them; they had smothered it with trumpery ornament and
scrapbook art, with strange excrescences and bunchy draperies, with
gimcracks that might have been keepsakes for maid-servants and
nondescript conveniences that might have been prizes for the blind. They
had gone wildly astray over carpets and curtains; they had an infallible
instinct for disaster, and were so cruelly doom-ridden that it rendered
them almost tragic. Their drawing-room, Mrs. Gereth lowered her voice to
mention, caused her face to burn, and each of the new friends confided
to the other that in her own apartment she had given way to tears. There
was in the elder lady's a set of comic water-colors, a family joke by a
family genius, and in the younger's a souvenir from some centennial or
other Exhibition, that they shudderingly alluded to. The house was
perversely full of souvenirs of places even more ugly than itself and of
things it would have been a pious duty to forget. The worst horror was
the acres of varnish, something advertised and smelly, with which
everything was smeared; it was Fleda Vetch's conviction that the
application of it, by their own hands and hilariously shoving each
other, was the amusement of the Brigstocks on rainy days.

When, as criticism deepened, Fleda dropped the suggestion that some
people would perhaps see something in Mona, Mrs. Gereth caught her up
with a groan of protest, a smothered familiar cry of "Oh, my dear!" Mona
was the eldest of the three, the one Mrs. Gereth most suspected. She
confided to her young friend that it was her suspicion that had brought
her to Waterbath; and this was going very far, for on the spot, as a
refuge, a remedy, she had clutched at the idea that something might be
done with the girl before her. It was her fancied exposure at any rate
that had sharpened the shock; made her ask herself with a terrible chill
if fate could really be plotting to saddle her with a daughter-in-law
brought up in such a place. She had seen Mona in her appropriate setting
and she had seen Owen, handsome and heavy, dangle beside her; but the
effect of these first hours had happily not been to darken the prospect.
It was clearer to her that she could never accept Mona, but it was after
all by no means certain that Owen would ask her to. He had sat by
somebody else at dinner, and afterwards he had talked to Mrs. Firmin,
who was as dreadful as all the rest, but redeemingly married. His
heaviness, which in her need of ex