His hand on the back of the chair, he still leaned over her. Felicia rose, drawing a long breath. She walked to the end of the room; went to the window; turned to face him.
“Ah! Felicia,” said Geoffrey. Looking at her with a sadness almost stern, he clasped his hands together in a gesture curiously uncharacteristic of him; significant of his helpless pain.
“Yes, yes,” she said, “I know. Why did I make the mistake? Why did I not see who was the man I must love? Geoffrey, I would rather have you reproach me than listen to myself.”
“Did you think I would reproach you? Did you think I would add that? I, too, was blindfolded,” he said, looking away from her.
His voice was the voice of frozen tears.
They stood silent, his suffering beating at her heart. She knew that a word from her would unlock flood-gates.
And a great wave of longing rose in Felicia, engulfing her utterly, so that she knew for some moments that seemed eternal nothing but its thunder and its restlessness. She had already seen in herself, in her love for Maurice, this capacity for recklessness, and now a deeper tumult roared in her ears. For this was the man she loved. Through mistakes and misery they had found each other. Why not fall upon his neck and shut her eyes to all that distant world? Why not cry out to him, Take me away? His strength would never lift a finger to tempt her weakness; but was there not in him a new and beautiful weakness that would not resist the appeal of her strength, her courage? Would appeal not be courageous? To see that weakness in him was a craving that shook her through and through as she stood there with her fixed, contemplative face.
She closed her eyes, dazzled by the thought, and it was as if the wave echoed far above her head, and in the sudden stillness of its depths she knew them black and dangerous.
But in that moment of deep struggle it was not the thought of danger or of duty that gave her strength to strike upward to the air. It was the thought of Geoffrey and of the ruin that such an abandonment would make in his life. More than the lurid courage to repudiate safety and the world’s wise barriers for herself, was her refusal to burden him with a defiant happiness.
She could not distinguish her weakness from her strength, nor know which had tempted and which saved her. She knew only her love for Geoffrey; a love that at the crucial moment seemed a long, strong stroke that sent her upward, up to the air again. It was a leaden waste of water she rose to; a sad, colourless sky above; but there was a radiance in its whiteness. Her soul was half fainting, but she knew that her lassitude was that of victory. And all the time the surface woman of custom and control kept her look of contemplative solemnity.