“Metaphysics!” Mr. Merrick ejaculated with impatience. He had glanced at Felicia’s banner rather fretfully, and saw now her banner, rather than his own bomb-shells, attracting the general attention. Turning his shoulder upon the trivial crew, he addressed himself once more to the task of forcing a way into his brother’s comprehension—overlaid with “crusts of custom.”
“A shallow infidelity is a very foolish thing, Felicia,” said Mrs. Merrick.
“Miss Merrick isn’t an infidel; she’s only a loyalist,” said Maurice.
Mrs. Merrick, not quite sure whether the highest culture as represented by Lady Angela required of her belief or scepticism, continued—
“Don’t you fancy, Lady Angela, that the Church will outlast all attacks?”
“I think more of the spirit than of the form, perhaps,” said Angela, who still leaned on her hand and still looked down; “but to me mere disbelief, especially when founded on egotistic self-assertion, is more repellent, since more crude and embittered, than the lowest forms of belief. Any symbol, however rudimentary, that enables the self to lose itself, is sacred to me.”
She was in the right, as she would always be in the right, Felicia felt; yet as she sat silent now, and not looking at Angela, she knew that the scorn she felt was not the impotent spite of mere wrongness.
Mrs. Merrick, murmuring her gratitude for this enlightenment, rose, and Lady Angela, her hand on her shoulder, walked beside her out on to the lawn. Felicia went into the drawing-room.
She could have wept with fury; but taking up a book, she read, intently, clearly conscious of every word, turning swift pages.
Presently she looked up. Angela had entered the room. Going to a desk near Felicia, she sat down and wrote. They were alone. Felicia read on. Suddenly, laying down her pen, smiling, Angela turned to her. “You were more a loyalist than an infidel—I understood. Only your father pained me so. My faiths, you see, are deep. I did not, through my pain, pain you?”