She sat among her possessions, near the tea-table, her head and shoulders dark against a window. Felicia, on entering the ugly room, always felt the sense of latent hostility; to-day it was more than ever apparent, perhaps in contrast to the new, warm sympathy beside her. Mrs. Merrick gave her a cold kiss, one or two cool questions, and a tepid cup of tea, and left her to dispose of herself as best she might, while she herself turned her quick, tight smile on Maurice Wynne. Carrying her tea-cup, Felicia went across the room to a solitary seat under the tallest palm, amused as usual by her own contrast to the tropics above her and the upholstered respectability beneath. She put her cup on a small and intricately hideous table, perforated, heavily inlaid, with distorted bandy legs--a table, Felicia thought, that seemed to totter up to one, winking and leering with all its decorations--and drawing off her gloves, she looked about her, interested in the latest turn of her aunt's kaleidoscope.
Near Mrs. Merrick sat a stately young man; Felicia had felt that her adjective had found its subject on first entering the room, even before he had been named to her, and had risen gravely, tea-cup in hand; a young man of really oppressive good looks. His expression was not arrogant, showing, as he suavely surveyed his hostess, only a calm vacancy; but his profile was arrogantly perfect. One sought face and figure in vain for some humanizing defect, some deviation from Olympian completeness. He had the air, radiant and inflexible, of a sun-god. His height, too, was Olympian; his legs, terminating in long, slender shoes, were stretched out before him to quite a startling distance. Felicia's quickened sense of latent hostility found nothing hostile in this young man; he was merely magnificently indifferent. Her genial maliciousness found him, too, rather funny; not even a sun-god had a right to be so magnificent.
An obvious cause for that quickened sense met her eyes as they left Mr. Daunt and turned to a dim corner on the other side of the room, a corner from which all hint of Mid-Victorian had ebbed, leaving Liberty hangings and deep cushions, inviting to pensiveness, in full possession. The presence among the cushions was, she felt, Lady Angela, and she and Lady Angela were bound to dislike one another; a glance told her that. Mr. Daunt amused her, but Lady Angela made her uncomfortable.