ry cover; she
prolonged the vistas, opened wide the whole house, gave it an appearance
of awaiting a royal visit. The shimmer of wrought substances spent
itself in the brightness; the old golds and brasses, old ivories and
bronzes, the fresh old tapestries and deep old damasks threw out a
radiance in which the poor woman saw in solution all her old loves and
patiences, all her old tricks and triumphs.

Fleda had a depressed sense of not, after all, helping her much: this
was lightened indeed by the fact that Mrs. Gereth, letting her off
easily, didn't now seem to expect it. Her sympathy, her interest, her
feeling for everything for which Mrs. Gereth felt, were a force that
really worked to prolong the deadlock. "I only wish I bored you and my
possessions bored you," that lady, with some humor, declared; "then
you'd make short work with me, bundle me off, tell me just to pile
certain things into a cart and have done." Fleda's sharpest difficulty
was in having to act up to the character of thinking Owen a brute, or at
least to carry off the inconsistency of seeing him when he came down. By
good fortune it was her duty, her function, as well as a protection to
Mrs. Gereth. She thought of him perpetually, and her eyes had come to
rejoice in his manly magnificence more even than they rejoiced in the
royal cabinets of the red saloon. She wondered, very faintly at first,
why he came so often; but of course she knew nothing about the business
he had in hand, over which, with men red-faced and leather-legged, he
was sometimes closeted for an hour in a room of his own that was the one
monstrosity of Poynton: all tobacco-pots and bootjacks, his mother had
said--such an array of arms of aggression and castigation that he
himself had confessed to eighteen rifles and forty whips. He was
arranging for settlements on his wife, he was doing things that would
meet the views of the Brigstocks. Considering the house was his own,
Fleda thought it nice of him to keep himself in the background while his
mother remained; making his visits, at some cost of ingenuity about
trains from town, only between meals, doing everything to let it press
lightly upon her that he was there. This was rather a stoppage to her
meeting Mrs. Gereth on the ground of his being a brute; the most she
really at last could do was not to contradict her when she repeated that
he was watching--just insultingly watching. He _was_ watching, no doubt;
but he watched somehow