“Oh! frightful fits of the blues. It’s funny that I should talk to you about it; no, not funny that I should talk about it to you, but that there should be a you that made it possible. No one suspects me of blues except Geoffrey. I give him a glimpse now and then. That is really the way our friendship began. I was in a frightful state of mind one term at Eton, sinking in depths of scepticism and horror, and Geoffrey hauled me out, put me on my feet, and, once I’d done gasping, set me running, as it were, got up my circulation. He didn’t argue; but he wonderfully understood, and he promptly acted.”
“And do you have them, the moods, because things don’t last?” Felicia asked, looking ahead into the wood’s translucent green.
“No; not so much that as that things don’t come. I want so much more than I ever get. I want to feel everything—to the uttermost. I never get a chance to exercise my capacity for feeling. It is lack, you see, rather than loss that I dread.”
They had come to the edge of the wood where, beyond a stile, were meadows of tall grasses. Larks sang overhead. Maurice vaulted over the stile and held out his hand to her. Her eyes, looking down at him, showed a gravity, a little perplexity. “You don’t understand that?” he asked, when she stepped down beside him.
“No; I dread both.”
“I am awfully human,” said Maurice; “and I want the whole human gamut—but that’s all I ask.”
“But what is the human gamut?”
“That question from your father’s daughter! Your father, I hear, is a great positivist.”
“Well, his daughter asks the question.”
They walked on through the meadow, white with the lacey disks of tall field flowers.