"I know that you are lying," said Felicia. But as she listened, as she spoke, old doubts, old fears flitted across the dimness of the past.
"Then,"--Angela's breath failed her; she drew Maurice's letter from her breast and put it in Felicia's hand--"read that," she half whispered.
And as she did this she knew that she had rolled to the very bottom of the abyss. It was only a glance of horrid wonder. She could not look at herself. She could not turn her eyes from the moment's supreme vengeance. She stood watching her rival--her victim--yes, yes, those voices from the abyss were true--watched her cheeks grow ashen, her eyes freeze, her beauty waver, change to something strange, rigid, mask-like.
But Felicia, as she read on to the end, and then, mechanically turning to the first page, read once more, did not think of Angela or even know that she was there. As she read and the blood seemed slowly crushed out of her heart, she forgot Angela, forgot herself, fixed in a frozen contemplation of Maurice's perfidy, a trance-like stare at him and at Geoffrey; Maurice who had abased, Geoffrey who had exalted her. Geoffrey held up from the dust, where Maurice struck her, some piteous, alien creature. But this new revelation of Geoffrey was dimmed again by the written words and the thought they hammered on her brain: "My husband's words." Then at last identity whispered "of me."
They ran, the words, like flame, scorching, blackening her past with him. Meanest, weakest, cruellest. Most dastardly of all, most loathly, was his love for her, his facile adaptation of his life to hers, his fawning dependence on the nature nearest him. Most horrible it was to know--for she knew it--that he indeed loved her. An acted lie--while he could betray her to another woman--would have made him less odious to her. That he could at once love and betray was the horror.
She hated him. She had shut her eyes again and again so that in seeing too clearly she might not love him less; they were widely open now and they saw more than the loss of love.
With all the force of her crucified trust and tenderness, all the passion of her shattered pride, she hated him.
Raising her eyes she saw Angela standing and looking at her. Angela was distant, unreal, a picture hung before dying eyes. She felt no hatred for Angela; instead, with the terrible clearness of her new vision, she felt a far-away and contemptuous pity. She saw both herself and Angela caught in the same net of falsity; both she and Angela in their struggles were piteous. Angela had been ugly in her struggle, but she could not feel that she hated her.
