ould be an odd result of her magnanimity to prevent her friend's
shaking off a woman he disliked. If he didn't dislike Mona, what was the
matter with him? And if he did, Fleda asked, what was the matter with
her own silly self?

Our young lady met this branch of the temptation it pleased her frankly
to recognize by declaring that to encourage any such cruelty would be
tortuous and base. She had nothing to do with his dislikes; she had only
to do with his good-nature and his good name. She had joy of him just as
he was, but it was of these things she had the greatest. The worst
aversion and the liveliest reaction moreover wouldn't alter the
fact--since one was facing facts--that but the other day his strong arms
must have clasped a remarkably handsome girl as close as she had
permitted. Fleda's emotion at this time was a wondrous mixture, in which
Mona's permissions and Mona's beauty figured powerfully as aids to
reflection. She herself had no beauty, and _her_ permissions were the
stony stares she had just practiced in the drawing-room--a consciousness
of a kind appreciably to add to the particular sense of triumph that
made her generous. I may not perhaps too much diminish the merit of that
generosity if I mention that it could take the flight we are considering
just because really, with the telescope of her long thought, Fleda saw
what might bring her out of the wood. Mona herself would bring her out;
at the least Mona possibly might. Deep down plunged the idea that even
should she achieve what she had promised Owen, there was still the
contingency of Mona's independent action. She might by that time, under
stress of temper or of whatever it was that was now moving her, have
said or done the things there is no patching up. If the rupture should
come from Waterbath they might all be happy yet. This was a calculation
that Fleda wouldn't have committed to paper, but it affected the total
of her sentiments. She was meanwhile so remarkably constituted that
while she refused to profit by Owen's mistake, even while she judged it
and hastened to cover it up, she could drink a sweetness from it that
consorted little with her wishing it mightn't have been made. There was
no harm done, because he had instinctively known, poor dear, with whom
to make it, and it was a compensation for seeing him worried that he
hadn't made it with some horrid mean girl who would immediately have
dished him by making a still bigger one. Their protec