"I'm unhappy because I torment you, and you don't understand me." "I took hold of them hard—I put them in the forefront. I made them work."!

"Didn't you ask?" Mrs. Gereth spoke as if she might have said, "What then were you doing all the while?" "Oh, that's what I should call it!" Fleda laughed, to her own surprise.

"It's never permitted to be surprised at the aberrations of born fools," said Mrs. Gereth. "If a cow should try to calculate, that's the kind of happy thought she'd have. Mrs. Brigstock came down to plead with me." Fleda was infinitely shaken; she was silent a little. "Yes, I understand. Did she go to you to complain of me?" "We're together, we're together," Mrs. Gereth lifelessly repeated. "That's all we are now; it's all we have." The words brought to Fleda a sudden vision of the empty little house at Ricks; such a vision might also have been what her companion found in the face of the stopped Dutch clock. Yet with this it was clear that she would now show no bitterness: she had done with that, had given the last drop to those horrible hours in London. No passion even was left to her, and her forbearance only added to the force with which she represented the final vanity of everything.