Felicia felt her old hostility rising; for the sake of a pathos she surmised in Angela, she controlled it, asking, still lightly, as she arranged her tea-cups, "What quest do you mean?"
"Why, the quest of youth and happiness--success in life. It is a pity that it should be seen as a toy before the time comes for a sad seeing of things. I always think of you as the lover of life personified, always see you crowned with roses and walking under sunny skies."
Felicia, re-filling Geoffrey's cup and helping herself to a slice of bread and butter, made no comment on this vision. But Geoffrey did not let it pass. "What do you mean by life?" he asked.
Angela still seemed to muse. "Oh, in this instance, I don't mean life in its sense of expansion through self-sacrifice, of self-achievement through renunciation, but in the happy, finite sense, the illusion through which we must rise to reality, the rose and sunlight sense, the bread-and-butter sense, in fact," she added, raising her eyes to Felicia and smiling.
"Why not _pâté de foie gras_ sandwiches?" asked Felicia; "they are even happier. Do have one."
"Yes, the _pâté de foie gras_ sense, too. My first impression of you was that--None for me, thanks. Do you remember, Geoffrey, we first saw Mrs. Wynne eating sandwiches?--five, I think you made the number--and isn't it right and fitting that she should have sandwiches and roses? I want her to let me give her all I may."
Felicia now leaned back in her chair, folded her arms, and fixed on Angela a look both firm and gay. "Why do you think such things of me?" she asked.
"Things?--what things?" Angela's smile was neither firm nor gay. She felt suddenly confronted, before a witness, too, and she remembered Felicia's crude disposition for forcing issues just when one most intended avoiding them. Geoffrey's cold, unvarying eye was upon her. It was a married hostility she had before her, and, in the little moment of confusion, she saw clearly her hatred of Maurice's wife. Yes, she was again face to face with hate; but they pushed her to it; for she had come as love personified, as a most magnanimous angel, and she had the right to scorn both Maurice and his wife if Maurice's letter had spoken the truth--if Felicia's love and Geoffrey's charity had forced him into marriage. But had it spoken the truth? Had it? That question had beaten in her brain for months. And the suspicion that Maurice, still talking in his group at the other side of the room, avoided her, filled her with an added bitterness which only an exaggeration of her outward self enabled her to hide.