t so much even as a home, and
her nearest chance of one was that there was some appearance her sister
would become engaged to a curate whose eldest brother was supposed to
have property and would perhaps allow him something. Her father paid
some of her bills, but he didn't like her to live with him; and she had
lately, in Paris, with several hundred other young women, spent a year
in a studio, arming herself for the battle of life by a course with an
impressionist painter. She was determined to work, but her impressions,
or somebody's else, were as yet her only material. Mrs. Gereth had told
her she liked her because she had an extraordinary _flair_; but under
the circumstances a _flair_ was a questionable boon: in the dry places
in which she had mainly moved she could have borne a chronic catarrh.
She was constantly summoned to Cadogan Place, and before the month was
out was kept to stay, to pay a visit of which the end, it was agreed,
should have nothing to do with the beginning. She had a sense, partly
exultant and partly alarmed, of having quickly become necessary to her
imperious friend, who indeed gave a reason quite sufficient for it in
telling her there was nobody else who understood. From Mrs. Gereth there
was in these days an immense deal to understand, though it might be
freely summed up in the circumstance that she was wretched. She told
Fleda that she couldn't completely know why till she should have seen
the things at Poynton. Fleda could perfectly grasp this connection,
which was exactly one of the matters that, in their inner mystery, were
a blank to everybody else.

The girl had a promise that the wonderful house should be shown her
early in July, when Mrs. Gereth would return to it as to her home; but
even before this initiation she put her finger on the spot that in the
poor lady's troubled soul ached hardest. This was the misery that
haunted her, the dread of the inevitable surrender. What Fleda had to
sit up to was the confirmed appearance that Owen Gereth would marry Mona
Brigstock, marry her in his mother's teeth, and that such an act would
have incalculable bearings. They were present to Mrs. Gereth, her
companion could see, with a vividness that at moments almost ceased to
be that of sanity. She would have to give up Poynton, and give it up to
a product of Waterbath--that was the wrong that rankled, the humiliation
at which Fleda would be able adequately to shudder only when she should
know the