“I should think it ought to have an aim.”
“Such as making the stupid less stupid? raising the masses? all that sort of thing?”
“It is the part of the powerful person to say that.”
Maurice continued smilingly to look at her. “You won’t like Geoffrey,” he observed. “But though he hasn’t ideals I will say of him that he is dear of the usual reproach of the politician—he claims none. Now Lady Angela does,” he went on, in a sequence that again gave Felicia that rather alarming sense of sudden intimacy. “She lives under tremendously high pressure, you know.” They had passed down the uninteresting avenue, its trees marking sections of flat, green country, and as the house was reached Felicia felt the moment deferred for learning more precisely in what this pressure consisted.
CHAPTER V
MRS. MERRICK’S drawing-room overflowed with aesthetic intentions. Such intentions had come to her late in life, and, as a result, Middle Victorian warred with Morris and final, disconcerting notes of Art Nouveau. Circular plush seats enclosed lofty palms; sofas and chairs weirdly suggested vegetable forms; on walls and draperies was an obsession of pattern. Photographs, in heavy silver frames, in frames of painted glass, in screens and in hanging fan-shaped receptacles, swarmed like a pest of locusts. Mrs. Merrick’s painfully acquired taste had not had the courage of its new convictions; there were accretions, no eliminations, and the room seemed gasping with surfeit.
She sat among her possessions, near the tea-table, her head and shoulders dark against a window. Felicia, on entering the ugly room, always felt the sense of latent hostility; to-day it was more than ever apparent, perhaps in contrast to the new, warm sympathy beside her. Mrs. Merrick gave her a cold kiss, one or two cool questions, and a tepid cup of tea, and left her to dispose of herself as best she might, while she herself turned her quick, tight smile on Maurice Wynne. Carrying her tea-cup, Felicia went across the room to a solitary seat under the tallest palm, amused as usual by her own contrast to the tropics above her and the upholstered respectability beneath. She put her cup on a small and intricately hideous table, perforated, heavily inlaid, with distorted bandy legs—a table, Felicia thought, that seemed to totter up to one, winking and leering with all its decorations—and drawing off her gloves, she looked about her, interested in the latest turn of her aunt’s kaleidoscope.
Near Mrs. Merrick sat a stately young man; Felicia had felt that her adjective had found its subject on first entering the room, even before he had been named to her, and had risen gravely, tea-cup in hand; a young man of really oppressive good looks. His expression was not arrogant, showing, as he suavely surveyed his hostess, only a calm vacancy; but his profile was arrogantly perfect. One sought face and figure in vain for some humanizing defect, some deviation from Olympian completeness. He had the air, radiant and inflexible, of a sun-god. His height, too, was Olympian; his legs, terminating in long, slender shoes, were stretched out before him to quite a startling distance. Felicia’s quickened sense of latent hostility found nothing hostile in this young man; he was merely magnificently indifferent. Her genial maliciousness found him, too, rather funny; not even a sun-god had a right to be so magnificent.
An obvious cause for that quickened sense met her eyes as they left Mr. Daunt and turned to a dim corner on the other side of the room, a corner from which all hint of Mid-Victorian had ebbed, leaving Liberty hangings and deep cushions, inviting to pensiveness, in full possession. The presence among the cushions was, she felt, Lady Angela, and she and Lady Angela were bound to dislike one another; a glance told her that. Mr. Daunt amused her, but Lady Angela made her uncomfortable.
She was leaning back, her arms folded, talking to a small, pallid man—Mr. Jones, Felicia placed him—and in appearance she was very long and curiously incorporeal. It was difficult to define the woman in the swathing lines of her diaphanous black gown that seemed to trail like a shadow across the cushions. Strange ornaments gleamed dimly on her; clasps of turquoise and opal, sombre rings, a chain of heavy gems that curved among the curves of her laces. Her head seemed to hold forward the melancholy smile of her half-parted lips; her eyes were pale, shadowed to mysterious depths by long eyelids; soft dust-coloured hair haloed a narrow face and a long throat, the face so narrow that all the delicate features looked disproportionately large. There was an almost spectre-like effect in this emphasis of the means of expression and the meagreness of setting, and the expression itself, thought Felicia, was like a cosmetic, cunningly applied. A “touched-up” spectre. Lady Angela certainly did not please—nor amuse her either. Their eyes met more than once while she drank her tea, and each time Lady Angela’s seemed to rest on hers with a more insistent, more gentle pathos; they almost seemed to be consoling her for her isolation in a roomful of strangers, yet making her more conscious of isolation. It was with a sense of quick relief, pleasure, and, funnily, almost triumph, that she saw Maurice Wynne approaching her, his tea-cup in one hand, a plate of sandwiches in the other.