“Wearing out my scabbard,” she said with a fatigue that made no attempt at lightness. “That is the fate of all of us who dedicate our lives to anything, isn’t it? It does one good to see these young people, doesn’t it, Geoffrey? Life smiles on them, doesn’t it? It does one good,” she repeated, while her eyes went from him to Felicia.
Angela always bored her cousin; to-day she irritated him, especially when she took a chair and the sibylline attitude. His talk with Felicia was obviously and indefinitely postponed. If not the irritation, the boredom, at all events, showed itself in his “To be with people who aren’t wearing out their scabbards.”
“Yes,”—Angela did not look up from her tea-cup—“people who have in their lives what one longs to put into everybody’s life.”
“You mean that we are dedicated merely to happiness?” Felicia smiled, a little disturbed, as she remembered she had long ago been, by Geoffrey’s manner of mild ridicule.
“No, no; only that it has dedicated itself to you. You must let me come often and look at you. You must let an old friendship like mine and Maurice’s be included in the new relationship. I am included, am I not? just as Geoffrey, I feel sure, is. You, too, must think of me as an old friend, Mrs. Wynne. You must make use of me if there are any things you want to do, any people you want to meet. You must let me help you in your quest. I can hand on to you a good many of the toys that make a London season enjoyable.”
Felicia felt her old hostility rising; for the sake of a pathos she surmised in Angela, she controlled it, asking, still lightly, as she arranged her tea-cups, “What quest do you mean?”
“Why, the quest of youth and happiness—success in life. It is a pity that it should be seen as a toy before the time comes for a sad seeing of things. I always think of you as the lover of life personified, always see you crowned with roses and walking under sunny skies.”
Felicia, re-filling Geoffrey’s cup and helping herself to a slice of bread and butter, made no comment on this vision. But Geoffrey did not let it pass. “What do you mean by life?” he asked.
Angela still seemed to muse. “Oh, in this instance, I don’t mean life in its sense of expansion through self-sacrifice, of self-achievement through renunciation, but in the happy, finite sense, the illusion through which we must rise to reality, the rose and sunlight sense, the bread-and-butter sense, in fact,” she added, raising her eyes to Felicia and smiling.
“Why not pâté de foie gras sandwiches?” asked Felicia; “they are even happier. Do have one.”