“Well, dear, I’m afraid he is unmalleable. He is going.”
Felicia’s face hardened a little, but not, he knew, towards himself.
“He sees the strain, the unnaturalness he makes?”
“Try not to mind, dear. You’ll find that it will adjust itself.”
Maurice had not guessed, nor had Felicia herself even, the almost panic sense of dismay and danger that underlay her determined activity, her determined cheerfulness. Angela seemed to threaten all her life. Worst of all, though Felicia clung blindly to her instinct, she seemed to threaten her very power of judging, feeling clearly. Darts of self-distrust went through her, and following them, strange disintegrating longings to justify Angela by that self-distrust, to own herself hard, cruel, and to find peace. Her mind played her these will-of-the-wisp tricks, tempting her—to what bogs and quicksands? Under the shifting torment only the instinct held firm, and with shut eyes it clung to courage as her only safeguard; courage to face the tangled life, and the greater courage needed to face the tangled thoughts and conscience. It kept the quiet in her voice, her eyes, as she answered now.
“I mind, of course; but I believe that with time he will come back to me. I shan’t oppose him. As long, dear, as she doesn’t come between you and me, it’s really all right.”
CHAPTER VIII
“YES, it had become impossible,” said Geoffrey. He was standing before her in the little room overlooking the river where they so often talked. “I couldn’t submit to being dragged helplessly at the wheels of a chariot that I would have driven in precisely the opposite direction.” He smiled a little as he added, “So you see before you a ruined man. Are you pleased with me that I’ve embraced failure?” Lightness of voice went with the smile, and, superficially, the old manner of holding out a sugar-plum to a child.
Felicia, knowing what his resignation of office meant to him, was too much distressed by what she felt beneath the lightness to respond in the playful key.
“You are not a ruined man,” she said; “I’m not pleased that you should call yourself that. You really can’t afford to re-enter the House as an independent member?”