s not only a
brilliant creature, but she heard herself commended in these days for
new and strange attractions; she figured suddenly, in the queer
conversations of Ricks, as a distinguished, almost as a dangerous
beauty. That retouching of her hair and dress in which her friend had
impulsively indulged on a first glimpse of her secret was by implication
very frequently repeated. She had the sense not only of being advertised
and offered, but of being counseled and enlightened in ways that she
scarcely understood--arts obscure even to a poor girl who had had, in
good society and motherless poverty, to look straight at realities and
fill out blanks.

These arts, when Mrs. Gereth's spirits were high, were handled with a
brave and cynical humor with which Fleda's fancy could keep no step:
they left our young lady wondering what on earth her companion wanted
her to do. "I want you to cut in!"--that was Mrs. Gereth's familiar and
comprehensive phrase for the course she prescribed. She challenged again
and again Fleda's picture, as she called it (though the sketch was too
slight to deserve the name), of the indifference to which a prior
attachment had committed the proprietor of Poynton. "Do you mean to say
that, Mona or no Mona, he could see you that way, day after day, and not
have the ordinary feelings of a man?" This was the sort of interrogation
to which Fleda was fitfully and irrelevantly treated. She had grown
almost used to the refrain. "Do you mean to say that when, the other
day, one had quite made you over to him, the great gawk, and he was, on
this very spot, utterly alone with you--?" The poor girl at this point
never left any doubt of what she meant to say, but Mrs. Gereth could be
trusted to break out in another place and at another time. At last Fleda
wrote to her father that he must take her in for a while; and when, to
her companion's delight, she returned to London, that lady went with her
to the station and wafted her on her way. "The Morning Post" had been
delivered as they left the house, and Mrs. Gereth had brought it with
her for the traveler, who never spent a penny on a newspaper. On the
platform, however, when this young person was ticketed, labeled, and
seated, she opened it at the window of the carriage, exclaiming as
usual, after looking into it a moment: "Nothing--nothing--nothing: don't
tell _me_!" Every day that there was nothing was a nail in the coffin of
the marriage. An instant later the tr