s usual appeal to
any interlocutor to add the right thing to what he said. To Fleda, at
this moment, it appeared that the right thing might easily be the wrong.
He only said, at any rate: "I want you to understand, you know--I want
you to understand."

What did he want her to understand? He seemed unable to bring it out,
and this understanding was moreover exactly what she wished not to
arrive at. Bewildered as she was, she had already taken in as much as
she should know what to do with; the blood also was rushing into her
face. He liked her--it was stupefying--more than he really ought: that
was what was the matter with him and what he desired her to assimilate;
so that she was suddenly as frightened as some thoughtless girl who
finds herself the object of an overture from a married man.

"Good-bye, Mr. Gereth--I _must_ get on!" she declared with a
cheerfulness that she felt to be an unnatural grimace. She broke away
from him sharply, smiling, backing across the grass and then turning
altogether and moving as fast as she could. "Good-bye, good-bye!" she
threw off again as she went, wondering if he would overtake her before
she reached the gate; conscious with a red disgust that her movement was
almost a run; conscious too of just the confused, handsome face with
which he would look after her. She felt as if she had answered a
kindness with a great flouncing snub, but at any rate she had got away,
though the distance to the gate, her ugly gallop down the Broad Walk,
every graceless jerk of which hurt her, seemed endless. She signed from
afar to a cab on the stand in the Kensington Road and scrambled into it,
glad of the encompassment of the four-wheeler that had officiously
obeyed her summons and that, at the end of twenty yards, when she had
violently pulled up a glass, permitted her to recognize the fact that
she was on the point of bursting into tears.

VII

As soon as her sister was married she went down to Mrs. Gereth at
Ricks--a promise to this effect having been promptly exacted and given;
and her inner vision was much more fixed on the alterations there,
complete now, as she understood, than on the success of her plotting and
pinching for Maggie's happiness. Her imagination, in the interval, had
indeed had plenty to do and numerous scenes to visit; for when on the
summons just mentioned it had taken a flight from West Kensington to
Ricks, it had hung but an hour over the terrace of painted pots and t