could be no
object to him. So days and weeks had passed on and she had conveyed to
him no hint of her decision.

On that Sunday evening, in the seclusion of her bedroom, Flossie said
to herself that she had made one great mistake. Prudence and foresight
were all very well in their way, but this time she had blundered
through excess of caution. In sticking to the post that made her
independent she had broken her strongest line of defence. If only she
had had the courage to relinquish it at the crucial moment, she would
have stood a very much better chance in her contest with Keith. She
could then have appealed to his pity as she had done with such signal
success two years ago, when the result of the appeal had been to bring
him violently to the point. She was wise enough to know that in
contending with a chivalrous man a woman's strongest defence is her
defencelessness. Though she was unable to believe that pure abstract
honour was or could be the sole and supreme motive of Keith's
behaviour, she felt that if she could have said to him, "I've thrown
up a good situation to marry you," his chivalry would not have held
out against that argument.

But Flossie never made mistakes. She was too consummate a diplomatist.
Therefore, though appearances were against her, it was only reasonable
to suppose that she had not really done so now, and that her original
inspiration had been right. It was foresight so subtle, so advanced,
that it outstripped the ordinary processes of calculation, and
appeared afterwards as the mysterious leading of a profounder power,
of the under-soul that presses the innocent intellect into the
services of its own elemental instincts. The people who yield most
obediently to this compulsion are said to have good luck.

Flossie's good luck, however, was not yet apparent either to herself
or to her fellow-boarders at Tavistock Place. Not that she had
enlarged on her trouble to any of them. The whole thing had been too
profoundly humiliating for that. To say nothing of being engaged to a
man who had shown so very little impatience to marry her, to have
taken and furnished a house and be unable to live in it, to have
received congratulations and wedding presents which had all proved
premature, to know, and feel that everybody else knew, that her
bedroom was at this moment lumbered up with a trousseau which, whether
she wore it or put it by two years, would make her equally ridiculous,
was really a very tr