to hate her if she didn't: very well, she
couldn't, she wouldn't rise; she already moved at the altitude that
suited her, and was able to see that, since she was exposed to the
hatred, she might at least enjoy the calm. The smallest trouble, for a
girl with no nonsense about her, was to earn what she incurred; so that,
a dim instinct teaching her she would earn it best by not being
effusive, and combining with the conviction that she now held Owen, and
therefore the place, she had the pleasure of her honesty as well as of
her security. Didn't her very honesty lead her to be belligerently blank
about Poynton, inasmuch as it was just Poynton that was forced upon her
as a subject for effusiveness? Such subjects, to Mona Brigstock, had an
air almost of indecency, and the house became uncanny to her through
such an appeal--an appeal that, somewhere in the twilight of her being,
as Fleda was sure, she thanked heaven she _was_ the girl stiffly to draw
back from. She was a person whom pressure at a given point infallibly
caused to expand in the wrong place instead of, as it is usually
administered in the hope of doing, the right one. Her mother, to make up
for this, broke out universally, pronounced everything "most striking,"
and was visibly happy that Owen's captor should be so far on the way to
strike: but she jarred upon Mrs. Gereth by her formula of admiration,
which was that anything she looked at was "in the style" of something
else. This was to show how much she had seen, but it only showed she had
seen nothing; everything at Poynton was in the style of Poynton, and
poor Mrs. Brigstock, who at least was determined to rise, and had
brought with her a trophy of her journey, a "lady's magazine" purchased
at the station, a horrible thing with patterns for antimacassars, which,
as it was quite new, the first number, and seemed so clever, she kindly
offered to leave for the house, was in the style of a vulgar old woman
who wore silver jewelry and tried to pass off a gross avidity as a sense
of the beautiful.

By the day's end it was clear to Fleda Vetch that, however Mona judged,
the day had been determinant; whether or no she felt the charm, she felt
the challenge: at an early moment Owen Gereth would be able to tell his
mother the worst. Nevertheless, when the elder lady, at bedtime, coming
in a dressing-gown and a high fever to the younger one's room, cried
out, "She hates it; but what will she do?" Fleda pretended vaguene