The fragrance of the cigar was pleasant to Felicia, gave emphasis to her reckless little sense of satisfaction in doing for herself in all their eyes, if need be. After all, they were not her life, and for having fancied herself a part, perhaps a rather important part, of one of their lives she needed, no doubt, this smart little dose of self-mortification.
But Angela, with a closer pressure of the hand, was speaking. “May I help you, then, to be of more use?” she said; “I know how circumstances—material circumstances—interfere. You live so far from the village, and your father’s interests, your interests, are intellectual, not ethical. You haven’t had an opportunity for thinking about all the responsibilities of this difficult life of ours. I should love to talk to you about it all—the giving of oneself, the life for others, which is the only true living. You haven’t seen the spiritual and practical side of things—for practical and spiritual are one in reality. We know, only to do.”
They had emerged once more upon the lawn, and Felicia was now between Angela and Geoffrey Daunt, who still strolled a little apart, looking at the tree-tops. Maurice smiled first at her and then at Angela, as though finding a whimsical humour in the situation. He must sympathize with Angela. How could he not? Did not she herself sympathize? Were not these thoughts her own familiar thoughts? Yet her one impulse was to disown them when put before her in that soft, rapt voice; she found herself contemplating them with no sense of communion, with a dull, hard indifference, rather. She almost thought that she preferred pigs behind their palings to seraphs in laces.
“I know very little,” she said; “I certainly do nothing.”
“Oh, come now!” Maurice broke in. “You talk to your father; you make a beautiful garden; you play magnificently. Do you call that doing nothing? And you were telling me last evening of the teas you loved giving in the garden to the village children—pets of yours. I have no doubt your teas give more pleasure than heaps of highly organized charities.”
“Ah! you do interest yourself then!” Angela turned on her a look of bright reproach. “How can you say you do nothing? I am so glad you have the children—so glad that you don’t shut yourself away in a palace of art; nothing is more dangerous than that.”
“That’s a hit at me,” Maurice declared; “I inhabit the dangerous palace, and don’t intend to come out of it, either, although Angela is always sounding her trumpet at its gate.”
Geoffrey, flicking the ash from his cigar, now asked, “Might not a shrine, conceivably, be sometimes as dangerous as a palace?”
The tide, Felicia felt, as far as it had a direction, was with her and against Angela; but the fact only heightened her angry discomposure. She would not be drawn into a contest with Angela; she would not bid for approbation. That she seemed to have gained it made her angrier. Mr. Daunt was a half-insolent coxcomb, and she did not want Maurice to defend her motives.
Angela’s eyes turned in a long gaze upon Geoffrey, who had asked his light question as casually as he blew smoke rings into the air. “My dear Geoffrey,” she said, “you say things at times that make me wonder whether you have not very delicate perceptions as well as a ruthless will. I don’t quite know what, to your mind, your meaning may be, but to mine it is deep. Any height that separates us from life is dangerous; is that it? Yet may not the shrine be brought amidst the turmoil, the suffering of life—so that those who see it may touch it and be healed?”