glossed over, and
drawn out by a personality sufficiently neutral, sufficiently potent,
and sufficiently in need of what she had to give. The successive
flickers of the gas-lamps through the carriage window made of Clara's
profile so hard and fine a little medallion that it was impossible to
conceive it in need of anything. And yet it was just their mutual need
that had drawn these two women together, and after three years it was
still the only thing that held them. As much of a fight as she had put
up with the rest--the people who had taken her in--she had put up the
hardest with Clara. Yet of them all Clara was the only one she had
failed to capture. Clara was always there in the middle of her affairs,
but surveying them from a distance, and Flora's struggle with her had
resolved itself into the attempt to keep her from seeing too much, from
seeing more than she herself saw. Clara's seeing, thus far, had always
been to help, but Flora sometimes wondered whether in an emergency this
help could be depended on--whether Clara could give anything without
exacting a price.

Their dubious intimacy had created for Flora a special sort of
loneliness--a loneliness which lacked the security of solitude; and it
was partly as an escape from this that she had accepted Harry Cressy.
By herself she could never have escaped. The initiative was not hers.
But he had presented himself, he had insisted, had overruled her
objections, had captured her before she knew whether she wanted it or
not--and held her now, fascinated by his very success in capturing her,
and by his beautiful ruddy masculinity. She did not ask herself whether
women ever married for greater reasons than these. She only wondered
sometimes if he did not stand out more brilliantly against Clara and the
others than he intrinsically was. But these moments when she was obliged
to defend him to herself were always when he was not with her. Even in
the dusky carriage she had been as aware of the splendor of his
attraction as now when they had stopped between the high lamps of the
club entrance, and she saw clearly the broad lines of his shoulders and
the stoop of his square-set head as he stepped swingingly to the
pavement. After all, she ought to be glad to think that he was going to
stand up as tall and protectingly between her and the world, as now he
did between her and the press of people which, like a tide of water,
swept them forward down the hall, sucked them back in