bed away into an immense allowance for the young man. How could she
after all know what, in the disturbance wrought by his mother, Mona's
relations with him might have become? If he had been able to keep his
wits, such as they were, more about him he would probably have felt--as
sharply as she felt on his behalf--that so long as those relations were
not ended he had no right to say even the little he had said. He had no
right to appear to wish to draw in another girl to help him to an
escape. If he was in a plight he must get out of the plight himself, he
must get out of it first, and anything he should have to say to any one
else must be deferred and detached. She herself, at any rate--it was her
own case that was in question--couldn't dream of assisting him save in
the sense of their common honor. She could never be the girl to be drawn
in, she could never lift her finger against Mona. There was something in
her that would make it a shame to her forever to have owed her happiness
to an interference. It would seem intolerably vulgar to her to have
"ousted" the daughter of the Brigstocks; and merely to have abstained
even wouldn't assure her that she had been straight. Nothing was really
straight but to justify her little pensioned presence by her use; and
now, won over as she was to heroism, she could see her use only as some
high and delicate deed. She couldn't do anything at all, in short,
unless she could do it with a kind of pride, and there would be nothing
to be proud of in having arranged for poor Owen to get off easily.
Nobody had a right to get off easily from pledges so deep, so sacred.
How could Fleda doubt they had been tremendous when she knew so well
what any pledge of her own would be? If Mona was so formed that she
could hold such vows light, that was Mona's peculiar business. To have
loved Owen apparently, and yet to have loved him only so much, only to
the extent of a few tables and chairs, was not a thing she could so much
as try to grasp. Of a different way of loving him she was herself ready
to give an instance, an instance of which the beauty indeed would not be
generally known. It would not perhaps if revealed be generally
understood, inasmuch as the effect of the particular pressure she
proposed to exercise would be, should success attend it, to keep him
tied to an affection that had died a sudden and violent death. Even in
the ardor of her meditation Fleda remained in sight of the truth that it
w