ke me feel very
old-fashioned and simple and bad. But you must take me as I am, since
you take so much else _with_ me!" She spoke now with the drop of her
resentment, with a dry and weary calm. "It would have been better for me
if I had never known you," she pursued, "and certainly better if I
hadn't taken such an extraordinary fancy to you. But that too was
inevitable: everything, I suppose, is inevitable. It was all my own
doing--you didn't run after me: I pounced on you and caught you up.
You're a stiff little beggar, in spite of your pretty manners: yes,
you're hideously misleading. I hope you feel how handsome it is of me to
recognize the independence of your character. It was your clever
sympathy that did it--your extraordinary feeling for those accursed
vanities. You were sharper about them than any one I had ever known, and
that was a thing I simply couldn't resist. Well," the poor lady
concluded after a pause, "you see where it has landed us!"

"If you'll go for him yourself, I'll wait here," said Fleda.

Mrs. Gereth, holding her mantle together, appeared for a while to
consider.

"To his club, do you mean?"

"Isn't it there, when he's in town, that he has a room? He has at
present no other London address," Fleda said: "it's there one writes to
him."

"How do _I_ know, with my wretched relations with him?" Mrs. Gereth
asked.

"Mine have not been quite so bad as that," Fleda desperately smiled.
Then she added: "His silence, _her_ silence, our hearing nothing at
all--what are these but the very things on which, at Poynton and at
Ricks, you rested your assurance that everything is at an end between
them?"

Mrs. Gereth looked dark and void. "Yes, but I hadn't heard from you then
that you could invent nothing better than, as you call it, to send him
back to her."

"Ah, but, on the other hand, you've learned from them what you didn't
know--you've learned by Mrs. Brigstock's visit that he cares for me."
Fleda found herself in the position of availing herself of optimistic
arguments that she formerly had repudiated; her refutation of her
companion had completely changed its ground.

She was in a fever of ingenuity and painfully conscious, on behalf of
her success, that her fever was visible. She could herself see the
reflection of it glitter in Mrs. Gereth's sombre eyes.

"You plunge me in stupefaction," that lady answered, "and at the same
time you terrify me. Your account of Owen is inconceivable, and y