The Old Things

V.

“ I ’LL give up the house if they ’ll let me take what I require ! ” That, on the morrow, was what Mrs. Gereth’s stifled night had qualified her to say, with a tragic face, at breakfast. Fleda reflected that what she “ required ” was simply every object that surrounded them. The poor woman would have admitted this truth and accepted the conclusion to be drawn from it, the reduction to the absurd of her attitude, the exaltation of her revolt. The girl’s dread of a scandal, of spectators and critics, diminished the more she saw how little vulgar avidity had to do with this rigor. It was not the crude love of possession; it was the need to be faithful to a trust and loyal to an idea. The idea was surely noble : it was that of the beauty Mrs. Gereth had wrought. Pale but radiant, with her back to the wall, she rose there like a heroine guarding a treasure. To give up the ship was to flinch from her duty ; there was something in her eyes that declared she would die at her post. If their difference should become public, the shame would be all for the others. If Waterbath thought it could afford to expose itself, why, Waterbath was welcome to the folly. Her fanaticism gave her a new distinction, and Fleda perceived almost with awe that she had never carried herself so well. She trod the place like a reigning queen or a proud usurper; full as it was of splendid pieces, it could show, in these days, no ornament so effective as its menaced mistress.

Our young lady’s spirit was strangely divided ; she had a tenderness for Owen which she deeply concealed, yet it left her occasion to marvel at the way a man was made who could care in any relation for a creature like Mona Brigstock, when he had known in any relation a creature like Adela Gereth. With such a mother to give him the pitch, how could he take it so low ? She wondered that she did n’t despise him for this, but there was something that kept her from it. If there had been nothing else, it would have sufficed that she really found herself from this moment the medium of communication with him.

“ He ’ll come back to assert himself,” Mrs. Gereth had said ; and the following week Owen in fact reappeared. He might merely have written, Fleda could see, but he had come in person, because it was at once “ nicer ” for his mother and stronger for his cause. He did n’t like the row, though Mona probably did ; if he had n’t a sense of beauty, he had after all a sense of justice : but it was inevitable he should clearly announce at Poynton the date at which he must look to find the house vacant. “ You don’t think I ‘m rough or hard, do you ? ” he asked of Fleda, his impatience shining in his idle eyes as the dining-hour shines in clubwindows. “ The place at Ricks stands there with open arms. And then I give her lots of time, and tell her she can remove everything that belongs to her.” Fleda recognized the elements of what the newspapers call a deadlock in the circumstance that nothing at Poynton belonged to Mrs. Gereth either more or less than anything else. She must either take everything or nothing, and the girl’s suggestion was that it might perhaps be an inspiration to do the latter, and begin again on a clean page. What, however, was the poor woman, in that case, to begin with ? What was she to do at all, on her meagre income, but make the best of the objets d’art of Ricks, the treasures collected by Mr. Gereth’s maiden aunt ? She had never been near the place: for long years it had been let to strangers, and after that the foreboding that it would be her doom had kept her from the abasement of it. She had felt that she should see it soon enough, but Fleda (who was careful not to betray to her that Mona had seen it and had been gratified) knew her reasons for believing that the maiden aunt’s principles had had much in common with the principles of Waterbath. The only thing, in short, that she would ever have to do with the objets d’art of Ricks would be to turn them out into the road. What belonged to her at Poynton, as Owen said, would conveniently mitigate the void resulting from that demonstration.

The exchange of observations between the friends had grown very direct by the time Fleda asked Mrs. Gereth whether she literally meant to shut herself up and stand a siege, or whether it was her idea to expose herself, more informally, to be dragged out of the house by constables. “ Oh, I prefer the constables and the dragging ! ” the heroine of Poynton had answered. “ I want to make Owen and Mona do everything that will be most publicly odious.” She gave it out that it was her one thought now to force them to a line that would dishonor them and dishonor the tradition they embodied, though Fleda was privately sure that she had visions of an alternative policy. The strange thing was that, proud and fastidious all her life, she now showed so little distaste for the world’s hearing of the squabble. What had taken place in her, above all, was that a long resentment had ripened. She hated the effacement to which English usage reduced the widowed mother : she had discoursed of it passionately to Fleda; contrasted it with the beautiful homage paid in other countries to women in that position, women no better than herself, whom she had seen acclaimed and enthroned, whom she had known and envied ; made, in short, as little as possible a secret of the injury, the bitterness, she found in it. The great wrong Owen had done her was not his “taking up ” with Mona, — that was disgusting, but it was a detail, an accidental form ; it was his failure from the first to understand what it was to have a mother at all, to appreciate the beauty and sanctity of the character. She was just his mother as his nose was just his nose, and he had never had the least imagination or tenderness or gallantry about her. One’s mother, good heavens, if one were the kind of fine young man one ought to be, the only kind Mrs. Gereth cared for, was a subject for poetry, for idolatry. Had n’t she often told Fleda of her friend Madame de Jaume, the wittiest of women, but a small, black, crooked person, each of whose three boys, when absent, wrote to her every day of their lives ? She had the house in Paris, she had the house in Poitou, she had more than in the lifetime of her husband (to whom, in spite of her appearance, she had afforded repeated cause for jealousy), because she had, to the end of her days, the supreme word about everything. It was easy to see that Mrs. Gereth would have given again and again her complexion, her figure, and even perhaps the spotlesss virtue she had still more successfully retained, to have been Madame de Jaume. She was n’t, alas, and this was what she had at present a magnificent occasion to protest against. She was fully aware, of course, of Owen’s concession, his willingness to let her take away with her the few things she liked best; but as yet she only declared that to meet him on this ground would be to give him a triumph, to put him impossibly in the right. “ Liked best ” ? There was n’t a thing in the house that she did n’t like best, and what she liked better still was to be left where she was. How could Owen use such an expression without being conscious of his hypocrisy ? Mrs. Gereth, whose criticism was often gay, dilated with sardonic humor on the happy look a dozen objects from Poynton would wear, and the charming effect they would conduce to when interspersed with the peculiar features of Ricks. What had her whole life been but an effort toward completeness and perfection ? Better Waterbath at once, in its cynical unity, than the ignominy of such a mixture!

All this was of no great help to Fleda, in so far as Fleda tried to rise to her mission of finding a way out. When at the end of a fortnight Owen came down once more, it was ostensibly to tackle a farmer whose proceedings had been irregular ; the girl was sure, however, that he had really come, on the instance of Mona, to see what his mother was doing. He wished to satisfy himself that she was preparing her departure, and he wished to perform a duty, distinct but not less imperative, in regard to the question of the trophies with which she would retreat. The tension between them was now such that he had to perpetrate these offenses without meeting his adversary. Mrs. Gereth was as willing as himself that he should address to Fleda Vetch whatever odious remarks he might have to make : she only pitied her poor young friend for repeated encounters with a person as to whom she perfectly understood the girl’s repulsion. Fleda thought it nice of Owen not to have expected her to write to him ; he would n’t have wished any more than herself that she should have the air of spying on his mother in his interest. What made it comfortable to deal with him in this more familiar way was the sense that she understood so perfectly how poor Mrs. Gereth suffered, and that she measured so adequately the sacrifice the other side did take rather monstrously for granted. She understood equally how Owen himself suffered, now that Mona had already begun to make him do things he did n’t like. Vividly Fleda apprehended how she would have first made him like anything she would have made him do ; anything even as disagreeable as this appearing there to state, virtually oil 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 did n’t think a dozen pieces, chosen absolutely at will, would n’t be a handsome allowance ; and above all to consider the very delicate question of whether the advantage enjoyed by Mrs. Gereth might n’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 could n’t help having a sense of propriety about the whole matter, so he could as little help hating it. It was for his hating it, Fleda reasoned, that she liked him so, and her insistence to his mother on the hatred perilously resembled, on one or two occasions, a revelation of the liking. There were moments when, in conscience, that revelation pressed her; inasmuch as it was just on the ground of her not liking him that Mrs. Gereth trusted her so much. Mrs. Gereth herself didn’t, in these days, like him at all, and she was of course on Mrs. Gereth’s side. He ended, really, while the preparations for his marriage went on, by quite a little custom of coming and going; but on no one of these occasions would his mother receive him. He talked only with Fleda and strolled with Fleda; and when he asked her, in regard to the great matter, if Mrs. Gereth were really doing nothing, the girl usually replied, “ She pretends not to be, if I may say so; but I think she is 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, my dear, to see what you do ! ”

Mrs. Gereth, a month after she had received her great shock, did something abrupt and extraordinary: she caught up her companion and went to have a look at Ricks. They had come to London first and taken a train from Liverpool Street, and the least of the sufferings they were armed against was that of passing the night. Fleda’s admirable dressing-bag had been given her by her friend. “ Why, it’s charming ! ” she exclaimed a few hours later, turning back again into the small prim parlor from a friendly advance to the single plate of the window. Mrs. Gereth hated such windows, the one flat glass, sliding up and down, especially when they enjoyed a view of four iron pots on pedestals, painted white and containing ugly geraniums, ranged on the edge of a gravel-path, and doing their best to give it the air of a terrace. Fleda had instantly averted her eyes from these ornaments, but Mrs. Gereth grimly gazed, wondering of course how a place in the deepest depths of Essex and three miles from a small station could contrive to look so suburban. The room was practically a shallow box, with the junction of the walls and ceiling guiltless of curve or cornice, and marked merely by a little band of crimson paper glued round the top of the other paper, a turbid gray sprigged with silver flowers. This decoration was rather new and quite fresh ; and there was in the centre of the ceiling a big square beam papered over in white, as to which Fleda hesitated about venturing to remark that it was rather picturesque. She recognized in time that this remark would be weak, and that, throughout, she should be able to say nothing either for the mantelpieces or for the doors, of which she saw her companion become sensible with a soundless moan. On the subject of doors, especially, Mrs. Gereth had the finest views ; the thing in the world she most despised was the meanness of the single flap. From end to end, at Poynton, there were high double leaves. At Ricks the entrances to the rooms were like the holes of rabbit-hutches.

It was all, none the less, not so bad as Fleda had feared ; it was faded and melancholy, whereas there had been a danger that it would be 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 rarities of Poynton. She too, for a home, could have lived with them : they made her like the old maiden aunt; they made her even wonder if it did n’t work more for happiness not to have tasted, as she herself had done, of knowledge. Without resources, without a stick, as she said, of her own, Fleda was moved, after all, to some secret surprise at the pretensions of a shipwrecked woman who could hold such an asylum cheap. The more she looked about, the surer she felt of the character of the maiden aunt, the sense of whose dim presence urged her to pacification : the maiden aunt had been a dear ; she would have adored the maiden aunt. The poor lady had had some tender little story ; she had been sensitive and ignorant and exquisite : that too was a sort of origin, a sort of atmosphere for relics, though different from the sorts most prized at Poynton. Mrs. Gereth had of course more than once said that one of the deepest mysteries of life was the way that, by certain natures, hideous objects could be loved ; but it was n’t a question of love, now, for these; it was only a question of a certain practical patience. Perhaps some thought of that kind had stolen over Mrs. Gereth when, at the end of a brooding hour, she exclaimed, taking in the house with a strenuous sigh. “ Well, something can be done with it!” Fleda had repeated to her more than once the indulgent fancy about the maiden aunt, — she was so sure she had suffered. “ I ’m sure I hope she did ! ” was, however, all that Mrs. Gereth had replied.

VI.

It was a great relief to the girl at last to perceive that the dreadful move would really be made. What might happen if it should n’t had been from the first indefinite. It was absurd to pretend that any violence was probable, — a tussle, dishevelment, shrieks ; yet Fleda had an imagination of a drama, a “ great scene ” a thing, somehow, of indignity and misery, of wounds inflicted and received, in which, indeed, though Mrs. Gereth’s presence, with movements and sounds, loomed large to her, Owen remained indistinct and on the whole unaggressive. He would n’t be there with a cigarette in his teeth, very handsome and insolently quiet: that was only the way he would be in a novel, across whose interesting page some such figure, as she half closed her eyes, seemed to her to walk. Fleda had rather, and indeed with shame, a confused, pitying vision of Mrs. Gereth with her great scene left in a manner on her hands, Mrs. Gereth missing her effect, and having to appear merely hot and injured and in the wrong. The symptoms that she would be spared even that spectacle resided not so much, through the chambers of Poynton, in an air of determination as in an air of deeper suspense. There was no common preparation, but one day, at the turn of a corridor, she found her hostess standing very still, with hanging hands and only eyes that moved. These eyes appeared to Fleda to meet her own with a strange, dim bravado, and there was a silence, almost awkward, before either of the friends spoke. The girl afterwards thought of the moment as one in which her hostess mutely accused her of an accusation, meeting it, however, at the same time, by a kind of defiant acceptance. Yet it was with mere melancholy candor that Mrs. Gereth at last sighingly exclaimed, “I ’m thinking over what I had better take ! ” Fleda could have embraced her for this virtual promise of a concession, the announcement that she had finally accepted the problem of knocking together a shelter with the small salvage of the wreck.

It was true that when, after their return from Ricks, they tried to lighten the ship, the great embarrassment was still immutably there, the odiousness of sacrificing the exquisite things one would n’t take to the exquisite things one would. This immediately made the things one would n’t take the very things one ought to, and, as Mrs. Gereth said, condemned one, in the whole business, to an eternal vicious circle. In such a circle, for days, she had been tormentedly moving, prowling up and down, comparing incomparables. It was for that one had to cling to them and their faces of supplication. Fleda herself could judge of these faces, so conscious of their race and their danger, and she had little enough to say when her companion asked her if the whole place, perversely fair on October afternoons, looked like a place to give up. It looked, to begin with, through some effect of season and light, larger than ever, immense, and it was filled with the hush of sorrow, which in turn was all charged with memories. Everything was in the air,—every history of every find, every circumstance of every Struggle. Mrs. Gereth had drawn back every curtain and removed every cover ; she prolonged the vistas, opened wide the whole house, gave it an appearance of awaiting a royal visit. The shimmer of wrought substances spent itself in the brightness; the old golds and brasses, old ivories and bronzes, the fresh old tapestries and deep old damasks, threw out a radiance in which the poor woman saw in solution all her old loves and patiences, all her old tricks and triumphs.

Fleda had a depressed sense of not, after all, helping her much; this was lightened, indeed, by the fact that Mrs. Gereth, letting her off easily, did n’t now seem to expect it. Her sympathy, her interest, her feeling for everything for which Mrs. Gereth felt, were a force that really worked to prolong the deadlock. “ I only wish I bored you and my possessions bored you,” that lady, with some humor, declared ; “ then you ’d make short work with me, bundle me off, tell me just to pile certain things into a cart and have done.” Fleda’s sharpest difficulty was in having to act up to the character of thinking Owen a brute, or at least to carry off the inconsistency of seeing him when he came down. Fortunately, it was her duty, her function, and a protection to Mrs. Gereth. She thought of him perpetually, and her eyes had come to rejoice in his manly magnificence more even than they rejoiced in the royal cabinets of the red saloon. She wondered, very faintly at first, why he came so often ; but of course she knew nothing about the business he had in hand, over which, with men red-faced and leather-legged, he was sometimes closeted for an hour in a room of his own that was the one monstrosity of Poynton : all tobacco-pots and bootjacks, his mother had said, — such an array of arms of aggression and castigation that he himself had confessed to eighteen rifles and forty whips. He was arranging for settlements on his wife, he was doing things that would meet the views of the Brigstocks. Considering the house was his own, Fleda thought it nice of him to keep himself in the background while his mother remained ; making his visits, at some cost of ingenuity about trains from town, only between meals, doing everything to let it press lightly upon her that he was there. This was rather a stoppage to her meeting Mrs. Gereth on the ground of his being a brute ; the most she really, at last, could do was not to contradict her when she repeated that he was watching, — he was just insultingly watching. He was watching, no doubt ; but he watched somehow with his head turned away. He knew that Fleda knew at present what he wanted of her, so that it would be gross of him to keep repeating it. It existed as a confidence between them, and made him sometimes, with his wandering stare, meet her eyes as if a silence so pleasant could only unite them the more. He had no great flow of speech, certainly, and at first the girl took for granted that this was all there was to be said about the matter. Little by little she speculated as to whether, with a person who, like herself, could put him, after all, at a sort of domestic ease, it was not supposable that he would have more conversation if he were not keeping some of it back for Mona.

From the moment she suspected he might be thinking what Mona would Say to his chattering so to another person, this young lady’s repressed emotion began to require still more repression. She grew impatient of her situation at Poynton : she privately pronounced it false and horrid. She said to herself that she had let Owen know that she had, to the best of her power, directed his mother in the general sense he desired ; that he quite understood it, and that he also understood how unworthy it was of either of them to stand over the good lady with a notebook and a lash. Was n’t this practical unanimity just practical success ? Fleda became aware of a sudden desire, as well as of pressing reasons, for bringing her stay at Poynton to a close. She had not, on the one hand, like a minion of the law, undertaken to see Mrs. Gereth down to the train, and locked, in sign of her abdication, into a compartment; neither had she, on the other, committed herself to hold Owen indefinitely in dalliance while his mother gained time or dug a 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 Poynton, by an old Spanish altar-cloth. She would have to exert herself still further for the intended recipient of this offering, turn her out for her marriage with more than that drapery. She would go up to town, in short, to dress Maggie ; and their father, in lodgings at West Kensington, would stretch a point and take them in. He, to do him justice, never reproached her with profitable devotions ; so far as they existed he profited by them. Mrs. Gereth gave her up as heroically as if she had been a great bargain, and Fleda knew that she would n’t at present miss any visit of Owen’s, for Owen was shooting at Waterbath. Owen shooting was Owen lost, and there was scant sport at Poynton.

The first news she had from Mrs. Gereth was news of that lady’s having accomplished, in form at least, her migration. The letter was dated from Ricks, to which place she had been transported by an impulse apparently as sudden as the inspiration she had obeyed before. “ Yes, I’ve literally come,” she wrote, “ with a bandbox and a kitchenmaid ; 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 hack the ice will have been broken. I did n’t write to you to meet me on my way through town, because I know how busy you are, and because, besides, I’m too savage and odious to be fit company even for you. You ’d say I really go too far, and there ’s no doubt whatever I do. I ’m here, at any rate, just to look round once more, to see that certain things are done before I enter in force. I shall probably be at Poynton all next week. There’s more room than I quite measured the other day, and a rather good set of old Worcester. But what are space and time, what ’s even old Worcester, to your wretched and affectionate A. G. ?”

The day after Fleda received this letter she had occasion to go into a big shop in Oxford Street,—a journey that she achieved circuitously, first on foot, and then by the aid of two omnibuses. The second of these vehicles put her down on the side of the street opposite to her shop, and while, on the curbstone, she humbly waited, with a parcel, an umbrella, and a tucked-up frock, to cross in security, she became conscious that, close beside her, a hansom had pulled up short, in obedience to the brandished stick of a demonstrative occupant. This occupant was Owen Gereth, who had caught sight of her as he rattled along, and who, with an exhibition of white teeth that, from under the hood of the cab, had almost flashed through the fog, now alighted to ask her if he could n’t give her a lift. On finding that her destination was only over the way, he dismissed his vehicle and joined her, not only piloting her to the shop, but taking her in ; with the assurance that his errands did n’t matter, that it amused him to be concerned with hers. She told him she had come to buy a trimming for her sister’s frock, and he expressed an hilarious interest in the purchase. His hilarity was almost always out of proportion to the case, but it struck her at present as more so than ever ; especially when she had suggested that he might find it a good time to buy a garnishment of some sort for Mona. After wondering an instant whether he gave the full satiric meaning, such as it was, to this remark, Fleda dismissed the possibility as inconceivable. He stammered out that it was for her he would like to buy something, something “ ripping,” and that she must give him the pleasure of telling him what would please her : he could n’t have a better opportunity for making her a present, — the present, in recognition of all she had done for Mummy, that he had had in his head for weeks.

Fleda had more than one small errand in the big bazaar, and he went up and down with her, pointedly patient, pretending to be interested in questions of tape and of change. She had now not the least hesitation in wondering what Mona would think of such proceedings. But they were not her doing, — they were Owen’s ; and Owen, inconsequent and even extravagant, was unlike anything she had ever seen him before. He broke off, he came back, he repeated questions without heeding answers, he made vague, abrupt remarks about the resemblances of shopgirls and the uses of chiffon. He unduly prolonged their business together, and gave Fleda a sense that he was putting off something particular that he had to face. If she had ever dreamed of Owen Gereth as nervous, she would have seen him with some such manner as this. But why should he be nervous ? Even at the height of the crisis his mother had n’t made him so, and at present he was satisfied about his mother. The one idea he stuck to was that Fleda should mention something she would let him give her: there was everything in the world in the wonderful place, and he made her incongruous offers, — a traveling-rug, a massive clock, a table for breakfast in bed, and above all, in a resplendent binding, a set of somebody’s “ works.” His notion was a testimonial, a tribute, and the “ works ” would be a graceful intimation that it was her cleverness he wished above all to commemorate. He was immensely in earnest, but the articles he pressed upon her betrayed a delicacy that went to her heart: what he would really have liked, as he saw them tumbled about, was one of the splendid stuffs for a gown, — a choice proscribed by his fear of seeming to patronize her, to refer to her small means and her deficiencies. Fleda found it easy to chaff him about his exaggeration of her deserts ; she gave the just measure of them in consenting to accept a small pincushion, costing sixpence, in which the letter F was marked out with pins. A sense of loyalty to Mona was not needed to enforce this discretion, and after that first allusion to her she never sounded her name. She noticed, on this occasion, more things in Owen Gereth than she had ever noticed before, but what she noticed most was that he said no word of his intended. She asked herself what he had done, in so long a parenthesis, with his loyalty ; and then reflected that even if he had done something very good with it, the situation in which such a question could come up was already a little strange. Of course he was n’t doing anything so vulgar as making love to her; but there was a kind of rigor for a man who was engaged.

That rigor did n’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 did n’t count too much for familiarity in a restaurant. She had to get home with her trimming, and the most, in his company, she was amenable to was a retracing of her steps to the Marble Arch, and then, after a discussion, when they had reached it, a walk with him across the Park. She knew Mona would have considered that she ought to take the omnibus again ; but she had now to think for Owen as well as for herself, — she could n’t think for Mona. Even in the Park the autumn air was thick, and as they moved westward over the grass, which was what Owen preferred, the cool grayness made their words soft, made them at last rare, and everything else dim. He wanted to stay with her, — he wanted not to leave her: he had dropped into complete silence, but that was what his silence said. What was it he had postponed ? What was it he wanted still to postpone ? She grew a little scared as they strolled together and she thought. It was too confused to be believed, but it was as if somehow he felt differently. Fleda Vetch did n’t suspect him at first of feeling differently to her, but only of feeling differently to Mona ; yet she was not unconscious that this latter difference would have had something to do with his being on the grass beside her. She had read in novels about gentlemen who on the eve of marriage, winding up the past, had surrendered themselves for the occasion to the influence of a former tie ; and there was something in Owen’s behavior now, something in his very face, that suggested a resemblance to one of those gentlemen. But whom, and what, in that case, would Fleda herself resemble ? She was n’t a former tie, she was n’t any tie at all; she was only a deep little person for whom happiness was a kind of pearldiving plunge. It was down at the very bottom of all that had lately happened; for all that had lately happened was that Owen Gereth had come and gone at Poynton. That was the sum of her experience, and what it had made for her was her own affair, and 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 much longer.

They walked very far, to the southwest corner of the great Gardens, where, by the old round pond and the old red palace, when she had put out her hand to him in farewell, declaring that from the gate she must positively take a conveyance, it seemed suddenly to rise between them that this was a real separation. She was on his mother’s side, she belonged to his mother’s life, and his mother, in the future, would never come to Poynton. After what had passed she would n’t even be at his wedding, and it was not possible now that Mrs. Gereth should mention that ceremony to the girl, or express a wish that she 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 her. Everything, therefore, was ended; they would go their different ways ; this was the last time they would stand face to face. They looked at each other with the fuller sense of it, and, on Owen’s part, with an expression of dumb trouble, the intensification of his usual appeal to any interlocutor to add the right thing to what he said. To Fleda, at this moment, it appeared that the right thing might easily be the wrong. He only said, at any rate, “ I want you to understand, you know, — I want you to understand.”

What did he want her to understand ? He seemed unable to bring it out, and this understanding was, moreover, exactly what she wished not to arrive at. Bewildered as she was, she had already taken in as much as she should know what to do with, and the blood 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 wanted her to understand ; so that she was suddenly as frightened as some thoughtless girl who finds herself the object of an overture from a married man.

“ Good-by, Mr. Gereth, — I must get on ! ” she declared, with a cheerfulness that she felt to be an unnatural grimace. She broke away from him sharply, smiling, backing across the grass, and then turning altogether and moving as fast as she could. “ Good-by, good-by ! ” she threw off again as she went, wondering if he would overtake her before she reached the gate; conscious, with a red disgust, that her movement was almost a run; conscious, too, of just the confused, handsome face with which he would look after her. She felt as if she had answered a kindness with a great flouncing snub, but at any rate she had got away, though the distance to the gate, her ugly gallop down the Broad Walk, every graceless jerk of which hurt her, seemed endless. She signed from afar to a cab on the stand in the Kensington Road and scrambled into it, glad of the encompassment of the four-wheeler that had officiously obeyed her summons, and that, at the end of twenty yards, when she had violently pulled up a glass, permitted her to recognize the fact that she was on the point of bursting into tears.

Henry James.