“If I acted badly, I should expect to be beaten.”
“Well,” said Cecilia, also flippantly, following with disapproving eyes the little person in green, who danced happily by us (it is Cecilia’s first season, and such spectacles make her cynical), “Bobby will never beat you, Felicia, however much you need it. Bobby’s too kind. He would not even have beaten Lydia!”
“Wouldn’t you beat me, no matter what I did?” Felicia appealed to me. Then for one second my heart stopped and then raced on again, for the fantastic explanation of her question that came to me was that this was one of the things she had been trying to ask me; that perhaps she had wanted me to beat her and storm and take on, and that I had failed her.
“No, Felicia,” I replied sadly, “I shall never beat you.” I thought she looked disappointed. I wondered if I had really found a light in the darkness that had surrounded us.
Meantime the little lady and her companion had sat down, and in that crowded place they were talking as eagerly and unconsciously as if they had been all alone in the Garden of Eden.
“I hate an ostrich,” remarked Lydia.
“Her husband doesn’t see her, anyway,” said Felicia lightly; but there was an edge of bitterness in her voice; and again I wondered if through all our meaningless talk Felicia was signalling to me in a cipher code of her own invention.
“Perhaps he does see just the same, perhaps he cares, and can’t find the words to tell her in,” I ventured.
“She may,” Felicia speculated, “be keeping on and on, just waiting for the word from him. She may not be able to stop all by herself—she may have no way of stopping herself.” The corners of her mouth drooped. I felt she had told me all—everything that had saddened her, all the things she had tried to say and couldn’t. For few of us can stop all of ourselves, there must be some warning voice to call “halt” to each of us, and I had been leaving it to Monty Saunders’ first impertinence. Now I had to tell her I was unable to do anything else.
“He may have tried and tried to tell her and found that he couldn’t. He may have found he was constitutionally unable to interfere,” I told her.