But in consequence Mr. Merrick assumed his manner of the sulky child, and Felicia felt her husband’s eye upon her as, in all his encounters with his father-in-law, he adjusted his attitude to what he imagined she desired of him.
CHAPTER III
“WHAT ages it is, Maurice, since we have really talked together!” said Angela. Maurice, indeed, had avoided meetings all the spring, and Felicia’s unexpressed reluctance had made much adroitness in evasion unnecessary. His world was drifting away from Angela’s world, and in the consequent shrinking he perhaps recognized how large a background she had put into his life; but a background with Angela standing out upon it was well lost; Maurice did not regret it.
But they had met at last, and he had taken her down to dinner, and she sat beside him now, her long eyes, steady, enigmatical, upon him, her mouth, stiffened a little with its smile; her white garments, as usual, seeming to slide away from her thin, white shoulders. That the shoulders were very thin, Maurice noticed, and then, on looking into her face, that it was almost haggard. The hint of delicate wrinklings was upon it, like a pool of wintry water when some desolate wind breathes over its first thin veil of ice.
For really the first time since he had put her out of his life with the letter, a swift, poignant pity went through him, followed by an eager clutch at the hope that pity, by now, was pure impertinence. And the letter, with all the sacrifices that it had made to her, had given him the right to put her out of his life. Following the short ease of the hope that she had ceased to love him was the thought that she might still believe that he loved her. With an ugly vividness some phrases of the letter flashed into his mind, and suddenly, under her steady eyes, he felt himself growing hot.
“No,” he said, beginning to eat his soup, “we have both been busy, haven’t we?”
“Have you, Maurice?” Angela also bent her head to a delicately raised spoon—eating seemed always a graceful concession in her, a charitable keeping in countenance of the grosser needs of others. “I haven’t seen the great picture or the great book yet.”
Though feeling that indolence in artistic production was not to be struggled against, the fact, freshly remembered, that Angela knew how that indolence had been made facile, gave Maurice a hotter sense of burning cheeks. “Not as I should have been,” he confessed. His confusion was so apparent to himself that after a slight pause it seemed only natural to hear Angela say, in a low, unemphatic voice, as she played with her fork, “Do you mind this—so much? Don’t on my account. I am completely seared, Maurice.”
And as he could find no answer: “We must meet, you know. Can’t you pretend calm, as I do?”
She had not accepted then the way of escape; the way of escape would have meant a miserable crouching. She would never pretend that it had been a trifling. She had loved him, and she would crouch to no pretence. She took for granted the bond of a mutual understanding between them.