n remained of
whether the jollity of London was not merely the only name his small
vocabulary yielded for the jollity of Mona Brigstock. There was indeed
in his conduct another ambiguity--something that required explaining so
long as his motive didn't come to the surface. If he was in love, what
was the matter? And what was the matter still more if he wasn't? The
mystery was at last cleared up: this Fleda gathered from the tone in
which, one morning at breakfast, a letter just opened made Mrs. Gereth
cry out. Her dismay was almost a shriek: "Why, he's bringing her
down--he wants her to see the house!" They flew, the two women, into
each other's arms and, with their heads together, soon made out that the
reason, the baffling reason why nothing had yet happened, was that Mona
didn't know, or Owen didn't, whether Poynton would really please her.
She was coming down to judge; and could anything in the world be more
like poor Owen than the ponderous probity which had kept him from
pressing her for a reply till she should have learned whether she
approved what he had to offer her? That was a scruple it had naturally
been impossible to impute. If only they might fondly hope, Mrs. Gereth
wailed, that the girl's expectations would be dashed! There was a fine
consistency, a sincerity quite affecting, in her arguing that the better
the place should happen to look and to express the conceptions to which
it owed its origin, the less it would speak to an intelligence so
primitive. How could a Brigstock possibly understand what it was all
about? How, really, could a Brigstock logically do anything but hate it?
Mrs. Gereth, even as she whisked away linen shrouds, persuaded herself
of the possibility on Mona's part of some bewildered blankness, some
collapse of admiration that would prove disconcerting to her swain--a
hope of which Fleda at least could see the absurdity and which gave the
measure of the poor lady's strange, almost maniacal disposition to
thrust in everywhere the question of "things," to read all behavior in
the light of some fancied relation to them. "Things" were of course the
sum of the world; only, for Mrs. Gereth, the sum of the world was rare
French furniture and Oriental china. She could at a stretch imagine
people's not having, but she couldn't imagine their not wanting and not
missing.

The young couple were to be accompanied by Mrs. Brigstock, and with a
prevision of how fiercely they would be watched Fleda bec