Such victory made all lesser struggle easy. She merely looked her incomprehension when she heard Geoffrey saying—
“And now I wonder if you will believe me when I say that I still want you to go back to Maurice.”
His voice told her that he, too, had been engulfed; that he, too, had struggled; that love of her had given him strength to win his victory, and then, in its light, to think; think clearly. But his thought made a fog about her. She could only gaze in wonder. “Nothing is really changed,” said Geoffrey, who, his hand still on the back of her empty chair, had curiously the expression of an orator determined to convince, hardly stooping to persuasion. “You and I are parted. He needs you as much as ever, and you, Felicia, need him more than ever, his claim on you, I mean, his dependence, the burden that it must take all your time and all your energy to carry. I must hurt you with the truth—only I believe you have seen it, as I have. It’s a choice between taking up your old life—and, I am sure of it, Felicia, making a tremendously good thing out of it—or living the new life I described to you—the life of the flower in the vase on the mantelpiece—a life of constant danger. For you—I know your strength; but could it keep me from you, year in and year out, do you suppose, if there were no barriers between us, no actual barriers of everyday life and everyday obligations? For myself—I would die for you, as you know; but to live without you—seeing you drifting—alone—in a sadness worse than any suffering—? I know that the time would come when I would ask you to chuck everything for my sake—for your own I’d put it, too:—Felicia—for my sake—if I asked you as I could—you would do it; and you know as well as I do that that sort of chucking means failure all round. You wouldn’t be the growing flower; you wouldn’t be the cut flower in the vase”—his face, white in its intentness, grew hard as his mind flashed to the similes that would strip all illusion from her; “you would be like those snowdrops that I carry here—on my heart;—on my heart for ever, but crushed, shrivelled, dead.” He had seen his weakness as she had not seen her own. She saw now, and as he had wished, without illusions.
“But go back to him!” she said, closing her eyes and shuddering from the cup he held out to her.
“He loves you. He needs you.”
“Go back from fear?—fear of you?—of myself?”
“Turn from that thought then. Don’t let it be a question of you or me. Go back from pity, and because you loved him; because you are his wife.”
“But after that letter!”
“Is a person’s moral deficiency to warrant the breaking of such a bond? If your mother had done something horrible would you be justified in disowning her?”
“Oh—a mother!” Felicia’s tears ran down.