“How selfish, my dear Angela.” Geoffrey, stretching his long legs in a low chair, did not even offer to accept the open hint. “You don’t get rid of me like that. I refuse to miss you.”
“Isn’t that a palpable evasion?” Angela turned her smile from him; “we must play Pyramus and Thisbe to his determined wall. Only please make allowances for acoustic disturbances; a voice heard through a wall may be misinterpreted.”
Felicia, ready to be amused and to make things easy, laughed at the wall’s stubborn presence. “I can’t urge him to miss you. If he is cynical we will simply leave him—planté là. He is more the schoolboy, though, than the cynic.”
“You find the kindest interpreter, Geoffrey. Well, as a schoolboy then, don’t let him pull off my legs and wings for love of mischief. What have you been doing all this time?”
“Simply jogging on,” said Felicia, finding in Angela’s application of her simile a certain justice. There was, indeed, in Geoffrey’s ruthlessness an element of cruel glee.
“Maurice tells me that he has been lazy. You must whip him up; you must spur him; it’s fatal to Maurice to be allowed to jog. He must race neck-to-neck with some incentive or he soon falls to mere grazing. He is the racer type. But your father hasn’t been jogging,” Angela continued, telling herself before Felicia’s not very responsive look that she must try some other interest—any allusion to Maurice would rouse the hostility of this jealous little wife. “What a gallop, indeed, his article on ‘Credulity’!—Maurice and I have been talking about it.”
Felicia’s eyes turned on her father, who was standing in isolation and assumed indifference before the fire-place. She felt, in seeing him, that familiar throb of indignant pity. No one could realize more acutely than she the qualities in him that made for unpopularity; but it was his ineffectiveness more than his vanity, his lack of power more than his assumption of it, that made the world fall away from him. Her judgement of her father always passed, with a swift self-condemnation, into a judgement of human unkindness. She brought her eyes back to Angela, her good temper chilled; there was sudden hardness in her look as she said: “Have you?”
“Yes,”—Angela smiled tender comprehension upon her—“I do understand. Only I don’t feel quite as you and Maurice do about it. I don’t feel it either so grotesque or so painful. I like the combativeness of it, the way he hurls himself at windmills. You take it too seriously. It’s a thing to smile over, not a thing to be distressed about.”
Felicia’s stare had become frozen, and before it she faltered, suddenly and gently.
“As an old friend of Maurice’s—as a friend of yours—you allow me to understand—and be sorry for the pain, don’t you?”