ppealed to it a
certain gorgeous audacity? Mrs. Gereth's high hand was, as mere great
effect, the climax of the impression.

"It's too wonderful, what you've done with the house!"--the visitor met
her friend's eyes. They lighted up with joy--that friend herself so
pleased with what she had done. This was not at all, in its accidental
air of enthusiasm, what Fleda wanted to have said: it offered her as
stupidly announcing from the first minute on whose side she was. Such
was clearly the way Mrs. Gereth took it: she threw herself upon the
delightful girl and tenderly embraced her again; so that Fleda soon went
on, with a studied difference and a cooler inspection: "Why, you brought
away absolutely everything!"

"Oh no, not everything; I saw how little I could get into this scrap of
a house. I only brought away what I required."

Fleda had got up; she took a turn round the room. "You 'required' the
very best pieces--the _morceaux de musee_, the individual gems!"

"I certainly didn't want the rubbish, if that's what you mean." Mrs.
Gereth, on the sofa, followed the direction of her companion's eyes;
with the light of her satisfaction still in her face, she slowly rubbed
her large, handsome hands. Wherever she was, she was herself the great
piece in the gallery. It was the first Fleda had heard of there being
"rubbish" at Poynton, but she didn't for the moment take up this
insincerity; she only, from where she stood in the room, called out, one
after the other, as if she had had a list in her hand, the pieces that
in the great house had been scattered and that now, if they had a fault,
were too much like a minuet danced on a hearth-rug. She knew them each,
in every chink and charm--knew them by the personal name their
distinctive sign or story had given them; and a second time she felt
how, against her intention, this uttered knowledge struck her hostess as
so much free approval. Mrs. Gereth was never indifferent to approval,
and there was nothing she could so love you for as for doing justice to
her deep morality. There was a particular gleam in her eyes when Fleda
exclaimed at last, dazzled by the display: "And even the Maltese cross!"
That description, though technically incorrect, had always been applied,
at Poynton, to a small but marvelous crucifix of ivory, a masterpiece of
delicacy, of expression, and of the great Spanish period, the existence
and precarious accessibility of which she had heard of at Malta, years