“Yes, if she feels my dislike even when I try not to show it. Perhaps she didn’t mean to be unpleasant.”
“Perhaps she didn’t know that she meant it.”
“But it’s pitiful—if she thinks she has lost friends.”
“Pretty brazen of Angela—that assumption.”
“But aren’t you rather cruel?” She tried to smile, but a glance at her face showed him how hurt, how tossed by conjecture and regret she was. Geoffrey did not speak his own crueller thought, a thought in which he recognized a complacent vindictiveness—“She is furiously jealous of you.” Accepting her reproach he merely said, “Angela makes me cruel. I enjoy showing her her own real meaning.”
“That is indeed cruel—to enjoy it. I hate showing her, and yet I feel forced to let her know what her meaning seems to me. But I’m more sorry than I can say for it all—for her being in my life in any way. Yet she is in it. She is the centre of Maurice’s old life. Most of his friends are hers, and she was his nearest friend—next to you. She blights everything.” Her voice had a tremor.
“That is tremendously exaggerating her importance. I shouldn’t have suspected you of such weakness. She doesn’t really make you sad?”
“She does, rather.”
“Only on her own account then—not on your own.”
Felicia again recognized the acuteness in him that she had at first been so blind to. Yet even to him she must pass in silence over Angela’s deepest pathos. “Oh, on my own, too,” she said. “I am quite weak enough for that.” She added: “You always make me show my weakness. I seem to find strength in showing it to you—your strength, I suppose.”