owded
with objects of which the aggregation somehow made a thinness and the
futility a grace; things that told her they had been gathered as slowly
and as lovingly as the golden flowers of Poynton. She too, for a home,
could have lived with them: they made her fond of the old maiden-aunt;
they made her even wonder if it didn't work more for happiness not to
have tasted, as she herself had done, of knowledge. Without resources,
without a stick, as she said, of her own, Fleda was moved, after all, to
some secret surprise at the pretensions of a shipwrecked woman who could
hold such an asylum cheap. The more she looked about the surer she felt
of the character of the maiden-aunt, the sense of whose dim presence
urged her to pacification: the maiden-aunt had been a dear; she would
have adored the maiden-aunt. The poor lady had had some tender little
story; she had been sensitive and ignorant and exquisite: that too was a
sort of origin, a sort of atmosphere for relics and rarities, though
different from the sorts most prized at Poynton. Mrs. Gereth had of
course more than once said that one of the deepest mysteries of life was
the way that, by certain natures, hideous objects could be loved; but it
wasn't a question of love, now, for these: it was only a question of a
certain practical patience. Perhaps some thought of that kind had stolen
over Mrs. Gereth when, at the end of a brooding hour, she exclaimed,
taking in the house with a strenuous sigh: "Well, something can be done
with it!" Fleda had repeated to her more than once the indulgent fancy
about the maiden-aunt--she was so sure she had deeply suffered. "I'm
sure I hope she did!" was, however, all that Mrs. Gereth had replied.

VI

It was a great relief to the girl at last to perceive that the dreadful
move would really be made. What might happen if it shouldn't had been
from the first indefinite. It was absurd to pretend that any violence
was probable--a tussel, dishevelment, shrieks; yet Fleda had an
imagination of a drama, a "great scene," a thing, somehow, of indignity
and misery, of wounds inflicted and received, in which indeed, though
Mrs. Gereth's presence, with movements and sounds, loomed large to her,
Owen remained indistinct and on the whole unaggressive. He wouldn't be
there with a cigarette in his teeth, very handsome and insolently quiet:
that was only the way he would be in a novel, across whose interesting
page some such figure, as she half