her contest with Keith.  She could then have appealed to his pity as she had done with such signal success two years ago, when the result of the appeal had been to bring him violently to the point.  She was wise enough to know that in contending with a chivalrous man a woman’s strongest defence is her defencelessness.  Though she was unable to believe that pure abstract honour was or could be the sole and supreme motive of Keith’s behaviour, she felt that if she could have said to him, “I’ve thrown up a good situation to marry you,” his chivalry would not have held out against that argument.

But Flossie never made mistakes.  She was too consummate a diplomatist.  Therefore, though appearances were against her, it was only reasonable to suppose that she had not really done so now, and that her original inspiration had been right.  It was foresight so subtle, so advanced, that it outstripped the ordinary processes of calculation, and appeared afterwards as the mysterious leading of a profounder power, of the under-soul that presses the innocent intellect into the services of its own elemental instincts.  The people who yield most obediently to this compulsion are said to have good luck.

Flossie’s good luck, however, was not yet apparent either to herself or to her fellow-boarders at Tavistock Place.  Not that she had enlarged on her trouble to any of them.  The whole thing had been too profoundly humiliating for that.  To say nothing of being engaged to a man who had shown so very little impatience to marry her, to have taken and furnished a house and be unable to live in it, to have received congratulations and wedding presents which had all proved premature, to know, and feel that everybody else knew, that her bedroom was at this moment lumbered up with a trousseau which, whether she wore it or put it by two years, would make her equally ridiculous, was really a very trying position for any young lady, and to Flossie, whose nature was most delicately sensitive to such considerations, it was torture.  But, after all, these things were material and external; and the worst of Flossie’s suffering was in her soul.  Before the appearance of Miss Harden, the last two years had passed for Flossie in gorgeous triumphal procession through the boarding-house.  She had been the invincible heroine of Mrs. Downey’s for two years, she had dragged its young hero at her chariot wheels for two years, she had filled the heart of Ada Bishop with envy and the hearts of Mr. Soper and Mr. Spinks with jealousy and anguish for two years; and now she had all these people pitying her and looking down on her because she had been so queerly treated; and this was even more intolerable to poor Flossie.  She knew perfectly well what every one of them was saying.  She knew that Ada Bishop had thanked Goodness she wasn’t in her shoes; that Miss Bramble spoke of her persistently as “that poor young thing”; that Mrs. Downey didn’t know which she pitied most, her or poor Mr. Rickman.  He was poor Mr.