Felicia, after the kiss, still looked at him. “I would do anything for you—suffer anything,” she said.
“I don’t want you ever to suffer for me.”
“I would almost rather. It would make even deeper roots.”
“And if the suffering were poverty, grinding poverty?—I am very poor, Felicia”—Maurice’s voice hurried, broke a little—“I have nothing.”
“I should like showing you how little I mind. We can both work. I have always thought that I might make something by giving lessons in music—or translating; I am a good linguist.” Her realism was a new aspect of her. Her steadiness, then, had not faced mere visions. But such realism perplexed, almost dismayed him. A laborious union had never entered his mind. Her words conjured up a grey picture of unrelieved effort, a wife striving beside him in obscurity. It hurt him more for her than for himself, though for himself it gave a tremor of shrinking.
“You work, darling! Absurd! Besides, London swarms with music-teachers, with translators. No, no; something will turn up for me. I can put such heaps of irons in the fire. I may suddenly become a popular portrait-painter—charge a thousand apiece for my pictures; two or three a year would keep us going beautifully. Or I may write a book.”
“Papa and I live on as many hundreds!” Felicia ejaculated, in her smile a touch of maternal tolerance for such improbabilities.
In his strong reaction from that grim picture she had so calmly drawn he could laugh at the thought of the little hundreds. Yet that even those base rungs of the ladder were not beneath his feet gave him a chill.
Among the pines, as they began to climb, the wind sighed, and the sun, far below and far away over the grey wastes of evening, made only a sullenly smouldering line of embers on a cloud-barred horizon. They paused to look back at it.
“How one feels the autumn—almost like winter already,” said Felicia, leaning against him. “It is like our music of yesterday morning, isn’t it?—a sadness so beautiful to look at from our happiness.”