"To act, to take means." "Why, legal, don't you know?—what he calls setting the lawyers at you."!

"Marry him if he were to ask me? Most distinctly not!" Fleda wondered, but she also smiled. "To-night—to-morrow?"

Fleda felt herself flush slightly, but she tried to smile. "Did you tell her all about it? Did you make her understand you want me?" "You've diverged uncommonly far!"—Owen laughed back. Fleda, with her hideous crockery and her father's collections, could conceive that these objects, to her visitor's perception even more strongly than to her own, measured the length of the swing from Poynton and Ricks; she was aware too that her high standards figured vividly enough even to Owen's simplicity to make him reflect that West Kensington was a tremendous fall. If she had fallen it was because she had acted for him. She was all the more content he should thus see she had acted, as the cost of it, in his eyes, was none of her own showing. "What seems to have happened," he exclaimed, "is that you've had a row with her and yet not moved her!" "Didn't he answer the note in which you let him know that I was in town?" Fleda asked.