“Yes, the pâté de foie gras sense, too. My first impression of you was that—None for me, thanks. Do you remember, Geoffrey, we first saw Mrs. Wynne eating sandwiches?—five, I think you made the number—and isn’t it right and fitting that she should have sandwiches and roses? I want her to let me give her all I may.”
Felicia now leaned back in her chair, folded her arms, and fixed on Angela a look both firm and gay. “Why do you think such things of me?” she asked.
“Things?—what things?” Angela’s smile was neither firm nor gay. She felt suddenly confronted, before a witness, too, and she remembered Felicia’s crude disposition for forcing issues just when one most intended avoiding them. Geoffrey’s cold, unvarying eye was upon her. It was a married hostility she had before her, and, in the little moment of confusion, she saw clearly her hatred of Maurice’s wife. Yes, she was again face to face with hate; but they pushed her to it; for she had come as love personified, as a most magnanimous angel, and she had the right to scorn both Maurice and his wife if Maurice’s letter had spoken the truth—if Felicia’s love and Geoffrey’s charity had forced him into marriage. But had it spoken the truth? Had it? That question had beaten in her brain for months. And the suspicion that Maurice, still talking in his group at the other side of the room, avoided her, filled her with an added bitterness which only an exaggeration of her outward self enabled her to hide.
“What things?” she repeated, conscious that she seemed to blink before something blinding.
“Horrid things!” Felicia decisively, though still gaily, answered.
“My dear child!” Angela breathed with a long sigh. “What have you been thinking of me? What do you mean?”
“I haven’t set out on a quest for roses and sandwiches. I don’t ask for either. You don’t really know me at all, so please don’t talk about me as if you did.”
Her manner, that put the episode on a half-playful footing, completed Angela’s discomfiture. Unless she showed her hate, what should she say? Flight was safer than possibility of shameful exposure. She rose to go, murmuring, as she took Felicia’s hand: “I am sorry—sorry. You have not understood.”
“It seemed to me that you did not.”
Maurice was approaching them at last, and, the impulse of flight arrested, Angela rejoined: “I am afraid that you hardly want me to understand.” Maurice was beside her; she could safely say it, sheltered from rejoinder by his eagerness.