“I shall work, then,” Felicia declared; “it’s only fair that I should. You have a right to lounge, but I, who have lounged all my life, must prove to you that I meant what I said—do you remember?”
Their tiny income just sufficed. “If a pinch comes I’ll set to,” Maurice affirmed. But Felicia said that she didn’t need to be pinched; she wanted to set to as a preventive to pinches. She was a good linguist and she found some translating to do. Through Maurice’s numerous literary relations there was quite a nice little field of endeavour open to her, and she persisted in ploughing it. Maurice laughed at the determination with which she shut herself up every morning.
“You must wait for inspiration,” she retorted; “but there is no reason why this hack-work of mine shouldn’t keep off a pinch for ever.”
Adjustment to a constant and growing anxiety was necessary when her father arrived for his long visit, a visit whose length, Maurice eagerly insisted, must be indefinite. He saw that his insistence, generous as she must feel it in a lover, gave pleasure to Felicia, and he pressed Mr. Merrick for a promise of indefiniteness.
But Felicia felt at once that her father, as usual, jarred. She had no need to explain her father to Maurice; understanding was Maurice’s strong point; very cheerfully he found her father a bore. Unfortunately, though quick, Mr. Merrick could not be expected to grasp the unflattering impression nor to suspect from Maurice’s attitude of bright acquiescence that Maurice found in acquiescence the easiest way of getting rid of him. Mr. Merrick’s dogmatic intolerance could only weary or amuse a mind so fundamentally sceptical. Felicia realized that it was for her sake that Maurice smiled and acquiesced, but she felt it, in consequence, incumbent on her to be very exact in acquiescence, with the really funny result that it was, at first, more and more upon Maurice that Mr. Merrick counted. It was the knowledge that he counted upon an unreality that made the anxiety, the pain, for Felicia. The little tangles of silent misconceptions on one side, of discernments on the other, drew constantly into knots, and Felicia found herself contemplating such a knot with discomfort one day after a talk with her father.
She went into Maurice’s studio at the back of the flat, finding, in his ease over a volume of French verse, an added cause for irritation.
“Maurice, have you encouraged papa to publish that article on ‘Credulity’?” she asked.
“It is vieux jeu, you know,” Maurice confessed, glad of the occasion for frankness, and putting his arm around her as she stood beside his deep chair.
“Do I know?” said Felicia, smiling irrepressibly, though unwillingly, as she met the limpid blue of his eyes.
“It is all true enough, as far as it goes,” said Maurice, hardly recognizing her vexation and wishing to be consolatory. “Sit down on the arm of the chair, dear, and don’t stand so still, so stiff, so disapproving.”