These were neither more nor less than the things with which she had had time to learn from Mrs. Gereth that Poynton overflowed¹. Poynton, in the south of England, was this lady's established, or rather her disestablished home, having recently passed into the possession of her son. The father of the boy, an only child, had died two years before, and in London, with his mother, Owen was occupying for May and June a house good-naturedly lent them by Colonel Gereth, their uncle and brother-in-law. His mother had laid her hand so engagingly on Fleda Vetch that in a very few days the girl knew it was possible they should suffer together in Cadogan Place almost as much as they had suffered together at Waterbath. The kind colonel's house was also an ordeal², but the two women, for the ensuing month, had at least the relief of their confessions³. The great drawback of Mrs. Gereth's situation was that, thanks to the rare perfection of Poynton, she was condemned⁴ to wince⁵ wherever she turned. She had lived for a quarter of a century in such warm closeness with the beautiful that, as she frankly⁶ admitted, life had become for her a kind of fool's paradise. She couldn't leave her own house without peril⁷ of exposure. She didn't say it in so many words, but Fleda could see she held that there was nothing in England really to compare to Poynton. There were places much grander and richer, but there was no such complete work of art, nothing that would appeal so to those who were really informed. In putting such elements into her hand fortune had given her an inestimable chance; she knew how rarely well things had gone with her and that she had tasted a happiness altogether rare.