s no sense of possession attached to that; there was only a horrible
sense of privation. She had quite moved from under Mrs. Gereth's wide
wing; and now that she was really among the pen-wipers and ash-trays she
was swept, at the thought of all the beauty she had forsworn, by short,
wild gusts of despair. If her friend should really keep the spoils she
would never return to her. If that friend should on the other hand part
with them, what on earth would there be to return to? The chill struck
deep as Fleda thought of the mistress of Ricks reduced, in vulgar
parlance, to what she had on her back: there was nothing to which she
could compare such an image but her idea of Marie Antoinette in the
Conciergerie, or perhaps the vision of some tropical bird, the creature
of hot, dense forests, dropped on a frozen moor to pick up a living. The
mind's eye could see Mrs. Gereth, indeed, only in her thick, colored
air; it took all the light of her treasures to make her concrete and
distinct. She loomed for a moment, in any mere house, gaunt and
unnatural; then she vanished as if she had suddenly sunk into a
quicksand. Fleda lost herself in the rich fancy of how, if _she_ were
mistress of Poynton, a whole province, as an abode, should be assigned
there to the august queen-mother. She would have returned from her
campaign with her baggage-train and her loot, and the palace would unbar
its shutters and the morning flash back from its halls. In the event of
a surrender the poor woman would never again be able to begin to
collect: she was now too old and too moneyless, and times were altered
and good things impossibly dear. A surrender, furthermore, to any
daughter-in-law save an oddity like Mona needn't at all be an abdication
in fact; any other fairly nice girl whom Owen should have taken it into
his head to marry would have been positively glad to have, for the
museum, a custodian who was a walking catalogue and who understood
beyond any one in England the hygiene and temperament of rare pieces. A
fairly nice girl would somehow be away a good deal and would at such
times count it a blessing to feel Mrs. Gereth at her post.

Fleda had fully recognized, the first days, that, quite apart from any
question of letting Owen know where she was, it would be a charity to
give him some sign: it would be weak, it would be ugly, to be diverted
from that kindness by the fact that Mrs. Gereth had attached a tinkling
bell to it. A frank relation wit