In the little silence the oddity of the situation perhaps struck him too. Felicia, looking up from the fire, saw in his pre-occupied gaze at her some inner cogitation. He hesitated a moment, and then with grave courtesy asked, “Your father is well, I hope?”
“Very well, thank you.” She was still looking at him, and into both minds there flashed the memory of that silent drama at the table, and, seeing that he, too, remembered, Felicia was astonished, really touched, to see the Olympian suddenly flush deeply.
For a moment the dominating young man looked quite helplessly at her, and in this little silence something else passed between them; it refused analysis. Felicia could not have said whether pleasure or compunction were uppermost in her consciousness, she was so sorry for his discomposure, yet so pleased at his capacity for it. At all events enmity was over.
“About your caring for the view,” she said, going to the tea-table and busying herself with the spirit-lamp and kettle; “it doesn’t make you happy to look at beautiful things, does it? You haven’t at all cultivated your senses of seeing or hearing, have you?”
Geoffrey took some moments to bring his mind back to this level. The shock of his own emotion before that memory, his pain that it should be, his desire that it should not count against him with her, were new elements in himself that he contemplated with some bewilderment. “No; I haven’t had time for cultivating my senses,” he said, after the evident adjustment. “I hardly believe that they would be worth cultivating. Does that seem a guilty negligence to you? You are awfully well up in all that sort of thing; I could see it.”
“Indeed, I don’t at all exaggerate the importance of that sort of thing”; she smiled her amusement at the idea of finding his negligence guilty.
“Certainly there are more important things in the world,” Geoffrey answered, also with a smile. “I don’t understand making feelings—however exquisite—the object of life.”
“Nor do I—I hope you see that too.”
“Oh, yes; I see that.” He had evidently seen a good deal, and with the sense of groping for a new interpretation of him, Felicia asked—
“But what do you call the object of life?”