"You have a talent for misinterpretation, Geoffrey;--wilful, isn't it?--perhaps a habit caught in the scuffles of debate. But certain attitudes make misinterpretations by some people inevitable. One accepts it."
"Misinterpret you, my dear Angela?" Geoffrey inquired, raising his eyebrows and looking not at her but at the young couple under the palm-tree. "I hope not. Surely I am right in assuming that to live for others is unselfish, and that you recognize it as being so."
"I have owned to an aim--not to an attainment. Why is it that those who do not aim cannot forgive those who do?--try always to smirch the effort in the eyes of those who make it? I hope that I am not self-righteous, Geoffrey--I frankly recognize your intimation--why not make it as frankly?"
Geoffrey at this was silent for a moment or two, evidently not at all abashed by her discerning humility, and evidently thinking it over very lightly, as he would have thought over any unimportant fact put before him. Looking round at her and again smiling, he observed, "I am sure that you are very clever, and I am sure that you are sure that you are very good. I confess that I like to test your conviction by teasing you a little."
"It would be better, Geoffrey, if, instead of ridiculing people, you were to sometimes try to help them by a little faith in them. Nothing is more maiming to an ideal not yet strong than ridicule; mine, happily, is strong, though I myself am weak."
Geoffrey looked down at his shoe, turning his foot a little as though to observe the hue of his silk sock. He was silent, placidly silent; but it was now as if his thought had passed away from her and her words, and his abrupt change of the subject when he again spoke, as of a large mind turning from a trivial encounter with a small one, was anything but flattering. "Who is that girl?" he inquired.
Angela's eyes followed his to Maurice and Felicia. She knew that Geoffrey's interest in her, his relative, was only because of his interest in Maurice, his friend; knew that the match which for some years had seemed so imminent, and that by her friends was regarded as the quite disastrously bad match for her, was merely regarded by Geoffrey as the good match for Maurice. Angela had always hoped that Geoffrey saw the delay in final measures as caused by her own hesitation; and that at times he had tried to urge her to a decision, she had fancied more than once, and always with a soothing sense of sustainment. He knew Maurice so well; the hesitation, then, could not be Maurice's, although to her weariness it so often seemed Maurice's indecision and not his fear of hers that kept them apart. Looking now at the girl under the palm--the obvious link that Geoffrey had turned the talk to--she said vaguely, "A niece--a cousin--I forget which Mrs. Merrick said. A poor relation; this her one yearly peep at the world--the world to her. Quaint, isn't it?"