"It came to Mona's knowledge--I can't tell you how, but it came--that
the things I was sending back had begun to arrive at Poynton. I had sent
them for you, but it was _her_ I touched." Mrs. Gereth paused; Fleda was
too absorbed in her explanation to do anything but take blankly the
full, cold breath of this. "They were there, and that determined her."
"Determined her to what?"
"To act, to take means."
"To take means?" Fleda repeated.
"I can't tell you what they were, but they were powerful. She knew how,"
said Mrs. Gereth.
Fleda received with the same stoicism the quiet immensity of this
allusion to the person who had not known how. But it made her think a
little, and the thought found utterance, with unconscious irony, in the
simple interrogation: "Mona?"
"Why not? She's a brute."
"But if he knew that so well, what chance was there in it for her?"
"How can I tell you? How can I talk of such horrors? I can only give
you, of the situation, what I see. He knew it, yes. But as she couldn't
make him forget it, she tried to make him like it. She tried and she
succeeded: that's what she did. She's after all so much less of a fool
than he. And what _else_ had he originally liked?" Mrs. Gereth shrugged
her shoulders. "She did what you wouldn't!" Fleda's face had grown dark
with her wonder, but her friend's empty hands offered no balm to the
pain in it. "It was that if it was anything. Nothing else meets the
misery of it. Then there was quick work. Before he could turn round he
was married."
Fleda, as if she had been holding her breath, gave the sigh of a
listening child. "At that place you spoke of in town?"
"At the Registrar's, like a pair of low atheists."