"Too exciting for poor Mummy. She won't hear of it. She has been slating her fearfully. She says she's a 'barbarian.'" Her hostess was looking at her hard again. "Didn't he tell you—didn't he say anything about it?"!

"You pegged at her so hard?" Owen asked. "He asked for Miss Vetch, mum," the girl replied, with a face that brought startlingly to Fleda's ear the muffled chorus of the kitchen.

"When I got into this I didn't know you, and now that I know you how can I tell you the difference? And she's so different, so ugly and vulgar, in the light of this squabble. No, like you I've never known one. It's another thing, it's a new thing altogether. Listen to me a little: can't something be done?" It was what had been in the air in those moments at Kensington, and it only wanted words to be a committed act. The more reason, to the girl's excited mind, why it shouldn't have words; her one thought was not to hear, to keep the act uncommitted. She would do this if she had to be horrid. Fleda broke into a laugh which gave him a surprise as visible as the emotion it testified to. "Then how am I to know that you 'really' love—anybody else?" "I can't tell you what it is to me to feel you on my side!" Owen exclaimed.