector--a patience, an almost infernal cunning, that had
+enabled her to do it all with a limited command of money. There wouldn't
+have been money enough for any one else, she said with pride, but there
+had been money enough for her. They had saved on lots of things in life,
+and there were lots of things they hadn't had, but they had had in every
+corner of Europe their swing among the Jews. It was fascinating to poor
+Fleda, who hadn't a penny in the world nor anything nice at home, and
+whose only treasure was her subtle mind, to hear this genuine English
+lady, fresh and fair, young in the fifties, declare with gayety and
+conviction that she was herself the greatest Jew who had ever tracked a
+victim. Fleda, with her mother dead, hadn't so much even as a home, and
+her nearest chance of one was that there was some appearance her sister
+would become engaged to a curate whose eldest brother was supposed to
+have property and would perhaps allow him something. Her father paid
+some of her bills, but he didn't like her to live with him; and she had
+lately, in Paris, with several hundred other young women, spent a year
+in a studio, arming herself for the battle of life by a course with an
+impressionist painter. She was determined to work, but her impressions,
+or somebody's else, were as yet her only material. Mrs. Gereth had told
+her she liked her because she had an extraordinary _flair_; but under
+the circumstances a _flair_ was a questionable boon: in the dry places
+in which she had mainly moved she could have borne a chronic catarrh.
+She was constantly summoned to Cadogan Place, and before the month was
+out was kept to stay, to pay a visit of which the end, it was agreed,
+should have nothing to do with the beginning. She had a sense, partly
+exultant and partly alarmed, of having quickly become necessary to her
+imperious friend, who indeed gave a reason quite sufficient for it in
+telling her there was nobody else who understood. From Mrs. Gereth there
+was in these days an immense deal to understand, though it might be
+freely summed up in the circumstance that she was wretched. She told
+Fleda that she couldn't completely know why till she should have seen
+the things at Poynton. Fleda could perfectly grasp this connection,
+which was exactly one of the matters that, in their inner mystery, were
+a blank to everybody else.
+
+The girl had a promise that the wonderful house should be shown her
+early in July, when Mrs. Gereth would return to it as to her home; but
+even before this initiation she put her finger on the spot that in the
+poor lady's troubled soul ached hardest. This was the misery that
+haunted her, the dread of the inevitable surrender. What Fleda had to
+sit up to was the confirmed appearance that Owen Gereth would marry Mona
+Brigstock, marry her in his mother's teeth, and that such an act would
+have incalculable bearings. They were present to Mrs. Gereth, her
+companion could see, with a vividness that at moments almost ceased to
+be that of sanity. She would have to give up Poynton, and give it up to
+a product of Waterbath--that was the wrong that rankled, the humiliation
+at which Fleda would be able adequately to shudder only when she should
+know the place. She did know Waterbath, and she despised it--she had
+that qualification for sympathy. Her sympathy was intelligent, for she
+read deep into the matter; she stared, aghast, as it came home to her
+for the first time, at the cruel English custom of the expropriation of
+the lonely mother. Mr. Gereth had apparently been a very amiable man,
+but Mr. Gereth had left things in a way that made the girl marvel. The
+house and its contents had been treated as a single splendid object;
+everything was to go straight to his son, and his widow was to have a
+maintenance and a cottage in another county. No account whatever had
+been taken of her relation to her treasures, of the passion with which
+she had waited for them, worked for them, picked them over, made them
+worthy of each other and the house, watched them, loved them, lived with
+them. He appeared to have assumed that she would settle questions with
+her son, that he could depend upon Owen's affection. And in truth, as
+poor Mrs. Gereth inquired, how could he possibly have had a
+prevision--he who turned his eyes instinctively from everything
+repulsive--of anything so abnormal as a Waterbath Brigstock? He had been
+in ugly houses enough, but had escaped that particular nightmare.
+Nothing so perverse could have been expected to happen as that the heir
+to the loveliest thing in England should be inspired to hand it over to
+a girl so exceptionally tainted. Mrs. Gereth spoke of poor Mona's taint
+as if to mention it were almost a violation of decency, and a person who
+had listened without enlightenment would have wondered of what fault the
+girl had been or had indeed not been guilty. But Owen had from a boy
+never cared, had never had the least pride or pleasure in his home.
+
+"Well, then, if he doesn't care!"--Fleda exclaimed, with some
+impetuosity; stopping short, however, before she completed her sentence.
+
+Mrs. Gereth looked at her rather hard. "If he doesn't care?"
+
+Fleda hesitated; she had not quite had a definite idea. "Well--he'll
+give them up."
+
+"Give what up?"
+
+"Why, those beautiful things."
+
+"Give them up to whom?" Mrs. Gereth more boldly stared.
+
+"To you, of course--to enjoy, to keep for yourself."
+
+"And leave his house as bare as your hand? There's nothing in it that
+isn't precious."
+
+Fleda considered; her friend had taken her up with a smothered ferocity
+by which she was slightly disconcerted. "I don't mean of course that he
+should surrender everything; but he might let you pick out the things to
+which you're most attached."
+
+"I think he would if he were free," said Mrs. Gereth.
+
+"And do you mean, as it is, that _she_'ll prevent him?" Mona Brigstock,
+between these ladies, was now nothing but "she."
+
+"By every means in her power."
+
+"But surely not because she understands and appreciates them?"
+
+"No," Mrs. Gereth replied, "but because they belong to the house and the
+house belongs to Owen. If I should wish to take anything, she would
+simply say, with that motionless mask: 'It goes with the house.' And day
+after day, in the face of every argument, of every consideration of
+generosity, she would repeat, without winking, in that voice like the
+squeeze of a doll's stomach: 'It goes with the house--it goes with the
+house.' In that attitude they'll shut themselves up."
+
+Fleda was struck, was even a little startled with the way Mrs. Gereth
+had turned this over--had faced, if indeed only to recognize its
+futility, the notion of a battle with her only son. These words led her
+to make an inquiry which she had not thought it discreet to make before;
+she brought out the idea of the possibility, after all, of her friend's
+continuing to live at Poynton. Would they really wish to proceed to
+extremities? Was no good-humored, graceful compromise to be imagined or
+brought about? Couldn't the same roof cover them? Was it so very
+inconceivable that a married son should, for the rest of her days, share
+with so charming a mother the home she had devoted more than a score of
+years to making beautiful for him? Mrs. Gereth hailed this question with
+a wan, compassionate smile; she replied that a common household, in such
+a case, was exactly so inconceivable that Fleda had only to glance over
+the fair face of the English land to see how few people had ever
+conceived it. It was always thought a wonder, a "mistake," a piece of
+overstrained sentiment; and she confessed that she was as little capable
+of a flight of that sort as Owen himself. Even if they both had been
+capable, they would still have Mona's hatred to reckon with. Fleda's
+breath was sometimes taken away by the great bounds and elisions which,
+on Mrs. Gereth's lips, the course of discussion could take. This was the
+first she had heard of Mona's hatred, though she certainly had not
+needed Mrs. Gereth to tell her that in close quarters that young lady
+would prove secretly mulish. Later Fleda perceived indeed that perhaps
+almost any girl would hate a person who should be so markedly averse to
+having anything to do with her. Before this, however, in conversation
+with her young friend, Mrs. Gereth furnished a more vivid motive for her
+despair by asking how she could possibly be expected to sit there with
+the new proprietors and accept--or call it, for a day, endure--the
+horrors they would perpetrate in the house. Fleda reasoned that they
+wouldn't after all smash things nor burn them up; and Mrs. Gereth
+admitted when pushed that she didn't quite suppose they would. What she
+meant was that they would neglect them, ignore them, leave them to
+clumsy servants (there wasn't an object of them all but should be
+handled with perfect love), and in many cases probably wish to replace
+them by pieces answerable to some vulgar modern notion of the
+convenient. Above all, she saw in advance, with dilated eyes, the
+abominations they would inevitably mix up with them--the maddening
+relics of Waterbath, the little brackets and pink vases, the sweepings
+of bazaars, the family photographs and illuminated texts, the "household
+art" and household piety of Mona's hideous home. Wasn't it enough simply
+to contend that Mona would approach Poynton in the spirit of a
+Brigstock, and that in the spirit of a Brigstock she would deal with her
+acquisition? Did Fleda really see _her_, Mrs. Gereth demanded, spending
+the remainder of her days with such a creature's elbow in her eye?
+
+Fleda had to declare that she certainly didn't, and that Waterbath had
+been a warning it would be frivolous to overlook. At the same time she
+privately reflected that they were taking a great deal for granted, and
+that, inasmuch as to her knowledge Owen Gereth had positively denied his
+betrothal, the ground of their speculations was by no means firm. It
+seemed to our young lady that in a difficult position Owen conducted
+himself with some natural art; treating this domesticated confidant of
+his mother's wrongs with a simple civility that almost troubled her
+conscience, so deeply she felt that she might have had for him the air
+of siding with that lady against him. She wondered if he would ever know
+how little really she did this, and that she was there, since Mrs.
+Gereth had insisted, not to betray, but essentially to confirm and
+protect. The fact that his mother disliked Mona Brigstock might have
+made him dislike the object of her preference, and it was detestable to
+Fleda to remember that she might have appeared to him to offer herself
+as an exemplary contrast. It was clear enough, however, that the happy
+youth had no more sense for a motive than a deaf man for a tune, a
+limitation by which, after all, she could gain as well as lose. He came
+and went very freely on the business with which London abundantly
+furnished him, but he found time more than once to say to her, "It's
+awfully nice of you to look after poor Mummy." As well as his quick
+speech, which shyness made obscure--it was usually as desperate as a
+"rush" at some violent game--his child's eyes in his man's face put it
+to her that, you know, this really meant a good deal for him and that he
+hoped she would stay on. With a person in the house who, like herself,
+was clever, poor Mummy was conveniently occupied; and Fleda found a
+beauty in the candor and even in the modesty which apparently kept him
+from suspecting that two such wiseheads could possibly be occupied with
+Owen Gereth.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+
+They went at last, the wiseheads, down to Poynton, where the palpitating
+girl had the full revelation. "_Now_ do you know how I feel?" Mrs.
+Gereth asked when in the wonderful hall, three minutes after their
+arrival, her pretty associate dropped on a seat with a soft gasp and a
+roll of dilated eyes. The answer came clearly enough, and in the rapture
+of that first walk through the house Fleda took a prodigious span. She
+perfectly understood how Mrs. Gereth felt--she had understood but
+meagrely before; and the two women embraced with tears over the
+tightening of their bond--tears which on the younger one's part were the
+natural and usual sign of her submission to perfect beauty. It was not
+the first time she had cried for the joy of admiration, but it was the
+first time the mistress of Poynton, often as she had shown her house,
+had been present at such an exhibition. She exulted in it; it quickened
+her own tears; she assured her companion that such an occasion made the
+poor old place fresh to her again and more precious than ever. Yes,
+nobody had ever, that way, felt what she had achieved: people were so
+grossly ignorant, and everybody, even the knowing ones, as they thought
+themselves, more or less dense. What Mrs. Gereth had achieved was indeed
+an exquisite work; and in such an art of the treasure-hunter, in
+selection and comparison refined to that point, there was an element of
+creation, of personality. She had commended Fleda's _flair_, and Fleda
+now gave herself up to satiety. Preoccupations and scruples fell away
+from her; she had never known a greater happiness than the week she
+passed in this initiation.
+
+Wandering through clear chambers where the general effect made
+preferences almost as impossible as if they had been shocks, pausing at
+open doors where vistas were long and bland, she would, even if she had
+not already known, have discovered for herself that Poynton was the
+record of a life. It was written in great syllables of color and form,
+the tongues of other countries and the hands of rare artists. It was all
+France and Italy, with their ages composed to rest. For England you
+looked out of old windows--it was England that was the wide embrace.
+While outside, on the low terraces, she contradicted gardeners and
+refined on nature, Mrs. Gereth left her guest to finger fondly the
+brasses that Louis Quinze might have thumbed, to sit with Venetian
+velvets just held in a loving palm, to hang over cases of enamels and
+pass and repass before cabinets. There were not many pictures--the
+panels and the stuffs were themselves the picture; and in all the great
+wainscoted house there was not an inch of pasted paper. What struck
+Fleda most in it was the high pride of her friend's taste, a fine
+arrogance, a sense of style which, however amused and amusing, never
+compromised nor stooped. She felt indeed, as this lady had intimated to
+her that she would, both a respect and a compassion that she had not
+known before; the vision of the coming surrender filled her with an
+equal pain. To give it all up, to die to it--that thought ached in her
+breast. She herself could imagine clinging there with a closeness
+separate from dignity. To have created such a place was to have had
+dignity enough; when there was a question of defending it the fiercest
+attitude was the right one. After so intense a taking of possession she
+too was to give it up; for she reflected that if Mrs. Gereth's remaining
+there would have offered her a sort of future--stretching away in safe
+years on the other side of a gulf--the advent of the others could only
+be, by the same law, a great vague menace, the ruffling of a still
+water. Such were the emotions of a hungry girl whose sensibility was
+almost as great as her opportunities for comparison had been small. The
+museums had done something for her, but nature had done more.
+
+If Owen had not come down with them nor joined them later, it was
+because he still found London jolly; yet the question remained of
+whether the jollity of London was not merely the only name his small
+vocabulary yielded for the jollity of Mona Brigstock. There was indeed
+in his conduct another ambiguity--something that required explaining so
+long as his motive didn't come to the surface. If he was in love, what
+was the matter? And what was the matter still more if he wasn't? The
+mystery was at last cleared up: this Fleda gathered from the tone in
+which, one morning at breakfast, a letter just opened made Mrs. Gereth
+cry out. Her dismay was almost a shriek: "Why, he's bringing her
+down--he wants her to see the house!" They flew, the two women, into
+each other's arms and, with their heads together, soon made out that the
+reason, the baffling reason why nothing had yet happened, was that Mona
+didn't know, or Owen didn't, whether Poynton would really please her.
+She was coming down to judge; and could anything in the world be more
+like poor Owen than the ponderous probity which had kept him from
+pressing her for a reply till she should have learned whether she
+approved what he had to offer her? That was a scruple it had naturally
+been impossible to impute. If only they might fondly hope, Mrs. Gereth
+wailed, that the girl's expectations would be dashed! There was a fine
+consistency, a sincerity quite affecting, in her arguing that the better
+the place should happen to look and to express the conceptions to which
+it owed its origin, the less it would speak to an intelligence so
+primitive. How could a Brigstock possibly understand what it was all
+about? How, really, could a Brigstock logically do anything but hate it?
+Mrs. Gereth, even as she whisked away linen shrouds, persuaded herself
+of the possibility on Mona's part of some bewildered blankness, some
+collapse of admiration that would prove disconcerting to her swain--a
+hope of which Fleda at least could see the absurdity and which gave the
+measure of the poor lady's strange, almost maniacal disposition to
+thrust in everywhere the question of "things," to read all behavior in
+the light of some fancied relation to them. "Things" were of course the
+sum of the world; only, for Mrs. Gereth, the sum of the world was rare
+French furniture and Oriental china. She could at a stretch imagine
+people's not having, but she couldn't imagine their not wanting and not
+missing.
+
+The young couple were to be accompanied by Mrs. Brigstock, and with a
+prevision of how fiercely they would be watched Fleda became conscious,
+before the party arrived, of an amused, diplomatic pity for them. Almost
+as much as Mrs. Gereth's her taste was her life, but her life was
+somehow the larger for it. Besides, she had another care now: there was
+some one she wouldn't have liked to see humiliated even in the form of a
+young lady who would contribute to his never suspecting so much
+delicacy. When this young lady appeared Fleda tried, so far as the wish
+to efface herself allowed, to be mainly the person to take her about,
+show her the house, and cover up her ignorance. Owen's announcement had
+been that, as trains made it convenient, they would present themselves
+for luncheon and depart before dinner; but Mrs. Gereth, true to her
+system of glaring civility, proposed and obtained an extension, a dining
+and spending of the night. She made her young friend wonder against what
+rebellion of fact she was sacrificing in advance so profusely to form.
+Fleda was appalled, after the first hour, by the rash innocence with
+which Mona had accepted the responsibility of observation, and indeed by
+the large levity with which, sitting there like a bored tourist in fine
+scenery, she exercised it. She felt in her nerves the effect of such a
+manner on her companion's, and it was this that made her want to entice
+the girl away, give her some merciful warning or some jocular cue. Mona
+met intense looks, however, with eyes that might have been blue beads,
+the only ones she had--eyes into which Fleda thought it strange Owen
+Gereth should have to plunge for his fate and his mother for a
+confession of whether Poynton was a success. She made no remark that
+helped to supply this light; her impression at any rate had nothing in
+common with the feeling that, as the beauty of the place throbbed out
+like music, had caused Fleda Vetch to burst into tears. She was as
+content to say nothing as if, Mrs. Gereth afterwards exclaimed, she had
+been keeping her mouth shut in a railway-tunnel. Mrs. Gereth contrived
+at the end of an hour to convey to Fleda that it was plain she was
+brutally ignorant; but Fleda more subtly discovered that her ignorance
+was obscurely active.
+
+She was not so stupid as not to see that something, though she scarcely
+knew what, was expected of her that she couldn't give; and the only mode
+her intelligence suggested of meeting the expectation was to plant her
+big feet and pull another way. Mrs. Gereth wanted her to rise, somehow
+or somewhere, and was prepared to hate her if she didn't: very well, she
+couldn't, she wouldn't rise; she already moved at the altitude that
+suited her, and was able to see that, since she was exposed to the
+hatred, she might at least enjoy the calm. The smallest trouble, for a
+girl with no nonsense about her, was to earn what she incurred; so that,
+a dim instinct teaching her she would earn it best by not being
+effusive, and combining with the conviction that she now held Owen, and
+therefore the place, she had the pleasure of her honesty as well as of
+her security. Didn't her very honesty lead her to be belligerently blank
+about Poynton, inasmuch as it was just Poynton that was forced upon her
+as a subject for effusiveness? Such subjects, to Mona Brigstock, had an
+air almost of indecency, and the house became uncanny to her through
+such an appeal--an appeal that, somewhere in the twilight of her being,
+as Fleda was sure, she thanked heaven she _was_ the girl stiffly to draw
+back from. She was a person whom pressure at a given point infallibly
+caused to expand in the wrong place instead of, as it is usually
+administered in the hope of doing, the right one. Her mother, to make up
+for this, broke out universally, pronounced everything "most striking,"
+and was visibly happy that Owen's captor should be so far on the way to
+strike: but she jarred upon Mrs. Gereth by her formula of admiration,
+which was that anything she looked at was "in the style" of something
+else. This was to show how much she had seen, but it only showed she had
+seen nothing; everything at Poynton was in the style of Poynton, and
+poor Mrs. Brigstock, who at least was determined to rise, and had
+brought with her a trophy of her journey, a "lady's magazine" purchased
+at the station, a horrible thing with patterns for antimacassars, which,
+as it was quite new, the first number, and seemed so clever, she kindly
+offered to leave for the house, was in the style of a vulgar old woman
+who wore silver jewelry and tried to pass off a gross avidity as a sense
+of the beautiful.
+
+By the day's end it was clear to Fleda Vetch that, however Mona judged,
+the day had been determinant; whether or no she felt the charm, she felt
+the challenge: at an early moment Owen Gereth would be able to tell his
+mother the worst. Nevertheless, when the elder lady, at bedtime, coming
+in a dressing-gown and a high fever to the younger one's room, cried
+out, "She hates it; but what will she do?" Fleda pretended vagueness,
+played at obscurity and assented disingenuously to the proposition that
+they at least had a respite. The future was dark to her, but there was a
+silken thread she could clutch in the gloom--she would never give Owen
+away. He might give himself--he even certainly would; but that was his
+own affair, and his blunders, his innocence, only added to the appeal he
+made to her. She would cover him, she would protect him, and beyond
+thinking her a cheerful inmate he would never guess her intention, any
+more than, beyond thinking her clever enough for anything, his acute
+mother would discover it. From this hour, with Mrs. Gereth, there was a
+flaw in her frankness: her admirable friend continued to know everything
+she did; what was to remain unknown was the general motive.
+
+From the window of her room, the next morning before breakfast, the girl
+saw Owen in the garden with Mona, who strolled beside him with a
+listening parasol, but without a visible look for the great florid
+picture that had been hung there by Mrs. Gereth's hand. Mona kept
+dropping her eyes, as she walked, to catch the sheen of her
+patent-leather shoes, which resembled a man's and which she kicked
+forward a little--it gave her an odd movement--to help her see what she
+thought of them. When Fleda came down Mrs. Gereth was in the
+breakfast-room; and at that moment Owen, through a long window, passed
+in alone from the terrace and very endearingly kissed his mother. It
+immediately struck the girl that she was in their way, for hadn't he
+been borne on a wave of joy exactly to announce, before the Brigstocks
+departed, that Mona had at last faltered out the sweet word he had been
+waiting for? He shook hands with his friendly violence, but Fleda
+contrived not to look into his face: what she liked most to see in it
+was not the reflection of Mona's big boot-toes. She could bear well
+enough that young lady herself, but she couldn't bear Owen's opinion of
+her. She was on the point of slipping into the garden when the movement
+was checked by Mrs. Gereth's suddenly drawing her close, as if for the
+morning embrace, and then, while she kept her there with the bravery of
+the night's repose, breaking out: "Well, my dear boy, what _does_ your
+young friend there make of our odds and ends?"
+
+"Oh, she thinks they're all right!"
+
+Fleda immediately guessed from his tone that he had not come in to say
+what she supposed; there was even something in it to confirm Mrs.
+Gereth's belief that their danger had dropped. She was sure, moreover,
+that his tribute to Mona's taste was a repetition of the eloquent words
+in which the girl had herself recorded it; she could indeed hear, with
+all vividness, the pretty passage between the pair. "Don't you think
+it's rather jolly, the old shop?" "Oh, it's all right!" Mona had
+graciously remarked; and then they had probably, with a slap on a back,
+run another race up or down a green bank. Fleda knew Mrs. Gereth had not
+yet uttered a word to her son that would have shown him how much she
+feared; but it was impossible to feel her friend's arm round her and not
+become aware that this friend was now throbbing with a strange
+intention. Owen's reply had scarcely been of a nature to usher in a
+discussion of Mona's sensibilities; but Mrs. Gereth went on, in a
+moment, with an innocence of which Fleda could measure the cold
+hypocrisy: "Has she any sort of feeling for nice old things?" The
+question was as fresh as the morning light.
+
+"Oh, of course she likes everything that's nice." And Owen, who
+constitutionally disliked questions--an answer was almost as hateful to
+him as a "trick" to a big dog--smiled kindly at Fleda and conveyed that
+she would understand what he meant even if his mother didn't. Fleda,
+however, mainly understood that Mrs. Gereth, with an odd, wild laugh,
+held her so hard that she hurt her.
+
+"I could give up everything without a pang, I think, to a person I could
+trust, I could respect." The girl heard her voice tremble under the
+effort to show nothing but what she wanted to show, and felt the
+sincerity of her implication that the piety most real to her was to be
+on one's knees before one's high standard. "The best things here, as you
+know, are the things your father and I collected, things all that we
+worked for and waited for and suffered for. Yes," cried Mrs. Gereth,
+with a fine freedom of fancy, "there are things in the house that we
+almost starved for! They were our religion, they were our life, they
+were _us_! And now they're only _me_--except that they're also _you_,
+thank God, a little, you dear!" she continued, suddenly inflicting on
+Fleda a kiss apparently intended to knock her into position. "There
+isn't one of them I don't know and love--yes, as one remembers and
+cherishes the happiest moments of one's life. Blindfold, in the dark,
+with the brush of a finger, I could tell one from another. They're
+living things to me; they know me, they return the touch of my hand. But
+I could let them all go, since I have to, so strangely, to another
+affection, another conscience. There's a care they want, there's a
+sympathy that draws out their beauty. Rather than make them over to a
+woman ignorant and vulgar, I think I'd deface them with my own hands.
+Can't you see me, Fleda, and wouldn't you do it yourself?"--she appealed
+to her companion with glittering eyes. "I couldn't bear the thought of
+such a woman here--I _couldn't_. I don't know what she'd do; she'd be
+sure to invent some deviltry, if it should be only to bring in her own
+little belongings and horrors. The world is full of cheap gimcracks, in
+this awful age, and they're thrust in at one at every turn. They'd be
+thrust in here, on top of my treasures, my own. Who would save _them_
+for me--I ask you who _would_?" and she turned again to Fleda with a
+dry, strained smile. Her handsome, high-nosed, excited face might have
+been that of Don Quixote tilting at a windmill. Drawn into the eddy of
+this outpouring, the girl, scared and embarrassed, laughed off her
+exposure; but only to feel herself more passionately caught up and, as
+it seemed to her, thrust down the fine open mouth (it showed such
+perfect teeth) with which poor Owen's slow cerebration gaped. "_You_
+would, of course--only you, in all the world, because you know, you
+feel, as I do myself, what's good and true and pure." No severity of the
+moral law could have taken a higher tone in this implication of the
+young lady who had not the only virtue Mrs. Gereth actively esteemed.
+"_You_ would replace me, _you_ would watch over them, _you_ would keep
+the place right," she austerely pursued, "and with you here--yes, with
+you, I believe I might rest, at last, in my grave!" She threw herself on
+Fleda's neck, and before Fleda, horribly shamed, could shake her off,
+had burst into tears which couldn't have been explained, but which might
+perhaps have been understood.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+
+A week later Owen Gereth came down to inform his mother that he had
+settled with Mona Brigstock; but it was not at all a joy to Fleda,
+conscious how much to himself it would be a surprise, that he should
+find her still in the house. That dreadful scene before breakfast had
+made her position false and odious; it had been followed, after they
+were left alone, by a scene of her own making with her extravagant
+friend. She notified Mrs. Gereth of her instant departure: she couldn't
+possibly remain after being offered to Owen, that way, before her very
+face, as his mother's candidate for the honor of his hand. That was all
+he could have seen in such an outbreak and in the indecency of her
+standing there to enjoy it. Fleda had on the prior occasion dashed out
+of the room by the shortest course and in her confusion had fallen upon
+Mona in the garden. She had taken an aimless turn with her, and they had
+had some talk, rendered at first difficult and almost disagreeable by
+Mona's apparent suspicion that she had been sent out to spy, as Mrs.
+Gereth had tried to spy, into her opinions. Fleda was sagacious enough
+to treat these opinions as a mystery almost awful; which had an effect
+so much more than reassuring that at the end of five minutes the young
+lady from Waterbath suddenly and perversely said: "Why has she never had
+a winter garden thrown out? If ever I have a place of my own I mean to
+have one." Fleda, dismayed, could see the thing--something glazed and
+piped, on iron pillars, with untidy plants and cane sofas; a shiny
+excrescence on the noble face of Poynton. She remembered at Waterbath a
+conservatory where she had caught a bad cold in the company of a stuffed
+cockatoo fastened to a tropical bough and a waterless fountain composed
+of shells stuck into some hardened paste. She asked Mona if her idea
+would be to make something like this conservatory; to which Mona
+replied: "Oh no, much finer; we haven't got a winter garden at
+Waterbath." Fleda wondered if she meant to convey that it was the only
+grandeur they lacked, and in a moment Mona went on: "But we have got a
+billiard-room--that I will say for us!" There was no billiard-room at
+Poynton, but there would evidently be one, and it would have, hung on
+its walls, framed at the "Stores," caricature-portraits of celebrities,
+taken from a "society-paper."
+
+When the two girls had gone in to breakfast it was for Fleda to see at a
+glance that there had been a further passage, of some high color,
+between Owen and his mother; and she had turned pale in guessing to what
+extremity, at her expense, Mrs. Gereth had found occasion to proceed.
+Hadn't she, after her clumsy flight, been pressed upon Owen in still
+clearer terms? Mrs. Gereth would practically have said to him: "If
+you'll take _her_, I'll move away without a sound. But if you take any
+one else, any one I'm not sure of, as I am of her--heaven help me, I'll
+fight to the death!" Breakfast, this morning, at Poynton, had been a
+meal singularly silent, in spite of the vague little cries with which
+Mrs. Brigstock turned up the underside of plates and the knowing but
+alarming raps administered by her big knuckles to porcelain cups. Some
+one had to respond to her, and the duty assigned itself to Fleda, who,
+while pretending to meet her on the ground of explanation, wondered what
+Owen thought of a girl still indelicately anxious, after she had been
+grossly hurled at him, to prove by exhibitions of her fine taste that
+she was really what his mother pretended. This time, at any rate, their
+fate was sealed: Owen, as soon as he should get out of the house, would
+describe to Mona that lady's extraordinary conduct, and if anything more
+had been wanted to "fetch" Mona, as he would call it, the deficiency was
+now made up. Mrs. Gereth in fact took care of that--took care of it by
+the way, at the last, on the threshold, she said to the younger of her
+departing guests, with an irony of which the sting was wholly in the
+sense, not at all in the sound: "We haven't had the talk we might have
+had, have we? You'll feel that I've neglected you, and you'll treasure
+it up against me. _Don't_, because really, you know, it has been quite
+an accident, and I've all sorts of information at your disposal. If you
+should come down again (only you won't, ever,--I feel that!) I should
+give you plenty of time to worry it out of me. Indeed there are some
+things I should quite insist on your learning; not permit you at all, in
+any settled way, _not_ to learn. Yes indeed, you'd put me through, and I
+should put you, my dear! We should have each other to reckon with, and
+you would see me as I really am. I'm not a bit the vague, mooning, easy
+creature I dare say you think. However, if you won't come, you won't;
+_n'en parlons plus_. It _is_ stupid here after what you're accustomed
+to. We can only, all round, do what we can, eh? For heaven's sake, don't
+let your mother forget her precious publication, the female magazine,
+with the what-do-you-call-'em?--the grease-catchers. There!"
+
+Mrs. Gereth, delivering herself from the doorstep, had tossed the
+periodical higher in air than was absolutely needful--tossed it toward
+the carriage the retreating party was about to enter. Mona, from the
+force of habit, the reflex action of the custom of sport, had popped
+out, with a little spring, a long arm and intercepted the missile as
+easily as she would have caused a tennis-ball to rebound from a racket.
+"Good catch!" Owen had cried, so genuinely pleased that practically no
+notice was taken of his mother's impressive remarks. It was to the
+accompaniment of romping laughter, as Mrs. Gereth afterwards said, that
+the carriage had rolled away; but it was while that laughter was still
+in the air that Fleda Vetch, white and terrible, had turned upon her
+hostess with her scorching "How _could_ you? Great God, how _could_
+you?" This lady's perfect blankness was from the first a sign of her
+serene conscience, and the fact that till indoctrinated she didn't even
+know what Fleda meant by resenting her late offense to every
+susceptibility gave our young woman a sore, scared perception that her
+own value in the house was just the value, as one might say, of a good
+agent. Mrs. Gereth was generously sorry, but she was still more
+surprised--surprised at Fleda's not having liked to be shown off to Owen
+as the right sort of wife for him. Why not, in the name of wonder, if
+she absolutely _was_ the right sort? She had admitted on explanation
+that she could see what her young friend meant by having been laid, as
+Fleda called it, at his feet; but it struck the girl that the admission
+was only made to please her, and that Mrs. Gereth was secretly surprised
+at her not being as happy to be sacrificed to the supremacy of a high
+standard as she was happy to sacrifice her. She had taken a tremendous
+fancy to her, but that was on account of the fancy--to Poynton of
+course--Fleda herself had taken. Wasn't this latter fancy then so great
+after all? Fleda felt that she could declare it to be great indeed when
+really for the sake of it she could forgive what she had suffered and,
+after reproaches and tears, asseverations and kisses, after learning
+that she was cared for only as a priestess of the altar and a view of
+her bruised dignity which left no alternative to flight, could accept
+the shame with the balm, consent not to depart, take refuge in the thin
+comfort of at least knowing the truth. The truth was simply that all
+Mrs. Gereth's scruples were on one side and that her ruling passion had
+in a manner despoiled her of her humanity. On the second day, after the
+tide of emotion had somewhat ebbed, she said soothingly to her
+companion: "But you _would_, after all, marry him, you know, darling,
+wouldn't you, if that girl were not there? I mean of course if he were
+to ask you," Mrs. Gereth had thoughtfully added.
+
+"Marry him if he were to ask me? Most distinctly not!"
+
+The question had not come up with this definiteness before, and Mrs.
+Gereth was clearly more surprised than ever. She marveled a moment. "Not
+even to have Poynton?"
+
+"Not even to have Poynton."
+
+"But why on earth?" Mrs. Gereth's sad eyes were fixed on her.
+
+Fleda colored; she hesitated. "Because he's too stupid!" Save on one
+other occasion, at which we shall in time arrive, little as the reader
+may believe it, she never came nearer to betraying to Mrs. Gereth that
+she was in love with Owen. She found a dim amusement in reflecting that
+if Mona had not been there and he had not been too stupid and he verily
+had asked her, she might, should she have wished to keep her secret,
+have found it possible to pass off the motive of her action as a mere
+passion for Poynton.
+
+Mrs. Gereth evidently thought in these days of little but things
+hymeneal; for she broke out with sudden rapture, in the middle of the
+week: "I know what they'll do: they _will_ marry, but they'll go and
+live at Waterbath!" There was positive joy in that form of the idea,
+which she embroidered and developed: it seemed so much the safest thing
+that could happen. "Yes, I'll have you, but I won't go _there_!" Mona
+would have said with a vicious nod at the southern horizon: "we'll leave
+your horrid mother alone there for life." It would be an ideal solution,
+this ingress the lively pair, with their spiritual need of a warmer
+medium, would playfully punch in the ribs of her ancestral home; for it
+would not only prevent recurring panic at Poynton--it would offer them,
+as in one of their gimcrack baskets or other vessels of ugliness, a
+definite daily felicity that Poynton could never give. Owen might manage
+his estate just as he managed it now, and Mrs. Gereth would manage
+everything else. When, in the hall, on the unforgettable day of his
+return, she had heard his voice ring out like a call to a terrier, she
+had still, as Fleda afterwards learned, clutched frantically at the
+conceit that he had come, at the worst, to announce some compromise; to
+tell her she would have to put up with the girl, yes, but that some way
+would be arrived at of leaving her in personal possession. Fleda Vetch,
+whom from the first hour no illusion had brushed with its wing, now held
+her breath, went on tiptoe, wandered in outlying parts of the house and
+through delicate, muffled rooms, while the mother and son faced each
+other below. From time to time she stopped to listen; but all was so
+quiet she was almost frightened: she had vaguely expected a sound of
+contention. It lasted longer than she would have supposed, whatever it
+was they were doing; and when finally, from a window, she saw Owen
+stroll out of the house, stop and light a cigarette and then pensively
+lose himself in the plantations, she found other matter for trepidation
+in the fact that Mrs. Gereth didn't immediately come rushing up into her
+arms. She wondered whether she oughtn't to go down to her, and measured
+the gravity of what had occurred by the circumstance, which she
+presently ascertained, that the poor lady had retired to her room and
+wished not to be disturbed. This admonition had been for her maid, with
+whom Fleda conferred as at the door of a death-chamber; but the girl,
+without either fatuity or resentment, judged that, since it could render
+Mrs. Gereth indifferent even to the ministrations of disinterested
+attachment, the scene had been tremendous.
+
+She was absent from luncheon, where indeed Fleda had enough to do to
+look Owen in the face; there would be so much to make that hateful in
+their common memory of the passage in which his last visit had
+terminated. This had been her apprehension at least; but as soon as he
+stood there she was constrained to wonder at the practical simplicity of
+the ordeal--a simplicity which was really just his own simplicity, the
+particular thing that, for Fleda Vetch, some other things of course
+aiding, made almost any direct relation with him pleasant. He had
+neither wit, nor tact, nor inspiration: all she could say was that when
+they were together the alienation these charms were usually depended on
+to allay didn't occur. On this occasion, for instance, he did so much
+better than "carry off" an awkward remembrance: he simply didn't have
+it. He had clean forgotten that she was the girl his mother would have
+fobbed off on him; he was conscious only that she was there in a manner
+for service--conscious of the dumb instinct that from the first had made
+him regard her not as complicating his intercourse with that personage,
+but as simplifying it. Fleda found beautiful that this theory should
+have survived the incident of the other day; found exquisite that
+whereas she was conscious, through faint reverberations, that for her
+kind little circle at large, whom it didn't concern, her tendency had
+begun to define itself as parasitical, this strong young man, who had a
+right to judge and even a reason to loathe her, didn't judge and didn't
+loathe, let her down gently, treated her as if she pleased him, and in
+fact evidently liked her to be just where she was. She asked herself
+what he did when Mona denounced her, and the only answer to the question
+was that perhaps Mona didn't denounce her. If Mona was inarticulate he
+wasn't such a fool, then, to marry her. That he was glad Fleda was there
+was at any rate sufficiently shown by the domestic familiarity with
+which he said to her: "I must tell you I've been having an awful row
+with my mother. I'm engaged to be married to Miss Brigstock."
+
+"Ah, really?" cried Fleda, achieving a radiance of which she was
+secretly proud. "How very exciting!"
+
+"Too exciting for poor Mummy. She won't hear of it. She has been slating
+her fearfully. She says she's a 'barbarian.'"
+
+"Why, she's lovely!" Fleda exclaimed.
+
+"Oh, she's all right. Mother must come round."
+
+"Only give her time," said Fleda. She had advanced to the threshold of
+the door thus thrown open to her and, without exactly crossing it, she
+threw in an appreciative glance. She asked Owen when his marriage would
+take place, and in the light of his reply read that Mrs. Gereth's
+wretched attitude would have no influence at all on the event,
+absolutely fixed when he came down, and distant by only three months. He
+liked Fleda's seeming to be on his side, though that was a secondary
+matter, for what really most concerned him now was the line his mother
+took about Poynton, her declared unwillingness to give it up.
+
+"Naturally I want my own house, you know," he said, "and my father made
+every arrangement for me to have it. But she may make it devilish
+awkward. What in the world's a fellow to do?" This it was that Owen
+wanted to know, and there could be no better proof of his friendliness
+than his air of depending on Fleda Vetch to tell him. She questioned
+him, they spent an hour together, and, as he gave her the scale of the
+concussion from which he had rebounded, she found herself saddened and
+frightened by the material he seemed to offer her to deal with. It _was_
+devilish awkward, and it was so in part because Owen had no imagination.
+It had lodged itself in that empty chamber that his mother hated the
+surrender because she hated Mona. He didn't of course understand why she
+hated Mona, but this belonged to an order of mysteries that never
+troubled him: there were lots of things, especially in people's minds,
+that a fellow didn't understand. Poor Owen went through life with a
+frank dread of people's minds: there were explanations he would have
+been almost as shy of receiving as of giving. There was therefore
+nothing that accounted for anything, though in its way it was vivid
+enough, in his picture to Fleda of his mother's virtual refusal to move.
+That was simply what it was; for didn't she refuse to move when she as
+good as declared that she would move only with the furniture? It was the
+furniture she wouldn't give up; and what was the good of Poynton without
+the furniture? Besides, the furniture happened to be his, just as
+everything else happened to be. The furniture--the word, on his lips,
+had somehow, for Fleda, the sound of washing-stands and copious bedding,
+and she could well imagine the note it might have struck for Mrs.
+Gereth. The girl, in this interview with him, spoke of the contents of
+the house only as "the works of art." It didn't, however, in the least
+matter to Owen what they were called; what did matter, she easily
+guessed, was that it had been laid upon him by Mona, been made in effect
+a condition of her consent, that he should hold his mother to the
+strictest accountability for them. Mona had already entered upon the
+enjoyment of her rights. She had made him feel that Mrs. Gereth had been
+liberally provided for, and had asked him cogently what room there would
+be at Ricks for the innumerable treasures of the big house. Ricks, the
+sweet little place offered to the mistress of Poynton as the refuge of
+her declining years, had been left to the late Mr. Gereth, a
+considerable time before his death, by an old maternal aunt, a good lady
+who had spent most of her life there. The house had in recent times been
+let, but it was amply furnished, it contained all the defunct aunt's
+possessions. Owen had lately inspected it, and he communicated to Fleda
+that he had quietly taken Mona to see it. It wasn't a place like
+Poynton--what dower-house ever was?--but it was an awfully jolly little
+place, and Mona had taken a tremendous fancy to it. If there were a few
+things at Poynton that were Mrs. Gereth's peculiar property, of course
+she must take them away with her; but one of the matters that became
+clear to Fleda was that this transfer would be immediately subject to
+Miss Brigstock's approval. The special business that she herself now
+became aware of being charged with was that of seeing Mrs. Gereth safely
+and singly off the premises.
+
+Her heart failed her, after Owen had returned to London, with the
+ugliness of this duty--with the ugliness, indeed, of the whole close
+conflict. She saw nothing of Mrs. Gereth that day; she spent it in
+roaming with sick sighs, in feeling, as she passed from room to room,
+that what was expected of her companion was really dreadful. It would
+have been better never to have had such a place than to have had it and
+lose it. It was odious to _her_ to have to look for solutions: what a
+strange relation between mother and son when there was no fundamental
+tenderness out of which a solution would irrepressibly spring! Was it
+Owen who was mainly responsible for that poverty? Fleda couldn't think
+so when she remembered that, so far as he was concerned, Mrs. Gereth
+would still have been welcome to have her seat by the Poynton fire. The
+fact that from the moment one accepted his marrying one saw no very
+different course for Owen to take made her all the rest of that aching
+day find her best relief in the mercy of not having yet to face her
+hostess. She dodged and dreamed and romanced away the time; instead of
+inventing a remedy or a compromise, instead of preparing a plan by which
+a scandal might be averted, she gave herself, in her sentient solitude,
+up to a mere fairy tale, up to the very taste of the beautiful peace
+with which she would have filled the air if only something might have
+been that could never have been.
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+
+"I'll give up the house if they'll let me take what I require!" That, on
+the morrow, was what Mrs. Gereth's stifled night had qualified her to
+say, with a tragic face, at breakfast. Fleda reflected that what she
+"required" was simply every object that surrounded them. The poor woman
+would have admitted this truth and accepted the conclusion to be drawn
+from it, the reduction to the absurd of her attitude, the exaltation of
+her revolt. The girl's dread of a scandal, of spectators and critics,
+diminished the more she saw how little vulgar avidity had to do with
+this rigor. It was not the crude love of possession; it was the need to
+be faithful to a trust and loyal to an idea. The idea was surely noble:
+it was that of the beauty Mrs. Gereth had so patiently and consummately
+wrought. Pale but radiant, with her back to the wall, she rose there
+like a heroine guarding a treasure. To give up the ship was to flinch
+from her duty; there was something in her eyes that declared she would
+die at her post. If their difference should become public the shame
+would be all for the others. If Waterbath thought it could afford to
+expose itself, then Waterbath was welcome to the folly. Her fanaticism
+gave her a new distinction, and Fleda perceived almost with awe that she
+had never carried herself so well. She trod the place like a reigning
+queen or a proud usurper; full as it was of splendid pieces, it could
+show in these days no ornament so effective as its menaced mistress.
+
+Our young lady's spirit was strangely divided; she had a tenderness for
+Owen which she deeply concealed, yet it left her occasion to marvel at
+the way a man was made who could care in any relation for a creature
+like Mona Brigstock when he had known in any relation a creature like
+Adela Gereth. With such a mother to give him the pitch, how could he
+take it so low? She wondered that she didn't despise him for this, but
+there was something that kept her from it. If there had been nothing
+else it would have sufficed that she really found herself from this
+moment the medium of communication with him.
+
+"He'll come back to assert himself," Mrs. Gereth had said; and the
+following week Owen in fact reappeared. He might merely have written,
+Fleda could see, but he had come in person because it was at once
+"nicer" for his mother and stronger for his cause. He didn't like the
+row, though Mona probably did; if he hadn't a sense of beauty he had
+after all a sense of justice; but it was inevitable he should clearly
+announce at Poynton the date at which he must look to find the house
+vacant. "You don't think I'm rough or hard, do you?" he asked of Fleda,
+his impatience shining in his idle eyes as the dining-hour shines in
+club-windows. "The place at Ricks stands there with open arms. And then
+I give her lots of time. Tell her she can remove everything that belongs
+to her." Fleda recognized the elements of what the newspapers call a
+deadlock in the circumstance that nothing at Poynton belonged to Mrs.
+Gereth either more or less than anything else. She must either take
+everything or nothing, and the girl's suggestion was that it might
+perhaps be an inspiration to do the latter and begin again on a clean
+page. What, however, was the poor woman, in that case, to begin with?
+What was she to do at all, on her meagre income, but make the best of
+the _objets d'art_ of Ricks, the treasures collected by Mr. Gereth's
+maiden aunt? She had never been near the place: for long years it had
+been let to strangers, and after that the foreboding that it would be
+her doom had kept her from the abasement of it. She had felt that she
+should see it soon enough, but Fleda (who was careful not to betray to
+her that Mona had seen it and had been gratified) knew her reasons for
+believing that the maiden aunt's principles had had much in common with
+the principles of Waterbath. The only thing, in short, that she would
+ever have to do with the objets d'art of Ricks would be to turn them out
+into the road. What belonged to her at Poynton, as Owen said, would
+conveniently mitigate the void resulting from that demonstration.
+
+The exchange of observations between the friends had grown very direct
+by the time Fleda asked Mrs. Gereth whether she literally meant to shut
+herself up and stand a siege, or whether it was her idea to expose
+herself, more informally, to be dragged out of the house by constables.
+"Oh, I prefer the constables and the dragging!" the heroine of Poynton
+had answered. "I want to make Owen and Mona do everything that will be
+most publicly odious." She gave it out that it was her one thought now
+to force them to a line that would dishonor them and dishonor the
+tradition they embodied, though Fleda was privately sure that she had
+visions of an alternative policy. The strange thing was that, proud and
+fastidious all her life, she now showed so little distaste for the
+world's hearing of the squabble. What had taken place in her above all
+was that a long resentment had ripened. She hated the effacement to
+which English usage reduced the widowed mother: she had discoursed of it
+passionately to Fleda; contrasted it with the beautiful homage paid in
+other countries to women in that position, women no better than herself,
+whom she had seen acclaimed and enthroned, whom she had known and
+envied; made in short as little as possible a secret of the injury, the
+bitterness she found in it. The great wrong Owen had done her was not
+his "taking up" with Mona--that was disgusting, but it was a detail, an
+accidental form: it was his failure from the first to understand what it
+was to have a mother at all, to appreciate the beauty and sanctity of
+the character. She was just his mother as his nose was just his nose,
+and he had never had the least imagination or tenderness or gallantry
+about her. One's mother, gracious heaven, if one were the kind of fine
+young man one ought to be, the only kind Mrs. Gereth cared for, was a
+subject for poetry, for idolatry. Hadn't she often told Fleda of her
+friend Madame de Jaume, the wittiest of women, but a small, black,
+crooked person, each of whose three boys, when absent, wrote to her
+every day of their lives? She had the house in Paris, she had the house
+in Poitou, she had more than in the lifetime of her husband (to whom, in
+spite of her appearance, she had afforded repeated cause for jealousy),
+because she had to the end of her days the supreme word about
+everything. It was easy to see that Mrs. Gereth would have given again
+and again her complexion, her figure, and even perhaps the spotless
+virtue she had still more successfully retained, to have been the
+consecrated Madame de Jaume. She wasn't, alas, and this was what she had
+at present a magnificent occasion to protest against. She was of course
+fully aware of Owen's concession, his willingness to let her take away
+with her the few things she liked best; but as yet she only declared
+that to meet him on this ground would be to give him a triumph, to put
+him impossibly in the right. "Liked best"? There wasn't a thing in the
+house that she didn't like best, and what she liked better still was to
+be left where she was. How could Owen use such an expression without
+being conscious of his hypocrisy? Mrs. Gereth, whose criticism was often
+gay, dilated with sardonic humor on the happy look a dozen objects from
+Poynton would wear and the charming effect they would conduce to when
+interspersed with the peculiar features of Ricks. What had her whole
+life been but an effort toward completeness and perfection? Better
+Waterbath at once, in its cynical unity, than the ignominy of such a
+mixture!
+
+All this was of no great help to Fleda, in so far as Fleda tried to rise
+to her mission of finding a way out. When at the end of a fortnight Owen
+came down once more, it was ostensibly to tackle a farmer whose
+proceedings had been irregular; the girl was sure, however, that he had
+really come, on the instance of Mona, to see what his mother was doing.
+He wished to satisfy himself that she was preparing her departure, and
+he wished to perform a duty, distinct but not less imperative, in regard
+to the question of the perquisites with which she would retreat. The
+tension between them was now such that he had to perpetrate these
+offenses without meeting his adversary. Mrs. Gereth was as willing as
+himself that he should address to Fleda Vetch whatever cruel remarks he
+might have to make: she only pitied her poor young friend for repeated
+encounters with a person as to whom she perfectly understood the girl's
+repulsion. Fleda thought it nice of Owen not to have expected her to
+write to him; he wouldn't have wished any more than herself that she
+should have the air of spying on his mother in his interest. What made
+it comfortable to deal with him in this more familiar way was the sense
+that she understood so perfectly how poor Mrs. Gereth suffered, and that
+she measured so adequately the sacrifice the other side did take rather
+monstrously for granted. She understood equally how Owen himself
+suffered, now that Mona had already begun to make him do things he
+didn't like. Vividly Fleda apprehended how _she_ would have first made
+him like anything she would have made him do; anything even as
+disagreeable as this appearing there to state, virtually on Mona's
+behalf, that of course there must be a definite limit to the number of
+articles appropriated. She took a longish stroll with him in order to
+talk the matter over; to say if she didn't think a dozen pieces, chosen
+absolutely at will, would be a handsome allowance; and above all to
+consider the very delicate question of whether the advantage enjoyed by
+Mrs. Gereth mightn't be left to her honor. To leave it so was what Owen
+wished; but there was plainly a young lady at Waterbath to whom, on his
+side, he already had to render an account. He was as touching in his
+offhand annoyance as his mother was tragic in her intensity; for if he
+couldn't help having a sense of propriety about the whole matter, so he
+could as little help hating it. It was for his hating it, Fleda
+reasoned, that she liked him so, and her insistence to his mother on the
+hatred perilously resembled, on one or two occasions, a revelation of
+the liking. There were moments when, in conscience, that revelation
+pressed her; inasmuch as it was just on the ground of her not liking him
+that Mrs. Gereth trusted her so much. Mrs. Gereth herself didn't in
+these days like him at all, and she was of course and always on Mrs.
+Gereth's side. He ended really, while the preparations for his marriage
+went on, by quite a little custom of coming and going; but on no one of
+these occasions would his mother receive him. He talked only with Fleda
+and strolled with Fleda; and when he asked her, in regard to the great
+matter, if Mrs. Gereth were really doing nothing, the girl usually
+replied: "She pretends not to be, if I may say so; but I think she's
+really thinking over what she'll take." When her friend asked her what
+Owen was doing, she could have but one answer: "He's waiting, dear lady,
+to see what _you_ do!"
+
+Mrs. Gereth, a month after she had received her great shock, did
+something abrupt and extraordinary: she caught up her companion and went
+to have a look at Ricks. They had come to London first and taken a train
+from Liverpool Street, and the least of the sufferings they were armed
+against was that of passing the night. Fleda's admirable dressing-bag
+had been given her by her friend. "Why, it's charming!" she exclaimed a
+few hours later, turning back again into the small prim parlor from a
+friendly advance to the single plate of the window. Mrs. Gereth hated
+such windows, the one flat glass, sliding up and down, especially when
+they enjoyed a view of four iron pots on pedestals, painted white and
+containing ugly geraniums, ranged on the edge of a gravel-path and doing
+their best to give it the air of a terrace. Fleda had instantly averted
+her eyes from these ornaments, but Mrs. Gereth grimly gazed, wondering
+of course how a place in the deepest depths of Essex and three miles
+from a small station could contrive to look so suburban. The room was
+practically a shallow box, with the junction of the walls and ceiling
+guiltless of curve or cornice and marked merely by the little band of
+crimson paper glued round the top of the other paper, a turbid gray
+sprigged with silver flowers. This decoration was rather new and quite
+fresh; and there was in the centre of the ceiling a big square beam
+papered over in white, as to which Fleda hesitated about venturing to
+remark that it was rather picturesque. She recognized in time that this
+remark would be weak and that, throughout, she should be able to say
+nothing either for the mantelpieces or for the doors, of which she saw
+her companion become sensible with a soundless moan. On the subject of
+doors especially Mrs. Gereth had the finest views: the thing in the
+world she most despised was the meanness of the single flap. From end to
+end, at Poynton, there were high double leaves. At Ricks the entrances
+to the rooms were like the holes of rabbit-hutches.
+
+It was all, none the less, not so bad as Fleda had feared; it was faded
+and melancholy, whereas there had been a danger that it would be
+contradictious and positive, cheerful and loud. The house was crowded
+with objects of which the aggregation somehow made a thinness and the
+futility a grace; things that told her they had been gathered as slowly
+and as lovingly as the golden flowers of Poynton. She too, for a home,
+could have lived with them: they made her fond of the old maiden-aunt;
+they made her even wonder if it didn't work more for happiness not to
+have tasted, as she herself had done, of knowledge. Without resources,
+without a stick, as she said, of her own, Fleda was moved, after all, to
+some secret surprise at the pretensions of a shipwrecked woman who could
+hold such an asylum cheap. The more she looked about the surer she felt
+of the character of the maiden-aunt, the sense of whose dim presence
+urged her to pacification: the maiden-aunt had been a dear; she would
+have adored the maiden-aunt. The poor lady had had some tender little
+story; she had been sensitive and ignorant and exquisite: that too was a
+sort of origin, a sort of atmosphere for relics and rarities, though
+different from the sorts most prized at Poynton. Mrs. Gereth had of
+course more than once said that one of the deepest mysteries of life was
+the way that, by certain natures, hideous objects could be loved; but it
+wasn't a question of love, now, for these: it was only a question of a
+certain practical patience. Perhaps some thought of that kind had stolen
+over Mrs. Gereth when, at the end of a brooding hour, she exclaimed,
+taking in the house with a strenuous sigh: "Well, something can be done
+with it!" Fleda had repeated to her more than once the indulgent fancy
+about the maiden-aunt--she was so sure she had deeply suffered. "I'm
+sure I hope she did!" was, however, all that Mrs. Gereth had replied.
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+
+It was a great relief to the girl at last to perceive that the dreadful
+move would really be made. What might happen if it shouldn't had been
+from the first indefinite. It was absurd to pretend that any violence
+was probable--a tussel, dishevelment, shrieks; yet Fleda had an
+imagination of a drama, a "great scene," a thing, somehow, of indignity
+and misery, of wounds inflicted and received, in which indeed, though
+Mrs. Gereth's presence, with movements and sounds, loomed large to her,
+Owen remained indistinct and on the whole unaggressive. He wouldn't be
+there with a cigarette in his teeth, very handsome and insolently quiet:
+that was only the way he would be in a novel, across whose interesting
+page some such figure, as she half closed her eyes, seemed to her to
+walk. Fleda had rather, and indeed with shame, a confused, pitying
+vision of Mrs. Gereth with her great scene left in a manner on her
+hands, Mrs. Gereth missing her effect and having to appear merely hot
+and injured and in the wrong. The symptoms that she would be spared even
+that spectacle resided not so much, through the chambers of Poynton, in
+an air of concentration as in the hum of buzzing alternatives. There was
+no common preparation, but one day, at the turn of a corridor, she found
+her hostess standing very still, with the hanging hands of an invalid
+and the active eyes of an adventurer. These eyes appeared to Fleda to
+meet her own with a strange, dim bravado, and there was a silence,
+almost awkward, before either of the friends spoke. The girl afterwards
+thought of the moment as one in which her hostess mutely accused her of
+an accusation, meeting it, however, at the same time, by a kind of
+defiant acceptance. Yet it was with mere melancholy candor that Mrs.
+Gereth at last sighingly exclaimed: "I'm thinking over what I had better
+take!" Fleda could have embraced her for this virtual promise of a
+concession, the announcement that she had finally accepted the problem
+of knocking together a shelter with the small salvage of the wreck.
+
+It was true that when after their return from Ricks they tried to
+lighten the ship, the great embarrassment was still immutably there, the
+odiousness of sacrificing the exquisite things one wouldn't take to the
+exquisite things one would. This immediately made the things one
+wouldn't take the very things one ought to, and, as Mrs. Gereth said,
+condemned one, in the whole business, to an eternal vicious circle. In
+such a circle, for days, she had been tormentedly moving, prowling up
+and down, comparing incomparables. It was for that one had to cling to
+them and their faces of supplication. Fleda herself could judge of these
+faces, so conscious of their race and their danger, and she had little
+enough to say when her companion asked her if the whole place,
+perversely fair on October afternoons, looked like a place to give up.
+It looked, to begin with, through some effect of season and light,
+larger than ever, immense, and it was filled with the hush of sorrow,
+which in turn was all charged with memories. Everything was in the
+air--every history of every find, every circumstance of every struggle.
+Mrs. Gereth had drawn back every curtain and removed every cover; she
+prolonged the vistas, opened wide the whole house, gave it an appearance
+of awaiting a royal visit. The shimmer of wrought substances spent
+itself in the brightness; the old golds and brasses, old ivories and
+bronzes, the fresh old tapestries and deep old damasks threw out a
+radiance in which the poor woman saw in solution all her old loves and
+patiences, all her old tricks and triumphs.
+
+Fleda had a depressed sense of not, after all, helping her much: this
+was lightened indeed by the fact that Mrs. Gereth, letting her off
+easily, didn't now seem to expect it. Her sympathy, her interest, her
+feeling for everything for which Mrs. Gereth felt, were a force that
+really worked to prolong the deadlock. "I only wish I bored you and my
+possessions bored you," that lady, with some humor, declared; "then
+you'd make short work with me, bundle me off, tell me just to pile
+certain things into a cart and have done." Fleda's sharpest difficulty
+was in having to act up to the character of thinking Owen a brute, or at
+least to carry off the inconsistency of seeing him when he came down. By
+good fortune it was her duty, her function, as well as a protection to
+Mrs. Gereth. She thought of him perpetually, and her eyes had come to
+rejoice in his manly magnificence more even than they rejoiced in the
+royal cabinets of the red saloon. She wondered, very faintly at first,
+why he came so often; but of course she knew nothing about the business
+he had in hand, over which, with men red-faced and leather-legged, he
+was sometimes closeted for an hour in a room of his own that was the one
+monstrosity of Poynton: all tobacco-pots and bootjacks, his mother had
+said--such an array of arms of aggression and castigation that he
+himself had confessed to eighteen rifles and forty whips. He was
+arranging for settlements on his wife, he was doing things that would
+meet the views of the Brigstocks. Considering the house was his own,
+Fleda thought it nice of him to keep himself in the background while his
+mother remained; making his visits, at some cost of ingenuity about
+trains from town, only between meals, doing everything to let it press
+lightly upon her that he was there. This was rather a stoppage to her
+meeting Mrs. Gereth on the ground of his being a brute; the most she
+really at last could do was not to contradict her when she repeated that
+he was watching--just insultingly watching. He _was_ watching, no doubt;
+but he watched somehow with his head turned away. He knew that Fleda
+knew at present what he wanted of her, so that it would be gross of him
+to say it over and over. It existed as a confidence between them, and
+made him sometimes, with his wandering stare, meet her eyes as if a
+silence so pleasant could only unite them the more. He had no great flow
+of speech, certainly, and at first the girl took for granted that this
+was all there was to be said about the matter. Little by little she
+speculated as to whether, with a person who, like herself, could put
+him, after all, at a sort of domestic ease, it was not supposable that
+he would have more conversation if he were not keeping some of it back
+for Mona.
+
+From the moment she suspected he might be thinking what Mona would say
+to his chattering so to an underhand "companion," who was all but paid,
+this young lady's repressed emotion began to require still more
+repression. She grew impatient of her situation at Poynton; she
+privately pronounced it false and horrid. She said to herself that she
+had let Owen know that she had, to the best of her power, directed his
+mother in the general sense he desired; that he quite understood it and
+that he also understood how unworthy it was of either of them to stand
+over the good lady with a notebook and a lash. Wasn't this practical
+unanimity just practical success? Fleda became aware of a sudden desire,
+as well as of pressing reasons, to bring her stay at Poynton to a close.
+She had not, on the one hand, like a minion of the law, undertaken to
+see Mrs. Gereth down to the train and locked, in sign of her abdication,
+into a compartment; neither had she on the other committed herself to
+hold Owen indefinitely in dalliance while his mother gained time or dug
+a counter-mine. Besides, people _were_ saying that she fastened like a
+leech on other people--people who had houses where something was to be
+picked up: this revelation was frankly made her by her sister, now
+distinctly doomed to the curate and in view of whose nuptials she had
+almost finished, as a present, a wonderful piece of embroidery,
+suggested, at Poynton, by an old Spanish altar-cloth. She would have to
+exert herself still further for the intended recipient of this offering,
+turn her out for her marriage with more than that drapery. She would go
+up to town, in short, to dress Maggie; and their father, in lodgings at
+West Kensington, would stretch a point and take them in. He, to do him
+justice, never reproached her with profitable devotions; so far as they
+existed he consciously profited by them. Mrs. Gereth gave her up as
+heroically as if she had been a great bargain, and Fleda knew that she
+wouldn't at present miss any visit of Owen's, for Owen was shooting at
+Waterbath. Owen shooting was Owen lost, and there was scant sport at
+Poynton.
+
+The first news she had from Mrs. Gereth was news of that lady's having
+accomplished, in form at least, her migration. The letter was dated from
+Ricks, to which place she had been transported by an impulse apparently
+as sudden as the inspiration she had obeyed before. "Yes, I've literally
+come," she wrote, "with a bandbox and a kitchen-maid; I've crossed the
+Rubicon, I've taken possession. It has been like plumping into cold
+water: I saw the only thing was to do it, not to stand shivering. I
+shall have warmed the place a little by simply being here for a week;
+when I come back the ice will have been broken. I didn't write to you to
+meet me on my way through town, because I know how busy you are and
+because, besides, I'm too savage and odious to be fit company even for
+you. You'd say I really go too far, and there's no doubt whatever I do.
+I'm here, at any rate, just to look round once more, to see that certain
+things are done before I enter in force. I shall probably be at Poynton
+all next week. There's more room than I quite measured the other day,
+and a rather good set of old Worcester. But what are space and time,
+what's even old Worcester, to your wretched and affectionate A. G.?"
+
+The day after Fleda received this letter she had occasion to go into a
+big shop in Oxford Street--a journey that she achieved circuitously,
+first on foot and then by the aid of two omnibuses. The second of these
+vehicles put her down on the side of the street opposite her shop, and
+while, on the curbstone, she humbly waited, with a parcel, an umbrella,
+and a tucked-up frock, to cross in security, she became aware that,
+close beside her, a hansom had pulled up short, in obedience to the
+brandished stick of a demonstrative occupant. This occupant was Owen
+Gereth, who had caught sight of her as he rattled along and who, with an
+exhibition of white teeth that, from under the hood of the cab, had
+almost flashed through the fog, now alighted to ask her if he couldn't
+give her a lift. On finding that her destination was only over the way
+he dismissed his vehicle and joined her, not only piloting her to the
+shop, but taking her in; with the assurance that his errands didn't
+matter, that it amused him to be concerned with hers. She told him she
+had come to buy a trimming for her sister's frock, and he expressed an
+hilarious interest in the purchase. His hilarity was almost always out
+of proportion to the case, but it struck her at present as more so than
+ever; especially when she had suggested that he might find it a good
+time to buy a garnishment of some sort for Mona. After wondering an
+instant whether he gave the full satiric meaning, such as it was, to
+this remark, Fleda dismissed the possibility as inconceivable. He
+stammered out that it was for _her_ he would like to buy something,
+something "ripping," and that she must give him the pleasure of telling
+him what would best please her: he couldn't have a better opportunity
+for making her a present--the present, in recognition of all she had
+done for Mummy, that he had had in his head for weeks.
+
+Fleda had more than one small errand in the big bazaar, and he went up
+and down with her, pointedly patient, pretending to be interested in
+questions of tape and of change. She had now not the least hesitation in
+wondering what Mona would think of such proceedings. But they were not
+her doing--they were Owen's; and Owen, inconsequent and even
+extravagant, was unlike anything she had ever seen him before. He broke
+off, he came back, he repeated questions without heeding answers, he
+made vague, abrupt remarks about the resemblances of shopgirls and the
+uses of chiffon. He unduly prolonged their business together, giving
+Fleda a sense that he was putting off something particular that he had
+to face. If she had ever dreamed of Owen Gereth as nervous she would
+have seen him with some such manner as this. But why should he be
+nervous? Even at the height of the crisis his mother hadn't made him so,
+and at present he was satisfied about his mother. The one idea he stuck
+to was that Fleda should mention something she would let him give her:
+there was everything in the world in the wonderful place, and he made
+her incongruous offers--a traveling-rug, a massive clock, a table for
+breakfast in bed, and above all, in a resplendent binding, a set of
+somebody's "works." His notion was a testimonial, a tribute, and the
+"works" would be a graceful intimation that it was her cleverness he
+wished above all to commemorate. He was immensely in earnest, but the
+articles he pressed upon her betrayed a delicacy that went to her heart:
+what he would really have liked, as he saw them tumbled about, was one
+of the splendid stuffs for a gown--a choice proscribed by his fear of
+seeming to patronize her, to refer to her small means and her
+deficiencies. Fleda found it easy to chaff him about his exaggeration of
+her deserts; she gave the just measure of them in consenting to accept a
+small pin-cushion, costing sixpence, in which the letter F was marked
+out with pins. A sense of loyalty to Mona was not needed to enforce this
+discretion, and after that first allusion to her she never sounded her
+name. She noticed on this occasion more things in Owen Gereth than she
+had ever noticed before, but what she noticed most was that he said no
+word of his intended. She asked herself what he had done, in so long a
+parenthesis, with his loyalty or at least his "form;" and then reflected
+that even if he had done something very good with them the situation in
+which such a question could come up was already a little strange. Of
+course he wasn't doing anything so vulgar as making love to her; but
+there was a kind of punctilio for a man who was engaged.
+
+That punctilio didn't prevent Owen from remaining with her after they
+had left the shop, from hoping she had a lot more to do, and from
+pressing her to look with him, for a possible glimpse of something she
+might really let him give her, into the windows of other establishments.
+There was a moment when, under this pressure, she made up her mind that
+his tribute would be, if analyzed, a tribute to her insignificance. But
+all the same he wanted her to come somewhere and have luncheon with him:
+what was that a tribute to? She must have counted very little if she
+didn't count too much for a romp in a restaurant. She had to get home
+with her trimming, and the most, in his company, she was amenable to was
+a retracing of her steps to the Marble Arch and then, after a discussion
+when they had reached it, a walk with him across the Park. She knew Mona
+would have considered that she ought to take the omnibus again; but she
+had now to think for Owen as well as for herself--she couldn't think for
+Mona. Even in the Park the autumn air was thick, and as they moved
+westward over the grass, which was what Owen preferred, the cool
+grayness made their words soft, made them at last rare and everything
+else dim. He wanted to stay with her--he wanted not to leave her: he had
+dropped into complete silence, but that was what his silence said. What
+was it he had postponed? What was it he wanted still to postpone? She
+grew a little scared as they strolled together and she thought. It was
+too confused to be believed, but it was as if somehow he felt
+differently. Fleda Vetch didn't suspect him at first of feeling
+differently to _her_, but only of feeling differently to Mona; yet she
+was not unconscious that this latter difference would have had something
+to do with his being on the grass beside her. She had read in novels
+about gentlemen who on the eve of marriage, winding up the past, had
+surrendered themselves for the occasion to the influence of a former
+tie; and there was something in Owen's behavior now, something in his
+very face, that suggested a resemblance to one of those gentlemen. But
+whom and what, in that case, would Fleda herself resemble? She wasn't a
+former tie, she wasn't any tie at all; she was only a deep little person
+for whom happiness was a kind of pearl-diving plunge. It was down at the
+very bottom of all that had lately happened; for all that had lately
+happened was that Owen Gereth had come and gone at Poynton. That was the
+small sum of her experience, and what it had made for her was her own
+affair, quite consistent with her not having dreamed it had made a
+tie--at least what _she_ called one--for Owen. The old one, at any rate,
+was Mona--Mona whom he had known so very much longer.
+
+They walked far, to the southwest corner of the great Gardens, where, by
+the old round pond and the old red palace, when she had put out her hand
+to him in farewell, declaring that from the gate she must positively
+take a conveyance, it seemed suddenly to rise between them that this was
+a real separation. She was on his mother's side, she belonged to his
+mother's life, and his mother, in the future, would never come to
+Poynton. After what had passed she wouldn't even be at his wedding, and
+it was not possible now that Mrs. Gereth should mention that ceremony to
+the girl, much less express a wish that the girl should be present at
+it. Mona, from decorum and with reference less to the bridegroom than to
+the bridegroom's mother, would of course not invite any such girl as
+Fleda. Everything therefore was ended; they would go their different
+ways; this was the last time they would stand face to face. They looked
+at each other with the fuller sense of it and, on Owen's part, with an
+expression of dumb trouble, the intensification of his usual appeal to
+any interlocutor to add the right thing to what he said. To Fleda, at
+this moment, it appeared that the right thing might easily be the wrong.
+He only said, at any rate: "I want you to understand, you know--I want
+you to understand."
+
+What did he want her to understand? He seemed unable to bring it out,
+and this understanding was moreover exactly what she wished not to
+arrive at. Bewildered as she was, she had already taken in as much as
+she should know what to do with; the blood also was rushing into her
+face. He liked her--it was stupefying--more than he really ought: that
+was what was the matter with him and what he desired her to assimilate;
+so that she was suddenly as frightened as some thoughtless girl who
+finds herself the object of an overture from a married man.
+
+"Good-bye, Mr. Gereth--I _must_ get on!" she declared with a
+cheerfulness that she felt to be an unnatural grimace. She broke away
+from him sharply, smiling, backing across the grass and then turning
+altogether and moving as fast as she could. "Good-bye, good-bye!" she
+threw off again as she went, wondering if he would overtake her before
+she reached the gate; conscious with a red disgust that her movement was
+almost a run; conscious too of just the confused, handsome face with
+which he would look after her. She felt as if she had answered a
+kindness with a great flouncing snub, but at any rate she had got away,
+though the distance to the gate, her ugly gallop down the Broad Walk,
+every graceless jerk of which hurt her, seemed endless. She signed from
+afar to a cab on the stand in the Kensington Road and scrambled into it,
+glad of the encompassment of the four-wheeler that had officiously
+obeyed her summons and that, at the end of twenty yards, when she had
+violently pulled up a glass, permitted her to recognize the fact that
+she was on the point of bursting into tears.
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+
+As soon as her sister was married she went down to Mrs. Gereth at
+Ricks--a promise to this effect having been promptly exacted and given;
+and her inner vision was much more fixed on the alterations there,
+complete now, as she understood, than on the success of her plotting and
+pinching for Maggie's happiness. Her imagination, in the interval, had
+indeed had plenty to do and numerous scenes to visit; for when on the
+summons just mentioned it had taken a flight from West Kensington to
+Ricks, it had hung but an hour over the terrace of painted pots and then
+yielded to a current of the upper air that swept it straight off to
+Poynton and to Waterbath. Not a sound had reached her of any supreme
+clash, and Mrs. Gereth had communicated next to nothing; giving out
+that, as was easily conceivable, she was too busy, too bitter, and too
+tired for vain civilities. All she had written was that she had got the
+new place well in hand and that Fleda would be surprised at the way it
+was turning out. Everything was even yet upside down; nevertheless, in
+the sense of having passed the threshold of Poynton for the last time,
+the amputation, as she called it, had been performed. Her leg had come
+off--she had now begun to stump along with the lovely wooden substitute;
+she would stump for life, and what her young friend was to come and
+admire was the beauty of her movement and the noise she made about the
+house. The reserve of Poynton and Waterbath had been matched by the
+austerity of Fleda's own secret, under the discipline of which she had
+repeated to herself a hundred times a day that she rejoiced at having
+cares that excluded all thought of it. She had lavished herself, in act,
+on Maggie and the curate, and had opposed to her father's selfishness a
+sweetness quite ecstatic. The young couple wondered why they had waited
+so long, since everything was after all so easy. She had thought of
+everything, even to how the "quietness" of the wedding should be
+relieved by champagne and her father kept brilliant on a single bottle.
+Fleda knew, in short, and liked the knowledge, that for several weeks
+she had appeared exemplary in every relation of life.
+
+She had been perfectly prepared to be surprised at Ricks, for Mrs.
+Gereth was a wonder-working wizard, with a command, when all was said,
+of good material; but the impression in wait for her on the threshold
+made her catch her breath and falter. Dusk had fallen when she arrived,
+and in the plain square hall, one of the few good features, the glow of
+a Venetian lamp just showed, on either wall, the richness of an
+admirable tapestry. This instant perception that the place had been
+dressed at the expense of Poynton was a shock: it was as if she had
+abruptly seen herself in the light of an accomplice. The next moment,
+folded in Mrs. Gereth's arms, her eyes were diverted; but she had
+already had, in a flash, the vision of the great gaps in the other
+house. The two tapestries, not the largest, but those most splendidly
+toned by time, had been on the whole its most uplifted pride. When she
+could really see again she was on a sofa in the drawing-room, staring
+with intensity at an object soon distinct as the great Italian cabinet
+that, at Poynton, had been in the red saloon. Without looking, she was
+sure the room was occupied with other objects like it, stuffed with as
+many as it could hold of the trophies of her friend's struggle. By this
+time the very fingers of her glove, resting on the seat of the sofa, had
+thrilled at the touch of an old velvet brocade, a wondrous texture that
+she could recognize, would have recognized among a thousand, without
+dropping her eyes on it. They stuck to the cabinet with a kind of
+dissimulated dread, while she painfully asked herself whether she should
+notice it, notice everything, or just pretend not to be affected. How
+could she pretend not to be affected, with the very pendants of the
+lustres tinkling at her and with Mrs. Gereth, beside her and staring at
+her even as she herself stared at the cabinet, hunching up a back like
+Atlas under his globe? She was appalled at this image of what Mrs.
+Gereth had on her shoulders. That lady was waiting and watching her,
+bracing herself, and preparing the same face of confession and defiance
+she had shown the day, at Poynton, she had been surprised in the
+corridor. It was farcical not to speak; and yet to exclaim, to
+participate, would give one a bad sense of being mixed up with a theft.
+This ugly word sounded, for herself, in Fleda's silence, and the very
+violence of it jarred her into a scared glance, as of a creature
+detected, to right and left. But what again the full picture most showed
+her was the far-away empty sockets, a scandal of nakedness in high, bare
+walls. She at last uttered something formal and incoherent--she didn't
+know what: it had no relation to either house. Then she felt Mrs.
+Gereth's hand once more on her arm. "I've arranged a charming room for
+you--it's really lovely. You'll be very happy there." This was spoken
+with extraordinary sweetness and with a smile that meant, "Oh, I know
+what you're thinking; but what does it matter when you're so loyally on
+my side?" It had come indeed to a question of "sides," Fleda thought,
+for the whole place was in battle array. In the soft lamplight, with one
+fine feature after another looming up into sombre richness, it defied
+her not to pronounce it a triumph of taste. Her passion for beauty
+leaped back into life; and was not what now most appealed to it a
+certain gorgeous audacity? Mrs. Gereth's high hand was, as mere great
+effect, the climax of the impression.
+
+"It's too wonderful, what you've done with the house!"--the visitor met
+her friend's eyes. They lighted up with joy--that friend herself so
+pleased with what she had done. This was not at all, in its accidental
+air of enthusiasm, what Fleda wanted to have said: it offered her as
+stupidly announcing from the first minute on whose side she was. Such
+was clearly the way Mrs. Gereth took it: she threw herself upon the
+delightful girl and tenderly embraced her again; so that Fleda soon went
+on, with a studied difference and a cooler inspection: "Why, you brought
+away absolutely everything!"
+
+"Oh no, not everything; I saw how little I could get into this scrap of
+a house. I only brought away what I required."
+
+Fleda had got up; she took a turn round the room. "You 'required' the
+very best pieces--the _morceaux de musee_, the individual gems!"
+
+"I certainly didn't want the rubbish, if that's what you mean." Mrs.
+Gereth, on the sofa, followed the direction of her companion's eyes;
+with the light of her satisfaction still in her face, she slowly rubbed
+her large, handsome hands. Wherever she was, she was herself the great
+piece in the gallery. It was the first Fleda had heard of there being
+"rubbish" at Poynton, but she didn't for the moment take up this
+insincerity; she only, from where she stood in the room, called out, one
+after the other, as if she had had a list in her hand, the pieces that
+in the great house had been scattered and that now, if they had a fault,
+were too much like a minuet danced on a hearth-rug. She knew them each,
+in every chink and charm--knew them by the personal name their
+distinctive sign or story had given them; and a second time she felt
+how, against her intention, this uttered knowledge struck her hostess as
+so much free approval. Mrs. Gereth was never indifferent to approval,
+and there was nothing she could so love you for as for doing justice to
+her deep morality. There was a particular gleam in her eyes when Fleda
+exclaimed at last, dazzled by the display: "And even the Maltese cross!"
+That description, though technically incorrect, had always been applied,
+at Poynton, to a small but marvelous crucifix of ivory, a masterpiece of
+delicacy, of expression, and of the great Spanish period, the existence
+and precarious accessibility of which she had heard of at Malta, years
+before, by an odd and romantic chance--a clue followed through mazes of
+secrecy till the treasure was at last unearthed.
+
+"'Even' the Maltese cross?" Mrs. Gereth rose as she sharply echoed the
+words. "My dear child, you don't suppose I'd have sacrificed _that_! For
+what in the world would you have taken me?"
+
+"A _bibelot_ the more or the less," Fleda said, "could have made little
+difference in this grand general view of you. I take you simply for the
+greatest of all conjurers. You've operated with a quickness--and with a
+quietness!" Her voice trembled a little as she spoke, for the plain
+meaning of her words was that what her friend had achieved belonged to
+the class of operation essentially involving the protection of darkness.
+Fleda felt she really could say nothing at all if she couldn't say that
+she knew what the danger had been. She completed her thought by a
+resolute and perfectly candid question: "How in the world did you get
+off with them?"
+
+Mrs. Gereth confessed to the fact of danger with a cynicism that
+surprised the girl. "By calculating, by choosing my time. I _was_ quiet,
+and I _was_ quick. I manoeuvred; then at the last rushed!" Fleda drew
+a long breath: she saw in the poor woman something much better than
+sophistical ease, a crude elation that was a comparatively simple state
+to deal with. Her elation, it was true, was not so much from what she
+had done as from the way she had done it--by as brilliant a stroke as
+any commemorated in the annals of crime. "I succeeded because I had
+thought it all out and left nothing to chance: the whole process was
+organized in advance, so that the mere carrying it into effect took but
+a few hours. It was largely a matter of money: oh, I was horribly
+extravagant--I had to turn on so many people. But they were all to be
+had--a little army of workers, the packers, the porters, the helpers of
+every sort, the men with the mighty vans. It was a question of arranging
+in Tottenham Court Road and of paying the price. I haven't paid it yet;
+there'll be a horrid bill; but at least the thing's done! Expedition
+pure and simple was the essence of the bargain. 'I can give you two
+days,' I said; 'I can't give you another second.' They undertook the
+job, and the two days saw them through. The people came down on a
+Tuesday morning; they were off on the Thursday. I admit that some of
+them worked all Wednesday night. I had thought it all out; I stood over
+them; I showed them how. Yes, I coaxed them, I made love to them. Oh, I
+was inspired--they found me wonderful. I neither ate nor slept, but I
+was as calm as I am now. I didn't know what was in me; it was worth
+finding out. I'm very remarkable, my dear: I lifted tons with my own
+arms. I'm tired, very, very tired; but there's neither a scratch nor a
+nick, there isn't a teacup missing." Magnificent both in her exhaustion
+and in her triumph, Mrs. Gereth sank on the sofa again, the sweep of her
+eyes a rich synthesis and the restless friction of her hands a clear
+betrayal. "Upon my word," she laughed, "they really look better here!"
+
+Fleda had listened in awe. "And no one at Poynton said anything? There
+was no alarm?"
+
+"What alarm should there have been? Owen left me almost defiantly alone:
+I had taken a time that I had reason to believe was safe from a
+descent." Fleda had another wonder, which she hesitated to express: it
+would scarcely do to ask Mrs. Gereth if she hadn't stood in fear of her
+servants. She knew, moreover, some of the secrets of her humorous
+household rule, all made up of shocks to shyness and provocations to
+curiosity--a diplomacy so artful that several of the maids quite yearned
+to accompany her to Ricks. Mrs. Gereth, reading sharply the whole of her
+visitor's thought, caught it up with fine frankness. "You mean that I
+was watched--that he had his myrmidons, pledged to wire him if they
+should see what I was 'up to'? Precisely. I know the three persons you
+have in mind: I had them in mind myself. Well, I took a line with
+them--I settled them."
+
+Fleda had had no one in particular in mind; she had never believed in
+the myrmidons; but the tone in which Mrs. Gereth spoke added to her
+suspense. "What did you do to them?"
+
+"I took hold of them hard--I put them in the forefront. I made them
+work."
+
+"To move the furniture?"
+
+"To help, and to help so as to please me. That was the way to take them;
+it was what they had least expected. I marched up to them and looked
+each straight in the eye, giving him the chance to choose if he'd
+gratify me or gratify my son. He gratified _me_. They were too stupid!"
+
+Mrs. Gereth massed herself there more and more as an immoral woman, but
+Fleda had to recognize that she too would have been stupid and she too
+would have gratified her. "And when did all this take place?"
+
+"Only last week; it seems a hundred years. We've worked here as fast as
+we worked there, but I'm not settled yet: you'll see in the rest of the
+house. However, the worst is over."
+
+"Do you really think so?" Fleda presently inquired. "I mean, does he,
+after the fact, as it were, accept it?"
+
+"Owen--what I've done? I haven't the least idea," said Mrs. Gereth.
+
+"Does Mona?"
+
+"You mean that she'll be the soul of the row?"
+
+"I hardly see Mona as the 'soul' of anything," the girl replied. "But
+have they made no sound? Have you heard nothing at all?"
+
+"Not a whisper, not a step, in all the eight days. Perhaps they don't
+know. Perhaps they're crouching for a leap."
+
+"But wouldn't they have gone down as soon as you left?"
+
+"They may not have known of my leaving." Fleda wondered afresh; it
+struck her as scarcely supposable that some sign shouldn't have flashed
+from Poynton to London. If the storm was taking this term of silence to
+gather, even in Mona's breast, it would probably discharge itself in
+some startling form. The great hush of every one concerned was strange;
+but when she pressed Mrs. Gereth for some explanation of it, that lady
+only replied, with her brave irony: "Oh, I took their breath away!" She
+had no illusions, however; she was still prepared to fight. What indeed
+was her spoliation of Poynton but the first engagement of a campaign?
+
+All this was exciting, but Fleda's spirit dropped, at bedtime, in the
+chamber embellished for her pleasure, where she found several of the
+objects that in her earlier room she had most admired. These had been
+reinforced by other pieces from other rooms, so that the quiet air of it
+was a harmony without a break, the finished picture of a maiden's bower.
+It was the sweetest Louis Seize, all assorted and combined--old
+chastened, figured, faded France. Fleda was impressed anew with her
+friend's genius for composition. She could say to herself that no girl
+in England, that night, went to rest with so picked a guard; but there
+was no joy for her in her privilege, no sleep even for the tired hours
+that made the place, in the embers of the fire and the winter dawn, look
+gray, somehow, and loveless. She couldn't care for such things when they
+came to her in such ways; there was a wrong about them all that turned
+them to ugliness. In the watches of the night she saw Poynton
+dishonored; she had cared for it as a happy whole, she reasoned, and the
+parts of it now around her seemed to suffer like chopped limbs. Before
+going to bed she had walked about with Mrs. Gereth and seen at whose
+expense the whole house had been furnished. At poor Owen's, from top to
+bottom--there wasn't a chair he hadn't sat upon. The maiden aunt had
+been exterminated--no trace of her to tell her tale. Fleda tried to
+think of some of the things at Poynton still unappropriated, but her
+memory was a blank about them, and in trying to focus the old
+combinations she saw again nothing but gaps and scars, a vacancy that
+gathered at moments into something worse. This concrete image was her
+greatest trouble, for it was Owen Gereth's face, his sad, strange eyes,
+fixed upon her now as they had never been. They stared at her out of the
+darkness, and their expression was more than she could bear: it seemed
+to say that he was in pain and that it was somehow her fault. He had
+looked to her to help him, and this was what her help had been. He had
+done her the honor to ask her to exert herself in his interest,
+confiding to her a task of difficulty, but of the highest delicacy.
+Hadn't that been exactly the sort of service she longed to render him?
+Well, her way of rendering it had been simply to betray him and hand him
+over to his enemy. Shame, pity, resentment oppressed her in turn; in the
+last of these feelings the others were quickly submerged. Mrs. Gereth
+had imprisoned her in that torment of taste; but it was clear to her for
+an hour at least that she might hate Mrs. Gereth.
+
+Something else, however, when morning came, was even more intensely
+definite: the most odious thing in the world for her would be ever again
+to meet Owen. She took on the spot a resolve to neglect no precaution
+that could lead to her going through life without that accident. After
+this, while she dressed, she took still another. Her position had
+become, in a few hours, intolerably false; in as few more hours as
+possible she would therefore put an end to it. The way to put an end to
+it would be to inform Mrs. Gereth that, to her great regret, she
+couldn't be with her now, couldn't cleave to her to the point that
+everything about her so plainly urged. She dressed with a sort of
+violence, a symbol of the manner in which this purpose was precipitated.
+The more they parted company the less likely she was to come across
+Owen; for Owen would be drawn closer to his mother now by the very
+necessity of bringing her down. Fleda, in the inconsequence of distress,
+wished to have nothing to do with her fall; she had had too much to do
+with everything. She was well aware of the importance, before breakfast
+and in view of any light they might shed on the question of motive, of
+not suffering her invidious expression of a difference to be accompanied
+by the traces of tears; but it none the less came to pass, downstairs,
+that after she had subtly put her back to the window, to make a mystery
+of the state of her eyes, she stupidly let a rich sob escape her before
+she could properly meet the consequences of being asked if she wasn't
+delighted with her room. This accident struck her on the spot as so
+grave that she felt the only refuge to be instant hypocrisy, some
+graceful impulse that would charge her emotion to the quickened sense of
+her friend's generosity--a demonstration entailing a flutter round the
+table and a renewed embrace, and not so successfully improvised but that
+Fleda fancied Mrs. Gereth to have been only half reassured. She had been
+startled, at any rate, and she might remain suspicious: this reflection
+interposed by the time, after breakfast, the girl had recovered
+sufficiently to say what was in her heart. She accordingly didn't say it
+that morning at all: she had absurdly veered about; she had encountered
+the shock of the fear that Mrs. Gereth, with sharpened eyes, might
+wonder why the deuce (she often wondered in that phrase) she had grown
+so warm about Owen's rights. She would doubtless, at a pinch, be able to
+defend them on abstract grounds, but that would involve a discussion,
+and the idea of a discussion made her nervous for her secret. Until in
+some way Poynton should return the blow and give her a cue, she must
+keep nervousness down; and she called herself a fool for having
+forgotten, however briefly, that her one safety was in silence.
+
+Directly after luncheon Mrs. Gereth took her into the garden for a
+glimpse of the revolution--or at least, said the mistress of Ricks, of
+the great row--that had been decreed there; but the ladies had scarcely
+placed themselves for this view before the younger one found herself
+embracing a prospect that opened in quite another quarter. Her attention
+was called to it, oddly, by the streamers of the parlor-maid's cap,
+which, flying straight behind the neat young woman who unexpectedly
+burst from the house and showed a long red face as she ambled over the
+grass, seemed to articulate in their flutter the name that Fleda lived
+at present only to catch. "Poynton--Poynton!" said the morsels of
+muslin; so that the parlor-maid became on the instant an actress in the
+drama, and Fleda, assuming pusillanimously that she herself was only a
+spectator, looked across the footlights at the exponent of the principal
+part. The manner in which this artist returned her look showed that she
+was equally preoccupied. Both were haunted alike by possibilities, but
+the apprehension of neither, before the announcement was made, took the
+form of the arrival at Ricks, in the flesh, of Mrs. Gereth's victim.
+When the messenger informed them that Mr. Gereth was in the
+drawing-room, the blank "Oh!" emitted by Fleda was quite as precipitate
+as the sound on her hostess's lips, besides being, as she felt, much
+less pertinent. "I thought it would be somebody," that lady afterwards
+said; "but I expected on the whole a solicitor's clerk." Fleda didn't
+mention that she herself had expected on the whole a pair of constables.
+She was surprised by Mrs. Gereth's question to the parlor-maid.
+
+"For whom did he ask?"
+
+"Why, for _you_, of course, dearest friend!" Fleda interjected, falling
+instinctively into the address that embodied the intensest pressure. She
+wanted to put Mrs. Gereth between her and her danger.
+
+"He asked for Miss Vetch, mum," the girl replied, with a face that
+brought startlingly to Fleda's ear the muffled chorus of the kitchen.
+
+"Quite proper," said Mrs. Gereth austerely. Then to Fleda: "Please go to
+him."
+
+"But what to do?"
+
+"What you always do--to see what he wants." Mrs. Gereth dismissed the
+maid. "Tell him Miss Vetch will come." Fleda saw that nothing was in the
+mother's imagination at this moment but the desire not to meet her son.
+She had completely broken with him, and there was little in what had
+just happened to repair the rupture. It would now take more to do so
+than his presenting himself uninvited at her door. "He's right in asking
+for you--he's aware that you're still our communicator; nothing has
+occurred to alter that. To what he wishes to transmit through you I'm
+ready, as I've been ready before, to listen. As far as _I_'m concerned,
+if I couldn't meet him a month ago, how am I to meet him to-day? If he
+has come to say, 'My dear mother, you're here, in the hovel into which
+I've flung you, with consolations that give me pleasure,' I'll listen to
+him; but on no other footing. That's what you're to ascertain, please.
+You'll oblige me as you've obliged me before. There!" Mrs. Gereth turned
+her back and, with a fine imitation of superiority, began to redress the
+miseries immediately before her. Fleda meanwhile hesitated, lingered for
+some minutes where she had been left, feeling secretly that her fate
+still had her in hand. It had put her face to face with Owen Gereth, and
+it evidently meant to keep her so. She was reminded afresh of two
+things: one of which was that, though she judged her friend's rigor, she
+had never really had the story of the scene enacted in the great
+awestricken house between the mother and the son weeks before--the day
+the former took to her bed in her over-throw; the other was, that at
+Ricks as at Poynton, it was before all things her place to accept
+thankfully a usefulness not, she must remember, universally
+acknowledged. What determined her at the last, while Mrs. Gereth
+disappeared in the shrubbery, was that, though she was at a distance
+from the house and the drawing-room was turned the other way, she could
+absolutely see the young man alone there with the sources of his pain.
+She saw his simple stare at his tapestries, heard his heavy tread on his
+carpets and the hard breath of his sense of unfairness. At this she went
+to him fast.
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+
+"I asked for you," he said when she stood there, "because I heard from
+the flyman who drove me from the station to the inn that he had brought
+you here yesterday. We had some talk, and he mentioned it."
+
+"You didn't know I was here?"
+
+"No. I knew only that you had had, in London, all that you told me, that
+day, to do; and it was Mona's idea that after your sister's marriage you
+were staying on with your father. So I thought you were with him still."
+
+"I am," Fleda replied, idealizing a little the fact. "I'm here only for
+a moment. But do you mean," she went on, "that if you had known I was
+with your mother you wouldn't have come down?"
+
+The way Owen hung fire at this question made it sound more playful than
+she had intended. She had, in fact, no consciousness of any intention
+but that of confining herself rigidly to her function. She could already
+see that, in whatever he had now braced himself for, she was an element
+he had not reckoned with. His preparation had been of a different
+sort--the sort congruous with his having been careful to go first and
+lunch solidly at the inn. He had not been forced to ask for her, but she
+became aware, in his presence, of a particular desire to make him feel
+that no harm could really come to him. She might upset him, as people
+called it, but she would take no advantage of having done so. She had
+never seen a person with whom she wished more to be light and easy, to
+be exceptionally human. The account he presently gave of the matter was
+that he indeed wouldn't have come if he had known she was on the spot;
+because then, didn't she see? he could have written to her. He would
+have had her there to let fly at his mother.
+
+"That would have saved me--well, it would have saved me a lot. Of course
+I would rather see you than her," he somewhat awkwardly added. "When the
+fellow spoke of you, I assure you I quite jumped at you. In fact I've no
+real desire to see Mummy at all. If she thinks I _like_ it--!" He sighed
+disgustedly. "I only came down because it seemed better than any other
+way. I didn't want her to be able to say I hadn't been all right. I dare
+say you know she has taken everything; or if not quite everything, why,
+a lot more than one ever dreamed. You can see for yourself--she has got
+half the place down. She has got them crammed--you can see for
+yourself!" He had his old trick of artless repetition, his helpless
+iteration of the obvious; but he was sensibly different, for Fleda, if
+only by the difference of his clear face, mottled over and almost
+disfigured by little points of pain. He might have been a fine young man
+with a bad toothache; with the first even of his life. What ailed him
+above all, she felt, was that trouble was new to him: he had never known
+a difficulty; he had taken all his fences, his world wholly the world of
+the personally possible, rounded indeed by a gray suburb into which he
+had never had occasion to stray. In this vulgar and ill-lighted region
+he had evidently now lost himself. "We left it quite to her honor, you
+know," he said ruefully.
+
+"Perhaps you've a right to say that you left it a little to mine." Mixed
+up with the spoils there, rising before him as if she were in a manner
+their keeper, she felt that she must absolutely dissociate herself. Mrs.
+Gereth had made it impossible to do anything but give her away. "I can
+only tell you that, on my side, I left it to her. I never dreamed either
+that she would pick out so many things."
+
+"And you don't really think it's fair, do you? You _don't_!" He spoke
+very quickly; he really seemed to plead.
+
+Fleda faltered a moment. "I think she has gone too far." Then she added:
+"I shall immediately tell her that I've said that to you."
+
+He appeared puzzled by this statement, but he presently rejoined: "You
+haven't then said to mamma what you think?"
+
+"Not yet; remember that I only got here last night." She appeared to
+herself ignobly weak. "I had had no idea what she was doing; I was taken
+completely by surprise. She managed it wonderfully."
+
+"It's the sharpest thing I ever saw in _my_ life!" They looked at each
+other with intelligence, in appreciation of the sharpness, and Owen
+quickly broke into a loud laugh. The laugh was in itself natural, but
+the occasion of it strange; and stranger still, to Fleda, so that she
+too almost laughed, the inconsequent charity with which he added: "Poor
+dear old Mummy! That's one of the reasons I asked for you," he went
+on--"to see if you'd back her up."
+
+Whatever he said or did, she somehow liked him the better for it. "How
+can I back her up, Mr. Gereth, when I think, as I tell you, that she has
+made a great mistake?"
+
+"A great mistake! That's all right." He spoke--it wasn't clear to her
+why--as if this declaration were a great point gained.
+
+"Of course there are many things she hasn't taken," Fleda continued.
+
+"Oh yes, a lot of things. But you wouldn't know the place, all the
+same." He looked about the room with his discolored, swindled face,
+which deepened Fleda's compassion for him, conjuring away any smile at
+so candid an image of the dupe. "You'd know this one soon enough,
+wouldn't you? These are just the things she ought to have left. Is the
+whole house full of them?"
+
+"The whole house," said Fleda uncompromisingly. She thought of her
+lovely room.
+
+"I never knew how much I cared for them. They're awfully valuable,
+aren't they?" Owen's manner mystified her; she was conscious of a return
+of the agitation he had produced in her on that last bewildering day,
+and she reminded herself that, now she was warned, it would be
+inexcusable of her to allow him to justify the fear that had dropped on
+her. "Mother thinks I never took any notice, but I assure you I was
+awfully proud of everything. Upon my honor, I _was_ proud, Miss Vetch."
+
+There was an oddity in his helplessness; he appeared to wish to persuade
+her and to satisfy himself that she sincerely felt how worthy he really
+was to treat what had happened as an injury. She could only exclaim,
+almost as helplessly as himself: "Of course you did justice! It's all
+most painful. I shall instantly let your mother know," she again
+declared, "the way I've spoken of her to you." She clung to that idea as
+to the sign of her straightness.
+
+"You'll tell her what you think she ought to do?" he asked with some
+eagerness.
+
+"What she ought to do?"
+
+"_Don't_ you think it--I mean that she ought to give them up?"
+
+"To give them up?" Fleda hesitated again.
+
+"To send them back--to keep it quiet." The girl had not felt the impulse
+to ask him to sit down among the monuments of his wrong, so that,
+nervously, awkwardly, he fidgeted about the room with his hands in his
+pockets and an effect of returning a little into possession through the
+formulation of his view. "To have them packed and dispatched again,
+since she knows so well how. She does it beautifully"--he looked close
+at two or three precious pieces. "What's sauce for the goose is sauce
+for the gander!"
+
+He had laughed at his way of putting it, but Fleda remained grave. "Is
+that what you came to say to her?"
+
+"Not exactly those words. But I did come to say"--he stammered, then
+brought it out--"I did come to say we must have them right back."
+
+"And did you think your mother would see you?"
+
+"I wasn't sure, but I thought it right to try--to put it to her kindly,
+don't you see? If she won't see me, then she has herself to thank. The
+only other way would have been to set the lawyers at her."
+
+"I'm glad you didn't do that."
+
+"I'm dashed if I want to!" Owen honestly declared. "But what's a fellow
+to do if she won't meet a fellow?"
+
+"What do you call meeting a fellow?" Fleda asked, with a smile.
+
+"Why, letting _me_ tell her a dozen things she can have."
+
+This was a transaction that Fleda, after a moment, had to give up trying
+to represent to herself. "If she won't do that--?" she went on.
+
+"I'll leave it all to my solicitor. _He_ won't let her off: by Jove, I
+know the fellow!"
+
+"That's horrible!" said Fleda, looking at him in woe.
+
+"It's utterly beastly!"
+
+His want of logic as well as his vehemence startled her; and with her
+eyes still on his she considered before asking him the question these
+things suggested. At last she asked it. "Is Mona very angry?"
+
+"Oh dear, yes!" said Owen.
+
+She had perceived that he wouldn't speak of Mona without her beginning.
+After waiting fruitlessly now for him to say more, she continued: "She
+has been there again? She has seen the state of the house?"
+
+"Oh dear, yes!" Owen repeated.
+
+Fleda disliked to appear not to take account of his brevity, but it was
+just because she was struck by it that she felt the pressure of the
+desire to know more. What it suggested was simply what her intelligence
+supplied, for he was incapable of any art of insinuation. Wasn't it at
+all events the rule of communication with him to say for him what he
+couldn't say? This truth was present to the girl as she inquired if Mona
+greatly resented what Mrs. Gereth had done. He satisfied her promptly;
+he was standing before the fire, his back to it, his long legs apart,
+his hands, behind him, rather violently jiggling his gloves. "She hates
+it awfully. In fact, she refuses to put up with it at all. Don't you
+see?--she saw the place with all the things."
+
+"So that of course she misses them."
+
+"Misses them--rather! She was awfully sweet on them." Fleda remembered
+how sweet Mona had been, and reflected that if that was the sort of plea
+he had prepared it was indeed as well he shouldn't see his mother. This
+was not all she wanted to know, but it came over her that it was all she
+needed. "You see it puts me in the position of not carrying out what I
+promised," Owen said. "As she says herself"--he hesitated an
+instant--"it's just as if I had obtained her under false pretenses."
+Just before, when he spoke with more drollery than he knew, it had left
+Fleda serious; but now his own clear gravity had the effect of exciting
+her mirth. She laughed out, and he looked surprised, but went on: "She
+regards it as a regular sell."
+
+Fleda was silent; but finally, as he added nothing, she exclaimed: "Of
+course it makes a great difference!" She knew all she needed, but none
+the less she risked, after another pause, an interrogative remark. "I
+forget when it is that your marriage takes place?"
+
+Owen came away from the fire and, apparently at a loss where to turn,
+ended by directing himself to one of the windows. "It's a little
+uncertain; the date isn't quite fixed."
+
+"Oh, I thought I remembered that at Poynton you had told me a day, and
+that it was near at hand."
+
+"I dare say I did; it was for the 19th. But we've altered that--she
+wants to shift it." He looked out of the window; then he said: "In fact,
+it won't come off till Mummy has come round."
+
+"Come round?"
+
+"Put the place as it was." In his offhand way he added: "You know what I
+mean!"
+
+He spoke not impatiently, but with a kind of intimate familiarity, the
+sweetness of which made her feel a pang for having forced him to tell
+her what was embarrassing to him, what was even humiliating. Yes indeed,
+she knew all she needed: all she needed was that Mona had proved apt at
+putting down that wonderful patent-leather foot. Her type was misleading
+only to the superficial, and no one in the world was less superficial
+than Fleda. She had guessed the truth at Waterbath and she had suffered
+from it at Poynton; at Ricks the only thing she could do was to accept
+it with the dumb exaltation that she felt rising. Mona had been prompt
+with her exercise of the member in question, for it might be called
+prompt to do that sort of thing before marriage. That she had indeed
+been premature who should say save those who should have read the matter
+in the full light of results? Neither at Waterbath nor at Poynton had
+even Fleda's thoroughness discovered all that there was--or rather, all
+that there was not--in Owen Gereth. "Of course it makes all the
+difference!" she said in answer to his last words. She pursued, after
+considering: "What you wish me to say from you then to your mother is
+that you demand immediate and practically complete restitution?"
+
+"Yes, please. It's tremendously good of you."
+
+"Very well, then. Will you wait?"
+
+"For Mummy's answer?" Owen stared and looked perplexed; he was more and
+more fevered with so much vivid expression of his case. "Don't you think
+that if I'm here she may hate it worse--think I may want to make her
+reply bang off?"
+
+Fleda thought. "You don't, then?"
+
+"I want to take her in the right way, don't you know?--treat her as if I
+gave her more than just an hour or two."
+
+"I see," said Fleda. "Then, if you don't wait--good-bye."
+
+This again seemed not what he wanted. "Must _you_ do it bang off?"
+
+"I'm only thinking she'll be impatient--I mean, you know, to learn what
+will have passed between us."
+
+"I see," said Owen, looking at his gloves. "I can give her a day or two,
+you know. Of course I didn't come down to sleep," he went on. "The inn
+seems a horrid hole. I know all about the trains--having no idea you
+were here." Almost as soon as his interlocutress he was struck with the
+absence of the visible, in this, as between effect and cause. "I mean
+because in that case I should have felt I could stop over. I should have
+felt I could talk with you a blessed sight longer than with Mummy."
+
+"We've already talked a long time," smiled Fleda.
+
+"Awfully, haven't we?" He spoke with the stupidity she didn't object to.
+Inarticulate as he was, he had more to say; he lingered perhaps because
+he was vaguely aware of the want of sincerity in her encouragement to
+him to go. "There's one thing, please," he mentioned, as if there might
+be a great many others too. "Please don't say anything about Mona."
+
+She didn't understand. "About Mona?"
+
+"About its being _her_ that thinks she has gone too far." This was still
+slightly obscure, but now Fleda understood. "It mustn't seem to come
+from _her_ at all, don't you know? That would only make Mummy worse."
+
+Fleda knew exactly how much worse, but she felt a delicacy about
+explicitly assenting: she was already immersed moreover in the deep
+consideration of what might make "Mummy" better. She couldn't see as yet
+at all; she could only clutch at the hope of some inspiration after he
+should go. Oh, there was a remedy, to be sure, but it was out of the
+question; in spite of which, in the strong light of Owen's troubled
+presence, of his anxious face and restless step, it hung there before
+her for some minutes. She felt that, remarkably, beneath the decent
+rigor of his errand, the poor young man, for reasons, for weariness, for
+disgust, would have been ready not to insist. His fitness to fight his
+mother had left him--he wasn't in fighting trim. He had no natural
+avidity and even no special wrath; he had none that had not been taught
+him, and it was doing his best to learn the lesson that had made him so
+sick. He had his delicacies, but he hid them away like presents before
+Christmas. He was hollow, perfunctory, pathetic; he had been girded by
+another hand. That hand had naturally been Mona's, and it was heavy even
+now on his strong, broad back. Why then had he originally rejoiced so in
+its touch? Fleda dashed aside this question, for it had nothing to do
+with her problem. Her problem was to help him to live as a gentleman and
+carry through what he had undertaken; her problem was to reinstate him
+in his rights. It was quite irrelevant that Mona had no intelligence of
+what she had lost--quite irrelevant that she was moved not by the
+privation, but by the insult: she had every reason to be moved, though
+she was so much more movable, in the vindictive way, at any rate, than
+one might have supposed--assuredly more than Owen himself had imagined.
+
+"Certainly I shall not mention Mona," Fleda said, "and there won't be
+the slightest necessity for it. The wrong's quite sufficiently yours,
+and the demand you make is perfectly justified by it."
+
+"I can't tell you what it is to me to feel you on my side!" Owen
+exclaimed.
+
+"Up to this time," said Fleda, after a pause, "your mother has had no
+doubt of my being on hers."
+
+"Then of course she won't like your changing."
+
+"I dare say she won't like it at all."
+
+"Do you mean to say you'll have a regular kick-up with her?"
+
+"I don't exactly know what you mean by a regular kick-up. We shall
+naturally have a great deal of discussion--if she consents to discuss
+the matter at all. That's why you must decidedly give her two or three
+days."
+
+"I see you think she _may_ refuse to discuss it at all," said Owen.
+
+"I'm only trying to be prepared for the worst. You must remember that to
+have to withdraw from the ground she has taken, to make a public
+surrender of what she has publicly appropriated, will go uncommonly hard
+with her pride."
+
+Owen considered; his face seemed to broaden, but not into a smile. "I
+suppose she's tremendously proud, isn't she?" This might have been the
+first time it had occurred to him.
+
+"You know better than I," said Fleda, speaking with high extravagance.
+
+"I don't know anything in the world half so well as you. If I were as
+clever as you I might hope to get round her." Owen hesitated; then he
+went on: "In fact I don't quite see what even you can say or do that
+will really fetch her."
+
+"Neither do I, as yet. I must think--I must pray!" the girl pursued,
+smiling. "I can only say to you that I'll try. I _want_ to try, you
+know--I want to help you." He stood looking at her so long on this that
+she added with much distinctness: "So you must leave me, please, quite
+alone with her. You must go straight back."
+
+"Back to the inn?"
+
+"Oh no, back to town. I'll write to you to-morrow."
+
+He turned about vaguely for his hat.
+
+"There's the chance, of course, that she may be afraid."
+
+"Afraid, you mean, of the legal steps you may take?"
+
+"I've got a perfect case--I could have her up. The Brigstocks say it's
+simple stealing."
+
+"I can easily fancy what the Brigstocks say!" Fleda permitted herself to
+remark without solemnity.
+
+"It's none of their business, is it?" was Owen's unexpected rejoinder.
+Fleda had already noted that no one so slow could ever have had such
+rapid transitions.
+
+She showed her amusement. "They've a much better right to say it's none
+of mine."
+
+"Well, at any rate, you don't call her names."
+
+Fleda wondered whether Mona did; and this made it all the finer of her
+to exclaim in a moment: "You don't know what I shall call her if she
+holds out!"
+
+Owen gave her a gloomy glance; then he blew a speck off the crown of his
+hat. "But if you do have a set-to with her?"
+
+He paused so long for a reply that Fleda said: "I don't think I know
+what you mean by a set-to."
+
+"Well, if she calls _you_ names."
+
+"I don't think she'll do that."
+
+"What I mean to say is, if she's angry at your backing me up--what will
+you do then? She can't possibly like it, you know."
+
+"She may very well not like it; but everything depends. I must see what
+I shall do. You mustn't worry about me."
+
+She spoke with decision, but Owen seemed still unsatisfied. "You won't
+go away, I hope?"
+
+"Go away?"
+
+"If she does take it ill of you."
+
+Fleda moved to the door and opened it. "I'm not prepared to say. You
+must have patience and see."
+
+"Of course I must," said Owen--"of course, of course." But he took no
+more advantage of the open door than to say: "You want me to be off, and
+I'm off in a minute. Only, before I go, please answer me a question. If
+you _should_ leave my mother, where would you go?"
+
+Fleda smiled again. "I haven't the least idea."
+
+"I suppose you'd go back to London."
+
+"I haven't the least idea," Fleda repeated.
+
+"You don't--a--live anywhere in particular, do you?" the young man went
+on. He looked conscious as soon as he had spoken; she could see that he
+felt himself to have alluded more grossly than he meant to the
+circumstance of her having, if one were plain about it, no home of her
+own. He had meant it as an allusion of a tender sort to all that she
+would sacrifice in the case of a quarrel with his mother; but there was
+indeed no graceful way of touching on that. One just couldn't be plain
+about it.
+
+Fleda, wound up as she was, shrank from any treatment at all of the
+matter, and she made no answer to his question. "I _won't_ leave your
+mother," she said. "I'll produce an effect on her; I'll convince her
+absolutely."
+
+"I believe you will, if you look at her like that!"
+
+She was wound up to such a height that there might well be a light in
+her pale, fine little face--a light that, while, for all return, at
+first, she simply shone back at him, was intensely reflected in his own.
+"I'll make her see it--I'll make her see it!" She rang out like a silver
+bell. She had at that moment a perfect faith that she should succeed;
+but it passed into something else when, the next instant, she became
+aware that Owen, quickly getting between her and the door she had
+opened, was sharply closing it, as might be said, in her face. He had
+done this before she could stop him, and he stood there with his hand on
+the knob and smiled at her strangely. Clearer than he could have spoken
+it was the sense of those seconds of silence.
+
+"When I got into this I didn't know you, and now that I know you how can
+I tell you the difference? And _she_'s so different, so ugly and vulgar,
+in the light of this squabble. No, like _you_ I've never known one. It's
+another thing, it's a new thing altogether. Listen to me a little: can't
+something be done?" It was what had been in the air in those moments at
+Kensington, and it only wanted words to be a committed act. The more
+reason, to the girl's excited mind, why it shouldn't have words; her one
+thought was not to hear, to keep the act uncommitted. She would do this
+if she had to be horrid.
+
+"Please let me out, Mr. Gereth," she said; on which he opened the door
+with an hesitation so very brief that in thinking of these things
+afterwards--for she was to think of them forever--she wondered in what
+tone she could have spoken. They went into the hall, where she
+encountered the parlor-maid, of whom she inquired whether Mrs. Gereth
+had come in.
+
+"No, miss; and I think she has left the garden. She has gone up the back
+road." In other words, they had the whole place to themselves. It would
+have been a pleasure, in a different mood, to converse with that
+parlor-maid.
+
+"Please open the house-door," said Fleda.
+
+Owen, as if in quest of his umbrella, looked vaguely about the
+hall--looked even wistfully up the staircase--while the neat young woman
+complied with Fleda's request. Owen's eyes then wandered out of the open
+door. "I think it's awfully nice here," he observed; "I assure you I
+could do with it myself."
+
+"I should think you might, with half your things here! It's Poynton
+itself--almost. Good-bye, Mr. Gereth," Fleda added. Her intention had
+naturally been that the neat young woman, opening the front door, should
+remain to close it on the departing guest. That functionary, however,
+had acutely vanished behind a stiff flap of green baize which Mrs.
+Gereth had not yet had time to abolish. Fleda put out her hand, but Owen
+turned away--he couldn't find his umbrella. She passed into the open
+air--she was determined to get him out; and in a moment he joined her in
+the little plastered portico which had small resemblance to any feature
+of Poynton. It was, as Mrs. Gereth had said, like the portico of a house
+in Brompton.
+
+"Oh, I don't mean with all the things here," he explained in regard to
+the opinion he had just expressed. "I mean I could put up with it just
+as it was; it had a lot of good things, don't you think? I mean if
+everything was back at Poynton, if everything was all right." He brought
+out these last words with a sort of smothered sigh. Fleda didn't
+understand his explanation unless it had reference to another and more
+wonderful exchange--the restoration to the great house not only of its
+tables and chairs, but of its alienated mistress. This would imply the
+installation of his own life at Ricks, and obviously that of another
+person. Such another person could scarcely be Mona Brigstock. He put out
+his hand now; and once more she heard his unsounded words: "With
+everything patched up at the other place, I could live here with _you_.
+Don't you see what I mean?"
+
+Fleda saw perfectly, and, with a face in which she flattered herself
+that nothing of this vision appeared, gave him her hand and said:
+"Good-bye, good-bye."
+
+Owen held her hand very firmly and kept it even after an effort made by
+her to recover it--an effort not repeated, as she felt it best not to
+show she was flurried. That solution--of her living with him at
+Ricks--disposed of him beautifully, and disposed not less so of herself;
+it disposed admirably too of Mrs. Gereth. Fleda could only vainly wonder
+how it provided for poor Mona. While he looked at her, grasping her
+hand, she felt that now indeed she was paying for his mother's
+extravagance at Poynton--the vividness of that lady's public plea that
+little Fleda Vetch was the person to insure the general peace. It was to
+that vividness poor Owen had come back, and if Mrs. Gereth had had more
+discretion little Fleda Vetch wouldn't have been in a predicament. She
+saw that Owen had at this moment his sharpest necessity of speech, and
+so long as he didn't release her hand she could only submit to him. Her
+defense would be perhaps to look blank and hard; so she looked as blank
+and as hard as she could, with the reward of an immediate sense that
+this was not a bit what he wanted. It even made him hang fire, as if he
+were suddenly ashamed of himself, were recalled to some idea of duty and
+of honor. Yet he none the less brought it out. "There's one thing I dare
+say I ought to tell you, if you're going so kindly to act for me; though
+of course you'll see for yourself it's a thing it won't do to tell
+_her_." What was it? He made her wait for it again, and while she
+waited, under firm coercion, she had the extraordinary impression that
+Owen's simplicity was in eclipse. His natural honesty was like the scent
+of a flower, and she felt at this moment as if her nose had been brushed
+by the bloom without the odor. The allusion was undoubtedly to his
+mother; and was not what he meant about the matter in question the
+opposite of what he said--that it just _would_ do to tell her? It would
+have been the first time he had said the opposite of what he meant, and
+there was certainly a fascination in the phenomenon, as well as a
+challenge to suspense in the ambiguity. "It's just that I understand
+from Mona, you know," he stammered; "it's just that she has made no
+bones about bringing home to me--" He tried to laugh, and in the effort
+he faltered again.
+
+"About bringing home to you?"--Fleda encouraged him.
+
+He was sensible of it, he achieved his performance. "Why, that if I
+don't get the things back--every blessed one of them except a few
+_she_'ll pick out--she won't have anything more to say to me."
+
+Fleda, after an instant, encouraged him again. "To say to you?"
+
+"Why, she simply won't marry me, don't you see?"
+
+Owen's legs, not to mention his voice, had wavered while he spoke, and
+she felt his possession of her hand loosen so that she was free again.
+Her stare of perception broke into a lively laugh. "Oh, you're all
+right, for you _will_ get them. You will; you're quite safe; don't
+worry!" She fell back into the house with her hand on the door.
+"Good-bye, good-bye." She repeated it several times, laughing bravely,
+quite waving him away and, as he didn't move and save that he was on the
+other side of it, closing the door in his face quite as he had closed
+that of the drawing-room in hers. Never had a face, never at least had
+such a handsome one, been so presented to that offense. She even held
+the door a minute, lest he should try to come in again. At last, as she
+heard nothing, she made a dash for the stairs and ran up.
+
+
+
+
+IX
+
+
+In knowing a while before all she needed, Fleda had been far from
+knowing as much as that; so that once upstairs, where, in her room, with
+her sense of danger and trouble, the age of Louis Seize suddenly struck
+her as wanting in taste and point, she felt that she now for the first
+time knew her temptation. Owen had put it before her with an art beyond
+his own dream. Mona would cast him off if he didn't proceed to
+extremities; if his negotiation with his mother should fail he would be
+completely free. That negotiation depended on a young lady to whom he
+had pressingly suggested the condition of his freedom; and as if to
+aggravate the young lady's predicament designing fate had sent Mrs.
+Gereth, as the parlor-maid said, "up the back road." This would give the
+young lady more time to make up her mind that nothing should come of the
+negotiation. There would be different ways of putting the question to
+Mrs. Gereth, and Fleda might profitably devote the moments before her
+return to a selection of the way that would most surely be tantamount to
+failure. This selection indeed required no great adroitness; it was so
+conspicuous that failure would be the reward of an effective
+introduction of Mona. If that abhorred name should be properly invoked
+Mrs. Gereth would resist to the death, and before envenomed resistance
+Owen would certainly retire. His retirement would be into single life,
+and Fleda reflected that he had now gone away conscious of having
+practically told her so. She could only say, as she waited for the back
+road to disgorge, that she hoped it was a consciousness he enjoyed.
+There was something _she_ enjoyed; but that was a very different matter.
+To know that she had become to him an object of desire gave her wings
+that she felt herself flutter in the air: it was like the rush of a
+flood into her own accumulations. These stored depths had been
+fathomless and still, but now, for half an hour, in the empty house,
+they spread till they overflowed. He seemed to have made it right for
+her to confess to herself her secret. Strange then there should be for
+him in return nothing that such a confession could make right! How could
+it make right that he should give up Mona for another woman? His
+attitude was a sorry appeal to Fleda to legitimate that. But he didn't
+believe it himself, and he had none of the courage of his suggestion.
+She could easily see how wrong everything must be when a man so made to
+be manly was wanting in courage. She had upset him, as people called it,
+and he had spoken out from the force of the jar of finding her there. He
+had upset her too, heaven knew, but she was one of those who could pick
+themselves up. She had the real advantage, she considered, of having
+kept him from seeing that she had been overthrown.
+
+She had moreover at present completely recovered her feet, though there
+was in the intensity of the effort required to do so a vibration which
+throbbed away into an immense allowance for the young man. How could she
+after all know what, in the disturbance wrought by his mother, Mona's
+relations with him might have become? If he had been able to keep his
+wits, such as they were, more about him he would probably have felt--as
+sharply as she felt on his behalf--that so long as those relations were
+not ended he had no right to say even the little he had said. He had no
+right to appear to wish to draw in another girl to help him to an
+escape. If he was in a plight he must get out of the plight himself, he
+must get out of it first, and anything he should have to say to any one
+else must be deferred and detached. She herself, at any rate--it was her
+own case that was in question--couldn't dream of assisting him save in
+the sense of their common honor. She could never be the girl to be drawn
+in, she could never lift her finger against Mona. There was something in
+her that would make it a shame to her forever to have owed her happiness
+to an interference. It would seem intolerably vulgar to her to have
+"ousted" the daughter of the Brigstocks; and merely to have abstained
+even wouldn't assure her that she had been straight. Nothing was really
+straight but to justify her little pensioned presence by her use; and
+now, won over as she was to heroism, she could see her use only as some
+high and delicate deed. She couldn't do anything at all, in short,
+unless she could do it with a kind of pride, and there would be nothing
+to be proud of in having arranged for poor Owen to get off easily.
+Nobody had a right to get off easily from pledges so deep, so sacred.
+How could Fleda doubt they had been tremendous when she knew so well
+what any pledge of her own would be? If Mona was so formed that she
+could hold such vows light, that was Mona's peculiar business. To have
+loved Owen apparently, and yet to have loved him only so much, only to
+the extent of a few tables and chairs, was not a thing she could so much
+as try to grasp. Of a different way of loving him she was herself ready
+to give an instance, an instance of which the beauty indeed would not be
+generally known. It would not perhaps if revealed be generally
+understood, inasmuch as the effect of the particular pressure she
+proposed to exercise would be, should success attend it, to keep him
+tied to an affection that had died a sudden and violent death. Even in
+the ardor of her meditation Fleda remained in sight of the truth that it
+would be an odd result of her magnanimity to prevent her friend's
+shaking off a woman he disliked. If he didn't dislike Mona, what was the
+matter with him? And if he did, Fleda asked, what was the matter with
+her own silly self?
+
+Our young lady met this branch of the temptation it pleased her frankly
+to recognize by declaring that to encourage any such cruelty would be
+tortuous and base. She had nothing to do with his dislikes; she had only
+to do with his good-nature and his good name. She had joy of him just as
+he was, but it was of these things she had the greatest. The worst
+aversion and the liveliest reaction moreover wouldn't alter the
+fact--since one was facing facts--that but the other day his strong arms
+must have clasped a remarkably handsome girl as close as she had
+permitted. Fleda's emotion at this time was a wondrous mixture, in which
+Mona's permissions and Mona's beauty figured powerfully as aids to
+reflection. She herself had no beauty, and _her_ permissions were the
+stony stares she had just practiced in the drawing-room--a consciousness
+of a kind appreciably to add to the particular sense of triumph that
+made her generous. I may not perhaps too much diminish the merit of that
+generosity if I mention that it could take the flight we are considering
+just because really, with the telescope of her long thought, Fleda saw
+what might bring her out of the wood. Mona herself would bring her out;
+at the least Mona possibly might. Deep down plunged the idea that even
+should she achieve what she had promised Owen, there was still the
+contingency of Mona's independent action. She might by that time, under
+stress of temper or of whatever it was that was now moving her, have
+said or done the things there is no patching up. If the rupture should
+come from Waterbath they might all be happy yet. This was a calculation
+that Fleda wouldn't have committed to paper, but it affected the total
+of her sentiments. She was meanwhile so remarkably constituted that
+while she refused to profit by Owen's mistake, even while she judged it
+and hastened to cover it up, she could drink a sweetness from it that
+consorted little with her wishing it mightn't have been made. There was
+no harm done, because he had instinctively known, poor dear, with whom
+to make it, and it was a compensation for seeing him worried that he
+hadn't made it with some horrid mean girl who would immediately have
+dished him by making a still bigger one. Their protected error (for she
+indulged a fancy that it was hers too) was like some dangerous, lovely
+living thing that she had caught and could keep--keep vivid and helpless
+in the cage of her own passion and look at and talk to all day long. She
+had got it well locked up there by the time that, from an upper window,
+she saw Mrs. Gereth again in the garden. At this she went down to meet
+her.
+
+
+
+
+X
+
+
+Fleda's line had been taken, her word was quite ready; on the terrace of
+the painted pots she broke out before her interlocutress could put a
+question. "His errand was perfectly simple: he came to demand that you
+shall pack everything straight up again and send it back as fast as the
+railway will carry it."
+
+The back road had apparently been fatiguing to Mrs. Gereth; she rose
+there rather white and wan with her walk. A certain sharp thinness was
+in her ejaculation of "Oh!"--after which she glanced about her for a
+place to sit down. The movement was a criticism of the order of events
+that offered such a piece of news to a lady coming in tired; but Fleda
+could see that in turning over the possibilities this particular peril
+was the one that during the last hour her friend had turned up oftenest.
+At the end of the short, gray day, which had been moist and mild, the
+sun was out; the terrace looked to the south, and a bench, formed as to
+legs and arms of iron representing knotted boughs, stood against the
+warmest wall of the house. The mistress of Ricks sank upon it and
+presented to her companion the handsome face she had composed to hear
+everything. Strangely enough, it was just this fine vessel of her
+attention that made the girl most nervous about what she must drop in.
+"Quite a 'demand,' dear, is it?" asked Mrs. Gereth, drawing in her
+cloak.
+
+"Oh, that's what I should call it!" Fleda laughed, to her own surprise.
+
+"I mean with the threat of enforcement and that sort of thing."
+
+"Distinctly with the threat of enforcement--what would be called, I
+suppose, coercion."
+
+"What sort of coercion?" said Mrs. Gereth.
+
+"Why, legal, don't you know?--what he calls setting the lawyers at you."
+
+"Is that what he calls it?" She seemed to speak with disinterested
+curiosity.
+
+"That's what he calls it," said Fleda.
+
+Mrs. Gereth considered an instant. "Oh, the lawyers!" she exclaimed
+lightly. Seated there almost cosily in the reddening winter sunset, only
+with her shoulders raised a little and her mantle tightened as if from a
+slight chill, she had never yet looked to Fleda so much in possession
+nor so far from meeting unsuspectedness halfway. "Is he going to send
+them down here?"
+
+"I dare say he thinks it may come to that."
+
+"The lawyers can scarcely do the packing," Mrs. Gereth humorously
+remarked.
+
+"I suppose he means them--in the first place, at least--to try to talk
+you over."
+
+"In the first place, eh? And what does he mean in the second?"
+
+Fleda hesitated; she had not foreseen that so simple an inquiry could
+disconcert her. "I'm afraid I don't know."
+
+"Didn't you ask?" Mrs. Gereth spoke as if she might have said, "What
+then were you doing all the while?"
+
+"I didn't ask very much," said her companion. "He has been gone some
+time. The great thing seemed to be to understand clearly that he
+wouldn't be content with anything less than what he mentioned."
+
+"My just giving everything back?"
+
+"Your just giving everything back."
+
+"Well, darling, what did you tell him?" Mrs. Gereth blandly inquired.
+
+Fleda faltered again, wincing at the term of endearment, at what the
+words took for granted, charged with the confidence she had now
+committed herself to betray. "I told him I would tell you!" She smiled,
+but she felt that her smile was rather hollow and even that Mrs. Gereth
+had begun to look at her with some fixedness.
+
+"Did he seem very angry?"
+
+"He seemed very sad. He takes it very hard," Fleda added.
+
+"And how does _she_ take it?"
+
+"Ah, that--that I felt a delicacy about asking."
+
+"So you didn't ask?" The words had the note of surprise.
+
+Fleda was embarrassed; she had not made up her mind definitely to lie.
+"I didn't think you'd care." That small untruth she would risk.
+
+"Well--I don't!" Mrs. Gereth declared; and Fleda felt less guilty to
+hear her, for the statement was as inexact as her own. "Didn't you say
+anything in return?" Mrs. Gereth presently continued.
+
+"Do you mean in the way of justifying you?"
+
+"I didn't mean to trouble you to do that. My justification," said Mrs.
+Gereth, sitting there warmly and, in the lucidity of her thought, which
+nevertheless hung back a little, dropping her eyes on the gravel--"my
+justification was all the past. My justification was the cruelty--" But
+at this, with a short, sharp gesture, she checked herself. "It's too
+good of me to talk--now." She produced these sentences with a cold
+patience, as if addressing Fleda in the girl's virtual and actual
+character of Owen's representative. Our young lady crept to and fro
+before the bench, combating the sense that it was occupied by a judge,
+looking at her boot-toes, reminding herself in doing so of Mona, and
+lightly crunching the pebbles as she walked. She moved about because she
+was afraid, putting off from moment to moment the exercise of the
+courage she had been sure she possessed. That courage would all come to
+her if she could only be equally sure that what she should be called
+upon to do for Owen would be to suffer. She had wondered, while Mrs.
+Gereth spoke, how that lady would describe her justification. She had
+described it as if to be irreproachably fair, give her adversary the
+benefit of every doubt, and then dismiss the question forever. "Of
+course," Mrs. Gereth went on, "if we didn't succeed in showing him at
+Poynton the ground we took, it's simply that he shuts his eyes. What I
+supposed was that you would have given him your opinion that if I was
+the woman so signally to assert myself, I'm also the woman to rest upon
+it imperturbably enough."
+
+Fleda stopped in front of her hostess. "I gave him my opinion that
+you're very logical, very obstinate, and very proud."
+
+"Quite right, my dear: I'm a rank bigot--about that sort of thing!" and
+Mrs. Gereth jerked her head at the contents of the house. "I've never
+denied it. I'd kidnap--to save them, to convert them--the children of
+heretics. When I know I'm right I go to the stake. Oh, he may burn me
+alive!" she cried with a happy face. "Did he abuse me?" she then
+demanded.
+
+Fleda had remained there, gathering in her purpose. "How little you know
+him!"
+
+Mrs. Gereth stared, then broke into a laugh that her companion had not
+expected. "Ah, my dear, certainly not so well as you!" The girl, at
+this, turned away again--she felt she looked too conscious; and she was
+aware that, during a pause, Mrs. Gereth's eyes watched her as she went.
+She faced about afresh to meet them, but what she met was a question
+that reinforced them. "Why had you a 'delicacy' as to speaking of Mona?"
+
+She stopped again before the bench, and an inspiration came to her. "I
+should think _you_ would know," she said with proper dignity.
+
+Blankness was for a moment on Mrs. Gereth's brow; then light broke--she
+visibly remembered the scene in the breakfast-room after Mona's night at
+Poynton. "Because I contrasted you--told him _you_ were the one?" Her
+eyes looked deep. "You were--you are still!"
+
+Fleda gave a bold dramatic laugh. "Thank you, my love--with all the best
+things at Ricks!"
+
+Mrs. Gereth considered, trying to penetrate, as it seemed; but at last
+she brought out roundly: "For you, you know, I'd send them back!"
+
+The girl's heart gave a tremendous bound; the right way dawned upon her
+in a flash. Obscurity indeed the next moment engulfed this course, but
+for a few thrilled seconds she had understood. To send the things back
+"for her" meant of course to send them back if there were even a dim
+chance that she might become mistress of them. Fleda's palpitation was
+not allayed as she asked herself what portent Mrs. Gereth had suddenly
+perceived of such a chance: that perception could come only from a
+sudden suspicion of her secret. This suspicion, in turn, was a tolerably
+straight consequence of that implied view of the propriety of surrender
+from which, she was well aware, she could say nothing to dissociate
+herself. What she first felt was that if she wished to rescue the spoils
+she wished also to rescue her secret. So she looked as innocent as she
+could and said as quickly as possible: "For me? Why in the world for
+me?"
+
+"Because you're so awfully keen."
+
+"Am I? Do I strike you so? You know I hate him," Fleda went on.
+
+She had the sense for a while of Mrs. Gereth's regarding her with the
+detachment of some stern, clever stranger. "Then what's the matter with
+you? Why do you want me to give in?"
+
+Fleda hesitated; she felt herself reddening. "I've only said your son
+wants it. I haven't said _I_ do."
+
+"Then say it and have done with it!"
+
+This was more peremptory than any word her friend, though often speaking
+in her presence with much point, had ever yet directly addressed to her.
+It affected her like the crack of a whip, but she confined herself, with
+an effort, to taking it as a reminder that she must keep her head. "I
+know he has his engagement to carry out."
+
+"His engagement to marry? Why, it's just that engagement we loathe!"
+
+"Why should _I_ loathe it?" Fleda asked with a strained smile. Then,
+before Mrs. Gereth could reply, she pursued: "I'm thinking of his
+general undertaking--to give her the house as she originally saw it."
+
+"To give her the house!" Mrs. Gereth brought up the words from the depth
+of the unspeakable. The effort was like the moan of an autumn wind; it
+was in the power of such an image to make her turn pale.
+
+"I'm thinking," Fleda continued, "of the simple question of his keeping
+faith on an important clause of his contract: it doesn't matter whether
+it's with a stupid girl or with a monster of cleverness. I'm thinking of
+his honor and his good name."
+
+"The honor and good name of a man you hate?"
+
+"Certainly," the girl resolutely answered. "I don't see why you should
+talk as if one had a petty mind. You don't think so. It's not on that
+assumption you've ever dealt with me. I can do your son justice, as he
+put his case to me."
+
+"Ah, then he did put his case to you!" Mrs. Gereth exclaimed, with an
+accent of triumph. "You seemed to speak just now as if really nothing of
+any consequence had passed between you."
+
+"Something always passes when one has a little imagination," our young
+lady declared.
+
+"I take it you don't mean that Owen has any!" Mrs. Gereth cried with her
+large laugh.
+
+Fleda was silent a moment. "No, I don't mean that Owen has any," she
+returned at last.
+
+"Why is it you hate him so?" her hostess abruptly inquired.
+
+"Should I love him for all he has made you suffer?"
+
+Mrs. Gereth slowly rose at this and, coming across the walk, took her
+young friend in her arms and kissed her. She then passed into one of
+Fleda's an arm perversely and imperiously sociable. "Let us move a
+little," she said, holding her close and giving a slight shiver. They
+strolled along the terrace, and she brought out another question. "He
+_was_ eloquent, then, poor dear--he poured forth the story of his
+wrongs?"
+
+Fleda smiled down at her companion, who, cloaked and perceptibly bowed,
+leaned on her heavily and gave her an odd, unwonted sense of age and
+cunning. She took refuge in an evasion. "He couldn't tell me anything
+that I didn't know pretty well already."
+
+"It's very true that you know everything. No, dear, you haven't a petty
+mind; you've a lovely imagination and you're the nicest creature in the
+world. If you were inane, like most girls--like every one, in fact--I
+would have insulted you, I would have outraged you, and then you would
+have fled from me in terror. No, now that I think of it," Mrs. Gereth
+went on, "you wouldn't have fled from me; nothing, on the contrary,
+would have made you budge. You would have cuddled into your warm corner,
+but you would have been wounded and weeping and martyrized, and you
+would have taken every opportunity to tell people I'm a brute--as indeed
+I should have been!" They went to and fro, and she would not allow
+Fleda, who laughed and protested, to attenuate with any light civility
+this spirited picture. She praised her cleverness and her patience; then
+she said it was getting cold and dark and they must go in to tea. She
+delayed quitting the place, however, and reverted instead to Owen's
+ultimatum, about which she asked another question or two; in particular
+whether it had struck Fleda that he really believed she would comply
+with such a summons.
+
+"I think he really believes that if I try hard enough I can make you:"
+after uttering which words our young lady stopped short and emulated the
+embrace she had received a few moments before.
+
+"And you've promised to try: I see. You didn't tell me that, either,"
+Mrs. Gereth added as they went on. "But you're rascal enough for
+anything!" While Fleda was occupied in thinking in what terms she could
+explain why she had indeed been rascal enough for the reticence thus
+denounced, her companion broke out with an inquiry somewhat irrelevant
+and even in form somewhat profane. "Why the devil, at any rate, doesn't
+it come off?"
+
+Fleda hesitated. "You mean their marriage?"
+
+"Of course I mean their marriage!" Fleda hesitated again. "I haven't the
+least idea."
+
+"You didn't ask him?"
+
+"Oh, how in the world can you fancy?" She spoke in a shocked tone.
+
+"Fancy your putting a question so indelicate? _I_ should have put it--I
+mean in your place; but I'm quite coarse, thank God!" Fleda felt
+privately that she herself was coarse, or at any rate would presently
+have to be; and Mrs. Gereth, with a purpose that struck the girl as
+increasing, continued: "What, then, _was_ the day to be? Wasn't it just
+one of these?"
+
+"I'm sure I don't remember."
+
+It was part of the great rupture and an effect of Mrs. Gereth's
+character that up to this moment she had been completely and haughtily
+indifferent to that detail. Now, however, she had a visible reason for
+being clear about it. She bethought herself and she broke out--"Isn't
+the day past?" Then, stopping short, she added: "Upon my word, they must
+have put it off!" As Fleda made no answer to this she sharply went on:
+"_Have_ they put it off?"
+
+"I haven't the least idea," said the girl.
+
+Her hostess was looking at her hard again. "Didn't he tell you--didn't
+he say anything about it?"
+
+Fleda, meanwhile, had had time to make her reflections, which were
+moreover the continued throb of those that had occupied the interval
+between Owen's departure and his mother's return. If she should now
+repeat his words, this wouldn't at all play the game of her definite
+vow; it would only play the game of her little gagged and blinded
+desire. She could calculate well enough the effect of telling Mrs.
+Gereth how she had had it from Owen's troubled lips that Mona was only
+waiting for the restitution and would do nothing without it. The thing
+was to obtain the restitution without imparting that knowledge. The only
+way, also, not to impart it was not to tell any truth at all about it;
+and the only way to meet this last condition was to reply to her
+companion, as she presently did: "He told me nothing whatever: he didn't
+touch on the subject."
+
+"Not in any way?"
+
+"Not in any way."
+
+Mrs. Gereth watched Fleda and considered. "You haven't any idea if they
+are waiting for the things?"
+
+"How should I have? I'm not in their counsels."
+
+"I dare say they are--or that Mona is." Mrs. Gereth reflected again; she
+had a bright idea. "If I don't give in, I'll be hanged if she'll not
+break off."
+
+"She'll never, never break off!" said Fleda.
+
+"Are you sure?"
+
+"I can't be sure, but it's my belief."
+
+"Derived from _him_?"
+
+The girl hung fire a few seconds. "Derived from him."
+
+Mrs. Gereth gave her a long last look, then turned abruptly away. "It's
+an awful bore you didn't really get it out of him! Well, come to tea,"
+she added rather dryly, passing straight into the house.
+
+
+
+
+XI
+
+
+The sense of her adversary's dryness, which was ominous of something she
+couldn't read, made Fleda, before complying, linger a little on the
+terrace; she felt the need moreover of taking breath after such a flight
+into the cold air of denial. When at last she rejoined Mrs. Gereth she
+found her erect before the drawing-room fire. Their tea had been set out
+in the same quarter, and the mistress of the house, for whom the
+preparation of it was in general a high and undelegated function, was in
+an attitude to which the hissing urn made no appeal. This omission, for
+Fleda, was such a further sign of something to come that, to disguise
+her apprehension, she immediately and without an apology took the duty
+in hand; only, however, to be promptly reminded that she was performing
+it confusedly and not counting the journeys of the little silver shovel
+she emptied into the pot. "Not _five_, my dear--the usual three," said
+her hostess, with the same dryness; watching her then in silence while
+she clumsily corrected her mistake. The tea took some minutes to draw,
+and Mrs. Gereth availed herself of them suddenly to exclaim: "You
+haven't yet told me, you know, how it is you propose to 'make' me!"
+
+"Give everything back?" Fleda looked into the pot again and uttered her
+question with a briskness that she felt to be a little overdone. "Why,
+by putting the question well before you; by being so eloquent that I
+shall persuade you, shall act upon you; by making you sorry for having
+gone so far," she said boldly; "by simply and earnestly asking it of
+you, in short; and by reminding you at the same time that it's the first
+thing I ever have so asked. Oh, you've done things for me--endless and
+beautiful things," she exclaimed; "but you've done them all from your
+own generous impulse. I've never so much as hinted to you to lend me a
+postage-stamp."
+
+"Give me a cup of tea," said Mrs. Gereth. A moment later, taking the
+cup, she replied: "No, you've never asked me for a postage-stamp."
+
+"That gives me a pull!" Fleda returned, smiling.
+
+"Puts you in the situation of expecting that I shall do this thing just
+simply to oblige you?"
+
+The girl hesitated. "You said a while ago that for me you _would_ do
+it."
+
+"For you, but not for your eloquence. Do you understand what I mean by
+the difference?" Mrs. Gereth asked as she stood stirring her tea.
+
+Fleda, to postpone answering, looked round, while she drank it, at the
+beautiful room. "I don't in the least like, you know, your having taken
+so much. It was a great shock to me, on my arrival here, to find you had
+done so."
+
+"Give me some more tea," said Mrs. Gereth; and there was a moment's
+silence as Fleda poured out another cup. "If you were shocked, my dear,
+I'm bound to say you concealed your shock."
+
+"I know I did. I was afraid to show it."
+
+Mrs. Gereth drank off her second cup. "And you're not afraid now?"
+
+"No, I'm not afraid now."
+
+"What has made the difference?"
+
+"I've pulled myself together." Fleda paused; then she added: "And I've
+seen Mr. Owen."
+
+"You've seen Mr. Owen"--Mrs. Gereth concurred. She put down her cup and
+sank into a chair, in which she leaned back, resting her head and gazing
+at her young friend. "Yes, I did tell you a while ago that for you I'd
+do it. But you haven't told me yet what you'll do in return."
+
+Fleda thought an instant. "Anything in the wide world you may require."
+
+"Oh, 'anything' is nothing at all! That's too easily said." Mrs. Gereth,
+reclining more completely, closed her eyes with an air of disgust, an
+air indeed of inviting slumber.
+
+Fleda looked at her quiet face, which the appearance of slumber always
+made particularly handsome; she noted how much the ordeal of the last
+few weeks had added to its indications of age. "Well then, try me with
+something. What is it you demand?"
+
+At this, opening her eyes, Mrs. Gereth sprang straight up. "Get him away
+from her!"
+
+Fleda marveled: her companion had in an instant become young again.
+"Away from Mona? How in the world--?"
+
+"By not looking like a fool!" cried Mrs. Gereth very sharply. She kissed
+her, however, on the spot, to make up for this roughness, and summarily
+took off her hat, which, on coming into the house, our young lady had
+not removed. She applied a friendly touch to the girl's hair and gave a
+businesslike pull to her jacket. "I say don't look like an idiot,
+because you happen not to be one, not the least bit. _I_'m idiotic; I've
+been so, I've just discovered, ever since our first days together. I've
+been a precious donkey; but that's another affair."
+
+Fleda, as if she humbly assented, went through no form of controverting
+this; she simply stood passive to her companion's sudden refreshment of
+her appearance. "How _can_ I get him away from her?" she presently
+demanded.
+
+"By letting yourself go."
+
+"By letting myself go?" She spoke mechanically, still more like an
+idiot, and felt as if her face flamed out the insincerity of her
+question. It was vividly back again, the vision of the real way to act
+upon Mrs. Gereth. This lady's movements were now rapid; she turned off
+from her as quickly as she had seized her, and Fleda sat down to steady
+herself for full responsibility.
+
+Her hostess, without taking up her ejaculation, gave a violent poke at
+the fire and then faced her again. "You've done two things, then,
+to-day--haven't you?--that you've never done before. One has been asking
+me the service, or favor, or concession--whatever you call it--that you
+just mentioned; the other has been telling me--certainly too for the
+first time--an immense little fib."
+
+"An immense little fib?" Fleda felt weak; she was glad of the support of
+her seat.
+
+"An immense big one, then!" said Mrs. Gereth irritatedly. "You don't in
+the least 'hate' Owen, my darling. You care for him very much. In fact,
+my own, you're in love with him--there! Don't tell me any more lies!"
+cried Mrs. Gereth with a voice and a face in the presence of which Fleda
+recognized that there was nothing for her but to hold herself and take
+them. When once the truth was out, it was out, and she could see more
+and more every instant that it would be the only way. She accepted
+therefore what had to come; she leaned back her head and closed her eyes
+as her companion had done just before. She would have covered her face
+with her hands but for the still greater shame. "Oh, you're a wonder, a
+wonder," said Mrs. Gereth; "you're magnificent, and I was right, as soon
+as I saw you, to pick you out and trust you!" Fleda closed her eyes
+tighter at this last word, but her friend kept it up. "I never dreamed
+of it till a while ago, when, after he had come and gone, we were face
+to face. Then something stuck out of you; it strongly impressed me, and
+I didn't know at first quite what to make of it. It was that you had
+just been with him and that you were not natural. Not natural to _me_,"
+she added with a smile. "I pricked up my ears, and all that this might
+mean dawned upon me when you said you had asked nothing about Mona. It
+put me on the scent, but I didn't show you, did I? I felt it was _in_
+you, deep down, and that I must draw it out. Well, I _have_ drawn it,
+and it's a blessing. Yesterday, when you shed tears at breakfast, I was
+awfully puzzled. What has been the matter with you all the while? Why,
+Fleda, it isn't a crime, don't you know that?" cried the delighted
+woman. "When I was a girl I was always in love, and not always with such
+nice people as Owen. I didn't behave as well as you; compared with you I
+think I must have been horrid. But if you're proud and reserved, it's
+your own affair; I'm proud too, though I'm not reserved--that's what
+spoils it. I'm stupid, above all--that's what I am; so dense that I
+really blush for it. However, no one but you could have deceived me. If
+I trusted you, moreover, it was exactly to be cleverer than myself. You
+must be so now more than ever!" Suddenly Fleda felt her hands grasped:
+Mrs. Gereth had plumped down at her feet and was leaning on her knees.
+"Save him--save him: you _can_!" she passionately pleaded. "How could
+you _not_ like him, when he's such a dear? He _is_ a dear, darling;
+there's no harm in my own boy! You can do what you will with him--you
+know you can! What else does he give us all this time for? Get him away
+from her; it's as if he besought you to, poor wretch! Don't abandon him
+to such a fate, and I'll never abandon _you_. Think of him with that
+creature, that future! If you'll take him I'll give up everything.
+There, it's a solemn promise, the most sacred of my life! Get the better
+of her, and he shall have every stick I removed. Give me your word, and
+I'll accept it. I'll write for the packers to-night!"
+
+Fleda, before this, had fallen forward on her companion's neck, and the
+two women, clinging together, had got up while the younger wailed on the
+other's bosom. "You smooth it down because you see more in it than there
+can ever be; but after my hideous double game how will you be able to
+believe in me again?"
+
+"I see in it simply what _must_ be, if you've a single spark of pity.
+Where on earth was the double game, when you've behaved like such a
+saint? You've been beautiful, you've been exquisite, and all our trouble
+is over."
+
+Fleda, drying her eyes, shook her head ever so sadly. "No, Mrs. Gereth,
+it isn't over. I can't do what you ask--I can't meet your condition."
+
+Mrs. Gereth stared; the cloud gathered in her face again. "Why, in the
+name of goodness, when you adore him? I know what you see in him," she
+declared in another tone. "You're right!"
+
+Fleda gave a faint, stubborn smile. "He cares for her too much."
+
+"Then why doesn't he marry her? He's giving you an extraordinary
+chance."
+
+"He doesn't dream I've ever thought of him," said Fleda. "Why should he,
+if you didn't?"
+
+"It wasn't with me you were in love, my duck." Then Mrs. Gereth added:
+"I'll go and tell him."
+
+"If you do any such thing, you shall never see me again,--absolutely,
+literally never!"
+
+Mrs. Gereth looked hard at her young friend, showing she saw she must
+believe her. "Then you're perverse, you're wicked. Will you swear he
+doesn't know?"
+
+"Of course he doesn't know!" cried Fleda indignantly.
+
+Her interlocutress was silent a little. "And that he has no feeling on
+_his_ side?"
+
+"For me?" Fleda stared. "Before he has even married her?"
+
+Mrs. Gereth gave a sharp laugh at this. "He ought at least to appreciate
+your wit. Oh, my dear, you _are_ a treasure! Doesn't he appreciate
+anything? Has he given you absolutely no symptom--not looked a look, not
+breathed a sigh?"
+
+"The case," said Fleda coldly, "is as I've had the honor to state it."
+
+"Then he's as big a donkey as his mother! But you know you must account
+for their delay," Mrs. Gereth remarked.
+
+"Why must I?" Fleda asked after a moment.
+
+"Because you were closeted with him here so long. You can't pretend at
+present, you know, not to have any art."
+
+The girl hesitated an instant; she was conscious that she must choose
+between two risks. She had had a secret and the secret was gone. Owen
+had one, which was still unbruised, and the greater risk now was that
+his mother should lay her formidable hand upon it. All Fleda's
+tenderness for him moved her to protect it; so she faced the smaller
+peril. "Their delay," she brought herself to reply, "may perhaps be
+Mona's doing. I mean because he has lost her the things."
+
+Mrs. Gereth jumped at this. "So that she'll break altogether if I keep
+them?"
+
+Fleda winced. "I've told you what I believe about that. She'll make
+scenes and conditions; she'll worry him. But she'll hold him fast;
+she'll never give him up."
+
+Mrs. Gereth turned it over. "Well, I'll keep them, to try her," she
+finally pronounced; at which Fleda felt quite sick, as if she had given
+everything and got nothing.
+
+
+
+
+XII
+
+
+"I must in common decency let him know that I've talked of the matter
+with you," she said to her hostess that evening. "What answer do you
+wish me to write to him?"
+
+"Write to him that you must see him again," said Mrs. Gereth.
+
+Fleda looked very blank. "What on earth am I to see him for?"
+
+"For anything you like."
+
+The girl would have been struck with the levity of this had she not
+already, in an hour, felt the extent of the change suddenly wrought in
+her commerce with her friend--wrought above all, to that friend's view,
+in her relation to the great issue. The effect of what had followed
+Owen's visit was to make that relation the very key of the crisis.
+Pressed upon her, goodness knew, the crisis had been, but it now seemed
+to put forth big, encircling arms--arms that squeezed till they hurt and
+she must cry out. It was as if everything at Ricks had been poured into
+a common receptacle, a public ferment of emotion and zeal, out of which
+it was ladled up to be tasted and talked about; everything at least but
+the one little treasure of knowledge that she kept back. She ought to
+have liked this, she reflected, because it meant sympathy, meant a
+closer union with the source of so much in her life that had been
+beautiful and renovating; but there were fine instincts in her that
+stood off. She had had--and it was not merely at this time--to recognize
+that there were things for which Mrs. Gereth's _flair_ was not so happy
+as for bargains and "marks." It wouldn't be happy now as to the best
+action on the knowledge she had just gained; yet as from this moment
+they were still more intimately together, so a person deeply in her debt
+would simply have to stand and meet what was to come. There were ways in
+which she could sharply incommode such a person, and not only with the
+best conscience in the world, but with a sort of brutality of good
+intentions. One of the straightest of these strokes, Fleda saw, would be
+the dance of delight over the mystery Mrs. Gereth had laid bare--the
+loud, lawful, tactless joy of the explorer leaping upon the strand. Like
+any other lucky discoverer, she would take possession of the fortunate
+island. She was nothing if not practical: almost the only thing she took
+account of in her young friend's soft secret was the excellent use she
+could make of it--a use so much to her taste that she refused to feel a
+hindrance in the quality of the material. Fleda put into Mrs. Gereth's
+answer to her question a good deal more meaning than it would have
+occurred to her a few hours before that she was prepared to put, but she
+had on the spot a foreboding that even so broad a hint would live to be
+bettered.
+
+"Do you suggest that I shall propose to him to come down here again?"
+she presently inquired.
+
+"Dear, no; say that you'll go up to town and meet him." It _was_
+bettered, the broad hint; and Fleda felt this to be still more the case
+when, returning to the subject before they went to bed, her companion
+said: "I make him over to you wholly, you know--to do what you please
+with. Deal with him in your own clever way--I ask no questions. All I
+ask is that you succeed."
+
+"That's charming," Fleda replied, "but it doesn't tell me a bit, you'll
+be so good as to consider, in what terms to write to him. It's not an
+answer from you to the message I was to give you."
+
+"The answer to his message is perfectly distinct: he shall have
+everything in the place the minute he'll say he'll marry you."
+
+"You really pretend," Fleda asked, "to think me capable of transmitting
+him that news?"
+
+"What else can I really pretend when you threaten so to cast me off if I
+speak the word myself?"
+
+"Oh, if _you_ speak the word!" the girl murmured very gravely, but happy
+at least to know that in this direction Mrs. Gereth confessed herself
+warned and helpless. Then she added: "How can I go on living with you on
+a footing of which I so deeply disapprove? Thinking as I do that you've
+despoiled him far more than is just or merciful--for if I expected you
+to take something, I didn't in the least expect you to take
+everything--how can I stay here without a sense that I'm backing you up
+in your cruelty and participating in your ill-gotten gains?" Fleda was
+determined that if she had the chill of her exposed and investigated
+state she would also have the convenience of it, and that if Mrs. Gereth
+popped in and out of the chamber of her soul she would at least return
+the freedom. "I shall quite hate, you know, in a day or two, every
+object that surrounds you--become blind to all the beauty and rarity
+that I formerly delighted in. Don't think me harsh; there's no use in my
+not being frank now. If I leave you, everything's at an end."
+
+Mrs. Gereth, however, was imperturbable: Fleda had to recognize that her
+advantage had become too real. "It's too beautiful, the way you care for
+him; it's music in my ears. Nothing else but such a passion could make
+you say such things; that's the way I should have been too, my dear. Why
+didn't you tell me sooner? I'd have gone right in for you; I never would
+have moved a candlestick. Don't stay with me if it torments you; don't,
+if you suffer, be where you see the old rubbish. Go up to town--go back
+for a little to your father's. It need be only for a little; two or
+three weeks will see us through. Your father will take you and be glad,
+if you only will make him understand what it's a question of--of your
+getting yourself off his hands forever. _I_'ll make him understand, you
+know, if you feel shy. I'd take you up myself, I'd go with you, to spare
+your being bored; we'd put up at an hotel and we might amuse ourselves a
+bit. We haven't had much pleasure since we met, have we? But of course
+that wouldn't suit our book. I should be a bugaboo to Owen--I should be
+fatally in the way. Your chance is there--your chance is to be alone;
+for God's sake, use it to the right end. If you're in want of money I've
+a little I can give you. But I ask no questions--not a question as small
+as your shoe!"
+
+She asked no questions, but she took the most extraordinary things for
+granted. Fleda felt this still more at the end of a couple of days. On
+the second of these our young lady wrote to Owen; her emotion had to a
+certain degree cleared itself--there was something she could say
+briefly. If she had given everything to Mrs. Gereth and as yet got
+nothing, so she had on the other hand quickly reacted--it took but a
+night--against the discouragement of her first check. Her desire to
+serve him was too passionate, the sense that he counted upon her too
+sweet: these things caught her up again and gave her a new patience and
+a new subtlety. It shouldn't really be for nothing that she had given so
+much; deep within her burned again the resolve to get something back. So
+what she wrote to Owen was simply that she had had a great scene with
+his mother, but that he must be patient and give her time. It was
+difficult, as they both had expected, but she was working her hardest
+for him. She had made an impression--she would do everything to follow
+it up. Meanwhile he must keep intensely quiet and take no other steps;
+he must only trust her and pray for her and believe in her perfect
+loyalty. She made no allusion whatever to Mona's attitude, nor to his
+not being, as regarded that young lady, master of the situation; but she
+said in a postscript, in reference to his mother, "Of course she wonders
+a good deal why your marriage doesn't take place." After the letter had
+gone she regretted having used the word "loyalty;" there were two or
+three milder terms which she might as well have employed. The answer she
+immediately received from Owen was a little note of which she met all
+the deficiencies by describing it to herself as pathetically simple, but
+which, to prove that Mrs. Gereth might ask as many questions as she
+liked, she at once made his mother read. He had no art with his pen, he
+had not even a good hand, and his letter, a short profession of friendly
+confidence, consisted of but a few familiar and colorless words of
+acknowledgment and assent. The gist of it was that he would certainly,
+since Miss Vetch recommended it, not hurry mamma too much. He would not
+for the present cause her to be approached by any one else, but he would
+nevertheless continue to hope that she would see she _must_ come round.
+"Of course, you know," he added, "she can't keep me waiting
+indefinitely. Please give her my love and tell her that. If it can be
+done peaceably I know you're just the one to do it."
+
+Fleda had awaited his rejoinder in deep suspense; such was her
+imagination of the possibility of his having, as she tacitly phrased it,
+let himself go on paper that when it arrived she was at first almost
+afraid to open it. There was indeed a distinct danger, for if he should
+take it into his head to write her love-letters the whole chance of
+aiding him would drop: she would have to return them, she would have to
+decline all further communication with him: it would be quite the end of
+the business. This imagination of Fleda's was a faculty that easily
+embraced all the heights and depths and extremities of things; that made
+a single mouthful, in particular, of any tragic or desperate necessity.
+She was perhaps at first just a trifle disappointed not to find in the
+note in question a syllable that strayed from the text; but the next
+moment she had risen to a point of view from which it presented itself
+as a production almost inspired in its simplicity. It was simple even
+for Owen, and she wondered what had given him the cue to be more so than
+usual. Then she saw how natures that are right just do the things that
+are right. He wasn't clever--his manner of writing showed it; but the
+cleverest man in England couldn't have had more the instinct that, under
+the circumstances, was the supremely happy one, the instinct of giving
+her something that would do beautifully to be shown to Mrs. Gereth. This
+was a kind of divination, for naturally he couldn't know the line Mrs.
+Gereth was taking. It was furthermore explained--and that was the most
+touching part of all--by his wish that she herself should notice how
+awfully well he was behaving. His very bareness called her attention to
+his virtue; and these were the exact fruits of her beautiful and
+terrible admonition. He was cleaving to Mona; he was doing his duty; he
+was making tremendously sure he should be without reproach.
+
+If Fleda handed this communication to her friend as a triumphant gage of
+the innocence of the young man's heart, her elation lived but a moment
+after Mrs. Gereth had pounced upon the tell-tale spot in it. "Why in the
+world, then," that lady cried, "does he still not breathe a breath about
+the day, the _day_, the day?" She repeated the word with a crescendo of
+superior acuteness; she proclaimed that nothing could be more marked
+than its absence--an absence that simply spoke volumes. What did it
+prove in fine but that she was producing the effect she had toiled
+for--that she had settled or was rapidly settling Mona?
+
+Such a challenge Fleda was obliged in some manner to take up. "You may
+be settling Mona," she returned with a smile, "but I can hardly regard
+it as sufficient evidence that you're settling Mona's lover."
+
+"Why not, with such a studied omission on his part to gloss over in any
+manner the painful tension existing between them--the painful tension
+that, under providence, I've been the means of bringing about? He gives
+you by his silence clear notice that his marriage is practically off."
+
+"He speaks to me of the only thing that concerns me. He gives me clear
+notice that he abates not one jot of his demand."
+
+"Well, then, let him take the only way to get it satisfied."
+
+Fleda had no need to ask again what such a way might be, nor was her
+support removed by the fine assurance with which Mrs. Gereth could make
+her argument wait upon her wish. These days, which dragged their length
+into a strange, uncomfortable fortnight, had already borne more
+testimony to that element than all the other time the two women had
+passed together. Our young lady had been at first far from measuring the
+whole of a feature that Owen himself would probably have described as
+her companion's "cheek." She lived now in a kind of bath of boldness,
+felt as if a fierce light poured in upon her from windows opened wide;
+and the singular part of the ordeal was that she couldn't protest
+against it fully without incurring, even to her own mind, some reproach
+of ingratitude, some charge of smallness. If Mrs. Gereth's apparent
+determination to hustle her into Owen's arms was accompanied with an air
+of holding her dignity rather cheap, this was after all only as a
+consequence of her being held in respect to some other attributes rather
+dear. It was a new version of the old story of being kicked upstairs.
+The wonderful woman was the same woman who, in the summer, at Poynton,
+had been so puzzled to conceive why a good-natured girl shouldn't have
+contributed more to the personal rout of the Brigstocks--shouldn't have
+been grateful even for the handsome puff of Fleda Vetch. Only her
+passion was keener now and her scruple more absent; the fight made a
+demand upon her, and her pugnacity had become one with her constant
+habit of using such weapons as she could pick up. She had no imagination
+about anybody's life save on the side she bumped against. Fleda was
+quite aware that she would have otherwise been a rare creature; but a
+rare creature was originally just what she had struck her as being. Mrs.
+Gereth had really no perception of anybody's nature--had only one
+question about persons: were they clever or stupid? To be clever meant
+to know the marks. Fleda knew them by direct inspiration, and a warm
+recognition of this had been her friend's tribute to her character. The
+girl had hours, now, of sombre wishing that she might never see anything
+good again: that kind of experience was evidently not an infallible
+source of peace. She would be more at peace in some vulgar little place
+that should owe its _cachet_ to Tottenham Court Road. There were nice
+strong horrors in West Kensington; it was as if they beckoned her and
+wooed her back to them. She had a relaxed recollection of Waterbath; and
+of her reasons for staying on at Ricks the force was rapidly ebbing. One
+of these was her pledge to Owen--her vow to press his mother close; the
+other was the fact that of the two discomforts, that of being prodded by
+Mrs. Gereth and that of appearing to run after somebody else, the former
+remained for a while the more endurable.
+
+As the days passed, however, it became plainer to Fleda that her only
+chance of success would be in lending herself to this low appearance.
+Then, moreover, at last, her nerves settling the question, the choice
+was simply imposed by the violence done to her taste--to whatever was
+left of that high principle, at least, after the free and reckless
+meeting, for months, of great drafts and appeals. It was all very well
+to try to evade discussion: Owen Gereth was looking to her for a
+struggle, and it wasn't a bit of a struggle to be disgusted and dumb.
+She was on too strange a footing--that of having presented an ultimatum
+and having had it torn up in her face. In such a case as that the envoy
+always departed; he never sat gaping and dawdling before the city. Mrs.
+Gereth, every morning, looked publicly into "The Morning Post," the only
+newspaper she received; and every morning she treated the blankness of
+that journal as fresh evidence that everything was "off." What did the
+Post exist for but to tell you your children were wretchedly
+married?--so that if such a source of misery was dry, what could you do
+but infer that for once you had miraculously escaped? She almost taunted
+Fleda with supineness in not getting something out of somebody--in the
+same breath indeed in which she drenched her with a kind of appreciation
+more onerous to the girl than blame. Mrs. Gereth herself had of course
+washed her hands of the matter; but Fleda knew people who knew Mona and
+would be sure to be in her confidence--inconceivable people who admired
+her and had the privilege of Waterbath. What was the use therefore of
+being the most natural and the easiest of letter-writers, if no sort of
+side-light--in some pretext for correspondence--was, by a brilliant
+creature, to be got out of such barbarians? Fleda was not only a
+brilliant creature, but she heard herself commended in these days for
+new and strange attractions; she figured suddenly, in the queer
+conversations of Ricks, as a distinguished, almost as a dangerous
+beauty. That retouching of her hair and dress in which her friend had
+impulsively indulged on a first glimpse of her secret was by implication
+very frequently repeated. She had the sense not only of being advertised
+and offered, but of being counseled and enlightened in ways that she
+scarcely understood--arts obscure even to a poor girl who had had, in
+good society and motherless poverty, to look straight at realities and
+fill out blanks.
+
+These arts, when Mrs. Gereth's spirits were high, were handled with a
+brave and cynical humor with which Fleda's fancy could keep no step:
+they left our young lady wondering what on earth her companion wanted
+her to do. "I want you to cut in!"--that was Mrs. Gereth's familiar and
+comprehensive phrase for the course she prescribed. She challenged again
+and again Fleda's picture, as she called it (though the sketch was too
+slight to deserve the name), of the indifference to which a prior
+attachment had committed the proprietor of Poynton. "Do you mean to say
+that, Mona or no Mona, he could see you that way, day after day, and not
+have the ordinary feelings of a man?" This was the sort of interrogation
+to which Fleda was fitfully and irrelevantly treated. She had grown
+almost used to the refrain. "Do you mean to say that when, the other
+day, one had quite made you over to him, the great gawk, and he was, on
+this very spot, utterly alone with you--?" The poor girl at this point
+never left any doubt of what she meant to say, but Mrs. Gereth could be
+trusted to break out in another place and at another time. At last Fleda
+wrote to her father that he must take her in for a while; and when, to
+her companion's delight, she returned to London, that lady went with her
+to the station and wafted her on her way. "The Morning Post" had been
+delivered as they left the house, and Mrs. Gereth had brought it with
+her for the traveler, who never spent a penny on a newspaper. On the
+platform, however, when this young person was ticketed, labeled, and
+seated, she opened it at the window of the carriage, exclaiming as
+usual, after looking into it a moment: "Nothing--nothing--nothing: don't
+tell _me_!" Every day that there was nothing was a nail in the coffin of
+the marriage. An instant later the train was off, but, moving quickly
+beside it, while Fleda leaned inscrutably forth, Mrs. Gereth grasped her
+friend's hand and looked up with wonderful eyes. "Only let yourself go,
+darling--only let yourself go!"
+
+
+
+
+XIII
+
+
+That she desired to ask no questions Mrs. Gereth conscientiously proved
+by closing her lips tight after Fleda had gone to London. No letter from
+Ricks arrived at West Kensington, and Fleda, with nothing to communicate
+that could be to the taste of either party, forbore to open a
+correspondence. If her heart had been less heavy she might have been
+amused to perceive how much rope this reticence of Ricks seemed to
+signify to her that she could take. She had at all events no good news
+for her friend save in the sense that her silence was not bad news. She
+was not yet in a position to write that she had "cut in;" but neither,
+on the other hand, had she gathered material for announcing that Mona
+was undisseverable from her prey. She had made no use of the pen so
+glorified by Mrs. Gereth to wake up the echoes of Waterbath; she had
+sedulously abstained from inquiring what in any quarter, far or near,
+was said or suggested or supposed. She only spent a matutinal penny on
+"The Morning Post;" she only saw, on each occasion, that that inspired
+sheet had as little to say about the imminence as about the abandonment
+of certain nuptials. It was at the same time obvious that Mrs. Gereth
+triumphed on these occasions much more than she trembled, and that with
+a few such triumphs repeated she would cease to tremble at all. What was
+most manifest, however, was that she had had a rare preconception of the
+circumstances that would have ministered, had Fleda been disposed, to
+the girl's cutting in. It was brought home to Fleda that these
+circumstances would have particularly favored intervention; she was
+quickly forced to do them a secret justice. One of the effects of her
+intimacy with Mrs. Gereth was that she had quite lost all sense of
+intimacy with any one else. The lady of Ricks had made a desert around
+her, possessing and absorbing her so utterly that other partakers had
+fallen away. Hadn't she been admonished, months before, that people
+considered they had lost her and were reconciled on the whole to the
+privation? Her present position in the great unconscious town defined
+itself as obscure: she regarded it at any rate with eyes suspicious of
+that lesson. She neither wrote notes nor received them; she indulged in
+no reminders nor knocked at any doors; she wandered vaguely in the
+western wilderness or cultivated shy forms of that "household art" for
+which she had had a respect before tasting the bitter tree of knowledge.
+Her only plan was to be as quiet as a mouse, and when she failed in the
+attempt to lose herself in the flat suburb she felt like a lonely fly
+crawling over a dusty chart.
+
+How had Mrs. Gereth known in advance that if she had chosen to be "vile"
+(that was what Fleda called it) everything would happen to help
+her?--especially the way her poor father, after breakfast, doddered off
+to his club, showing seventy when he was really fifty-seven, and leaving
+her richly alone for the day. He came back about midnight, looking at
+her very hard and not risking long words--only making her feel by
+inimitable touches that the presence of his family compelled him to
+alter all his hours. She had in their common sitting-room the company of
+the objects he was fond of saying that he had collected--objects, shabby
+and battered, of a sort that appealed little to his daughter: old
+brandy-flasks and match-boxes, old calendars and hand-books, intermixed
+with an assortment of pen-wipers and ash-trays, a harvest he had
+gathered in from penny bazaars. He was blandly unconscious of that side
+of Fleda's nature which had endeared her to Mrs. Gereth, and she had
+often heard him wish to goodness there was something striking she cared
+for. Why didn't she try collecting something?--it didn't matter what.
+She would find it gave an interest to life, and there was no end of
+little curiosities one could easily pick up. He was conscious of having
+a taste for fine things which his children had unfortunately not
+inherited. This indicated the limits of their acquaintance with
+him--limits which, as Fleda was now sharply aware, could only leave him
+to wonder what the mischief she was there for. As she herself echoed
+this question to the letter she was not in a position to clear up the
+mystery. She couldn't have given a name to her errand in town or
+explained it save by saying that she had had to get away from Ricks. It
+was intensely provisional, but what was to come next? Nothing could come
+next but a deeper anxiety. She had neither a home nor an
+outlook--nothing in all the wide world but a feeling of suspense.
+
+Of course she had her duty--her duty to Owen--a definite undertaking,
+reaffirmed, after his visit to Ricks, under her hand and seal; but there
+was no sense of possession attached to that; there was only a horrible
+sense of privation. She had quite moved from under Mrs. Gereth's wide
+wing; and now that she was really among the pen-wipers and ash-trays she
+was swept, at the thought of all the beauty she had forsworn, by short,
+wild gusts of despair. If her friend should really keep the spoils she
+would never return to her. If that friend should on the other hand part
+with them, what on earth would there be to return to? The chill struck
+deep as Fleda thought of the mistress of Ricks reduced, in vulgar
+parlance, to what she had on her back: there was nothing to which she
+could compare such an image but her idea of Marie Antoinette in the
+Conciergerie, or perhaps the vision of some tropical bird, the creature
+of hot, dense forests, dropped on a frozen moor to pick up a living. The
+mind's eye could see Mrs. Gereth, indeed, only in her thick, colored
+air; it took all the light of her treasures to make her concrete and
+distinct. She loomed for a moment, in any mere house, gaunt and
+unnatural; then she vanished as if she had suddenly sunk into a
+quicksand. Fleda lost herself in the rich fancy of how, if _she_ were
+mistress of Poynton, a whole province, as an abode, should be assigned
+there to the august queen-mother. She would have returned from her
+campaign with her baggage-train and her loot, and the palace would unbar
+its shutters and the morning flash back from its halls. In the event of
+a surrender the poor woman would never again be able to begin to
+collect: she was now too old and too moneyless, and times were altered
+and good things impossibly dear. A surrender, furthermore, to any
+daughter-in-law save an oddity like Mona needn't at all be an abdication
+in fact; any other fairly nice girl whom Owen should have taken it into
+his head to marry would have been positively glad to have, for the
+museum, a custodian who was a walking catalogue and who understood
+beyond any one in England the hygiene and temperament of rare pieces. A
+fairly nice girl would somehow be away a good deal and would at such
+times count it a blessing to feel Mrs. Gereth at her post.
+
+Fleda had fully recognized, the first days, that, quite apart from any
+question of letting Owen know where she was, it would be a charity to
+give him some sign: it would be weak, it would be ugly, to be diverted
+from that kindness by the fact that Mrs. Gereth had attached a tinkling
+bell to it. A frank relation with him was only superficially
+discredited: she ought for his own sake to send him a word of cheer. So
+she repeatedly reasoned, but she as repeatedly delayed performance: if
+her general plan had been to be as still as a mouse, an interview like
+the interview at Ricks would be an odd contribution to that ideal.
+Therefore with a confused preference of practice to theory she let the
+days go by; she felt that nothing was so imperative as the gain of
+precious time. She shouldn't be able to stay with her father forever,
+but she might now reap the benefit of having married her sister.
+Maggie's union had been built up round a small spare room. Concealed in
+this apartment she might try to paint again, and abetted by the grateful
+Maggie--for Maggie at least was grateful--she might try to dispose of
+her work. She had not indeed struggled with a brush since her visit to
+Waterbath, where the sight of the family splotches had put her immensely
+on her guard. Poynton moreover had been an impossible place for
+producing; no active art could flourish there but a Buddhistic
+contemplation. It had stripped its mistress clean of all feeble
+accomplishments; her hands were imbrued neither with ink nor with
+water-color. Close to Fleda's present abode was the little shop of a man
+who mounted and framed pictures and desolately dealt in artists'
+materials. She sometimes paused before it to look at a couple of shy
+experiments for which its dull window constituted publicity, small
+studies placed there for sale and full of warning to a young lady
+without fortune and without talent. Some such young lady had brought
+them forth in sorrow; some such young lady, to see if they had been
+snapped up, had passed and repassed as helplessly as she herself was
+doing. They never had been, they never would be, snapped up; yet they
+were quite above the actual attainment of some other young ladies. It
+was a matter of discipline with Fleda to take an occasional lesson from
+them; besides which, when she now quitted the house, she had to look for
+reasons after she was out. The only place to find them was in the
+shop-windows. They made her feel like a servant-girl taking her
+"afternoon," but that didn't signify: perhaps some day she would
+resemble such a person still more closely. This continued a fortnight,
+at the end of which the feeling was suddenly dissipated. She had stopped
+as usual in the presence of the little pictures; then, as she turned
+away, she had found herself face to face with Owen Gereth.
+
+At the sight of him two fresh waves passed quickly across her heart, one
+at the heels of the other. The first was an instant perception that this
+encounter was not an accident; the second a consciousness as prompt that
+the best place for it was the street. She knew before he told her that
+he had been to see her, and the next thing she knew was that he had had
+information from his mother. Her mind grasped these things while he said
+with a smile: "I saw only your back, but I was sure. I was over the way.
+I've been at your house."
+
+"How came you to know my house?" Fleda asked.
+
+"I like that!" he laughed. "How came you not to let me know that you
+were there?"
+
+Fleda, at this, thought it best also to laugh. "Since I didn't let you
+know, why did you come?"
+
+"Oh, I say!" cried Owen. "Don't add insult to injury. Why in the world
+didn't you let me know? I came because I want awfully to see you." He
+hesitated, then he added: "I got the tip from mother: she has written to
+me--fancy!"
+
+They still stood where they had met. Fleda's instinct was to keep him
+there; the more so that she could already see him take for granted that
+they would immediately proceed together to her door. He rose before her
+with a different air: he looked less ruffled and bruised than he had
+done at Ricks, he showed a recovered freshness. Perhaps, however, this
+was only because she had scarcely seen him at all as yet in London form,
+as he would have called it--"turned out" as he was turned out in town.
+In the country, heated with the chase and splashed with the mire, he had
+always rather reminded her of a picturesque peasant in national costume.
+This costume, as Owen wore it, varied from day to day; it was as copious
+as the wardrobe of an actor; but it never failed of suggestions of the
+earth and the weather, the hedges and the ditches, the beasts and the
+birds. There had been days when it struck her as all nature in one pair
+of boots. It didn't make him now another person that he was delicately
+dressed, shining and splendid--that he had a higher hat and light gloves
+with black seams, and a spearlike umbrella; but it made him, she soon
+decided, really handsomer, and that in turn gave him--for she never
+could think of him, or indeed of some other things, without the aid of
+his vocabulary--a tremendous pull. Yes, this was for the moment, as he
+looked at her, the great fact of their situation--his pull was
+tremendous. She tried to keep the acknowledgement of it from trembling
+in her voice as she said to him with more surprise than she really felt:
+"You've then reopened relations with her?"
+
+"It's she who has reopened them with me. I got her letter this morning.
+She told me you were here and that she wished me to know it. She didn't
+say much; she just gave me your address. I wrote her back, you know,
+'Thanks no end. Shall go to-day.' So we _are_ in correspondence again,
+aren't we? She means of course that you've something to tell me from
+her, eh? But if you have, why haven't you let a fellow know?" He waited
+for no answer to this, he had so much to say. "At your house, just now,
+they told me how long you've been here. Haven't you known all the while
+that I'm counting the hours? I left a word for you--that I would be back
+at six; but I'm awfully glad to have caught you so much sooner. You
+don't mean to say you're not going home!" he exclaimed in dismay. "The
+young woman there told me you went out early."
+
+"I've been out a very short time," said Fleda, who had hung back with
+the general purpose of making things difficult for him. The street would
+make them difficult; she could trust the street. She reflected in time,
+however, that to betray to him she was afraid to admit him would give
+him more a feeling of facility than of anything else. She moved on with
+him after a moment, letting him direct their course to her door, which
+was only round a corner: she considered as they went that it might not
+prove such a stroke to have been in London so long and yet not to have
+called him. She desired he should feel she was perfectly simple with
+him, and there was no simplicity in that. None the less, on the steps of
+the house, though she had a key, she rang the bell; and while they
+waited together and she averted her face she looked straight into the
+depths of what Mrs. Gereth had meant by giving him the "tip." This had
+been perfidious, had been monstrous of Mrs. Gereth, and Fleda wondered
+if her letter had contained only what Owen repeated.
+
+
+
+
+XIV
+
+
+When Owen and Fleda were in her father's little place and, among the
+brandy-flasks and pen-wipers, still more disconcerted and divided, the
+girl--to do something, though it would make him stay--had ordered tea,
+he put the letter before her quite as if he had guessed her thought.
+"She's still a bit nasty--fancy!" He handed her the scrap of a note
+which he had pulled out of his pocket and from its envelope. "Fleda
+Vetch," it ran, "is at 10 Raphael Road, West Kensington. Go to see her,
+and try, for God's sake, to cultivate a glimmer of intelligence." When
+in handing it back to him she took in his face she saw that its
+heightened color was the effect of his watching her read such an
+allusion to his want of wit. Fleda knew what it was an allusion to, and
+his pathetic air of having received this buffet, tall and fine and kind
+as he stood there, made her conscious of not quite concealing her
+knowledge. For a minute she was kept silent by an angered sense of the
+trick that had been played her. It was a trick because Fleda considered
+there had been a covenant; and the trick consisted of Mrs. Gereth's
+having broken the spirit of their agreement while conforming in a
+fashion to the letter. Under the girl's menace of a complete rupture she
+had been afraid to make of her secret the use she itched to make; but in
+the course of these days of separation she had gathered pluck to hazard
+an indirect betrayal. Fleda measured her hesitations and the impulse
+which she had finally obeyed and which the continued procrastination of
+Waterbath had encouraged, had at last made irresistible. If in her
+high-handed manner of playing their game she had not named the thing
+hidden, she had named the hiding-place. It was over the sense of this
+wrong that Fleda's lips closed tight: she was afraid of aggravating her
+case by some ejaculation that would make Owen prick up his ears. A
+great, quick effort, however, helped her to avoid the danger; with her
+constant idea of keeping cool and repressing a visible flutter, she
+found herself able to choose her words. Meanwhile he had exclaimed with
+his uncomfortable laugh: "That's a good one for me, Miss Vetch, isn't
+it?"
+
+"Of course you know by this time that your mother's very sharp," said
+Fleda.
+
+"I think I can understand well enough when I know what's to be
+understood," the young man asserted. "But I hope you won't mind my
+saying that you've kept me pretty well in the dark about that. I've been
+waiting, waiting, waiting; so much has depended on your news. If you've
+been working for me I'm afraid it has been a thankless job. Can't she
+say what she'll do, one way or the other? I can't tell in the least
+where I am, you know. I haven't really learnt from you, since I saw you
+there, where _she_ is. You wrote me to be patient, and upon my soul I
+have been. But I'm afraid you don't quite realize what I'm to be patient
+with. At Waterbath, don't you know? I've simply to account and answer
+for the damned things. Mona looks at me and waits, and I, hang it, I
+look at you and do the same." Fleda had gathered fuller confidence as he
+continued; so plain was it that she had succeeded in not dropping into
+his mind the spark that might produce the glimmer invoked by his mother.
+But even this fine assurance gave a start when, after an appealing
+pause, he went on: "I hope, you know, that after all you're not keeping
+anything back from me."
+
+In the full face of what she was keeping back such a hope could only
+make her wince; but she was prompt with her explanations in proportion
+as she felt they failed to meet him. The smutty maid came in with
+tea-things, and Fleda, moving several objects, eagerly accepted the
+diversion of arranging a place for them on one of the tables. "I've been
+trying to break your mother down because it has seemed there may be some
+chance of it. That's why I've let you go on expecting it. She's too
+proud to veer round all at once, but I think I speak correctly in saying
+that I've made an impression."
+
+In spite of ordering tea she had not invited him to sit down; she
+herself made a point of standing. He hovered by the window that looked
+into Raphael Road; she kept at the other side of the room; the stunted
+slavey, gazing wide-eyed at the beautiful gentleman and either stupidly
+or cunningly bringing but one thing at a time, came and went between the
+tea-tray and the open door.
+
+"You pegged at her so hard?" Owen asked.
+
+"I explained to her fully your position and put before her much more
+strongly than she liked what seemed to me her absolute duty."
+
+Owen waited a little. "And having done that, you departed?"
+
+Fleda felt the full need of giving a reason for her departure; but at
+first she only said with cheerful frankness: "I departed."
+
+Her companion again looked at her in silence. "I thought you had gone to
+her for several months."
+
+"Well," Fleda replied, "I couldn't stay. I didn't like it. I didn't like
+it at all--I couldn't bear it," she went on. "In the midst of those
+trophies of Poynton, living with them, touching them, using them, I felt
+as if I were backing her up. As I was not a bit of an accomplice, as I
+hate what she has done, I didn't want to be, even to the extent of the
+mere look of it--what is it you call such people?--an accessory after
+the fact." There was something she kept back so rigidly that the joy of
+uttering the rest was double. She felt the sharpest need of giving him
+all the other truth. There was a matter as to which she had deceived
+him, and there was a matter as to which she had deceived Mrs. Gereth,
+but her lack of pleasure in deception as such came home to her now. She
+busied herself with the tea and, to extend the occupation, cleared the
+table still more, spreading out the coarse cups and saucers and the
+vulgar little plates. She was aware that she produced more confusion
+than symmetry, but she was also aware that she was violently nervous.
+Owen tried to help her with something: this made rather for disorder.
+"My reason for not writing to you," she pursued, "was simply that I was
+hoping to hear more from Ricks. I've waited from day to day for that."
+
+"But you've heard nothing?"
+
+"Not a word."
+
+"Then what I understand," said Owen, "is that, practically, you and
+Mummy have quarreled. And you've done it--I mean you personally--for
+_me_."
+
+"Oh no, we haven't quarreled a bit!" Then with a smile: "We've only
+diverged."
+
+"You've diverged uncommonly far!"--Owen laughed back. Fleda, with her
+hideous crockery and her father's collections, could conceive that these
+objects, to her visitor's perception even more strongly than to her own,
+measured the length of the swing from Poynton and Ricks; she was aware
+too that her high standards figured vividly enough even to Owen's
+simplicity to make him reflect that West Kensington was a tremendous
+fall. If she had fallen it was because she had acted for him. She was
+all the more content he should thus see she _had_ acted, as the cost of
+it, in his eyes, was none of her own showing. "What seems to have
+happened," he exclaimed, "is that you've had a row with her and yet not
+moved her!"
+
+Fleda considered a moment; she was full of the impression that,
+notwithstanding her scant help, he saw his way clearer than he had seen
+it at Ricks. He might mean many things; and what if the many should mean
+in their turn only one? "The difficulty is, you understand, that she
+doesn't really see into your situation." She hesitated. "She doesn't
+comprehend why your marriage hasn't yet taken place."
+
+Owen stared. "Why, for the reason I told you: that Mona won't take
+another step till mother has given full satisfaction. Everything must be
+there. You see, everything _was_ there the day of that fatal visit."
+
+"Yes, that's what I understood from you at Ricks," said Fleda; "but I
+haven't repeated it to your mother." She had hated, at Ricks, to talk
+with him about Mona, but now that scruple was swept away. If he could
+speak of Mona's visit as fatal, she need at least not pretend not to
+notice it. It made all the difference that she had tried to assist him
+and had failed: to give him any faith in her service she must give him
+all her reasons but one. She must give him, in other words, with a
+corresponding omission, all Mrs. Gereth's. "You can easily see that, as
+she dislikes your marriage, anything that may seem to make it less
+certain works in her favor. Without my telling her, she has suspicions
+and views that are simply suggested by your delay. Therefore it didn't
+seem to me right to make them worse. By holding off long enough, she
+thinks she may put an end to your engagement. If Mona's waiting, she
+believes she may at last tire Mona out." That, in all conscience, Fleda
+felt was lucid enough.
+
+So the young man, following her attentively, appeared equally to feel.
+"So far as that goes," he promptly declared, "she _has_ at last tired
+Mona out." He uttered the words with a strange approach to hilarity.
+
+Fleda's surprise at this aberration left her a moment looking at him.
+"Do you mean your marriage is off?"
+
+Owen answered with a kind of gay despair. "God knows, Miss Vetch, where
+or when or what my marriage is! If it isn't 'off,' it certainly, at the
+point things have reached, isn't _on_. I haven't seen Mona for ten days,
+and for a week I haven't heard from her. She used to write me every
+week, don't you know? She won't budge from Waterbath, and I haven't
+budged from town." Then he suddenly broke out: "If she _does_ chuck me,
+will mother come round?"
+
+Fleda, at this, felt that her heroism had come to its real test--felt
+that in telling him the truth she should effectively raise a hand to
+push his impediment out of the way. Was the knowledge that such a motion
+would probably dispose forever of Mona capable of yielding to the
+conception of still giving her every chance she was entitled to? That
+conception was heroic, but at the same moment it reminded Fleda of the
+place it had held in her plan, she was also reminded of the not less
+urgent claim of the truth. Ah, the truth--there was a limit to the
+impunity with which one could juggle with it! Wasn't what she had most
+to remember the fact that Owen had a right to his property and that he
+had also her vow to stand by him in the effort to recover it? How did
+she stand by him if she hid from him the single way to recover it of
+which she was quite sure? For an instant that seemed to her the fullest
+of her life she debated. "Yes," she said at last, "if your marriage is
+really abandoned, she will give up everything she has taken."
+
+"That's just what makes Mona hesitate!" Owen honestly exclaimed. "I mean
+the idea that I shall get back the things only if she gives me up."
+
+Fleda thought an instant. "You mean makes her hesitate to keep you--not
+hesitate to renounce you?"
+
+Owen looked a trifle bewildered. "She doesn't see the use of hanging on,
+as I haven't even yet put the matter into legal hands. She's awfully
+keen about that, and awfully disgusted that I don't. She says it's the
+only real way, and she thinks I'm afraid to take it. She has given me
+time and then has given me again more. She says I give Mummy too much.
+She says I'm a muff to go pottering on. That's why she's drawing off so
+hard, don't you see?"
+
+"I don't see very clearly. Of course you must give her what you offered
+her; of course you must keep your word. There must be no mistake about
+_that_!" the girl declared.
+
+Owen's bewilderment visibly increased. "You think, then, as she does,
+that I _must_ send down the police?"
+
+The mixture of reluctance and dependence in this made her feel how much
+she was failing him. She had the sense of "chucking" him too. "No, no,
+not yet!" she said, though she had really no other and no better course
+to prescribe. "Doesn't it occur to you," she asked in a moment, "that if
+Mona is, as you say, drawing away, she may have, in doing so, a very
+high motive? She knows the immense value of all the objects detained by
+your mother, and to restore the spoils of Poynton she is ready--is that
+it!--to make a sacrifice. The sacrifice is that of an engagement she had
+entered upon with joy."
+
+Owen had been blank a moment before, but he followed this argument with
+success--a success so immediate that it enabled him to produce with
+decision: "Ah, she's not that sort! She wants them herself," he added;
+"she wants to feel they're hers; she doesn't care whether I have them or
+not! And if she can't get them she doesn't want _me_. If she can't get
+them she doesn't want anything at all."
+
+This was categoric; Fleda drank it in. "She takes such an interest in
+them?"
+
+"So it appears."
+
+"So much that they're _all_, and that she can let everything else
+absolutely depend upon them?"
+
+Owen weighed her question as if he felt the responsibility of his
+answer. But that answer came in a moment, and, as Fleda could see, out
+of a wealth of memory. "She never wanted them particularly till they
+seemed to be in danger. Now she has an idea about them; and when she
+gets hold of an idea--Oh dear me!" He broke off, pausing and looking
+away as with a sense of the futility of expression: it was the first
+time Fleda had ever heard him explain a matter so pointedly or embark at
+all on a generalization. It was striking, it was touching to her, as he
+faltered, that he appeared but half capable of floating his
+generalization to the end. The girl, however, was so far competent to
+fill up his blank as that she had divined, on the occasion of Mona's
+visit to Poynton, what would happen in the event of the accident at
+which he glanced. She had there with her own eyes seen Owen's betrothed
+get hold of an idea. "I say, you know, _do_ give me some tea!" he went
+on irrelevantly and familiarly.
+
+Her profuse preparations had all this time had no sequel, and, with a
+laugh that she felt to be awkward, she hastily complied with his
+request. "It's sure to be horrid," she said; "we don't have at all good
+things." She offered him also bread and butter, of which he partook,
+holding his cup and saucer in his other hand and moving slowly about the
+room. She poured herself a cup, but not to take it; after which, without
+wanting it, she began to eat a small stale biscuit. She was struck with
+the extinction of the unwillingness she had felt at Ricks to contribute
+to the bandying between them of poor Mona's name; and under this
+influence she presently resumed: "Am I to understand that she engaged
+herself to marry you without caring for you?"
+
+Owen looked out into Raphael Road. "She _did_ care for me awfully. But
+she can't stand the strain."
+
+"The strain of what?"
+
+"Why, of the whole wretched thing."
+
+"The whole thing has indeed been wretched, and I can easily conceive its
+effect upon her," Fleda said.
+
+Her visitor turned sharp round. "You _can_?" There was a light in his
+strong stare. "You can understand it's spoiling her temper and making
+her come down on _me_? She behaves as if I were of no use to her at
+all!"
+
+Fleda hesitated. "She's rankling under the sense of her wrong."
+
+"Well, was it _I_, pray, who perpetrated the wrong? Ain't I doing what I
+can to get the thing arranged?"
+
+The ring of his question made his anger at Mona almost resemble for a
+minute an anger at Fleda; and this resemblance in turn caused our young
+lady to observe how handsome he looked when he spoke, for the first time
+in her hearing, with that degree of heat, and used, also for the first
+time, such a term as "perpetrated." In addition, his challenge rendered
+still more vivid to her the mere flimsiness of her own aid. "Yes, you've
+been perfect," she said. "You've had a most difficult part. You've _had_
+to show tact and patience, as well as firmness, with your mother, and
+you've strikingly shown them. It's I who, quite unintentionally, have
+deceived you. I haven't helped you at all to your remedy."
+
+"Well, you wouldn't at all events have ceased to like me, would you?"
+Owen demanded. It evidently mattered to him to know if she really
+justified Mona. "I mean of course if you _had_ liked me--liked me as
+_she_ liked me," he explained.
+
+Fleda looked this inquiry in the face only long enough to recognize
+that, in her embarrassment, she must take instant refuge in a superior
+one. "I can answer that better if I know how kind to her you've been.
+_Have_ you been kind to her?" she asked as simply as she could.
+
+"Why, rather, Miss Vetch!" Owen declared. "I've done every blessed thing
+she wished. I rushed down to Ricks, as you saw, with fire and sword, and
+the day after that I went to see her at Waterbath." At this point he
+checked himself, though it was just the point at which her interest
+deepened. A different look had come into his face as he put down his
+empty teacup. "But why should I tell you such things, for any good it
+does me? I gather that you've no suggestion to make me now except that I
+shall request my solicitor to act. _Shall_ I request him to act?"
+
+Fleda scarcely heard his words; something new had suddenly come into her
+mind. "When you went to Waterbath after seeing me," she asked, "did you
+tell her all about that?"
+
+Owen looked conscious. "All about it?"
+
+"That you had had a long talk with me, without seeing your mother at
+all?"
+
+"Oh yes, I told her exactly, and that you had been most awfully kind,
+and that I had placed the whole thing in your hands."
+
+Fleda was silent a moment. "Perhaps that displeased her," she at last
+suggested.
+
+"It displeased her fearfully," said Owen, looking very queer.
+
+"Fearfully?" broke from the girl. Somehow, at the word, she was
+startled.
+
+"She wanted to know what right you had to meddle. She said you were not
+honest."
+
+"Oh!" Fleda cried, with a long wail. Then she controlled herself. "I
+see."
+
+"She abused you, and I defended you. She denounced you--"
+
+She checked him with a gesture. "Don't tell me what she did!" She had
+colored up to her eyes, where, as with the effect of a blow in the face,
+she quickly felt the tears gathering. It was a sudden drop in her great
+flight, a shock to her attempt to watch over what Mona was entitled to.
+While she had been straining her very soul in this attempt, the object
+of her magnanimity had been pronouncing her "not honest." She took it
+all in, however, and after an instant was able to speak with a smile.
+She would not have been surprised to learn, indeed, that her smile was
+strange. "You had said a while ago that your mother and I quarreled
+about you. It's much more true that you and Mona have quarreled about
+_me_."
+
+Owen hesitated, but at last he brought it out. "What I mean to say is,
+don't you know, that Mona, if you don't mind my saying so, has taken it
+into her head to be jealous."
+
+"I see," said Fleda. "Well, I dare say our conferences have looked very
+odd."
+
+"They've looked very beautiful, and they've been very beautiful. Oh,
+I've told her the sort you are!" the young man pursued.
+
+"That of course hasn't made her love me better."
+
+"No, nor love me," said Owen. "Of course, you know, she says she loves
+me."
+
+"And do you say you love her?"
+
+"I say nothing else--I say it all the while. I said it the other day a
+dozen times." Fleda made no immediate rejoinder to this, and before she
+could choose one he repeated his question of a moment before. "_Am_ I to
+tell my solicitor to act?"
+
+She had at that moment turned away from this solution, precisely because
+she saw in it the great chance of her secret. If she should determine
+him to adopt it she might put out her hand and take him. It would shut
+in Mrs. Gereth's face the open door of surrender: she would flare up and
+fight, flying the flag of a passionate, an heroic defense. The case
+would obviously go against her, but the proceedings would last longer
+than Mona's patience or Owen's propriety. With a formal rupture he would
+be at large; and she had only to tighten her fingers round the string
+that would raise the curtain on that scene. "You tell me you 'say' you
+love her, but is there nothing more in it than your saying so? You
+wouldn't say so, would you, if it's not true? What in the world has
+become, in so short a time, of the affection that led to your
+engagement?"
+
+"The deuce knows what has become of it, Miss Vetch!" Owen cried. "It
+seemed all to go to pot as this horrid struggle came on." He was close
+to her now, and, with his face lighted again by the relief of it, he
+looked all his helpless history into her eyes. "As I saw you and noticed
+you more, as I knew you better and better, I felt less and less--I
+couldn't help it--about anything or any one else. I wished I had known
+you sooner--I knew I should have liked you better than any one in the
+world. But it wasn't you who made the difference," he eagerly continued,
+"and I was awfully determined to stick to Mona to the death. It was she
+herself who made it, upon my soul, by the state she got into, the way
+she sulked, the way she took things, and the way she let me have it! She
+destroyed our prospects and our happiness, upon my honor. She made just
+the same smash of them as if she had kicked over that tea-table. She
+wanted to know all the while what was passing between us, between you
+and me; and she wouldn't take my solemn assurance that nothing was
+passing but what might have directly passed between me and old Mummy.
+She said a pretty girl like you was a nice old Mummy for me, and, if
+you'll believe it, she never called you anything else but that. I'll be
+hanged if I haven't been good, haven't I? I haven't breathed a breath of
+any sort to you, have I? You'd have been down on me hard if I had,
+wouldn't you? You're down on me pretty hard as it is, I think, aren't
+you? But I don't care what you say now, or what Mona says, either, or a
+single rap what any one says: she has given me at last, by her
+confounded behavior, a right to speak out, to utter the way I feel about
+it. The way I feel about it, don't you know, is that it had all better
+come to an end. You ask me if I don't love her, and I suppose it's
+natural enough you should. But you ask it at the very moment I'm half
+mad to say to you that there's only one person on the whole earth I
+_really_ love, and that that person--" Here Owen pulled up short, and
+Fleda wondered if it was from the effect of his perceiving, through the
+closed door, the sound of steps and voices on the landing of the stairs.
+She had caught this sound herself with surprise and a vague uneasiness:
+it was not an hour at which her father ever came in, and there was no
+present reason why she should have a visitor. She had a fear, which
+after a few seconds deepened: a visitor was at hand; the visitor would
+be simply Mrs. Gereth. That lady wished for a near view of the
+consequence of her note to Owen. Fleda straightened herself with the
+instant thought that if this was what Mrs. Gereth desired Mrs. Gereth
+should have it in a form not to be mistaken. Owen's pause was the matter
+of a moment, but during that moment our young couple stood with their
+eyes holding each other's eyes and their ears catching the suggestion,
+still through the door, of a murmured conference in the hall. Fleda had
+begun to make the movement to cut it short when Owen stopped her with a
+grasp of her arm. "You're surely able to guess," he said, with his voice
+dropped and her arm pressed as she had never known such a drop or such a
+pressure--"you're surely able to guess the one person on earth I love?"
+
+The handle of the door turned, and Fleda had only time to jerk at him:
+"Your mother!"
+
+The door opened, and the smutty maid, edging in, announced "Mrs.
+Brigstock!"
+
+
+
+
+XV
+
+
+Mrs. Brigstock, in the doorway, stood looking from one of the occupants
+of the room to the other; then they saw her eyes attach themselves to a
+small object that had lain hitherto unnoticed on the carpet. This was
+the biscuit of which, on giving Owen his tea, Fleda had taken a
+perfunctory nibble: she had immediately laid it on the table, and that
+subsequently, in some precipitate movement, she should have brushed it
+off was doubtless a sign of the agitation that possessed her. For Mrs.
+Brigstock there was apparently more in it than met the eye. Owen at any
+rate picked it up, and Fleda felt as if he were removing the traces of
+some scene that the newspapers would have characterized as lively. Mrs.
+Brigstock clearly took in also the sprawling tea-things and the mark as
+of high water in the full faces of her young friends. These elements
+made the little place a vivid picture of intimacy. A minute was filled
+by Fleda's relief at finding her visitor not to be Mrs. Gereth, and a
+longer space by the ensuing sense of what was really more compromising
+in the actual apparition. It dimly occurred to her that the lady of
+Ricks had also written to Waterbath. Not only had Mrs. Brigstock never
+paid her a call, but Fleda would have been unable to figure her so
+employed. A year before the girl had spent a day under her roof, but
+never feeling that Mrs. Brigstock regarded this as constituting a bond.
+She had never stayed in any house but Poynton where the imagination of a
+bond, one way or the other, prevailed. After the first astonishment she
+dashed gayly at her guest, emphasizing her welcome and wondering how her
+whereabouts had become known at Waterbath. Had not Mrs. Brigstock
+quitted that residence for the very purpose of laying her hand on the
+associate of Mrs. Gereth's misconduct? The spirit in which this hand was
+to be laid our young lady was yet to ascertain; but she was a person who
+could think ten thoughts at once--a circumstance which, even putting her
+present plight at its worst, gave her a great advantage over a person
+who required easy conditions for dealing even with one. The very
+vibration of the air, however, told her that whatever Mrs. Brigstock's
+spirit might originally have been, it had been sharply affected by the
+sight of Owen. He was essentially a surprise: she had reckoned with
+everything that concerned him but his presence. With that, in awkward
+silence, she was reckoning now, as Fleda could see, while she effected
+with friendly aid an embarrassed transit to the sofa. Owen would be
+useless, would be deplorable: that aspect of the case Fleda had taken in
+as well. Another aspect was that he would admire her, adore her, exactly
+in proportion as she herself should rise gracefully superior. Fleda felt
+for the first time free to let herself "go," as Mrs. Gereth had said,
+and she was full of the sense that to "go" meant now to aim straight at
+the effect of moving Owen to rapture at her simplicity and tact. It was
+her impression that he had no positive dislike of Mona's mother; but she
+couldn't entertain that notion without a glimpse of the implication that
+he had a positive dislike of Mrs. Brigstock's daughter. Mona's mother
+declined tea, declined a better seat, declined a cushion, declined to
+remove her boa: Fleda guessed that she had not come on purpose to be
+dry, but that the voice of the invaded room had itself given her the
+hint.
+
+"I just came on the mere chance," she said. "Mona found yesterday,
+somewhere, the card of invitation to your sister's marriage that you
+sent us, or your father sent us, some time ago. We couldn't be
+present--it was impossible; but as it had this address on it I said to
+myself that I might find you here."
+
+"I'm very glad to be at home," Fleda responded.
+
+"Yes, that doesn't happen very often, does it?" Mrs. Brigstock looked
+round afresh at Fleda's home.
+
+"Oh, I came back from Ricks last week. I shall be here now till I don't
+know when."
+
+"We thought it very likely you would have come back. We knew of course
+of your having been at Ricks. If I didn't find you I thought I might
+perhaps find Mr. Vetch," Mrs. Brigstock went on.
+
+"I'm sorry he's out. He's always out--all day long."
+
+Mrs. Brigstock's round eyes grew rounder. "All day long?"
+
+"All day long," Fleda smiled.
+
+"Leaving you quite to yourself?"
+
+"A good deal to myself, but a little, to-day, as you see, to Mr.
+Gereth,--" and the girl looked at Owen to draw him into their
+sociability. For Mrs. Brigstock he had immediately sat down; but the
+movement had not corrected the sombre stiffness taking possession of him
+at the sight of her. Before he found a response to the appeal addressed
+to him Fleda turned again to her other visitor. "Is there any purpose
+for which you would like my father to call on you?"
+
+Mrs. Brigstock received this question as if it were not to be
+unguardedly answered; upon which Owen intervened with pale irrelevance:
+"I wrote to Mona this morning of Miss Vetch's being in town; but of
+course the letter hadn't arrived when you left home."
+
+"No, it hadn't arrived. I came up for the night--I've several matters to
+attend to." Then looking with an intention of fixedness from one of her
+companions to the other, "I'm afraid I've interrupted your
+conversation," Mrs. Brigstock said. She spoke without effectual point,
+had the air of merely announcing the fact. Fleda had not yet been
+confronted with the question of the sort of person Mrs. Brigstock was;
+she had only been confronted with the question of the sort of person
+Mrs. Gereth scorned her for being. She was really, somehow, no sort of
+person at all, and it came home to Fleda that if Mrs. Gereth could see
+her at this moment she would scorn her more than ever. She had a face of
+which it was impossible to say anything but that it was pink, and a mind
+that it would be possible to describe only if one had been able to mark
+it in a similar fashion. As nature had made this organ neither green nor
+blue nor yellow, there was nothing to know it by: it strayed and bleated
+like an unbranded sheep. Fleda felt for it at this moment much of the
+kindness of compassion, since Mrs. Brigstock had brought it with her to
+do something for her that she regarded as delicate. Fleda was quite
+prepared to help it to perform, if she should be able to gather what it
+wanted to do. What she gathered, however, more and more, was that it
+wanted to do something different from what it had wanted to do in
+leaving Waterbath. There was still nothing to enlighten her more
+specifically in the way her visitor continued: "You must be very much
+taken up. I believe you quite espouse his dreadful quarrel."
+
+Fleda vaguely demurred. "His dreadful quarrel?"
+
+"About the contents of the house. Aren't you looking after them for
+him?"
+
+"She knows how awfully kind you've been to me," Owen said. He showed
+such discomfiture that he really gave away their situation; and Fleda
+found herself divided between the hope that he would take leave and the
+wish that he should see the whole of what the occasion might enable her
+to bring to pass for him.
+
+She explained to Mrs. Brigstock. "Mrs. Gereth, at Ricks, the other day,
+asked me particularly to see him for her."
+
+"And did she ask you also particularly to see him here in town?" Mrs.
+Brigstock's hideous bonnet seemed to argue for the unsophisticated
+truth; and it was on Fleda's lips to reply that such had indeed been
+Mrs. Gereth's request. But she checked herself, and before she could say
+anything else Owen had addressed their companion.
+
+"I made a point of letting Mona know that I should be here, don't you
+see? That's exactly what I wrote her this morning."
+
+"She would have had no doubt you would be here, if you had a chance,"
+Mrs. Brigstock returned. "If your letter had arrived it might have
+prepared me for finding you here at tea. In that case I certainly
+wouldn't have come."
+
+"I'm glad, then, it didn't arrive. Shouldn't you like him to go?" Fleda
+asked.
+
+Mrs. Brigstock looked at Owen and considered: nothing showed in her face
+but that it turned a deeper pink. "I should like him to go with _me_."
+There was no menace in her tone, but she evidently knew what she wanted.
+As Owen made no response to this Fleda glanced at him to invite him to
+assent; then, for fear that he wouldn't, and would thereby make his case
+worse, she took upon herself to declare that she was sure he would be
+very glad to meet such a wish. She had no sooner spoken than she felt
+that the words had a bad effect of intimacy: she had answered for him as
+if she had been his wife. Mrs. Brigstock continued to regard him as if
+she had observed nothing, and she continued to address Fleda: "I've not
+seen him for a long time--I've particular things to say to him."
+
+"So have I things to say to you, Mrs. Brigstock!" Owen interjected. With
+this he took up his hat as if for an immediate departure.
+
+The other visitor meanwhile turned to Fleda. "What is Mrs. Gereth going
+to do?"
+
+"Is that what you came to ask me?" Fleda demanded.
+
+"That and several other things."
+
+"Then you had much better let Mr. Gereth go, and stay by yourself and
+make me a pleasant visit. You can talk with him when you like, but it is
+the first time you've been to see me."
+
+This appeal had evidently a certain effect; Mrs. Brigstock visibly
+wavered. "I can't talk with him whenever I like," she returned; "he
+hasn't been near us since I don't know when. But there are things that
+have brought me here."
+
+"They are not things of any importance," Owen, to Fleda's surprise,
+suddenly asserted. He had not at first taken up Mrs. Brigstock's
+expression of a wish to carry him off: Fleda could see that the instinct
+at the bottom of this was that of standing by her, of seeming not to
+abandon her. But abruptly, all his soreness working within him, it had
+struck him that he should abandon her still more if he should leave her
+to be dealt with by her other visitor. "You must allow me to say, you
+know, Mrs. Brigstock, that I don't think you should come down on Miss
+Vetch about anything. It's very good of her to take the smallest
+interest in us and our horrid little squabble. If you want to talk about
+it, talk about it with _me_." He was flushed with the idea of protecting
+Fleda, of exhibiting his consideration for her. "I don't like your
+cross-questioning her, don't you see? She's as straight as a die: _I_'ll
+tell you all about her!" he declared with an excited laugh. "Please come
+off with me and let her alone."
+
+Mrs. Brigstock, at this, became vivid at once; Fleda thought she looked
+most peculiar. She stood straight up, with a queer distention of her
+whole person and of everything in her face but her mouth, which she
+gathered into a small, tight orifice. Fleda was painfully divided; her
+joy was deep within, but it was more relevant to the situation that she
+should not appear to associate herself with the tone of familiarity in
+which Owen addressed a lady who had been, and was perhaps still, about
+to become his mother-in-law. She laid on Mrs. Brigstock's arm a
+repressive hand. Mrs. Brigstock, however, had already exclaimed on her
+having so wonderful a defender. "He speaks, upon my word, as if I had
+come here to be rude to you!"
+
+At this, grasping her hard, Fleda laughed; then she achieved the exploit
+of delicately kissing her. "I'm not in the least afraid to be alone with
+you, or of your tearing me to pieces. I'll answer any question that you
+can possibly dream of putting to me."
+
+"I'm the proper person to answer Mrs. Brigstock's questions," Owen broke
+in again, "and I'm not a bit less ready to meet them than you are." He
+was firmer than she had ever seen him: it was as if she had not known he
+could be so firm.
+
+"But she'll only have been here a few minutes. What sort of a visit is
+that?" Fleda cried.
+
+"It has lasted long enough for my purpose. There was something I wanted
+to know, but I think I know it now."
+
+"Anything you don't know I dare say I can tell you!" Owen observed as he
+impatiently smoothed his hat with the cuff of his coat.
+
+Fleda by this time desired immensely to keep his companion, but she saw
+she could do so only at the cost of provoking on his part a further
+exhibition of the sheltering attitude, which he exaggerated precisely
+because it was the first thing, since he had begun to "like" her, that
+he had been able frankly to do for her. It was not in her interest that
+Mrs. Brigstock should be more struck than she already was with that
+benevolence. "There may be things you know that I don't," she presently
+said to her, with a smile. "But I've a sort of sense that you're
+laboring under some great mistake."
+
+Mrs. Brigstock, at this, looked into her eyes more deeply and yearningly
+than she had supposed Mrs. Brigstock could look; it was the flicker of a
+certain willingness to give her a chance. Owen, however, quickly spoiled
+everything. "Nothing is more probable than that Mrs. Brigstock is doing
+what you say; but there's no one in the world to whom you owe an
+explanation. I may owe somebody one--I dare say I do; but not you, no!"
+
+"But what if there's one that it's no difficulty at all for me to give?"
+Fleda inquired. "I'm sure that's the only one Mrs. Brigstock came to
+ask, if she came to ask any at all."
+
+Again the good lady looked hard at her young hostess. "I came, I
+believe, Fleda, just, you know, to plead with you."
+
+Fleda, with a bright face, hesitated a moment. "As if I were one of
+those bad women in a play?"
+
+The remark was disastrous. Mrs. Brigstock, on whom her brightness was
+lost, evidently thought it singularly free. She turned away, as from a
+presence that had really defined itself as objectionable, and Fleda had
+a vain sense that her good humor, in which there was an idea, was taken
+for impertinence, or at least for levity. Her allusion was improper,
+even if she herself wasn't; Mrs. Brigstock's emotion simplified: it came
+to the same thing. "I'm quite ready," that lady said to Owen rather
+mildly and woundedly. "I do want to speak to you very much."
+
+"I'm completely at your service." Owen held out his hand to Fleda.
+"Good-bye, Miss Vetch. I hope to see you again to-morrow." He opened the
+door for Mrs. Brigstock, who passed before the girl with an oblique,
+averted salutation. Owen and Fleda, while he stood at the door, then
+faced each other darkly and without speaking. Their eyes met once more
+for a long moment, and she was conscious there was something in hers
+that the darkness didn't quench, that he had never seen before and that
+he was perhaps never to see again. He stayed long enough to take it--to
+take it with a sombre stare that just showed the dawn of wonder; then he
+followed Mrs. Brigstock out of the house.
+
+
+
+
+XVI
+
+
+He had uttered the hope that he should see her the next day, but Fleda
+could easily reflect that he wouldn't see her if she were not there to
+be seen. If there was a thing in the world she desired at that moment,
+it was that the next day should have no point of resemblance with the
+day that had just elapsed. She accordingly aspired to an absence: she
+would go immediately down to Maggie. She ran out that evening and
+telegraphed to her sister, and in the morning she quitted London by an
+early train. She required for this step no reason but the sense of
+necessity. It was a strong personal need; she wished to interpose
+something, and there was nothing she could interpose but distance, but
+time. If Mrs. Brigstock had to deal with Owen she would allow Mrs.
+Brigstock the chance. To be there, to be in the midst of it, was the
+reverse of what she craved: she had already been more in the midst of it
+than had ever entered into her plan. At any rate she had renounced her
+plan; she had no plan now but the plan of separation. This was to
+abandon Owen, to give up the fine office of helping him back to his own;
+but when she had undertaken that office she had not foreseen that Mrs.
+Gereth would defeat it by a manoeuvre so simple. The scene at her
+father's rooms had extinguished all offices, and the scene at her
+father's rooms was of Mrs. Gereth's producing. Owen, at all events, must
+now act for himself: he had obligations to meet, he had satisfactions to
+give, and Fleda fairly ached with the wish that he might be equal to
+them. She never knew the extent of her tenderness for him till she
+became conscious of the present force of her desire that he should be
+superior, be perhaps even sublime. She obscurely made out that
+superiority, that sublimity, mightn't after all be fatal. She closed her
+eyes and lived for a day or two in the mere beauty of confidence. It was
+with her on the short journey; it was with her at Maggie's; it glorified
+the mean little house in the stupid little town. Owen had grown larger
+to her: he would do, like a man, whatever he should have to do. He
+wouldn't be weak--not as she was: she herself was weak exceedingly.
+
+Arranging her few possessions in Maggie's fewer receptacles, she caught
+a glimpse of the bright side of the fact that her old things were not
+such a problem as Mrs. Gereth's. Picking her way with Maggie through the
+local puddles, diving with her into smelly cottages and supporting her,
+at smellier shops, in firmness over the weight of joints and the taste
+of cheese, it was still her own secret that was universally inter-woven
+In the puddles, the cottages, the shops she was comfortably alone with
+it; that comfort prevailed even while, at the evening meal, her
+brother-in-law invited her attention to a diagram, drawn with a fork on
+too soiled a tablecloth, of the scandalous drains of the Convalescent
+Home. To be alone with it she had come away from Ricks; and now she knew
+that to be alone with it she had come away from London. This advantage
+was of course menaced, but not immediately destroyed, by the arrival, on
+the second day, of the note she had been sure she should receive from
+Owen. He had gone to West Kensington and found her flown, but he had got
+her address from the little maid and then hurried to a club and written
+to her. "Why have you left me just when I want you most?" he demanded.
+The next words, it was true, were more reassuring on the question of his
+steadiness. "I don't know what your reason may be," they went on, "nor
+why you've not left a line for me; but I don't think you can feel that I
+did anything yesterday that it wasn't right for me to do. As regards
+Mrs. Brigstock, certainly, I just felt what was right and I did it. She
+had no business whatever to attack you that way, and I should have been
+ashamed if I had left her there to worry you. I won't have you worried
+by any one; no one shall be disagreeable to you but me. I didn't mean to
+be so yesterday, and I don't to-day; but I'm perfectly free now to want
+you, and I want you much more than you've allowed me to explain. You'll
+see if I'm not all right, if you'll let me come to you. Don't be
+afraid--I'll not hurt you nor trouble you. I give you my honor I'll not
+hurt any one. Only I _must_ see you, on what I had to say to Mrs. B. She
+was nastier than I thought she could be, but I'm behaving like an angel.
+I assure you I'm all right--that's exactly what I want you to see. You
+owe me something, you know, for what you said you would do and haven't
+done; what your departure without a word gives me to understand--doesn't
+it?--that you definitely can't do. Don't simply forsake me. See me, if
+you only see me once. I shan't wait for any leave--I shall come down
+to-morrow. I've been looking into trains and find there's something that
+will bring me down just after lunch and something very good for getting
+me back. I won't stop long. For God's sake, be there."
+
+This communication arrived in the morning, but Fleda would still have
+had time to wire a protest. She debated on that alternative; then she
+read the note over and found in one phrase an exact statement of her
+duty. Owen's simplicity had expressed it, and her subtlety had nothing
+to answer. She owed him something for her obvious failure, and what she
+owed him was to receive him. If indeed she had known he would make this
+attempt she might have been held to have gained nothing by her flight.
+Well, she had gained what she had gained--she had gained the interval.
+She had no compunction for the greater trouble she should give the young
+man; it was now doubtless right that he should have as much trouble as
+possible. Maggie, who thought she was in her confidence, but was
+immensely not, had reproached her for having left Mrs. Gereth, and
+Maggie was just in this proportion gratified to hear of the visitor with
+whom, early in the afternoon, she would have to ask to be left alone.
+Maggie liked to see far, and now she could sit upstairs and rake the
+whole future. She had known that, as she familiarly said, there was
+something the matter with Fleda, and the value of that knowledge was
+augmented by the fact that there was apparently also something the
+matter with Mr. Gereth.
+
+Fleda, downstairs, learned soon enough what this was. It was simply
+that, as he announced the moment he stood before her, he was now all
+right. When she asked him what he meant by that state he replied that he
+meant he could practically regard himself henceforth as a free man: he
+had had at West Kensington, as soon as they got into the street, such a
+horrid scene with Mrs. Brigstock.
+
+"I knew what she wanted to say to me: that's why I was determined to get
+her off. I knew I shouldn't like it, but I was perfectly prepared," said
+Owen. "She brought it out as soon as we got round the corner; she asked
+me point-blank if I was in love with you."
+
+"And what did you say to that?"
+
+"That it was none of her business."
+
+"Ah," said Fleda, "I'm not so sure!"
+
+"Well, _I_ am, and I'm the person most concerned. Of course I didn't use
+just those words: I was perfectly civil, quite as civil as she. But I
+told her I didn't consider she had a right to put me any such question.
+I said I wasn't sure that even Mona had, with the extraordinary line,
+you know, that Mona has taken. At any rate the whole thing, the way _I_
+put it, was between Mona and me; and between Mona and me, if she didn't
+mind, it would just have to remain."
+
+Fleda was silent a little. "All that didn't answer her question."
+
+"Then you think I ought to have told her?"
+
+Again our young lady reflected. "I think I'm rather glad you didn't."
+
+"I knew what I was about," said Owen. "It didn't strike me that she had
+the least right to come down on us that way and ask for explanations."
+
+Fleda looked very grave, weighing the whole matter. "I dare say that
+when she started, when she arrived, she didn't mean to 'come down.'"
+
+"What then did she mean to do?"
+
+"What she said to me just before she went: she meant to plead with me."
+
+"Oh, I heard her!" said Owen. "But plead with you for what?"
+
+"For you, of course--to entreat me to give you up. She thinks me awfully
+designing--that I've taken some sort of possession of you."
+
+Owen stared. "You haven't lifted a finger! It's I who have taken
+possession."
+
+"Very true, you've done it all yourself." Fleda spoke gravely and
+gently, without a breath of coquetry. "But those are shades between
+which she's probably not obliged to distinguish. It's enough for her
+that we're singularly intimate."
+
+"I am, but you're not!" Owen exclaimed.
+
+Fleda gave a dim smile. "You make me at least feel that I'm learning to
+know you very well when I hear you say such a thing as that. Mrs.
+Brigstock came to get round me, to supplicate me," she went on; "but to
+find you there, looking so much at home, paying me a friendly call and
+shoving the tea-things about--that was too much for her patience. She
+doesn't know, you see, that I'm after all a decent girl. She simply made
+up her mind on the spot that I'm a very bad case."
+
+"I couldn't stand the way she treated you, and that was what I had to
+say to her," Owen returned.
+
+"She's simple and slow, but she's not a fool: I think she treated me, on
+the whole, very well." Fleda remembered how Mrs. Gereth had treated Mona
+when the Brigstocks came down to Poynton.
+
+Owen evidently thought her painfully perverse. "It was you who carried
+it off; you behaved like a brick. And so did I, I consider. If you only
+knew the difficulty I had! I told her you were the noblest and
+straightest of women."
+
+"That can hardly have removed her impression that there are things I put
+you up to."
+
+"It didn't," Owen replied with candor. "She said our relation, yours and
+mine, isn't innocent."
+
+"What did she mean by that?"
+
+"As you may suppose, I particularly inquired. Do you know what she had
+the cheek to tell me?" Owen asked. "She didn't better it much: she said
+she meant that it's excessively unnatural."
+
+Fleda considered afresh. "Well, it is!" she brought out at last.
+
+"Then, upon my honor, it's only you who make it so!" Her perversity was
+distinctly too much for him. "I mean you make it so by the way you keep
+me off."
+
+"Have I kept you off to-day?" Fleda sadly shook her head, raising her
+arms a little and dropping them.
+
+Her gesture of resignation gave him a pretext for catching at her hand,
+but before he could take it she had put it behind her. They had been
+seated together on Maggie's single sofa, and her movement brought her to
+her feet, while Owen, looking at her reproachfully, leaned back in
+discouragement. "What good does it do me to be here when I find you only
+a stone?"
+
+She met his eyes with all the tenderness she had not yet uttered, and
+she had not known till this moment how great was the accumulation.
+"Perhaps, after all," she risked, "there may be even in a stone still
+some little help for you."
+
+Owen sat there a minute staring at her. "Ah, you're beautiful, more
+beautiful than any one," he broke out, "but I'll be hanged if I can ever
+understand you! On Tuesday, at your father's, you were beautiful--as
+beautiful, just before I left, as you are at this instant. But the next
+day, when I went back, I found it had apparently meant nothing; and now,
+again, that you let me come here and you shine at me like an angel, it
+doesn't bring you an inch nearer to saying what I want you to say." He
+remained a moment longer in the same position; then he jerked himself
+up. "What I want you to say is that you like me--what I want you to say
+is that you pity me." He sprang up and came to her. "What I want you to
+say is that you'll _save_ me!"
+
+Fleda hesitated. "Why do you need saving, when you announced to me just
+now that you're a free man?"
+
+He too hesitated, but he was not checked. "It's just for the reason that
+I'm free. Don't you know what I mean, Miss Vetch? I want you to marry
+me."
+
+Fleda, at this, put out her hand in charity; she held his own, which
+quickly grasped it a moment, and if he had described her as shining at
+him it may be assumed that she shone all the more in her deep, still
+smile. "Let me hear a little more about your freedom first," she said.
+"I gather that Mrs. Brigstock was not wholly satisfied with the way you
+disposed of her question."
+
+"I dare say she wasn't. But the less she's satisfied the more I'm free."
+
+"What bearing have _her_ feelings, pray?" Fleda asked.
+
+"Why, Mona's much worse than her mother. She wants much more to give me
+up."
+
+"Then why doesn't she do it?"
+
+"She will, as soon as her mother gets home and tells her."
+
+"Tells her what?" Fleda inquired.
+
+"Why, that I'm in love with _you_!"
+
+Fleda debated. "Are you so very sure she will?"
+
+"Certainly I'm sure, with all the evidence I already have. That will
+finish her!" Owen declared.
+
+This made his companion thoughtful again. "Can you take such pleasure in
+her being 'finished'--a poor girl you've once loved?"
+
+Owen waited long enough to take in the question; then with a serenity
+startling even to her knowledge of his nature, "I don't think I can have
+_really_ loved her, you know," he replied.
+
+Fleda broke into a laugh which gave him a surprise as visible as the
+emotion it testified to. "Then how am I to know that you 'really'
+love--anybody else?"
+
+"Oh, I'll show you that!" said Owen.
+
+"I must take it on trust," the girl pursued. "And what if Mona doesn't
+give you up?" she added.
+
+Owen was baffled but a few seconds; he had thought of everything. "Why,
+that's just where you come in."
+
+"To save you? I see. You mean I must get rid of her for you." His
+blankness showed for a little that he felt the chill of her cold logic;
+but as she waited for his rejoinder she knew to which of them it cost
+most. He gasped a minute, and that gave her time to say: "You see, Mr.
+Owen, how impossible it is to talk of such things yet!"
+
+Like lightning he had grasped her arm. "You mean you _will_ talk of
+them?" Then as he began to take the flood of assent from her eyes: "You
+_will_ listen to me? Oh, you dear, you dear--when, when?"
+
+"Ah, when it isn't mere misery!" The words had broken from her in a
+sudden loud cry, and what next happened was that the very sound of her
+pain upset her. She heard her own true note; she turned short away from
+him; in a moment she had burst into sobs; in another his arms were round
+her; the next she had let herself go so far that even Mrs. Gereth might
+have seen it. He clasped her, and she gave herself--she poured out her
+tears on his breast; something prisoned and pent throbbed and gushed;
+something deep and sweet surged up--something that came from far within
+and far off, that had begun with the sight of him in his indifference
+and had never had rest since then. The surrender was short, but the
+relief was long: she felt his lips upon her face and his arms tighten
+with his full divination. What she did, what she _had_ done, she
+scarcely knew: she only was aware, as she broke from him again, of what
+had taken place in his own quick breast. What had taken place was that,
+with the click of a spring, he saw. He had cleared the high wall at a
+bound; they were together without a veil. She had not a shred of a
+secret left; it was as if a whirlwind had come and gone, laying low the
+great false front that she had built up stone by stone. The strangest
+thing of all was the momentary sense of desolation.
+
+"Ah, all the while you _cared_?" Owen read the truth with a wonder so
+great that it was visibly almost a sadness, a terror caused by his
+sudden perception of where the impossibility was not. That made it all
+perhaps elsewhere.
+
+"I cared, I cared, I cared!" Fleda moaned it as defiantly as if she were
+confessing a misdeed. "How couldn't I care? But you mustn't, you must
+never, never ask! It isn't for us to talk about!" she insisted. "Don't
+speak of it, don't speak!"
+
+It was easy indeed not to speak when the difficulty was to find words.
+He clasped his hands before her as he might have clasped them at an
+altar; his pressed palms shook together while he held his breath and
+while she stilled herself in the effort to come round again to the real
+and the right. He helped this effort, soothing her into a seat with a
+touch as light as if she had really been something sacred. She sank into
+a chair and he dropped before her on his knees; she fell back with
+closed eyes and he buried his face in her lap. There was no way to thank
+her but this act of prostration, which lasted, in silence, till she laid
+consenting hands on him, touched his head and stroked it, held it in her
+tenderness till he acknowledged his long density. He made the avowal
+seem only his--made her, when she rose again, raise him at last, softly,
+as if from the abasement of shame. If in each other's eyes now, however,
+they saw the truth, this truth, to Fleda, looked harder even than
+before--all the harder that when, at the very moment she recognized it,
+he murmured to her ecstatically, in fresh possession of her hands, which
+he drew up to his breast, holding them tight there with both his own:
+"I'm saved, I'm saved,--I _am_! I'm ready for anything. I have your
+word. Come!" he cried, as if from the sight of a response slower than he
+needed, and in the tone he so often had of a great boy at a great game.
+
+She had once more disengaged herself, with the private vow that he
+shouldn't yet touch her again. It was all too horribly soon--her sense
+of this was rapidly surging back. "We mustn't talk, we mustn't talk; we
+must _wait_!" she intensely insisted. "I don't know what you mean by
+your freedom; I don't see it, I don't feel it. Where is it yet, where,
+your freedom? If it's real there's plenty of time, and if it isn't
+there's more than enough. I hate myself," she protested, "for having
+anything to say about her: it's like waiting for dead men's shoes! What
+business is it of mine what she does? She has her own trouble and her
+own plan. It's too hideous to watch her and count on her!"
+
+Owen's face, at this, showed a reviving dread, the fear of some darksome
+process of her mind. "If you speak for yourself I can understand, but
+why is it hideous for _me_?"
+
+"Oh, I mean for myself!" Fleda said impatiently.
+
+"_I_ watch her, _I_ count on her: how can I do anything else? If I count
+on her to let me definitely know how we stand, I do nothing in life but
+what she herself has led straight up to. I never thought of asking you
+to 'get rid of her' for me, and I never would have spoken to you if I
+hadn't held that I _am_ rid of her, that she has backed out of the whole
+thing. Didn't she do so from the moment she began to put it off? I had
+already applied for the license; the very invitations were half
+addressed. Who but she, all of a sudden, demanded an unnatural wait? It
+was none of _my_ doing; I had never dreamed of anything but coming up to
+the scratch." Owen grew more and more lucid, and more confident of the
+effect of his lucidity. "She called it 'taking a stand,' to see what
+mother would do. I told her mother would do what I would make her do;
+and to that she replied that she would like to see me make her first. I
+said I would arrange that everything should be all right, and she said
+she really preferred to arrange it herself. It was a flat refusal to
+trust me in the smallest degree. Why then had she pretended so
+tremendously to care for me? And of course, at present," said Owen, "she
+trusts me, if possible, still less."
+
+Fleda paid this statement the homage of a minute's muteness. "As to
+that, naturally, she has reason."
+
+"Why on earth has she reason?" Then, as his companion, moving away,
+simply threw up her hands, "I never looked at you--not to call
+looking--till she had regularly driven me to it," he went on. "I know
+what I'm about. I do assure you I'm all right!"
+
+"You're not all right--you're all wrong!" Fleda cried in despair. "You
+mustn't stay here, you mustn't!" she repeated with clear decision. "You
+make me say dreadful things, and I feel as if I made _you_ say them."
+But before he could reply she took it up in another tone. "Why in the
+world, if everything had changed, didn't you break off?"
+
+"I?--" The inquiry seemed to have moved him to stupefaction. "Can you
+ask me that question when I only wanted to please you? Didn't you seem
+to show me, in your wonderful way, that that was exactly how? I didn't
+break off just on purpose to leave it to _her_. I didn't break off so
+that there shouldn't be a thing to be said against me."
+
+The instant after her challenge Fleda had faced him again in
+self-reproof. "There _isn't_ a thing to be said against you, and I don't
+know what nonsense you make me talk! You _have_ pleased me, and you've
+been right and good, and it's the only comfort, and you must go.
+Everything must come from Mona, and if it doesn't come we've said
+entirely too much. You must leave me alone--forever."
+
+"Forever?" Owen gasped.
+
+"I mean unless everything is different."
+
+"Everything _is_ different--when I _know_!"
+
+Fleda winced at what he knew; she made a wild gesture which seemed to
+whirl it out of the room. The mere allusion was like another embrace.
+"You know nothing--and you must go and wait! You mustn't break down at
+this point."
+
+He looked about him and took up his hat: it was as if, in spite of
+frustration, he had got the essence of what he wanted and could afford
+to agree with her to the extent of keeping up the forms. He covered her
+with his fine, simple smile, but made no other approach. "Oh, I'm so
+awfully happy!" he exclaimed.
+
+She hesitated: she would only be impeccable even though she should have
+to be sententious. "You'll be happy if you're perfect!" she risked.
+
+He laughed out at this, and she wondered if, with a new-born acuteness,
+he saw the absurdity of her speech, and that no one was happy just
+because no one could be what she so lightly prescribed. "I don't pretend
+to be perfect, but I shall find a letter to-night!"
+
+"So much the better, if it's the kind of one you desire." That was the
+most she could say, and having made it sound as dry as possible she
+lapsed into a silence so pointed as to deprive him of all pretext for
+not leaving her. Still, nevertheless, he stood there, playing with his
+hat and filling the long pause with a strained and anxious smile. He
+wished to obey her thoroughly, to appear not to presume on any advantage
+he had won from her; but there was clearly something he longed for
+beside. While he showed this by hanging on she thought of two other
+things. One of these was that his countenance, after all, failed to bear
+out his description of his bliss. As for the other, it had no sooner
+come into her head than she found it seated, in spite of her resolution,
+on her lips. It took the form of an inconsequent question. "When did you
+say Mrs. Brigstock was to have gone back?"
+
+Owen stared. "To Waterbath? She was to have spent the night in town,
+don't you know? But when she left me, after our talk, I said to myself
+that she would take an evening train. I know I made her want to get
+home."
+
+"Where did you separate?" Fleda asked.
+
+"At the West Kensington station--she was going to Victoria. I had walked
+with her there, and our talk was all on the way."
+
+Fleda pondered a moment. "If she did go back that night you would have
+heard from Waterbath by this time."
+
+"I don't know," said Owen. "I thought I might hear this morning."
+
+"She can't have gone back," Fleda declared. "Mona would have written on
+the spot."
+
+"Oh yes, she _will_ have written bang off!" Owen cheerfully conceded.
+
+Fleda thought again. "Then, even in the event of her mother's not having
+got home till the morning, you would have had your letter at the latest
+to-day. You see she has had plenty of time."
+
+Owen hesitated; then, "Oh, she's all right!" he laughed. "I go by Mrs.
+Brigstock's certain effect on her--the effect of the temper the old lady
+showed when we parted. Do you know what she asked me?" he sociably
+continued. "She asked me in a kind of nasty manner if I supposed you
+'really' cared anything about me. Of course I told her I supposed you
+didn't--not a solitary rap. How could I suppose you _do_, with your
+extraordinary ways? It doesn't matter; I could see she thought I lied."
+
+"You should have told her, you know, that I had seen you in town only
+that one time," Fleda observed.
+
+"By Jove, I did--for _you_! It was only for you."
+
+Something in this touched the girl so that for a moment she could not
+trust herself to speak. "You're an honest man," she said at last. She
+had gone to the door and opened it. "Good-bye."
+
+Even yet, however, he hung back; and she remembered how, at the end of
+his hour at Ricks, she had been put to it to get him out of the house.
+He had in general a sort of cheerful slowness which helped him at such
+times, though she could now see his strong fist crumple his big, stiff
+gloves as if they had been paper. "But even if there's no letter--" he
+began. He began, but there he left it.
+
+"You mean, even if she doesn't let you off? Ah, you ask me too much!"
+Fleda spoke from the tiny hall, where she had taken refuge between the
+old barometer and the old mackintosh. "There are things too utterly for
+yourselves alone. How can I tell? What do I know? Good-bye, good-bye! If
+she doesn't let you off, it will be because she _is_ attached to you."
+
+"She's not, she's not: there's nothing in it! Doesn't a fellow
+know?--except with _you_!" Owen ruefully added. With this he came out of
+the room, lowering his voice to secret supplication, pleading with her
+really to meet him on the ground of the negation of Mona. It was this
+betrayal of his need of support and sanction that made her
+retreat--harden herself in the effort to save what might remain of all
+she had given, given probably for nothing. The very vision of him as he
+thus morally clung to her was the vision of a weakness somewhere in the
+core of his bloom, a blessed manly weakness of which, if she had only
+the valid right, it would be all a sweetness to take care. She faintly
+sickened, however, with the sense that there was as yet no valid right
+poor Owen could give. "You can take it from my honor, you know," he
+whispered, "that she loathes me."
+
+Fleda had stood clutching the knob of Maggie's little painted
+stair-rail; she took, on the stairs, a step backward. "Why then doesn't
+she prove it in the only clear way?"
+
+"She _has_ proved it. Will you believe it if you see the letter?"
+
+"I don't want to see any letter," said Fleda. "You'll miss your train."
+
+Facing him, waving him away, she had taken another upward step; but he
+sprang to the side of the stairs and brought his hand, above the
+banister, down hard on her wrist. "Do you mean to tell me that I must
+marry a woman I hate?"
+
+From her step she looked down into his raised face. "Ah, you see it's
+not true that you're free!" She seemed almost to exult. "It's not
+true--it's not true!"
+
+He only, at this, like a buffeting swimmer, gave a shake of his head and
+repeated his question. "Do you mean to tell me I must marry such a
+woman?"
+
+Fleda hesitated; he held her fast. "No. Anything is better than that."
+
+"Then, in God's name, what must I do?"
+
+"You must settle that with her. You mustn't break faith. Anything is
+better than that. You must at any rate be utterly sure. She _must_ love
+you--how can she help it? _I_ wouldn't give you up!" said Fleda. She
+spoke in broken bits, panting out her words. "The great thing is to keep
+faith. Where _is_ a man if he doesn't? If he doesn't he may be so cruel.
+So cruel, so cruel, so cruel!" Fleda repeated. "I couldn't have a hand
+in _that_, you know: that's my position--that's mine. You offered her
+marriage: it's a tremendous thing for her." Then looking at him another
+moment, "_I_ wouldn't give you up!" she said again. He still had hold of
+her arm; she took in his blank alarm. With a quick dip of her face she
+reached his hand with her lips, pressing them to the back of it with a
+force that doubled the force of her words. "Never, never, never!" she
+cried; and before he could succeed in seizing her she had turned and,
+scrambling up the stairs, got away from him even faster than she had got
+away from him at Ricks.
+
+
+
+
+XVII
+
+
+Ten days after his visit she received a communication from Mrs.
+Gereth--a telegram of eight words, exclusive of signature and date.
+"Come up immediately and stay with me here"--it was characteristically
+sharp, as Maggie said; but, as Maggie added, it was also
+characteristically kind. "Here" was an hotel in London, and Maggie had
+embraced a condition of life which already began to produce in her some
+yearning for hotels in London. She would have responded in an instant,
+and she was surprised that her sister seemed to hesitate. Fleda's
+hesitation, which lasted but an hour, was expressed in that young lady's
+own mind by the reflection that in obeying her friend's summons she
+shouldn't know what she should be "in for." Her friend's summons,
+however, was but another name for her friend's appeal; and Mrs. Gereth's
+bounty had laid her under obligations more sensible than any reluctance.
+In the event--that is at the end of her hour--she testified to her
+gratitude by taking the train and to her mistrust by leaving her
+luggage. She went as if she had gone up for the day. In the train,
+however, she had another thoughtful hour, during which it was her
+mistrust that mainly deepened. She felt as if for ten days she had sat
+in darkness, looking to the east for a dawn that had not yet glimmered.
+Her mind had lately been less occupied with Mrs. Gereth; it had been so
+exceptionally occupied with Mona. If the sequel was to justify Owen's
+prevision of Mrs. Brigstock's action upon her daughter, this action was
+at the end of a week as much a mystery as ever. The stillness, all
+round, had been exactly what Fleda desired, but it gave her for the time
+a deep sense of failure, the sense of a sudden drop from a height at
+which she had all things beneath her. She had nothing beneath her now;
+she herself was at the bottom of the heap. No sign had reached her from
+Owen--poor Owen, who had clearly no news to give about his precious
+letter from Waterbath. If Mrs. Brigstock had hurried back to obtain that
+this letter should be written, Mrs. Brigstock might then have spared
+herself so great an inconvenience. Owen had been silent for the best of
+all reasons--the reason that he had had nothing in life to say. If the
+letter had not been written he would simply have had to introduce some
+large qualification into his account of his freedom. He had left his
+young friend under her refusal to listen to him until he should be able,
+on the contrary, to extend that picture; and his present submission was
+all in keeping with the rigid honesty that his young friend had
+prescribed.
+
+It was this that formed the element through which Mona loomed large;
+Fleda had enough imagination, a fine enough feeling for life, to be
+impressed with such an image of successful immobility. The massive
+maiden at Waterbath _was_ successful from the moment she could entertain
+her resentments as if they had been poor relations who needn't put her
+to expense. She was a magnificent dead weight; there was something
+positive and portentous in her quietude. "What game are they all
+playing?" poor Fleda could only ask; for she had an intimate conviction
+that Owen was now under the roof of his betrothed. That was stupefying
+if he really hated Mona; and if he didn't really hate her what had
+brought him to Raphael Road and to Maggie's? Fleda had no real light,
+but she felt that to account for the absence of any result of their last
+meeting would take a supposition of the full sacrifice to charity that
+she had held up before him. If he had gone to Waterbath it had been
+simply because he had to go. She had as good as told him that he would
+have to go; that this was an inevitable incident of his keeping perfect
+faith--faith so literal that the smallest subterfuge would always be a
+reproach to him. When she tried to remember that it was for herself he
+was taking his risk, she felt how weak a way that was of expressing
+Mona's supremacy. There would be no need of keeping him up if there were
+nothing to keep him up to. Her eyes grew wan as she discerned in the
+impenetrable air that Mona's thick outline never wavered an inch. She
+wondered fitfully what Mrs. Gereth had by this time made of it, and
+reflected with a strange elation that the sand on which the mistress of
+Ricks had built a momentary triumph was quaking beneath the surface. As
+The Morning Post still held its peace, she would be, of course, more
+confident; but the hour was at hand at which Owen would have absolutely
+to do either one thing or the other. To keep perfect faith was to inform
+against his mother, and to hear the police at her door would be Mrs.
+Gereth's awakening. How much she was beguiled Fleda could see from her
+having been for a whole month quite as deep and dark as Mona. She had
+let her young friend alone because of the certitude, cultivated at
+Ricks, that Owen had done the opposite. He had done the opposite indeed,
+but much good had that brought forth! To have sent for her now, Fleda
+felt, was from this point of view wholly natural: she had sent for her
+to show at last how much she had scored. If, however, Owen was really at
+Waterbath the refutation of that boast was easy.
+
+Fleda found Mrs. Gereth in modest apartments and with an air of fatigue
+in her distinguished face--a sign, as she privately remarked, of the
+strain of that effort to be discreet of which she herself had been
+having the benefit. It was a constant feature of their relation that
+this lady could make Fleda blench a little, and that the effect
+proceeded from the intense pressure of her confidence. If the confidence
+had been heavy even when the girl, in the early flush of devotion, had
+been able to feel herself most responsive, it drew her heart into her
+mouth now that she had reserves and conditions, now that she couldn't
+simplify with the same bold hand as her protectress. In the very
+brightening of the tired look, and at the moment of their embrace, Fleda
+felt on her shoulders the return of the load, so that her spirit frankly
+quailed as she asked herself what she had brought up from her trusted
+seclusion to support it. Mrs. Gereth's free manner always made a joke of
+weakness, and there was in such a welcome a richness, a kind of familiar
+nobleness, that suggested shame to a harried conscience. Something had
+happened, she could see, and she could also see, in the bravery that
+seemed to announce it had changed everything, a formidable assumption
+that what had happened was what a healthy young woman must like. The
+absence of luggage had made this young woman feel meagre even before her
+companion, taking in the bareness at a second glance, exclaimed upon it
+and roundly rebuked her. Of course she had expected her to stay.
+
+Fleda thought best to show bravery too, and to show it from the first.
+"What you expected, dear Mrs. Gereth, is exactly what I came up to
+ascertain. It struck me as right to do that first. I mean to ascertain,
+without making preparations."
+
+"Then you'll be so good as to make them on the spot!" Mrs. Gereth was
+most emphatic. "You're going abroad with me."
+
+Fleda wondered, but she also smiled. "To-night--to-morrow?"
+
+"In as few days as possible. That's all that's left for me now." Fleda's
+heart, at this, gave a bound; she wondered to what particular difference
+in Mrs. Gereth's situation as last known to her it was an allusion.
+"I've made my plan," her friend continued: "I go for at least a year. We
+shall go straight to Florence; we can manage there. I of course don't
+look to you, however," she added, "to stay with me all that time. That
+will require to be settled. Owen will have to join us as soon as
+possible; he may not be quite ready to get off with us. But I'm
+convinced it's quite the right thing to go. It will make a good change;
+it will put in a decent interval."
+
+Fleda listened; she was deeply mystified. "How kind you are to me!" she
+presently said. The picture suggested so many questions that she
+scarcely knew which to ask first. She took one at a venture. "You really
+have it from Mr. Gereth that he'll give us his company?"
+
+If Mr. Gereth's mother smiled in response to this, Fleda knew that her
+smile was a tacit criticism of such a form of reference to her son.
+Fleda habitually spoke of him as Mr. Owen, and it was a part of her
+present vigilance to appear to have relinquished that right. Mrs.
+Gereth's manner confirmed a certain impression of her pretending to more
+than she felt; her very first words had conveyed it, and it reminded
+Fleda of the conscious courage with which, weeks before, the lady had
+met her visitor's first startled stare at the clustered spoils of
+Poynton. It was her practice to take immensely for granted whatever she
+wished. "Oh, if you'll answer for him, it will do quite as well!" she
+said. Then she put her hands on the girl's shoulders and held them at
+arm's length, as if to shake them a little, while in the depths of her
+shining eyes Fleda discovered something obscure and unquiet. "You bad,
+false thing, why didn't you tell me?" Her tone softened her harshness,
+and her visitor had never had such a sense of her indulgence. Mrs.
+Gereth could show patience; it was a part of the general bribe, but it
+was also like the handing in of a heavy bill before which Fleda could
+only fumble in a penniless pocket. "You must perfectly have known at
+Ricks, and yet you practically denied it. That's why I call you bad and
+false!" It was apparently also why she again almost roughly kissed her.
+
+"I think that before I answer you I had better know what you're talking
+about," Fleda said.
+
+Mrs. Gereth looked at her with a slight increase of hardness. "You've
+done everything you need for modesty, my dear! If he's sick with love of
+you, you haven't had to wait for me to inform you."
+
+Fleda hesitated. "Has he informed _you_, dear Mrs. Gereth?"
+
+Dear Mrs. Gereth smiled sweetly. "How could he, when our situation is
+such that he communicates with me only through you, and that you are so
+tortuous you conceal everything?"
+
+"Didn't he answer the note in which you let him know that I was in
+town?" Fleda asked.
+
+"He answered it sufficiently by rushing off on the spot to see you."
+
+Mrs. Gereth met that allusion with a prompt firmness that made almost
+insolently light of any ground of complaint, and Fleda's own sense of
+responsibility was now so vivid that all resentments turned
+comparatively pale. She had no heart to produce a grievance; she could
+only, left as she was with the little mystery on her hands, produce,
+after a moment, a question. "How then do you come to know that your son
+has ever thought--"
+
+"That he would give his ears to get you?" Mrs. Gereth broke in. "I had a
+visit from Mrs. Brigstock."
+
+Fleda opened her eyes. "She went down to Ricks?"
+
+"The day after she had found Owen at your feet. She knows everything."
+
+Fleda shook her head sadly; she was more startled than she cared to
+show. This odd journey of Mrs. Brigstock's, which, with a simplicity
+equal for once to Owen's, she had not divined, now struck her as having
+produced the hush of the last ten days. "There are things she doesn't
+know!" she presently exclaimed.
+
+"She knows he would do anything to marry you."
+
+"He hasn't told her so," Fleda said.
+
+"No, but he has told you. That's better still!" laughed Mrs. Gereth. "My
+dear child," she went on with an air that affected the girl as a sort of
+blind profanity, "don't try to make yourself out better than you are.
+_I_ know what you are. I haven't lived with you so much for nothing.
+You're not quite a saint in heaven yet. Lord, what a creature you'd have
+thought me in my good time! But you do like it, fortunately, you idiot.
+You're pale with your passion, you sweet thing. That's exactly what I
+wanted to see. I can't for the life of me think where the shame comes
+in." Then with a finer significance, a look that seemed to Fleda
+strange, she added: "It's all right."
+
+"I've seen him but twice," said Fleda.
+
+"But twice?" Mrs. Gereth still smiled.
+
+"On the occasion, at papa's, that Mrs. Brigstock told you of, and one
+day, since then, down at Maggie's."
+
+"Well, those things are between yourselves, and you seem to me both poor
+creatures at best." Mrs. Gereth spoke with a rich humor which tipped
+with light for an instant a real conviction. "I don't know what you've
+got in your veins: you absurdly exaggerated the difficulties. But enough
+is as good as a feast, and when once I get you abroad together--!" She
+checked herself as if from excess of meaning; what might happen when she
+should get them abroad together was to be gathered only from the way she
+slowly rubbed her hands.
+
+The gesture, however, made the promise so definite that for a moment her
+companion was almost beguiled. But there was nothing to account, as yet,
+for the wealth of Mrs. Gereth's certitude: the visit of the lady of
+Waterbath appeared but half to explain it. "Is it permitted to be
+surprised," Fleda deferentially asked, "at Mrs. Brigstock's thinking it
+would help her to see you?"
+
+"It's never permitted to be surprised at the aberrations of born fools,"
+said Mrs. Gereth. "If a cow should try to calculate, that's the kind of
+happy thought she'd have. Mrs. Brigstock came down to plead with me."
+
+Fleda mused a moment. "That's what she came to do with _me_," she then
+honestly returned. "But what did she expect to get of you, with your
+opposition so marked from the first?"
+
+"She didn't know I want _you_, my dear. It's a wonder, with all my
+violence--the gross publicity I've given my desires. But she's as stupid
+as an owl--she doesn't feel your charm."
+
+Fleda felt herself flush slightly, but she tried to smile. "Did you tell
+her all about it? Did you make her understand you want me?"
+
+"For what do you take me? I wasn't such a donkey."
+
+"So as not to aggravate Mona?" Fleda suggested.
+
+"So as not to aggravate Mona, naturally. We've had a narrow course to
+steer, but thank God we're at last in the open!"
+
+"What do you call the open, Mrs. Gereth?" Fleda demanded. Then as the
+other faltered: "Do you know where Mr. Owen is to-day?"
+
+Mrs. Gereth stared. "Do you mean he's at Waterbath? Well, that's your
+own affair. I can bear it if _you_ can."
+
+"Wherever he is, I can bear it," Fleda said. "But I haven't the least
+idea where he is."
+
+"Then you ought to be ashamed of yourself!" Mrs. Gereth broke out with a
+change of note that showed how deep a passion underlay everything she
+had said. The poor woman, catching her companion's hand, however, the
+next moment, as if to retract something of this harshness, spoke more
+patiently. "Don't you understand, Fleda, how immensely, how devotedly,
+I've trusted you?" Her tone was indeed a supplication.
+
+Fleda was infinitely shaken; she was silent a little. "Yes, I
+understand. Did she go to you to complain of me?"
+
+"She came to see what she could do. She had been tremendously upset, the
+day before, by what had taken place at your father's, and she had posted
+down to Ricks on the inspiration of the moment. She hadn't meant it on
+leaving home; it was the sight of you closeted there with Owen that had
+suddenly determined her. The whole story, she said, was written in your
+two faces: she spoke as if she had never seen such an exhibition. Owen
+was on the brink, but there might still be time to save him, and it was
+with this idea she had bearded me in my den. 'What won't a mother do,
+you know?'--that was one of the things she said. What wouldn't a mother
+do indeed? I thought I had sufficiently shown her what! She tried to
+break me down by an appeal to my good nature, as she called it, and from
+the moment she opened on _you_, from the moment she denounced Owen's
+falsity, I was as good-natured as she could wish. I understood that it
+was a plea for mere mercy, that you and he between you were killing her
+child. Of course I was delighted that Mona should be killed, but I was
+studiously kind to Mrs. Brigstock. At the same time I was honest, I
+didn't pretend to anything I couldn't feel. I asked her why the marriage
+hadn't taken place months ago, when Owen was perfectly ready; and I
+showed her how completely that fatuous mistake on Mona's part cleared
+his responsibility. It was she who had killed _him_--it was she who had
+destroyed his affection, his illusions. Did she want him now when he was
+estranged, when he was disgusted, when he had a sore grievance? She
+reminded me that Mona had a sore grievance too, but she admitted that
+she hadn't come to me to speak of that. What she had come to me for was
+not to get the old things back, but simply to get Owen. What she wanted
+was that I would, in simple pity, see fair play. Owen had been awfully
+bedeviled--she didn't call it that, she called it 'misled'--but it was
+simply you who had bedeviled him. He would be all right still if I would
+see that you were out of the way. She asked me point-blank if it was
+possible I could want him to marry you."
+
+Fleda had listened in unbearable pain and growing terror, as if her
+interlocutress, stone by stone, were piling some fatal mass upon her
+breast. She had the sense of being buried alive, smothered in the mere
+expansion of another will; and now there was but one gap left to the
+air. A single word, she felt, might close it, and with the question that
+came to her lips as Mrs. Gereth paused she seemed to herself to ask, in
+cold dread, for her doom. "What did you say to that?" she inquired.
+
+"I was embarrassed, for I saw my danger--the danger of her going home
+and saying to Mona that I was backing you up. It had been a bliss to
+learn that Owen had really turned to you, but my joy didn't put me off
+my guard. I reflected intensely for a few seconds; then I saw my issue."
+
+"Your issue?" Fleda murmured.
+
+"I remembered how you had tied my hands about saying a word to Owen."
+
+Fleda wondered. "And did you remember the little letter that, with your
+hands tied, you still succeeded in writing to him?"
+
+"Perfectly; my little letter was a model of reticence. What I remembered
+was all that in those few words I forbade myself to say. I had been an
+angel of delicacy--I had effaced myself like a saint. It was not for me
+to have done all that and then figure to such a woman as having done the
+opposite. Besides, it was none of her business."
+
+"Is that what you said to her?" Fleda asked.
+
+"I said to her that her question revealed a total misconception of the
+nature of my present relations with my son. I said to her that I had no
+relations with him at all, and that nothing had passed between us for
+months. I said to her that my hands were spotlessly clean of any attempt
+to make him make up to you. I said to her that I had taken from Poynton
+what I had a right to take, but had done nothing else in the world. I
+was determined that if I had bit my tongue off to oblige you I would at
+least have the righteousness that my sacrifice gave me."
+
+"And was Mrs. Brigstock satisfied with your answer?"
+
+"She was visibly relieved."
+
+"It was fortunate for you," said Fleda, "that she's apparently not aware
+of the manner in which, almost under her nose, you advertised me to him
+at Poynton."
+
+Mrs. Gereth appeared to recall that scene; she smiled with a serenity
+remarkably effective as showing how cheerfully used she had grown to
+invidious allusions to it. "How should she be aware of it?"
+
+"She would if Owen had described your outbreak to Mona."
+
+"Yes, but he didn't describe it. All his instinct was to conceal it from
+Mona. He wasn't conscious, but he was already in love with you!" Mrs.
+Gereth declared.
+
+Fleda shook her head wearily. "No--I was only in love with him!"
+
+Here was a faint illumination with which Mrs. Gereth instantly mingled
+her fire. "You dear old wretch!" she exclaimed; and she again, with
+ferocity, embraced her young friend.
+
+Fleda submitted like a sick animal: she would submit to everything now.
+"Then what further passed?"
+
+"Only that she left me thinking she had got something."
+
+"And what had she got?"
+
+"Nothing but her luncheon. But _I_ got everything!"
+
+"Everything?" Fleda quavered.
+
+Mrs. Gereth, struck apparently by something in her tone, looked at her
+from a tremendous height. "Don't fail me now!"
+
+It sounded so like a menace that, with a full divination at last, the
+poor girl fell weakly into a chair. "What on earth have you done?"
+
+Mrs. Gereth stood there in all the glory of a great stroke. "I've
+settled you." She filled the room, to Fleda's scared vision, with the
+glare of her magnificence. "I've sent everything back."
+
+"Everything?" Fleda gasped.
+
+"To the smallest snuff-box. The last load went yesterday. The same
+people did it. Poor little Ricks is empty." Then as if, for a crowning
+splendor, to check all deprecation, "They're yours, you goose!" Mrs.
+Gereth concluded, holding up her handsome head and rubbing her white
+hands. Fleda saw that there were tears in her deep eyes.
+
+
+
+
+XVIII
+
+
+She was slow to take in the announcement, but when she had done so she
+felt it to be more than her cup of bitterness would hold. Her bitterness
+was her anxiety, the taste of which suddenly sickened her. What had she
+become, on the spot, but a traitress to her friend? The treachery
+increased with the view of the friend's motive, a motive magnificent as
+a tribute to her value. Mrs. Gereth had wished to make sure of her and
+had reasoned that there would be no such way as by a large appeal to her
+honor. If it be true, as men have declared, that the sense of honor is
+weak in women, some of the bearings of this stroke might have thrown a
+light on the question. What was now, at all events, put before Fleda was
+that she had been made sure of, for the greatness of the surrender
+imposed an obligation as great. There was an expression she had heard
+used by young men with whom she danced: the only word to fit Mrs.
+Gereth's intention was that Mrs. Gereth had designed to "fetch" her. It
+was a calculated, it was a crushing bribe; it looked her in the eyes and
+said simply: "That's what I do for you!" What Fleda was to do in return
+required no pointing out. The sense, at present, of how little she had
+done made her almost cry aloud with pain; but her first endeavor, in the
+face of the fact, was to keep such a cry from reaching her companion.
+How little she had done Mrs. Gereth didn't yet know, and possibly there
+would be still some way of turning round before the discovery. On her
+own side too Fleda had almost made one: she had known she was wanted,
+but she had not after all conceived how magnificently much. She had been
+treated by her friend's act as a conscious prize, but what made her a
+conscious prize was only the power the act itself imputed to her. As
+high, bold diplomacy it dazzled and carried her off her feet. She
+admired the noble risk of it, a risk Mrs. Gereth had faced for the
+utterly poor creature that the girl now felt herself. The change it
+instantly wrought in her was, moreover, extraordinary: it transformed at
+a touch her emotion on the subject of concessions. A few weeks earlier
+she had jumped at the duty of pleading for them, practically quarreling
+with the lady of Ricks for her refusal to restore what she had taken.
+She had been sore with the wrong to Owen, she had bled with the wounds
+of Poynton; now however, as she heard of the replenishment of the void
+that had so haunted her, she came as near sounding an alarm as if from
+the deck of a ship she had seen a person she loved jump into the sea.
+Mrs. Gereth had become in a flash the victim; poor little Ricks had been
+laid bare in a night. If Fleda's feeling about the old things had taken
+precipitate form the form would have been a frantic command. It was
+indeed for mere want of breath that she didn't shout: "Oh, stop
+them--it's no use; bring them back--it's too late!" And what most kept
+her breathless was her companion's very grandeur. Fleda distinguished as
+never before the purity of such a passion; it made Mrs. Gereth august
+and almost sublime. It was absolutely unselfish--she cared nothing for
+mere possession. She thought solely and incorruptibly of what was best
+for the things; she had surrendered them to the presumptive care of the
+one person of her acquaintance who felt about them as she felt herself,
+and whose long lease of the future would be the nearest approach that
+could be compassed to committing them to a museum. Now it was indeed
+that Fleda knew what rested on her; now it was also that she measured as
+if for the first time Mrs. Gereth's view of the natural influence of a
+fine acquisition. She had adopted the idea of blowing away the last
+doubt of what her young friend would gain, of making good still more
+than she was obliged to make it the promise of weeks before. It was one
+thing for the girl to have heard that in a certain event restitution
+would be made; it was another for her to see the condition, with a noble
+trust, treated in advance as performed, and to be able to feel that she
+should have only to open a door to find every old piece in every old
+corner. To have played such a card was therefore, practically, for Mrs.
+Gereth, to have won the game. Fleda had certainly to recognize that, so
+far as the theory of the matter went, the game had been won. Oh, she had
+been made sure of!
+
+She couldn't, however, succeed for so very many minutes in deferring her
+exposure. "Why didn't you wait, dearest? Ah, why didn't you wait?"--if
+that inconsequent appeal kept rising to her lips to be cut short before
+it was spoken, this was only because at first the humility of gratitude
+helped her to gain time, enabled her to present herself very honestly as
+too overcome to be clear. She kissed her companion's hands, she did
+homage at her feet, she murmured soft snatches of praise, and yet in the
+midst of it all was conscious that what she really showed most was the
+wan despair at her heart. She saw Mrs. Gereth's glimpse of this despair
+suddenly widen, heard the quick chill of her voice pierce through the
+false courage of endearments. "Do you mean to tell me at such an hour as
+this that you've really lost him?"
+
+The tone of the question made the idea a possibility for which Fleda had
+nothing from this moment but terror. "I don't know, Mrs. Gereth; how can
+I say?" she asked. "I've not seen him for so long; as I told you just
+now, I don't even know where he is. That's by no fault of his," she
+hurried on: "he would have been with me every day if I had consented.
+But I made him understand, the last time, that I'll receive him again
+only when he's able to show me that his release has been complete and
+definite. Oh, he can't yet, don't you see, and that's why he hasn't been
+back. It's far better than his coming only that we should both be
+miserable. When he does come he'll be in a better position. He'll be
+tremendously moved by the splendid thing you've done. I know you wish me
+to feel that you've done it as much for me as for Owen, but your having
+done it for me is just what will delight him most! When he hears of it,"
+said Fleda, in desperate optimism, "when he hears of it--" There indeed,
+regretting her advance, she quite broke down. She was wholly powerless
+to say what Owen would do when he heard of it. "I don't know what he
+won't make of you and how he won't hug you!" she had to content herself
+with lamely declaring. She had drawn Mrs. Gereth to a sofa with a vague
+instinct of pacifying her and still, after all, gaining time; but it was
+a position in which her great duped benefactress, portentously patient
+again during this demonstration, looked far from inviting a "hug." Fleda
+found herself tricking out the situation with artificial flowers, trying
+to talk even herself into the fancy that Owen, whose name she now made
+simple and sweet, might come in upon them at any moment. She felt an
+immense need to be understood and justified; she averted her face in
+dread from all that she might have to be forgiven. She pressed on her
+companion's arm as if to keep her quiet till she should really know, and
+then, after a minute, she poured out the clear essence of what in
+happier days had been her "secret." "You mustn't think I don't adore him
+when I've told him so to his face. I love him so that I'd die for him--I
+love him so that it's horrible. Don't look at me therefore as if I had
+not been kind, as if I had not been as tender as if he were dying and my
+tenderness were what would save him. Look at me as if you believe me, as
+if you feel what I've been through. Darling Mrs. Gereth, I could kiss
+the ground he walks on. I haven't a rag of pride; I used to have, but
+it's gone. I used to have a secret, but every one knows it now, and any
+one who looks at me can say, I think, what's the matter with me. It's
+not so very fine, my secret, and the less one really says about it the
+better; but I want you to have it from me because I was stiff before. I
+want you to see for yourself that I've been brought as low as a girl can
+very well be. It serves me right," Fleda laughed, "if I was ever proud
+and horrid to you! I don't know what you wanted me, in those days at
+Ricks, to do, but I don't think you can have wanted much more than what
+I've done. The other day at Maggie's I did things that made me,
+afterwards, think of you! I don't know what girls may do; but if he
+doesn't know that there isn't an inch of me that isn't his--!" Fleda
+sighed as if she couldn't express it; she piled it up, as she would have
+said; holding Mrs. Gereth with dilated eyes, she seemed to sound her for
+the effect of these words. "It's idiotic," she wearily smiled; "it's so
+strange that I'm almost angry for it, and the strangest part of all is
+that it isn't even happiness. It's anguish--it was from the first; from
+the first there was a bitterness and a kind of dread. But I owe you
+every word of the truth. You don't do him justice, either: he's a dear,
+I assure you he's a dear. I'd trust him to the last breath; I don't
+think you really know him. He's ever so much cleverer than he makes a
+show of; he's remarkable in his own shy way. You told me at Ricks that
+you wanted me to let myself go, and I've 'gone' quite far enough to
+discover as much as that, as well as all sorts of other delightful
+things about him. You'll tell me I make myself out worse than I am,"
+said the girl, feeling more and more in her companion's attitude a
+quality that treated her speech as a desperate rigmarole and even
+perhaps as a piece of cold immodesty. She wanted to make herself out
+"bad"--it was a part of her justification; but it suddenly occurred to
+her that such a picture of her extravagance imputed a want of gallantry
+to the young man. "I don't care for anything you think," she declared,
+"because Owen, don't you know, sees me as I am. He's so kind that it
+makes up for everything!"
+
+This attempt at gayety was futile; the silence with which, for a minute,
+her adversary greeted her troubled plea brought home to her afresh that
+she was on the bare defensive. "Is it a part of his kindness never to
+come near you?" Mrs. Gereth inquired at last. "Is it a part of his
+kindness to leave you without an inkling of where he is?" She rose again
+from where Fleda had kept her down; she seemed to tower there in the
+majesty of her gathered wrong. "Is it a part of his kindness that, after
+I've toiled as I've done for six days, and with my own weak hands, which
+I haven't spared, to denude myself, in your interest, to that point that
+I've nothing left, as I may say, but what I have on my back--is it a
+part of his kindness that you're not even able to produce him for me?"
+
+There was a high contempt in this which was for Owen quite as much, and
+in the light of which Fleda felt that her effort at plausibility had
+been mere groveling. She rose from the sofa with an humiliated sense of
+rising from ineffectual knees. That discomfort, however, lived but an
+instant: it was swept away in a rush of loyalty to the absent. She
+herself could bear his mother's scorn; but to avert it from his sweet
+innocence she broke out with a quickness that was like the raising of an
+arm. "Don't blame him--don't blame him: he'd do anything on earth for
+me! It was I," said Fleda, eagerly, "who sent him back to her; I made
+him go; I pushed him out of the house; I declined to have anything to
+say to him except on another footing."
+
+Mrs. Gereth stared as at some gross material ravage. "Another footing?
+What other footing?"
+
+"The one I've already made so clear to you: my having it in black and
+white, as you may say, from her that she freely gives him up."
+
+"Then you think he lies when he tells you that he has recovered his
+liberty?"
+
+Fleda hesitated a moment; after which she exclaimed with a certain hard
+pride: "He's enough in love with me for anything!"
+
+"For anything, apparently, except to act like a man and impose his
+reason and his will on your incredible folly. For anything except to put
+an end, as any man worthy of the name would have put it, to your
+systematic, to your idiotic perversity. What are you, after all, my
+dear, I should like to know, that a gentleman who offers you what Owen
+offers should have to meet such wonderful exactions, to take such
+extraordinary precautions about your sweet little scruples?" Her
+resentment rose to a strange insolence which Fleda took full in the face
+and which, for the moment at least, had the horrible force to present to
+her vengefully a showy side of the truth. It gave her a blinding glimpse
+of lost alternatives. "I don't know what to think of him," Mrs. Gereth
+went on; "I don't know what to call him: I'm so ashamed of him that I
+can scarcely speak of him even to _you_. But indeed I'm so ashamed of
+you both together that I scarcely know in common decency where to look."
+She paused to give Fleda the full benefit of this remarkable statement;
+then she exclaimed: "Any one but a jackass would have tucked you under
+his arm and marched you off to the Registrar!"
+
+Fleda wondered; with her free imagination she could wonder even while
+her cheek stung from a slap. "To the Registrar?"
+
+"That would have been the sane, sound, immediate course to adopt. With a
+grain of gumption you'd both instantly have felt it. _I_ should have
+found a way to take you, you know, if I'd been what Owen's supposed to
+be. _I_ should have got the business over first; the rest could come
+when you liked! Good God, girl, your place was to stand before me as a
+woman honestly married. One doesn't know what one has hold of in
+touching you, and you must excuse my saying that you're literally
+unpleasant to me to meet as you are. Then at least we could have talked,
+and Owen, if he had the ghost of a sense of humor, could have snapped
+his fingers at your refinements."
+
+This stirring speech affected our young lady as if it had been the shake
+of a tambourine borne towards her from a gypsy dance: her head seemed to
+go round and she felt a sudden passion in her feet. The emotion,
+however, was but meagrely expressed in the flatness with which she heard
+herself presently say: "I'll go to the Registrar now."
+
+"Now?" Magnificent was the sound Mrs. Gereth threw into this
+monosyllable. "And pray who's to take you?" Fleda gave a colorless
+smile, and her companion continued: "Do you literally mean that you
+can't put your hand upon him?" Fleda's wan grimace appeared to irritate
+her; she made a short, imperious gesture. "Find him for me, you
+fool--_find_ him for me!"
+
+"What do you want of him," Fleda sadly asked, "feeling as you do to both
+of us?"
+
+"Never mind how I feel, and never mind what I say when I'm furious!"
+Mrs. Gereth still more incisively added. "Of course I cling to you, you
+wretches, or I shouldn't suffer as I do. What I want of him is to see
+that he takes you; what I want of him is to go with you myself to the
+place." She looked round the room as if, in feverish haste, for a mantle
+to catch up; she bustled to the window as if to spy out a cab: she would
+allow half an hour for the job. Already in her bonnet, she had snatched
+from the sofa a garment for the street: she jerked it on as she came
+back. "Find him, find him," she repeated; "come straight out with me, to
+try, at least, to get at him!"
+
+"How can I get at him? He'll come when he's ready," Fleda replied.
+
+Mrs. Gereth turned on her sharply. "Ready for what? Ready to see me
+ruined without a reason or a reward?"
+
+Fleda was silent; the worst of it all was that there was something
+unspoken between them. Neither of them dared to utter it, but the
+influence of it was in the girl's tone when she returned at last, with
+great gentleness: "Don't be harsh to me--I'm very unhappy." The words
+produced a visible impression on Mrs. Gereth, who held her face averted
+and sent off through the window a gaze that kept pace with the long
+caravan of her treasures. Fleda knew she was watching it wind up the
+avenue of Poynton--Fleda participated indeed fully in the vision; so
+that after a little the most consoling thing seemed to her to add: "I
+don't see why in the world you take so for granted that he's, as you
+say, 'lost.'"
+
+Mrs. Gereth continued to stare out of the window, and her stillness
+denoted some success in controlling herself. "If he's not lost, why are
+you unhappy?"
+
+"I'm unhappy because I torment you, and you don't understand me."
+
+"No, Fleda, I don't understand you," said Mrs. Gereth, finally facing
+her again. "I don't understand you at all, and it's as if you and Owen
+were of quite another race and another flesh. You make me feel very
+old-fashioned and simple and bad. But you must take me as I am, since
+you take so much else _with_ me!" She spoke now with the drop of her
+resentment, with a dry and weary calm. "It would have been better for me
+if I had never known you," she pursued, "and certainly better if I
+hadn't taken such an extraordinary fancy to you. But that too was
+inevitable: everything, I suppose, is inevitable. It was all my own
+doing--you didn't run after me: I pounced on you and caught you up.
+You're a stiff little beggar, in spite of your pretty manners: yes,
+you're hideously misleading. I hope you feel how handsome it is of me to
+recognize the independence of your character. It was your clever
+sympathy that did it--your extraordinary feeling for those accursed
+vanities. You were sharper about them than any one I had ever known, and
+that was a thing I simply couldn't resist. Well," the poor lady
+concluded after a pause, "you see where it has landed us!"
+
+"If you'll go for him yourself, I'll wait here," said Fleda.
+
+Mrs. Gereth, holding her mantle together, appeared for a while to
+consider.
+
+"To his club, do you mean?"
+
+"Isn't it there, when he's in town, that he has a room? He has at
+present no other London address," Fleda said: "it's there one writes to
+him."
+
+"How do _I_ know, with my wretched relations with him?" Mrs. Gereth
+asked.
+
+"Mine have not been quite so bad as that," Fleda desperately smiled.
+Then she added: "His silence, _her_ silence, our hearing nothing at
+all--what are these but the very things on which, at Poynton and at
+Ricks, you rested your assurance that everything is at an end between
+them?"
+
+Mrs. Gereth looked dark and void. "Yes, but I hadn't heard from you then
+that you could invent nothing better than, as you call it, to send him
+back to her."
+
+"Ah, but, on the other hand, you've learned from them what you didn't
+know--you've learned by Mrs. Brigstock's visit that he cares for me."
+Fleda found herself in the position of availing herself of optimistic
+arguments that she formerly had repudiated; her refutation of her
+companion had completely changed its ground.
+
+She was in a fever of ingenuity and painfully conscious, on behalf of
+her success, that her fever was visible. She could herself see the
+reflection of it glitter in Mrs. Gereth's sombre eyes.
+
+"You plunge me in stupefaction," that lady answered, "and at the same
+time you terrify me. Your account of Owen is inconceivable, and yet I
+don't know what to hold on by. He cares for you, it does appear, and yet
+in the same breath you inform me that nothing is more possible than that
+he's spending these days at Waterbath. Excuse me if I'm so dull as not
+to see my way in such darkness. If he's at Waterbath he doesn't care for
+you. If he cares for you he's not at Waterbath."
+
+"Then where is he?" poor Fleda helplessly wailed. She caught herself up,
+however; she did her best to be brave and clear. Before Mrs. Gereth
+could reply, with due obviousness, that this was a question for her not
+to ask, but to answer, she found an air of assurance to say: "You
+simplify far too much. You always did and you always will. The tangle of
+life is much more intricate than you've ever, I think, felt it to be.
+You slash into it," cried Fleda finely, "with a great pair of shears,
+you nip at it as if you were one of the Fates! If Owen's at Waterbath
+he's there to wind everything up."
+
+Mrs. Gereth shook her head with slow austerity. "You don't believe a
+word you're saying. I've frightened you, as you've frightened me: you're
+whistling in the dark to keep up our courage. I do simplify, doubtless,
+if to simplify is to fail to comprehend the insanity of a passion that
+bewilders a young blockhead with bugaboo barriers, with hideous and
+monstrous sacrifices. I can only repeat that you're beyond me. Your
+perversity's a thing to howl over. However," the poor woman continued
+with a break in her voice, a long hesitation and then the dry triumph of
+her will, "I'll never mention it to you again! Owen I can just make out;
+for Owen _is_ a blockhead. Owen's a blockhead," she repeated with a
+quiet, tragic finality, looking straight into Fleda's eyes. "I don't
+know why you dress up so the fact that he's disgustingly weak."
+
+Fleda hesitated; at last, before her companion's, she lowered her look.
+"Because I love him. It's because he's weak that he needs me," she
+added.
+
+"That was why his father, whom he exactly resembles, needed _me_. And I
+didn't fail his father," said Mrs. Gereth. She gave Fleda a moment to
+appreciate the remark; after which she pursued: "Mona Brigstock isn't
+weak; she's stronger than you!"
+
+"I never thought she was weak," Fleda answered. She looked vaguely round
+the room with a new purpose: she had lost sight of her umbrella.
+
+"I did tell you to let yourself go, but it's clear enough that you
+really haven't," Mrs. Gereth declared. "If Mona has got him--"
+
+Fleda had accomplished her search; her interlocutress paused. "If Mona
+has got him?" the girl inquired, tightening the umbrella.
+
+"Well," said Mrs. Gereth profoundly, "it will be clear enough that Mona
+_has_."
+
+"Has let herself go?"
+
+"Has let herself go." Mrs. Gereth spoke as if she saw it in every
+detail.
+
+Fleda felt the tone and finished her preparation; then she went and
+opened the door. "We'll look for him together," she said to her friend,
+who stood a moment taking in her face. "They may know something about
+him at the Colonel's."
+
+"We'll go there." Mrs. Gereth had picked up her gloves and her purse.
+"But the first thing," she went on, "will be to wire to Poynton."
+
+"Why not to Waterbath at once?" Fleda asked.
+
+Her companion hesitated. "In _your_ name?"
+
+"In my name. I noticed a place at the corner."
+
+While Fleda held the door open Mrs. Gereth drew on her gloves. "Forgive
+me," she presently said. "Kiss me," she added.
+
+Fleda, on the threshold, kissed her; then they went out.
+
+
+
+
+XIX
+
+
+In the place at the corner, on the chance of its saving time, Fleda
+wrote her telegram--wrote it in silence under Mrs. Gereth's eye and then
+in silence handed it to her. "I send this to Waterbath, on the
+possibility of your being there, to ask you to come to me." Mrs. Gereth
+held it a moment, read it more than once; then keeping it, and with her
+eyes on her companion, seemed to consider. There was the dawn of a
+kindness in her look; Fleda perceived in it, as if as the reward of
+complete submission, a slight relaxation of her rigor.
+
+"Wouldn't it perhaps after all be better," she asked, "before doing
+this, to see if we can make his whereabouts certain?"
+
+"Why so? It will be always so much done," said Fleda. "Though I'm poor,"
+she added with a smile, "I don't mind the shilling."
+
+"The shilling's _my_ shilling," said Mrs. Gereth.
+
+Fleda stayed her hand. "No, no--I'm superstitious."
+
+"Superstitious?"
+
+"To succeed, it must be all me!"
+
+"Well, if that will make it succeed!" Mrs. Gereth took back her
+shilling, but she still kept the telegram. "As he's most probably not
+there--"
+
+"If he shouldn't be there," Fleda interrupted, "there will be no harm
+done."
+
+"If he 'shouldn't be' there!" Mrs. Gereth ejaculated. "Heaven help us,
+how you assume it!"
+
+"I'm only prepared for the worst. The Brigstocks will simply send any
+telegram on."
+
+"Where will they send it?"
+
+"Presumably to Poynton."
+
+"They'll read it first," said Mrs. Gereth.
+
+"Read it?"
+
+"Yes, Mona will. She'll open it under the pretext of having it repeated;
+and then she'll probably do nothing. She'll keep it as a proof of your
+immodesty."
+
+"What of that?" asked Fleda.
+
+"You don't mind her seeing it?"
+
+Rather musingly and absently Fleda shook her head. "I don't mind
+anything."
+
+"Well, then, that's all right," said Mrs. Gereth as if she had only
+wanted to feel that she had been irreproachably considerate. After this
+she was gentler still, but she had another point to clear up. "Why have
+you given, for a reply, your sister's address?"
+
+"Because if he _does_ come to me he must come to me there. If that
+telegram goes," said Fleda, "I return to Maggie's to-night."
+
+Mrs. Gereth seemed to wonder at this. "You won't receive him here with
+me?"
+
+"No, I won't receive him here with you. Only where I received him
+last--only there again." She showed her companion that as to that she
+was firm.
+
+But Mrs. Gereth had obviously now had some practice in following queer
+movements prompted by queer feelings. She resigned herself, though she
+fingered the paper a moment longer. She appeared to hesitate; then she
+brought out: "You couldn't then, if I release you, make your message a
+little stronger?"
+
+Fleda gave her a faint smile. "He'll come if he can."
+
+Mrs. Gereth met fully what this conveyed; with decision she pushed in
+the telegram. But she laid her hand quickly upon another form and with
+still greater decision wrote another message. "From _me_, this," she
+said to Fleda when she had finished: "to catch him possibly at Poynton.
+Will you read it?"
+
+Fleda turned away. "Thank you."
+
+"It's stronger than yours."
+
+"I don't care," said Fleda, moving to the door. Mrs. Gereth, having paid
+for the second missive, rejoined her, and they drove together to Owen's
+club, where the elder lady alone got out. Fleda, from the hansom,
+watched through the glass doors her brief conversation with the
+hall-porter and then met in silence her return with the news that he had
+not seen Owen for a fortnight and was keeping his letters till called
+for. These had been the last orders; there were a dozen letters lying
+there. He had no more information to give, but they would see what they
+could find at Colonel Gereth's. To any connection with this inquiry,
+however, Fleda now roused herself to object, and her friend had indeed
+to recognize that on second thoughts it couldn't be quite to the taste
+of either of them to advertise in the remoter reaches of the family that
+they had forfeited the confidence of the master of Poynton. The letters
+lying at the club proved effectively that he was not in London, and this
+was the question that immediately concerned them. Nothing could concern
+them further till the answers to their telegrams should have had time to
+arrive. Mrs. Gereth had got back into the cab, and, still at the door of
+the club, they sat staring at their need of patience. Fleda's eyes
+rested, in the great hard street, on passing figures that struck her as
+puppets pulled by strings. After a little the driver challenged them
+through the hole in the top. "Anywhere in particular, ladies?"
+
+Fleda decided. "Drive to Euston, please."
+
+"You won't wait for what we may hear?" Mrs. Gereth asked.
+
+"Whatever we hear, I must go." As the cab went on she added: "But I
+needn't drag _you_ to the station."
+
+Mrs. Gereth was silent a moment; then "Nonsense!" she sharply replied.
+
+In spite of this sharpness they were now almost equally and almost
+tremulously mild; though their mildness took mainly the form of an
+inevitable sense of nothing left to say. It was the unsaid that occupied
+them--the thing that for more than an hour they had been going round and
+round without naming it. Much too early for Fleda's train, they
+encountered at the station a long half-hour to wait. Fleda made no
+further allusion to Mrs. Gereth's leaving her; their dumbness, with the
+elapsing minutes, grew to be in itself a reconstituted bond. They slowly
+paced the great gray platform, and presently Mrs. Gereth took the girl's
+arm and leaned on it with a hard demand for support. It seemed to Fleda
+not difficult for each to know of what the other was thinking--to know
+indeed that they had in common two alternating visions, one of which, at
+moments, brought them as by a common impulse to a pause. This was the
+one that was fixed; the other filled at times the whole space and then
+was shouldered away. Owen and Mona glared together out of the gloom and
+disappeared, but the replenishment of Poynton made a shining, steady
+light. The old splendor was there again, the old things were in their
+places. Our friends looked at them with an equal yearning; face to face,
+on the platform, they counted them in each other's eyes. Fleda had come
+back to them by a road as strange as the road they themselves had
+followed. The wonder of their great journeys, the prodigy of this second
+one, was the question that made her occasionally stop. Several times she
+uttered it, asked how this and that difficulty had been met. Mrs. Gereth
+replied with pale lucidity--was naturally the person most familiar with
+the truth that what she undertook was always somehow achieved. To do it
+was to do it--she had more than one kind of magnificence. She confessed
+there, audaciously enough, to a sort of arrogance of energy, and Fleda,
+going on again, her inquiry more than answered and her arm rendering
+service, flushed, in her diminished identity, with the sense that such a
+woman was great.
+
+"You do mean literally everything, to the last little miniature on the
+last little screen?"
+
+"I mean literally everything. Go over them with the catalogue!"
+
+Fleda went over them while they walked again; she had no need of the
+catalogue. At last she spoke once more: "Even the Maltese cross?"
+
+"Even the Maltese cross. Why not that as well as everything
+else?--especially as I remembered how you like it."
+
+Finally, after an interval, the girl exclaimed: "But the mere fatigue of
+it, the exhaustion of such a feat! I drag you to and fro here while you
+must be ready to drop."
+
+"I'm very, very tired." Mrs. Gereth's slow head-shake was tragic. "I
+couldn't do it again."
+
+"I doubt if they'd bear it again!"
+
+"That's another matter: they'd bear it if I could. There won't have
+been, this time either, a shake or a scratch. But I'm too tired--I very
+nearly don't care."
+
+"You must sit down, then, till I go," said Fleda. "We must find a
+bench."
+
+"No. I'm tired of _them_: I'm not tired of you. This is the way for you
+to feel most how much I rest on you." Fleda had a compunction, wondering
+as they continued to stroll whether it was right after all to leave her.
+She believed, however, that if the flame might for the moment burn low,
+it was far from dying out; an impression presently confirmed by the way
+Mrs. Gereth went on: "But one's fatigue is nothing. The idea under which
+one worked kept one up. For you I _could_--I can still. Nothing will
+have mattered if _she's_ not there."
+
+There was a question that this imposed, but Fleda at first found no
+voice to utter it: it was the thing that, between them, since her
+arrival, had been so consciously and vividly unsaid. Finally she was
+able to breathe: "And if she _is_ there--if she's there already?"
+
+Mrs. Gereth's rejoinder too hung back; then when it came--from sad eyes
+as well as from lips barely moved--it was unexpectedly merciful. "It
+will be very hard." That was all, now; and it was poignantly simple. The
+train Fleda was to take had drawn up; the girl kissed her as if in
+farewell. Mrs. Gereth submitted, then after a little brought out: "If we
+_have_ lost--"
+
+"If we have lost?" Fleda repeated as she paused again.
+
+"You'll all the same come abroad with me?"
+
+"It will seem very strange to me if you want me. But whatever you ask,
+whatever you need, that I will always do."
+
+"I shall need your company," said Mrs. Gereth. Fleda wondered an instant
+if this were not practically a demand for penal submission--for a
+surrender that, in its complete humility, would be a long expiation. But
+there was none of the latent chill of the vindictive in the way Mrs.
+Gereth pursued: "We can always, as time goes on, talk of them together."
+
+"Of the old things?" Fleda had selected a third-class compartment: she
+stood a moment looking into it and at a fat woman with a basket who had
+already taken possession. "Always?" she said, turning again to her
+companion. "Never!" she exclaimed. She got into the carriage, and two
+men with bags and boxes immediately followed, blocking up door and
+window so long that when she was able to look out again Mrs. Gereth had
+gone.
+
+
+
+
+XX
+
+
+There came to her at her sister's no telegram in answer to her own: the
+rest of that day and the whole of the next elapsed without a word either
+from Owen or from his mother. She was free, however, to her infinite
+relief, from any direct dealing with suspense, and conscious, to her
+surprise, of nothing that could show her, or could show Maggie and her
+brother-in-law, that she was excited. Her excitement was composed of
+pulses as swift and fine as the revolutions of a spinning top: she
+supposed she was going round, but she went round so fast that she
+couldn't even feel herself move. Her emotion occupied some quarter of
+her soul that had closed its doors for the day and shut out even her own
+sense of it; she might perhaps have heard something if she had pressed
+her ear to a partition. Instead of that she sat with her patience in a
+cold, still chamber from which she could look out in quite another
+direction. This was to have achieved an equilibrium to which she
+couldn't have given a name: indifference, resignation, despair were the
+terms of a forgotten tongue. The time even seemed not long, for the
+stages of the journey were the items of Mrs. Gereth's surrender. The
+detail of that performance, which filled the scene, was what Fleda had
+now before her eyes. The part of her loss that she could think of was
+the reconstituted splendor of Poynton. It was the beauty she was most
+touched by that, in tons, she had lost--the beauty that, charged upon
+big wagons, had safely crept back to its home. But the loss was a gain
+to memory and love; it was to her too, at last, that, in condonation of
+her treachery, the old things had crept back. She greeted them with open
+arms; she thought of them hour after hour; they made a company with
+which solitude was warm and a picture that, at this crisis, overlaid
+poor Maggie's scant mahogany. It was really her obliterated passion that
+had revived, and with it an immense assent to Mrs. Gereth's early
+judgment of her. She too, she felt, was of the religion, and like any
+other of the passionately pious she could worship now even in the
+desert. Yes, it was all for her; far round as she had gone she had been
+strong enough: her love had gathered in the spoils. She wanted indeed no
+catalogue to count them over; the array of them, miles away, was
+complete; each piece, in its turn, was perfect to her; she could have
+drawn up a catalogue from memory. Thus again she lived with them, and
+she thought of them without a question of any personal right. That they
+might have been, that they might still be hers, that they were perhaps
+already another's, were ideas that had too little to say to her. They
+were nobody's at all--too proud, unlike base animals and humans, to be
+reducible to anything so narrow. It was Poynton that was theirs; they
+had simply recovered their own. The joy of that for them was the source
+of the strange peace in which the girl found herself floating.
+
+It was broken on the third day by a telegram from Mrs. Gereth. "Shall be
+with you at 11.30--don't meet me at station." Fleda turned this over,
+but was sufficiently expert not to disobey the injunction. She had only
+an hour to take in its meaning, but that hour was longer than all the
+previous time. If Maggie had studied her convenience the day Owen came,
+Maggie was also at the present juncture a miracle of refinement.
+Increasingly and resentfully mystified, in spite of all reassurance, by
+the impression that Fleda suffered more than she gained from the
+grandeur of the Gereths, she had it at heart to exemplify the perhaps
+truer distinction of nature that characterized the house of Vetch. She
+was not, like poor Fleda, at every one's beck, and the visitor was to
+see no more of her than what the arrangement of luncheon might
+tantalizingly show. Maggie described herself to her sister as intending
+for a just provocation even the understanding she had had with her
+husband that he also should remain invisible. Fleda accordingly awaited
+alone the subject of so many manoeuvres--a period that was slightly
+prolonged even after the drawing-room door, at 11.30, was thrown open.
+Mrs. Gereth stood there with a face that spoke plain, but no sound fell
+from her till the withdrawal of the maid, whose attention had
+immediately attached itself to the rearrangement of a window-blind and
+who seemed, while she bustled at it, to contribute to the pregnant
+silence; before the duration of which, however, she retreated with a
+sudden stare.
+
+"He has done it," said Mrs. Gereth, turning her eyes avoidingly but not
+unperceivingly about her and in spite of herself dropping an opinion
+upon the few objects in the room. Fleda, on her side, in her silence,
+observed how characteristically she looked at Maggie's possessions
+before looking at Maggie's sister. The girl understood and at first had
+nothing to say; she was still dumb while Mrs. Gereth selected, with
+hesitation, a seat less distasteful than the one that happened to be
+nearest. On the sofa near the window the poor woman finally showed what
+the two past days had done for the age of her face. Her eyes at last met
+Fleda's. "It's the end."
+
+"They're married?"
+
+"They're married."
+
+Fleda came to the sofa in obedience to the impulse to sit down by her;
+then paused before her while Mrs. Gereth turned up a dead gray mask. A
+tired old woman sat there with empty hands in her lap. "I've heard
+nothing," said Fleda. "No answer came."
+
+"That's the only answer. It's the answer to everything." So Fleda saw;
+for a minute she looked over her companion's head and far away. "He
+wasn't at Waterbath; Mrs. Brigstock must have read your telegram and
+kept it. But mine, the one to Poynton, brought something. 'We are
+here--what do you want?'" Mrs. Gereth stopped as if with a failure of
+voice; on which Fleda sank upon the sofa and made a movement to take her
+hand. It met no response; there could be no attenuation. Fleda waited;
+they sat facing each other like strangers. "I wanted to go down," Mrs.
+Gereth presently continued. "Well, I went."
+
+All the girl's effort tended for the time to a single aim--that of
+taking the thing with outward detachment, speaking of it as having
+happened to Owen and to his mother and not in any degree to herself.
+Something at least of this was in the encouraging way she said:
+"Yesterday morning?"
+
+"Yesterday morning. I saw him."
+
+Fleda hesitated. "Did you see _her_?"
+
+"Thank God, no!"
+
+Fleda laid on her arm a hand of vague comfort, of which Mrs. Gereth took
+no notice. "You've been capable, just to tell me, of this wretched
+journey, of this consideration that I don't deserve?"
+
+"We're together, we're together," said Mrs. Gereth. She looked helpless
+as she sat there, her eyes, unseeingly enough, on a tall Dutch clock,
+old but rather poor, that Maggie had had as a wedding-gift and that eked
+out the bareness of the room.
+
+To Fleda, in the face of the event, it appeared that this was exactly
+what they were not: the last inch of common ground, the ground of their
+past intercourse, had fallen from under them. Yet what was still there
+was the grand style of her companion's treatment of her. Mrs. Gereth
+couldn't stand upon small questions, couldn't, in conduct, make small
+differences. "You're magnificent!" her young friend exclaimed. "There's
+a rare greatness in your generosity."
+
+"We're together, we're together," Mrs. Gereth lifelessly repeated.
+"That's all we _are_ now; it's all we have." The words brought to Fleda
+a sudden vision of the empty little house at Ricks; such a vision might
+also have been what her companion found in the face of the stopped Dutch
+clock. Yet with this it was clear that she would now show no bitterness:
+she had done with that, had given the last drop to those horrible hours
+in London. No passion even was left to her, and her forbearance only
+added to the force with which she represented the final vanity of
+everything.
+
+Fleda was so far from a wish to triumph that she was absolutely ashamed
+of having anything to say for herself; but there was one thing, all the
+same, that not to say was impossible. "That he has done it, that he
+couldn't _not_ do it, shows how right I was." It settled forever her
+attitude, and she spoke as if for her own mind; then after a little she
+added very gently, for Mrs. Gereth's: "That's to say, it shows that he
+was bound to her by an obligation that, however much he may have wanted
+to, he couldn't in any sort of honor break."
+
+Blanched and bleak, Mrs. Gereth looked at her. "What sort of an
+obligation do you call that? No such obligation exists for an hour
+between any man and any woman who have hatred on one side. He had ended
+by hating her, and now he hates her more than ever."
+
+"Did he tell you so?" Fleda asked.
+
+"No. He told me nothing but the great gawk of a fact. I saw him but for
+three minutes." She was silent again, and Fleda, as before some lurid
+image of this interview, sat without speaking. "Do you wish to appear as
+if you don't care?" Mrs. Gereth presently demanded.
+
+"I'm trying not to think of myself."
+
+"Then if you're thinking of Owen, how can you _bear_ to think?"
+
+Sadly and submissively Fleda shook her head; the slow tears had come
+into her eyes. "I can't. I don't understand--I don't understand!" she
+broke out.
+
+"_I_ do, then." Mrs. Gereth looked hard at the floor. "There was no
+obligation at the time you saw him last--when you sent him, hating her
+as he did, back to her."
+
+"If he went," Fleda asked, "doesn't that exactly prove that he
+recognized one?"
+
+"He recognized rot! You know what _I_ think of him." Fleda knew; she had
+no wish to challenge a fresh statement. Mrs. Gereth made one--it was her
+sole, faint flicker of passion--to the extent of declaring that he was
+too abjectly weak to deserve the name of a man. For all Fleda cared!--it
+was his weakness she loved in him. "He took strange ways of pleasing
+you!" her friend went on. "There was no obligation till suddenly, the
+other day, the situation changed."
+
+Fleda wondered. "The other day?"
+
+"It came to Mona's knowledge--I can't tell you how, but it came--that
+the things I was sending back had begun to arrive at Poynton. I had sent
+them for you, but it was _her_ I touched." Mrs. Gereth paused; Fleda was
+too absorbed in her explanation to do anything but take blankly the
+full, cold breath of this. "They were there, and that determined her."
+
+"Determined her to what?"
+
+"To act, to take means."
+
+"To take means?" Fleda repeated.
+
+"I can't tell you what they were, but they were powerful. She knew how,"
+said Mrs. Gereth.
+
+Fleda received with the same stoicism the quiet immensity of this
+allusion to the person who had not known how. But it made her think a
+little, and the thought found utterance, with unconscious irony, in the
+simple interrogation: "Mona?"
+
+"Why not? She's a brute."
+
+"But if he knew that so well, what chance was there in it for her?"
+
+"How can I tell you? How can I talk of such horrors? I can only give
+you, of the situation, what I see. He knew it, yes. But as she couldn't
+make him forget it, she tried to make him like it. She tried and she
+succeeded: that's what she did. She's after all so much less of a fool
+than he. And what _else_ had he originally liked?" Mrs. Gereth shrugged
+her shoulders. "She did what you wouldn't!" Fleda's face had grown dark
+with her wonder, but her friend's empty hands offered no balm to the
+pain in it. "It was that if it was anything. Nothing else meets the
+misery of it. Then there was quick work. Before he could turn round he
+was married."
+
+Fleda, as if she had been holding her breath, gave the sigh of a
+listening child. "At that place you spoke of in town?"
+
+"At the Registrar's, like a pair of low atheists."
+
+The girl hesitated. "What do people say of that? I mean the 'world.'"
+
+"Nothing, because nobody knows. They're to be married on the 17th, at
+Waterbath church. If anything else comes out, everybody is a little
+prepared. It will pass for some stroke of diplomacy, some move in the
+game, some outwitting of _me_. It's known there has been a row with me."
+
+Fleda was mystified. "People surely knew at Poynton," she objected, "if,
+as you say, she's there."
+
+"She was there, day before yesterday, only for a few hours. She met him
+in London and went down to see the things."
+
+Fleda remembered that she had seen them only once. "Did _you_ see them?"
+she then ventured to ask.
+
+"Everything."
+
+"Are they right?"
+
+"Quite right. There's nothing like them," said Mrs. Gereth. At this her
+companion took up one of her hands again and kissed it as she had done
+in London. "Mona went back that night; she was not there yesterday. Owen
+stayed on," she added.
+
+Fleda stared. "Then she's not to live there?"
+
+"Rather! But not till after the public marriage." Mrs. Gereth seemed to
+muse; then she brought out: "She'll live there alone."
+
+"Alone?"
+
+"She'll have it to herself."
+
+"He won't live with her?"
+
+"Never! But she's none the less his wife, and you're not," said Mrs.
+Gereth, getting up. "Our only chance is the chance she may die."
+
+Fleda appeared to consider: she appreciated her visitor's magnanimous
+use of the plural. "Mona won't die," she replied.
+
+"Well, _I_ shall, thank God! Till then"--and with this, for the first
+time, Mrs. Gereth put out her hand--"don't desert me."
+
+Fleda took her hand, and her clasp of it was a reiteration of a promise
+already given. She said nothing, but her silence was an acceptance as
+responsible as the vow of a nun. The next moment something occurred to
+her. "I mustn't put myself in your son's way."
+
+Mrs. Gereth gave a dry, flat laugh. "You're prodigious! But how shall
+you possibly be more out of it? Owen and I--" She didn't finish her
+sentence.
+
+"That's your great feeling about _him_," Fleda said; "but how, after
+what has happened, can it be his about you?"
+
+Mrs. Gereth hesitated. "How do you know what has happened? You don't
+know what I said to him."
+
+"Yesterday?"
+
+"Yesterday."
+
+They looked at each other with a long, deep gaze. Then, as Mrs. Gereth
+seemed again about to speak, the girl, closing her eyes, made a gesture
+of strong prohibition. "Don't tell me!"
+
+"Merciful powers, how you worship him!" Mrs. Gereth wonderingly moaned.
+It was, for Fleda, the shake that made the cup overflow. She had a
+pause, that of the child who takes time to know that he responds to an
+accident with pain; then, dropping again on the sofa, she broke into
+tears. They were beyond control, they came in long sobs, which for a
+moment Mrs. Gereth, almost with an air of indifference, stood hearing
+and watching. At last Mrs. Gereth too sank down again. Mrs. Gereth
+soundlessly, wearily wept.
+
+
+
+
+XXI
+
+
+"It looks just like Waterbath; but, after all, we bore _that_ together:"
+these words formed part of a letter in which, before the 17th, Mrs.
+Gereth, writing from disfigured Ricks, named to Fleda the day on which
+she would be expected to arrive there on a second visit. "I sha'n't, for
+a long time to come," the missive continued, "be able to receive any one
+who may _like_ it, who would try to smooth it down, and me with it; but
+there are always things you and I can comfortably hate together, for
+you're the only person who comfortably understands. You don't understand
+quite everything, but of all my acquaintance you're far away the least
+stupid. For action you're no good at all; but action is over, for me,
+forever, and you will have the great merit of knowing, when I'm brutally
+silent, what I shall be thinking about. Without setting myself up for
+your equal, I dare say I shall also know what are your own thoughts.
+Moreover, with nothing else but my four walls, you'll at any rate be a
+bit of furniture. For that, you know, a little, I've always taken
+you--quite one of my best finds. So come, if possible, on the 15th."
+
+The position of a bit of furniture was one that Fleda could
+conscientiously accept, and she by no means insisted on so high a place
+in the list. This communication made her easier, if only by its
+acknowledgment that her friend had some thing left: it still implied
+recognition of the principle of property. Something to hate, and to hate
+"comfortably," was at least not the utter destitution to which, after
+their last interview, she had helplessly seemed to see Mrs. Gereth go
+forth. She remembered indeed that, in the state in which they first saw
+it, she herself had "liked" the blessed refuge of Ricks; and she now
+wondered if the tact for which she was commended had then operated to
+make her keep her kindness out of sight. She was at present ashamed of
+such obliquity, and made up her mind that if this happy impression,
+quenched in the spoils of Poynton, should revive on the spot, she would
+utter it to her companion without reserve. Yes, she was capable of as
+much "action" as that: all the more that the spirit of her hostess
+seemed, for the time at least, wholly to have failed. Mrs. Gereth's
+three minutes with Owen had been a blow to all talk of travel, and after
+her woeful hour at Maggie's she had, like some great moaning, wounded
+bird, made her way, with wings of anguish, back to the nest she knew she
+should find empty. Fleda, on that dire day, could neither keep her nor
+give her up; she had pressingly offered to return with her, but Mrs.
+Gereth, in spite of the theory that their common grief was a bond, had
+even declined all escort to the station, conscious apparently of
+something abject in her collapse and almost fiercely eager, as with a
+personal shame, to be unwatched. All she had said to Fleda was that she
+would go back to Ricks that night, and the girl had lived for days after
+with a dreadful image of her position and her misery there. She had had
+a vision of her now lying prone on some unmade bed, now pacing a bare
+floor like a lioness deprived of her cubs. There had been moments when
+her mind's ear was strained to listen for some sound of grief wild
+enough to be wafted from afar. But the first sound, at the end of a
+week, had been a note announcing, without reflections, that the plan of
+going abroad had been abandoned. "It has come to me indirectly, but with
+much appearance of truth, that _they_ are going--for an indefinite time.
+That quite settles it; I shall stay where I am, and as soon as I've
+turned round again I shall look for you." The second letter had come a
+week later, and on the 15th Fleda was on her way to Ricks.
+
+Her arrival took the form of a surprise very nearly as violent as that
+of the other time. The elements were different, but the effect, like the
+other, arrested her on the threshold: she stood there stupefied and
+delighted at the magic of a passion of which such a picture represented
+the low-water mark. Wound up but sincere, and passing quickly from room
+to room, Fleda broke out before she even sat down. "If you turn me out
+of the house for it, my dear, there isn't a woman in England for whom it
+wouldn't be a privilege to live here." Mrs. Gereth was as honestly
+bewildered as she had of old been falsely calm. She looked about at the
+few sticks that, as she afterwards phrased it, she had gathered in, and
+then hard at her guest, as if to protect herself against a joke
+sufficiently cruel. The girl's heart gave a leap, for this stare was the
+sign of an opportunity. Mrs. Gereth was all unwitting; she didn't in the
+least know what she had done, and as Fleda could tell her Fleda suddenly
+became the one who knew most. That counted for the moment as a
+magnificent position; it almost made all the difference. Yet what
+contradicted it was the vivid presence of the artist's idea. "Where on
+earth did you put your hand on such beautiful things?"
+
+"Beautiful things?" Mrs. Gereth turned again to the little worn,
+bleached stuffs and the sweet spindle-legs. "They're the wretched things
+that were here--that stupid, starved old woman's."
+
+"The maiden aunt's, the nicest, the dearest old woman that ever lived? I
+thought you had got rid of the maiden aunt."
+
+"She was stored in an empty barn--stuck away for a sale; a matter that,
+fortunately, I've had neither time nor freedom of mind to arrange. I've
+simply, in my extremity, fished her out again."
+
+"You've simply, in your extremity, made a delight of her." Fleda took
+the highest line and the upper hand, and as Mrs. Gereth, challenging her
+cheerfulness, turned again a lustreless eye over the contents of the
+place, she broke into a rapture that was unforced, but that she was
+conscious of an advantage in being able to feel. She moved, as she had
+done on the previous occasion, from one piece to another, with looks of
+recognition and hands that lightly lingered, but she was as feverishly
+jubilant now as she had formerly been anxious and mute. "Ah, the little
+melancholy, tender, tell-tale things: how can they _not_ speak to you
+and find a way to your heart? It's not the great chorus of Poynton; but
+you're not, I'm sure, either so proud or so broken as to be reached by
+nothing but that. This is a voice so gentle, so human, so feminine--a
+faint, far-away voice with the little quaver of a heart-break. You've
+listened to it unawares; for the arrangement and effect of
+everything--when I compare them with what we found the first day we came
+down--shows, even if mechanically and disdainfully exercised, your
+admirable, infallible hand. It's your extraordinary genius; you make
+things 'compose' in spite of yourself. You've only to be a day or two in
+a place with four sticks for something to come of it!"
+
+"Then if anything has come of it here, it has come precisely of just
+four. That's literally, by the inventory, all there are!" said Mrs.
+Gereth.
+
+"If there were more there would be too many to convey the impression in
+which half the beauty resides--the impression, somehow, of something
+dreamed and missed, something reduced, relinquished, resigned: the
+poetry, as it were, of something sensibly _gone_." Fleda ingeniously and
+triumphantly worked it out. "Ah, there's something here that will never
+be in the inventory!"
+
+"Does it happen to be in your power to give it a name?" Mrs. Gereth's
+face showed the dim dawn of an amusement at finding herself seated at
+the feet of her pupil.
+
+"I can give it a dozen. It's a kind of fourth dimension. It's a
+presence, a perfume, a touch. It's a soul, a story, a life. There's ever
+so much more here than you and I. We're in fact just three!"
+
+"Oh, if you count the ghosts!"
+
+"Of course I count the ghosts. It seems to me ghosts count double--for
+what they were and for what they are. Somehow there were no ghosts at
+Poynton," Fleda went on. "That was the only fault."
+
+Mrs. Gereth, considering, appeared to fall in with the girl's fine
+humor. "Poynton was too splendidly happy."
+
+"Poynton was too splendidly happy," Fleda promptly echoed.
+
+"But it's cured of that now," her companion added.
+
+"Yes, henceforth there'll be a ghost or two."
+
+Mrs. Gereth thought again: she found her young friend suggestive. "Only
+_she_ won't see them."
+
+"No, 'she' won't see them." Then Fleda said, "What I mean is, for this
+dear one of ours, that if she had (as I _know_ she did; it's in the very
+taste of the air!) a great accepted pain--"
+
+She had paused an instant, and Mrs. Gereth took her up. "Well, if she
+had?"
+
+Fleda still hesitated. "Why, it was worse than yours."
+
+Mrs. Gereth reflected. "Very likely." Then she too hesitated. "The
+question is if it was worse than yours."
+
+"Mine?" Fleda looked vague.
+
+"Precisely. Yours."
+
+At this our young lady smiled. "Yes, because it was a disappointment.
+She had been so sure."
+
+"I see. And you were never sure."
+
+"Never. Besides, I'm happy," said Fleda.
+
+Mrs. Gereth met her eyes awhile. "Goose!" she quietly remarked as she
+turned away. There was a curtness in it; nevertheless it represented a
+considerable part of the basis of their new life.
+
+On the 18th The Morning Post had at last its clear message, a brief
+account of the marriage, from the residence of the bride's mother, of
+Mr. Owen Gereth of Poynton Park to Miss Mona Brigstock of Waterbath.
+There were two ecclesiastics and six bridesmaids and, as Mrs. Gereth
+subsequently said, a hundred frumps, as well as a special train from
+town: the scale of the affair sufficiently showed that the preparations
+had been complete for weeks. The happy pair were described as having
+taken their departure for Mr. Gereth's own seat, famous for its unique
+collection of artistic curiosities. The newspapers and letters, the
+fruits of the first London post, had been brought to the mistress of
+Ricks in the garden; and she lingered there alone a long time after
+receiving them. Fleda kept at a distance; she knew what must have
+happened, for from one of the windows she saw her rigid in a chair, her
+eyes strange and fixed, the newspaper open on the ground and the letters
+untouched in her lap. Before the morning's end she had disappeared, and
+the rest of that day she remained in her room: it recalled to Fleda, who
+had picked up the newspaper, the day, months before, on which Owen had
+come down to Poynton to make his engagement known. The hush of the house
+was at least the same, and the girl's own waiting, her soft wandering,
+through the hours: there was a difference indeed sufficiently great, of
+which her companion's absence might in some degree have represented a
+considerate recognition. That was at any rate the meaning Fleda,
+devoutly glad to be alone, attached to her opportunity. Mrs. Gereth's
+sole allusion, the next day, to the subject of their thoughts, has
+already been mentioned: it was a dazzled glance at the fact that Mona's
+quiet pace had really never slackened.
+
+Fleda fully assented. "I said of our disembodied friend here that she
+had suffered in proportion as she had been sure. But that's not always a
+source of suffering. It's Mona who must have been sure!"
+
+"She was sure of _you_!" Mrs. Gereth returned. But this didn't diminish
+the satisfaction taken by Fleda in showing how serenely and lucidly she
+could talk.
+
+
+
+
+XXII
+
+
+Her relation with her wonderful friend had, however, in becoming a new
+one, begun to shape itself almost wholly on breaches and omissions.
+Something had dropped out altogether, and the question between them,
+which time would answer, was whether the change had made them strangers
+or yokefellows. It was as if at last, for better or worse, they were, in
+a clearer, cruder air, really to know each other. Fleda wondered how
+Mrs. Gereth had escaped hating her: there were hours when it seemed that
+such a feat might leave after all a scant margin for future accidents.
+The thing indeed that now came out in its simplicity was that even in
+her shrunken state the lady of Ricks was larger than her wrongs. As for
+the girl herself, she had made up her mind that her feelings had no
+connection with the case. It was her pretension that they had never yet
+emerged from the seclusion into which, after her friend's visit to her
+at her sister's, we saw them precipitately retire: if she should
+suddenly meet them in straggling procession on the road it would be time
+enough to deal with them. They were all bundled there together, likes
+with dislikes and memories with fears; and she had for not thinking of
+them the excellent reason that she was too occupied with the actual. The
+actual was not that Owen Gereth had seen his necessity where she had
+pointed it out; it was that his mother's bare spaces demanded all the
+tapestry that the recipient of her bounty could furnish. There were
+moments during the month that followed when Mrs. Gereth struck her as
+still older and feebler, and as likely to become quite easily amused.
+
+At the end of it, one day, the London paper had another piece of news:
+"Mr. and Mrs. Owen Gereth, who arrived in town last week, proceed this
+morning to Paris." They exchanged no word about it till the evening, and
+none indeed would then have been uttered had not Mrs. Gereth
+irrelevantly broken out: "I dare say you wonder why I declared the other
+day with such assurance that he wouldn't live with her. He apparently
+_is_ living with her."
+
+"Surely it's the only proper thing for him to do."
+
+"They're beyond me--I give it up," said Mrs. Gereth.
+
+"I don't give it up--I never did," Fleda returned.
+
+"Then what do you make of his aversion to her?"
+
+"Oh, she has dispelled it."
+
+Mrs. Gereth said nothing for a minute. "You're prodigious in your choice
+of terms!" she then simply ejaculated.
+
+But Fleda went luminously on; she once more enjoyed her great command of
+her subject: "I think that when you came to see me at Maggie's you saw
+too many things, you had too many ideas."
+
+"You had none," said Mrs. Gereth: "you were completely bewildered."
+
+"Yes, I didn't quite understand--but I think I understand now. The case
+is simple and logical enough. She's a person who's upset by failure and
+who blooms and expands with success. There was something she had set her
+heart upon, set her teeth about--the house exactly as she had seen it."
+
+"She never saw it at all, she never looked at it!" cried Mrs. Gereth.
+
+"She doesn't look with her eyes; she looks with her ears. In her own way
+she had taken it in; she knew, she felt when it had been touched. That
+probably made her take an attitude that was extremely disagreeable. But
+the attitude lasted only while the reason for it lasted."
+
+"Go on--I can bear it now," said Mrs. Gereth. Her companion had just
+perceptibly paused.
+
+"I know you can, or I shouldn't dream of speaking. When the pressure was
+removed she came up again. From the moment the house was once more what
+it had to be, her natural charm reasserted itself."
+
+"Her natural charm!" Mrs. Gereth could barely articulate.
+
+"It's very great; everybody thinks so; there must be something in it. It
+operated as it had operated before. There's no need of imagining
+anything very monstrous. Her restored good humor, her splendid beauty,
+and Mr. Owen's impressibility and generosity sufficiently cover the
+ground. His great bright sun came out!"
+
+"And his great bright passion for another person went in. Your
+explanation would doubtless be perfection if he didn't love you."
+
+Fleda was silent a little. "What do you know about his 'loving' me?"
+
+"I know what Mrs. Brigstock herself told me."
+
+"You never in your life took her word for any other matter."
+
+"Then won't yours do?" Mrs. Gereth demanded. "Haven't I had it from your
+own mouth that he cares for you?"
+
+Fleda turned pale, but she faced her companion and smiled. "You
+confound, Mrs. Gereth, you mix things up. You've only had it from my own
+mouth that I care for _him_!"
+
+It was doubtless in contradictious allusion to this (which at the time
+had made her simply drop her head as in a strange, vain reverie) that
+Mrs. Gereth, a day or two later, said to Fleda: "Don't think I shall be
+a bit affected if I'm here to see it when he comes again to make up to
+you."
+
+"He won't do that," the girl replied. Then she added, smiling: "But if
+he should be guilty of such bad taste, it wouldn't be nice of you not to
+be disgusted."
+
+"I'm not talking of disgust; I'm talking of its opposite," said Mrs.
+Gereth.
+
+"Of its opposite?"
+
+"Why, of any reviving pleasure that one might feel in such an
+exhibition. I shall feel none at all. You may personally take it as you
+like; but what conceivable good will it do?"
+
+Fleda wondered. "To me, do you mean?"
+
+"Deuce take you, no! To what we don't, you know, by your wish, ever talk
+about."
+
+"The old things?" Fleda considered again. "It will do no good of any
+sort to anything or any one. That's another question I would rather we
+shouldn't discuss, please," she gently added.
+
+Mrs. Gereth shrugged her shoulders.
+
+"It certainly isn't worth it!"
+
+Something in her manner prompted her companion, with a certain
+inconsequence, to speak again. "That was partly why I came back to you,
+you know--that there should be the less possibility of anything
+painful."
+
+"Painful?" Mrs. Gereth stared. "What pain can I ever feel again?"
+
+"I meant painful to myself," Fleda, with a slight impatience, explained.
+
+"Oh, I see." Her friend was silent a minute. "You use sometimes such odd
+expressions. Well, I shall last a little, but I sha'n't last forever."
+
+"You'll last quite as long--" Here Fleda suddenly hesitated.
+
+Mrs. Gereth took her up with a cold smile that seemed the warning of
+experience against hyperbole. "As long as what, please?"
+
+The girl thought an instant; then met the difficulty by adopting, as an
+amendment, the same tone. "As any danger of the ridiculous."
+
+That did for the time, and she had moreover, as the months went on, the
+protection of suspended allusions. This protection was marked when, in
+the following November, she received a letter directed in a hand at
+which a quick glance sufficed to make her hesitate to open it. She said
+nothing, then or afterwards; but she opened it, for reasons that had
+come to her, on the morrow. It consisted of a page and a half from Owen
+Gereth, dated from Florence, but with no other preliminary. She knew
+that during the summer he had returned to England with his wife, and
+that after a couple of months they had again gone abroad. She also knew,
+without communication, that Mrs. Gereth, round whom Ricks had grown
+submissively and indescribably sweet, had her own interpretation of her
+daughter-in-law's share in this second migration. It was a piece of
+calculated insolence--a stroke odiously directed at showing whom it
+might concern that now she had Poynton fast she was perfectly
+indifferent to living there. The Morning Post, at Ricks, had again been
+a resource: it was stated in that journal that Mr. and Mrs. Owen Gereth
+proposed to spend the winter in India. There was a person to whom it was
+clear that she led her wretched husband by the nose. Such was the light
+in which contemporary history was offered to Fleda until, in her own
+room, late at night, she broke the seal of her letter.
+
+"I want you, inexpressibly, to have, as a remembrance, something of
+mine--something of real value. Something from Poynton is what I mean and
+what I should prefer. You know everything there, and far better than I
+what's best and what isn't. There are a lot of differences, but aren't
+some of the smaller things the most remarkable? I mean for judges, and
+for what they'd bring. What I want you to take from me, and to choose
+for yourself, is the thing in the whole house that's most beautiful and
+precious. I mean the 'gem of the collection,' don't you know? If it
+happens to be of such a sort that you can take immediate possession of
+it--carry it right away with you--so much the better. You're to have it
+on the spot, whatever it is. I humbly beg of you to go down there and
+see. The people have complete instructions: they'll act for you in every
+possible way and put the whole place at your service. There's a thing
+mamma used to call the Maltese cross and that I think I've heard her say
+is very wonderful. Is _that_ the gem of the collection? Perhaps you
+would take it, or anything equally convenient. Only I do want you
+awfully to let it be the very pick of the place. Let me feel that I can
+trust you for this. You won't refuse if you will think a little what it
+must be that makes me ask."
+
+Fleda read that last sentence over more times even than the rest; she
+was baffled--she couldn't think at all of what it might be. This was
+indeed because it might be one of so many things. She made for the
+present no answer; she merely, little by little, fashioned for herself
+the form that her answer should eventually wear. There was only one form
+that was possible--the form of doing, at her time, what he wished. She
+would go down to Poynton as a pilgrim might go to a shrine, and as to
+this she must look out for her chance. She lived with her letter, before
+any chance came, a month, and even after a month it had mysteries for
+her that she couldn't meet. What did it mean, what did it represent, to
+what did it correspond in his imagination or his soul? What was behind
+it, what was beyond it, what was, in the deepest depth, within it? She
+said to herself that with these questions she was under no obligation to
+deal. There was an explanation of them that, for practical purposes,
+would do as well as another: he had found in his marriage a happiness so
+much greater than, in the distress of his dilemma, he had been able to
+take heart to believe, that he now felt he owed her a token of gratitude
+for having kept him in the straight path. That explanation, I say, she
+could throw off; but no explanation in the least mattered: what
+determined her was the simple strength of her impulse to respond. The
+passion for which what had happened had made no difference, the passion
+that had taken this into account before as well as after, found here an
+issue that there was nothing whatever to choke. It found even a relief
+to which her imagination immensely contributed. Would she act upon his
+offer? She would act with secret rapture. To have as her own something
+splendid that he had given her, of which the gift had been his signed
+desire, would be a greater joy than the greatest she had supposed to be
+left to her, and she felt that till the sense of this came home she had
+even herself not known what burned in her successful stillness. It was
+an hour to dream of and watch for; to be patient was to draw out the
+sweetness. She was capable of feeling it as an hour of triumph, the
+triumph of everything in her recent life that had not held up its head.
+She moved there in thought--in the great rooms she knew; she should be
+able to say to herself that, for once at least, her possession was as
+complete as that of either of the others whom it had filled only with
+bitterness. And a thousand times yes--her choice should know no scruple:
+the thing she should go down to take would be up to the height of her
+privilege. The whole place was in her eyes, and she spent for weeks her
+private hours in a luxury of comparison and debate. It should be one of
+the smallest things because it should be one she could have close to
+her; and it should be one of the finest because it was in the finest he
+saw his symbol. She said to herself that of what it would symbolize she
+was content to know nothing more than just what her having it would tell
+her. At bottom she inclined to the Maltese cross--with the added reason
+that he had named it. But she would look again and judge afresh; she
+would on the spot so handle and ponder that there shouldn't be the shade
+of a mistake.
+
+Before Christmas she had a natural opportunity to go to London; there
+was her periodical call upon her father to pay as well as a promise to
+Maggie to redeem. She spent her first night in West Kensington, with the
+idea of carrying out on the morrow the purpose that had most of a
+motive. Her father's affection was not inquisitive, but when she
+mentioned to him that she had business in the country that would oblige
+her to catch an early train, he deprecated her excursion in view of the
+menace of the weather. It was spoiling for a storm; all the signs of a
+winter gale were in the air. She replied that she would see what the
+morning might bring; and it brought, in fact, what seemed in London an
+amendment. She was to go to Maggie the next day, and now that she had
+started her eagerness had become suddenly a pain. She pictured her
+return that evening with her trophy under her cloak; so that after
+looking, from the doorstep, up and down the dark street, she decided,
+with a new nervousness, and sallied forth to the nearest place of access
+to the "Underground." The December dawn was dolorous, but there was
+neither rain nor snow; it was not even cold, and the atmosphere of West
+Kensington, purified by the wind, was like a dirty old coat that had
+been bettered by a dirty brush. At the end of almost an hour, in the
+larger station, she had taken her place in a third-class compartment;
+the prospect before her was the run of eighty minutes to Poynton. The
+train was a fast one, and she was familiar with the moderate measure of
+the walk to the park from the spot at which it would drop her.
+
+Once in the country, indeed, she saw that her father was right: the
+breath of December was abroad with a force from which the London
+labyrinth had protected her. The green fields were black, the sky was
+all alive with the wind; she had, in her anxious sense of the elements,
+her wonder at what might happen, a reminder of the surmises, in the old
+days of going to the Continent, that used to worry her on the way, at
+night, to the horrid cheap crossings by long sea. Something, in a dire
+degree, at this last hour, had begun to press on her heart: it was the
+sudden imagination of a disaster, or at least of a check, before her
+errand was achieved. When she said to herself that something might
+happen she wanted to go faster than the train. But nothing could happen
+save a dismayed discovery that, by some altogether unlikely chance, the
+master and mistress of the house had already come back. In that case she
+must have had a warning, and the fear was but the excess of her hope. It
+was every one's being exactly where every one was that lent the quality
+to her visit. Beyond lands and seas and alienated forever, they in their
+different ways gave her the impression to take as she had never taken
+it. At last it was already there, though the darkness of the day had
+deepened; they had whizzed past Chater--Chater, which was the station
+before the right one. Off in that quarter was an air of wild rain, but
+there shimmered straight across it a brightness that was the color of
+the great interior she had been haunting. That vision settled before
+her--in the house the house was all; and as the train drew up she rose,
+in her mean compartment, quite proudly erect with the thought that all
+for Fleda Vetch then the house was standing there.
+
+But with the opening of the door she encountered a shock, though for an
+instant she couldn't have named it; the next moment she saw it was given
+her by the face of the man advancing to let her out, an old lame porter
+of the station, who had been there in Mrs. Gereth's time and who now
+recognized her. He looked up at her so hard that she took an alarm and
+before alighting broke out to him: "They've come back?" She had a
+confused, absurd sense that even he would know that in this case she
+mustn't be there. He hesitated, and in the few seconds her alarm had
+completely changed its ground: it seemed to leap, with her quick jump
+from the carriage, to the ground that was that of his stare at her.
+"Smoke?" She was on the platform with her frightened sniff: it had taken
+her a minute to become aware of an extraordinary smell. The air was full
+of it, and there were already heads at the window of the train, looking
+out at something she couldn't see. Some one, the only other passenger,
+had got out of another carriage, and the old porter hobbled off to close
+his door. The smoke was in her eyes, but she saw the station-master,
+from the end of the platform, recognize her too and come straight to
+her. He brought her a finer shade of surprise than the porter, and while
+he was coming she heard a voice at a window of the train say that
+something was "a good bit off--a mile from the town." That was just what
+Poynton was. Then her heart stood still at the white wonder in the
+station-master's face.
+
+"You've come down to it, miss, already?"
+
+At this she knew. "Poynton's on fire?"
+
+"Gone, miss--with this awful gale. You weren't wired? Look out!" he
+cried in the next breath, seizing her; the train was going on, and she
+had given a lurch that almost made it catch her as it passed. When it
+had drawn away she became more conscious of the pervading smoke, which
+the wind seemed to hurl in her face.
+
+"_Gone?_" She was in the man's hands; she clung to him.
+
+"Burning still, miss. Ain't it quite too dreadful? Took early this
+morning--the whole place is up there."
+
+In her bewildered horror she tried to think. "Have they come back?"
+
+"Back? They'll be there all day!"
+
+"Not Mr. Gereth, I mean--nor his wife?"
+
+"Nor his mother, miss--not a soul of _them_ back. A pack o' servants in
+charge--not the old lady's lot, eh? A nice job for care-takers! Some
+rotten chimley or one of them portable lamps set down in the wrong
+place. What has done it is this cruel, cruel night." Then as a great
+wave of smoke half choked them, he drew her with force to the little
+waiting room. "Awkward for you, miss--I see!"
+
+She felt sick; she sank upon a seat, staring up at him. "Do you mean
+that great house is _lost_?"
+
+"It was near it, I was told, an hour ago--the fury of the flames had got
+such a start. I was there myself at six, the very first I heard of it.
+They were fighting it then, but you couldn't quite say they had got it
+down."
+
+Fleda jerked herself up. "Were they saving the things?"
+
+"That's just where it was, miss--to get _at_ the blessed things. And the
+want of right help--it maddened me to stand and see 'em muff it. This
+ain't a place, like, for anything organized. They don't come up to a
+_reel_ emergency."
+
+She passed out of the door that opened toward the village and met a
+great acrid gust. She heard a far-off windy roar which, in her dismay,
+she took for that of flames a mile away, and which, the first instant,
+acted upon her as a wild solicitation. "I must go there." She had
+scarcely spoken before the same omen had changed into an appalling
+check.
+
+Her vivid friend, moreover, had got before her; he clearly suffered from
+the nature of the control he had to exercise. "Don't do that, miss--you
+won't care for it at all." Then as she waveringly stood her ground,
+"It's not a place for a young lady, nor, if you'll believe me, a sight
+for them as are in any way affected."
+
+Fleda by this time knew in what way she was affected: she became limp
+and weak again; she felt herself give everything up. Mixed with the
+horror, with the kindness of the station-master, with the smell of
+cinders and the riot of sound, was the raw bitterness of a hope that she
+might never again in life have to give up so much at such short notice.
+She heard herself repeat mechanically, yet as if asking it for the first
+time: "Poynton's _gone_?"
+
+The man hesitated. "What can you call it, miss, if it ain't really
+saved?"
+
+A minute later she had returned with him to the waiting-room, where, in
+the thick swim of things, she saw something like the disk of a clock.
+"Is there an up-train?" she asked.
+
+"In seven minutes."
+
+She came out on the platform: everywhere she met the smoke. She covered
+her face with her hands. "I'll go back."
+
+
+
+
+Henry James's Books.
+
+
+A PASSIONATE PILGRIM, AND OTHER TALES.
+
+TRANSATLANTIC SKETCHES.
+
+RODERICK HUDSON. A Novel.
+
+THE AMERICAN. A Novel.
+
+THE EUROPEANS. A Novel.
+
+CONFIDENCE. A Novel.
+
+THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY.
+
+THE AUTHOR OF BELTRAFFIO. Including also Pandora; Georgina's Reasons;
+The Path of Duty; Four Meetings.
+
+THE SIEGE OF LONDON. Including also The Pension Beaurepas; The Point of
+View.
+
+TALES OF THREE CITIES. Including The Impressions of a Cousin; Lady
+Barberina; A New England Winter.
+
+A LITTLE TOUR IN FRANCE.
+
+PORTRAITS OF PLACES.
+
+DAISY MILLER. A Comedy.
+
+THE TRAGIC MUSE. 2 vols.
+
+WATCH AND WARD. A Novel.
+
+THE SPOILS OF POYNTON. A Novel.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Spoils of Poynton, by Henry James
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE SPOILS OF POYNTON ***
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+Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org) public repository for
+eBook #33325 (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/33325)