She turned her head away, looking vaguely around her at the room that had become unfamiliar, ominous. A chair was near her, one she and Maurice had bought together. She sank upon it thinking dimly--"This was home."
"You see--I did not lie to you," said Angela. That Felicia should show no anger, should not writhe and curse beneath the foot upon her neck, made her wonder--in another of those crumbling flashes--whether indeed her foot was upon Felicia's neck. She had struck her down, she had humbled her, but was she not now to be allowed to forgive, to staunch the wounds with magnanimity and sorrow? Was it possible that the horrid image of her was the true one? Was it possible that Felicia too, was seeing her in the mire?
She repeated: "You see I did not lie to you."
"No," said Felicia, folding her husband's letter as she spoke, "you didn't lie."
Her very voice had the charred, the wasted quality; life had been burned out of it.
"And can you not believe _now_ that I never hated you?" said Angela.
Felicia leaned her head on her hand, closing her eyes. "I don't care. It makes no difference to me."
Angela felt herself shut out, infinitely remote from the other's consciousness. Tears rose in her eyes, almost a sob in her throat. "How cruel you are. What have I done to deserve such cruelty? I have only tried to help you."
Still with her hidden face, Felicia sat silent, thinking of Maurice, of Geoffrey, only vaguely hearing Angela's words.
"And then how human;--after all I am human. See how intolerable it was to me, your scorn of me, your rejection of me when I meant only good, when I knew that he had loved me most; when I knew how infinitely I loved him." It comforted her to feel the tears running down her cheeks and, in her poor, stricken humanity, to seem noble to herself in her avowed abasement. "Perhaps I have been jealous--oh, how can I tell? Perhaps I made too high and impossible an ideal for myself and thought that I could conquer that yearning to be loved. Can't you pity me? Can't you see what I have suffered in seeing him with you?"
Felicia, looking on the ground, mechanically pushed back the hair from her forehead. The picture indeed was in a piteous attitude; she knew it, although she could feel nothing.