"Sadly sure; I hoped you would not notice it." Felicia looked at him with a touch of placid severity. "Have another of the small ones."
"No--no, I thank you. I don't care for them." He had eaten three. The distressing episode curdled his mood for the rest of the day. A tactful and unexpected _hors d'oeuvre_ at dinner effaced the grievance. It was with a species of tender, maternal malice that Felicia resorted to these cajoleries, herself making the peace-offering. And after dinner when he smoked, and she read _Leopardi_ aloud to him, the frosted cake was quite forgotten.
When Felicia went up to her room her mind was running in a melancholy current that often underlay her surface ripple. She stood at her window looking out at the monotones of the night, and she sighed deeply. Self-pity caught her. This life of repression, of appreciation, of theory, how weary she was of it, how lonely she was in it! How wonderful it would be--she had a swift smile at herself for the turn of thought--to love, to be loved. She stood dreaming of this deliverance, this awakening.
Felicia's ideas of love, despite the severely realistic literature and pessimistic theories that had nourished her youth, were as white, as gracious and as lofty as the shining crescent of the moon that hung in beauty over the pine-woods. She smiled, but with a little fear, analyzing the feminine waiting for a fairy prince, facing the fact that she was really ready to fall in love with the first nice person who presented himself for idealization. He must, of course, be possible; idealization had been impossible with the stupid men she had met at Trensome Hall; or the curate with his short legs and rabbit head. He must be possible--he must be delightful; and would he ever come? "Beware, Felicia," she thought. "You are young; you are lonely; you are sentimental and idle; that's a basis for mistakes and tragedies." She laughed at herself, but as she leaned there and looked out, all the yearning, all the sadness and solemnity of the pine-woods, the moon and the sky, found an echo in her untried heart.
Austin Merrick had begun life inauspiciously. The younger son of an unimportant country squire, he had been none of the things which a younger son should be, neither industrious, nor independent, nor even anxious to please those who might help his disadvantages. He was helpless, and he would not recognize the fact; would ask for no help. He had loitered through college, fitting himself for no career, talking vaguely of a literary life and of a philosophic pursuit of truth. He was still pursuing it, very placidly, not at all chagrined, indeed quite the contrary, by the fact that his pursuit implied that other people's apparent attainments rested on a highly illusory basis. Austin Merrick's attitude had always been what it now was--a calm down-smiling from a hill-top upon other people's dulness.