In knowing a while before all she needed, Fleda had been far from knowing as much as that; so that once upstairs, where, in her room, with her sense of danger and trouble, the age of Louis Seize suddenly struck her as wanting in taste and point, she felt that she now for the first time knew her temptation. Owen had put it before her with an art beyond his own dream. Mona would cast him off if he didn't proceed to extremities¹; if his negotiation² with his mother should fail he would be completely free. That negotiation depended on a young lady to whom he had pressingly suggested the condition of his freedom; and as if to aggravate³ the young lady's predicament designing fate had sent Mrs. Gereth, as the parlor-maid said, "up the back road." This would give the young lady more time to make up her mind that nothing should come of the negotiation. There would be different ways of putting the question to Mrs. Gereth, and Fleda might profitably devote the moments before her return to a selection of the way that would most surely be tantamount to failure. This selection indeed required no great adroitness⁴; it was so conspicuous⁵ that failure would be the reward of an effective introduction of Mona. If that abhorred⁶ name should be properly invoked⁷ Mrs. Gereth would resist to the death, and before envenomed resistance Owen would certainly retire. His retirement⁸ would be into single life, and Fleda reflected that he had now gone away conscious of having practically told her so. She could only say, as she waited for the back road to disgorge, that she hoped it was a consciousness he enjoyed. There was something she enjoyed; but that was a very different matter. To know that she had become to him an object of desire gave her wings that she felt herself flutter in the air: it was like the rush of a flood into her own accumulations. These stored depths had been fathomless⁹ and still, but now, for half an hour, in the empty house, they spread till they overflowed¹⁰. He seemed to have made it right for her to confess to herself her secret. Strange then there should be for him in return nothing that such a confession¹¹ could make right! How could it make right that he should give up Mona for another woman? His attitude was a sorry appeal to Fleda to legitimate¹² that. But he didn't believe it himself, and he had none of the courage of his suggestion. She could easily see how wrong everything must be when a man so made to be manly¹³ was wanting in courage. She had upset him, as people called it, and he had spoken out from the force of the jar of finding her there. He had upset her too, heaven knew, but she was one of those who could pick themselves up. She had the real advantage, she considered, of having kept him from seeing that she had been overthrown¹⁴.  
She had moreover at present completely recovered her feet, though there was in the intensity¹⁵ of the effort required to do so a vibration¹⁶ which throbbed¹⁷ away into an immense allowance for the young man. How could she after all know what, in the disturbance¹⁸ wrought¹⁹ by his mother, Mona's relations with him might have become? If he had been able to keep his wits, such as they were, more about him he would probably have felt—as sharply as she felt on his behalf—that so long as those relations were not ended he had no right to say even the little he had said. He had no right to appear to wish to draw in another girl to help him to an escape. If he was in a plight²⁰ he must get out of the plight himself, he must get out of it first, and anything he should have to say to any one else must be deferred²¹ and detached. She herself, at any rate—it was her own case that was in question—couldn't dream of assisting him save in the sense of their common honor. She could never be the girl to be drawn²² in, she could never lift her finger against Mona. There was something in her that would make it a shame to her forever to have owed her happiness to an interference. It would seem intolerably vulgar to her to have "ousted²³" the daughter of the Brigstocks; and merely to have

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