"I couldn't stand the way she treated you, and that was what I had to say to her," Owen returned.
"She's simple and slow, but she's not a fool: I think she treated me, on the whole, very well." Fleda remembered how Mrs. Gereth had treated Mona when the Brigstocks came down to Poynton.
Owen evidently thought her painfully perverse. "It was you who carried it off; you behaved like a brick. And so did I, I consider. If you only knew the difficulty I had! I told her you were the noblest and straightest of women."
"That can hardly have removed her impression that there are things I put you up to."
"It didn't," Owen replied with candor. "She said our relation, yours and mine, isn't innocent."
"What did she mean by that?"
"As you may suppose, I particularly inquired. Do you know what she had the cheek to tell me?" Owen asked. "She didn't better it much: she said she meant that it's excessively unnatural."
Fleda considered afresh. "Well, it is!" she brought out at last.
"Then, upon my honor, it's only you who make it so!" Her perversity was distinctly too much for him. "I mean you make it so by the way you keep me off."
"Have I kept you off to-day?" Fleda sadly shook her head, raising her arms a little and dropping them.