This, then, must seem the reality that underlay it all; the struggle of two women over a man. Felicia’s face kept its hardness as she and Maurice went out. She had never struggled, yet her certainty of him, the fact that her departure with him had been a triumph, made her feel as if she had. She did not like the triumph, and walking silently over the lawn, Maurice beside her, she regretted the command. It implied a great deal; it accepted all that his eyes had implied to her. Smarting under this sense of humiliation, she could show no suavity to her companion, and the acute young man suspected that he had served his purpose in merely following her.
Maurice’s tact, as delicate as a woman’s, forced no sympathy upon her by an allusion to the scene they had just left. He talked lightly as they went through the shrubberies into the garden, for Felicia, forgetting the intention of her departure, did not speak of a long walk, and went slowly along the flower-beds, past the warm walls where fruit was ripening. She responded with grave smiles to his talk.
“Do you know,” he said presently, stopping before her in a narrow path where small fruit-trees cast shadows upon them, “to-day you are not a bit a Watteau, but a Romney? The shade your hat makes across your brows and eyes is all Romney—Romney at his best. Do you mind being told that you only remind me of beautiful things?”
Felicia, finding him, for the first time, almost tactless, made no reply. She picked a small pear from the tree beside her. “Now do you consider such a remark impertinent?” Maurice demanded. “You frighten me, you know. I feel in you such a farouche fastidiousness. Our idealist in the drawing-room, now, can accept positively blaring compliments.”
“Well, your appreciation of the shadow my hat makes could hardly be called that,” said Felicia, biting into her pear; “I suppose I hardly know how to accept compliments gracefully—never having had any made me before.”
“It’s too funny! But you know that I am incapable of blaring before you. You know that, don’t you?”
“How can I tell? I have known you just five days.”
“Still—you do know me.”
“Doesn’t Lady Angela know you too? and does she know that you consider your compliments to her blaring?” Felicia, over her pear, was smiling at him now with her dryad-like malice.
“Ergo, if she is deceived in me you must be, and I am not at all trustworthy.”