closed her eyes, seemed to her to
walk. Fleda had rather, and indeed with shame, a confused, pitying
vision of Mrs. Gereth with her great scene left in a manner on her
hands, Mrs. Gereth missing her effect and having to appear merely hot
and injured and in the wrong. The symptoms that she would be spared even
that spectacle resided not so much, through the chambers of Poynton, in
an air of concentration as in the hum of buzzing alternatives. There was
no common preparation, but one day, at the turn of a corridor, she found
her hostess standing very still, with the hanging hands of an invalid
and the active eyes of an adventurer. These eyes appeared to Fleda to
meet her own with a strange, dim bravado, and there was a silence,
almost awkward, before either of the friends spoke. The girl afterwards
thought of the moment as one in which her hostess mutely accused her of
an accusation, meeting it, however, at the same time, by a kind of
defiant acceptance. Yet it was with mere melancholy candor that Mrs.
Gereth at last sighingly exclaimed: "I'm thinking over what I had better
take!" Fleda could have embraced her for this virtual promise of a
concession, the announcement that she had finally accepted the problem
of knocking together a shelter with the small salvage of the wreck.

It was true that when after their return from Ricks they tried to
lighten the ship, the great embarrassment was still immutably there, the
odiousness of sacrificing the exquisite things one wouldn't take to the
exquisite things one would. This immediately made the things one
wouldn't take the very things one ought to, and, as Mrs. Gereth said,
condemned one, in the whole business, to an eternal vicious circle. In
such a circle, for days, she had been tormentedly moving, prowling up
and down, comparing incomparables. It was for that one had to cling to
them and their faces of supplication. Fleda herself could judge of these
faces, so conscious of their race and their danger, and she had little
enough to say when her companion asked her if the whole place,
perversely fair on October afternoons, looked like a place to give up.
It looked, to begin with, through some effect of season and light,
larger than ever, immense, and it was filled with the hush of sorrow,
which in turn was all charged with memories. Everything was in the
air--every history of every find, every circumstance of every struggle.
Mrs. Gereth had drawn back every curtain and removed eve