“I can’t.”
“Why?” he demanded. And then it came out. Why? It had been staring me in the face all along. I had known why, but I had shirked, as long as I could, putting my confession of weakness into words. If I had never seen 479 Felicia cry, it would have been different. I might have talked to her as man to man, but now:
“I can’t, because it’s impossible for me to interfere with Felicia.”
I told him. There it was. It was constitutionally impossible for me to interfere, in words anyway. It was like a sense lacking, but there where my Felicia-preventing faculties should have been there was a blank.
“Do you mean you would let her do anything?”
“Anything,” I assented.
“Let her drift from you and not reach out your hand for her?”
“I couldn’t raise my hand,” I confessed sadly. There it was. I couldn’t do the disagreeable task known as “bringing her to her senses.” If Felicia couldn’t feel that I didn’t like what she did, I couldn’t, for the life of me, or even the life of Felicia, open my mouth. And I believe there are a great many men like me in the world, and more women, too. A certain kind of pain makes us dumb. A certain pride freezes back the words that would come. The men of us have perhaps seen our Felicias cry. And there’s no use saying afterwards, Why didn’t you tell me? What, after all, is the use of words, when it’s written all over you in the very set of your coat that you’re hurt?
So now it was all settled. There was no use in my lying awake at night any longer while my other self tickled his vanity by making up admonitory conversations with Felicia, that went this way:
“Felicia,” I was to say tenderly yet seriously, “I have something I want to talk over with you.”