She had never before, Geoffrey realized, shown him at once her malice and her kindness. Her smile, at last, was like the smiles at Maurice. He had the sense of sunny playfulness—reminiscent of childhood, and the big words they bandied were delightfully rebounding, gaily coloured balls.
“I must seem almost impertinent, I am afraid,” Felicia went on, “but I have to be—to keep up my courage. I never gave tea to a great man before. I suppose that you are a great man—for I can’t say that my littleness has any means of knowing. Impudence is the privilege of littleness, you see.”
“But not satire; that’s the privilege of equality or superiority; you have a perfect right to it. It’s only potentially that I can be called a great man.”
“Why, I see people reading whole columns of you—in the Times;—what is greatness, pray, if that isn’t?”
“You never read my speeches?”
“Never,” she confessed; “besides, you have only made one or two, you know, since I ever knew any thing about you.”
“Politics don’t interest you?”
“They might, if I came into any real contact with them. To read speeches is to see the flag without knowing what battles are going on under it.”
“What do you do?” he asked.
“Since I don’t read speeches? Not much, really. I am an embodiment of the dullest thing in nature—inertia. I exist—like the trees outside. Things happen to me; the seasons pass over me; perhaps I have a branch lopped off now and then. I express nothing that I can think of except indolent vegetation.” She really liked him so much that she had allowed her voice to gather a bitterness from her undercurrent of thought as she went on. She laughed, though half sighing as she added, “I am matter, you see—and you are motion. It must be nice to be a force.”