Felicia smiled as she made the statement but there was genuine feeling behind it.
"Would you dread change for yourself?"
"For myself? I don't know. I wasn't thinking especially about myself."
"Do you ever?"
"Not oftener than is agreeable. I am getting to be a very placid, settled sort of person. That is the comfort of being in the thirties. You don't expect so much of life. Now, ten years ago if I had been thinking of submitting designs for a competition I should have been frightfully excited. Now, I think I would almost rather not win, which is fortunate considering how little chance there is of my doing so."
"There is all the chance in the world," objected Stephen. "You need a little of the virus of vanity instilled into you. Felicia, do you remember back there in Paris when old Regnier used to insist you had more talent than any man in his class?"
Felicia tranquilly snipped off her thread and admitted that she remembered.
"And do you remember how he raved when you told him you were going to marry Syd?"
Felicia nodded. She remembered that, too; remembered also, though she did not say so, how she had smiled at the old master's ravings, sure that love would prove no hindrance to her art, sure that she and Sydney would work and achieve fame together. She had not dreaded changes in those days. She had welcomed them, taken risks blithely, unafraid. And there had been risks. Her aunt had raved also, to more purpose than the Master, and in a moment of rage had changed her will, cutting off from inheritance the willful girl who chose to reject the French count her judicious relative had selected for her and insisted on marrying instead a penniless artist. The loss of her inheritance had seemed to Felicia at the time a trifle light as air, quite as irrelevant indeed as the Master's gloomy prediction as to the eternal incompatibility of art and matrimony. All these things she had thrown into the scales with love in the opposite balance and love had weighed immeasurably heaviest.
There had followed a few years of idyllic happiness. Though with the coming of the babies the art she loved had been temporarily suspended; both she and her husband promised themselves eagerly that it was only a suspension, that she would go back to it again as soon as Marianna and Brother were just a little older. But before Marianna and Brother were much older Felicia was left alone with a "big heartache to carry round inside her and two children to provide immediate bread and butter for," as Suzanne had put it. And so the old dreams had been thrust out of sight, and the young woman whom the Master pronounced to have possessed more talent than twenty talented young men, fell to earning a living for herself and her little folk by painting place cards and Christmas greetings and calendars and such like small ilk. All this drifted in retrospect through Felicia Emory's mind as she bent over her sewing, and something in the droop of her mouth touched Stephen as he perceived it. Impulsively he threw away his cigarette and leaned forward letting his hand touch hers.