“It could not be if you loved her most.” He was silent, struggling with his thoughts.
“You love her most—now,” Angela said with a distant, a tragic touch of questioning.
“She is—my wife.”
“And therefore you love her most: for the past—loyalty to your wife must seal your lips. If it were so! Yet it is hard—hard to forgive, Maurice, not the pain, not the bewildered pain, but the crippling of my life, the blotting out—for a time—of my heaven. And how could I forgive if you robbed me of even my right to a memory? Of even my dead joy?”
“But—I told you—that I was unworthy—that I was undependable; that I couldn’t depend on my own feeling——“ Maurice stammered on.
“You tried to help me so,” said Angela quickly, “and it was that that I could not forgive—your smirching of it all; but you told me, too, to read between the lines. I did; I believed what I read there.”
Even there she had only read that he loved her; not that he loved her most. There was the intolerable, the unforgiveable. She rose, feeling that she must leave him or burst into sobs. “I understand,” she said. “You must, for her sake, be loyal to the past. I won’t ask further. Now I will go and talk to her.” She went across the room to Geoffrey and Felicia, leaving Maurice in a miserable perplexity.
Should he have been bravely brutal? Told her that the first truth, of past and present, was his love for Felicia? Yet the minor truth was there—the truth Angela clung to as her right—that he had loved her, too, if only for the moment; could he, in the name of the larger truth, rob her of it? He was not able clearly to see what he most wished or regretted—that he might never see Angela again, that he had ever seen her, were perhaps the clearest wish and regret.
Angela sank into a seat beside Felicia. She had still that sense of a strangled sob in her throat. A spiteful little comment floated, strawlike, upon the passionate sea of her thoughts; she grasped it, repeating to herself, “Cheap, alluring little creature.” It helped her to evade the sob and to bear the contemplation of Felicia’s beauty. Oh, yes, she had a certain beauty, a creamy childishness, the obvious charm of soft white and cloudy ambers that had brought Geoffrey to her and won her husband’s shallow heart to constancy. Creaminess, childishness, cheapness would always count for most in this strange world of irony and pain.
“At last I can escape to you,” she said. “You have been so surrounded all the evening, and Maurice and I have been reminiscing; I can never, it seems, find you quite alone”—she smiled at Geoffrey—“but Geoffrey hardly counts, does he? Isn’t it odd—have you noticed it—that I have hardly spoken with you except before Geoffrey, and perhaps, with me, Geoffrey does count—a little uncomfortably? I seem to arouse all his cynicism, and it’s difficult to be quite oneself in the face of even a friendly cynicism. I always fancy that we could really get at one another, Mrs. Wynne, if we could achieve a tête-à-tête.”