While Maurice moved from country house to country house, this migratory season, stretching on until the late autumn, he found it easy to keep his spirits in the golden-haze atmosphere, and his letters to Felicia in harmony with his spirits. The impression Felicia had made was deep enough to carry him through several months at the same pitch of determination, a determination more stable than any he had mustered when in Felicia's presence; for Felicia made him face facts, and in these pleasant houses where he was appreciated and made much of, he faced only imaginations; it was easy to imagine himself potentially a rich man, when a rich environment put itself at his disposal, and when Felicia was no longer before him to make him feel that because he was not rich he must part from her. It was with a positive sense of injury that he met, when he came back to London, the brute facts. A terrific array of unpaid bills, a disconcerting army of duns, made the difference between actuality and imagination grotesquely apparent. He had to take several very deep steps into further involvements before the present ones were at all relieved, and present relief made a still more menacing future. Economy was certainly the first necessity, and after that work.
Maurice was quite convinced of his own willingness to dine off a chop when he had no invitation for dinner, yet it seemed far more fitting, when there was gold in his pocket, to think about an essay over a delicate little dinner at a first-rate restaurant. He had never found chops inspiring, and it was, though more costly, particularly inspiring when a friend was asked to share the delicate little dinner with him. He often thought of running down to Trensome Hall to see Felicia, but restrained the impulse with a self-control he could but find very magnanimous. It pained him still to write to her in a tone he felt to be hypocritical, yet he could not bring himself to tell her that all definiteness grew vaguer and vaguer, and that marriage was out of the question, for who knew how long. He would not say so yet, for who knew what might turn up? But what pained him most was to feel that the very pain of not seeing her was losing its poignancy. The impression she had made was deep, but it was being overlaid, effaced to a certain extent by others, for in his crowded life impressions were many. His easy, flexible, smiling nature followed almost inevitably the line of least resistance, and though when he thought of Felicia it was often with pangs of positively disintegrating gloom and self-reproach, he could but associate her, now that realities were before him, with a grey, drudging aspect of life that could certainly bring her no happiness. A hand-to-mouth existence was endurable only when unshared. Far kinder, for the present, to leave her dreaming of him on her lovely hill-top; kinder? It was necessary.