Fleda hesitated; she had not quite had a definite idea. "Well—he'll give them up." Fleda moved to the door and opened it. "I'm not prepared to say. You must have patience and see."!

Fleda thought. "You don't, then?" "Why, legal, don't you know?—what he calls setting the lawyers at you."

"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!" She hesitated: she would only be impeccable even though she should have to be sententious. "You'll be happy if you're perfect!" she risked. "Well, was it I, pray, who perpetrated the wrong? Ain't I doing what I can to get the thing arranged?"