Fleda hesitated. "Why do you need saving, when you announced to me just now that you're a free man?" "I'm only thinking she'll be impatient—I mean, you know, to learn what will have passed between us."!

He spoke not impatiently, but with a kind of intimate familiarity, the sweetness of which made her feel a pang for having forced him to tell her what was embarrassing to him, what was even humiliating. Yes indeed, she knew all she needed: all she needed was that Mona had proved apt at putting down that wonderful patent-leather foot. Her type was misleading only to the superficial, and no one in the world was less superficial than Fleda. She had guessed the truth at Waterbath and she had suffered from it at Poynton; at Ricks the only thing she could do was to accept it with the dumb exaltation that she felt rising. Mona had been prompt with her exercise of the member in question, for it might be called prompt to do that sort of thing before marriage. That she had indeed been premature who should say save those who should have read the matter in the full light of results? Neither at Waterbath nor at Poynton had even Fleda's thoroughness discovered all that there was—or rather, all that there was not—in Owen Gereth. "Of course it makes all the difference!" she said in answer to his last words. She pursued, after considering: "What you wish me to say from you then to your mother is that you demand immediate and practically complete restitution?" "That he would give his ears to get you?" Mrs. Gereth broke in. "I had a visit from Mrs. Brigstock."

Mrs. Gereth turned on her sharply. "Ready for what? Ready to see me ruined without a reason or a reward?" This was a transaction that Fleda, after a moment, had to give up trying to represent to herself. "If she won't do that—?" she went on. Fleda's surprise at this aberration left her a moment looking at him. "Do you mean your marriage is off?"