 Chapter 1. Mrs. Gareth had said that 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 water bath was a punctual meal, and she still had 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 knows, 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 the necessity of every nerve. The flowers at water bath would probably go wrong in color, and the nightingale sing out of tune. But she remembered to have heard the place described as possessing those advantages that he usually spoken of as natural. There were advantages enough that 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 wallpaper in her room. Yet nonetheless, 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 sundies. 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 grosser's wife, she would rather have perished than have looked en demoncier. 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 ground, she recognized that with a sight, 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 for 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 vetsches, had no beauty. But Mrs. Gareth, scanning the dullness for a sign of life, had been straight away able to classify such a figure as the least for the moment of her reflections. Flea de Vetch was dressed with an idea, though perhaps not with much else, and that made a bond when there was none other, especially as in this case the idea was real, not imitation. Mrs. Gareth 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 and exchange of platitudes. The two less developed brigstocks, daughters of the house, were in particular tiresomely lovely. A second glance, a sharp one at the young lady before her, conveyed to Mrs. Gareth the soothing assurance that she was also guiltless of looking hot and fine. They had had no talkers yet. But here was a note that would effectively 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. Gareth had recognized in her attitude. The elder woman drew her down again and for a minute as they sat together, their eyes met and sat 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. Gareth was destined to take to Flee de 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. Gareth 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, contending herself with letting it regulate her steps and show quietly in her life, remembering at all times that there were few things more soundless than a deep devotion. She was therefore struck with the acuteness of the little girl, who would 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 gym cracks 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. Gareth 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 ladies a set of comic watercolors, a family joke by a family genius, and in the youngers a souvenir from some centennial or other exhibition that they shudderingly eluded to. The house was perversely full of souvenirs of places even more ugly than itself, and of things that 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 Flea de Vetch's conviction that the application of it, by their own hands and hilariously shoving each other, was the amusement of the brig-stocks on rainy days. When, as criticism deepened, Flea de dropped the suggestion that some people would perhaps see something in Mona, Mrs. Gareth 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. Gareth most suspected. She confided to her young friend that it was her suspicion that had brought her to water-bath, and this was going very far, for on this spot as a refuge, a remedy, she had clutched at the idea that something might be done with a 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 had talked to Mrs. Furman, 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 would ask if it weren't wonderful, Mrs. Gareth had begun to say a word about Pointon, 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, upwinch, Owen Gareth and Mona Briggstock 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. Gareth had expressed to reserves on the subject of Ms. Briggstock's personality. Ms. Briggstock 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 omission 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 Gareth, who had plenty of them, an 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. Gareth. There had been intimacy, oh yes, intimacy as well as plurality, in the horseplay 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. Gareth'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 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. Gareth's intervention from the fact that ten minutes later, on the way to church, still another pairing had been affected. 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. Gareth 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 imposed themselves as an influence, such as feeling finally that Owen Gareth 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 offence, of a pleasant effect and more remarkable indeed than to be clever and horrid. Owen Gareth, 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. Gareth. On that flushed and huddled Sunday a great matter occurred, her little life became aware of a singular quickening, her meager 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 out from the train in the suburban fields was a future full of the things she particularly loved. These were neither more nor less than the things with which she had had time to learn from Mrs. Gareth, that pointon overflowed. Pointon, in the south of England, was this lady's established, or rather her disestablished home. It had 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 Gareth, their uncle and brother-in-law. His mother had laid her hand so engagingly on flea-de-veche, that in a very few days the girl knew it was possible they should suffer together in Caduggan Place, almost as much as they had suffered together at Water Bath. The kind soldier'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. Gareth's situation was that, thanks to the rare perfection of Pointon, 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 Fleida could see that she held there was nothing in England really to compare to Pointon. 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, Destiny had given her an inestimable chance. She knew how rarely well things had gone with her, and that she had enjoyed an extraordinary fortune. There had been, in the first place, the exquisite old house itself, early Jacobian, 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 and 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 anyone 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 Flida, 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 gaiety and conviction that she was herself the greatest Jew who would ever track the victim. Flida, with her mother dead, hadn't even so much 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 else's, were as yet her only material. Mrs. Gareth 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 spaces in which she had mainly moved, she could have borne a chronic couture. She was constantly summoned to gedug in place, and before the end of 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. For Mrs. Gareth 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 Fleeter that she couldn't completely know why, till she should have seen the things at Pointon. Fleeter 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 would be shown her early in July, when Mrs. Gareth 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 Fleeter had to sit up to was the confirmed appearance that Owen Gareth 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. Gareth, her companion could see, with a vividness that at moments almost ceased to be that of sanity. She would have to give up Pointon, and give it up to a product of water bath. That was the wrong that rankled the humiliation at which Fleeter would be able adequately to shudder only when she should know the place. She did know water bath, 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. Gareth had apparently been a very amiable man, but Mr. Gareth 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 on Owen's affection. And in truth, as poor Mrs. Gareth inquired, how could he possibly have had a pre-vision? He who turned his eyes instinctively from everything repulsive, of anything so abnormal as a water bath 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. Gareth 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, Fleida exclaimed with some impetuosity, stopping short, however, before she completed her sentence. Mrs. Gareth looked at her rather hard. If he doesn't care? Fleida 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. Gareth 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. Fleida 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. Gareth. 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. Gareth 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. Fleeter was struck, was even a little startled with the way Mrs. Gareth 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 friends continuing to live at Pointon? 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. Gareth hailed this question with a wan, compassionate smile. She replied that a common household in such a case was exactly so inconceivable that Fleeter 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. Fleeter's breath was sometimes taken away by the great bounds and illusions which, on Mrs. Gareth's lips, the course of the discussion could take. This was the first she had heard of Mona's hatred, though she certainly had not needed Mrs. Gareth to tell her that in close quarters that young lady would prove secretly mulesh. Later Fleeter 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. Gareth 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. Fleeter reasoned that they wouldn't, after all, smash things or burn them up, and Mrs. Gareth 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 water baths, 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 pointen in the spirit of a brigstock, and that in the spirit of a brigstock she would deal with her acquisition? Did Fleeter really see her, Mrs. Gareth demanded, spending the rest of her days with such a creature's elbow in her eye? Fleeter had to declare that she certainly didn't, and that water bath 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, in as much as to her knowledge, Owen Gareth 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. Gareth 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 Fleida 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 and 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 Fleida found her beauty in the candor, and even in the modesty which apparently kept him from suspecting that two such wise heads could possibly be occupied with Owen Gareth. End of Chapter 2 Chapter 3 of The Spoils of Pointon. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. The Spoils of Pointon by Henry James. Chapter 3. They went at last the wise heads down to Pointon, where the palpitating girl had the full revelation. Now do you know how I feel? Mrs. Gareth 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, Fleida took a prodigious span. She perfectly understood how Mrs. Gareth felt. She had understood but meagerly 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 Pointon, often as she had shown her house, had been present at such an exhibition. She exalted 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 which she had achieved. People were so grossly ignorant and everybody, even the knowing ones, as they thought themselves, more or less dense. What Mrs. Gareth 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 Fleida's flair, and Fleida 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 Pointon was the record of a life. It was written in great syllables of color and form, the tongues of other countries in the hands of rare artists. It was all France and Italy, where 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. Gareth left her guest to finger fondly the brasses that Louis Kanz 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. At an all-the-great wainscoted house there was not an inch of pasted paper. What struck Fleida 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 or stooped. She felt, indeed, as this lady had intubated to her that she would, both of 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, the 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 the taking of possession, she, too, was to give it up, for she reflected that if Mrs. Gareth'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 him, nor joined him later, it was because he still found London jolly. Yet the question remained of whether the jollity of London were not merely the only name his small vocabulary yielded for the jollity of Mona Brighstock. 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 fleeta gathered from the tone in which, one morning at breakfast, a letter just opened made Mrs. Gareth cry out. Her dismay was almost a shriek. While 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 Pointon 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. Gareth 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 intelligent 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. Gareth, 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 swaying, a hope of which Flida 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. Gareth the sum of the world was rare French furniture and oriental china. She could at a stretch imagine peoples not having, but she couldn't imagine they're not wanting and not missing. The young couple were to be accompanied by Mrs. Brigstock, and with a pre-vision of how fiercely they would be watched, Flida became conscious before the party arrived of an amused diplomatic pity for them. Almost as much as Mrs. Gareth's, her taste was her life, though her life was somehow the larger for it. Besides, she had another care now. There was someone 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, Flida tried, so far as the wish to efface herself aloud, 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. Gareth trued her 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. Flida 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 and fine scenery, she exercised it. She felt in her nerves the effect of such a manner on her companions, 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 one she had, eyes into which Flida thought it strange, Owen Gareth should have to plunge for his fate, and his mother for a confession of whether poignant was the success. She made no remark that helped 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 Flida Vetch to burst into tears. She was as content to say nothing as if, Mrs. Gareth afterwards exclaimed, she had been keeping her mouth shut in a railway tunnel. Mrs. Gareth contrived at the end of an hour to convey to Flida that it was plain she was brutally ignorant, but Flida more finely 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 over 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. Gareth 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 pointing, in as much as it was just pointing that was forced upon her as a subject for effusiveness? Such subjects, to Mona Brighstock, 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 Fleeter 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. Gareth 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 Pointon was in the style of Pointon, and poor Mrs. Brighstock, who at least was determined to rise, and had brought with her a trophy of her journey, a ladies magazine purchased at the station, a horrible thing with patterns for anti-McCassers, 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 day's end it was clear to fleet a 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 Gareth 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? Fleet had pretended vagueness, playing at obscurity, and assented disingenuously to the proposition that they at least had a respite. The future was dark to her, but there was the silk and 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. Gareth, 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 the listening parasol, but without a visible look for the great flowered picture that had been hung there by Mrs. Gareth'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 Flita came down, Mrs. Gareth 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 born on a wave of joy exactly to announce, before the brig stocks departed, that Mona had at last faltered out the sweet word he had been waiting for? He shook hands with his friendly violence, but Flita 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. Gareth 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. Flita 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. Gareth's belief that the danger had dropped. She was sure, moreover, that his tribute to Mona's taste was the repetition of the eloquent words in which the girl had herself recorded it. She could indeed hear, with all its 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 the back, run another race up or down a green bank. Flita knew Mrs. Gareth 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. Gareth went on in a moment with an innocence of which Flita 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 Flita and conveyed that she would understand what he meant even if his mother didn't. Flita, however, mainly understood that Mrs. Gareth, 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. Gareth, with a fine freedom of fancy. There are things in this house that we almost starved for. They were our religion, they were our life, they were us. And now they're only me, accepting that they're also you, thank God, a little you, dear. She continued, suddenly inflicting on Flita 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 defaced them with my own hands. Can't you see me, Flita, 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 devilry if it should be only to bring in her own little belongings and horrors. The world is full of cheap Jim cracks 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 Flita 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 celebration 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. Gareth 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 Flita's neck, and before Flita, horribly shamed, could shake her off and burst into tears which couldn't have been explained, but which might perhaps have been understood. End of Chapter 3 A week later, Owen Gareth came down to inform his mother that he had settled with Mona Briggstock, but it was not at all a joy to Flita, aware of 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. Gareth 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 honour 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. Flita 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. Gareth had tried to spy into her opinions. Flita 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 water bath suddenly and perversely said, Why has she never had a winter garden thrown out? If I ever have a place of my own, I mean to have one. Flita, 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 Pointon. She remembered at water bath a conservatory, where she had caught a bad cold in the company of a stuffed cockatoo fastened to a tropical bow, 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 water bath. Flita wondered if she meant to convey that it was the only grandchildren 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 Pointon, but there evidently would 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 into breakfast, it was for Flita to see at a glance that there had been a further passage of some high colour between Owen and his mother, and she had turned pale and guessing to what extremity at her expense, Mrs. Gareth had found occasion to proceed. Hadn't she, after her clumsy flight, been pressed upon Owen and still clear at terms? Mrs. Gareth would practically have said to him, if you'll take her, I'll move away without a sound, but if you take anyone else, anyone I'm not sure of as I am of her, heaven help me, I'll fight to the death. Breakfast this morning at Pointon had been a meal singularly silent, in spite of the vague little cries with which Mrs. Briggstock turned up the underside of plates, and the knowing but alarming raps administered by her big knuckles to porcelain cups. Someone had to respond to her, and the duty assigned itself to Flita, who, while pretending to meet her on the ground of explanation, wondered what Owen thought of a girl still indelically 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. Gareth, 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, moaning, easy creature, I dare say you think. However, if you won't come, you won't, non parlant plus. It is stupid here, after what you are accustomed to. We can only all round do what we can, eh? For heaven's sakes, don't let your mother forget her precious publication, The Female Magazine, with, though what you call them, the grease-catchers. There! Mrs. Gareth, delivering herself from the doorstep, had tossed the periodical higher in air than was absolutely needful, tossed it toward the carriage the retreating part he was about to enter, Mona from the force of habit, the reflex action of the custom of sport had popped out with the little spring, a long arm, and intercepted the missile as easily as she would have caused the 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. Gareth afterwards said, that the carriage had rolled away, but it was while that laughter was still in the air that Fleta 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 sign of her serene conscience, and the fact that till indoctrinated she didn't even know what Fleta 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 the mere value, as one might say, of a good agent. Mrs. Gareth was generously sorry, but she was still more surprised, surprised that Fleta'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 an explanation that she could see what her young friend meant by having been laid, as Fleta called it, at his feet. But it struck the girl that the admission was only made to please her, and that Mrs. Gareth was secretly surprised at her not being 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 point in, of course, Fleta herself had taken. Wasn't this latter fancy then so great after all? Fleta felt she could declare it to be great indeed, when really for the sake of it she could forgive what she had suffered, and after her approaches and tears, the severations 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 bomb, consent not to depart, take refuge in the thin comfort of at least knowing the truth. The truth was simply that all Mrs. Gareth'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. Gareth 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. Gareth was clearly more surprised than ever. She marveled a moment, not even to have pointed, not even to have pointed. But why on earth, Mrs. Gareth's sad eyes were fixed on her. Fleed a-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. Gareth, 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 pointed. Mrs. Gareth evidently thought in these days of little but things hymenial, 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 water-bath. 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 the vicious nod at the southern horizon, will 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 Pointon, it would offer them, as in one of their Jim-cracked baskets, or other vessels of ugliness, a definite daily facility that Pointon could never give. Owen might manage his estate just as he managed it now, and Mrs. Gareth 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 Flida 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 out of leaving her in personal possession. Flida Vetch, whom from the earliest 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 her 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. Gareth 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 Flida conferred as at the door of a death chamber, but the girl, without either fatuity or resentment, judged that, since it could render Mrs. Gareth indifferent even to the ministrations of disinterested attachment, the scene had been tremendous. She was absent from luncheon, where indeed Flida 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 Flida 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. Flida 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 an even 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 Flida 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 Briggstock. Ah, really? cried Flida, 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, Flida exclaimed. Oh, she's all right. Mother must come round. Only give her time, said Flida. 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. Gareth's wretched attitude would have no influence at all on the offence, absolutely fixed when he came down and distant by only three months. He liked Flida 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 pointin' 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. The sit was that Owen wanted to know, and there could be no better proof of his friendliness than his air of depending on Flida 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 Flida 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 he wouldn't give up, and what was the good of pointing 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 Flida the sound of washing stands and copious bedding, and she could well imagine the note it might have struck for Mrs. Gareth. 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 the 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. Gareth had been liberally provided for, and had asked him, codently, 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 Pointon, as the refuge of her declining years, had been left to the late Mr. Gareth, 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 Flida that he had quietly taken Mona to see it. It wasn't a place like Pointon, 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 Pointon that were Mrs. Gareth's particular property, of course she must take them away with her. But one of the matters that became clear to Flida was that this transfer would be immediately subject to Miss Briggstock's approval. The special business that she herself now became aware of being charged with was that of seeing Mrs. Gareth 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. Gareth that day. She spent it in roaming with sick sighs and feelings, 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? Flida couldn't think so, once she remembered that, so far as he was concerned, Mrs. Gareth would still have been welcomed to keep her seat by the point of fire. The fact that from the moment one accepted his marrying, one saw no very different course for Owen to take. This fact 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 fairytale, up to the very taste of the beautiful piece with which she would have filled the air, if only something might have been that could never have been. I'll give up the house if they'll let me take what I require. That, on the borrow, was what Mrs. Gareth's stifled night had qualified her to say, with a tragic face at breakfast. Flida 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. Gareth had so patiently and consummately wrought. Pale but radiant, 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 Fleeta 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 those 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 had 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 Gareth. With such a mother to give in 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 that 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. Gareth had said, and the following week Owen in fact reappeared. He might merely have written Fleeta 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 point in the date at which he must look to find the house vacant. You don't think I'm rougher hard, do you? He asked of Fleeta, his impatience shining in his idle eyes as the dining-hour shines in club windows. The place that Rick stands there with open arms, and then I give her lots of time, tell her she can remove everything that belongs to her. Fleeta recognized the elements of what the newspapers call a deadlock in the circumstance that nothing at point and belong to Mrs. Gareth, 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 with a clean page. What, however, was the poor woman in that case to begin with? What was she to do at all on her meager income but make the best of the objadal of Rick's, the treasures collected by Mr. Gareth's maiden aunt? She had never been near the place. For long years it had been led 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 Fleeta, 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's 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 objadal of Rick's would be to turn them out into the road. What belonged to her at point and, 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 Fleeta asked Mrs. Gareth 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 point and 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 align that would dishonor them and dishonor the tradition they embodied, though Fleeta 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 Fleeta, 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 founded 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. Gareth cared for, was a subject for poetry, for idolatry. Hadn't she often told Fleeta of her friend Madame de Jôme, 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 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. Gareth 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 Jôme. 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. Like best there wasn't a thing in the house 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. Gareth, whose criticism was often gay, dilated with sardonic humor on the happy look a dozen objects from point and would wear and the charming effect they were used 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 than its cynical unity than the ignominy of such a mixture. All this was no great help to Fleida, insofar as Fleida 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 desired 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 perpetuate these offenses without meeting his adversary. Mrs. Gareth was as willing as himself that he should address to Fleida Vetch whatever cruel remarks he might have to make. She only pitied her poor young friend for repeated encounters with the person as to whom she perfectly understood the girl's repulsion. Fleida 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. Gareth 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 Fleida 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. Gareth 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, Fleida 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, in as much as it was just on the ground of her not liking him, that Mrs. Gareth trusted her so much. Mrs. Gareth herself didn't in these days like him at all, and she was, of course, always on Mrs. Gareth's side. He ended, really, while the preparations for his marriage went on, by quite a little custom of coming and going, but at no one of these junctures would his mother receive him. He talked only with Fleida and strolled with Fleida, and when he asked her, in regard to the great matter, if Mrs. Gareth 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. Gareth, 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 Rick's. 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. Fleida'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. Gareth 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. Fleida had instantly averted her eyes from these ornaments. But Mrs. Gareth 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 wasn't the center of the ceiling, a big square beam papered over in white, as to which Fleida hesitated about venturing to remark that it was rather picturesque. She recognized in time that this venture 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. Gareth had the finest views, the thing in the world she most despised was the meanness of the single flap. From end to end at Pointon there were high double leaves, at ricks the entrances to the rooms were like the holes of rabbit hutches. It was all nonetheless not so bad as Fleida 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 Pointon. 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, Fleida 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 sureer 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 deer. 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 Pointon. Mrs. Gareth 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. Gareth, 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. Fleta 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. Gareth had replied. End of Chapter 5 Chapter 6 of the Spoils of Pointon. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. The Spoils of Pointon by Henry James, Chapter 6. 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 tussle, dishevelment, shrieks. Yet Fleta 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. Gareth'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. Fleta had rather, and indeed with shame, a confused, pitying vision of Mrs. Gareth, with her great scene left in a manner on her hands, Mrs. Gareth 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 appointed, 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 host distanding very still, with the hanging hands of an invalid and the active eyes of adventure. These eyes appeared to Fleta 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. Gareth, at last sighingly, exclaimed, I'm thinking over what I had better take. Fleta 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. Gareth 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. Fleta 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. Gareth 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, throughout a radiance in which the poor woman saw, in solution, all her old loves and patience, all her old tricks and triumphs. Fleta had a depressed sense of not, after all, helping her much. This was lightened indeed by the fact that Mrs. Gareth, letting her off easily, didn't now seem to expect it. Her sympathy, her interest, her feeling for everything for which Mrs. Gareth 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. Fleta'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 her protection to Mrs. Gareth. 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 frankly 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 Pointon. 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, Fleeder 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. Gareth 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 Fleeder 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 silent 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, an inmate all but paid, this young lady's repressed emotion began to require still more repression. She grew impatient of her situation at Pointon. 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? Fleeter became aware of a sudden desire, as well as of pressing reasons, to bring her stay to Pointon to a close. She had not, on the one hand, like a minion of the law, undertaken to see Mrs. Gareth 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 countermine. 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 Pointon 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. Gareth gave her up as heroically as if she had been a great bargain, and fleeted anew that she wouldn't at present miss any of Owens, for Owens was shooting at Waterbath. Owens' shooting was Owens' lost, and there was scant sport at Pointon. The first shoe she had for Mrs. Gareth was news of that ladies 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 band box 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 Pointon all next week. There's more room than I quite measured the other day, and a rather good set of old Worcester. But what a space and time, what's even old Worcester to your wretched and affectionate AG? The day after Fleeter 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 curb stone 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 handsome had pulled up short in obedience to the brandished stick of a demonstrative occupant. This occupant was Owen Gareth, 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 just 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, and 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 a 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, Fleed had 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. Fleed 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 shop girls and the uses of chiffon. He unduly prolonged their business together, giving Fleed a sense that he was putting off something particular that he had to face. If she had ever dreamed of Owen Gareth 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 Fleed a 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 travelling rug, a massive clock, a table for breakfast and 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 an 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 prescribed by his fear of seeming to patronize her, to refer to her small means and her deficiencies. Fleed a found it easy to chaff him about his exaggeration of her desserts. She gave him 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 Gareth 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 with 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 to make 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 the 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. Fleed of 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 Fleeda 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 a pearl-diving plunge. It was down at the very bottom of all that had lately occurred. For all that had lately occurred was that Owen Gareth had come and gone at Pointon. 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, whereby 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 Pointon. After what had passed, she wouldn't even be at his wedding, and it was not possible now that Mr. Gareth 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 Flida. 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 Flida, at this moment, it appeared that the right thing might easily be the wrong. At any rate, he only said, 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 more over 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 swallow, 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. Gareth, I must get on, she declared with the 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 the 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 in any case 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.