"If there were more there would be too many to convey the impression in which half the beauty resides—the impression, somehow, of something dreamed and missed, something reduced, relinquished, resigned: the poetry, as it were, of something sensibly gone." Fleda ingeniously and triumphantly worked it out. "Ah, there's something here that will never be in the inventory!" "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.!

"What else can I really pretend when you threaten so to cast me off if I speak the word myself?" "Why, letting me tell her a dozen things she can have."

"You'll last quite as long—" Here Fleda suddenly hesitated. "I'm very, very tired." Mrs. Gereth's slow head-shake was tragic. "I couldn't do it again." "Of course I mean their marriage!" Fleda hesitated again. "I haven't the least idea."