ped to listen; but all was so
quiet she was almost frightened: she had vaguely expected a sound of
contention. It lasted longer than she would have supposed, whatever it
was they were doing; and when finally, from a window, she saw Owen
stroll out of the house, stop and light a cigarette and then pensively
lose himself in the plantations, she found other matter for trepidation
in the fact that Mrs. Gereth didn't immediately come rushing up into her
arms. She wondered whether she oughtn't to go down to her, and measured
the gravity of what had occurred by the circumstance, which she
presently ascertained, that the poor lady had retired to her room and
wished not to be disturbed. This admonition had been for her maid, with
whom Fleda conferred as at the door of a death-chamber; but the girl,
without either fatuity or resentment, judged that, since it could render
Mrs. Gereth indifferent even to the ministrations of disinterested
attachment, the scene had been tremendous.

She was absent from luncheon, where indeed Fleda had enough to do to
look Owen in the face; there would be so much to make that hateful in
their common memory of the passage in which his last visit had
terminated. This had been her apprehension at least; but as soon as he
stood there she was constrained to wonder at the practical simplicity of
the ordeal--a simplicity which was really just his own simplicity, the
particular thing that, for Fleda Vetch, some other things of course
aiding, made almost any direct relation with him pleasant. He had
neither wit, nor tact, nor inspiration: all she could say was that when
they were together the alienation these charms were usually depended on
to allay didn't occur. On this occasion, for instance, he did so much
better than "carry off" an awkward remembrance: he simply didn't have
it. He had clean forgotten that she was the girl his mother would have
fobbed off on him; he was conscious only that she was there in a manner
for service--conscious of the dumb instinct that from the first had made
him regard her not as complicating his intercourse with that personage,
but as simplifying it. Fleda found beautiful that this theory should
have survived the incident of the other day; found exquisite that
whereas she was conscious, through faint reverberations, that for her
kind little circle at large, whom it didn't concern, her tendency had
begun to define itself as parasitical, this strong young man, who had a
right to