ntract: it doesn't matter whether
it's with a stupid girl or with a monster of cleverness. I'm thinking of
his honor and his good name."

"The honor and good name of a man you hate?"

"Certainly," the girl resolutely answered. "I don't see why you should
talk as if one had a petty mind. You don't think so. It's not on that
assumption you've ever dealt with me. I can do your son justice, as he
put his case to me."

"Ah, then he did put his case to you!" Mrs. Gereth exclaimed, with an
accent of triumph. "You seemed to speak just now as if really nothing of
any consequence had passed between you."

"Something always passes when one has a little imagination," our young
lady declared.

"I take it you don't mean that Owen has any!" Mrs. Gereth cried with her
large laugh.

Fleda was silent a moment. "No, I don't mean that Owen has any," she
returned at last.

"Why is it you hate him so?" her hostess abruptly inquired.

"Should I love him for all he has made you suffer?"

Mrs. Gereth slowly rose at this and, coming across the walk, took her
young friend in her arms and kissed her. She then passed into one of
Fleda's an arm perversely and imperiously sociable. "Let us move a
little," she said, holding her close and giving a slight shiver. They
strolled along the terrace, and she brought out another question. "He
_was_ eloquent, then, poor dear--he poured forth the story of his
wrongs?"

Fleda smiled down at her companion, who, cloaked and perceptibly bowed,
leaned on her heavily and gave her an odd, unwonted sense of age and
cunning. She took refuge in an evasion. "He couldn't tell me anything
that I didn't know pretty well already."

"It's very true that you know everything. No, dear, you haven't a petty
mind; you've a lovely imagination and you're the nicest creature in the
world. If you were inane, like most girls--like every one, in fact--I
would have insulted you, I would have outraged you, and then you would
have fled from me in terror. No, now that I think of it," Mrs. Gereth
went on, "you wouldn't have fled from me; nothing, on the contrary,
would have made you budge. You would have cuddled into your warm corner,
but you would have been wounded and weeping and martyrized, and you
would have taken every opportunity to tell people I'm a brute--as indeed
I should have been!" They went to and fro, and she would not allow
Fleda, who laughed and protested, to attenuate with any light civility
this spirited pictu