“So much silence; how exquisite! Isn’t that a picture, Maurice, that she makes for us! Much silence ought to mean much peace, much happiness, much growth. You and your father on your hill-top; Maurice has told me of it.” Again she smiled from him to Felicia, the gentle link between them. “Do you understand one another so well that you need talk very little?”
“Oh! we talk a good deal, though we understand one another, I hope. I only meant that there was no one else to talk to, and that one could have so much silence as not to care much about it.”
Lady Angela made her feel immature and irritable; and could the shrinking irritability be simply—she asked it of herself with quite a pang of self-disgust—a latent sense of contrast, of jealousy? But it was prior to, deeper than, any possible jealousy; she could exonerate herself from the pettiness, though wondering if the deeper cause were more creditable. What creditable cause could there be for disliking Lady Angela, so exquisite, so tender, holding her hand so closely within hers as they walked? Yet she knew that she wanted, like a rude child, to push her away; and though that rudimentary instinct must be controlled, her eye in going over her went with something of a child’s large coldness.
Angela wore, on the hot summer afternoon, a trailing dress of white. A scarf of gauze and lace fell from her shoulders to her feet. Her arms and breast glimmered through dim old laces. Enfolded as she was with transparent whiteness, she looked exquisitely undressed—a wan Aphrodite rising through faint foam. Ridiculous, indeed, Felicia thought, that this spiritual creature should arouse in her a Puritanic rigour, so that she was glad of the crisp creak of her own linen frock, stiff with much laundering, quite badly cut, she unregretfully knew—a frock simply, and in no sense an ornament. She was glad that she had not put on her better dress, the white lawn, with its flutter and its charm. Let the contrast be as obvious as possible—as unbecoming to herself as possible.
“You must let me come and see you on your hill-top some day when I am here again,” Angela went on; “may I? I can’t tell you how people interest me. I have always loved to look at other people’s lives—haven’t I, Maurice?” Geoffrey walked a little apart, smoking; none of her pretty appeals included him.
“To meddle as well as look, you think—don’t you?” and her smile was now half sad in its humour.
“Oh, you meddle quite nicely,” Maurice said; “Let her meddle with you, Miss Merrick, if she longs to; it will give her lots of pleasure and do you no harm.”
“Rather scant encouragement for you!” laughed Angela, looking down, for she was the taller of the two, at Felicia; “but may I? What I really want of you is your help in a little general meddling here. I have been talking with your aunt about the village people. There seems so much to be done; and so much apathy, so much deadness. I am afraid it is a struggle for your poor aunt, and of course she has not the gift, the grace, the charm that you could bring to the struggle. What charities are you interested in? What do you suggest? You mustn’t think me a Don Quixote—tilting at other people’s windmills; but wherever I go I confess I try to do something. I want to help people. What else is there to live for?”
“I don’t help anybody,” said Felicia, nerving herself to resoluteness, for she disliked putting a smudge beside the flowing loveliness of Lady Angela’s signature; “I don’t know anything about the charities here. We never go to church, and the charities are connected with that. We are quite the black sheep of the parish, and black sheep can’t be of much use, except as warnings, I suppose.”
It was ugly, it was uncouth; Lady Angela made her feel both; and after the smudge was made there was silence for quite a long moment while they turned among the laurels of the shrubbery, she, Angela and Maurice still abreast, while Mr. Daunt and his cigar came behind them.