"He knows," Maurice stammered, "that if he were to feel a shackle I would abandon----."
"Ah, but would you?" said Angela as he paused. "Though that is why, for your sake, more than his--I know your sensitiveness--that is why, dear friend, I had hoped that this year would be for you an incentive to energy rather than lethargy. You are more shackled than he is--I want to see you free. I wish--I wish," she smiled with quite her old sweet lightness now, "you would let me try to help you. Can I inspire no longer?"
But Maurice could feel no sweetness, or, if sweetness there were, it was to him poisonous. Had he, indeed, opened himself to this? He could find no words.
"Dear Maurice, how you distrust me," she murmured, "how you forget that such a friend as I know myself to be takes it too much for granted, perhaps, that she has all her old rights; the right to be true; the right to help. Forgive me, I have hurt you, I see. I couldn't hurt you if you trusted me. Is Mr. Merrick, here, too? Ah, yes, I see. I read to-day his article on 'Credulity.'"
In the turmoil of his feeling, helpless astonishment, distrust indeed, yet a self-reproachful pity pervading it, Maurice almost gasped with relief at the change of topic. She was speaking on normal levels where he could breathe; she was smiling kindly, no longer with that over-significant sweetness that stung and bewildered, and with a comprehension of his pain, she had turned from it.
"Isn't it appalling!" he laughed--he would have laughed at anything said in that normal voice--"it's unfortunate weakness of his, that beating of dead lions, to which Felicia and I have to yield." Angela also laughed. "My dear Maurice! I see it all. It is rather pretty. There's a pathos in it, so far as you and she are concerned."
"Of course, we were done with all that crude naturalism in the eighties," Maurice said. "I am afraid Felicia and I find the grotesqueness of his attack painful rather than pretty or pathetic;" and with the relieved sense of respite, of free breathing, he humorously enlarged upon this grotesque side of the situation.
Meanwhile, at the other end of the table, Geoffrey and Felicia talked with their sense of peaceful confidence. That she made the music of his life, the sad yet stirring music, she could but know: how much she was its object she had not guessed. But the time seemed far away when she had seen his object as a rather pompous ambition, symbolized in her roguish imagination by a statesman statue with roll of papers in hand, and commanding brow, set high and overlooking conquered territory.