“Dallying, pure and simple, to both of us.”
“Yet you came down here——?”
“To go on dallying. I own it. But I’ve never yet made up my mind to find my culminating romance in Angela, and I haven’t any reason to believe that she hopes to find hers in me. We both enjoy dallying. We both do it rather nicely.” Maurice spoke now with his recovered light gaiety, and as though by holding the matter at arm’s length he were keeping it from the crude touch of bad taste with which Geoffrey threatened it.
The latter’s composure remained unruffled, but after a pause he said, “Frankly, Maurice, you will be a great ass if you don’t find the culminating romance in Angela. You know the importance of material considerations as well as I do, so I’ll not urge them, but add to them the fact that for some years you have been more or less in love with Angela and have led her and everybody else to suppose it—and they might help a very hard-up young man like yourself to a decision.”
“Not at all; they confuse all decisions. Don’t show me the nuggets under the flowers. The flowers alone must be the attraction—must charm me into forgetfulness of the nuggets. There might be some reason in my urging you to marry for money. Poverty in your life is a drag that my Bohemianism can throw off. You do want a rich wife badly; and treating marriage as an unemotional business episode wouldn’t jar upon you as it would upon me. When it’s got to be done I want to do it thoroughly; to fall in love so completely that I shan’t be able to write a sonnet about it. Now, I’ve written several sonnets to Angela.”
Geoffrey, who received these remarks imperturbably, now looked at his watch and observed that they must be going in to breakfast, adding, “I don’t urge an unemotional episode upon you. Your feeling for Angela is, I am quite sure, more than that. I only suggest that you don’t allow an emotional episode to interfere with more important matters. You’ve had quite enough of these experiments in feeling.”
“Ah! but suppose—suppose,” laughed Maurice, happy excitement in the laugh, again throwing back his head, again clasping his hands behind him, “suppose that this were the permanent emotion.”
“In that case,” Geoffrey answered, “I should be very sorry for you, and for Angela and for the wild rose.”
CHAPTER VIII
“YOU and Mr. Wynne seem to be great friends, Felicia,” Mrs. Merrick said to her niece on the following day. She was laying the papers and magazines on a small table in more even rows, the occupation a cover for a conversation significant, Felicia felt at once, but feigning desultoriness. Mrs. Merrick’s mind was of the order that infers matrimonial projects from the smallest indications, and to her vision the indications here were not small. Walks, talks, practisings on piano and violin—whatever Mr. Wynne’s projects, Felicia ought not to count upon them. Mrs. Merrick felt a certain acrid interest in her niece’s worldly welfare. A too sumptuous match might, indeed, have distressed her more deeply than a disastrous one; but Mr. Wynne was in no sense a good match, although he might be a luxury to which Lady Angela could treat herself. Marriage for Felicia must be a more serious matter, not quite of bread and butter, but of, at all events, a decent and secure establishment.