."

"Then you think he lies when he tells you that he has recovered his
liberty?"

Fleda hesitated a moment; after which she exclaimed with a certain hard
pride: "He's enough in love with me for anything!"

"For anything, apparently, except to act like a man and impose his
reason and his will on your incredible folly. For anything except to put
an end, as any man worthy of the name would have put it, to your
systematic, to your idiotic perversity. What are you, after all, my
dear, I should like to know, that a gentleman who offers you what Owen
offers should have to meet such wonderful exactions, to take such
extraordinary precautions about your sweet little scruples?" Her
resentment rose to a strange insolence which Fleda took full in the face
and which, for the moment at least, had the horrible force to present to
her vengefully a showy side of the truth. It gave her a blinding glimpse
of lost alternatives. "I don't know what to think of him," Mrs. Gereth
went on; "I don't know what to call him: I'm so ashamed of him that I
can scarcely speak of him even to _you_. But indeed I'm so ashamed of
you both together that I scarcely know in common decency where to look."
She paused to give Fleda the full benefit of this remarkable statement;
then she exclaimed: "Any one but a jackass would have tucked you under
his arm and marched you off to the Registrar!"

Fleda wondered; with her free imagination she could wonder even while
her cheek stung from a slap. "To the Registrar?"

"That would have been the sane, sound, immediate course to adopt. With a
grain of gumption you'd both instantly have felt it. _I_ should have
found a way to take you, you know, if I'd been what Owen's supposed to
be. _I_ should have got the business over first; the rest could come
when you liked! Good God, girl, your place was to stand before me as a
woman honestly married. One doesn't know what one has hold of in
touching you, and you must excuse my saying that you're literally
unpleasant to me to meet as you are. Then at least we could have talked,
and Owen, if he had the ghost of a sense of humor, could have snapped
his fingers at your refinements."

This stirring speech affected our young lady as if it had been the shake
of a tambourine borne towards her from a gypsy dance: her head seemed to
go round and she felt a sudden passion in her feet. The emotion,
however, was but meagrely expressed in the flatness with which she heard
herself presen