“But I want to suffer,” said Felicia. “The time will come when I won’t mind. Haven’t you that fear—the worst of all—that even the suffering will go? One does outlive everything one cares about. After a time there is only a dim regret. Life is so shrunken, that one can hardly remember larger hopes.”
“No, no,” said Geoffrey, as she raised her face; “you don’t really believe that. Perhaps you will suffer less, but it won’t be because you’ve grown littler. Things must come to you. You will keep things. And,” he went on, smiling, and seeing an answering smile, sad, infinitely touched, dawn on her weary face, “you have your feeling for beauty to help you; you read poetry. You play so wonderfully. You see snowdrops.”
Her eyes were on him while he spoke, while he smiled at her. She had a sense, startled, almost reverent, of losing herself in the contemplation of his beauty. Her mind, racked to a languor, could not clearly see the difference between her own passionately rebellious grief, self-centred in its longing for lost happiness, and his sorrow that over its slain hope knew a selfless suffering; but with the humility of dim recognitions came a dim peace. Her soul, like a storm-beaten ship, seemed entering a still harbour at evening.
“How you think of me. How dear you are,” she said softly. She had that image of torn, drooping sails; of a deep, safe sea; quiet, encircling shores, and the evening star. “You make me ashamed. I have thought only of showing you my own unhappiness. I see you—really see you—for the first time.”
She leaned toward him, and Geoffrey, in all the dreamy contemplation of her face, saw a yearning impulse to comfort, to atone, that looked a kiss, even guessed that in a moment she would kiss him; he had only to let that inner, sobbing self glance mutely from his eyes.
He rose, flushing a little. “Thanks,” he said; “you won’t forget me, I know.”
She understood the abruptness; it awoke her to a sense of the greater pain her unconsciousness might have given. Saying that now she must go home, she, too, rose.
Her thoughts, as she walked beside him, were grey, vague, peaceful like an evening mist. All was dim; but the harbour was about her. The tattered sails could sleep.
They left the woods near Felicia’s garden wall.
“And now I go back to those scuffles that don’t interest you,” said Geoffrey.