Since the grunt from Aunt Kate, since that discomposing walk in the garden, Felicia had avoided Maurice, though unsuccessfully, for the sense of his pursuing comradeship enveloped her, the anger that repulsed them all felt itself helpless, unjust, before his intently smiling eye that, seeing through her evasions, said, "I understand everything. Command me, you charming friend." To keep silence towards him, to escape for solitary walks, or to shut herself into her room for her readings was not to evade that sense of comradeship shining in the sudden gloom.
It warmly irradiated gloom on the day after her father's arrival, while at lunch she tried to talk about roses with Mr. Jones, and to hear her father monologuing, almost haranguing, at the other end of the table.
Uncle Cuthbert, rosy, good-tempered, loud-laughing, had succumbed to his brother's vehemence, and watched him with an air of cheerful immovability. Gloom was upon Felicia and beneath it that heave of anger, ready to bubble up.
Maurice's eyes meeting hers once or twice, was the one ray of light, strong, gay, sustaining. He was, indeed he was with her, however much against her all the rest.
"It's an age of sham, of conformity," Mr. Austin announced. "There seem no fighters left. The pseudo-believers have it all their own way, since apparently there is no genuine belief to oppose them. The spectacle is revolting. We have our political figure-heads cynically dissolving old faiths into vaporous metaphors--metaphors accepted literally by the masses. We have science tottering to a ruinous alliance with metaphysics. We have a church engaged in a dignified tug of war over a candlestick--the rival camps spattering one another with mud or holy water!" His audience was silent and Mr. Merrick, pushing back his plate and leaning his arm on the table as he sat sideways to it, continued in even more impressive tones, "Don't, my dear Cuthbert, speak to me of faith, blind faith. Faith is a sort of intellectual suicide. With a fixed subjective faith one is cut off from all objective truth as, I think, Guyau said."
He might as well have been talking Greek as far as the cheerful squire was concerned; had better, for tattered remnants of youthful learning still lurked in his wholesomely disencumbered mind.